#2
Wall Street Journal
November 2, 2015
No Evidence of Terrorism in Russian Plane Crash in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, Says U.S. Intelligence Chief
James Clapper says conclusions about cause couldn't be reached until investigation is complete
By DAMIAN PALETTA

WASHINGTON-U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Monday there were no indications terrorists brought down a Russian passenger jet over Egypt on Saturday, though he said no firm conclusions could be reached until an investigation into the crash was complete.

"We don't have any direct evidence of any terrorist involvement yet," Mr. Clapper said at a Washington conference hosted by Defense One.

The local affiliate of the Islamic State terrorist network has claimed it downed the plane. Mr. Clapper said the group "has a very aggressive...chapter in the Sinai, but we really don't know and I think once the black boxes have been analyzed...perhaps we'll know more."

Mr. Clapper said he "wouldn't rule it out" when asked whether the Islamic State had the capability to shoot down an airplane, though he said it was "unlikely."

It is still unclear what led to the plane crash, which is believed to have killed the 224 people on board. The Russian airline on Monday dismissed technical or human error as being the cause of the crash.

[return to Contents] 

 #3
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
November 2, 2015
Two reasons why ISIS claims to have downed a Russian airliner
The tragic crash of a Russian passenger plane in Egypt is now part of a broader information war between Russia and ISIS.
By Sergey Markedonov
Sergey Markedonov is an Associate Professor at Russian State University for the Humanities based in Moscow (Russia). From May 2010 to October 2013, he was a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Washington, DC, USA). In April-May 2015 he was a visiting fellow at the Center for Russia and Central Asia Studies, Institute of International Studies (IIS), Fudan University (Shanghai, China).

The crash of Russian Kogalymavia (MetroJet) flight 9268 in the Sinai Peninsula came as shocking news over the weekend. The circumstances relating to this terrible disaster are being investigated, and no doubt there will be many conflicting assessments of what happened before a proper expert investigation is conducted.

Keeping in mind that any version put forward right now is pure speculation, there are already attempts being made to interpret the tragedy as politically motivated. Given Russia's stepped-up military campaign in Syria, it was only a matter of time before speculation turned to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS).

And, in fact, ISIS issued a statement through Aamaq News Agency claiming responsibility for "downing" the Russian aircraft in the skies above Egypt. The jihadists' statement was even reproduced by some respectable international news agencies.

Despite the lack of official confirmation about the origins of the tragedy and the Russian Transport Ministry's assertion that the terrorist group was not involved, questions remain over the potential for such attacks against Russia, as well as the capabilities and ideological aims of the terrorists.

A year ago Egyptian jihadist group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (also known as Wilayat Sinai), a subdivision of ISIS in Egypt, threatened to carry out attacks on foreigners if they did not leave the country. And, in recent years, the Sinai Peninsula has become a battleground between the Egyptian military and armed jihadists.

The search for a possible precedent

Addressing this question, it is worth bearing in mind that vociferous (albeit unconfirmed) statements claiming responsibility for terror attacks against Russian citizens have been made before. In the context of Russia's involvement in the Syrian conflict, it would be useful to analyze them.

Notorious terrorist Doku Umarov made the most provocative statement in August 2009, when the then leader of the subversive terrorist group Caucasus Emirate said that he had been involved in that year's catastrophic accident at the Sayano-Shushensk hydroelectric power station, which killed people 75 people.

Thus, six years ago Umarov tried to demonstrate that his reach extended far beyond the North Caucasus (the dam, which houses Russia's largest hydropower plant, is located in Siberia on the border between Krasnoyarsk Territory and the Republic of Khakassia).

The rhetoric of the "emir" and his associates changed with the circumstances. In February 2012 Umarov stated that civilian facilities should not be targeted, but canceled his "moratorium" in July 2013 ahead of the Sochi Olympics, calling for their disruption. A year later his successor, Ali Abu-Muhammad (Aliaskhab) Kebekov, announced that non-military attacks were unacceptable for followers of Caucasus Emirate.

Why would ISIS claim responsibility for the aircraft crash?

In trying to understand the strategy behind radical Islamist terrorism, two crucial points should be kept in mind.

First, the terrorists' strategy is not based on formal logic. Their main objective is to sow fear, and fear is multiplied by misunderstanding. Through this approach they seek to impose their own vision and interpretation by showing that they are the ones in charge.

Given that the outcome of the Syrian conflict is anyone's guess, and the internal situation in other Middle Eastern countries (including Egypt, not to mention Libya) is serious cause for concern, ISIS feels compelled to demonstrate its capabilities.

It is not ruled out that various "peacemaking initiatives" will sound from the lips of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's supporters, like those voiced by Umarov a few years back. No one should be surprised by that. As part of the information war, the radicals must display harmony and allegiance to a single command center.

In reality that is not the case. The terrorist organizations leading the fight against state institutions are generally built on the network principle, even if they proclaim themselves to be states or emirates. In this regard, we should not expect followers of such structure to obey the orders of a "caliph" or "emir." Any cell in the network can show independence and arrange an independent attack without central coordination.

After the announcement of Umarov's "moratorium," for instance, in the last three months of 2012 alone terrorism killed 22 people who were not military, police or internal troops, but rather, civilians. Among them were the rector of the Institute of Agriculture Boris Zherukov and journalist Kazbek Gekkiev (both from Kabardino-Balkaria). That is why the words of terrorists (both "war-mongering" and "peace-loving") should be considered as just part of their communication strategy.

In 2012 Umarov's disciples hoped to take advantage of the rapid cooling between Russia and the United States (in the context of the "third Putin term") and play the role of "freedom fighters" against the "imperial yoke." But back then the West did not dare antagonize Moscow. The divisions appeared later, during the Ukraine crisis. But whereas during the Maidan protests in Kiev, U.S. and EU leaders wanted to see "champions of European values" (what they actually got is another matter), terrorists in the North Caucasus were not recognized as "freedom campaigners."

The upshot is support for Russian aspirations in the struggle against Caucasus Emirate and Umarov supporters' abandonment of their "moratorium" on attacks on civilian targets, together with a return to militant rhetoric (including strong anti-Western rhetoric).

Hence the second reason why ISIS claimed responsibility for the plane crash: Modern terrorist networks are not only about attacks and explosions, but also about seizing control (or at least gaining influence) over the information space. The latter is a no less powerful or important element.

Without knowing one's enemy it is hard to defeat it. The "shadow boxing" metaphor is only good for the movies. In today's fight against the terror threat, knowledge of the enemy is more valuable than in conventional standoffs between countries. That is why the counterstrategy must amount to more than simply striking terrorist infrastructure.

Russia has to understand that ISIS will try to exert influence on the North Caucasian audience, exploiting the very real problems that the region faces.
Despite the significant progress made in integrating the North Caucasus (fewer terror acts; more recruits from the region in the Russian armed forces), there is still high unemployment, unresolved territorial issues and weak secular institutions of government (particularly the courts). Religious leaders' lack of proper Islamic education is also a factor.

Without solving these issues it is extremely difficult to withstand the ideas of radicals who appeal to social justice and the problems of "ordinary Muslims."

Therefore, Russia's tough response to terrorism, both home and abroad, must go hand in hand with lowering the internal political and socio-economic risks and learning to spot the correlations between terrorist rhetoric and the changing situation in Russia and the world.

 [return to Contents] 

 #4
The Unz Review
www.unz.com
November 1, 2015
Made in Russia: Not Just Oil and Gas
By Anatoly Karlin
[Charts here http://www.unz.com/akarlin/made-in-russia/]

Rhetoric about it being "Nigeria with snow," "Zaire with permafrost," "Upper Volta with missiles," "gas station masquerading as a country," etc., regardless, the fact of the matter is that Russia does have a respectable manufacturing base.

This should be pretty obvious just from a quick perusal of the sorts of manufactures Russia produces:

-A vast military-industrial complex that produces (and exports) on a scale and versatility exceeded only in the US.
-Rosatom is building an amazing 40% of all the nuclear power plants currently under construction in the world. 10% of the world's power turbines are made at the Leningrad Metallurgical Factory.
-More prosaic but also more generally indicative, Russia produces about 2 million cars annually, which is about the same as in the UK and France, and thrice more than in Italy. This satisfies around 70% of its total domestic sales - virtually the exact same percentage as in the US and UK

This is not, of course, to make Russia out to be some kind of manufacturing behemoth like Germany, Japan, or Korea. It is however on approximately the same level as the European economic Middle Powers of France, Italy, and the UK, as well as that of fellow BRIC members Brazil (which has a 35% larger population) and India (which has eight times its population). In other words, it is broadly what you would expect based on its GDP and status as an upper middle income country.

This is pretty elementary stuff any other journalist or pundit can discover for himself through a quick glance through the various economics statistical databases on the Internet. The figures below were derived from the World Bank's data on nominal GDP and the share of manufacturing in the economy for 2013.

Country    Manufacturing Output in 2013
China    $2,923bn
USA    $2,081bn
Japan    $912bn
Germany    $829bn
Korea    $404bn
Italy    $327bn
India    $321bn
France    $318bn
Russia    $308bn
Brazil    $276bn
UK    $259bn

And here is a historical graph showing Russia's manufacturing sector on a global perspective (log scale) since the early 2000s.

To be sure, yes, Russia exports very little of this. As mentioned, its manufacturing base is to a very large extent domestically orientated. Instead, its exports are dominated by oil, natural gas, and metals, of which it has a cornucopia.

Why? Because comparative advantage, otherwise known as Economics 101. A concept that in Russia's case the Western media consistently has trouble with.

Cue the famous graph of Russia's exports structure that supposedly makes it a gas station:

... which if so would then make Australia, a well educated nation and one of the richest in the world, nothing but a coaling station.

Incidentally, what makes the "Nigeria with snow" rhetoric so convenient is that it can be - and is - wielded against Russia regardless of what actually happens to the oil price. If it goes up, emphasis can be put on the increasing dependence of the Russian budget, exports, and overall economy on hydrocarbons. If it goes down, you can instead focus on the imminent fiscal collapse - no matter that Russia has almost $400 billion socked away and that its current budget deficit is close to non-existent. Regardless of what happens with the oil price, doom is always preordained. And there is nothing that Russia can do about this "oil dependence" in anything but the very longterm short of nuking all its oilfields.

I would write more but Ben Aris writing in February 2014 in response to a typical hackneyed Economic editorial on how Russia is hopelessly addicted to oil and about to collapse any moment now has made any such effort redundant, so I will instead save myself some work and quote him in extenso:

"this achievement was founded almost entirely on oil and gas prices, which have climbed fivefold since 1999."

So now we launch into the core of the attach, the increasingly hackneyed argument that "all Russia's prosperity is due to its gift of oil and the government has done nothing else to make life better."

This argument is becoming extremely tiring and moreover as time passes it is demonstrably not true. Oil remains very important but a lot has changed in Russia in the last decade, which is being willfully ignored.

Firstly oil prices didn't take off until about 2005. Prior to that the long-term average was $25/barrel. And yet Russia put in 10% GDP growth in 2000 and continued to grow at least 4-5% until 2005. And only then did oil prices take off lifting growth to 6-8%.

So if Putin is so rubbish and all the good stuff depends on oil, how did he manage to get all that growth in the years when he had the same oil prices as Yeltsin had??? Could it be that something else happened? Could it be that the devaluation of the ruble had a positive effect? Could it be that oil companies invested more in themselves in 2000 than in all the 1990s. Could it be this started off a virtuous circle of growth, investment and rising wages that lead to other companies appearing to take advantage of this new money? And if not, where did all those consumers come from that have been driving Russian growth in last five crisis years? Just askin'... because according to the Economist analysis it appears that oil pours directly into Russians pockets which they then go out and spend in the shops.

"Dependence on energy exports is greater even than under the Soviet Union: they now account for 75% of the total, against 67% in 1980."

Journalism 101: "when citing statistics, you need to attribute them to the valid source so they can be checked."

This number is flat out wrong, or made up, or I don't know as the author doesn't say where it comes from. The last number I have is from the Russian customs service and is 49.4% export revenues for oil and 11.7% for gas in 2013 - a total of 61.1% of export revenues which is LESS than the "Soviet number" (where ever that is from).

No one is denying that oil and gas play do provide funds to pay for lots of other things the government wants to do - and so impede reforms because the government is so actively throwing money at problems. But the statistic that everyone who makes this argument always skips over is that oil and gas only account for about 15% of GDP in terms of value created according to Rosstat; the service sector made up just over 50% of GDP in value terms last year. Russia is not just a black and white petroeconomy.

Oil is of course even more important than that as it has direct knock on effects to other industries. A paper from the highly respected Bank of Finland economic analysis team (BOFIT) tried to assess exactly how important oil and gas are to the Russian economy. It adjusted the number up to about 25% of GDP and made this conclusion: "When adjusted to reflect the oil and gas sector's actual contribution to GDP, Russia is on par with Norway (Table 2). This is much less than traditional oil states such as Saudi Arabia, which generates about half of its GDP directly from the oil and gas sector."

Lets just pause for a moment and take that in: Russia's dependence on oil and gas is the same as that of NORWAY.... not a true petro-economy like Saudi Arabia.
...

"Ten years ago the Russian budget balanced if oil was around $20 a barrel; today it needs to be around $103."

Yeah, and ten years ago you could buy a coffee in London for 50p and not the £5 a cup it costs now. This "balance-the-budget" price of oil is another myth.

What you need to look at is the non-oil budget deficit (the federal budget deficit Russia would have if you magic all the oil and its revenue away). In the boom years of 2006-2008 Russia was running a health budget surplus, but it as also running a non-oil budget surplus of about 1%. In other words it had broken its addiction to oil as the real economy was producing enough tax revenue to finance everything before a dollar of oil tax money was received. That changed in 2008 when the non-oil deficit when down to 14% and the state poured rescue money into the economy, but has recovered somewhat since and the plan is to take the non-oil deficit back to about 4-5%. In other words the government was to modest subside the budget with oil money. It is actually an extremely reasonable plan and how the budget was run in the first half of the last decade.

However, in the 90s the non-oil deficit was over 25% of GDP. In other words under Putin the fiscal oil dependence has steadily decline as that service sector and other industries increase their share of the economy, but the crisis was a big set back - and thank god for that oil as it is the cushion that has given Russia a soft landing.

Bear this in mind whenever you encounter the next loud proclamation about how Russia is [insert banana country]-with snow that doesn't produce anything.

 [return to Contents]

 #5
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 30, 2015
Is the Russian economy about to be hit by a new drop in oil prices?
Low prices for hydrocarbons have led to the record-breaking filling of storage facilities in Europe and the United States, according to data published by Goldman Sachs. Although the report predicts a sharp decline in demand for oil, posing a threat to the Russian economy, Russian experts do not expect panic in the oil market.
ALEXEI LOSSAN, RBTH

Oil storage facilities in the U.S. and Europe have been filled at a record level thanks to the continued slump in the price of crude. In the future, oversupply may lead to a drop in oil demand and a sharp decline in the price of hydrocarbons, said Goldman Sachs analysts in a research report published on Oct. 27.

"This raises the specter of 1998 [and] 2009 when distillate storage hit capacity, pushing runs and crude oil prices sharply lower," warned experts from the U.S. investment banking multinational.

This scenario represents a serious threat to the Russian economy - according a report by CitiGroup, the fall in oil prices by $10 per barrel will lead to a reduction in GDP of 0.8 percent.

Little room for optimism

This is not the first time that Goldman Sachs analysts have scared the market with forecasts of falling oil prices, said Georgy Vashchenko, head of Russian stock market operations at the Freedom Finance investment company.

"From their recent forecasts - the price could reach $20 a barrel and remain at that level for decades," he said.

The drop in oil prices is due to the volume of reserves, explained Vashchenko, but this is the opposite of causation: Reserves become greater because of falling prices, and not vice versa.

According to Pyotr Dashkevich, an analyst at investment company UFS, stocks are growing due to concerns of possible supply disruptions from the Middle East.

"There is no guarantee as yet that it necessarily will result in a massive 'release' of oil in the market," he said.

But quotations are already responding to another batch of negative forecasts: On Oct. 29, Brent crude oil fell by 1.57 percent to $48.3 per barrel.

According to Vashchenko, the period of low prices has already lasted for more than six months - ample time for consumers fill their storage facilities to the brink.

"All known information is taken into account in current prices and, in particular, information on the filling of storage facilities," said Alexei Baskakov, head of the assessment department at Finekspertiza.

According to him, in any case this will exert a slight negative pressure on oil prices, and only a slight reduction in soft quotes can be expected from the OPEC meeting in December 2015.

Two choices

Effectively, the industry has two choices - either to wait for a growth in demand or reduce production, said Dashkevich.

"No one wants to reduce production so far, and it is only the most inefficient producers that leave the market, including offshore projects and some shale deposits," he explained.

At the same time, Russian analysts say that despite the forecasts, the fall in oil prices will not lead to the closing of shale deposits in the United States.

"The U.S. continues to extract oil even at $45 per barrel; the number of closed wells is very small," said Baskakov. According to Vashchenko, meanwhile, American deposits are profitable even at the price of $40 per barrel.

Over the last year, the volume of shale oil produced in the U.S. has barely changed, said Semyon Nemtsov, an analyst from Russ-Invest, explaining that while the least efficient companies are leaving the market, the more successful producers are taking their share.

The efficiency of production in the U.S. is growing every year by dozens of percent, and the new technologies that are in active use there reduce production costs by about $5-10, Nemtsov explains.

 #6
The Unz Review
www.unz.com
October 30, 2015
Russia Goes Up on WB's Doing Business Rankings
By Anatoly Karlin
[Charts here http://www.unz.com/akarlin/russia-doing-business-2016/]

In the overall scheme of things, the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business (and other such indices) don't seem to be terribly important. As long as you don't go full retard on such matters and adopt Soviet-style central planning, or something like that, then you should do just fine as long as your human capital/national IQ is up to scratch. Just compare Chile and China: The former radically liberalized under the late Pinochet; the latter still exercises capital controls, with layers of bureaucracy and prevalent state ownership. But China, with human capital indicators approximately one standard deviation higher than Chile's, has been growing at 10% for more than three decades, while Chile remains in the middle-income trap.

That said, there are good reasons for paying attention to them too.

First, elites pay a lot of attention to it. Several countries - including Russia, Kazakhstan, and India - have made climbing up the Doing Business rankings a matter of national economic planning.

Second, all else equal, more economic freedom really is "better" than less economic freedom. You do not need to be some kind of neoliberal hypercapitalist to appreciate that having more layers of bureaucracy, more hops you need to jump through to start a business or enforce a contract, as benefitting anyone other than the bureaucrats who create these rules in the first place. Indeed, when adjusted for differing GDP per capita levels, there is a strong correlation between a country's place on the Doing Business rankings and its reported incidences of bribery/corruption, presumably because the more regulations you have the more opportunities bureaucrats have to shake businesses down.

Finally, one presumes that "kleptocracies" - i.e., what the Putin regime is frequently characterized as by Western officials and the media - will be unwilling to cut down on regulations because it is "built on corruption" and similar rhetoric. But instead we are seeing the precise opposite across multiple objective indicators of corruption, with the Doing Business rankings being just a case in point.

First off, here is Russia's percentile performance on the Ease of Doing Business rankings since the World Bank began doing them. (Each report refers to the year beforehand, so the most recent report, Doing Business 2016, refers to the situation as of this year). Relative to other countries - and in general, the world has been improving fast this past decade in this respect - Russia went down under the second Putin administration. The Medvedev administration, for all its reformist rhetoric, made no appreciable gains. Only under the current administration has Russia surged ahead to 51st place this year, ahead of the vast majority of non-OECD nations. (Though ironically, at the same time, its growth rate has plummeted, which just goes to further show that in the large scheme of things, institutions aren't that big of a deal).

A more useful way of looking at this, which also enables both cross-country and temporal comparisons, is to look at the Distance to Frontier index - i.e., how far any particular country lags from the "optimal" level of ease of doing business at any particular year.

Russia and the Ex-USSR

Thoughout the ex-USSR, business conditions have improved significantly in the past few years, to the extent that Russia, Kazakhstan, and - yes - Belarus as now close to the level of the much-lauded Baltics in the late 2000s. Contrary to Maidanist rhetoric, it also seems that Ukraine under Yanukovych made big leaps forwards, only for progress to come to a grinding halt under the pro-European and "reformist" Maidan regime. Let it sink in that it is and long has been much easier to do business in "statist" Belarus under Europe's "last dictator" than it has been in the pro-Western failed state of Ukraine.

Russia and BRICS

From being middling amongst the BRICS, Russia has surged to the forefront. Note that Russia's low position on the Ease of Doing Business index has at times been given as a reason to kick it out of BRICS (no matter that Brazil and India always did worse).

Russia and East-Central Europe

From lagging the Visegrad bloc of countries a few years back, Russia has more or less merged into them.

Russia and the West

And has even merged with some Western countries - primarily the more traditionally more corrupt ones along the Eastern Med such as Italy, Greece, and Israel - but still. Point is - no longer is Russia an outlier in terms of ease of doing business even relative to the fully developed world.

Not surprisingly, many people are not very happy about these developments. Bloomberg's Leonid Bershidsky, normally one of the better anti-Putin journalists:

"For some governments, improving their country's standing in the World Bank's Doing Business survey has become a national priority. Yet the results of such efforts sometimes are deceptive.

"That's because the annual ranking of business friendliness of regulatory systems isn't based on surveys of businesses. Instead, it analyzes regulations and regulatory change, and awards points for pro-business measures and takes them away for anti-business ones. In practice, that means rating government policies without considering their real effect. It's a ranking of institutional good intentions, which explains why so many politicians swear by it."

The fact that it is not based on surveys of perceptions picked by mysterious methods and accountable to nobody is its very point and what makes it objective in the first place! (And I'm not just saying this now that Russia is performing quite well on it. I was saying the same thing in 2008 back when Russia's position on the Doing Business rankings was nothing to write home about).

Unlike, say, Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, which is what Bershidsky from the sounds of it basically wants to copy in relation to Doing Business:

"As I explained in previous posts on this blog, it suffers from numerous flaws. Part of it has to do with its questionable methodology: using changing mixes of different surveys to gauge a fluid, opaque-by-definition social phenomenon. Another is its reliance on its appeal to authority, the theory being that "experts" in business and think-tanks know more about corruption relative to anyone else. Countries with more regulations are systematically prejudged, as are those facing hostile media environments such as Russia or Venezuela. Above all, the CPI doesn't pass the face validity test - in other words, many of its results are frankly ludicrous. Is it truly plausible that Russia (2.1) is as corrupt as failed states like Zimbabwe (2.4) or D.R. Congo (2.0), or that Italy (3.9) is more corrupt than Saudi Arabia (4.7) which is a feudalistic monarchy!?"

Bershidsky continues:

"... Russia jumped in the charts thanks to four innovations: It cut the number of days required for a new company to open a bank account and register property, cut property taxes and simplified the process of obtaining an electricity connection.

"These hardly seem substantial improvements, compared with the danger of losing property to powerful and thoroughly corrupt law enforcement agencies and bureaucrats, the risks imposed by Putin's external aggression, and the country's shrinking economy and decayed infrastructure. It's not for nothing that Russia is 143rd out of 152 nations in the Heritage Foundation's latest Index of Economic Freedom."

Bershidsky translated: It's showing the wrong results shut it down let me and Anders Aslund compile it instead.

More general theme: Whenever Russia's scores on such indices begin to unfathomly climb a bit too high for comfort, there are inevitably calls for them to be erased and replaced with other indices.

This is a familiar phenomenon. For instance, when Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer 2013 appeared to indicate that incidences of bribery had recently plummeted in Russia to levels resembling those of the more corrupt First World nations (as opposed to typical levels of other middle-income countries) they opted to not release them at all due to not having "confidence in the reliability of the data."

 [return to Contents]

 #7
www.rt.com
October 30, 2015
Putin - Western media's villain for every season
Stuart Smith, for RT

As the hysterical outpourings of the Western media and their relentless anti-Putin narrative becomes ever more ridiculous. Let's look at why.

Vladimir Putin wants to cut off your internet. At least, if you are a reader of the New York Times, you may well believe this. The NYT recently reported that "Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications."

The NYT didn't bother to expand on how a submarine might go about acting 'aggressively' in the presence of inert under sea cables in international waters. Indeed, later in the article they admit that there is "no evidence of any cable cutting." So the real story here is in fact: Russian submarine in the sea.

That doesn't sound like a terribly catchy headline though does it?

If you are a Mail on Sunday reader of the print edition, you were recently treated to a two page headline declaring "Putin's bombing of the innocents."

Curiously, the online version of that story omitted that headline.

The Mail is good at this. They can find a reason to blame Russia (quoted from someone else of course) in almost any story. The UK telephone company Talk Talk recently suffered a database hacking. The Mail ran a story about it. Sure enough, in that story we find a quote by someone called Ewan Lawson: "this could be part of a wider pattern of activity encouraged or even supported by the Russian state as part of an effort to destabilise the West."

Colour me sceptical, but I can't really see the West being destabilised because someone hacked the database of a minor mobile telephone company.

It must have been a quiet day at the Daily Express this week; they are again suggesting Russia is set to start WW3. Apparently, the Express "laid bare" Putin's "imperialist ambitions". The reason? Russia plans to build a military base - in Russia.

We see such nonsense in the Western media more than usual right now. When the editors want to keep a narrative alive, or bury some inconvenient actual news, they will publish something, anything, which allows them to use the headlines that apply to that narrative.

Often these stories are essentially made up, but they allow the use of the words and phrases the narrative dictates, and the narrative remains in the 'news'.

Continual hyperventilating about so-called (and usually non-existent) 'Russian aggression' keeps things like the US bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan off the front pages. Certainly it will keep out of the news the US tank that crashed through the gates of the same hospital destroying evidence less than two weeks later.

That is what is happening here. The Western media have had nothing credible to bash Russia with for some time. There's not a lot being published about American bumbling in the Middle East, Ukraine is yesterday's news while Petro Poroshenko decides how to further eviscerate the country that he is, nominally, the leader of. Few in the Western media really want to run stories about how Russia is obliterating ISIS positions in a matter of weeks where the US failed over a year and a half.

So instead, we get silly pieces that enable writers and thought leaders to keep the anti-Russian meme going with their audiences. Make something up, quote an unnamed source, add a stock photo of Putin with no shirt, and the anti-Putin propaganda train keeps on rumbling down the tracks.

Why the Western media misunderstand Russia

Much of the Western media fundamentally misunderstand Russians and Russia. Many blame Putin's 89 percent popularity rating in Russia on a ludicrous notion that people answer poll questions while gripped with fear. US News recently reported that "Russians that truly do support Putin form their opinions in a virtual information vacuum. The Russian public's news and information is overwhelmingly created, or at least vetted, by the Kremlin."

The very idea that - in the internet age - the government of a country such as Russia could control the media to such an extent that 127 million people (89 percent) could be hoodwinked en masse is frankly, preposterous.

A better approach for Western hacks might be to take a look at why Putin has such high support in Russia rather than trying to pretend he hasn't. From that, politicians elsewhere might learn something.

If one judges a politician's credibility by what they do, compared to what they say they will do, Putin is credible, honest and honourable. He has a long track record of doing what he said he would do. On the whole, when he says a thing, it will be so. If he does not say a thing, then you can be sure that what you are hearing is speculation. Voters like that. In the West, we have almost no experience of this.

On foreign policy, the Western media glibly overlooks the fact that the US has invaded over a dozen countries and tried to overthrow the elected governments of many others since just 1990. Yet Russia is criticised for allowing Crimea to reunify with hardly a shot fired, which undoubtedly saved many lives while following the will of the people.

Russia is somehow 'aggressive' when it expresses concern that the US and the EU are surrounding it with missiles placed in FSU countries, but continual US aggression across the world - this week with China - is meant to be seen as somehow 'spreading democracy' and a harbinger of some kind of 'freedom'.

The Western media is confused. To find a president that actually leads, one who puts the national interest first and does what he says he will do is somewhat disturbing for them. Such behaviour is beyond their domestic sphere of experience. So they extrapolate from this that it cannot actually be so. The polls must be faked, people must be rigid with terror and afraid to speak out or they must have no access to news.

How to report what you do not understand?

If so few Western hacks understand Russia, and cannot be bothered to learn, how do they fill their column inches? Rather than critical analysis, investigating a variety of viewpoints or perhaps even talking to some Russians, many just follow the herd and make it up.

Cue another story on 'Russian aggression', Russia being poised to invade [choose any country here], Russia encroaching in someone's airspace or the latest media misrepresentation: Russia killing moderate terrorists (helpfully called 'rebels' for that purpose), presented as if eradicating terrorists is a bad thing.

Reading the Western media can easily conjure up an image of Putin that has him cackling in his volcano, stroking a white cat with a control panel of missile launch buttons at his elbow. It is also amusing to note that every decision made at any level of government in Russia is always personally attributed to Putin. The media imagines that he somehow personally approves every piece of media output, every article and every minor decision. He must have some time management skills!

With such an anti-Putin narrative now the norm in the Western media for so long, it becomes quite easy to see how lazy hacks will use him as the default baddie for almost anything that happens. Mobile phone company hacked? Blame Russia. Found a Russian submarine in the sea someplace? See what is nearby and accuse Russia of being aggressive towards it. Facts are irrelevant if you are able to twist words or modify their intent by quoting them out of context. Find someone who is 'worried' and sprinkle in the word 'Kremlin' here and there for a sinister overtone.

It seems unlikely that the mainstream Western media will ever go back to honest and fair journalism as they have now travelled so far in the other direction. But a good start would be having the hacks who diligently churn out negative content about Russia each and every day to actually go to Russia and learn something.

Better still; send them to Syria to watch the 800,000 refugees returning home thanks to Russia's efforts to crush ISIS. It's hard to put a negative spin on that.

 [return to Contents]

#8
Analysts: Syrian settlement process in Vienna shows signs of progress
By Tamara Zamyatina

MOSCOW, November 2. /TASS/. Last Friday's second round of international consultations on a political settlement in Syria brought about a real shift narrowing differences among the negotiators. Polled analysts have told TASS they saw real progress.

In contrast to the first meeting of the Syrian Quartet (which brought together the foreign ministers of the United States, Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia) the latest round was held in the expanded format involving all permanent members of the UN Security Council, representatives of the European Union, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman and, lastly, Iran. The latter had for a long time been barred from the talks by Washington and Riyadh.

The chairman of Russia's Foreign and Defence Policy Council, Fyodor Lukyanov, believes that the participants in the Vienna consultations will find it rather hard to come to terms. "In a situation where the partners at the negotiating table hate each other so much the outcome of consultations sometimes looks like an unachievable line of horizon, the way it happened in the previous years at the Syrian settlement talks in Geneva, Moscow and Cairo," Lukyanov told TASS.

"However, the fundamental distinction of the Vienna consultations from all previous talks on Syria is the participants have set themselves the task of achieving a specific result. In the agreed communique the negotiators came out for preserving the territorial integrity and secular nature of the Syrian state and for the preservation of all governing institutions. That's a practical outcome of the consultations, some sort of a framework that can now be filled with specific content."

The expanded list of negotiators is another strength of the Vienna process. "Whereas before the United States and other Western countries tried to bar some important actors from the Syrian settlement, now they have realized that the situation cannot be changed for the better without Russia and Iran," Lukyanov said.

"The very fact that the key players involved in the Syrian settlement have begun to agree on some general principles of activity will enable them to exercise influence on the smaller actors, who have been fighting with each other in Syria. It remains to be seen, though, whether these will agree to obey, because in the modern world the tail-wagging-the-dog type of situations are ever more frequent. But minor players will surely be forced to rely on support from outside forces and behave accordingly," Lukyanov believes.

The Moscow Carnegie Centre's expert Aleksei Malashenko, a leading expert on oriental affairs, believes it is a good sign the multilateral consultations over such a complex issue as Syria settlement in Vienna have materialized and produced no row. "In Syria the world community is confronted with a large bundle or problems, because the country is being shaken by several armed conflicts. The Syrian government army is fighting with the armed opposition. A war is on between President Bashar Assad's army and militants of the terrorist groups Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra. The US-supported Free Syrian Army and Kurdish militias are fighting with the Islamic State. In turn, Turkey is fighting with the Kurdish militias," Malashenko told TASS.

On the Vienna consultations' credit side, Malashenko said, the United States, Russia and other participants have shown greater awareness of the need for establishing an intra-political process for overcoming the Syrian conflict. "Whereas in the first round of the Vienna process, which brought together the Syrian Quartet's foreign ministers, Russia's stance was totally different from everybody else's, now Moscow's initiatives are shared by Iran, Jordan and Egypt. This is a clear success of Russian diplomacy," Malashenko said.

"In Vienna, no calls for Assad's immediate resignation were made. All negotiators tend to agree, although to a different extent, that there should be a transitional period, followed by early elections, although US President Barack Obama just recently was adamant Assad must go. Another important development at the consultations is Russia has begun to establish contacts with the moderate Syrian opposition. Delegates from the Free Syrian Army have paid a visit to Moscow. Both Russia and the United States regard it as a major military and political force. It is not ruled out that its representatives will participate in the future rounds of Vienna consultations alongside the Syrian government delegation. Turkey is not against this format, and this is good," he remarked.
"Figuratively speaking, Vienna is a melting pot. As consultations go on, quite a few interim problems will arise. But nobody has ever said the Syrian settlement process can be easy," Malashenko said.


 

[return to Contents] 

 #9
AP
November 2, 2015
Analysis: Russian Goals in Syria Defined by Timing
By Steven Hurst

WASHINGTON - There's much speculation about Russian motives for intervening in Syria. The root answer lies in the timing.

Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin boss, finally decided Syrian leader and Moscow ally Bashar Assad was in danger of losing control of Damascus, the capital of the civil-war ravaged nation.

That, in turn, would have crushed a key Russian foreign policy objective - keeping Syria together as a unitary state and maintaining the Russian foothold in the Middle East.

"Assad has not been doing well for a long time, so that leads me to believe they (the Russians) saw something lately that made them think things were getting considerably worse, and they had to intervene," said Eugene Rumer, director of the Carnegie Endowment Russia and Eurasia program.

Holding together the status quo has played heavily in Kremlin foreign policy reaching deep into the past. And the logic of Mideast and North African developments - the centrifugal spinning apart of Iraq and Libya, for example - was deeply unnerving to Moscow.

That was particularly true as the Russians saw the danger in Syria, a long-time client, arms customer and Moscow's only remaining outpost in the region. Beyond that, Syria is home to Moscow's only naval base in the Mediterranean.

Putin began Russian involvement in what is becoming his textbook incremental fashion. First, in late summer, he quietly boosted military hardware and personnel at the Soviet-era Tartus base on the Syrian Mediterranean coast. Then, in late September, Putin spoke at the United Nations General Assembly for the first time in years. He issued a strong argument that the U.S. was failing against ISIS militants who hold a large swath of territory in Syria and neighboring Iraq.

The next day, Putin said Russia might start air strikes. Those bombing runs began within days, but the targets were not ISIS fighters, as Putin had said, but the more moderate Syrian rebels Washington was backing against Assad.

The northwest region out of which Moscow is operating remains a heartland of Alawite supporters of Assad. Alawites form a branch of Shiite Islam, a fact that also has made Syria a close ally of non-Arab but predominantly Shiite Iran. Tehran already was heavily involved on Assad's behalf in the four-year civil war.

But Tehran's help, along with militia fighters from Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah, wasn't enough.

"For some time Russian security and military leaders have been frustrated that even with the aid of fighters from Iran and Hezbollah, Assad's forces have been unable to hold their own," said William Courtney, a former U.S. diplomat in Moscow, and now adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, and a former ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia.

The Kremlin fears, however, that the armed opposition to Assad will adapt to Russian air power, which will then lose effectiveness, Courtney said.

"These worries have contributed to Russia's recent professed interest in finding a 'political solution' to the Syrian crisis," he said. "The Kremlin may press for a while for Assad to retain his position. In some time, however, Russia and the West may both see him as expendable. The West views Assad as too brutal, and Russia (sees him) as too weak and ineffective."

Whether effective or not, Russia's involvement has led to resumed talks about Syria's future in Vienna. So far there's no progress but at least there are talks, notable for including Iran - at Russia's insistence - for the first time. They are notable as well for easing the Kremlin's isolation after its takeover of Crimea and backing for pro-Moscow forces fighting the central government in Ukraine.

The Russian action - whether causal or not - has now been followed by President Barack Obama's decision to insert a few dozen American special operators in Syria to bolster the Assad opposition, including highly effective Kurdish fighters in the north. That move is in contrast to Obama's previous vow to not put American "boots on the ground" in Syria.

While it remains unclear if Russia can succeed in Syria - by holding together a unified state whether led by Assad or another strongman - it is certain Kremlin intervention was strategically timed, has undercut U.S. tactics and has restarted negotiations to end the Syrian civil war.

The success of those talks, however, remains highly uncertain.

EDITOR'S NOTE - Steven R. Hurst is The Associated Press' international political writer and has covered foreign affairs for 35 years.

 [return to Contents] 

 #10
Christian Science Monitor
October 30, 2015
In Syria, Russian media take a page from US playbook
Russian reporting is as sophisticated and compelling as US reporting in Iraq, thanks to the military's adoption of 'embeds' and the media's adoption of Western techniques. But it's also repeating US mistakes.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent

MOSCOW - Fighter jets swoop in to hammer enemy installations, and bomb sight videos record the devastating direct hits. Embedded reporters, in body armor and ballistic helmets, scramble through trenches to reach the front lines. They pan their cameras over positions of Islamic State militants, interview Syrian soldiers and frightened local residents - and often do it all in an intensely personal style.

Welcome to Russia's first-ever living room war. If it sounds familiar, that's probably because Moscow has been paying close attention to the way the US military has dealt with the media, and has picked up a few ideas.

The lessons adopted from American war planners and media outlets have shaped a Russian media that is far more modern - and freer - than during the era of Soviet operations abroad.

But while the new Russian media may have picked up its American peers' polish and sophistication, it is also repeating their mistakes of the Iraq war: uncritically taking the state line and failing to ask enough hard questions about the war's impact and execution.

"Our TV stations are showing the war in Syria just as American TV depicted the operation in Iraq: accurate air strikes, remote war like a computer game," says Sergei Korzun, a founder of the independent Ekho Moskvi radio station. "Such war doesn't seem scary. It's a 'clean' war of marvelous technology battering evil terrorists. There is no hint of human suffering in the picture."

Lessons from the West

The war in Syria is Russia's first out of its own region since Soviet forces fought in Afghanistan for a decade in the 1980s.

In those days, TV coverage of the war mostly consisted of talking heads "explaining" the political correctness of the decision, with a bit of antiseptic war news that carefully avoided any front-line atmosphere or suggestion of casualties.

Now, Russia is sending in an overwhelmingly youthful, professional, and technically savvy new generation of war correspondents to cover the operation abroad. And while the coverage may be as one-sided as the Soviet days, it is breathless, first-hand, and often compelling.

"Young TV producers and journalists have grown up with much more access to Western TV than their Soviet counterparts had, and they like what they've seen," says Vladimir Posner, a veteran of the Soviet media machine who also worked in the US for several years co-hosting a political talk show with Phil Donahue.

"Another big difference [from Soviet days] is that they don't seem to feel conflicted about their jobs. There is a sense that our involvement in Syria is something to be proud of, that we are doing the right thing here. Western criticism doesn't make them feel the least bit defensive, and that's quite a change from the past," says Mr. Posner.

They aren't exactly free agents, as US journalists were during the Vietnam War and Russian ones were during the first Chechen conflict in the 1990s. That's because military establishments in both countries noted how free-roaming reporters created images that soured the public mood.

By the time of the first Gulf war, the Pentagon was "embedding" journalists with military forces. The Kremlin has also taken that tack: bring them into the action, but keep them on a tight leash. So far, the new Russian media seems happy to go along with that.

"It's true that what they're doing is in harmony with what the Russian government basically wants to see," says Posner. "But they're not being stage-managed or commanded. They're OK with what they're doing."

The official line made credible

Much Western commentary on Russian coverage has focused on a few oddball sidelights, such as the weather reporter who informed her audience that atmospheric conditions in Syria were "excellent for bombing IS" and the video photographer who has attracted criticism by putting some of his stunning war images to music.

But the typical report on state TV is more comprehensive. It's often built around a defense ministry briefing, which gives detailed information about the day's bombing missions, and sometimes goes to great lengths to show that the Russian Air Force is not hitting any civilian areas - in one case by comparing military video of a strike on a Syrian town with Google Earth images of the same town.

"There is only one official line, but it is made deeply credible by the way the war is covered, especially on TV," says Sergei Strokan, foreign affairs columnist for the Moscow daily Kommersant.

"There is a hierarchy of sources," he says," and the first place goes to official ones like the Kremlin and the defense ministry. Then there are correspondents on the ground, who provide sympathetic and often personal images of Syrian soldiers and people struggling against the terrorists. Then there are friendly experts, who offer supporting commentary."

Mr. Strokan adds that "outside reports can be included in the coverage if they fit the narrative, or sometimes even when they clash with it. Sometimes Western reports are highlighted to show what awful propaganda people over there [Americans] are being subjected to."

The Kremlin-funded English-language news network RT has a brace of correspondents in Syria who are producing good examples on the new approach, much of it straight from the front lines. With its foreign audience to think about, RT also takes a more active approach to responding to Western criticisms, especially claims that the Russian Air Force is attacking civilian targets.

"The Russian mass media are paying a lot of attention to Syria right now, and they are covering it with pride. The main idea is that Russia is restoring order, where the Americans made only chaos," says Nikolai Svanidze, a veteran Russian TV personality and member of the Public Chamber, a semi-official advisory body.

Questions unasked

But, outside of a few opposition outlets, Russian journalists clearly lack any adversarial instincts when confronting the official line. As Strokan points out, they can often be quite inventive in efforts to refute claims made by Western media. And they rarely pose hard questions at briefings or take a critical tack.

"There are still some questions that cannot be touched, most importantly whether our forces are killing innocent civilians as we go after the terrorists. There are all sorts of denials, but there is no effort to objectively investigate actual cases," says Strokan.

Then there is the economic toll of the war on Russia, a subject that has been explored by Western journalists but gets virtually no mention in Russian media.

"You would think that the public burden of this war would be an issue that journalists would tackle, but that's not happening," Strokan adds.

More independent Western journalists are more inclined to hold the Pentagon's feet to the fire over civilian casualties. And a much broader media landscape means there are dissenting publications, such as The Intercept, which recently did a major expose of the US drone war based on leaked documents, which feed those stories into the wider media.

Andrei Bystritsky, dean of media studies at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, says there is greater diversity in Russia's media than usually assumed in the West, but that it's a work in progress.

"We have over 100,000 media outlets in Russia, and even in the crucial area of television only about 35 percent are owned by the state. We have a huge number of journalists, and they are learning their trade fast," he says.

"Russia is evolving, and the media with it. The mood of the country right now is patriotic, and competitive media speak to that public mood. I don't agree that they are prevented from asking certain questions - indeed, I think some are asking hard questions - it's just that they are mostly trying to give the audience what it wants."

'Of course it's propaganda'

It does appear that public opinion, which was clearly against getting involved in Syria before the operation began, turned sharply in favor after the air strikes began in late September. The popularity of President Vladimir Putin soared to the unprecedented height of almost 90 percent.

"Direct involvement [i.e. boots on the ground] is still unpopular among Russians, but air strikes are viewed differently because there is less risk of casualties," says Alexei Grazhdankin, deputy director of the Levada Center, Russia's only independent polling agency. "After the air operation began, 54 percent supported it. But 66 percent still oppose the introduction of Russian ground forces in Syria," he adds.

How much of the public support is due to media coverage?

"You want to be careful saying things like 'the Russian people are brainwashed' by their media," says Posner, who is currently host of one of state TV's top-rated public affairs programs. "There is a huge misunderstanding in the West about why Russians like Putin. They like him not because they're told to, but because they identify him as the person who's made the world admit that Russia matters."

As for the media coverage, he says "of course it's propaganda. However sophisticated it may be, it's very one-sided, mostly based on official sources and accounts from embedded reporters. But that's very similar to the way the Americans do it."

 [return to Contents] 

 #11
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 30, 2015
The one military scenario in Syria that scares the Kremlin
The Kremlin recognizes the risks of the Syria campaign, especially the potential for capture of Russian pilots carrying out the ISIS bombing campaign. So how will Russia respond to casualties in Syria?
By Artem Kureev
Artem Kureev is an expert from the Moscow-based think tank "Helsinki+" that deals with protecting interests of Russians living in the Baltic countries. Kureev graduated from Saint Petersburg State University's School of International Relations.

There are no wars without casualties, and the Russian authorities were definitely aware of that as they made the decision to launch the military operation in Syria. Any strategic misstep would compromise Russia, immediately providing the Western media that is against Russian involvement in Syria with something to talk about and boosting the cause of Muslim extremists.

Moscow claims that it will not alter the scope of its current involvement regardless of the circumstances. However, there is one serious scenario that would push the Russian military to step up the use of its army and air force: Russian pilots or any other servicemen being captured in Syria.

For the longest time, captives have been a part of information warfare. Back in the times of the Roman Empire, noble captives were marched into a city behind a triumphant victor. During World War II, Nazi propaganda officers flew hydroplanes and picked up PQ-17 convoy survivors to parade them before "victorious Germany." [PQ-17 was the code name of an Allied World War II convoy in the Arctic Ocean, which suffered a serious defeat, losing 24 of its 35 merchant ships as a result of a weeklong attack - Editor's note]. In July 1944, the U.S.S.R. held a captives parade in Moscow for the Soviet people to see their enemies' faces. However, in modern warfare captives are sparse, which makes them that much more valuable.

Famous Hollywood filmmaker Barry Levinson presented a fine example of modern information warfare in his movie "Wag the Dog," a story about spin doctors who help their presidential candidate win the election by saving one American "captive" who is actually safely tucked away at an insane asylum. Modern media have the ability to sensationalize a confirmed casualty or speculate about an unconfirmed capture, putting it in the spotlight.

In Syria, a major challenge for Russian Aerospace Forces is to avoid confirmed losses and, even more importantly, not let the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS) take any captives. These are both tasks rather common for the military. For example, during the Korean conflict, Soviet pilots were expressly forbidden from crossing front lines, and in 1999 the U.S. worked hard on locating and saving pilots that were shot down over Yugoslavia to prevent them from making the news on Serbian TV.

A brief historical guide to POW rescues

The idea of devising a methodology for the rescue of downed pilots originated in Great Britain during World War II. Once massive bombings of Germany started, Great Britain formed a special force that produced equipment for pilots that were shot down and tried to rescue them from prisoner-of-war (POW) camps.

World War II pilots were equipped with detailed maps of areas that they were bombing, compasses, and some money in case they got captured and escaped. Maps were disguised as handkerchiefs, gold coins were safely tucked away, and the simplest navigation device could be concealed in a signet ring.

Moreover, British intelligence agencies cooperated with French partisans on assisting POWs that escaped from Nazi camps and devised secret passages from Switzerland to Portugal. Captured pilots received special Red Cross packages that contained miniature files and other devices that facilitated their escape. Every success story was widely publicized by the British and American media and instilled surety that all Royal Air Force pilots were cared for and had nothing to fear.

However, experienced pilots knew what could be lying in wait on the ground after massive bombings that destroyed entire towns. Quite frequently, against all rules and wartime regulations, the crew of a downed bomber was shot on the spot.

The development of electronics and invention of helicopters further simplified pilot rescue. In his memoirs, one of the most successful Russian fighter pilots, Chief Marshal of Aviation Ivan Kozhedub, who was in charge of the Soviet Air Force in Korea, noted with a certain degree of jealousy that Americans excelled at pilot rescue operations, while Soviet pilots often landed under enemy fire and on rough terrain in an attempt to rescue their fellow pilots during World War II. Still, Soviet pilots' readiness to sacrifice themselves in order to save their fellow fighters was greatly admired by the allies and helped shape contemporary rescue programs throughout the world.

The U.S. devised its own rescue program. One or more helicopters protected by fighter jets or attack bombers moved into the sector where a plane was thought to have been shot down. A special task force then combed the territory and retrieved the pilot. Pilots were wearing jackets with notes in multiple languages that promised a reward for assistance. They were also given gold coins to compensate the locals for their help.

Even though the Vietnamese, Koreans, and Yugoslavians were aware of this program and often used pilots as bait, Americans adhered to the No Man Left Behind principle and, thus, set an example for the rest of the world. However, in major conflicts, some men were indeed left behind. For example, U.S. senator and former POW John McCain spent more than five years in Vietnamese camps and prisons, even though he came from a family of high-ranking military officers.

The situation changed, though, because McCain served in the military when there was no Internet, YouTube, or other easily accessible sources of information. Nowadays, they are everywhere and spread on the news 24/7. For example, the execution of Jordanian pilot Moaz Kasasbeh by ISIS was posted online in early 2015 and made international headlines.

Dealing with the potential for enemy capture of Russian pilots

If a Russian pilot were captured in Syria, he could be beaten, or he could be drugged and executed, and millions would see the gruesome death of a man who served his country. Of course, the stereotypical extremist text of "My name is Ivan Ivanov; I am a Captain in the Russian Army, and now I will be executed for my crimes against Allah" is not going to be perceived as proof of Russia's defeat. However, the Internet will pick up "the execution of a Russian pilot," and all hate mongers might use it as a weapon in information warfare against Russia.

The first confirmed casualty is now a fact. According to Russian military authorities, it is the noncombatant death of Vadim Kostenko, who was serving on contract and commited suicide. However, his friends and relatives reject these claims, strongly supported by the Russian Defense Ministry. So, it remains unclear if this soldier has really been killed by Muslim extremists. At any rate, he was laid to rest back in his homeland, and neither Al-Jazeera nor numerous pro-ISIS Internet channels can boast of the exclusive footage of the death of an infidel.

It is clear that any downed Russian pilot is in danger of starring in one of those videos, especially since Russian involvement in Syria made ISIS and its allies prioritize the upgrade of their air defense systems. Russian General Staff officers definitely recognize the threat, and, most likely, that is why Russian forces in Syria added Mi-17 helicopters, marines, and airborne units.

Such military units are most useful in pilot rescue operations. It is irrelevant whether such an operation is classified as ground, air, or mixed; the important part is depriving extremists of an opportunity to record and broadcast the execution or interrogation of a Russian pilot. Here is a telling fact: all proclamations of extremists' success made by ISIS officers or anti-Russian officials in Ukraine so far have been false.

There is also no evidence of unsuccessful pilot rescue operations, but we can rest assured that those operations will take place, for the Kremlin will not stand to see its pilots executed. Still, after the statements made by Anton Geraschenko, a Counselor of the Ministry of Internal Affair of Ukraine, we can reasonably expect to see constantly shifting narratives in the Syrian information war.

Doubtless, when Russian authorities decided to take part in the Syrian conflict they recognized the inevitability of casualties, whether they be noncombatant, friendly fire, force majeure, etc. However, to this day, those who are fighting against Syrian President Bashar Assad and his Russian allies have not been able to come up with an efficient response to Russian Aerospace Forces operations.

 [return to Contents] 

 #12
London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk
October 23, 2015
Too Weak, Too Strong
Patrick Cockburn on the state of the Syrian war
Patrick Cockburn reports regularly from the Middle East. He is the author of The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution, among other books.

The military balance of power in Syria and Iraq is changing. The Russian air strikes that have been taking place since the end of September are strengthening and raising the morale of the Syrian army, which earlier in the year looked fought out and was on the retreat. With the support of Russian airpower, the army is now on the offensive in and around Aleppo, Syria's second largest city, and is seeking to regain lost territory in Idlib province. Syrian commanders on the ground are reportedly relaying the co-ordinates of between 400 and 800 targets to the Russian air force every day, though only a small proportion of them come under immediate attack. The chances of Bashar al-Assad's government falling - though always more remote than many suggested - are disappearing. Not that this means he is going to win.

The drama of Russian military action, while provoking a wave of Cold War rhetoric from Western leaders and the media, has taken attention away from an equally significant development in the war in Syria and Iraq. This has been the failure over the last year of the US air campaign - which began in Iraq in August 2014 before being extended to Syria - to weaken Islamic State and other al-Qaida-type groups. By October the US-led coalition had carried out 7323 air strikes, the great majority of them by the US air force, which made 3231 strikes in Iraq and 2487 in Syria. But the campaign has demonstrably failed to contain IS, which in May captured Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. There have been far fewer attacks against the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, Jabhat al-Nusra, and the extreme Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham, which between them dominate the insurgency in northern Syria. The US failure is political as much as military: it needs partners on the ground who are fighting IS, but its choice is limited because those actually engaged in combat with the Sunni jihadis are largely Shia - Iran itself, the Syrian army, Hizbullah, the Shia militias in Iraq - and the US can't offer them full military co-operation because that would alienate the Sunni states, the bedrock of America's power in the region. As a result the US can only use its air force in support of the Kurds.

The US faces the same dilemma in Iraq and Syria today as it did after 9/11 when George Bush declared the war on terror. It was known then that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, Osama bin Laden was a Saudi and the money for the operation came from Saudi donors. But the US didn't want to pursue al-Qaida at the expense of its relations with the Sunni states, so it muted criticism of Saudi Arabia and invaded Iraq; similarly, it never confronted Pakistan over its support for the Taliban, ensuring that the movement was able to regroup after losing power in 2001.

Washington tried to mitigate the failure of its air campaign, officially called Operation Inherent Resolve, by making exaggerated claims of success. Maps were issued to the press showing that IS had a weakening grip on between 25 and 30 per cent of its territory, but they conveniently left out the parts of Syria where IS was advancing. Such was the suppression and manipulation of intelligence by the administration that in July fifty analysts working for US Central Command signed a protest against the official distortion of what was happening on the battlefield. Russia has now taken advantage of the US failure to suppress the jihadis.

But great power rivalry is only one of the confrontations taking place in Syria, and the fixation on Russian intervention has obscured other important developments. The outside world hasn't paid much attention, but the regional struggle between Shia and Sunni has intensified in the last few weeks. Shia states across the Middle East, notably Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, have never had much doubt that they are in a fight to the finish with the Sunni states, led by Saudi Arabia, and their local allies in Syria and Iraq. Shia leaders dismiss the idea, much favoured in Washington, that a sizeable moderate, non-sectarian Sunni opposition exists that would be willing to share power in Damascus and Baghdad: this, they believe, is propaganda pumped out by Saudi and Qatari-backed media. When it comes to keeping Assad in charge in Damascus, the increased involvement of the Shia powers is as important as the Russian air campaign. For the first time units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have been deployed in Syria, mostly around Aleppo, and there are reports that a thousand fighters from Iran and Hizbullah are waiting to attack from the north. Several senior Iranian commanders have recently been killed in the fighting. The mobilisation of the Shia axis is significant because, although Sunni outnumber Shia in the Muslim world at large, in the swathe of countries most directly involved in the conflict - Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon - there are more than a hundred million Shia, who believe their own existence is threatened if Assad goes down, compared to thirty million Sunnis, who are in a majority only in Syria.
Lumiere, Durham. The Conference

In addition to the Russian-American rivalry and the struggle between Shia and Sunni, a third development of growing importance is shaping the war. This is the struggle of the 2.2 million Kurds, 10 per cent of the Syrian population, to create a Kurdish statelet in north-east Syria, which the Kurds call Rojava. Since the withdrawal of the Syrian army from the three Kurdish enclaves in the summer of 2012, the Kurds have been extraordinarily successful militarily and now control an area that stretches for 250 miles between the Euphrates and the Tigris along the southern frontier of Turkey. The Syrian Kurdish leader Salih Muslim told me in September that the Kurdish forces intended to advance west of the Euphrates, seizing the last IS-held border crossing with Turkey at Jarabulus and linking up with the Syrian Kurdish enclave at Afrin. Such an event would be viewed with horror by Turkey, which suddenly finds itself hemmed in by Kurdish forces backed by US airpower along much of its southern frontier.

The Syrian Kurds say that their People's Protection Units (YPG) number fifty thousand men and women under arms (though in the Middle East it is wise to divide by two all claims of military strength). They are the one force to have repeatedly beaten Islamic State, including in the long battle for Kobani that ended in January. The YPG is lightly armed, but highly effective when co-ordinating its attacks with US aircraft. The Kurds may be exaggerating the strength of their position: Rojava is the safest part of Syria aside from the Mediterranean coast, but this is a measure of the chronic insecurity in the rest of the country, where, even in government-held central Damascus, mortar bombs fired from opposition enclaves explode daily. Front lines are very long and porous, so IS can infiltrate and launch sudden raids. When in September I drove from Kobani to Qamishli, another large Kurdish city, on what was meant to be a safe road, I was stopped in an Arab village where YPG troops said they were conducting a search for five or six IS fighters who had been seen in the area. A few miles further on, in the town of Tal Abyad, which the YPG had captured from IS in June, a woman ran out of her house to wave down the police car I was following to say that she had just seen an IS fighter in black clothes and a beard run through her courtyard. The police said there were still IS men hiding in abandoned Arab houses in the town. Half an hour later, we were passing though Ras al-Ayn, which the Kurds have held for two years, when there was the sound of what I thought was shooting ahead of us, but it turned out to be a suicide bomber in a car: he had blown himself up at the next checkpoint, killing five people. At the same time, a man on a motorbike detonated a bomb at a checkpoint we had just passed through, but killed only himself. The YPG may have driven IS out of these areas, but they have not gone far.

Innumerable victories and defeats on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq have been announced over the last four years, but most of them haven't been decisive. Between 2011 and 2013 it was conventional wisdom in the West and much of the Middle East that Assad was going to be overthrown just as Gaddafi has been. In late 2013 and throughout 2014, it was clear that Assad still controlled most populated areas, but then the jihadi advances in northern and eastern Syria in May revived talk of the regime's crumbling. In reality, neither the government nor its opponents are likely to collapse: all sides have many supporters who will fight to the death. It is a genuine civil war: a couple of years ago in Baghdad an Iraqi politician told me that 'the problem in Iraq is that all parties are both too strong and too weak: too strong to be defeated, but too weak to win.' The same applies today in Syria. Even if one combatant suffers a temporary defeat, its foreign supporters will prop it up: the ailing non-IS part of the Syrian opposition was rescued by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey in 2014 and this year Assad is being saved by Russia, Iran and Hizbullah. All have too much to lose: Russia needs success in Syria after twenty years of retreat, while the Shia states dare not allow a Sunni triumph.

The military stalemate will be difficult to break. The battleground is vast, with front lines stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean. Will the entrance of the Russian air force result in a new balance of power in the region? Will it be more effective than the Americans and their allies? For air power to work, even when armed with precision weapons, it needs a well-organised military partner on the ground identifying targets and relaying co-ordinates to the planes overhead. This approach worked for the US when it was supporting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraqi peshmerga against Saddam's army in northern Iraq in 2003. Russia will now hope to have the same success through its co-operation with the Syrian army. There are some signs that this may be happening; on 18 October what appeared to be Russian planes were reported by independent observers to have wiped out a 16-vehicle IS convoy and killed forty fighters near Raqqa, Islamic State's Syrian capital.

But Russian air support won't be enough to defeat IS and the other al-Qaida-type groups, because years of fighting the US, Iraqi and Syrian armies has given their fighters formidable military expertise. Tactics include multiple co-ordinated attacks by suicide bombers, sometimes driving armoured trucks that carry several tons of explosives, as well as the mass use of IEDs and booby traps. IS puts emphasis on prolonged training as well as religious teaching; its snipers are famous for remaining still for hours as they search for a target. IS acts like a guerrilla force, relying on surprise and diversionary attacks to keep its enemies guessing.

Over the last three years I have found that the best way of learning what is really happening in the war is to visit military hospitals. Most wounded soldiers, eyewitnesses to the fighting, are bored by their convalescence and eager to talk about their experiences. In July, I was in the Hussein Teaching Hospital in the Shia holy city of Karbala, where one ward was reserved for injured fighters from the Shia militia known as the Hashid Shaabi. Many had answered a call to arms by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani after IS captured Mosul last year. Colonel Salah Rajab, the deputy commander of the Habib battalion of the Ali Akbar brigade, who was lying in bed after having his lower right leg amputated, had been fighting in Baiji City, a town on the Tigris close to Iraq's largest oil refinery, for 16 days when a mortar round landed near him, leaving two of his men dead and four wounded. When I asked him what the weaknesses of the Hashid were, he said that they were enthusiastic but poorly trained. He could speak with some authority: he was a professional soldier who resigned from the Iraqi army in 1999. He complained that his men got a maximum of three months' training when they needed six months, with the result that they made costly mistakes such as talking too much on their mobile phones and field radios. IS monitored these communications, and used intercepted information to inflict heavy losses. The biggest problem for the Hashid, which probably numbers about fifty thousand men, is the lack of experienced commanders able to organise an attack and keep casualties low.

Omar Abdullah, an 18-year-old militia volunteer, was in another bed in the same ward. He had been trained for just 25 days before going to fight in Baiji, where his arm and leg were broken in a bomb blast. His story confirmed Colonel Rajab's account of enthusiastic but inexperienced militiamen suffering heavy losses as they fell into traps set by IS. On arriving in Baiji, Abdullah said, 'we were shot at by snipers and we ran into a house to seek cover. There were 13 of us and we didn't realise that the house was full of explosives.' These were detonated by an IS fighter keeping a watch on the house; the blast killed nine of the militiamen and wounded the remaining four. Experienced soldiers, too, have been falling victim to traps like this. A bomb disposal expert in the ward told me he had been examining a suspicious-looking wooden bridge over a canal when one of his men stepped onto it and detonated a bomb that killed four and wounded three of the bomb disposal team.

The types of injury reflect the kind of combat that predominates. Most of it takes place in cities or built-up areas and involves house-to-house fighting in which losses are high. Syrian, Kurdish and Iraqi soldiers described being hit by snipers as they manned checkpoints or being injured by mines or booby traps. In May, I talked to an 18-year-old Kurdish YPG fighter called Javad Judy in the Shahid Khavat hospital in the city of Qamishli in north-east Syria. He had been shot through the spine as his squad was clearing a Christian village near Hasaka of IS fighters. 'We had divided into three groups that were trying to attack the village,' he said, 'when we were hit by intense fire from behind and from the trees on each side of us.' He was still traumatised by finding out that his lower body was permanently paralysed.

For some soldiers, injuries aren't the only threat to their survival. In 2012, in the Mezze military hospital in Damascus, I met Mohammed Diab, a 21-year-old Syrian army soldier who a year earlier in Aleppo had been hit by a bullet that shattered his lower left leg. After making an initial recovery he had gone back to his home village of Rahiya in Idlib province, which was a dangerous move since it was under the control of the opposition. Hearing that there was a wounded government soldier in the village, they took Diab hostage and held him for five months; they even sold his metal splint and gave him a piece of wood to strap to his leg instead. Finally, his family ransomed him for the equivalent of $1000 but his leg had become infected and so he was back in hospital.

In one sense, the soldiers and fighters I spoke to were the lucky ones: at least they had a hospital to go to. Thousands of IS fighters must have been wounded at Kobani, where 70 per cent of the buildings were destroyed by seven hundred American airstrikes. In Damascus, whole districts held by the opposition have been pounded into rubble by government artillery and barrel bombs. Since March 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 250,124 Syrians have been killed and an estimated two million injured out of a population of 22 million. The country is saturated by violence. In September I went to the town of Tal Tamir outside Hasaka City, near where Javad Judy was shot. Islamic State had retreated, but people were still too terrified to return to their houses - or those houses that were still standing. A local official said he was trying to persuade refugees to come back. Their reluctance wasn't surprising: the previous week an apparently pregnant Arab woman had been arrested in Tal Tamir market. She turned out to be a suicide bomber who had failed to detonate the explosives strapped to her stomach under her black robes.

The Russian intervention in Syria, the greater involvement of Iran and the Shia powers, and the rise of the Syrian Kurds has not yet changed the status quo in Iraq and Syria, though it has the potential to do so. The Russian presence makes Turkish military intervention against the Kurds and the government in Damascus less likely. But the Russians, the Syrian army and their allies need to win a serious victory - such as capturing the rebel-held half of Aleppo - if they are to transform the civil war. Assad won't want his experienced combat units to be caught up in the sort of street-by-street fighting described by the wounded soldiers in the hospitals. On the other hand, the Russian air campaign has an advantage over that of the Americans in that it has been launched in support of an effective regular army. The US never dared to attack IS when it was fighting the Syrian army because Washington didn't want to be accused of keeping Assad in power. The US approach has left it without real allies on the ground, aside from the Kurds, whose effectiveness is limited outside Kurdish majority areas. The crippling weakness of US strategy in both Iraq and Syria has been to pretend that a 'moderate Sunni opposition' either exists or can be created. For all America's fierce denunciations of Russian intervention, some in Washington can see the advantage of Russia doing what the US can't do itself. Meanwhile, Britain is wrestling with the prospect of joining the US-led air campaign, without noticing that it has already failed in its main purpose.

 [return to Contents] 

 #13
Wall Street Journal
November 2, 2015
John Kerry Seeks to Check Russia's Influence in Central Asia
By JAY SOLOMON

Secretary of State John Kerry, on a swing through the Central Asian states, is seeking to boost trade and security ties with countries at risk of falling further under the sway of the Kremlin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has increasingly sought to rally the former Soviet states of the region behind a Moscow push to fight the Islamic State and other Islamist militant groups that are spreading their influence across the Middle East and Central Asia. Mr. Kerry, during meetings in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan over the weekend, stressed that these countries didn't need to fall into a Russian bloc in order to fight the shared threat of the Islamic State.

"For our part, we want to broaden and deepen our bilateral relationships through the region," Mr. Kerry said on Sunday in Samarkand, the capital of Uzbekistan. "And we need to be clear that friendship with one country does not - at least should not - diminish the possibilities of friendship with another country. This is not a zero-sum game."

Later on Sunday, the American diplomat signed a joint declaration of cooperation with five Central Asian countries-Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Mr. Kerry will visit all of their capitals by the end of this week.

Mr. Putin has used the threat of Islamic State and Washington's diminishing military role in Afghanistan to cast Russia as the region's pre-eminent power in fighting terrorism.

Late last month, the Russian president attended a regional conference in Kazakhstan and warned leaders that the threat posed by Islamic State, al Qaeda and the Taliban was growing.

"Terrorists of all kinds are getting more clout and do not hide their plans of further expansion," Mr. Putin said in Astana. "One of their goals is to push into the Central Asian region. It's important that we are prepared to react to this scenario together."

The U.S. and Russia have been walking a delicate diplomat path as the threat from Islamic State grows.

Mr. Putin began launching airstrikes in Syria in late September allegedly to target the terrorist organization. But U.S. officials said many of the attacks have hit militias backed by the U.S. and its allies in their campaigns to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. Russia remains one of the Arab dictator's closest allies.

Last week in Vienna, the U.S. and Russia agreed to back a new United Nations-led process to end the Syrian civil war. But the White House and Kremlin remain deeply divided over Mr. Assad's future.

The U.S. believes Mr. Assad needs to stand down at some point in order to end the violence in his country. Russia argues his fate should be decided by an election.

 [return to Contents] 

 #14
Carnegie Moscow Center
November 2, 2015
Warriors vs Merchants: Russia's Foreign Policy Rivals
By Tatyana Stanovaya
Tatyana Stanovaya is director of the analytical department of the Center of Political Technologies in Moscow.

Vladimir Putin takes advice from three distinct groups of foreign policy ideologists who can be labeled warriors, merchants and pious believers. Each of them serves a role, but they have very different views of how Russia should develop.

As he looks out on the world from the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin is besieged by advice and surrounded by very different competing visions of what Russia's foreign policy should be.

His self-appointed foreign policy advisers can be broadly divided into three groups: warriors, merchants and "believers."

The president deliberately does not privilege one over another and tries to keep his options open. He is constantly lobbied with dossiers full of proposals and ideas and uses them tactically. Novaya Gazeta newspaper caused a stir earlier this year when it published a memorandum with a scenario for the annexation of Crimea that had been allegedly presented to the Kremlin early in 2014.

It would be wrong to take this as proof of a long-term Kremlin plan to seize the Crimean peninsula. It is much more likely that the Crimea operation was a last-minute improvisation that drew on a contingency plan. Putin simply pulled the relevant dossier off the shelf and put it into action.

Currently, the "warriors" enjoy the most favor in the Kremlin. They consist not only of officials in the defense ministry and the counter-intelligence service, the FSB, but also of men outside the security sector who can be described as "hawks," such as parliamentary speaker Sergei Naryshkin, deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin and presidential advisor Sergei Glazyev. Pretty much anyone who stands to earn money and privileges if Russia follows an isolationist course can be called a warrior.

It would not be correct to call this group a "Party of War." They are a disparate collection of public figures united by an interest in confrontation, who know that the worse things get with the West, the stronger they will grow. These warriors would be willing to bring their children home from schools in the West, close their foreign bank accounts, and sell their dachas, as this would strengthen their position within Russia.

The "merchants" are most in tune with the ambiguous line currently pursued by the Russian state: seeking neither war nor peace and the maximum possible room for maneuver. Even Putin's current aggressive stance still leaves the door open to a possible U-turn in which the Kremlin seeks reconciliation with the West, praises democracy and Western values.

The merchants are mostly businessmen who emerged in the 1990s or who prospered with Putin's blessing in the 2000s. State sector businessmen have been hurt by Western sanctions and as a result become more reliant on the favors Putin provides. Those in the private sector have suffered less but are minimizing their risks by giving full support to the Kremlin. "I don't like being disliked," said Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia's richest men, in an interview, arguing that Westerners would come to be ashamed of their emotional and destructive behavior towards Russia.

The merchants oppose confrontation with the West and want sanctions to be lifted as quickly as possible. Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin has complained about the falling capitalization of his company. Gennady Timchenko has redistributed his assets in order to minimize losses. According to oligarch Oleg Deripaska, "we need to work for a de-escalation of tensions with the USA...and with Europe."

Potanin and Deripaska remain completely loyal to Putin, accepting that his 90-percent approval rating will not change. But they are afraid that sanctions will stretch into the long term. "We can't leave Europe and the U.S., and they can't leave us," said Potanin. For him the West is a difficult partner, but a partner nevertheless.

Even though the warriors and the merchants both back Putin, they differ strongly on domestic Russian policy. Veteran market reformer Anatoly Chubais keeps up a dialogue with opposition leader Alexei Navalny, whom much of the establishment would like to see behind bars. Potanin calls telecommunications magnate Dmitry Zimin a "real patriot" just as a television documentary on NTV labels him an agent of the U.S. State Department.

The third group, the pious believers, makes a louder noise than the others, but has a smaller influence. It consists of the Orthodox Church, zealous parliamentarians, propagandists, and religious activists. Warmongering is their sacred duty. Social aggression and hatred is their raison d'etre-and a useful practical tool for the Kremlin.

The believers give the regime a solid base in society. The ideology of the new Putinism rests on traditional values, religious faith and contempt for Western lifestyle and civilization.

The stock of the believers is highest when the West attacks Russia, when Russia's enemies twist Putin's arm and trample on its national interests. The more enemies Russia has, the greater their freedom of action, their budgets, and their career potential. But, unlike the warriors, the believers want the West to stay accessible so they can wage ideological combat there. A harsher confrontation with the West would make redundant the army of spin doctors who are currently fighting propaganda battles in the decadent West.

Putin presides over and above all these different conglomerates. He views them as actors in a play he knows well. The warriors are a powerful resource, the merchants are subjects with a certain political potential, and the believers are a Greek chorus who make threatening noises. In Putin's mind, all of them can co-exist.

However, it is unlikely that the warriors and the merchants will always agree to the limited roles assigned to them. If it ever develops into a real political force, a Party of War would acquire a separate identity and begin to make the Kremlin dependent on its actions. The merchants are fed up with the new trends and aspire to play a more long-term political role. So Putin's biggest foreign policy dilemma is whether he wants to fight or to do business.

 [return to Contents] 

 #15
The Atlantic
October 31, 2015
Russia and the Curse of Geography
Want to understand why Putin does what he does? Look at a map.
By Tim Marshall
TIM MARSHALL is a writer based in London and a former foreign correspondent for Sky News.
[Maps here http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/russia-geography-ukraine-syria/413248/]

This article has been adapted from Tim Marshall's new book, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything

Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers, and ask God: "Why didn't you put mountains in eastern Ukraine?"

If God had built mountains in eastern Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the European Plain would not have been such inviting territory for the invaders who have attacked Russia from there repeatedly through history. As things stand, Putin, like Russian leaders before him, likely feels he has no choice but to at least try to control the flatlands to Russia's west. So it is with landscapes around the world-their physical features imprison political leaders, constraining their choices and room for maneuver. These rules of geography are especially clear in Russia, where power is hard to defend, and where for centuries leaders have compensated by pushing outward.

Western leaders seem to have difficulty deciphering Putin's motives, especially when it comes to his actions in Ukraine and Syria; Russia's current leader has been described in terms that evoke Winston Churchill's famous 1939 observation that Russia "is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside of an enigma." But it's helpful to look at Putin's military interventions abroad in the context of Russian leaders' longstanding attempts to deal with geography. What if Putin's motives aren't so mysterious after all? What if you can read them clearly on a map?

For Russia, the world's largest country by landmass, which bestrides Europe and Asia and encompasses forests, lakes, rivers, frozen steppes, and mountains, the problems come by land as well as by sea. In the past 500 years, Russia has been invaded several times from the west. The Poles came across the European Plain in 1605, followed by the Swedes under Charles XII in 1707, the French under Napoleon in 1812, and the Germans-twice, in both world wars, in 1914 and 1941. In Poland, the plain is only 300 miles wide-from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Carpathian Mountains in the south-but after that point it stretches to a width of about 2,000 miles near the Russian border, and from there, it offers a flat route straight to Moscow. Thus Russia's repeated attempts to occupy Poland throughout history; the country represents a relatively narrow corridor into which Russia could drive its armed forces to block an enemy advance toward its own border, which, being wider, is much harder to defend.

The European Plain

On the other hand, Russia's vastness has also protected it; by the time an army approaches Moscow, it already has unsustainably long supply lines, which become increasingly difficult to protect as they extend across Russian territory. Napoleon made this mistake in 1812, and Hitler repeated it in 1941.

Just as strategically important-and just as significant to the calculations of Russia's leaders throughout history-has been the country's historical lack of its own warm-water port with direct access to the oceans. Many of the country's ports on the Arctic freeze for several months each year. Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the flow of trade into and out of Russia; it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power, as it does not have year-round access to the world's most important sea-lanes.

Russia as a concept dates back to the ninth century and a loose federation of East Slavic tribes known as Kievan Rus, which was based in Kiev and other towns along the Dnieper River, in what is now Ukraine. The Mongols, expanding their empire, continually attacked the region from the south and east, eventually overrunning it in the 13th century. The fledgling Russia then relocated northeast in and around the city of Moscow. This early Russia, known as the Grand Principality of Moscow, was indefensible. There were no mountains, no deserts, and few rivers.

Enter Ivan the Terrible, the first tsar. He put into practice the concept of attack as defense-consolidating one's position at home and then moving outward. Russia had begun a moderate expansion under Ivan's grandfather, but Ivan accelerated it after he came to power in the 16th century. He extended his territory east to the Ural Mountains, south to the Caspian Sea, and north toward the Arctic Circle. Russia gained access to the Caspian, and later the Black Sea, thus taking advantage of the Caucasus Mountains as a partial barrier between itself and the Mongols. Ivan built a military base in Chechnya to deter any would-be attacker, be they the Mongol Golden Horde, the Ottoman Empire, or the Persians.

Now the Russians had a partial buffer zone and a hinterland-somewhere to fall back to in the case of invasion. No one was going to attack them in force from the Arctic Sea, nor fight their way over the Urals to get to them. Their land was becoming what's now known as Russia, and to invade it from the south or southeast you would have to have a huge army and a very long supply line, and you would have to fight your way past defensive positions.

In the 18th century, Russia, under Peter the Great-who founded the Russian Empire in 1721-and then Empress Catherine the Great, expanded the empire westward, occupying Ukraine and reaching the Carpathian Mountains. It took over most of what we now know as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia-from which it could defend against attacks from the Baltic Sea. Now there was a huge ring around Moscow; starting at the Arctic, it came down through the Baltic region, across Ukraine, to the Carpathians, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Caspian, swinging back around to the Urals, which stretched up to the Arctic Circle.

At the end of World War II in 1945, the Russians occupied territory conquered from Germany in Central and Eastern Europe, some of which then became part of the U.S.S.R., as it began to resemble the old Russian Empire writ large. This time, though, it wasn't the Mongols at the gates; after 1949, it was NATO. The fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 caused Russian territory to shrink again, with its European borders ending at Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, even while NATO crept steadily closer as it incorporated more countries in Eastern Europe.

Russia's Changing Borders

Two of Russia's chief preoccupations-its vulnerability on land and its lack of access to warm-water ports-came together in Ukraine in 2014. As long as a pro-Russian government held sway in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, Russia could be confident that its buffer zone would remain intact and guard the European Plain. Even a neutral Ukraine, which would promise not to join the European Union or NATO and would uphold the lease Russia had on the warm-water port at Sevastopol in Crimea, would be acceptable. But when protests in Ukraine brought down the pro-Russia government of Viktor Yanukovych and a new, more pro-Western government came to power, Putin had a choice. He could have respected the territorial integrity of Ukraine, or he could have done what Russian leaders have done for centuries with the bad geographic cards they were dealt. He chose his own kind of attack as defense, annexing Crimea to ensure Russia's access to its only proper warm-water port, and moving to prevent NATO from creeping even closer to Russia's border.

The Ukraine Buffer

The same geographic preoccupations are visible now in Russia's intervention in Syria on behalf of Putin's ally, Bashar al-Assad. The Russians have a naval base in the port city of Tartus on Syria's Mediterranean coast. If Assad falls, Syria's new rulers may kick them out. Putin clearly believes the risk of confronting NATO members in another geographic sphere is worth it.

Russia has not finished with Ukraine yet, nor Syria. From the Grand Principality of Moscow, through Peter the Great, Stalin, and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. It doesn't matter if the ideology of those in control is czarist, communist, or crony capitalist-the ports still freeze, and the European Plain is still flat.

 [return to Contents] 

 #16
www.wnd.com
November 1, 2015
FAMOUS RUSSIAN CHESS CHAMPION: 'BRING DOWN PUTIN'
'Dictator' seeking to 'create mass chaos and wars in Middle East'
By Greg Corombos

Russian President Vladimir Putin will do anything to accumulate and preserve power, and the world will descend into greater and greater chaos unless the United States and other free nations stand up to him, according to legendary chess champion and Russian democracy advocate Garry Kasparov.

Kasparov has been fighting for greater freedoms in his native Russia for decades. After 20 years as the top-ranked chess player in the world, he retired in 2005 to devote his full energies to be a leading voice against Putin and his assault on liberty. Kasparov's new book is "Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped."

In the book, Kasparov chronicles the stunning swiftness with which Russia embraced freedom, only to begin handing it back to Putin by the end of the 1990s. In the intervening 15 years, Kasparov said Putin has not revealed any grand goals or overarching principles.

In our subsequent interview, he said Putin's modus operandi is actually quite simple.

"Putin's strategy, if you may call it a strategy, in fact is the tactics of survival," Kasparov said. "He must stay in power in Russia, and, to stay in the Kremlin, he must come up with a good rationale for the Russian public."

He said that gets tougher for Putin given the current state of Russia.

"The economy is in terrible shape and nobody expects it to get better, especially with oil prices around 50 (dollars per barrel) and unlikely to rise dramatically in the near future. Of course, that's one of Putin's goals, to create mass chaos and wars in the Middle East in expectation that could effect oil prices the way he wants it," Kasparov explained.

As Putin feels the heat economically, Kasparov believes the plan is to rally the Russian people around his response to manufactured threats.

"When you run out of enemies in Russia, as with every dictator, he has been looking for enemies elsewhere," Kasparov said. "His image as a strong leader who could defy the United States, who could send Russian troops abroad, who can annex territories of the neighboring countries; this is what he sells the Russian public."

He said the Russian public relations campaign is constantly working to burnish Putin's reputation.

"Russia today, from the eyes of Putin's propaganda machine that has been working 24/7 and is really poisonous and brainwashing, represents our country as a fortress of good surrounded by evil and Putin is the only savior who can protect Mother Russia against the global conspiracy," Kasparov said.

In the book, Kasparov said Putin and his cronies are far different than the old Soviet regime, noting that Putin and his allies do not simply want to repress freedoms and have a vacation home on the Black Sea. Instead, he said, they want to get very rich and live the high life and gain influence throughout the world.

Kasparov said that approach is a greater threat than the USSR.

"It's a greater threat because, unlike the Soviet Union, we're dealing with a full-blown one-man dictatorship, and it's much less predictable," Kasparov said. "The Soviet Union was an existential threat, but there was the Politburo, there was the Central Communist Party and there was a system that tried to protect itself."

"Here you're dealing with a situation where any threat to a dictator could be dealt with by the whole power of the Russian state," he added.

He believes there are no limits to what Putin will do if he feels threatened.

"He thinks if it helps him to stay in power for another year, he will do absolutely anything," Kasparov said.

Putin's lust for power is only part of the story Kasparov tells. He said the failure of the U.S. and its allies to confront Putin is a major problem, and he spares no criticism for President Obama.

"Obama's response to Putin, if you may call it a response, was very weak, and I think it destroyed the reputation of the U.S. presidency globally," Kasparov said. "It will take a considerable amount of time for a new president to restore this credibility.

"If you don't have credibility and no one takes your word seriously - and who will after Obama's infamous red line in Syria two years ago? - then force remains your only argument," Kasparov added.

He said Putin is taking full advantage of Obama.

"That's what happened with all dictators in the past," Kasparov said. "They have been growing in their strength and arrogance while seeing there was no adequate response from the free world."

Kasparov's biggest frustration with the West is that once the USSR collapsed, the U.S. and others abandoned its firm demands for Russia to embrace a free society.

"I believe that many mistakes were made in the '90s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, everybody was in a cheerful mood and nobody wanted to think about the right strategy for the future," said Kasparov, who says every president since George H.W. Bush adopted "intellectual self-deception" and pursued a vague engagement strategy that has only enabled Russian leaders to consolidate power.

Even now, he said, those who refuse to stand up to Putin are offering a false choice.

"Some people say that if it's not negotiation or diplomacy or concessions, then war is the only alternative," Kasparov said. "Before we look at boots on the ground a as a last resort, there are so many economic and financial options to bring the Russian economy to the ground and to destroy the foundation of Putin's power in Russia."

What would work? Kasparov said the focus should be on energy.

"Creating alternative sources of oil and gas supply, which can be done by America and Europe, will hurt Putin badly," he said. Kasparov said the Russian economy is so dependent upon oil and gas that if the U.S. and Europe flooded the market with energy alternatives to the nations of western Europe that Russia's financial health would implode.

Kasparov has been a strong, public critic of Putin for years. Many others who have spoken out over the years have met mysterious deaths. Does Kasparov worry that he may be targeted?

"Yes I do," he said. "That's why I work in New York, not in Moscow."

But he is quick to add that he feels he must continue to highlight what Putin is doing.

"I believe I have no choice," Kasparov said. "It's a moral imperative, especially after my close friend and colleague, great opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was gunned down in front of the Kremlin on February 27th of this year."

Kasparov is pessimistic that democracy will return to Russia anytime soon, and he says whatever follows Putin will likely be messy.

"I don't expect that the fall of Putin's regime will lead to democracy," he said. "Putin has steadily destroyed all democratic institutions. You don't have democratic components to rebuild democratic institutions instantly. Most likely it will be chaos."

That being said, Kasparov said playing nice with Putin and allowing him free rein in perpetuity simply cannot be an option.

"Even if the price of bringing down Putin looks high, tomorrow the price will be higher and the day after tomorrow it could be unbearable," he warned. " That's why the sooner we can bring Putin down, the sooner we can start rebuilding Russia, the better the chance Russia will join the family of civilized nations and will start playing a constructive role, not a destructive one."

 [return to Contents] 

 #17
Newsweek.com
October 31, 2015
We Need to Take a Tougher Line With Putin
BY WILLIAM COURTNEY AND DONALD JENSEN
William Courtney is an adjunct senior fellow at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation, and a former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia. Donald Jensen is a senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

In responding to Russian thrusts in Ukraine and Syria, the West has relied on economic sanctions or conceded initiative to Moscow. Experience shows that direct measures-ones that target troublesome behavior-are more likely to be effective.

In Ukraine and Syria, the West seems less sure of its aims and less committed to achieving them. In contrast, Russia appears to have clearer goals, cares more about outcomes, lies closer to the contested theater and acts with dispatch.

This was also true when the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979. President Jimmy Carter responded by seeking to organize a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, but only some Western allies went along. Carter halted the export of U.S. grain to the USSR, but U.S. farmers were outraged and a year later President Reagan canceled the embargo.

Responding to aggression in Afghanistan and the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, Reagan banned U.S. companies and their foreign subsidiaries from selling energy technology to the USSR. Within a year, European protests forced him to lift the sanctions.

A lesson: Economic sanctions tend neither to be sustainable nor cause Moscow to cease troublesome behavior.

In contrast to these indirect measures, the British, Chinese, Saudis and Americans had more impact by providing substantial aid to Mujahideen resistance fighters via Pakistan. In the mid-1980s, America stepped up the pressure by providing Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, enabling the Muj to neutralize a devastating Soviet air campaign. Another help was Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's eagerness to reduce military costs and lift popular morale. Thus in 1989, after a decade of war in Afghanistan, the USSR withdrew its combat forces.

Direct Western responses have blunted other Soviet moves. In the 1970s, the USSR began deploying a new intermediate-range nuclear-armed missile aimed at Europe and Japan. NATO countered with its own missile deployments, and in 1987 the United States and the USSR agreed to ban both sides' missiles.

These episodes suggest how the West might better respond to Russian military thrusts in Ukraine and Syria. In Ukraine, the West has emphasized sanctions against Kremlin-linked cronies and state enterprises, economic aid to Ukraine and training of Ukrainian forces away from the war zone. But NATO and its members have shied away from providing lethal defensive arms, and from permanently moving NATO forces to the territory of its eastern members, although some forces are being rotated through the region.

The West has responded even more modestly to Russia's deployment of combat air and ground forces to Syria, and warships with advanced anti-aircraft missiles off its Mediterranean coast. The West has voiced strong rhetorical concern, but not acted to impede Russian air attacks on U.S.-backed rebels fighting against the Bashar al-Assad regime. This faint response has convinced many in the region that Russia is more determined than the West to shape events there.

Russia and America have agreed to technical air safety protocols for the Syrian theater, but beyond this President Barack Obama signals restraint: "We're not going to make Syria into a proxy war." Washington opposes creation of a no-fly zone in Syria to protect displaced persons. It also refuses to give the rebels it backs hand-held anti-aircraft missiles, although it has boosted supplies of anti-armor missiles.

Kremlin leaders may well infer from the West's restrained responses that it will not defend its interests or sees them as only modest. The West should consider acting to reduce these risks. This would mean rebalancing the tools used to influence Moscow's behavior.

Western sanctions seem inadequate to cause Russia to withdraw from eastern Ukraine, much less Crimea, and political dynamics in Europe suggest that sanctions may not long be sustainable. Moreover, despite some financial pain, Russian society is adjusting to sanctions and oil price volatility.

While maintaining U.S.-EU alignment on sanctions, the West could give higher priority to direct, targeted measures. To strengthen deterrence against possible future aggression, America could station army brigades in Poland and the Baltics, and help arm the Ukrainian military. In Syria, the West could establish a safe zone for displaced persons, with America guarding the airspace and Turkey the ground. The West could rotate more warships through the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Russia's moves in Ukraine and Syria are fraught with risk. The bloodless takeover of Crimea evidently emboldened the Kremlin, but then in eastern Ukraine Russia met stalemate. In Syria, Russia is unlikely to reverse the sagging performance of the Assad regime. Public support among Russians for the Syrian intervention will undoubtedly drop if more Russian troops are killed or there is a major terrorist incident at home.

For these reasons the Kremlin seems now to be giving more attention to the Minsk peace process for eastern Ukraine, and to the search for a political solution in Syria. In both cases Russian cooperation with the West will be essential to success.

But military asymmetries in Ukraine and Syria that favor Russia may cause it to resist needed compromise. By responding more robustly to Russia's interventions, the West could reduce the asymmetries and improve prospects for negotiated outcomes.

 [return to Contents] 

#18
The Daily Star (UK)
November 1, 2015
EXCLUSIVE: Europe braced for Russian INVASION as Putin masses troops on NATO borders
EUROPE is braced for a Russian invasion and will use "any means" necessary to protect its freedom.
By Michael Havis

Defence bosses in three governments said Vladimir Putin had become unpredictable and had a history of attacking neighbours.

Accusing him of "unprecedented" aggression in Europe, they warned he was ready to risk it all in "a game without rules" against them.

It comes after British troops were sent to the Baltic amid fears Russia would invade the region in the same way it did Ukraine.

With NATO rules stipulating any attack on one member state is an attack on all, Britain could be plunged into a new world war.

Juozas Olekas, the Lithuanian minister of defence, hailed the UK for putting boots on the ground in his country.

He told Daily Star Online: "We would like to live in peace with Russia as our neighbours, but it depends on Russia's behaviour."

Naming other countries occupied by Kremlin forces, he said Lithuania had massively increased military spending and was already taking part in joint operations with British forces.

Army bosses in nearby Estonia said they had seen a "constant build up" of Putin's troops on NATO borders and branded his recent actions "unimaginable".

And while they think the strength of NATO will deter the Russian strongman, a spokesman warned: "Putin may miscalculate the strength of NATO's bonds."

He said: "Russia has shown its willingness to use military force against its close neighbours - in 2008 in Georgia and since 2014 in Ukraine.

"It's clear that NATO cannot leave an obvious challenge to its security unattended.

"Russia's behaviour is becoming increasingly harder to forecast which leads to the need to take steps to ensure our own security."

And he warned his country would use "any means to defend its freedom and independence."

Defence chiefs in neighbouring Latvia accused Putin of undermining the international order, violating nations' territorial integrity and showcasing its might in the Baltic.

"Our main area of concern is Russia's unpredictability," a government spokesman said.

"Its aggression in Ukraine proves that Russia is ready to use military force for political objectives and to risk international isolation.

"Russia's assertiveness and military power have grown during the last three to four years.

"It has significantly contributed to modernising its military infrastructure and boosting capabilities along European borders that goes in line with the significant increase in its military expenditure."

In a stark warning, he added: "Russia is ready to continue the confrontation with the West and is ready to play the game without rules.

"It applies not only to Ukraine, but also to the relations with the West."

The office of Russian president Vladimir Putin was contacted for comment by the Daily Star Online, but had not responded at time of writing.

 [return to Contents] 

 #19
Defensenews.com
October 30, 2015
Gen. Breedlove: Intelligence Community Changing How it Handles Russia
By Aaron Mehta

WASHINGTON - The US intelligence community has begun changing how it handles the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to the top American general in Europe.

Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, the top military officer at NATO and the head of US European Command (EUCOM), said Friday that the intelligence community has begun reforming itself to better adjust to Russia after nearly two decades of treating the eastern nation as a potential ally, rather than an adversary.

"We are not where we need to be now, and the IC [intelligence community] is addressing it," Breedlove told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. "The IC has already made some fairly dramatic changes in the last several months in how we use our analysts, and they are beginning to look at reprioritizing assets, as well. We're gently turning the nose of this ship to get back to what we need to be looking at."

Breedlove acknowledged a "lack of ability to see into Russia, especially at the operational and tactical level," describing it as an issue based on the US posture toward Russia in recent years.

"I think our nation made decisions over the last two decades that were congruent with our approach to Russia," Breedlove said. "Now we see that, possibly, we didn't have the partner we thought we had, and we're having to readjust. And the IC is doing that, and I'm thankful for that."

He also emphasized that he was not criticizing the decision to focus attention elsewhere, given limited capacity, the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the attempts by the US to partner with Russia on a number of military activities.

Unsurprisingly, Breedlove was not willing to get into details about what might be changing on the intelligence front, but his mention of the importance of analysts is notable. For the last two years, top intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) officials in the US Air Force have been sounding an alarm about a lack of human intelligence.

Some in DC have questioned whether the US was caught surprised by Russian actions in both Ukraine and Syria, a charge the intelligence community has flatly denied.

""For several years, the Intelligence Community has provided regular assessments of Russia's military, political, and financial support to the regime," Brian Hale, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in an emailed statement. "In recent months, the Intelligence Community tracked and reported Moscow's determination to play a more direct role in propping up Assad's grip on power, including its deployment of offensive military assets to Syria.  While these events unfolded quickly, the IC carried out its responsibilities with equal agility.

"Any suggestion that the IC was surprised by Russia's military support to the Assad regime is misleading," Hale added.

Hand-in-hand with the intelligence community is the need for ISR support, Breedlove said, indicating that part of his US visit was focused on securing greater ISR apportionment for EUCOM in the fiscal year 2017 budget.

"The building clearly understands my requirement for ISR in Europe, and that's one of the reasons I'm back this week: to work that issue," Breedlove said.

"Our force structure in Europe now is not adequate to the larger Russia task that we now see," Breedlove said.

 [return to Contents] 

 #20
New York Review of Books
November 19, 2015

Amy Knight: "Putin's personality cult is fast approaching that of Stalin."

 [return to Contents] 

 #21
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
November 2, 2015
Tourists Are Flocking to Moscow's Cheap Prices
Vacationing in Moscow is 1.5 times cheaper than in Berlin and 3 times cheaper than in Paris.
Visa-free regime brings tourists from South-East Asia
By Alexander Vorobioff

In the first 9 months of 2015, Moscow has seen over two million tourists visit the city.

Because of a cheaper Ruble, a vacation in Moscow costs 1.5 times less than in Berlin, 2.3 times less than in London, and 3 times less than in Paris. The cost for two in a three star hotel in Moscow's center during New Year's (Russia's most important holiday) is presumed to be about 30 thousand Rubles. A similar accommodation in Berlin, long known for its low prices, will go for 46 thousand Rubles, in London for 69 thousand Rubles, and in Paris, a whopping 87 thousand Rubles!

Better prices are not the only reason why many tourists visit Moscow. Due to Russia's visa-free policies with Southeast Asian countries, the influx of tourists from this region has dramatically grown. Sergey Shpilko, Deputy Head of the city's Department of Multicultural Policy, Interregional Cooperation and Tourism, says tourism from South Korea, has grown by 47%. He adds "last year, because of a visa-free policy, 110 thousand Chinese tourists visited, this year the number is already 200 thousand." Thus, while the number of European and North American tourists slightly fell, the amount of Asian and Middle Eastern tourists has grown.

Moscow is also the most popular travel destination for Russian tourists followed by Saint-Petersburg and Sochi.

 [return to Contents] 

 #22
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 31, 2015
American pop culture trends Russians choose to adopt
While public polls are showing a negative attitude toward Americans among ordinary Russians, from a lifestyle perspective, the influence of American pop culture is quite notable.
KIRA TVERSKAYA, SPECIAL TO RBTH

DeLorean cars, Doc Brown quotes and Photoshopped images of Marty McFly flooded Inernet users Oct. 21. Crowds gathered to greet time travelers Marty and Doc, set to arrive on this date in 2015, according to the American cult classic "Back to the Future" movies. The future was in full swing just as BTTF had imagined it, with one difference: the scene and its surrounding hubbub took place in Russia.

Weeks into this historic period of the future, one can't help but think about the influence American culture has on Russian everyday life.

Even in the days of the Iron Curtain, people managed to hear illegal songs and learn about fashion and cultural trends via forbidden radio waves caught in secret in the middle of the night. But these days, with world media wide open to Russian users, there's no lack of all things foreign. In fact, certain trends have grown so solidly into Russian life that they're no less important to the current generation than Chekov or Tarkovsky.

"Back to the Future" was never a thing of the past for Natasha Bezrukova, 36, who in 2012 managed to finagle two special guests for her son Seva's seventh birthday. She posted an ad in a Moscow newspaper, asking for "a kind heart that would be able to gift the child an hour of delight," as well as one specific detail. The result: not one but both owners of the two existing DeLoreans in Russia volunteered their cars for a birthday ride.

"There's something in the movies of the '80-'90s, something true, something that makes you watch it again at an older age with your own kids," Bezrukova said.

It was only when she decided to show Seva the things she liked as a child that Bezrukova discovered her own love for the series, she said.

"We saw the trilogy when Seva was six," Bezrukova says. "To my surprise, he got the point of the time-space interconnection, got excited about time traveling, watched everything on YouTube on the topic."

What Marty and Doc didn't foresee: how the past would become a fashion statement. Red lips, provocative poses, playful clothes - who would've thought that American pin-up, a popular 1940-50 trend, would make its way into contemporary Russia? And yet projects such as "Haunted Cathouse," the first pin-up project in Russia, weave together the retro with the modern.

Radmila "Rocky Zombie," 26, discovered pin-up at 18 while searching for herself, her style and her way to femininity.

"Pin-up can't but attract with its 'sweetness,' lovely color combinations, smiles and charm of the girls," Radmila says. "When I saw modern American models with tattoos and colorful hair I thought 'that's my option,' as I was an alternative girl at the time."

A retro stylist, hairstylist, photographer and creator, Radmila and her team organize performances, lectures, and master classes and go to festivals and exhibitions.

"At first I never thought about business and money, but I thought straight away about world fame for my pin-up project," Radmila says. "That's what moves me still and what turned the project into profit."

For Radmila, who is inspired by American models and photographers, artsy makeup is a daily must, as well as certain clothes and accessories.

"They're real innovators in everything and are afraid of nothing, then and now. Our shoots go to American magazines or just into the web," Radmila says. "Our clients are clothes stores, fashion brands, festivals, cafes and private individuals."

The interest is growing day by day, and Radmila and her group are booked till Jan. 1, she says. The popularity of pin-up could be explained by the emerging fashion for femininity, something that hasn't been emphasized since the '80s, Radmila says.

Another trend making a comeback: the cult of famous '90s TV shows such as "Sex in the City" and "Friends."

Visit the Russian city of Perm, a city near the Ural Mountains 700 miles from Moscow, and you'll find a recreation of the old "Central Perk" café set in Los Angeles, a facsimile that has attracted visitors from all over Russia for four years.

Karina Alenina, 36, the creator of the café, says the series has become a solid part of her life, literally.

"It's not just that I'm quoting it all the time and persuading people to watch it, but also the fact that my first daughter is named Emma, after Ross and Rachel's daughter," Alenina says. Alenina first saw "Friends" in 1995 as an exchange student in the U.S., at her host family's home. She was hooked instantly.

"Later, I saw the series translated in Russian and started watching. At last I got all the jokes!" Alenina says. "The older I became, the more all the characters and plots got revealed from a new perspective."

She adds, "I think this series has all the everyday life situations played out, which surely helps to look at one's own problems in a different light, easier, with humor." Alenina jumped at the chance to recreate part of her favorite show, and so Perm's "Central Perk" café was born, she says.

"We did it all by ourselves, from the famous red sofas, all the furniture and signs to the tiniest interior details," Alenina says. "Joe's famous sawed door became a toilet door at the last stage." Raised watching the show, Alenina and her friends hold it in high regard.

"In Russia 'Friends' was one of the first American series translated into Russian, and that's why a generation has grown up with it, capable of telling the quality," Alenina says.

Alenina, Radmila and Bezrukova are not alone: From huge annual Comic Con events to a snug little café in Perm, American culture has become a part of daily life for many Russians, and for many, a part of their identity.

"It's not that retro culture is so very popular, but people started recognizing it and distinguishing it," Radmila says. "Maybe out of respect for the past or maybe because we're so influenced by American fashion and trends."

---

Expert's note

I wouldn't necessarily connect such hobbies with the extensive cultural expansion of the U.S. over the U.S.S.R in the 1980-'90s; the interest appeared earlier. We can recall during the 1950-'60s and movement of the Stilyagi (Hipsters) in the Soviet Union, who liked jazz, boogie-woogie and rock'-n'-roll.

Besides, I would pay attention to the fact, that in the U.S. it is possible to meet the people who are fond of Russian culture. They aren't only collecting works of folk art, balalaikas and samovars, but also opening private museums of Russian art or restaurants of Russian cuisine.

Now, Anti-Americanism is high but even among its loudest decriers not everyone is against all of America. Many people are critical of U.S. foreign policy and its politics, but at the same time accept, use and even love American culture and its scientific achievements (this is often a subject opponents are teased with: 'you are an anti-Americanist, and you use the computer with Windows, you have an iPhone, you watch Hollywood films, etc.').

If we're speaking about American cultural influence, of course it is very great in the field of popular, mass culture. But all forms of pop-culture are now filled with national meaning, for example songs people listen to more in their own language than in English. Who is asking anymore, where the ballet or symphony orchestra were invented? These phenomena have long been perceived as the expansion of the French, Italian or German culture.

Ivan Kurilla, Professor of History and Political Science, European University in St. Petersburg

 [return to Contents] 

 #23
From: "Sperling, Erik" <Erik.Sperling@mail.house.gov>
Subject: Nov. 4 event on Capitol Hill: The Crisis in US-Russia Relations, from Ukraine to Syria
Date: October 28, 2015

The Crisis in US-Russia Relations, from Ukraine to Syria:

Is Congress Overlooking its Causes and Potential Solutions?

Hosted by Rep. John Conyers, Jr., Rep. Ted Yoho, Rep. Charles Rangel, Rep. Steve Cohen, Rep. Jim Himes, Rep. Rick Nolan, Rep. Alan Grayson, Rep. Peter Welch, and Rep. Barbara Lee

Wednesday, November 4, 2015, 2pm

Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2237

Free & Open to the Public | Light Refreshments will be served


Expert Panelists
·        Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991 under President Ronald Reagan and President Bush
·        John Pepper, former Chairman and CEO of The Procter & Gamble Company, and former Chairman of Disney and of the Yale Corporation;
·        Ellen Mickiewicz, Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University; and
·         Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies, History, and Politics at New York University and Princeton University

The Ukrainian crisis represents a low in U.S.-Russian relations not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union-and the recent Russian intervention in the Syrian Civil War is only making things worse. American and Russian jets flying bombing missions in close proximity to one another raises the possibility of a military accident between two nuclear-armed powers.  As the New York Times warns, the complicated and shifting landscape of alliances leaves us "edging closer to an all-out proxy war between the United States and Russia."

The majority of Americans never lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 or the darkest decades of the Cold War-they have led lives without the looming specter of nuclear war.  But the areas of conflict between our nations are growing-the conflict in Ukraine, the expansion of NATO, Russia's involvement in Syria, and other lesser issues are driving a new wedge between the U.S. and Russia.

While most would agree that conflict between the United States and Russia benefits no one, the likelihood of such conflict, as well as the serious consequences it could bring, is not being adequately discussed on Capitol Hill.  In the interest of fostering more robust debate on U.S.-Russia relations, Rep. Conyers will convene an informal hearing featuring four eminent American experts on the subject.  All four are members of the Board of the recently re-founded American Committee for East-West Accord (http://eastwestaccord.com) a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose purpose is to promote public discussion and debate about the state of U.S. and Russian relations.

 [return to Contents] 

 #24
AFP
November 1, 2015
Ukraine leader says arrest of oligarch ally just 'the start'

Guennadi Korban, 45, a businessman and right-hand man of billionaire Igor Kolomoyski, was arrested Saturday as part of a probe into organised crime and corruption.

"Korban won't be the last," Poroshenko said in a joint interview with three television networks.

"The fight against corruption and to restore order will continue," he said, vowing "no one will enjoy immunity... neither the representatives of the new dispensation nor the representatives of the old regime" -- a reference to the pro-Russian regime of ousted former president Viktor Yanukovych.

Korban is being investigated among other things over the reported theft of 40 million hryvnias (1.5 millions euros, $1.7 million) earmarked for Ukrainian soldiers fighting pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country, according to the SBU security service.

Ukraine's army alleges the money was used to finance private militia.

Korban's Ukrop party has blasted his arrest as "political repression" targeting "patriots."

Poroshenko, himself a millionaire businessman, has promised to crack down on oligarchs as part of a drive to tackle the graft that fuelled the street protests which brought down Yanukovych in 2014.

Last year, he dismissed Kolomoyski -- one of Ukraine's richest men with major interests in banking and energy -- as governor of the eastern region of Dnipropetrovsk.

The government accused Kolomoyski of setting up his own militia and of trying to take control of a state-owned oil company.

Saturday's arrest of his associate Korban came a day after an annual wealth list showed Poroshenko's own assets soaring in value to $979 million (889 million euros), despite a deep economic crisis.

Several dozen Ukrainians travelling in a convoy of vehicles protested Saturday outside the presidential palace in Kiev, demanding tougher action against graft.

 [return to Contents] 

 #25
http://readrussia.com
November 1, 2015
Yes, Folks, Ukraine Is Still Politically Divided
By Mark Adomanis
[Map here http://readrussia.com/2015/11/01/yes-folks-ukraine-is-still-politically-divided/]

Before the Maidan uprising, Ukraine's politics were rather obviously divided along regional lines. The Western part of the country tended to vote for more pro-European candidates, while the Eastern part of the country tended to vote for more pro-Russian ones. Is that an oversimplification that partially masks a more complicated and multifaceted reality? Sure.

There were a range of other factors that helped determine who would come to the fore of Ukraine's oligarch-dominated political system including language, religion, and class. Region was related to these differences, but was not a perfect proxy for them. Nonetheless, despite the existence of numerous other cleavages, the map of the past several presidential elections reflected a blatantly obvious division between the North and the West and the South and the East.

Since Maidan, and particularly since the start of Russia's "hybrid war" in Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts, many Western observers have convinced themselves that these regional divisions had melted away. Sagacious proclamations that "Ukraine is united in its European choice" were regularly splashed across the editorial pages of major newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Ukrainian politicians also got in on the act, solemnly intoning that, whatever might have been the case in the past, the old dividing lines were no longer relevant to a united, pro-European Ukraine. I experienced this firsthand earlier this fall in Kiev at the Yalta European Strategy conference. One of the speakers, a famous Ukrainian writer, even went so far as to declare that the idea of a Ukraine divided along regional lines was "hateful propaganda," "malicious nonsense," and a "disgusting Russian attempt to paint Ukraine as a false country."

Now, simply as a matter of fact, all manner of countries have deep, regional political divisions. It's actually a surprisingly banal phenomenon. Whether it is urban-rural, north-south, or east-west it's incredibly common to find various kinds of social, economic, or political "cleavages" that are primarily drawn along regional lines. A cursory glance at any of the past 4 or 5 presidential elections in the United States shows an incredibly sharp and worsening regional divide (a divide that, in one form or another, stretches back for virtually the entirety of American history). Indeed this divide manifests itself in almost everything, even health insurance. There is an entire genre of pop sociology whose only goal is to compare the multitudinous differences of "red" versus "blue" America, for example David Brooks' famous (if somewhat overrated) Bobos in Paradise.

Similarly, Italy's stark regional contrasts (the north of the country is, on average, about as wealthy as the Netherlands, while the south is poorer than Portugal) have been exhaustively documented in the realms of political science, economics, and history. Even Poland, among the most ethnically homogenous and politically centralized countries in all of Europe, has political divisions that can, in part, be traced along the now vanished border between the German and Russian empires.

No one in their right mind, of course, would claim that a writer who tried to analyze the economic, social, and political differences between New York and Texas was somehow engaged in "anti-American propaganda," or an attempt to prove that the United States is a "fictitious nation." But when it comes to Ukraine, the current government and its supporters are rabid in attacking anyone who points out that Ukraine is not united in its desire to fulsomely embrace the European Union.

This isn't my own weird, personal opinion, it's simply, objective reality. Look at the following map, which shows the percentage of the vote won by the "Opposition Block," a successor to Yanukovych's late (and not much lamented) Party of Regions. It would be wrong to simply call the party "pro-Russia" (it's financed by Ukrainian oligarchs who have every interest in maintaining their country's independence from Moscow) but it is, broadly speaking, fair to say that the Opposition Block is not in favor of the process of European integration that sparked the Maidan revolt.

Perhaps there is a way to look at that map and not see a sharp regional divide but I'm not sure what kind of mental gymnastics it would require.

None of this means that Ukraine is any less genuine or "real" of a state. As noted previously, regional divisions within countries are incredibly common and, in fact, totally unremarkable. But pretending that Ukrainian public opinion is united, much less formulating public policy on that basis, is a mistake because...well because it is simply not true.

Maybe at some point in the future Ukraine's populace will be united behind a particular political party or set of ideals. There is strong evidence that Soviet nostalgia and anti-EU opinions are overwhelmingly concentrated in the older generations, and so, over time, you would expect these views to gradually wither away. But at the moment Ukrainians absolutely do not agree on what the country ought to do or where it ought to head and we shouldn't pretend that they do.

 [return to Contents] 

 #26
The Guardian (UK)
November 2, 2015
Ukrainian rebels grow restless amid cracks in alliance with Russia
A trip to the self-declared Luhansk People's Republic in eastern Ukraine reveals militants unhappy with the ceasefire and increasingly out-of-step with Moscow
Jack Losh in Alchevsk and Jolobok
[Photos here http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/02/ukraine-ghost-brigade-ukraine-rebels]

Portraits of Putin and Stalin adorn the room where the rebel commander, Yuri "Rostov" Shevchenko, holds court.

In this former KGB complex in the industrial town of Alchevsk in the self-declared Luhansk People's Republic, members of Shevchenko's militant Ghost Brigade are growing restless as a shaky ceasefire holds in eastern Ukraine.

With their Russian backers turning their attention to the war in Syria, cracks are appearing in the rebels' alliance with Moscow. The Kremlin is reportedly pressing the militants to put the conflict on ice, at least for the time being.

Some in the east feel abandoned, stuck between Syria and a ceasefire they are reluctant to respect. Fighters insist that the war is not over - it's only the tactics that have changed.

"Our republic is not yet independent - it depends on help from Russia," said Aleksey Markov, a nuclear physicist from Moscow and Shevchenko's second-in-command. "We must first take more land, more industry, more cities. Only then can we finish the war."

Peotr Berykov, another of the Ghost Brigade's upper ranks, accuses Moscow of threatening to withhold humanitarian aid to prevent rebels from taking unilateral action. "The Kremlin tells us: 'An offensive would be bad politically. Wait. Otherwise we won't send our white trucks'," he said. "Without their help, civilians will starve."

Shevchenko's rebels are keen to launch a new push to consolidate their breakaway territory. Despite a fresh truce, Markov said the conflict continues "just in different ways" - fewer artillery attacks but more "special ops".

"We get help from the Russian people but the Kremlin is ignoring us," he said.

The unit's leader, Shevchenko, is a former Soviet soldier who later worked in customs.

He became commander of the Ghost Brigade when his predecessor, a local maverick and Soviet idealist called Aleksey Mozgovoy, was killed in a roadside ambush in May. In a corner of the conflict, criss-crossed by rebel factions, Shevchenko knows he could be next.

"I'm concerned, how could I not be?" he said. "It happened to him, it can happen to me. But I'm very philosophical about death."

After Mozgovoy's death, some blamed forces loyal to Ukraine. But there were also rumours of an enemy within - rebel chiefs taking out rivals to bolster their own power.

Shevchenko remains circumspect. "We need a court to find the truth," he says. "We have our own investigation. There is nothing more to know until that is complete."

The commander's rebel stronghold is just 40 miles from the Russian border. Drab, Soviet-era blocks rise from the rolling steppe on the town's southern flanks. To the north, a coke furnace and steel works dominate the landscape.

The ranks of the Ghost Brigade are drawn from disparate regions of Russia, Ukraine and even western Europe. They occupy a stretch of the front running through the deserted village of Jolobok, ruined by months of shelling. Daily artillery attacks marked the summer. Now, calm has been restored - punctuated by the sporadic rattle of gunfire.

The rebels on front-line duty endure poor conditions, set to worsen in winter. They live in abandoned, rubble-strewn houses and slip through alleyways to avoid sniper bullets. Food is prepared in a derelict yard next to an exploded shell.

Some don't stay very long. "It's very frustrating," says Markov as he inspects the front. "Many are volunteers, often they go home. We lose them and we have to start from scratch."

A short walk away over shattered glass, shell craters and a child's sandpit, a middle-aged soldier placidly cleans his machine-gun in a firewood shed, just a few hundred metres from Ukrainian positions.

One family stubbornly remain: Vladimir, Olga and her frail, 90-year-old mother. Despite their plight, the couple are sanguine. "This is our land, our home," says Olga. "There's nowhere else to go. We have a saying, 'If you survive for three days, you become a guest of the war'."

Their rusty metal gate, ruptured by shrapnel and scrawled over with chalk, doubles as a tab system for rebels yet to pay for their milk rations. Nina, the elderly matriarch, rests against a wall. "I can't describe the pain in my head when the bombs come," she says. "I'm an old woman and never expected to end my life like this."

 [return to Contents] 

 
#27
Valdai Discussion Club
November 2, 2015
The Settlement Process in Ukraine: Breakthroughs, Problems, Prospects
By Vladimir Bruter
Vladimir Bruter is expert of the International Institute of Humanitarian and Political Studies.

The crisis in Syria is more important for the international community and the main world centers of power than the crisis in Ukraine. The conflict in Ukraine is largely "artificial". It could and should have been avoided.

The Normandy Four meetings have been quite a success in terms of the observation of the ceasefire regime and not so successful in terms of political settlement of the situation in Eastern Ukraine.

In general, when we talk about the ceasefire regime, everything seems more or less clear to everyone. When it comes to political settlement, "interpretations" of the Minsk II Agreement start appearing, predominantly among the Ukrainian authorities and their Western political sponsors. Such "interpretations" underlie the fact that the political dialogue between Kiev, Donetsk and Luhansk has not begun and Kiev's commitments stipulated by the Minsk II Agreement remain unfulfilled. For some reason, Kiev believes that amendments affecting Eastern Ukraine can be introduced without the consent of the Eastern Ukraine (self-proclaimed republics) itself.

Obviously, this approach is ineffective for political settlement. In this regard, the potential of the Normandy Four (actually three, Ukraine does not bear upon it) is limited. Doubtlessly, Russia, France and Germany make certain attempts to induce Kiev to respect the terms of the Minsk II Agreement. However, Kiev is reluctant to comply with the trio's position. Perhaps, it is due to the local elections and the need to bolster the "high degree of patriotism" in the society. In this case, the situation should be re-examined after the elections, somewhere in the second half of November.

There are two significant breakthroughs in the settlement process of Ukraine.

The first one is the actual observation of the ceasefire regime, considerable de-escalation of the conflict and drastic reduction of the risks of new escalation. This may have different explanations. However, the veto imposed by President Obama on the defense budget, which implies direct military aid to Ukraine, suggests that the top US decision makers understand the risks and realize that any escalation of conflict in Eastern Ukraine is unacceptable and may lead to irreversible consequences. At the same time, the US position on political settlement of the conflict has not really changed and remains very stern, aimed at limiting Russia's influence in Ukraine by any possible means.

As for the second one, the migrant crisis in Europe convinced France and Germany to "better understand" the terms of Minsk II and indisputably show more interest in stability in Ukraine than a year ago. Paris and Berlin realize that neither the crisis in Ukraine nor in the Middle East can be solved without Russia's constructive role.

This has not propelled a special rapprochement between the positions of France, Germany and Russia, and it hardly would in the near future, but the number of irresolvable differences has gone down. Europe does not need a new crisis in Ukraine. It does not need unnecessary and largely demonstrative Russophobia among Ukrainian authorities. It is another reason why all the parties involved in the conflict understand that new escalation of the conflict is unacceptable.

President Putin made a very detailed clarification of what Minsk II provisions Kiev was interpreting arbitrarily and just how Kiev was trying to imitate fulfillment of the agreements.

Without getting into details and legal nuances, we can point out the following moments:

- all the legal initiatives the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine needs to pass should be coordinated with the self-proclaimed republics;

- constitutional amendments in Ukraine should not be limited by transitional provisions or time;

- all the humanitarian limitations (commercial and economic relations or transition of citizens) should be lifted immediately, regardless of the general political discussions or adjustments in the Ukrainian law.

Only after that, we can talk about a shift from de-escalation of the situation in the Eastern Ukraine to normalization. It is not happening at the moment. This means that implementation of the political element of the Minsk II Agreement has not begun yet. It increases the risk of a new "frozen" conflict, which (at least verbally) Kiev and its Western sponsors would prefer to avoid.

The key goal of the forthcoming meeting in Berlin is to stimulate the political element of the settlement process.

It is currently unclear how it can be done practically, but such goal is part of the agenda.

Doubtlessly, Berlin and Paris will keep certain pressure on Kiev, but its effectiveness is vague. So far, Washington has consistently neutralized all the attempts to put any pressure on Kiev, and Europeans cannot "force" Kiev to start realizing the political part of the Minsk II Agreement.

There will be another attempt in Berlin, but the extent of its fruitfulness depends on a number of factors that are either hard to define or are only unraveling. In any case, the changes in Kiev will only begin after November 15 and will depend (among other things) on the public response following the election results.

The crisis in Syria is more important for the international community and the main world centers of power than the crisis in Ukraine.

Large international coalitions are engaged in the conflict in Syria and the Middle East as a whole. There is a real collision between radical Islam, which is an influential world-scale factor and lays claims for recognition as a new independent power, a non-systemic, aggressive and devastating power. None of this has been seen in the Ukrainian conflict.

The conflict in Ukraine is largely "artificial". It could and should have been avoided, unlike the conflicts in Syria and the Middle East, which are a natural result of the collapse of secular statehood in many Arab states. The destruction of authoritarian regimes in North Africa and Middle East made radical Islam the most appealing version of "vertical mobilization" for many, most active "network" structures in the countries. It demonstrates that, regardless of the military campaign in Syria, the conflict in the Middle East and North Africa will be long-running. The conflicts in Somalia and Sudan alone have been ongoing for over 20 years.

The conflict in Syria is a lot more serious than the conflict in Ukraine. Russia and the US are a lot deeper engaged in the Syrian conflict, while the conflict in Ukraine is (and was) of less importance to them.

Nevertheless, two nuances should be mentioned.

First of all, the US is ready to "play" geopolitical games on any number of "boards" and the development of the situation in Ukraine will be constantly in Washington's limelight, whoever is in charge of the White House, however the situation in Syria develops. The US is not only "playing" to restrain Russia, it is simultaneously playing to restrain everyone capable of (potentially) seriously challenging Washington's will to dominate the world ubiquitously and single-handedly. The US will not "leave" Ukraine or "forget" about it, even despite the exceptionally complicated internal political situation in Ukraine, which constantly extravagates the "worst American expectations".

Secondly, unlike the US, Western Europe is not ready for "global geopolitical games". The migrant crisis alone is largely changing the sentiments of the Western European man in the street, who demands peace, comfort and "return to normalcy" from the government. Under such priorities, the positions of Germany and France on Ukraine start depending on the internal political situation. On the other hand, Western Europeans are entirely against "greater involvement" of their countries in the situation in the Middle East.

Therefore, the situation around the settlement process in Ukraine is influenced not only by the situation in Syria and the Middle East, but also by the general situation in the world and the internal political situation in Western European states.

In general, all the world problems are interconnected one way or another. Ukraine is no exception here.

 [return to Contents] 

 #28
Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
October 29, 2015
Briefing by Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova (excerpt)

The internal political situation in Ukraine

I would like to comment on the local elections held in Ukraine on October 25, 2015. As you know, the final results will become clear later, after the second round of voting is held in some areas. Its results will be used to determine the newly elected mayors, including the mayor of Kiev.

However, it is possible to make some conclusions right now. Unfortunately, the present campaign, like last year's presidential and parliamentary elections, has not contributed to defusing the existing split in Ukrainian society and the partition of the country. Moreover, despite the optimistic claims made by Kiev officials and some of their Western partners, this trend has become even stronger due to the population's growing disappointment with the current political situation, the ongoing economic crisis, overrunning corruption which paralyses the country, and absence of global changes for the better.

The backstage and rash adoption of the new law on local elections, which was submitted just four months before the voting date, has also had a negative impact on the election procedures in Ukraine. The law turned out to be a fragmented piece with a number of deficiencies and ambiguities, which made it difficult to be interpreted by both the electors and the organizers of the elections. Moreover, the law does not comply with some Kiev's obligations outlined by the OSCE, as concluded by observers of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) working in Ukraine. Incidentally, they also noticed problems with registering the candidates, especially the restrictions for the nomination of independent candidates. Thus, given the flow of messages from various Ukrainian regions concerning numerous violations before and during voting, it can be assumed that the elections were far from the recognised standards of integrity and objectivity and hence can hardly serve as a model of democracy.

We hope that Kiev's officials will draw relevant conclusions based on these critical remarks and will implement them when drafting a separate law of Ukraine in coordination with representatives of Donbass on modalities for holding local elections in the southeast of the country, which is an indispensable part of the Package of Measures of February 12, 2015.

This and other issues of Ukrainian settlement became the matter of debate at the October 27 meetings of the Contact Group and its working subgroups in Minsk. The participants also discussed the withdrawal of tanks and small-calibre artillery from the demarcation line, including its subsequent verification procedure, as well as mine clearing in the conflict area. The parties continued to discuss ways out of the relevant economic problems and the current humanitarian situation in the region.

The coordination of the issues related to the implementation of the planned exchange of prisoners was a positive point for the parties. The relevant procedure involving representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is scheduled for October 29, 2015. Eleven Ukrainian prisoners of war and nine Donbass self-defence fighters are expected to return home.

The initiatives seeking practical solutions to settle the Ukrainian crisis, including the agreements reached at the October 2 Normandy Four summit in Paris, will be continued. The possibility of holding a Normandy format meeting of foreign ministers next week is currently being addressed.

 [return to Contents] 

 #29
Interfax-Ukraine
October 30, 2015
Corrupt judges continue to work in Ukraine - Pyatt
 
Ukraine's judiciary can work without political interference and corruption, but corrupt judges are still on the job as lustration in the country is incomplete, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt has said.

"While that process continues, Ukraine can also push forward in three areas to strengthen judicial independence, accountability, and integrity. First, implement the Law on Restoration of Trust in the Judiciary. Lustration is incomplete. More than a year into the process, corrupt judges are still on the job. Judges continue to go unpunished when they disregard human rights and demonstrate contempt for the rule of law," he said at the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council and Kyiv School of Economics Conference on Legal and Governance Reform on October 30.

According to him, the Interim Special Commission for Vetting Judges needs more time to complete its vital work and the judiciary needs to act on its recommendations so that the lustration process brings real results.

The U.S. ambassador also called on the Ukrainian authorities to strengthen judicial self-governance so that Ukraine's judiciary can work without political interference and corruption.

"When an influential or corrupt person calls, looking to buy a decision or threaten a judge, that judge should be able to hang up the phone fully confident that he or she is shielded by her independence and protected by the judiciary. Judges should feel empowered and protected to act independently, knowing they will not face punishment or reprisal for deciding a case on its legal - not political - merits," he said.

In his words, the Constitutional Commission has proposed changing Ukraine's Constitution to strip the Parliament, the Presidential Administration and the Cabinet of the right to appoint judges, establish, or abolish courts, or make decisions about how funds supporting judicial operations are spent. However, those amendments alone will not guarantee judicial independence.

"To succeed, judges need to understand the scope of their independence and exercise it with confidence and, critically, integrity. At the same time, other branches of government must give up control - control that has given them power, influence, and, in many cases, opportunities for corruption," he said.

He also said that Ukrainian prosecutors must abandon the Soviet legacy of political control and corruption which has allowed the powerful - including those in government - to get away with influence peddling and human rights abuses.

"These acts of impunity undermine the rule of law and Ukraine's future place in Europe's community of free, prosperous, democratic nations," he said.

"The Prosecutor General's office must stop undermining reforms, stop protecting corrupt prosecutors within its ranks, such as the notorious "diamond prosecutors" arrested in July, and stop blocking criminal investigations into bribery, graft, and political dealing," he added.

In his words, the United States is committed to supporting an effective Prosecutor General's Office which Ukrainians can trust.

He praised the deputies of the prosecutor general, Davit Sakvarelidze and Vitaliy Kasko, who are working establish an independent Inspector General to investigate and prosecute corrupt individuals within the Prosecutor General's Office.

"We hope the Prosecutor General's office will provide Inspectors General Sakvarelidze and Kasko with the resources and authority they need to seek more convictions and restore public trust in the PGO," he said.

"Kasko's comments to the media this week that he and other reformers within the PGO are under intense pressure are very worrisome, a sign that the battle between Old Ukraine and New Ukraine rages within this critical institution. I have discussed with Prosecutor General [Viktor] Shokin our strong support for a new regulation on the independent operations of the Office of Inspector General (IG) that meets western standards and clearly defines the IG's jurisdiction, powers, and authority, in order to enable it to perform its functions in a manner that is effective and credible," he added.

 [return to Contents] 

 #30
AFP
November 1, 2015
Ukraine leader's wealth grows despite war, economic woes
President Petro Poroshenko's assets reportedly rose by 20 percent to $979 million

The value of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's assets soared despite economic crisis and conflict while those of other tycoons shrank in an annual wealth list published Friday.

The 50-year-old Western-backed president's business empire ranges from chocolates to media holdings still under his control.

Friday's independent Novoye Vremya weekly showed the Ukrainian leader -- often criticised for failing to curb the political powers of fellow tycoons -- ranked as the country's sixth-richest man.

His assets reportedly rose by 20 percent to $979 million (889 million euros) -- only just supporting his claim he is no longer a billionaire.

Poroshenko retains control of a top TV channel and has failed to follow through on his promise to sell off his Roshen chocolate empire due to a lack of foreign interest and a dearth of rich-enough investors in Ukraine itself.

The president's official spokesman did not pick up his phone when contacted repeatedly by AFP.

"Poroshenko's (wealth) rose thanks to the rise in value of his candy business that -- even in the midst of the deepest of crises -- is developing quickly, building new capacities and conquering new markets," the weekly said.

The wealth list is topped by metals magnate Rinat Akhmetov.

The 49-year-old Akhmetov is a controversial figure accused by some local media of impeding Poroshenko's efforts to halt the 18-month war in the pro-Russian east.

Novoye Vremya said Akhmetov's fortunes had plunged by 56 percent to $4.5 billion due in part to the sharp recent fall in global commodity prices.

Poroshenko's sworn political foe and banking giant Igor Kolomoyskiy came in third with an estimated fortune of $1.9 billion.

The 52-year-old grey-bearded and fiercely outspoken figure finds himself in the peculiar position of being at odds with both Kiev and Moscow.

Russia's state media accuse him of funding Ukrainian neo-Nazi combat units that commit grave crimes in the separatist east.

Poroshenko's fight against Kolomoyskiy began with efforts to strip him of his indirect control of a state-owned oil company and culminated in the businessman losing his seat as governor of the industrially important Dnipropetrovsk region in March.

Kolomoyskiy's wealth reportedly slipped by 17 percent due to the country's financial woes.

All the others in the top 10 also lost money in the year since the last Novoye Vremya poll.

Ukraine's economy is on track to shrink by about 12 percent this year and only return to marginal growth should the eastern campaign end in 2016.

'No benefit to president'

Poroshenko promotes himself as a Western-style businessman who built his empire from the ground up and kept to transparency standards that most others simply ignored.

Many of Ukraine's other mega-rich scooped up their holdings at cut-price rates in pre-arranged privatisation deals in which which they rewarded the government by funding its parliamentary parties and campaigning for them in the media.

But analysts said Poroshenko's reputation may still suffer for being the only one of the country's already-despised oligarchs to profit while presiding over Ukraine's worst crisis since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

"This will not benefit the president's ratings or help improve Ukraine's image as a nation run by oligarchs," Vadym Karasyov of Kiev's Institute of Global Strategies told AFP.

"The world views Ukraine as a poor country with a super-rich minority," Karasyov said.

 [return to Contents] 

 #31
IMF set to help Ukraine avoid debt repayment to Russia
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, October 30. /TASS/. The IMF's plans to change the lending rules suggest that the Fund is actually adapting to Ukraine's needs and wants to help Kiev avoid repaying its $3 billion debt to Russia, experts say.

The IMF will take a step dangerous for the stability of the international lending system, if it gives up the practice of denying loans to countries that owe to official creditors, according to experts.

Russia bought $3 billion worth of Ukraine's sovereign bonds in late 2013. Ukraine is due to repay its debt to Russia before December 20, 2015. Ukraine's financial authorities have said on many occasions they consider Russia's loan as a commercial debt and insist on its restructuring. Russia, however, considers this loan as Ukraine's sovereign debt and demands its repayment on schedule and in full.

"Russia's position has not undergone any changes," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday. "Russia continues to insist that this is not a private loan but a sovereign state debt that has to be paid."

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov reiterated on Friday that Ukraine's debt to Russia was not subject to restructuring and write-off under Kiev's program for private creditors and the Finance Ministry would turn to an international court, if Kiev failed to repay the loan in December 2015.

The Ukrainian government is preparing to pass a decision on a moratorium on debt repayment to Russia, the publication Apostrophe reported on Friday, referring to a government source.

Moscow hoped until now that it would be able to raise the issue of the IMF's further assistance to Ukraine under the four-year $17.5 billion loan facility, if Ukraine refused to repay the debt. The IMF's rules prohibit providing loans to countries with overdue payments to other states. However, as an IMF official said at a briefing on Thursday, the Fund is now discussing reforms, which should allow providing loans to countries even if they have overdue debts to official bilateral creditors. According to The Wall Street Journal, the IMF governing board will consider these amendments in late November.

"The haste, with which this is done, testifies to the fact that the moment for discussing the amendments to the Fund's rules coinciding with the second review of the IMF's Ukraine program has not been chosen by chance," Siluanov said.

"If the IMF amends the lending rules and Ukraine defaults partially on its obligations, it will be difficult for Russia to get its loan back," Professor of the Russian Presidential Academy of the National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) Yuri Yudenkov told TASS.

"A loophole is opening for Kiev not to pay the debt. An impression is created that the IMF is seeking to prevent Russia from getting this money back," he added.

If the IMF amends its lending rules, each country will itself determine to whom it will return the debt and to whom it won't repay the loan, the expert said.

"Everything will be determined by situational political considerations of a particular government. Surely, this will not contribute to the development of the international lending system," he added.

"Everyone would think about whether a particular country will return me the debt or not or whether it will be repaying the debt to someone else. If the IMF amends the rules, this will be bad for everyone, especially for creditor nations. Rules of the game will change: general stability will be sacrificed for the sake of political interests," the expert said.

The expert said he was surprised by the selective approach of the IMF, an international organization established by the United Nations.

"The IMF means not only the United States and Great Britain but also China and Russia. Of course, we have small quotas but we are participants and we have our capital there [in the IMF]," the expert said.

"A decision by the IMF to change the lending policy would be very dangerous because it weakens the requirements of international financial institutions, which are not tough even now compared with commercial creditors," Professor of the Higher School of Economics Ivan Rodionov told TASS.

Last year, when the IMF started to provide loans to Ukraine, part of the loans was purposefully intended several times for repaying debts to Russia. However, this did not happen, the expert said.

The scenario of applying to a court of law holds little prospects, the expert said.

"The case examination would last long while a decision would finally not be enforced. It will be necessary to come to terms as there is no other method," the expert said.

"Most likely, Russia will see a judicial process for many years with a hardly predictable prospect because it is quite probable that Ukraine will refuse to pay," RANEPA Associate Professor Sergey Khestanov told TASS.

"This means we'll have to conduct legal proceedings for 3 to 10 years in international courts. Today it is quite difficult to predict the outcome of the process. But in any case it is understandable that the litigation will drag on," the expert said.

In the expert's opinion, "most likely, the IMF's intention is partly dictated by purely economic considerations so as not to further worsen Ukraine's plight but politics is also present in this case partly and latently," the expert said.

 [return to Contents] 

 #32
Facebook
October 30, 2015
Maidan Snipers
By Ivan Katchanovski
University of Ottawa

A Maidan protester in his recent interview publicly stated that members of the Afgan war veteran unit and other units of the Maidan Self-Defence captured snipers in the Hotel Ukraina and the Bank Arkada and shot and gravely wounded one of them. He also states that some Maidan opposition leaders evacuated snipers in a bus along with captured members of the Internal Troops. Videos show that the Maidan Self-Defence leader, the Right Sector leader, Svoboda and Fatherland deputies, and Poroshenko around 1:00am-2:00am on February 21, 2014 took part in this purported evacuation, which this protester along with a large group of Maidan protesters attempted to stop. In a democratic country with the rule of law, like the US or Canada, this and similar allegations by "Radical Maidan" and the leader of the Kyiv organization of Patriot of Ukraine would have prompted parliamentary and independent investigations and media scrutiny. This is not likely to happen in Ukraine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YddO4rayik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilRA375uUf0
Активісти і депутати взяли силовиків у полон - #Євромайдан
Вночі дві тисячі активістів влашували штовханину на Богдана Хмельницького - аби не випустити з Євромайдану полонених солдатів Внутрішніх...

 [return to Contents] 

 #33
http://newcoldwar.org
October 24, 2015
Right-wing nationalists under investigation after last year's sniper massacre in Kiev
By Paul Funder Larsen, Jyllands-Posten (Denmark), Oct 24, 2015 (original in Danish here, translation by New Cold War.org)

Ukraine is now investigating nationalists complicit in the 'snipers' massacre in Kiev in February 2014. The arrow points to the far-right Svoboda Party which is participating in the October 25 local elections.

MOSCOW-The right nationalist party Svoboda (Freedom) aims to be represented in a number of Ukrainian City Council after Sunday's local elections, but currently the party's extra-parliamentary activities that attract the most interest in Ukraine.

For 20 months after snipers on and around Kiev's Independence Square, killing more than 100 protesters and police officers are members of the party in the authorities' attention in the investigation of the massacre.

The case is still far from being fully resolved, but members of the police special forces Berkut stands accused of the bulk of the killings.

However, only foot soldiers who are behind bars in Kiev - both the superiors in the police force and policymakers have long since fled the country, mainly to Russia.

Raids earlier this month of top people of Svoboda have now opened a second front in the investigation of the killings that sparked a dramatic change of power in Ukraine.

"It's a real time bomb," says Ivan Katchanovski from the University of Ottawa about the investigation of Svoboda.

"This is the first set directly Svoboda with the mass killing of demonstrators and reveals that snipers shot from the 11th floor of the Hotel Ukraine from a room where one of the Svoboda members was living," says the Canadian-Ukrainian university lecturer who has been working on detailed maps of the events in central Kiev in February 2014.

Also according to Katchanovski, another investigation of the far right is taking place in connection with last year's massacres in Kiev. A member of 'Vikings' group with links to the radical network Pravyj Sector is suspected of killing four police officers.

Violent nationalists

Svoboda is one of the oldest groups on Ukraine's well-armed right wing and is described by various sources as everything from the right to the nationalist neo-Nazi. The party has six members in the Ukrainian parliament and for a time last year was represented in the government. Now it is suspected in several cases to have engaged in violence.

It is a member of the party who stands accused of having thrown the grenade at the Ukrainian Parliament, on August 31 of this year, killing four policemen and injuring more than 100.

Two activists also connected to Svoboda are suspected of the killing of the pro-Russian [sic] journalist and writer Oles Buzina in Kiev in April.

During the recent election campaign, however, the party invested a lot of money and effort to paint a more moderate image of themselves, says political analyst Jaroslav Kovaltjuk from the think tank ICPS in Kyiv.

In last year's Ukrainian parliamentary elections, October 2014, Svoboda did not reach the five per cent threshold for party lists to win seats in Parliament. But some of its member did win election in a handful of single-member constituencies.

The party is now directing its full attention to the October 25 municipal elections. [1]

"Much is at stake for Svoboda in these elections and the expectation is that they will win seats on the city councils of Kiev and several cities in western Ukraine," says Jaroslav Kovaltjuk.

In general, support for the nationalist forces is greatest in western Ukraine, while it is harder to win support in the capital.

Unlike Svoboda, the second major organization in Ukraine's extreme right, Right Sector, not in local elections.

 [return to Contents] 

 #34
Deutsche Welle
October 30, 2015
Re-integrate Donbass? No, thanks!
While the Ukrainian leadership tries to implement the Minsk agreement, opposition to a re-integration of separatist-controlled areas is growing. Experts warn of a new internal political crisis.
By Roman Goncharenko

In October, the conflict in eastern Ukraine saw more signs of easing tensions than there'd been in a long time: both the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian separatists pulled back more tanks and heavy weapons from the dividing line. The separatists postponed local elections until 2016, while Ukraine presented a draft bill which is to make those elections possible. The Minsk agreement (Minsk II )is being implemented slowly, and not without setbacks. It stipulates that the Donetsk and Luhansk areas located in the Donbass coal-mining region should be granted more rights and eventually become Ukrainian territory again.

What appears to be the greatest challenge on that path to re-integration still lies ahead for Ukraine. In Minsk, Kyiv pledged to enshrine special rights for the separatist areas in its constitution before the end of 2015. The vote on the first reading at the end of August was overshadowed by heavy rioting in front of the Kyiv parliament. Four policemen died when a protester launched a grenade. Right-wing populist party "Svoboda" (Freedom) was one of the driving forces behind the protests. In parliament, the "Radical Party" under right-wing populist Oleh Lyashko tried to block the vote. After the ballot, Lyashko's party resigned from the coalition government. Observers predict that the vote on the second reading - scheduled for December - will see a similarly fraught situation.

Greek-style referendum

As early as 12 February - the day when the Minsk agreement was signed - critical voices could be heard in Ukraine. They blamed Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko for having been hoodwinked by Russian head of state Vladimir Putin. Serhy Rahmanin, deputy editor-in-chief of renowned weekly "Dzerkalo Tyzhnia," put it thus: the agreement facilitated the creation of pseudo-republics in eastern Ukraine that were hostile to Kyiv and had their own police forces and judicial systems, but were to be financed by the central government. He added that a comprehensive amnesty for separatists was questionable as well.

His colleague Serhiy Harmash, editor-in-chief of the online newspaper "OstroV," had similar views: "I'm against the Minsk agreement," the Donetsk-based journalist , who had fled from the separatists and escaped to Kyiv, told DW: "It imposes a conflict solution on Ukraine which could destroy the country in the end." The greatest danger was that the Russia-fueled conflict could spread from the level of foreign policy to that of domestic policy, he continued. Trying to re-integrate the separatist areas into Ukraine could "provoke a civil war," Harmash warned, and stated what he sees as the two possible ways out of the situation: Poroshenko either had to "let the people decide" and - in analogy to Greece and the EU's austerity demands - hold a referendum on the Minsk agreement, or he had to step down.

Anatoliy Hrytsenko even recommends canceling the Minsk agreement. "There are plenty of reasons to do this, because it wasn't adhered to for many months, the ceasefire being a prime example," the opposition politician, who formerly served as defense minister under pro-Western president Victor Yushchenko, told DW: "The Minsk agreement is not to be implemented under any circumstances, beause otherwise Ukraine will be in danger of ceasing to exist." Kyiv, he went on, had to restart negotiations on Donbass with Moscow, inviting the European Union as well as the United States to the negotiating table. And this time, he said, Russia-annexed Crimea could not be excluded, as had been the case in Minsk.

Majority does not believe in peace after Minsk

Oksana Syroyid, deputy speaker of Ukraine's parliament and member of the governing party "Samopomich" (Self Reliance), is considered to be the most influential and prominent critic of the Minsk agreement and its implementation under the constitution. "Samopomich" is a new, liberal, pro-Western party, with its stronghold in western Ukraine. In August, her parliamentary group voted against the constitutional reform. In local elections held on 25 October, "Samopomich" gained votes, establishing itself as the third-strongest political power across almost the entire country. In many interviews, Syroyid warns of a "virus of separatism" which could infect Ukraine via the Minsk agreement.

Critics such as the journalist Harmash or the politician Hrytsenko are by no means isolated voices, says Volodymyr Fesenko. Talking to DW, the Kyiv-based political scientist cited an open letter submitted to President Poroshenko in August by around 30 Ukrainian intellectuals, asking him not to enshrine a so-called "decentralization" in the constitution. "This is Putin's plan - legitimizing an Russian enclave on Ukrainian territory," the letter said. The plea, however, had no consequences.

"This reflects public sentiment," Fesenko said. The majority of Ukrainians (60.7 percent) do not believe that the implementation of the Minsk accord will lead to peace, according to a survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute for Sociology (KMIS) at the end of September. Only one in four of those polled gave a different opinion. Another polling institute, the Kyiv-based Razumkov Centre, determined in its survey that there were more opponents than advocates of a constitutional reform in Ukraine (32 versus 21 percent).

Potential to stop the constitutional reform

The adversaries of the Minsk accord have neither a political leader nor a coordination center, but they have still the potential to stop the reform of the constitution, according to Fesenko. "At this point, the Ukrainian parliament cannot come up with the 300 votes required to adopt the constitutional reform on the second reading," the expert says. "If Minsk was implemented to the letter, this could lead to a serious political crisis," he warns, saying that some political parties were suspected of trying to provoke early parliamentary elections by this very means.

 [return to Contents] 

 
#35
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
November 1, 2015
Ukrainization = dehumanization: a personal reflection on mass psychosis in Ukraine
Aleksandr Rostovtsev, PolitNavigator
http://www.politnavigator.net/raschelovechivanie-kak-nacionalnaya-katastrofa.html
Translated for Fort Russ by J. Arnoldski

"Dehumanization as a national catastrophe"

It should already be time to get used to things, but I simply can't as I am constantly faced with the massive orgy of "non-humans" over dead people. The catastrophe of the Russian airliner somewhere over Egypt blew the seats off the toilets of Ukrainian social network contingents and other contingents sympathetic to them. It should already be time to get used to things, but every time that I'm faced with a flood of sewage sludge that flows from the TV screen and computer monitor from the vilest depths of the human gut, I shudder and loathe. Somehow it's impossible be so hardened that you deal with such things indifferently, shrug, and turn away.

It's not even the first time. And it didn't just start yesterday. Or last year...The loss of lives as a result of the accident in the Moscow metro; the throwing around of photographs depicting piles of bodies of militiamen killed during the first attempt at storming the Donetsk Airport; bloody May 9 in Mariupol; the massive, bestial massacre of "Kulikovtsy" on May 2 in Odessa; the murder and humiliation of employees of the police and internal troops on the second Maidan; the medieval show of mocking dissent for the dear public; and comments like "a Rus knocked off," "a Colorado fried," "stab the Moskal," and "Crimea and Donbass - either Ukrainian or depopulated." Once the bottom is reached, the bottom is knocked out and broken, then the abyss! The competition is who can quicker and to a greater extent than the others force the human out of himself, free himself from the Chimera of conscience, and transform internally into an ugly monster, like Alien from the fantastic thriller movie. It follows that we should recognize and realize that the Ukrainization of the population of the former USSR has become a Banderization with the dehumanization and obtaining of a crowd of mindless robots in the framework of the program "Ukraine is not Russia."

It's possible to rewind events back a few years and with a bit of effort find comments about the residents of Eastern Ukraine after the victory of Maidan-1 not covered by the euphoria of Yushchenko's victory in the fraudulent "third round." Already back then they called Crimeans "agents of Moscow", and the residents of Donbass "slaves" and "Akhmetov's shrews." And five years ago, when there was a peaceful transfer of power from the sick Yushchenko to the thieving Professor, when a new Maidan with Eurointegration couldn't even be smelled, there was a mass emission of crap across social networks on the occasion of the death of miners: "slaves went to visit Shubin," "Why not everyone at once?" and "Pity that there wasn't their swine with their brood"...Dehumanization was already a lushly blooming flower and the berries were in reach.

What's worst of all is that those rejoicing and dancing over corpses are not some kind of bitten Transylvanian vampires, not rotten Banderites who have miraculously survived and come out of their hideouts, and not galvanized fascists a slew of which are from the autoclaves of Wolfenstein castle. These are people - not only ethnic Ukrainians, and not all of them come from the Western regions, and even less of them have Banderite heritage. These are people formerly from the same cultural matrix as us. Originating from the Soviet Union, they became pioneers around the Eternal Flame or on the Street of Glory; they wrote essays about Prince Andrey Bolkonsky on the fields of Austerlitz or the persistence of the 28 Panfilov heroes, and wrote  "Human - that sounds proud." These people, together with us, ran to the cinema for Shurik and "Only Old Men are Going to Battle", laughed at the circus characters of Nikulin with Shuydin, sang and played "Dreams come true" and "There where the maple rustles" on the guitar on the porch. Their fathers and grandfathers, together with ours, went on desperate counterattacks outside Kastornoye, their last strength given in one of the summer cauldrons of terrifying 1941, and buried in mass graves.

What became of these people and their children? For what sake have they abandoned everything meaningful they did in their lives? Why have they abandoned their very own people?

For year after year, day after day, 24 hours a day, the brainwashing machine of dehumanization has been doing its job: the masses of people created in the old days or by parental discipline, who resisted the onslaught of shit from the outside, were washed away and destroyed. There are no "new Ukrainians" - there is a crowd of mindless robots ready to rejoice at death and suffering. For them, no kind of Russia will ever be good. Neither that which is trying to live next to them in peace and harmony, nor a Russia which firmly protects its vital interests. They will accept only one Russia, one which has a hand of abundance, giving freely, not requiring anything in return, and which silently allows itself to be pushed around and have its feet knocked out from under it. These are no special networks of Banderites. These are citizens of Ukraine with heads and spirits which are clogged with manure.

It follows that Russia should open its eyes more widely. They can't bomb Russia, fight it, or win its natural resources. For already a quarter century, they have tried to bend and liquor it up to be in the same condition...that Ukraine has already turned into, where ordinary people bring their children to and applaud at torchlit processions of Right Sector, sig heil, sing "lalala," and call to raise knives against the Moskal. Meanwhile, they peacefully get along with schizophrenia of "Where did you see fascists?" in one head.

This means that it's impossible to keep throwing hands up and groaning pitifully "but they themselves aren't aware of what they're doing!"

They are still unaware.

And when streams of cannibalistic joy spew across social networks and in the media on the occasion of a massive loss of life, when killing people on the Maidan, organizing the slaughter of Crimeans near Korsun, burning Odessa federalists, and when looters and punitive forces arrive to rebellious Donbass - at this point it's not possible to talk with these dehumanized robots or appeal to a sense of right or lumps of poetry in their spider souls. In this case, a single shot in the lag replaces three hours of educational conversation.

They say that night is specially dark before dawn. The dead of night has stretched over Ukraine. It is unclear how long this will last and what shocks are waiting for its citizens with the arrival of the coming hangover. Not everyone in Ukraine has turned into an alien or insect. Today, ordinary, good people are gathering in different cities. They are able to have empathy. They are preserving humanity and what is kindred in themselves. They are bringing flowers and lighting candles near the Russian Embassy and in those memorable places historically associated with Russia.

One wants to believe that these people, especially the youth, are seeds for a future Ukraine. After all, robots and corpse-rejoicers can't win once and for all...

 [return to Contents] 

 #36
Counterpunch.org
November 2, 2015
Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom, AKA Triumph of the Will 2.0
By ANDREW STEWART
Andrew Stewart is a documentary film maker and independent journalist who lives outside Providence.  His film, AARON BRIGGS AND THE HMS GASPEE, about the historical role of Brown University in the slave trade, is available for purchase on Amazon Instant Video or on DVD.

There is a new film that has premiered on Netflix, WINTER ON FIRE: UKRAINE'S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM, that is a stunning piece of neoliberal propaganda, an utter depravity that has as much intellectual merit as a bowl of cottage cheese and as much honesty as Leni Riefenstahl. Of course, one should not be surprised.

In the absolute debacle that has been the Ukraine crisis, I have personally found a certain level of difficulty in handling both sides of the media. There is a failure to acknowledge, for example, that Ukraine, much like Poland, is a historic front line in the sometimes quite nasty and violent feud between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches, a schism that dates back to 1054 and was based around both theological and territorial disputes. There is also a tendency on the pro-Russian side to paint the entire Ukrainian nationalist movement as neo-Nazi. I am not saying this is untrue, but some of the players in Ukraine are descended from opponents of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. And while we are talking about Ukrainian anti-Semites, it is absolutely necessary to include in that discussion the name of Nikita Khrushchev, who had some truly awful moments regarding settling Jews in Crimea, though the question of when Soviet anti-Zionism morphed into anti-Semitism is a hard topic to parse through.

My point is that the Ukraine is not a replay of the Great Patriotic War totally, just as that war was not a re-staging of Napoleon's invasion of Tsarist Russia. The neoliberal siege of a historic warm water port of the Russian sphere of influence is its own unique theater of combat that can be informed by reading Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate or Tolstoy's War and Peace, but neither an atomic bomb nor the cannons of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture will end this episode. Neoliberalism as a socio-economic and political program of social engineering is in many regards far more insidious than fascism ever was, especially considering how it coopts and utilizes identity politics as a weapon in ways the Nazi project would have been genuinely revolted by. For example, the film features as advocates of the neoliberal program Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish voices, going farther than petty tokenism and into co-option of the history of national minorities in Europe so to serve capital. This is what we can call a new development or evolution in the coordinates of imperialism.

That kind of nuance is absolutely lacking from WINTER ON FIRE, which imposes a cheap Hollywood three-act structure on an eastern European conflict that has multiple parties and perspectives. Not since Leni Riefenstahl gave us the godly descent of Der Führer in THE TRIUMPH OF THE WILL have audiences been subjected to such bombast and lack of critical thinking. Figures like Volodymyr Parasyuk and Mykhailo Havryliuk, both politicians with right wing connections, are interviewed and represented as glorious patriots rather than stooges for neoliberalism. The film begins with a passage that lets the cat right out of the bag for anyone who has a clue, which is the critical crack in the foundation that makes this exercise ultimately so banal. From the beginning, the film discusses how the hinge of the dispute is a free trade agreement that was part of European Union integration. OOPS! Heads up, boys and girls, America has been dealing with free trade since the 1990's thanks to the work of Bill Clinton's passage of NAFTA, it is not a harbinger of freedom. In reality, it merely gives you the freedom to starve in creative fashions. I know personally people on the verge of losing their houses because of free trade. You sure this is so awesome?

The film is glossy and relies on the type of hallmarks that have made documentaries so successful in the past ten years, using gritty realism in the cinematography that is reminiscent of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Since the box office success of Michael Moore's BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE and FAHRENHEIT 9/11, nonfiction cinema has become a hot commodity in a fashion akin to how the 1977 STAR WARS made science fiction cool for a good decade or so. But just as was the case with HOWARD THE DUCK, one cannot say all the successors of the original hit have been fantastic. There have been some stellar documentaries in the past few years, but a large majority of them have been absolute garbage, trash cinema that will never have a kitschy value in a few more decades. WINTER ON FIRE, as both an advertisement for neoliberalism and a film, is a stunning example of this.

 [return to Contents] 

 #37
Interfax
October 30, 2015
Case against Moscow's Library of Ukrainian Literature may be closed

A criminal investigation launched against the director of the Moscow-based Library of Ukrainian Literature, Natalya Sharina, who is a suspect in a case opened into the spreading of extremist literature, may be closed, a source in law enforcement agencies told Interfax.

"The case against Sharina may be closed on the basis of the Prosecutor's Office's decision on its having been opened groundlessly," he said.

It will be difficult to charge Sharina with spreading extremist literature, the source said.

"Library stocks can store books of different content. The question here is how they can be accessed. It will be quite difficult to collect evidence proving that Sharina spread banned books," he added.

Searches were conducted at the Library of Ukrainian Literature on October 28. Library director Natalya Sharina was detained shortly afterwards.

Russian Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin told Interfax on October 29 that the committee would ask a court to arrest Sharina.

A criminal case has been opened against Sharina on suspicion of "fomenting interethnic hatred and enmity, as well as humiliating human dignity," he said.

The case was opened after investigators found out that the library offered its customers a book by Dmytro Korchynsky, which a Russian court had earlier qualified as extremist and banned of the use and circulation.

 [return to Contents] 

 #38
Euromaidan Press
http://euromaidanpress.com
November 1, 2015
After Putin, Russia to become even greater threat to Ukraine, Kyiv analyst says
By Paul Goble

Many Ukrainians and others believe that after Vladimir Putin leaves the scene, Moscow will return Crimea and the Donbas to Ukraine and relations between the two Slavic countries will normalize, Anatoly Oktisyuk says. But in fact, Russia may become an even greater threat to Ukraine than it is now.

The reason for that sobering conclusion, the Kyiv analyst says, is to be found in the growing power and influence of the extreme right Russian nationalists in Russia, something that is becoming "a major test not only for Vladimir Putin but also for the future of Ukraine."

Even more than Putin, Oktisyuk says, these Russian nationalists "do not understand why "Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities' but still up to now is the capital of an independent Ukraine;" and they are likely to act on that belief and take an even more aggressive line regarding Ukrainian statehood.

Consequently, there is "every reason to think" that those who believe a post-Putin Russia will necessarily be better for Ukraine (or indeed for itself and the rest of the world) almost certainly are deluding themselves about the nature and even more the source of the Russian "problem."

Looking into the future, "after Putin, power in the Kremlin could be seized by representatives of the army and force structures or the nationalists. Either of these variants will carry with them great risks and threats for Ukraine." Neither of these groups understands why Putin didn't follow up his success in Crimea by seizing even more of Ukraine.

"Over the course of the last 15 years," Oktisyuk says, "an entire generation was raised in the spirit of Russian chauvinism and great power views. Moscow, in its opinion, is 'the third Rome,' the new center of a world force, which everyone must take into consideration, as they did at some point with the Soviet Union."

As a result, he continues, "the new Russian geopolitical paradigm by itself excludes the existence of the politically and economically independent states, which arose on the post-Soviet space" and in the first instance, these include Ukraine, whose appearance "on the world map" many in Russia and elsewhere consider "a geopolitical 'misunderstanding.'"

Putin's approach to Ukraine, with all its reactive and unpredictable qualities, reflects his effort to balance among various groups in Russia - big business, the bureaucracy, the church, the army and the force structures - all of whom are united by money and power, the Ukrainian analyst argues.

But "the 'nationalists in principle' are very angry" about what Putin has not done in Ukraine, and "it is not excluded that under the impact of sanctions and in connection with the significant reduction of Russia's 'resource base' on which the entire system of Putin's power rests, this boat will begin to rock" because the nationalists want to take command.

If the Russian nationalists came to power, then there would be "more challenges and problems" for Ukraine and the other countries in the region, Oktisyuk says. And "if [Ukraine] withstood the first wave of Russian aggression only thanks to the heroism of the army and volunteers and the mobilization of the active strata of the population, the second wave could be still more destructive."

Because of that possibility, even likelihood, he concludes, Ukraine must "prepare itself already now," with the government carrying out "real reforms, modernizing the country and struggling with corruption."

 [return to Contents]