#2
Kazakhstan down to 56th position, Russia climbs to 58th place in Prosperity Index

ASTANA. Nov 3 (Interfax) - Kazakhstan occupies 56th place in the Legatum Institute's 2015 Prosperity Index, being one position down since the previous year.

Norway retained the leading position; its first runner-ups are Switzerland, whose position was also changed, and Denmark. The top ten prosperous countries of the world also include New Zealand, Sweden, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Finland and Ireland.

The Central African Republic is at the bottom of the list.

The best ranking amongst former Soviet republics was posted by Latvia (40th position) and Lithuania (41st). Belarus was downgraded from the 53rd to the 63rd position, and Ukraine went down from the 63rd position to the 70th. Meanwhile, Russia climbed ten places to 58th place.

Kazakhstan is the leader amongst Central Asian republics. It is followed by Uzbekistan (57th), Kyrgyzstan (66th) and Tajikistan (91st). Turkmenistan is not included in the rating.

The Legatum Institute Prosperity Index has eight categories: economy, education, health, personal freedom, safety and security, entrepreneurship and opportunity, governance and social capital.

The Prosperity Index involves 142 states, 96% of the global population and 99% of global GDP.

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 #3
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
November 2, 2015
Two Centuries of Russian Surprises - Why Are We Surprised?
Underestimating Russia will surprise you
By Shellback
Shellback is the pseudonym of someone who started working for a NATO military structure in the Brezhnev years.

The USA/NATO has been surprised - or is stunned a better word? - by the Russian operation in Syria. The fact that it intervened; the speed with which it did it; the secrecy with which it did it; the numbers of sorties being flown; the accuracy and effectiveness of the strikes. But especially by the discovery that insignificant boats in the Caspian Sea - of all places - have a surprisingly long reach. McCain's gas station or Obama's negligible Russia couldn't possibly be expected to do such things. And, if half the rumors about Russia's "A2/AD bubble" are true, there's another huge surprise as well.

Russia, over its millennium of history, has been usually successful in war, and especially so when defeating invaders. The Mongols were eventually seen off, the Teutonic Knights sent home, the Polish-Lithuanian invaders driven out, the Swedes defeated and Napoleon and Hitler were followed home by avenging armies. The West is only faintly aware of this record: it tends to remember Russia's rare defeats like the Japanese war or World War I and, when Russia (or the USSR) wins, the common opinion in the West is that victory was really owed to factors like "General Winter" or endless manpower. In short, the Western meme is that doesn't really win, the other side loses.

This is, to put it mildly, incorrect. Dominic Lieven's book "Russia Against Napoleon" destroys the meme. The author establishes the case that the Emperor Alexander and his government foresaw that war with Napoleon was inevitable, studied how Napoleon fought and made the necessary preparations to defeat him. And defeat him they did. Fighting an army as big as the one that invaded in 1812 led by as brilliant a commander as Napoleon is never going to be easy and Alexander probably didn't envisage a battle as bloody as Borodino, so close to Moscow, to be indecisive. I'm sure nobody planned for Moscow to be occupied and burned. But, even so, Alexander held to his purpose. He knew that Napoleon's typical campaign was a swift battlefield victory, followed by negotiations, perhaps the loss of a few bits of territory, a relative or two being made into a prince, and then the gathering of the defeated power into the French camp. In short, Napoleon's expected he and Alexander would meet again when Alexander had been taught a lesson: Russia would then rejoin the "continental system" and its navy would keep the Royal Navy out of the Baltic. Something limited like that. But Alexander was fighting a different war and never came to him. Moscow burned and Napoleon gave up waiting and went home. Certainly, "General Winter" played his part, but the French retreat turned into a rout as they were driven faster and faster by the menacing proximity of the rebuilt Russian Army, harried by warmly dressed Cossack raiders with endless remounts and enraged partisans roused into the first Great Patriotic War. This famous graph tells the story: four hundred thousand went in, ten thousand came out and the Russian army followed Napoleon all the way back to Paris. Lieven explains the planning and the enormous logistics operation which sustained a large army all the 1500 miles from Moscow to Paris. Very far indeed from the Western story of masses of men hurled at a freezing enemy.

In short: Alexander understood how Napoleon did things and surprised him with proper preparation and a full strategy. This, I believe, is the essence of the "Russian way in warfare". Know and understand the enemy and surprise him. We have just seen this again in Syria. And, for that matter, over and over again in the Ukraine crisis where nothing has gone the way Nuland & Co intended. And in Ossetia in 2008.

While the First World War was a disaster for Russia, surprise and intelligence was present. Germany's plan to deal with enemies both east and west assumed Russia would take so long to mobilize that the bulk of the German Army could be sent west to knock France out - as it had done in 1870 - and return in time to meet the Russians. The Russians, who perhaps knew this, attacked early and threw the Germans into consternation. Their attack, however, went wrong: the Russian commanders were incompetent, the German commanders weren't and the Germans were saved. Intelligence and surprise were there, but the execution was bungled. A second intelligence/surprise was the Brusilov Offensive in 1916 (again something not much known in the West). The attack was notable for two innovations later adopted in the Western front: a short, intense, accurate artillery bombardment immediately followed up by attacks of small specially trained shock troops. Very different indeed from the synchronous Somme offensive on the with its prolonged bombardment and the slow advance of thousands of heavily burdened soldiers. But, in the end, Russia was overwhelmed by the strains of the first industrial war and undermined by German and Austrian subterfuges and collapsed. Intelligence and surprise weren't enough.

Intelligence and surprise returned in the Soviet period. In the Far East we saw the perfect combination of surprise in 1939 with the annihilation of a Japanese army at the battle of Khalkin-Gol and intelligence in 1941 with Richard Sorge's discovery that Japan was turning south. This intelligence allowed Stavka to transfer divisions, that the Germans had no idea existed, to Moscow and surprise them with the first Soviet victory at the Battle of Moscow. Certainly Hitler surprised Stalin with his attack (although he shouldn't have because Soviet intelligence picked up many warning signs) but that appears to have been the last German surprise of the war. From then on it was the Soviets who foresaw German plans and surprised them time and time again - the counter attack at Stalingrad and the entire Battle of Kursk being two of the most dramatic examples of the Soviets preparing for what their intelligence told them was coming and achieving complete surprise with their counter-attack. Again, surprise and intelligence, almost all of it on the Soviet side. (Which should make one wonder what Reinhard Gehlen, head of the German Army's Soviet intelligence section had to sell the Americans in 1945, shouldn't it?)

So then, Syria is just the latest example of something that has been present in Russian and Soviet war-fighting doctrine for at least two centuries.

A good piece of advice, then: if you are contemplating a war (even a non-shooting war) against Russia you'd better assume that they have a pretty good idea of what you are doing but that you have very little idea of what they are doing.

It's much more likely that you will be surprised than you will surprise them.

Lots of people in lots of places over lots of years have underestimated Russia. Most of them have regretted it.

Is there anything in the last couple of years in the West's anti-Russia campaign that would cause anyone to think otherwise?

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 #4
www.rt.com
November 3, 2015
Top army general calls Russia '#1 threat' to US
[Graphics here https://www.rt.com/usa/320572-general-milley-russia-threat/]

Fresh back from Kiev, Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley called Russia "aggressive" and "adversarial to the interests of the United States," claiming that having nuclear weapons and the ability to use them makes Russia the foremost threat to the US.

Russia is the only country in the world with the nuclear capability to destroy the United States, which makes it an existential threat, Milley told the audience at the Defense One summit in Washington, DC on Monday. Moscow's recent behavior suggested that Russia would be willing to use such weapons, the general added, saying that Russia has been violating "the Westphalian order" since about 2008 by "invading sovereign nations."

If that sounds familiar, that's because Milley used the exact same phrases during his confirmation hearing before the US Senate this July. The only difference is that he wore a blue service uniform then, and chose a camouflage combat uniform (ACU) for his conference appearance Monday.

What's more, the phrasing most likely was not even his own: Two weeks prior to Milley's confirmation hearing, General James Dunford used the exact same language at his own Senate confirmation hearing for the post of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dunford previously commanded the US Marine Corps.

"I would say that Russia's recent behavior is adversarial to the interests of the United States," Milley said, citing "aggressive" exercises and patrols by Russian aircraft, submarines and troops - inside Russia - for the past "four-five-six-seven" years.

"Russia bears close watching," the general added.

When asked whether this means Russia should be treated like a foe and not a partner, Milley executed a fighting retreat, urging a "strength and balance sort of approach, which is our current policy."

Diplomacy is a "bit more nuanced" than a binary calculation, he noted. While Russian "aggression" should be fought with sanctions and NATO posturing, the US should work with Moscow on matters of mutual interest and convenience, such as the Iran nuclear deal.

This just happens to be the official party line of the Obama administration, as espoused by Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, and President Barack Obama himself on a number of occasions.

Between the talking points and clichés, such as "Freedom isn't free," Milley leavened his presentation with references to the army's favorite book on military philosophy, On War, which was written almost two centuries ago by Prussian officer Carl von Clausewitz. The unfinished book was published in 1832, following Clausewitz's death during a cholera outbreak.

Though many of his observations have been questioned since, and others grown into truisms from overuse, Clausewitz at least knew a thing or two about Russians, having fought alongside them against Bonaparte in the Napoleonic wars.

Instead of honoring the Pentagon tradition of treating his audience to a PowerPoint presentation, Milley offered canned responses to questions from Fox News defense analyst Jennifer Griffin.

One of Griffin's remarkably insightful inquiries was whether the US could defeat Russia in a ground war.

"Our capabilities today are plenty good enough to deal with anything that Russia has," Milley retorted, ignoring his own words about Russia's nuclear capabilities.

Milley had the unenviable job of arguing that the US Army was not "hollow" and could do everything asked of it, while at the same time pleading for more funding, troops and gear.

"To maintain our way of life, to maintain a military that protects that way of life, is a very expensive endeavor," he said.

The general had just come back from Ukraine, where he had been visiting US troops who are teaching the Kiev forces "human rights and use of force."

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 #5
In Moscow's Shadows
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com
November 2, 2015
If US Intelligence on Russia is Broken (A Bit), What Can Be Done To Help Fix It?
By Mark Galeotti
Professor of Global Affairs at the Center for Global Affairs of New York University's School of Professional Studies.

General Philip Breedlove, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, recently gently but unmistakably reprimanded the US intelligence community for its "lack of ability to see into Russia, especially at the operational and tactical level." While he acknowledged change was under way, even then he made it clear that this was very, very much a work in progress: "We're gently turning the nose of this ship to get back to what we need to be looking at." Is Russia befuddling US intelligence, and if so what should be done about it?

Outside the movies, intelligence rarely gets a good press. On screen, the perceptive analyst or gung-ho field agent gets that one scrap of world-changing intel, realizes what it means, and suddenly-typically, just in the nick of time-policy spins on the proverbial dime, and all is put to rights in time for the closing credits. In practice, it is never quite so neat and clear, and the intelligence community tend not only to have to juggle multiple possible interpretations and "best truths" but they are also just a few voices in the mighty and often discordant choir of government.

Precisely because information and timely warning is its core business, the intelligence agencies tend to get the blame when governments are caught by surprise. And, let's be honest, Washington has been caught by surprise again and again when Moscow is concerned, from the seizure of Crimea to most recently the Russian deployment to Syria.

Needless to say, the spooks have rushed to their own defense and affirmed that they were on top of all these developments and briefed to that end. To an extent, this is entirely true, but not necessarily the whole truth. Modern intelligence products often cover a range of possibilities, but there is a world of difference between including something as a potential option and clearly identifying it as the likely one. Consider, for example, the real and evident confusion which reigned when the "little green men" were taking Crimea while Moscow flatly disavowed responsibility: were they local militias, were they mercenaries, were they soldiers working for maverick local commanders? The answer was the simplest one - that Moscow was lying - but the period of uncertainty allowed Russia's special forces to seize the peninsula in a smooth fait accompli. This did not suggest a strong and confident grasp of the unfolding situation in Washington.

Director of National Intelligence Clapper's response to the charge of intelligence failure is instructive. In an interview, he said

"We tracked [the situation in Ukraine] pretty carefully and portrayed what the possibilities were and certainly portrayed the difficulties we'd have, because of the movements of Russian troops and provided anticipatory warning of their incursion into Crimea."

Likewise, a CIA spokesman said:

"Since the beginning of the political unrest in Ukraine, the CIA has regularly updated policymakers to ensure they have an accurate and timely picture of the unfolding crisis. These updates have included warnings of possible scenarios for a Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Any suggestion otherwise is flat wrong."

That's all well and good, but tracking stuff happening, potential difficulties, possible scenarios and the like do not represent clear and unambiguous predictions, and the "anticipatory warning" does seem to have been pretty much as things happened, not early enough to do anything potentially to forestall the invasion. (Although in fairness, probably nothing could have done so.) Certainly on the eve of the invasion, US intel sources were briefing The Daily Beast that "From an intelligence perspective we don't have any reason to think it's more than military exercises."

Of course often the problem is that smart and shrewd insights from the intelligence community get lost in the political process. The making of foreign policy is, after all, an arena in which diplomats and lobbyists, op. ed. writers and lawyers, soldiers and senators, overseas allies and domestic sentiment all get to pitch in. Given how rarely the intel products really can speak with the absolute confidence any good lobbyist or ignoramus can muster, no wonder they can get drowned out by other voices.

But it's not quite that simple. There does seem to be a genuine intelligence problem with Moscow.

In part, this is because the Russians are very, very good at counter-intelligence. Just as they managed to fly their bombers into Syria undetected with transponders off, hidden beneath a larger cargo plane, so too they kept their Crimean operation off the US intelligence radar. A military exercise masked the movement of troops; orders were transmitted on paper, to sidestep America's extraordinary signals intelligence capabilities; soldiers were even instructed to keep their cellphones and radios off, again to prevent the leakage of radioelectronic indications. The Russians may not be able to match most American intel capacities, but they are aware of them and put considerable thought into working out how to minimize them.

This is exacerbated by the extraordinarily small, tight circle within which most policy and especially security policy is made. We do not even know for sure exactly whose advice Putin takes. My own suspicion is that neither Foreign Minister Lavrov nor Defense Minister Shoigu are in the innermost circle, and instead we have to look to figures such as Presidential Chief of Staff Sergei Ivanov, Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Federal Security Service Director Alexander Bortnikov. These are close-lipped loyalists, hardly likely to make incautious comments in public, nor easy to bring under human or electronic surveillance.

Furthermore, given that this is a regime which expects the elite and masses alike to rally round whatever is the policy of the day, it feels no need to signal policy in advance, to float ideas to gauge their response, or do any of the other kind of systematic foreshadowing exercises that might otherwise give us meaningful clues.

Finally, it takes time to come to terms with real, human-level change. Today's Putin is not the Putin of his first two presidencies, when outspoken nationalist rhetoric was tempered by a much more pragmatic approach. Whether because we are seeing the real Vladimir or, more likely, because like most authoritarian leaders he has over the time become more insulated from reality, more steeped in his own mythology, this is a different man, heading a different team, for a different national purpose.

So what can be done to help "turn the nose of the ship"?

Given that the issue is human more than technical, I suspect that - for all the many challenges that poses - a greater concentration on building up HUMINT assets in Russia is a must. This poses risks of all kinds, from the potential for further embarrassing incidents such as the 2013 Ryan Fogle "wig-gate" case, through to the actual risk to agents and handlers. But if we are in a war of sorts with Russia - and the Russians certainly seem to feel so - then this cannot be without some danger and cost.

Secondly, play the analysis. Just as with so many other tectonic shifts which seem to have caught the USA and the West by surprise, from the collapse of the USSR to the Arab Spring, there are often no magic documents, no secret communiqués that would have revealed the future. Instead, what was needed was and is now an analytic capacity that is at least as strong as the technical intelligence capacity developed. It's all very well building a $1.7 billion NSA computer facility in Utah, or planning a $2-4 billion next-generation spy satellite constellation - arguably you'd get vastly more bang for buck spending half as much on the best analysts around and giving them access to the huge amounts of open source information available. Predicting Russia's next move will come by sneaking into Putin's head; all the spy satellites will show is what he has decided as it starts to happen.

Thirdly, this means there needs to be as much creativity as possible in the intelligence process. If one accepts Clapper's assertion that Putin is "kind of winging it, day to day," then this becomes all the more important. One key area is the interaction with outside experts and perspectives, something which certainly happens, but often only under complex (and expensive) cut-outs which may help security but slow and reduce the flow of information. Furthermore, it is harder to be sure that iconoclastic insights actually inform the intel process; just as the CIA's Red Cell is an attempt to challenge the groupthink that so often emerges, there is the scope to treat the outside analytic community - from journalists to academics to random bloggers - more often as analytic partners rather than just a passive resource.

Finally, the US government needs to listen more to its spooks, but also demand more from them. Consider the disastrous "reset" which, inter alia, put great emphasis on cultivating seat-warmer-in-chief, President-for-Halflife Dmitri Medvedev, something that helped infuriate and alienate Putin. As I understand it, this very much came out of the White House and State, without meeting with great enthusiasm from the intel community. At present, the spooks may not be listened to much, but then again there is a certain comfort for them in that. Time for them to take a more central role, but also to be expected to abandon the defensive tendency to offer ranges of possibilities like a fan of cards and asking the policy makers to pick whichever one they choose.

Of course, there is a corollary. I honestly don't know - only insiders can - but I get the sense that just as Putin's spooks seem to be competing for favour by pandering to his paranoiac and persecutionist world view, there may be more of a touch of that in Washington, too. It doesn't matter how good your case officers and analysts, if the final intelligence products are smoothed down to suit a political consensus. One of the perennial problems has been how to manage and maximize the value of US intelligence for the policy process, and it is hard to believe that this has yet been cracked.

The Russian challenge is a bit of a Potemkin one, not - for all some of the over-the-top rhetoric of an "existential threat" - one that perhaps is likely to be so serious for years to come. So why is this such a concern? Put it this way: don't crack the intel/policy problem this time round, and the USA will be scrambling to do it with a newly-resurgent Iran tomorrow, or perhaps China the week after...

 #6
Experts suspect metal fatigue, engine failure or blast on board in A321 Egypt plane crash
By Tamara Zamyatina

MOSCOW, November 3. /TASS/. While the official probe into last weekend's crash of the Russian A321 passenger jet in the Sinai peninsula proceeds, TASS has polled several experts of authority for their off-the-cuff opinions on what may have caused the disaster. The three most-frequently mentioned likely factors are a bomb planted in the plane's rear, engine failure or fatigue cracks that caused the fuselage to fall apart.

St. Petersburg - destination of the ill-fated flight carrying holidaymakers from the Egyptian tourist resort of Sharm El-Sheikh - is in the third day of mourning for victims of Russia's worst-ever air disaster - 224 passengers and crew, including 25 children.

An official explanation of what happened to the A321 liner is not available yet. The air carrier that operated the jet - Kogalymavia - speculates that the plane may have suffered a mechanical impact. The company ruled out technical problems or mistakes by pilots. Also, it pointed out that neither the mixture of Russian and Egyptian fuel nor the 2001 incident in which the plane's tail was damaged could hardly affect the plane's condition or the operation of onboard equipment.

The head of Russian air transport authority Rosaviatsiya, Alexander Neradko, has described such statements as premature. The Egyptian panel of inquiry, he said, has not begun to analyze data contained in the cockpit voice and flight data recorders. This procedure will begin only when all participants in the investigation gather in Egypt. Russian specialists have already taken a look at the "black boxes" to say that at first sight their condition is satisfactory, Neradko said. According to a source in Cairo, there are no traces of explosives on the plane's fragments studied so far.

Russian society has reacted to the A321 crash as a national tragedy. Mourners have rallied in many cities across the nation. On Sunday, the day after the crash, all entertainment events were canceled and television channels have revised their broadcasting schedules for several days preceding the victims' funerals. In St. Petersburg, local taxicab drivers were giving victims' relatives free rides to Pulkovo airport.

People's natural reaction to the tragedy has been to change their holiday plans and cancel trips abroad. The A321 crash brought a slump in sales of all foreign tours of 30% to 50%. The Russian Tourist Industry Union has said the market is "stunned." Holiday-makers are handing in already pre-paid vouchers. Number One question both specialists and passengers are asking is what the plane crash was due to. On Monday, it was officially confirmed that the liner fell apart in the air. Many aviation industry experts agree that the impact that tore off the plane's tail was instant and very brief.

Test pilot Magomed Tolboyev, of the Gromov Flight Research Institute, told the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets: "It is pretty clear even to the layman that the plane has many technical hatches where a bomb may be planted." Russian veteran pilot and former flight director of Vnukovo airlines Yury Sytnik also does not rule out this possibility. Military pilot Valery Burkov, holder of the Hero of the Soviet Union title and president of the Heroes of the Fatherland foundation, suspects a terrorist attack. "When a plane's tail falls off, it is a sure sign there was an explosion on board."

A leading aviation specialist who has preferred to stay anonymous has shared with TASS his own analysis of the plane's crash. "When a plane loses the tail part but no external impact has been identified there are enough reasons to suspect metal fatigue. Some experts argue the A321 crashed because back in 2001 its tail touched the runway during a landing. That does not matter at all. Tail strikes during takeoffs and landings are commonplace. What really matters is the quality of repairs that follow," the source said.

"A crack in the plane's rear that remained unnoticed during repairs may have affected the plane's controllability. The crack gaped open, the tail fell off, and the plane plummeted. When decompression is instant, the pilot cannot do anything. After full decompression the human body stays alive for just seventeen seconds. That's the time the captain has to put on the oxygen mask, to see to it that all passengers and crew do so too, and to contact air traffic controllers on the ground. Apparently the pilot did not have even these 17 seconds. He lost consciousness that very moment. Breathing without an oxygen mask is possible only at altitudes below 4,000 meters," the expert explained.

According to the analyst the plane performed some strange up and down manoeuvres after takeoff: "Engine failure is not to blame. That the pilot tried to gain altitude indicates that at least one engine was working." The source does not rule out a terrorist attack. Somebody may have planted a bomb on board - many such incidents have occurred in the past.

Retired air force Major General Alexander Tsalko advances a similar version. "I believe a terrorist attack was possible. It is enough to put just 50 grams of explosive in some technical hatch in the plane's rear to cause the whole aircraft to fall apart. This is one likely cause. Engine failure is another possibility. The moment one of the two engines goes dead the other, still operational, pushes its side of the plane forward. Its thrust is distributed asymmetrically. The plane begins to turn and the strain on the plane's frame soars with the net effect of the tail falling off," Tsalko said.

"Or one can imagine another situation. First the engine fails to start. After the second attempt to start it the engine explodes, the turbine is destroyed and hits the fuselage to hack off a large piece. One should not forget that the A321's tail was damaged during a landing in 2001. That incident is in the flight history. The plane's tail is always subjected to variable strains. Its task is to keep the plane in its proper position. Air pockets or high turbulence may have subjected the plane's tail to multiple shocks, thus causing fatigue cracks and eventual destruction."

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 #7
Sputnik
November 3, 2015
Mystery of Russian Airbus A321 Crash: All Possible Causes of Tragedy

Following the tragic crash of the Kogalymavia flight 9268 that killed all 224 people on board, a number of theories explaining a possible cause of the accident have appeared. For your convenience, Sputnik compiled the list of the most common possible causes which could have led to the catastrophe.

On Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that it won't be possible to formulate an official reason of the Airbus A321 crash until the ongoing investigation into the accident is concluded. Meanwhile Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi said the probe, conducted by the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC), might take months to come up with an official conclusion.

Nonetheless, a number of versions why and how the plane crashed have already appeared in media. Here are some possible explanations of how the tragedy may have unfolded.

ISIL Terrorists

After the accident ISIL claimed responsibility for the crash on Twitter.

However, experts were quick to reject the claim stating that the terrorists couldn't have attacked the plane simply because the Airbus was flying well above a firing range of any man portable air defense system.
Nonetheless, speculations that the plane crash happened as the result of a terrorist attack are present, especially since the Russian airliner broke up in the air, according to Egyptian authorities.

"It's [ISIL shooting down the plane] unlikely, but I wouldn't rule it out," said James Clapper at the Defense One Summit in Washington, as cited by CBS News.

On Board Explosion

The prestigious US global intelligence company Stratfor speculated that a bomb explosion on board of the Airbus A321 could have been the possible cause of the accident.

"It seems that the most possible explanation for the downed plane is the existence of an explosive device onboard," Stratford said, thus rejecting the version of missile attack from the ground.

Someone could have carried an explosive device into the aircraft or loaded a bomb into the cargo hold. Security personnel often accept bribes in exchange for allowing passengers to avoid checkpoints while cargo security screenings are less strict than those in the United States and Europe, Stratfor said.

If this is the case, the catastrophe in Sinai is reminiscent of the crash of Pan American Flight 103 near Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. Following the accident, investigators gathered the parts of the Pan Am Boeing 747 and discovered a small hole in the fuselage of the plane which had curved outward-looking edges. The hole was caused by the explosion of a small bomb  hidden in a suitcase. Later, a Libyan man was identified as the terrorist who loaded the suitcase onto the plane and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

An explosion itself can't destroy the plane the size of the Airbus A321, but similar to the Pan Am Boeing 747, the bomb explosion could have caused depressurization due to the sudden drop of pressure and quickly led to the disintegration of the plane in the air.

So far, the ongoing investigation hasn't found any traces of explosive devices among the debris scattered around at the site of the crash in Sinai, a source close to the investigation told RIA Novosti.

Corrosion of Plane Parts

After visiting the crash site of the Airbus A321 in Sinai some experts compared it to the crash site of a catastrophe that took place near Cherkessk, Russia in March of 1997. Similar to the Kogalymavia-owned airbus, the Antonov An-24 also broke up into pieces while flying at an altitude of 6 km (around 20,000 feet) due to corrosion that occurred after the plane had flown in Africa, Russian newspaper Kommersant said.

In both cases the areas, in which the fragments of the two planes were scattered on the ground, were in the shape of an ellipse - 8 km in length and 4 km in width for the A321 and for the smaller An-24, which crashed in Cherkessk, the ellipse was 10.5 km in length and 2.5 km in width.

Previous Damage to the Tail of the Plane

Another version related to a technical failure of the plane is born out of the fact that the Airbus A321 struck its tail on a runaway during an unsuccessful landing in 2001. After the incident, the aircraft was checked and after all its defects were repaired it was re-commissioned and allowed to go back in the skies. However, the damage to its tail during that incident or inadequate repair could have caused the crash in Egypt.

"Old metal parts, old aircraft that was already damaged. In this case, the plane touched the ground with its tail during a landing in 2001," Andrei Litvinov, a 1st class pilot who received the Honor of Excellence working for Russia's flag carrier Aeroflot, told Kommersant.

Sloppy technical procedures in the company could have led to mistakes in the repair process of the plane. It was reported that Kogalymavia apparently hadn't paid salaries to its employees for two months which could also mean that the company might have ignored some maintenance issues in the past, Litvinov said, according to Kommersant.

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 #8
www.rt.com
November 3, 2015
'US already casting judgment on crash of Russian flight 7K9268'

The Western press is looking for the worst possible scenario for the Russians: something negative, someone to blame, or something to put Putin in a bad light, says Daniel Patrick Welch, writer and political analyst.

RT: The CIA says they don't have any evidence the plane was downed by terrorists yet. Are they suggesting they're expecting some? What do you make of the wording of the phrase?

Daniel Patrick Welch: The first thing is that the kind of point of coverage of Russia in the West and specifically in the US is to find something negative or something blaming, or something to cast Putin and Russia in a bad light. It is just like the DNA of how the Western press works. So whether or not they are expecting this or not, they are looking for the worst possible scenario for the Russians and it is kind of mean-spirited.

RT: Western media is also actively speculating over the terror cause of the crash, admitting though that most experts think this is not the case. What's the point in speculating then?

DPW: That is an easy thing to sell, if you're floating a story and you don't really have any proof then you can say: "We don't know yet." Or, "some sources say," which is what Fox News uses all the time, or "some people say" or "we've heard rumors," which isn't really journalism.  It's a fraud; it's kind of based on this Russia bashing.

First of all it is a horrific tragedy for the hundreds of families that have lost a loved one. The first thing [John Kerry] had to do was to say: "Well, our thoughts and prayers are with the people who lost their family members, and our condolences go out to the Russian people," etc.

But you can see that there is a secondary sort of glee that if it was brought down by IS then it is going to draw [Vladimir] Putin in even deeper. And the whole thing is also a sort of projected envy that he - meaning the Russian security council and the Russian armed forces - got involved in Syria at the request and with the cooperation of the Syrian government and have had enormous success in doing what the US has claimed to have been doing for 15-16 months and hasn't been able to make any progress at all. So one of the things that also shows through in this very transparent coverage: If [the crash] is about the Islamic State then it has to be payback and [Russia's Syrian campaign] isn't as big a success as everyone is trying to say it is. It's kind of sour grapes no matter how you cut it.  

RT: Why wouldn't they wait till the flight recorders are decoded?

DPW: They drew conclusions about MH17 for 16 months before any proof came out on this, and they still don't have any proof. They are never looking to follow up a series of evidentiary lines with a conclusion that is based on scientific evidence - that is not what they want to do; that is not what they ever do. What they have is the tease of a potential story that can make Russia look bad and then they go with it to suggest that it might be. One thing I will add is that if it does turn out to have been shot down I have no doubt at all that the CIA or the US government would have had some hand in it because it's those kind of fingerprints that you see on attacks like this like MH-17.  

RT: The general understanding among the expert community is that terrorists in the Sinai Peninsula don't have the capabilities to bring down a jet flying at 10,000 meters. Do you personally think they could've downed it?

DPW: That is not really a complicated question, but first of all the Western media works like that - 'sensationalism' - something that sells to a pre-story that is already settled in the minds of the viewers. That is: "America good, Russia bad, how can we frame this to sell more newspapers, more airtime?"

The second thing is that on the state level the American government is trying to do the same thing. They cannot help but attach a geopolitical analysis to this before the time is ready because they need and want to push back against what they see as resistance from Russia, as well as from China, and they are very nervous about any independent actors in the geopolitical sphere.

What they have said is: "We're not going to wait before making this judgment" , but then they say: "We're not sure yet!" The question is: There are recorders - they are on the ground, they will be found unlike in these other tragedies where no black boxes are found.  They will be found and we will have a detailed and reasonable explanation of what happened. We just have to wait and see and share our thoughts and prayers with the hundreds of families who lost people in this tragedy.

RT: An international investigation into the cause of the crash is underway. Are there any reasons to doubt it will answer all the questions?

DPW: I suppose it depends if the Russians and the Egyptians are in charge of it or are listened to, then it may very well answer those questions. I don't see why it wouldn't; it is very different from the Dutch safety board or some of these other investigations that have gone on.

I think there is a level of it that is in the realm of international intrigue that if it was either by accident or if it was a shoot down, nobody really wants that to become a huge international incident, because it would be an enormous escalation and a huge mistake. So everyone would have an interest in not having that be too prominent a conclusion. But for now we have to wait and see what the investigation shows.

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 #9
Kiev shares Russia's grief over Sinai plane crash

KIEV, November 2. /TASS/. Residents of Ukrainian capital Kiev and ambassadors from countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States have visited the Russian embassy there to leave sympathy notes in the Book of Condolence following Saturday's crash of the Russian airliner in Sinai, Egypt.

The book was opened as a stream of locals began arriving with flowers and candles, embassy press secretary Oleg Grishin told TASS on Monday after Ukraine's President, Petro Poroshenko, had offered his own official condolences to Russia.

Parapets of the embassy building are laden with flowers, wreaths, toys and paper model aircraft from a flow of people not thinning even after nightfall.

One young man arriving told TASS of his surprise at seeing the offerings. "I thought I would be the one to come. But I see crowds of people, a sea of flowers, and people crying," he said. "Last year, nobody came after a Moscow metro accident. People were afraid as radicals were constantly on guard here and it was dangerous".

"I felt ashamed for my country," he added. "But at last, people have recollected that we are brothers," said the man, refusing to give his name and calling himself "just a rank-and-file Kiever".

Bunches of flowers are tied with St. George ribbons, a symbol of military glory in some countries of the former Soviet Union - a decoration of some consequence given strains in Russia-Ukraine relations.

Inscriptions alongside proclaim "Russia, we love and mourn together with you!", "Loved ones, we are with you, stand firm!", "We mourn together with Russia", "Russia, we are one people in spirit and blood!"

Kogalymavia Flight 9268 came down about half-an-hour after leaving the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh for the Russian city of St. Petersburg. The disaster site is 100 kilometres south of the administrative centre of North Sinai Governorate, the city of Al-Arish. All 224 aboard the plane perished.

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 #10
Kremlin attaches no importance to absence of condolences from Obama over plane crash

MOSCOW, November 3. /TASS/. The Kremlin does not attach any importance to the absence of condolences from US President Barack Obama on the Russian airliner's crash in Egypt, US Secretary of State John Kerry conveyed the condolences from the entire American people, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

"While talking to [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov, Kerry conveyed sympathies from the entire American people," the Kremlin spokesman said, answering a question whether the U.S. president had personally offered his condolences. "Perhaps, this should be explained not by the Kremlin," Peskov noted. "For us the main thing now is the work to assist families who lost their loved ones in the plane crash, and we are focusing on this," the presidential spokesman said answering a question on the attitude of the Russian authorities to the fact that Obama had not offered condolences personally.

Peskov added that numerous messages of condolences on the plane crash had been received from abroad.

He declined to comment on media reports on the heat flashes allegedly registered by satellites at the site of the crash of the Russian passenger jet or the foreign objects found with the debris. "Just like you, I Iearned [about this] from media reports. The investigation is in progress, we conduct a separate investigation, the investigation is also underway in Egypt," Peskov said.

The Kremlin spokesman added that "a number of countries indeed offered their assistance in investigating the causes of the plane crash." Peskov pointed to the international rules of investigating air crashes, according to which the investigation may involve a country of [aircraft] registration, a country of manufacture, a country where the tragedy occurred and the countries whose citizens lost their lives.

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 #11
Moscow Times
November 3, 2015
Russian Incidence of Tuberculosis Falls by 30% Over 10 Years

Russian incidence of tuberculosis has fallen by 30 percent over the past 10 years, the country's health minister said Friday, according to the RIA Novosti news agency.

Since 2005, incidence of tuberculosis infections in Russia has decreased by 30 percent, while the mortality rate from the disease has decreased twofold, Veronika Skvortsova said at the BRICS Health Ministers Meeting, according to RIA.

At the meeting, Skvortsova urged the BRICS countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - to unite in their fight against tuberculosis, adding that it is not possible to solve the problem in any one country amid globalization, increasing flows of migrants and the spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis.

Skvortsova offered at the meeting to conduct an international forum on the coordination of efforts against tuberculosis with the participation of BRICS countries and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO last year called the high tuberculosis incidence in Russia and Belarus a "disaster," according to Reuters.

In 2014, incidence of tuberculosis in Russia was 59.5 per 100,000 people, the TASS news agency reported at the time, citing data from the Health Ministry.

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 #12
Moscow Times
October 31, 2015
Russians Need 175,000 Rubles a Month to Feel Happy, Poll Shows

Russians believe they need an income of at least 175,000 rubles ($2,725) a month to feel happy, according to poll results published by the Izvestia daily Friday.

The cost of happiness is higher in Moscow, where an average resident needs at least 193,000 rubles a month to feel happy, the poll by the Superjob employment website indicated, Izvestia reported.

Men feel they need more money than women to be happy, with the average threshold of a Russian man's happiness starting with a monthly paycheck of 193,000 rubles, while women were content with 158,000 rubles, the poll indicated.

Russians view as "rich" anybody who earns 450,000 rubles or more per month, while the poverty threshold starts at 15,000 rubles or less per month, the poll indicated, Izvestia reported.

No margin of error for the poll was provided.

The average monthly salary in Russia stood at 34,000 rubles, according to official government data for April this year, Ekho Moskvy radio reported. Only 2.8 percent of the country's residents earn between 100,000 rubles and 250,000 rubles a month, Izvestia reported.

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 #13
Moscow Times
November 3, 2015
Will This Russian Winter Be a Cold One for Investors?
By Chris Weafer
Chris Weafer is a senior partner with Macro Advisory, a consultancy advising international companies and investors working in Russia and across the Eurasia region.

For much of the past three years, ever since the macroeconomic indicators began to slip from the third quarter of 2012, it has generally been right for strategic and portfolio investors in Russia to consider the glass to be half empty. Pessimism is now so ingrained in the psyche of investors that any evidence of a turning point will likely be dismissed until established beyond question. We have seen that several times in Russia since 1998 and, no doubt, will again. But, don't worry, I have not taken leave of my senses and about to tell you all is well in the economy and it is safe to jump back into the stock market. By almost all measures, we are a long way from that. Almost all.

For the adventurous, it is worth pointing out the modest increase in optimism that some of the sanctions, or the terms of those sanctions, imposed against Russia in 2014 may start to ease in 2016 and that this may allow the economy to return to "acceptable" growth in the 2.5 to 3.0 percent range, in 2017.

The reason for the optimism is the continuing cease-fire in eastern Ukraine and the hope that the perception of progress in shifting the focus from a frozen conflict to a political solution may be validated. Clearly any confirmation that such a move in sanctions becoming more likely would have a significant impact on the value of Russian equities and debt and start to unlock some of the suspended investment projects.

Before considering how that might happen and what he impact might be, it is worth reminding ourselves of the facts about sanctions. There is a great deal of confusing noise on the subject which has added to the perception of investment risk and cut investment flows.

There are two categories of sanctions; the Crimea sanctions and those linked to events in eastern Ukraine. Nobody expects the Crimea sanctions to be eased or removed "indefinitely" as Crimea will remain part of the Russian Federation. But these sanctions have no material impact on the economy or the stock market valuation.

With regard to eastern Ukraine, there are three separate sub-categories; sanctions which are linked to the defense industries, including the ban on dual use technologies; those applied to certain projects in the oil sector and those which block state banks and some other state institutions and companies from accessing Western credits with a maturity beyond 30 days. It is not expected that the first two categories, i.e. affecting the defense and oil sectors, will be eased in the foreseeable future and are not part of optimistic scenario.

So, when it is stated that sanctions usually remain in place for many years, these are the categories where that is likely to be true for Russia. But increasingly these sanctions will become less relevant as Russian companies find work-arounds and source more equipment from Asia. Western sanctions applied to China after Tiananmen Square are, for example, still fully in place and are irrelevant. The only sanction category which really matters for the Russia story is the block on accessing Western debt and credits and this is the category where there is a flicker of optimism for improvement during 2016.  

First let us also be clear on the oil versus sanctions debate as a cause of the current recession. It was the oil price slide, not sanctions, which almost entirely brought the economy to its current position. Specifically it was the ruble collapse and the contagion from that which derailed the economy. The ruble was almost unchanged from Crimea weekend (March 2, 2014) until mid-August that year even though sanctions tightened.

It was only when the oil price cracked in that the ruble started its precipitous decline. Both fell in tandem over the last four months of 2014. The sharp ruble decline resulted in the emergency interest rate hike and the spike in inflation to over 17 percent by end March this year. That combination, plus the big hit to consumer confidence, directly led to the near 10 percent drop in real wages, in retail sales and in such rate sensitive sectors as construction.

The financial sector sanctions were part of the negative backdrop for sure but less of a factor than the already weakening state of the economy coming out of 2013. In other words, the patient was already showing symptoms of a cold in 2013 and the oil price collapse turned that into a full blown flu.

A critical point at this stage, however, is that while the oil price collapse pulled the economy into a recession which would otherwise have been either very mild or avoided, a higher oil price would only help the economy pull out of recession but would not facilitate growth returning to the targeted 3 to 4 percent level. For that to happen the financial sector sanctions would need to come down and allow Russian banks, industrial companies and the state to again access Western debt markets and at reasonable interest rates.

The problem with the financial sector sanctions is not entirely because of the block on state banks and institutions accessing new debt but the fact that this sanction led to a total block on any Russian entity accessing any Western credits. Recently, as the news from eastern Ukraine has improved and at least raised hopes that sanctions will not get worse, some Russian companies have been able to get new debt denominated in euros. But the interest rate charged is well above that available to comparable Western companies and so the flow remains light.

It can be stated that if only the EU makes such a concession while the U.S. does not then the positive impact will be limited as no EU bank will go against U.S. sanctions. The first point to make is that, unlike the very long lived Jackson-Vanik restrictions again Russia, the U.S. sanctions are a) designed to be scalable both up and down and, b) are at the discretion of the White House and not Congress. Still, any move by the U.S. is not considered likely ahead of the inauguration of the next president in early 2017.

The hope, therefore, and the basis of the emerging optimism, is that if there is even some easing in that sanctions category by the EU countries, the voluntary restrictions adopted by EU institutions will be disproportionately eased and allow non-sanctioned Russian companies and entities to access a bigger volume of new debt and at reasonable rates.

One of the unintended consequences of the financial sector sanctions has been the cold-turkey deleveraging of external debt by the state and by corporations. At the start of 2014 the total volume of external Russian debt was $740 billion. By the end of this year it should be less than $500 billion. It means that when the opportunity to borrow re-opens, Russia will be in a good position to acquire new debt and to start investing in some of the recovery programs, such as localization and infrastructure improvement, now planned.

That's why the financial sector sanctions now matter more than an oil price rally. They did not inflict the damage but they hold the solution to long-term recovery. To that end, a continued shift away from a frozen conflict outcome to a political solution in eastern Ukraine is now the most important consideration for investors and (one hopes) for the Kremlin.

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 #14
Russian Finance Ministry projects capital outflow at about $70 bln in 2015

MOSCOW, November 3. /TASS/. The outflow of capital from Russia in 2015 will be about $70 billion, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said at a meeting of the State Duma, lower house of parliament.

"We see that the confidence of investors in our fiscal policy is growing and the outflow of capital is reducing. In the beginning of the year, we estimate that it was about $130 billion. The third quarter was a net capital inflow of $5.3 billion," Siluanov said.

Earlier on Tuesday, the head of the Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina said that the bank had lowered its outlook for capital outflow in 2015 to over $ 70 billion instead of the previously projected $85 billion. She said that the forecast was adjusted partially due to positive data of the third quarter of this year.

Foreign investors return to Russia

The minister said Russia's budgetary and economic policy enjoys confidence of foreign investors, with part of them returning to the country.
"The budgetary, economic, financial policy we're pursuing, enjoy confidence of investors. Many of them, including foreign investors, are returning to the [Russian] markets," he said.

On the other hand, capital outflow is decreasing, Siluanov said, adding that it is expected to reach $70 bln by the end of the year.
"We evidence this [investors' coming back] from issuance of Russian public securities. Despite the fact that we place securities in rubles, we see that foreigners successfully invest in those instruments," the Minister said.

"Bottom" in GDP decline expected in Q4 of 2015

The ministry expects to reach the "bottom" of the decline in the growth of Russian economy in the Q4 of 2015.

"Early next year we will see positive economic growth," Siluanov said.Russia's Economic Development Minister Alexey Ulyukayev said earlier that the peak of the crisis in Russia was reached in the summer; the economy will recover slowly.

"We have reached crisis peak in the summer of this year. In June of this year we have reached the bottom. June against July [GDP - TASS] - zero, July against August - zero, August against September - zero and September against August - 0.3%," he said.

However, "the people and businesses do not feel it," he said, these are the estimation of the Russian Federal Statistics Service (Rosstat).

"So far I feel that we are going to get up slowly. But we can handle the challenge," Ulyukayev said.

Answering the question why the crisis wasn't avoided, he said: "We were not able to find answers to the questions posed by life in time. How did we develop in the past 8 years? We have produced oil, it rose in price in the price and everything was ok. But the music has stopped playing, and the dancer does not know what to do. We were not able to establish mechanisms that transfer national savings into national investment."

Finance Ministry to control all budget-funded expenditures of companies

According to Siluanov the Ministry of Finance will use treasury for all investment expenditures of the state-owned companies next year to improve their transparency.

"We stipulate the whole range of institutional measures next year, aimed at improving performance of work with budget funds. Allocated resources, particularly for capitals of companies, are often standing at deposits with commercial banks. We provide for using treasury system in respect of all expenses related to investments," the minister said.

This will make possible to reduce spending of government reserves for such purpose, Siluanov added.

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 #15
www.rt.com
November 3, 2015
Leftists propose free land distribution to boost Russia's middle class

The Fair Russia party has prepared a bill proposing the free handout of 1 hectare land plots to all citizens, claiming that such a measure would increase the strength of the middle class in the country, help agriculture and the development of unpopulated regions.

The bill was drafted Tuesday by the head of the Fair Russia parliamentary caucus, Sergey Mironov, and MP Oleg Nilov of the same party. The current version of the document allows certain categories of citizens, such as families with many children, disabled persons and people whose profession includes hard physical labor to receive 1 hectare (2.47 acres) of free land from the state to build a home and start a farm for personal use or a commercial agricultural enterprise.

At the same time, some categories of citizens, such as convicts who have not served their sentences and all people convicted of corruption crimes would not be allowed to participate in the program.

According to the bill, the land will be first granted for free use for a period of five years. After that, state bodies will check if the plot is used for the declared purposes and allow prolongation of its free use or make it the homeowner's permanent property.
In comments to the media, Mironov said that he hoped that the measure would help millions of Russians to turn to agriculture and also solve the problem of repopulation of remote areas and the return of abandoned lands to agricultural production.

Eventually, the new landowners could form the core of the Russian middle class, he added.

Another benefit of the program was its input into the import replacement program launched after Russia introduced reciprocal sanctions on agricultural produce from EU countries.

Oleg Nilov added in comments that the bill could fulfill the Bolsheviks' promises to give the land to the Russian people, even if it happened a century after these promises were made. He noted that the free handover of land plots was very appropriate during the crisis, as it would allow people to invest their savings and revive the national economy.

Fair Russia's idea of a "Russian Homestead Act" was not original - in mid-January the presidential envoy to the Far East Federal District, Yuri Trutnev, suggested offering large land plots for free to anyone who resettled to the Russian Far East to start a farm or other business. The plan also included the handover of one-hectare plots, a ban on selling the received land and a five-year trial period.

However, according to Izvestia daily, the start of the Far East land handover has been postponed from September 2015 to sometime in 2016.

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 #16
Moscow Times
November 3, 2015
Foreign IT Companies Threaten to Quit Russia Over Restrictive Legislation
By Anastasia Bazenkova

Major foreign IT companies could suspend their investment in Russia or withdraw from the country altogether over restrictions in the Russian market, the Kommersant newspaper reported Monday.

These restrictions include a Russian law that obliges state agencies to justify the purchases of foreign software from Jan. 1, 2016, as well as a government decree that prohibits the state purchase of foreign software when a domestic version is available, Frank Schauff, head of the Association of European Businesses (AEB), wrote in a letter to top Russian officials.

AEB considers these measures discriminatory as they limit competition and access to the Russian market for foreign companies, Kommersant reported, citing a copy of Schauff's letter to the Trade and Industry Minister Denis Manturov, Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov, Minister of Economic Development Alexei Ulyukayev and Federal Anti-Monopoly Service chief Igor Artemyev.

"European business has made significant investments in Russia over the past decade and was planning to invest in the future, but now foreign IT companies may suspend investment or even leave the Russian market," the paper quoted Schauff as saying.

Equal conditions for Russian and foreign companies must be provided if foreign investment is to remain in Russia, Schauff said in the letter, according to Kommersant.

According to data from The United Nations, direct foreign investment dropped by 70 percent in Russia last year over sanctions and Russia's economic recession, the newspaper reported.

However, the share of foreign software in the Russian market currently exceeds 75 percent or 90 billion rubles ($1.4 billion), the RBC newspaper reported last month, citing data from Russian IT company Parallels. Foreign investment is a key factor in the development of the IT sector.

In its letter, AEB urged the Russian government to postpone for six months the law that obliges state agencies to provide written justification when purchasing foreign-made software. During those six months, AEB suggests that joint criteria be developed for the localization of foreign IT companies in Russia so that they can qualify as Russian under the new laws.

Last year, foreign IT firms SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Cisco supplied the Russian state sector with software worth 20 billion rubles ($312 million), according to Kommersant.

The new legislation, prepared by the Communications Ministry, allows the purchase of foreign software from Jan. 1, 2016 only if a domestic version is not available or if the domestic analogue doesn't have the required functions.

The document is expected to be signed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev within the next two weeks, Kommersant reported, citing an unidentified source in one of the ministries.

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 #17
Forbes.com
November 2, 2015
For The First Time In A Long Time, Russian Wages Are Clearly Declining
By Mark Adomanis
[Chart here http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2015/11/02/for-the-first-time-in-a-long-time-russian-wages-are-clearly-declining/]

In the early and mid 2000's, Vladimir Putin's popularity was largely built on the foundation of rising living standards. After suffering terribly during the botched market reforms of the 1990's, when average incomes were devastated by a combination of inflation, unemployment, and pervasive wage arrears, Russian workers suddenly found themselves enjoying almost a decade of more than 10% annual growth in their real wages. In the years leading up to the crisis of 2009, when, supercharged by a massive-run up in oil prices, the economy was rocketing along at 7% annual growth, Russians' average wages almost tripled. It was one of the most rapid spates of income growth anywhere in the world, creating, for the first time in the country's usually tragic history, a significant middle class.

Is that the only reason that Putin enjoyed such good poll ratings? No, of course not. There were a number of other reasons, including the conscious suppression by the government of dissenting political voices. But I think it's fair to say that the enormous growth in Russian paychecks was not unrelated to Putin's popularity. All things being equal, you would expect pretty much any head of state who was in office during such a massive consumer boom to be broadly popular. Wage growth, then, wasn't the only part of the Putinist equation, but it was an extremely important one.

Since 2009, the record has been a little more mixed. During the worst part of the financial crisis the Russian government pumped money into the pension system, hiking pensions by as much as 50% in a single year. In a bid to both stimulate aggregate demand and to ensure its own popularity, the government also significantly boosted public sector wages. These anti-crisis measures couldn't totally erase the harm caused by the sharp drop in oil prices, but they helped to limit the carnage to Russians' pocketbooks. Economy-wide wages cane down only modestly amidst a more than 7% contraction in economic output. However, after the crisis the Russian economy's growth rate never again matched its pre-crisis pace. Consequently, wage growth in the post-crisis years was also rather subdued.

It is only over the past several months, however, that Russian inflation-adjusted wages have really started to come down. Here, courtesy of Rosstat's latest report, is what has happened since the beginning of 2014:

There were some peaks and valleys, but the basic story is that during 2014 wages didn't really move very much. During the entire year they were down by about 0.6%, but essentially all of that decline happened during December, when the ruble was in the midst of a sharp tumble against the dollar and oil prices were in free-fall. During 2015, however, the story has been a very different, and much worse, one. During the January-September period Russian wages were down by an average of 3.3%. Even more worryingly, the decline has shown little sign of abatement. Indeed, wages were down by more in August and September than they were at the beginning of the year, when the economy was performing even worse than it is now.

Putin's poll ratings haven't been impacted by the decline in living standards. So far. But as I hope is clear from the above, we're in uncharted territory at the moment. At no point in Putin's time in power have average wages fallen as far for as long as they have over the past six months. At a certain point, if I were forced to guess sometime in the not-too-distant future, that's going to be an enormous problem for the authorities.

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 #18
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
October 31, 2015
Russia Leaps Up World Bank 'Ease of Doing Business' Rankings - Refuting Claims of Corruption and Backwardness
Rapid progress up the rankings shows an economy that is rapidly and purposefully modernising
By Alexander Mercouris

A comment I repeatedly hear made about the Russian economy is that it supposedly needs "reform".

Allegedly "the Kremlin" (ie. the Russian government) is failing to carry out this "reform", which is why the economy is "stagnating".

Those who say this are usually very vague about exactly what they mean by "reform".

Mostly it is a cliche that simply gets written into articles about the Russian economy without the writers feeling the need to explain what they mean by it.  

When pressed, it often turns out that they are confusing "reform" with budgetary policy.  

For example it may be correct that Russia should raise the pension age or cut military spending so that it can spend more on education or health care or so that it can better balance its budget. However these are demands not for "reform" but for the reallocation of resources from the budget.

Very occasionally demands for the break-up and privatisation of companies like Gazprom, Rosneft, the Russian Railways etc slip out.  

All I will say about that is (1) that when large-scale privatisation took place in Russia in the 1990s it was not a resounding success and those who call for more of it need to explain better why think it would be different this time; and (2) academic research anyway questions the supposed macroeconomic benefits of this sort of "reform" when carried out in a fully functioning market economy like Russia's.

My major complaint is however that this ceaseless demand for more and more "reform" (1) disregards the extent to which Russia has already "reformed" - no country in the industrialised world has "reformed" more since the 1980s - and (2) ignores the extent to which "reform" is anyway already taking place.  

The World Bank's recent publication of its latest "ease of doing business" survey highlights the last point.

Unlikely many surveys, this survey uses a rigorous methodology developed for the World Bank apparently by Harvard University.  It is also based on rigorous research on the ground. To the extent that any such survey can ever be considered reliable, this one is.

What the survey shows is a steep and continuing improvement in business conditions in Russia.  

In the 2010 survey Russia's ranking was 120th out of 183. By the time of the publication of the  2014 survey Russia's ranking had risen to 62nd place out of 189. This year's survey ranks Russia 51st out of 189 - a further rise of 11 places in just one year.

The improvement is dramatic and sustained and in the West is going completely unreported.  

In terms of ease of doing business the World Bank rates Russia at 51st - far and away the best amongst the BRICS (Brazil is 116th, India 130th, China 84th and South Africa 73rd).

Moreover drilling into the numbers establishes certain further surprising - or at least interesting - facts.

The commercial justice system in Russia is highly efficient.  

Russia comes fifth in enforcing contracts, ahead of every one of the G7 states: Britain is 33rd, the US is 21st, Germany is 12th, France is 14th, Japan is 51st, Italy is 111th and Canada is 49th.

This accords with my own impression and what people who use the Russian commercial justice system tell me.

Russia does less well in resolving insolvency issues, where its ranking is 51st.  

This is not due to inefficiency on the part of the courts. It is the result of gaps in Russia's bankruptcy laws. Passage of a new bankruptcy law - which has just entered into force this month - is designed to address precisely this problem, and will doubtless do so.

On the subject of protecting minority shareholders - a vexed issue where Russia was historically weak - the improvement is slower but still significant.

Russia comes 66th - equal to the Netherlands and Finland, and better than Germany (72nd) or Switzerland (105th) or France (87th) or Estonia (81st) - the last a country which routinely gets rhapsodic revues for its pro-business practises in the Western media.

In terms of paying taxes Russia comes 47th - above the US (53rd), Germany (72nd), France (87th), Spain (60th), Japan (121st) or Italy (137th).

This too incidentally accords with my own impression and what I have heard from people working in Russia.

In one other respect Russia does surprisingly well in the survey. It is now in the top ten in terms of the ease of registering property. In this key area its ranking is now 8th.

What this all means is that Russia cannot be the corrupt kleptocratic oligarchy of Western fantasy.  

When I made this point recently in my discussion of Russia's house construction boom it provoked an angry reaction from some quarters.

The facts in the World Bank "ease of doing business" survey however speak for themselves.  

In corrupt kleptocratic oligarchies courts do not function efficiently, contracts are not performed and enforced, rights of minority shareholders are not protected, and people are not able to register their property easily and do not pay their taxes.  

That is not of course to say that there is no corruption in Russia or that there are no other problems there

On the subject of corruption I intend to write about this complex issue separately, taking into account my impressions from my recent visits to Moscow and Perm.

As to the other problems that remain, the World Bank's "ease of doing business" survey provides an important clue as to their source.

The two indicators where Russia scores badly are: Dealing with Construction Permits (119th) and Trading Across Borders (170th).

The problems associated with Trading Across Borders partly reflect Russia's position as a self-sufficient continental sized economy. Russian companies simply do not need to trade beyond their borders, and they are unlikely to want to do so on any very great scale any time soon.

Whatever changes are made - and there is certainly much room for improvement - Russia is unlikely to achieve a score as high for this indicator as do the world's major trading economies and city state entrepôts like Singapore and Hong Kong.

What the very poor level of this indicator does however point to - as does the indicator showing the difficulty in dealing with building permits - is Russia's longstanding problem of excessive bureaucracy.

It is difficult to avoid the feeling that the reason why these two indicators are so bad is because business people who have to deal with these issues are burdened with complex and expensive procedures administered inefficiently by an unresponsive bureaucracy.

This accords exactly with what I was told by business people I spoke to during my recent visit to Perm.  

When I asked them what was the single biggest problem that as business people they faced, they told me it was dealing with a bureaucracy that is unqualified and unfit for purpose.

The problem is not that the bureaucracy is corrupt or excessively large - on the contrary it is if anything too small.  

Rather it is that the people who staff the bureaucracy lack the training and the necessary understanding of commercial life to support - and regulate - the business community effectively.

However even this problem - though real and serious - can be overcome.  

It would have been impossible to achieve the dramatic improvement in Russia's overall ease of doing business ranking if the entire bureaucracy was completely incompetent and unresponsive.

The transformation in the indicator for connecting to the electric supply shows what can be done if the will is there.

In the 2012 survey Russia ranked an abysmal 183rd for this key indicator - pointing to massively complex procedures and a severe bureaucratic overload.  

In just three years this ranking has improved to a very respectable 29th.  

Clearly there has been a sustained and successful drive to improve this indicator by simplifying procedures and cutting red tape.

If Russia's rapid rise in the World Bank's ease of doing business rankings tells us that - for all its problems - Russia cannot be the corrupt kleptocratic oligarchy of Western fantasy, it also tells us two other things.

The first is - as I said at the beginning of this article - that the demand for more and more "reforms" simply ignores the fact that reforms are in fact being carried out.

Anyone who reads through the World Bank's annual surveys will see that they are all about "reforms". It is precisely because Russia is carrying out "reforms" that its ranking is rising so fast.

To be clear, modernising the court system, introducing a new bankruptcy law, simplifying procedures for connecting to the electricity supply, and passing laws on registering property and on administering bankruptcy, are reforms.  

They may lack the drama of breaking up Gazprom, but academic research, historical experience and the World Bank all say the same thing: it is these sort of unexciting reforms that in the end are the ones that make a difference and which produce results.

In other words Russia is reforming, and it is doing so successfully, in a methodical and purposeful way.  

Doing so requires hard work and unremitting attention to detail. The Russian authorities deserve credit for successfully doing it, not the criticism for doing nothing that they normally get.

The second point is that if one looks at what sort of countries now outrank Russia in the survey, it turns out that they are - broadly speaking - the three Asian industrial giants: Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, the two Asian city states of Hong Kong and Singapore, and the traditional and well established industrialised societies of the West: the US, the three rich countries of the British commonwealth (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and most (though not all) the states of the EU - in sum what was once called "the first world".

If one removes the one indicator where Russia scores especially badly, Trading Across Borders - for which there are special reasons (see above) - Russia becomes even more clearly aligned with these "first world" countries rather than with those countries that make up what used to be called "the third world".

The Russian government's target is to achieve 20th place in the World Bank's ease of doing business survey by 2018. That may be too optimistic, though it is worth pointing out that the target for this year was 50th, which Russia only missed by one place.  

If Russia does achieve a ranking of 20th in the world by 2018 then it will be right in the middle of the "first world" group of countries rather than just outside it. At that point it will also have one of the best business climates in the world.  

Even if Russia does not achieve 20th position by 2018, the pace of improvement in the rankings is so fast it suggests Russia will break in fully in terms of quality of its business climate into the list of "first world" countries before long.  

Already Russia outscores many "first world" countries on individual indicators (see above) and is ahead of outliers such as Israel, Luxembourg and Greece.

Whatever view one has of Russia, "Upper Volta with missiles" or "Nigeria on the Volga" it obviously is not, and there is no excuse or justification for continuing to claim that it is.

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 #19
Forcing anti-corruption standards upon other states impermissible - Kremlin chief of staff

ST. PETERSBURG, November 2. /TASS/. Kremlin Chief of Staff Sergey Ivanov has said that standards of fighting against corruption should not be forced upon other countries.

"Forcing standards upon other countries is impermissible as they are not ready for them," Ivanov told the 6th session of the Conference of the States Parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption. "We have already realized that the experience of other countries in forming these or those norms of behavior often turns out to be unsuitable, and sometimes even harmful," Ivanov added.

"In this connection, we think that peculiarities of each concrete country should be taken into account when implementing international anti-corruption standards," he continued.

Ivanov reminded that UN Convention against Corruption has served as a universal document for fighting against the corruption threat for the last 10 years. "Such unity of principled basic approaches increases effectiveness of efforts at the national level, helps to build efficient inter-state partnership in which Russia traditionally actively participates," he noted.

"It is important that the established system of conventional anti-corruption standards is spreading not only on the state competence. It is already spreading on the private sector and civil society," Ivanov stressed.

The official also noted that Russian anti-corruption legislation has been recognized as adherent to the Convention and global standards. "At the same time, we continue to pay special attention to bilateral and multilateral initiatives in the sphere of fighting against corruption, money laundering and legalizing assets of questionable, criminal origin," Ivanov said.

Both government and business should fight against corruption

According to Kremlin Chief of Staff, both government and business should fight against corruption.

"We understand very well that in the fight against corruption, not only precise legal mechanisms and decisive steps on behalf of the state are important. Business circles could and should also considerably contribute to the joint work," Ivanov told the 6th session of the Conference of the States Parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption.

Ivanov described as promising Russia's initiative to adopt the Anti-Corruption Charter of the Russian Business. "The considerable number of Russian entrepreneurs have already joined it voluntarily, including shareholders and top executives of mining and industrial companies," the official noted. "The Charter aims to form the culture of non-acceptance of corruption, increasing transparency both in the sphere of corporate relations and in interactions between business and the government," he added.

The Kremlin chief of staff also stressed that "the system of fighting against corruption in Russia is based on the national legal culture, taking into account the historical and social-economic development, as well as concrete demands and interests of the society." He reminded that mechanisms on preventing corruption schemes are actively employed in Russia. For instance, information about property and assets of state officials is discloses, and their earnings and spending are closely monitored. "To eliminate preconditions for corruption, the work of control and monitor authorities is being put into order, the number of business checks is shrinking," Ivanov said.

"Another key condition for successful fight against corruption is broad involvement of civil society's structures in the process," the official said. He reminded that "formats of using non-governmental organizations are enshrined in conventional mechanisms, which is rather logical. Reaching sensible results in the fight against corruption is directly linked with consistent and systematic formation of total unacceptance toward any manifestations of this evil among the population," he added.

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 #20
RIA Novosti
Protests on the rise in Russia - study

Moscow, 2 November: Protest activity in Russia in the first six months of this year increased by 15 per cent compared with the same period last year, according to a study by the Civil Initiatives Committee [founded by former Finance Minister Aleksey Kudrin].

The assessment of protest activity was based on reports in the media and by new agencies about public protests (rallies, marches, pickets, assemblies, strikes, hunger strikes etc.). The aim of monitoring is to identify regions in the high-risk group based on the combination of socio-economic and political factors. The study's aggregate mark for a region is obtained by adding together the marks in each category.

"In the first half of 2015, recorded protest activity was 15 per cent up on the same period in 2014," says the report presented on Monday [2 November] by the political scientist and Civil Initiatives Committee expert Aleksandr Kynev.

The list of regions with high protest activity in 2014-2015 remains stable and includes Moscow, St Petersburg, Novosibirsk Region, Irkutsk Region, Krasnodar Territory, Bashkortostan and Dagestan.

In that period, the share of domestic political issues has increased (from 15.7 per cent in the first half of the year to 19.6 per cent in the second half), that of foreign policy ones dropped sharply (1.6 per cent in the first half of 2015 against 9.8 per cent in the second half [of 2014], including the Ukrainian conflict), while the share of social issues and urban environment problems remained high (19.3 per cent and 17.9 per cent respectively in the second half of 2015).

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 #21
New York Times
November 3, 2015
Russia Tackles Racism, While Playing It Down, Ahead of World Cup
By SAM BORDEN

MOSCOW - In Russia, where monkey chants directed at black players and Nazi salutes by fans have been persistent problems at soccer matches, local organizers of the 2018 World Cup have created a job that sets their preparations apart from those of previous hosts: antiracism inspector.

The job, much like the issue of racism in Russian soccer generally, is complex. As evidence, consider that in a rare interview, the man appointed to fill the role, Alexei Tolkachev, pledged his office's commitment to eradicating racism in Russian soccer even as he disputed the notion that Russian soccer was rife with racism at all.

"We in Russia take this problem very seriously," Mr. Tolkachev said at one point during a conversation at an Italian restaurant here. He then added, seconds later, "We don't consider it as a serious problem."

This contradiction is not uncommon in discussions of discrimination in Russia. Depending on one's perspective (or choice of reading material), Russian soccer is either overrun with abhorrent fan behavior - like the unfurling of flags bearing swastikas, the displaying of banners endorsing white power and the chanting of taunts featuring racial epithets - or unfairly characterized based on the foreign news media's sensationalizing of isolated events involving uncultured fans.

Examples of both views abound. Alexei Smertin, a former Russian national team player and ambassador for the World Cup bid, dismissed concerns about racism this year when he told the BBC that "there's no racism in Russia because it does not exist." A British newspaper, meanwhile, published an article in July that suggested England should consider boycotting the 2018 World Cup, for which it has not yet qualified, if the situation in Russia "does not improve."

Interviews with players, fans and executives in Russia found that most acknowledged that there was, at a minimum, a problem. High-profile episodes, like the jeering of visiting black players and the frequent taunts aimed at the Brazilian forward Hulk, who plays for Zenit St. Petersburg, have contributed to the perception that Russian fans are intolerant. And an action by the Russian Football Union this summer - it suspended Emmanuel Frimpong, a Ghanaian, for making an obscene gesture at fans who he said had been racially abusing him but did not punish the fans or the club they were supporting - adds to the concerns about institutional ignorance.

For a more overt example, critics still point to 2012, when one of the largest groups of Zenit supporters publicized a manifesto urging the club never to sign either "dark-skinned" players (calling their absence "an important tradition" at Zenit) or gay players (who are "unworthy of our great city").

According to a soon-to-be-released report compiled by the SOVA Center, a Moscow-based research organization that focuses on nationalism and racism, and the Fare network, an organization that fights discrimination in European sports, there were 85 episodes of discriminatory behavior (classified in the report as either racist or "far-right" manifestations) in Russia from May 2014 to May 2015.

A copy of the report, which is expected to be made public in the next week but was viewed by The New York Times, includes details on cases involving monkey chants, fans making Nazi salutes and a coach who referred to Ebola during a news conference when asked about injuries to players on his team. The same coach later disputed the notion that he might have interest in acquiring a Cameroonian player in a transfer because, he said: "We have six blacks already, so do you want me to get the seventh one now? I already don't know where to hide from them."

The report, however, also notes that while the rate of total episodes recorded has increased - 99 were recorded in the previous two years combined - the cases were largely "less aggressive" than in the past. Natalia Yudina, who worked on the report in her role at the SOVA Center, said that in a country that was under Soviet rule until 1991 and that still has a largely homogeneous population, it was unrealistic to think that near-uniform tolerance would appear overnight. Progress, such as it is, will be slow, she said.

"Before, it was murders and attacks - they were using knives, and it was much more dangerous," Ms. Yudina said in an interview. "Now, it is more symbols, like flags and shirts and banners. This is something, O.K., but there is clearly a long way to go."

Ms. Yudina added that she did not expect significant cases of racism at the 2018 World Cup, in large part because of the traditional Russian commitment to putting the country's best foot forward when hosting international events. Increased policing and government monitoring of the most aggressive fans, known as ultras, will almost surely "make the tournament safe and comfortable for everyone," said Alexey Sorokin, the head of the local organizing committee.

The larger issue, though, is how safe players and fans will feel when the spotlight of the World Cup is not illuminated. While most publicized examples of bigotry in Russian soccer have involved the country's higher-profile clubs - two Russian teams, Zenit and CSKA Moscow, are playing in the European Champions League this season - the issue is present at all levels.

Ted Ntirubuza, a defender for the second-division club Solyaris Moscow, was born in Russia but has a Burundian father and is dark-skinned. He said his first encounter with racism came when he was 7 and was taunted by other boys for "being dark." He got into fights over race when he was younger, he said, but after years of hearing a racial epithet used casually, he became largely numb to it.

"If I was white, I might even use it, too," he said, shrugging. Players of all races, he added, simply accept that a large segment of ultras will use racism as part of their chants; when Ntirubuza was 18, he recalled, he played with Spartak Moscow's youth team and even heard monkey noises from fans of his club. "My teammates were like, 'Wow, now you're a star,' " he said.

Bananas - thrown on the field or simply held out by fans in the stands - and monkey noises are common forms of racist taunting in Russia and elsewhere in Europe. They are also one of the schism points in the debate about racism in Russia, as outsiders are almost universally offended by any such incident while Russian officials often play them down.

Yevgeny Selemenev, a longtime fan of Spartak Moscow and a former member of one of the club's most famed groups of ultras, said many of the most racist aspects of ultras' behavior had faded in recent years. There are still online shops where ultras can buy Nazi-branded clothing, he said, but members have taken steps to self-police in recent years and now limit plainly racist or fascist banners.

Monkey chants, he added, are a lingering aspect of what he called behavior from an "older time," and he contended that the chants often came from younger fans who were simply repeating what they had heard from their fathers or uncles.

"All fans have different levels of cultural education," Mr. Selemenev said. "I did monkey chants when I was 15 or 20, and the average age of fans in present Russian stadiums is about that age, and they do what they remember. They do it because it was done before and because they don't know any better."

He added, "I think a lot of the people who do monkey chants during the game go to try and take photographs with the players they shouted at after the game."

Mr. Tolkachev, the antiracism official, said that in his opinion, "monkey chants are difficult to classify, as it is something that is not spelled out anywhere," but he allowed that the Russian government was "inclined to consider it as a demonstration of racism." Separately, he disputed Fare's inclusion of the imperial Russian flag on its list of discriminatory symbols, saying that flag was "part of our country's history."

Mr. Selemenev, and others, also said that the Western news media did not scrutinize racist episodes in other European countries' soccer leagues to the same degree it did the Russian cases. Three Polish clubs, for example, were sanctioned by European soccer's governing body after events reported by Fare from July 2013 to May 2014. In that period, a single club in Croatia was punished for three cases, and clubs in Greece, Italy and Spain were penalized as well. Numerous other episodes were reported from domestic league matches in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

As recently as two weeks ago, black fans were attacked in the stands during a Champions League match in Ukraine.

"People are worried about what will happen at the Russia World Cup, but I think it will be fine from the Russians," Mr. Selemenev said. "Of course, if fan groups from Poland, Germany, Ukraine and Russia are in the same city, it will happen. But it will not differ from what is happening in any other country in the world."

The larger concern is clearly more layered, and it is difficult to predict what will happen in the next three years. Ms. Yudina and others have called for increased education about diversity for young people in Russia as a way to overcome embedded cultural divisions in a country in which an overwhelming majority of citizens are light-skinned, and Mr. Tolkachev seemed to agree with the premise that reaching the younger generation of fans would be crucial in sustaining any sort of progress with anti-discrimination efforts.

Yet when asked if his office planned to enact any new education programs for players, coaches or fans, Mr. Tolkachev demurred, saying instead that "this is not a systemic problem."

Pressed about the reports from the monitoring groups, Mr. Tolkachev, most likely unintentionally, offered an apt summation of the prevailing Russian paradox when it comes to racism.

"We are of course concerned and find such incidents unacceptable," he said with a solemn nod, before adding, with a shrug, "but one should not make a problem out of nothing."

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 #22
The Russian Reader
https://therussianreader.wordpress.com
October 26, 2015
The Two-State Solution (Racism and the Russian Intelligentsia)
"a blog by the militant wing of the russian language purity league"
[Excerpt. Full text here https://therussianreader.wordpress.com/2015/10/26/racism-russian-intelligentsia/]

Boris Akunin:

"In Russia, two distinct, completely dissimilar peoples live side by side, and these peoples have long been bitterly hostile towards each other. (May the Byzantine double-headed eagle that Ivan the Third selected as the country's emblem go to hell in a hand basket.)

"There is Us and there is Them.

"We have our own heroes: Chekhov, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Sakharov.

"They have their own heroes: Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and now Putin.

"Members of the two nations recognize each other at first glance and experience a pang of acute dislike that selfsame second. We do not like anything about Them: the way They look, talk, carry themselves, rejoice and grieve, dress and undress. Their favorite singers, films, and TV shows make us sick. They pay Us in kind, and with interest.

"Apart from Us and Them, there are just plain folk, who make up the majority of the population. We and They are constantly trying to win over this neither-fish-nor-fowl, to introduce them to our values.

"What do you think should be done with this reality? Should we kill each other?"

-Excerpted from Boris Akunin and Mikhail Shishkin, "Conversation between a Novelist and a Writer," July 30, 2013

While there seems to be a fair amount of self-irony, in the comments, above, by the famed Russian detective novel writer Boris Akunin, I cannot help laughing when I read such exercises in self-praise by the so-called Russian intelligentsia and, at the same time, recall something that happened to me several years ago when I was running a summer study program in Petrograd for an American university.

Our students lived with Russian host families, and fitting student to host family was not always a snap, but it was mostly doable. That particular summer, however, more students had signed up for the program than ever before, and our limited resources were stretched thin. So I was taking recommendations from whomever I could get them, rather than relying only on the list of potential host families provided by our partners at the state university here in town.

That is how found myself visiting a couple in their flat somewhere in the city's Central District. It was in a Stalin-era building, but the couple proudly informed me right away that Oleg Basilashvili, a well-known screen and stage actor and liberal intelligentsia icon, was a neighbor. They, too, were members of the creative intelligentsia. One of them was a theater critic, while the other had something to do with the Conservatory, I seem to remember.

The point, as I had already told them over the phone, was that I had one student left to place with a family, a male student. They, it transpired, had a teenage daughter. Would it be a problem for them to have a male student living in the same flat as their daughter? No, it would not be a problem, they told me.

Given the reputation of the university I was representing, they might have imagined I would be setting them up with a blond scion of a New England old money, so if their daughter was whisked off her feet over the summer or merely made useful connections in high places, what could be the harm?

As we were wrapping our conversation at their flat, having ironed out almost all the practical details, the couple thought to ask me what the young man's name was.

"Diego," I said.

My answer literally sent their eyes spinning in circles and smoke shooting from their ears. All it took was the "wrong" name for them to imagine a summer of their daughter basking in the glow of old American money with a patina of academic respectability turning into the constant threat of rape and ravishment at the hands of a "hot-blooded Latino."

And they told me that in so many words, all the while denying that they were what they were-racists.

The funny thing was that Diego was gay in every sense of the word: fun to be around, a kind, sweet-hearted young man, and no "threat" to their precious daughter. But since Oleg Basilashvili's neighbors had already outed themselves as racists, I did not want to hang around and find out whether they were homophobes as well.

I was more naïve than I am now. Although I had already had many encounters with "casual" racism and anti-Semitism Russian style, Petrograd had not yet arrived at the bad part of its mid noughties, when more proactive racists than my intelligentsia couple would ever want to be began assaulting and murdering immigrants, foreigners, anti-fascists, and members of Russian ethnic minorities in especially large numbers.

But I was not naïve enough to try and plead Diego's case to these assholes. I immediately left their precious den of culture-vulturehood and hit the streets, cursing them out loud while also trying to think of a back-up plan.

That it is when I thought of our long-time acquaintance F.A., who had nannied the young son of a friend for years, and even had cooked for our family for a short while when we were in a bad spot. By no means was F.A. a member of the ballyhooed intelligentsia, which was not to say that she was uneducated or crude or anything but kind, loving, funny, smart, warm, and one of the best cooks I have ever met in my life. Besides that, she had worked in a factory her whole life, doing quality control, and she was Jewish.

When I telephoned her and told her what the deal was, she did not hesitate a second to welcome Diego into her home.

Needless to say, Diego and F.A. hit it off and had a great time in each other's company that summer.

So when, a while later, I was asked to find temporary summer accommodation in Petrograd for another young gay Latino man, I could think of no better hostess than F.A. They also hit it off famously.

This is my roundabout way of saying something that has only been confirmed ten thousand times since by experiences both personal and vicarious: the liberal Russian intelligentsia is not all it is cracked up to be. It is often not particularly liberal or progressive, and is just as likely to be as Putinist or more Putinist than Putin's mythical alleged "base" among industrial workers and peasants in the "Russian heartlands" or the "simple folk" in the big cities. If anything, my own experience has been that, on the contrary, these simple folk are not so simple and not so automatically inclined to putinize the world around them, much less racialize it.

There are just as many bigots and racists among the "Russian liberal intelligentsia" as there are among the Russian lower classes, maybe more.

Whatever the case, the fact that many Russian liberals have loose reactionary, racist screws in their brains has become apparent from the rabid reactionary discourse that has sprung up within Russia's talking, thinking, and writing classes around the "refugee crisis" in Europe and the fresh clashes between Israelis and Palestinians..

Yegor Osipov and Kirill Kobrin's attempts, below, to counter this utterly irrational discourse might seem mild outside of this context, but they are welcome contributions to a debate that it is most remarkable for its near-total absence from Russian public life....

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 #23
Moscow Times
November 3, 2015
One in Three Russians Exempt From Military Service for Medical Reasons
By Eva Hartog

Roughly one third of this year's potential conscripts have been exempted from serving in the Russian military for medical reasons, the head of the Defense Ministry's main military medical directorate, Alexander Fisun, told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper on Tuesday.

This year, about 30 percent of conscripts were turned down after failing medical tests - a trend that has remained constant in recent years, the report said.

Many Russian draftees fake medical conditions to dodge their military duties amid widespread reports of brutal hazing and abuse in army barracks.

In July, a 19-year-old conscript in the Chelyabinsk region died days after he was beaten over the head with an iron flask by his immediate superior, in one of many examples of fatal beatings and suicides to have plagued the Russian army for decades.

But according to Fisun, the high number of rejections is directly related to the medical committee's high standards.

"We don't need sick soldiers in the army," Fisun told Rossiiskaya Gazeta. "That's why young people go through at least three medical committees in the military directorate," he said.

The most common health problems among this year's conscripts were musculoskeletal disorders - a category that includes arthritis and osteoporosis. Neuropsychological conditions were the second most frequent medical condition, often caused by "adaption problems encountered in the conscripts' youth," Fisun said. Circulatory system diseases - such as hypertension - and respiratory diseases, like asthma, were the third most common reason for exemption on medical grounds, the report said.

More than 63,000 conscripts were recruited in the fall draft which began in October, Interfax news agency reported.

Russia's military fervor is at a years-long high following Russia's annexation of Crimea last year and air strikes in Syria. But societal attitudes toward the draft are divided.

A recent survey by the state-run VTsIOM pollster showed one quarter of respondents said they thought the army "crippled young people morally, and sometimes physically," whereas 64 percent said it provided moral and physical training.

Ten percent of respondents thought the time served primarily gave people experience in "humiliation and abuse," while at least four times as many people cited "physical strength and stamina," "courage," "life experience," and other positive attributes.

The negative view of the army is less widespread now than in a similar poll conducted in 1990, when 42 percent thought serving was a crippling experience, the survey showed.

The VTsIOM survey was conducted from Oct. 10 to 11 and questioned 1,600 people in 46 Russian regions. The margin of error did not exceed 3.5 percent.

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 #24
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
November 2, 2015
How Russian media responded to the airliner crash in Egypt
Russian media roundup: After the tragic crash of a Russian civilian airliner in Egypt, Russia's top journalists attempted to make sense of what really happened. In addition, these journalists analyzed the high-profile meeting of Nicolas Sarkozy with Vladimir Putin.
By Anastasia Borik

For the Russian media, the biggest news of the week was the tragic crash on Oct. 31 of a passenger jet of Metrojet Airlines (former Kagalymavia Airlines), flying from Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg. The crash, which killed all 224 people on board, with the vast majority being Russian citizens, once again raised the specter of terrorism and resulted in introspection about the safety record of Russia's civil aviation industry.

Russian passenger plane crash in Egypt

Causes of this crash are now being analyzed, and according to preliminary data, the main conclusion being put forward is equipment failure. However, experts have not excluded the possibility that this was a terrorist attack. It should be noted that immediately after this tragedy, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS) claimed responsibility. On Nov. 1, Russia declared a day of mourning for the victims.

Yulia Latynina, a staff columnist for the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, expressed its indignation with the poor safety record of Russian civil aviation. The newspaper reminds its readers that in the last few years, there have been a number of major aircraft accidents in Russia, in each of which the main factor was low professionalism and negligence of the crews or the airline company. The newspaper says that in the final analysis, there will be little left of the air transport market, but this will not make Russian airlines any safer.

Vera Chereneva, the author of the pro-government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, reported on the numerous mourning ceremonies taking place in St. Petersburg, where in the center of the city, thousands of people gathered to commemorate the victims and express condolences to their families. The newspaper wrote about the depression that prevailed among those that came.

Meanwhile, Sergey Mashkin from the business newspaper Kommersant tried to understand the reasons for the crash and presented three possible versions, citing the opinions of experts.

According to the first version, the biggest disaster in the history of modern Russian aviation occurred due to explosive decompression of the interior - the body of the airliner burst due to a sudden drop in cabin pressure at high altitude.

According to the second version, the fuselage could have had its integrity compromised by the shock wave caused by small bomb going off in the luggage compartment of the airplane, or by parts breaking off from an engine. In addition, metal fatigue cracks that might have developed in the supporting structures could be responsible. The third reason given was a faulty engine that eventually led to explosive decompression.

Moskovsky Komsomolets tried to humanize the names on the list of passengers, telling a little story about each person that flew on the ill-fated flight. Who were these people, what did they do in life, and what were they planning to do in the future? In this way, the newspaper tried to focus a little attention on each person.

Nicolas Sarkozy's visit to Moscow

On Oct. 28, the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, visited Moscow. The program included not only all sorts of cultural activities, but also a personal meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which the two politicians discussed the current international agenda, including Russia's military operations in Syria. The Russian media tried to guess what the French politician's motives were for coming to Moscow.

Novaya Gazeta's reporter in Paris Yuri Safronov argues that "creating an image" was the primary motivation for Sarkozy's decision to visit Moscow. Sarkozy has already started campaigning for the presidential elections that will be held in 2017 in France, and is trying to maximize his own popularity. For him, this meeting with the "chief troublemaker" in world politics - is a real "treasure," something needed to improve his ratings.

For Putin, this visit is also important, because the Kremlin still hopes for Sarkozy's return to power. On many occasions, Sarkozy has criticized the current French President François Hollande for being too tough on Russia.

The online newspaper Gazeta.ru, quoting Russian political scientists, noted that this visit was more important for Putin. Although Putin and Sarkozy are not bound by such warm and friendly relations, as for example, exist between Putin and Berlusconi, the Russian leader still sees a potential ally in Sarkozy.

Thus the Kremlin is interpreting his visit to Moscow as yet one more proof of the falsity of the thesis being circulated by Western leaders - that Russia is isolated.

The business newspaper Kommersant gives the voice to political scientist Igor Bunin. He also pointed to Sarkozy's desire to obtain additional political points from a dialogue with Moscow. Sarkozy is distancing himself from the ruling Socialists and their leader, Francois Hollande, whose relations with Moscow have grown very cool.

This expert believes that many in the political elite in France support a rapprochement with Russia, and these are the very people that Sarkozy wishes to attract to his side. In addition, the analyst believes that this also provides a good opportunity for Moscow to dissociate itself from Marine Le Pen and her nationalists, and lay its bets on a more traditional political force.

Parliamentary elections in Poland

On Oct. 25, parliamentary elections were held in Poland. As a result, the conservative Law and Justice Party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski came to power, which was previously in opposition. The party won enough votes to form a majority single-party government led by the current leader - Beata Szydlo, a protégé of Kaczynski.

Ivan Preobrazhensky, an author of the independent media publication Slon, believes that the victory of the conservatives has played into the hands of Moscow, as relations with Warsaw could hardly be worse (and may even improve on the background of the pragmatism shown by Szydlo), while Brussels will once again have to deal with the intransigence of Law and Justice when it comes to pan-European issues.

Moskovsky Komsomolets interviews a Polish journalist, Vatslav Radzivinovich,  who has a similar point of view - the relations between Russia and Poland are so bad that they cannot deteriorate any further, so we can expect a return to tough rhetoric and numerous accusations being hurled against Russia. At the same time, Germany should feel afraid, which during the last government run by the Law and Justice Party, was forced to endure regular insults and reminders of its own past evils committed against Poland.

Stanislav Kuvaldin, an author of Kommersant-Vlast political magazine, analyzing the results of the elections, called them unprecedented, because for the first time since 1989, no left-wing forces entered the Sejm, and other traditional parties have also lost much of their support.

Thus, several new parties and individual politicians came out successful, including the populist Pawel Kukiz and the liberal Ryszard Petru. In addition, the magazine also emphasizes that the situation has actually not changed for Russia, because relationship between the two countries are constantly poor.

Revival of the Pioneers

The Pioneers, the Soviet-era children's movement and organization that played an important step in the socialization of Soviet citizens, had largely disappeared with the collapse of the U.S.S.R. On Oct. 29 Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the establishment of a Russian movement for students "to promote the development of an identity based on the intrinsic values system of Russian society."

The Russian media immediately drew an analogy with the Soviet pioneer movement, and went on to actively discuss this innovation.

The author of the business newspaper Vedomosti, Olga Churakova, point to the fact that the views of legislators and experts were clearly far apart - the parliamentarians recall their bright pasts in the ranks of the Pioneers and the Komsomol, considering it an important step in the socialization of young people, while political experts talk about the return to the Soviet system that was ideologized and politicized.

Gazeta.ru's journalist Alexey Yablokov writes about the students' movement with a great deal of irony, alluding to its association with Soviet ideas, as well as the fact that this initiative will be implemented in pre-school education as well.

Rossiyskaya Gazeta's blogger Elena Yakovleva sees this initiative as a good idea, and emphasizes the importance of socialization of students. The mission of this movement, according to the newspaper, is not political action, but to involve students in sports, extracurricular activities, as well as participation in cultural activities.

The blogger for the Echo of Moscow radio station, Alexey Kuznetsov, considers that, in fact, it does not really matter whether the creation of the Russian student movement is a trip back to the days of the Soviet Union or not, what is more important is that this idea is doomed to failure.

First of all, this is because, in terms of ideology, the state cannot offer students anything. Soviet leaders had an arsenal of Communist values and symbols, while in modern Russian - there is nothing but questionable conservative ideas and "spiritual bonds."

Quotes of the week:

Political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin on the creation of the Russian students' movement: "An eventual return to the Soviet Union is inevitable, and now we are getting even closer to it, with increasing levels of idiocy, anti-professionalism and corruption."

Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko on the revival of the Young Pioneers: "This is a timely, long-awaited, and much-needed document. This being a continuity of the Pioneers and Komsomol movements is obvious. Life demands we revisit the experiences and activities of these associations, but of course, taking into account the qualitatively new realities of modern Russia."

Political analyst Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, on Russian-Polish relations, in the context of the recent elections: "Against the background of nervousness in Europe, the reaction in Russia has been surprisingly one of indifference. Do Russians have any reason to rejoice? Of course not. Kaczynski and his associates do not conceal their attitude towards Russia, treating it as an evil empire."

Nicolas Sarkozy on Russian-French relations: "We should not now be returning to the reasons for these difficulties, which our relations are suffering from. Drawing further away from each other is a mistake. France and Russia need to work together."

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 #25
AP
November 3, 2015
Russia Says It Doesn't Mind if Assad Stays or Steps Down

MOSCOW - A Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman said on Tuesday that Moscow does not consider it a matter of principle that Syrian President Bashar Assad should stay in power, stepping back from its previous position of strong support for him.

Asked whether it was crucial for Moscow that Assad stays, Maria Zakharov said on the Ekho Moskvy radio station: "Absolutely not, we've never said that."

"What we did say is a regime change in Syria could become a local or even regional catastrophe," she said, adding that "only the Syrian people can decide the president's fate."

Russia is believed to be Assad's strongest backer and has previously balked at the West's suggestions that the Syrian president should be ousted.

Russia in September began carrying out air strikes at Islamic State fighters in Syria at Assad's request.

Earlier on Tuesday, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov told Russian news agencies that Moscow is aiming to host a round of talks between Syrian officials and opposition leaders next week.

Bogdanov said the Syrian government has agreed to participate, but that it is unclear which opposition groups might come. He did not give a specific date for the proposed talks.

The talks are expected to be discussed Wednesday at a meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.N. Syrian envoy Staffan de Mistura, Bogdanov said.

Assad made a surprise visit to Moscow last month, which was viewed as a signal that Russia ultimately seeks a political settlement after weeks of heavy airstrikes in Syria, although the terms of such an arrangement are uncertain.

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 #26
Vineyard of the Saker
http://thesaker.is
November 2, 2015
Week Four of the Russian Intervention in Syria: assessing the Vienna declaration

I would argue that, at least so far, Russia has achieved many important goal in her intervention in Syria.  Most importantly, the Russian intervention in Syria forced the USA to agree to a conference in which all the regional actors, including Iran, would be invited.  At the end of its proceedings the conference adopted a joint statement which I have fully reposted here: http://thesaker.is/joint-statement-final-declaration-on-the-results-of-the-syria-talks-in-vienna-as-agreed-by-participants/

I believe that this statement represents a major diplomatic defeat for the USA and yet another Russian diplomatic victory.  Here some points which have been agreed upon (with relevant section of the declaration indicated in brackets):

-Iran will participate in the negotiations about the future of Syria (preamble)
-Syria will not be allowed to break up (#1)
-Syria will not be ruled by a religious regime (#1)
-The Syrian military will not be disbanded (#2)
-Daesh and other terrorists must be defeated (#6)
-The Syrian people will get to chose their leader (#8)

Now let's translate that into political terms and see what this implies.

-The USA has failed to isolate Iran whose crucial role is now recognized by all
-The USA will not be allowed to partition into a Wahabistan and an Alawistan
-None of the factions supported by the US (all being religious) will be allowed to rule
-The Syrian military (which is solidly pro-Assad) will not be disbanded or disarmed
-All the factions supported by the US (all being Wahabi extremists) must be militarily defeated
-Assad will be allowed to remain in power (since he is by far the most popular leader)

Now, I am not stupid or naive to believe for one second that the USA will truly abide by these terms.  Quite to the contrary.  All I am saying is that Russia has inflicted yet another massive diplomatic defeat on the USA similar to the one Lough Erne or to the Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 Agreements.   In Lough Erne, for example, the USA had to accept the following statement: "We call on the Syrian authorities and opposition at the Geneva Conference jointly to commit to destroying and expelling from Syria all organisations and individuals affiliated to Al Qaeda, and any other non-state actors linked to terrorism."  In other words, Daesh-linked Wahabis were told to join forces with the Syrian military to defeat Daesh!  Of course, we all know that this did not happen.  But what is important here is that the US actions and policies are so indefensible that the USA has to condemn or, at least, contradict them, in any public forum.

Let me repeat this once more: what the US is doing on the ground, in reality, is in complete and total contradiction with the declaratory policy of the USA:

US actions/policies/goals    US official policy on Syria

Full military support for Daesh /    Categorical opposition to Daesh
Promotion of a Wahabi regime /    Promotion of a secular regime
Breakup of Syria /    Maintaining a unitary Syria
Destruction of the Syrian military /    Maintaining the Syria military
Removal of Assad at any cost /    Syrian people get to elect Assad
Sabotage of all Russian efforts /    Collaboration with Russia
Regime change in Iran /    Iran as a partner

While, at least so far, the USA has been successful in doing the exact opposite of what it has been declaring, this becomes extremely difficult once the Russian military is directly involved.  This was best illustrated by the surreal moment when following US accusations that Russia was bombing the "wrong" guys the USA refused to give Russia a list of bad guys and a list of good guys.

This tactic, to force the USA to formally agree to something which they oppose is also what Putin used in the Minsk-2 Agreement where the Russians basically forced the USA and its puppet regime to accept a dialog with the Novorussians even though such a dialog is absolutely out of the question.  This is what Russia is doing now: forcing the USA to negotiate with Assad and Iran.

Russia's declared policies and actions in contrast, are as simple, straightforward and in full conformity with each other: defeating terrorists, support the legal Syrian government, uphold international law.  In Russia's case, there is no need to hide anything and, in fact, the Russians have been amazingly transparent about their operations.

For years now the USA has been dreaming of doing to Assad what was done to Hussein and Gaddafi and they most definitely have the military might to do so: what they are discovering, to their great distress, is that Russia is capable of defeating US plans by skillfully using a mix of intense diplomacy and limited military efforts.  So far, the US have not found a way of coping with this situation.

On the military front the situation remain, at best, complex.  The best reports about the combat situation that I have found so far are, yet again, on Colonel Cassad's website.  To make a long story short and in sparing you all the details battle by battle, it appears that the Syrian Army is making slow progress on many directions, but it has been unable to capitalize on the Russian airstrikes and these modest tactical successes have not produced any operational breakthroughs.  In simple terms: the government forces are struggling very hard to achieve even modest progress.

I am, by the way, in no way blaming the Syrians for that.  The frontlines are long, convoluted, the Wahabis are well dug in, the Russian air force contingent is very small and can only do so much.  One Russian expert declared today that he believes that the Syrian military lost about 85'000 men since the war began.  If that is true, it would explain, at least partially, the fact that the Syrians are over-stretched and are having a hard time concentrating enough forces in one location to achieve a breakthrough.

Still, it is quite possible that the combined efforts of the Russians and the Syrian will eventually yield an operational success and that the Daesh forces will suddenly collapse, at least on one section of the front.  The problem with that is that both sides are in a race for time: the next round of negotiations is scheduled in two weeks already and, so far, neither side as much to show to come to the negotiating table in a position of strength.  Apparently, the Americans are planning some kind of attack on Raqqa, and they want to use primarily Kurdish forces.  If so, then this is a rather bizarre plan.  After all, why would the Kurdish forces agree to such a dangerous and potentially costly (in terms of equipment and lives) operation far away from their own zones which they must protect on more or less all directions?!  In comparison, the Russian plan of unblocking the Syrian military and helping it reconquer Aleppo and the key highway linking Damascus to Homs and Aleppo appears much more realistic, if full of potential difficulties.  If the Syrians fail to achieve these goals in the next 2 weeks, then this will immensely complicate the upcoming negotiations and might forces Iran and Hezbollah to commit a much larger force to relieve the Syrian Army.

The next couple of weeks will be crucial.

The Saker

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 #27
www.rt.com
November 3, 2015
Syria hospitals Russia accused of bombing don't exist - Defense Ministry
[Graphics here https://www.rt.com/news/320509-syria-russian-air-force/]

The Russian Defense Ministry has denied media reports its aircraft hit hospitals in Syria, saying the medical facilities mentioned by Western media don't actually exist.

The Defense Ministry has checked the data presented in recent media reports, which blamed Russian aviation for hitting several hospitals in Syria, Major-General Igor Konashenkov, the ministry spokesman said in a press briefing on Monday.

Konashenkov denied the accusations, which he said were "traditionally made without any proof, without any factual backing."

Out of six hospitals that were mentioned in the reports, only one medical facility actually exists in real life, he added.

"We've checked this information. It turned out that, a hospital is only present in the village Sarmin," the spokesman said, adding that there are no hospitals and no medical workers in the other five villages named in media reports.

The Defense Ministry presented a photo of the Sarmin hospital, which was taken on October 31 after the reports emerged.

The image showed the building was intact, disproving claims it had been completely destroyed and 12 people killed.

Reports in several Western media outlets on October 21-23 claimed that 12 people, including doctors, were killed in a Russian airstrike on the village of Sarmin in Syria's Idlib province. They also said medical facilities were hit in al-Eis, al-Hadher, Khan Tuman, Latamna and al-Zarba.

The Russian Air Force has performed 131 sorties over the last two days, hitting 237 terrorist targets in various Syrian provinces, Konashenkov said.

"131 sorties were carried out from the Hmeimim airbase, during which 237 terrorist targets in Hama, Latakia, Homs, Damascus Aleppo and Raqqa provinces were hit," Konashenkov said.

In Homs, Russian warplanes have destroyed underground shelters and anti-aircraft artillery positions of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).

"In Tadmor district of the Homs province, an Su-25 attack aircraft struck an IS fortified area. As a result of the direct hit, fortifications, underground shelters and terrorist anti-aircraft artillery positions, which hosted two ZSU-23 systems, were destroyed," Konashenkov said.

According to the spokesman, another Russian airstrike wiped out a Jabhat al-Nusra command center in Latakia province, which the jihadists used to suppressed radio communications by Syrian government forces.

"In the suburbs of the city of Aleppo, an Su-34 bomber struck a camp used for training militants arriving from foreign countries. The air bombs completely destroyed an arms depot as well as the terrorists' training infrastructure," Konashenkov said.

Russia began a large-scale air campaign against Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra and other the terrorist groups in Syria on September 20. Dozens of sorties are carried out by Russian warplanes every day at the official request of the Syrian government.

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 #28
The National Interest
October 29 2015
Exploiting Russia's Fear of ISIS
By Paul R. Pillar
Paul R. Pillar is Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and Nonresident Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution.  He is a contributing editor to The National Interest, where he writes a blog.
 
As multilateral talks begin in Vienna to search for a possible resolution of the Syrian civil war, we should realize that even when a foreign government is not being entirely above board in explaining what it is up to, it still may be honest in identifying part of what motivates it. The principal government in question regarding the Syrian situation is that of Russia, which has said a lot about beating back the so-called Islamic State or ISIS but whose military operations so far in Syria seem to be saying something else. Russian military strikes directed against other opposition groups in Syria may actually be helping ISIS insofar as they bring ISIS closer to becoming, or at least appearing to be, the only viable alternative to the Assad regime.

Despite this apparent divergence between talk and action, Russia undoubtedly and genuinely considers ISIS to be a significant threat. This is partly because ISIS currently is the principal inspiration for individual Muslim radicals and would-be radicals within the Russian federation, especially in the north Caucasus. Estimates of the number of Russian citizens who have joined ISIS are in the thousands, with perhaps the single biggest concentration of them being from Dagestan, the province at the eastern end of the north Caucasus region. The problem for Russia is only likely to get worse, and statements from Russian officials indicate they realize that. So far an exodus of radicals to join the fight in the Middle East may have reduced the chance of trouble in Russia. The worry, which President Vladimir Putin has expressed, is over what happens when the radicals who survive return home.

It is impossible for us to measure the relative weights of the variety of Russian motives for militarily intervening in Syria. Notwithstanding all that has been said, however, about Moscow wanting to assert itself and maintain its presence in the Middle East, the ISIS-centered radical threat to Russia has to be one of the weightiest motivations. This concern exists against the background of several high-casualty terrorist attacks over the past decade and a half inside Russia by radicals from the Caucasus, with some of the attacks occurring within the city of Moscow. Homelands matter, for Russians as they do for Americans.

We should assume that Russian decision-making in the months ahead will be guided by the considerations just mentioned. Putin and his advisers probably are smart enough to understand the possible long-term counterproductive effects, as far as beating back ISIS is concerned, of some of their military operations to date, however much they wanted in the short term to shore up Assad's regime and to make whatever other statements they wished to make with their intervention. The United States and Russia have more interests in common with regard to Syria than current military operations may suggest-insofar as the United States is focused on countering ISIS and not distracted by the habit of measuring success in the Middle East by the number of regimes that get toppled.

As for what all this means for specific future Russian decisions on Syria (and perhaps on Iraq), Moscow has to perform the same sort of balancing of considerations that the United States does even if it were solely focused on countering ISIS. On one hand there is that problem of how the success of ISIS on the ground in the Middle East has been a malevolent inspiration for individual radicals back home. Push back ISIS on the ground, and it won't look so much like an inspiring winner. But on the other hand there is the danger of military operations in the Middle East provoking attacks against the country conducting those operations. The provocation may be a matter of calculated retaliation by a group or of rage and radicalization driven by the damage and casualties that such operations cause. If the Russians think this through, their thoughts may lead them to revise their targeting policies; the airstrikes against non-ISIS opposition groups can raise the risk of terrorist attacks against Russia while doing nothing to push back ISIS.

Pursuing this line of thought even further-and here's where U.S. and Russian interests begin to diverge again-it is in Russia's interest to have someone else, such as the United States, bear more of the dangerous terrorism-provoking burden of pushing back ISIS. The common goal of pushing back this group is achieved, while the more divisible cost of terrorist retaliation is borne by someone else.

The policy implication for the United States is that it should view the situation in a very similar way but with the roles reversed. It is in U.S. interests for someone else, such as Russia, to bear more of the danger and the costs of achieving the common goal of pushing ISIS back. This is the game that the United States and Russia are playing today in Syria-not some game of filling vacuums in which winning is seen as doing more things and having more of a presence in a foreign land than the other guy does.

In playing the true game of who does heavy and dangerous lifting in achieving a common goal, the United States ought to recognize-and exploit-the fact that Russia has more reasons to worry about ISIS than the United States does. This is partly a matter of geographic proximity. It is partly a matter of ISIS being ideologically distinct from Al-Qaeda, with its doctrine of hitting a "far enemy" that meant primarily the West and especially the United States. And it is in large part a matter of the United States not having anything like the vulnerability that Russia has in the form of concentrated, disaffected Muslim populations in the north Caucasus.

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#29
http://readrussia.com
November 2, 2015
ISIS, or Isn't It a Threat to Russia?
By Mark Galeotti
Professor of Global Affairs at the Center for Global Affairs of New York University's School of Professional Studies.

The justification for Moscow's Syrian adventure is the threat from Islamic State - ISIS - and thus the opportunity to fight them on someone else's turf. "If we just stood by and let Syria get gobbled up," said Vladimir Putin, "thousands of people running around there now with Kalashnikovs would end up on our territory, and so we are helping President Assad fight this threat before it reaches our borders." But how serious is the threat?

On 31 October, three alleged ISIS-affiliated North Caucasus insurgents were arrested in the middle of Nazran, capital of Ingushetia. A week before, a Dagestani fighter with alleged ISIS links was shot resisting arrest in Gimry, accused of a bomb attack on the Irganayskaya hydroelectric power station. And a week before that, a dozen alleged terrorists, including one who was said to have been trained in an ISIS camp, were arrested in Moscow, charged with planning to detonate a bomb on the metro. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, never one to be late to a party, has also claimed three ISIS jihadists were killed by security forces in Grozny.

Quite what one thinks of this depends to a large extent on what one thinks of the Kremlin. To some, Russia is simply and cynically using ISIS as a rationale for a military deployment in Syria meant to shore up an unpleasant regime and force the West to abandon its attempt to keep Moscow in the geopolitical sin-bin. There is more than a little truth in this, but that does not mean that Russia's rulers and their security apparatus do not have a genuine concern about ISIS.

There appears to have been a steady change in attitudes over the last year. At first, ISIS seemed to be a gift to Moscow, as it drew away young militants from the North Caucasus - precipitating a distinct downturn in terrorist attacks - to Iraq and Syria where, it as confidently assumed, American bombs and drones could do the rest. However, increasingly there is a worry that as Russian citizens begin to return from the battlefield, they not only do so with the guns, experience and allies they picked up there, but they also bring with them a commitment to uniting the various scattered and divided insurgent and jihadist groups into a single command.

Even how many Russian citizens are fighting for ISIS is unclear. In February, Federal Security Service (FSB) director Alexander Bortnikov said 1,700, but now guesstimates - and that is all they can be - put the figure at 2,700 or more. (One of the reasons for confusion is that there are also rebels in Syria drawn from the country's ethnic Chechen minority, who sometimes get counted as Russian expatriates.) Either way, though, at least some are returning: over a hundred have been arrested back in Russia, according to the FSB, and their presence in recent terrorist incidents is also an alarming indication.

ISIS vs IK

The obvious fear is that they will galvanize the running conflict in the North Caucasus. There is, after all, something of a leadership vacuum within the region. In August, the Caucasus Emirate (IK), which claims (if never actually exercises) overall control over the scattered local jamaats, or insurgent groups, had to admit that it had lost its third leader in less than two years, Emir Magomed Suleimanov (also known as Abu Usman Gimrinsky). Ever since its formation by Doku Umarov in 2007, IK has never been an especially relevant or powerful command structure. The efforts of Suleimanov - a compromise candidate and a Sharia judge rather than a fighting leader - to try and persuade young militants not to travel to Syria and join ISIS sounded pathetic enough even before it became clear just how ineffective they were. With his death, the very future of IK is in doubt.

Meanwhile, increasingly numbers of not just individual fighters but whole jamaats began pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. As a result, he declared the establishment of the new vilayat (province) of the North Caucasus under Rustam Asilderov, a Dagestani who defected to ISIS at the end of 2014. At present, this is just as token a structure as IS, but it marks the serious start of a struggle for the loyalties of the North Caucasus insurgency.

Mindful of the way that the influx of Al-Qaeda funds, fighters and money helped energize and radicalize the Chechen rebellion in the 1990s, turning a nationalist struggle for independence into something much more vicious and expansive, Moscow is inevitably concerned that ISIS could do the same in the wider North Caucasus. Perhaps most serious is the threat that ISIS, with its commitment to structure and state-building, could unite the jamaats, and turn a generalized, low-level insurgency into a full-blown regional insurrection.

But this is, to be honest, a relatively distant prospect. My sense is that while the security agencies appear to have little real penetration of the jamaats - their intelligence seems drawn from communications intercepts and the, ahem, "enhanced interrogation" of those fighters and sympathizers who do end up in the hands - they are still relatively effective at the ABCs of domestic security and counter-insurgency. Of course, their ABC too often comes down to Arbitrariness, Brutality and Corruption. Thus there is the danger that, if Moscow really comes to believe that a serious ISIS threat is metastasizing in the North Caucasus, it will unleash the kind of campaign that will drive more and more locals into the hands of jihadists and other rebels. Will the Kremlin seek Ingush, Dagestani and Kabardin Kadyrovs? A terrifying thought that could see a vicious circle of violence and counter-violence with no obvious way to stop it.

ISIS at home and in the head

Of course, Russia may also be vulnerable to ISIS on its Central Asian flank. Not only is there a real danger of the movement's penetration of the often-unsteady authoritarianisms of the region, but there is also the huge population of Central Asian migrant workers inside Russia. From laying pavements in Moscow to servicing oil pipelines in the Urals, they are a crucial economic asset, to a considerable extent because of the exploitative conditions under which they are forced to work. No wonder that some have proven susceptible to jihadist ideas. To a considerable extent this has up to now largely been the preserve of Hizb ut-Tahrir, proscribed as a terrorist movement under Russian law since 2003. In fact, Hizb ut-Tahrir in Russia has largely disassociated itself from calls for direct action, but this may change as its leaders begin to worry about being "out-jihaded" by ISIS and its more militant rhetoric. It may itself become a source of terrorism within Russia, or simply be eclipsed by more radical ISIS-linked groups.

After all, following the start of the Russian airstrikes in Syria - even though ironically most did not target ISIS - its spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani called on "Islamic youth everywhere, [to] ignite jihad against the Russians ... in their crusaders' war against Muslims." The recent arrests may reflect this, or simply be a sign of Moscow's concerns, and the extent to which ISIS connections really have begun to spread within Russia's tiny but dangerous jihadist communities.

Of course, here again in many ways the greatest risk is over over-reaction: even Kremlin-friendly Chief Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin, while acknowledging of the spread of jihadism within Russia's Moslem minority and the "foolishness, utter ignorance" of those seduced by ISIS (especially converts to Islam), is also making increasingly pointed warnings that 12% of the total population should not by judged by the actions of a handful.

As the Syria show drives Donbas off the TV screens - hardly an accident, giving the Kremlin more scope to negotiate a quiet extrication from that particular adventure-turned-quagmire - and as more and more alleged ISIS-related cases are announced, the risk of a social backlash is considerable. Prejudice towards Moslems and Central Asians is hardly unknown within Russian culture, and the more Moscow builds up the scale of the threat to justify its operations in Syria, then the greater the risk that it simply plays to the kind of xenophobic tendencies that have already exploded in the past - such as against Caucasians in Biryulevo in 2013 and Kondopoga in 2006 - and yet which more often manifest themselves in low-level prejudice and discrimination. (Think of all those adverts for apartments just for "slavs" or adverts for services provided by agencies with a "no migrants" policy).

And that, in its own way, also becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, as prejudice breeds anger, and anger opens the door to ISIS and similar parasites of hate. Besides which, it also empowers and excuses Ramzan Kadyrov, the bloody jailer of Chechnya, who is already making his pitch that if he goes, Moscow loses its best weapon against ISIS in the North Caucasus. Here is Russia's greatest challenge: it has nothing to fear, except fear itself - and the misunderstanding and hatred that can cause.

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 #30
Moscow Times
November 3, 2015
West Must Cooperate With Russia in the Arctic
By Elizabeth Buchanan
Elizabeth Buchanan is manager of the China Economy Program at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University.

Predictions of a catastrophic Arctic future will not be a reality. Instead, the Arctic is shaping up to be a region of international cooperation. In August, Russia submitted their revised Arctic claim - sparking widespread calls of a new Cold War. However, given current tensions, it is all but impossible to view Russia's claim for what it really is. Instead, the imperialist and expansionist narrative is further fueled - signaling a general misreading of Russian Arctic ambitions.

The apparent militarization of the Arctic is merely a process of normative securitization. Arctic rim powers are meeting increased activities in the region with standard steps to ensure the security of their vast exposed borders.

Yet, Russia reprises its Cold War role and is cast as the villain of the Arctic narrative. This is despite having an Arctic security strategy not too dissimilar from the other Arctic powers. In fact, it could be argued that since the Cold War the Arctic has undergone systematic demilitarization. Today, military hardware isn't on par with the Arctic's Cold War levels. Discussion of Russia's 'rapid' militarization is misleading, as Russia's Arctic military might isn't anything new.

According to the U.S. Coast Guard, Russia has always had the Arctic military advantage. It's never been an even playing field. In 1970, Russia had 32 icebreakers, in 2000 it had 37 and in 2015 it has 52. Dwarfing the U.S. fleets - 10 in 1970, five in 2000 and mere six in 2015. Historically, Russia is the Arctic's leading military power in terms of hardware and capability. The U.S. is still playing catch up and should conflict ever emerge, the U.S. is quite simply not equipped to challenge.   

Communication between the Arctic Five (A5) powers is relatively open. The region's central institution, the Arctic Council, is mandated to discuss just about everything except strategic/military affairs. As such, A5 cooperation is thriving in the environmental and scientific areas. Furthermore, A5 submissions to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in terms of specific Arctic stakes points to the states following international law.

Any overlapping territorial claims are unlikely to be ruled on by UN - instead entrusted to the A5 to resolve among each other. Such cooperative precedent exists between Russia and NATO member Norway in the Barents Sea. Tales of looming A5 clashes are unfounded and destructive.

A5 powers accept the Arctic as a long-term challenge and are taking advantage of this to strengthen cooperative foundations. In the short-term, forces beyond the A5 challenge Russian Arctic strategy. Sanctions as punishment for the Kremlin's involvement in the Ukraine conflict curbed Russia's ability to source investment and technology to access the offshore Arctic. Russia's current situation is further compounded by the oil price dive of 2014.

In fact, economically, the Arctic isn't viable for anyone in the short-term. Market forces are busy with the shale revolution, and bracing for the influx of previously sanctioned Iranian oil. Both likely to keep the oil price below $80 a barrel till late 2016. The Arctic energy opportunity is long-term - 15 years away at best.

Today, Arctic resources aren't competitive enough for the global market. Yet this reality isn't detrimental to the long-term Arctic game. Environmentalists recently celebrated Shell's apparent Arctic exit when it announced it was ceasing work on its offshore Alaska venture. However, there is no exit, Shell's Arctic gambit has merely been put on ice.

The announcement demonstrates the complexities of Arctic exploration. Shell's decision was spurred by a remaining short season for drilling - limited by harsh operational circumstances - as well as the low oil price. Shell's announcement surprised few for it was a commercially sound decision to halt operations. Shell will return to its Alaskan venture with an extended lease when oil prices bounce back.

International Arctic interest - driven increasingly by China - will keep the Arctic 'great game' dialogue alive. Not only will Arctic shipping routes transform global transportation, the reality is the world will remain reliant on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. With 30 percent of the world's remaining natural gas and 13 percent of its oil located in the Arctic - it is clear that the resources will be required.  

Realistically, the key challenge of the Arctic has nothing to do with a resource clash or starving off the new Cold War between Russia and the U.S. The global challenge sits around how to exploit Arctic resources safely and sustainably. The potential for an oil spill is a central threat to the Arctic. Furthermore, vessels must be able to navigate Arctic shipping routes safely and efficiently. These two challenges will require A5 powers to rely heavily on a cooperative approach to the region. Behind closed doors it would appear those discussions are very much under way.

Climate change is opening up the Arctic and our global energy insecurity is propelling interest. Good governance of region must be a priority for the A5 powers. Yet, good governance is an impossible feat if the West further isolates the chief Arctic power. This is not constructive for the Arctic narrative. Russia is the leading A5 power - by way of sheer geography. Pre-existing notions of Russia can not be applied to the Arctic. Continuing to do so will simply force the region into a strategic fog.  

The Arctic's future will largely hinge on the next U.S. administration's ability to bring Russia in from the cold. The Arctic is a level playing field with each of the A5 powers holding a stake. Those stakes overlapping will no doubt be negotiated between the A5, for that is in their communal interest. Attempts to isolate Russia from a region it considers not only to be the cornerstone of its economic future, but strategically significant to its international standing, will backfire greatly. Such efforts will merely serve to back the Kremlin into a corner it will most definitely fight its way out of.

It is of grave importance that the Arctic is protected from Ukraine narrative - the Arctic dialogue with Russia must be kept open.

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#31
Civil Georgia (Tbilisi)
October 30, 2015
Proceedings to Terminate Saakashvili's Georgian Citizenship Launched

Proceedings for termination of Georgian citizenship for ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili have launched after receiving an official confirmation from Ukraine that Saakashvili, who is now governor of Odessa region, was granted Ukrainian citizenship, Georgia's Justice Minister Tea Tsulukiani said on October 30.

According to Georgian legislation, a Georgian national will lose Georgian citizenship after acquiring citizenship of a foreign country.
 
Saakashvili was granted Ukrainian citizenship in late May, when Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko appointed him as governor of Odessa.

Justice Minister, Tea Tsulukiani, said that although a presidential decree on granting Saakashvili Ukrainian citizenship was posted on the official website of the Ukrainian president, in July Saakashvili was quoted in media that obtaining Ukrainian passport was delayed.

According to Tsulukiani, these reported remarks by Saakashvili promoted the Georgian side not to hurry with the launch of procedures for termination of citizenship and to verify whether the ex-president was granted or not the Ukrainian citizenship.

For that purpose, she said, the Justice Ministry's Public Service Development Agency sent a request to the State Migration Service of Ukraine regarding Saakashvili's citizenship.

"The response [from the Ukrainian side] was delaying and we had to remind them [about our request] for number of times - the last time it was on October 19, when my deputy asked our embassy in Ukraine to seek response on our letter," Tsulukiani said.

The Georgian Public Service Development Agency received a notification from the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on October 23, 2015, confirming that Saakashvili received Ukrainian citizenship.

"Based on this notification from Ukraine and pursuant to the Georgian legislation... we are launching on October 30 proceedings for termination of the Georgian citizenship to Mikheil Saakashvili," the Georgian Justice Minister said.

"The person in question in Odessa will be notified about the commencement of the proceedings and will be given reasonable timeframe for laying out his position as envisaged by the law," Tsulukiani said.

"After that the Public Service Development Agency will compile a conclusion on termination of citizenship and submit it for final decision to the President of Georgia [Giorgi Margvelashvili]," she said.

The announcement comes after two wiretapped recordings were leaked onto internet on October 29 in which Saakashvili discusses "defending" Tbilisi-based Rustavi 2 TV through erecting barricades, calls for "going through revolutionary scenario" and speaks about the need for "physical confrontation".

Officials in Tbilisi said that timing of the announcement on Saakashvili's citizenship is just a coincidence and a technical process of termination of ex-president's citizenship was launched only after receiving formal confirmation about his Ukrainian citizenship.

In a video address posted on his Facebook page on October 30 Saakashvili says that termination of his Georgian citizenship "is closing door to Georgian elections" for him.

The video address was about development over Rustavi 2 TV ownership dispute. Saakashvili said that the Rustavi 2 TV is the "last remaining barrier" that stands in Georgian ex-PM Bidzina Ivanishvili's way to implement all of his "dark plans."

"Defending of Rustavi 2 TV, including physically by people, is a direct path towards saving Georgian democracy," Saakashvili said, adding that court case about the broadcaster's ownership dispute is "bluff."

"We are dealing with blackmail and dirty methods - will we give in to this and accept it?" Saakashvili said.

"I want to warn everyone over one thing - if we fail to stand firmly and united, we will fail to avoid much more excesses and real violence in the future," Saakashvili said, adding that  Georgia should prevent what happened in Ukraine when Viktor Yanukovych was the President, who "fired shots at his own people."

"We should avoid it in Georgia with our unity including in defense of freedom," he added.

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 #32
www.rt.com
November 2, 2015
Reverse Midas: Everything Saakashvili touches turns to rot
By Bryan MacDonald
Bryan MacDonald is a journalist. He began his career in journalism aged 15 in his home town of Carlow, Ireland, with the Nationalist & Leinster Times, while still a schoolboy. Later he studied journalism in Dublin and worked for the Weekender in Navan before joining the Irish Independent. Following a period in London, he joined Ireland On Sunday, later re-named the Irish Mail on Sunday. He was theater critic of the Daily Mail for a period and also worked in news, features and was a regular op-ed writer.

With the Midas touch, everything you touch turns to gold. With the Saakashvili touch, you destroy everything you touch. The fortunes of the former Georgian President, currently regional governor of Odessa, and fanatical friend of 'Uncle Sam' continue to amuse.

It's pretty commonly accepted that Midas was a great guy. According to Greek mythology, everything he laid his finger on turned to gold. Who wouldn't want to have Midas around? Especially at a time when the precious metal sells for $36,792 a kilo.

The opposite of the Midas touch is sometimes known as the Sidam touch. This is achieved by reversing the letters in his name. However, it hasn't really caught on, for various reasons. Mostly because it sounds a bit naff. The Saakashvili touch could be a 2015 alternative, with lots of contemporary Hipster associations thrown in.

America has nurtured the careers of many foreign leaders, especially those dedicated to promoting US interests in their homelands. They've ranged from the sublime, South Korea's Syngman Rhee for example or West Germany's Konrad Adenauer, to the shambolic, like Iranian Shah Mohammad Pahlavi. There's also been the downright criminal - think Augusto Pinochet of Chile or Panama's Manuel Noriega.

Even the most incompetent of them can boast at least one major success. Something to justify their usefulness to Washington. However, Saakashvili has zero notable accomplishments to speak of. Despite this, the West clings on to the hope that one day the former Georgian president can redeem himself. To that end, after his complete failure in Georgia, they've even offered him a second chance to fail in Ukraine. Tbilisi's Jimmy Porter has become Odessa's Archie Rice.

Ever tried. Ever failed.

Saakashvili is a master of PR, or perhaps he has access to a masterful PR agency. He's had the New York Times rebrand him as a Brooklyn hipster before trying to spread the affliction to Odessa, where his fans applauded.

Also, only last week The Guardian allowed Natalia Antelava to write a 5,000 word love letter to her hero. A billet doux so destitute of vision that even Ray Charles could have spotted the holes from the next room.

The Western media is loath to truthfully analyze Saakashvili's track record. Especially those on the Russia beat who seem to empathize with plucky losers, perhaps seeing something of themselves in their subjects.

Let's be clear about Saakashvili. This is a man who, in 2008, started a war with Russia. One he believed his former country of 4.3 million could win. It was the military equivalent of putting Dinamo Tbilisi up against Real Madrid and fancying their chances. Of course, Georgia's forces were quickly smashed and as a consequence the country finally lost any chance of ever regaining its former territories in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The following year, in 2009, violent protests against his regime erupted in Tbilisi. As Saakashvili's rule became more totalitarian, a graphic video showing inmates being sodomized and beaten in Gldani prison sparked more demonstrations.

In 2012, with Georgia's economy teetering, Saakashvili's party lost a parliamentary election to Bidzina Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream movement, achieved despite Saakashvili's harassment of his opponent. Saakashvili had illegally stripped Ivanishvili of his Georgian citizenship in 2011. This was right after the latter had announced his intention to challenge him. The following year, Saakashvili's courts attempted to fine Ivanishvili $90 million for allegedly breaching party funding rules. At that time, Georgia's GDP per capita was $2,919. Saakashvili left Georgia for the USA shortly after his defeat.

No matter. Try again.

In 2014, Georgian prosecutors filed criminal charges against Saakashvili for a range of offences. They included "exceeding official powers" during earlier protests in 2007 and spending $11,000 of public money on Botox injections. Saakashvili's extravagance was well known in Tbilisi, which he ran like a personal fiefdom. He flew in - on the Presidential jet no less - a masseuse from Berlin who specialized in biting her clients. Furthermore, it appears that the massage expert didn't even bother with the formalities of immigration as her video blog is the only evidence of the visit.

The former Georgian President had re-surfaced in Ukraine where he enthusiastically supported the Maidan demonstrations. Despite his brutal intolerance of such gatherings in Georgia and his abuse of power there, the irony was completely lost on the Western media and pro-Europe/NATO activists in Ukraine.

Later, Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko began to involve him in 'reforms' in Kiev, where Saakashvili did a lot of talking about the idea. Out of the blue, in May this year, the billionaire oligarch suddenly appointed him Governor of Odessa, the southern port-city. At the same time, Saakashvili became a Ukrainian citizen, relinquishing his Georgian passport. Thus, only two years after leaving office in Tbilisi, he had completely turned his back on his homeland.

Since then, Saakashvili has done a lot of pontificating, staged a few photo opportunities and hung out with some adoring Western journalists. In July, the London Independent carried a two-part eulogy which merits mention as a classic example of how to soft-soap and then forget to rinse.

Fail again. Fail better.

While Saakashvili has had no problem convincing foreign liberal arts graduates, masquerading as journalists, that he's the real deal, he's failed to persuade local voters of his brilliance. Last week, Sasha Borovik, his candidate for mayor of Odessa was trounced by the incumbent Gennadiy Trukhanov.

Incidentally, Trukhanov opposed the Maidan project from the outset.

Then, just as Saakashvili was probably feeling a bit vulnerable, Fatou Bensouda, a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, requested authorization to investigate his role in alleged crimes committed during the ill-fated 2008 assault on South Ossetia. This was the harebrained intervention that pre-empted the subsequent, brief, Russian-Georgian war. Saakashvili launched an attack on the breakaway province, killing a number of peacekeepers in the process. Russia stepped in to defend South Ossetia, quickly defeating Georgian forces.

Surely, Saakashvili believed things couldn't get any worse? Remarkably, they did. A Ukrainian website leaked a tape in which a Saakashvili 'sound-alike' calls for a violent coup in his homeland. Needless to say, Georgia's authorities aren't amused. In the recording, a man with a "voice strongly resembling Georgia's ex-leader is heard advising such a course (an uprising) to Nika Gvaramia, the head of Rustavi 2, one of Georgia's biggest TV stations, and opposition leader Giorgi Bokeria," RT News reported.

Back in September, Saakashvili admitted that it will take at least 15 years to restore Ukraine's economy to pre-Maidan levels. That's the same Maidan he so enthusiastically supported. Saakashvili compared the Ukraine that his friends created to Gabon, qualifying it by saying "with due respect to Africa." The reaction in Libreville must have been amusing. In 2013, Gabon's GDP per capita was $10,067 compared to Ukraine's $3,082. Remember, that's before the Maidan coup collapsed the Ukrainian economy.

The question now is where to next for Saakashvili? His Ukraine gambit appears to have failed and he is a wanted criminal in Georgia. Indeed, there's even talk of an appointment at The Hague. Saakashvili's best bet is probably to scuttle off back to Brooklyn, his personal hipster Elba. He's sure to attract the odd fawning journalist willing to take him down memory lane to a time when Mikhail Saakashvili mattered.

Saakashvili, the reverse Midas. Everything he touches turns to rot.

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 #33
Subject: Détente NOW!
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2015
From: "Dr. Christian Wipperfürth" <cwipperfuerth@email.de>

Your readers might be interested in the "Détente NOW!" - Initiative by
leading members of the Social Democratic Party (which takes part in the
German government), the industrie and NGOs. It can be found
at http://www.cwipperfuerth.de/2015/10/detente-now-english/
----

Pax Christi
Press Release (translation) Berlin, October 2015
For a new Policy of Peace and Détente NOW

Joint statement on results of consultations among German initiatives for peace Representatives of the "Berlin Appeal", the "Willy-Brandt-Kreis", the "Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations" of the Federation of German Industries (BDI) and the "Initiative for a New East Memorandum", among them SPD Deputy Chairman Ralf Stegner, Professor Peter Brandt and peace researcher Professor Hans-Joachim Giessmann, held discussions in Berlin about how to improve cooperation between civil society and politics aimed at supporting the renewal of German and European peace politics. The background for the meeting were the current efforts for a peaceful solution to the Ukraine conflict and for ending the war in Syria.

These are the main results:

The Ukraine conflict and the European refugee crisis triggered by wars urgently demand efforts for a new phase of détente including Russia and for discussions with all relevant stakeholders of conflict.

The détente policy initiated in 1969 by German Chancellor Willy Brandt had significantly contributed to preventing war in Europe, ending the Cold War and making the peaceful unification of Germany and Europe possible. One of the lessons learned from Egon Bahr is: peace politics and termination of war and conflict always require "common conflict solutions with those who do not share our values".

The struggle for a new détente policy requires the commitment of civil society as well, which in the past had contributed to the success of the peace and détente policy.

The groups of civil society represented at the meeting share the hope of the people of the Ukraine for ending the armed conflict. They call for both the parties of conflict as well as their related international supporters to increase efforts to end the crisis peacefully. They support the sustained efforts of Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier to implement the Minsk II agreement. Nevertheless, it has become clear that a
policy that would continue to rely on sanctions and the isolation of Russia, will not solve the existing conflicts.

They consider political and diplomatic cooperation with Russia crucial for eliminating global threats to peace - starting with nuclear arms control up to ending the wars and proxy wars in neighboring regions of Europe.

They are urging the federal German government to use its OSCE-presidency in 2016 to build an OSCE-based pan-European area of security, without dividing lines, where no state or alliance system could improve its own security at the expense of others. This is exactly what the OSCE Summit in 1999 had agreed upon, however this was never implemented.

Despite the changed conditions, the legacy of Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr stays valid: Common Security in Europe can only be achieved with and not against Russia.

Therefore, instead of building arms against each other, Europe, NATO and Russia should together contribute to disarmament and arms control.

For the same reason, the USA, EU and Russia should work together in the Middle East, and exert pressure on their respective partners to agree upon ceasefires and negotiations in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Additionally, they should stop the supply of arms and ammunition to them. More diplomatic initiatives are needed to stop current wars as well as prevent wars rather than expanding them through new military missions. This requires first and foremost providing vital humanitarian assistance to the people in war-affected countries, as well as helping them form governments of national unity in order to begin reconstruction work.

The participants of the meeting want to reinforce their co-operation and include other appeals and initiatives in non-partisan events and discussion forums as well as offering support  through internet information campaigns aimed at supporting diplomatic efforts to cooperation, de-escalation and ending of hostilities. They are committed to supporting efforts to stop the looming arms race in Europe, to withdraw nuclear weapons and prevent deployment of missile defense systems. This applies to both armament plans of NATO and Russia.

Their activities are not directed to a particular political party. Nevertheless, they expect from the SPD in particular to continue following the tradition of Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr for peace and international reconciliation. This includes seeking participation and support from the civil society and standing up for taking the lead in the struggle for a Cooperative Security system throughout all of Europe.
Berlin, October 2015


The participants involved in the strategy consultation of Berlin Appeal / Willy Brandt
Circle / Initiative for a New East Eemorandum ('Ostdenkschrift') of the EKD (German
Lutheran Churches) / Eastern European Economic Relations Committee of the
German Federation of German Industries (BDI):
− Dr. Wolfgang Biermann, Political scientist, signatory to the Berlin Appeal "To End the
Spiral of Violence - For a New Policy of Peace and Détente", longtime Foreign and
Security Advisor to Prof. Egon Bahr,
− Prof. Dr. Peter Brandt / Historian, signatory to the Declaration "On the Threat to Peace -
for a New European Approach Towards the Ukraine Crisis", board member of the Willy
Brandt Circle,
− Daniela Dahn, a writer, signatory to the Declaration "On the Threat to Peace, ,... ", board
member of the Willy Brandt Circle,
− Ulrich Frey / co-initiator of the Berlin Appeal, a spokesperson of the Platform for Peaceful
Conflict Management, long-standing member of the Committee for Social Responsibility of
the Lutheran Church in Rhineland,
− Prof. Dr. Hans-Joachim Giessmann / peace researcher, co-author of the Declaration "On
the Threat to Peace, ... ", Executive Director of the Berghof Foundation, Berlin, Member of
the Willy Brandt Circle,
− Andreas Metz, Head, Press and Communications, Eastern European Economic Relations
Committee of the German Federation of German Industries (BDI),
− Wiltrud Rösch-Metzler / political scientist and freelance journalist, signatory to the Berlin
Appeal, National Chairperson of the Catholic peace movement Pax Christi,
− Dr. Hans Misselwitz / biophysicist, signatory to the Declaration "On the Threat to Peace,
...", Treasurer of the Willy Brandt Circle, former State Secretary,
− Irina Mohr, signatory to the Declaration "On the Threat to Peace, ...", board member of the
Willy Brandt Circle,
− Prof. Dr. Konrad Raiser / theologian, representative of the "Initiative for a New East
Memorandum of the EKD",
− Dr. Christine Schweitzer / peace researcher, signatory to the Berlin Appeal, Deputy
Managing Director of the Federation for Social Defence,
− Dr. Ralf Stegner / signatory to the Berlin Appeal, Chairman of the (regional) SPD
Schleswig-Holstein and Deputy Chairman of the SPD,
− Dr. Christian Wipperfurth, publicist, signatory to the Berlin Appeal, Associate Fellow
German Council on Foreign Relations,
− Burkhard Zimmermann, co-initiator and secretary of the Berlin Appeal.
Responsible according to the German press law: Ulrich Frey, Ulrich.frey@web.de
Contact: sekretariat@paxchristi.de, Wi

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 #34
RFE/RL
November 02, 2015
Perestroika, Putin-Style
by Brian Whitmore

We picked the wrong metaphor.

When Vladimir Putin announced four years ago that he was returning to the Kremlin, the comparisons to Leonid Brezhnev came fast and furious.

If he served two more terms, the logic went, Putin would be in power until 2024 and his reign would end up being even longer than that of the octogenarian Soviet leader. Surely another period of stagnation was coming.

Instead, what happened was a revolution from above.

The new model Putin abandoned the laissez-faire authoritarianism he had relied on during his first two terms in the Kremlin.

He scrapped a governing model based on elite stability and rising living standards, one that relied more on the passive acquiescence of the masses than on mass mobilization and repression.

Mass mobilization and repression, of course, are now very much in vogue. So are traditional values, ideological rigidity, imperial expansion, and campaigns against imported food.

The elite is being asked to steal a little less. And the public is being asked to sacrifice a lot more.

Putin has essentially torn up the existing social contract.

Instead of presiding over Brezhnev-style stagnation, he has launched his own perestroika -- albeit in reverse.

"It's an irony of history that there is an analogy here with Mikhail Gorbachev, who himself created a dynamic, started a process and deepened it, but in the end the process ended not as he had intended," Valery Solovei, a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, said in a televised interview in April 2014 as the Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine was gathering steam. "Right now, the same kind of full-scale dynamic is beginning."

Gorbachev understood that the Cold War was sapping the Soviet economy and sought to ease tensions with the West, opt out of the arms race, and ultimately join the Western community of nations.

Putin appears to be savoring confrontation with the West and in the space of a couple of years has undone nearly three decades of Russian efforts at integration and cooperation.

Gorbachev's perestroika destroyed the woefully inefficient Soviet command economy, but did so before a market economy developed to replace it. This led to severe hardship and falling living standards that ultimately undermined the regime's legitimacy.

Putin's antiperestroika is undermining Russia's market economy, moving it toward autarky.

Western sanctions are denying Russian firms access to credits, Russian countersanctions are pushing imports out of the market, and import substitution isn't filling the gap.

The result is declining living standards, negligible growth, galloping inflation, and depleting currency reserves. Thus far, this hasn't undermined the regime's legitimacy -- but it's hard to imagine how it won't eventually.

By upending the existing political arrangements in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev's perestroika allowed a fledgling democratic movement to find its voice and led to the rise of independence movements in the non-Russian republics.

The marginal became the mainstream and Gorbachev lost control of the forces he unleashed.

Putin's anti-Perestroika has also upset existing political arrangements and has empowered formerly marginalized groups -- in this case, ultranationalists.

It's too soon to tell whether the nativist monsters Putin has unleashed will be his undoing, but there are signs that they are getting restless.
 
Volunteer fighters are returning from Ukraine, and taking their heavy weapons with them, leading to an increase in violent crime.

Talk of betrayal is becoming more common on nationalist websites.

And former separatist commander Igor Strelkov has said that Putin's inner circle has been infiltrated by a fifth column and announced that he is considering forming his own political party to challenge the ruling elite.

There is one other thing that Gorbachev's perestroika and Putin's antiperestroika have in common. Both came at a time of falling oil prices.

The political elite in the late 1980s came to the conclusion that this meant it was time to reform the economy and make amends with the West.

But the Putin elite has come to the opposite conclusion. They've decided it's time to double down.

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 #35
New York Times
November 8, 2015
SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
'The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,' by Steven Lee Myers
By GAL BECKERMAN
Gal Beckerman is the author of "When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry."

Vladimir Putin has an origin story. It takes place in Dresden in the fall of 1989, in the dying days of East Germany, on the night that thousands of protesters stormed the city's Stasi headquarters. Once they were done ransacking the offices that had inspired so much terror, they directed their anger down the street toward the K.G.B. residence where Lieutenant Colonel Putin, a young intelligence officer, stood looking out the window. Watching the approaching mob, Putin called the local Soviet military command and asked for reinforcements. But no higher authority would approve it. "Moscow is silent," he was told.

Shocked that the Soviet Union was so weakened that it couldn't even defend the sensitive documents inside the building, he decided to take matters into his own hands. Dressed in his military uniform but with no pistol, no orders and no backup, he walked out to the gate where the crowd had assembled. And he bluffed. "This house is strictly guarded," he said in an even tone, in fluent German. "My soldiers have weapons. And I gave them orders: If anyone enters the compound, they are to open fire." With that, he turned and walked back into the house. The protesters dispersed.

Putin loves this story. But it's also good fodder for Putinologists, struggling to decipher what drives the man who has so completely ruled Russia for the last 15 years. It's a question as critical now - with a Moscow-backed insurgency raging in eastern Ukraine and Russia choosing to actively intervene in the Syrian civil war - as it was when Putin first came to power in 2000 and went to war in Chechnya. And here we have some insight into how he likes best to see himself: One man representing his country, representing stability and order, stands against the chaos of the street; one man who still believes in the unique power of the state personifies its sovereignty and its prerogative to defend its interests; one man who embodies calm, measured authority resists the emotional swell of undisciplined, angry people, and understands that the appearance of forcefulness and obstinacy can be as powerful as an actual show of force.

What does Putin want? Is he trying to restore the Soviet empire? Is it all about the oil and maximizing Russia's position as a petro-power? Maybe corruption and cronyism are his ultimate objectives as he enriches himself and the tight circle of friends from his native St. Petersburg. Perhaps he's never stopped being a K.G.B. man, paranoid about "foreign agents" and with a Cold War wariness about the power of the United States? Is the answer megalomania, the self-regard of a man who likes being photographed bare-chested on horseback? Or do the moralistic pronouncements about Russia as a Third Rome, saving a fallen Western world, provide the key?

There's truth to each of these, but what Steven Lee Myers gets so right in "The New Tsar," his comprehensive new biography - the most informative and extensive so far in English - is that at bottom Putin simply feels that he's the last one standing between order and chaos. Rather than a unified theory of Putin, what Myers offers is the portrait of a man swinging from crisis to crisis with one goal: projecting strength. That seems about as close as we can get to him. Shaped like many in his generation by witnessing the disappearance of the Soviet Union - a superpower, no less - and all the uncertainty and insecurity that followed in the 1990s, Putin has never stopped being haunted by the notion that Moscow was silent. And out of this fear of collapse he has become for his people and himself, as Myers puts it, "the living embodiment of Russia's stability."

In the name of this stability, he has consolidated power in his own person in an astounding way. In his first two terms, from 2000 to 2008, he brought down the oligarchs, thereby regaining total control of the news media and orchestrating the breakup of Yukos, the giant oil company (and jailing its chief executive, Mikhail Khodorkovsky), which returned two important power sources to the state. His loyal friends now run most of Russia's important industries. Unfettered democracy also pointed the way to chaos, and so he developed something his advisers called "managed democracy," providing only the semblance of popular will. ­Opposition parties were neutered, and Russians lost the ability to vote in direct elections for local or regional governments. "The Russian people are backward," Putin once told a group of foreign journalists. "They cannot adapt to democracy as they have done in your countries. They need time."

In Putin's mind, enemies looking to upend the order he restored and return Russia to its 1990s state of entropy lurk everywhere, whether Chechen separatists, E.U.-loving Ukrainian politicians or the West as a whole, working through its nefarious pro-gay N.G.O.s or NATO. When Putin faced his first real protest movement in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential elections, the calls for change were nothing more to him than another foreign invasion and, using the news media, riot police and a corrupt legal system, he found a way to squash them. If he is order, anything opposed to him is disorder. Even taking the side of dictators during the Arab Spring, which was perceived as a defense of Russia's economic and geopolitical interests, was really about something "much deeper" for Putin, Myers writes, "a dark association in his mind between aspirations for democracy and the rise of radicalism, between elections and the chaos that would inevitably result."

This is a journalist's book, which harvests old notebooks and clips. Myers has covered Russia for The New York Times on and off since 2002 and has reported on many of the incremental twists and turns of Putin's rule. This makes for a knowledgeable and thorough biography, though one that can feel a bit detached and bogged down by information at times. What's missing, for example, is a view from the street, an understanding of what Russians feel about their "new tsar." Without perspectives like this, flowing beneath the news items, it's hard to really grasp how Putin, who by Myers's own account was a colorless and uncharismatic figure before coming to power ("like that bored schoolboy in the back of the classroom," President Obama observed in 2013), became a living monument for his people, a leader onto whose taut skin they have projected ­so much.

Myers's book ends with perhaps the greatest examples of Putin's total power: in quick succession, the Olympic Games in Sochi and the conquering of the Crimea in early 2014. In Putin's mind, he singlehandedly tamed nature and changed borders for the glory of Russia. But if he has built his autocratic rule on the need to beat back the barbarians at the gate, thoroughly crushing every other source of power in the country, how does he justify the fact that there is no one and no party that can replace him, that civil society has been decimated and the parliamentary system has been turned into a joke? As becomes increasingly clear reading this biography, Putin himself now represents the chaos he so abhors - the chaos that will surely come in his wake.

THE NEW TSAR
The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin
By Steven Lee Myers
Illustrated. 572 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $32.50.

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 #36
Interfax-Ukraine
December 30, 2013
Half of Ukrainians don't support Kyiv Euromaidan, R&B poll
 
Ukrainians are divided into almost two equal camps in their attitude to Kyiv Euromaidan: 50% of Ukrainians don't support Euromaidan, while 45% have the opposite position, according to the December research conducted by Research & Branding Group.

Regarding the forecast of Euromaidan future, 43% of citizens said that its consequences sooner could be negative, while 31% of the respondents thought the opposite. Besides, 17% said that the Euromaidan would bring no negative consequences.

The Research & Branding Group conducted survey of the public opinion of Ukrainians regarding its assessment of the current situation in Ukraine from December 23 to December 27. The information was collected through personal interviews in 24 regions of Ukraine, Crimea, Kyiv and Sevastopol. The possible margin of error is 2.2%.

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#37
Interfax-Ukraine
February 5, 2014
Euromaidan divides Ukraine into two almost equal camps - survey
 
Kyiv, February 5 (Interfax-Ukraine) - The Ukrainian people have been divided into two equal camps regarding their opinions of the Euromaidan, according to a survey conducted by the Sociopolis Institute at the request of the Situations Modelling Agency.

When being asked about their attitude to the Euromaidan, 49.0% of the respondents expressed complete or greater support, while 45.5% oppose Euromaidan (to full or greater degree), the research said.

According to sociologists, the majority of those polled (over 60%) were harsh, when characterized Euromaidan events either positively or negatively, while 30% of the Ukrainians were less categorical in there estimates on the above-mentioned events.

"Thus, it's possible to consider that Euromaidan has divided the country not just into two camps, but into two almost irreconcilable camps," the sociologists said.

According to the majority of respondents, the main reasons for the wave of rallies occurred in Ukraine were failure of Viktor Yanukovych to sign the Association Agreement with EU (51.9% of the respondents), unfavorable socio-political and socio-economical conditions in the country (41.7%) and dispersal of the students' Euromaidan by the law enforcers (37.7%). Furthermore, a great number of the respondents that are unlikely to support or don't support Euromaidan at all said that main reasons for Euromaidan phenomenon were provocations by the opposition and international influence.

The number of the respondents, who required to punish the authorities responsible for the break-up of the students' Euromaidan, was the biggest - 57%.

Although, 29.8% of the respondents don't support this demand.

According to the overwhelming majority, the most acceptable kind of protesting is peaceful demonstration (78.5%); only 16.3% don't support it. A small number of respondents encouraged direct clashes with law enforcers (15.9%) and the demolition of the Lenin monument (18.0%).

The situation caused by Euromaidan must be settled by negotiations and compromises, according to the majority of the respondents (41.3%). Over a fourth of the respondents think that the authorities must comply with the protestors' demands (26.3%). Break-up of Euromaidan by force is supported by 15.8% of the respondents.

"It's worth noticing that there are people welcoming a compromise solution of the current situation among those, who support Euromaidan and those, who don't," the sociologists said.

In addition, there's a great uncertainty among Ukrainians as to how Euromaidan will end, according to the poll results. All five major scenarios of Euromaidan outcomes, presented to the respondents, polled nearly the same number of votes; none of the scenarios was named the most likely by the majority of respondents.

Thus, 13.5% believe that the protestors will have their demands complied with, 18.5% believe that the demands will be satisfied partially, after which the protestors will go home. At the same time, 16.2% of those polled believe that the protestors will go home due to internal conflicts and loss of public interest towards Maidan; and 11.2% believe that a "trimmed-down" version of Euromaidan will remain for a long time, which the authorities will ignore.

In spite of 40% of the respondents considering negotiations and compromises between the parties of the conflict to be the ideal solution of the Euromaidan situation, only 18.5% consider this scenario the most likely. According to 18.3% of the respondents, Euromaidan will be broken up by force.

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 #38
Interfax-Ukraine
December 24, 2013
Yanukovych sees pro-European protests as Ukrainian's desire to live better
 
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych believes the opposition's protests on Independence Square in Kyiv in support of closer integration with the European Union, known widely as Euromaidan, are a sign of the people's desire to live better.

"When we saw such an upsurge in society and when we saw Euromaidan, I said at the very start that there is nothing bad in this. This is the people's aspiration for a better life," the Ukrainian presidential press service quoted Yanukovych as saying at a meeting with candidates for heads of district administrations on Tuesday.

Yanukovych noted at the same time that "a lot of people are guided not by reason but by emotions."

"Politicians, extremists, and various instigators started to gamble on this during this emotional outburst. We need to make conclusions from this all, and we are making them so as never to allow such cases in the near future. The Lord has given us this ordeal, and we should pass it with an open face and looking into the people's eyes," he said.

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 #39
Interfax-Ukraine
October 19, 2015
More than half of polled Ukrainians ready for street protests if life gets worse - poll
 
Today's protest moods in Ukraine are comparable to those prior to the 2013-2014 Maidan demonstrations, says Oleksiy Antypovych, the head of Rating, a sociological survey group, based on the findings of a recent survey.

"Currently, 53% of Ukrainians are saying that in the event of significant deterioration of their existence, they are ready to protest in the streets, and 20% believe they are ready to tolerate a worse situation," Antypovych said during a presentation of the sociological survey of the electoral mood of the public in October 2015 at an Interfax press conference on Monday.

"Approximately the same figures were recorded in late 2013, when the Euromaidan was beginning (in December 2013, 50% were ready to protest and 29% could tolerate), he said.

"This goes to show that protest moods among Ukrainians remain fairly high," Antypovych said.

Rating interviewed 3,000 respondents aged 18 and above on October 3-12, 2015.

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 #40
Kyiv Post
November 3, 2015
Ukraine's general prosecutor's office shot at in Kyiv (VIDEO)
By Allison Quinn
[Video here http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/ukraines-general-prosecutors-office-shot-at-in-kyiv-video-401240.html]

Just two days after protests took place in Kyiv demanding the ouster of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, his office was fired at on Nov. 2 at 10 p.m. while a meeting was under way inside. No one was hurt.

Olena Hitlyanska, a spokeswoman for the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, announced the news on her Facebook page under the heading, "Horror!!!"

According to Hitlyanska, the shooting occurred as a "meeting was taking place between the head of the agency in his office and his subordinates."

SBU investigators were sent to the scene.

Hitlyanska told Interfax-Ukraine that a criminal case had been opened over the matter on the charge of endangering the life of a civil servant. The charge carries a maximum life in prison sentence.

In mid-October Shokin told Fakty newspaper that he sleeps in different safe houses during the week for safety reasons, adding that he fears attempts on his life and drives in an armored Mercedes that the prosecutor's office leased for a year.

"(My) bodyguards periodically change license plate numbers on the car, as well as the routes I take and places of sleep. I truly, for safety purposes, stay in different apartments," Shokin told Fakty in an interview published on Oct. 15.

The incident of Nov. 2 comes amid growing public resentment of Shokin for his inability to prosecute serious crime and his alleged obstruction of investigations into high-level corruption, including within his own ranks.

On Oct. 31, a group of about 200 protesters drove to President Petro Poroshenko's home to demand that he fire Shokin. The "Poroshokin" demonstrators accused the prosecutor general of derailing corruption cases, protecting corrupt officials and obstructing the investigation into the murders of more than 100 protesters during the EuroMaidan Revolution.

A petition by lawmakers to vote on Shokin's ouster has so far gathered some 120 out of the required 150 signatures in parliament as of Nov. 2.

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 #41
Bloomberg
November 3, 2015
Ukraine Probes Attack on Chief Prosecutor Amid Calls He Resign
By Daryna Krasnolutska and Kateryna Choursina

Ukrainian authorities opened a criminal investigation into a sniper attack on Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who's under pressure to resign amid criticism he has hindered the country's fight against graft.

At about 10 p.m. Kiev time on Monday, an unknown assailant fired at a window in Shokin's office as he held a meeting with employees, prosecutor Anatoliy Matios told reporters. The attack follows censure from Ukrainians, the U.S., and anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International, who say Shokin has blocked efforts to fight corruption.

"They were under fire from a sniper who shot three rounds," Matios said on Tuesday in Kiev. "Only bullet-proof windows allowed him to escape."

The European Union has demanded Ukraine accelerate its fight against sleaze to keep international financial aid flowing and progress toward easing a visa regime with the bloc. The former Soviet state needs to appoint anti-graft prosecutors and establish an independent anti-corruption bureau to qualify for the next tranche of its $17.5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, which was originally slated for last month.

In September, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt blamed "corrupt actors within the Prosecutor General's office" for "openly and aggressively undermining reform," and dozens of people rallied at President Petro Poroshenko's house this weekend calling for Shokin's dismissal. The country ranked 142nd of the 175 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index in 2014, and the watchdog criticized Shokin as "personally responsible for the failure to fight corruption among top officials."

"Attempts by Shokin to set up a puppet anti-corruption institution shows he neither wants to reform the prosecutor's office nor investigate corruption among top Ukrainian officials," Transparency International said in a statement.

The government's efforts to overhaul its economy has stirred conflict between authorities and powerful businessmen, while also bringing accusations from opposition figures of selective justice. In March, billionaire Igor Kolomoisky was ousted as governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region in March after his security guards barricaded themselves in the offices of a state oil company. The standoff with police followed Poroshenko's signing legislation allowing for the replacement of a management team that Kolomoisky, a minority owner in the company, had picked.

On Saturday, prosecutors and the state security service detained a close ally of Kolomoisky, Gennadiy Korban. They accused Korban, who leads the opposition Ukrop party and ran for Kiev mayor in Oct. 25 municipal elections, of being part of an embezzling and kidnapping gang. Ukrop denies the accusations and contends that Poroshenko is trying to pressure on his political opponents.

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 #42
Kyiv Post
September 26, 2015
Geoffrey R. Pyatt: Corrupt prosecutors under Shokin 'are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform'
[Text here http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/op-ed/geoffrey-r-pyatt-corrupt-prosecutors-under-shokin-are-making-things-worse-by-openly-and-aggressively-undermining-reform-398683.html]

Editor's Note: The following remarks were delivered by U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey R. Pyatt at the Odesa Financial Forum on Sept. 24 in Hotel Bristol....

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 #43
Kyiv Post
November 2, 2015
Vigilante group targets gays and others in violent promotion of its 'family values'
By Veronika Melkozerova

They call themselves Fashion Verdict - a group that tries to sweep promiscuity, gambling, sexual offenders and homosexuality from the streets of Ukraine's cities, without the help of what they say is a corrupt law enforcement system.

Mykola Dulskiy, a 26-year-old self-proclaimed promoter of "traditional family values," last year founded the group in Kyiv, which claims more than 20,000 members in Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

Usually, the group attacks a person when it receives three pictures, and other forms of so-called evidence, of someone leading an "improper lifestyle" -along with their contact information on social media. The self-styled activists then find the victim and then beat them or spray gas in their eyes.The incident is recorded on video.Beatings are dealt out, according recordings the group has posted on social media, for things as trivial as an unusual haircut, to wearing earrings, or posting nude pictures online.

"Everyone knows who deserves punishment. But people are too cowardly to meet out justice. Well, we're not," Dulskiy told the Kyiv Post.

One of the Fashion Verdict emblems showing one man attack another man with the motto "Fight until the end".

Detractors of the organization say it is nothing more than a homophobic group of gangs that violently impose their own standards of morality. And their enforcement methods are cruel, involving the use of baseball bats, bare fists and public humiliation. Their alleged victims could be promiscuous girls aged under 16, and gay people. Although the self-styled vigilantes say they never rob their victims, they film their actions and post the videos on social media likeVkontakte, a Russian online social network that has a huge following in Ukraine.

The exact number of their alleged victims is unknown. TochkaOpory, a group that protects the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people, published a report in March according to which 112 acts of violence by Fashion Verdict against gay people were filmed and published online in 2014-2015.

Tochka Opory activists have filed police reports with the Interior Ministry in Kyiv three times asking for them to investigate the alleged Fashion Verdict crimes. "Butthe police closed the cases because of the impossibility of identifying the victims," reads the report.

"Most of their (Fashion Verdict's alleged) victims do not call the police, or withdraw their testimonysoon after recovering from the incident," said Bogdan Globa, Tochka Opory's managing director.

Dulskiy, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Kyiv last month, said Ukrainian society should be thankful for the group's deeds.

"I created Fashion Verdict as a movement for young men who stand for morality and want to fight for a better life. We have already a huge network of communities all over Ukraine. About 300 people in every neighborhood of Kyiv and a community in Kharkiv, Odesa and Donetsk," Dulskiy told the Kyiv Post.

Mykola Dulskiy, the creator of Fashion Verdict in Ukraine, explains his own view on life in Ukraine on Oct. 27 in Kyiv.

Dulskiy said that he created the group to keep youngsters away from drugs."After the EuroMaidan, many activists didn't know what to do with themselves and started to degenerate and take drugs. So I decided to create a new fashion for sobriety and morality among the youth," he said.

Before giving up control over the group to found Nazhdak (emery) late in 2014 for older men wishing to crack down on vices, Dulskiy said he "fought against pedophiles, drug dealers, and conducted different campaigns."

However, soon it became very hard to control so many people, and Dulskiy decided to form another group to continue fighting against "illegal gambling, prostitution and LGBT."

"We're not against homosexuals. And we're not devils, we just don't want families with 'parent number one' and 'parent number two' in Ukraine!" said Dulskiy.

The so-called activist wants to embark on a political career. He left the Unity Party of former Mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko to run as an independent.

"Ukraine needs real men in parliament! Not those oligarchs, who are not even of the same blood or faith as us! When Nazhdak becomes a political party, it will become a force that is good for the West and East," Dulskiy said.

Dulskiy says he plans bring back Fashion Verdict to his fold when he finds investors who will help him turn it into a youth development organization.

In fact, Fashion Verdict came to Ukraine from Russia, Globa said. Russian activists gave lessons on how to "punish wrong people," he said, adding that the workshops ended with dozens of people becoming victims of hate crimes.

Prosecuting members of the group for their violent attacks is no easy matter, however.

One gay rights activist, who was allegedly beaten by Fashion Verdict members in Kyiv's Holosiyivsky Park, according to Globa, withdrew his police testimony because he didn't want to face his attackers and was afraid his parents would find out that he is gay.

Other Fashion Verdict group members declined to respond to the Kyiv Post's requests for comment.

"Many people criticize our methods. But we do not want to live in the world of young sluts, homos and other crap anymore," says an official statement by Fashion Verdict posted on social media.

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 #44
Ukraine's parliament to ban geographical names dating back to Czarist Russia

KIEV, October 30. /TASS/. Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada on Thursday registered a bill prohibiting the names of cities and streets that date back to the times of Czarist Russia, that is, before March 1917, the parliamentary secretariat said.

The bill was initiated by deputies of all the four factions of the ruling nationalistic coalition - the Petro Proshenko bloc, the People's Front, Samopomich, and Batkivshchina.

The bill prohibits giving the names or pseudo-names of Russian monarchs, statesmen, politicians, or military of the Russian state of the period from the 14th through to the 20th century or the names derived from them, as well as the names consonant with or including the elements of the titles of Russian monarchs to geographic objects on the territory of Ukraine.

"To bring the laws concerning totalitarian regimes and fighters for independence into conformity with European practices, it stands to reason to ban the geographic names linked to the propaganda of Russian imperialism, the Russian Kingdom and Muscovy, the Russian Empire of the 14th through to the 20th century, and the period of Ukraine's colonial depends, as they may be fueling the plans to misappropriate Ukrainian territories," the bill says.

Experts say the bill aims to prevent the return of the historic name Yelisavetgrad to Kirovograd, which the incumbent Ukrainian politicians think to be alluding to Empress Elizabeth, who ruled in Russia from 1741 through to 1762. The true fact of history, however, is the city's original name relates to St Elizabeth.

In April, the Verkhovna Rada passed a law banning the symbols of Communism. It demands that the local authorities rename the regions, districts, cities, villages, and other geographic objects having Soviet names.

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 #45
Donetsk republic may postpone weaponry withdrawal due to repeated shellings

MOSCOW, November 3. /TASS/. The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) does not rule out postponing withdrawal of mortars of less than 120mm caliber due to repeated provocations from Ukrainian forces, DPR defense ministry deputy unit commander Eduard Basurin told a briefing in Donetsk News Agency on Tuesday.

"I hope that the number of shellings will decrease by the scheduled date, and we will be able to painlessly withdraw mortars. The date remains in force for now, but the situation is very unstable," Basurin said.

He added that DPR plans to complete weaponry withdrawal by November 10.

Four militiamen injured in shellings overnight

The emergency medical center said on Tuesday four militiamen of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) have been injured in shellings by Ukrainian forces on the western outskirts of Donetsk.

"As a result of shellings of Petrovsky and Kirovsky districts on November 2, four militiamen received mine blast injuries," Donetsk News Agency quoted the center as saying. "All victims sustained heavy shrapnel wounds to the limbs, body, head and chest," the medical center added.

It was earlier reported that Ukrainian forces shelled DPR's north-western outskirts overnight. As a result of night shellings, the roof of a residential house in the Staromikhaylovka settlement in Donetsk's Kirovsky district was destroyed.

DPR defense ministry noted intensification of shellings by Ukrainian forces over the last two days. On November 2, 16 ceasefire violations by Kiev forces were registered in DPR.

The supplement to the Package of measures on implementing the Minsk Agreements from 12 February 2015 was agreed upon on September 29 at the negotiations of the Contact Group in Minsk. The supplement envisages withdrawal of tanks, artillery weapons of less than 100mm caliber, and mortars of equal to or less than 120mm caliber to a distance of 15 kilometers from the contact line in Donbas. On September 30, the document was signed by DPR head Alexander Zakharchenko and LPR head Igor Plotnitsky.

In accordance with the reached agreement, tanks are withdrawn first, followed by artillery weapons of less than 100mm caliber and mortars. The first stage should start two days after the complete ceasefire and finish in 15 days. The second stage will take 24 days to complete. The withdrawal will start in the "North" sector on the LPR territory and will continue in the "South" sector in DPR. The whole process of withdrawal is expected to take a total of 41 days.

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 #46
Oligarchs' war in Ukraine takes new turn
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, November 2. /TASS/. The arrest of Gennady Korban - head of Ukraine's newly-founded UKROP party and Igor Kolomoisky's right-hand man - has been interpreted by analysts as another round of President Petro Poroshenko's clash with the disfavoured big business tycoon. Analysts say it is not accidental that the event has turned Kolomoisky-funded ultra-right group Right Sector furious. "The two tycoons are at daggers drawn," they say.

Last Saturday, the Ukrainian security service SBU detained the former deputy governor of the Dnepropetrovsk Region, Gennady Korban, on charges of leading an organized criminal group. The law enforcers held a large-scale special operation in several cities to search the offices and homes of people linked with Kolomoisky or his party UKROP. The ultra-right opposition has interpreted this affair as political and urged a campaign of resistance against the "totalitarian regime."

The authorities in Kiev have spent much time and effort in their attempts to get rid of Kolomoisky and put the Dnepropetrovsk Region under control. The squads of thugs on Kolomoisky's payroll, who had fought against the militias of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics, was one of the main problems. Kolomoisky and his team funded the squads entirely on their own and the process went out of control.

"At the moment Poroshenko and Kolomoisky have clashed for the Odessa-Dnepropetrovsk link, which as a matter of fact remains Ukraine's sole profitable business," the online periodical VZGLYAD quotes the president of Ukraine's Systemic Analysis and Forecasting Centre, Rostislav Ishchenko, as saying. "The one who controls this source to a certain extent also commands what's left of the Ukrainian state."

Poroshenko's opponents are rather strong in both Odessa and Dnepropetrovsk, so the president has to use force in order to oust them. "In Odessa, Poroshenko's opponents have scored an indisputable victory and they had very good chances in Dnepropetrovsk. So there was no option left for him other than to use force," Ishchenko said.

Korban is Kolomoisky's figurehead. The tycoon himself has ostensibly stepped into the background, an expert at the Political Technologies Centre, Georgy Chizhov, has told TASS. "It is believed that he is the financier of nearly all anti-presidential projects. Most parties opposed to Poroshenko must be getting money from him." In the first place this is true of the Right Sector, whose leader Dmitry Yarosh is on friendly terms with Kolomoisky.

The right-wing radicals are a threat to the stability of the ruling regime and the whole country, Chizhov said. "They can always play some role should street unrest erupt. They may spark tensions on the streets and then spread them to politics, to serve as a fuse capable of exploding the whole powder keg."

"Korban's arrest is one of the blows dealt in the fight between Poroshenko and Kolomoisky. Everybody is aware of that," the deputy director of the CIS Countries Institute, Vladimir Zharikhin, has told TASS. "The very same Right Sector (Kolomoisky's personal armed resource) is aware that after Korban and his UKROP party it will be the next target. That's what makes the radicals so angry."

"The two oligarchs are at each other's throats. The country has an absolutely oligarchic type of government," he said. "Poroshenko has certain administrative and power leverage at his disposal. Kolomoisky is now on the defensive and been trying to retain what he has. And, what is most important, Poroshenko is the president and he relies on support from the Americans, who largely govern the country. As everybody remembers, last time Kolomoisky was dismissed as Dnepropetrovsk governor by the US ambassador, and not Poroshenko."

Korban's arrest must be regarded as another phase of struggle with Kolomoisky, who has made an attempt to complement his economic influence with a role in politics, Zharikhin said. "Poroshenko has for the time being preferred to leave in peace those who don't try to do that."

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 #47
Poroshenko's party fails to keep majority in Kiev legislature

KIEV, November 2. /TASS/. Ukraine's pro-presidential party, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc Solidarity, has failed to keep the majority in the legislative body of the Ukrainian capital city Kiev, the Kiev Council.

The Petro Poroshenko Bloc has won 52 seats in the 120-seat Kiev legislature, the city election commission said on Monday after counting 100% of protocol of the October 25 local elections. "Five parties have surpassed the five-percent barrier," the commission's chairman, Anatoly Suldin said.

Apart from Solidarity, the Kiev new legislature will have the party Samopomich (Self-assistance) led by Mayor of Lviv Andriy Sadovy (22 seats), Yulia Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) (17 seats), the party Unity led by Kiev's former mayor Alexander Omelchenko (15 seats), and the nationalist party Svoboda (Freedom) with 14 seats.

The UDAR-Solidarity faction in the current Kiev City Council controls 69 seats. Unity has ten seats, the Radical Party of Oleh Lyashko has seven seats, Svoboda - six seats, Samopomich - five seats, Civil Position - three seats, Batkivshchyna - two seats, Democratic Alliance - two seats, New Life - one seat. Fifteen lawmakers are affiliated with neither of the factions.

Earlier, first deputy leader of Petro Poroshenko Bloc's faction in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) Igor Kononenko said his political force hoped to win at least 50 seats in the Kiev City Council.

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 #48
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
October 22, 2015
Hysteria continues: star Kiev propagandist denounced as Russian agent
Vladimir Raichenko, PolitNavigator
http://www.politnavigator.net/glavnyjj-propagandist-yacenyuka-poroshenko-okazalsya-agentom-putina.html
Translated for Fort Russ by J. Arnoldski

"Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk's main propagandist turns out to be an agent of Putin"

Ukrainian media continues to identify Russian agents allegedly entrenched in the Ukrainian government.

Thus, the Ukrainian source Elise.com.ua, which positions itself as a social-political forum of Ukraine, accused Dmitry Tymchuk, leader of the group "Information Resistance" and Verkhovna Rada deputy from Yatsenyuk's "People's Front" list, of working for Moscow in his propagandistic reports from the ATO zone which have been nicknamed "No Losses."

Here we offer for our readers the full version of the revelatory material published by the Ukrainian website:

"BREAKING: Dmitry Tymchuk is a traitor to Ukraine. He's on the hook of the FSB!

The national security of Ukraine is under threat. It's scary to imagine how many of our politicians and security structure officers can hang on the hook of the Russian special services and how many compromising gigabytes [of information] lie somewhere on Lubyanka or Grizodubovoy street (the headquarters of the GRU). These are mines laid by the enemy under the defense ability of Ukraine. They can detonate at the most critical moment for the country, but they can also be conserved for years. The task of Ukrainian society is to identify such people who influence processes in our the country. And we need to start from the top.

It's not necessary to go far for examples. Let's take the Committee on National Security and Defense of the Verkhovna Rada and Dmitry Tymchuk, a member of this very committee. Since the beginning of Russian aggression against Ukraine, Tymchuk has occupied a niche as an expert on information resistance. His posts and articles were read by thousands of Ukrainians. Even the information is presented concisely, and, at a first, objective glance, it appears to be first hand information. Riding this wave, Dmitry became a people's deputy of Ukraine, the thirteenth on the "People's Front" list. Well, naturally, he was entrusted as a member of one of the most important committees of our time - the Committee on National Defense and Security led by the renowned Sergey Pashinsky.

It's possible to write a separate article about this man, and not only one, but today the matter at hand is Tymchuk. And so, this hero of information resistance is an expert on defense, NATO, army reforms, the main editor of the internet project "Fleet 2017", and leader of the NGO "Center for Military-Political Studies." This person worked in the headquarters of the National Guard until 2000 and in various positions in the Ministry of Defense until 2012. The biography of the people's deputy is publicly available. This expert more than once wrote articles about cooperation with NATO, Eurointegration, and the foundations of reforming the armed forces. Unfortunately, there's a second side of the coin.

Apparently, Dmitry wasn't totally sure about the European choice of Ukraine. Therefore, parallel with public speaking about the Western vector, under the pseudonym Boris Takayev he wrote for pro-Russian projects of an entirely different orientation. A complete list of Boris Takayev's (Dmitry Tymchuk's) articles can be found at this link: "Ukraine-NATO: An invitation to massacre," "The Association Agreement: a strike at the economy of Ukraine," "The Ukrainian path to the East and the 'moment of truth' for the EU", "Ukraine-NATO: 'friendship' at one gate," "How NATO is disarming Ukraine," "Where does Yatsenyuk's Tigipkophobia come from?" and many others. "One Homeland" (the site linked above) positions itself as an informational-analytical publication, and the collective of authors consists of such well-known "vatniki" as Elena Bondarenko, Miroslav Berdnik, Vadim Kolesnichenko, and Petr Simonenko. In addition, Boris Takayev was listed as an expert on military politics, the development of the UAF, and regional security from the NGO "Center for Military-Political Studies," which was headed by Tymchuk. Dmitry Tymchuk was also among the editors of the "Fleet 2017" publication.

Three independent sources immediately confirm that no such Boris Takayev exists, and that this alias of the people's deputy of Ukraine and member of the Committee on Defense and Security was used for broadcasting anti-Ukrainian, anti-NATO, and anti-European positions, and for simply spreading "vatnik" ideas and thoughts. Having become a deputy, Dmitry tried to clean himself up. His acclaimed article "Why do the Ukrainian oligarchs need Eurointegration?" disappeared from the website "One Homeland."

So it turns out that if Ukraine knows about the alter ego of Tymchuk, then he should be well known in Russia. The people who inspired Boris-Dmitry to write such materials might keep some correspondence and, it's possible, some kind of financial documents. If we assume that Boris Takayev is not the same person as Tymchuk (but we know that it is), then the dispute is very simple to solve. It's sufficient enough to show the public that this pro-Russian "expert" worked side by side with Dmitry for more than a year.

But it is known in advance that no such person exists. History knows only one real such Takayev - an illiterate Kalmyk of the Red Army who died in Shiroklag from tuberculosis in 1944. The preparation and publication of explicitly anti-Ukrainian materials by Dmitry Borisovich Tymchuk is not only outrageous from an ethical point of view, but also creates a clear and direct threat to the interests of Ukraine. Such people make decisions on matters of national security and defense, influence other politicians, and have access to classified information. Defense, of course, doesn't get any stronger from this."

From the editors of "PolitNavigator":

We don't know if there really is information that Tymchuk and Takayev are one person, and we especially cannot speak to his work for these or those special services. It is more likely that we are dealing with the fact that banal political repainting has become quite common at the present political moment in the modern history of Ukraine. We will only add that the articles by Boris Takaev, as noted earlier according to the author of these revelations, bear an anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian character and he is still listed among the experts of the Center for Military-Political Studies led by Dmitry Tymchuk.

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#49
http://newcoldwar.org
October 24, 2015
Five things Netflix' documentary on Maidan doesn't tell you about Ukraine
By Pedro Marin

The following article was originally published  by Revista Opera (Brazil) on October 10, 2015. Translation to English by New Cold War.org.

An historical video that was broadcast in Brazil some decades ago warned, "Lies can be told even when speaking truths." Netflix's new documentary film 'Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom' is a exquisite example. By ignoring fundamental details of Ukraine's history and of the composition of the 2013-early 2014 political movement in Ukraine called 'Maidan' (or 'Euromaidan'), the documentary's half-truths pave the way to disconcerting lies. Here are some of those:

The Ukrainian people

Right at the documentary's beginning, it is stated that "while the people of Ukraine were looking to the West, the leader [President Yanukovych] was looking to the East."

The statement, at first innocent, ignores Ukraine's history and the characteristics of its people. Ukraine is the result of a complex ethnic formation, stemming from numerous conflicts between nations and ethnic groups that have ruled or resided on the territory since the fifth century. Not coincidentally, the word Ukraine actually means 'borderland'. It has always been a conflictual territory. Such a formation would obviously end up with divided historical interpretations and political scenarios.

According to data from a 2012 USAID survey, 37% of Ukrainians were in favor of the country adopting closer ties with Russia while 27% thought it would be better to draw closer to the European Union. Twenty six per cent said it was important to maintain economic relations with both. In other words: the "Ukrainian people" have very different thoughts about the EU.

Geographic variations are highlighted by the survey. In Kyiv, where the largest Maidan protests were later held, 51% were in favor of closer association with Europe. That rises to 57% for the entire west of Ukraine. In contrast, 71% of people in Crimea favored better relations with Russia while 53% of those in eastern Ukraine had the same view. In the center of the country, 37% chose better relations with Russia and 23% chose the EU.

'Non-partisan'

The view of Euromaidan as a "non-partisan" movement with broad opposition to the political class is also widely propagated by the Netflix documentary. The documentary has many scenes of flags of the extreme-right Svoboda Party and Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists flying prominently over the Maidan protests and showing the hatred of Maidan protesters against ex-UDAR party member and present Mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko. He is a figure in the 'Petro Poroshenko Bloc' electoral machine. In the May 2014 election issuing from the Maidan protests, Klitschko was elected mayor of Kyiv with 57% of the vote. No other candidate reached nine per cent. The non partisan claims of Maidan cannot be taken seriously.

Berkut provocateurs

At a certain moment during Euromaidan, some leaders of the protest decided it was a good idea to head to the presidential palace in Kyiv. Their path was blocked by Berkut special police. Right-wing militants linked to Svoboda and the Social National Assembly clashed with the police. In Netflix's documentary, this clash is portrayed as the work of "provocateurs" paid by the government to incite the Berkut police into repressive acts.

In an article published in Foreign Policy (in which, by the way, sharp critiques are levelled against Russian President Vladimir Putin), it is stated that Ukraine is home to Svoboda, arguably Europe's most influential far-right movement today. Party leader Oleh Tyahnybok is on record complaining that his country is controlled by a "Muscovite-Jewish mafia," while his deputy party leader has derided the Ukrainian-born film star Mila Kunis as a "dirty Jewess".

So we have a portrayal in the film of neo-Nazi militants fighting against a "Muscovite -Jewish mafia" and its government and who are victims of paid provocateurs of the mafia-government's police. This turns reality on its head.

In fact, right-wing extremists had a active role during Euromaidan, both inside the movement's defense units and during the occupations of buildings. The infamous Azov Battalion went from Maidan Square to fighting the rebel uprising in the east of the country, under contract of Ukraine's Ministry of Interior Affairs. Several members of the inglorious battalion who participated in the fight to seize the international airport at Donetsk, including the notorious Belarussian neo-Nazi Serhiy Korotkykh, would later be honored by President Poroshenko.

'Berkut snipers'

Probably one of the most problematic points in the documentary is the absolutely biased and irresponsible narrative concerning the events from February 18 to 20, 2014. On those dates, at least 90 people - including 20 Berkut police officers - were shot dead by snipers. It's still nuclear what happened during those days or who is to blame, but more and more video and other revelations show it to have been a provocation staged by the Europmaidan extremists.

According to an article from the BBC published in February of this year, a Maidan protester identified as 'Sergei' said he shot at Berkut officers during the demonstrations from the top of a building in central Kyiv. Ottawa researcher Ivan Katchanovski has used the available, extensive amateur video  of events those days to show that the deadly sniper fire came from buildings controlled by the Maidan protesters, and he is one of the rare commentators to be closely following the government "investigation" of events which he says is delayed and deeply flawed.[1]

During a phone call after a visit to Kyiv on February 25, 2014, Estonian Foreign Affairs Minister Urmas Paet told the EU's Catherine Ashton, "There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers was not Yanukovych but somebody from the new coalition." Ashton replied, "I think we do want to investigate. I mean, I didn't pick that up, that's interesting. Gosh."

According to Paet, the bullets that hit protesters and Berkut troops were similar, and the new government had no interest in a investigation. Yet, in Netflix's documentary, government troops are pointed to as responsible for the mass killings.

Crimea's 'annexation'

In the 98-minute documentary, only one minute was devoted to examining what has happened to Ukraine since Yanukovych's fall from power. The repressive measures against communists, persecutions of journalists and the death toll in the country's east from Kyiv's civil war are all simply ignored.

Concerning Crimea, we are simply told it was "annexed" by Russia. Maybe it would be relevant for the film to explain that Crimea was transferred to the jurisdiction of Soviet Ukraine in 1954 during the USSR government of Nikita Krushchev. Russian is still the language of the majority in the region, with app. 50% of Crimean people being ethnic Russian. In March 2014, a reported 96% of residents of Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. That preference has been confirmed by several polls since then.

Pedro Marin is the editor of the online journal Revista Opera, published in Brazil. In January and February of this year, a correspondent for the journal travelled to eastern Ukraine to report for the journal.

Notes:
[1] From the Facebook page of Ivan Katchanovski on October 23, 2015:

New Maidan massacre trial revelations that, again, have not been reported.

Replication by other scholars is the best way to check findings of existing studies. This specifically concerns the Maidan massacre and its analysis in my paper, which contains links to publicly available data that make such replication easy to do. But there is still no other scholarly study of this crucial case of mass killing. However, the ongoing Maidan massacre trial continues to corroborate findings of my study that the Maidan protesters were killed from the Maidan-controlled locations.

During her testimony in the last trial sessions on October 8 and October 9, sister of Parashchuk stated under oath that her brother was shot dead in the back of his head from the Hotel Ukraina (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUqHEVRcnMo 1h57m). She made this conclusion based on the forensic medical report and the moment of his killing in a video shown in court (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7TZMjrkAB4). The defense lawyer revealed during the trial that even an on-site experiment by the government investigation concluded that Huryk could have been killed from both the Berkut positions and from the Maidan-controlled positions, specifically from the Hotel Ukraina (58m).

The trial showed that the prosecution did not establish the exact time and place of killings of Bondarchuk and Vaida. But disclosures during the trial of forensic medical reports findings about directions and locations of their wounds and their positions at the time of their killings in the video indicated that Bondarchuk and Vaida were killed from the Hotel Ukraina, respectively by a 6-7mm bullet and by pellets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDViXaeicRQ (1h47m, 5h38m).

The prosecution charged the two Berkut policemen with killings these four protesters from an open Berkut barricade. No eyewitnesses of killings of these protesters were mentioned during the trial sessions. The trial on these dates examined testimonies by the relatives of these four victims and the same videos that I used in my study. But a defence lawyer also revealed during the trial that there is a non-published video which shows protesters in a massacre area shouting about gunshots from the Hotel Ukraina (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUqHEVRcnMo1h37m).

These trial revelations again have not been reported by the mainstream Western and Ukrainian media.

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#50
Atlantic Council
November 2, 2015
Ukraine Must Not Pay Russia Back
By Anders Åslund
Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of "Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It."

On December 20, Ukraine is supposed to pay Russia $3 billion in return for a Eurobond that Russian President Vladimir Putin issued in December 2013. Ukraine has no reason to pay.

In February 2014, the Kremlin launched military aggression against Ukraine, first annexing Crimea and later pursuing military subversion in southern and eastern Ukraine. For more than a year, Russian-commanded troops with a mixture of volunteers and regular Russian soldiers have occupied 3 percent of Ukraine's easternmost territories.

Moscow's war has caused major damage to Ukraine. Russia has not only usurped the territory of Crimea but also many enterprises, goods in storage, cash, and other bank assets. In eastern Ukraine, Russian troops have devastated buildings, factories, and bridges. The war has cost Ukraine at least 7 percent of GDP in lost production, and foreign investors have been scared off. Russia has also pursued a trade war against Ukraine, eliminating 18 percent of the country's prior exports. Ukraine has no reason to pay such an aggressor; in fact, Russia ought to pay reparations to Ukraine.

Putin negotiated this deal personally with former President Viktor Yanukovych to provide him with a lifeline. It was never meant to benefit the Ukrainian nation.

Additionally, the Kremlin intentionally caused confusion in its formalization of these bonds. Russia issued them as a Eurobonds in Ireland in accordance with British law, making them a tradable private debt. But Moscow financed the loan from its National Wealth Fund, a sovereign wealth fund, and claims it is a sovereign debt. The Kremlin rigged a legal trap for Ukraine.

Georgetown University Professor Anna Gelpern has argued that Ukraine should not pay this debt because it amounts to "odious debt." She has concluded: "The United Kingdom should make the bonds unenforceable under English law."

The Ukrainian government has agreed to debt restructuring with the bond's private holders, which has won approval by both the Ukrainian parliament and three-quarters of the private bondholders. This deal includes a nominal cut of the private debt (which is $18 billion) by 20 percent, and a postponement of debt repayments for four years. There are no private holdouts who do not accept these conditions. On October 29, the deal was finalized with the exchange of the old Eurobonds for new ones.

Ukraine offered the same restructuring conditions to Russia for its bonds, but Russian Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov refused to accept these conditions and demands payment in full on December 20. Putin has repeatedly brought up this topic himself. On October 13, he said, "But they need to return our money. And why doesn't the IMF [International Monetary Fund] want to add those three billion to Ukraine so that it can pay us back? Why change its rules for a specific nation, essentially destroying the very system of rules for how the IMF functions?" Since Ukraine has already settled with the private bondholders, they do not mind if Ukraine does not pay Russia.

For Russia, whose current official international reserves are $375 billion, $3 billion is chump change, while such a payment could drive Ukraine into an acute currency crisis; its reserves are only $13 billion. Putin's personal engagement enhances the impression that this is part of his warfare against Ukraine.

The only reason for Ukraine to pay is that it could run the risk of not receiving further funding from the IMF, which is vital for Ukraine's financial sustenance. The IMF has an old practice of not lending to a country in arrears to a sovereign, but that practice should not be applied in this case. There was a dispute over whether these bonds were to be recognized as sovereign debt, but now the IMF is changing its rule so that it no longer matters whether it is a private or sovereign debt.

The IMF is about to change its practice of not lending into arrears. This is easily done because it is not incorporated into the IMF Articles of Agreement, that is, the IMF statutes. The IMF Executive Board can decide to change this policy with a simple board majority. The IMF has lent to Afghanistan, Georgia, and Iraq in the midst of war, and Russia has no veto right, holding only 2.39 percent of the votes in the IMF. When the IMF has lent to Georgia and Ukraine, the other members of its Executive Board have overruled Russia.

Ukrainian Minister of Finance Natalie Jaresko has repeatedly encouraged Russia to participate in the debt restructuring on the same conditions as private lenders, but Russia has rejected this option. Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk gave Russia until October 29 to accept the debt restructuring, but after that date, he offers Russia nothing but legal proceedings. In November, the IMF Executive Board is set to allow funding even when a country has not paid all of its debt obligations to sovereigns. Russia's intransigence has convinced a board majority that the rules have to change fast. After that, Russia's argument that the IMF should not pay Ukraine loses validity.

Ukraine will still have to fulfill standard IMF conditions; that is another matter altogether.

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