#2
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
October 29, 2015
Igor Ivanov, president of the Russian Council on International Affairs and Russian foreign minister 1998-2004: The Putin plan. Russia's proposals and actions for a Syrian settlement - The way to world order

The regular, 12th annual meeting of the Valday Club took place in Sochi last week. As always, the participants discussed a very wide range of problems in present-day international life and argued a lot about distant and recent history, about Russia and the West, and about the state of and trends in the development of world civilization in general. All the same, the central matter under discussion was the question of Syria, the prospects for a Syrian settlement, and the role of Russia and the international community in Syrian affairs. The question was given additional urgency by recent events - the Russian air strikes against the positions of Islamist terrorists, the surprise visit by Syrian leader Bashar al-Asad to Moscow, and the sharp increase in diplomatic activity around the Syrian crisis.

Speaking at the Valday Club, Russian President Vladimir Putin expounded in detail his vision of a Syrian settlement, and this vision, it appears, reflects Russia's more general approach to questions of creating a new world order. It must be said that against the background of numerous declarative, ambiguous, and sometimes even internally contradictory statements on Syria coming from some of our Western partners, Vladimir Putin's proposals were concrete, logical, and consistent. There are no areas of reticence, silences, or gaps in Russia's position; you may argue with this position, you may disagree with it, you may add to it or correct it, but you cannot fail to reckon with it. Let us try to sum up the main provisions of the "Putin plan" set forth at the Valday Club.

1. First and foremost the Russian president emphasized the need to preserve Syria's statehood and restore in full the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity. This position is presented as the essential basis for all subsequent steps. It is no secret that various proposals have recently become current for dividing Syria - along religious, ethnic, or political lines. It is not difficult to predict that such a division would lead to the creation within the territory of the present Syrian state of several mini-states burdened by a great many political and economic problems, confronting one another, and forming extremely convenient targets for manipulation on the part of external forces. The division of Syria is not a way to resolve the crisis, it is taking it to another, even more dangerous dimension.

2. In his speech Vladimir Putin also noted that the immediate objective should not be the division of Syria imposed by somebody from the outside, but the creation of conditions such that the Syrian people can themselves decide their destiny. This is Russia's principled position based on the conviction that no construct imposed from the outside can be stable or long-lasting irrespective of who imposes it - the neighbouring states of the region or the great powers.

3. But does this mean that the international community should distance itself entirely from the situation in Syria? Of course not. In the four and a half years since it began, the civil war has long ceased to be purely the Syrians' internal affair; it has come to involve, in one way or another, the neighbouring states and other countries from the Middle East region and beyond. As for the new player in the Syrian conflict, the terrorist "state" ISIL, it creates a direct threat not only to Syria and Iraq but to the whole world.

That is why the Russian president once again urged the international community to combine its efforts first and foremost in the struggle against ISIL and other international terrorist groups. In this common struggle there should be no room for other motivations or objectives - the desire to influence Syria's future political structure, to carve out some special sphere of influence for oneself in Syrian territory, and so forth. This joint struggle should not become a pretext for interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. Unless this condition is met, it will not be possible to achieve the necessary confidence between the main players, and this means that the struggle against a common and extremely dangerous enemy is hardly likely to prove effective.

4. The vital necessity of mobilizing the international community with a view to resolving the Syrian crisis is also predetermined by another factor: This crisis is inseparable from the other problems of the wider region of the Middle East and North Africa. Since the time of the first "Arab Spring" revolutions, and perhaps since the moment of the military intervention by the United States and its allies in Iraq, the region has been drawn into a process of fundamental changes accompanied by periodic outbreaks of instability and armed conflicts. We are observing such outbreaks in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. The region's age-old problems are also escalating - first and foremost the Arab-Israeli conflict.

I do not think the main objective today is to seek culprits to blame for these negative trends. It is more important to register something else - we are dealing with a profound regional-level systemic crisis whose possible destructive consequences are difficult even to imagine today. In any case these consequences will erupt outside the region of the Middle East and North Africa and will to some extent affect international relations at the global level. That being so, the response to this crisis should also be global. The time has probably come to raise the question of creating a fundamentally new regional security system in the Middle East with guarantees from the UN Security Council.

5. In his speech Vladimir Putin also spoke of the need to combine efforts in tackling the tasks of the postwar socioeconomic restoration of Syria. The scale of these tasks is such that it is hardly possible to achieve them by the efforts of the Syrians alone. A pooling of efforts will be required both by the neighbouring states and by international organizations, currency and financial institutions, private business, and public organizations. One can only welcome the recent stepping up of EU diplomacy in the Syrian salient, especially since without the resolution of the Syrian crisis and the restoration of Syrian statehood in full, it can hardly be possible substantially to lessen the current migration pressure on the EU countries.

The Russian leader's proposals on the Syrian crisis, as noted above, are concrete and linked to the specific nature of this conflict. At the same time these proposals are fundamentally universal, they reflect Russia's approach to world politics in general and can also be applied in other crisis situations. For instance, in relation to the Ukraine crisis.

The preservation of Ukraine's statehood, like Syria's, is an objective of priority importance. Any division of Ukraine is just as unacceptable to Russia as any division of Syria. Ukraine's future should be determined by the Ukrainians themselves - in the west and the east of the country, by those who support the present authorities in Kiev and those who are in opposition to them. External forces should decisively give up trying to "drag" Ukraine over to their own side, playing at further escalating internal confrontation in Ukraine, and supporting the most radical groups on both sides of the confrontation line. As in the case of Syria, the role of the international community should incorporate multifaceted assistance for Ukraine's socioeconomic rebirth after the resolution of the country's most urgent political problems.

Of course substantial differences will always persist between Russia and the West in their views of the future of both Syria and Ukraine. It is also obvious that the interests of the various external forces involved in the Syrian crisis, the Ukrainian crisis, or any other regional crisis will never completely coincide. Differences in assessing the situation, in determining priorities in the steps aimed at improving it, in the desired distribution of functions between external players - all these things were, are, and will remain additional complicating factors that must in no circumstances be underestimated. But these factors, as Vladimir Putin emphasized, should not prevent bilateral and multilateral cooperation. Provided, of course, that the aim of this cooperation is to resolve problems, not to impose one's own view on one's partners.

This approach may seem to some people to be too idealistic and divorced from real international practice. But history can show much evidence that this is the only approach that works. It was this approach that made it possible to build a system of Soviet-American cooperation on strategic issues during the Cold War. It was this approach that formed the basis of the success of multilateral talks on the Iranian nuclear dossier. It was this approach that guided the leaders of Russia and the United States when they adopted the decision to work together to eliminate chemical weapons in Syria.

As for the numerous critics of Russia's proposals on Syria that were put forward at the Valday Club meeting, I would like to ask them a simple question: What alternative ideas and plans are you prepared to present? And what experience do you have in the successful resolution of complex crisis situations? Maybe one should, after all, pay slightly more attention to what Moscow is proposing today? Understanding does not, of course, mean automatic and unconditional support for Russia's proposals, but it presupposes, at the very least, a readiness for serious and meaningful dialogue. Without such dialogue one can hardly count on the successful resolution of international crises, still less on the joint building of a new world order.

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 #3
Antiwar.com
November 9, 2015
The Russian Question
Are we in for another nuclear standoff with the Kremlin?
By Justin Raimondo
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles.

It's 2018, and President Hillary Clinton has announced that the Russians have violated her "no fly zone" over Syria. Damascus is about to fall, as jihadists - some armed and supported by the United States - gather in a final assault on the city. In the fog of war, a Russian fighter jet nearly collides with a US warplane sent in to fulfill the US "responsibility to protect" the "moderate" rebels.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the newly-elected ultra-nationalist government has declared its intention to take back Crimea, and the freshly-rearmed Ukrainian military - with the neo-Nazi Azov Brigade in the lead - moves into the city of Mariupol, which has just voted to secede from Ukraine and asked for Russian protection. In Kalingrad, the isolated Russian outpost completely surrounded by Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, groups funded by the EU are staging demonstrations demanding reunification with Germany. In the midst of all this, Vladimir Putin announces Russia's withdrawal from the INF treaty, Russian forces converge on the border with the Baltic states, and President Clinton puts US nuclear forces in Germany - which have just undergone a second "upgrade" - on high alert.

Since the US-Russian verification and information exchange, mandated by the INF treaty, has been suspended since 2016, both countries are flying blind as far as monitoring the actions and intentions of the other.

It is near midnight in a small town in eastern Germany, as NATO radar picks up indications that what may be a Russian fighter squadron is headed for Kaliningrad, and NATO's missile defense system - just installed in Poland last summer - readies its response. The world teeters on the brink of World War III, as Hillary Clinton gets that call at 3 a.m.....

Given the resumption of the cold war with Russia, some variation on the scenario described above is not only entirely possible, it is nearly inevitable. The INF treaty signed by Ronald Reagan is in danger of falling apart at the seams as NATO moves its forces ever closer to the Russian border and the Russians respond in kind. The US-EU coup d'etat in Ukraine, Georgia's imminent entry into NATO, the "upgrading" of US nuclear weapons in Germany, and the radical uptick in anti-Russian rhetoric by US military and political figures has returned us to a danger we thought ended with the implosion of the Soviet empire: the threat of nuclear war.

Accusations that Russia has violated the terms of the INF Treaty are not quite true, but what is clear is that the US and its NATO allies are prepositioning heavy weaponry on their eastern frontier and doubling the size of our "Response Force" in Europe. The Russian response has been largely rhetorical: in terms of facts on the ground, their much-touted nuclear modernization effort still puts them many miles behind the US. As Adam Mount, Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, puts it:

"Even if Russia were somehow to accelerate its nuclear modernization efforts, the U.S. Department of Defense recognizes that Russia "would not be able to achieve a militarily significant advantage by any plausible expansion of its strategic nuclear forces, even in a cheating or breakout scenario under the New START Treaty."

"To summarize: Russia could deploy many more missiles and still remain behind the United States in numbers of launchers and under the New START caps. Even if it cheated on the New START treaty and deployed still more, the Pentagon does not believe that this would significantly affect the strategic balance."

The United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, installed anti-ballistic missile systems in two east European countries, and has aggressively moved to expand NATO to the point that they are standing before the gates of Moscow. The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, signed by President George Herbert Walker Bush and then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the winter of 1990, was effectively breached by the construction of permanent US military bases in Bulgaria and Romania, and the installation of US ABM facilities: the general atmosphere produced by the new cold war caused the Russians to formally withdraw from the treaty in 2007.

The encirclement of Russia is a key element of Putin's justified paranoia: not only in Europe but also in Central Asia, the Americans are on the march, as John Kerry's recent trip to the region demonstrates. There Kerry canoodled with Central Asian despots like Islam Karimov, whose bloody dictatorship is a model for tyrants everywhere, making stops in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan as well as Uzbekistan, where the USA maintains a military base not far from the Tajikistan border. Manas Air Base, near Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, has been a key link in the supply chain servicing US troops in Afghanistan. Kerry's Uzbekistan sojourn was marked by a news conference in which a Washington Post reporter was hustled out of the room by US and Uzbek security for asking inconvenient questions about Karimov's horrendous human rights record.

But human rights are only an issue for Washington in this context insofar as they can be used to indict Putin: the arrest and imprisonment of, say, journalists in Ukraine for questioning government policies is not even mentioned by our State Department, let alone protested.

The anti-Russian hysteria sweeping Washington doesn't discriminate as to party: while Hillary Clinton has been vocal about the alleged Russian "threat," and hasn't backed down from her "no fly zone" advocacy since the Russian intervention, GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio has done her one better by openly coming out for shooting down Russian planes in Syrian skies. Falsely claiming that the US isn't modernizing its nuclear arsenal, Rubio wants to install more ABM sites throughout eastern Europe, and says Ukraine should be allowed to join NATO - setting the stage for a full-on showdown with the Russians. Rubio's "vision for Europe" would send us back to the 1950s, when the specter of all-out war between the superpowers haunted the headlines.

This retrograde vision is shared by most of Rubio's Republican rivals, with the exception of Sen. Rand Paul - who is far behind in most polls. With Mrs. Clinton waxing hawkish when it comes to Putin's Russia, and even Bernie Sanders echoing cold war propaganda - he supports US aid, including military aid, to Ukraine, and "freezing Russian assets all over the world" -   the political atmosphere here in the US does not bode well for Russo-American relations.

With the general collapse of the post-cold war arms agreements with Moscow, and escalating tensions with the Kremlin in eastern Europe and the Middle East, the danger of a military confrontation between the US and  Russia is as great as it has ever been. This represents a shift by the Washington elite away from their seemingly eternal "war on terrorism" to a Russia-centric policy targeting Putinism rather than Islamism as the main danger to US interests.

What is needed is a grassroots movement to counter the hysterical cold war propaganda being beamed at us by the "mainstream" media - and, of course, Antiwar.com is a leader in this respect. We've been warning against the dangers posed by a new cold war with Russia for years, and the latest developments simply underscore how right we were.

But we can't do it without your help. If you've been to our front page, you'll notice that we've started our Autumn fundraising drive - and it's essential that our readers and supporters do their part to make it a success. We can't hope to match the tremendous resources available to the War Party and its cash-rich thinktanks: but we do have one huge advantage, and that is the natural unwillingness of the American people to be drawn into another cold war. Popular support for arming Ukraine and provoking the Russians is very low, and no one wants a nuclear showdown with the Kremlin. Significantly, the less Americans know about Ukraine the more they support US intervention - which just underlines how important our educational campaign is

The demonization of Putin has been relatively successful, but the reality is that Russia has come a long way since the days of Stalin, and the willingness of the American people to engage in another international crusade against the Kremlin is highly problematic, at best. We have enough problems here at home that need addressing.

What is desperately needed is a revived grassroots movement to reduce our nuclear weapons arsenal and rebuild the arms agreements with Russia that have been gathering dust in the wake of the new cold war. Do we really want another version of the Cuban missile crisis?

I was struck by what one participant in the recent "Realism and Restraint" conference, co-sponsored by The American Conservative, the Charles Koch Institute, and the Georgetown University political science department, had to say at the outset of the event. In the first panel, Kori Schake, a research associate at the Hoover Institution who thinks US foreign policy must necessitate the recreation of the British Empire, raised a question that was meant as a litmus test of the other panel members' views. What, she wanted to know, "should we do about Russia?"

That we need to "do something" about Russia is in itself an assumption that hardly anyone in the foreign policy community "mainstream" questions. Undergoing economic convulsions and suffering from a rapidly falling birth rate, Russia is in no position to challenge the policy of US "primacy" so lovingly advanced by Schake and her fellow neocons. The reality, however, is that the policy of global hegemony pursued by our foreign policy elites requires the subjugation of Russia - which is, after all, a nuclear power. And that represents a dire threat to the peace of the world.

The Russian question is, today, the main issue before us - and how we answer it will make the difference between war and peace.

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 #4
Wall Street Journal
November 9, 2015
U.S. Military Officials Aim to Bolster Troop Presence in Europe
Pentagon leaders propose rotating more forces to the Continent to deter Russia
By JULIAN E. BARNES And GORDON LUBOLD

SIMI VALLEY, Calif.-Senior U.S. military leaders have proposed sending more forces into Europe on a rotating basis to build up the American presence and are stepping up training exercises to counter potential Russian interference with troop transfers in the event of a crisis with Moscow.

The new steps would allow for the presence of multiple U.S. brigades in Europe at any given time, increasing that number above current limits.

They were outlined at a forum here over the weekend by military and defense leaders, who condemned military aggression and threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin and warned that the U.S. must not let Moscow's cooperation with the West in Syria distract from the conflict in Ukraine.

Russia has been involved in diplomatic talks over the war in Syria and the future of the regime of its ally President Bashar al-Assad. In late September, it launched a campaign of airstrikes in support of Mr. Assad's government.

Gen. Philip Breedlove, the supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said he would like to see more brigades committed to Europe as rotational forces. Decisions on the proposal, he said, will be made "in the next couple of months."

Gen. Mark Milley, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, said the Army is refining its training to ensure the U.S. military is able to face threats posed by Russian forces, learning to counter hybrid war, which blends regular and irregular forces, propaganda and unconventional tactics to sow confusion. He also said he was in favor of sending more troops to deploy-on a temporary basis-to Europe.

Such moves, Gen. Milley said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, are critical to ensure that no new conflict erupts in Europe.

"Aggression left unanswered is likely to lead to more aggression," he said.

The generals' comments came over the weekend at the Reagan National Defense Forum here, an annual gathering of U.S. defense and national security leaders.

The proposal for more rotating forces must be formally developed by Pentagon planners and then approved by the Obama administration and funded by Congress. The military will push for the inclusion of funding in a budget request to be sent to Capitol Hill early next year, officials said.

At the same forum, Defense Secretary Ash Carter also issued a warning against Russian aggression. He said in an address Saturday that Moscow seems "intent to play spoiler" by "throwing gasoline" on the fire of Syria and criticized Russian "nuclear saber-rattling."

Russian officials declined to comment on Sunday. Senior Russian officials have repeatedly said there is little difference between rotational forces and a permanent buildup. They have also repeatedly accused the U.S. and NATO of being the aggressor in Europe.

NATO countries are discussing increasing the number of troops stationed in members bordering Russia and putting them under formal alliance command. The next talks on that idea are likely to come in early December, when foreign ministers gather and begin discussing proposals to be formalized at a Warsaw summit in July.

U.S. defense leaders have been more hawkish in their comments than either White House or European officials as they focus on the U.S.-Russian military landscape.

Both the Obama administration and German leaders have criticized Russia as well, but they also have emphasized the importance of including Moscow in discussions over the future of Syria.

While officials have said the White House in recent weeks has asked some military leaders to temper some comments, the administration is pursuing a strategy that allows Pentagon officials the latitude to talk about bolstering defenses, while State Department diplomats try to engage with Moscow.

An administration official said it was reasonable for the Pentagon and State Department "to pursue different tracks." The Pentagon, the official said, is focused on enhancing European readiness, while the State Department was pursuing "diplomacy where we can and where it is in our interest."

Gen. Breedlove warned that by cooperating with Russia on Syria, the West will come to accept Moscow's annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in Ukraine's Donbas region.

"I fear that as we are dealing with Russia in Syria, the eyes are off the Donbas," Gen. Breedlove said in an interview. "Why would we want our first negotiations on how we cooperate to be in Syria and then possibly allow the eyes of the world to accept what happened in Crimea?"

Mr. Carter defended what he called a balanced approach to Russia, saying Moscow may play a constructive role in resolving the Syrian civil war.

But signaling his wariness over Russian intentions, he said NATO needs a "new playbook" to deter Russia.

Defense officials said NATO would avoid massive troop buildups and instead rely on ways to get smaller numbers of troops forward from the U.S. both during a crisis and to prevent tensions from growing into a conflict.

The Army currently has two brigades-of about 3,500 soldiers each-based in Europe. It has assigned one additional brigade in the U.S. to serve as a regionally aligned force that will rotate into and out of Europe. Gen. Milley said he would like to add more brigades to those rotating to Europe, and add attack helicopter units, engineering teams and artillery brigades.

Russia has been building up and modernizing its military to make U.S. steps to reinforce European defenses more difficult. Russian submarine patrols and exercises have increased dramatically, Navy officials have noted.

Russia also has been increasing what military leaders call anti-access, area denial forces-air defense systems, surface-to-surface missiles, antiship weaponry-that can be used to keep opposing military equipment at arm's length.

Other military officials have warned about such missile systems being moved into Kaliningrad-the Russian exclave located between Poland and Lithuania-and Crimea. Officials said Russia now seems intent on putting new weaponry at a base in Belarus.

In the event of a conflict, Gen. Breedlove said the U.S. will face a problem both with flying troops from the U.S. to Europe, as well as moving forces and equipment from airports and seaports to front-line conflict zones.

"The Russian navy is not going to stand by and watch us reinforce Europe," in the event of a confrontation, said Gen. Breedlove. "For two decades we haven't thought about the fact that we are going to have to fight our way across the Atlantic."

Mr. Carter said the U.S. is investing in technologies meant to counter these Russian investments, including in lasers, a new bomber and upgraded drones. He also said the U.S. was "updating and advancing" operational defense plans against the Russian military, "given Russia's changed behavior."

Military officials noted that any new deployments must be carefully calibrated.

"The challenge here is to deter further aggression without triggering that which you are trying to deter," Gen. Milley said. "It is a very difficult proposition."

Throughout the later years of the Cold War, the U.S. military conducted a massive exercise called Reforger, that practiced moving tens of thousands of troops from the U.S. to Europe quickly. While there is no need to revive the exercise on that same scale, a new kind of drill that echoed the old Reforger operation would be helpful, Gen. Milley said.

"Nobody wants to go back to the days of the Cold War," Gen. Milley said. "We don't need exercises as big as Reforger anymore. But the concept of Reforger, where you exercise contingency forces ... that is exactly what we should be doing."

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 #5
Interfax
November 9, 2015
Poll: Russians continue to lose interest in protests

Seventy-seven percent of Russians call unlikely mass protests against declining living standards and in support of their rights. This is the largest index since the end of last year (68 percent in December 2014), Levada Center told Interfax.

The percentage of Russians who deem demonstrations focused on economic demands possible has reduced from 24 percent last December to 18 percent now. The sociologists polled 1,600 persons in 134 populated localities in 46 regions on October 23-26.

Only 11 percent of the respondents said they were ready to take part in protests (14 percent in December), while the overwhelming majority had no intention to participate (83 percent vs. 78 percent in December).

The percentage of respondents believing in the possibility of political protests is also down, from 16 percent last December to 14 percent now. Eighty-one percent called such protests unlikely (77 percent in December).

Eight percent of Russians are ready to join political protests (9 percent in December), while 85 percent are not going to participate in such demonstrations (84 percent in December).

Thirty percent said that strikes were an inefficient tool and "could achieve nothing", and 28 percent dubbed strikes as an extreme measure that "was sometimes impossible to avoid under current circumstances."

Sixteen percent described strikes as a normal way of resolving problems, 7 percent said that strikes were the only way to achieve the fulfillment of demands, and 12 percent said that strikes were inadmissible in their country.

Thirty-seven percent of the respondents expressed their interest in politics, and 60 percent said they were not focused on political matters, the sociologists said.

 #6
Only quarter of Russians satisfied with police work - poll

MOSCOW, November 9. /TASS/. Some 25% of Russians approve the work of the country's police, the figure doubled since 2005, the state-run Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VTsIOM) said on Monday.

Some 23% of respondents said they consider the work of police in their regions good, the result for the 2005 year was 11% Meanwhile, 15% of those polled said the work of the police was bad, comparing with 2005 figure of 27%.

According to the pollster, the level of trust for police hasn't faced significant change and stands at 46%

The number of parents willing their children to work in police has doubled since 1990, the pollster added.

The poll was conducted on October 31, November 1 among 1,600 respondents in 46 Russian regions. The margin of error does not exceed 3.5%

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 #7
Russia loses territory equal to Andorra annually - geology expert

NOVOSIBIRSK, November 9. /TASS/. Due to melting of the permafrost area and to eroding of the northern seas' coasts Russia is losing every year the territory, which is equal to the territory of Andorra (468 square kilometers), and the process cannot be stopped, a scientist of the Siberian department of the Russian Academy of Sciences told TASS on Monday.

"Every year due to melting of the permafrost along coasts of northern seas we are losing a territory, comparable with the territory of Andorra," the scientist said. "The shores in the south also change due to eroding, but the process is much quicker in the north."

He explained, the coastal line is destroyed to the distance of one-two to ten meters, which depends on many factors, including the character of the coastal line, the storms and on the term of ice covering seas.

The permafrost border in Russia is now moving rapidly northwards.

"This border, where our scientists are monitoring it, for the past 40 years has moved 30 kilometers to the north, which is quite a lot," he said.

The melting would mean further rise of temperatures, thus, for example, if the climate norm is exceeded by 1-2 degrees, the warm fertile land in Russia's southern Stavropol or Krasnodar will have a shortage of water, and agriculture would have to move northwards to the level of Voronezh.

"Most favourable territories will thus move 200-300 kilometers to the north," the scientist said.

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 #8
AP
November 8, 2015
Putin to Join More Than 100 Leaders at Paris Climate Talks
By SYLVIE CORBET

More than 100 world leaders will attend the upcoming U.N. climate conference in Paris, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, France's foreign minister said Sunday during a three-day ministerial meeting in the capital to prepare the negotiations.

Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said that Putin has accepted an invitation to attend the conference in Paris. He will be among the speakers on the conference's first day, along with President Barack Obama and the leaders of India and China.

The Kremlin hasn't confirmed Putin's participation at the so-called COP 21 talks, which aim to reach the most ambitious accord to date limiting emissions that cause global warming.

Organizers expect at least 40,000 people in addition to thousands of activists from environmental, human rights and other groups to attend the Nov. 30-Dec. 11 conference.

Fabius spoke during a meeting of foreign and environment ministers to prepare the way for the climate conference's final negotiations.

"The purpose of these three days is to find the road of compromise on as many issues as possible," Fabius told senior officials from more than 70 countries.

One key issue to be discussed is how rich countries can provide financial and other support to help developing countries reduce emissions.

The foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, Tony de Brum, told The Associated Press that "the most important thing that is at stake is the survival of my country. We need to get an agreement that's going to ensure the most vulnerable states will not be forgotten."

The Marshall Islands is among the small island states that fear they will be submerged by rising seas caused by global warming.

The Paris climate conference will gather 196 parties to reach an agreement aiming at limiting the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) between pre-industrial times and the end of the century.

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 #9
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
November 7, 2015
Top 10 Russian media any Kremlin watcher needs to know
Russia Direct has compiled a special round-up of the most influential and interesting media outlets that provide insights into political, economic and social spheres in Russia.
By Uliana Malashenko

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks to the media on April 16, 2015. Photo: AP

#1. Kommersant

Kommersant is one of the oldest publishing houses in contemporary Russia. It produces a large number of well-respected print media, including the Vlast Magazine and Ogonek. However, the publishing house is best-known for its newspaper of the same name -  Kommersant. It covers the most resonance business, social, and political news in Russia.
Now the Kommersant newspaper is known for its reporting on the Ukrainian crisis contributed by Ilya Barabanov, parliamentary reporting by Viktor Hamraev, in-depth articles about the Russian military-industrial complex by Ivan Safronov, coverage of social life and current issues by Grigory Tumanov and Alexander Chernih, and live blogging of big stories by Artyom Galustyan.

#2. Vedomosti

Founded in 1999 by Sanoma Independent Media, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, Vedomosti quickly became one of the most trusted sources of financial information in Russia.
As a result of a new law adopted in February 2015 which limits foreign ownership of the media in Russia, the newspaper had to change one of its owners: Sanoma sold its shares to Demyan Kudryavtsev, a former top-manager at the Kommersant Publishing House.
However, this didn't seem to have influenced its editorial policy: The newspaper keeps producing quality content and is highly-regarded for its original business investigations.

For instance, one of the most recent articles which has been widely discussed in Russia describes business connections between Alexander Fedotov, a new owner at the Russian edition of Forbes, and Dmitry Sablin, a senator who has launched a pro-government movement called Anti-Maidan.
 
#3. Novaya Gazeta

Novaya Gazeta is one of the most respected independent newspapers in Russia and is best known for its journalistic investigations. Most recently, it released a special edition devoted to the Malaysian Boeing crash in Donetsk where it analyzed in detail the main versions of the tragedy.
This year it also broke a story describing the wedding of a 17-year-old girl and a Chechen police officer who was originally reported to be already married and to be 57, although he later claimed he was 46 and single. This "wedding of the millennium," as it was dubbed in the Russian media, has raised public attention to the problem of human rights in Chechnya.
Outside of Russia Novaya Gazeta became best known for Anna Politkovskaya's investigations of the war in Chechnya.

#4. Meduza

Even though Meduza is a Riga-based medium, it is considered to be one of the best news publications on Russia. Because of its English version, it seems to be part and parcel of a must-read list of any non-Russian speakers interested in the country. Having attracted numerous small investors, the medium operates as an independent publication. Its content meets the highest standards of professional journalism.

Particularly, it brings together a lot of exclusive interviews and unique reports from Meduza's special correspondent, Daniil Turovsky, who provides a very detailed coverage of the most relevant events and problems in Russia and the world.

One of his most recent reports comes from a very dangerous place: the border between Turkey and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS). "At the edge of hell: The mad world of the borderlands between ISIL and Turkey," it reads.

Turovsky vividly described the place that brings together "former and future fighters for terrorist organizations from across Europe and Asia, thousands of Syrian and Kurdish refugees, international and humanitarian aid workers, and smugglers and merchants making good business out of this war."

#5. RBC

The RBC Group includes many different media assets but the most well-known are the newspaper, the TV-channel, and the website - all three by the same name, RBC. Even though the group states that it is focused on delivering business-related information, the RBC TV Channel, in fact, operates mostly as an all-news TV Channel which broadcasts news programs every fifteen minutes. This is a very fast and convenient way for both Russians and those outside of the country to find out what's happening in Russia now.
Although there was gossip about the financial crisis in the group and possible change of the owner, RBC is still owned by Mikhail Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire owner of the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, and the group seems to be doing well.

#6. TV Rain

The TV Rain Channel (Dozhd) gained its popularity during the protests of the Russian opposition in 2011. It was the only TV channel that provided balanced and uncensored reporting of these events. TV Rain also provided quality coverage of anti-corruption investigations of prominent Russian opposition activist Alexey Navalny.

In the beginning of 2014 the channel was disconnected from cable networks after it raised a question about whether the war-time blockade of Leningrad was indeed unavoidable during one of its evening shows. The attack on the channel was considered by many as politically motivated.

TV Rain quickly lost income and was forced to move to another office. It introduced a subscription service to survive and now it seems that the is recovering pretty successfully. The Hard day's night program and the evening show by Ksenia Sobchak and Pavel Lobkov are especially popular with the audience.

#7. Slon

The Slon Magazine is a relatively new medium launched in 2009 by the team of  Leonid Bershidsky, a journalist and a publisher, with financial support of Alexander Vinokurov, the present owner of the TV Rain Channel. Slon focuses on analytical content created by both journalists and experts. The majority of the Slon articles are behind a paywall.

One of the most recent texts that attracted public attention is an opinion piece about the Russian diaspora abroad contributed by Vyacheslav Inozemtsev, director of the Center of Post-Industial Studies.

#8. Snob

The Snob Magazine is interesting primary as a space for discussion where one can find opinion pieces on various topics contributed by well-known figures, including Russian writer Boris Akunin, journalist and political commentator Sergey Parkhomenko, or media entrepreneur Anton Nosik, among many other writers.

#9. Interfax

Interfax is the place to go to for breaking news both in Russian and English. It is the only major Russian non-governmental news agency and it specializes in the developing markets of Eurasia. Interfax was founded in 1989 and has gained respect for its objectivity, speed and exclusives.

While today Russian news agencies tend to provide information in a way that is favorable to the government, Interfax regards professional journalistic standards as more than standards of loyalty. The agency doesn't omit coverage of important social or political events and reports in a neutral manner.

#10. Takie Dela

Takie Dela is a publication launched in collaboration with a charity foundation called "Need Help" (Nuzhna pomosh). The solid team of its journalists includes such well-known figures as Andrey Loshak, Ekaterina Gordeeva, Olga Allenova, Olga Bichkova, and Valery Panushkin.

The publication is exclusively devoted to social issues in Russia. For instance, Takie Dela has recently published an article by Ekaterina Gordeeva, which describes how the Russian medicine operates under Western sanctions with no Western medicaments and almost no Russian substitutes.

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 #10
Moscow Times
November 9, 2015
Russian Students to Get Paid Foreign Education - If They Return Home Afterward

Russia will pay for its students to study at elite foreign universities, provided they return home to work after graduation, Education and Science Minister Dmitry Livanov was cited as saying by news agency TASS.

The program, titled "Global Education," was signed into force in June 2014 and is designed to send 1,500 Russian students abroad for the 2014 through 2016 school years, Livanov said, the Ekho Moskvy radio station reported Sunday.

The government has approved a list of prestigious world universities for which students can receive funding from the state budget, including the United States' Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Yale, and Britain's Cambridge and Oxford, Ekho Moskvy reported.

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#11
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
October 28, 2015
Oleg Poptsov, Belated Enlightenment. The Government's Obsession with a Neoliberal Economic Policy Has Led the Country into a Blind Alley

The world has changed. This is not a prophetic epitaph for major politicians but an acknowledgment voiced by ordinary people in the kitchens of their own apartments. It is totally logical. Life has changed not only in some remote "corridors of power" but in the streams of people in the street known as "the citizens of Russia." If the government is switching the country to a one-year planning model, it is possible to assess the scale of the administrative incompetence of the powers that be.

Every day the president is always present on all the television channels' screens. No, this is not self-promotion, it is the reality.

We have heard endless wailing from politicians and political analysts who have allegedly discovered a truth encapsulated in a single fundamental phrase: "Political will is needed." And we are seeing a demonstration of hands-on control of the country that is providing clear confirmation that "political will" is not an invention. It actually exists, and one person possesses this will, and likewise the right to make use of it. This is Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. This is essentially an indictment of the system that has been devised for governing a country that is territorially huge, occupying one-sixth of the Earth's land area.

We can see confirmation of this fact every day. The endless procession of obedient lackeys at the centre and in the localities is a characteristic feature of the executive branch. Yet without possessing effective autonomy, effective authority does not exist.

The futile appeal that "it is necessary to display political will" is like an incantation. Because it is impossible to display what you do not have. Our prime minister's latest "Forward, Russia!" article was published recently - part two, which is a continuation of part one under the same title. There is a clear perception that the article was prepared by government members who hold neoliberal views. The prime minister has not changed his stance. Once again the stance that was expressed was for support for small and medium businesses and an easing of their tax burden; furthermore, private business was seen as the driver ensuring Russia's forward progress. Unfortunately such thoughts are voiced constantly, but everything still stays the same.

But one point in the article catches the attention. The prime minister does not regard investment in the military-industrial complex as a guarantee of the successful modernization of the country as a whole. He stresses that the military-industrial sector is no longer the driver of progress in a modern economy. A strange assertion.

A strand from my memories of Khrushchev's time. At that time I was first secretary of the Communist Youth League's Leningrad Rural Oblast Committee and, finding myself in America, witnessed the modernization of American agriculture. One detail struck me. Experts from the American military-industrial complex were recruited to modernize agriculture. They were the ones who designed the "carousel system" that became a significant factor in modernizing stockraising. Precisely so. It is specifically the military-industrial complex that drives a country's forward development in all areas of industrialization. And even in America.

The military-industrial complex is not only a contributor to development. The military-industrial complex is the country's shield, its protection. A desire to cut spending on the military-industrial complex, which can be seen in Medvedev's arguments, is a possibility, but not now, when we are seeing the deployment of NATO forces on the territory of European states bordering Russia. Furthermore, European countries are being provided with nuclear weapons - although Europe had previously stated its noninvolvement in both producing them and hosting them on their territories. But suddenly the Americans are creating a military base in Germany that they are supplying with 15 nuclear missiles allegedly providing Germany with security against a possible attack - referring to Russia, of course.

But even that is not what it is all about. The prime minister is emphasizing his adherence to a neoliberal course for the country's development. And the fact that in the changed situation the country proved unprepared for import substitution confirms the hopelessness of the economic policy being pursued by the government.

In any developing economy import substitution is not a life belt that this tossed out at a critical moment. When people build railroads they never confine themselves to a single track, because a full-fledged railroad means twin-track traffic. Thus, import substitution is the second track of economic development, which actually makes an economy independent. It is a constantly operating focus of attention - a fallback move that is intended to constantly safeguard the economy and should therefore be always being developed.

As a recent meeting the president discussed agricultural development problems in order to obtain a clear answer as to when we will put in place the import substitution that is supremely necessary to us. Especially since the process is happening, because following the latest big wheat harvest we are literally starting to sing at the top of our voices that "Russia is capable of feeding Europe." Capable it may be, but it is not doing so because the Russian regime is failing to solve the main problem.

Russia's most valuable asset is not oil and not gas. These riches have literally perverted the country. Admittedly there are enormous reserves of both, of course, but they are nonrenewable. So this paradise will come to an end sometime. But there are renewable assets - land and forests. And it is specifically these two most valuable assets that we are not developing and not growing but destroying. In Russia only one third of the land - 30 per cent - is utilized to produce agricultural products. 70 per cent of the land has been sold off and is privately owned and does not belong to the state. This land is not being worked, is becoming overgrown, and is ceasing to exist as arable land.

I travel around Kaluzhskaya Oblast and look with horror at the enormous expenses of land that have become infested with weeds and have not been worked for many years now. But according to the law a person who has acquired arable land and has not utilized it for its designated purpose for three years is obliged to return it to the state. Where is the enforcement of this law? Why is the mass embezzlement of land continuing?

The country's second renewable asset is its forests. The forestry academy from which I had the honour to graduate is the country's oldest higher educational establishment. And it is no coincidence that the Forestry Academy created by [Empress] Catherine was the second most important higher educational establishment after Petersburg University. Because the forests were regarded as Russia's main assets to be cherished and increased. Today millions and millions of hectares are covered by forests. And nowadays less than 4,000 experts work them. The national forestry department has carried out our "perspicacious" government's instruction to cut costs, which is explained by the process of cutting the budget deficit. Who should halt this insanity in the government of the country? Let us try to work out the loss incurred by the country from forest fires and how much forest is embezzled every month by illegal loggers and compare these figures with the figures that the country's budget is allegedly gaining from cutting forestry-protection personnel. It would come to one 100,000th of the incurred losses. This is where the root of the evil lies, the crux of the matter.

One third of Russian arable land is working to develop the country, while two thirds is working to destroy it. This is the essence of the absurdity that goes by the name of Russia's neoliberal economic policy. The state of the forests in the country is close to catastrophic. What is needed is immediate intervention and the reorganization of all structures for managing Russia's forest assets.

And to live by the principle of "not everything will get burned down, there will still be something left; after all there is a lot of forest" is the very kind of management insanity that is knowingly killing off the country.

I believe that another manifestation of political will is appropriate. We need to have an immediate conference chaired by the president that would discuss in detail all the problems relating to the development of the country's forestry sector and make an assessment of the losses that the country has incurred in this sector in recent years and who should be accountable for it. Everything is being embezzled. By whom, when, and to what extent?

And one day we will wake up and learn that Russian forests no longer belong to the state. These are all global problems, but ones requiring an immediate response. The reality compels this.

Here is a most pressing example. The draft budget for 2016 has been submitted to the Duma. All the indications are that it will be a difficult debate. Deputies' preliminary familiarization with the budget that has been presented has already confirmed its vulnerability. This is evidenced by the polemic with Economic Development Minister Ulyukayev, who says that the budget's entire contingency resource - the savings accumulated as a result of high oil prices - has been totally spent down and there is no money to safeguard the budget for 2016. This assertion was rebutted by Accounting Chamber head Tatyana Golikova, who, having analysed the expenditure items in the 2015 budget, convincingly proved that a significant proportion of the funds allocated for items of expenditure were either less than 50-per cent spent or actually remained unspent and were placed in bank accounts at corresponding rates of interest. And this is despite the fact that the president's May edicts were only 30-per cent fulfilled. Question: What can we expect from this government? Answer: To hope for the best but prepare for the worst, because the worst is the everyday reality of our government.

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 #12
Vedomosti
November 3, 2015
Putin prepares new team to implement economic reforms - pundits
Yelena Mukhametshina, Regime will undertake structural reforms after presidential election, experts consider. But Kremlin is already grooming new administrators for this

Vladimir Putin is grooming new administrators who will tackle the shaping of a new model for managing the economy in the medium term, the Minchenko Consulting holding company report "The Politburo and the Syrian gambit: Comintern 2.0 vs Gosplan 2.0" states. The Russian authorities are behaving more actively in the geopolitical arena, and the increased emphasis on foreign policy is creating comfortable conditions for Putin's re-election in 2018. Since the shaping of a new model for managing the economy as a strategic task is being deferred, economic problems will come to the fore after 2018, when a desire to improve administrative effectiveness will become mainstream, the experts feel. Right now, however, the president is engaged in grooming a new caste of administrators who can be divided into "princes" - the children of representatives of the ruling elite holding state posts - and young technocrats who owe their career to Putin. In the opinion of the report's authors, deputy prime ministers Igor Shuvalov and Arkadiy Dvorkovich and also Sberbank head German Gref may lay claim to the leadership role in restructuring the economy.

Ten of the most influential politicians and business representatives belong to the informal Politburo 2.0. A further 45 people are candidate members.

Following the Crimean campaign and the sanctions, the authorities attempted to rapidly minimize the external pressure, as happened after August 2008, but it did not work and so they started to engage in import substitution and turn towards the East, but there has been no qualitative breakthrough in Russia-Chinese relations, Yevgeniy Minchenko explains: "Restructuring the economy takes a long time. So it was decided to play on a second chessboard in Syria. Through this the Putin team is trying to change attitudes to Russia, but the president realizes that such a game will be effective for a year or two, but then structural reforms will be needed."

Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev, businessman Arkadiy Rotenberg, and head of the Kremlin administration Sergey Ivanov have strengthened their position most during the year. Since the end of last year, Putin has started emphasizing his support for Medvedev, Minchenko notes: "Since proximity to the top man is a key resource, this is strengthening the prime minister's position in other areas." The State Duma election will be a test: if they take place with an agenda of mistrust in the government, it will create problems for Medvedev, the political analyst feels. Rotenberg has demonstrated loyalty by undertaking to build a bridge in Crimea and is being given major infrastructure projects, and Ivanov's influence has grown as a result of the operation in Syria and the anticorruption agenda in domestic policy.

The foreign policy agenda has in no way squeezed out the resolution of the economic tasks or the improvement of administration, political analyst Dmitriy Orlov says: "Foreign policy ploys are being utilized to create conditions for solving current domestic policy problems, as the population's attention gradually switches to the socioeconomic agenda." The new generation of administrators has a better knowledge of modern Western management, but they are performing the political tasks that they have been set, political analyst Boris Makarenko says: "People can be replaced, but I do not believe that there will be a switch to structural reforms from the current course, when the monopoly on power and property is being carefully protected and security agencies are standing guard."

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 #13
RIA Novosti
November 6, 2015
One in six Russians overwhelmed by debts - poll

Moscow, 6 November: The majority of Russians are unsatisfied with their financial situation, and nearly each one in six is overwhelmed by a large amount of debts, according to a survey conducted by the National Financial Research Agency.

Some 17 per cent of citizens complain about an enormous amount of debts. The percentage of those having debts is higher among villagers (23 per cent) than among city dwellers (16 per cent). The situation is the most difficult in Far Eastern Federal District, where 42 per cent of citizens complain about the debts.

Some 70 per cent of Russians try to pay their bills on time. This is more typical for citizens over 50 years of age (72 per cent) than for young people between 20 and 29 years of age (63 per cent).

About a third of Russians noted that they were preoccupied by the lack of money (38 per cent). This problem is more acute among rural residents - 50 per cent. Among city dwellers 35 per cent complain about the lack of money.

Nearly half of Russians (45 per cent) are dissatisfied with their financial situation and a third of the respondents (31 per cent) were undecided. Only a quarter of Russians (24 per cent) is satisfied with their current financial situation.

"The fact that financial discipline is more typical for Russians over 50 than for young people is a rather worrying sign. Usually the financial burden on younger people is significantly larger, consequently, providers of different services might suffer significant losses if people refuse to pay their bills," the head of the banking sector research department at the National Financial Research Agency, Irina Lobanova, said, commenting on the survey results.

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#14
Russian Economy Set to Take Another Hit - A Much Smaller Labor Force in the Future
Paul Goble

Staunton, November 8 - To the extent that falling prices for natural resources will force Moscow to rely on the development of other sectors, the Russian economy faces another and perhaps even more serious hit in the near term - a dramatically smaller workforce, each of whose members will have to support significantly larger pensioner and youth populations.

hat in turn means that the government will have to go into debt to support these non-working groups because it will not be able to rely either on earnings from the export of raw materials or from the production of its own workers in other sectors, thus imposing further downward pressure on economic growth.

These are just some of the issues Russian experts and officials are grappling with following the release of a World Bank report showing that in the 2020s, the number of working-age Russians will fall by more than seven million, "twice more than in this decade" (finanz.ru/novosti/aktsii/vsemirny-bank-podskazal-rossii-lekarstva-ot-starosti-v-nishchete-1000899328).

And the Bank's experts say that Russia's available workforce will continue to decline by "approximately a quarter" by 2050 compared to 2010, which will mean that each worker will have to "carry" 50 percent more people who will be either underage or pensioners, with the latter group especially likely to increase along with the average age of the population as well.

The aging of the Russian population, the Bank's experts say, will by itself reduce Russian economic growth by 1.3 percent each year over the next 25.  And that will require more government spending on pensions and health care, something Moscow should deal with in part by raising the retirement age, an extremely controversial step in the population.

If the elderly can be kept on the job, the Bank report continues, that would boost Russia's labor force by two to three million and keep the lower birthrates of the 1990s and subsequently from limiting economic growth in the non-raw materials sectors.

The World Bank expects birthrates in Russia to continue to fall and suggests that Moscow should devote "more attention" to supporting those families "who want to have more children," a pro-natalist policy to which the Russian government has given lip service but not provided the enormous amount of resources that would be required for it to be successful.

The report also calls for boosting training and pay for women so that more of them will want to remain in the workforce even if incomes rise - and to assist that by providing support for fathers whose wives have recently given birth. Doing any of these things will be controversial; doing none of them will make Russian economic growth in the future far more problematic.

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 #15
Russian imports from non-CIS plummet 38% in 10M - Customs Service

MOSCOW. Nov 9 (Interfax) - Russia's merchandise imports from outside the CIS plunged 37.9% year-on-year in January-October 2015 to $132.84 billion, the Federal Customs Service (FCS) said, citing preliminary data.

In October alone, imports from non-CIS countries totaled $14.375 billion, down 35.9% year-on-year.

Imports declined 36.5% in October 2015 year-on-year for food goods and raw materials for their production to $1.851 billion, those of machinery and equipment fell 36.4% to $7.185 billion, textile goods and footwear were down 34.4% to $700.9 million and 29.9% for chemical industry products to $2.748 billion.

Imports of fish dropped 62%, meat and byproducts - down 52%, dairy products - down 52%, cereals fell 47%, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages - down 44%, sugar - down 36.4%, vegetables - down 32.3%, vegetable oil - down 32.1%, fruit - down 24.0% and tobacco - down 11.4%.

Among chemical goods, imports of pharmaceutical products fell 36.7%, soap and detergents - down 31.5%, perfumery and cosmetics - down 29.8%, polymers and rubbers - down 28.2%, and organic and inorganic chemical products - down 24.7%.

For textile goods and footwear, imports declined 55% for knit fabric, 47% for chemical fiber, 40.4% for textile material, 38.1% for finished textile products, 34.1% for footwear, 33.1% for textile clothing, 29.7% for knitted garments, 22.1% for synthetic thread and 9.6% for cotton.

Imports of machine-building products also fell by 86% for aircraft and aircraft parts, 62% for rail locomotive parts and equipment, 44% for overland transport, 41.5% for optical instruments and tools, 31.5% for electrical equipment and 31.4% for mechanical equipment. Meanwhile imports of ships and other vessels rose 3.2-fold.

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 #16
Member of Sever battalion Mukhutdinov charged in absentia in Nemtsov murder - lawyer

MOSCOW. Nov 9 (Interfax) - Investigators have charged in absentia Ruslan Mukhutdinov, a member of the Sever battalion, in the killing of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.

"Last Friday, investigators charged Mukhutdinov in absentia with organizing the Nemtsov murder. He was put on the federal wanted persons list," Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer for the victims, told Interfax on Monday.

A source in Moscow familiar with the situation told Interfax on Friday that investigators from the central administration of the Central Investigative Committee had tried to summon Mukhutdinov and Ruslan Geremeyev, deputy commander of the Sever battalion of the Interior Ministry of Chechnya, for questioning, but their family members refused to take the summons.

"It's a good thing that the investigation is going in the right direction, but it is lamentable that the investigators could not bring themselves to bring charges against Geremeyev," the lawyer said.

Prokhorov believes bringing charges against Ruslan Mukhutdinov "is the same as bringing charges against Geremeyev."

Prokhorov earlier said more than once that investigators intend to question Geremeyev and Mukhutdinov as people who may be involved in the politician's murder. The victims' request for the questioning of other persons, including Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Chechnya, was declined.

The Moscow Basmanny Court on October 14 declined Prokhorov's complaint about investigators' actions. The victim and the defense lawyers for suspected perpetrator Zaur Dadayev disagree with this decision. Its legitimacy will be determined by the Moscow City Court.

Nemtsov was assassinated on Moscow's Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge on February 27, 2015. A criminal case was opened based on the articles of the Criminal Code dealing with murder and illegal weapons turnover. Five people implicated in the case (suspected perpetrators Zaur Dadayev, Anzor Gubashev and their suspected accomplices Bakhayev, Shadid Gubashev and Timerlan Eskerkhanov) remain in custody under a Basmanny court decision.

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 #17
The Independent (UK)
November 7, 2015
Egypt plane crash: This attack shows that Russia is hurting Isis
World View: Air power may not be enough to stop the jihadis, who are expecting more help from Turkey now
By Patrick Cockburn

Once again the world has underestimated the strength and viciousness of Isis. The group has always retaliated against any attack by targeting civilians and killing them in a way that ensures maximum publicity. This happened most recently in Turkey on 10 October when Isis suicide bombers killed 102 people attending a pro-Kurdish peace demonstration. In Kobani in Syria at the end of June, Isis suicide squads avenged recent military defeats by the Syrian Kurds by murdering at least 220 men, women and children. In Iraq, the leader of the Albu Nimr tribe told this newspaper how 864 of his tribesmen had been killed over the previous year for resisting Isis advances.

It was always likely that Isis would retaliate against the Russian air campaign in Syria that is targeting its forces and al-Qaeda clones such as the al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham. But the carefully planned destruction of a Russian plane with 224 people on board by a bomb on 31 October has presented Western governments and media with a publicity problem. They had been relentlessly pursuing a propaganda line that the Russian air strikes in Syria have avoided hitting Isis and are almost entirely directed against "moderate" or "Western-backed" Syrian opposition forces seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. The fact that Syrian armed opposition in north-west Syria is dominated by al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham is seldom mentioned.

Isis evidently does not have any doubts about the Russian air strikes being aimed at itself and cannot have done so since the raids started on 30 September, because an operation such as getting a bomb on to a plane at Sharm el Sheikh airport would take weeks to set up. There is a further misunderstanding about the Russian attacks on Isis and other salafi-jihadi armed groups in Syria. They are much heavier than anything being carried out by the US-led coalition, with 59 Russian strikes on one day recently compared to the US launching just nine.

There is a limitation on the use of US air power in Syria which may not be immediately evident, even to those who study communiqu�s issued by the US defence department. Of nine strikes on 6 November, three are described as being near Hawl, an Arab town in north-east Syria where the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) are fighting Isis. Two strikes were near Hasakah, also in north-east Syria and, again apparently, in support of the YPG. The remaining four were near Abu Kamal, near the Iraqi border, said to be an Isis "crude oil collection point".

This is in keeping with the US air campaign's almost exclusive focus in Syria on helping the Syrian Kurds in fighting Isis, and also attacking Isis-controlled oil facilities in north-east Syria. There are seldom any attacks on Isis when it is engaged in fighting the Syrian army because this might be interpreted as keeping Assad in power in Damascus. But this does not make much sense because American and British policy is meant to be to remove Assad, but keep the Syrian state in being. This would be unlike Iraq in 2003 when the US-led invasion overthrew Saddam Hussein, but destroyed the Iraqi state in the process and opened the door to a Sunni insurgency and the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

It would therefore make sense, and have made sense over the last year, for the US air force to attack Isis when it is advancing against the Syrian army. It is this army which is the most important institution of the Syrian state, and if Washington and allies such as the British do not want to repeat the disastrous fiasco of their intervention in Iraq, they should support it when fighting Isis.

Again, sensible policy decisions are blocked by a view of the situation on the ground in Syria that is largely shaped by sloganeering and propaganda. In this case, the Syrian opposition claim is that the Syrian army has never seriously fought Isis and, indeed, is complicit in its growth and expansion. This view has been widely credited, though it is demonstrably false because Isis has repeatedly fought and usually defeated the Syrian army in eastern Syria. It captured Palmyra in May and has since advanced to within a few miles of the crucial north-south M5 highway linking Damascus to Homs. For a few days recently, it cut the last government-held road into Aleppo before being driven back by the Syrian army supported by Russian air strikes.

There are several other points about the US-led air campaign. First, it has failed in its purpose of containing Isis, since its fighters are still advancing in Syria and are holding cities such as Ramadi, Mosul and Fallujah in Iraq which they have captured since the start of 2014. This is despite 7,871 air strikes of which the US has conducted 6,164, with 2,578 of these in Syria. Non-US air forces participating in the operation, part of that great anti-Isis coalition of 65 nations so often commended by the US ambassador to the UK, have carried out just 142 strikes in Syria. The Arab air forces are apparently now  busy bombing Yemen.

For those with good eyesight, there is another figure in small print in the US defence department's daily report on "Inherent Resolve" which is worth thinking about. It says that "as of Nov 3, US and partner nation aircraft have flown an estimated 61,288 sorties in support of operations in Iraq and Syria". In other words, only 10 per cent of sorties are finding targets, showing that, even taking into account reconnaissance and refuelling flights, Isis is difficult to find, as would be expected in an experienced and well-organised guerrilla force. Effectiveness in attacking it depends on good intelligence, which in turn can only come from a competent partner on the ground capable of identifying targets and swiftly passing on this information to aircraft overhead.

All attention at the moment is on the Isis bomb on a Russian plane, claimed four times by Isis though some still doubt that the group is responsible. But a much less dramatic event may have greater long-term impact on the course of the civil war in Syria and Iraq. This is the victory of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the parliamentary elections on 1 November, a victory  welcomed with effusive messages by no fewer than 15 different non-Isis armed opposition groups in Syria. Prominent among those congratulating President Erdogan is the Army of Conquest, which captured much of Idlib province earlier in the year and 90 per cent of whose fighters reportedly come from al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham.

Metin Gurcan, writing in the online magazine al-Monitor, points out that the Army of Conquest says in a statement that Erdogan and the AKP government have never abandoned their support for the Syrian revolution, despite domestic and foreign pressure. Mr Gurcan cites a well-informed Turkish authority saying many of these Syrian opposition "groups are trying to sign non-hostility pacts with Isis" - pacts that say they will not fight Isis unless attacked by them. Governments pretending to distinguish between "moderate opposition" and Isis in Syria should keep this in mind.

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 #18
Komsomolskaya Pravda
November 5, 2015
Russian Aerospace Forces commander interviewed on Syria operation
Interview with Col-Gen Viktor Bondarev, commander in chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces, by Viktor Baranets: Viktor Bondarev, commander in chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces: 'Unlike the Americans, we are actually hitting ISIL members.' The colonel general summed up the initial results of our troops' operation in Syria in an interview with military observer Viktor Baranets

For a month now several dozen Russian aircraft and helicopters have been participating in combat operations in Syria, hitting at armed formations belonging to Islamic State and other terrorist groupings. How was the air operation conceived? How is it going right now? Why is the United States refusing to hit ISIL together with the Russians? Col-Gen Viktor Bondarev, commander in chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces, answered these and many other questions from Komsomolskaya Pravda military observer Viktor Baranets.

Pretend bombing

[Baranets] Viktor Nikolayevich, how do you see the significance of the tragic Syrian events?

[Bondarev] It is a war against the 21st-century plague - international terrorism. Scum from all over the world have gathered on long-suffering Syrian soil. ISIL, the Al-Nusrah Front, and other rabble.

[Baranets] But aircraft belonging to the United States and its allies have been bombing ISIL for more than a year....

[Bondarev] Yes, "bombing" them in such a way that ISIL took control of, first, 30 per cent and then almost 75 per cent of Syrian territory together with major oil facilities. It was a sham, a pretence of fighting the terrorists. This "moderate" opposition was not strong enough to oust Al-Asad. We heard that coalition aircraft were bombing ISIL, but nobody could see the results. And if the legitimate Syrian regime had surrendered to ISIL members and they had become aware of their organization's potential, their ranks would have increased many times over.

[Baranets] Have you been in Syria?

[Bondarev] Yes I have been specifically where our aircraft and helicopters are based.

[Baranets] What was the purpose of your visit?

[Bondarev] I went there when something like 80 per cent of our personnel were already there. I needed to see how ready we were to carry out the combat tasks that we have been set. I looked at how the pilots had settled in and talked with them. I was pleased at their high morale.

[Baranets] Why was it decided to utilize primarily our Aerospace Forces' aircraft and helicopters in Syria; what was the idea here?

[Bondarev] What other method could we have used? Firing missiles every day? That is very wasteful. And indeed ISIL members are a highly mobile gang of bandits. They move around in cars, on motorcycles, on bicycles, on mules, on donkeys. You cannot pursue them with tanks, trucks, or infantry fighting vehicles. After every attack they change position in order to try to avoid casualties. Aircraft are another matter. It was on this basis that the decision was made to use our combat equipment that is located there.

The beginning

[Baranets] Where did the preparation of the air operation begin?

[Bondarev] We calculated all the possible threats. We delivered there not only fighters, attack aircraft, bombers, and helicopters, but also surface-to-air missile systems. Because various kinds of force-majeure circumstances may arise. For example, the hijacking of a warplane on the territory of a state adjacent to Syria and an attack on us. And we need to be ready for that.

[Baranets] How did our aircraft and helicopters get to Syria?

[Bondarev] The aircraft flew there themselves, the helicopters were transported there. Because a helicopter's combat range is not sufficient to fly that far.

[Baranets] Did you not have intelligence information that the Americans had got wind of the relocation of our combat equipment to Syria?

[Bondarev] We blind-sided them....

[Baranets] How specifically?

[Bondarev] I am not going to divulge our strategic concealment arrangements....

Red circles

[Baranets] Nevertheless shortly after the start of the operation (on 30 September - VB) one of the Pentagon general said that "the Russians' aircraft are ready and they might start moving" within days.... Was this objective information?

[Bondarev] In principle we were ready to start within as little as three hours.

[Baranets] After landing?

[Bondarev] Precisely so.

[Baranets] But might they have just been pretending that they had not noticed the relocation of our combat equipment?

[Bondarev] I don't think so. Our appearance in Syria and the start of the air operation fundamentally wrecked their plans in this strategically important region. The Russian army has become a different entity in only the last three years. Rearming it has begun, and the number of contract personnel with a professional mastery of high-tech weaponry has started to increase dynamically. We have started taking delivery of 250 aircraft a year! The combat training system has also changed. Since 2012 we have been carrying out spot checks, which have taught us a very great deal. Because before he launches an attack an enemy is not going to send a telegram saying when specifically and in what area he is going to invade or attack Russia. And spot checks make it possible to understand the real level of the army's combat readiness. We can now get ready to perform combat tasks in a minimal amount of time - even less than what we had planned to get troops to a given level of readiness. It is all of this that predetermined the speed with which we started operating in Syria.... It is not because we are such hotheads and were prepared to just rush into battle. But because all of ISIL's infrastructure and deployment areas had been studied in detail.

[Baranets] In advance?

[Bondarev] Not in advance, but constantly. We carefully carried out reconnaissance and obtained information and are continuing to do so. The aircrew study the areas for upcoming operations. We studied all of the places that are "sensitive" for Syria's civilian population. They include mosques, schools, holy places, hospitals, maternity homes, and schools. We marked them with red circles and arrows. So that not a single bomb should fall there in any circumstances....

[Baranets] They were marked on a map?

[Bondarev] Yes, on every pilot's flight map.

[Baranets] Was this even before the start of the operation?

[Bondarev] Before their use in combat. Because we did not and do not have the right to behave any other way.

[Baranets] Can you tell us the number of aircraft and helicopters that are supporting the Syrian government army's actions from the air?

[Bondarev] There are more than 50 aircraft and helicopters there. Precisely as many as we need. As yet we do not need more.

[Baranets] On what basis were the pilots, navigators, and technicians selected to work in Syria?

[Bondarev] On the basis of their level of readiness as demonstrated in the course of real practical actions - in the course of exercises and checks.

[Baranets] How do you assess your pilots' level of professionalism?

[Bondarev] There is definitely no need to say much here: We demonstrate all of this during Aviadarts [military aviation] competitions and during exercises. I am happy with and proud of my pilots.

[Baranets] Approximately how many flying hours on average did these top guns have before the start of the operation?

[Bondarev] This was late September, and so practically all of the pilots had more than 100 hours. But given that they are there, their flying hours will be significantly greater.

Syria is visible from Arbat [the street on which The Russian Defence Ministry is located]

[Baranets] Does the commander in chief of the Aerospace Forces have the opportunity to see both Syria and his air resources from space?

[Bondarev] Yes he does.

[Baranets] And when you are at the National Defence Control Centre can you see everything online?

[Bondarev] But why should I need to go there? I have my own control point. I can see everything that I need to here too....

[Baranets] Right here, at the High Command?

[Bondarev] Yes. I only have to go across to another office....

[Baranets] How do our pilots in Syria receive information about the positions of ISIL and other terrorist formations?

[Bondarev] First, there is outer space, of course. Second, there are drones. Third, there is aerial reconnaissance. Operational information is also received from intelligence agents. So every target, every task that is set we carefully check and coordinate with the local leadership and Syrian Armed Forces generals, and then we make a decision on each target.

[Baranets] Media sources in the United States and other NATO countries regularly report that Russian aircraft are hitting civilians. How do you react to such information?

[Bondarev] I keep a very watchful eye on my pilots' work. And I can state with 100-per-cent certainty that this cannot happen. And the things that the Americans and their lackeys there dream up - this was actually to be expected. Bullshit is their media weapon. They need to besmirch our work by any means. We are doing this work transparently - showing it to the world every day. But take the work of American pilots in Afghanistan. They do not show that at all! But as regards our counterparts' work, it is not for me to judge.

[Baranets] But if ISIL was to blow up some civilian target and say that the Russians did it, what cover would we have?

[Bondarev] We have the coordinates for every target; we have objective monitoring.

Tactics

[Baranets] How has the intensity of our airstrikes against ISIL changed?

[Bondarev] On the first day we carried out nine strikes. And it then went to 80. The average now is 50-60 strikes a day.

[Baranets] ISIL formations are changing tactics. They have started to move right up close to civilian centres of population, mosques, and hospitals. Is this compelling our pilots to take account of such circumstances?

[Bondarev] Of course.

[Baranets] In what way?

[Bondarev] They are compelled to do so. To hit more accurately. On the other hand, it is even a positive that the terrorists are now fleeing from these fortified checkpoints, clearing the way for the Syrian army. There is nowhere for them to go; they realize very well that a stationary target will be destroyed by us. They are not occupying small villages because the Syrian army is approaching and they can easily bombard these villages with artillery. And the bandits have been forced to concentrate in big towns or centres of population. This again works against them.

[Baranets] Why?

[Bondarev] Because it is easier for the Syrian army to surround a big town and finish their job there.... Whereas for us the only problem is that there has to be precision work by a pilot so locations that are sensitive for Syrian civilians are not hit.

[Baranets] How is this precision achieved?

[Bondarev] First, through reconnaissance. Second, every flight is carefully calculated, every target is studied, the coordinates of this target are computed, and all of this is programmed into the aircraft. In the aircraft it is fully checked several times. Then, when the pilot is approaching his target and there is even the slightest doubt that he might undershoot or overshoot he simply carries out repeat approaches and after that does his job. So this many levels of protection do not allow the pilot to make a mistake.

[Baranets] How did we manage to divide up Syrian airspace with the Americans?

[Bondarev] You know this is probably the only point or agreed decision reached by both the Americans and ourselves, and we signed a memorandum on the use of airspace.

[Baranets] Are the Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi Air Forces participating in combat operations together with our aircraft?

[Bondarev] Yes, Syrian pilots are participating - both army aircraft and attack aircraft. The Iraqis are also participating on their own territory.

[Baranets] And are you appreciative of their professional potential?

[Bondarev] What can I say here.... Their equipment is pretty old compared to ours. But thanks to their combat experience they have also improved their performance and are performing pretty well.

[Baranets] Were they trained on Russian territory?

[Bondarev] Yes, virtually all of them. Admittedly they eventually got their own flying academy, but they are mainly graduates of our academies.

[Baranets] Do we have a single coordinating staff there with a representative of yours coordinating air operations?

[Bondarev] Yes, of course.

[Baranets] Is this done online every day?

[Bondarev] Yes, coordination takes place in that format - there is full information on every sortie, every strike.

Enemy forgeries

[Baranets] There was a story in some foreign media about downed Russian aircraft and helicopters; they even showed a video. What can you say about this?

[Bondarev] I would say that they are indulging in wishful thinking. Thank God, as of today there have been no losses.

[Baranets] How often do you receive information about the state of our air wing?

[Bondarev] I start work with precisely this every day. I am briefed at eight in the morning.

[Baranets] One of the American newspapers reported that in one instance terrorists successfully bombarded our airfield with rocket artillery, while on another occasion the airfield guards allegedly suffered severe losses during an attack by an ISIL detachment. Was there an attack on the airfield?

[Bondarev] No, there was no attack on the airfield. Everybody is alive, thank God.

The battlefield landscape

[Baranets] Syrian territory has a very specific landscape, and there are also sandstorms. How do you take account of all these factors in your pilots' combat work?

[Bondarev] Indeed, Syrian territory, particularly closer to the sea, has a sandy landscape and is a bit hilly and overgrown with vegetation. But beyond that all Syrian territory is virtually flat sandy savanna, more of a desert. So the Syrians' main task is to drive them from mountainous forest terrain and then move onto the plain.

[Baranets] But severe sandstorms happen there, and people say that by as early as the end of the year they might be shrouded in dust....

[Baranets] The rainy season is now beginning there, and pretty much not a day goes by without there being storms there. This mainly happens in the afternoon. So we will of course be operating at night. Although in principle it makes no difference to us whether it is day or night.

[Baranets] How are relations between the civilian population in Syria and our pilots shaping up?

[Bondarev] The Syrians know very well the location of the airfield from which we are operating. We have been there for a long time, and there has not been a single instance of a complaint from the Syrians. I am 100-per-cent confident that this will continue to be the case.

[Baranets] Is the work of our aircraft and helicopters in Syria maybe also a kind of laboratory, a test of our combat equipment in real battlefield conditions?

[Bondarev] Undoubtedly. We are checking out all the equipment there and its potential. We are checking out our attack systems - how they behave in given situations. Naturally we have no right to leave all of this unanalysed, unstudied, unimproved, and so forth.

[Baranets] There was a story that one of our plants is already operating on a three-shift basis.... Our pilots in Syria are reportedly short of missiles....

[Bondarev] Total garbage! As yet not a single enterprise director has called me and said that he is running out of steam.

[Baranets] How do you assess the effectiveness of these weapons?

[Bondarev] I consider that there are splendid weapons, they have proved themselves well. It is not for nothing that other countries buy them. So there have been no complaints. Except from those who are being hit by these weapons....

[Baranets] But what about the incident when our aircraft flew into Turkish airspace? Why did they make such a big fuss there?

[Bondarev] Our aircraft was performing a combat task in northern Syria there. There was very dense cloud. When our fighter started flying along the border with Turkey the equipment showed that some ground-based air defence systems were attempting to intercept the warplane. So the pilot was forced to carry out an antimissile manoeuvre within seconds. And he strayed slightly into Turkish airspace. Which we honestly admitted....

Debut

[Baranets] The use of the combat aircraft and air defence systems in Syria is essentially the Aerospace Forces' debut. It is virtually the Aerospace Forces' first involvement in real wartime conditions.

[Bondarev] Yes, its first involvement since 1 August.

[Baranets] And how do you assess this "debut?"

[Bondarev] The strength of our category of troops has increased and strengthened, of course. The supreme commander in chief's decision to merge us into a single "strike force" was absolutely correct. We have amalgamated outer space, air defence, and the air force. That is to say, all these areas have been gathered together and we are carrying out combat standby duty in this environment. And we are currently fine-tuning this entire "setup," including in Syria....

[Baranets] What finally would you like to say to your subordinates in Syria from the pages of Komsomolskaya Pravda?

[Bondarev] I would first like to thank our pilots, technicians, and air defence experts for their excellent work there. I would like to express enormous gratitude to their families for the fact that they understand that their husbands, sons, and brothers are doing a very important job there. I am very gratified that there has been not a single complaint, not a single refusal, not a single wish to leave there. And I would also like to thank the leadership of the country and the Defence Ministry for the fact that we have acquired splendid equipment and can resolve any task that we are set.

 [return to Contents] 

 #19
New York Times
November 9, 2015
Confirmation of Attack on Russian Jet May Strengthen Putin's Resolve in Syria
By NEIL MacFARQUHARN

MOSCOW - The main bell in St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg tolled 224 times on Sunday, once for each victim of the destruction of a Russian charter flight in Egypt a week ago.

Although President Vladimir V. Putin and his aides at first indignantly dismissed suspicions of a terrorist act, the Kremlin has since then clearly come to grips with the idea that a bomb was probably involved in the crash: Late Friday it suspended all travel by Russians to Egypt, and initiated an emergency airlift that by Sunday had repatriated 11,000 Russians, by government count.

Should an attack be confirmed - and particularly if the Islamic State's claim that it bombed the plane in revenge for Russia's intervention in Syria turns out to be true - analysts and other experts expect that it will only strengthen Mr. Putin's resolve to become more deeply involved in the Middle East.

First, Mr. Putin said the Russian Air Force's bombing campaign in Syria was partly intended to help dismantle the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which includes up to 7,000 fighters from Russia and the former Soviet Union. One worry is that they might return to wage a terrorist war in Russia. An attack against a civilian airliner would confirm that Russian interests were already being threatened - and might cause Russia to begin targeting the Islamic State more aggressively.

Second, Mr. Putin's Syrian intervention has been taken as an attempt to show that Russia is again become a global power capable of tackling the world's most intractable problems. Reversing course after the first setback, however violent, would undercut that image.

Third, the Russian leader has painted the West, and the United States in particular, as quick to abandon its Arab allies since the dawn of the Arab Spring in 2011 and its chaotic aftermath. Syria, now beleaguered, has been Russia's only Arab ally for decades, but Mr. Putin has also been courting President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt. A terrorist attack by enemies of the Egyptian government will most likely strengthen, not diminish, that effort.

Ever since the Russian Air Force began bombing targets in Syria at the end of September, Mr. Putin has repeated the theme that it is better to attack terrorists on their home territory. His response in the face of any terrorist attack will probably be to double down, analysts said. But he is still likely to avoid committing ground forces, which polls show remains highly unpopular among Russians.

"If it was a terrorist act, that pushes the stakes higher and makes this Syria operation more costly," said Vladimir Frolov, a political analyst. "It also proves the point that terrorists have to be destroyed before they come to our own land."

The problem, he said, is that "Russia's current strategy cannot defeat the Islamic State."

Russia deployed more than 50 combat aircraft in Syria, along with some 4,000 troops. About half of them were already there as advisers and technicians, while most of the rest are ground forces needed to protect the pilots and various bases.

The strategy as laid out by Mr. Putin was that the Russian Air Force would bolster the weakened military forces under President Bashar al-Assad, allowing them to strengthen their hold on Syria and then to take on the Islamic State strongholds in western Syria, using Syrian and allied ground forces.

Alexei Makarkin, an analyst at the Center for Political Technologies, saw two main options for Russia. One, he said, was that "Russia can intensify the Syria operation, send more troops and volunteers to support Assad." That move, he said, would probably worsen already strained ties with the West.

In the second option, "Fighting the Islamic State will become a priority rather than supporting Assad," he said. "In this situation, Russia will pressure Assad to move toward a transitional government." Those efforts had already started but not gotten very far before the attack.

In the few instances that Mr. Putin has spoken out about the crash, it was mostly to offer his condolences. Soon, though, he will need to explain the catastrophe at home - especially given the Kremlin's initial insistence on dismissing the idea that the plane's downing could be linked to Syria.

Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and frequent Kremlin critic, argued that Mr. Putin intervened in Syria to fulfill his own international political ambitions and so would avoid anything suggesting that ordinary Russians might pay a price for his gamble.

"They do not want to link the plane crash with Syria, because then the question is, 'Why did we go into fight in Syria at all? Does it correspond to Russia's basic national interests?' " Mr. Belkovsky said on Dozhd television, a tiny independent media outlet.

Last week somebody floated two plain wooden coffins in a canal in St. Petersburg - home to most of the victims - one spray-painted with the question "For what?" in red, and the other with "For whom?"

"The Kremlin will have to reverse cause and effect here so that its strategy is not seen as leading to civilian deaths," said Maxim Trudolyubov, an editor at large for the newspaper Vedomosti.

Still, the Kremlin has one important factor in its favor as it seeks to shape public opinion: a deepening belief in the Russian public, stoked by Mr. Putin's propaganda machine, that Western governments are conspiring against the country's interests.

Indeed, the idea that the West created the Islamic State in the first place is taken as a given here. And it took little time for allies of the Kremlin to frame the plane's downing as yet another example of Western malfeasance.

One official almost immediately seized on the early British suspension of flights to Sharm el Sheikh, from which the downed plane took off, calling it a form of psychological warfare on Russia.

"There is a geopolitical pressure against Russia's actions in Syria," Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Federation Council, Russia's upper house, was quoted as saying by the RIA Novosti news agency.

He added: "It might sound blasphemous, but there are plenty of those who, without any grounds, would like to deliberately blame this catastrophe on the reaction of the jihadists to Russia's actions."

Sputnik News, an arm of the Russian government efforts to spread its point of view globally, published a column suggesting that British intelligence might have blown up the plane.

"It is not hard to imagine that both would like to see Russian President Vladimir Putin incurring a political backlash from his nation over what is Russia's worst-ever air crash," said the commentary. "Was it really terrorists, or was it British MI-6 agents palming the deed off as terrorists?"

Suspicions that the West is withholding information, voiced by the Russian Foreign Ministry, reflect the distrust between the two sides. The United States raised similar suspicions after the Boston Marathon bombers turned out to be two brothers with roots in the Russian Caucasus.

Other analysts said that the slow Kremlin reaction compared with other governments' responses reflected both Mr. Putin's own caution and the desire not to harm Egypt: Russians make up about a third of the nine million tourists who visit the country annually. Almost 80,000 still need to be flown home, government officials said.

Egypt used to be the Soviet Union's most important ally in the region, until President Anwar Sadat expelled all its military advisers in 1972. Mr. Putin has been trying to rebuild that relationship.

Not only does it counter American influence, but it is important for domestic reasons for Russia to have a strong Sunni Muslim ally at a time when it is allied with two Shiite Muslim governments, Iran and Syria, in a fight against Sunni jihadists. The estimated 20 million Muslims in Russia are overwhelmingly Sunni.

"It is important for Russia to be seen in the Middle East to be in close touch with the biggest Arab country," said Dimitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center. "It feels uncomfortable with this alliance with Shiite power."

Still, many expect a forceful response in Syria if the airplane downing is traced back to the Islamic State.

"A terrorist attack against Russian citizens means a declaration of war against all Russians," wrote Tatiana Stanovaya, an analyst, on Slon.ru, a current events website. "The Syria campaign will thus become not a matter of Putin's ambitions, but of national revenge."

Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.

 [return to Contents] 

 #20
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
November 7, 2015
How Russia Is Saving Syria
Conduct of military campaign shows that it is carefully weighed to achieve Russia's political objective of a united and secular Syrian state
By Alexander Mercouris

The Russian military campaign in Syria has now been underway for several weeks.

This provides a good opportunity for an overview.

There has been no increase in the forces Russia has deployed in Syria since the start of the campaign there.  

There have been no further cruise missile strikes on jihadi positions in Syria from the Caspian Sea.

The Russians have publicly ruled out enlarging their force. They have said they will not engage in ground operations. There are no plans to launch strikes with long range TU22 bomber aircraft flying from Russia.

The Russians say the present force is adequate to achieve their objectives.

That provides an important clue as to what those objectives are.

The Russians have also said they have held no discussions with the Iraqis about deploying Russian aircraft in Iraq, or about bombing the Islamic State there.

That shows the objectives the Russians have set themselves concern only Syria.

The Russians have provided detailed reports of the targets they are striking. There is no reason to doubt the truth of these reports.  

The reports show the Russians' primary target is the infrastructure the jihadis have built up to support their war effort: command centres, weapons depots, training centres, and communications facilities as well as oil pipelines, workshops and factories.

The Russians have on occasion destroyed jihadi vehicle convoys (there are reliable reports that a 16 vehicle convoy belonging to the Islamic State was destroyed in this way) and they regularly report the destruction of major items of military hardware belonging to the jihadis such as tanks and artillery. However, these targets appear to be secondary.

There are also a few reports of the Russian airforce providing direct air support to Syrian troops engaged in offensive operations, though the extent to which this is happening appears for the moment to be limited.

What conclusions can we draw from all this?

Firstly, it is clear that the purpose of the deployment is not to defeat the jihadi insurgency in Syria or to destroy the Islamic State through air power.  

The strike force in Latakia - which the Russians insist they have no plan to increase - is obviously inadequate for such a task.  

That the Russians have ruled out expanding their strike force suggests that they do not think that it is possible to defeat the jihadi rebellion in Syria by air power alone.

This is consistent with Russian military philosophy. The Russians have never bought into the US idea of "victory through air power". Russia's operational military doctrine is based on the principle of "combined arms" in which every arm of the military service is used together in a complimentary way to achieve victory.

The pattern of Russian activity in Syria in fact bears out what we said previously about the purpose of the deployment: it was done to prevent the US from declaring a "no-fly zone" over Syria.

If the size of the strike force is obviously inadequate to win the Syrian civil war and destroy the Islamic State, it has proved fully adequate for the purpose of preventing the US from declaring a "no-fly zone".

We know the US planned to set up a "no-fly zone". The US has admitted as much.

We know the US was in active discussion with its allies to set up such a "no-fly zone" over the course of the summer.   

Deployment of the Russian strike force to Syria has forced the US to abandon the idea.  

There have been some worries - exacerbated by excited talk from perennial war hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski - that the US might attack the Russian strike force in order to humiliate Russia and impose the "no-fly zone" despite Russian opposition.

As we discussed previously, the launch of the Russian cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea - demonstrating that all US bases in the region are within striking range of a potentially devastating Russian counter-strike - has put paid to that idea.

The reason there have been no further Russian cruise missile strikes is not because Russia's Caspian Flotilla has run out of long range cruise missiles, as some have suggested.  

It is because the cruise missile strike achieved its purpose, which was to demonstrate to the US Russia's ability to launch a counter strike if its strike force in Syria is attacked.

The Russians' success in forcing the US to drop its plan for a "no-fly zone" has had a dramatic effect on the strategic calculus.

In contemporary parlance "no-fly zone" - whatever its original meaning - is now simply shorthand for "US bombing campaign".

Had the US declared a "no fly zone" it would have rapidly evolved into an all-out bombing campaign against the Syrian government and military.

That is what happened in Yugoslavia and Iraq in the 1990s and in Libya in 2011, and the same would have happened in Syria.

The "no fly zone" would have been accompanied by the declaration of "safe havens" inside Syria. We know this was the plan, and incredibly there are some people who still demand it (see here and here).

These "safe havens" would have been presented as areas for civilians and refugees to flee to for safety from attack ("barrel-bombing") by the Syrian army and airforce. Based on what happened in Yugoslavia and Iraq in the 1990s and in Libya in the 2011, they would quickly have become base areas under rebel control.

Before long, to the accompaniment of a furious media campaign, the "safe havens" would have been extended to all and every part of Syria where refugees and civilians were supposedly "in danger" from the Syrian government. It would have been only a question of time before they included the whole of Damascus and Aleppo, and towns like Homs and Hama.

The US airforce, supported by those of Britain, France, Turkey and probably Jordan, would then have gone into action "to protect" "the safe havens" by bombing the Syrian military and - as was the case in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya - the civilian infrastructure upon which the Syrian state and military depend.

Many more civilians would of course have died but as was the case in Yugoslavia and Libya that would not have stopped the bombing.

As the bombing campaign escalated, weapons and special forces to "advise" the rebels would have poured in, and it would only have been a matter of time before the Syrian government and military collapsed.

It was to prevent this scenario that the Russians acted. By acting as they did, they stopped it in its tracks.

That the Russian action was first and foremost intended to stop Western military action against Syria - and has been completely successful in that respect - is best illustrated by the effect it has had in Britain.

To the dismay of Britain's war hawks, the British government has been forced to abandon its plan to bomb Syria. A report by a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee makes clear it was Russia's intervention that was the decisive factor (see paragraph 28 of the report here).

The US for its part has been forced - very much against its will - into an accommodation with the Russians.  

It has agreed to a technical agreement with the Russians to coordinate the flight of US and Russian aircraft in Syrian airspace. It has even been obliged to undertake joint exercises with the Russians to iron out problems.

The US is deploying F15C fighter aircraft to its base at Incirlik in Turkey and F22 fighter aircraft to its bases in Saudi Arabia, and has stepped up supplies of weapons - including TOW anti tank missiles - to the rebels.

These are not steps preparatory to an attack on the Russian strike force. They are an attempt to redress the balance in the region, which is tilting heavily to the Russians.

With Russia's SU30 and SU34 aircraft technologically superior to all other aircraft deployed in the region, the US urgently needs to reassure its allies - especially Israel and Turkey - that it can match the very advanced aircraft Russia is deploying in the region.

Similarly the supply of weapons to the rebels is intended to reassure the rebels - and their supporters in Washington - that the US is not abandoning them. The US knows the weapons are insufficient to change the situation on the ground, especially as the Russians are more than capable of matching them.

Once it is clearly understood that the purpose for Russia's deployment of the strike force was to prevent the US bombing Syria - not to defeat the jihadi insurgency single handedly by airpower alone - everything else about the Russian deployment falls into place.

By preventing a US attack on Syria, the Russians have bought time for diplomacy to work and for the Syrian army to regain its strength.

The diplomacy of recent weeks has been thoroughly discussed by the Saker and by Patrick Armstrong and I will say no more about it other than to repeat what I have said before - that the plan the Russians are pushing is in all essentials the same plan that was agreed in Geneva in 2012 but which was wrecked by the Syrian rebels and their Western backers when they made the resignation of President Assad a precondition for talks.

There is no sign the Syrian rebels or their Western sponsors have backed off from this demand. On the contrary what looks like a deliberate Western misinformation campaign about Russia's position on the question suggests they have made no shift at all (for a detailed discussion of Russia's position and the reasons for it see my article from 2012 here).

The inclusion of Iran in the talks is however a breakthrough.

It suggests that whilst the hardliners are still in the ascendant, the realists in Washington led by Secretary of State Kerry understand that US objectives in Syria are no longer achievable.  

It seems that they are playing a waiting game - engaging Russia and Iran in talks and keeping negotiations going until the situation on the ground changes to the point where all but the most stubborn of the hardliners in Washington are forced to accept that a diplomatic settlement along the lines agreed in 2012 in Geneva is unavoidable.

What are however the prospects for a change in the situation on the ground?

If the Russian deployment has bought time for diplomacy to take place, it has also bought time for the Syrian army to recover.

Three years of intense fighting has left the Syrian army an exhausted force.

Casualties in men and equipment have been very high. The Syrian army has been forced to withdraw from large areas of the country in order to concentrate on defending what it can.

Though tempered by war, the Syrian army appears to suffer from many of the structural problems that afflict all Arab armies (see here).  

The fact that it is said to find it difficult to maintain an advance in the face of small numbers of rebel anti tank missiles (according to some reports just 50 TOW anti tank missiles were sufficient to defeat an advance by the Syrian army in 2014 to relieve Aleppo) suggests its infantry lacks aggression and offensive spirit, and is poorly coordinated with its tank units.

It may also mean that supplies of tanks - or of the technicians and spare parts necessary to keep them going - are running low, so that the few tanks still in running order have to be carefully husbanded. This may explain the reluctance to risk them when there are anti tank missiles present.

It is the condition of the Syrian military that explains the character of the Russian air campaign.  

By targeting the rebels' infrastructure the Russians are disrupting the rebels' logistics chain. By doing so they are preventing the rebels from sustaining an offensive. That gives the Syrian army the time it needs to recover and rebuild its strength.  

Once the Syrian military has been rebuilt - with Russian supplies and technical help and with men, material and training provided by Iran - the damage to the rebels' infrastructure will make it more difficult for them to withstand the Syrian army's offensive when it comes.

In the meantime limited operations - all the Syrian army seems presently capable of - are being conducted to relieve pressure points.  

Syria's northern city of Aleppo - once Syria's largest city and its economic capital - has been under continuous siege since 2012. A few weeks ago it was practically cut off. Russian air support has helped the Syrian army break the siege and reopen roads and supply lines into the city.

Elsewhere, under cover of Russian aircraft, the Syrian army appears to be engaging in limited offensive operations in the direction of Palmyra - a site of immense cultural significance - and near Damascus.  

Information on the progress of these offensives is limited and contradictory (see for example here and here) but what evidence there is suggests that for the first time this year the Syrian army is gaining ground overall rather than losing it.

The Russian air campaign is therefore carefully judged and is achieving its objectives.

1. It has prevented the US and its allies carrying out their plan for a bombing campaign that would have resulted in the overthrow of the Syrian government;

2. It has provided time and space for a renewed diplomatic effort paving the way for an eventual political settlement based on Russian ideas.  These exclude the setting up of an Islamist jihadi state on Syrian territory. As the Saker correctly says the US appears to have conceded the point;

3. It has provided time and space for the Syrian army to recover, so that it can eventually go on the offensive, creating the conditions for the political settlement the Russians want to impose; and

4. It is weakening the rebels' infrastructure, preventing them launching an offensive and weakening them in preparation for the Syrian military offensive which is to come.

Of these four objectives the first is the most important since without achieving it the other three would be impossible.

As things stand, the first objective has been achieved. The US bombing campaign has been called off in a major success for Russian policy.

The other three objectives continue to be a work in progress.  

The Syrian conflict provides a text-book example of how the Russians conduct foreign policy.  

They do not separate the military from the political in the way that Western powers do.

Nor do they allow the military to dictate the whole approach.

Nor do they see war and diplomacy as mutually exclusive, with the one beginning when the other stops.

On the contrary the Russians see war and diplomacy as complimentary instruments the Russian state uses to achieve its objectives, which are invariably set by the country's political leadership, and which are always framed in strictly political terms focused exclusively - and unashamedly - on Russia's national interests.

In the Syrian conflict the objective is to preserve the Syrian state as it was before the conflict - independent, united, functional and secular - so that an Islamist jihadi state that might pose a threat to Russia is not established on Syrian territory.  

Grandiose ideologically conceived objectives dressed up in moralistic language of "remaking the Middle East" or of spreading "democracy" there form no part of Russia's objectives.  

Since such megalomania has no part in what the Russians are up to, they have no need to commit massive forces to achieve vague and over ambitious objectives which are in fact unachievable.

The Russian intervention can therefore be pitched more modestly - at precisely the level needed to achieve the objective the political leadership has set - which is what we are seeing.

Whereas Westerners often quote Clausewitz's famous dictum - "war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means" - it is the Russians who actually apply it.

As for the Russian aircraft that crashed over Sinai, if it was destroyed by a bomb - as is looking increasingly likely - that will not change Russian policy in the least.

Those who think it will do not understand the Russian approach to foreign policy, and underestimate the clearheaded and single-minded way the Russians pursue their objectives.

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 #21
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
November 6, 2015
Vienna talks on Syria a reminder about Cold War legacy for Russia, US
Russia Direct sat down with retired American diplomat John Evans to discuss recent achievements of the Vienna-2 talks on Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin's position in the 2015 Forbes ranking and the lessons from 2015 for U.S.-Russia bilateral relations.
By Pavel Koshkin

Amidst numerous warnings about a looming U.S.-Russia proxy war over Syria, diplomats have been doing their best to prevent a worst case scenario or at least start a process of political settlement of the Syrian crisis, as indicated by a recent Vienna-2 summit that took place in late October.

That effort brought to the negotiation table 19 countries, including Russia, the U.S. and the Middle East's perennial rivals: Saudi Arabia and Iran. All this seems to be a light at the end tunnel amidst the highly charged political rhetoric of Russian and American leaders.

The long political process of settling the war in Syria might - at best - be the start of easing the Moscow-Washington confrontation as was the case shortly before perestroika in 1985, the famous reforms undertaken by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the time when the Soviet-American ties were strengthened.
Recommended: "What Obama and Putin should know about each other"

However, the highly unfavorable geopolitical situation in 1981-1983 and ideological face-off was followed by the perestroika revival of cultural exchanges and renewed dialogue between the Kremlin and the White House in 1985.

In 1981 the Soviet Union was continuing the war in Afghanistan and a new U.S. President, Ronald Reagan, had been elected, with tough rhetoric toward Russia and no sign of reconciliation. In 1983, the Soviet Air Force shot down a South Korean Boeing, Korean Airlines Flight 007, with 269 passengers on board, including a U.S. Congressman, which affected Soviet-American relations very severely: It resulted in American sanctions on the Soviet Union, increased political pressure and stimulated spy hysteria in both countries.

John M. Evans, a retired American diplomat with extensive experience, the former director of the Russian Affairs Office at the U.S. Department of State (2002-2004), had his first tour of duty at the U.S. Embassy to Moscow during these difficult times, from 1981 to 1983.

He knows very well that it was very challenging for Moscow and Washington to see eye-to-eye, but they finally did find common ground during perestroika. There are a lot of parallels with the current state of bilateral relations: the Ukraine crisis, the downing of MH17 Malaysian Boeing over Donbas, Russia's campaign in Syria. However, Evans remains optimistic about the future of U.S.-Russia relations and believes the decline is cyclical in its nature.

Russia Direct sat recently down with Evans to discuss the latest international events, including the Vienna-2 talks on Syria, as well as the new rating of Forbes magazine which for the third time ranked Russian President Vladimir Putin the world's most influential man in 2016.

Russia Direct: How do you assess the Vienna-2 talks over the Syrian crisis: To what extent will these negotiations contribute to resolving the Syrian standoff?

John Evans: Clearly the recent talks in Vienna represented only the start of a diplomatic process that is long overdue, but the simple fact that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry were able to bring all the major external actors to the table was an extraordinary achievement in and of itself.  

It is too early to talk about concrete achievements on the ground, but the fact that the parties were able to agree on some basic principles, for example, that Syria should be a home to people of all faiths, was impressive. It remains to be seen whether the process will live up to its early promise. The same might have been said of the Congress of Vienna when it began.

RD: Forbes recognized Putin as the world's most influential man for the third time. How can you account for this: Was it his positive or negative contribution that helped him to maintain the leading positions in the ranking?

J.E.: From 1994 to 1997, I served as U.S. Consul General in St. Petersburg. There I got to know the future Russian president when he was first deputy mayor. I have been saying for years, at least since 2000, that people in Washington were making a mistake to underestimate Mr. Putin, so the Forbes ranking does not come as a surprise to me. Clearly his leadership in bringing Russia back from the disasters of the 1990s, and the support Russian voters have given him since then, are the basic building blocks of his power and influence. Even Forbes admits that its rankings are somewhat subjective, but in this case, I do not think they are wrong.

RD: What would you recommend to the next U.S. presidential administration to do with Russia?

J.E.: I am an unapologetic advocate of working with Russia. I think the United States and Russia have many common interests, although we went through very difficult days in the Cold War, and still view the world in different ways.  

Let's remember that we got through the Cold War without actually going to war. So, rather than a war, it was a long period of tense peace, you might call it, as [American foreign policy analyst] Strobe Talbott has, a "nuclear peace," because it was a peace enforced by the fact that we knew we had the possibility of ending life on earth. Fortunately, we had the wisdom not to do that.

The fact that we finally got through the Cold War is our common inheritance. And I think that we can get through other things too. I do not believe that the current tensions truly constitute a new Cold War.

The evidence of that is the fact that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov are still in close communication; they are able to work together and share some common goals, although, as former hockey players, they know they will occasionally collide on the ice.

RD: 2015 is coming to an end. What lessons should Russia and the U.S. draw from this turbulent year?

J.E.: One of the first things we should have learned one hundred years ago after World War I is that our own pre-conceived ideas and our own internal processes can lead to unforeseen circumstances and great tragedies. It is very dangerous to make facile judgments about what the other side is thinking.

And this implies we should keep the channels of communication open. We should talk when possible. Our leaders should not assume the worst motives in everything the other side does. But, most importantly, we should learn to really listen to each other.

President Putin has consistently expressed his ideas and thinking in his public appearances and speeches, yet there are some Washington politicians and journalists who do not really want to know what he has actually said, and, worse, probably do not care.

It is common for people in the United States to ask "What does Putin want?" but if they had been listening to what he has been saying starting with his 2007 Munich speech, they would have a much clearer idea of what he and the group around him are thinking.  We have to listen to each other more closely, and it is important to show respect to one's international partners.

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#22
The Unz Review
www.unz.com
November 8, 2015
Week Five of the Russian Intervention in Syria: The Russians Are Digging in
By The Saker

Whether this tragedy was directly linked to the war in Syria or not, there is no doubt that the downing of Kogalymavia Flight 9268 was the main event of the past week. Since I have covered this issue elsewhere, I shall not return to it in detail again here. I will just repeat here my personal conclusion that this tragedy will not impact the Russian operation in Syria or affect the political situation inside Russia. As for the cause of the tragedy, there are increasing indications that both western and Russian security services have come to a tentative conclusion that it was, indeed, a bomb. On Friday, the head of the Federal Security Service has recommended canceling all flights to Egypt and the evacuation of all the Russian citizens in Egypt (roughly 70,000 people). Several EU countries have also taken similar measures.

There has, however, been another interesting but less noticed development this week in the Russian operation in Syria: the Russians are quietly but very effectively "digging in".

For the first time, Russia has officially declared that air-defense units were also deployed with the Russian forces. Until now, the main burden for air defense had fallen upon the Russian Navy and, specifically, the ships equipped with the naval variant of the S-300 missile system. This was not an optimal solution not only because it put the burden of defending land based assets from the sea, tying down the Russian navy expeditionary force, but also because this solution only "covered" about half of Syria.

TSaker-4W-1 The use of the Moskva guided missile cruiser was a stop-gap measure designed to protect the Russian force in Latakia, but now it appears that dedicated air defense units have been deployed. These are most likely the land-based versions of the S-300 missile, possibly in combination with point defense systems such as the Pantsir-S1 and other, shorter range, MANPADs such as the 9K338 Igla-S and the advanced 9K33 Verba.

There are also reports indicating that the Russians have deployed very sophisticated electronic warfare units including top-of-the line Krasukhka-4 EW systems which are amongst the most sophisticated mobile EW systems ever built and they are reportedly capable of jamming AWACS and satellites in space. Add to this the presense of SU-30SMs in the skies, and you have a force capable of controlling the Syrian skies.

When asked about this Russian officials gave a cute reply: they said that these air-defense systems were deployed in case of a hijacked being used to attack the Russian airbase in Latakia. Right.

The real purpose of these efforts is becoming obvious: Russia is trying to deny the US the control of the skies over Syria and, so far, there is very little the USA can do about it (short of starting WWIII). Furthermore, the Russians are also sending a message to Turkey, France and Israel - all countries which have, at different times and in different ways, indicated that they wanted to use the Syrian airspace for their own purposes.

There are now also reports of Russian special forces being sent to Syria. The WSJ suggested that these forces could be given the tasks of liaising with Syrian intelligence and acting as forward air controllers (FACs). I also personally see another important task for these units: to pre-position hidden fuel caches for the Russian helicopters should there be a need to send them to rescue downed Russian pilots in eastern Syria (Russian Spetsnaz units did create such fuel cashes in southern Afghanistan during the war).

TSaker-4W-2 Take a look at the combat radius of Russian helicopters in Syria. Ideally, a search and rescue mission would employ both a dedicated attack helicopter such as the Mi-24 and a multi-role helicopter such as the Mi-17, the former provider cover and protection for the latter. It would also be possible to have SU-25s protecting Mi-17s, but the best possible version would be to have a covert refueling base somewhere deep inside nominally Daesh territory to extend the range of the rescue teams.

Some western sources believe that Russian special forces might also be given direct action missions. This is absolutely possible and such missions are well within the capabilities of the Spetsnaz GRU. Still, there primary mission is a special reconnaissance one and while they might be used to destroy a high value Daesh target (material or human), we will probably never hear about it.

What is certain is that the Russians are steadily increasing their capabilities in Syria and that their presence is rapidly growing from a small and vulnerable force to a much more balanced and capable one.

The Syrians, in the meanwhile, might be achieving their first real successes in their counter offensive. While the Syrian government forces have been slowly pushing back Daesh on many fronts, this progress had, until now, failed to yield an operational breakthrough. This might be happening right now with the much awaited reopening of the highway to Aleppo.

The main problem for the Russians remains the fact that the Syrian military has not been able to capitalize on the Russian intervention. This is due to a combination of factors including the fact that the Syrian military is over-streched and unable to concentrate enough forces in one location to achieve a significant breakthrough and the fact that Daesh fighters are well dug-in and are, by all accounts, resisting with determination and skill. Still, the Russian air campaign is degrading the Daesh capabilities and it is possible that, eventually, this will result in a sudden collapse of the Daesh lines in a critical part of the front. For example, the Syrian army is, reportedly, only a few miles from liberating the Kuweyres military airbase and even though its progress is very slow it is likely that the Syrians will eventually break the Daesh siege of this crucial objective. Likewise, in Djobar neighborhood of Damascus is gradually being clearly in, again, a slow moving but successful operation.

All in all, I am very cautiously optimistic and I keep hoping for an operational victory for the Syrians. If it does not happen, the Iranians and Hezbollah will have to move much larger forces in.

 

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 #23
Washington Post
November 7, 2015
Editorial
Russian and Egyptian officials are not to be trusted over airline crash

THE CRASH of a Russian airliner in the Sinai Peninsula last week posed an immediate test for Russia, whose citizens made up most of the 224 killed, and for Egypt, which is responsible for security at the beach resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, where the flight originated. So it says much about the autocratic regimes that control the two countries that the first word that the destruction of the aircraft might have been a terrorist attack - and the first measures to protect the tens of thousands of tourists still in the Sinai - came from the government of Britain.

Prime Minister David Cameron, saying it was "more likely than not" that "a terrorist bomb" had destroyed the airliner, suspended regular British flights to Sharm el-Sheikh while taking steps to bring home some 20,000 British tourists stranded there. The governments of Vladi�mir Putin in Moscow and Abdel Fatah al-Sissi in Cairo reacted indignantly. While Mr. Putin suspended Russian flights on Friday, his spokesman was still insisting there was no reason to conclude that there had been an act of terrorism. When not issuing his own denials, Egypt's transport minister was obstructing the British evacuation effort, reducing the number of London flights from 29 to eight .

While Western governments worried about protecting their citizens, the Sissi and Putin regimes were focused on defending themselves. Both rulers have sold themselves as warriors courageously taking on the Islamic State and its affiliates; both are using that fight as a pretext to accomplish other ends, such as repressing peaceful domestic opponents and distracting attention from declining living standards. On the actual battlefield, both are failing: Mr. Sissi has been unable to pacify the Sinai in two years of scorched-earth operations, while Mr. Putin's offensive against rebels fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria has quickly bogged down.

As U.S. officials underlined, there are strong indications but so far no conclusive evidence that the plane was bombed. Yet to concede that the Islamic State might have penetrated Egyptian security at the Sharm el-Sheikh airport, and that Mr. Putin's Syrian ad�ven�ture could have prompted the worst civil air attack in Russia's history, would be not just an embarrassment but a potentially grievous political wound. So the two regimes are turning to familiar tactics: bluster and obfuscation. Mr. Sissi told the BBC that suggestions of terrorism must be intended "to damage the stability and security of Egypt and the image of Egypt." Russian officials, who still deny the overwhelming evidence that a Russian anti-aircraft missile downed a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine last year, are insisting that it will take months to draw any conclusions. .

The state media controlled by Messrs. Putin and Sissi have a nasty habit of blaming all disasters on the United States, no matter how far-fetched the theory required. So we won't be surprised if Russians and Egyptians are told the CIA is somehow responsible for the tragedy in the Sinai. Those seeking a more rational conclusion must consider this somber point: The Egyptian and Russian regimes are far less adept at fighting terrorism than they are at lying.

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 #24
Defensenews.com
November 8, 2015
Russia's '16 Defense Spending To Remain Essentially Flat
By Matthew Bodner

MOSCOW - A draft copy of Russia's 2016 federal budget shows that its military spending will remain essentially flat next year, with a modest increase of 0.8 percent, while the majority of Russian government spending is set for cuts amid an economic downturn.

But Russia's economic crisis, spurred in part by Western economic sanctions following the annexation of Crimea last year and the collapse of global oil prices - which, in turn, cut the ruble's value by nearly half - appears to have thrown a wrench in procurement plans.Russian military spending has been rising each year since an ambitious 20 trillion ruble (US $700 billion at the time) modernization and rearmament program was launched in 2011. The program kicked into high gear last year, when expenditures jumped 26 percent over 2014.

According to a draft 2016 military budget, "the 2016 budget allocation for national defense is planned at 3.145 trillion rubles [US $50 billion]," or around four percent of Russia's expected gross domestic product next year, the TASS news agency reported.

Going into 2015, the State Duma - Russia's lower house of Parliament - allocated about 3.3 trillion rubles (US $52 billion) for defense expenditures. Economic realities this year later forced a 5 percent reduction to just over 3.1 trillion rubles, which still represented a 26 percent increase.

If approved, next year's budget will see just 25.5 billion rubles ($400 million), or less than one percent, added over 2015.

With around two-thirds of Russian military spending typically allocated for procurements under the state rearmament program and the value of the ruble contributing to inflation at home, it is not clear that Russia will be able to continue its procurement programs as planned.

In 2015, nearly 2 trillion rubles of the budget (US $32 billion) was allocated to procurements. IHS analyst Craig Caffrey wrote in June that Russia would need to begin hiking expenditures by 10 percent each year through 2020 to meet President Vladimir Putin's spending targets.

"Since 2010, the budget has increased by an average of 20 percent a year," Caffrey told Defense News in response to follow-up questions on Nov. 4., explaining that without continuing this level of growth, it will be difficult to fund modernization without significant cuts to operational spending.

While funding for the re-armament program may increase marginally over the next several years, the downturn in funding hikes may force investment and procurement targets to be pushed back into an upcoming procurement program covering the period from 2016 to 2025.

"So, what we may see when the new 2016-2025 [modernization program] is released is that some funding is deferred and back-loaded into the 2020-2025 period," Caffrey concluded.

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 #25
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
November 6, 2015
Six key trends in Russian foreign policy, as seen by the West
Heading into 2016, Russian foreign policy is arguably more unpredictable than at any time in the post-Cold War period. There are several key factors, though, that continue to influence the future trajectory of Russian diplomacy.
By Michael Kofman
Michael Kofman is a fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center and an analyst at CNA Corporation. His work focuses on Russian military analysis and security issues in the post-Soviet space. Previously he served as a fellow and program manager at National Defense University, U.S. Department of Defense. His prior experience includes working at the U.S. Institute of Peace, HSBC Bank, and The Diplomatic Courier.

After October's Valdai Discussion in Sochi, Ivan Timofeev wrote a succinct assessment of the latest trends in Russian foreign policy. Indeed, after the annexation of Crimea, the conflict in Ukraine, a downward spiral of sanctions, and Russia's latest intervention in Syria, it is no simple task to identify clear patterns of behavior.

One challenge is separating the old from the truly new, and the signal from the noise. That is, Russia's foreign policy today comes with an assortment of information packaging, symbolism, and features that make the actual decision-making process opaque. This, in and of itself, is a new trend, the challenge of separating actual vectors of Russian foreign policy from those promoting the brand of leadership, and understanding their relative importance. Below is a reflection and addition to Timofeev's noteworthy list.

#1: Military power

Russia will continue using military power as the most trusted means of achieving political ends. Unlike the West, which walked away from the past "decade of war," learning that military power translates poorly into desired political ends states abroad, Moscow has learned the opposite lessons from recent history.
From the Second Chechen War, to the Russia-Georgia War, Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, Moscow has relied heavily the use of military force to secure political objectives. This is a reflection of the limited repertoire of Russia's national power toolkit, that is, its economic, diplomatic, and informational capabilities are quite weak, and if anything, even weaker since the confrontation with the West.

Wanting in allies, economic leverage, and position in the international system, Russia will grow only more dependent on the use of force to change facts on the ground in its favor, with Syria being the latest example.

#2: Zero-sum game

Timofeev identifies Russia's approach to its periphery as now a zero-sum game. However, this was already the case, precisely why Russia reacted with force in Ukraine. The notion that Russia has privileged or special interests in its periphery is a historical vector of Russian foreign policy. The question is, what does this mean in practical terms today?

If the line in the sand was around Ukraine, it is now across it. Both sides will settle into the mid- to long term game for Ukraine's future, where they have equal chances of success. Meanwhile, Russia will eye nervously its influence in the rest of the post-Soviet space.

Here, Moscow will spend far less time fighting Western intrusion, and far more dealing with instability, political transitions, terrorism and economic failure.  Ultimately, Russia is likely to become far more nervous and even rash in response to any perceived deterioration of position.

#3: The new normal?

With the previous framework of engagement with the West now gone, Russia will no doubt try to float several ideas to find new rules of interaction with Western "partners," or a new normal. Such proposals, which were previously made after the Russia-Georgia War, will be dead on arrival.

However, Russia will try to pull itself out of political isolation by the West through gambits such as Syria, and look for other areas to force recognition and cooperation from the U.S. in particular. Afghanistan could represent the next point of conflict, less out of a desire for stability and more out of a need to find another plane of interaction with the U.S.

Moscow will search for the answers to the consequences of its rift with the West outside of Europe, but always with an eye to what troubles it most, sanctions, and the absence of any stable normal in relations.

#4: Europe first

The U.S. no longer sees Moscow as a potential partner under Russian President Vladimir Putin, but does evaluate it as a greater threat, meriting a firmer hand. This adversarial relationship may be more familiar for Moscow, but Russia is not the U.S.S.R., and the consequences will prove far less manageable. There will be no "new normal" with the U.S., because Russia will not be forgiven for its transgressions in Ukraine, while as a power, it is still far too weak to make America want to compromise.

That is, the U.S. will not agree to cease democratization (arguably it can't help itself) or settle for a new detente in Europe. Moscow will have to find a way to turn German leadership to its favor, thereby blunting any future U.S. policy of containment and more active pressure. Russia will seek to ameliorate Germany, and repair that relationship. The way back into German graces lies through Ukraine, hence Russia has worked hard over the summer to restore its credibility in seeing the Minsk-2 ceasefire agreement implemented.  

#5: The China factor

Russia's relationship with China will ironically mirror its previous interaction with the West, cycles of engagement and disappointment. On the one hand, there is far more substance and economic basis for cooperation there; on the other, as American diplomat and political scientist Henry Kissinger has pointed out, it is not in the two countries' "nature" to be allies.

Hence, Russia will consistently seek more from the relationship than China is willing to confer. Without a real ally in Beijing, and shunned by the West where possible in international institutions, Moscow will turn to new partners from South Korea, Indonesia and Japan, or to others in the Middle East. Perhaps being co-belligerents in Syria will rehabilitate Russian-Iranian relations, while at the same time firmly entrenching Moscow on the Shia side of the sectarian divisions in the region.

#6: Economic considerations

Russia's efforts at economic reform and import substitution will fail, and are already failing. While much depends on the price of oil, which Russia cannot affect, there can be no hope for growth even with strong prices unless financial sanctions are lifted. Russia's political system is simply not configured to leverage an economic crisis into positive transformation, the evidence of this is being presented daily.

Instead of being considerate of or hostage to the dire economic situation, Russia's foreign policy has completely ignored economic costs as necessary and manageable - an unsustainable approach. This was fine as long as the gains in the public perception of the personal brand of Vladimir Putin's leadership were made faster than the accumulation of economic costs at home.

In the near future, Russia's foreign and domestic policy will finally meet each other for the first time in many years. The decision-making style of political decisions first, economic consequences second, will rebalance with domestic considerations becoming must stronger factors in foreign policy.

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 #26
The Blog Mire
www.theblogmire.com
November 7, 2015
On Scaremongering and The Importance of Keeping the Real Agenda From the Masses - by Russell O'Phobe
Rob Slane
From Russell O'Phobe to all journalists working on Russia-related stories in the media

Dear Friends & Colleagues,

I want to begin this missive by pointing to some of the success stories that we have seen over the past few weeks, before going on to issue what I believe is a necessary warning about some of the challenges that lie ahead.

I must say that it has been particularly pleasing for me personally to see many of the rules I set out for you in my Primer on the Art of Writing Russian Scare Stories and in my last letter being followed so judiciously by so many of you. The exercise was clearly valuable and it seems that many of the points I made have been thoroughly imbibed. That is to your credit.

Let me draw your attention to one such example, which I think we can all learn from. The Huffington Post recently ran a wonderful piece entitled "What Would Happen If Russia Cut The Transatlantic Data Cables?" Now that's a great start, is it not? Fear? Check! Disturbing question ungrounded in anything resembling reality? Check! Presupposing that the Russians are so unutterably sinister that they want to shut down the internet? Check! The perfect headline to start a scare story.

The piece itself was a masterpiece in the art. I urged you in my Primer to make good use of submarines in your articles - gives them a very Cold War feel - and I also went on to encourage the use of phrases such as "Fears are growing that...". Well HuffPo really exceeded all my expectations of the sort of thing we can conjure up if we put our minds to it. Here's an excerpt:

"Recent reports have suggested that deep beneath the ocean, something ominous is taking place. According to sources inside the US intelligence community there is an increased fear that Russia could have the power to take down the world's internet...Some have even postured that these deep sea cloak and dagger manoeuvres could be the start of a 'new Cold War'".

Got that? Recent reports! From where? Doesn't say. Why not? Doesn't need to! Are they credible? Who cares! You see how it works? Try making something up off the top of your head - say, Russians have developed technology that can cause mental illnesses at targeted people groups - and then all you have to do is refer to some other "reports" add a few spicy phrases like "cloak and dagger manoeuvres" or "sinister movements" into the mix, and you've got your story.

So how about: "Disturbing reports have suggested that deep within Kholat Syakhl - Mountain of the Dead - Russia under Vladimir Putin has for years been developing 'WMD's - Weapons of Mass Depression'. These weapons, can apparently cause mass depression amongst Westerners at a range of up to 1,500 km. It is thought that this might explain the increasing prevalence of depression and possibly even dementia in the West. According to sources inside the US intelligence community blah blah blah." Job done.

But back to that business of cutting internet cables. I have to say we did have a chuckle in our office about that, since the obvious answer to the question of what would happen if Russia cut the transatlantic data cables is that they'd be cutting their nose to spite their face, as we'd at last be able to get our narrative out there unchallenged by all those pesky citizen sites that irritatingly keep on questioning what we write. Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea, you know. Cut the cables. Blame it on the Russkies. And no wretched internet around for anyone to challenge the narrative! Must remember to run that by the chaps up at GCHQ.

On the theme of telecommunications - and by the way it's always good practice to try to get a "Barbaric Russians interfering with modern technology" meme going in your pieces - there was another issue which I think is a wonderful demonstration not only of what we can do, but also of what we can get away with. You may or may not recall the hacking of the UK telecommunications company, TalkTalk, back in October. When I first heard of it, my eyes lit up at the plethora of headline opportunities that this presented us with: "Was Putin behind the TalkTalk hack?" "Russia suspected of hacking Telecom company". Or my favourite, especially for the trashy tabloids: "Putin's Crack Hacks in Max Attack." The headlines were practically writing themselves.

But when I looked at my MSN newsfeed, what did I see: "Islamic Jihadists claim responsibility for cyberhack." I was livid, I can tell you. An open goal and we missed it. Surely someone could have had the sense to allege Russian involvement for pity's sake?

Then, lo and behold, I clicked into the article to see this: "TalkTalk cyberattack: 'Russia-based Islamic jihadists' claim responsibility for hack action". Dear friends, I must confess that I have rarely laughed so hard. Even now it brings tears of laughter to my eyes. There they are bombing the living daylights out of Islamic jihadists in Syria to stop Islamic jihadists coming back to Russia, and this genius of a headline writer in one foul swoop comes up with a line that makes it look to the uninitiated and clueless as if Russia is actually harbouring Islamic jihadists who hack British telecoms companies.

But just when I thought it couldn't get any better, I went over to our friends at HuffPo again and saw this:

"The TalkTalk cyberattack that has potentially affected four million customers around the UK could have been caused by an Islamic jihadi group, a former detective in the Met's cybercrime unit has said. Speaking to the BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Adrian Culley said the perpetrators posted a message online last night claiming to be part of an Islamic group based in Soviet Russia."

Yes it really did say "Soviet" Russia. My colleagues were almost picking me up off the floor at that point. The line about Soviet Russia apparently came from this semi-literate email posted online:

"We Have adapted To The Security measures Of The Web. We Cannot Be Stopped. We Have Made Our Tracks Untraceable Through Onion Routing, Encrypted Chat Messages, Private Key Emails, Hacked Servers. We Will Teach our Children To Use The Web For Allah.. Your Hands Will Be Covered In Blood.. Judgement Day Is Soon. Our One Childrens Name Is Mohammed. Your Women Are being Taken Over By Us. Your Children are being Killed By Us For Being S**t On Earth. WE Are In The Soviet Russia And Near Place, Your Europe, WE control Asia, We Control AMERICA. Prepare, Secure Your Websites, Secure Your Borders, Secure Your Country, But Jihad From Us Is Coming."

Kudos to the journalist and her editor for their bravery and ingenuity in deciding to report that as if it were to be taken seriously and not as patently absurd drivel. And of course the punchline is that since then, police have arrested several people in connection with the hack, including a 15-year-old in - no not Soviet Russia, funnily enough - but Northern Ireland. Goes by the name of Vladislav Mikhailovich O'Donnell :)

But all joking aside, I do want to get serious for a moment. These stories are great and they serve our twin objectives of demonising an entire country and its leader through baseless scaremongering, whilst at the same time treating our readers like imbeciles. That's as it should be, but we do need to be careful. Take this piece from the Daily Star, where in the midst of their usual array of titillation and gossip, they printed this: "Exclusive: Europe braced for Russian invasion as Putin masses troops on NATO borders".

Well yes, on the one hand you know we've never had it so good when we can write that sort of nonsense, but on the other hand a quick look down the comments section underneath that piece will show you that more and more readers are wising up to it. Some of them are starting to ask questions such as where this country called "NATO" actually is, where are its borders, and whether "Russia putting troops on NATO's borders" might more accurately be described as "Russia has troops in Russia".

Don't get me wrong, I am by no means trying to discourage you from a good dose of dishonest scaremongering - it will always have its place - but I am saying be careful how far you go. It's fine reporting on the non-existent threat to Europe as if Russia were poised to invade, because as you know, nobody can "prove" that they aren't about to invade. But the real problem, and where we need to be really careful is in Syria. Friends, I do hope you appreciate how precarious that situation is. We could be found out at any moment if we're not careful. Let me give you an example.

You will recall that when Moscow started its bombing, we and our friends in government did a sterling job of telling the world that they were hitting the wrong targets - "moderates" and hospitals (did we manage to get any orphanages in there?), but not terrorists. But then those foxes in Moscow went and called our bluff by saying, "Well if you think we're hitting the wrong targets, presumably you must know where the right targets are, so tell us and we'll hit them".

Of course this was, for reasons I'm sure we all understand, followed by radio silence from Washington. I must admit that I broke into regular sweats and had many a sleepless night for a week or so as it seemed to me that our entire narrative was on the verge of collapsing. I mean if the average Joe out there had realised the significance of Moscow's question and Washington's muted response, and what that meant about Washington's real agenda, all sorts of unknowns might have occurred.

Thankfully - and I mean thanks to all of you - by and large you were wise enough to keep all that uncomfortable stuff out of the papers, and I would urge you very much to continue sticking to that rule. At all costs we mustn't let the realities of the situation seep into our narrative, right? Remember, never quote Moscow in context, never report accurately on the types of people they are really bombing, and above all, avoid giving any impression that our side is doing anything else other than fighting ISIS and trying to sort out the mess which we didn't create in the first place and which Moscow is now making even more difficult for us.

Maybe I might pick up on those "dos and don'ts" more fully in my next epistle. But I do feel much better having got that off my chest, and perhaps I can sleep a little easier and reduce my sweatiness knowing that I have warned you to be on your guard.

Best wishes,

Russ

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 #27
www.rt.com
November 8, 2015
Editorial
Talking out of both sides of their mouths: Tuesday's bizarre US Senate hearings about RT

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) is the parent of Voice of America and RFE/RL, the foreign news broadcasters of the US government. It has an annual budget of $751 million, two and a half times that of RT, but it wants more.
Tuesday's hearings at the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations were undoubtedly yet another thinly-veiled attempt by fans of the BBG to help it secure a funding increase.

As has become far too common, these supporters of the US government propaganda efforts are talking out of both sides of their mouths. Whatever they might be thinking in private, in public, they apparently can't decide whether RT is ineffective or a massive threat. For their purposes, both answers are equally useful - depending on what opinion they are trying to sell that day.

On Tuesday, some of the usual suspects lined up in front of the Senate to paint Russian media, and specifically RT, as a bogeyman and a threat to America and its values. During the offensive, facts were far from sacred and the truth didn't play a significant role. Instead, we witnessed a textbook example of the menace of unreality as speakers continuously contradicted each other and sometimes even themselves while trying to sell their fear-mongering narrative.

The panel featured four members, all from the think tank circuit, influential to varying degrees but all united in hostility to Russia and all pushing a hawkish foreign policy agenda in Washington. These activists passionately told the senators what the BBG and, it's safe to assume, the rest of the Washington establishment wanted them
to hear.

Take Maksymilian Czuperski, a fawning Atlantic Council staffer.

Would there be any danger that he'd deliver comment that contradicted the party line?

Heather Conley also testified. Conley is a former State Department hack who now plies her trade at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Nothing is real

A bigger beast is Peter Pomeranstev, a former television producer and now a lobbyist for the Legatum Institute who has been promoted extensively by Washington-friendly media. Legatum is controlled by Chris Chandler, a vulture capitalist who, along with his brother Richard was an investor in Russia during the "wild east" days of the 1990s. The motley crew of anti-Russia activists and journalists who have been employed by Legatum includes Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, British neocon Ben Judah and Cristina Odone, wife of notorious RT-hater and Economist Editor, Ed Lucas.

Veteran Russia watcher Mark Ames, now a correspondent with Pando Daily, wrote earlier this year: "The Chandler brothers reportedly were the single biggest foreign beneficiaries of one of the greatest privatization scams in history: Russia's voucher program in the early 1990s, when each Russian citizen was given a voucher that represented a share in a state concern to be privatized . . . and most naive Russians were fooled or coerced into dumping their vouchers for next to nothing, snapped up by clever vulture capitalists and factory directors from the inside."

These actions left millions of Russians poor, and boosted the wealth of oligarchs, including those from the West. Since Vladimir Putin assumed office, the Chandlers and their fellow-travelers are not welcome in Russia anymore. Hence, they have a grudge. A very big one.

Pomerantsev has made a career out of his obsession with RT. Indeed, were RT to close down tomorrow, the British lobbyist would probably struggle to find any work at all, so single-minded is his professional focus over the last few years.

A close family

At the Senate hearing, the activist was assisted by Dr. Leon Aron, Governor of the BBG and an employee of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The AEI is closely linked to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and enjoys strong ties to the pro-war Neo-Con movement. In fact, Paul Wolfowitz, who was deputy secretary of defence during America's illegal invasion of Iraq, is on the payroll. Lynne Cheney, wife of George W. Bush's former VP Dick Cheney, is another member.

Aron alleges that RT does not ever "identify itself as a Russia-based and government-funded network." While the US Senators he preaches to might swallow this nonsense, RT viewers won't, because every day they are greeted by our presenters kicking off their hourly news bulletins with "This is RT International, live from Moscow," or a variation thereof. Either Aron believes that Americans and the rest of the world don't know what country Moscow is the capital of, or he's telling fibs.

As for the fact of our public funding, we publish that information on our own website, many times over, to dispel a myriad of myths as to the sources and volume of RT financing. Indeed, a Google search for "Russia Today, state funded" leads to 49.8 million results. Last month, we even published an Op-Edge in this very section, transparently explaining our budget for 2016. If RT were trying to hide it, that dastardly plan hasn't worked.

Sifting through the bluster, it becomes apparent that lobbyists like Peter Pomerantsev and Dr. Leon Aron aren't actually concerned about the evils of government funding. They never criticise the BBC World Service, Euronews, France 24 or Deutsche Welle, for instance. Rather they seem willing to tolerate foreign state broadcasters so long as the countries involved are US allies and NATO members. It's only when a nation has a different perspective that belief in free speech goes out the window and the worst McCarthyite tendencies of censorship emerge.

Confused stances

Aron also delivered some curious rhetoric about RT's influence, saying that the channel is "barely visible" quite literally in the midst of an entire hearing dedicated to showcasing how great a threat Russian media is. In the next breath, he asked for more "money for US international media." If RT is so ineffective, why would our American competitors - who already massively outspend and outnumber all Russian foreign media services combined - need more money?

Of course, Pomerantsev is also guilty of schizophrenic viewpoints on RT. Last month, he published another report on his sole topic of alleged expertise for NED, which links him again to Aron, via AEI. He claims: "RT's actual viewership is far lower than what it claims." Again, if this were true, why the need to lobby endlessly on how big a threat RT is? Either the network is a Big Bad Wolf or Little Red Riding Hood, but it sure can't be both at the same time.

The BBG's problem is that it needs to paint RT as an all-powerful foe in order to secure additional funding from the US government. To achieve this, it must keep up its fear-mongering efforts because anxiety - whether imagined or real - has long been the key to getting attention in Washington's reactive political system. As Hollywood learned a long time ago, due to stereotypes, there is no better-imagined scoundrel than Russia.

However, to justify that same largesse, it must give the impression that its networks are then more successful than Russia's. These competing positions have led to a form of institutional flip-flopping which make the BBG and US legislators, think-tankers and public officials that support it look lost at best. Sorry, guys, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

_______________________________

For reference: RT audience

RT is the #1 TV news network on YouTube, with nearly 3 billion views; more than half of that number belongs to the main RT YouTube channel. According to comScore, RT's total monthly online audience has exceeded 32 million unique users. RT is the world leader among non-Anglo-Saxon international TV news channels, and ahead of many international news outlets, including Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle and Voice of America in terms of worldwide PC audience.

In 2014, Nielsen research found that 2.8 million people in seven major US urban areas watch RT weekly. That's greater than the audience of Euronews, Deutsche Welle, NHK or France 24. According to a different 2014 Nielsen study, RT's Arabic-language news channel has a higher daily audience in six MENA countries than UK's BBC Arabic and Sky News Arabia, the US's Al Hurra or China's CCTV in Arabic. In Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE and Iraq. In just those 6 states, RT Arabic is watched by 6.7 million viewers every day.

In the UK, RT's audience is almost 700,000 viewers weekly, according to BARB public information, and is over 3 times greater than the audience of Fox News and roughly double that of Euronews when it was still measured by BARB (January 2014). According to the Ipsos Affluent Survey Europe 2015, conducted in 21 European countries among the most affluent 13% of the population in each, RT is the fastest-growing pan-regional TV channel among Europe's most affluent individuals.

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#28
Reuters
November 9, 2015
The continuing Soviet collapse
By John Lloyd
John Lloyd co-founded the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he is Senior Research Fellow. Lloyd has written several books, including "What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics" (2004). He is also a contributing editor at FT and the founder of FT Magazine.

It's commonly believed that Russia is diving head-first into an ever-deeper authoritarianism. The ideology is no longer Marxism Leninism: instead, it's an amalgam of resurgent imperialism, Eurasian exceptionalism and a deepening, and popular, hatred of the United States and Europe.

It's not common, yet, to see Ukraine, with which Russia wages a frozen, part covert, semi-war, as on the same trajectory. But, like Russia, it's strengthening what's become known as the "power vertical" - a post-Soviet system of governance in which the formal institutions are subverted. Despite democratic trappings, the central structure is severely hierarchical, with effective power vested in the presidency and the presidential administration.

Two leading political scientists, one Russian and one Ukrainian, have produced important essays on the current situation in their respective states. Both speak to the despair engendered in both liberal-minded Russians and a broader swathe of Ukrainians over the failure of the projects and promises of democracy. In Ukraine, that disillusionment is both sharper and wider, as the hope of a more democratic and "European-style" politics diminishes. Instead, there is political infighting, continuing control by the wealthy oligarchs, unchecked corruption and fears of renewed warfare.

In the first essay, Mikhail Minakov, president of the Foundation for Good Politics in Kiev, writes that Ukraine remains in thrall to wealthy oligarchs, despite a democratic fa�ade. He believes that in spite of the 2014 Maidan Square revolution that toppled Moscow ally President Victor Yanukovych, the system remains configured for continued authoritarian rule. The barely concealed struggle between Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk and current President Petro Poroshenko; the shadowy control the oligarchs exercise on politics and on the judiciary; the supine state of the opposition parties - all leave the way open, Minakov believes, for a strengthening of the presidential-dominated "power vertical.

Regional elections last week were poorly attended, and showed continuing low support for Poroshenko in eastern - mainly Russian-speaking - regions of the country. In September, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt made an unusually pointed charge, in a speech to business executives in the ultra-corrupted port of Odessa, that the Prosecutor-General's Office in Kiev was an "obstacle" to anticorruption reforms. The office had failed to "successfully fight internal corruption... rather than supporting Ukraine's reforms and working to root out corruption, corrupt actors within the Prosecutor-General's Office are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform," he said.

Anders Aslund, the most prominent economic expert on Ukraine, has estimated the loss to the country's GDP over 2014 and 2015 as 16 percent. That number is comprised of 7 percent in lost production in Eastern Ukraine, 6 percent from Russian trade sanctions and 3 percent in lost foreign investment. He has called, repeatedly, for urgent Western assistance.

Ukraine has, however, been of immense use to Russian President Vladimir Putin - according to the Russian commentator Andrei Kolesnikov, a former deputy editor of the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta. In an essay he says that "following the annexation of (the Ukrainian province of) Crimea in March 2014, the Russian public has embraced an increasingly conservative and nationalistic ideology... and have thrown their support behind the commander of the fortress, President Vladimir Putin."

Kolesnikov shows that hostility to both Europe and the United States has increased steeply since the invasion of Crimea - a rise similar to the increase in inflation over the same period. Over that period, too, those seeing Josef Stalin (architect behind the death of many millions) as playing a "positive" role also grew strongly - an opinion shared, at the beginning of this year, by just over half the respondents to a Levada Center poll. The Russian Orthodox Church has resumed its role as an important but faithful supporter of the Russian ruler. Both "ideology and the Russian Orthodox Church," writes Kolesnikov, "'sanctify' this political system, which closely resembles a corporate state... the state legally enshrines concepts such as "foreign agent" and "undesirable nongovernmental organization" among others, which gives it plenty of tools to exert complete control over real civil society."

Both Minakov and Kolesnikov argue that change can come. "Sooner or later," writes the Russian, "both those on top and those on the bottom will create the demand for a pragmatically formulated, liberal economic ideology." For the moment, however, the strongly nationalistic and militaristic trend in Russia and the weakness of, and disillusion with, the Ukrainian government, combine to make change in a benign direction highly unlikely.

Together, these two states made up over two thirds of the population of the Soviet Union. With much smaller Belarus to Ukraine's north, these were the core of the Soviet state, the Russians seeing the other two - with some condescension - as both little brothers and big buffers against an always-feared (and often suffered) Western invasion. Ukraine's efforts to claw its way to the West represents, for Putin, an inadmissible l�se majest�, a move he has sought with present success to kill by weakening the country to the point where its very statehood is put at risk.

In Vladimir Nabokov's story "Conversation Piece 1945," a former White Guard colonel, anti-communist and Christian, says that in spite of his views, he puts Stalin on a par with Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great as a mighty leader. "Today, in every word that comes out of Russia, I feel the power, I feel the splendor of Old Mother Russia. She is again a country of soldiers, of religion and true Slavs." Such views, writes Kolesnikov, "can still be heard in Moscow's conservative quarters, corporate backrooms, luxury apartments." It is the privileging of power and national glory over peaceful co-existence: the need to subdue those within its boundaries who rebel against the national imperative.

Both the EU and the United States encouraged Ukraine to "come west, young nation." That they may not have thought through the consequence of the invitation doesn't relieve their responsibility to deal with it.

Ukraine will need very large financial assistance for some years if it's not to slip deeper into a corrupt authoritarianism - and from there, it would be only a step back to return to the embrace of "Old Mother Russia."

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 #29
Moscow Times
October 29, 2015
A Cookbook to Rehabilitate Soviet Cuisine
By Michele A. Berdy

If you think of the Soviet period in Russia as a culinary desert, a new book in English by the country's most prominent food historians, Olga and Pavel Syutkin, may change your mind.

"CCCP Cook Book: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine" was commissioned especially for an English-speaking audience by the FUEL publishing house. It is a compendium of 60 recipes that were developed during the Soviet period, from pre-dinner drinks - a champagne cocktail - through soups, salads and main courses to, at the end of the meal, some spectacular sugary, buttery, and creamy desserts. For people who remember the greasy meat ragouts and mayonnaise-laden salads of the late Soviet period, these recipes will come as a revelation.

Russia's Food Historians

The Syutkins are Russia's premiere historians and advocates of Russian cooking. In the past five years they have written - or perhaps rewritten - the story of Russian cuisine in hundreds of articles, television shows, and cooking workshops. They are best known for their series of books: "The Real Story of Russian Cuisine," "The Real Story of Soviet Cuisine," and "The Real Story of Russian Products."

Both Pavel and Olga grew up in the southern part of European Russia. And as Pavel Syutkin said in an interview with The Moscow Times, "Olga and I grew up in culinary families where we liked to eat and cook good food. It was something that our mothers and grandmothers inculcated in us."
 
And Pavel Syutkin was first trained as a historian. He was a graduate with a Ph.D. in history when the Soviet Union dissolved, and to support his family in the 1990s, he took up business. About five years ago he realized that he could take a break from the rat race, and so he returned to do "what I loved and what I wasn't able to do in my youth."

The couple combined their knowledge and love of good food with his expertise as a historian and began to study Russian cuisine. "And as we studied it," Pavel Syutkin said, "we came across a huge number of legends, inventions, and other falsities that had nothing to do with reality. So we decided to do something about it."

The Soviet Period

Working on the history of Soviet cuisine was quite different from examining pre-Revolutionary Russian culinary traditions. Olga Syutkin said, "It's the food of our childhood and youth, so no matter what, it was we will always think of it with warm feelings." And it isn't ancient history. "We found people still living here who could tell us things about the real history," Pavel Syutkin added.

Although the general tendency is to see the Soviet period as one of the destruction of the intricate, subtle and complex cuisine of the tsarist period, the Syutkins are not so categorical. Pavel Syutkin said: "Imagine the hypothetical situation that there was no revolution and the tsar continued to rule. What would have happened? Many features of Soviet cuisine would have appeared anyway. It was the cuisine of an industrial state - and what occurred here happened in other developed countries: fast food, a mix of many national cuisines, new kinds of canned goods, concentrates, and ready-to-eat food. These are foods that help women who are working full time."

They also appreciate the thousands of talented specialists who worked in the test kitchens of culinary institutes developing new recipes. "Now we might consider some of them funny," Olga Syutkin said, "but many are delicious, like Kiev cake, Prague cake, and 'bird's milk' cake."

CCCP Cook Book

The Syutkins have compiled some of the best recipes from the Soviet era in this English-language cookbook, produced to look as if it were beamed into the future from about 1959, complete with the slightly fuzzy and very stylized illustrations from old cookery books. The translation by Ast A. Moore is delightfully idiomatic and accurate down to every last gram and cut of meat.

Each recipe is introduced by a story that puts the dish into the cultural, economic and political context that produced it, showing how Soviet cuisine evolved over 70 years. Some of the stories are as entertaining as they are illuminating. For example, how did the early Soviet government convince people to try the new canned fish products developed by Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov's wife, Polina Zemchuzhina? They pulled off a legendary public relations stunt. Molotov announced that smugglers were using the cans to transport contraband pearls to the West, and to illustrate his point, he opened a can and pulled out a pearl necklace. The cans flew off the shelves.

The CCCP Cook Book is the best kind of cookbook: You can read it like a novel, or use it to cook up some terrific dishes.

CCCP Cook Book: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine by Olga and Pavel Syutkin is published by FUEL and available in both the U.K. and U.S.

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 #30
Irrussianality
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com
November 7, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
STALIN AND STALINISM
By Paul Robinson
University of Ottawa

Paul Grenier's recent post on this blog about historian Nikolai Starikov and his whitewashing of Stalinism generated a record number of comments. Stalin's legacy remains a hot topic. As it happens, a new biography of the Soviet ruler has just come out.

Authored by Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator is based on years of research in the Soviet archives. Khlevniuk's unparalleled access to Stalin's papers well justifies the production of yet another Stalin biography. That said, the Stalin he describes is a very familiar one, a man who 'was cruel by temperament and devoid of compassion', and who 'favored terror and saw no reason to moderate its use.' Those who are already well versed in the dictator's story will not find anything surprising in this book. Nonetheless, it is a useful reminder given attempts by people like Starikov to play down Stalin's brutality and the awfulness of his legacy.

Indeed, Khlevniuk indicates early in the book that his purpose is to denounce the 'large scale poisoning of minds with myths of an "alternative Stalin",' and complains that, 'In today's Russia ... Stalin's image is primarily being shaped by pseudo-scholarly apologias.' Khlevniuk's Stalin is a man who ruled through terror. 'Fear was the primary force behind the dictator's patrimonial power,' he writes. Stalin's modus operandi was to keep the Soviet people perpetually mobilized in the pursuit of internal and external enemies, and his close associates continually off balance and in fear of being the next target of one of the leader's regular purges. Paranoia, combined with an insatiable desire for power, characterized his rule.

Khlevniuk has no patience for theories which exculpate Stalin from any of the Soviet regime's worst crimes. Rather, he places Stalin at the centre of all of them. 'We do not know of a single decision of major consequence taken by anyone other than Stalin,' he writes, adding that. 'He personally initiated all the main repressive campaigns, devised plans for carrying them out, and painstakingly monitored their implementation. He guided the fabrication of evidence for numerous political trials and in several cases wrote detailed scripts for how the trials should play out. ... He often wrote commentaries and issued orders for additional arrests or for the use of torture to "get to the truth". He personally sanctioned the shooting of many people.' 'Stalin personally organized acts of terror that went far beyond any reasonable sense of "official necessity",' Khlevniuk writes.

The Great Terror was not the result of spontaneous action by local officials. Instead, writes Khlevniuk, 'Archival records clearly show Stalin to be the initiator of all key decisions having to do with purges of party and government institutions. ...  he took a strong interest in the details. ... The documentary evidence shows that large-scale operations rarely deviated from Stalin's orders.' During the Great Terror, 'each region and republic was assigned specific numerical targets for executions and imprisonments' by the Politburo. 'Approximately 1.6 million people were arrested, and 700,000 of them were shot.' This was a very deliberate, and highly centralized, operation, designed and overseen by Stalin himself.

Eschewing some of the larger figures conjured up by Cold War-era historians, Khlevniuk nevertheless concludes that the scale of Stalinist repression was enormous.  According to Khlevniuk,

"Official records show that approximately eight hundred thousand people were shot between 1930 and 1952. The number who perished as a result of the regime's actions, however, was much higher. ... [due to] the conditions prevailing in the labor camps. ... Between 1930 and 1952, some 20 million people were sentenced to incarceration ... During that same period no fewer than 6 million, primarily 'kulaks' and members of 'repressed peoples', were subjected to 'administrative exile'. ... On average, ... 1 million people were shot, incarcerated, or deported to barely habitable areas of the Soviet Union every year.

"... Tens of million were forced to labor on difficult and dangerous projects, arrested, subjected to lengthy imprisonment without charges, or fired from their jobs and evicted from their homes for being relatives of 'enemies of the people.' Overall, the Stalinist dictatorship subjected at least 60 million people to some sort of 'hard' or 'soft' repression and discrimination. To this figure we must add the victims of periodic famines or starvation, which during 1932-1933 alone took the lives of between 5 and 7 million people. The Stalinist famine was largely the result of political decisions. ... the Stalinist government used famine as a means of 'punishing' the countryside."

All this was the result of a worldview characterized by 'oversimplification of reality ... unidimensionality ... with rigid ideological and political dogmatism.'

Not even Stalin's wartime leadership excuses, or otherwise balances, his brutality. The picture Khlevniuk paints of Stalin during the Great Patriotic War doesn't deviate from that found in most history books - blundering incompetence for the first year and half of the war, followed by a period of 'growth as a military leader' as Stalin learned to listen to his generals. At first, writes Khlevniuk, Stalin was 'The Blunderer in Chief. ... As defensive lines collapsed ... he developed an array of strategies that wound up depriving commanders of flexibility and often increased Red Army casualties.' Later in the war, he began to pay attention to professional advice and there was 'a genuine discussion of problems' with subordinates. This is about the only positive thing Khlevniuk says about Stalin.

Stalin's defenders sometimes maintain that the gigantic human price of his rule was a necessary sacrifice for making the Soviet Union a modern industrial economy. Khlevniuk is having none of it. The Stalin he describes is an economic ignoramus, whose policies were catastrophic. 'No one was more guilty of putting political expediency before the needs of the economy than Stalin,' he writes. Far from being a success of rapid industrialization, the first Five Year Plan 'established a ruinously inefficient approach to industrialization. Vast sums were poured into undertaking construction that was never completed; into equipment for which no use was ever found.' Stalin never learnt from this. In his final years, he encouraged 'exorbitant spending on infrastructure', and 'a chaotic proliferation of projects led to losses on uncompleted construction.' He ignored advice to stop wasting vast sums of money on grandiose projects of no economic value. After his death, the Soviet Union's economic situation markedly improved.

As for collectivization, it was, Khlevniuk says, 'insane'. The countryside 'was treated like a conquered colony to be exploited.' In 1932-33, the result was a famine which killed perhaps 6 million people. Khlevniuk blames Stalin, saying, 'Although the famine was a complex phenomenon, posterity has every right to call it the Stalin Famine. The Stalinist policy of the Great Leap was its primary cause. ... The famine was the inevitable result of industrialization and collectivization.'

In November 1952, Stalin received a letter from a party worker in Riazan province who complained that:

1. You have to stand in line for black bread.

2. You can't get white bread at all.

3. There's neither butter nor vegetable oil.

4. There's no meat in the stores.

5. There's no sausage.

6. There are no groats of any kind.

7. There's no macaroni or other flour products.

8. There's no sugar.

9. There are no potatoes in the stores.

10. There is no milk or other dairy products.

11. There is no form of animal fat (lard etc.).

This was the economic legacy which Stalin bequeathed to his successors.

Because it is based on such thorough knowledge of the archives, Khlevniuk's Stalin: A New Biography is thoroughly convincing. Khlevniuk writes that, 'Historians are compelled to deal not with simple schemes and political conjecture but with the concrete facts'. The facts which he has assembled leave no room for alternative views. Stalin was a disaster for his country. There is nothing positive in his legacy.

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 #31
Bloomberg
November 6, 2015
Ukraine Is in Danger of Becoming a Failed State
By Leonid Bershidsky

The most effective thing Russian President Vladimir Putin did to destabilize Ukraine was the one thing the West was demanding: He leaned on pro-Russian separatists in the country's east to cease fire. Left without the much-used cover of a war, the internal divisions and dysfunctional core of the Ukrainian political elite didn't take long to reveal itself. Rather than the democratic hope it might have become after last year's "Revolution of Dignity," Ukraine now looks like just another incompetent and corrupt post-Soviet regime. It's no wonder cracks are appearing in Kiev's all-important relationship with the West.

The government is in turmoil: Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk is in danger of being fired as soon as that becomes legally possible in December, threatening the fragile ruling coalition, in which Yatsenyuk's party is the second strongest force. If the coalition falls apart -- a likely outcome if Yatsenyuk is forced to resign -- there will be an early parliamentary election. Pro-European Ukrainians might actually be relieved at that. Populists dominate the legislature, which would have made it difficult to push through meaningful reform -- if anyone were trying. On Thursday, the parliament rejected a bill specifically banning workplace discrimination against homosexuals.

Despite attempts at change by a new generation of bureaucrats, Ukraine's economy remains unreformed. Taxes are oppressive but widely evaded, the shadow economy is growing and the regulatory climate for business has barely improved. The International Monetary Fund, the country's biggest source of hard currency after a steep drop in exports, is optimistic about next year's economic growth prospects, forecasting a 2 percent expansion, but last month it revised this year's projection to an 11 percent decline. Ukraine's most popular politician -- not a Ukrainian but Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia, appointed by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to run the Odessa region -- has proposed a libertarian reform package, but Poroshenko hasn't given it his official backing and the current parliament is not likely to adopt it.

Equally unreformed is Ukraine's incredibly corrupt justice system. In September, Christof Heyns, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said after visiting Ukraine that the country lived in an "accountability vacuum." Heyns bemoaned the failure of the Ukrainian authorities to investigate the deaths of more than 100 people on the streets of Kiev in the final days of the revolution and of 48 pro-Russian protesters in a burning building in Odessa in May, 2014. Those investigations are stalled, and attempts by the victims' lawyers to speed them up have been stonewalled by authorities as some of the suspects in the Kiev shootings are still employed by the Interior Ministry.

Heyns also said Ukraine's Security Service "seems to be above the law." Apart from raiding a number of tech companies in an apparent scare campaign in recent weeks, last weekend the service arrested Gennady Korban, a top lieutenant of oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, who has been resisting the consolidation of power by Poroshenko. The arrest gave rise to accusations of selective justice in the Ukrainian press. Other oligarchs, after all, face no reprisals -- perhaps because they've accepted Poroshenko's dominance.

Two years after the corrupt team of President Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine corruption is still rife and the country's intrepid investigative journalists have been especially busy again. Setting the tone is Poroshenko -- the only of the country's 10 richest people to see his net worth increase in the past year -- who seems to have forgotten his promise to sell off his businesses; his bank has only expanded as many others lost their licenses. Poroshenko's and Yatsenyuk's close allies are routinely named in connection with corrupt schemes involving Ukraine's customs service and state energy companies. Sergei Leschenko, Ukraine's best-known investigative reporter, who last year got elected to parliament on Poroshenko's party ticket, on Thursday published a column in Novoye Vremya that succinctly described the current political layout:

"The system of checks and balances that has been sold to the Americans isn't working. Instead of keeping an eye on each other, the Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk teams have made a deal. They have divided up spheres of influence and responsibility so they don't get in each other's way and come into conflict."  

Americans are highly visible in the Ukrainian political process. The U.S. embassy in Kiev is a center of power, and Ukrainian politicians openly talk of appointments and dismissals being vetted by U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and even U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. "Pyatt and the U.S. administration have more influence than ever in the history of independent Ukraine," Leschenko wrote.

Europeans too are involved in shaping the way Ukraine is governed, not just because they are donors -- the U.S. is more important in that respect because of its influence on the IMF -- but because visa-free travel to Europe is one of Poroshenko's major goals. In his eyes, it would validate his efforts at making Ukraine more European and revive his flagging popularity.

Europe's requirements for the visa-free regime center on Ukraine's seriousness in fighting corruption. The European Union recently refused a request for more funding for the anti-corruption prosecutor's office, because of "concerns raised with regard to some people who participate in the selection" of prosecutors for the office. This is a clear reference to the team of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, a Poroshenko appointee and long-time associate, who has been accused of undermining the anti-corruption efforts.

On Thursday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker wrote Poroshenko a letter saying that "progress in reforms in the area of the fight against corruption remains a key priority for achieving visa-free travel" and supplying a long list of reforms Ukraine would need to implement.

All told, Ukraine's war on its past has been even less successful than its military efforts against Russia and its proxies. Too much time has passed since the "Revolution of Dignity" to justify the absence of tangible progress. U.S. and European efforts at external management have largely failed, too: The grip of oligarchs and a corrupt bureaucracy on what's left of the Ukrainian economy has proven too strong, the schemes too entrenched.

Ukrainian civil society is stunted by these powerful vested interests. I doubt it can push the country to a more civilized direction with the usual tools of electoral democracy: The local elections have proven that post-Soviet practices of fraud, bribery and intimidation have not been overcome. There's little will for further upheavals so soon after the revolution and the war in the east. But unless the current political elite finds it in itself to clean up -- a highly unlikely turn of events --Ukraine's history of violent regime change is probably not over yet.

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 #32
The Ukraine Today
https://theukrainetoday.wordpress.com
November 8, 2015
UKRAINE'S FAILED FRIENDS
AUTHOR: SOHRYU_L

We interrupt your regular scheduled programming for a very important message. You may say that any message that requires me tearing away from the latest Call of Duty title must be pretty damn important, and guess what?

It is.

In case you're an ignorant Westerner or spent the last several months living under a rock, Leonid Bershidsky wrote a piece about how Ukraine is, quote, 'becoming a failed state', unquote. Of course, RIA Novosti gleefully latched onto the piece. You could say anything RIA Novosti latches onto should be considered bullshit, but this is apparently lost on the Western observers (this is a swear word) who began endorsing Bershidsky's article.

Bullshit. Bull. Shit.

What Bershidsky does is rehash the ZRADA myths that are prevalent in Ukraine's informational landscape. He doesn't mention the Lipetsk chocolate factory or call President Poroshenko a 'Chocolate tyrant', but boy oh boy, here's poor Kolomoyskiy being oppressed, and here's quoting Leschenko, and here's... Well, actually, it is a very mild version of the ZRADA narrative, compared to some. That doesn't make it any less bullshit.

What Bershidsky doesn't understand - or what everyone, including Ukrainians, fail to understand - is that ANY attempt at reform, in ANY country with ANY government takes time to bear fruit. This was true for post-Communist Poland (whose reforms actually started when Jaruzelski was President - you know, the bloody military dictator who imposed martial law and ordered ZOMO riot police to shoot at unarmed protesters?); this is even more true for Ukraine, because, well, Ukraine is no Poland. Poland didn't have oligarchs and local strongmen with an iron grip on mass media and industry. Poland didn't have a proxy war with Russia, neither.

The main reason why Ukraine is no Poland is that it squandered the last 25 years since the fall of the Soviet Union. Oh, there were plenty reforms under President Kuchma, but he mostly used them to cement his own power. Then we had the Orange Revolution and an endless shitfight for power - spurred, in part, by no other than Yulia Tymoshenko. Then we had Yanukovych and his cronies, who stole, then stole, then stole some more. When Yanukovych finally fled for Rostov, Ukrainian treasury was around 33 000 Euro.

Ukrainian ZRADA pundits and ivory-tower Western observers proudly declare that 'nothing changed' in the last two years. The problem is, most Ukrainians have very short memories and barely remember the Maidan, let alone the events afterwards. If Ukraine was on its way to becoming a failed state, it did then. It was a big Russian propaganda schtick at the time.

Somehow, though, Ukraine held together, got back with the separatists, stood its own against what was undoubtedly a covert Russian invasion, and now, since the war wound down, it has to deal with its own internal problems. However, apparently holding the country together and facing down Russia doesn't count in favor of the Ukrainian government anymore, because it failed to wave a magic wand and make Ukraine's decades-old problems go away.

Where Bersidsky is right is on exactly one count: the hovercraft legislature is full of eels populists. The problem, though, is that it is the Rada that gets everything done in this country... yet it doesn't. This is especially funny when someone in the West starts talking about 'reform-minded pro-European MPs', usually in contrast to the corrupt Chocolate tyrant Poroshenko. From what I've seen in the last year, these reform-minded, pro-European, MPs actually do everything in their power to stall reforms... and then blame the executive branch for it.

Rada couldn't vote military procurement bills because of personal interests of some MPs. Of course, the greatest interest here is being able to scream about 'our boys' having inadequate equipment, which is somehow the government's fault - despite the fact that the government can't do anything without a law voted by the Rada.

Rada can't change the Criminal Code, which includes a neat provision that mandates that suspects in corruption cases MUST be offered a possibility of bail. This is what happens to everyone suspected of corruption: the court HAS to offer them bail - bail which they'll gladly pay. This Criminal Code was the brainchild of Andriy Portnov, Yanukovych's former chief of staff. Only the Rada can change it, but it doesn't. How would it cry itself hoarse about 'Poroshenko not jailing corrupt officials' if it does?

Corrupt judges? Have to be fired by the Rada, which fired a grand total of 145 judges out of a list of 303. But if Rada fires judges, how can it howl about 'the judicial system is unchanged!'?

MP immunity? Has to be abolished by the Rada with a minimum of 300 votes, since MP immunity is written into the Constitution. But the Rada doesn't do that. Guess why? So it can shout about how 'the government abides criminals' - criminals that hide behind MP immunity in the first place! In fact, most of the 'reform-minded', 'pro-European' MPs have done a lot of highly questionable things - take 'Tourette Man' Ihor Mosiychuk, who was famously arrested right inside the Rada's plenum chamber on corruption charges and bribery. Mosiychuk recently plead guilty to both. Quite a number of the MPs have reasons to fear the same fate.

EVERY reform in this country has to go through the Rada. Yet somehow only Poroshenko, and sometimes Yatsenyuk, are to blame.

Speaking of Yatsenyuk, he's pretty much set to go at this point. I'm not sure about Bershidsky's claims that it will automatically trigger parliamentary reelections, but he pretty much is. To be sure, Yatsenyuk held the country together at its worst, but it just seems he's not up to the challenge anymore. The most reform-minded ministries are headed by Poroshenko appointees.

Of course, Rada populists want a stake in the coming government. Thus the parliamentary circus we witness on a daily basis. But reelections are hardly a viable proposition nowadays. One needs only to look at local election results to see that.

And now we come to the oligarch question. Remember what I said about the iron grip over mass media? This is exactly the reason. 1+1 (which includes Ukraine Today) belongs to Kolomoyskiy. Inter belongs to Firtash. ICTV belongs to Pinchuk. Ukraina belongs to Akhmetov. 112 is linked to the infamous former interior minister Zakharchenko (no, not the DNR one). Even the nominally independent outlets like Espreso and Hromadske are increasingly linked with private interests. None of these are particularly happy with the government's anti-oligarch policy. Contrary to what Bershidsky claims, Kolomoyskiy is not the only oligarch to be bossed around: Akhmetov loses billions, and local energy companies are slowly being twisted from Firtash's grip. And there is really no other way: would Bershidsky rather the Ukrainian government nationalized everything the Bolshevik way?

Kolomoyskiy is merely under fire because he is the biggest offender, with Ukrnafta, Ukrtransnafta and a private army at its beck and call. A political angle is laughable because Kolomoyskiy's man Korban lost the recent mayoral elections in Kyiv, and the UKROP party didn't show decent results outside of Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizzhia. Or, well, any results. How is someone with barely a percent of votes a huge political threat to the government?

Korban got arrested merely because he had a lot going for him. The man was foolish enough to boast about his illegal successes on national TV, for God's sake! This is probably one of the reasons he strived for MP immunity - or any immunity; but that didn't come to pass.

And lastly, there's Serhiy Leschenko the journalist-turned-MP. Leschenko and his fellow 'Eurooptimists' recently ignored the infamous Rada meeting outright: so much for Eurooptimism, I'd say! But the problem is that Ukrainian journalism is very much a relic of a begone age. Muckraking was fashionable in the 2000s Ukraine; then the economic crisis came and most self-proclaimed muckraking journalists started selling their skills for the highest bidder. Thus the rapid deterioration of Ukraine's journalist corps we see today. Leschenko isn't one of them; but now, as MP, he confuses his muckraking journalist impulses with, actually, his job. His job is to vote in the Rada. When Rada failed to approve urgently required laws, Leschenko chose to be absent.

Actually, Ukrainian journalism is probably what prompted Bershidsky to write his article - because most Ukrainian journalists serve certain private interests, interests not at all happy with what the government does or what it can do. Most of the incidents Bershidsky alludes to about 'Ukraine's souring relationship with the West' actually turned out to be fakes spun by Ukrainian mass media journalists and outlets like Ukrainska Pravda - which will gladly spin anything if its the least bit anti-establishment. Bershidsky doesn't include any alternative opinions in his article - something Ukrainian journalists don't do very often. It's always 'expert' this or 'source' that, and the hated government isn't even allowed a say. It isn't journalism. Certainly not Western journalism that Ukrainian journalists aspire to. It's spin doctoring.

Ukraine has been slow on the reform angle, that is true. But despite the best efforts of corrupt officials, populist MPs, pissed-off oligarchs and yellow journalists, it's not a failed state by any stretch.

I'll believe when I see a 1 billion hryvnya note.

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 #33
Ukrainian forces return heavy artillery to contact line in Donbas - DPR defense ministry

MOSCOW, November 9. /TASS/. The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) intelligence registered the return of 10 units of heavy weaponry to the contact line in Donbas, DPR defense ministry spokesman Eduard Basurin said on Monday.

"Four D-30 howitzers were spotted near the Luhanskoye settlement [on Donetsk's outskirts], and two Grad multiple rocket launcher systems were seen in Dzerzhinsk [to the north-west of Gorlovka].Four self-propelled artillery systems were also spotted near the Novgorodskoye settlement [in Gorlovka's west]," Donetsk News Agency quoted Basurin as saying.

Three T-64 tanks were also spotted by intelligence as they arrived to Krasnogorovka located 10 kilometers from the contact line in Donbas, he added.

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.

The process of withdrawal that started on October 3 and is expected to be completed in 41 days is monitored by representatives of the Joint Center for Control and Coordination (JCCC). They send reports on the withdrawal progress to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Special Monitoring Mission (SMM).

Ukrainian forces violate ceasefire regime 11 times over last 24 hours

According to DPR defense ministry, Ukrainian forces have violated ceasefire regime 11 times over the last 24 hours on the territory of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic.

Ukrainian forces "continued to provoke DPR Armed Forces over the last 24 hours to open fire at the positions of nationalist battalions. Yesterday they violated ceasefire 11 times," Donetsk News Agency quoted a DPR defense ministry spokesperson as saying.

According to DPR defense ministry, Kiev forces shelled the Volvo Center near the Donetsk airport, Zhabunki settlement on Donetsk's northern outskirts, settlements of Ozeryanovka and Panteleymonovka in Golvoka's south-west. More than 30 mines were fired at the DPR territory.

Ukrainian forces also opened fire from large-caliber firearms at settlements to the north and north-west of Gorlovka (Zaytsevo, mine 6-7) and Shirokaya Balka settlement.

At the meeting of the Contact Group in Minsk on August 26, the participants confirmed their plans to ensure ceasefire in Donbas from September 1. Over the last weeks, only few violations of ceasefire regime were registered in Donbass. Observing ceasefire by both sides is one of the main conditions for completing withdrawal of weaponry of less than 100mm caliber from the contact line in Donbas.

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

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

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

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#34
Kyiv Post
November 5, 2015
Editorial
Yatsenyuk's cover

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatensyuk weakened his shaky corruption-fighting credentials (which, nonetheless, remain marginally better than President Petro
Poroshenko's) in a recent interview with Politico, published on Nov. 3.

Ukraine is under fire for not cooperating with the Swiss investigation into whether a key Yatsenyuk ally, lawmaker Mykola Martynenko of the prime minister's own People's Front party, accepted a bribe of 30 million Swiss francs for an agreement to supply equipment to Ukraine's nuclear power stations. The Swiss investigation has dragged on for two years. Yatsenyuk said it's not his responsibility. Moreover, he told Politico that he refused to order a party or parliamentary investigation into the matter because his ally "strongly denies all these allegations."

Really? Since when are criminal suspects able to evade investigation because they proclaim their innocence? This is akin to not investigating ex-President Leonid Kuchma because he swears he had nothing to do with the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze in 2000.

In this one damning passage alone, Yatsenyuk cast his lot with forces suspected of corruption rather than those trying to find the truth, with those who want to keep conflicts of interest and insider dealings as the standard way in which Ukraine conducts its business, rather than those trying to impose rule of law.

It is hard to see how much longer he can stay in office with such taints, even harder to imagine how he can tell the world with a straight face he is interested in fighting corruption if he doesn't take such allegations against his allies seriously. It is doubtful that Yatsenyuk's Western backers will continue to support this prime minister. Most Ukrainians have already given up on him.

Yatensyuk appears to see himself as a victim of anyone who disagrees with him - the media, the prosecutor, the judiciary, Odesa Governor Mikheil Saakashvili and Western donors who justifiably insist on a genuine clampdown on graft.

It's unfortunate because his government has made real achievements. The elimination of energy mogul Dmitry Firtash and other intermediaries from the gas sector is one of them. Also, several ministers are making progress in modernizing government and making it work more transparently in numerous ways. This is to their credit and to his, even though many changes were part of Western aid conditions. But Yatsenyuk's petulance and no-show, bordering on obstructionist, attitude on fighting corruption will undermine all progress.

"The Swiss government didn't contact the Ukrainian government. The government has nothing to do with the prosecutor's office, nor the judiciary," Yatsenyuk told Politico. He left out the police, over which he does have influence. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov commands 150,000 law enforcers and is a leading member of Yatsenyuk's party. He also left out the fact that, indeed, the prime minister has great influence in how prosecutors, police and judges are paid through the state budget, appointments and conflict-of-interest laws that could help ensure an independent yet effective judiciary.

Yatsenyuk last month announced support for a dramatic anti-corruption proposal to fire all of the nation's 9,000 judges, curb prosecutorial powers and set up a state investigative agency. But it has to go through parliament and, to do so, that requires lobbying, planning and strategy, not just a fleeting pronouncement in front of TV cameras.

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 #35
Ukrainian parliament coalition risks collapsing as another party may join opposition

KIEV, November 6. /TASS/. The coalition in Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada (parliament) is collapsing, as leader of the Samopomich (Self-assistance) faction Oleg Bereznyuk said his political force "has been discussing the variant of joining the opposition" thus quitting the coalition.

Earlier, the parliamentary majority lost the Radical Party of Oleh Lyashko, and then Batkivshchyna of Yulia Tymoshenko refused to vote any bills until gas tariffs are down, taxes are off pensions and moratorium on selling land is extended.

The People's Front faction may also quit the coalition if the parliament initiates dismissal of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.The prime minister said if the coalition made him resign, he would take away with him all deputies of the People's Front. The dismissal may be initiated in a month's time already - on December 12 the premier immunity expires.

If the parliament is not happy with work of the cabinet, the issue of dismissing will be only logical.

"If the prime minister quits, the government collapses, and the coalition follows suit," head of the Ukrainian Barometer sociology service Viktor Nebozhenko said.

President [Petro] Poroshenko is not interested in collapse of the coalition. He needs the majority (300 votes) to make changes to the constitution. The changes are due to be discussed in December. The parliament also should adopt the budget for the upcoming year, and without it international creditors would not give a cent to the country.

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 #37
http://newcoldwar.org
November 7, 2015
Ukraine Rada approves first draft of regressive labour code, putting visa-free travel in Europe at risk

Provisions prohibiting discrimination against sexual minorities were rejected, a key EU demand for entry into its visa-free travel zone. President Poroshenko's appeal to accept amendments to this effect fell on deaf ears

Ukrainian MPs voted overwhelmingly on November 5 in favour of a new labour code law for Ukraine. This was the first vote on a draft bill; a final vote is required.

258 Rada members voted in favour. A minimum of 226 in favour was required.

Trade unions in Ukraine and internationally have denounced the proposed changes to the labour code. Ukrainian unions have called it a 'slave labour code'.

Employers in Ukraine have sought for years to weaken the labour code and power of unions. That effort predates even the protest movement on Maidan Square. Here, for example, is a March 2012 statement by the Communist Party of Ukraine opposing an attempt at the time by the government then led by Victor Yanukovych to degrade certain conditions of the labour code. International financial institutions have also long lobbied that workers rights in Ukraine be diminished.

The draft code greatly increases the power of employers to fire workers, discriminate against women workers and reduce compensation to workers when companies go bankrupt or change owners. It will expand the use of "temporary" employment and weaken the rights of workers on the job.

Some months ago, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) expressed alarm over the draft law, saying that if adopted, it would "introduce changes to the existing legislation on trade unions and their activities inconsistent with the relevant international labour standards and the legal obligations of Ukraine". (See text of letter below.) The IndustriALL Global Union has also expressed deep concern.

Here are several other background articles on the New Cold War.org website explaining the draft code:

The battle over changes to Ukraine's Soviet-era labour code, from the Ukrainian business publication Delo.ua, Sept 17, 2015
Ukraine's labour reforms threaten workers' rights, from Open Democracy, June 4, 2015

The most immediately controversial issue in the draft bill is protection of workers from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation. Rada deputies voted down an amendment that would provide such protection. One reason why that's especially big news in Ukraine is because provisions for protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation is a key obligation that Ukraine must assume by this month in order to be gain accession to the 'Schengen' visa-free travel zone in Europe. The AFP news agency devotes an entire article to this subject on November 5.

President Poroshenko gave a nationally televised address on Nov 4 appealing for support to an anti-discrimination ammendment to the proposed labour code. His appeal fell on deaf ears in the Rada. Only 117 deputies voted for the ammendment.

Other amendments rejected by Rada lawmakers are those protecting from discrimination on racial, political and religious grounds, marital or property status, and whether persons had ever participated in strikes or contracted AIDS.
---
 
ITUC calls on Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to postpone any discussions about bill #2983

Dear Mr Chairman,

Re Draft Law No. 2983 "On State Registration of Legal Entities and Individuals - Entrepreneurs and Community Groups

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which represents 176 million workers in 162 countries and territories and has 328 national affiliates, is very concerned about draft law No. 2983 "On State Registration of Legal Entities and Individuals - Entrepreneurs and Community Groups". This draft law was put on the agenda of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and was considered already at a first hearing on 14 July this year. This law, if adopted, would introduce changes to the existing legislation on trade unions and their activities inconsistent with the relevant international labour standards and the legal obligations of Ukraine. It is difficult to see any reason why this reform is being undertaken, in particular in such a hasty and non-participative manner.

The ITUC affiliated organisations - the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine (FPU) and the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU) - as well as the joint national body of trade unions of Ukraine, strongly protest such draft legislation, as the adoption of the proposed text would weaken the autonomy of trade unions and would deprive them from protection from external interference, including by the public authorities. In particular, it would install a system of authorisation of trade union activities by the means of state registration instead of the notification procedure existing today. That is a clear violation of Article 2 of ILO Convention on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise No 87, which defines workers' right "to establish and, subject only to the rules of the organisation concerned, to join organisations of their own choosing without previous authorisation". There are other problematic areas in the draft law, including the requirement to provide various and excessive information about the union founders.

We urge you to postpone any discussions about this draft law until a thorough analysis is undertaken to determine whether the provisions of the law are consistent with the international obligations of Ukraine by the competent national authorities and the International Labour Organization. The ITUC and its national affiliates have already requested the ILO to provide its technical assessment of the law. Previously, in various cases, the ILO supervisory bodies havealready denounced the similar trade union registration procedures as a violation of the ILO Convention 87.

The ITUC will continue supporting Ukrainian workers and their unions in the difficult and turbulent situation Ukraine has been experiencing and will use all means available to make sure trade union rights, and in particular freedom of association are fully respected in Ukraine, in law and in practice.

Yours sincerely,
Sharan Burrow
General Secretary, International Trade Union Confederation

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 #38
Kyiv Post
November 9, 2015
Ukraine's failure to adopt anti-discrimination legislation is putting European freedoms in danger
By Stefan Huijboom

Growing up in the Netherlands I didn't have to fear that my sexual orientation could harm my future career. The law would protect me from discrimination. As a teenager I struggled with my homosexuality, and I think most teens do when they find out that they're gay. "Can I also like girls?" I asked myself a couple of times as being gay would make me different and I didn't want to be different. No, I didn't like girls. Not sexually at least. Have I ever felt ashamed of being gay? No. I've always been proud of who I am. Therefore, I'm openly gay and choose not to live a closeted life full of secrecy like in countries where lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender rights are ignored. Ukraine is such a country.

I've met many gays in Ukraine (whose full names I will not publish for their own safety) who live a secret life in what can be described as an "underground world" -- meeting other gay guys via social media, or visiting gay clubs that are hidden for the public, fearing for anti-gay raids.

When I tell some of my gay friends my parents know about me and are okay with my homosexuality, they're shocked. The fear that some of them carry with them is unimaginable for me. Ukraine is a country where traditional Christian family values are cherished. Religion plays a big part in the daily life of many Ukrainians, and there is zero-tolerance towards gays. Just like in Russia, many gays in Ukraine fear violence on a daily basis. If violence is used against them, many fear to report it to the police because of their homosexuality. They're too scared to tell the police that they're gay.

A country that is literally fighting for a European future should do its utmost best to implement not just European values, but fundamental human rights.

As Ukraine is on the edge of receiving visa-free travel to the European Union, the EU required Ukraine to adopt legislation to prohibit discrimination in the work place on basis of sexual orientation.

On Nov. 5 the Ukrainian parliament failed to adopt this legislation into the labor code as a majority of members of parliament voted against it, smashing the door of a visa-free regime into the face of millions of Ukrainians and ignoring the fundamental human rights that are needed for a European integration.

"Traditional values," or by 2015 you could maybe better call it homophobia, are considered more important than becoming a stronger European partner.

Human rights are two difficult words to understand for some of the members of parliament in Ukraine's parliament.

Sergey Kaplin, a member of parliament from the Bloc of President Petro Poroshenko, mentioned during a discussion in the parliament that Ukraine's ancestors, the Cossacks, "would trample those people (gays) with their horses." Kaplin voted no. Still, I have to think twice when he actually said those words, "trample those people with their horses."

A member of parliament, part of a so-called "pro-European coalition party" that is chosen by the Ukrainian citizens, that should represent the Ukrainian people, is treating a part of them like second-class citizens.

It's not only wrong, but his words could even inspire more violence against gays. Being openly homophobic as a member of parliament will trigger more homophobia and thus violence targeted at the LGBT community. It takes a way an essential part of freedom: being who you want to be and to not be scared who you are. The EU should condemn in strong words what Ukraine's parliament has said and how some MPs talked about the LGBT community as dirt.

The no vote against the anti-discrimination legislation also brings up the question what Ukraine actually wants. Does it really want to become part of the "European family," and is it willing to adopt changes?

The actions in the Rada on Nov. 5 clearly show that old-time politics aren't yet ready for it. Reforms in Ukraine are driven by young, motivated people, and what I do know, is that there are many talented, young people in Ukraine, straight or gay, that don't care about "traditional values," but rather see this country shape up again under a European flag with opportunities for everyone, gay or straight.

I call it freedom.

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 Sputnik
November 8, 2015
Why Ukraine's Parliamentary Punch Up Could Spell the End of EU Integration

Svobodnaya Pressa journalist Andrei Polunin explains why the latest rumble in the Rada may have serious implications for Ukraine's bid for European integration.

Last Thursday, another round of fisticuffs broke out in the halls of Ukraine's parliament, after Andriy Teteruk, a member of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's People's Front, hit Fatherland MP Alexandra Kuzhel over the head with a glass bottle, sending her to the hospital with a concussion.

Teteruk, the commander of the notorious Myrotvorets territorial defense battalion, justified his attack on his female colleague by explaining that she had tried to hit him with her handbag, forcing him to retaliate.

Setting aside the details of the fight itself (they're standard fare as far as the day-to-day business of the Rada is concerned), what's important here, according to journalist Andrei Polunin, is that this particular fight may have important implications as far as Ukraine's European aspirations are concerned.

In his piece, published Sunday by news and analysis portal Svobodnaya Pressa, Polunin explained that while melees in Ukraine's parliament are nothing out of the ordinary, "happening so often that they've almost become one of the prerequisites for being a people's representative," what's different this time is that "Europe is paying attention."

The reason for this, according to the journalist, is that the MPs from the Yulia Tymoshenko's Fatherland Party (a member of the governing coalition government) "have vowed that they will not participate in future sessions of the parliament so long as Teteruk is not stripped of his mandate."

The Speaker of Ukraine's parliament proposed installing an actual boxing ring inside the parliament building following yesterday's bout.

Taking note of the deadlock which has emerged, German foreign broadcaster Deutsche Welle worryingly suggested that this could very well mean that the discussion of the package of laws on the creation of a visa-free travel regime between Ukraine and the European Union, scheduled for November 10, "may become hostage to this inter-parliamentary strife."
It could also mean the cancellation of the planned trip to Brussels by Ukrainian lawmakers, where the fate of the visa-free regime was to be decided.

Deutsche Welle recalled that the Rada has already failed, repeatedly, to adopt a series of anti-discrimination amendments to its labor code, as well as the anti-corruption measures demanded by Brussels.

Ultimately, the newspaper suggested that Ukraine's lawmakers have not fully realized what they've done, given that "the stakes in this game are not even just the visa-free regime with the EU, but the future of the Ukrainian state itself. The fighting in the Rada may now postpone Ukraine's move toward Europe."

"In other words," Polunin noted, "MP Teteruk may have been aiming his bottle at Kuzhel's head, but ended up hitting the Europeans, leaving them dazed and confused."

Commenting on the sordid affair, Russian Institute for Strategic Studies Deputy Director Tamara Guzenkova explained that "the project for Ukraine's European integration is in part a propaganda fa�ade, and in part associated with the real processes taking place in the country." In turn, "the fight in the parliament has broken loose of the advertised picture, thus drawing the attention of European and American observers."

Guzenkova noted that "for the US and the EU, such incidents are not just an unpleasant reality. In recent years, the West has been aggressively trying to depict the supposedly intensive process of the 'Europeanization' of Ukrainian politics. This has been done with the help of reforms announced and carried out by Kiev."

In this sense, according to the expert, the fight serves as a blow to the "public relations" aspects of Ukraine's reform. Still, with the Ukrainian parliament "known for a long time for its brawling tradition," the Guzenkova suggests that ultimately, "the fate of European integration in the long run will depend not on the Ukrainian lawmakers themselves, but on whether Brussels and Washington will be willing to close their eyes" to such behavior.

As far as Brussels is concerned, Guzenkova emphasizes the supranational union's bureaucracy is well known for its skillful ability to postpone fulfilling their promises, citing the failure of the applicant country to fulfill their obligations. On the other hand, she notes that another, much more worrying tendency also exists, "where for geopolitical reasons, a country which is clearly not prepared for integration is accepted almost instantly."

"In any case," the expert notes that "in its current form, the Ukrainian project is a headache for both Eastern and Western Europe. At the moment, the West remains committed to the carrot and stick approach to forcing Kiev to take the necessary measures. But the process is complicated by the fact that the West does not fully understand what it should do with the country. Thus, in order to avoid aggravating the situation inside Ukraine, the West makes psychotherapeutic gestures, speaking about the possibility of integration."

Bogdan Bezpalko, Deputy Director of the Center of Ukrainian and Belorussian Studies at Moscow State University, also suggests that Kiev's reform efforts ultimately have little effect on Brussels' choice about whether or not to begin the integration process. Moreover, citing the example of Turkey, which was left hanging after carrying out virtually all the necessary reforms, the expert noted that he is not so sure about Ukraine's chances.

And this may be for the best, according to Bezpalko. "Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic countries achieved integration, but now all of them are faced with the outflow of young people and the degradation of their economies, with political pressures from Brussels forcing them to abandon profitable economic projects. In fact, having lost a part of their sovereignty, these countries really haven' gained anything in return -except, perhaps, certain benefits for their officials."

For his part, Polunin suggests that as European media and expert opinion becomes increasingly disillusioned with Ukraine's entrenched corruption, going up to the highest levels of power, together with its seemingly hopeless social situation, Europeans themselves are becoming "afraid of the prospects even for the introduction of a visa-free regime" with the country, much less integration.

"They are afraid," the journalist notes, "and not without reason, that it could result in many of the country's 40 million people immediately abandoning their homes in an attempt to settle down in Europe. Such fears are only exacerbated in a situation where the EU is already showing signs of strain from the crowd of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa."

And while Ukrainians are not from a cultural background which is radically different from Europeans, and therefore "do not pose a threat to Europe's ethnic and religious balance, this is not enough of an argument for integration."

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 #40
http://readrussia.com
November 6, 2015
Russia Gets a Lesson in International Power Politics
By Mark Adomanis

Russia is currently in the midst of the mother of all benders. The drug of choice is not (given the stereotypes about Russians and heavy drinking) alcohol. Indeed it is a drug that, with a few notable exceptions, most countries in the world have long since renounced, one of the most potent, dangerous, and unstable concoctions yet devised by man: superpower delusions.

In the official narrative, Russia has "risen from its knees" to (re)claim its rightful place in the world, unbowed by the West's (and especially the United States') dastardly meddling. The country has boldly moved from triumph to triumph. Russia has successfully defended its compatriots in Ukraine and stared down the "fascist junta" in Kiev (without, of course, sending troops there, any suggestions that Russian troops fought in Donetsk and Lugansk are pure American propaganda).

But that is not all! Russian forces are also valiantly fighting against ISIS. Not content with the half measures of the US and its NATO allies, Russian planes have taken the fight to the terrorists, "liquidating" countless bases, ammunition depots, and terrorists themselves. Russia stepped up to the plate when other powers were too cowardly or equivocating, helping to bring stability to a region that has been in the midst of chaos. Even now, Russia is attracting new allies and partners.  

Russia, in other words, is back, and is back in a big way. It can no longer be ignored. It must be accommodated, listened to, and respected.

The only problem is that the above narrative (which I have constructed so that it imitates, to the greatest extent possible, the official Russian government line) is that it is based on an extraordinarily selective reading of recent history.

A recent example, of Russia's exhaustive (and entirely futile) efforts to get Ukraine to repay a bond, are an excellent riposte to the great power mania in the Russian media that is seemingly more evident by the day.

The bond in question is a $3 billion Eurobond* that Ukraine issued and Russia purchased at the very end of 2013, while Viktor Yanukovych was still desperately clinging to power. This $3 billion bond was supposed to be simply the first tranche in a much larger and more comprehensive Russian bailout, but reality intervened and Yanukovych was overthrown before the other parts could be organized. The bond is, by the often-esoteric standards of modern finance, quite straightforward. It had a two-year maturity and a 5% coupon payment.

Russia, rather understandably, wants the bond paid back. This is not only because it needs the money (though $3 billion plus interest in hard currency would be a welcome addition to the state's coffers) but because it is doing everything it can to scuttle Ukraine's IMF-backed bailout package. The bond is an important source of leverage over the Ukrainian government, and the Kremlin is trying to use this to the greatest extent possible.

How is the Russian bond relevant to the IMF? Well the IMF has a "lending-into-arrears policy," which prohibits it from lending money to governments that are in arrears to other governments. Since the Eurobond in question is clearly an official loan (some in the Ukrainian government have attempted to argue otherwise, but even in the West this argument got little traction because it is so obviously false) if Ukraine defaults on the payment it would be technically ineligible for any further IMF assistance.

Here's the thing though: the IMF's policies aren't set in stone. If its leadership determines that the policies need to change, then change they will. And, in one of the least shocking developments of all time, the IMF is already in the process of tweaking its "lending-into-arrears" policy. As the Wall Street Journal reported:

"IMF managing director Christine Lagarde announced that the fund would consider in March 2016 a review of the lending-into-arrears policy, with an informal discussion planned for November.

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

The Russians (as you might expect!) are not terribly happy about this. Sputnik had a screeching article bemoaning the "IMF's unfair game," a Kremlin-linked think tank said that the IMF was behaving "like Washington's obedient flunky," while Vladimir Putin has publicly begged the IMF to lend Ukraine money so that it can pay back its loan to Russia. The IMF, just as predictably, has been unmoved. A betting man would say that Russia's debt is going to be restructured and that the Kremlin will be lucky to get back even half of what it lent Kiev.

Here we see Russia's exaggerated sense of its own power and influence coming up against an organization with real power and influence: the IMF. Russia can whine all its wants to about the IMF's "politicization" or "selectivity," but none of it will matter because Russia isn't strong enough to force the IMF to do anything.

 In the past Russia tried to work with international organizations like the IMF and the World Bank because its leaders accurately understood that fighting the head-on would be extremely costly and counterproductive. That reality hasn't changed, even if Russia's behavior has.

*just to spare readers any confusion, in this case "Euro" refers not to the currency but to the fact that the bond is a dollar-denominated bond issued in London. Anytime you read about "Eurobonds" or the "Eurodollar" market remember that you are talking about dollar-denominated financial products issued by a London-based bank

 [return to Contents] 

 #41
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
November 8, 2015
War in Ukraine Will Resume Soon - Top Russian Theorist (Alexander Dugin)

Western media are eager to advance Alexander Dugin as a Russian fascist and the brain behind Putin - he isn't the former and certainly not the latter, as the two are more often at odds than not.

Nonetheless, he is an interesting thinker and with considerable influence on various Russian patriots

He has recently broken a one year media silence to give an exhaustive interview on the results of the pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine last year, the war in Syria, and the inevitability of a final battle in East Ukraine.

He argues that renewed war in Ukraine is even more likely now than before because it is the US's only means to parry Russian successes in Syria.

"The war in Donbass will be imposed on us by Washington and Kiev."
"And if we were not fighting ISIS in Syria, then we would have to do it in Central Asia."
"Yes, we are losing (in the Ukraine), but we haven't lost yet so far as the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics control the border."
 
---

Alexander Dugin (Katehon)
Originally appeared at Katehon
http://katehon.com/topic/geopolitics/1276-war-in-donbass-will-be-imposed-on-us-by-washington-and-kiev.html

Q: Alexander Gelyevich, here's a question for you as the acknowledged ideologist of the Russian Spring: How do you assess the current situation in Novorossiya? What was conceived in the beginning and what has actually come about?

Alexander Dugin: I've long refrained from any commentating on what's happening in Donbass, and there were serious reasons for this. Now, a few cycles of reflection on these dramatic events, which are known as the "Russian Spring", have passed, and we now have the possibility to have a more balanced, calm, and analytical attitude towards the subject, which for me personally was a colossal, heartfelt, spiritual wound.

The topic of the "Russian Spring" is my direct and living pain. I can not speak about it calmly. It's not just about the loss of loved ones - it is the deepest strike at the very center of those expectations which I had in regards to Novorossiya and the revival of Russia, its spirit, and its identity. The matter at hand is the reawakening of Russia.

For a long time I couldn't speak on topics of this kind, refrained from commenting and shied away from assessments due to the deep trauma that I experienced as one of the first enthusiasts of the rebirth of Great Russia, starting with Crimea through to Novorossiya and so on. Now it's not trauma that is ongoing but, at least, a wound whose severity is healing.

Having given this introduction, I would like to make an analysis of how I see the situation.

Russia is not the Russian Federation. Russia is the Russian World, a civilization, one of the poles of a multipolar world which we ought to be and which we are obliged to become.

The history of Russia is like a heartbeat. Our Russian heart shrinks and expands.

It shrank after the collapse of the USSR and our territory was reduced as happens often in history such as, for example, in 1917, but each time our borders expand again.

At the end of the '90's and the beginning of the 2000's, there was a crisis. As a geopolitician, I follow the pulse of Russian history - this is also my pulse, and my heart pounds exactly in rhythm with the heart of my country and my people. I awaited a diastole.

To make things clearer: the rhythm of a heart includes systoles and diastoles, or contractions and expansions. A diastole, accordingly, is an expansion.

Each time that our heart ceases to contract and begins to expand, so does our Russian civilization once again start to return to its own (natural, continental) forms. In the first place, this return was associated with the integration of the post-Soviet space. The very term "Eurasianism" is this diastole. Eurasianism is when Russia unites all the post-Soviet, and in fact Russian, Imperial, civilizational space, imparting the cultural category of the Russian World with a geopolitical and military-strategic dimension.

And thus I awaited this diastole, but I didn't simple wait, watching (as people wait for the bus), but I in every possible way promoted this cardiac phase as an ideologist and active practitioner of Eurasianism, of integration processes in the post-Soviet space, and as a consistent apologist for the revival of Great Russia. Greater Russia.

It needs to be said that all the signs of this new expansion were staring us in the face: the beginning of Eurasian integration in the form of the Eurasian Economic Community, and then the creation of the Eurasian Union, the forcing of the pro-Atlanticist regime of Saakashvili to make peace, when we first went beyond the borders of the Russian Federation and didn't allow the suppression of hotbeds of pro-Russian resistance in the South Caucasus, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia, and, of course, in response to the actions our enemies - the Atlanticists who attempted to take the brotherly Ukrainian people under the control of American hegemony - the annexation of Crimea. In all of this I saw the expansion of the Russian heart, a geopolitical diastole.

Further, Novorossiya logically followed Crimea, and I don't see any difference between them. I am absolutely sure that, if we lose Donbass, then we will lose Crimea, and then all of Russia, because if we interrupt a diastole, then heart failure, a chip in our historical existence, in our historical rhythm, occurs. Therefore, I fought hard for the Russian Spring and against the betrayal of Novorossiya.

I'll repeat once more: the Russian Spring is a requirement of our Russian historical existence. Russia will either be great, or will not be at all. Great Russia - this is not only a territory or expansion, as we do don't need anything else. And I'm not against the existence of a sovereign Ukraine, if only it would be our ally or partner or, in the least, a neutral, intermediate space. We would like to be together in one state, but on this the citizens of Ukraine must decide. But what exactly shouldn't be allowed is an Atlanticist occupation of Ukraine. This is a geopolitical axiom. Our enemies perfectly understand that Russia can become great again only together with Ukraine, either unified or having built some kind of balanced alliance. There is no other way. The Russian Spring is impossible without a Eurasian pivot in Ukraine, no matter what form, peaceful or not, that it takes.

Ukraine can be an autonomous and independent state exclusively among our allies. If it were to come under occupation, then we are obliged to liberate it or, as a minimum, guarantee the historical existence of the half of its population which is linked with us by faith. Doing this is our duty, our unconditional historical imperative. If we do not fulfill this, then we betray our own people, ourselves, and our history. From the very beginning of the Russian Spring, I spoke openly about this and I have not changed my opinion thus far.

But those at the top insisted that Crimea is ours, but not Donbass - certainly not ours, but it's unknown whose it is and it has an uncertain future. But...Blood not water, and then children are killed, and finally, the spirit of the Russian spring. The unacceptable price for retarded diplomacy with questionable success. There was nothing particularly "tricky" in this...

Despite this, I believe that criticism of the leadership of the country, which for its conduct in Donbass it fully deserves, is inappropriate now. Although criticism arises (albeit from the patriotic pole), it is immediately picked up by the West in the fight with Russia itself. Criticizing the government, one unwittingly becomes part of the enemy's ranks. And this is unacceptable and contrary to allegiance to the homeland, which, in fact, is in a state of direct conflict with the main enemy - the US and NATO bloc.

What is left to do? Thank the government for the suppression of the Russian Spring? Stand among the ranks of Russia's enemy in criticizing the government? Anyway this government is still continuing the same patriotic rhetoric,-albeit a bit empty and sometimes even like a simulation. It's suppressing not only the best, but also the worst. In each case of half-heartedness, there is that which is hateful towards us, but also that which is hateful towards our enemies. This is the well-known dialectic of the glass half full of water. Half-patriotism is half-liberalism, and the milligrams [of water] on both sides are regulated, so that there would be a balance...Here is why I was silent the whole time. Criticizing the glass, which is half full anyway, we attack not only the void, but also the second half in the name of which we are acting. This is called an epistemological impasse, an aporia.

Has Russia had a heart failure, has the diastole ceased?

I've spoken too much on the topic of Novorossiya, because now two events have happened - big and small.

The first is Syria. The Russian Federation, not carrying out the creation of a perimeter of Great Russia, Greater Russia, and the Russian World to its end, and leaving the bleeding wound of Donbass in the terrible that it's in, has now spoken out in defense of our geopolitical interests in the Middle East. This is a more distant goal, but not less important. And I, as a geopolitician, can say that our intervention in Syria is absolutely correct, flawless, sound, and an orthodox step in protecting our national interests.

I'll explain. As we see in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and even in the North Caucasus, trends towards an increase in the influence of ISIS are growing. And if we were not fighting ISIS in Syria, then we would have to do it in Central Asia and then, perhaps, on the territory of the Russian Federation.

This is the plan of the Americans. Islamic fundamentalism has traditionally been an instrument in the structure of American and Atlanticist geopolitics, and this is an obvious point. The Islamic State is an American special operation directed against the opponents of American hegemony in the Middle East, and this includes (and is primarily) against us.

When we, at the request of Assad, invaded Syria, we once again returned to history, again appealing to the diastole of the Russian heart. This comes after a stupor, Minsk, indecision, hesitation, trade offs, and a dubious tug of war. After a bloody pause.

Look at what is happening now. We are fighting against the essence of the pro-American, crypto-Atlanticist, fundamentalist sect that is ISIS, in order to inflict a blow on it as far away as possible from our borders. Otherwise, we will fight with them here. This indicates the presence of a strategic, geopolitical conscience among the leadership of the country, and this is encouraging. Support for Assad is also a part of the Russian Spring, the assertion of Russia as a subject, not an object of history, a gesture towards strengthening our sovereignty.

The second point is that, no matter what, our border with the republics is controlled by our friends from the LPR and DPR.

Thank God that over this period of time we haven't given anything up. We didn't save anything, but we didn't lose anything. That we didn't save is very bad, but that we didn't lose is good (again the strategy of half a glass). The absence of control over the border by the Kiev side is an indicator by which to judge everything. Yes, there is a nightmare there. Yes, we are losing this battle, but we haven't lost yet so far as the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics control the border. Not everything is lost yet. Much is lost, but not all. And if not all at once, then nothing, as Cuzio Malaparte said. He wrote: "Nothing is lost as long as not everything is lost."

Another point. The fact of our military support for Assad in Syria, although real and effective, is still without a guaranteed result (the immediate results are generally very impressive and positive). Therefore, the Americans are vitally interested in an escalation of hostilities in Donbass in order to make the whole situation more difficult for us. And anyway, Poroshenko, who received little support in recent elections in Ukraine, is interested in the same. For him, the war is now the only way to maintain power.

The war in Donbass will be imposed on us by Washington and Kiev. Not we, but they, despite the Minsk agreements and our attempts to get out of direct confrontation by any means, will launch hostilities. Accordingly, we return to the point which I interrupted with a commentary on events.

As I predicted, the situation cannot have another solution other than the defense of Novorossiya from the pro-American, neo-Nazi junta, which was a junta and remains a junta, and whose neck it is time to snap. Sooner or later, we will return to Novorossiya. Of course, it's already late, but not critically late. He who controls the border of the DPR and LPR with Russia controls everything.

We are at the threshold of a new cycle, a new stage. We Russian people have seen many things in history. We've seen different Tsars, leaders, different regimes, and we have often retreated and met historical dead ends. There have been stagnations and uncertainties, but we always reached for our horizons, and now I feel a new expansion of the Russian diastole.

This is why I am ready to break analytical silence and more calmly talk on topics which now interest all Russian people, people who all understand and feel that they are also fighting, sacrificing themselves and fighting for our Great Homeland.

Q: Alexander Gelyevich, what do you think of the Minsk Agreements? Is this really a path to peace? After all, there is a number of fundamental contradictions which they have not resolved.

Alexander Dugin: The Minsk Agreements really haven't resolved any contradictions. This is just winning time. We and the Ukrainians have tried to take advantage of this delaying of the final fight.

We wanted to demonstrate to Europe that Crimea is ours, but that we were ready to discuss everything else. This was rather immoral, and I'm not sure if it really yielded any result. Nevertheless, we broadcasted this message, and those at the top were tasked with demonstrating our peaceful intentions. The shelling of Donbass cities, the murdered people, the mockery of the people of Novorossiya (not to mention the militia) - to me this price seems excessive for such a demonstration, so I have always been an opponent of the Minsk Agreements. They cannot be a solution to the situation, and this is obvious. No one on any side believes in them.

We tried to wink at Europe, to show that "we are wonderful" and say "throw out the Americans." They [the Americans] were the ones who brought the situation to such a critical point. This wasn't successful and couldn't be. The influence of the Atlanticist elites in Europe is quite strong, but we still tried to do this.

As regards Ukraine, Poroshenko demonstrated the same thing. This was not a game with America, but with Europe. Poroshenko says: "I'm sitting down with the Russians at the negotiating table. Look how democratic and decent enough we are to be ready even to discuss peaceful agreements with "terrorists," because we so want to be in Europe." That is, Poroshenko didn't want to report before America, but before Europe. We and the Ukrainians competed in a certain diplomatic battle to attract Europe to our side. But this wasn't successful - they didn't believe us up to the end, and they didn't believe us after Crimea, but after Syria this already became clear. It's all about confidence and power. My declared ourselves a sovereign and strong regional power, and let others understand that now it is necessary to perceive us as such. Not our diplomacy, but our real strength. Historically it has turned out that if we are strong, then they'll consider us, but if week, then there will be no consideration. Therefore we didn't persuade Europe, and we couldn't convince by such ridiculous negotiations. But then they were convinced by our air strikes on ISIS and other terrorists in Syria.

Poroshenko didn't convince them, and he couldn't convince them because Europe, from the very beginning, did not really engage in the Kiev Maidan. The Americans promised that everything in Ukraine will be really fast, and the Europeans won't incur any responsibility for what's happening. Moreover, the Americans forced European leaders (especially Hollande and Merkel) to participate in the Maidan. The "young partners," or, more precisely, the vassals of Washington naturally don't have greater freedom of action.

When Europe turned out to be an accomplice of the US and started to impose sanctions, then it realized that deliveries of gas were being put into question. Then Europe shrunk back in horror from the Russians and Ukrainians, preferring that everything be turned back to how it always was. The Normandy Format and the Minsk talks essentially revolved around whether or not it would be possible to turn back, or at least extend the status quo. Now, as long as the Minsk Agreements are recognized by everyone, there is already simply no other exit for Poroshenko and Washington except by breaking them unilaterally and beginning the final battle for Donbass.

For the Americans, this is a way to distract us from Syria, opening a second front which is the only way by which Poroshenko can maintain power. It's nothing personal: they'll impose this war on us.

We will shy away from this war and cling to the Minsk Agreements for the same reasons. We don't need a second front and need a falling, not strong, Poroshenko so that Ukraine will collapse before Donbass will be once again annexed by the Nazi state. We will shy away from direct conflict, and I can even assume that comments like mine will be censored by major media outlets. But we have seen this and it is such.

Our bet is not to allow the Ukrainians to impose war on us and not give them the opportunity to take control of the border. This is the main indicator: as long as the republics of Novorossiya control the border, the situation can more or less be characterized as normal, but if it's given up, then this will be a fully fundamental failure.

Much is being decided now and history is again open. We haven't resolved the issue of Novorossiya, and have merely postponed its resolution. It reminds us of ourselves. Accordingly, the Minsk Agreements, which we will try to hold on to, will be gradually destroyed and abolished in different ways. We will see soon.

Q: Does this mean that an intensification of hostilities is not far off?

It is inevitable. The war can only be delayed for a little while, and Russia is putting certain efforts in this direction. Because now a war isn't favorable for us, and we are less ready for it than we were a year ago.

Is an Ossetian scenario possible? In the case of a violation of all agreements the Ukrainian side will attack the young republics, then will Russia, as it was with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, bring in troops and recognize their independence in order to force the aggressor to make peace?

This would be correct. This scenario was highly relevant at the very beginning of the Russian Spring. In fact, in this scenario it was assumed that there will be not only geopolitical control, but that these regions would return to the space of Great Russia, bringing with them a new spirit and awakening a Russian light. This idealistic dimension, extraordinarily important, is now completely lost because of the subsequent trade off of Russian interests. Maybe this trade off was justified, in part, from a diplomatic point of view as a preparation for the final battle. I think not, but I'm ready to allow for such.

But there is another side. Having started haggling, we struck a huge blow at the spiritual dimension of the Russian Spring and at Novorossiya as an idea. This is irreversible. From a tough, tactical and technical point of view, this might be explained with some kind of reasons, but from a spiritual point of view this was a moral crime when we didn't go for the Ossetian-Abkhazian scenario at the moment when Ukrainian punitive forces started to bomb the cities of Novorossiya, massively destroying the peaceful population - we've all seen the footage. Our response was morally obvious, but we took a different decision. That is, regarding national interests, we still haven't failed, but we are much worse in terms of values.

In this respect, the Minsk Agreements are an immoral tool, peculiarity of understood interests, but there are no values for any of the sides. This is a purely pragmatic enterprise. There are people for whom history is a technology, but I believe that history is spirit. There are civilizational settings which it is impossible to sacrifice for technical interests, even the most peculiarly understood and controversial.

Consequently, the Minsk Agreements are a morally questionable pause. But we are going to keep them since we started playing the game. If there is a problem with values, let at least interests be realized.

It's necessary to recognize a simple truth: they won't leave us alone, and it its best to recognize this immediately. History is always a choice, often a choice in the face of death. The average person runs away from this and tries to barricade himself from problems, but if a government behaves like a layman, then this government is transitory. History begins when the top of the vertical power takes an existential - historic - decision, and this means looking death straight in the face.

It's possible to try and run away, but history catches up to us no matter what and there are signs that she's catching up with us. We at least cannot leave Syria without victory. And if they challenge us and rip up the Minsk Agreements in Donbass, then we will need not one victory but two. And I am sure that we are quite ready for this and we can do it. But we need to give up the politics of half a glass.

Our great people and valiant army have enough strength, fortitude, and courage for great victories. Another thing is whether the political leadership of the country has enough brains, courage, and will. Now all the questions put before them, and we will see how these people respond to their call by history. They think all the rest should bear the responsibility for what is in front of them. This is so. But they will be judged before the court of history. And the court of history is a scary thing. It is like God's judgement, and it is impossible to bribe or use an administrative resource.

 [return to Contents] 

 #42
New York Times
November 7, 2015
Ukraine Pins Hopes for Change on Fresh-Faced Police Recruits
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

LVIV, Ukraine - When officers of the new patrol police recently arrested a young, unemployed actor named Vladimir for a drunken midday nap on Market Square - the leafy center of this picturesque, cobblestoned city in western Ukraine - two giggling friends asked to snap a selfie with the detainee.

A fit, fresh-faced police officer consented, allowing them to clamber into the back seat of his white Toyota Prius patrol car while the disheveled Vladimir soon began flirting with the female battalion commander. The scene was a marked contrast with the old police force, an all-male preserve whose officers regularly punched first and then asked questions.

"Soft," pronounced Sgt. Mykola Lozynsky, a veteran at the station where Vladimir, 26, was taken for booking. "They don't know how to work."

It is a common appraisal by members of the old police force, known as the militia, of the thousands of novice officers deployed in major Ukrainian cities starting last July. There should be at least 10,000 new officers by the end of the year in a country where a patchwork of law enforcement agencies has about 140,000 uniformed officers.

Much is riding on the neophyte force, which is often praised as the only tangible sign of change 20 months after protests toppled the government.

Ukrainians pushing for change believe that for any reform to take root, the country needs to rebuild its criminal justice system from scratch, and it particularly must have a less abusive police force.

The new patrol officers are envisioned as the independent wedge that will begin to transform the entire system. With the two forces set to begin merging on Saturday, the question is whether the good can drive out the bad, and whether a merged force rife with mistrust between the old and the new can work effectively.

"Police reform will be the engine of overall reform," said Mustafa Nayyem, who is often credited with starting the Ukrainian uprising with a Facebook post. Mr. Nayyem, 34, is one of scores of new, young Parliament members struggling to reshape the petrified system they fought to overthrow. He even plans to head the new police force in two eastern cities once controlled by separatists.

To their myriad fans, the new officers embody the right kind of change: idealistic, helpful, diverse, clean and drilled endlessly that public service is their main task.

To skeptics, they represent what is fundamentally wrong with the current attempt to overhaul Ukraine: a superficial change to the patina of urban life while venality and incompetence endure behind every government facade.

"It is a good image, but it is useless," said Andriy Dudnyk, a Kiev businessman, describing the new police force. "Is it revolutionary? Yes. Is it provocative? Yes. Is it a step in the right direction? Yes. Has it achieved any real result? No."

Many Ukrainians criticize what they see as the glacial pace of change and the lack of progress on two issues in particular. No senior figure has been convicted on corruption charges, and investigators have yet to identify anyone responsible for the massacre of about 100 protesters on the Maidan, Kiev's main square, during the February 2014 uprising.

Overshadowing it all is the separatist war in the east, where a cease-fire is finally holding and a peace a greement has been extended past its Dec. 31 deadline. The ultimate status of the breakaway regions, however, and the extent to which Russia will use them to destabilize Ukraine remains a dark cloud.

Despite President Petro O. Poroshenko's promises that he is committed to "deep reform," Ukrainians increasingly question whether Mr. Poroshenko, a 50-year-old billionaire chocolate baron, is the right man to dismantle an oligarchy. In Ukraine, where the 10 richest men control 20 percent of the wealth, oligarchs buy factories and judges with equal ease.

A poll conducted by the Razumkov Center, a policy research organization in Kiev, found that 36 percent of the 2,011 people questioned last summer thought Mr. Poroshenko was the main promoter of change, while 39 percent named him the main brake.

Ukraine "is trying to be a new country, but it cannot function with old institutions," said Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia who was appointed the governor of the Ukrainian region of Odessa, at a recent forum.

Members of the militia were seen as "monsters," said Mr. Nayyem, so the idea was to create a popular new force that could leverage its standing to compel change.

"Someday, the new police will come into conflict with other branches of the security forces, and the judiciary," he said. "The outcome of that conflict will depend on the people's support."

The attempt to make them popular seems to be working. Calls to the police are markedly up in cities where the new officers have been deployed, and some clips from their body cameras - another innovation - that showed officers arresting a drunken soccer star and questioning a bishop, for example, became social media sensations.

Not all the attention is positive. One widely shared video showed new police officers beating a vagrant with batons. At least 30 new officers have been dismissed for infractions like sleeping on the job, though none for corruption, Mr. Nayyem said. Their salaries were raised to almost $400 a month, roughly three times the basic police salary previously, to decrease the temptation to demand payoffs.

The new police received just 10 weeks of training that included classes on criminal law, reporting traffic accidents and respecting gay rights, another first in Ukraine. Women, previously limited to clerical roles, make up about one-quarter of the new force.

American police officers conducted some of the training, funded by the $38 million that the State Department is spending to try to improve the rule of law in Ukraine.

The new police deal with low-level infractions, while the militia handles major crimes. The public line is that the two forces get along better all the time, but when they intersect they keep a wary distance.

Some militia members, who still run police stations, have brazenly undermined the work of the new police, releasing suspects right under the noses of the officers who arrested them. Four deputy chiefs in Kiev were dismissed over the lack of cooperation, said Eka Zguladze, 37, the first deputy interior minister, who is in charge of overhauling the police.

The fact that the government shoved aside the locals and imported Ms. Zguladze, who once carried out police reforms in her native Georgia, fueled significant resentment, as did the appointment of Khatia Dekanoidze, a former education minister of Georgia, to run the national police.

"They substitute real action with aggressive rhetoric that all the policemen who worked before were corrupt bribe takers and evil psychologically," said Aleksey Lazarenko, a police colonel who lost his job under the changes.

Among rank-and-file officers, Mr. Lazarenko said, 50 percent think nothing will change, 25 percent think things will improve once the new officers gain experience and 25 percent loathe them.

New police officers tend to exude a peach-fuzzy uncertainty when they engage suspects. They also look American because the United States donated the uniforms. Hence the entire program is often labeled "Police Academy" after the slapstick movie series about novice officers running amok.

"It is better for somebody to smile at you, remembering an American comedy, rather than to see that old Soviet cop with a 200-pound belly and $200 sticking out of his pocket from his last bribe," Ms. Zguladze said.

Andriy Sadovyi, Lviv's mayor, extols the new police as a main hope for change. The new patrol police chief here, Yuri Zozulya, was quick to challenge authority, the mayor said, which made him the target of a slur campaign by the old police.

Mr. Zozulya, 27, a martial arts aficionado and a former investment banker, provided abundant ammunition. Shortly after he began his new job, he was stopped for speeding, and it emerged that he had six outstanding traffic violations. Old pictures suddenly cropped up on social media, showing candid public moments of him swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Finally, he was stopped at the Polish border when he tried to import an undeclared cache of painkillers that he said was for soldiers fighting the separatists. (The painkillers were confiscated, but he was not detained or arrested.)

In an interview, he shrugged off the incidents as the teething pains of an unexpected police chief.

During the Maidan protests, Mr. Zozulya used his martial arts background to help defend the demonstrators, battling the militia constantly. The Interior Ministry appointed him to the chief's job partly because he was forceful toward militia members.

Since then, Mr. Zozulya has fearlessly issued traffic tickets to a politician and other influential figures. He succinctly summed up the philosophy that the new police officers are supposed to spread throughout Ukraine.

"For us," he said, "everybody is equal, everybody is a citizen."

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 #43
Dances With Bears
http://johnhelmer.net
November 9, 2015
THE TONGUE THAT RAN AWAY WITH ITSELF - AUSTRALIAN AND DUTCH OFFICIALS LOSE CONTROL OF MH17 INFOWAR
By John Helmer, Moscow
[Footnotes, links, and photos here http://johnhelmer.net/?p=14500]

Australian and Dutch police investigating the evidence of the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 have gone public in disagreement with their superiors and with their governments' political leaders. The split has opened between forensic investigators and police on the one hand, who say they aren't convinced what weapon caused the crash, or who fired it; and politicians on the other hand, who blame the Kremlin.

Last month a senior officer of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) announced in The Hague, where a multinational team of investigators is fifteen months into gathering evidence for a criminal prosecution: "I'm sure we have everything we need by way of evidence." Ian McCartney is an assistant commissioner of the AFP, and the most senior member of the AFP group working on the case to bring to justice those responsible for causing the MH17 crash and the deaths of all 298 people on board. Of those killed, 196 were Dutch nationals; 38 were Australians.

McCartney (above, left), according to an insider, is a "straight shooter". But not on the prosecution of the MH17 shootdown perpetrators, according to his subordinate, Andrew Donoghue (right). Donoghue is the AFP detective superintendent in command of the Australian officers in the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) in The Netherlands and in Ukraine, which is responsible for collecting the evidence of criminal responsibility, and assembling an indictment for the courts. The JIT was created in August 2014 by the governments of The Netherlands, Australia, Ukraine, and Belgium,. For more details, including the conflict with the Malaysian government, which has been excluded from key parts of the investigation and then erased from the press record, see this [2] and this [3].

Donoghue has contradicted McCartney, saying last month: "We're not at the stage of being able to say enough in terms of evidence and credible witnesses." In short, no identification of perpetrators, no court case to answer - not yet. Donoghue went on to express doubt that more time for the investigation will produce an indictment, or an effective prosecution. "If the brief [indictment] is presented, it'll be good enough [but] I'd say we still have twelve months' work ahead of us, and taking other similar incidents as a benchmark, it [might] be five or 10 years before this case is closed."

The AFP says its six officers in Kiev have conducted "hundreds" of interviews with Ukrainians claiming to have been witnesses on the ground. The AFP claims also to have analysed photographs and videotapes of the scene, plus audiotapes provided by Ukrainian and US intelligence agencies of chatter among Novorussian combatants. According to Donoghue, no witnesses have been interviewed by Australian officers in the area of the crash itself in the Donetsk region of Ukraine because it is controlled by the Novorussian forces and by the breakaway Novorussian government. The Australian government won't allow its police to negotiate with the Novorussians. Malaysian government officials who have done so have been excluded from the JIT.

"Kharkiv is the limit [for Australian investigators]", Donoghue has said, identifying the nearest Kiev-controlled territory to the crash scene, more than 300 kilometres to the southeast. The detective has added: "People with direct evidence of what they saw, smelled and touched, but in many cases we can't approach them or get them to a safe place."

Donoghue has acknowledged the evidence is uncertain and unlikely to be admissible by conventional court standards. "In Australia, we'd have control of it [the crash area] for as long as we needed - recovery [of the victims] would have been methodical; and in parallel, we'd be doing forensics to ensure we controlled the integrity and the chain of custody of the evidence." Donoghue has conceded that only after the wreckage from the crash scene was flown to The Netherlands could the investigators be confident "it could never be tampered with again."

The Sydney Morning Herald published these contradictory statements of the AFP officers in its newspaper on October 16. Ten days later, it had not appeared online on the paper's website. Reporter Paul McGeough confirmed this from Washington, DC, where he is the Herald's US correspondent, but he was surprised by the omission of his story, and could not explain why. Subsequently, the report has been published [4] in this online version.

McGeough has reported his personal conviction that the Kremlin is to blame for the MH17 downing, and "Moscow's intransigence" for delay in prosecution. Tony Abbott, the Australian prime minister at the time of the crash - July 17, 2014 - explicitly blamed the Russian Government. His successor, Malcolm Turnbull (right), has been less explicit. Turnbull said in a letter last month to families of the Australian victims: "We are focused on all possible options for prosecuting those responsible, with a view to securing due punishment for this crime." Turnbull is so far refusing to issue the statutory certification of what caused the crash, in order for the government to pay compensation. Click [5] for more details.

Turnbull has blamed the Russian government for vetoing a United Nations tribunal to prosecute the case outside international law. Turnbull was reacting to the release on October 13 of the Dutch Safety Board's report [6] on the MH17 case. The disagreements and contradictions among the Australian officials were revealed a few days later.

The newly published version of what the AFP is now saying reveals even more than the newspaper included in its edition of October 16. Donoghue admits he and his investigators "don't have an ability to go back to the scene to do our own inquiries. We can't go east of Kiev." Donoghue also confirms the Ukrainian government controls everything the other national investigators on the JIT can investigate. "Everything we do," Donoghue is quoted as saying, "is independently reviewed by each of the countries involved - and sometimes that review is done jointly." This confirms the Ukrainian veto provisions in the secret JIT agreement, which the AFP refused to release publicly last December [7].

The public airing of Australian police scepticism towards the MH17 evidence follows the decision by Victorian state coroner Ian Gray to classify secret all autopsy evidence collected by Australian coronial pathologists from the bodies of victims. Gray acted after autopsy results had been published [8] in Australia and internationally. This evidence revealed the absence of missile shrapnel in the bodies of the Australians, casting doubt on the claims of a Buk missile warhead as cause of the crash, and of Russian culpability in the deaths. Gray's new secrecy order came after he had been briefed by government officials. On their recommendation, Gray is also refusing to set a date for an inquest into the cause of death for the Australian victims. For details, read this [9].

Australian experts on coronial law say Gray's actions are an unprecedented violation of the law. One inquest specialist said: "As the Coroner [Gray] is required to make a finding as to the cause of death. He has several options and the only possible one is that the victim was killed by an unlawful act. In order to reach that determination he has to utilise the pathologist's findings." Other Australian lawyers believe Gray has been told by government officials that if he holds an inquest, and the pathologists' evidence is introduced in court, it will be open to lawyers for the victims' families to attack the credibility of international claims of Russian culpability.

In The Netherlands there has been a similar effort by Dutch government officials to suppress autopsy evidence from the victims' bodies. For details, read the case of the Dutch government's attempt to discredit one of its senior pathologists on the JIT, George Maat [10] (below, left). For Maat's recent charges of political interference, media falsification, and infowar, read the interview he gave on September 29 [11].

Recently the Dutch prosecutor leading the JIT, Fred Westerbeke (above, right), has made public acknowledgements similar to the AFP disclosures. On August 11, Westerbeke said [12]: "we are still not 100 percent sure" of the Buk missile evidence. He was also publicly uncertain on evidence for the perpetrators. "We hope to move on the international identification of suspects." On October 11, two days before the DSB announced its report, Westerbeke told [13] the Dutch press: "We are getting closer to legal and convincing evidence."

The public statements of the DSB chairman, Tjibbe Joustra [1], leave no ambiguity. He blames the Russian government for providing the missile, the command-control system which fired it, and the subsequent concealment of the perpetrators. According to Joustra [14], he knows who they are, and that the Russian government is "not rushing at all to deliver people". Joustra told a Dutch reporter that although he's sure he knows the Russians were the perpetrators of the MH17 crime, he is pessimistic they will ever be brought to court. "Joustra never lets anything just fall out of his mouth," the Dutch reporter claims [15].

Westerbeke has said nothing in public since then.

For readers interested to open the encyclopedia of infowar on MH17, here is a collection of reports by a group of independent Dutch, German, American and British investigators, who have examined each element of the evidence so far published [16].

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