#2
Obama expresses regret over Russian plane downing incident at meeting with Putin

PARIS, November 30 /TASS/. US President Barack Obama has expressed regret over the Sukhoi Su-24 bomber incident at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

"Obama expressed regret in cinnection with the incident involving the Russian jet downed by the Turkish Air Force in Syria," Peskov said.

 Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Barack Obama held a meeting on the sidelines of the Paris climate conference that lasted for around 30 minutes.

The meeting, which was held behind the closed doors, had not been planned or discussed beforehand. The presidents used the opportunity of attending the international conference to speak about topical issues in the bilateral format. The two leaders also discussed the situation in Syria and Ukaine.

"Syria was discussed in detail, too, and both presidents spoke in favor of moves towards the start of political settlement," Peskov said. "They also spoke about Ukraine and pointed out the importance of an earliest possible implementation of the Minsk accords."

Last time, the two leaders met at the G20 summit in Turkey's Antalya two weeks ago where they had two meetings and one of them lasted for around 20 minutes.

Earlier, the Russian and US presidents had long talks in New York in late September on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly's anniversary session.

Relations between Russia and Turkey hit a low after the incident on November 24 when a Turkish F-16 fighter jet brought down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M bomber, which, Ankara alleges, violated the country's airspace near the Syrian border. The Russian Defense Ministry said the warplane was flying over Syrian territory and had never violated Turkey's airspace.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Turkey's attack will have "serious consequences" for Russian-Turkish relations. Putin said Ankara's attack against the Russian Sukhoi Su-24 plane, which took part in Russia's antiterrorism operation in Syria and did not present a threat to Turkey, was a "stab in Russia's back" delivered by terrorists' accomplices.

On Sunday, Putin signed a decree on a provisional ban on employing Turkish citizens in Russia as of January 1, 2016. The same decree suspends visa-free traveling between the two countries and imposes restrictions on the imports of certain commodities from Turkey.

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 #3
Kremlin.ru
November 26, 2015
Press statements and answers to journalists' questions following meeting with President of France Francois Hollande (excerpt)

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.

The President of France and I have just completed substantive talks, which were held in a trust-based, constructive tone. Naturally, we gave the greatest attention to the issue of jointly combating international terrorism.

The barbaric attack on Russia's airplane over the Sinai Peninsula, the horrible events in Paris and the terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Nigeria and Mali have left many people dead, including hundreds of Russian and French citizens. This is our common tragedy and we stand united in our commitment to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

We have already intensified the Russian Armed Forces operation against terrorists in Syria. Our military actions are effective; militants from the so-called Islamic State and other radical groups are suffering heavy losses. We have disrupted the extremists' operating mechanisms, damaged their military infrastructure and significantly undermined their financial base - I am referring first and foremost to illicit trade in oil, which generates immense profits for the terrorists and their sponsors.

Those who apply double standards when dealing with terrorists, using them to achieve their own political aims and engaging in unlawful business with them, are playing with fire. History shows that sooner or later such actions will backfire against those who abet criminals.

Russia and France know what it means to act in the spirit of alliance; we have come together more than once throughout our history. Today, we agreed to step up our joint efforts on the anti-terrorist track, to improve the exchange of operational information in the fight against terrorism and establish constructive work between our military experts in order to avoid overlapping incidents and to focus our efforts on ensuring that our work in fighting terror is more effective, avoiding any strikes against territories and armed forces that are themselves fighting terrorists.

The barbaric attack on Russia's airplane over the Sinai Peninsula, the horrible events in Paris and the terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Nigeria and Mali have left many people dead. This is our common tragedy and we stand united in our commitment to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.
Mr Hollande and I are looking at this kind of cooperation as concrete and practical input towards forming a broad anti-terrorist coalition, a broad anti-terrorist front under the auspices of the United Nations. I will note that the number of nations sharing this initiative is growing.

We are confident that eradicating terrorism in Syria will create the necessary conditions for achieving a final and long-term settlement of the Syrian crisis. We agreed to continue working together very actively within the framework of the International Syria Support Group and promote the fulfilment of all agreements reached within this group, first and foremost with regard to the deadlines and parameters for holding intra-Syrian talks.

In today's talks, we could not ignore the situation in Ukraine; in this context, we discussed prospects of cooperating in the Normandy format. We will continue to insist on the implementation of all provisions of the Minsk Agreements of February 12.

The Russian Armed Forces operation against terrorists in Syria is effective; militants from the so-called Islamic State and other radical groups are suffering heavy losses. We have significantly undermined their financial base - I am referring first and foremost to illicit trade in oil, which generates immense profits for the terrorists and their sponsors.

In conclusion, I would like to thank Mr President and all his French colleagues for an open, substantive dialogue. We agreed to continue our discussion in Paris within the framework of the UN Climate Change Conference.

Thank you for your attention....

Question (retranslated): Good evening. A question for Mr Putin. Mr President, do you agree that Mr Assad remaining in office hinders the achievement of your common goals? Have you agreed about which groups should and should not be the targets of air strikes?

Vladimir Putin: I believe that the fate of the President of Syria should be entirely in the hands of the Syrian people.

Moreover, we all agree that it is impossible to successfully fight terrorism in Syria without ground operations, and no other forces exist today that can conduct ground operations in the fight against ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and other terrorist organisations aside from the Syrian government army.

We are confident that eradicating terrorism in Syria will create the necessary conditions for achieving a final and long-term settlement of the Syrian crisis.

In this respect, I feel that President Assad's army and he himself are our natural allies in the fight against terrorism. There may be other forces there that talk about their readiness to fight terror. We are currently attempting to establish ties with them, have already done so with some of them, and as I have said many times, we will be prepared to support their efforts in the fight against ISIS and other terrorist organisations, as we support Assad's army.

We agreed - I feel this is a very important part of our agreements with Mr President today - that just as with certain other countries in the region, we will exchange information on which territories are occupied by healthy opposition groups, rather than terrorists, and will avoid air strikes there. We will also exchange information when we - France and Russia - are absolutely certain that particular territories are occupied by terrorist organisations and we will coordinate our efforts in those areas.

Question: I have a question for the President of Russia. Mr President, we are currently talking about a broad-based coalition and in this regard, I have a question about Turkey's particular place in this story. Today, for example, the Russian military reported that they intensified strikes on the Syrian quadrant where the Russian plane was downed.

At the same time, the Turkish media are practically accusing Russia of bombing a humanitarian convoy. In this context, did you discuss Turkey during your talks with Francois Hollande? And what can you say about Turkey's role in this whole story and in our relations with it?

Vladimir Putin: As you know, Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation; France is also a NATO member, so we understand France's position in this situation. But Mr President expressed his condolences following the death of our servicemen, and we are grateful to him for that.

It is impossible to successfully fight terrorism in Syria without ground operations, and no other forces exist today that can fight on the ground aside from the Syrian government army. President Assad's army and he himself are our natural allies in the fight against terrorism.
As for the territory you mentioned, where our servicemen died, indeed, Syria's armed forces used multiple rocket launchers which we supplied recently to the Syrian army, in coordinated actions with our Air Force, and intensified strikes in this area right after we received credible information that one of our servicemen was killed and we were able to save the second one. How could it be otherwise? That is how it should be.

In this regard, I want to comment on what we are hearing about certain tribes close to Turkey, the Turkmens and so on. First of all, a question arises: what are representatives of Turkish terrorist organisations, who show themselves on camera and post themselves all over the Internet, doing in these territories?

Second, what are nationals of the Russian Federation, whom we are seeking because of their crimes and who are clearly classified as international terrorists, doing in that territory? Our servicemen were working in this quadrant to prevent the possible return of these people to Russia's territory to commit crimes; they were fulfilling their duties to their Fatherland, to Russia directly. Directly! Question: what are these people doing there? And we feel it is absolutely justified to intensify the efforts of our aviation there and support the intensification of the Syrian forces' efforts.

As for shelling a humanitarian convoy, as far as I know, the humanitarian organisation that the Turkish authorities are referring to has already stated that its convoys and representatives were not in that area at the time. There may have been some sort of convoy there, but it certainly wasn't peaceful. If there was some sort of convoy, then I suppose, in accordance with international law, it was necessary to determine what kind of convoy it was, where it was headed and what it was doing. And if none of this was done, then we suspect that this convoy was not carrying a purely humanitarian cargo. This serves as another piece of evidence of abetting international terrorists.

Question (retranslated): Good evening, I'm addressing both presidents. Mr Putin, why have you deployed S-400 multiple launch rocket systems? Mr Hollande, is the deployment of the S-400s in keeping with the spirit of the international coalition's efforts?

Vladimir Putin: S-400 is not a multiple rocket launcher system but an anti-aircraft missile system. We did not have these systems in Syria because our aviation is working at heights where the terrorists' criminal hand cannot reach. They do not have the corresponding military technology that is capable of taking down planes at a height of more than three or four thousand metres. It had never occurred to us that we could be hit by a country that we considered our ally.

After all, our planes, flying at a height of five to six thousand metres, were absolutely unprotected; they were not protected against possible attacks by fighter jets. If we had even thought this might be possible, then first of all, we would have long ago established systems there to protect our planes against possible attacks.

Moreover, there are other forms of technology and military protection, for example, fighter escorts, or at least technical means of defence against missile attacks, including thermal guards. Experts know how this can be done.

I repeat, we did not do any of this because we believed Turkey to be a friendly state and simply did not expect an attack from that country. That is precisely why we consider what has happened to be a treacherous blow.

Now we have seen that this is possible; we have lost people there. We are obligated to ensure the safety of our aircraft. So we have deployed a modern S-400 system there. It operates at a long distance and is one of the most effective systems in the world of its kind.

But we will not limit ourselves to that. If necessary, we will complement the activity of our aircraft by fighters and other means, including electronic warfare. There are actually many kinds, and now we will be applying them.

This does not in any way contradict what we are doing with the coalition headed by the United States. We are exchanging information with it, but we are very concerned by the nature of the exchanges and the results of our joint work.

We believed Turkey to be a friendly state and did not expect an attack from that country. That is precisely why we consider what has happened to be a treacherous blow.

Just look: we warned our US partners in advance about where our pilots would be operating, when, and at what flight levels. The American side, which heads the coalition that includes Turkey, knew about the location and time of the flights. And that is precisely where and when we were hit.

So I ask you: why did we provide this information to the Americans? Either they cannot control what their allies are doing, or they are handing out the information left and right, without understanding the consequences. Naturally, we will need to have some serious consultations with our partners on this matter. But the air defence system is not in any way directed against our partners, with whom we are fighting terrorists in Syria.

Francois Hollande (retranslated): If I may, I'd like to comment on the incident that took place on Tuesday as a result of which a Russian bomber was shot down by Turkey. This is a very serious incident, and I regret that it happened. I've said this to President Erdogan and to the Russian President.

It is absolutely clear that it is necessary to avoid any risk and any possible repetition of this sort of thing at this time and place. It is critical that we refrain from escalating the situation. The only goal that we should all set for ourselves is the fight against ISIS and the elimination of the terrorists. We have no other goals.

Therefore, we should draw the following conclusions. We must enhance coordination between our countries so that the armed forces present in the region and the aircraft capable of conducting air strikes do not interfere with each other so as to prevent any encounters leading to deplorable consequences and collisions. We must do our outmost to prevent this from happening again. It is for this reason that I have taken initiatives aimed at stepping up joint efforts and cooperation. I have been doing it for the very purpose I've just stated.

Finally, what have President Putin and I agreed upon? This is a very important point: we have agreed on the need to carry out strikes against terrorists only, only against ISIS and jihadist groups. It is crucial in this respect that groups that are also combating terrorists are not targeted by air strikes. It is in this area that we intend to share information with each other, as was discussed during the meeting.

We have to understand who can fight and who can't, who should or should not be targeted. Consequently, our current objective is to try to avoid any incidents of this kind between the countries that are engaged in counter-terrorist efforts in Syria. Second, we must identify goals that would be clear to everyone.

Question: You spoke of the need to establish a broad coalition. Is this the kind of coalition you spoke about at the UN conference, or will competition continue between coalitions? If competition does continue, we would have to wonder about just how effective such coalitions can be, especially after the incident with the Russian plane. Or do you envisage a new common coalition, and if so, is it possible that such a coalition could potentially act in other countries also under threat from ISIS, and not just in Syria?

Coming back to the incident with the Russian plane, just a few hours ago, the Turkish President said in an interview that if the Turkish Air Force had known that the plane was Russian, they would not have acted as they did. He also said that the Turkish forces destroy all oil shipments they seize from ISIS, and that if Russia has other information and can prove otherwise, the President is ready to step down. I would like to hear your comments on these statements.

Vladimir Putin: Regarding the coalition, President Hollande and I discussed this issue today. We respect the coalition the United States is heading and are ready to work with this coalition. We think it would be best to establish a unified, common coalition. This would make it simpler and easier, and, I think, more effective to coordinate our common efforts in this situation. But if our partners are not ready for this... In fact, this was what I spoke about at the UN. But if our partners are not ready for this, fine, we are ready to work in other formats, in whatever format our partners would find acceptable. We are ready to cooperate with the US-led coalition.

We are obligated to ensure the safety of our aircraft and have deployed a modern S-400 system there. It operates at a long distance and is one of the most effective systems in the world of its kind.

But of course, incidents such as the destruction of our plane and the death of our servicemen - the pilot, and a marine who was attempting to rescue his brothers in arms - are completely unacceptable. Our position is that this must not happen again. If this is not the case, we do not need such cooperation, with anyone, any coalition or country.

I discussed all of this in detail with the President of France. We agreed to work together over this coming time, in bilateral format, and with the US-led coalition in general.

The question is one of delineating the territories that are targets for strikes and those where it is better to refrain from launching strikes, exchanging information on these and other matters, and coordinating action in the combat zone.

As for the oil question and the assertion that it is destroyed on Turkish territory, at the G20 summit, which took place in Turkey as it happens, in Antalya, I showed a photograph (I had already spoken publicly about this) taken by our pilots at a height of 5,000 metres. Vehicles transporting oil made a long line that vanished over the horizon. It looks like a living oil pipeline. These are industrial-scale oil supplies coming in from parts of Syria now in the terrorists' hands. This oil comes from these regions, not from other places. We see from the air where these vehicles are heading. They are heading for Turkey day and night. I can imagine that perhaps Turkey's senior leaders are not aware of this situation. It is hard to believe, but theoretically, it is possible.

This does not mean that the Turkish authorities should not attempt to put an end to this illegal trade. The UN Security Council passed a special resolution that bans direct purchase of oil from terrorists, because these barrels coming in are filled not just with oil but with our citizens' blood, and because terrorists use the money from this trade to buy arms and munitions and then carry out bloody attacks such as those against our plane in the Sinai, and the attacks in Paris and other cities and countries.

Incidents such as the destruction of our plane and the death of our servicemen are completely unacceptable. Our position is that this must not happen again.
If the Turkish authorities are destroying this oil, why do we not see smoke from the fires? Let me say again that this is oil supply on an industrial scale. You would need to build entire special facilities to destroy this oil. Nothing of this sort is taking place. If Turkey's senior leadership is not aware of the situation, let them open their eyes to it now.

I would be willing to believe that some corruption and shady deals might be involved. Let them sort out just what is going on there. But there is absolutely no question that the oil is heading for Turkey. We see this from the air. We see that loaded vehicles are heading there in a constant stream and returning empty. These vehicles are loaded in Syria, in territory controlled by the terrorists, and they go to Turkey and return to Syria empty. We see this every day.

Regarding the question of whether or not the Turkish President should step down, this is absolutely no concern of ours but is the Turkish people's affair. We have never meddled in others' affairs and will not do so now. It is a great pity though to lose the unprecedented level of bilateral relations that we developed with Turkey over these last years. We really did reach a very high level of relations and we looked at Turkey not just as our neighbour but also as a friendly country and practically an ally. It is very sad to see this so heedlessly and brutally destroyed....

Vladimir Putin: As for the idea that the Turkish air force did not recognise our plane, this is simply not possible. It is out of the question. Our planes have identification marks that are easily visible. They were obviously our planes and not anyone else's.

At the G20 summit in Antalya I showed a photograph taken by our pilots. Vehicles transporting oil made a long line that vanished over the horizon. These are industrial-scale oil supplies coming in from parts of Syria now in the terrorists' hands. These vehicles are heading for Turkey day and night.
Furthermore, let me say again that in accordance with our agreements with the Americans, we always gave prior information on where our planes will operate, on the formations, locations and times. Our position is that this is a working coalition, and Turkey, as a member of this coalition, should have known that Russian aircraft were operating in this location at that moment. Who else's planes could they have been? What would they have done if they discovered that it was an American plane? Would they have fired at an American plane? This is all a load of nonsense, just an attempt to make excuses. It is a shame that instead of making a thorough investigation of the situation and taking steps to make sure such things never happen again, we hear from them these unclear explanations and statements to the effect that there is nothing even to apologise for. Well, this is not our choice, but Turkey's choice.

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 #4
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
November 25, 2015
Today's alliances built on ad hoc basis - Russian pundit
Fedor Lukyanov, chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy: Nothing personal, just politics. World without rules

The Islamic State group (a terrorist organization banned in Russia) has, it seems, pulled off the impossible - united powers which had just now been in a state of cold war practically. The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle is coordinating operations with the Russian military. The president of France is on his way to Moscow and Washington to craft a joint plan. Barack Obama is reluctantly acknowledging that the Russian action in Syria could be useful. In Europe the louder voices are coming from those who believe that Russians are too much needed in the fight against terrorism for continuation of the policy of sanctions pressure.

And at the same time, on the other hand, the EU sanctions are about to be extended for a minimum of six months, the most vigilant Europeans and Americans are calling for people not to believe Putin or cooperate with him, the storm clouds are beginning to gather once again in eastern Ukraine.... Where are we heading?

The Syrian conflict is the quintessence of the international situation of the middle of the second decade of the 21st century. And most likely a prototype of what is to come. Not in the sense of the brutality of wars, God grant that not every conflict be resolved by such barbaric methods, but based on the intrinsic contradictoriness of the situation and the impossibility of identifying the resultant.

Much has been said about the fact that Syria is multi-level confrontation, where the interests of the great powers, regional actors, religious groups, and ethnic communities clash. The main difficulty is that in the mess of motives and interests, a clear "front line" cannot be formed, no alliance is plainly taking shape. Different participants (almost all of them) may act as current allies on some issues while being sworn enemies on others here (there are exceptions, of course - the mutual animosity of Iran and Saudi Arabia is stable and universal). Following the start of the Russian operation six weeks ago, I happened to hear the assessment of one representative of the Middle East. While of an unfriendly frame of mind regarding the operations of our air and space forces as a whole, he discerned a positive aspect in the "simplification" of the picture. He believes that the Russian intervention has furthered a "crystallization" of positions and the formation of more precise parties to the confrontation. He saw this as a step forward - the region is very tired of the war of "all against all".

If viewed from this perspective, there has now been one further change for the better. Backstage cooperation with the IS, which many in this confused war have not shunned, is becoming entirely obscene and unacceptable. At least one obvious point of repulsion is emerging.

This does not guarantee further mutual understanding, after all, everyone has a different idea of Syria's future. More precisely, there is no such thing as yet since none of the available pictures is practicable, and there is no compromise plan, as there is no clear mechanism of its formulation either. The Vienna negotiations, which for the first time took place in full format, without the artificial exclusion of some key players, that is, instilled hope of the start of a real diplomatic process. For the time being, understandably, the contradictions are so critical that they appear hopeless. The flexibility of the participants will depend on the situation in the military theatre.

But let us return to the outside powers - Russia and the USA/the EU. I have no doubt that the extension of the EU sanctions, which will most likely occur at the start of 2016, will cause an outburst of sincere anger with us. How is it possible to speak of a joint battle against terror and simultaneously put pressure on a key partner?

Alas, this type of mutual relations is coming to be the rule, it seems. The modern world is an inseparable interweave of profound interdependence with growing political and economic competition. Alliances are increasingly opportunistically dictated and temporary for the accomplishment of some specific objective. Right at the start of the century, Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary at that time, spoke candidly about this. He enriched the international political vocabulary with the "coalition of the willing" concept (those who had got together on a one-time basis, that is) and the aphorism "the mission determines the coalition", in other words, we'll call whom we want. At that time this evoked the anger of the United States' NATO allies, who suspected an eagerness of Washington to rid itself of commitments as part of the alliance.

Rumsfeld was a while later dismissed, his approach was deemed mistaken. But the Pentagon boss had correctly caught the spirit of the new times.

Today it can be seen that permanent alliances are no longer taking shape, NATO is a unique and inimitable instance of ideological and historical affinity. All other alliances are built pragmatically and on an ad hoc basis. Moreover, even within the North Atlantic bloc the imposition of a huge fine on the bank of a very close ally, who violated unilateral (not internationally recognized) regulation on the part of the United States, is coming to be a routine matter. Never mind states that are not among the trusted, like Russia.

It is known from the history and theory of international relations that there are no friends, even less brothers, in world politics, there are calculation and interests. And this is not cynicism, it is common sense since it reflects the essence of relations between states. Emotions, from which the political sphere simply cannot be fenced off, of course, hamper the achievement of goals. This needs to be remembered to avoid both charms and disappointments.

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 #5
Russia Insider/Hintergrund
www.russia-insider.com
November 30, 2015
The Ukraine-Syria Complex: What Does Putin Want?
'Putin is a neo-liberal modernizer who wants to restore Russia as a great, sovereign nation'
By Kai Ehlers

Originally appeared at Hintergrund
http://www.hintergrund.de/201511233755/politik/welt/der-ukraine-syrien-komplex-was-will-was-kann-putin.html
Translated from the German by Susan Neumann.

Once again, they want to fog up [reality.] They're trying to make us believe that the only thing standing in the way of the democratization process in Ukraine is Russia's support for the unrecognized republics Donetsk and Lugansk. Russia's adherence to President Baschar el-Assad is the only thing preventing an established peace in Syria, which would bring about an end to the terror and an end to the stream of refugees.

The fact is, only after Juncker's ultimatum was Poroshenko willing to introduce an anti-discrimination law in parliament, and to refrain from taking on people from the ruling oligarchical clans as members in the Anti-Corruption Commission. EU Commission President Juncker had ultimately told Poroshenko that the Ukraine would not receive the pending loan installments if Poroshenko couldn't finally bring himself to making significant concessions.

It's been paid now. After the three presidential elections in May 2014, after the parliamentary election in October of the same year, after the recent local election in October 2015, and after the establishment of a constitutional commission that would decentralize the country; Poroshenko can now finally say that the Ukraine is on the path to democracy.

It's only correct that the election results of the years 2014/15 reveal that the slope of acceptance for the nationalist government has fallen.  This government appeared after the upheaval in February of 2014. There's also a growing rift within the ruling nationalist coalition. Prime Minister Yatsenyuk didn't even dare to compete at the local October elections with his run-down party. The area east of Kiev made itself known to be clearly against President Poroshenko, voting strongly in favor of the "opposition block." The populations of Donetsk and Lugansk weren't even involved in the elections, neither in these elections nor the ones previously held. They're preparing for their own elections. The Constitutional Commission that was called into existence is the centerpiece of the planned reform and will shape the future relationship between the central and regional areas. When considering the participation of these territories in parliamentary proceedings, it was decided that "criminals" are not be negotiated with.

In short, the question about the status of the separatist areas has yet to be decided; therefore, the conflict - reaching the point of war - can be cooked up again at any time. That's why, according to the German government in its impenetrable logic, sanctions against Russia cannot be lifted as long as Russia supports the separatists. That's also why it's just as logical that Poroshenko invite NATO troops back into the country. So this conflict can be heated up again at any time, along with all other similar conflicts that had been "put on ice".  

Heavy fog over Syria

They want to fog up the situation in Syria, too. Supposedly, the only thing standing in the way of peace and democracy in Syria is the "butcher," Bashar al-Assad, who is also supported by Russia and Iran. Then the country is described as a battlefield of religious fanatics, who can't come to grips with Western values. It began with the great enemies of the Shiites and Sunnis throughout the various terrorist groups from Al Qaeda all the way up to "(Anti) -Islamist State." Given the situation, the people see the enlightened West as the only means of escape.  All this combined has made a "regime change" unavoidable and perhaps even inevitable.

Reality presents itself differently. [There is] a not-to-be-dismissed account of the situation in the country prior to the first riots in Deraa (author's note: area in southern Syria on the border of Jordan) In March of 2011, Peter Scholl-Latour left the following account in his last book, which was published just after his death:  (1) in comparison of the surrounding chaos, he writes about the so-called Arab Spring and its disastrous consequences: "In Syria, things were quite different. The United States - in cooperation with Saudi Arabia and Israel - did not wait for the first protest demonstrations against the dictatorship of Deraa, Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite-dominated Baath Party, to undermine the foundations of the state.  Long before that there was an unrestrained campaign, a systematic propaganda in the American and European media used against this Arab Republic, a republic which - even taking into account the brutality, which they themselves practice - represents the only secular political system in the entire Arab region. Compared to the preferential allies of the West - be it Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, or Kuwait - the capital Damascus offered an image of religious tolerance and an almost Western lifestyle, ever since Bashar el-Assad accepted his  inheritance from his uncompromising father, Hafez el-Assad. Somewhere, in secret command posts, in secret factories of disinformation operated masterfully by Anglo-Saxon opinion manipulators, the motto was adopted that Syria had to give in to the American belief [which included] a deceptive reorganization of the Middle East. (...) In any case, long before the outbreak of local revolts in Deraa and Homs, there was the relentless demand for the destruction of the Damascus regime. When I was in Damascus in December 2011, there was still nothing to be felt of any struggle ... "(2)

Syria as linchpin

Nevertheless, Scholl-Latour leaves open that which lies hidden behind the "masterfully crafted mottos" and "secret command posts." You also don't hear anything in the general media about it. [There's] a hint which will be given here. It can lead into the background, which will definitely have to be delved into deeper.  Only a few years after the turn of the millennium, new promising gas deposits were found off the Syrian Mediterranean coast. Oil fields were also discovered in Golan Heights. Ever since then, Syria is dealt with as the linchpin of all future oil and gas supplies. However, the details of the annual results of the findings and the sizes of the fields vary. Once again, there is considerable need for clarification.

At least since the year 2009, the Government of Qatar has tried to arrange an agreement with Assad to build a pipeline. The very large but up to that point poorly developed gas fields in the Persian Gulf would flow over the Arabian Peninsula to the north, over Syria and Turkey, up to the Nabucco-Pipeline. This project of the EU was built around the turn of the century to rival the Russian South Stream and was previously untapped for lack of supply. Assad rejected the deal in 2011. Instead, apparently anticipating a Syria exploitation of the Mediterranean gas fields, he made a contract with Iran in 2013 for the construction of a pipeline leading from the Iranian gas fields through Syria to the Mediterranean. What's fatal about all of this is that both Qatar and Iran are laying claim to the gas field below the Persian Gulf.

Assad's decision was a hot deal for Syria, if not understandable - because instead of just collecting transit fees, Syria would be both the supplier and beneficiary of transit fees, if such a project were to come to fruition. It's also understandable that the Government of Qatar was more than a little upset about Assad's cancellation and the subsequent pivot to Iran, especially since this arrangement goes beyond immediate economic competition; it taps into the permanent religious war of the Wahabi-Sunni Islam of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the Shiite-Islam of Iran.

At least since 2013, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have acted as financiers and suppliers for Assad's opposition. Three billion dollars must have flown out of Qatar by now, all in support of the "opposition". The amounts that have been financed; how much the Saudis have invested, and beyond that, how much the United States has invested, can only be estimated at this time. Not having the exact details prevents us from naming figures. Unfortunately, the Middle East has, so far, no one like Victoria Nuland.

However, the often puzzled-over breakup of the former "friendship" between Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo(ğ)an can be explained here.  With the loss being a transit country in Syrian-Iranian pipeline project, Turkey didn't just lose a lucrative transit operation. They lost out on the possibility of exerting pressure on the EU.

The geopolitical context

What happened after this situation was created is understandable only in a geopolitical sense. First of all, let's envision again the current basic situation that can viewed as a juxtapostition of all the three major transformation trends currently happening around the globe: the post-Soviet partitioning of the world, the crisis of the nation state, and the fundamental problem of how we want to live in the future if we're not subject to the spent "either-or" of socialism OR capitalism.

These three basic trends overlap each other. At the overlap points, alternating knots of conflict are formed which - after they've been broken up and used - are generally left unresolved as whole, or they remain as half-frozen deferred conflicts. Only to name the last few: the day before yesterday [it was] Moldova [and] Georgia; yesterday the Ukraine; today Syria and the entire "Crescent." Maybe tomorrow [it will be] the North Pole, whose territorial claim provides the start [of a new conflict] for those already driving their marked stakes into the ground.

As different as these conflicts are, there's one constant variable, a common thread that runs through all of them: the containment of Russia as a potential rival for the US, who still sees itself as the only world power. The possible conflict with China, India, and other countries that might connect themselves to Russia is lurking in the background.

Why Russia?  It cannot be repeated enough:  because Russia is the only country that has, throughout its history, evaded the control and associated exploitation of its resources through the colonial grip of the West - and it continues to this day.

Always the same method

Let's direct our attention to the Ukraine and Syria. The method is essentially the same in each case. The main message is as follows:

Russia can no longer remain an empire without the Ukraine.

Without its alliance with Syria, Russia can only realize the half of its resource-based exports.

For both of these methods, there exist strategies worth following up on, and these need to be briefly clarified here:

Ukraine:  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-91, the "winner" USA unmistakably and publicly formulated their intention to free the Ukraine from Russian influence in order to secure US hegemony.  This is the religious mantra that has been repeated most obviously by Zbigniew Brzezinski throughout his various books. For the Kiev "Regime Change" of 2013/14, this strategy was implemented tactically. (3)

Syria: Post-9/11, year 2001, the neoconservative forces behind George W. Bush [started] the "Project for the New American Century," which - regardless of a nation-state's sovereignty - focused on a gradual subjugation of the states in the Mesopotamian area, all in the interests of the US. This policy has been camouflaged by its initiators as a "war against terrorism," sometimes referred to as the "Fourth World War." (The "Cold War" is considered to be the Third.) The final phase of this war should be the acquisition of Syria. (4)

Already at the time of planning these strategies - both in 1990, 1991, and even in 2001 -international energy experts drew a "strategic ellipse" on a map.

Contained in the ellipse was the largest-known share of oil and gas reserves, from the northern and central Russia, down to the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula. The Russian resources in the north and the south of the Mesopotamian-Arab region were equally represented in this ellipse. By making use of new discoveries and possibly activating previously untapped oil fields in the Mesopotamian-Arabian region, and considering the fact that this tight oil [oil trapped in impermeable rock] is currently thought to be the supply of the future, the southern part of this ellipse has reached a resource weight which could far exceed that of Russia's.

If previously untapped gas from Qatar were to be fed directly into the Nabucco line, it would inevitably cut Russia off as a resources supplier, providing Russia were to lose the Ukraine as well.  This would indeed be life-threatening, because the entire South Stream, leading out from Russia and the Central Asian interior, would be severed. This affects deliveries to Europe. This loss could not be quickly compensated through a redirection to China, India, and other Asian countries.

Conversely, Assad's decision for a joint project with Iran had to lead to bitter hostility towards Syria on the part of Qatar and the Saudis - and of course this has brought consequences from their ally the US, who had set its hopes on being able to wrestle Russia to the ground.

One recalls that it wasn't long ago, in 2013, when the US Secretary of State John Kerry was on the verge of declaring war on Syria. It was the occasion where Assad was immediately blamed for the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian slaughter, although to this day there hasn't been any clear evidence in support of this. An escalation was prevented solely through Russian intervention. This intervention prompted Assad to have his chemical weapons be destroyed under international control. (5)

The hope of being able to circumvent Russia was fostered  and is being fostered by the EU politicians, by the way. These politicians have had the issue for more than a decade, in which they've complained about their oil and especially their gas dependence on Russia, and they have felt the need to "diversify" in order to make deliveries with their purposefully-built but so far untapped Nabucco Pipeline. This interest has increased among the EU politicians with current geopolitical tensions. One can assume that the conflict over the projected pipelines and the future use of natural gas fields is not over.

Putin's offensive defense

Taking into consideration all the aforementioned conditions, Russia's policy in Ukraine as well as in Syria, including their current bombing of the "pro-democracy forces" opposing Assad, can only be judged as an offensive defense. It's important to mention that the Russians are operating in observance of Syrian sovereignty; concretely, [they had] prior agreement of Syria's elected head of state.

Please, no confusion! Looking at all the fundamental problems that have been mentioned - repartitioning of the world and the crisis of the nation state, how do we want to live? - We have to be clear: Putin is not Russia. Russia's future power extends far beyond Putin. Putin is also not a socialist. He's not a democrat and not an anti-capitalist. He's also not a sponsor of the world revolution, promoting the idea that capitalist production is the worst cause of the present conflict; that is, the expanding migration out of the exploited southern hemisphere of the globe into the industrial centers. A reverse migration into new settlements in the countries of origin can only be effected with a fundamentally different industrial policy, which would end the migration favoring the development of local and regional economies, which was caused by the capitalist mode of production.

This is not Putin's goal. One only need to look at the Republics Donetsk and Lugan(s)k, and how he has dealt with their democratically-counselled dreams of self-determination and autonomy; or the building of an autonomous "Novorossiya" in Eastern Ukraine. After offering his short-term opportunistic support, he - how does one say - brushed off these cases. His goal is evident in his social policy, and how he reintroduced the class society in Russia, by restricting the basic rights of the dependent labor force. The fact that criticism [of his policy] is so limited is due to the fact that the population regards him as the defender of their homeland against colonization attempts coming from the outside.

Putin is a neo-liberal modernizer who wants to restore Russia as a great, sovereign nation. What distinguishes his national as well as his foreign policy is his ability to pursue a course leading from a weak position towards that of building a consensus. Since his inaugural in 1999/2000, he has involved the Russian oligarchs in his taking charge of the new Russia. In matters of foreign policy, he has acted out of a cooperation of weak elements, out of which begins to build its own independent strength. This has already had the effect of putting the US in its place, and the US has always seen itself as being the word's police. In other words, under Putin's political leadership, Russia is the leading force under the weak; a force which is currently against the warmongering dominance of the US, and which is in favor of a cooperative world order among sovereign states.  Putin's political policy is what he himself calls "an architecture for global security" - no more, no less.

To be able to recognize [the need for such architecture] in the atmosphere of current global conflict requires a stance of critical solidarity. Putin understands this solidarity as being a de-escalating force.  [The author says this] without trying to put [Putin] on a pedestal of being a possible Nobel Peace Prize recipient, as was the case with his opponent, Obama.

Authors footnotes and sources:
(1) Peter Scholl-Latour, Der Fluch der Bösen Ta(t), Ullstein, Novv. 2015
(2) Ebenda, S. 275/5
(3) Zbigniew Brzezinski, Die einzige Weltmacht, Fischer tb 14358, deutsch, 1999 (English Original: The Grand Chessboard, Basis books, New York 1997). WeitereTitelenglisch, imselben Verlag: Second Chance, 2007; Strategic Vision 2012
(4)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century#Origins_and_operation
(5) Please see Scholl-Latour, Der Fluch der bösen Tat, Page 281

 #6
Washington Post
November 24, 2015
Why we should be confident that Putin is genuinely popular in Russia
By Joshua Tucker
Joshua Tucker is a Professor of Politics at New York University. He specializes in voting, partisanship, public opinion, and protest, as well as the relationship of social media usage to all of these forms of behavior, with a focus on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
[Chart here https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/24/why-we-should-be-confident-that-putin-is-genuinely-popular-in-russia/]

Tuesday brings yet another dramatic development in the story of Russia's relationship with the West. Monday, it was the possibility of improving relations in the wake of French President Francois Hollande's decision to visit Moscow to seek solidarity in the fight against the Islamic State. Tuesday, it is the specter of renewed conflict following the downing of a Russian fighter jet by Turkish armed forces. Tomorrow, it may be something else.

No matter the direction in which relations are trending, new research (ungated) presented at last week's Association for the Study of East European and Eurasian Studies Annual Meeting by political scientists Timothy Frye, Scott Gehlbach, Kyle L. Marquardt, and Ora John Reuter suggests that the West will be dealing with a leader who is genuinely popular at home.

On the one hand, this news is hardly earth-shattering. As data from the Levada Center in the figure below shows (click on it if you want a larger version), Russian President Vladimir Putin has long enjoyed approval ratings that just about any Western leader would envy:

Vladimir Putin's Approval Ratings (Data and Figure: Levada Center, http://www.levada.ru/eng/indexes-0)

However, as the authors note, there are some reasons for thinking these numbers might be artificially inflated. Pollsters might be under pressure to produce numbers that are favorable to Putin (although Western researchers report similar numbers). Alternatively, respondents might not share their true preferences with pollsters. This could be because they are somehow afraid there will be negative repercussions from expressing anti-Putin sentiment or, more benignly, because they simply want to tell the pollster what they think the pollster wants to hear, a phenomenon known as social desirability bias.

Fortunately, new techniques have been developed in recent years by survey researchers in order to measure these kinds of "sensitive" opinions known as "list experiments" (or, more formally, item-count experiments). The way this works is as follows. First, survey respondents are randomly split into two groups. The first group is asked how many - but not which - of a certain list of items they like (or dislike, or disapprove of etc., depending on the needs of the study). The second group is presented with the same list of items plus the sensitive one.

So to give an example, if we thought people were sensitive about saying they didn't like cats, we might ask the first (control) group how many of the following animals - dolphins, dogs, and chickens - they like, and then the second (treatment) group would be asked how many they liked out of dolphins, dogs, chickens and cats. Since we expect that support for dolphins, dogs, and chickens will on average be equal across the groups (since people will be randomly assigned to each group), the difference in the average number of items people state they like across the two groups gives us an estimate of proportion of the population that likes cats without forcing anyone to specifically answer a question about whether or not they like cats.

This is the method the authors employed in Russia. They ran two surveys, one in January and one in March of 2015, and in each survey embedded two experiments: one where Putin was included alongside a group of contemporary Russian leaders, and another where Putin was included alongside more historical leaders.

The net result, though, was the same across all of the studies. While the list experiments suggested that Putin was indeed a bit less popular than one would conclude from the direct questions normally used to measure his approval, his underlying support remained very high. More specifically, while direct questioning suggested Putin's approval was in the high 80s, the list experiments suggested it was closer to 80 percent.

Three points are worth noting from these findings.

First, the experiments suggest that Putin was indeed very popular among Russians at the time of the survey, and, perhaps even more importantly, that most of the support reported for Putin using standard questions to measure presidential approval was, at least in that point in time, genuine.

Second, there is some evidence suggesting that some Russians might be answering direct questions about Putin's popularity in the affirmative when they may not actually like the job he is doing. The actual size of this bias could be affected by a number of different factor (see the paper for details and additional analysis), but it is likely more than 5 percent and less than 10 percent. So while this should not affect our overall conclusion that Putin is genuinely popular, it is interesting to observe that this is taking place.

Finally, as the authors of the paper note, the study has nothing to say about the depth of the support for Putin. It might be that the 80 percent of Russians whom the list experiment suggest support Putin are fervent supporters who will stick with him through thick and thin, and it might be that they are fair-weather supporters who will desert him at the slightest provocation.

Taken together, the findings suggest both that the West will likely be dealing with a popular leader when it interacts with Putin in the days to come, and, at least earlier in the year, that the headline approval numbers generated using traditional survey techniques provide a (fairly) good approximation of that support.

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#7
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
November 27, 2015
Museum to Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin opens to public
November 25 saw the official opening in Yekaterinburg of a museum dedicated to Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first president. Besides documenting Yeltsin's tenure as leader of the country, the museum also explores the turbulent history of the 1990s.
MARINA OBRAZKOVA, RBTH

A museum to Boris Yeltsin has been unveiled in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, where Russia's first president spent most of his life and career before the demands of high office called him to Moscow.

The museum, which is effectively devoted to the history of the early 1990s in Russia, was officially opened by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Yeltsin's widow Naina Yeltsina on Nov. 25.

"The work of any leader of the country, no matter how many years he was at the helm, is his time," said Yeltsina at the ceremony.

"The era in the history of the country, with all its achievements and mistakes. And we need to make sure that in the presidential center of not only Yeltsin, but of each successive head of state, one can find answers to any questions related to his time. Of course, to achieve this, everything has to be absolutely true there. No gloss - only the documentary truth about that time," she said.

Open archives

The museum is the first example of its kind in Russia. The exhibition has been created by museum designer Ralph Appelbaum, who built the Jewish Museum in Moscow several years ago. His name on the list of the organizers means just one thing - interactivity and immersion in the era are guaranteed.

The museum already has audio guides in English and is preparing to translate them into Spanish, French and German, allowing foreigners to get acquainted with Russian history.

However, the archivists were faced with a serious problem while collecting artifacts for the museum; it turned out that a large number of essential documentary videos had not been preserved because the tapes had not been archived but were instead re-used.

Some of the museum's showcases have been left empty to allow future visitors to share their things from that time and tell their own story.

7 days in Russian history

The museum is divided into seven areas - "seven important days in the history of the country." Each of these zones presents stages of Russia's development in the late 20th century: the anticipation of change; the August coup (the attempted removal of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev from power in August 1991); unpopular economic measures; the birth of the Constitution; "Vote or Lose" (the famous slogan of Yeltsin's second election campaign); the presidential marathon; and Yeltsin's farewell to the Kremlin on Dec. 31, 1999.

"The rooms are arranged in a circle, referring to the symbol of history - the Wheel of Time," said Lyudmila Telen, deputy executive director of the Yeltsin Center. "This structure was proposed by renowned Russian film director Pavel Lungin."

At the beginning, visitors are treated to a film about the history of Russia from ancient times to the present, which, among other things, documents the origins of democracy in the country and its development.

Then come documents, photos and videos exploring attitudes to history and Russians' changing views on various historical events. The history of the country's life is intermingled with Yeltsin's personal history. One hall is occupied by a real trolleybus of the kind used by the future president when he was a Moscow official. A film about Yeltsin's work in Moscow is screened inside.

Emotional moments

Three rooms seem to be the most emotional - the ones dedicated to the coup, the war in Chechnya and Yeltsin's last day in office.

The first shows the typical interiors of a Soviet apartment, the phone rings, and from the conversation in the receiver one can understand how people reacted to the sudden appearance of tanks on the streets of Moscow in support of the new government. Opening the door of the room, visitors walk out directly onto Moscow's 1991 barricades, made of barrels, concrete blocks and grilles, while a chronicle of events is shown on the wall.

In the room dedicated to the Chechen War of 1994-1996, there are bullet holes in a convex wall. By looking into them, visitors can examine photographs of those tragic events.

The last room is Yeltsin's office - just as it was in the Kremlin - where he said goodbye to the people on New Year's Eve 1999. There is even a frosted pattern on the glass and a view from the window. His jacket hangs on the chair, while a cup of tea and the pen with which he signed his decrees are on the table.

The light dims and Yeltsin's last address sounds: "I'm tired. I'm leaving." The president apologizes, and wishes good luck to the Russian people.


 

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 #8
Moscow Times
November 30, 2015
Two-Thirds of Russians Think Their Country Is Great Power

Russians are more convinced than at any time in recent history that their country is a great power, as enthusiasm over military campaigns in Ukraine and Syria seems to outweigh worries about a deep economic slump.

Sixty-five percent of Russians surveyed by the independent Levada Center pollster said Russia was a great power, compared to 25 percent who disagreed. Four years ago, in 2011, the split was around 50-50.

Since then, Russia's economy has entered a deep recession and a currency collapse means the economy is some 40 percent smaller in U.S. dollar terms, thanks in part to the effect of sanctions over the Ukraine crisis and a fall in the price of oil, Russia's most important export.

However, President Vladimir Putin has flexed military muscles abroad, annexing Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula last year and firing cruise missiles and dropping bombs on Syria this fall, all with the approval of state-run Russian media.

The Levada Center polled 1,600 people across Russia between Nov. 20-23. The margin of error did not exceed 3.4 percent.

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 #9
Interfax
November 30, 2015
Soros Foundation recognized as undesirable in Russia

The Russian Prosecutor General's Office has recognized undesirable several foreign non-profit organizations, such as the Open Society Foundation and the Assistance Foundation in Russia.

"This decision was taken, following an address by the Federation Council of the Russian Federal Assembly to the Russian general prosecutor, foreign minister and justice minister to inspect the organizations, which were put on the so-called 'patriotic stop-list'," spokesperson of the Russian Prosecutor General's Office Marina Gridneva told Interfax on Nov. 30.

She recalled that the 'stop-list' was approved by the Federation Council resolution as of July 8 this year, in which the activity of the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation) is paid attention to.

"It was found out that the activity of the Open Society Foundations and the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation poses a threat to the foundations of the Russian constitutional system and security of the state," she said.

"The information about the taken decision was submitted to the Russian Justice Ministry to put these organizations on the list of foreign and international non-governmental organizations, the activity of which is recognized undesirable in Russia," Gridneva said.

The Soros Foundation is an international charity organization, which was founded by financier and philanthropist George Soros.

The foundation has offices in more than 30 countries. The governing bodies are situated in New York and Budapest. Since 2003 all Soros foundations have stopped their activity in Russia.

Lyudmila Alekseyeva, human rights activist and head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, regrets the decision made by the Russian Prosecutor General's Office to recognize the Open Society organization of financier and philanthropist George Soros as unwelcome in Russia.

"I don't only regret that. It seems unfair to me," Alekseyeva told.

"Soros has done a lot of good to our county. He has not only financed independent public organizations, but also given a lot of money to universities and libraries. In the difficult 1990s, when there was no money for anything, he founded pensions for scientists. He financed scientific institutes," Alekseyeva said.

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 #10
Moscow Times
November 28, 2015
Russian Minister: Security Concerns Justify Restricting Civil Rights
By Anna Dolgov

Russia's interior minister said restricting civil rights is justifiable if security considerations demand it, according to a television interview that was broadcast Thursday night and prompted criticism from human rights advocates.

Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev told NTV television that police and security agencies must "tighten the screws" in case of unspecified major threats.

"There is a time for tightening, and there is a time for loosening," Kolokoltsev said. "But in any case, when there is a need for tightening, we are obliged to do it. Because for the sake of the common good, it's fine to give up something, by encroaching upon the rights and duties of citizens, but of a much smaller number than could be hurt by some kind or other of dangerous situations."

The prominent human rights advocate and founder of Moscow Helsinki Group, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, said the government has been chipping away at Russians' rights for years, and warned that Kolokoltsev's subordinates may interpret his interview as a go-ahead for disregarding citizens' rights, the Interfax news agency reported.

"They have been tightening the screws here for a long time, and I haven't noticed the arrival of a period when the screws were being loosened up," Alexeyeva was quoted as saying.

Since President Vladimir Putin initially came to power in 2000, television broadcasts on all the major networks have turned increasingly pro-Kremlin, observers have been reporting large-scale violations during elections and reputable news portals that criticized the government have been shut down in the country as "extremist."

Ever since the large-scale anti-Kremlin protests on Moscow's Bolotnaya Square in May 2012 - which were sparked by Putin's decision to run for a third presidential term and which led to lengthy prison convictions for a number of participants - Russia has not seen any major pro-democracy demonstrations.

A survey by the independent Levada Center pollster earlier this year indicated that 61 percent of Russians believe restricting democratic rights and principles is acceptable for the sake of "order." About 21 percent of respondents said democracy should take precedence, even if it expands the rights of criminals or other "destructive elements."

This compares to a peak of 81 percent who thought law and order were more important than democracy in April 2000 - less than a year after a series of apartment building bombings killed more than 300 people in Moscow and other cities.

This year's poll was conducted in late March among 1,600 people in 46 Russian regions, and gave a margin of error of no more that 3.4 percentage points.

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 #11
Bloomberg
November 30, 2015
The $30 Oil Cliff Threatening Russia's Economy
By Andre Tartar and Olga Tanas
[Chart here http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-29/the-30-oil-cliff-that-economists-see-threatening-russia-in-2016]
For Russia, $30 is the number to watch.

Crude prices at that level will push the economy to depths that would threaten the nation's financial system, according to 63 percent of respondents in a Bloomberg survey. Lower prices for the fuel are next year's biggest risk for Russia, which is unprepared to ride out another shock on the oil market, most economists said. Other dangers for 2016 include geopolitics, strains in the banking industry and the ruble, according to the poll of 27 analysts.

"If oil prices fall lower and stay at that low level for longer, risks of fiscal and financial destabilization increase significantly," Sergey Narkevich, an analyst at PAO Promsvyazbank in Moscow, said by e-mail.

Russia, which has adjusted to the worst commodities slump in a generation with spending cutbacks and a weaker ruble, may be hard-pressed for policy answers if oil slumps further after losing more than a third of its value in the past year. While Brent, the European benchmark, is trading around $45 a barrel, a warmer-than-average winter could weaken heating-fuel demand enough to trigger a decline in the price of crude to $20, analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said in a note Nov. 18.

'New Reality'

"The situation we are in is no longer a crisis," Deputy Finance Minister Maxim Oreshkin said at a round-table at the upper house of parliament in Moscow on Monday. "It's a new reality, reflecting new prices for oil, a new situation with the balance of payments."

Oil has dropped as U.S. inventories climbed to near a record and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries produced above its quota. OPEC, which meets to discuss policy Dec. 4 in Vienna, is set to stick with its strategy of defending market share by maintaining output and driving down higher-cost production elsewhere, according to all 30 analysts and traders in a separate Bloomberg survey.

Low or lower oil prices remain "the key risk for the Russian economy, despite adaptation to the shock during 2015," said Andreas Schwabe, an economist at Raiffeisen Bank International AG in Vienna. "From that risk, an even weaker ruble and new waves of high inflation and budget problems derive."

Further complicating the outlook are geopolitical tensions that followed the downing of a Russian warplane by Turkey in Syria last week and pushed investors to sell Russian assets. In addition to events in the Middle East, Russia also has to contend with international sanctions over the conflict in Ukraine.
Whither Sanctions

A diplomatic thaw between Russia and its Cold War-era foes in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Paris and Egypt has stoked optimism that the improved relations will help remove the punitive measures.

Russia may get that boost in the next 12 months, with 56 percent of economists saying the European Union will ease its penalties during the period, up from 34 percent the last time the question was asked in August. Twenty percent predict the U.S. will begin relaxing its restrictions in the next calendar year, compared with 3 percent three months ago.

EU countries will probably extend sanctions for another six months at the end of January despite improved cooperation in Syria, according to three European diplomats. The bloc's 28 leaders are set to discuss the issue at a Dec. 17-18 summit.

"Only without sanctions will the Russian economy return to GDP growth," said Wolf-Fabian Hungerland, an economist at Berenberg Bank in Hamburg, Germany. Despite "a unique chance for a thaw between Russia and the West," there's "a substantial risk that this chance is not taken, implying prolonged sanctions."

Ruble, Economy

The adjustment to the new economic reality was helped by swift changes in the exchange rate, Bank of Russia First Deputy Governor Ksenia Yudaeva said in Moscow Friday. The ruble is down almost 32 percent against the dollar since the central bank shifted to a free-floating regime in November 2014. That's the third-worst performance among its emerging-market peers after Brazil's real and Colombia's peso, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

A renewed bout of ruble weakness last summer forced policy makers to pause monetary easing in September and October after five consecutive interest-rate cuts brought their benchmark to 11 percent. Even as high borrowing costs choke investment, Governor Elvira Nabiullina in November left open the possibility of keeping rates on hold until March.

$30 Oil?

Russia has learned to live with oil near $40 and only a decline to $30 a barrel can provoke another deterioration, which isn't the most likely scenario, the Finance Ministry's Oreshkin said Nov. 25. The central bank estimates that in a stress-case scenario, with crude below $40 in 2016-2018, the economy will contract 5 percent or more next year and price growth may be at 7 percent to 9 percent. That would also raise risks to inflation and financial stability, according to the Bank of Russia.

GDP will contract 3.9 percent to 4.4 percent this year and may shrink as much as 1 percent next year if oil stays at $50 a barrel, the central bank forecasts.

"Russia is better prepared than it was last year to manage another oil price shock; the exchange rate is flexible, the budget has been tightened, the banking sector is consolidating, and reserves are still ample," said Per Hammarlund, chief emerging-markets strategist at SEB AB in Stockholm. Still, "even without another oil price shock, the government is caught between a rock and a hard place," with crude at the current level leaving it the choice of weakening the ruble or cutting expenditures.

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 #12
Bloomberg
November 26, 2015
Putin Doesn't Mind Oil's Fall
By Leonid Bershidsky
[Charts here http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-11-26/putin-doesn-t-mind-oil-s-fall]

Russia's economic decline this year is often attributed to low oil prices. Yet Russia has performed considerably worse than most of its oil-exporting peers, so there must be another reason.

Marek Dabrowski, co-founder of the Center for Social and Economic Research in Warsaw and a professor at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, recently ran the numbers on the oil-exporting economies and discovered a paradox. Russia is not even close to being the most oil-dependent of these countries:

Fuel accounts for more than 70 percent of Russia's exports (in countries such as Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Algeria or Kuwait, it exceeds 90 percent), but oil rents only make up 13.7 percent of the country's gross domestic product. So there's a dependence on oil revenue but perhaps not a life-threatening addiction. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have more to worry about, with oil rent at 57.5 percent and 43.6 percent, respectively.

At the same time, Russia is about to post one of the worst economic results among its peers this year:

The International Monetary Fund expects the Russian economy to shrink 3.8 percent. Among major oil exporters, only Libya and Venezuela are expected to do worse. And most fuel exporters are going to show growth despite the oil slump. In most cases, the numbers will look somewhat worse than in 2013, before oil took a dive, but they still look great in comparison to Russia.

The Gulf states, Dabrowski says, have staved off decline with fiscal expansion, increasing debt levels and budget deficits. Yet Russia now runs a fiscal deficit, too, and it hasn't helped.

Oil Prices

Could it be that Russia has suffered more than others because of Western sanctions, imposed after its aggression in Ukraine? Dabrowski mentions these in passing, but they haven't had a serious effect on the Russian economy. According to Citigroup research, the sanctions only account for 10 percent of the country's output decline. Citigroup analyst Ivan Tchakarov pointed out that, with access to Western financial markets limited by the sanctions, Russian companies have successfully deleveraged; they have felt little pain.

According to Tchakarov, the oil slump was responsible for 90 percent of Russia's decline. So why have more oil-dependent countries suffered less?

The answer probably is related to the Russia's handling of the oil slump. It is the champion in currency depreciation among oil-exporting peers, and only Iran will experience higher inflation this year, according to the IMF. The government has allowed the ruble to slide freely instead of drawing down international reserves -- something other oil exporters have been reluctant to do, seeking to lessen the economic pain. President Vladimir Putin, however, was unconcerned about that: wars in Ukraine and now in Syria, and a propaganda machine running full steam, have kept his approval ratings high.

Yet making Russians pay has resulted in plummeting domestic demand. That pessimism, in turn, led to disinvestment. Retail volume and investments are still in decline, though the recession appears to be bottoming out as the economy begins growing, as measured in month-on-month terms. Putin's government has done nothing to relax its iron grip on business or eradicate high-level corruption. It hasn't even pretended to be more welcoming to investors: The rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin is mainly grim survival and hostility.

Oil-exporting countries that are doing better than Russia fall into three groups. The first includes highly diversified economies such as Malaysia or Canada. Russia could have worked harder on diversification while oil was expensive, but it missed the chance. Another group includes countries such as Norway, United Arab Emirates and Qatar, with huge foreign reserves and negative net debt positions -- meaning they are owed a lot of money. Russia had a chance to do that, too, but only saved up enough to last a couple of years at the current oil price -- which explains why it would rather let the ruble devalue indefinitely than use the reserves to defend the currency. Members of the third group -- Bolivia, Azerbaijan and some others -- have tried to soften the blow while making their financial situation more precarious and hoping for a price recovery. Russia could have done that, too, but it wouldn't have been prudent given Putin's sense that he was defending his country against a hostile West.

Some oil exporters -- Venezuela and Nigeria, for example -- are inept when it comes to economic policy. That isn't the case with Russia: It just has a leader who doesn't prioritize the economy or care too much about living standards as long as the population is enthusiastic about his quest for a bigger geopolitical role. Russia is unique among oil exporters as a nation that is being milked for the sake of one man's grand vision. If oil prices go up, the vision will be more lavishly funded.

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#13
AP
November 28, 2015
Energy-Rich Russia Pays Little Attention to Climate Change
KATHERINE JACOBSEN

MOSCOW (AP) - When forest fires roared through Siberia this summer, so vast that the smoke blocked vast Lake Baikal from satellite view, Russian officials blamed the blazes on arsonists and disorganized fire crews. Environmentalists say there was another culprit: global warming.

As temperatures rise worldwide, areas such as Siberia are suffering increasingly long dry spells. Russia's national weather agency says the country is the fastest-warming part of the world.

But Russia has taken little action to reduce its own emissions of the greenhouse gases believed to be behind the warming and at next week's international climate conference in Paris it aims to push a proposal that would allow its emissions to increase.

To Vladimir Churpov of Greenpeace Russia, the country's leadership is obtuse and in denial.

"Of course the forest won't burn if it's not set on fire, but the unusually dry environment and high temperatures - that's global warming," he said. "The fact that the fires burned for so long, that's because the government can't adapt to the new demands of a warming climate."

The issue is largely absent from public discussion and officials appear to give it only lip service, when they're not sardonically dismissing it.

In 2003 at the World Climate Change Conference, President Vladimir Putin quipped that "Russia is a northern country. It's not scary if it's two to three degrees warmer. Maybe it would even be a good thing. We'd have to spend less money on fur coats and warmer things."

Leading up to the Paris conference, which seeks to implement the most ambitious emissions cuts ever, Russia presented a paradoxical pledge by promising to reduce its greenhouse gas output over the next 15 years by 25 to 30 percent from what it was in 1990. However, 1990 saw a spike in industrial output before the Soviet industrial complex collapsed during the decade, causing a steep drop in emissions. So Russia's pledge means it could actually increase emission levels by about 40 percent from current levels by 2030.

The 1990 emissions levels were the baseline for cuts in the Kyoto Treaty of 1997; that baseline is still used by many countries, including those of the European Union.

By volume, Russia is the world's fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter after China, the United States and India, releasing more than 2 gigatons of greenhouse gases per year. But based on emissions per unit of gross domestic product, Russia is one of the most carbon intensive countries in the world, according to Shift Project Data Portal, an aggregator of climate change statistics; China, India and the U.S. aren't even in the top 20.

"One doesn't get the sense from Russia that climate change is a big problem," said Bill Hare, the head of the Climate Analytics research group. "There is a clear lack of political will in Russia to address climate change, which will be much to their detriment in the coming years."

Russia's chief climate negotiator, Oleg Shamanov, canceled an interview requested by The Associated Press.

Russia may be paying little attention to the issue because of the influence of the state-controlled oil and gas companies and the metallurgical industries that account for some 90 percent of the country's export revenue.

"Because of the oil and gas lobby, climate and environmental issues are more often than not ignored by the government," said Chuprov.

At the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009, Russia also agreed to transition 4.5 percent of its power sources to renewable energy, with national funding for renewable energy projects to start in 2014. This year, lawmakers postponed the program until 2024. Currently, 0.2 percent of all Russian energy comes from renewable sources, excluding hydropower, says Greenpeace's Chuprov.

In a country where even recycling is a little-understood concept, there is little support and few incentives from the national government for Russian companies to switch over to green energy.

"To get rid of the climate change, or at least stop it ... they never find the money," said Yevgenia Chirikova, an environmental activist who has left the country due to pressure from the government related to her work.

One natural antidote for Russia's emissions could be its carbon-absorbing boreal forests, which absorb approximately 500 million tons of emissions per year. Russian climate change negotiators have been pushing to include the forests in carbon emissions calculations, but critics say that including the forests' carbon-offset would mean that Russia would reduce emissions only by 6-11 percent by 2030. And scientists at the Russian Academy of Science warn that increased greenhouse gas emissions could negate the carbon absorbing effects of the boreal forests by 2040.

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 #14
Moscow Times
November 28, 2015
Despite Economic Woes, the Book Fair is Bigger Than Ever
By Justin Lifflander

Other countries have book fairs where publishers come to do business. The 17th International Book Fair for High-Quality Fiction and Non-Fiction - commonly simply referred to as "nonfiction" - taking place in Moscow this week is very much an event for readers. And as such it is a good place to find out how Russian reader tastes are changing, and how publishing houses are struggling to satisfy those tastes - and stay afloat.

In addition to the long-winded authors and emoting poets who typically get top billing at any book fair, "non/fictioNo17" has a broad appeal for all types of visitors: from parents looking for books to help raise their children as independent thinkers to adults seeking cook books or a photo op with an Ecuadorian Indian princess. All this under one roof at the Central House of Artists.

From the opening press conference it became clear that the publishing industry is in the process of surviving a car crash, and, looking down at its scratched and bruised body, is pleasantly surprised to see it's still alive.

"We publishers are amazed at our own existence," said Irina Prokhorova, a member of the expert committee of the fair and chief editor of NLO Publishing. "The book industry survives thanks only to small independent publishers -they are the basis for the continuation of culture for the country."

Despite grumbling about economic hardship and limited government support, the fair has a festive and cozy feeling. "I've been at 16 of these fairs. It's like coming home and seeing old friends," said Marina Dyadunova, marketing manager at VES MIR Publishing.

There are 274 publishers in attendance - 25 more than last year. Spanish language and literature is playing the role of "Guest of Honor," with 19 authors from 8 Spanish speaking countries present. Other countries with stands include France, Poland, Germany and Japan. The US Embassy planned to have a stand as it has in past years, but cancelled at the last minute.

"The fair provides a great opportunity for readers to fill their shelves with a broad selection of books, often at discount prices," said Julia Blagorazumova, the fair director. There are two stands with English language books, and even a hall dedicated to selling old-style LP records, as the vinyl crave hits Russian music-lovers.

Thinking Tots

Children's literature and development is a paramount theme at fair, under the motto "Think for Yourself!"

"Today we live in a society where infantile thinking, indifference and zombification of the individual can have frightening consequences for society as a whole," according to the fair press release. To counter this, the event offers a developmental interactive quest for children. "It's an effort to battle the absence of critical thinking," said Anna Tikhomirova, a child psychologist and president of the Childhood Culture foundation. There are also special sections with books for those contemplating adoption and for teenagers, she added.

There is a "Discovery Zone" for children, where they can participate in seminars, developmental games, history discussions and illustration classes.

A near stampede towards the children's publisher stands on the third floor just after the fair opened Wednesday afternoon confirmed that nothing gets in the way of a Russian mother trying to obtain something for her child.

Hopefully some of those aggressive moms will purchase a very unique book that debuted at the fair. Far deeper than Suessian rhymes like "one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish," "The ABC's of Truisms," is a unique volume from Clever Publishing that has 33 stories by 33 famous Russian authors-one for each letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. The stories describe important values to young readers, like "a" is for avtoritet (authority) and "b" is for byt (existence).

Business for Grown-Ups

People working in the publishing industry, especially those dealing with foreign literature, have little time for such philosophizing, though clinging to their values seems to be a common theme of success in time of crisis. The litany of problems plaguing publishers left some feeling squeezed and others defiant.

Varvara Gornostayeva, a member of the fair's executive committee and chief editor at Corpus Books - a publishing house with a reputation as a leader in foreign literature in Russia - is counting on her company's reputation and instinct to keep them successful.

"We are under pressure from "mass" literature publishers, which have huge print runs. But we are defending our position and our reputation as a publisher of high-quality literature. We have some popular books that have 80,000 to even 150,000 print runs. But for our average book, if we sell 3,000 we are satisfied," she said. Gornostayeva, who brought Steve Job's memoir here and is just now introducing the memoir by Monty Python's Terry Gilliam to Russian readers, is an optimist. "Despite the crisis and the typical Russian tendency to complain, things are going well for us. Though prices of books are going up while book-buyer's salaries are not, we are counting on our readers. So far it's working."

Oleg Zimarin, general director and editor-in-chief at VES MIR Publishing, which handles a mix of Russian and foreign academic, history, and international relations books - including this author's book - sees a shrinking market for scholarly works. One tool he uses is funding from foreign government and public organizations which help pay for translation and printing costs. "That means that publishers very often don't publish what they want but choose books which get external support," Zimarin said. "This creates a strange and misleading picture of translated books on the market."

Text Publishing is another company with a focus on foreign literature. It started out publishing local legends like the Strugatsky brothers and has expanded to translations of western writers, like Samuel Beckett, Isaac Singer and others. But buying foreign rights in hard currency with a weakened ruble is problematic. "The ruble crash has had a big impact, while at the same time it's impossible to raise prices - it would just put an end to book buying," said Olgert Libkin, head of Text. He also laments distribution shortcomings, like the absence of real chain-stores or discounts from Russian Post for book mailing - a move that would buoy Internet book sales.

Government Support, Sort Of

If the publishing industry car is crashing, the airbag of government support has yet to fully deploy. Fair organizers were thankful they got agreement from the Moscow City Government to waive a new trade levy that would have seen each stand owner fork over 80,000 rubles to the government, on top of what they were already paying for their stands. But they lamented the fact that in the federally declared "Year of the Book," city governments around the country were closing down bookstores and libraries.

VES MIR's Zimarin has seen signs of support at the federal level. The government press agency Rospechat helped finance printing of some of his foreign titles. The only long term cure for the Russian publishing industry's woes is a breakthrough in e-books, Zimarin said. This must be accompanied by serious enforcement of intellectual property rights legislation.

"E-pirates should be considered as terrorists who are a threat to national security," he added. And he believes that there are best practices worth mimicking. "VAT for books in the UK is zero; the Norwegian government buys a thousand copies of every title published and their average prices are ten times higher than in Russia. This kind of approach could return vitality and influence to Russian publishing. That would be for good of society as a whole."

Evolving Tastes

Meanwhile, publishers of foreign literature have to keep up with evolving reader preferences in order to maximize their share of limited disposable income. There is overall agreement that nonfiction is outpacing fiction, though modern classics remain popular. And there is little room for unknown foreign authors, while domestic writers are gaining ground.

"We see that interest towards foreign authors writing about Russia is steadily decreasing," said VES MIR's Zimarin. "There was a great boom in 90s. The first volume of American historian Robert Tucker's biography of Stalin sold more than 100 thousand copies in 1990 and only one thousand of the second volume in 1996."

Corpus's Gornostayeva credits the growth of sales of popular science books - like the works of Richard Dawkins and Eric Kandel - to the efforts of Dmitry Zimin's Dynasty Foundation, which closed recently because he refused to accept the label of foreign agent.

"There was a similar genre during Soviet Times, but it fell apart when the country did, and was only resuscitated thanks to Dynasty," she said. "In the 12 years that they worked, their book program not only financed scientific works, but they also had an expert committee that helped to select books, and they funded qualified scientific editors to help make a high-quality final product."

Gornostayeva sees the share of Russian authors growing not only in non-fiction, but also fiction. "After the breakup of the USSR we were starving for foreign literature - any author, any language - and demand was huge," she said. "But ten years later there was saturation and readers became more discriminating. So in fiction we focus now only on big important projects: where popularity is matched by quality. Like Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. We are not talking about works like Fifty Shades of Grey."

Sometimes she makes decisions about what book rights to buy based purely on instinct. "We enjoyed the Terry Gilliam memoir ourselves so much that we bought the rights without giving it a second thought. We just believe, based on our experience, that it will be liked by our readers," Gornostayeva said.

"It fits the accepted business model of successful independent publishers: having one track with proven, reliable products so we can be sure of the return on investment, and another line of more exotic projects where we operate on gut feeling and take risk," she added.

The foreign authors that Text Publishing seeks are also those who are already well known in their home countries. "Rarely do we deal with new authors," said Text's Libkin. "However the spectrum of languages we are interested in is very broad: from Chinese (Yu Hua) to French (Modiano) to Hungarian (Kertesz)."

But clearly Libkin is not in this business in order to get rich.

"The German poet Heinrich Heine said that he became a poet because his mother liked to read poetry, while his rich uncle became a banker because his mother liked books about thieves," he said. "I suspect my mother did not read books about thieves."

Central House of Artists. 10 Krymsky Val. Metro Park Kultury and Polyanka. +7 495 657 9922. moscowbookfair.ru. Wed. 2-7 p.m., Thurs. through Sun. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

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#15
Turkey's F-16 that downed Russian bomber was in Syrian airspace for 40 seconds - commander

MOSCOW, November 27. /TASS/. Turkey's F-16 fighter that shot down the Russian Aerospace Forces' Sukhoi Su-24M bomber was in Syria's airspace for 40 seconds and went 2 kilometers inside its territory, while the Russian bomber did not violate the Turkish state border, the commander-in-chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces, Viktor Bondarev, said Friday.

"In line with air defense means objective control materials, the Turkish plane was in Syria's airspace for 40 seconds and flew two kilometers inside its territory, whereas the Russian bomber did not violate the state border of Turkey," Bondarev said.

He said the crew of the second Su-24 plane confirmed the launch of the missile from the F-16. After the combat employment at the mentioned target and left turn to 130-degree course "it observed on the left side of it flame and a tail of white smoke, which it reported to the flight operations director," he said.

 According to the commander, Turkey's F-16 fighter stopped maneuvering in its duty zone and started heading to the missile launch point nearly two minutes before the maximum proximity of the Russian Su-24M bomber to the Syrian-Turkish border.

"It's necessary to note that the fighter stopped maneuvering in the duty zone and started promptly heading to the set-forward launch point 1 minute 40 seconds prior to the maximum proximity of the Su-24M plane to the Syrian-Turkish border," Bondarev told journalists.

He said the actions of the Turkish plane after the missile launch above Syrian territory - wind-down turn with altitude loss and withdrawal under the lower limit of the air defense means target acquisition area - were treacherous and planned beforehand.

Bondarev said the Turkish fighters that attacked the Su-24M were waiting for the Russian bomber in the air. Besides, according to Russian military data, the bomber was in the Turkish Air Force's radar stations coverage area for over 30 minutes.

According to him, during the analysis of the video recording of the air situation display, obtained from the Syrian Air Force and air defense command post, "a mark of the air target flying at a speed of 810 kmph from the direction of Turkey toward the state border on a 190-degree course was discovered."

"After the Turkish fighter's approach with the Su-24M jet at a distance equal to the missile firing range (5-7 kilometers), which testifies to the F-16 plane being above the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic, the fighter made an aggressive maneuver to the right in descent and got lost from the screen of the air situation display," he said.
The commander also said that terrorists were informed about the plotted provocation against the Russian plane in advance.

"The fact that groups of terrorists reached the site of the pilot's landing so quickly and that the video of the incident was posted on the internet in a span of 90 minutes proves that the terrorists had been informed in advance about the plotted provocation so that it could be video recorded and posted in social networks," he said.

Bondarev also noted that the video footage of Russian bomber's crash was shot from the territory controlled by terrorists from North Caucasus and former Soviet republics. He also noted that the person shooting the video knew the time and place of the attack in advance.

"The shot angle makes it possible to define the exact place. It is located in a territory held by radical terrorist groups from the North Caucasus or the former Soviet republics. The cameraman knew the exact time and place from it would be possible to make exclusive shots," Bondarev said.

According to him, the Turkish media's readiness to cover the incident was amazingly surprising. The general recalled that the Russian jet was hit at 10:24 on November 25. A private Turkish TV company posted the video 90 minutes later.

"The prompt appearance of terrorist gangs at the landing place and the video's publication in the Internet 90 minutes after the incident proves that the terrorists had been informed of the forthcoming provocation in advance with an aim to shoot everything on a video and place the materials in social networks," Bondarev stressed.

The facts, the general went on to say, are pointing to a pre-planned action designed to destroy the Russian plane and later cover the incident in social networks.

The Turkish Air Force's F-16 fighter on November 24 shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M bomber that Ankara claims violated the country's airspace on the border with Syria. The Su-24M crew ejected but one of the two pilots was killed by fire from the ground. The second pilot was rescued as a result of a 12-hour operation. During evacuation of the Su-24M crew, a Mi-8 helicopter was lost and a contract marine was killed.

Russia's Defense Ministry said the Su-24M was above Syrian territory and "there was no violation of Turkey's airspace." It said the Turkish Air Force fighter violated Syria's airspace.

To protect Russian aircraft in Syria, state-of-the-art S-400 air defense systems, whose killing range reaches 400 kilometers, were redeployed to the Khmeimim airbase. Besides, the Russian missile cruiser Moskva equipped with the Fort air defense system (sea version of S-300) approached the Syrian coast.

Russia's Defense Ministry warned that Russian strike aircraft will from now on be escorted by fighters during sorties, while all potentially dangerous targets will be destroyed.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Turkey's attack will have "serious consequences" for Russian-Turkish relations.

Russia's Aerospace Forces started delivering pinpoint strikes in Syria at facilities of the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist organizations, which are banned in Russia, on September 30, 2015, on a request from Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The air group initially comprised over 50 aircraft and helicopters, including Sukhoi Su-24M, Su-25SM and state-of-the-art Su-34 aircraft. They were redeployed to the Khmeimim airbase in the province of Latakia.

On October 7, four missile ships of the Russian Navy's Caspian Flotilla fired 26 Kalibr cruise missiles (NATO codename Sizzler) at militants' facilities in Syria. On October 8, the Syrian army passed to a large-scale offensive.

In mid-November, Russia increased the number of aircraft taking part in the operation in Syria to 69 and involved strategic bombers in strikes at militants.

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 #16
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
November 25, 2015
Moscow and Ankara facing test of political nerve
Bilateral relations between Turkey and Russia have been seriously damaged by the shooting down of a Russian bomber near the Syrian border by the Turkish air force. However, despite a history of uneasy partnership, both sides will realize that it is not in their interests to allow tensions to spiral over the incident.
SERGEI MARKEDONOV, SPECIAL TO RBTH
Sergei Markedonov is an assistant professor of the Foreign Regional Studies and Foreign Policy Department of the Russian State University for the Humanities.

The incident involving the Russian aircraft shot down by the Turkish air force will be a difficult test for bilateral relations between Moscow and Ankara. Until recently, politicians and experts viewed them as an example of success in improving relations between the former historical enemies.

Meanwhile, it would be wrong to consider the current problems as something which arose suddenly and for no apparent reason. Prominent Turkish expert Bulent Aras has described Turkish-Russian relations as a "competitive partnership."

Indeed, the views of Moscow and Ankara have not coincided on many political subjects, including both the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Georgia, whose territorial integrity has not been questioned by Turkish politicians.

A relationship based on pragmatism

However, the countries were able for a long time to narrow their differences through the development of mutually beneficial economic relations. It seemed that pragmatism would continue to overshadow the contradictions and debate on political subjects.

Moreover, the relationship between the last decade's leading Turkish politician Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the United States and the European Union left much to be desired.

Ankara was not happy about Washington's relations with the Kurdish movements in the Middle East, while the movement of the Turkish Republic toward European integration did not meet much enthusiasm on the part of Brussels. The parties were unable to reach a breakthrough on the issue of Cyprus.

In addition, the "Kurdish card" in Turkey also provoked debate within the EU about the advisability of bringing Turkey into the fold. Moreover, the Turkish Republic was the only NATO member country to receive the status of a dialogue partner in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

In short, Russia and Turkey agreed to disagree on some issues, but did not cross the "red lines" and question the need for increased economic cooperation. This was evidenced by the preparation for the implementation of the Turkish Stream energy project, designed to reduce Russian dependence on Ukraine as a transit country for the export of Russian gas by circumventing it completely.

Revolution in the Arab world

However, it is not in 2015 that the logic of an "agreement to disagree" began to break down. The origins should be sought in the events of 2011, when the so-called Arab Spring came to the Middle East.

If Moscow saw this event as a dangerous challenge associated with the collapse of the secular state, the strengthening of Islamic fundamentalism and concerns about its export to the post-Soviet states and Russia itself, then Turkey saw it as a chance to return to the region, which Ankara for many years did not see as its priority.

Hence Turkish support for the leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi, a sharp turn to criticism of Israel and political support of Palestine, and the struggle against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Ankara has effectively made a claim for the Middle East as its sphere of influence.

As a result, the two Eurasian giants formed different political "lenses." In Syria, Moscow sees Islamic State (ISIS) and the collapse of the secular state as the main threat, while Ankara fears the strengthening of the positions of the Kurds and the Alawites, and the defeat of its "clients" who are interested in the strengthening of the Turkish influence in the region.

Finding a way forward

There is no doubt that the incident with the aircraft has jeopardized relations between the two Eurasian giants. Each has both national prestige and its understanding of the prospects of getting out of the current situation at stake. Of course, the situation will continue to change and refine itself. Emotions have reached a high point both in Ankara and Moscow.

But, firstly, the parties already have some experience of getting out of complex and almost deadlocked situations. Secondly, neither side wants to help third parties by weakening each other.

Thirdly, Turkey is well aware that in spite of its dislike for Assad, destabilization in the neighboring country may rebound on Turkish society itself. There is radical Islamist sentiment in the country, and its carriers are ready to fight against Erdogan, regardless of his relations with Russia. Even by spoiling them, he will not get forgiveness and support from these people.

All this provides faint hope that the parties will find some modus vivendi in this difficult new environment.

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 #17
Hurriyet (Turkey)
November 28, 2015
Commentary urges Russia, Turkey to de-escalate tension, revive status quo
Mustafa Akyol, Dear Russians, let's de-escalate please

Turkey's downing of a Russian warplane right on the Turkish-Syrian border, not too surprisingly, proved to be a major incident. For sure, Ankara and Moscow are not going to war over this. But a sort of cold war seems to be unfolding, with various channels of Russian anger being directed against Turkey.

Yet this is a cold war that is going to help neither Turkey nor Russia, which have huge economic ties with each other. So, instead of chest-beating and letting the anger boil over, it is in the interest of both nations to de-escalate the tension and try to revive the status quo ante.

For sure, de-escalation involves not just mere calls, but an understanding of what happened and why. And of course, there are always two sides any to story, at least, but here are some facts on the Turkish side.

First, there seems to be a conviction on the Russian side that the downing of the plane was a premeditated provocation by Ankara. But that really does not seem to be the case, and the best evidence for this is Ankara's obvious effort since the first day to calm Russia down. (Why would you intentionally provoke the world's quasi-superpower, and then try to undo what you did?) The messages given by President Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu all show that Ankara is "sorry" about what happened. This does not translate into an apology, but it shows regret. Ankara clearly seems to be wishing that this incident had never happened.

Why it happened is first of all related with Turkey's much-hailed "rules of engagement," which were changed back in 2013, when the Bashar al-Assad regime downed a Turkish jet and killed two Turkish pilots. Turkey's response was to tighten its rules of engagement on its southern frontier: Any "military asset" approaching from Syria would be considered a threat. What happened on Nov. 24 with the Russian warplane seems to be just an application of these rules, which the Turkish air force was ordered to implement without any hesitation.

It is also notable that the Turkish military was unsure whether the plane was Russian or not. Erdogan notably said: "The nationality of the plane was unknown at the time of the incident. We do not have any reason to target Russia with whom we have strong relations." It could also have been a Syrian plane, since the Syrian Air Force uses many Russian-made aircraft.

It also seems fair to assume that the Turkish Air Force targeted the Russian warplane only with the perception that it violated Turkish airspace. Otherwise, they would not dare. (I am referring to a perception here, for the Russian argument is different, which could be taken as the counter-perception, even if there is no evidence on any side.)

Besides such technicalities, it is no secret that this indecent took place against the backdrop of the conflicting strategies Russia and Turkey have been following regarding the future of Syria. Russia is among the biggest patrons of the al-Assad regime, while Turkey is among the biggest enemies of the same regime. Moreover, Russia is targeting the "terrorists" that Turkey considers as freedom fighters -in a very typical dilemma, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

Yet it would be unfair and counter-factual to think that Turkey's "freedom fighters" include the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). No, Turkey considers ISIL a terrorist group, and actually fights against it actively, in tandem with the United States. No wonder ISIL routinely condemns the Turkish government as an "apostate" and a pawn of the infidel's Crusade.

The real Turkey-supported groups in Syrian are more moderate jihadists, which fight both al-Assad and ISIL, and also the Turkmen fighters with whom Turkey has strong ethnic and emotional ties. One cannot expect any Turkish government to disregard the Turkmens. Moreover, Turkey's support for them has been actually quite mild and temperate when compared to what Russia did in Ukraine on the pretext of its own ethnic and emotional ties with the Russians of Ukraine.

I bet Erdogan and Putin - two very similar personalities - can reach some understanding on these matters once they sit down and talk. And we can all help that by being a bit less provocative

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#18
Moscow Times
November 30, 2015
Turkish Shootdown Shows Importance of NATO-Russia Dialogue
By Kevin Ryan
Retired Brigadier General Kevin Ryan is director of Defense and Intelligence Projects at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center and organizer of the Elbe Group. He served as U.S. defense attachО to Moscow from 2001-2003.

Fighter aircraft from NATO member Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 military plane along the Turkish-Syrian border on Nov. 24. One of the pilots, Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Peshkow, was killed as a result. Not since a Soviet sentry shot U.S. Army Major Arthur Nicholson in 1985, has there been a shooting death between the forces of Russia and members of NATO.  

Russian President Vladimir Putin immediately threatened "serious consequences" for what he called a stab in the back. He characterized the Turkish government as "the accomplices of terrorists." Russia deployed longer range air defense systems to Syria while Turkish President Recep Erdogan threatened that any shootdown of a Turkish aircraft would be considered an "act of aggression" which might bring NATO into the conflict.

As tensions peaked between Russia and Turkey, Putin and Erdogan did what many leaders have done before - they began shutting down diplomatic and military channels of communication. This incident highlights the danger posed when two adversaries break off important channels of communication at a time when dialogue is most necessary. The potential for escalation and miscalculation becomes even greater.

In October, the Elbe Group - a group of six U.S. and six Russian retired general officers - met for the seventh time in five years and urged NATO and Russia to open a military-to-military dialogue immediately to communicate on military operations in proximity to each other's borders.

The Elbe Group recommended this policy because it was convinced that an accidental shootdown or clash of forces was inevitable considering the concentration of U.S., NATO, and Russian troops along the Turkish-Syrian border.

The group includes such senior U.S. veterans as former CENTCOM Commander General John Abizaid, former STRATCOM Commander General Eugene Habiger and former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Michael Maples, as well as Russian counterparts such as former Interior Minister General Anatoly Kulikov, former Military Intelligence Chief General Valentin Korabelnikov and former FSB Deputy Head General Anatoly Safonov.  

In a joint statement reflecting the opinion of both the U.S. and Russian members, the Elbe Group recommended renewed "contacts between Russia and NATO, given that combat operations in Syria are being conducted near the border of a NATO member state."

The shootdown of the Russian fighter underscores the urgency of the recommendation. Transparency about operations, force dispositions, and intentions is key to avoiding miscalculation or misunderstanding that could lead to unintended consequences.

In that light, the Elbe Group commended the recent agreement between Russia and the U.S. to "deconflict" operations in Syria, but urged that it be expanded to include "practical steps for coordination and actions in the fight against the Islamic State." For example, the agreement reached in October does not provide for cooperation in rescuing downed pilots.   

It is important to recognize how serious the situation has become between Russia and NATO over the last two years. In response to Russia's annexation of Crimea and its activities in Ukraine, almost all operational communications between the militaries of NATO and Russia have been suspended.

Even if it is not possible to reconcile the two sides politically and diplomatically, it is vital that a military dialogue reopen now to provide national leaders with a means to deconflict and resolve security issues without resorting to force.  

This kind of dialogue was able to keep the Cold War "cold" and is needed again.

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 #19
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
November 28, 2015
How Turkish downing of Russian jet fuels Middle East tensions
Regardless of Russia's response to Turkey's downing of the Russian bomber, it will not make the region or the world any safer.
By Vladimir Avatkov
Vladimir Avatkov, Ph.D., is a Turkey expert and the director of the Center of Oriental Studies, International Relations and Public Diplomacy.

Days after Turkey brought down a Russian bomber, Russia revoked its visa-free regime with Turkey and signed a decree imposing immediate   economic sanctions against Ankara. In the meantime, the press is speculating whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is going to meet with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the UN Climate Change Summit in Paris in order to address several pressing issues.

Clearly, Turkey's shooting down of the Russian Su-24 bomber over Syria on Nov. 24 has brought Russian-Turkish relations to its lowest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s.

This recent incident, which led to the deaths of a Russian pilot and a marine, has caused irreparable damage to cooperation between the two countries. Turkey is now trapped because its actions could be used by its opponents and interpreted as providing support to the very terrorists that the Russian Air Force is fighting in Syria.

The course of action chosen by Turkey does not just hamper Russia-Turkey relations. It also undermines the newly emerging dialogue that seeks to bring Russia, the U.S. and the EU together to fight terrorism in the region.

Obviously, Turkey has its own grievances, including earlier violations of Turkish airspace; Russia's bombing of ISIS oil sites, which according to some sources belong to circles close to the Turkish political establishment; and Russia hindering Turkey's ambitions to benefit from bringing order to neighboring countries such as Syria.

Recently, Ankara's list of reasons for confronting Russia has grown longer: The Russian Air Force is operating in Northern Syria, which is occupied by Syrian Turkmen and helps Kurds in their movement west.

This maneuver could enable Kurdish anti-ISIS forces to surround the militants and prevent them from entering Turkey. Turkish authorities might have taken these factors into consideration when they made the decision to use force in order to show Russia its place.

Lately, Russia and Turkey have worked hard on building a mutually beneficial partnership, but a number of issues remained unresolved.

First, cooperation should not have been limited to the economy. It should have encompassed geopolitics and security, the two areas that historically were particularly problematic for the two countries.

Second, it was a mistake to rely exclusively on leadership that can be easily replaced. Russia should have engaged all Turkish political forces.

Still, what is done is done. The past cannot be changed and everyone will have to cope with the current situation. We need to learn from our mistakes, abandon reactionism and adopt proactive policies.

Erdogan, who has been trying to maintain the balance between Russia and the West, has grown weak and most likely cannot contain the Turkish "hawks," including Turkish Prime Minister and the current leader of the Justice and Development Party, Ahmet Davutoğlu, who propagates the idea of rebuilding the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

Russia is a world power that has de facto suffered an act of aggression. Unfortunately, regardless of its response, the region and the world on the whole will likely not become any safer.

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 #20
The Hill
November 25, 2015
Russians may have a strong case in Turkish shootdown
By Charles J. Dunlap Jr
Dunlap is a retired Air Force major general who is currently executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke Law School.

The shootdown of the Russian Su-24 bomber by Turkish F-16s raises a number of critical issues under international law that the U.S. needs to carefully navigate. This is especially so since the result of the Turkish action was the apparently illegal killing by Syrian rebels of one of the Russian aircrew, as well as the possibly unlawful death of a Russian marine attempting to rescue the downed aviators.

While President Obama is certainly correct in saying that "Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its airspace," exactly how it may do so is more complicated than the president implies. In fact, the Russians may have strong legal arguments that any such right under international law was wrongly asserted in this instance.

When is self-defense triggered?

Article 51 of the U.N. charter permits the use of force in the event of an "armed attack." However, in a 1986 case, the International Court of Justice concluded that a "mere frontier incident" might constitute a breach of the U.N. charter, but did not necessarily trigger the right to use force absent a showing that the attack was of a significant scale and effect. Most nations also accept that states threatened with an imminent attack can respond in self-defense so long as they did not have under the circumstances "any means of halting the attack other than recourse to armed force," as noted by Leo Van den hole in the American University International Law Review.

The problem here is that the Turks are not asserting that any armed attack took place or, for that matter, that any armed attack was even being contemplated by the Russians. Instead, in a letter to the U.N., the Turks only claimed that the Russians had "violated their national airspace to a depth of 1.36 to 1.15 miles in length for 17 seconds." They also say that the Russians were warned "10 times" (something the Russians dispute) and that the Turkish jets fired upon them in accordance with the Turks' "rules of engagement." Of course, national rules of engagement cannot trump the requirements of international law. Moreover, international law also requires any force in self-defense be proportional to the threat addressed.

Thus, the legal question is this: Is a mere 17-second border incursion of such significance and scale as to justify as "proportional" the use of deadly force as the only recourse - particularly where there is no indication that the Russians were going to actually attack anything on Turkish soil?

The U.S., so far, is staying mum about what it may know about the precise location of the planes (which the Russians insist never entered Turkish airspace). What is more is that even if the Russians had penetrated Turkish airspace, that fact alone would not necessarily legally authorize the use of force, absent a showing of hostile intent (which the Turks are not alleging). Additionally, it is quite possible that the Russian aircraft may have penetrated Turkish airspace - if at all - because of a bona fide navigational misunderstanding occasioned by the satellite guidance system the Russians employ. Navigation errors are not an adequate reason to use deadly force.

In short, it appears at this point that the Turkish case justifying the use of deadly force is, at best, weak. Nevertheless, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that NATO stands "in solidarity with Turkey." However, it may have been more prudent to withhold judgment until all the facts are definitively known and a full legal analysis is complete. Why? Article 5 of the NATO treaty governing self-defense tracks almost exactly with the Article 51 of the U.N. charter, so if the facts show illegality under international law, that would undercut the wisdom of NATO standing "in solidarity" with any nation.

The attack on the Russian aviator and marine

Another important international law issue arose after the Russian aircraft was struck by the Turkish missiles. The two aviators ejected, but were attacked as they parachuted from their stricken aircraft - reportedly by elements of the Free Syrian Army. In the effort to rescue the downed aviators, one Russian marine was killed.

It is extraordinarily well-settled that the law of war prohibits making anyone parachuting from a distressed aircraft the object of attack, and that doing so is a war crime. There is no real dispute among experts as to this reading of the law.

Regarding the Russian marine killed on the rescue operation, the law is more complex. Generally, a rescue effort is a military operation subject to lawful attack. If, however, the aircraft was displaying the red cross or a similar internationally recognized medical emblem, and the aim was simply to provide medical care, the attack would likely be unjustified. Furthermore, given that shooting at parachuting aviators is itself a war crime, the effort to rescue them from patently illegal conduct may very well transform the incident into one where international law could find the marine's death an unlawful killing.

What it means for the U.S.

Turkey is not only a highly valued U.S. and NATO ally, but also a key member of the international coalition opposing the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). That said, adherence to the rule of law is especially important in extremely unstable situations like that in Syria today. It is not the time or place for loose interpretations that can lead to unintended consequences. The U.S. also needs to keep in mind that there are several other volatile aeronautical situations around the globe - overflights in the South China Sea being one - where U.S. interests are served by having legal restraints on the use of force meticulously observed.

If Turkey was wrong on this one, the U.S. should say so, regardless of whatever other disputes we may have with the Russians. A friend should always tell a friend when they made a mistake. It really is that simple.

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 #21
S-400 antiaircraft missile system to defend Russia's air group in Syria
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, November 27. /TASS/. The S-400 (NATO reporting name: SA-21 Growler) air defense missile systems that Russia has moved to its airbase near Latakia in Syria after Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 bomber will help keep most of Syrian airspace under control and will be a sword of Damocles over the heads of potential aggressors, experts say.
Any incidental encounters with the aircraft of the US-led coalition in Syria are hardly possible thanks to modern military hardware, the experts say.

Along with the Fort air defense missile systems aboard the missile cruiser Moskva already in Syrian waters, the S-400 systems will ensure the safety of the Russian air group's flights and will destroy any targets posing a threat to it. Also, Russian aircraft and helicopters on a combat mission will be accompanied by fighter jets for combat cover and also by aerial electronic warfare systems.

The Pentagon has voiced fears that the Russian S-400 air defense missile systems may complicate the situation in the sky over Syria and has said it expects that these complexes won't be aimed against the US-led coalition.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said he was surprised over the US reaction.

"We were confident until Tuesday that our planes destroying Islamic State facilities were guaranteed against attacks from the so-called US-led anti-IS coalition," he said.
"Now all the northern provinces in Syria bordering on Turkey, as well as the north-eastern provinces bordering on Iraq are tracked by our [S-400] system and targets can be hit at a depth of up to 300 km," military expert and editor-in-chief of the Arsenal of the Fatherland journal Viktor Murakhovsky told TASS.

"Therefore, as it turns out, with the deployment of the S-400 at the Khmeimim airbase, the territory of Turkey is visible within the distance of about 350-400 km while fire can be delivered at a distance of about 200-250 km in depth," the military expert said.

"Turkey has itself created such a situation that now its plane may be shot down if it enters the Syrian airspace even for a second. Now the [S-400] system will track all Turkish warplanes approaching the border. The S-400 is a sword of Damocles that will hang over the heads of potential intruders," he added.

As for the US indignation, the expert noted that the United States had signed a memorandum with Russia on preventing air incidents.

"The S-400 will not create big problems for the US-led coalition," Deputy Director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies Maxim Shepovalenko told TASS. "All the rest depends on them. If they behave badly and obstruct our aircraft, they will be let known about that. But we'll hardly enter into direct confrontation with them."

In principle, no one is guaranteed against incidents, he added. "But modern identification and detection systems exclude such things. There can be no incidental occurrences there. The statements that the Turks did not know that this was the Russian plane and confused it with a Syrian aircraft is child's talk and does not stand up to criticism," the military expert said.

The electronic warfare system will now be used in the first place, the expert said. "Until now, we refrained from this because we hoped for understanding from the so-called partners," he noted.

'As for electronic warfare and air defense systems, it can be said that we're among the best in the world," the military expert said.

Regional Security Sector Head at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies Igor Nikolaichuk believes that the S-400 will play the role of a deterrence factor as the newest system of Russia's strategic echelon: "Don't step in and don't try to shoot down our planes."

"The Americans' fears are completely unfounded and are only an element of political pressure," the expert told TASS.

"Modern technical capabilities and specialists' qualification give a possibility actually to exclude an incidental downing of planes," the military expert said.

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 #22
The Guardian
November 26, 2015
Why did it take Turkey just 17 seconds to shoot down Russian jet?
Ankara has delivered an incendiary message to Moscow, and while there may be too much at stake for the conflict to spill out of control it also won't go away
By Mark Galeotti
Mark Galeotti is a professor at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, who specialises in Russian history and security issues. He writes a blog in Moscow's Shadows.

Even if Turkey is right that a Russian fighter jet strayed into its airspace, the plane was within Ankara's borders for just 17 seconds before being attacked - and was making no hostile moves against the Turks.

Airspace incursions, granted usually in less politically tense contexts, happen all the time, and generally you'd expect warning shots to be fired and then attempts to force the intruder to leave or to land.

That the Turks shot down the jet and did so within 17 seconds - with the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, saying he gave the order to fire himself - suggests very strongly they were waiting for a Russian plane to come into or close enough to Turkish airspace with the aim of delivering a rather pyrotechnic message.

In this respect, it is understandable that the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called the attack a provocation and an ambush.

Moscow may have been foolish to let its planes stray so close to the border - doubly so if its rules of engagement allowed pilots to dip into Turkish airspace when it was operationally useful (as is likely). But Turkey's response went way beyond the usual practice.

In 2012, the Syrians shot down a Turkish jet which had entered its airspace, and Erdoğan's furious response at the time was that "a short-term border violation can never be a pretext for an attack".

(At the time, the then Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen called it "another example of the Syrian authorities' disregard for international norms". There hasn't been a similar critique of Ankara.)

Yet no one wants this conflict to escalate, and both Ankara and Moscow are working to that end. Presumably Erdoğan feels satisfied the point has been made, and presumably Moscow, while no doubt harbouring its grudges, is aware it has a great deal of lost diplomatic ground to make up and wants to be able to strike a deal with the west over Syria and Ukraine.

To this end, while Putin was angry ("a stab in the back") and Erdoğan obstinate ("everyone should respect the right of Turkey to defend its borders"), their respective foreign ministers are doing what foreign ministers do and trying to bring things back to the diplomatic track.

Analyst Pavel Felgenhauer has suggested that "further dogfights are possible during which Russian planes will attack Turkish planes in order to protect our bombers. Sea battles between the Turkish and Russian fleets are possible".

There are striking similarities between Erdogan's Turkey and Putin's Russia
But in fact, the mechanisms in place to control conflict remain robust. Nato is aware that Turkey is an ally, but is not piling in to increase the tension; Russia knows that while it may have a certain moral authority in this incident, but if it turns to military pressure then Nato must back its maverick ally.

There are striking similarities between Erdoğan's Turkey and Putin's Russia, not least their ability and propensity to move conflicts into the covert arena. While Russia's intervention in Syria may have cynical intent, the Turks are acting in support of their national interests in Syria with equal ruthlessness.

Ankara is often guilty of neglecting attacks on Isis and hitting the Kurds (who are in so many ways the most effective force against the jihadists) instead, smuggling weapons in the guise of humanitarian convoys (something we saw the Russians doing in Ukraine), and being willing to support groups which are often jihadist in their own terms. Turkish military intelligence organisation (MIT) is every bit as cynically opportunist as the Russian military spy agency (GRU), and Erdoğan every bit as erratic, brutal and ambitious as Putin.

As the analysts Fiona Hill and Kemal Kirisci have put it, "the personalities and political styles of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russian president Vladimir Putin seemed to complement if not mirror each other" such that these "similarities ... have now come into play in a dramatic way."

While the overt clashes may be headed off by the usual machinery of diplomacy, both countries - with large, extensive, secretive and brutal intelligence apparatuses and a history of working with both gangsters and terrorists - may well instead simply transfer these tensions to the covert arena.

In Syria itself, the Russians are likely to put greater emphasis on attacking those groups under Ankara's patronage. A strike on a Turkish aid convoy may be the first manifestation of this.

Meanwhile, the Turks will presumably arm and encourage those groups most able to give the Russians a bloody nose.

In this way, what wasn't really a proxy war before is likely to become one.

Meanwhile, Moscow may put greater emphasis on countering Turkey's efforts to establish regional influence (Azerbaijan is an obvious place of contention) and could support problematic non-state actors inside Turkey, from Kurds to criminals (at least, those criminals not already tied to the Turkish state).

This is a conflict that Ankara triggered and while it is being managed it is not going to go away. Nor is it just going to become another chapter in the histories of Russo-Ottoman rivalry. Expect to see this play out in snide, deniable, but nonetheless bitter actions for months to come.

This article first appeared on In Moscow's Shadows

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 #23
Wall Street Journal
November 30, 2015
Russians Seeking Winter Retreat Are Stopped Cold
Moscow's travel bans to Egypt, Turkey amid diplomatic crises force tens of thousands to adjust or cancel vacations
By ANDREY OSTROUKH And  JAMES MARSON

MOSCOW- Dmitri Kharlampidi's traditional family trip to Egypt for New Year's fell through when a Russian passenger jet was downed there and Moscow stopped travel. Then his Plan B for a winter getaway-Turkey-also fizzled, after Turkey shot down a Russian military jet.

"Egypt is the best place for vacation in the winter. It's only a four-hour flight to get there, you don't need a visa, the sea is wonderful, and the coral reefs are the best in the world," said Mr. Kharlampidi, a 60-year-old interpreter. "But it's scary to go there now. I'd better wait for about a year without going anywhere. Nowhere is safe now."

For the holidays, he'll be heading to his dacha some 40 miles north of Moscow.

Russia's restrictions on travel to Egypt and Turkey have scrambled the vacation plans of tens of thousands of Russians who want to escape the winter gloom. The travel curbs are part of a new reality for Russia's middle classes, which grew wealthier under President Vladimir Putin but have been hit by a recession at home and the Kremlin's confrontations abroad.

An oil boom pumped up Russians' average salaries to the equivalent of just over $1,000 a month in 2013, allowing many citizens to vacation abroad, a luxury in Soviet times. Two years later, a recession brought on by Western sanctions and a plunge in oil prices means the average salary is higher in rubles, but about half the value in U.S. dollars.

In the first half of the year, the number of Russians vacationing abroad dropped by a third, to 5.5 million. Numbers will fall 40% next year, according to the head of Russia's Federal Tourism Agency, Oleg Safonov.

Turkey and Egypt were popular destinations, offering hotels and services far better than Russian equivalents at a reasonable price. Six million Russians visited Turkey or Egypt last year, almost twice as many as in 2007.

But after a Russian passenger jet with 224 on board crashed last month while returning from Egypt, in what Russia called a terrorist attack, authorities moved quickly to halt travel.

On Tuesday, Turkey shot down a Russian warplane, sparking a furious response from Moscow. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the danger of terrorism in Turkey was no less than Egypt, and recommended avoiding travel there. The Federal Tourism Agency chimed in, too, and tour operators stopped selling trips even before Mr. Putin formalized a ban on sales in a decree on Saturday.

Now, Russians are searching out other options, choosing between more expensive trips to Asia and the Middle East, or simply staying at home.

Vladimir Vorobyov, president at one of Russia's largest travel companies, Natalie Tours, said some 100,000 vacation packages from Russia to Egypt had been booked. Half the packages sold by his firm have been rebooked for the United Arab Emirates, where a typical all-inclusive package would cost around $1,000 a week, compared with $500 in Egypt. Around 30% have changed plans for Thailand or Europe, he said.

The Turkey news was a less immediate blow, he said, as there were around 5,000 winter bookings because it's not as warm there.

Russian officials-from tourism chiefs to the head of a state bank-are urging people to holiday in Russia, touting Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that it annexed last year, as an alternative. Tourism chief Mr. Safonov said domestic tourist numbers will be up 30% next year.

But some aren't convinced, saying Crimea's poor hotels and service aren't up to the standards they are used to. Crimea is largely without electricity at the moment after Ukrainian activists downed power lines that supply the disputed region.

"I'm a patriot, but I won't go Crimea or Sochi because of the unpredictable weather, poor quality of service, and prices," said Mr. Kharlampidi, the interpreter. Sochi is another Black Sea resort, which Russia overhauled for the Winter Olympics last year.

Mr. Kharlampidi said he would spend the New Year holiday period, which kicks off at the end of December and runs for around 10 days, with his wife and two daughters. They plan to go cross-country skiing and relax at the house, where he recently installed hot water.

Mr. Putin's popularity doesn't appear to be suffering from the travel curbs and is nudging 90%, according to official pollsters. The ban on travel to Egypt is supported by 77% of Russians, according to a survey by independent pollster Levada-Center.

Russian propaganda channels have been filled with reports of Turkey and Europe bursting with refugees and terrorism. Earlier this month, one senior lawmaker said Russia should introduce exit visas, though the Kremlin quickly dismissed the idea.

Lawmakers in Russia's lower house of parliament said Wednesday that they are preparing a list of safe destinations for Russian tourists that would include Cuba and the south coasts of Vietnam and China, Interfax news agency reported.

"The geography of travel is changing. I won't go to the Turkey-Egypt region at any cost," said a 29-year-old programmer from Moscow named Andrei, who declined to give his last name. "Traveling to Europe also scares me in the wake of recent events."

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 #24
New York Times
November 30, 2015
Discord Between Turkey and Russia Is Fueled by Leaders' Similarities
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

MOSCOW - Russia has a new Enemy No. 1.

His name is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, or as the TV news program hosted by the Kremlin's main ideologue described him on Sunday night, "an unrestrained and deceitful man hooked on cheap oil from the barbaric caliphate" - referring to the Islamic State.

Not long ago, Mr. Erdogan earned about the warmest accolade possible from President Vladimir V. Putin. He described the Turkish president as "a strong man," willing to stand up to the West. That was then.

Ever since the Turkish Air Force shot down a Russian warplane last week that Turkey accused of violating its airspace, Mr. Putin has been calling Mr. Erdogan a back stabber. Mr. Erdogan has not taken on Mr. Putin directly, but even as he has softened his tone, he has refused to apologize for the downing of the fighter jet. And a pro-government Turkish newspaper recently ran a headline saying "Putin tries to deceive the world with his lies," a reference to Moscow's actions in the war in Syria.

The animosity between Russia and Turkey has been growing for years because they back different sides in Syria's civil war, with Russia intervening to buttress the government of President Bashar al-Assad, an Alawi Shiite, and Turkey backing the Sunni majority and pushing for Mr. Assad to leave office.

But in the wake of the warplane's downing, the two men's personal styles - including an unwillingness to compromise - are further inflaming the tensions.

Those resentments now threaten to at least prolong the bloody, intractable conflict in Syria, and have raised fears that NATO could be dragged in if the conflict between Russia and Turkey escalates.

"The problem is that you have two presidents who are both highly status conscious and both high-risk players," said Ivan Krastev, a political scientist who is chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. "Not looking weak is something very important for both Putin and Erdogan. Neither knows how to retreat, nor apologize. In that way they are like twins."

Both men are often described as combative, uncompromising, nationalistic and authoritarian. Mr. Putin changed jobs to keep running his country, switching between the post of prime minister and president; Mr. Erdogan has done the same and wants to revamp the Turkish Constitution to give more powers to the presidency.

Both are trying to restore luster to the empires that were lost in World War I - Czarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire. One is sometimes derisively likened to a czar, and the other a sultan. Both nurse a sense of historical grievance that the West does not fully accept them.

The two leaders profess to respect the rule of law but are widely criticized for ignoring it when it threatens their reach. They have unleashed the courts or the tax authorities to silence criticism from big business and opposition media.

Mr. Putin is well known for cracking down on his opposition. Mr. Erdogan is building his own reputation for harsh treatment; scores of people have been investigated on charges of insulting the president and several foreign journalists have been deported.

Both tend to blame external, global conspiracies for failures.

Or as the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny wrote on his blog last week: "They both talk foreign policy nonsense to distract citizens from internal problems. Both use imperial ambitions, imperial rhetoric to strengthen their personal power and personal enrichment. Both hate social and news media. Both call the West their enemy and appeal to traditional values, while they both are immoral."

They also enjoy soaring popularity ratings at home, which gives them a sense of impunity. The two men are such mirror images of each other, in fact, analysts said, that they are unlikely to be able to resolve the dispute over the plane without outside mediation.

"They do not trust each other," Mr. Krastev said. "There is too much ambition on both sides."

Mr. Putin has demanded a public apology for the downing of the military jet and compensation from the Turkish leadership. The extent of Mr. Putin's pique is perhaps best reflected by the repeated accusations on Russian state television that Mr. Erdogan's son is deeply involved in the black market trade in oil extracted by the Islamic State, the terrorist group that has taken over parts of Iraq and Syria - and whose Egyptian affiliate recently took responsibility for downing a Russian passenger jet in Sinai.

Mr. Erdogan strongly denied the allegations. "They are lies; they are slander. We have never, never had this kind of commercial relationship with any terror organization," Mr. Erdogan said in an interview with France 24 last week. "They have to prove it, and if they can, Tayyip Erdogan will leave office."

Still, Mr. Erdogan did seem to be trying to dial back after first demanding that Russia apologize over what Turkey said was a violation of its airspace, and direct military confrontation seems unlikely. By the weekend, he said, "We are truly saddened by this incident."

"In his own way he is trying to apologize, but I don't think Putin is receptive," said Asli Aydintasbas, a Turkish fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Or as Dmitry Kiselyev, the Kremlin ideologue, said pointedly Sunday night, "The hotline has been switched off." In the hourlong news program, which was devoted almost entirely to bashing Turkey, he added, "Has Erdogan lost his marbles?"

It was not always thus. A year ago the two leaders seemed born allies as they agreed that Russia would invest in a major gas pipeline, known as the Turkish Stream, that would pump Russian gas through Turkey to Europe as an alternative to the one across the Balkans that the European Union had opposed. Indeed, the two leaders pledged to more than triple their roughly $30 billion annual trade to $100 billion dollars by 2020.

The fact that Mr. Erdogan openly boasted about the project at a time when the West was calling for wider sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis prompted Mr. Putin to call him a "strong man."

Right after the Russian military jet was shot down, Turkish trucks began to back up at the Russian border, as the government food watchdog suddenly discovered problems with the produce that it had praised a year ago as exceptional. It is not clear whether the Turkish Stream and other major projects will be affected by planned sanctions.

It is also unclear if the two leaders will try to work out their differences this week. Both are due in Paris on Monday for the global climate change conference. Mr. Erdogan said that he had called the Kremlin to suggest that they meet on the sidelines to help defuse the crisis. Mr. Putin's only public response so far was a decree issued late Saturday night ordering up a list of vaguely defined economic sanctions against Turkey.

In the end, some analysts say, a continued confrontation with Turkey, hot or cold, could work to Mr. Putin's advantage, possibly speeding his goal of lifting Western sanctions imposed after his country's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Replacing Moscow's heated anti-Western criticism with a new target might improve Russia's estranged ties with the West.

"If you are the military chieftain and there is no way to switch back to electoral legitimacy, you need enemies," said Nicolai Petrov, a political scientist at the Higher School of Economics. "Turkey is the best candidate."

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 #25
http://gordonhahn.com
November 24, 2015
Putin the Risk-Taker
By Gordon M. Hahn
Gordon M. Hahn is an Analyst and Advisory Board Member of the Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, Chicago, Illinois; a Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California; a Contributor for Russia Direct, www.russia-direct.org; and an Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View - Russia Media Watch, http://www.russiaotherpointsofview.com.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's entire career, from the Soviet KGB in Dresden to the Russian presidency in Moscow, has displayed bold risk-taking. In situations where he has been under great pressure to make difficult decisions, he has repeatedly demonstrated a propensity or ability to act promptly, decisively, and with considerable effectiveness. A few examples from key turning points in Putin's political life will suffice to demonstrate these points. On the more humorous side, but perhaps no less indicatively, Putin almost married a college girlfriend but at the last minute reneged, leaving her standing at the altar.

Dresden 1989

His first political test came with the fall of the Berlin wall, which threatened the KGB's outpost in Dresden where Putin had been stationed since 1985 to recruit agents undercover as deputy director of the House of Soviet-German Freindship. As mobs of protesters turned their attention to the KGB building after storming Dresden's Stasi headquarters, Putin went outside to confront the "aggressively-minded crowd" and answered their questions. He then went back inside and called the Soviet military base for help but was told that they could do nothing without an order from Moscow and that "Moscow is silent." "Hours" later troops arrived and the crowd quietly dispersed (N. Gevorkyan and A. Kolesnikov, Ot Pervogo Litsa: Razgovory s Vladimirom Putinym (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000), p. 71.]

Incidentally, a different, apparently embellished version of events makes Putin's conduct out to be even bolder and, not surprisingly, more menacing and aggressive. In the Peter Baker's and Susan Glasser's recounting, Putin took a pistol from a security guard when he went outside to confront the crowd and "(p)ointedly cocking the gun, he warned that he would open fire on anyone who trtied to scale the fence.... Back inside Putin tried to obtain instructions on what to do," bringing the famous response "Moscow is silent." The authors delete Putin's request for troops and the troops' arrival leading to the crowd's quiet dispersal described by Putin. [Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution (New York: Scribner, 2005), pp. 44-5).] Baker and Glasser cite page 79 of First Person [Vladimir Putin, Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), p. 390, footnote 20.], the English-language translation of Ot Pervogo Litsa, the extended biographical interview with Putin published shortly after Putin's rise to the presidency. I cite the Russian version. There is no mention whatsoever of a pistol in Putin's recounting of the Dresden event in either the English translation cited by Baker and Glasser or the Russian-language version cited by the present author. Even without the pistol and the cocking, Putin's actions were sufficiently bold and risky and seemed to be effective in calming the mob down until the cavalry arrived.

August 1991

Along with his new mentor and boss, democratic St. Petersburg Mayor Anatolii Sobchak, deputy mayor Putin played a leading role in helping to defeat in St. Petersburg the Moscow-centered hardline August 1991 coup against reformers led by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and pro-democracy revolutionaries led in the moderate wing by Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The coup plot was led by Putin's still then formal boss, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, and Putin responded by writing his second resignation letter to the KGB, risking arrest by driving to the airport to meet Sobchak who returned to St. Petersburg from Moscow to organize the resistance in the 'second capitol' to the coup-plotters, and touring the city's enterprises and businesses to drum up pro-deocracy supporters to attend the mass demonstration on Palace Square and to undertake other measures around the city to resist the authoritarian takeover. Putin has stated that he and Sobchak also oversaw some distribution of weapons to combat the coup. (Gevorkyan and Kolesnikov, Ot Pervogo Litsa: Razgovory s Vladimirom Putinym, pp. 84-5 and Baker and Glasser, Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution, pp. 46-7.) Although many in Russia took risks in those days when choosing either side, Putin's actions were certainly decisive, bold, seemingly effective, and fraught with great risk, given what would have been his fate if the GKChP had succeeded. Incidentally once more, per the oft-misquoted Putin statement about the collapse of the USSR being the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, Putin also ensured "a few months" after the coup collapsed that communists ceased hanging the Soviet flag on government buildings.  (Gevorkyan and Kolesnikov, Ot Pervogo Litsa: Razgovory s Vladimirom Putinym, p. 86.)

St. Petersburg

On 7 November 1997 it appears that Putin took another political risk in helping to spirit his mentor Sobchak out of the country after hardliners were moving to charge him with improper privatization of his apartment, that of his elder daughter's, and his wife's art studio. Compared to the massive corruption and numerous thefts of multi-billion dollar enterprises by Russia's infamous oligarchs and former Soviet officials over the seven previous years, this was minor stuff. Sobchak flew to Paris ostensibly for heart treatment and returned two years later. Putin claimed in 2000 that he played no role (Gevorkyan and Kolesnikov, Ot Pervogo Litsa: Razgovory s Vladimirom Putinym, p. 111.)

In reality, it is almost certain that Putin played a key role in his political mentor's exodus. Sobchak flew out of St. Petersburg's Pulkovo airport on a private plan without a passport check when he departed. Putin was the highest tanking official with close ties to Sobchak at the time. The risk for Putin comes in that the position in the Kremlin at the time was not all-powerful: Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration in charge of Main Control Directorate of the Presidential Property Management Department. Putin was still a politically vulnerable bureaucrat, rather than a high-powered politician. Caught on the losing side of a power struggle, his fall could be precipitate and permanent. Putin was able to get the charges against Sobchak dropped only after he became FSB chief (July 1998) and Secretary of the Security Council (March 1999), and Sobchak flew back to Russia in June 1999.

Moscow 1999

One reason Putin ended up on the winning side in the Yeltsin succession struggle and why he was promoted to Security Council Secretary was the loyalty to the Yeltsin clan he displayed in the position of FSB chief. In 1999 the succession struggle was at its peak and Russian General Prosecutor Yurii Skuratov in the midst of a series of investigations of corruption in and around Yeltsin, his immediate family, and the Kremlin, including the notorious oligarch Boris Berezovskii. Yeltsin attempted to have Skuratov removed from office but was overruled by the State Duma. On March 19 a video of Skuratov cavorting with prostitutes was aired on several of Russia's main television channels, allowing Yeltsin to fire him. Skuratov's dalliance with the ladies of the night took place in a FSB house, suggesting that the FSB was behind the videotaping and revelations. It is likely that this was the work of Berezovskii, and Putin had little choice but to play along, still being a Yeltsin family outsider.

Nevertheless, Putin had made the 'right' choice in terms of the family's interests and thus had made a high-stakes play in cahoots with it. He, like they, if the play had been trumped would not only have never been Yeltsin's choice as successor-a third or fourth successive one, albeit-but his career in Moscow would have met a quick end.

Dagestan-Chechnya, 1999-2002

Putin's decision to not only rebuff the jihadi invasion of Dagestan launched from the anarchic, lawless and jihadizing ultra-nationalist Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya (ChRI) but to continue into Chechnya and re-occupy the breakaway region was another bold, risky decision. There was a ready, more cautious alternative of stopping at the Terek River and setting up a line of defense there in order to isolate the terrorists in the less welcoming climes of mountainous southern Chechnya and thus create a buffer. Putin resisted this tempting compromise variant that might have proved less costly in military and political terms at least in the short-term and instead took the considerable risk of attempting to re-conquer, occupy and pacify Chechnya.

Oligarchs 2000

This leads us right into Putin's next risky move: his move to rein in the oligarchs who were plundering the state and driving the agenda and dynamics of Russian politics and policy through their control of the main mass media organs. This is a well-known aspect of Putin's rule and need not be detailed here. The main point is that the Berezovskiis, Khodorkovskiis, Potanins, Abramoviches, Gusinskiis, Smolenskiis, Freidmans, Avens, and others had great power and resources. Had they been able to temporarily overcome their differences, they could have gravely undermined this relatively green president with few allies outside the still somewhat weakened FSB. Moreover, Berezovskii had sunk his teeth into the FSB and controlled elements within the corruption and organized crime fighting departments. So even after becoming president-not to mention during he campaign-Putin remained vulnerable, especially with the war against Chechen and jihadi terrorists destabilizing the Caucasus, with its own organized crime syndicates, with which Berezovskii had contacts. A Berezovskii-funded assassination plot could have come onto the oligarch's agenda, if Putin had not quickly moved against him once deciding to do so. These elements, as is well-known, had exhibited considerable capacity to kill over the previous decade.

Georgia 2008

There was little to no risk in Putin's military response to Georgia's invasion of South Ossetiya and its massive, indiscriminate, hours-long artillery barrage of its capitol Tskhinvali, which killed several hundred civilians and 19 Russian peacekeeping troops. Little risk is probably the more accurate assessment, since we now have testimony that some in the George Bush Administration urged consideration of a U.S. military response of some sort, and the same figures may have lobbied more earnestly behind the scenes outside of meetings of the principle advisors and decisionmaker.

It seems to me there was more significant risk in his decision-after routing the U.S.-backed Georgian army to recognize the-to recognize the independence of South Ossetiya and Abkhaziya. This is not to say that he should have treated the former any differently from the latter. Surely, the reckless Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili would have treated both the same if he had the opportunity. If Russian had not responded and Georgia was able to re-take and pacify South Ossetiya or if Moscow decided not to protect Abkhaziya as it did South Ossetiya, then Saakashvili would certainly have attempted to repeat the act in Abkhaziya. It is to say that Putin did not leave himself the room for maneuver and change of policy he typically tries to maintain and he risked a much more harsh Western reaction than ultimately occurred. It was certainly reasonable to perceive a much more robust Western response-one similar, say, to that undertaken by the West after Russia's reunification of Crimea with a broad sanctions regime and attempt to isolate Moscow diplomatically.

Crimea 2014

With the occupation and annexation of Crimea, Putin took a step that he must have known risked the very reaction the West might have had in response to the Georgian crisis and did in fact have in response to Crimea. Moreover, he risked much more depending on how things played out in what is an incredibly complex Ukrainian crisis and conflict. A few examples make the real and potential risks obvious: the possible effects of the sanctions on an already lethargic Russian economy and thus political stability, the more forward posture adopted by NATO, the possibility that hawkish elements in DC might prevail on the Obama administration (or the next one) to send offensive weapons to Kiev, and the unpredictability of radical elements both at home in the person of Russian ultra-nationalists and neo-fascists in both Russia and even more threateningly in Ukraine. All these risks could have coalesced (and perhaps still could coalesce) into a perfect storm, creating a political crisis, or one or more could have been or be in future magnified by the omnipresent possibility of 'black swans'. All of the above can be said for Putin's decision to surgically assist the Donbass insurgents after Kiev declared war against the Donbass counter-revolt.

Syria 2015

Putin then added a new layer of risk onto the Ukrainian crisis and/or Russian-Western relations by deciding to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war. I have written about the very real concerns that I believe helped Putin make this decision. But there are grave risks-one of which we may have just seen with IS's bringing down of the Russian airliner over the Sinai on October 31. This is not to say that IS-which has an affiliate in Russia's North Caucasus-and other jihadists have, do, and will not have Russia in their cross-hairs. However, Russia's intervention is likely to encourage jihadists to focus on hitting Russia more than they otherwise might have. Although it should not be overstated-since Russia is sticking largely to air operations so far-the possibility of falling into a quagmire emerges once you step in. A failure of the air campaign to save Assad, the territorial integrity of the Syrian state, and or significantly reduce the capacity of jihadists in Syria could lead to a decision to assist Assad with significant ground troops. From there the quagmire easily can become more encompassing.

Conclusion

There are at least five conclusion that can be drawn from the aforementioned analysis. First, Putin is not risk-averse. He is willing to take risks, especially in an effort to fulfill obligations to political patrons (KGB in Dresden, Yeltsin and Sobchak against opposing clans), protect political allies whether domestic or foreign (Sobchak, Yeltsin, Ossetiyans, ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Assad) and/or to roll back a security or geopolitical setback (Chechnya/Dagestan, South Ossetiya/Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria). Second, so far all the risks Putin has taken appear to fall within the range of the rational. Third, most of the more bold risks he has taken have been a response to challenges posed by others: the jihadi ChRI invasion of Dagestan; Saakashvili's attack on South Ossetiya; the numerous Western actions and violation of the 20 February 2014 EU-Russian-Ukrainian agreement that led to the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, prompting Putin's counter-move in Crimea; and the new post-Maidan Kiev regime's declaration of an 'anti-terrorist' operation against anti-Maidan protesters and a small number of insurgents in the Donbass without attempting seriously to negotiate. Fourth, a decision not to respond to these challenges also entailed considerable risks, demonstrating that Putin has been forced to weigh and measure risks and like other leaders often has limited options.

Finally, all his risk-taking decisions have been successes or are still playing out and have good potential for ending in success or at least as arguable successes, and in today's spin-dominated politics an arguable success is often good enough.

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 #26
Reuters
November 26, 2015
Khodorkovsky says Putin is leading Russia towards stagnation, collapse
BY DMITRY ZHDANNIKOV AND GUY FAULCONBRIDGE

President Vladimir Putin will survive Western sanctions and lower oil prices but the Kremlin chief has brought such stagnation that Russia could eventually collapse, former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky said on Thursday.

Russia's richest man, who was arrested in 2003 after falling foul of Putin and released in 2013, told Reuters that Putin could survive oil prices of $45 per barrel but that the longer he stayed in power the greater the risks for Russia.

He said Putin, who became Kremlin chief on the last day of 1999, had shunted Russia back to the stagnation which sapped the power of the Soviet Union in the 1970s under Leonid Brezhnev.

"Russia has plunged back into a situation similar to the end of the 1970s," Khodorkovsky told Reuters in London. "We are in the final stages of the Brezhnev stagnation period. Putin is younger so unfortunately this [stagnation] may last longer."

Khodorkovsky, who once controlled Russia's biggest oil company, YUKOS, said he thought the West would ease sanctions on Russia eventually under pressure from business.

"If you are asking whether Russia will survive in its current borders when Putin goes, then I would say the chances of it surviving if he goes in the next 5-8 years are bigger than if he goes in the next say 15 years," Khodorkovsky said.

"I am talking about the survival of Russia in its current borders," he said.

Khodorkovsky said Russia's political and economic situation was not tense enough for a revolution in the short term as living standards have not fallen steeply enough to anger the population.

"Putin has a good chance of remaining in power for a long period of time," he said.

RAPPROCHEMENT

Putin wants to use the crisis in Syria to edge Russia towards a rapprochement with the West after a stand-off over Ukraine brought relations between the two sides to their lowest since the Cold War, Khodorkovsky said.

"Just by the time when the reserves will be running out, sanctions will be lifted on Russia," he said.

But he added: "There is a fundamental problem which will hamper the rapprochement: ... Authoritarian leaders commit mistakes without understanding that they are committing them," he said of Putin.

Khodorkovsky sidestepped questions about whether he would ever run for the Russian presidency himself, saying he was interested in social and civil society activity.

"(Being President) It is like asking me if I'm ready to fly to Mars: The likelihood of me being chosen to fly to Mars is very small," Khodorkovsky said.

Khodorkovsky, was convicted of tax evasion and fraud in a Moscow trial which he said was motivated by enemies who wanted to rip apart his company and punish him for his political ambitions.

He always denied the charges. YUKOS was crippled with massive back-tax claims and then its main Siberian oil production units were sold off by the state, only to be bought later by state-controlled companies.

He told Reuters he now mostly resided in London.

"I cannot give you short-term forecasts about Russia but if we are talking about the next ten years then we should expect revolutionary changes," he said.

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 #27
West Needs to End Its Illusions about Putin's Power, Shevtsova Says
Paul Goble

Staunton, November 30 - Many in the West still view Vladimir Putin as a powerful miracle worker who never loses at home or abroad, a perspective increasingly at odds with the facts and one that only partially conceals their own unwillingness to respond forcefully to his hooligan-like actions, according to Liliya Shevtsova.

In an interview with Apostrophe's Artem Dekhtyarenko, the first part of which is online today, the Russian political analyst argues that the notion that Putin is so strong is getting in the way of an adequate understanding of what is going on and preventing an adequate response (apostrophe.com.ua/article/world/2015-11-30/prishla-pora-konchat-s-illyuziyami-o-sile-putina---rossiyskiy-politolog-shevtsova/2660).

Despite what many in the West think, Putin's actions in Syria in fact reflect his weakness not his strength. On the one hand, Shevtsova says, "Putin is seeking a new model of the legitimation of his power because that legitimation which he obtained in the course of the war with Ukraine has already exhausted itself."

And on the other, she continues, the Kremlin recognizes that its current situation is unsustainable and that it must find a way to break out of its diplomatic isolation and the sanctions regime the West has imposed on it, at a minimum before the next election cycle in 2016-2018.

The West was not prepared for Putin's moves either in Ukraine or Syria and has been attempting "in essence to return to the times of the cold war, to find a new form of the cold war in new conditions."  But that is a highly problematic effort because of how much the world has changed.

The Russian elites are far more integrated in the West than the Soviet ones were, they have common ground with many on the right in Western countries, and at the same time, the West has lost its sense of mission and unity. As a result, the West is acting without the self-confidence it had and is far too inclined to see Putin as more powerful than he is.

In Syria, Shevtsova says, Putin has three goals: First, he hopes to "break out of Russia's international isolation ... by distracting the attention of the world and the West from Ukraine and his defeat there." Second, he wants to use Western "indecisiveness and disorientation to force the West to accept the Kremlin rules of the game." And third, Putin wants to raise "to a new level the patriotic-militaristic legitimation of his power and thus preserve and reproduce his regime.

But in considering Putin's approach, the Brookings analyst says, the West needs to end "two illusions and stereotypes," to stop believing that Putin is somehow all powerful, and to cease thinking that Putin is constantly winning and acting from strength rather than seeking to escape from weakness.  The facts are quite otherwise, she points out.

These illusions, she says, arise from the fact that after Iraq, the West has "returned to political and diplomatic forms of interaction," something that has given others the power to 'break glass'" not because they are strong but because they are frightened of the situation they find themselves in. Putin is a classic case, and he has made many costly mistakes.

Shevtsova points to eight of them, a far from exhaustive list. Putin has acted in ways that have led to the isolation of Russia. He has created a situation in which other major powers do not take him seriously. He has plunged Russia into a serious economic recession. He has ensured that encircling Russia is a ring of states hostile to his country.

The Kremlin leader has revived Europe "which has begun to return itself to is normal functioning." He has done the same thing for NATO "which was until now paralyzed." He has opened the way for the return of American forces to Europe.  And he has gotten involved in the Sunni-Shiia conflict which can be fatal for Russia itself.

And these defeats keep mounting even though they are not always recognized as such. Yes, French President Francois Hollande went to Moscow after the Paris terrorist attacks, but he did not agree with Putin on how to deal with Asad, a reality that was a defeat for Putin but that may refused to recognize as such.

Far more important, Shevtsova says, it is now completely clear that the West has not and will not trade off Ukraine for Syria. Even the Western leaders most inclined to talk to Moscow recognize that to do so would undermine both the West as a set of values and the West's interests and security.

They recognize that if they took this step, then Putin would cross other red lines where they would have to act. And consequently, they understand that to defend their interests elsewhere, they cannot trade away Ukraine.

That has enormous consequences for the Syrian crisis, Shevtsova suggests. Putin is not so tied to Asad personally as he is to the idea that he should not give up any position he has taken without getting something in return, but as of today, the Western coalition in Syria is "not capable of offering Russian dividends and 'payoffs' for the surrender of Asad."

But at the same time, she argues, the Syrian crisis is limited by the fact that "the Kremlin and Putin are not interested in and do not want, are frightened and trying to exclude a serious confrontation of Russia with the West."

"Even Ukraine did not testify to the desire of Moscow to confront the West," Shevtsova continues. "The annexation of Crimea and the direct aggression on Ukrainian territory was based on the near certainty of the Kremlin that the West would swallow this."  That didn't happen, and now Putin hopes to use Syria to "escape from [a full-scale] confrontation."

Because he has multiple goals, however, Shevtsova concludes, Putin will continue to play "two pianos." On one, he will signal his desire for cooperation. On the other, he will be threatening - but these threats will reflect his desire to achieve cooperation and reflect not the strength of his position but his weakness.

Shevtsova does not say, but one could easily add that the tendency of Western leaders to overrate the power of those who engage in bombastic and aggressive actions is an old one. Throughout much of the Cold War, the West overrated Soviet power - until one Western leader, Ronald Reagan, recognized how weak the USSR really was and acted accordingly.

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 #28
http://readrussia.com
November 30, 2015
Three Putins Leave Us All Guessing
By Mark Galeotti

Last week was Thanksgiving in the United States, when it appears to be traditional to eat one's body weight in turkey, to stuff oneself regardless of the costs to diets or consciousness. At a time when the Internet was, in the wake of the shooting down of a Russian bomber, equally stuffed with "what's Putin having for Thanksgiving? Turkey" memes, a similar struggle between head and heart must be taking place in Moscow. How far will Putin be driven by his emotions, how far by rational calculation? And do we understand either?

There is no doubt that Putin was genuinely enraged by the incident. Even accepting Ankara's account - and it probably is accurate in this respect - the Russian Su-24 bomber was in its airspace for just 17 seconds, cutting across a thin and anomalous outcrop of Turkish territory which protrudes into Syria. No attempt was made to fire warning shots, nor to force the plane down. Generally, firing on an intruding plane is the last recourse, if it looks as if it poses some direct threat. But the Russian jet was heading out of Turkish airspace and it would have been easy simply for the much more agile F-16 interceptors to have escorted it out, before some diplomatic protest was logged. Especially if it is true, as he claims, that Turkish President Erdogan personally gave the order to fire - in those 17 seconds - then they must have been waiting for the opportunity and spared no time in taking it. Whether to warn Moscow not to take Turkey lightly, to protect Its own proxies amongst the rebels, or to complicate efforts to get the Russians involved in the regional political process - or all of the above - then this was an ambush ready to be sprung the next time a Russian plane wandered across the border. (Something that happens all the time, not least with Turkish planes intruding into Greek airspace.)

Putin called it a "stab in the back" and people close to him reported that he was in a cold fury. The predictable diplomatic protests were made - although minister for foreign affairs Sergei Lavrov delivered a low-key performance that may itself have been a bit to calm the situation - and advanced S-400 missile systems were rushed to Syria in a pointed warning.

Equally predictable were the economic sanctions and the moves to strangle Russian tourism to Turkey. This will definitely have an impact: Russia is the country's second largest trading partner and Russian tourism brings in $6.5 billion a year. However, in a depressingly familiar pattern, this will also hit Russians, especially poorer Russians. Turkey has been an important source of fruit, vegetable and cheap textiles and clothes, while with Egypt now closed to them because of the Metrojet incident, Turkey was the remaining affordable and accessible destination for holiday makers looking for some sun and sea.

In the echoing halls of his palace at Odintsovo, none of this is likely to bother Putin directly. Likewise, the elites both greater and lesser still have the resources to holiday in the likes of San Moritz or Karlovy Vary, respectively. But nonetheless they surely cannot be wholly unaware of the impact this will have on ordinary Russians.

How far can the quality of Russians' lives be salami-sliced away before they begin not just to resent, but also to resist? Furthermore, every time government policy forces people to choose either more expensive or less appealing options, there is a frictional cost to the economy as a whole. In crude terms, Moscow could end up fighting an economic war with the world to the last Russian.

How many of Putin's initiatives, after all, make sense in true, rational terms? I'd suggest there are essentially three categories, three Putins. There are those decisions that come from Putin the Rational, moves which to outsiders appear comprehensible and logical. The Syrian adventure, for example, came as a surprise but is actually a shrewd, if risky geopolitical gambit.

Then there are those moves which probably have a compelling logic - when viewed strictly through the Kremlin windows. After all, the difference in the ways Putin and his Western counterparts describe the world is not just a question of rhetoric. It is also a reflection of the way Putin, steeped in his own and his country's distinctive experiences, isolated from the realities of Russian life, and surrounded - protected or confined? - by a narrowing circle of like-minded cronies, genuinely sees things differently. We may, for example, deride the notion that the Ukrainian Maidan was some CIA coup, but I cannot but feel that this leader, Putin the Misled, quite possibly truly believes this. I have certainly met figures within the security apparatus to whom this is a matter of fact, and they no doubt pass these beliefs up the chain of command.

And then there are, shall we say, the affairs of the heart, the times when Putin appears driven not by his head but by his emotions. The seizure of Crimea was probably one such case; of course, there was considerable domestic advantage, but the costs in terms of economic and political isolation surely outweighed this. Certainly the half-thought-through decision to ride the wave and continue into the Donbas could not have been anything but the outcome of triumphalism and arrogance on the part of Putin the Emotional. As with Crimea, the military and the foreign policy establishment do not even seem to have been consulted, no serious preparations were made, no cost-benefit analysis generated. This was instinct and passion, not careful statecraft.

So this is often the problem for outsiders trying to predict Russia's next move. Will it come from the heart or the head? And even if the head, will it be a decision that seems rational in terms of the way the Kremlin understands the world, even if not ours? We know too little about Putin's own mind these days - you can learn a certain amount from his public pronouncements, but only so much - and even less about what he is being told by those briefing and advising him.

And this is a particular problem with regards to Turkey, where one arrogant strongman - Erdogan - appears to have assumed that he had the measure of another. After all, were Putin minded to, he could go much further that his current responses. We could see weapons and money flowing to the Kurds, and extreme political groups. We could see provocations and bloodshed in a country in which even beforehand, Moscow was not shy about sending in assassins to murder Chechen rebel fundraisers. We could see attempts to provoke Turkey into a cross-border intrusion of its own into Syria, to give the Russians an excuse to even the score.

All of these would be counter-productive in the extreme, risking conflict with a country whose leadership has shown itself much more willing to take risks and show its teeth than its European partners,and yet which is also part of NATO. It would also undo much of the successful diplomatic work done to date, ending any hope for some kind of coalition in the Middle East that could end Russia's diplomatic isolation. One could hope that Putin the Rational understands this. The trouble is that this may be that's not how Putin the Misled sees it - or maybe Putin the Emotional is just angry enough not to care.

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 #29
www.opendemocracy.net
November 27, 2015
Ukraine is caught between war and reform
Two years on from the protests that ignited Maidan, Ukraine is suffering from a clash of agendas.
By Mikhail Minakov
Mikhail Minakov is Associate Professor at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and President of the Foundation for Good Politics, Kyiv. He is also director of the Krytyka Institute, and editor-in-chief of the journal Ideology and Politics.
 
Two years ago, in November 2013, what became known as EuroMaidan began. Civic protesters in central Kyiv demanded 'Europeanisation', which for Ukrainians meant liberal democracy, political and media pluralism, rule of law, economic freedoms, differentiation of branches of power and separation of government and business.

Two years on, the 'Europeanisation' agenda remains unfulfilled, and Ukrainians-now facing a new wave of violence in Donbas and explosions in the south of the country-are divided in opinion whether this agenda is a priority. With not unreasonable doubts about the success of the Kyiv-led transition, two of the biggest Ukrainian cities, Kharkiv and Odesa, have now elected mayors with strict ties to the previous regime.

To understand the general course of Ukraine's development in 2014-2015, we should pay attention to the clash between this agenda, set by the EuroMaidan movement, and another, the 'war agenda', stemming from the conflict in the Donbas. The fundamental contradictions between these two agendas has undermined both democratic change and security in Ukraine, and provided new and old oligarchic groups the chance to gain control over centres of power, influence and money.

Clash of agendas

To cope with the monopolisation of power and economy in the hands of one group led by ex-president Viktor Yanukovych, the EuroMaidan movement needed to consolidate different opposition groups, often rivals, by a set of shared goals. Diverse political parties, civic organisations, human rights groups, far right and new left networks, and masses of individuals were united by common goals.

The short-term perspective was to topple Yanukovych and destroy Ukraine's emerging authoritarian regime. But another important set of goals had a much longer timescale. It included fostering European integration and national liberation.

In the post-Soviet context, 'European integration' means much more than just formal association with the European Union: for those on the streets of Kyiv in the winter of 2013-2014 it meant rule of law, democratic pluralism, a de-monopolised economy, responsible government, accessible justice, representative parliament and strong local self-governance.

National liberation, meanwhile, included lesser dependence on Moscow's integration projects and better citizen control of elite behavior.

But another set of developmental goals evolved in response to Russian aggression in Crimea and separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine. In essence, the post-Maidan government was put on the defensive immediately after its appointment: the state of war demanded a 'disciplined' society led by one leader and one team, fast reforms of the security sector and a concentration of resources-economic, human, and administrative-to effectively fight a strong opponent such as the Kremlin.

This 'war agenda' privileges national security over civil liberties, centralisation over local self-governance, military discipline over democratic discussion and a military economy over the free market.

The origins of the war agenda can be traced to the period from March to May 2014, when separatists attempted to form 'People's Republics' in the Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, and Odesa regions, following Russia's annexation of Crimea. Ukraine's interim government was incapable of defending Crimea and, with support from Maidan self-defense groups, launched a military operation to secure these regions of south-east Ukraine (the so-called 'Anti-Terrorist Operation').

In effect, Ukraine's government was forced to set aside democratic reform ambitions in order to defend the country's sovereignty. As a result, the original EuroMaidan agenda has not been fully implemented.

But the reforms of the 'war agenda' have not been implemented either. Despite the pressing security situation, the Ukrainian government has neither declared a state of war, nor has it expedited reform of the armed forces.

Instead, the ATO policy is used as a hybrid remedy. On the one hand, the ATO gives the government a chance to deploy armed forces without a state of war being declared, and, on the other, elites can continue to rule uninhibited. Viktor Yanukovych made a similar decision in December 2013 by declaring an ATO against EuroMaidan, permitting the head of state to fight and continue business as usual. In the short run, this policy had its merits.

But in the longer term, it proved harmful for regime survival. Undecidedness is probably the worst form of decision making, but also the most characteristic of Ukrainian elites.

Slow implementation

The clash of these agendas has made it impossible to promote necessary changes in Ukrainian society. Today, Ukraine is as far away from the rule of law and liberal democracy as it was in March 2014. At the same time, the security ministries are inefficient and lack resources.

The implementation of Maidan's 'European' agenda is very slow. The Association Agreement (AA) with the European Union, one of the cornerstones of the revolution, has not been wholly enacted, though it was signed by the EU and Ukraine on 21 March, 2014. The Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) was signed in June 2014, with the agreement to come into force on 31 December, 2015 at Moscow's insistence.

At the May 2015 Eastern Partnership summit in Riga, Ukraine was unable to secure either a visa liberalisation agreement with the EU or even a clear path forward for formalising its closer relationship with the EU. Even though the ratification of AA was finished in November 2015 by the EU member-states, the Netherlands is yet to hold an upcoming referendum on association with Ukraine in April 2016.

The way the laws needed for EU visa regime liberalisation were approved in the fall of 2015 in Rada has also shown that the new Ukrainian political class are unprepared for real integration. The EU's values, norms and practices are shared by a depressingly small amount of MPs and citizens.

There are now two leading groups that have spread throughout Ukraine's executive, legislature and judiciary: one around President Petro Poroshenko, the other around Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk.

That said, in February 2014, parliament managed to reinstate Ukraine's 2004 constitution, which diminished presidential powers, increased the role of the Cabinet of Ministers and parliament, and enforced the possibility of separating the branches of power. Political realities, however, show that the financial-political groups that took over centres of power after EuroMaidan continue to disrespect the separation of powers. The same groups have installed their representatives in Ukraine's executive, legislature and judiciary, and promote their group interests-political and private simultaneously.

Arseniy Yatseniuk. They have a strong presence in the Cabinet of Ministers and Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament. The pro-Poroshenko group controls 11 ministries and 11 parliamentary committees, while the pro-Yatseniuk group controls 4 ministries and 8 committees. At the same time, these groups are in control of the majority of newly elected members of the High Judiciary Council, a key body of the judiciary's self-governance.

With local elections recently passed, these groups will soon have control over many mayors and local councils.

These groups are separate, but their political and administrative omnipresence is balanced and does less damage to Ukrainian democracy than might be expected.

The practice of 'power verticals', a post-Soviet alternative to western democracy, thus remains customary in Ukraine's political system. Power verticals are based on merging branches of power and undisputed control of local communities by central government. This key mechanism of post-Soviet political systems, which is counter to democratic rule, is alive and well in Ukraine and, at a later date may re-create Yanukovych-style rule.

Don't delay

The war reforms agenda also remains unimplemented. Despite concentrating large military forces in the ATO zone, the security of Ukraine remains fragile. Different security agencies continue to work without sufficient coordination, often with public conflicts among them.

Meanwhile, the draft is supposed to provide Ukraine's ineffective army with personnel, but the recruitment practices provoke growing remorse among many Ukrainians. To carry out the fifth and the sixth call-up waves, regional military commissars had to conduct manhunts on the streets, supermarkets and university dormitories around Ukraine. Moreover, the army lacks the necessary financial and human resources to equip and train new recruits.

This clash of agendas leads to an ironic contradiction in public life: when you ask senior officers in the security services why they're so inefficient, their usual answer refers to the lack of 'legal tools' to carry out their military tasks without declaring a state of war; when you ask political leaders why democratic reforms are lagging behind, they refer to the de-facto state of war. This contradiction is not only an obstacle to progress in Ukraine, but also an environment conducive to corruption.

Pervasive corruption is a problem that not only impedes government and stymies reform, but complicates Ukraine's future relations with the west. Despite growing intolerance towards corruption, an International Republican Institute poll from May 2015 reveals that a majority of citizens still deal with bribery and nepotism in their everyday lives.

Though the Poroshenko administration has created a number of anti-corruption agencies, Ukraine seems unprepared to tackle what may be the next wave of corruption: in 2016, the Cabinet of Ministers plans to embark on a new round of privatisation of government assets. The long list of enterprises slated for privatisation includes the country's most important plants and ports-all of which contain ample potential for graft. Furthermore, Poroshenko seeks to liberalise the land market-another area that could fuel corruption. The proposition of mass privatisation and the prospect of land reform has inspired old and new oligarchic groups to increase their coercive pressure on key public institutions in the centre and the regions. The tenders for these privatisations have to be closely monitored.

The competition between emerging oligarchic groups and the old ones are growing. The new groups, however, are much better at fulfilling their tasks and controlling centres of power that they have forced the well-known figures from the Forbes-Ukraine list to try and consolidate. In August, the older oligarchs had to call for a meeting to discuss combined responses to the growing competition from new groups. During local elections, they established control over certain territories and may now better oppose democratic and anti-corruption reforms.

Ukraine's current constitutional reform was driven by the EuroMaidan agenda. The recent tragic and disuniting clashes around constitutional changes have shown that competition between the Maidan and war agendas has reached an unprecedented level, and could lead to highly damaging processes far from the frontline in the Donbas.

The delays in choosing either of the reform agendas not only creates an opportunity for oligarchic groups to restore their rule, but later, as has happened twice previously in Ukraine, result in an authoritarian figure taking presidential office.

The fundamental contradictions between the Maidan and war agendas is undermining both democratic change and the ability to maintain peace. The choice must be made between the two, reforms implemented and a democratic Ukraine established.

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#30
Centre for International Policy (Canada)
www.cips-cepi.ca
November 27, 2015
Russia's Endgame in Donbass
By Paul Robinson
University of Ottawa
[Video of complete talk here https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2015/11/27/russias-endgame-in-donbass/]

Although in recent weeks the attention of many has shifted to events in Syria, the war in Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, has not entirely ended. Fighting continues to kill two or three people each week, and the peace process established at Minsk in February 2015 has reached something of an impasse, due to disagreement over the provisions concerning constitutional change and the holding of local elections. Whether the parties involved in the conflict will be able to overcome these difficulties, or whether violence will once again escalate, depends in large part on what the Russian Federation does.

Commentators have suggested several possibilities for Russia's desired endgame in Donbass, including that:

-Russia is a 'revisionist' power which wishes to destroy the existing international order and create a new one more to its liking.
-Russia is seeking further territorial expansion, including possibly a 'land bridge' linking Russia with Crimea.
-Russia wants a 'frozen conflict' in which the rebel Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics (DPR and LPR) set up in Donbass acquire de facto independence
-Russia would like the DPR and LPR to rejoin Ukraine, but with 'special status' giving them substantial autonomy.

Officially, Russia endorses the last of these options. Since the start of the crisis in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have insisted that Donbass is part of Ukraine, but also that the Ukrainian government must engage in direct dialogue with its opponents in the east of the country in order to find a political solution to the crisis. They insist this solution must include some degree of 'special status' for Donbass. Thus in April 2014, Putin remarked that 'they [the people of Donbass] are citizens of Ukraine, but they should be citizens with equal rights in their country, that's the entire issue. ... It's necessary to speak with people, and with their real representatives, with people they trust ... Only through dialogue ... can order be brought to the country.' And in June 2015, Putin told the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera that:

There needs to be constitutional reform to ensure the autonomous rights of the unrecognised republics. ... this should be done, as the Minsk Agreements read, in coordination with Donetsk People's Republic and Lugansk People's Republic. ... the leaders of the self-proclaimed republics have publicly stated that under certain conditions ... they are ready to consider themselves part of the Ukrainian state ... I think this position should be viewed as a sound precondition for the start of substantial negotiations. ... All our actions, including those with the use of force, were aimed not at tearing away this territory from Ukraine but at giving the people living there an opportunity to express their opinion on how they want to live their lives.

Russian actions fit with this rhetoric. There is little evidence to support the assertion, often made in the west, that Russia itself instigated the rebellions in Donbass. Rather, Russian actions suggest that their primary objective truly has been a negotiated settlement to the crisis. Getting there has required a two-pronged strategy: first, using military force to coerce Kiev to come to the negotiating table; and second, using the influence gained by military support to persuade the rebels to compromise. The first prong has meant providing the rebels with weapons and supplies, and on occasion intervening directly in combat. The second prong has meant restraining the rebels whenever an opportunity for talks has come about. In June 2014, Moscow persuaded the then head of the DPR, Aleksandr Borodai, to agree to a ceasefire offered by Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, in order to take advantage of the opportunity of promised peace negotiations. Similarly, in September 2014 and again in February 2015, when the Ukrainian army suffered severe military defeats and rebel leaders wished to continue their offensives, Putin exerted considerable pressure on them to instead sign the peace agreements in Minsk. Whenever there has been a chance for dialogue, the Russian government has used its influence to push the rebels into halting their military actions.

This strategy has not been successful. Despite the pressure exerted by Russia, the Ukrainian government has to date refused to speak directly with the rebel leadership. Moscow's position is that constitutional reform and the holding of local elections have to be agreed on with the rebels. Kiev's position is that it has the right to decide by itself what the reforms should be and how the elections should be held. The result is the current impasse. Moscow may well find itself having to settle for a frozen conflict. This, however, would be an acceptance of reality rather than the desired outcome of deliberate policy.

A political solution to the conflict is possible, but not without direct talks between Kiev and the rebels. It seems unlikely that Russia will accept any solution which is not a product of such talks. What this means for western states, including Canada, is that our diplomatic efforts should aim not so much to coerce Moscow as to persuade Kiev to participate in direct negotiations. The economic and military support Canada is providing to Ukraine gives us some degree of leverage over Kiev. We should use it.
 

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 #31
The Independent (UK)
November 28, 2015
Ukraine crisis: Forgotten victims of the war in east of country speak out as vital UN lifeline runs out of funds
'We struggle each day, with no way out'
By Jack Losh

The moments before the artillery shell struck her cottage, Natalia Svergun had little chance of knowing how irrevocably her quiet life was about to change.

As the blast tore through her property, the single mother grabbed her five children and fled the destruction. For months, they were forced to camp in a nearby cowshed, where her youngest, aged almost two and suffering from cerebral palsy, died. In recent weeks, the family have returned to their gutted home, where they now live in impoverished squalor.

This is Europe in the 21st century: the interior is charred and pitiful, the smell overpowering, the family utterly destitute. Natalia's children wear ragged clothes, their feet caked in dust and dirt. In short, the war has reduced her home to a slum.  

"I have no way out - we struggle every day," Natalia, 33, told The Independent on Sunday, her face haunted by months of trauma and loss. "I was so proud of my home and now it is nothing. I only live in hope that, one day, we can resume our old life."

Based in the government-held town of Slovyansk, she is just one of the thousands of forgotten victims in Ukraine's war-torn, industrial east - her plight, a powerful symbol of the wider disaster. Fighting between Russia-backed rebels and government forces in eastern Ukraine has so far killed more than 8,000 people since it began in March last year, and has destroyed communities across vast areas of the country's industrial heartland.

Now, a humanitarian crisis is looming as violence surges and a major UN aid agency faces a multi-million-pound funding black hole at the onset of winter. NGO access to rebel-held territory remains, at best, sporadic and constricted by tortuous bureaucracy. At worst, it is non-existent. Senior officials allege that authorities in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics use the promise of access as leverage to force the UN to recognise their legitimacy.

For the civilians beyond such tedious wrangling, the risk of malnutrition is increasing while the mercury continues to plunge. Internally displaced people (IDPs) and the most vulnerable, like Natalia, are torn between spending what little they have on food or on soaring utility bills to keep warm. For the worst affected, one option excludes the other. Faced with shortages in medicine and adequate shelter, many are woefully unprepared for winter.

The World Food Programme (WFP) is among many NGOs plugging the gap left by a government hobbled by corruption and a crisis-hit economy. It has provided a lifeline to more than 200,000 civilians here, distributing food parcels in rebel-held territory and electronic food vouchers in the worst affected parts of government-controlled Ukraine. As Natalia explained: "We couldn't survive without the vouchers. The pressure would just be too much to bear. At least I can now keep the house warm."

But the cash-strapped organisation faces a shortfall running to more than £20m, which threatens to derail the emergency response. It is lacking about £6.5m for this month and the next, and a further £15m for its 2016 operations. "WFP has not yet secured any funds for next year," said Deborah Nguyen, a communications officer at the organisation's Kiev HQ. "Winter is approaching very quickly. If no one helps, it will be disastrous."

Urgent rounds of advocacy are now targeting international donors to prevent a catastrophic repeat of WFP's fate in the Middle East, where sharp cutbacks this year forced the organisation to drop a third of Syrian refugees from its food voucher programme.

Aid workers in Ukraine hold grave fears over WFP's deficit. "If these civilians don't receive food vouchers, they will not eat - it's as simple as that," said Larisa Kobzarenko, a project managerwith Adra, one of WFP's on-the-ground partners.

In the drab, depressed town of Lysychansk - just an hour's drive from the Russian border - Ms Kobzarenko's team have commandeered a concrete, Soviet-era cinema as a food centre. Posters for Spiderman and The Incredibles beam over the heads of the steady stream of recipients.

"Without the aid, I don't know how they would cope," said Katya Fedotova, 24, Adra's co-ordinator for the battle-scarred Luhansk region. "So many people are in need here, but we just don't have the resources."

Roman Goncharov, 42, waited in line to collect food vouchers for his mother. "Her house was destroyed last June - the shell fell straight into her kitchen," the father-of-two said. "She suffered a stroke a month later from the stress of it all and now she's paralysed. We can only keep hoping the war ends soon."

Some families have resorted to living solely on buckwheat. "Meat is out of the question and their calorie intake is drastically reduced," said Zulfia Sabir, WFP's chief in eastern Ukraine. "They spend most of their money on utility bills, the percentage of which increases as the weather gets colder and prices go up."

This war has displaced 2.3 million people. Away from the destruction of the front lines, Ukraine's crisis can be deceptively invisible - those who have fled the fighting look like anybody else. But step inside a hostel for IDPs and their desperate plight is brought into sharp, disturbing relief.

In a five-storey block in the eastern town of Severodonetsk, one corridor is occupied by half a dozen IDP families. The conditions are dire, the smell musty and nauseating. In the communal kitchen, surrounded by peeling walls, a dirty sink and stark, exposed pipework, Natalia Prokupchuk, 31, described how she had fled the artillery blitz in nearby Pervomaisk.

"We arrived in this hostel last December and we've been here ever since," said Natalia, a single mother who rents a single room with her daughter, aged two, and 54-year-old mother. The heating has not worked for weeks. "I've been suffering from depression, sleeping problems, stress ...  I constantly think about home and if I'll ever be able to return."

After paying the rent, she is left with the equivalent of around £2 a day. For her, the Ukrainian government has failed its most vulnerable. "They just don't look after us. We couldn't survive without the aid."

Olga Lyshyk, the head of humanitarian affairs in the government-held Luhansk region, is well aware of the immense strain placed on government services. "We need all the help we can get from aid organisations," she said. "We need to get food and medicine to young children and the elderly, especially before winter."

The region faces huge challenges as officials try to restore devastated infrastructure as temperatures drop and hostilities escalate once more. The Red Cross is ramping up its activities to provide material to patch up destroyed homes, while Unicef  has warned that damaged pipelines threaten to affect water, heating and electrical supplies, putting some 700,000 children at risk.

Yuriy Klimenko, the region's Deputy Governor, is among those tasked with restoring the infrastructure across Ukraine's devastated, industrial heartland. For him, only diplomacy can end the conflict.

"Everyone dreams of North and South Korea reuniting one day," he said. "In the same way, many here dream of returning home to occupied territory. We all want to have Ukraine back. Nobody expected the war to turn out like this."

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#32
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
November 28, 2015
War Returns to Ukraine
Tensions escalate as Ukraine tries to regain international attention diverted by Syria
By Alexander Mercouris

Whilst all eyes are on Syria there has been a steady deterioration of the situation in Ukraine.

In violation of the ceasefire shelling of the territories of the two people's republics has resumed, and the OSCE has confirmed that the Ukrainian military has moved heavy weapons back to the contact line.

The Ukrainians meanwhile have extended their ban of commercial flights to and from Russia by banning also transit flights.

Ukraine has placed Crimea under food blockade. To the intense embarrassment of its Western backers (see this editorial in the Financial Times, headlined "Kiev should act to end the blockade of Crimea") it has enlarged this to an energy blockade.

Ukraine claims the power lines to Crimea were destroyed by Crimean Tatar "activists" backed by Right Sector.

Even if this were true, the Ukrainian authorities have done little or nothing to take control of the situation, arrest and punish those responsible for what was after all an act of criminal damage, or carry out the necessary repairs.

Characteristically most Western governments have said nothing, save that there has been some muted criticism from Germany.

Contrast this silence with the furious - and wrong - accusations regularly made in the West against Russia for its supposed use of energy as a political weapon.

All of this is happening to a drumbeat of demands in the Ukrainian media for the country to renounce the Minsk II agreement.

The Russians for their part have responded by stopping coal supplies to Ukraine. Since Ukraine is again failing to pay for its gas, it seems the Russians intend to stop supplying Ukraine with gas on Tuesday.

The two people's republics have also announced they are stopping their own coal deliveries to Ukraine.

These steps increase the prospects of severe power shortages in Ukraine during what is predicted to be a harsh winter.

The Russians are also due in January to impose sanctions on Ukrainian food imports to Russia. This is in retaliation to Ukraine joining EU sanctions against Russia, and imposing sanctions of its own.

Bizarrely, this systematic severing of trade links with Russia is being hailed in parts of the Western media as proof Ukraine is "successfully reorienting" its trade to the EU and away from Russia, and is becoming "less dependent" on Russia. This of course takes no account of the damage these actions are doing to Ukraine's economy.

There has also been an orchestrated attempt in recent weeks on the part of some sections of the Western media to talk up Ukraine's economic situation, with claims that it is "stabilising". The US credit agency Moody's has joined in the game by upgrading Ukraine's credit rating.

To the very limited extent this is true, it is wholly the consequence of the August ceasefire, which stopped the drain of fighting the war on the civilian economy.  

The actions the Ukrainian government and "activists" have been taking over the last few weeks puts this in jeopardy.

What is causing this sudden deterioration in the situation?

At its simplest, it is growing alarm in Ukraine that Western - especially European - support for Ukraine is flagging.

It is now widely accepted that Merkel and Obama are becoming increasingly isolated in their insistence that the sanctions against Russia be extended.

In France Nicholas Sarkozy, Hollande's likely conservative opponent at the Presidential election, has clearly signalled his opposition to sanctions, aligning himself on this issue with Marine Le Pen.

More to the point in Germany Merkel's coalition partners - the SPD and the CSU - are both becoming openly critical of a sanctions policy with which one senses they both privately always disagreed.

Russia Insider has already discussed the increasingly rebellious line being taken by Sigmar Gabriel, the SPD's leader and Germany's Vice Chancellor.

Possibly even more important is the call from Horst Seehofer, leader of the CSU - the CDU's right wing coalition partner in Merkel's coalition - for a rapprochement with Russia.  

Whilst Seehofer's comments seem to have been specifically triggered by the migrant crisis and the conflict in Syria, their tone suggests a wider rapprochement.

Interestingly, Seehofer has been forging increasingly close links in recent weeks with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban - a bete noir in Washington - who is known to be a strong advocate of good relations between Europe Russia.  

Back in September - as the migrant crisis was starting to spiral out of control - Orban made another call for a new relationship between Europe and Russia.  Significantly he did this straight after a meeting with Seehofer.

The mounting opposition in Europe to the sanctions is being picked up by the "realists" in the US.  

Russia Insider recently republished an article in The National Interest - the main publication in which the US foreign policy "realists" express their views - which should be read as a call to the Obama administration to take the lead in diplomatic discussions with Moscow before the sanctions regime collapses, leaving the US looking isolated and humiliated.  

A number of our readers misunderstood this article, taking literally its ritual claims about the sanctions' effectiveness and Putin's supposedly "desperate situation".  

The sad truth about policy debate in the US today is that it cannot admit defeat, so that even when it retreats it has to claim "victory".

The key point about the article in The National Interest is not what it says about Putin and Russia.

It is its call for the US to initiate diplomatic negotiations with Moscow to find a face-saving way to end the sanctions before Europe splits away and they fall apart.

The gradual shift towards an improvement in relations with Russia began before Russia's intervention in Syria.  

In fact it has been underway ever since the Minsk II agreement was reached in February. We have discussed the process at length in various articles here on Russia Insider.

However the Russian intervention in Syria and the Paris attacks have markedly accelerated the process, with Western public opinion showing increasing signs of backing Russia.

All of this is causing in Ukraine growing alarm. The Ukrainians must be seething as international attention is refocusing away from them, and as Russia shows signs of winning over Western public opinion to its side.

The consistent response of the Maidan movement whenever it senses it is losing is to double down and escalate and that is what we are now seeing.

A way to rationalise it would be to say that the Ukrainians are trying to provoke Russia into an overreaction, so as to reignite the conflict in order to shore up Western support and get the sanctions - due for renewal in December - extended.

Though this is at a certain level true, it seriously underestimates the purely visceral aspect in Ukrainian behaviour.  

For the Maidan movement any sign Russia is gaining credit with the Western public is like a red rag to a bull. There is no need to look for calculation in Ukrainian behaviour in order to understand it.

The underlying problem - as we have said many times - is that the Maidan movement is inherently incapable of the sort of compromise that Minsk II envisages.  

To see how that is so, consider what has happened since the October summit in Paris where the Europeans in effect ordered Poroshenko to implement Minsk II within a revised timetable.

The Ukrainians have done nothing of the sort, and the new timetable for carrying out the terms of Minsk II is already slipping.

Any discussion of the internal aspect of the Ukrainian conflict - as opposed to its external aspect - has to proceed from the fact that the present Ukrainian government is simply incapable of compromise unless overwhelming external pressure is brought upon it.  

The Russians long ago grasped this. Over the last few weeks there are clear signs the Europeans belatedly are starting to grasp it as well.

The question that remains is for how much longer the Europeans will be prepared to go on making their relations with Russia hostage to the ideological obsessions of the Maidan movement and its neocon supporters.

The mounting evidence - judging from comments by people like Sigmar Gabriel and Horst Seehofer in Germany, Sarkozy in France, and from what happened during the summit in Paris - is that European patience is wearing thin.

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 #33
Ukrainian army redeploys 277 tanks, heavy artillery pieces to contact line - DPR

MOSCOW, November 30. /TASS/. The Ukrainian armed forces over the past week have redeployed to the contact line in the southeast of the country 277 tanks and heavy artillery pieces, spokesman for the Defense Ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) Eduard Basurin reported on Monday.

"The Donetsk republic's reconnaissance units continue to fix the movement and concentration of military hardware along the entire contact line and violation by the Ukrainian side of the Minsk agreements on the withdrawal of heavy weapons," Basurin is quoted by the Donetsk news agency.

According to Basurin, the Ukrainian forces over the past week have moved military hardware to the separation line in various settlements in the areas of the cities of Gorlovka, Mariupol and Donetsk. The Ukrainian armed forces have concentrated at the contact line a total of 111 artillery pieces (including self-propelled artillery weapons, the BM-21 Grad multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), D-30 systems, 166 tanks, 147 infantry fighting vehicles and armoured personnel carriers, 26 vehicles with ammunition and more than 660 troops, including members of the Ukrainian extremist organisation Right Sector the activity of which is banned in Russia.

"The military-political leadership of Ukraine, taking advantage of the ceasefire regime, is actively building up forces and redeploying the troops all along the contact line," Basurin added.

Basurin said earlier on Monday that the Ukrainian armed forces 91 times opened fire over the past week on the DPR territory. The shelling attacks were launched from mortars and tank weapons, he said. "I would like to draw the attention to the fact that over the past week the Ukrainian forces have 91 times violated the ceasefire regime," the Donetsk news agency quoted him as saying.

According to Basurin, about 370 mortar rounds of 82 mm and 120 mm calibre were fired on the DPR settlements and positions. "All the data on the violations were handed over to JCCC (the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination of the ceasefire regime in the east of Ukraine) and the OSCE Mission," the DPR Defence Ministry official said.

The DPR Defense Ministry reported earlier on Monday that the Ukrainian forces have 9 times violated the ceasefire regime in DPR over the past day.

The Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine comprising senior representatives from Russia, Ukraine and the European security watchdog OSCE on February 12, 2015, signed a 13-point Package of Measures to fulfil the September 2014 Minsk agreements. The package was agreed with the leaders of the Normandy Four, namely Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine.

The Package of Measures, known as Minsk-2, envisaged a ceasefire between Ukrainian government forces and people's militias in the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Luhansk starting from February 15 and subsequent withdrawal of heavy weapons from the line of engagement.

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#34
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
November 25, 2015
Russia-Ukraine flight ban: A month in
In the days since direct flights between Russia and Ukraine ended, frequent travelers between the neighboring countries have had to spend more time and money going back and forth.
VLADIMIR KOZLOV, SPECIAL TO RBTH

Air travel is the latest industry to fall victim to tensions between Moscow and Kiev as both governments prohibit flights between their countries.

On Oct. 25, direct flights between Russia and Ukraine ceased in the world's largest closure of civilian airspace since the eruption of an Icelandic volcano wreaked havoc across Europe in 2010.

Following Russia's absorption of Crimea in March 2014, Ukrainian aviation authorities banned Russian airlines from landing at the peninsula's largest airport, in the city of Simferopol. Russian airlines promptly ignored this ban, which led Ukraine to impose fines on the Russian airlines. These penalties were similarly disregarded.

Eventually the dispute moved from Ukraine's aviation authorities to the country's political leadership, and, on Sept. 25, Ukraine unveiled a list of 20 Russian airlines that would not be permitted to operate in any Ukrainian airports as of Oct. 25. Russia reciprocated by barring all of Ukraine's airlines, and, in response, Ukraine barred the few remaining Russian airlines, thus sealing a complete closure of the airspace.

According to independent aviation expert Oleg Panteleyev, ordinary passengers will be the biggest losers in this geopolitical tit for tat. About two million Russian citizens are of Ukrainian descent, and over eight million Ukrainian citizens are ethnic Russians, according to census data. Many Russians have family in Ukraine, and the reverse is true for Ukrainians.

 "I'm more than upset about this situation; I'm furious," said Ivan, a Moscow-based advertising executive who is originally from Ukraine and whose parents still live there. "Why should ordinary people pay for politicians' decisions?"

Tatiana, a manager from Kiev who frequently travels to Russia on business, was disappointed but not surprised. "This had to be expected," she said. "The relations between the two countries are at such a low point, that it could have happened any minute."

Konstantin Liorek, the C.I.S. regional director for a European spare parts manufacturer who is based in Kiev but spends a lot of time in Russia, tried to find a bright side in the situation. "Okay, it'll take me a half day or even an entire day [to travel between Russia and Ukraine] as opposed to an hour and a half," he said. "But I'll collect more miles on a frequent flyer program!"

"I don't see it as a tragedy," he concluded. "Peace is more important."

Winners and losers

Russian and Ukrainian airlines will also face considerable losses. In the first eight months of 2015, about 800,000 people flew between Russia and Ukraine, according to Russian aviation authorities, according to inform agency Regions.ru. Aviation expert Pantaleyev estimated that Russian airlines carried half of them.

Russian airlines used to make about 450 flights a month to Ukraine, and the number of Ukrainian airlines'  flights to Russia was about half of that.

There are also some winners in this situation, however.

"Airlines from Belarus, Moldova and a few other countries are set to benefit," said Andrei Kramarenko, an industry expert at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Added Panteleyev, "Belarus airline Belavia has already added direct flights between Minsk and [Ukrainian Black Sea resort] Odessa."

Those traveling between Russia and Ukraine will now have to choose between stopovers in Minsk, Moldova's capital, Kishinev, Istanbul or a train.

However, none of these solutions would be comparable to a direct flight.

Currently, the shortest flight between Moscow and Kiev with connections is offered by Belavia, and takes 3 hours and 10 minutes with a connection in Minsk. Other options could be as long as seven or eight hours.

The price starts at about 12,000 rubles for a round trip, compared with about 8,000 for a direct fight before the ban. A train ride would be cheaper, with prices starting at 2,800 rubles one way for second class, but it takes 13 hours. There doesn't seem to be a lot of demand for this option. A quick check of the website of Russian passenger train monopoly Russian Railways showed plenty of tickets on the six trains leaving Moscow for Kiev the following day.

A precedent?

This isn't the first time air travel has been affected by political disputes between Russia and one of its neighbors. The country closed its airspace with Georgia in 2006 following allegations of spying. For 18 months, passengers traveling between the two countries had to decide to make a stopover in Azerbaijan, Armenia or Ukraine.

Direct flights were resumed in early 2008 but interrupted again in August of that year, as a result of the Five-Day War. The two countries eventually reopened their airspaces to direct flights between them in 2010.

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#35
First TV (Kyiv)
November 28, 2015
Ukraine president accuses Moscow of "centuries-old hybrid war", calls for unity

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has accused Russia of continuing the policy of the Soviet authorities to eliminate the Ukrainian people, which manifested itself in the 1932-33 great famine, called the Holodomor in Ukraine. He also called for unity to achieve victory in the conflict with Russia. His speech at commemoration events in central Kiev on 28 November was shown live by four Ukrainian TV channels, public UA:First and news-based private 5 Kanal, Ukraine News 24 and 112 Ukrayina.

Russia wages "centuries-old hybrid war"

"Using special-purpose units, regular army and police Ukraine was turned into a huge concentration camp in which a weapon of mass destruction, elimination of Ukrainians by famine, was tested. In our time it would be called ethnic cleansing," Poroshenko said.

"Many countries and a number of international organizations have resognized the Holodomor as genocide," he recalled.

"Russia has not only failed to recognize it, but has put and is still putting pressure on other states. Some of us could not understand for a long time why modern Russia so staunchly defends the past crimes of the Kremlin because they were committed by a different regime. Why do they take someone else's sin upon their soul? But as Ukraine has been repelling the Russian aggression for 21 month, the answer has become obvious.

"Let's think, over the past more than 100 years the Russian empire collapsed or shrank twice. It had five different names and at least seven different flags. Its citizens now sing the seventh anthem. Four different political regimes ruled it from two capitals, one of which was renamed three times. But one thing remained unchanged: the hatred of Ukrainians and uncontrollable desire to destroy us, Ukrainians, as a separate nation. The White [monarchists], the Red [Communists], and even the red-brown [Nazis] demonstrated and still demonstrate impressive unanimity in this idea.

"In this historical pattern, the Holodomor is nothing but a manifestation of the centuries-old hybrid war that Russia has been waging against Ukraine. Whether they take bread out of our land or fire on this land with Grad [multiple rocket launcher], their aim is the same and clear," Poroshenko said.

Calls for unity against Russia

"We will not forget the crimes of Holodomor. We will not forget this genocide and will not forget those responsible. We will not betray the ideals of the [2014] Revolution of Dignity and will do everything to achieve national, political and economic renaissance of Ukraine, and entry into the European family of free nations. Only the unshakable unity of the Ukrainian people can guarantee our victory," Poroshenko said.

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 #36
Los Angeles Times
November 24, 2015
Rose Revolution hero runs into a wall of debauchery in Odessa
By Carol J. Williams    
 
When former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was appointed governor of the Odessa region in May, Ukraine's president and fawning media hailed the brash, Western-educated reformer as the new sheriff in town who would clean up the Black Sea port's legendary corruption.

You could almost hear the oligarchs laughing.

Six months into the job, Saakashvili has run into the wall of entrenched back-scratching and self-interest that for centuries have typified Odessa's way of life. He has suffered a major defeat at the ballot box, with his handpicked candidate for mayor last month losing badly to a Kremlin crony - a devil the public knows - and his few bold initiatives aimed at breaking the bribery pandemic have succeeded in constraining the palm-greasing without installing functional alternatives in its place.

Saakashvili gained a reputation in his native Georgia for tough action against criminal gangs and powerful kingpins after leading the bloodless 2003 Rose Revolution against self-serving vestiges of the Soviet era.

But in Odessa, renowned for crime and debauchery since the czarist era, reform has never followed revolution. Instead, old habits die hard and the political careers of those who wish to break them die young.

In his short-lived tenure in the imposing stone gubernatorial headquarters on the outskirts of the city, Saakashvili, 47, has seen his popularity sputter after an initial dramatic rise. Odessites, accustomed to the crooked way goods are shipped and deals are done, complain that things have not changed for the better.

Some say Saakashvili is hobbled because he is an outsider, lacking the local knowledge and relationships crucial to working with the omnipotent business tycoons who dominate commerce in Ukraine's busiest port. Others blame geography: A city of 1 million, Odessa is Russian in its soul but Ukrainian in the post-Soviet order, and coveted by both the government in Kiev and Kremlin-backed separatists who have already gnawed off Ukraine's Crimea peninsula and annexed it to Russia.

Saakashvili appeared to score a victory in one of his first challenges to Ukraine's oligarchy, moving to break up the monopoly of banking and industry magnate Igor Kolomoisky's regional airlines at the Odessa airport. But his attempt to appoint an independent aviation administration chief to replace a Kolomoisky ally was thwarted by Kiev lawmakers and Cabinet ministers whose political careers are beholden to oligarchs, Kolomoisky first among them.

In all, Ukraine's top 50 magnates have a combined wealth accounting for 85% of Ukraine's gross domestic product, according to the Jamestown Foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor. And much of that power and money is concentrated in the hands of a mere dozen, including Kolomoisky, whose Privat Group is made up of financial institutions, metalworks, media, petrochemicals and aviation assets.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, himself a confectionary tycoon-turned-politician, had appointed Saakashvili to the Odessa governorship with the hope of tapping the Georgian's ability to make government more responsive to the people.

Saakashvili, the president said, had transformed Georgia "in the direction of transparency, effectiveness, anti-corruption, appeal to foreign investors, fair justice, protection of citizens' rights and democracy." The Georgian was eventually able to shame Kiev officials into endorsing the breakup of Kolomoisky's air travel monopoly.

But the victory turned the oligarch's national television and print media against him. Press attacks are credited with torpedoing the governor's attempt to propel a reformist ally, Harvard-educated former Microsoft executive Sasha Borovik, into the Odessa mayor's office. Borovik was trounced in the Oct. 25 election.

Saakashvili's initial moves to combat corruption have been a lesson in unintended consequences.

"No one ever wanted to stop the smuggling; they just wanted their share," said Vasily Vesselovsky, whose private equity firm Informall finances shipping operators across the Black Sea. "The shipping business is big money, with big egos involved, so it has always been in the hands of the oligarchs."

That has allowed the magnates to block efforts at tax reform and modernization of the archaic systems of customs declarations and tariff collection that have been in place since the Soviet era.

Saakashvili and Borovik, who serves as an advisor to the governor, have stumbled in introducing automated programs for assessing duties on the freight that passes through the Odessa waterfront. Promises of same-day billing, payment and clearance of goods have foundered amid the byzantine structure of federal and regional offices where clerks are beholden to political appointees with rival agendas.

Take the Odessa city council's attempt last year to prohibit the sale of cigarettes and alcohol near schools, recalls Yuri Tkachev, editor of the online local newspaper Timer. Although popular with the community, the bill was scuttled by politicians in Kiev who reserve even minute local government affairs for the federal legislature to decide. "Any effort by Saakashvili to change practices is subject to sabotage from lawmakers and oligarchs who want to maintain the status quo," Tkachev said.

Some obstacles to reform are deeply ingrained in Odessan culture, he said.

Back in the Soviet era, Odessa was the wild child of the communist giant's maritime network. More than 700 miles away from Moscow, seagoing captains and shippers played by their own rules, amassing fortunes through contraband smuggling and the sale of fuel and other state-owned property. Bribes and favors worked far better than central planning for getting cargo loaded and unloaded, dockside services hooked up and the tax and customs duties minimized.

Relatively wealthy and still graced with the balmy weather and shaded promenades that inspired Pushkin and Chekhov, Odessa now finds itself the object of a political tug of war. Every few weeks, a bomb goes off outside a police station or security service building, presumed to be provocations by the pro-Moscow separatists eyeing Odessa as the crown jewel in their envisioned corridor along the Black Sea that would link Russia with its forces occupying the Transnistria area on Ukraine's border with Moldova.

Odessa was the scene of one of the civil war's bloodiest confrontations on May 2, 2014, when demonstrations by rival supporters of Kiev and Moscow degenerated into running street battles. Scores of pro-Russia demonstrators holed up in a labor union building in the city center. At least 40 people were burned to death when a Molotov cocktail set fire to the ground floor and blocked their escape.

The "ethnic situation" - the fight for eastern territory between Ukrainians and Russians - has calmed down of late, says social scientist Iuliia Serbina with the National Institute for Strategic Studies.

One reason that tension has eased, she said, is that Odessites have witnessed the destruction visited on the east by the conflict that has taken 8,000 lives and concluded that staying out of the fight is their best strategy.

Serbina expressed disappointment in Saakashvili's performance in office, portraying his tactics as a public relations campaign that isn't working with jaded locals.

"He gave people hope for change when he first arrived," Serbina said. "But it would have been nice to see some results. I don't think he will be here much longer."

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 #37
Al Jazeera
Brothers No More
November 24, 2015
Two years after Ukraine's Euromaidan protests began, we examine a country in turmoil and a people divided. [excerpt]
[Complete text with graphics here http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2015/ukraine/]

They share a long, rich and sometimes bloody history, but today, the relationship between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians may be the greatest casualty of the Ukrainian crisis. We hear their stories.

"We are brothers," says Dima, his eyes lowered, his fingers fidgeting nervously in his lap.
 
The 33-year-old builder sits in military fatigues outside an old, single-storey cottage, its windows and doors painted a brilliant blue.
 
This is Luhanske, a village in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Scarcely populated even before the conflict broke out with Russia in the summer of 2014, it is now home to just a handful of pro-Russian villagers and dozens of Ukrainian soldiers and contractors - people like Dima, who either occupy the abandoned buildings or hide in the trenches nearby.
 
It is just 15km from the enemy line.
 
And on the other side of that line are the people Dima calls brothers; the Russians he says crossed into Donetsk to wrestle the region from the control of the Ukrainian government.
 
Brothers: it is a word used repeatedly - by both Ukrainians and Russians - to show just how closely related these two nations and their citizens - descendants of the ancient people of Kiev Rus - are.
 
But it is especially interesting to hear from Dima, a man with actual Russian brothers and sisters - the offspring of his mother's second marriage - living in Moscow.
 
He is voluntarily fighting alongside the Ukrainian army as a contractor; fighting against Russia and the ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens who rebelled against the central government in April 2014, declaring independence and establishing what they call the Donetsk People's Republic.

And, although he doesn't want to say it in front of his comrades now, that is exactly where he may need to seek employment once his military contract expires.
 
It's a prospect that doesn't trouble him too much - after all, he may be opposed to those Russians he believes are trying to cause a split in Ukraine, but he doesn't consider the Russian people as a whole to be his enemy.
 
"It is not right to put everyone in the same bowl," he reflects. "Ordinary people don't have anything against Ukraine. I'm talking to my friends in Moscow. They are in shock. They don't understand how this all happened."...

When the pro-Russian uprising began in early 2014, with protests across eastern cities, the demonstrators spoke of how the country's ethnic Russian population felt threatened. They feared, they said, that the new Ukrainian government, which had come to power following the ousting of the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovich, would seek to strip them of their identity and make them align with the West by joining the European Union.
 
Then, in March 2014, following a local referendum that revealed overwhelming support [95.7 percent] for cutting ties with Ukraine, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula without any military confrontation with the Ukrainian army.
 
In April, pro-Russian rebels in the neighbouring Donetsk and Luhansk regions took over government buildings and declared people's republics. They claimed that the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic would rather be annexed by Russia than stay within Ukraine.
 
It was a position widely supported by citizens of the highly industrialised Donetsk region - people like 56-year-old half-Russian widow Svetlana Vladimirevna - who say they are "fed up feeding" the rest of Ukraine from the money generated in their region's mines and factories.
 
"For 23 years we were sending 65 percent from all that Donetsk was earning to Kiev. We were receiving only seven percent back from there," says Svetlana, who has two sons and two sons-in-law fighting against the Ukrainian forces.

"He wouldn't [have] come to the bomb shelter," she adds, laughing.
 
Svetlana was also reluctant to do so at the beginning. Instead, she would wrap her grandchildren in a blanket and sit them beneath a table. "I was so naive," she reflects.
 
But when the battle reached her home on July 8 and the air strikes intensified, she knew it was time to flee.
 
"There was a lot of heavy weaponry near my house. Both warring sides were shelling each other with us in the middle. Our roof got damaged and we escaped in less than five days after that," she explains. "[The] children were not able to sleep, or play outside."
 
For two months after that, she gave the children medicine to calm their nerves.

But her house survived, and Svetlana takes her grandchildren there from time to time to shower and pick up clean clothes. She refuses to move back in, however, even though most of the heavy fighting in the area stopped after the two sides called a ceasefire months ago.
 
She believes the war is far from over and the danger far from passed. So she and dozens of others continue to make their home in the bomb shelter. Some people, including the administrators of the building that hosts concerts, ballets and different children's cultural activities, think the real reason so many people remain there is that they fear losing access to the humanitarian aid they receive in the shelter.
 
Svetlana says they are grateful for the food assistance from the Renat Akhmetov Fund, a humanitarian organisation run by Ukrainian businessman Renat Akhmetov, and the hygiene kit from UNICEF, but denies the allegation.
 
Then she declares, enthusiastically: "I think this will all end soon. And we will go home. And we will live happily. It can't be otherwise."...

During work hours, Evgeny is the fearless Count Almaviva, plotting ways to secure the hand of a beautiful noble woman, Rosine, in marriage. But when the opera performer finishes work, and steps outside the historic Donetsk National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, he becomes just like anyone else in the conflict zone - living under the constant fear of yet another round of shelling.
 
Even during a ceasefire, he is haunted by the horrors of the recent past - witnessed in person or on television.
 
"There is a psychological pressure. Even during quiet times, you think that a shell might fall near you at any time," he explains. Having changed from his costume into his casual clothes, Evgeny is standing outside the beautiful theatre, a bicycle helmet in his hand as he prepares to cycle home.

"I live in [the] Kiev area of Donetsk and you can imagine what it is like there. Every day there are shootings [even during a ceasefire as it is close to the rebel positions where truce violations are frequent]."
 
Once, before the truce was announced in February 2015, a shell exploded near Evgeny's block of flats. The sound was deafening, and he and his wife immediately ran to the basement.
 
"We lay there hiding, plastered to walls," he says, his face still pale from the traces of theatre make-up. "Life changed. I am somehow managing to seem calm, but inside ... I wake up with my pulse rate at 90, when I start walking it reaches 100 and when there is a shooting nearby my heart is doing like this [he makes the sound of a heart beating rapidly as he bangs his fist on his chest] and blood rushes to my brain. It's scary, consciously and subconsciously."

His work is his salvation. But it is something else too. He feels it is his duty to keep the show going in Donetsk. That is one of the reasons why, unlike many of his colleagues, he made a decision not to flee the conflict zone. The opera, like the city itself, seems at least half empty.
 
"Here there's nobody to replace me. I'm more needed here," he reflects. "We are supporting each other here and work so that we don't lose our audience, so that peace returns faster."
 
Besides, the opera has been his second home for the past 10 years. During that period he has been on tours to Switzerland, Spain, Romania, Hungary, Japan and the US. But nowadays, he is finding it hard to even visit his parents outside the rebel-held territory - in the Dniepropetrovsk region.
 
"When will I be able to go there? I don't know," he says, pausing to contemplate the possibility. "Risking through the checkpoints? Once a bus exploded, [a] second time another one was shot at. It's better not to risk it. It's better to sit here and worry."

Evgeny's parents are also worried. They fear that their son is risking his life by remaining. But Evgeny thinks that is a better option than moving to be with them. That would mean "sitting on the neck of the pensioners", he says, as his income would be limited to the $50 a month he would get from renting out his flat in Donetsk.
 
He also worries that "hot-headed" people would target him for being an ethnic Russian from Donetsk, if he were to move to one of the government-controlled areas. "Anything could happen," he says. "Even journalists on Lviv TV say 'Ukraine for Ukrainians'. I wish people would just come to their senses. There is not a single country in the world with only one ethnicity."
 
Evgeny believes it is ridiculous that Ukrainians want to push their country away from Russia's zone of influence in favour of a long shot chance of European Union membership.
 
Evgeny fears that west Ukraine will be claimed by Poland, in the event of EU membership, as it was before it became part of the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. He also believes that east Ukraine belongs with

He does not see any sense in fighting for Ukraine anyway.
 
"War doesn't make sense, it only brings sorrow and misery," he says. "One historian said in spring that empires of thousands of years vanished and Ukraine is only about 20 years old. Even if it disappears the world will not lose anything."
 
But, while Ukraine still exists, he believes Ukrainians should "repent and acknowledge their mistakes".
 
"They have brought us so much pain and sorrow already that it is hard to forgive," he says, "but it is necessary."

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 #38
Interfax-Ukraine
November 30, 2015
Poroshenko demands unconditional compliance with de-communization law
 
Ukraine's president Petro Poroshenko has stressed the need to strictly implement the law on de-communization and further publication of KGB archives.

"History has put everything in place. During the last year's parliamentary elections, the CPU (Communist Party of Ukraine) failed to get into Verkhovna Rada, and that was the real assessment by the Ukrainian people. In the last month's local elections, it (the Communist Party) did not participate at all since the de-communization law had already come into effect. And I as president demand both full and unconditional implementation (of the de-communization law) and further publication of the KGB archives," the head of state said during events held in Kyiv on Saturday on the occasion of the Day of Commemoration for the victims of Holodomor, the artificial famine of the 1932-1933 in Ukraine.

"We must finally get rid of the complex of a victim nation and be proud that in such a fierce competition we defended our place on the political map of Europe and the world," Poroshenko said.

Ukraine must do everything "for its national, political and economic revival, for it to join the European family of free nations," he said

After the speech Poroshenko announced a national minute of silence for the famine victims.

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 #39
Ukrainian minister says it's time to resume energy supply to Crimea

KIEV, November 30. /TASS/. Ukraine's Minister of Energy and Coal Mining Industry Volodymyr Demchishin said there is need to resume the supply of electricity to Crimea, which was interrupted due to Ukraine ceasing the deliveries of electric power because of explosions on its power transmission lines.

"I think it would be right to commence energy supplies to Crimea," Demchishin said.

In addition, according to Demchishin, the current situation with the power outage in the Kherson region creates a real threat of disaster. "With the onset of cold weather the situation with energy supplies in Ukrainebecame more complicated. The other day half of the Kherson region was disconnected. There is a threat of disaster," the Ministe said.

As for resuming the supply of coal from Donbas, according to Demchishin, it could resume during the day. However, it is directly connected to resuming supplies to Crimea, the Minister explained. "[The supply of - TASS] Coal from the Donetsk People's Republic could resume today. This issue is related to the resumption of supplies to the Crimea. There is a connection between these issues," Demchishin said.

Crimea was left without electricity supplies at night of November 22 after Ukraine stopped delivering electric power because of explosions on its power transmission lines.
Earlier Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said that Ukraine's cutting power supply to Crimea is diversion and the power bridge construction should be expedited.

"The region was left without electricity essentially as a result of energy manipulations and acts of Ukraine's authorities. Speaking in legal terms, this is subversion, that is, destruction of industrial facilities, which actually pursues terroristic objectives," Medvedev said.

Such acts left Crimean residents without heat and electricity. "They jeopardized life and health of many people, including social facilities. Therefore there could be no other political assessments," the prime minister said.

Measures are already undertaken to provide Crimea with power. "Acceleration of power bridge construction across the Kerch Strait is probably the most important in this situation," he added.

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 #40
Carnegie Moscow Center
November 25, 2015
The Crimea Blackout: Electrifying Maidan
By Balázs Jarábik
Balázs Jarábik is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his research focuses on Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Jarábik worked with Pact, Inc. in Kyiv, Ukraine to build its presence as one of the largest international nongovernmental organizations in Eastern Europe. He currently serves as a project director for Pact, based in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Kyiv seems to view the Crimea blockade as a pressure release valve - a way to allow agitated nationalists to blow off steam without sacrificing its own power. As such, the blockade is vastly preferable to some of the alternatives - namely allowing nationalists to vent their grievances in the Donbas, which would invite reprisals from Russia and the EU alike.

On Friday, November 20 (the second anniversary of the Maidan) two pylons carrying electricity to Crimea from mainland Ukraine were damaged in a series of explosions. Two more pylons were blown up two days later. With the peninsula effectively cut off from its chief source of electricity, the Crimean authorities briefly declared a state of emergency.    

The blackout coincided with another anniversary: just two months earlier, the leaders of Ukraine's Crimean Tatar community had begun a commercial blockade of the peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in March 2014. Despite promises from both the Ukrainian government and Tatar leaders to fix the damaged pylons, the blockade's participants have prevented repair crews from doing their job. On November 21, scuffles between protesters and the Ukrainian National Guard broke out.

Thanks to the blackout, the blockade's organizers, which also include Ukrainian "patriotic" groups such as AutoMaidan, the nationalist Right Sector and the far-right Azov battalion, have managed, at least for the time being, to propel their initiative into both the national and international spotlight.  

But what are these groups' actual goals?

Formally, Crimean Tatar activists have outlined five specific demands in connection with the blockade. They have called on Russian authorities to release Ukrainian political prisoners, including helicopter pilot Nadya Savchenko and to remove restrictions on media freedoms in Crimea. Yet from the very beginning, their real target was Kyiv. Specifically, they are pressuring Ukrainian officials to scuttle the free economic zone that entered into force in September 2014, allowing Ukrainian businesses to keep doing business with Crimea. Mustafa Dzhemilev, the legendary human rights activist and Tatar community leader, has talked publicly about ending the "mutually advantageous collaboration" between "the occupation regime and Ukrainian oligarchs." The current head of Ukraine's Crimean Tatar representative assembly, Refat Chubarov, has publicly called for blocking energy supplies to Crimea.

On Monday, Ukranian President Poroshenko responded by tacitly endorsing the protesters' demands and announcing an official blockade. In the process, Poroshenko conveniently overrode assertions that any blockade by non-state actors such as human rights activists was illegal. The timing is also important: Kyiv has grown increasingly impatient with what it sees as the Normandy group pushes for more concessions from Kyiv regarding the implementation of the Minsk agreements. Poroshenko's new stance on the blockade is a signal that he will not bend over backwards to make more concessions, even when it pleases Germany.

Yet the destruction of the pylons may boomerang, bringing longer-term consequences for Ukraine. Four local power plants, including two nuclear ones, have already had to scale back production because they had no means of distributing their electricity. The electricity grids of Ukraine and Russia are interconnected, and Ukraine depends on electricity supplies from Russia as well as coal supplies. Russia`s Inter RAO and Ukraine`s Ukrenergo signed a new contract when it was Ukraine in need of electricity supplies from Russia. So now, even as Ukraine makes the embargo of Crimea a part of official policy,it's conceivable that cutting off Crimea's electricity could prove counter-productive and painful for the mainland. As of this writing, Tatars activists are signaling that they may agree to restore one of the four pylons.

Russia is already talking about retaliation with the focus on cutting gas or coal supplies to Ukraine. Gas threats do not scare Kyiv much at the moment as it is better prepared for winter than a year ago. Ukraine has 10 percent more gas in storage than it had at this time last year. The winter has been mild so far, and the country is able to meet a growing percentage of its gas import needs through reverse flow. Even though coal reserves are up nearly 40 percent from last year, they are still 40 percent short of what Ukraine needs, which could result in blackouts, especially since the country's chief supplier halted deliveries from the Donbas on November 20.

Moreover, as observers of Ukraine know well, the Ukrainian leadership will need to take into account a number of behind-the-scenes special interests, many of them competing, as it navigates the current standoff. Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk, for one, may be attempting to use the situation as an opportunity to oust Energy Minister Volodymyr Demchyshyn, a Poroshenko loyalist. And Russian-born billionaire Konstantin Grigorishin is still believed to control Ukrenergo, despite recent purges in the company.  

Such non-transparent dealings with the Kremlin are precisely what Crimean Tatar leaders are most exercised about. After about 20,000 Crimean Tatars were forced to leave the peninsula over the past two years, many of them literally have nothing to lose. And by joining forces with Ukrainian nationalist groups, they are showing much more determination toward addressing the Crimea situation than Kyiv has.
 
Crucially, the destruction of the pylons - as well as Poroshenko's ambivalent response up to now - is a reminder that the leadership is essentially stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to dealing with Ukraine's activist community. That may foster efforts to look for an easy way out. Two years after the Maidan, oligarchs still operate largely with impunity, the justice system remains a farce, and the pace of reforms is painfully slow. Living standards have fallen sharply. A sustainable economic recovery is a distant proposition, at best. Not surprisingly, many Ukrainian officials rely on bashing Russia as a distraction from their own failings.

Where Crimea is concerned, civic activists claim that Kyiv has betrayed its own promises as well as the constitution. The overall effect is that some members of the public feel increasingly justified in turning to violent forms of civil disobedience. Yet violent actions will further alienate Ukraine European backers.    
 
While Prime Minister Yatsenyuk has promised to bring those responsible for the blackout to justice, this is likely to be yet another exercise in empty rhetoric. Kyiv seems to view the Crimea blockade as a pressure release valve - a way to allow agitated nationalists to blow off steam without sacrificing its own power. As such, the blockade is vastly preferable to some of the alternatives - namely allowing nationalists to vent their grievances in the Donbas, which would invite reprisals from Russia and the EU alike.
 
As thousands of frustrated activists return home from the eastern front with scant employment opportunities and extensive military expertise, the risk of further radical protests may be growing. Time may be running out for Kyiv to deliver on the promises of the Maidan, and for the West to start holding it accountable for these promises.

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 #41
RFE/RL
November 25, 2015
Crimeans Putting On Brave Faces, But Frustration Mounting Over Blackout
by Pavel Novikov and Claire Bigg

As Russian authorities in Crimea scramble to restore power after a massive blackout over the weekend, residents are learning to live with thawing fridges, pitch-dark highways, and shuttered schools.
 
The outage, caused by attacks that brought down power transmission towers in Ukraine's Kherson region, near the isthmus linking Crimea to the mainland, has plunged the annexed peninsula into darkness.

Despite the hum of generators filling the streets, most businesses have been forced to either shut down or dramatically scale back their operations due to power shortages.
 
"There are no more candles and batteries in shops. Everything has been bought up," laments Yekaterina, a resident of Dzhankoy in northern Crimea. "People travel from villages to the city's bakery. They buy huge bags of bread because it is not delivered to their villages."
 
Some 150 schools and preschools have been closed until further notice as part of state-of-emergency measures imposed by the de facto authorities that came to power when Russia annexed the peninsula from Ukraine in March 2014.
 
The blackout has disrupted water supplies and automatic teller machines are out of service.

Generators and power reserves are proving unable to adequately supply Crimea's hospitals.
 
"The situation could pose serious risks to people's lives," says Olga Skripnik, a Crimean human rights campaigner. "Many people also complain that due to the lack of mobile networks they are unable to call ambulances and fire departments."
 
Accustomed to upheaval after a turbulent period during which their homeland effectively changed hands after an occupation by Russian forces and a referendum denounced by more than 100 nations as illegal, many Crimeans are putting on brave faces.
 
"I think the problems will be resolved, everything will be alright," says a newspaper vendor in Simferopol, the regional capital.
 
"We are not worried about anything, not even the refrigerators," one woman in Simferopol tells RFE/RL defiantly. "It's OK. We'll get through it. We're used to it."

Elderly residents, recalling World War II and the shortages of the period before and after the Soviet breakup of 1991, appear to be taking the blackout in stride.
 
"What is there to say when there is no electricity?" says Valentina, an elderly woman sitting on a bench in Simferopol.

"No, wait, we have electricity today," she suddenly remembers.
 
"That was yesterday," one of her friends corrects from the next bench.
 
"Today we have no water," Valentina explains.
 
Some Crimean residents, however, are losing patience.

Frustration is mounting over the lingering disarray, particularly over the transportation problems brought on by the blackout -- trolleybuses no longer run, traffic lights are switched off, and the streets and highways are eerily dark.

Gas stations have been shutting down one after the other, creating long lines outside those still open for service.
 
"I don't understand, why isn't there any electricity?" asks a driver, queuing up to refuel at a petrol station in Simferopol. "We were told that Crimea is ready, that it has stations which can provide electricity to the whole of Crimea. Why aren't they doing it then. Have they vanished?"

So far, the majority of Crimeans appear to blame their woes on Ukrainian nationalists and Crimean Tatars, whose activists have been preventing engineers from repairing the damaged electricity pylons.
 
The activists in mainland Ukraine, which supplies 70 percent of Crimea's energy needs, said they would allow the repair work only if Russia released "political prisoners" -- a reference to a number of opponents of Russian annexation who have been jailed on charges supporters say are trumped-up -- and let Crimean Tatar leaders return to Crimea.
 
But inside Crimea, too, some fingers are pointing at local authorities.
 
Moscow has vowed to ship hundreds of emergency generators and has started laying undersea cables to connect Crimea to its power grid. The switch, however, will take years to complete.
 
In the meantime, Crimeans are bracing for weeks of disruptions and shortages.
 
The senior official among the Russian authorities who control Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, said it might take his government an entire month to restore electricity to the peninsula.
 
"If you seize a territory," Dmitry, a resident of the southern port city of Feodosia, tells RFE/RL, "then please be kind enough to supply electricity."

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 #42
www.opendemocracy.net
November 26, 2015
Mariupol elections: will Donbas voters be represented in Ukrainian politics?
The Donbas is being airbrushed out of Ukrainian politics. This will only build another barrier to a united and democratic country.
By Vitalii Atanasov
Vitalii Atanasov is a freelance journalist, videographer and coordinator of media education projects at Kyiv's Center for Social and Labor Research. He specialises in reporting on social inequalities, civil and labour movements, xenophobia, radical nationalism and media criticism. He is also the author of two documentary films, The Kherson Machine-Building Plant (2011) and Voices of Protest (2014).
 
The line of contact with separatist-controlled territory lies only a few dozen kilometres from Mariupol, the second largest city in the conflict-torn Donbas. Situated on the coast of the Azov Sea, Mariupol is home to a large port and acts as an important transport hub.

The Ukrainian state has managed to maintain control here, but despite the February 2015 ceasefire holding from September, many residents of Mariupol have little faith in the country's current political system, and the authorities are yet to figure out how to work the Donbas' local political identities into the post-Maidan project. A vital test of Ukrainian democracy, this Sunday's local elections in Mariupol could set the course for political inclusion in south east Ukraine.

Lack of faith

Last month, Ukraine hosted local elections across the country, with voters choosing mayors and city council members. In Mariupol, though, the elections did not take place-they were postponed until 29 November following a scandal at one of the ballot printers.

Well before this, though, Ukraine's 'elites' were faced with a dilemma: if the elections did take place in territories of the Donbas controlled by the Ukrainian state, then Opposition Bloc, the successor to Viktor Yanukovych's Party of Regions, would take the most votes.

To put it simply, this isn't what the Ukrainian government wanted-a majority for Opposition Bloc would have demonstrated the government's lack of popularity in the Donbas. But the government couldn't refuse to hold elections either, as that would suggest it feared the prospect of 'democratic self-expression' in the Donbas.

This dead-end situation is largely the result of the Poroshenko government's political failures, but it's also connected to eastern Ukraine's recent history, its system of values and the political preferences of its residents.

As Serhiy Kudelia notes, regional identity has been dominant among residents of the Donbas for decades. In contrast to other parts of Ukraine, in the east, people associate themselves first and foremost with their hometown or region, rather than the Ukrainian state as a whole. The region, it should be said, is also characterised by a strong paternalistic culture.

The people's director

The disintegration of the Soviet Union at the start of the 1990s plunged its former republics into chaos: social structures collapsed, populations were faced with poverty, and the heroes of criminal wars slaughtered one another in the fight for the initial accumulation of capital. Wages were unpaid for months, factories went bankrupt, job lost en masse and the surge of criminality-this is what the 'the wild 1990s' conjures up for most who lived it, or didn't. It didn't pass Mariupol by, either.

In contrast to the now depressed and deindustrialised parts of the Donbas though, Mariupol preserved its Soviet-era industry. Mariupol's mascot, and covert manager, became Vladimir Boiko, the 'red director' who came to control the Ilyich Mariupol Metallurgical Factory (MMK), one of Ukraine's largest producers of heavy metals. Despite the crisis raging in Ukraine's economy throughout the 1990s, the MMK plant flourished, expanding production and personnel. Using the plant as a staging ground, Boiko became more than a factory director or a city mayor.

Boiko started out at the bottom at MMK in the late 1950s. A year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, plant workers elected Boiko as general director of the plant, and for many years he positioned himself as the 'people's director'.

His authority was based not on fear, but respect. And local residents believed that Boiko lived a simple life, living in a normal apartment block and rising at 6am to inspect the MMK workshops. Boiko was, of course, the owner of the entire plant.

'He managed a miracle-to preserve not only the factory, but to turn it into an island of stability across the entire post-Soviet space,' this was the high praise lavished by a popular Mariupol newspaper on Boiko after he died earlier this summer. And these words reflect, to a certain extent, the opinion of many Mariupol residents.

For many years, a famous Soviet-era painting depicting Lenin at the St Petersburg's Smolny Institute decorated the wall of his office. In it, Lenin sits deep in concentration, in an atmosphere more befitting a monk than the leader of the fledgling Soviet Union.

Boiko, it seems, thought of Lenin as his historical counterpart-not the uncompromising revolutionary, but the founder of a strong state.

State capitalism on home turf

With the world collapsing around him, Boiko created something approaching a state within a state, which he ruled with an iron hand for 25 years. The number of people employed at MMK and its sister companies reached 100,000. Its annual profits exceeded a billion dollars.

But these ambitions went beyond the confines of MMK. While elsewhere the newly-crowned owners of former state enterprises transferred funds into offshore accounts, MMK built new workshops and maintained social infrastructure in Mariupol. The profits from metal exports financed city hospitals, sanatoriums, sport clubs, teachers and pensioners, and interest-free loans for workers.

Boiko was often involved in solving the city's problems, too. For instance, at the end of the 1990s, when Gazprom closed off gas to Mariupol, Boiko traveled to Moscow and got the gas turned back on. After the centre of power moved to Kyiv, Boiko went to the Ukrainian capital to lobby the decisions necessary for Mariupol's development.

In the mid-2000s, the leader of the Socialist Party of Ukraine at the time, Aleksandr Moroz, won financial support from Boiko. Visiting the plant, Moroz called it an 'example of socialism', though Boiko saw himself more in the state capitalist, rather than Stalinist, vein.

The workers at MMK and their families came to trust their fates to the people's director: the plant's success and the prosperity of a significant number of residents dependent on him. This was informal agreement, in which personal loyalty was exchanged for stable employment, pensions and working infrastructure.

Divided loyalties

In time, this agreement required political loyalty, too. For instance, the parliamentary elections of 2006 saw MMK's television and newspaper partners support the Socialist Party of Ukraine's campaign, which positioned itself as a moderate social-democratic party. The socialists won 18% of the vote in Mariupol-the highest result across Ukraine-and this was enough for Boiko and his team to take seats in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament.
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It wasn't,enough to resist the rise of the Party of Region's political monopoly, however. Created by local oligarch clans, the Party of Regions had practically no rivals in the Donbas. One of its key beneficiaries was Rinat Akhmetov, the majority owner of Metinvest, a rival in the metal business and Ukraine's argest mining and steel group. Akhmetov is popularly believed to be Ukraine's richest man.

In the end, thanks to Ukraine's economic crisis and direct pressure, Boiko gave in. He sold MMK to Metinvest in 2010. Now the Party of Regions was the only claimant left for Boiko's political legacy, and it subsumed the whole region to its power.

As a political project, the Party of Regions depended on regional patriotism. It actively speculated on the 'language issue', promising to make Russian the second official state language. The party used myths about the Donbas' economic power and the particular mentality of its residents, painting its political opponents as 'fascists' and 'Banderites' after the wartime Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera.

Pursuing this aim, the Party of Regions followed Russian state political technologists' and instrumentalised Soviet narratives of the Second World War. All of this had a significant impact on what came next.

Maidan, annexation, war

The mass Maidan protests, the flight of president Yanukovych and Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014 brought radical change to the political landscape of the Donbas region.

The political inertia that had seemed to characterise it for many years gave way to active opposition to the new Kyiv government. There were pro-Russian rallies in the cities; groups of separatists seized government buildings.

The bewildered functionaries of the ruling Party of Regions distanced themselves from these events. In April 2014, supporters of the self-styled 'Donetsk People's Republic' (DNR) seized Mariupol's city council building and police headquarters, stormed army bases and took control of part of the city. In May, when the separatists organised a 'referendum' on secession from Ukraine, four polling stations were opened in Mariupol. By the middle of June, however, Kyiv government forces had reclaimed control of the city, in which brief street fighting left 20 people from both sides dead.

Since then, the city has been relatively quiet. 'Relatively', however, is the operative word, since the situation could only be called 'quiet' in comparison with the full scale fighting in nearby parts of the Donbas. The most significant incident took place in January 2015, when highrise residential buildings in the eastern part of Mariupol were shelled, killing 31 civilians and wounding over 100 more.

While the fighting was going on, the locals lived in constant trepidation. There were frequent rumours about an imminent attack on the city by separatist troops or even Russian regulars. Panic was whipped up on all sides. Local politicians and commanders of volunteer battalions just outside the city demanded more action from the Ukrainian army, and separatist leaders threatened to storm Mariupol.

Public anger was also fanned by the presence of the Azov Battalion patrolling city streets. This volunteer militia, which has now been incorporated into and armed by Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs, uses neo-Nazi symbols on its banners and uniforms, and some members have known far right affiliations.

The election that didn't happen

Since the ceasefire, the atmosphere in Mariupol has calmed, and the focus has returned to peacetime problems. The loss of Donetsk and other parts of the region to the separatists has given Mariupol a more significant role within Ukraine.

The city's formal status is unchanged, but the Donetsk region governor's office moved to Mariupol in 2014. Its mayor is still Yuri Khotlubei, who has held the post since 1998. When the Party of Regions was in power in both Mariupol and Kyiv, Khotlubei was unswervingly loyal to it, but now Opposition Bloc is in opposition, the mayor has distanced himself from it publicly, and has stated that he will not contest the upcoming elections.  

One reason for this is that Opposition Bloc has put forward its own mayoral candidate, Vadim Boichenko (by coincidence, his name recalls that of Vladimir Boiko), a senior manager at Metinvest, who is squaring off against Yury Tarnavsky, an independent, and Roman Sokolov from UKROP.

Meanwhile, the centre-right and right-conservative parties that came to power in Ukraine in 2014 have been hot on 'patriotic' and sometimes openly nationalist rhetoric. This has alienated many residents of Donbas. In Mariupol, these forces have been represented by little known local activists, who made their names in the post-Maidan era.

In Ukraine's October 2014 parliamentary elections, Mariupol predictably voted for Opposition Bloc, and the prospect of that situation repeating itself this year is clearly unwelcome in the eyes of the national government. The idea of cancelling the elections, or postponing them for a year or 18 months, was first mooted by Donbas military-civil governor Pavel Zhebrivsky.

Appointed by President Poroshenko in June 2015, Zhebrivsky, a conservative politician and former businessman, announced in July that Russian propaganda had caused 'disorientation' among the residents of the region. Apparently, it would be difficult for these voters to make 'a sensible choice'.

The problem, however, solved itself: local elections were announced for October 2015, but they did not take place in Mariupol. Local branches of parties that belong to the parliamentary coalition (created after the October 2014 elections) disrupted the process. On the night before the elections, activists blocked the production of ballot papers at a local print works. Voters, who were not informed about this, turned out at polling stations but were unable to cast their votes.

The blockers were activists and election committee members of Democratic Forces, an informal alliance that included members of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, Batkivshchyna (Fatherland), the party headed by ex-PM Yulia Tymoshenko, the new centre-right UKROP party and the populist nationalist Radical Party. They alleged that the ballot papers contained errors and could be used to rig results in favour of Opposition Bloc.

'It is difficult to say how bad the errors were,' said Roman Kislenko, an analyst with the regional Ukrainian Voters' Committee, an organisation that monitors infringements of the election process, 'but some Electoral Committee members thought they were sufficiently serious.'

The Priazovsky print works where the papers were being produced does indeed belong to Rinat Akhmetov, who has close links to Opposition Bloc. The blockers' explanation of their actions was, however, less than convincing, as public opinion polls showed that the party could expect good results without having to resort to rigging. 'Everyone knew the level of support enjoyed by the various parties,' said Kislenko, 'so no one can deny that there were political forces interested in disrupting the elections.'

The elections were disrupted not only in Mariupol, but in Krasnoarmiysk, north east of Donetsk. There too, conflicts in the local Electoral Committee led to ballot papers not being ready on time, and the Ukrainian Parliament was forced to announce new elections, to take place this Sunday.

A crisis of representation

The election disruption reduced to a minimum the already small percentage of the Donetsk region's population who were able to vote. According to the regional Ukrainian Voters' Committee, less than a third of those entitled to vote in Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk are actually on the electoral roll. And if you subtract the 400,000 voters in Mariupol and Krasnoarmiysk, and take into account the low turnout, you are left with only seven per cent of the electorate actually casting their vote.

One important factor here is that displaced people, of whom, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees there are 1.4m in Ukraine (one million of them - voters), are also unable to vote. The overwhelming majority of these are from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, as well as refugees from annexed Crimea. A new local election law passed in Ukraine this summer, of which many people had high hopes, did not extend the vote to displaced people.

The government's attitude is pragmatic: they will do anything they can to prevent their opponents Opposition Bloc from increasing their influence. And where that doesn't work, they are willing to make compromises. So, as many people commented, the Central Electoral Commission (which is basically controlled by the president) openly assisted Opposition Bloc representatives in Mariupol's electoral commission. Meanwhile, electoral campaigning has also been banned in the city.

The presidential administration is not worried about former Party of Regions people as such, just the possibility that they may be in the pockets of another oligarchic clan. Proof of this fear can be seen in the Nash Krai (Our Land) project-a new party set up under the protection of the presidential administration to collect marginalised former functionaries of the Party of Regions.

Ukrainian nationalists and far right radicals, less visible in the government but well embedded in the defence and law enforcement agencies, are driven by ideological motives and probably genuinely believe that before running elections, the local people's mindset has to be adjusted.

In their public pronouncements, both government representatives and nationalists argue that a victory for Opposition Bloc will leave the region in the hands of the separatists. But is that the case? There were great popular illusions around about the self-styled separatist republics at the very start of the conflict, but even then only a third of the population of the Donstsk and Luhansk regions supported them.

Now, after the countless catastrophes and devastation caused by the war, support for the separatists is thin on the ground, and even in the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk 'Peoples' Republics' half the population would prefer the regions to remain part of Ukraine.

The fact that Opposition Bloc is gaining electoral support in Donbas is, of course, a problem, but not because it has aspirations to represent the region in parliament. As it happens, it should have wider representation. The problem is that the bloc, like most parties in the Ukrainian parliament, is a creature of the oligarchs. Its leaders promise to defend the interests of eastern Ukraine, but in fact their aim is to avenge their defeat at the hands of the Maidan and the early parliamentary elections of October 2014.

In spring 2014, the Party of Regions-the predecessor of today's Opposition Bloc-still controlled most of the votes in the Donstsk and Luhansk regions, but had lost its authority. Polls were showing that only four per cent of respondents in both regions wanted to see Party of Regions members in a new government. That government turned out to be so hopeless that local residents are now voting for their successors again, only a year and a half later.

However, despite the rhetoric (so beloved of the eastern regions) used by Opposition Bloc, voters still have little trust in the party. This was clear from the unprecedentedly low turnout in October. And the chances are that it would have even less support if there was room in the political arena for a clear alternative with a feel for Donbas' specific economic and cultural makeup.

Such an alternative would have had to distance itself from all the oligarchic clans and the forces of nationalism, as well as creating a social agenda and finding ways to revive the region's economy. This party should also reject existing stereotypes by not aligning itself with Russia: even in areas of Donbas not under Ukrainian control, attitudes to the current Russian leadership are far from enthusiastic.

In any case, the interests of the electorate and displaced residents of Donbas are far from the thoughts of the political establishment. And it is not just a question of electoral procedure: the problem is much wider. The region has been marginalised and pushed to the periphery of public consciousness. It is now a grey zone, whose residents are practically deprived of their social and political rights.

The region, its people and their sense of identity can be removed from the public sphere, as is happening today, but this will become yet another obstacle to the creation of a united and democratic Ukraine. And there is no guarantee that this obstacle will not be permanent.

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 #43
Fort Russ
November 30, 2015
Yatsenyuk: Ukraine lacks coal for winter, extraordinary measures needed

RusVesna
http://rusvesna.su/economy/1448640676
Translated for Fort Russ by J. Arnoldski

"Yatsenyuk: Ukraine doesn't have enough coal for the winter, extraordinary measures are needed"

The Prime Minister of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has stated that Ukraine does not have enough stockpiles of coal for the winter. He demanded that an emergency plan of measures be worked out to solve the problem.

"According to the date which I have, it is clear that, as I warned three months ago, there is not a sufficient supply of coal. In order to avoid power outages as last year, I urgently demand an extraordinary plan of measures in order to pass the winter with a stable energy system in the country. This is now the topic of discussion," Yatsenyuk stated during a meeting with the anti-crisis energy headquarters.

According to him, the state has allocated necessary resources, and now needs to get down to business.

The head of the Ministry of Energy of Ukraine, Vladimir Demchishin, said earlier on Friday that the coal reserves of Ukraine are sufficient for at least one month, "but in the longer term problems will arise."

According to Demchishin, at the present moment supplies of coal from Russia and Donbass to Ukraine are restricted.

This week, the Donetsk People's Republic suspended deliveries of coal to Kiev-controlled territories and has stated that it will not resume deliveries until Ukraine restores the power supply to Crimea.

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#44
Ukraine: politics harms economy
By Lyudmila Alexandreova

MOSCOW, November 26. /TASS/. Energy security matters instantly fade into the background in Kiev's eyes whenever it comes to relations with Russia. Ukraine prefers to be guided by political considerations, and not economic ones, which merely has a backlash effect, analysts believe.

In the latest move along these lines Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers prohibited the Naftogaz company from importing Russian gas. Alongside this an unofficial ban on Russian coal supplies to Ukraine has come into force in retaliation for the energy blockade of the Crimean Peninsula.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk on Wednesday declared Ukraine was ending the purchases of Russian gas. He argued that the European partners were offering better prices, while gas consumption in the country was already down by 20%. However, experts say it is a highly debatable question whose gas is cheaper. In any case, without Russian gas Ukraine will be unable to live through the winter season, because the Europeans surely do not have enough gas to sell to Kiev. All this is fraught with the risk Ukraine may begin to siphon off Russian gas flowing to Europe.

Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller says Kiev's refusal to purchase Russian gas poses serious risks to reliable gas transit to Europe and to providing enough gas for Ukrainian consumers throughout the coming winter.

"If the winter season is colder than usual, the available amount of gas may be not enough," the daily Izvestia quotes the deputy director of the National Energy Security Fund, Alexey Grivach, as saying. "It may so happen that Ukraine may need our gas. Under the effective contract we are prepared to provide 115 million cubic meters of gas a day. If there is no prepayment, Ukraine will have no option left other than to steal gas it is transiting to Europe. This may prove a delayed action mine in the second half of the heating season."

In the meantime, the Russian authorities have warned Kiev with retaliation for the power blackout of the Crimean Peninsula by banning the export of Russian coal. Ukraine's four high-voltage power lines in Ukraine that provided 80% of the amount of electricity Crimea needs went dead just recently when several pylons in Ukrainian territory were blown up. Ukraine is in no hurry to repair the pylons and resume power supplies.

Although no official ban has been declared yet, sources have confirmed to TASS that coal for Ukraine stopped crossing the border on Wednesday. Supplies of anthracite coal as many as half of Ukraine's thermoelectric power plants depend on from the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics have now been stalled for some time. The amounts of this fuel in store still available will last three weeks at the most, provided there are no harsh frosts.

In Kiev's actions one can see a whole lot more politics than economic feasibility, the leading expert of the Development Centre at the Higher School of Economics, Sergey Pukhov, told TASS. "They prefer to purchase coal and gas from other countries, although it is far more expensive. This is a matter of politics. Likewise, if they had really wished to repair the power supply lines, they would have done that long ago. "Ukraine sees Russia as an aggressor-country and it invariably hails any measures aimed against Moscow. In this particular case energy security matters are brushed aside in defiance of economic logic."

As far as future energy supplies are concerned, Kiev apparently tends to count on good fortune. "We'll get through the cold winter, if we are lucky enough. They have slashed gas consumption considerably, because the economy this year slumped, possibly, by 10%-15%. Now they are taking gas from underground storages, as there is no money to buy more gas. Whether Western partners will agree to give more money remains unclear. Respectively, Kiev is determined to make it through the winter somehow with reliance on its own reserves. Whether these are big enough or not big enough is a matter of guessing. The outcome may prove really bad."

Professor Ivan Rodionov, of the Higher School of Economics, believes it is too early to speculate the Ukrainian energy industry is doomed to collapse.

"Ukraine has problems with its industries. The demand for traditional export items is low, so the consumption of gas and coal is to fall accordingly," he told TASS. "Besides, the International Monetary Fund does provide some kind of support. This is a bad situation, of course, but they will most certainly manage to carry on somehow. Clearly, incomes and people's living standards will plummet."

"They indulge in political gambling. A situation where no investigation is being conducted into the explosions that disabled the power supply lines is really strange. Clearly, the reasons behind their actions are other than economic," Rodionov said.

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 #45
Facebook
November 29, 2015
Maidan massacre
By Ivan Katchanovski
University of Ottawa

Father of Ustym Holodniuk finally confirms a finding of my Maidan massacre study that his son in a blue helmet was killed from the Hotel Ukraina. He is a former policeman, and he conducted his own investigation of the killing of his son. My analysis found that the location of the entry wound, reported by his relatives, and the location of the exit wound in his helmet, and the Ustym Holodniuk's position in the moment of his killing in a video pointed towards the Hotel Ukraina. This hotel was then controlled by Svoboda and the Maidan Self-Defence and there were groups of armed Maidan shooters in the hotel. A lawyer of the Maidan protesters reveals that witnesses also reported that Ustym Holodniuk was shot dead from this hotel. But the lawyer denies that any protesters were killed from this hotel and even that any gunshots were fired from this hotel, in spite of videos of BBC, ZDF, ICTV, Ruptly, Spilne TV, and Maidan protesters showing armed Maidan protesters shooting from the hotel. He makes the same claim about the Music Conservatory in spite of admissions by the Maidan shooters and other evidence that they shot at the police from this building. The lawyer even claims that the ballistic expert reports show that the majority of the protesters were killed from the Berkut sector, even though ballistic expert report confirms that the majority of the protesters were killed from the Hotel Ukraina. He states that the cases of killings of the police and wounding of the protesters during the Maidan massacre are not being investigated.

"- Активисты инициативных групп по расследованию расстрелов на Майдане 18-20 февраля говорили о том, что в сотрудников МВД кто-то стрелял со стороны консерватории, которая находилась под контролем протестующих. Не меньше вопросов вызвали слова отца погибшего участника протестных акций Устима Голоднюка о том, что в его сына стреляли из окон гостиницы «Украина». Эти факты подтвердились?

- Из здания консерватории не стреляли. Из гостиницы «Украина» - тоже, хотя у многих сложилось такое впечатление. Об этом говорили свидетели гибели того же Устима. Но потом эксперты объяснили, что здание гостиницы «Украина» было естественным барьером для отражения звуковых волн. Стреляли с другой стороны, но удар звуковой волны отражался таким образом, что людям казалось, будто стрельбу вели из отеля."

Виталий Титыч: "Буду настаивать, чтобы статью обвинения для "беркутовцев" переквалифицировали на...
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