#2
Moscow Times
December 7, 2015
Russians 'No Longer Ashamed of Country' - Poll

Russia has seen a surge in patriotic feelings since the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, with 82 percent of respondents saying that Russian citizenship was preferable to any other, according to a new study by the independent Levada Center pollster, the RBC news site reported Monday.

The number of Russians thinking their country of birth the best in the world has grown dramatically over the past decade - only 36 per cent expressed similar views in a Levada poll from 1996, with the figure hovering around 70 percent for much of the 2000s and early 2010s, the report went on to say.

At the same time, the number of respondents reporting "feeling ashamed of contemporary developments in Russia" fell from 81 percent in 1996 to 55 percent this year.

According to the most recent poll, conducted in November this year, most Russians took pride in the country's history (88 percent) and army (85 percent).

The socioeconomic situation left them less impressed, with 72 percent saying they were dissatisfied with the welfare state and 66 percent feeling underwhelmed by Russia's economic performance.

At the same time, only 29 percent thought it beneficial to "openly admit the country's faults," compared to 44 percent in 2012 - with opposing views strongly held by 33 percent.

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#3
Moscow Times
December 3, 2015
Russians Want Better Ties With West, But No Change in Policy - Poll
By Eva Hartog

Amid a standoff over the crisis in Ukraine and ongoing conflict in Syria, most Russians want their country to mend ties with its nemeses even while maintaining its political course, the independent Levada Center pollster said Wednesday.

Seventy-five percent of those questioned in a new poll said Russia should mend ties with the United States and other Western countries.

Sixteen percent disagreed, whereas another ten percent found it hard to say.

Seventy percent of respondents wanted to see a thawing in Russia's relations with Ukraine.

When asked more concrete questions, however, most Russians appeared to support their country's existing policy.

Two-thirds of those questioned, 65 percent, said Russia should continue on its current political course, despite Western sanctions imposed on the country over its role in the Ukraine crisis. Only 26 percent was in favor of compromising for the sake of getting the sanctions lifted.

A small majority of respondents, 54 percent, felt Russia was isolated from global politics. Thirty-nine percent disagreed with that standpoint.

Russians were also asked to judge the threat level from both sides. Fifty-one percent said NATO countries had no reason to fear Russia, whereas 39 percent thought the military alliance did have reason to be concerned.

A similar number, 54 percent, thought Russia should be worried about NATO, a concern not shared by 36 percent of those questioned.

Levada Center also asked respondents to rate several countries according to their popularity.

The U.S. elicited an overwhelmingly negative response, with 70 percent of respondents rating it negatively, followed by Ukraine, with 63 percent. The European Union was rated negatively by 60 percent of respondents.

Among the most popular countries was Belarus - which was voted on favorably by 83 percent of respondents.

The poll was conducted Nov. 20 to 23 and questioned 1,600 people in 48 Russian regions.

The margin of error did not exceed 3.4 percent.

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 #4
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
December 4, 2015
What Putin said - and didn't say - in his Federal Assembly address
Putin's annual address to the Federal Assembly focused on the need for national unity, but did not delve deeply into important foreign policy and domestic policy issues.
By Ivan Tsvetkov
Ivan Tsvetkov is Associate Professor of American Studies, International Relations Department, St. Petersburg State University. He is an expert in the field of historical science and contemporary U.S. policy and U.S.-Russian relations. Since 2003, he has been the author and administrator of the educational website "History of the United States: Materials for the course" (http://ushistory.ru)

This week Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual address to Russia's Federal Assembly. From the official and legal point of view, this address is analogous to the State of the Union address that the U.S. president delivers to Congress each year. As a result, it's useful to analyze what exactly Putin said in his address - and what he left unsaid.

With each address, Russia's political canon is becoming clearer. Putin does not rely on American political rhetoric models, but rather finds his inspiration in Soviet leaders' speeches at communist party congresses, in terms of content, style and rhetorical flourishes. Some characteristics of this "authoritative style" were obvious back in 2015.

In spite of the "advisory" nature of the address, the Russian political elite has long since stopped perceiving the President's statements as something open for debate (for example, in the State Duma). Instead, everything Putin says immediately de facto becomes law. Deputies who hear the address (not to mention the members of the Government) are not expected to show support or provide their opinions. Rather, they are required to implement the plan of action that was laid out before them.

Among other things, this pertains to state budget allocation: The money mentioned by the President almost automatically reaches its destination. It is hardly surprising that the political and business elite pay a lot of attention to the addresses, even though the general public often finds Putin's speeches monotonous and boring.

Moreover, in supplying solutions to the country's problems, the President keeps following the same logic, which is based on traditional Russian principles of state supremacy and omnipresent bureaucracy. According to Putin, virtually every reform, even if it is hoping to promote liberalization, should start with the formation of a special administrative body.

For example, a separate Federal Corporation is meant to help small- and medium-sized businesses; import substitution is effected through a special Foundation; and Development Institutes are supposed to monitor technological growth. Even the promotion of Russian goods to be sold online, in Putin's opinion, requires a government "project office." Even if there is some positive mention of individual initiative, Putin never treats it as a self-sufficient force that can ensure the evolution of the Russian economy.

The President's addresses have started to have a strong ideological character to them, especially since the beginning of his latest term in 2012.

Previously, the Russian political elite used to complain about the lack of strict ideological boundaries for domestic and international development, but in 2014-2015 the situation changed dramatically.

After Crimea, Putin's speeches clearly distinguished friends from foes, explained the main direction for future development, and supported the argument with profound historical reminiscences and quotes from famous Russian thinkers (a rhetorical device based on the Soviet tradition of referencing the works of "classics of Marxism-Lenininsm").

In December 2014, for example, Putin reminded the nation of the "sacred place of Crimea in Russian history" and quoted conservative philosopher Ivan Ilyin. The Russian bureaucracy interpreted this ideological message as a call for action, and the promotion (and even imposition) of conservative values became a trendsetter in Russian public life.

In his 2015 address, Putin quoted historian Nikolay Karamzin and chemist Dmitry Mendeleev to explain the importance of self-respect ("Russians must know their value") and unity in the face of adversity ("We will be immediately destroyed if we are divided").

These quotes, as well as the general tone of the address, show that instead of looking for historical ties, Putin is suggesting that Russians unite in 2016 to find a way out of a grueling economic recession (which, but the way, the President himself prefers to call "economic difficulties"), otherwise we will not be able to pursue our ambitious international goals and ensure security within the country.

The analysis of this year's address through the lens of evaluating Putin's new political program (as opposed to looking at its correspondence to the emerging canon) highlights a number of important points.

First, the address is surprisingly scarce in its coverage of international events, in spite of the crisis in Syria and Russia's active involvement in the region. Ukraine, which was last year's hottest issue, was not even mentioned. Clearly, the Russian president understands the need for a serious reform of the Russian economy, which is also necessary for the successful implementation of new international projects, so Putin is urging the Russian political elite to work hard in this area.

Second, apart from predictable emotional jabs at Turkey, which shot down a Russian bomber ("a ban on tomato sales is not going to cut it"), Putin uttered plain, but extremely important words about the need to differentiate between the Turkish leadership and the people who are "kind, hardworking and talented."
Given the public's respect for the President's words, we can only hope that this statement will put a stop to widespread anti-Turkey hysteria that has already manifested itself in the change of Turkish restaurant signs, closure of cultural centers and the end of cooperation between Russian and Turkish universities.

Third, in the longest section of his address, Putin spoke of mechanisms for overcoming the economic crisis and was optimistic about the perspectives of the Russian agricultural sector. It looks like the President believes that this area is going to be the largest success story. According to Putin, Russia is capable of supplying the entire world with organically grown produce, which, among other things, can be facilitated by the transfer of vacant land to manufacturers of agricultural goods.

Fourth, some domestic policy issues of interest Putin managed to ignore completely or touch upon minimally. For example, he did not even mention mass trucker protests caused by the introduction of a fee for mileage covered. A European or American leader is not likely to have chosen not to comment on the situation.

Another issue that stirs up the public is the corruption scandal involving the family of Prosecutor General Yury Chaika. In the address, it was referenced in a rather oblique way: Putin proclaimed the need to eliminate corruption and assigned the Office of the Prosecutor General to the task.

Overall, Putin's address to the Federal Assembly showed that the Russian President maintains firm control of the situation within the country, does not plan on changing the stand on international affairs (or, at least, does not intend to consult the Federal Assembly), recognizes certain problems in the economy, but hopes to deal with them by increasing the efficiency of government control and conducting the redistribution of existing funds.

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 #5
Russian president puts in a word for business
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, December 4. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin's proposals for protecting businesses in Russia have met with support from the expert community. Analysts agree that the excessive activity of regulatory and supervisory authorities must be reduced. In exchange, though, businesses should agree to make themselves transparent.

As he addressed the Federal Assembly with the annual state-of-the-nation address on Thursday, Putin placed special emphasis on the need for supporting private enterprise. He urged creating comfortable conditions: reducing the number of watchdogs, using arrest against those responsible for economic crimes only in exceptional cases, and prolonging the amnesty of capital for another six months. Putin said that the freedom of enterprise was the most important pre-requisite for economic development, while the excessive activity of law enforcers harmed the business climate. He urged the government to present by July 1, 2016 its proposals for "eliminating excessive and redundant functions of control and supervisory bodies."

Putin said that according to the available statistics the investigative authorities in 2014 launched 200,000 criminal cases over economic crimes; 46,000 were taken to courts and another 15,000 fell apart. "In other words, a tiny 15% of cases ended with the pronouncement of verdicts. In the meantime, an absolute number of businessmen involved (83%) who faced criminal charges lost their businesses partially or completely. In other words, they were first subjected to pressures, then robbed and eventually allowed to go."

"The president's words are very important, but what will be done to act on his instructions is no less significant," the first vice-president of the all-Russia organization of small and medium businesses Pillar of Russia, Pavel Sigal, told TASS. "It is very important the president mentioned statistics confirming the victimization on businesses on pseudo-criminal charges. But will the law enforcers now derive the proper conclusions?"

"Putin said himself: we keep talking about these things year in year out, but the problems remain unresolved," Sigal said. "The identified benchmarks are correct ones by and large, but only political will can make the corresponding services and ministries do what they are expected to do."

"This is a very important signal," Associate Professor Emil Martirosian, of the presidential academy RANEPA, told TASS. "It was issued to both businesses and the control and law enforcement agencies. This is a bilateral process. Businesses should emerge from the shadow at last and reduce the share of their concealed, untaxed incomes. And this share is very large - I would estimate it at about 30%-35%. The president gives a clear message to both parties: one should agree to make it transparent, while the other should extend a helping hand (through an amnesty) to help businesses out of that situation."

"Just lowering the tax rate is not enough. There has to be business people's determination to operate openly and honestly," Martirosian. He believes that claims to the effect there was no chance of doing business in Russia honestly did not hold water. "Russia's tax rate is one of the world's lowest - 13%.

Social taxes are way below those in Europe or the United States. Newly-launched businesses remain immune from inspections for an initial period of three years, until they find feet. All inspections that may be carried out during the first two years as a rule are launched to probe into suspicious transactions to which the government cannot but respond."

"The gist of the presidential message is this: honest businesses must be well protected. Doing business must be prestigious," Professor Sergey Kalendzhian, of the presidential academy RANEPA told TASS. "Everybody remembers the cases in which numerous inspections were used for the sole purpose of taking away people's businesses. If this vicious practice is brought to an end, the prestige of private enterprise will grow and the economy will feel positive effects.

He pointed out that this time the task had been set of achieving specific solutions by the end of the year, including those in the legal sphere, which would make it possible to translate the presidential instructions into reality. Reducing the number of inspections is number one priority.

Kalendzhian warned that the tax pressures on Russia's small and medium businesses were unduly heavy and they continued to be increased on an on in defiance of the president's previous instructions.

 #6
www.rt.com
December 5, 2015
Russia confronts a warming planet
By Dr Alexander Yakovenko, Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Deputy foreign minister (2005-2011).  

The UN Climate Change Conference in Paris marks a moment of truth as regards shifting from words to constructive solutions in this genuinely existential problem.

Russia for its part is taking active measures to address global warming and has more than fulfilled its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.

Through the implementation of our Energy Efficiency and Energy Sector Development program we managed to improve our economy's energy efficiency by a third over 2000-2012, and we expect to reach a further 13.5 percent improvement by 2020.

The decrease of Russian emissions since 1991 has saved 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. By way of comparison, the total emissions of all countries in 2012 reached 46 billion tons. These improvements are achieved through the use of breakthrough energy-saving solutions, such as nanotechnologies, as well as modern regulatory measures.

Russia supports the world's community's long-term goal: to keep global warming within an increase of two degrees Celsius by the end of this century. In Paris, we are advocating a new, comprehensive and legally binding agreement for the post-2020 period. Such an instrument should unite efforts of all countries and in particular those with the highest emission levels. The agreement may become a solid foundation of a long-term climate regime, balanced in all its aspects. Environmental, economic and political considerations should be duly taken into account. Developed and developing countries should be treated on a fair basis and should together participate in the implementation of the new accord.

The new agreement should reflect the important role of forests as the main absorber of greenhouse gases. This is particularly important for Russia, which has immense forest resources and does a lot to preserve them.

Of course, not all countries are fully prepared to take efficient emission-cutting measures. That's why it is important to support developing countries' efforts to reduce harmful emissions. Russia will provide financial and other assistance to these countries, using the relevant mechanisms of the United Nations.

Finally, efficient tackling climate change is impossible without proper research. For this reason we have put forward an initiative of holding a UN-sponsored scientific congress on natural resources exhaustion and deterioration of human habitat, that will allow to put global warming into a broader environmental and social context.

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 #7
The Guardian
December 7, 2015
Russia pledges not to stand in the way of Paris climate deal
Vladimir Putin assures that his negotiators will not block an agreement that has the backing of other major countries
By Fiona Harvey and Lenore Taylor

Russia has pledged not to stand in the way of a deal at the Paris climate change conference, removing another obstacle to a potential agreement, the Guardian has learned.

President Vladimir Putin is understood to have given his personal assurance to Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, that his negotiators will not block an agreement that has the backing of other major countries.

The final week of negotiations in Paris opened with the French foreign minister and UN secretary general imploring ministers to reach an ambitious agreement and reminding them what was at stake. Ban Ki-moon said: "Seven billion people want to know that you, the world's leaders, have their interests at heart and those of their children."

France's Laurent Fabius said the 150 world leaders who came to Paris last Monday had given the meeting a clear mandate. "You must succeed ... it is up to you to take those decisions, you are political decision makers, in other words you are entrusted with the task of finding answers," he said.

Christiana Figueres, the UN climate change chief, said she was kept up at night by the vision of the next seven generations, asking her what she had done to solve the problem of climate change.

In the past, Russia has been a major player at the climate talks, which have been going on since 1992. At Russia's insistence, the country was put in a special category for the 1997 Kyoto protocol, reflecting its dire economic situation at that time, after the collapse of communism.

Putin's officials have sometimes expressed scepticism on climate change, and the Russian president is believed not to place a high priority on the issue. But European participants in the UN negotiations said that Russia would not block a climate deal backed by major countries.

Putin perceives a strong advantage for Russia if more countries move to burning gas, a lower-carbon fuel, in place of coal and oil. Russia has some of the biggest proven conventional gas resources in the world, and is building more infrastructure to exploit and export them.

Gas is promoted by some as a "transition" fuel, enabling countries to move away from high-carbon coal. However, green campaigners argue that too much can be made of this transition, as gas is a fossil fuel and exploiting all the world's gas resources, even if coal is left in the ground, could still put us beyond the threshold of dangerous climate change.

The baseline for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the talks is generally taken as 1990, rather than 1997 when the Kyoto protocol was signed, and this was chosen as a reflection of Russia's high-emissions and energy-inefficient economy. In 1990, Russia's emissions were much higher than in 1997, so the reductions that the country agreed to in Kyoto had already been made.

This gave Russia access to millions of carbon credits, potentially worth billions of dollars, which were awarded on the basis of reductions in emissions made from 1990 onwards. Those credits have subsequently been vastly reduced in monetary worth, but Russia has previously insisted that they should still be allowed to be traded.

At the fortnight-long Paris COP21 conference, which began last Monday, governments are hoping to sign a new global agreement on emissions that will kick in from 2020, when current commitments run out. A new draft text of an agreement was produced on Saturday, and negotiators have been examining it over the weekend.

This week, ministers will take over from their negotiators, who have worked on the minutiae of the text, to hammer out the political decisions necessary for a deal by Friday. These political issues include whether to institute a new series of five-yearly reviews of emissions commitments after 2020, and the finance to be offered by developed countries to the poor world, to help developing nations cut their emissions and cope with the effects of global warming.

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 #8
Most Russians Won't Defend Environment Unless State Gives the Order, Semenov Says
Paul Goble

taunton, December 6 - In Western countries, environmentalism is so popular that businessmen and politicians compete with each other to see who can be "the most green." But in Russia, with rare exceptions, people focus on defending the environment only if the government orders them to, according to Vladimir Semenov, the head of Russia's Ecology Chamber.,

But unfortunately, as the continuing travails of Yevgeny Vitishko show, many in the Russian government and business community are actively hostile to environmental protection; and that means that environmental conditions are likely to deteriorate and that Muscovites may soon follow the residents of Bejing and have to wear face masks because of air contamination.

In an interview with the Rex news agency, Semenov noted that unlike in many countries, ecological activists have made few inroads in the political system. There are none in the Russian parliament and almost none among the activists of leading political parties in large part because they are unknown (iarex.ru/interviews/52188.html).

"We understand this," Semenov says, "and our movement has set itself a more global task: to establish an all-Russian project, a project of an international level which will make ecology fashionable" by promoting ecology concerns via art and culture. That will be the foundation for more overtly political moves.

"The elites of America now compete as to who is the most ecologically minded, Hollywood stars compete, the question of ecology in the West is part of the life style," he notes. Getting to that point in Russia will be difficult because "ecology for many Russians is associated with Greenpeace" and its violation of Russian laws.

"It is obvious," he continues, that "the best, humane and thinking part of society" is for environmental protection and that a large number of those who back it are young people.  "But paradoxically," environmental concerns are promoted most off by non-Orthodox religions and sects, including Krishnas, Buddhists, and representatives of New Age groups.

Compared to them, the Russian Orthodox Church is "inactive and silent," a position at odds with many of its more general spiritual principles, Semenov says.  And that is a major obstacle to change as well.  But the greatest problem is that most Russians will not act in this area unless the state tells them to.

And all too often, the authorities send exactly the opposite message, that they do not want environmental activism to get in the way of economic or political goals.  That is highlighted by the Vitishko case who has been in prison for reporting on violations of environmental law in advance of the Sochi Olympics but was expected to be released on November 21 (ewnc.org).

But prosecutors intervened and he remains in prison. Vitishko has declared a hunger strike and his supporters fear his life is in danger. Three days ago, the court was supposed to hear his appeal for parole, but again prosecutors intervened and now the hearing will not take place until at least December 25.

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 #9
Deputy PM: Russia has potential to make Northern Sea Route operational round the year

ST. PETERSBURG, December 7. /TASS/. Russia has all the possibilities to make the Northern Sea Route operational round the year and in any season, Vice-Premier Dmitry Rogozin said on Monday.

"I believe Russia has big prospects and large advantages precisely through the Northern Sea Route," Rogozin said at a plenary session of the international forum on the Arctic.

"It is important that our structures and bodies responsible for the Northern Sea Route and the administration of the Northern Sea Route should be generators of ideas rather than the bodies stating facts and they should elaborate proposals on creating those technologies that will help make the Northern Sea Route operational round the year and in any season," the vice-premier said.

"We have all technological possibilities for this," Rogozin said.

The ambitious tasks of developing the Northern Sea Route are a priority for Russia along with the task of ensuring mobility and transport accessibility, the Russian vice-premier said.

The Northern Sea Route development model will integrate all kinds of transport communication, including the air, river and railway carriages, he added.
In his state-of-the-nation address to both houses of Russia's parliament, President Vladimir Putin stressed the importance of the competitiveness of the Northern Sea Route, which should become a link between Europe and the Asia-Pacific Region, the vice-premier said.

"This is twice as shorter, more accessible and safer route. There are no Somali pirates in the Arctic," Rogozin said.

Russia also needs to create its icebreaker fleet, which will open big prospects for leading vessels along the Northern Sea Route, the vice-premier said.
Russia invites China to take part in cargo shipments to Northern Sea Route

Rogozin noted that Russia has invited China to take part in delivery of cargos to the Northern Sea Route.

"Our Chinese partners got interested in it. We do not rule out that there may be interests related to the economic development of the Silk Road. We proposed them to participate in such projects of building railways to transport cargos to the ports of the NSR. In fact, we can say now that this is not just the economic Silk Road but the cool (Arctic -TASS) Silk Road," - Rogozin said.

According to the official, raising competitiveness of the Northern Sea Route is only possible if port infrastructure is seriously upgraded.

"Amid this environment it saves us effort of focusing on higher competitiveness of the Northern Sea Route tracks without serious upgrade of sea ports' infrastructure, provision of modern logistics, saturation of generating capacities, creation of modern communication and navigation systems, provision of navigation safety," Rogozin said.

According to the Deputy PM, out of 67 Russian operating sea ports 18 are located in the Arctic zone. As of July 1, 2014 222 ships were allowed to navigate in the Northern Sea Route water area, with 78 of them being foreign vessels. As of July 1, 2015 368 ships (of them 54 being foreign vessels) were allowed to do so.

However, for business enterprises exploring potential of maritime polar routes, issues of navigation safety, preservation of environmental ecology and timely provision of assistance to vessels in distress are of prior importance, Rogozin said as he called for focusing on real investment projects based on public-private partnership.

The Northern Sea Route is the shortest route connecting Europe with the Far East, with the Asia-Pacific and the western part of North America.

In summer Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed the integrated development plan of the Northern Sea Route.

According to Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, over 600 permits are annually issued at present for transportation of goods over the Northern Sea Route and the yearly goods transportation volume equals 4 mln tonnes.

"The potential estimated for the period of [the nearest] 15 years, and this is the implementation timeframe of the integrated plan, is over 80 mln tonnes. In other words, a twentyfold increase is possible," Dvorkovich said.

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#11
Financial Times
December 7, 2015
Editorial
Reform of Russia's ailing economy cannot wait

President Vladimir Putin's annual address to Russia's parliament last week began with the expected rallying call to fight Islamist terrorism, and praise for the country's military in Syria. He threatened to make Turkey "regret more than once" shooting down a Russian bomber last month. But then Mr Putin devoted much of his speech to domestic issues - above all, Russia's growing economic difficulties.

Such attention is welcome, though words are not enough. The Kremlin's obsession with projecting military resurgence in the face of supposed external threats has long trumped economic issues. Now the impact of low oil prices, western sanctions and failure to modernise is too harmful to ignore.

Russia's economy has proved somewhat more resilient than expected. Output will contract by 4 per cent this year, less than many initial forecasts, and seems set to stabilise next year.

But if oil prices continue where they are now, the Kremlin's economic policies look dangerously unsustainable. Military and social spending - above all, on pensions - have grown sharply in recent years. To compensate, vital spending on education, health and infrastructure will be cut next year.

Next year's budget foresees a 3 per cent deficit even assuming oil at $50 a barrel - well above Friday's price. Without measures such as curbing social spending increases and spreading rearmament over a longer period, Russia could hit serious financing difficulties within two or three years.

More broadly, capacity constraints, over-dependence on natural resources, excessive state domination and feeble investment have limited Russia's estimated potential growth to 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent a year. Structural reforms to boost investment and raise productivity are ever more overdue.

Perhaps most significantly, real household incomes are falling for the first time in Mr Putin's rule. Inflation is still above 15 per cent, boosted by rouble devaluation and a Russian ban on western food imports. Average real incomes will fall 5 per cent this year.

That undermines the unspoken social contract with Russians that underpinned Mr Putin's first two terms as president: give up some democratic freedoms and we will deliver higher living standards. Mr Putin's annexation of Crimea and Syrian intervention constitute a new compact that many Russians, for now, seem ready to accept: tighten your belts and we will restore Russian glory. Yet further military escapades carry great costs, and risks.

Associates says Mr Putin recognises the need for reform, but plans to postpone critical measures, such as pension reforms, until after the 2018 presidential election to avoid risks to stability. But delays leave Russia lagging further behind advanced economies, and raise the cost of investment. Interim measures to curb predatory attacks on business by law enforcement bodies, flagged by Mr Putin last week, are welcome if they happen, but insufficient.

Glimmers of discontent can, meanwhile, be seen. Long-distance truck drivers protesting over a national road toll blocked Moscow's ring road on Friday. Without careful handling, economists warn protests could spread.

Mr Putin should recognise military power is only one component of greatness. Economic clout matters at least as much. The time when Russia, along with other Brics economies, was seen as increasing its weight in the global economy in coming decades has long passed. Instead, even its own government forecasts its share of output is set to fall. Without fundamental economic reforms soon - not postponed until after 2018 - Russia's future is not one of resurgence, but long-term decline.

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 #12
Christian Science Monitor
December 4, 2015
Russian truckers blockade Moscow. Trouble for Putin?
Russian truck drivers are blockading roads in Moscow and other cities in protest over a new tax that is being collected by a private company owned by a Kremlin insider.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent

GORODNYA, RUSSIA - At a remote truck stop on the Leningrad Highway, about 100 miles from Moscow, a group of burly independent truckers gathered yesterday around a flat-screen TV to watch President Vladimir Putin's annual state-of-the nation address. They had vowed to cancel their plans to stage a protest rally in the capital if the president would just make a mention of their grievances and promise to look into them. He didn't.

"It's a big disappointment," says Oleg Krutsky, a St. Petersburg trucker and activist with a national truckers' movement that's erupted across the country over the past three weeks. The truckers are protesting a new freight tax that many claim will put them out of business - and line the pockets of pro-Kremlin oligarchs.

"We're people who've been working all our lives. We never thought much about politics at all, but now we're being forced to," says Mr. Krutsky.

On Friday, after days of evading police checkpoints and alleged official measures to intimidate them into cancelling their protest, scores of unidentified large trucks blocked Moscow's outer ring road, paralyzing the city's main artery. Similar protests have been held in other big cities since the tax took effect a month ago, but by blockading streets in the capital the truckers are deepening a confrontation with Putin's government.

Mr. Putin's 16 years in power have seen very few such challenges, and this is the first since he became president in 2012 for the second time. And the situation may escalate in coming days, as more independent truckers strive to reach Moscow along the several radial highways that connect the capital with the country's far-flung regions.

Truck owners belong to new working class

This is the first nationwide industrial action to hit Russia in several years, and it's something quite new. These truckers don't belong to the traditional, unionized working class or the more cosmopolitan middle class whose pro-democracy street protests rocked Moscow four years ago.

Rather, they are small businesspeople, who mostly own and operate their trucks that supply far-flung regions. Experts say there are about 2 million of them, and they are overwhelmingly supporters of Kremlin policy at home and abroad.

"The mentality of these truckers tends to be very conservative. The state media is finding it very hard to brand them as 'foreign agents' or some such," says Yevgeny Gontmakher, an economic sociologist who is deputy director of the official Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

Truckers are infuriated that the tax is being collected by a private company owned by the Rotenberg family, close friends with Mr. Putin, which takes a reported 20 percent commission for its services.

"They were doing OK, but suddenly they find themselves squeezed by this new tax, which looks like it will add up to about a month's income for most of them. They might have accepted it if it were just an increase in the gasoline tax, or something like that, but the fact they have to pay it to a private company owned by a Kremlin crony has infuriated them, and made this whole issue suddenly quite political," he says.

The truckers' business has been hammered by the current recession, as well as the ruble devaluation that's jacked up the price of spare parts. The so-called Platon tax will force them to pay about 3 cents per kilometer of road time, rising to 6 cents next March.

"We already pay a transport tax of [about $500] a year, and we pay taxes every time we fill our tanks with gas," says German Losev, a trucker from the Volga city of Saransk.

He claims there were promises that the transport tax would be abolished when new gasoline duties were introduced a couple years ago, but that never happened. The government says the new levy will fund road construction and maintenance, although the existing transport and fuel taxes are already earmarked for this purpose.

"I have three children to support, and we were already just getting by. This will crush me. I feel like I work nowadays just to pay taxes, maintain my truck, and service my bank loans. For me, and for many of us, this new tax is an existential issue," he says.

A tax and a tracker

The Platon system requires all truckers to file their itineraries in advance, and pay the tax upfront. If they refuse to do so, they must accept the installation of a tracking device on their trucks, with the requirement that they pay later for the full mileage.

"This is absolutely unacceptable," says Krutsky. "I've gotten used to being a free person. I am not going to allow someone to follow my every movement. I will fight."

Russia's economic crisis coupled with the global swoon in the price of oil, its main export, have squeezed state revenues. The government is striving to maintain high social spending, big infrastructure projects like the 2018 soccer World Cup, as well as massive military expenditures.

The recession has also imposed hard times on Russia's oligarchs, many of them part of the Kremlin inner circle. Boris Kagarlitsky, a veteran left-wing activist and director of the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Social Movements, says the new tax is a patronage handout.

"It's like medieval tax-farming," he says. "There's a shrinking pie, but these oligarchs feel entitled to their share. So they came up with this scheme. But they reckoned without the huge social protest, which is now explicitly directed against the Rotenbergs and, because they are closely connected with Putin, it immediately becomes political. If they back down now and appease the protesters, it will cause great disquiet among the oligarchs, upon whom the government depends. It's a potentially destabilizing situation."

The Kremlin denies that Putin's personal friendship with his old judo sparring-partner, Arkady Rotenberg, played any role in the awarding of the right to collect the new tax to his son, Igor.

Russia's parliament is currently rushing through a law that would subject "auto rallies" to the same stringent rules that govern other protest meetings, including the need to obtain a permit and limit its location, duration and permitted attendance.

But Russia's main opposition force, the Communist Party - which usually gives strong support to the Kremlin on foreign policy and some other issues - appears to have decided to support the truckers, even though they are not from its traditional base of working-class support.

The new tax is illegal, and it will drive up prices of good for the whole population, says Vladimir Rodin, a Communist deputy in the parliament.

"We will help these drivers by organizing their rally in a central place, and we'll register it as a 'voters' meeting with deputies,' which will make it exempt from the law. We've done this before. This is an issue of such central importance that [the authorities] just cannot be allowed to push it aside or hide it away."

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 #13
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
December 7, 2015
Why are Russian truckers protesting? 10 questions and answers
For over a month now, long-haul drivers in Russia have been engaged in a mass protest, staging rallies across the country, which have now reached Moscow. Truckers, especially those who are self-employed or work for small businesses, believe that the recently introduced additional toll for using federal highways will put their business on the brink of bankruptcy.
OLEG YEGÓROV, SPECIAL TO RBTH

1. What's the background?

Starting from Nov. 15, Russia has introduced a new toll collection system, called Platon, for collecting fees from trucks weighing over 12 tons for using federal highways. Even before Platon came into effect, long-haul drivers had started protesting against the new levy. They are still protesting.

2. What is Platon for?

According to statistics gathered by the Federal Road Agency (Rosavtodor), up to 58 percent of damage to roads in Russia is caused by heavy trucks (those weighing over 12 tons). The government has decided to compensate for this damage with a levy imposed on companies and sole proprietors using these trucks. The money collected through Platon is planned to be used for road repairs and various infrastructure projects.

3. What problems did the system experience?

In the first days after Platon was launched, there were numerous glitches in the system: It overcharged users and was frequently down. However, the problem was not only on the technical side: Many truckers were opposed to the very idea of an additional levy on their business.

4. Is the new toll really crippling for haulers?
The thing is that most haulers in Russia are small companies - often sole proprietors who own just one truck. There are no official statistics as to the share that sole proprietors and small businesses make up of all haulers in Russia, but truckers themselves (both those who are self-employed and those who work for big companies) are convinced that small businesses account for most of the road transportation sector in Russia, from 60 to 80 percent.

5. How did the protest start?

Truckers began to stage protests in regions across Russia even before Platon came online: Trucks moved along federal highways at minimal speed, causing massive traffic jams. The drivers objected to Platon and the new toll they were to be charged: 3.73 rubles ($0.06) per kilometer.

The authorities responded to the protest by lowering the toll for the first three and half months to 1.53 rubles ($0.02) per kilometer and by considerably reducing the penalty for non-payment. Initially, the penalty (for legal entities) was 450,000 rubles ($6,500) for the first non-payment and 1 million rubles for repeat non-payment. The penalty was reduced (for individuals and legal entities alike) to 5,000 rubles for the first offense, and 10,000 for repeat non-payment.

6. Where is the protest now?

Despite the concessions made by the authorities, the truckers have continued their protest. Activists from the regions have more than once announced their intention to come to Moscow and stage the main protest there by blocking traffic along the Moscow Ring Road. On Dec. 4, several groups of protesters appeared on roads leading to Moscow.

7. What are the authorities saying?

The authorities have not indicated that they are ready to cancel or suspend the Platon system. In an interview with the business daily RBK, the head of Rosavtodor, Roman Starovoit, insisted that an absolute majority of long-haul drivers did not object to the new levy and that the protest involved no more than 1 percent of all truckers in Russia. According to Starovoit, over two thirds of all 12-ton trucks have already registered with the system.

8. What do the truckers want?

The worst affected by the Platon system are small businesses and sole proprietors. If for large companies the introduction of a new levy is an unpleasant but far from a critical issue, for many small haulers it makes their business no longer viable. They are demanding that Platon either be scrapped altogether or at least suspended for several years.

9. What is the public attitude to the protest?

It would be an overstatement to say that the truckers' protest has received considerable support beyond the relevant professional community, though this may be due to the limited coverage the issue has received on state TV (Russia's Perviy Kanal, or Channel 1, has come under fire from internet users for ignoring the protest).

According to Denis Volkov, a sociologist with the Levada Center pollster, given the popularity that the incumbent authorities and their policies currently enjoy, the campaign against Platon is unlikely to develop into a mass protest. For their part, truckers say that ordinary people are supporting them and are even offering to put them up for the night and bring hot food to protesters.

10. What's next?

Political analyst Alexei Makarkin, vice-president of the Moscow-based Center for Political Technologies, believes that the authorities will succeed in suppressing the protest by splitting the truckers up.

"The state has decided to play the card of dividing long-haul drivers into moderate and radical ones, with the majority belonging to the former camp, representing large companies," Makarkin told RBTH. "At the same time, the authorities are making partial concessions by temporarily reducing the toll and slashing penalties, thus eroding the protest from within."

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 #14
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
December 7, 2015
The implications of truckers' protests in Russia
The Russian political leadership may have significantly underestimated the potential impact of truckers' protests.
By Yury Korgunyuk
Yury Korgunyuk is the head of Political Science at the Moscow-based Information Science for Democracy (INDEM) Foundation.

The truckers' protests that started in mid-November in response to the the implementation of the Platon (pay per ton) system, which involves charging fees for vehicles with maximum permissible weight exceeding 12 tons, is in full swing and widely discussed by Russian independent and opposition media. Thus, its implications for the Kremlin might be more serious than expected, even though the Russian authorities initially underestimated this problem and tried to pass over in silence.

From White Ribbon protests to truckers' rallies

In 2012, Russia's White Ribbon opposition protest movement was a response to the controversial results of the 2011 elections for the State Duma. Back then, the Russian authorities had every reason to be concerned that a single protest movement could transform into widespread public protests. Under these circumstances, the future of the nation's political leadership would have been called into question.

Experts were not very optimistic about this scenario. First, the government still had enough resources to choke the social unrest financially, as it had done in 2005 after an unsuccessful attempt at a quick and easy implementation of the monetization of social benefits.

Second, the authorities thought that protester demographics would be the same as in 2005, when the unrest was driven by socially vulnerable strata, mostly retirees and civil servants. Such protest is inherently defensive and is not likely to gain political momentum

Back in 2005, even the Communist Party failed to capitalize on retirees' malcontent with the elimination of their right to free public transportation, so it makes perfect sense that the White Ribbon activists, who represent the new Russian middle class (aka the "creative class") and have a huge ideological gap with retirees, could not find any points of common reference.

After the decline of the 2011-2012 protests and even more so after the major public opinion shift after the Crimean and Ukrainian events of 2014 that drove the Russian leadership's ratings to unprecedented heights, it appeared that the Kremlin had no reason to be wary of the thin fifth column so far removed from the people en masse. Most Russians at the time were ecstatic about the recent political developments and willing to sacrifice their well-being for the sake of the government's foreign policies.

Even the declining quality of life due to a weak ruble, high inflation rates, and the absence of imported goods did not diminish the public support of President Putin's foreign policy initiatives.

It seemed that all grounds for social or political protest were non-existent. However, the trouble brewed where no one saw it coming: a rather odd social group of truckers who drive 12-ton cargo vehicles.

Truckers take to the streets

In the beginning of November, Russan long-distance truckers started a large-scale strike as a response to the introduction of the Platon ("pay per ton") automatic payment system designed to charge truck drivers for each mile of their route.

Drivers were furious about all aspects of the system: the fee (approximately 2.4 rubles ($0.04) per mile from the beginning of November and over 6.3 ($0.09) rubles per mile beginning March 2016); the fact that no tender offer was placed or bidding conducted prior to entrusting the payment collection to a private company owned by Igor Rotenberg (son of billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, who used to be Putin's judo sparring partner in the 1960s and later in the 1990s and owes all his wealth to his long-standing relationship with Putin); Platon payment system breakdowns, freeze-ups, and malfunctioning that sometimes resulted in multiple charges to the same vehicle; and the size of fines for late payments (ranging from 500,000 to 1 million rubles).

For large companies, the fee was mostly negligible, but in many struggling regions, especially in Dagestan, trucking is a family business, and for them the fees were beyond what they could afford given the recession that cut deeply into their profits.

Russia employs a hundred thousand truckers. With family members, the number does not exceed 1.5 million, which is a little over 1 percent of the total population, but due to their line of work, truckers are very active and determined.

The strike started almost immediately after the introduction of the Platon payment system, and its participants demanded that the fee should be canceled and sharply criticized the authorities, including the President. Some strikers even threatened to help Putin experience "another 1917."

The strike instantly won the support of the opposition, including parties with parliamentary representation (Communist Party of the Russian Federation and A Just Russia party) and without it (Yabloko party and Alexei Navalny's Progress Party).

Official media has not been covering the strike, but the government made concessions rather quickly. First, fines were significantly reduced to a range of 5,000 to 10,000 rubles ($72-145). Second, the authorities agreed to keep low rates for a prolonged period of time. Still, truckers are not satisfied. They stand their ground and demand that the Platon payment system be revoked.

Will the Kremlin respond?

The government is facing a difficult choice because the current situation is very sensitive. Platon implementation has already angered a whole social group, and it is comprised of people who are not the "humiliated and insulted" kind, but rather self-supporting and economically independent taxpayers who can finally demand to be told where their money is going.

On the other hand, even if all strikers' demands are met, the authorities are not going to score any popularity points. Putin notoriously does not appreciate public pressure, and in his Address to the Federal Assembly on December 3 he completely ignored truckers' issues and the strike, which means that he is not intent on giving in.

However, if nothing is done, the situation will sooner or later spin out of control, and truckers will be able to paralyze the country's transportation system. In this case, all Russians will hear about the strike, and it will be impossible to keep ignoring that "something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

The Kremlin is likely to take (or has already resolved to take) half-measures: some concessions have already been granted, and some may follow soon, but the fee is there to stay, even though its amount is not going to change for at least a year, and payments will still be collected by Igor Rotenberg's company.

In this case, the tensions will continue, and truckers may become the social group that will launch the formation of an anti-government movement similar to the Polish Solidarity trade union in the 1980s or the Kuzbass miners' committees in the U.S.S.R. in the early 1990s.

Truckers are not the only social group whose attitude towards the government can change as the recession deepens. Russian business is heavily taxed by corrupt officials and favored entrepreneurs who are not about to curb their appetite in spite of the economic crisis, so the truckers' strike is not the last one of its kind.

At some point, the quantity of protests may turn into quality, and one day the government may wake up to the fact that the Russian post-Crimean consensus is no more, and the reality is the traditional conflict between the authority (bureaucracy) and the rest of the population. Overall, the leadership has a lot to consider, even though it may not have fully understood what lies in wait.

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 #15
Truckers' Strike Won't Lead to Political Change in Russia, Gontmakher Says
Paul Goble

Staunton, December 7 - Pro-Kremlin writers have argued that the deteriorating economic situation will lead Russians to willingly tighten their belts, and opposition ones have suggested that economic problems will lead to political protests and even regime change. But both are wrong, Yevgeny Gontmakher says.

In a commentary today, the Moscow economic analyst points out that there have been protests but they haven't spread and that that pattern continues even with all the attention that has been given to the truckers' strike and is likely to continue well into the future (echo.msk.ru/blog/gontmaher/1672410-echo/).

Nonetheless, Gontmakher argues, there are several interesting aspects to the truckers' action: they have attracted some support from allies groups like port workers, and they have been able to organize themselves for a mass action across the country and not just in isolated locations.

But perhaps most intriguingly, he continues, the long-haul truckers "up to now are proud of the fact that they support the state in the person of the current president ... and they hate 'the fifth column' which they at last have seen on television."  Despite that, however, they have acted in their drive on Moscow more collectively than have other groups.

"What has occurred?" Gontmakher asks rhetorically.

First of all, he says, the crisis for the truckers has been growing for some time. As the economic situation has worsened, demand for their services has fallen and so too have their earnings.  Second, in contrast to other groups, the state has imposed a new fee on them, something it hasn't done to any other group.

That of course has led the truckers to ask why us and why not others - and especially why does the state want our fees to go to a private oligarch?  If the state had asked them to sacrifice to state needs and to pay to it, Gontmakher says, "all the protests would have instantly disappeared."

And there has been a third factor at work as well: the truckers used to being independent operators and proud of that have not restrained themselves about those who want to take their money and they have seen this replayed again and again on the Internet. They hoped Vladimir Putin would hear their plea and respond in his presidential address, but that didn't happen.

Many are seeking to explain what is going on by pointing to the willingness of Russians to sacrifice for their country to again be a great power. Others argue that the refrigerator is finally defeating the television, and still others say that spiritual values are trumping material existence once again.

The truckers' strike shows that "not one of these scenarios is being realized in Russia," Gontmakher says. But at the same time, "judging from everything, their protest will not lead to the chain reaction of events like the All-Union miners' strike in 1989" or lead to the birth of something like Poland's Solidarnost movement.

The first was possible because the Soviet state was already weak, and the second because of the power of the Catholic Church. But in Russia now, the state is not so weak that it can't move against any protesters and people know that; and the Russian Orthodox Church is not on the side of the workers as the Catholic Church was.

That suggests, he continues, that after a time, the truck drivers will go home, some to sell off their trucks, others to continue to work as best they can, and still others to "go into the traditional Russian depression" and consumer enormous amount of low quality alcohol. Perhaps a tiny minority will even try to withdraw from society and go into a monastery.

"But this will not compensate for the growing social negative of millions of drivers and those who are linked to them in life," Gontmakher says. "Any talk about a 'special' Russian path, about our outstanding 'spirituality,' and about the dawning Russian leadership in innovation will lead them to respond with traditional unprintable Russian words."

And in responding in that way, the Moscow analyst says, "they will be right."

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 #16
International New York Times
December 8, 2015
A Russian Revolt, Delayed
By Masha Gessen
Masha Gessen is the author, most recently, of "The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy."

MOSCOW - The revolution has been postponed again.

On Friday afternoon, I was speaking with the anti-Putin organizer and anti-corruption activist Leonid Volkov. He was predicting the regime's impending collapse when he glanced at his iPhone and said, "In fact, right now, as we speak, the long-haul truck drivers are blocking the beltway" around Moscow. The protest had been awaited for weeks, and it was expected to be big, possibly historic.

Russian long-haul truck drivers had been staging smaller protests since at least the middle of last month, demanding the repeal of a new road tax that went into effect Nov. 15. The tax, ostensibly designed to compensate the state for the damage heavy vehicles cause to roads, amounts to 1.53 rubles (less than 3 cents) per kilometer until March 1, and 3.06 rubles (almost 5 cents) thereafter. At current exchange rates, come March, a Moscow-Novosibirsk run would cost about $150 in taxes, or roughly as much as a driver would be paid for the same distance.

To add insult to financial injury, truck owners are required to install a tracking payment-processing system called Platon (an acronym for "payment for tonnage" that sounds just like the way Russians pronounce the name of the Greek philosopher), made by a company that belongs to Igor Rotenberg, the son of one of President Vladimir Putin's lifelong friends and closest associates.

The new tax is widely perceived as nothing more than a conduit for corruption. In this country of long distances and import-dependent economy, there are nearly two million long-haul trucks. Their drivers and operators have the power and the equipment to make the Russian economy slow down and its road traffic come to a standstill.

Last month the drivers began by staging rallies and a couple of kinds of protests in their own cities. The most popular came to be known as ulitka, "the snail": A number of drivers would place their trucks in all the lanes of a given road and then slow to a crawl, forcing traffic to back up. Another form of protest, tried in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, forced traffic to stop by having a group of people constantly moving back and forth in a single pedestrian crosswalk.

There is a reason some drivers chose to protest on foot rather than in their trucks, and this reason points to a fundamental difficulty with the protests. To an even greater extent than many of their compatriots, long-haul drivers are at the mercy of the Russian bureaucracy: They have driving licenses and various permits that can be revoked. Any traffic cop can take away a long-haul trucker's livelihood.

If the truckers could be sure all their colleagues were taking the same risks, they might be able to disregard the traffic-police problem. But here they run up against the classic organizing issues of communication and trust. Russian labor unions are weak and often co-opted. Most media are under state control. Online forums are virtually the only organizing and communication tool the drivers have.

The drivers first threatened to stage a snail protest on the beltway that encircles Moscow on Nov. 30. Then they decided to wait until Dec. 3, when Mr. Putin was scheduled to deliver his annual address to Parliament. They had written to him and apparently hoped he would mention the Platon issue in his speech. That day, the Kremlin was under even heavier guard than usual, with pedestrians banned from parks adjacent to the fortress. Mr. Putin did not mention the long-haul truckers.

That night, trucks began to congregate outside the Moscow beltway. On Friday afternoon, news spread in independent media that the drivers had begun their ulitka action on the road. The traffic map seemed to bear this out: Around 4 p.m. the outer side of the beltway was jammed solid on the north side of the city.

But then the traffic police announced that they had sealed off the road themselves, for reasons they would not disclose. The effect on traffic may have been the same as the protest, but technically this had prevented it.

At the same time, Parliament hurriedly passed a measure drastically lowering the penalty for nonpayment of the new tax - for example, down to 5,000 rubles from 450,000 for a first fine - though it did not lower the actual tax or relieve truckers of the obligation to install the Platon system.

Will this small concession be enough to stop the protest? In case it is not, the traffic police appear to have essentially closed the Moscow area to long-haul trucks. Over the weekend, about 15 trucks set up camp in an Ikea parking lot about 10 kilometers to the north of Moscow. Some more trucks took up temporary residence about 70 kilometers to the south.

Drivers in the Ikea lot said that the police were not allowing more truckers to join them and that they themselves were stuck: If they drove off the lot in order to get food or fuel, they would not be allowed to re-enter. Moscow residents were bringing them food and diesel fuel so they could run their engines to keep warm.

With the beltway closed to them, the drivers could still blockade Moscow by clogging the dozen or so highways that lead to it. They have the numbers to do this. But they may lack the level of organization and trust necessary to carry off such a complicated protest. Even if they overcome those obstacles, state-controlled media will likely continue to ignore them, allowing Mr. Putin to continue ignoring them as well. And if it's not televised, the protest will not be a revolution.

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 #17
Kremlin comments on Anti-Corruption Foundation's report on prosecutor-general

MOSCOW, December 7. /TASS/. The information contained in the report of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) about the business of the family of Russia's Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika is not new and evokes no interest, as it is about Chaika's adult children, Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday.

According to him, the Kremlin has seen numerous media reports that spelled out the essence of the ACF material. "I can say that this information was available to us since the summer, we got familiarised with it in June. Other people were figuring as the authors of the materials then," Peskov said.

"And, actually, even then the information was not interesting to us, because the materials refer not to the prosecutor general, but to his adult sons who conduct business independently," the Kremlin official said.

Asked by TASS to specify, Peskov said that Chaika, as all high-ranking officials, is required by law to annually submit declarations about his income and property. "Chaika, like all of us, civil servants, every year submits in accordance with the established procedure declarations, which, the same as declarations of all of us, are thoroughly checked by anti-corruption agencies, therefore we have no reason to doubt that all the law requirements on declaring incomes will be complied with also next year," the presidential press secretary said.

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his state-of-the-nation address to the Federal Assembly that in addition to declaring by officials of their incomes, major spending and real estate ownership, the state and municipal officials will now also "have to disclose information about the contracts they plan to conclude with companies of their relatives, friends, and close persons."

The website of the Anti-Corruption Foundation published on December 1 a report claiming that it has exposed a number of "grey" financial schemes allegedly organised by the Chaika family members.

The prosecutor general has dismissed all the allegations as false and promised to announce who sponsored the investigation.

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 #18
www.rt.com
December 7, 2015
Communists declare 2016 'Year of Stalin'

Communists in the central Russian city of Penza have announced a plan to mark the 80th anniversary of the 1936 USSR Constitution by declaring 2016 the "Year of Stalin" and opening a museum dedicated to the controversial Soviet dictator.

"Stalin's Constitution will be 80 in 2016," said Georgiy Kamenev, head of the Penza regional branch of the Communist Party, told local news website PenzaNews. "We have decided to celebrate the coming year as Stalin's Year."

He added: "This is necessary also because currently there are a lot of attacks on Stalin and on his period in Soviet history. Attack is the best defense. We will actively promote historical facts about this time and about Joseph Stalin's personality."

The politician also announced that in the coming year the city will see the opening of a Stalin Center, a museum and meeting place used for events from cinema screenings to public discussions. The events will include "Stalin's Readings," a large-scale conference attended by prominent researchers and journalists, scheduled for early March.

In its statement dedicated to the initiative, the press service of the Penza branch of the Communist Party noted that city residents had received the idea to immortalize Stalin with great enthusiasm. It also wrote that people in Penza were putting fresh flowers on Stalin's monument "practically every day."

The Communist Party often uses Stalin's name and image to promote itself, and almost every time such steps are met with opposition from liberals, prompting heated discussions in the media.

In February 2015, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov appealed to President Vladimir Putin to rename the city of Volgograd as "Stalingrad," and also to give Stalin's name and a monument to a square in Moscow.

When a similar proposal was made in 2013, polls showed that 60 percent of Russians were against the renaming. Vladimir Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov said at the time that Kremlin officials had never considered renaming Volgograd as Stalingrad - and did not plan to put this issue on the agenda in the future.

The only concession made in 2013 was the decision of the Volgograd City legislature to have the city renamed as "Stalingrad" for just a few days each year - on the dates of major holidays and commemorative dates. On these days, regional officials and media are officially required to use the name "Stalingrad" in documents and reports.

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 #19
Poll shows Russian support grows for 'Dima Yakovlev' adoption law

MOSCOW, December 7. /TASS/. Support is growing for law banning US citizens from adopting children in Russia, a new poll suggests.

Legislation known as the Dima Yakovlev law has been in force since January 2013, named after a child from northwest Russia's Pskov region. The boy died of heat stroke four months after being adopted by a US couple when his adoptive father left him in a parked car for nine hours.

Soundings taken among 1,600 people across 46 Russian regions recorded 76% supporting the law compared with 54% in January 2013. Less than 20% voiced opposing views, close to the 21% in the 2013 survey, the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VTsIOM) website reported on Monday.

Citizens from 20 countries are allowed to adopt Russian children. Talks are now underway with Israel, Ireland and Sweden.

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 #20
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
December 7, 2015
Russian businesswomen break the glass ceiling
Despite large number of female managers in Russia, experts caution that women are mostly active in small businesses.
ALEXEI LOSSAN, RBTH

While Russia is believed to have the largest proportion of women in senior managerial positions in the world, women are mostly active in small businesses. In the medium and large business segments, they usually work as deputies.

According to the 'Women in Business: From Classroom to Boardroom' survey carried out by the Grant Thornton auditing firm, Russia has the world's highest proportion of female top managers. The survey says that women occupy about 40 percent of senior management positions in Russian companies. Georgia is in second place (38 percent) and Poland in third (37 percent). Yet in Japan, women occupy just 8 percent of senior management positions, in Germany 14 percent and in India and Brazil 15 percent.

Women in Russia are successful in information technology, retail trade, media, production, transportation, communications and politics, according to the survey, while men occupy the highest positions in the oil, gas, and metallurgical sectors. Globally, the number of female top managers increased from 19 percent in 2004 to 22 percent in 2015.

Bridging the gender gap

Some multilateral organizations evaluate gender equality in Russian business differently than in the Grant Thornton survey. According to the World Bank, there is a large gap between male and female incomes in Russia. On average, women earn 30 percent less than men.

Contrasting the Grant Thornton report, the International Labor Organization said in early 2015 that Russia ranks only 25th place when it comes to the proportion of women in managerial roles (39.1 percent). The organization says Jamaica has the highest percentage of female managers (59.3 percent).

"We still haven't reached the normal proportion of 50:50 concerning men and women in business management positions and if we consider that there are more women in Russia than men, then the proportions would not be 50:50 but somewhere around 40:60 in favor of women," says Elena Yakhontova, professor at the Ranepa Higher School of Business Management.

She says there are still significantly fewer female business managers than male.

Small business

In small businesses, Yakhontova says, the share of companies that women establish is about 50 percent. "These are owners of an endless number of cafes, bakeries, farms, pharmacies, dental clinics and consulting companies," she adds.

"The origins of discrimination are in the mentality. For now, the prevailing stereotype is that men make better managers."

Key positions

Despite these difficulties, women occupy four key positions in the Russian public arena. According to a rating published by the Ekho Moskvy radio station, the most influential woman in the country is the Chairwoman of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Russian Parliament, Valentina Matviyenko.

In second place is the Chairwoman of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina. The First Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets is in third place. The fourth most influential woman in Russia is Tatyana Golikova, head of the Account Chamber of Russia, a special government organ responsible for effective budget spending.

Only one Russian woman, however, made the Forbes 2015 rating of the most influential women in the world - Elvira Nabiullina.

The careers of such women are similar. "There are many female deputies in the ranking," says Yakhontova. "In small and medium-sized businesses, there are many women in leading roles - they simultaneously hold the positions of owner and manager."

Nabiullina started her government career in the beginning of the 2000s as first deputy minister of economic development. Her supervisor was the author of key economic reforms in the 2000s, German Gref.

The Account Chamber's Golikova was working at the same time as first deputy of another reform strategist, then Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin.

Golodets held the position of deputy general director of Norilsk Nickel, the world's largest producer of nickel and copper.

Yakhontova is certain that one of the most influential women in Russian business is Bella Zlatkis, deputy chairwoman of the state-owned Sberbank, the country's largest bank.

She also mentions Olga Dergunova, head of Rosimuschestvo, the government organ that manages most of the state's assets. She was also the president of Microsoft Russia and then worked for Russia's second-largest state-owned bank, VTB.

In 2002 the Wall Street Journal placed Dergunova on the list of the 25 most successful and influential businesswomen in Europe. While these success stories are encouraging, women still have a long way to go in Russia.

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 #21
US still confident of its monopoly on truth - Russian diplomat

MOSCOW, December 7. /TASS/. US President Barack Obama's address to the nation after the recent act of terror in California can be regarded as the result of the correction of mistakes, but not of the main mistake - confidence of the US monopoly on the truth, head of the international affairs committee at the Russian Federation Council upper house of parliament Konstantin Kosachev wrote on his Facebook page on Monday, commenting on Sunday's statement by the American leader.

The Federation Council official said that a number of theses in the US president's speech could be regarded as the result of "the correction of mistakes." First, "the Islamic radicals, not the Syrian leaders" were named as the main targets of the antiterrorism fight. Second, Obama said "cooperation was possible with the armed forces of Syria and Iraq." Third, Syria's political settlement was named as a prerequisite for the victory over terrorism," although the US president still meant the change of Bashar Assad's regime. Finally, he "articulated the need for uniting the efforts, also mentioning Russia in this context."

However, the United States reserves the main role in the Syrian settlement process, the parliamentarian says, as Obama said that "with American leadership, the international community has begun to establish a process and timeline to pursue ceasefires and a political resolution to the Syrian war."

"There are very strong doubts about that. There is no "correction of the main mistake" - the US confidence in its monopoly on the truth. There is no recognition of the previous mistakes - in Syria, and before that in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and in Ukraine. And, therefore, there will be more mistakes and that all, including Russia, will have to correct them one again," Kosachev said.

On Sunday evening, US President Barack Obama addressed the nation in connection with a recent act of terror at a social services facility in San Bernardino, California on December 2, as a result of which 14 people were killed and 21 - wounded. The American leader said that the United States would combat terrorism and succeed in the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group "by drawing upon every aspect of American power." He also said that the international community's efforts to pursue a political settlement to the Syrian conflict "will allow the Syrian people and every country, including our allies, but also countries like Russia, to focus on the common goal of destroying" Islamic State - "a group that threatens us all".

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 #22
Diplomat: "bogeyman stories" prompt NATO to adopt strategy of countering hybrid threats

MOSCOW, December 7 /TASS/. The foreign ministers of NATO countries gave adopted a strategy of fighting hybrid threats at their meeting in Brussels on December 1-2 under the impact of propaganda horror stories, which the Western media is circulating, Alexander Grushko, Russia's Permanent Representative to NATO, said during the Moscow-Brussels video conference on Monday.

"On the whole, the strategy is aimed at strengthening NATO's potential to react to the so-called 'hybrid threats' by using not only military but asymmetric means," Grushko explained.

"This theme has become widespread in NATO. It is the result of propaganda bogeyman stories, which have been circulating in Western media recently. We, in fact, know that NATO countries were the first to start applying hybrid operations," Grushko said meaning NATO bombardments of Yugoslavia in 1999.

Commenting on the recent invitation to Montenegro, a republic of the former Yugoslavia, to join the alliance, Grushko said that it was a geopolitical decision, which is unlikely to bring any benefits to NATO or European security.

"It is a geopolitical concept. There will be no real gains for NATO or European security from extending an invitation to Montenegro. It is clear that no one is threatening Montenegro," the Russian diplomat said.

"It is an attempt to push for the agenda from an era of confrontation," Grushko said.

Russia's Permanent Representative to NATO believes that a meeting of the Russia-NATO Council is still possible under the current circumstances.

It should be thoroughly prepared but it is still unclear how it should be held, Grushko said on Monday.

"NATO has made no official proposals (to hold the meeting) as of yet. But we discussed this theme during our contacts with NATO representatives who are members of the Russia-NATO Council," the Russian diplomat said.

"NATO's secretary general is right when he says that the Russia-NATO Council continues its existence as an institution," Grushko said adding it was necessary to thoroughly prepare the Council's meeting under the current circumstances.

"If we are going to hold such a meeting, we should have a clear idea what 'value added cost' it has. As for today, it is unclear because NATO is departing from partnership and switching over to a policy of deterrence. It is abandoning all the projects, which the Russia-NATO Council used to discuss," Grushko added.

"They concern fight against terrorism, the situation in Afghanistan, including the training of anti-drug experts for Afghanistan and Pakistan and technicians for maintaining Mi-17 and Mi-6 helicopters," the Russian diplomat said.

"But we are going to consult with the ambassadors. Russia has never tried to evade a dialogue. But such a meeting (of the Russia-NATO Council) will require thorough preparations and also the understanding of what results we should seek to achieve," Grushko concluded.

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 #23
Interfax
December 7, 2015
Russia welcomes intent of U.S., coalition to help seal Syria-Turkey border

Moscow welcomes the intentions of the United States and other members of the anti-terrorist coalition that it leads to help seal the Syrian-Turkish border with the purpose of stopping oil trafficking and other illegal businesses.

"What the Syrian-Turkish border is like has been known for a long time, the same as the Turkish-Iraqi border. It was know a long, long time ago thanks to what ISIL exists and expands; I mean oil trade and other illegal businesses. And we welcome the attention to the need to stop these criminal phenomena on the part of many countries of the world, including the USA and the coalition it leads," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with Interfax.

That was his comment on the phrase of U.S. President Barack Obama in his address to the nation that the U.S. is "working with Turkey to seal its border with Syria" in order to stop channels of replenishing terrorists in Syria and their funding.

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 #24
The National Interest
December 5, 2015
Russia's 5 Next Big Moves in Syria
As Russia's commitment escalates, expect to see these additions to the battlefield in the coming days and weeks.
By Robert Farley
Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as an Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat.

Russia formally intervened in the Syrian Civil War a little more than a month ago. Since then, the Russians have established a reputation for high sortie rates and inaccurate bombing, and a penchant for attacking anyone but the Islamic State. Russian and Syrian forces have made some progress in coordinated offensives against rebel positions, but the going remains slow.

It's difficult to avoid the feeling that Russia and the Assad regime are simply treading water, trying to maintain what they hold instead of making serious inroads against either ISIS or the "moderate" Syrian rebel factions. Russia's major losses thus far include a civilian jetliner, destroyed by an ISIS bomb, and a Su-24 Fencer, shot down by Turkish F-16s. Syrian government forces have lost numerous ground combat vehicles in attacks against well-armed, prepared rebel factions.

Now it looks as if Russia wants to step up its intervention. What do the Russians need to do in order to turn things around and win this war? Here are five capabilities that Russia needs to commit to the fight in order to save the Assad regime:

1. The Su-25 "Frogfoot"

While the shootdown of the Su-24 Fencer near Turkish territory demonstrated the vulnerability of the unescorted attack aircraft to modern jet fighters, the Russians still need to help the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and associated militias make progress on the ground. The best way to do that is to use a tough, heavy attack plane like the Su-25 Frogfoot, which can have an immediate impact on the battlefield. Known as the Soviet equivalent of the A-10, the slow-moving Frogfoot can deliver a tremendous amount of ordnance while taking a beating from small arms.

With some indication that Russia is about to massively step up its air campaign in Syria, we can be sure that additional attack aircraft, like the Frogfoot, will soon appear in the skies over rebel held territory. These aircraft will have a big impact on the success of SAA ground offensives.

2. S-400 surface-to-air missile system

Earlier this week, Russia announced the successful deployment of an S-400 surface-to-air missile system in Syria. Other articles have focused on the technical capabilities of this system, but in political terms the S-400 offers the Assad regime insurance against either a Western no-fly zone or an anti-Assad air campaign. This means, in effect, that ISIS and other Syrian rebels will need to defeat Assad (and Russia) on their own, without the direct kinetic support of any of their allies.

Western air forces can probably defeat the S-400 and associated air defense systems, although they might incur losses along the way. However, direct attacks against the Russian air defense network would portend a much higher level of escalation than anyone has expressed an interest in. The S-400 gives Russia a practical veto over any Western action against Assad.

3. Diplomacy

The most important weapon that Russia can use to save the Assad regime is its diplomatic corps. Although Russian soft power has deteriorated over the past several years, it still has the power and influence to make side deals with relevant stakeholders in the Syrian conflict. This includes Syria's regional neighbors, EU members less than enthusiastic about contributing to the fight and powerful countries further afield that might nevertheless make an impact on the conflict. All of this can help shift the terms of debate in the conflict in the direction of the Assad regime's survival.

Among Russia's most precious diplomatic assets is its veto on the United Nations Security Council. Russia can use this veto as a shield, preventing any serious UNSC action on the conflict and avoiding a replay of the NATO intervention in Libya.

4. Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance

Russia does not now, and has never had the kinds of ISR assets that the United States takes for granted. Nonetheless, it can substantially improve the capabilities of the SAA in this regard. Russian ISR can help accurately map the capabilities of the various rebel factions and analyze their reactions to SAA offensives. This can help the Russians and the SAA develop an effective strategy for defeating the rebels.

Russian assets in this regard include not only recon aircraft and drones, but also electronic warfare units that can analyze rebel communications. Putting this information together in a digestible form for Russian and Syrian deployed forces is well within the capabilities of Russian intelligence.

5. Spetsnaz

The Syrian Arab Army and its associated militias need to take territory from the rebel groups that currently occupy much of the country. Unfortunately, the SAA has traditionally fallen short in mobile, offensive operations (it has done much better in static defensive ops and in artillery duels). The Russians need to provide a leadership core that can help win the war on the ground.

Unless Russia decides to deploy a much more substantial ground force to Syria (a tricky prospect given limited Russian resources and long-range logistics), the primary role played by Russian troops will primarily be leadership, coordination and support. Russian special forces need to take their cues from the experience of Western SOF in Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere. At the same time, they must take care to avoid casualties, which would play poorly at home and prove embarrassing on the international stage.

Russia has a lot of war left to fight in Syria. The first weeks of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, and of NATO intervention in Libya, showed few obvious fruits of progress. In both cases air attacks had weakened and fragmented the resistance, however, eventually allowing major ground offensives to roll up the country. Two or three months from now, the international community could be celebrating the successful efforts of the Russian military to defeat ISIS, and the Assad regime could be cheering the destruction of rebel factions in the west of the country.

Don't bet on it, though.

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 #25
Moon of Alabama
www.moonofalabama.org
December 4, 2015
Erdogan's "Turkmen" Lose Some Of Their Chechen And Saudi Leaders
[Full text here http://www.moonofalabama.org/]

Following the shoot-down of a Russian fighter jet over north Latakia the Turkish President Erdogan insisted that there were no terrorists in the area the Russians were bombing but only "Turkmen". Today a Russian air attack in the area hit major "Turkmen" fighting positions but the death notices that follow do not fit Erdogan's "Turkmen" claims:

   Dismissing Russian claims that the Russian plane had been on an anti-terror mission against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) jihadists in northern Syria, Erdoğan said, "No one should ever fool themselves: There are no Daesh [ISIL] elements in the Bayırbucak region where Turkmen live."

   Erdoğan also attacked those who criticized his government's ostensible aid to the Turkmens.

   "You know the famous MİT truck betrayal which took place right after the Dec.17-25 coup attempt, don't you? There are some who still make their headlines for their newspapers without any shame. Those trucks were trucks taking aid to our Bayırbucak Turkmens. Some are saying, 'Prime Minister Erdoğan was saying that there were no weapons inside those [trucks].' What if there were, what if there weren't? What are we saying: 'We are taking humanitarian assistance there.' Who are they? They are our mistreated and oppressed Bayırbucak Turkmen siblings. That's what we did," Erdoğan said late Nov. 24.

So there are just Turkmen, says Erdogan. And he finally admits that he sent them weapons.

But the "Turkmen" Erdogan speaks of are not the 100,000 or so ethnic Turkmen who for hundreds of years have lived in the area. The "Turkmen" who killed the parachuting Russian pilot was a Turkish radical nationalist who belongs to the fascist Grey Wolf organization.

Today Russian planes flew extensive attacks in the area where the "Turkmen" fight against the approaching Syrian army:

   [T]he Russian Aerospace Forces destroyed a terrorist stronghold in the Syrian province of Latakia, which was located at a strategically important height.

   "Near the village of Kessab in the Latakia province, a major stronghold of militants located at a tactically important height was destroyed."

The strikes were in support of a Syrian Arab Army attack north of Arafit (map). This afternoon several death of anti-Syrian insurgents reported or mourned. Here are some samples:...

 
#26
Truthfulness of evidence of oil smuggled to Turkey from terrorists-controlled areas raises no doubt - senator Ozerov

MOSCOW. Dec 5 (Interfax) - Russia has no doubt about the credibility of the evidence it showed of oil supplies to Turkey from ISIL-controlled areas, said Viktor Ozerov, head of the Federation Council's Defense and Security Committee.

"These are objective documents. With the system of capabilities that the U.S. and other NATO states have, joking and serving - to put in a not quite parliamentary parlance - a fake means undermining your authority and dignity. And had there been a slightest doubt, our Defense Ministry and Russia as a whole would not have been doing it," Ozerov told Interfax on Saturday.

Today, means of reconnaissance than can detect the information Russia has provided are available, in particular, to the U.S. that has a much more potent space group, he said.

"And if we had not been certain that we were showing convoys of tank trucks belonging to the ISIL, which is banned in Russia, we probably would not done so," Ozerov said.

He recalled that the Russian Defense Ministry said earlier that Russia has more evidence, in addition to what it has already shown, of such a scheme involving oil supplies to Turkey

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 #27
www.rt.com
December 7, 2015
'Washington moving from war on terror to regime change in Syria'

The West has a confused policy as it claims it wants to defeat ISIS, but at the same time considers Assad to be an enemy, Middle East affairs expert Ali Rizk told RT.

READ MORE: Syria slams US-led coalition deadly strike against troops as 'act of aggression'

Initial reports said the air strike was carried out on an area with a heavy ISIS presence.

According to Rizk, the possibility that the attack was an accident cannot be completely ruled out.  

"However, at the same time you have to also remember that there has been a lot of anger in some quarters in Washington regarding the Russian role being played. There are many people in Washington that are saying that Russia is outmuscling the US in Syria," he added.

According to the expert, there have been many calls "for the Americans to do something, which would maybe reverse the momentum on the ground, which is a result of the rapid intervention."

Rizk argues that "when we can't completely rule out the possibility of an accident we also can't completely rule out the possibility that this was some kind of coordinated attack. A lot of question marks..."

He suggests "we have to wait and see what exactly this location was, which was subject to an airstrike."

"I don't believe that this kind of bombing by the American warplanes of the Syrian army position is, actually, an accident. Because the Americans keep telling us, they are very accurate, they choose their targets carefully and they have very smart bombs. So, how it comes that this smartness is not prevailing here." - Abdel Bari Atwan, writer and political analyst

"Was it an important army base; is it something that will affect the battle on the ground, which has taken place? These are all valid questions",  he continues.

"Once you have a confused policy accidents like this are bound to happen, the Americans, the West in general, have a confused policy saying that they want to defeat ISIS, at the same time they consider Syrian President Bashar Assad to be an enemy as well," Rizk told RT.

"When you have the US which is not coordinating with the Syrian Army on the ground, contrary to the Russian approach, which does coordinate with the Syria Army, when you have no coordination with the Syrian military on the ground, then these accidents or these incidents are bound to happen."

Rizk suggests the incident could have been "some kind of deliberate attack by the Americans."

"I am not saying that is certain, far from it - but maybe there is an American effort to try to thwart the advances made be the Syrian army ever since Russia began with its military operations in Syria," he said.

Catherine Shakdam, director of programs at the Shafaqna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies in London, thinks that "they [US] are continuing this campaign of trying to demonize the Syrian government and by that President Bashar Al-Assad."

"It is quite clear that the focus of Washington has moved away from this 'war on terror' and back onto regime change in Syria. It is very telling after what happened with the targeting of the Syrian position by the US Army," she continues.

In her opinion, "it is quite clear that what Washington wants to do in Syria today: they want to use the military to target not terror, but President Bashar Al-Assad...".

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 #28
The Unz Review
www.unz.com
December 5, 2015
Week Nine of the Russian Intervention in Syria: The Empire Strikes Back
By The Saker

Considering the remarkable success of the Russian intervention in Syria, at least so far, it should not have come as a surprise that the AngloZionist Empire would strike back. The only question was how and when. We now know the answer to that question.

On November 24th the Turkish Airforce did something absolutely unprecedented in recent history: it deliberately shot down another country's military aircraft even though it was absolutely obvious that this aircraft presented no threat whatsoever to Turkey or the Turkish people. The Russian Internet is full of more or less official leaks about how this was done. According to these versions, the Turks maintained 12 F-16 on patrol along the border ready to attack, they were guided by AWACS aircraft and "covered" by USAF F-15s in case of an immediate Russian counter-attack. Maybe. Maybe not. But this hardly matters because what is absolutely undeniable is that the USA and NATO immediatley took "ownership" of this attack by giving their full support to Turkey. NATO went as far as to declare that it would send aircraft and ships to protect Turkey as if it had been Russia which had attacked Turkey. As for the USA, not only did it fully back Turkey, it now also categorically denies that there is any evidence that Turkey is purchasing Daesh oil. Finally, as was to be expected, the USA is now sending The Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group into the eastern Mediterranean, officially to strike Daesh but, in reality, to back Turkey and threaten Russia. Even the Germans are now sending their own aircraft, but with the specific orders not to share any info with the Russians.

So what is really going on here?

Simple: the Empire correctly identified the weakness of the Russian force in Syria, and it decided to use Turkey to provide itself an element of plausible deniability. This attack is probably only the first step of a much larger campaign to "push back" Russia from the Turkish border. The next step, apparently, includes the dispatching of western forces into Syria, initially only as 'advisors', but eventually as special forces and forward air controllers. The US and Turkish Air Forces will play the primary role here, with assorted Germans and UK aircraft providing enough diversity to speak of an "international coalition". As for the French, stuck between their Russian counterparts and their NATO "allies", they will remain as irrelevant as ever: Hollande caved in, again (what else?). Eventually, NATO will create a de-facto safe heaven for its "moderate terrorists" in northern Syria and use it as a base to direct an attack on Raqqa. Since any such intervention will be completely illegal, the argument of the need to defend the Turkmen minority will be used, R2P and all. The creation of a NATO-protected safe heaven for "moderate terrorists" could provide the first step for breaking up Syria into several smaller statelets.

If that is really the plan, then the shooting down of the SU-24 sends a powerful message to Russia: we are ready to risk a war to push you back - are you ready to go to war? The painful answer will be No, Russia is not prepared to wage a war against the entire Empire over Syria, simply because she does not have the capabilities to do so.

As I have already mentioned many times now, Syria is beyond the Russian power projection capability (roughly 1000km), especially if that power projection has to be executed through hostile territory (which Turkey most definitely is). So far, the Russians have succeeded, brilliantly, in organizing and supporting their small force in Syria, but this in no way indicates a Russian capability to support a major air operation over Syria or, even less so, a ground operation. The fact is that the Russian intervention in Syria was always a risky and difficult one, and it did not take the Empire much time to capitalize on this. I get a lot of flak from flag-wavers and "hurrah patriots" for saying this, but the fact is that Russia cannot 'protect' Syria from the US, NATO or even CENCTOM. At least not in purely military terms. This does not mean that Russia does not have retaliatory options. Russia has already engaged in the following:

Economic sanctions: Russia has declared a number of sanctions against Turkey, including the freezing of the Turkish Stream project. Furthermore, Russian tourism in Turkey - a huge source of revenue - is most likely to dwindle down to a tiny fraction of what it used to be: Russians will not be banned from going to Turkey, but no tours or packages will be offered by Russian travel agencies. Some Turkish goods will be banned in Russia, and Turks will not be invited to bid for various types of contracts. All in all, these sanctions will hurt Turkey, but not in a major way.

Political sanctions: here Russia will use one of her most terrifying weapons: the truth. The Russian military presented a devastating series of photos and videos shot by Russian air and space assets proving that Turkey does, indeed, purchase oil from Daesh. What was especially shocking about this evidence is that it showed the truly immense scale of the smuggling: one photo showed 1,722 oil trucks in in Deir Ez-Zor region while another one showed 8,500 oil tankers are used by Daesh to transport up 200,000 barrels of oil. What these figures mean is that not only is this smuggling organized at the level of the Turkish state, but it is also absolutely obvious that the USA knows everything about it.

Predictably, the western media made no mention of the actual evidence, it only spoke of "images the Russians claim to show", but the damage is still done, especially in the long term. Now everybody with a modicum of intelligence knows that Erdogan is a lying crook. More importantly, it has now become undeniable that Turkey is not only an ally, but a patron and sponsor of Daesh. Finally, in the light of this evidence, it also becomes rather obvious why Turkey decided to shoot down the Russian SU-24: because the Russians were bombing the Daesh to Turkey smuggling routes.

The final blow to the prestige and credibility of Erdogan and Turkey came from Vladimir Putin himself who, in his annual address to the Parliament said:

"We know who are stuffing pockets in Turkey and letting terrorists prosper from the sale of oil they stole in Syria. The terrorists are using these receipts to recruit mercenaries, buy weapons and plan inhuman terrorist attacks against Russian citizens and against people in France, Lebanon, Mali and other states. We remember that the militants who operated in the North Caucasus in the 1990s and 2000s found refuge and received moral and material assistance in Turkey. We still find them there.

"Meanwhile, the Turkish people are kind, hardworking and talented. We have many good and reliable friends in Turkey. Allow me to emphasize that they should know that we do not equate them with the certain part of the current ruling establishment that is directly responsible for the deaths of our servicemen in Syria.

"We will never forget their collusion with terrorists. We have always deemed betrayal the worst and most shameful thing to do, and that will never change. I would like them to remember this - those in Turkey who shot our pilots in the back, those hypocrites who tried to justify their actions and cover up for terrorists.

"I don't even understand why they did it. Any issues they might have had, any problems, any disagreements we knew nothing about could have been settled in a different way. Plus, we were ready to cooperate with Turkey on all the most sensitive issues it had; we were willing to go further, where its allies refused to go. Allah only knows, I suppose, why they did it. And probably, Allah has decided to punish the ruling clique in Turkey by taking their mind and reason.

"But, if they expected a nervous or hysterical reaction from us, if they wanted to see us become a danger to ourselves as much as to the world, they won't get it. They won't get any response meant for show or even for immediate political gain. They won't get it.

"Our actions will always be guided primarily by responsibility - to ourselves, to our country, to our people. We are not going to rattle the sabre. But, if someone thinks they can commit a heinous war crime, kill our people and get away with it, suffering nothing but a ban on tomato imports, or a few restrictions in construction or other industries, they're delusional. We'll remind them of what they did, more than once. They'll regret it. We know what to do."

Of course, in a society thoroughly habituated to lying, dishonesty and hypocrisy, these are "only" words, and they shall be ignored. But in the Middle-East and the rest of the world, these are powerful words which the Turks will have a very hard time "washing off" from their reputation.

Military measures: these are limited, of course, but not irrelevant. First, Russia has now admitted that S-400 are now in Syria (I suspect they were there all along). Second, Russia has began building a 2nd air base, this time in Shaayrat, in central Syria. If this base is indeed built, then bringing in a few Russian AWACS and/or MiG-31s would make sense. Third, Russia will now use more modern SU-34s equipped with advanced air-to-air missiles in northern Syria and Russian strike aircraft will now be escorted by dedicated SU-30SM fighters. This combination of measures will make it much harder for the Turks to repeat such an attack, but I personally doubt that they have any such intentions, at least not in the immediate future.

Evaluation:

In order to fully understand what is happening now we need to look at the bigger picture. The first major consequence of the shooting down of the Russian SU-24 is that NATO has now become an impunity alliance. Now that the precedent has been set by Turkey's act of war against Russia, because that is what this shooting down undeniably was, any NATO member can now do the same thing while feeling protected by the alliance. If tomorrow, say, the Latvians decide to strafe a Russian Navy ship in the Baltic Sea or if the Poles shoot down a Russian aircraft over Kaliningrad, they will immediately get the 'protection' of NATO just like Turkey now did: the USA will fully endorse the Latvian/Polish version of the events, the Secretary General of NATO will offer to dispatch more forces to Latvia/Poland to "protect" these countries from any "threat" from "the east" and the world's corporate media will turn a blind eye to any evidence of Latvian/Polish aggression. This is an extremely dangerous development as it gives a strong incentive to any small country to deal with its inferiority complex by showing its "courage" and "determination" to challenge Russia even if, of course, this is done by hiding behind NATO's back.

NATO is also deliberately escalating its war on Russia by admitting Montenegro into the Alliance and by re-starting talks about admitting Georgia. In a purely military sense, the incorporation of Montenegro into NATO makes no difference whatsoever, but in political terms this is yet another way for the West to thumb its nose at Russia and say "see, we will even incorporate your historical allies into our Empire and there is nothing you can do about it". As for Georgia, the main purpose behind the discussion of its incorporation into NATO is to vindicate the "Saakashvili line", i.e. to reward aggression towards Russia. Here again, there is nothing Russia can do.

We thus are facing an extremely dangerous situation:

-The Russian forces in Syria are comparatively weak and isolated
-Turkey can, and will, continue its provocations under the cover of NATO
-The West is now preparing an (illegal) intervention inside Syria
-The western intervention will be made against Syria and Russia
-NATO politicians now have an easy way to score "patriotic" points by provoking Russia

If we strip all the NATO verbiage about "defending our members" what is happening now is that the Empire has now apparently decided that going down the road to war is safe because Russia will not dare to "start" a war. In other words, this is a game of chicken in which one side dares the other to do something about it. This is exactly what Putin was referring to when he said:

"If they expected a nervous or hysterical reaction from us, if they wanted to see us become a danger to ourselves as much as to the world, they won't get it. They won't get any response meant for show or even for immediate political gain. They won't get it. Our actions will always be guided primarily by responsibility - to ourselves, to our country, to our people"

What the imperial deep state is missing is the fact that Russia might not have a choice but to confront the Empire. Yes, the Russians do not want war, but the problem here is that, considering the absolutely reckless arrogance and imperial hubris of the western elites, every Russian effort to avoid war is interpreted by the western deep state as a sign of weakness. In other words, by acting responsibly the Russians are now providing an incentive for the West to act even more irresponsibly. This is a very, very, dangerous dynamic which the Kremlin will have to deal with. Putin, apparently, does have something in mind, at least this is how I understand his warning:

But, if someone thinks they can commit a heinous war crime, kill our people and get away with it, suffering nothing but a ban on tomato imports, or a few restrictions in construction or other industries, they're delusional. We'll remind them of what they did, more than once. They'll regret it. We know what to do.

I have no idea as to what he might be referring to, but I am confident that this is not some empty bluster: this was not a threat to Russia's enemies, but a promise to the Russian people. I sure hope that there is a plan because right now we are on a collision course leading to war. In conclusion, here is a short quote by Putin western leaders might want to ponder:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QxWYIAtCMU

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 #29
The Daily Telegraph (UK)
December 7, 2015
Let's deal with the Devil: we should work with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad in Syria
It is time to set aside our Cold War mindset and stop being picky about our allies if we are to defeat Isil before they kill thousands more
By Boris Johnson
Boris Johnson, one of Britain's best known politicians, and now mayor of London, tackles, with his irrepressible prose, the injustices and absurdities of life, from bicycle thieves to petty bureaucracy.

In the last couple of days, young people have been coming up to me in the street and asking in an accusing way: "Oi, Boris, why did you vote for war?" And I try as ever to explain that I was not voting for war. There currently is a war that is taking place in Syria.

That bestial conflict has already claimed a quarter of a million lives. I was voting to stop the war. I was voting for peace. "Yeah," they say, "but what about the bombing? What about all the innocent people who will die? It will be their blood on your hands."

To which I respond that innocent lives are being lost now: tens of thousands of people butchered just because they are women, or disabled, or gay, or because they belong to the wrong strand of Islam. I don't want to have them on my conscience, and I don't want these sickos from Daesh/Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) to continue to exult in their so-called caliphate, and to be allowed indefinitely to promote their terrorist campaigns.

When the House of Commons finally gave the go-ahead for air strikes last week, no one cheered; no one even hear-heared. No one is approaching this with the slightest sense of jingo or enthusiasm. We want to get on with whatever is the best and fastest way to bring peace to Syria. And since we all know that cannot be achieved by bombing alone, we need to think much more creatively about the coalition we could build.

That brings us to Vladimir Putin. I was in Paris at the end of last week, and the Russian leader's face glowered sulkily from every billboard. "Poutin", said the headline, "Notre nouvel ami". Many French people think the time has come to do a deal with their new friends the Russians - and I think that they are broadly right.

Look, I am no particular fan of Vlad. Quite the opposite. Russian-backed forces are illegally occupying parts of Ukraine. Putin's proxy army was almost certainly guilty of killing the passengers on the Malaysia Airlines jet that came down in eastern Ukraine. He has questions to answer about the death of Alexander Litvinenko, pitilessly poisoned in a London restaurant. As for his reign in Moscow, he is allegedly the linchpin of a vast post-Soviet gangster kleptocracy, and is personally said to be the richest man on the planet. Journalists who oppose him get shot. His rivals find themselves locked up. Despite looking a bit like Dobby the House Elf, he is a ruthless and manipulative tyrant.

Does that mean it is morally impossible to work with him? I am not so sure. We need to focus on what we are trying to achieve. Our aims - at least, our stated aims - are to degrade and ultimately to destroy Isil as a force in Syria and Iraq. That is what it is all about.

Our mission is to remove an evil death cult, to deprive their organisation of the charisma and renown that goes with controlling a territory of some 10 million people. We need to end their hideous administration of Raqqa, with its torchings and beheadings. We need them out of Palmyra, because if Syria is to have a future then we must protect its past.

We cannot do that without terrestrial forces. We need someone to provide the boots on the ground; and given that we are not going to be providing British ground forces - and the French and the Americans are just as reluctant - we cannot afford to be picky about our allies.

We have the estimated 70,000 of the Free Syrian Army (and many other groups and grouplets); but those numbers may be exaggerated, and they may include some jihadists who are not ideologically very different from al-Qaeda.

Who else is there? The answer is obvious. There is Assad, and his army; and the recent signs are that they are making some progress. Thanks at least partly to Russian air strikes, it looks as if the regime is taking back large parts of Homs. Al-Qaeda-affiliated militants are withdrawing from some districts of the city. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so.

With Russian air support, the Assad regime is only a few miles from Palmyra - the fabled pink-stoned city of monuments, where Isil decapitated the 82-year-old curator, Khaled Al-Assad, before beginning an orgy of cultural destruction.

Am I backing the Assad regime, and the Russians, in their joint enterprise to recapture that amazing site? You bet I am. That does not mean I trust Putin, and it does not mean that I want to keep Assad in power indefinitely. But we cannot suck and blow at once.

At the moment, we are in danger of treating our engagement as if it were some complicated three-sided chess game, in which we are trying to neutralise the Islamists while simultaneously preventing Putin from getting too big for his boots. If we try to be too clever, we will end up achieving nothing.

This is the time to set aside our Cold War mindset. It is just not true that whatever is good for Putin must automatically be bad for the West. We both have a clear and concrete objective - to remove the threat from Isil. Everything else is secondary.

Think of all those planes above Syria - some for the Assad regime, some against the regime, some against Isil, some against the non-Isil rebels. It is absurd. The best hope of getting rid of Isil is an agreement between all the powers - America, Russia, France, Britain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the rest - to take them out, together with a timetable for Assad to step down and a plan for a new Syrian government.

Everyone in Paris last week seemed familiar with one quotation from Sir Winston Churchill. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Churchill decided to qualify his lifelong hatred of communism. "If Hitler invaded Hell," said Churchill in 1941, "I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." And as he foresaw, it was the Russians who did the most to help us win the war.

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 #30
Consortiumnews.com
December 5, 2015
PBS Joins the MSM's Syria-Russia Bias
By Rick Sterling

Mainstream U.S. media systematically excludes points of view on world affairs that deviate from Official Washington's "group think." With no lessons learned from the Iraq-WMD debacle, the MSM only lets on establishment or right-wing pundits with conformist points of view on crises with Syria and Russia, notes Rick Sterling.

PBS Newshour is considered high-quality journalism by many North Americans. But is it? A test case is their report on Nov. 24 when a Russian jet was shot down and one pilot killed as he descended by parachute. This was a significant international event and the situation is still dangerous. The conflict in Syria could get even worse. PBS Newshour presented a discussion/analysis of the event with two guests: Nicholas Burns and Angela Stent. The PBS Newshour host was Judy Woodruff. [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/how-the-turkey-russia-conflict-complicates-anti-islamic-state-efforts/]

This critique applies to that one PBS Newshour broadcast but the essential points are true for much of what you see on the program (and across the mainstream U.S. news media). Assumptions and bias regarding the Syrian conflict are pervasive and persistent. So, how can U.S. foreign policy change (or even show some nuance) if the public is continually fed biased and false information from one point of view? Here are specific points:

Nicholas Burns is a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO. In early 2003 he urged the "unity" of NATO as some NATO allies expressed doubts about the U.S. the invasion of Iraq. In 2006, he urged punishing sanctions on Iran. In 2011, Burn wrote, "President Obama was surely right to commit the United States, however reluctantly, to the NATO campaign [to overthrow Libyan President Gaddafi]." Burns has a track record supporting Western aggression against other countries. He evidently has learned nothing from the resulting chaos, devastation and death.

Angela Stent is associated with conservative think tanks and a former State Department and National Intelligence Officer. She is also author of the 2015 book "The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the 21st Century." Written in non-academic prose, the book explores what she considers four efforts by the U.S. to reset or start new relations with Russia following the Cold War.

Unfortunately the bias of the author is apparent and inconvenient history is not mentioned. For example, the Project for a New American Century and aggressive U.S. foreign policy under its influence have been "disappeared." She presents a biased history which ignores or whitewashes examples of U.S. collusion and support of violent coups - from Venezuela to Honduras to Ukraine and Libya.

-The analysts make false or exaggerated claims: Burns said the Russians "did violate Turkish air space" but he offers no evidence and it now appears the Russian jet was shot down over Syrian air space. Both Burns and Stent claim the Russians violated Turkish air space "several" times or "repeatedly." Woodruff refers to them as "invasions." Contrary to the allegations, the only confirmed Russian violation of Turkish air space was on Sept. 3 in bad weather at the beginning of Russia's anti-terrorist bombing campaign inside Syria.

-The analysts failed to include relevant information, such as: Air space violations occur frequently and Turkey is a major offender. The normal practice is to usher an intruding plane out of the air space, not shoot it down.

-The analysts are hypocritical about air space violations. Burns claims that Russia's alleged 17-second violation of Turkish air space "is clearly illegal under international law." Yet the analysts say nothing about the frequent, much longer - and intentional - violations of Syrian air space by American jets and bombers that have NOT been authorized by the Syrian government.

-The program fails to consider Putin's comments that the action was "a stab in the back, carried out by the accomplices of terrorists." Why wasn't this comment discussed? A Columbia University researcher lists proof of Turkish collaboration with ISIS here. Another lengthy list is here. American Lebanese journalist Serena Shim documented Turkey's pivotal role in this video. She was killed the day after publicly expressing fear of the Turkish Intelligence Agency (MIT). Why did the guests not mention any of this?

-The analysts also ignore Turkey's economic support of ISIS. For example, Bilal Erdogan, the son of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been implicated in purchasing ISIS oil from Syria, mixing it with Iraqi Kurdish oil and shipping it abroad. Bilal Erdogan is co-owner of BMZ oil and chemicals shipping company which has been buying additional ships. Burns talks about the importance of "history and context" but he leaves out essential facts and history about the conflict.

-The analysts distort facts to support their biases. Analyst Burns claims "The Russians have been bombing Syrian Turkmen, ethnic Turkmen villages." Evidence indicates the Russians are not bombing random villages; they are bombing specific terrorist groups in the area. We know that terrorists are in the area because they have been raining missiles into Latakia city, killing 23 students and civilians on Nov. 10. We know the terrorists are there because they video recorded themselves. Other video shows the downing of the aircraft, the pilots descending, the "rebels" shooting at the parachutists, and then the captured dead Russian pilot. Article 42 of Geneva Convention says, "No person parachuting from a plane in distress shall be made the object of attack during his descent." Why should Russia and Syria be criticized for attacking these terrorists? It has since emerged that the most vocal "rebel" leader in the video is a Turkish citizen.

-Burns conflates a sectarian extremist fringe with an entire religious branch. When he refers to "Sunni" groups he actually means the Wahabi/Takfiri opposition such as Jabhat al Nusra, Ahrar al Sham, ISIS, etc. Most Sunni Muslims in the world oppose the bastardization of their religious faith by the fanatic Wahabi element. Characterizing the jihadis as being "Sunni groups" is comparable to identifying the Ku Klux Klan as representing the "Christian group." It's additionally false and misleading because the majority of Syrian Army soldiers are Sunni.

-The analysts ignore the fact that Syria has been the victim of severe violations of international law for over four years. Turkey, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, France and the United Kingdom have been training armed opposition groups and supplying them with weapons, logistics and salaries with the goal of violently overthrowing the Syrian government. As confirmed by the International Court at The Hague in their ruling filed by Nicaragua against the United States, this is in breach of international law.

-The analysts convey the confusion and contradiction of Western policy toward Syria. Stent says, "We disagree with the Russians on the fate of Assad and we disagree on who the enemy is." In short: Stent and Burns think the West should be able to dictate who can be President of Syria; they also think Russia should refrain from bombing any group except ISIS. They want Russia to refrain from bombing Nusra/Al Qaeda, Ahrar al Sham and other terrorist groups. It is a duplicitous strategy.

The Russian position is much more logical. They have been clear from the start: They are there to oppose sectarian terrorists threatening the Syrian people and state. ISIS is one of these groups but there are many others. What is common among them is sectarianism and reliance on outside funding. One group consists of Uighurs of Chinese nationality. They are part of the "Army of Conquest" that made a big advance in northern Syria in spring 2015.

The idea that these sectarian terrorist groups should be allowed to roam free is illogical if your goal is to overcome terrorism. There are tens of thousands of sectarian fighters who are not in ISIS. Some of these groups threaten major population areas including Latakia and government-controlled sections of Aleppo. Other groups control border zones which allow for inflow of more weapons and jihadis. It is logical that the Russian Air Force and Syrian Army would prioritize attacks on these groups near major population centers and controlling border zones.

Regarding the "fate of Assad," the Russians believe the Syrian Presidency should be determined by Syrians not foreigners. They have indicated they would accept internationally supervised elections. That policy is in keeping with international law. The policy of the West trying to dictate who can or cannot be President of Syria is a violation of the United Nations Charter and International Law.

-Stent engages is amateur psychology instead of policy analysis. She speculates that Russia is intervening in the Syrian conflict because "they want the U.S. to come to them, they want to be the leader. ... There is some reckless behavior obviously." It's a silly analysis that ignores serious issues such as the U.S. policy of "regime change," the historic links between Syria and Russia, and the credible belief that the attack on Syria is a step toward attacking Iran.

-Analyst Burns concludes with call for war via "No Fly Zone." He says, "If the Russians don't restrain the Syrian government from firing barrel bombs into civilian neighborhoods the U.S. ought to consider a No Flight (sic) Zone with Turkey and other countries to shut down the Syrian Air Force. That's what Secretary [Hillary] Clinton has been advocating and I think she's right. ... The way to save civilians and reduce the number of refugees is to shut down air traffic in the northern part of Syria. That's an idea that the administration has to consider now given these events."

Thus Ambassador Burns goes from criticizing Russia for an alleged 17-second intrusion into Turkish air space to calling for Turkey, the United States and other countries to take over northern Syrian air space. It's a call for more war masquerading as a call for peace.

We can see where his call would lead by looking at consequences of the "No Fly Zone" in Libya. This "humanitarian" effort became a cover for "regime change" that has resulted in vastly more conflict, deaths, displaced persons and refugees. Since the NATO-driven "regime change" in Libya, terrorism has exploded across Libya and into neighboring countries.

Does Burns really want to take the U.S. into a potential war with Syria and Russia by trying to take over northern Syria? What is wrong with following international law and letting the Syrian people determine their leader?

With Russian air support the Syrian Army is advancing on nearly all fronts. Is that what Turkey and other enemies of Syria are really concerned about?

The U.S. has been invading or surreptitiously overthrowing governments around the globe for the past 65 years. This U.S. aggression has usually ended badly, especially for the target country but also for the U.S. economy and population. Why do these wars keep happening? To some extent it is media failure to expose what's going on and encourage serious debate.

The PBS Newshour program on Nov. 24 is an example of why the U.S. public is so confused about Syria. PBS Newshour could have presented one of the analysts, Burns or Stent, along with an analyst with a different viewpoint who could have challenged the biased perspective. For instance, it could have been someone from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity like Ray McGovern or someone representing Russia or Syria, perhaps the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations.

Instead we had another propaganda presentation, biased and misleading. PBS Newshour is failing the public. If you agree, consider letting the PBS ombudsman know. His email and phone contact is at www.pbs.org/ombudsman/home/

Rick Sterling is a writer and organizer with Syria Solidarity Movement, Task Force on the Americas and Mt Diablo Peace & Justice Center.

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 #31
www.thedailybeast.com
December 6, 2015
No, We're Not Facing World War III
But this hysterical argument is effectively used by Vladimir Putin to force the West into submission.
By Edward Lucas
Edward Lucas is a senior editor for The Economist.

"And then we get World War III." With that crushing rejoinder, most arguments about how to deal with Vladimir Putin move toward a sterile conclusion. The Russian leader sits on the world's second-biggest nuclear arsenal. He has shown he is willing to use force, and to escalate. So any attempt to confront Russia militarily risks the end of life on the planet and are better not pursued.

People who come out with this sort of argument are only free to do so because we won the Cold War. If we had followed that approach in the years since 1948, history would have looked very different. We would not have saved Berlin during the airlift in 1948. We would not have protected South Korea when it was attacked from the north. We would never have dared fight Communism in Indochina. We would not have defended Western Europe from the overwhelming conventional threat posed by the Warsaw Pact. We would not have armed the Afghan resistance after the Soviet invasion of that country. In short, we would never have tried to resist Communism at all, and the result would have been defeat.

It is true that Russia's swaggering approach to its nuclear arsenal is worrying. Putin and his senior associates regularly refer to their nuclear weapons in both public and private meetings with foreigners. Most recently the gadfly Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the notionally opposition (but in fact Kremlin-friendly and thoroughly misnamed) Liberal Democrats suggested dropping a nuclear weapon in the Bosphorus to obliterate Istanbul. Other countries do not do that. Even Iran tempers its rhetoric when it comes to its putative nuclear arsenal.

It is also true that we came perilously close to nuclear conflict during the Cold War. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine commander called Vasili Arkhipov refused to launch nuclear-tipped torpedoes against American warships that were trying to force his vessel to surface. A technical failure in a new missile-defense radar in Moscow in September 1983 appeared to indicate a massive U.S. nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. A steely-nerved duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, defied procedures and ruled that the alarm was a false one. In the Abel Archer crisis two months later the Soviet leadership became convinced that NATO war games were a cover for a pre-emptive strike by NATO. Only the presence of a British mole, Oleg Gordievsky, in the heart of the KGB, alerted Western leaders to the danger of an accidental nuclear war.

There are plenty of lessons from the Cold War about how to manage deterrence better: arms control, hotlines, confidence-building measures and diplomacy. It is worrying that Russia shows no interest in renewing these, and is actively ripping up the last vestiges of strategic stability bequeathed by the East-West honeymoon which ended the Cold War.

Yet the big point is that deterrence worked, and still works. In fact it works better now than ever. The United States is overwhelmingly dominant in every part of the military spectrum, from space to cyber via conventional and nuclear weapons, just as the Western alliance with its combined GDP of around $40 trillion, and population of 800 million, is overwhelmingly more powerful than Russia (GDP of $1.7 trillion and population of 140 million: both shrinking, incidentally).

Putin is a bully, but he is not insane. He may rattle his nuclear saber, but in any real confrontation with the West, he is the guaranteed loser. He can credibly menace the Baltic states (because in Pentagon war games, the Russians always get to the coast before the allies get to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). But this ignores the wider context. So long as the West responds to a geographically limited provocation with a much broader response, Putin is powerless. He is only able to intimidate us if he frames the conflict in his terms: "Will you risk World War III to protect Estonia?"

The answer to that is (in most Western capitals) clearly no, but it is an answer to the wrong question. Instead, we should frame the conflict in our terms. The apocalypse which we can wreak on the Putin regime has nothing to do with enriched uranium and missiles. It comes from exploiting Russia's Achilles Heel-its dependence on Western financial markets and systems. The Putin regime steals tens of billions of dollars every year from the Russian people. But it does not stash those ill-gotten gains in its own rotten realms. It puts them into well-run investment vehicles in the West. Capital flight from Russia is running at $100 billion a year.

This gives the West-if it so chooses-the best possible response to Russian military intimidation. We can freeze and if necessary seize the Kremlin's assets in the West. We can question and if necessary prosecute the bankers, lawyers, and accountants who have facilitated this huge tide of dirty money that washes through Vienna, Cyprus, London, and Dubai. We can also investigate the curious behavior of Russian participants in setting energy prices in world markets.

This does not mean we should neglect the military countermeasures needed to deter the Putin regime from bullying its neighbors. We need more troops in Poland and the Baltic states, with closer integration of non-NATO Sweden and Finland. We need better intelligence-especially about Russia's battlefield nuclear weapons-better cyber-defenses, and a resilient economic and political system which can withstand sanctions, propaganda attacks, and the targeted use of corruption. All these are the elements of what in military jargon is known as "hybrid warfare"-the use of a wide range of military and non-military means in pursuit of a political goal. Hybrid warfare was waged in Ukraine, initially to dramatically success effect.

But it has not succeeded. Russia did not stoke an insurrection all across southern and eastern Ukraine. It did not best the Ukrainian army (pitifully led and equipped though it was). It did not succeed in breaking the Ukrainian people's will, or toppling the elected government. All that happened for lessons which we should bear in mind in our far stronger and richer societies: Ukrainians survived because they were not scared. We are losing because we are. The fear of "World War III" is part of the Kremlin's psychological arsenal, designed to make us think that resistance is futile or suicidally risky.

It is not. Russia is in objective terms a nuisance, not a menace. It becomes a danger only because we let it. Putin is far more scared of us than we should be of him. After all, we've got his money.

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 #32
Fair Observer
www.fairobserver.com
December 4, 2015
Is Europe's Buffer Zone in Ukraine Keeping it Safe?
BY OLENA LENNON AND BRIAN MILAKOVSKY

Olena Lennon is an adjunct professor of Foreign Policy and Conflict Resolution at the University of New Haven. Brian Milakovsky works on humanitarian issues in eastern Ukraine. He has been living and working in Russia and Ukraine since 2009

Ukraine must protect civilian populations in the Donbas region and seek a political solution to the conflict.

European and American foreign policy elites have come to regard the brutal war in eastern Ukraine almost entirely through the lens of geopolitics. The terrible human suffering of the war remains an unfocused foreground that they gaze through at a "resurgent Russia," "Europe in the balance," "challenges to world order."

The distorting effect of this distance became visible to the authors of this article, one of whom spent September 25 rubbing elbows with policymakers at the congressional forum, and the other as the guest of a young Ukrainian family on the frontlines of this conflict.

MAINTAINING THE ILLUSION

The forum brought together prominent Ukrainian, European and American politicians and activists to advocate for humanitarian, economic and "yes, military aid" as Ukraine gradually recedes from the headlines. But they were matched by numerous speakers who called for a reignition of the very conflict that has brought that crisis on. They stated that Ukrainians must be armed for the preservation of European order, because-as former Georgian Ambassador Temuri Yakobashvili put it during a discussion at the forum-"they are the only ones who know how to fight Russians."

Lest anyone think that a return to armed hostilities might come at too high a cost for the already traumatized country, Ukraine was reminded over and over that the stakes are pan-European, if not global.

"A successful democratic struggle in Ukraine will help revive the democratic spirit in Europe and the United States," said Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy. "Ukraine can succeed, and if it does, it will not just be a triumph for the Ukrainian people. It will also make possible a Europe that is whole and free." Similarly, General Wesley Clark emphatically stated in his keynote address that "much of mankind's future is being decided in Ukraine" and "if Ukraine completes this transition to Western democracy ... there's no more war in Europe. Ever. Ever!" No pressure.

Astonishingly, bellicose statements like those of Yakobashvili and Clark received cheers and applause from the audience. While these statements may sound like a compliment to the Ukrainian people, this position reduces their country to a buffer zone-a perpetual frontline. Neither American nor European politicians can afford to tell their domestic audiences that they are not doing enough to stop the Russian aggression (especially given its recent involvement in Syria). And so to a great extent, Ukraine is expected to be more aggressive in its fight against Russia in order to maintain the illusion that there is still progress in containing Moscow.

And behind the cold, pragmatic concept of a "buffer zone" hides its true meaning: "buffer people." It is Ukrainians who are to engage the Russian armed forces with the long-promised advanced weaponry, and Ukrainians who will comprise the entirety of the collateral damage.

While US President Barack Obama vetoed the national defense budget, which included $50 million toward defensive weapons for Ukraine, he announced that Washington would still supply Ukraine with counter-battery radar systems. And if US officials don't see provision of radars as potentially escalating the conflict, Russia certainly does-and it already threatened retaliation.

Obama is wise to avoid the more escalatory move. The cost of a return to full-on war for Ukraine would be untenable. At the United Nations' conservative estimate, the war has killed 8,000 people and displaced approximately 1.4 million. The life-giving mining and industrial sectors of Donbas are ravaged, and the economic crisis induced by the war is spreading that effect far into government-controlled territory.

ON THE GROUND IN DONBAS

Figures cannot express the full cost of suffering and strife, and the deep alienation in the eastern Ukraine. One of these authors spent the lovely autumn day of September 25 far from Washington at a young family's half-finished home on the Donbas frontline. Denis and Yulia survived the shelling in summer 2014, when the Ukrainian army drove the separatists out of their city. But that winter, their home was destroyed by a direct hit from separatist artillery, killing both of Yulia's parents.

They returned, and for months cleared the rubble and planted their garden under intermittent shelling. Their children learned to identify the sound of different shells as they passed overhead in both directions. With the help of aid organizations and volunteers, they began rebuilding their shattered home. Gazing at the cinderblock walls of their house Yulia sighs: "For me and the kids, this is already happiness. Just give us peace so we can enjoy it!"

Just give us peace.

This is the phrase one hears from so many refugees and frontline civilians in Donbas. From people like Natasha, who fled the Syrian conflict three years ago (she was married to a Kiev-educated Arab) for the refuge of her parent's home in Luhansk. When the city came under fire by the Ukrainian army last spring, she and her children became refugees again, moving to a government-held town across the river, which itself was under constant fire until the guns went silent two months ago.

And now, in the midst of its unaccustomed and fragile silence Natasha, Yulia, Denis and thousands like them are cautiously allowing themselves to hope that this is no mere lull in the fighting, but the end of the war that has overturned their lives. This is reflected in the falling numbers of internally displaced persons (IDP). In October, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported roughly 1.5 million IDPs in Ukraine; a month later, the number dropped to under 975,000-a staggering 35% decrease. Encouraged by the reduced fighting, people are returning to their homes.

If their hope is rewarded, and they are not forced to spend another winter hiding from the bombs in freezing basements and root cellars, then it could become a potent force for reconciliation and stabilization in Ukraine.

PEACE IS VICTORY

Treating Ukraine as a shield against Russia, as a "buffer zone," could mean keeping that country in a near perpetual state of armed conflict and everything that Europe hopes to reduce on its perimeters-instability, poverty and mass refugee flows.

The US should increase diplomatic support to resolve the Minsk Agreement's central quandary: If the so-called people's republics are to remain in Ukraine, how will they take part in the politics of a country they have recently been in armed conflict with?

Any sustainable resolution is likely prove as messy as the political resolution that ended the fighting in Bosnia 20 years ago. The horse-trading and gerrymandering of that deal were repugnant, but unquestionably preferable to the fratricide that preceded it.

Stabilizing Donbas will also require Ukraine to rethink its economic blockade of the breakaway regions. If the artificial internal border between the two halves of Donbas remains a persistent barrier to trade, then both sides are doomed to economic decline. It is only a question of which sponsor can prop up its Donbas longer.

Even if economic relations in the east are restored, huge injections of foreign aid will still be necessary to prop up the economy of Ukraine proper. In March, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved Ukraine's request for $17.5 billion. For good measure, the US has committed $2 billion in loan guarantees. However laudable, this level of financial support is nothing compared to the hundreds of billions the European Union has poured into Greece; and in the words of David R. Cameron, director of Yale's Program in European Union Studies, Western assistance to Ukraine has been "quite literally, nothing but cheap talk."

Western leaders should focus on helping Ukraine stave off economic collapse in the east, capitalize on this renewed sense of hope and continue to search nonmilitary solutions. With the return of civilian populations to Donbas' conflict zones, the stakes are only getting higher. No weapon, however precise, will eliminate Ukraine's enemies, deter Russia or make Europe safer without the political will of the conflicting sides to agree to a peaceful coexistence.

Yakobashvili is right in saying that "a successful Ukraine will be a crucial part of the European and Euro-Atlantic economic and security architecture, and a stimulus for the rest of the post-Soviet region, especially to Russia, to reform and drag themselves out of the swamp of corruption and forced ideologies." Ukrainians can be role models for humanism and democracy, and the place to start is in the volatile peripheral zone of the east.

If Ukraine is to become a model and not a cautionary tale, then the West must help it to protect civilian populations in Donbas and seek a political solution to this conflict.

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 #33
AFP
December 7, 2015
Biden in Ukraine to push reforms, reaffirm US support

US Vice President Joe Biden meets Ukrainian leaders on Monday to kickstart their drive against corruption and reassure them of Western support in the face of the current focus on Syria.

Biden's visit is his fourth to Kiev since Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in March 2014 and then watched with approval as pro-Kremlin insurgents carved out their own region in the eastern industrial heartland of the ex-Soviet state.

He met Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in private early Monday and will speak to Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk before delivering a highly anticipated address to parliament the following day.

"We do not know if there is any other historical precedent for a foreign official giving a speech like this," said one senior US administration official in a teleconference with reporters.

Washington and Kiev's EU allies support Ukraine's view of Russia being an "aggressor" that orchestrated the separatist revolt in reprisal for the February 2014 ouster of a Moscow-backed president -- an assertion the Kremlin denies.

Both Washington and Brussels have slapped stiff economic sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin's inner circle and have helped train and equip Ukraine's underfunded army with defensive equipment such as advanced radar.

But the situation changed when Russia began launching ferocious air strikes against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's foes on September 30.

Washington accused Putin of trying to prop up his most important Middle East ally by targeting Western-backed Syrian rebels instead of the Islamic State and other extremists occupying swathes of Syria and Iraq.

Yet the Islamic State's claim of downing a Russian airliner carrying 224 holidaymakers and crew from Egypt on October 31 appears to have prompted Moscow to focus more on bombing the Islamic State's oil infrastructure and other jihadist targets.

The November 13 Paris attacks further prompted French President Francois Hollande to try and enlist Russia in a "grand coalition" against the IS that included the United States and some European and Arab states.

Hollande's mission has been treated with caution by the White House and overt fright by Ukraine.

The senior US official said Biden would take extra care to stress that the overtures toward Putin in no way affected the West's backing of Kiev.

"I think that is going to be a major theme of the trip -- that nothing that is going on in the Middle East has changed one iota of our commitment to the Ukrainian people and to their security," the US official said.

Yatsenyuk added in a televised address on Sunday that "Russia's plan to erase Ukraine from the global radar (has failed) thanks to latest visits by our European partner and -- most importantly -- US Vice President Joe Biden."

Tackling corruption

Yet Biden arrives in a 40-million-strong country whose morale is sagging due to Poroshenko's seeming inability to erase corruption that has plagued Ukraine for much of its recent history.

Poroshenko's prosecutor general has particularly fallen prey to accusations of blocking investigations and hiring workers who have since been detained with huge stashes of gold and cash in their flats.

Both this and Kiev's futility in winning back the east after 19 months of bloodshed that has claimed more than 8,000 lives is souring the public's mood toward the government and helping the resurgence of Ukrainian far-right groups.

"Much more needs to be done to reform the prosecutor-general's office so that it actually enables anti-corruption efforts as opposed to standing in (their) way," the US official said.

Some analysts said the problem rested in Kiev's ineffective bid to break the grip a handful of tycoons have enjoyed over the state's politics by indirectly controlling its main firms.

"Ukraine has 1,833 state corporations that are a persistent source of corruption," said Anders Aslund of the US-based Atlantic Council.

"The government has failed to privatise one single enterprise because of deeply ingrained vested interests."

And even some of the president's backers agree.

Western "fatigue with Ukrainian corruption has reached a critical level," pro-Poroshenko lawmaker Sergiy Leschenko wrote on Facebook.

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 #34
Ukrainian government must take important political decisions in view of its obligations to IMF - U.S. Vice President Biden

KYIV. Dec 7 (Interfax) - The United States Vice President Joseph Biden has stressed the need for Ukraine to make important political decisions in the context of its obligations to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The parties talked about the very important implementation of Ukraine's obligations to the IMF with the aim to continue the assistance, Biden said at a briefing held jointly with Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko in Kyiv on Monday.

These obligations require important political decisions not only from the Ukrainian president, but from Rada too, said Biden, while acknowledging that tackling the lack of economic progress, which has gone on for 20-30 years, is not an easy thing to do.

Biden said that the U.S. will support Ukraine on this track and be its ally in dealing with the IMF.

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#35
Interfax-Ukraine
December 7, 2015
U.S. Vice President suggests Kyiv should accelerate passing of law on elections in Donbas
 
U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden assured full U.S. support for Ukraine and urged the passing of a law on elections in Donbas when speaking during his meeting with Ukrainian members of parliament, representatives of the presidential administration and members of civic society, Deputy Svitlana Zalischuk from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc parliamentary faction said.

"The Vice President made strong statements about support for Ukraine in financial terms and beyond. And [he] guaranteed that Ukraine is a central topic of any kind of meeting with Putin, whatever the pretext," Zalischuk wrote on her Facebook page.

According to her, Biden also urged at the meeting the simultaneous amendment of the country's constitution and the passing of legislation on elections in the territories beyond Kyiv's control, which "will make it possible for the U.S. to demand return moves from Russia and unity on the [anti-Russian] sanctions from Europe."

The key topics of the meeting were an unsatisfactory level of the fight against corruption and the prospect of a reshuffle of the government, as well as Minsk (international community acting on Russia), Constitution and the electoral law, she said. "And Crimea - what's next," Zalischuk wrote.

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 #36
Human Rights Watch
December 7, 2015
Letter to Vice President Biden on Ukraine
 
 Vice President Joseph Biden
Eisenhower Executive Office Building
1650 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20502
 
Dear Mr. Vice President,

We are writing regarding your upcoming travel to Ukraine the week of December 7, 2015. Your trip presents an important opportunity for the United States to raise human rights concerns with President Petro Poroshenko and other senior officials. We write to outline a few key concerns regarding Ukraine that we hope you will discuss during your trip.

Use of Schools in Armed Conflict: Since the beginning of the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, both Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed rebels have used schools for military purposes. Hundreds of schools on government-controlled and rebel-occupied territories have been damaged or destroyed by indiscriminate shelling or targeted attacks.  Targeted attacks on educational institutions not in use by military, and which therefore do not constitute military objectives, are war crimes under international criminal law and the laws of war. In light of Ukraine's upcoming membership of the United Nations Security Council, we urge you to encourage the government of Ukraine to heed Security Council Resolution 2225 (2015) and "take concrete measures to deter ... use of schools by armed forces and armed groups".

Cluster Munitions: Human Rights Watch has documented evidence of the use of cluster munitions by pro-government forces and Russia-backed rebels during the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine. Cluster munitions are inherently indiscriminate weapons that tend to cause significant harm to civilians, particularly when used in populated areas. We hope you will urge Ukraine to conduct a full investigation into the use of such weapons over the course of the conflict, and to take clear action to prevent them from being deployed in ways that can harm civilians in the future.

Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs): Over 1.5 million people have been internally displaced by the conflict since April 2014. The existing IDP registration procedure is unnecessarily cumbersome and bureaucratic. We hope you will urge President Poroshenko to sign a proposed law that improves the registration procedure and means of accessing employment and state benefits for those displaced by the conflict. President Poroshenko rejected the bill when it first came before him, returning it to parliament, but will have a second chance to sign the bill, which should retain the provisions to improve the IDP registration process.

LGBT Rights: In November 2015 the Rada adopted amendments to the labor code that ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Despite this very positive move, anti-LGBT sentiment in Ukraine remains strong - including among senior officials -and a new labor code is currently being prepared for adoption that does not include the same anti-discrimination provision. We hope you will urge Ukraine's leadership to ensure that the anti-discriminatory provision is included in any new version of the labor code.

Accountability for Past Abuses:  We urge you to press the Ukrainian government to ensure accountability for the perpetrators of abuses during the 2014 Maidan protests and the May 2, 2014 political violence in Odessa by conducting adequate and transparent investigations, capable of leading to the identification and prosecution of those responsible. We hope you will also urge Ukraine's leadership to conduct full investigations into abuses by both pro-Russia rebels and Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine since April 2014, including arbitrary detention, forced labor and torture of detainees.

Finally, we hope you will urge Ukraine's leadership to cooperate fully with the International Criminal Court (ICC). While not yet a member of the ICC, Ukraine has accepted the Court's jurisdiction, including over alleged crimes committed on its territory since February 20, 2014. This time period includes the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine. The ICC prosecutor is now considering whether a formal investigation is merited under the Rome Statute, the ICC treaty. We hope you encourage Ukraine's leadership to cooperate with the ICC prosecutor in her preliminary examination.

Sincerely,
Hugh Williamson
Director, Europe and Central Asia Division
Human Rights Watch

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 #37
Vice.com
December 7, 2015
Joe Biden Is Visiting Ukraine - And It Could Get Really Awkward
By Simon Ostrovsky

It's a diplomat's job to stay all smiles and keep the business of international relations chugging along, no matter how bad things look. But sometimes, even diplomats lose their cool.

This week, US Vice President Joe Biden is visiting Kiev to tell Ukrainians they still have Washington's support in their fight against Russia and Russia-backed separatists in the country's east. But his message may be overshadowed by the US ambassador to Kiev, who hasn't been acting very diplomatically lately.

At the end of September, Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt got up in front of a group of businessmen and investors at a conference in the city of Odessa and told them that Ukrainian prosecutors were protecting the corrupt owner of an energy company that employs the Biden's son, Hunter, instead of prosecuting him.

"We have learned that there have been times when the Prosecutor General's Office not only did not support investigations into corruption, but rather undermined prosecutors working on legitimate corruption cases," Pyatt said in Ukraine's main port city.

He then pointed specifically to a case involving former Ukrainian Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of the Burisma Holdings energy firm, which hired Hunter Biden to its board of directors shortly after the Euromaidan revolution overthrew Zlochevsky's former boss Viktor Yanukovych.

Burisma likely hired Biden's son in the hopes that some of the family prestige would rub off on the company in the uncertain times that followed the revolution, Daria Kaleniuk, director of Ukraine's Anti-Corruption Action Center, told VICE News.

"They want there to be less suspicion that they're involved in corrupt under-the-table dealings and are instead seen as operating in line with international standards," Kaleniuk said, adding that Burisma received gas production licenses in questionable circumstances under the former regime.

Burisma insists it hired the vice president's son to its board because he is an experienced lawyer. "This is totally based on merit," the company's chairman, Alan Apter said when the younger Biden was hired.

According to the US ambassador, Hunter Biden's boss Zlochevsky stole $23 million from the Ukrainian people. But when a British court seized the money and asked Ukrainian prosecutors to send documents to confirm the funds were illicit, they stalled, forcing the court to release the assets back to the former ecology minister.

The elder Biden arrives in Ukraine at a time when there is no bigger issue than corruption. With the war in the east stabilized for the time being, the media have nominated graft as the country's number one enemy - not Russia.

The vice president also lands after months of acrimony between reformers and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko over the prosecutor general, who Poroshenko has refused to dismiss despite numerous allegations about abuse of authority.

But the White House wants the focus of Biden's visit to be Ukraine's close alliance with the US. One senior administration official, who asked not to be named, said a major goal was to remind people that Ukraine was not forgotten despite the fact that attention has shifted toward Russia's involvement in Syria.

"That's going to be a major theme of the trip - that nothing that's going on in the Middle East has changed one iota of our commitment to the Ukrainian people and to their security," the official said in a briefing for journalists.

The official also acknowledged that the administration has had to fall into line with the ambassador's now public views.

"The Office of the Prosecutor General itself is in desperate need of reform," the official said. "And so [Biden] has made this very clear to President Poroshenko in previous conversations... So I think we are largely in line with Ambassador Pyatt's sense that much more needs to be done."

But Biden's meeting with Poroshenko may be a bit awkward, given that the US backs Ukraine on the presumption that it wants to have a Western-style democratic system with checks and balances - not a Russian-style autocracy where anyone who is friends with top officials gets a free pass.

Ukrainian reformers will be watching closely to hear what Biden tells the president.

"We have been very happy with the criticism the embassy has been bringing against the prosecutor's office," said Kaleniuk. "It has been very direct. So if Biden continues in the same vein and highlights the activities of the prosecutor's office in defending people associated with Burisma, then it will be clear that he is doing his job fairly and is not beholden to narrow family interests."

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 #38
Interfax
November 7, 2015
Lavrov: U.S. admits lack of prospects of restoring Ukrainian solvency

By having refused to guarantee Ukraine's debt as part of Russia's proposal to restructure it, the United States effectively admitted the absence of prospects of restoring its solvency, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with Interfax.

"We were ready to restructure Ukraine's $3 billion debt at much more advantageous terms than those asked of us by the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. But these terms, which extend the repayment not by one but three years and in equal installments, were certainly tied to these payments by Ukraine being guaranteed by the EU, the U.S. and the IMF or a first-class international bank. We were denied it. By officially rejecting the proposed scheme, the United States thereby subscribed to not seeing any prospects of Ukraine restoring its solvency," Lavrov said.

"This reform, which they are now trying to implement, designed to suit Ukraine only, could plant a time bomb under all other IMF programs," Lavrov said. "Essentially, this reform boils down to the following: since Ukraine is politically important - and it is only important because it is opposed to Russia - the IMF is ready to do for Ukraine everything it has not done for anyone else, and the situation that should 100 percent mean a default will be seen as a situation enabling the IMF to finance Ukraine," the minister said.

This December Ukraine must repay the $3-billion Eurobonds that were allocated in Russia's favor in 2013. Kyiv offered Moscow to restructure this issue under the same terms as for the holders of commercial bonds, Russia refused to discuss this option, insisting that the debt is sovereign, not commercial. In November, Russia proposed its option: a three-year deferral of the repayment ($1 billion to be paid each year in 2016-2018), provided that the debt is guaranteed by the U.S., the European Union or an international financial institution. Last Saturday the Russian Finance Ministry said that the U.S. government had officially refused to guarantee the Ukrainian debt.

The IMF Executive Board is meeting on Tuesday to consider changes to the IMF policy with respect to countries with a debt to official creditors. The IMF's current lending policy rules out the possibility of providing financing for a member state which has a debt to an official creditor. Removing this restriction will enable the IMF to continue disbursements to Ukraine under the current extended-financing program, even if Kyiv defaults on its debt to Russia for the $3 billion Eurobonds issued in 2013.

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 #39
Forbes.com
December 7, 2015
Russia Threatens To Sue Ukraine For Overdue Debts
By Kenneth Rapoza

Moscow wants to continue making Kyiv's work reviving its economy harder than it is. Russia says it will sue Ukraine if it does not pay service on its $3 billion loan, state media reported this weekend.

Russia is giving Ukraine until Dec. 20 before it goes after the government in arbitration. The Russian Finance Ministry said Saturday that Washington's recent refusal to backstop Ukrainian debt has convinced them that Ukraine will miss payments.

"This week we received an official refusal of the U.S. government to provide a guarantee for Ukraine's obligations. In this regard, we have no choice but to file a lawsuit against Ukraine in case of the borrower's non-fulfillment of its obligations in full by December 20 of this year, which will mean a sovereign default in Ukraine," the Ministry said in a statement.

Russia is worried that Ukraine, its former Soviet ally, is at risk of not getting the rest of its $40 billion financial aid package from the International Monetary Fund because Kyiv has yet to adopt a budget for 2016 that would be consistent with IMF requirements.

Kyiv attests that the Russian loan was a commercial loan and not a sovereign loan. Regardless, the Ukrainian government rejected Russia's restructuring plan of a billion dollars a year starting in 2016, leading to yet another stand-off between the two countries.

Russia and Ukraine have been at loggerheads since 2013. Western sanctions were imposed on Russia in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea, then a Ukrainian run peninsula in the Black Sea. The U.S. and Europe slammed harsher sectoral sanctions on Russia in July of 2014, sending Russian securities to their lowest levels since the financial crisis of 2008.

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 #40
Interfax
December 5, 2015
Russia won't turn off gas to Ukraine and risk transit to EU - energy minister

Vladivostok, 5 December: Russia will in no circumstances turn off the gas supply to Ukraine and place the transit of gas to Europe at risk, Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak has said.

He said this in an interview with Vesti on Saturday with Sergey Brilyev, which was broadcast in the [Russian] far east.

"Ukraine is receiving gas from Russia. Currently, these relations are regulated for six months by a protocol, which was signed in October of this year. We live within the framework of these contracts which were signed in the period to the end of 2019, both for delivery of gas and gas transit. I think that, we need to continue this cooperation in the framework of these contracts, because we are a trustworthy gas supplier for European consumers. This trustworthiness has been affirmed by many decades of work," the minister said.

Answering a question as to whether it would be worth turning off Ukraine's gas "in reprisal" for the cutting off of electric power lines to Crimea, Novak replied: "In no circumstances is it permissible for us to put in doubt the reliability and security of our deliveries for our European consumers, above all."

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 #41
Ukrainian businessman says Ukraine lost $400 bln due to Ukrainian PM

KIEV, December 7. /TASS/. Ukraine's budget has suffered serious losses due to incompetence of the government headed by Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukrainian businessman and politician David Zhvania said in an interview with Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper

"Today Ukraine has lost at least $400 billion because of this incompetent person. But soon they will have nothing more to lose. Further on there will be a disaster. We don't declare default only because we are a country which is in the state of war and the coalition is, I guess, helping us. How many more scandals will it take to realize Yatsenyuk has to go?" - he said.

Zhvania said that he has many "associates" in this fight against the Ukrainian PM.

"I am holding talks trying to explain it to everyone who has some influence that letting this person be the Prime Minister as well as stay in politics may lead to consequences which would ruin the country,"- he said.

"I do not see anyone who opposes it (Yatsenyuk's resignation) and would say no. The only thing Yatsenyuk always speculated on was his special relationship with the United States, he used it to bully and manipulate everyone. But he does not have any important allies any longer. In fact he is alone," - the politician said.

On December 11, the Ukrainian cabinet will report to the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament).

The one-year immunity period for the Yatsenyuk government (when neither the prime minister nor members of the government can be dismissed) expires December 12.

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 #42
Russian Duma speaker says Kiev might unleash new aggression in Donbas

MOSCOW, December 7. /TASS/. Speaker of Russia's State Duma lower parliament house, Sergey Naryshkin, said on Monday Kiev might take advantage of the current international situation and stage a new round of aggression in Donbas.

"There is risk that under the cover of the recent developments on the international arena Kiev might stake on a new round of confrontation as the Kiev authorities are apparently irritated that their problems are fading away from the international agenda," he said at a meeting of the Duma's working group on legal analysis of Ukraine's legislative procedures and laws.

"They seem to be afraid that their speculations on the Donbas problem could be terminated, they are afraid that the European Union will leave them alone in the face of the imminent default and the loss of the Russian market, which is apparently happening from January 1 due to the reasons and developments you are aware of," he said.

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 #43
Luhansk republic leader says Poroshenko won't launch new offensive in Donbas

MOSCOW, December 7. /TASS/. The Kiev leadership understands that it cannot win if Ukrainian forces launch a new offensive in Donbas, the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) head Igor Plotnitsky said on Monday.

"Only real combat actions can demonstrate how our forces are prepared. Judging from the way Kiev is acting, they understand very well what they will have to face. That is why I personally think that [Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko does not have enough gunpowder for such actions. Foolishness may be sufficient to launch provocations but they have to capabilities to win," Luhansk Inform Center quoted Plotnitsky as saying.

LPR people's militia repeatedly stated that Ukrainian Armed Forces regularly move personnel and military equipment to the contact line in Donbas, including those weapons prohibited by the Minsk Agreements. LPR noted that multiple rocket launcher systems were spotted, along with self-propelled artillery systems, tanks and mortars.

Earlier today the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) defense ministry spokesman Eduard Basurin said Ukrainian forces have moved 467 units of artillery, armored vehicles and vehicles with ammunition to the contact line in Donbass over the last week. He said that among military equipment spotted on the Gorlovka direction were 123 tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, 27 Grad multiple rocket launcher systems, 31 cannon artillery systems, two self-propelled artillery systems, one Buk missile defense system, four vehicles with personal belongings, ammunition and personnel.

As for military equipment spotted on the Donetsk direction, Basurin named 146 tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, nine Grad multiple rocket launcher systems, 34 self-propelled artillery systems, four howitzers, 16 vehicles with personal belongings and ammunition and 1,100 personnel.

The defense ministry spokesman said that on the Mariupol direction, DPR spotted 53 tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, eight cannon artillery systems, 13 Grad multiple rocket launcher systems, eight self-propelled artillery systems, seven vehicles with personal belongings and ammunition and 150 personnel.

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 #44
Interfax-Ukraine
December 7, 2015
Right Sector claims to have prevented resumption of power supply to Crimea
 
The Right Sector movement said they prevented an attempt by energy workers to resume power supply via one of the power lines leading to Crimea last night.

"Last night, an attempt was made to connect one of the power grids leading to the plant Tytan owned by oligarch Firtash. Repair workers who arrived in the company of Interior Ministry and SBU officials tried to launch the power line in accordance with an agreement between some organizers of the blockade of Crimea and Poroshenko," Right Sector said in a report posted on its website on Monday.

According to the movement's press service, "three Right Sector operative groups" accompanied by activists from Aidar [volunteer battalion that fights in Donbas] prevented the criminal actions and prevented the supply of power.

The Right Sector said the movement, like many participants in the blockade, were surprised when representatives of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis gave their consent for the resumption of power supply to Crimea.

"The position of the authorities and some organizers of the blockade on economic cooperation and trade with the enemy is unclear to us [...] We are saying that, if electrical power supply is resumed, Right Sector will stop its participation in the public action Blockade of Crimea because it sees no point in such a blockade. We reserve the right to exercise control in a different format and prevent the supply of cargo and resources," the movement said.

Two power line supports were blown up in southern Ukraine in late November, leaving Crimea without power supply. Radical activists from Right Sector and Crimean Tatar organizations prevented the resumption of power supply to Crimea.

The power system of the peninsula is currently working in an isolated mode; rotating outages are being used to save power.

On December 4, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk said the connection of the 220 kV Kakhovska-Tytan power line is needed to prevent industry-related accidents at the Crimean Titan and Crimean Soda Plants.

In an interview with Ukrainian television channels on December 6, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko expressed hope that the supply of power to Crimea would be resumed in the very near future.

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 #45
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
December 5, 2015
Will Crimea's 'energy bridge' save it from dependency on Ukraine?
Electricity in Crimea has been partially restored: On Dec. 2 an underwater cable linked the peninsula's electricity system with a Russian electrical grid. RBTH finds out why the Russian authorities were unprepared for the peninsula's electricity being cut off by Ukrainian activists and asks whether the energy bridge will save Crimean residents from other infrastructure failures in the future.
GEVORG MIRZAYAN, SPECIAL TO RBTH

The solemn inauguration of the so-called "energy bridge" along the bottom of the Kerch Strait on Dec. 2 was a joyous occasion for Crimeans, who had been living without power for more than a week after Ukrainian activists sabotaged pylons carrying power lines to the peninsula from Ukraine's Kherson Region.

However, for many it still has only symbolic significance. Out of the 500MW-power capacity that Crimea needs (it can produce another 500MW by itself) it now has only 200, since the first stage that was launched is only working at half-capacity. Moreover, many are worried about further subversive activities on the part of Ukraine.

"Whatever the Russian Federation does to organize and develop Crimea, it will be blown up, pulverized, destroyed and abandoned. By those who will not reconcile themselves to this... Someone will certainly swim up in a diving suit, lay an explosive device and blow it up," predicted Ukrainian journalist Matvei Ganapolsky, writing for Ukrop.org, a Ukrainian news website.

Experts believe that even if Crimea solves its urgent electricity problem, its water supply infrastructure will remain vulnerable. Last summer in August many Crimean resorts experienced an ecological catastrophe when supplies of fresh water ran out.

Darkness falls over Crimea

The Crimean electricity network was completely shut down in the early hours of Nov. 22 after a group of Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar activists opposed to Russian rule in the region blew up the power lines going to Crimea from Ukraine, plunging the peninsula into darkness. At that moment, in accordance with an agreement signed with Russia, Ukraine was supplying up to 80 percent of all the energy consumed by Crimea.

Strangely enough, considering the tensions between the two countries, the incident took the Crimean authorities by surprise. According to Russian Deputy Energy Minister Andrei Cherezov, out of the 94 supermarkets on the peninsula only 10 have autonomous power supply sources.

In such a situation the authorities were forced to supply power only to facilities providing life-sustaining activity (hospitals in particular), while other consumers (including clinics) were switched to rolling blackouts. The local economy came to a standstill. Residents began to complain that there was practically no mobile phone connection, that lights worked only an hour a day, that gasoline was about to run out and that cars were being pushed to the gas stations.

The failure to follow the scheduled rolling blackouts (which has made Crimeans extremely angry) and the unsuitability of the diesel generators to work in emergency mode (out of the 15 diesel generators supplying heat for Yevpatoria only two were working fully) resulted in the dismissal of Crimean Energy Minister Sergei Yegorov along with his deputy, Yevgeny Demin.

The government had to immediately transfer a large volume of diesel generators onto the peninsula and speed up work on the so-called "energy bridge," which would lay an electricity cable from Kuban (in the south of Russia) to the Crimean Peninsula.

Why wasn't the cable laid earlier?

Many observers, and especially the residents of Crimea, are irritated by the Energy Ministry's slowness and are asking why the cable was not laid earlier, as it is now more than a year and a half ago since the accession of the peninsula to the Russian Federation.

According to Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak, the problem was that the energy bridge did not only entail laying the cable along the bottom of the Kerch Strait (4 lines, 13.5 kilometers each), but it turned out that Russia does not produce cables of such length and most of Russia's foreign partners refused to supply the cable because of economic sanctions related to the takeover of Crimea in March 2014.

In the end the cable was bought in China but the Chinese ship from Shanghai arrived in Kerch only on Oct. 11and work on laying the cable began on October 18. Moreover, the energy bridge entails the construction of high-voltage lines and new substations in the Krasnodarsky Territory and in Crimea, and the overall cost of the project is estimated at about $700 million.

As a result, Russia is working on solving all these problems - but not as fast as it would like.

Nowhere to get water from

The situation with the water is much more complicated. Yes, for now water continues to be supplied from Ukraine, but if the supply were to be cut off, Moscow would be able to provide only temporary solutions.

Crimea consumes about two billion cubic meters of water a year, out of which 80 percent is used for agriculture. In normal natural conditions Ukraine provided one billion cubic meters of water along the North Crimean Canal and the rest flowed into reservoirs from local wells and runoffs. However, if the reservoirs for some reason were not filled up, then 85 percent of all water consumed on the peninsula came from Ukraine.

In this respect, Crimea is particularly vulnerable: If water supplies to Ukraine are also sabotaged (and the subject of various potential "blockades" - banking, maritime, etc - against Crimea is being discussed in Ukrainian media), then the peninsula would be facing serious problems.

The Russian Agriculture Ministry estimates that Crimea's agriculture alone could lose up to 120,000 hectares of terrain due to water supply problems, which would cost 5 billion rubles ($74 million) and 180,000 jobs.

Creating its own water intakes will not solve the problem. According to Crimean Ecology and Wildlife Minister Gennady Narayev, three new intakes, which will be built by the end of the year, will produce a total of only 195,000 cubic meters daily. The modernization of Crimea's water supply infrastructure (74.4 percent of which was in need of repair by 2013, and whose water supply networks lose 20-25 percent of the water) will also not help Crimea in the event of water supplies from Ukraine being severed.

Desalination plants must be built

Some have suggested solving the problem through additional pumping from subterranean sources. A year ago the Crimean authorities noted that the north-eastern part of the peninsula may contain large underground reserves of fresh water.

"It is important that these wells are renewed. The water in these sources, if used reasonably, is inexhaustible," said Rustam Temirgaliyev, First Deputy Chairman of Crimea's Council of Ministers.

Yury Shevchenko, Chairman of the Agrarian, Ecology and Natural Resource Policy Committee at the Crimean State Duma, cautioned: "If we use underground water thoughtlessly, without limits, in the end it will become salt water."

Meanwhile, Chairman of the Ecology and Peace Association of the Crimean Republic Viktor Tarasenko affirms that artesian wells will be effective only for 2-3 years, after which the ground will become salty.

As of today, the only alternative to the North Crimean Canal may be the construction of desalination plants (the overall cost of the project, including infrastructure construction and other work, may total $800 million, while the cost of desalinated water is $0.20-0.35 per cubic meter) or laying a water pipeline from Kuban (the cost of which is estimated at more than $1 billion). However, these projects are not even being studied in preliminary discussions.

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 #46
Kremlin.ru
December 2, 2015
The President launched first stage of power bridge to Crimea

Vladimir Putin participated in the launch of the first stage of a power bridge to Crimea. The ceremony was held during a visit to the Krymenergo company in Simferopol.

Vladimir Putin participated in the launch of the first stage of a power bridge to Crimea. With head of the Republic of Crimea Sergei Aksyonov.

Crimea lost all electricity on the night of November 22, when pylons carrying power lines from Ukraine were blown up.

The power bridge, which is being laid from Krasnodar Territory across the bottom of the Kerch Strait, will eliminate the peninsula's dependency on imported electricity.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Colleagues, we have an important event today: we are beginning work to connect the Crimean peninsula to Russia's unified energy system.

The people present here, behind me and in front of me, are your teams, and each of you has done a great deal of work to ensure that Crimea has reliable electricity supply. We have built more than one hundred kilometres of high-voltage electric cables and today, we are connecting the first power line.

In 2017, we will supply gas to Crimea from the Caucasus, and by the end of 2017, we should complete construction of a thermal power station that will provide an additional 470 megawatts. By 2018, we will add two more units and another 470 megawatts, so Crimea will have a significant development resource.
As you recall, Crimea used to receive 800 megawatts of electricity from Ukraine. Four power lines that should be completed by December 20 will also provide just over 800 megawatts. And after this, it is imperative to add generation capacity as quickly as possible.

In 2017, we will supply gas to Crimea from the Caucasus, and by the end of 2017, we should complete construction of a thermal power station that will provide an additional 470 megawatts. By 2018, we will add two more units and another 470 megawatts, so Crimea will have generation capacity that will allow it to not only supply everything it has today, all the consumers, but will also have a significant development resource that it will be able to use to supply households, recreation sphere and all prospective areas of development in its economy.

The work that has been done is truly extensive. I want to thank you all because we planned for the first power line to be launched on December 20, but instead we are launching it today. Of course, we used a great deal of new equipment in this project, so we will probably need to make additional adjustments. And we must warn consumers - Crimean residents - that some additional disruptions are possible. But overall, the first power line should be working and providing 200 megawatts of electricity.

I hope that the second power line will be launched on December 20, as we agreed, or perhaps even a little earlier, around December 15, providing 400 megawatts in total.

I ask Energy Minister Alexander Novak to report on the course of the work and what should happen in the immediate future in terms of consumption.

I hope that the second power line will be launched on December 20, as we agreed, or perhaps even a little earlier, around December 15, providing 400 megawatts in total.

Energy Minister Alexander Novak: Mr President, following your instructions in April 2014, we developed an energy supply plan for the Crimean Federal District. This plan stipulates, as you just said, the construction of two power stations: one in Sevastopol providing 470 megawatts, and a second one in Simferopol, providing 470 megawatts, with a total provision of 940 megawatts of electricity and a completion date in 2017 or 2018.

The second area is connecting the Crimean energy system to the Kuban energy system and the unified Russian energy system, by laying four underwater cable lines, each of which supplies 220 kilovolt with a capacity of 200 megawatts; that's 800 megawatts in total along the bottom of the Kerch Strait.

This also includes construction of two new substations: the Taman substation with a capacity of 500 kilovolt and 220 kilovolt in its first stage, and the Kafa substation, which is a brand new station. In addition, there will be over 500 kilometres of high-voltage energy lines: 220 kilovolt and higher. As you just said, indeed, our deadlines were very tight, but at the same time, we delivered the first 400 megawatts by December and the next 400 megawatts will be delivered in May 2016.

Given the situation we had at the end of November, with no electricity being supplied by the Ukrainian system, a decision was made to apply all necessary measures to accelerate the construction of a second power line of 200 megawatts and the 400 megawatts planned for launch in December of this year. And thanks to the builders that are here today and to our energy experts, this work was carried out and today we are ready to launch the first facilityand connect the Kuban energy system with the Crimean energy system, uniting the Crimean energy system with the unified Russian energy system for the first time in history and providing 200 megawatts in capacity.

To do this, we completed work to construct the Taman substation under very tight deadlines, and built four underwater lines for the first power line - we are laying cables and putting them into operation. We reconstructed cells at the Kamysh-Burun station, and implemented connectors within the existing Slavyanskaya-Vyshestebliyevskaya line, which allow for a power supplyfrom a single energy system.

That is the first stage. By the end of December - December 20, or perhaps, in accordance with the goal you set, we will be able to finish earlier, we will certainly try - we will provide another 200 megawatts, launching the Kafa substation, as well as the second line: an underwater cable connection of 200 megawatts and an electricity transmission line from Kamysh-Burun to Kafa with connectors to the existing substation in Feodosia. This will provide another 200 megawatts.

Mr President, today we have already checked the state of our energy system's preparedness; we have been in touch with the Taman substation, the Kamysh-Burun substation, the transfer points in Crimea and Taman, where our cable comes out of the water, and we are now ready to give the dispatcher ordersto connect consumers following your command.

Vladimir Putin: Just a second, let's look at how we will distribute this new electricity throughout the peninsula.

Alexander Novak: If I may report, Mr President: from the moment that consumers are connected, literally today, we will be able to provide capacity of about 100 megawatts out of the first 200 megawatts that will allow us to deliver electricity - through the underwater cable. I believe we will get the following 100 megawatts within the next 24 hours.

Currently, we have specificities in the use of the energy system. In order to complete the initial run and provide a reliable electricity supply, the first day's work will focus on a dedicated power grid, and the electricity will primarily go to consumers in the eastern part of Crimea: in Kerch, Feodosia and about 180 communities with a total consumption of about 120 megawatts.

At the same time, in gaining capacity up to 200 megawatts, we will need to provide additional electricity capacity over the next several days to the entire Crimean energy system, including the districts in the central, northern and southern part. As a result, it is imperative for us to determine how these 200 megawatts will be allocated within the next 24 hours, in order for it to be fair in terms of electricity provision and supplying electricity to consumers.

Vladimir Putin: We will ask the head of Crimea. Mr Aksyonov, what is the best way to do this? Should we concentrate the electricity supply in a particular district - or two or three - or distribute it evenly throughout Crimea?

Sergei Aksyonov: Mr President, with your permission, I would like to distribute this resource throughout all of the Republic of Crimea's municipalities evenly. That would be fair: people are truly all in the same situation. I want to pass on their words of enormous gratitude, respect and love for you personally. The Crimean people value you and believe in you, so they knew that you would not leave them helpless.

I always say: when there is a leader and administrator like you, we know that he will support us. They believe in and are proud of their nation, Russia. So my suggestion, Mr President, if you support it, is to distribute this resource evenly.

Vladimir Putin: Evenly, but we need to obtain and supplement the remaining 200 megawatts as quickly as possible. (Addressing to Alexander Novak.) As you said, this will take 24 hours. I remind you again that we will need another 200 megawatts by December 15-20.

Alexander Novak: Plus another 200, for a total of 400 megawatts.

Vladimir Putin: And in May, I will ask you to do this as quickly as possible as well, by the beginning or even ahead of the summer season - to have another 400 megawatts. Thus, we will replace electricity supply from Ukraine in full, completely, providing even a little more than needed. Of course, we also need to synchronise this with the gas suppliers and thermal power station builders in order to provide additional power generation to Crimea by 2017.

Alexander Novak: Very well, Mr President.

In accordance with your decision, when increasing capacity to 200 megawatts in 24 hours, all this electricity will be distributed evenly to consumers within the territory of the Crimean Federal District.

Vladimir Putin: Let's begin our work.

Launch of first stage of the power bridge to Crimea.

And in May, I will ask you to do this as quickly as possible as well, by the beginning or even ahead of the summer season - to have another 400 megawatts. Thus, we will replace electricity supply from Ukraine in full.
Vladimir Putin: I would like to once again point out that a great deal of new equipment is being used and we must avoid being rattled if there are disruptions. Instead, we must calmly, steadily bring it back to order, bring everything back to a normal state, but ideally do this quickly - so that people feel a change for the better.

I want to once again thank all the electrical engineers and builders for what has been done, as well as the leadership of Crimea and Sevastopol- for connecting the electrical supply and working directly with people.

The work is far from finished, and there are many stages in this work ahead. I assume that everything will be done in accordance with the timeline that we discussed, and at the highest level of quality.

Congratulations, and thank you.
<...>
Mr Aksyonov, please thank the Crimean people once again for their patience, and for believing in us, in all of us.

Head of the Republic of Crimea Sergei Aksyonov: They are ready to withstand the challenges. We are even receiving phone calls from people saying, "We don't need any handouts from Ukraine."

Vladimir Putin: We never took any handouts from anyone. But this will be a reliable system connected to Russia's main power grid, and Crimea will have its own power generation system in 2017-2018 that can provide more than it received from Ukraine. So we will provide opportunities for Crimea's economic development for at least the medium-term future.

Sergei Aksyonov: Thank you very much, Mr President.

Vladimir Putin: Thank you to the Crimean people.

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#48
Washington Post
December 3, 2015
Do Crimeans see themselves as Russian or Ukrainian? It's complicated.
By Eleanor Knott
Eleanor Knott is a PhD candidate in political science (expected 2015) at the London School of Economics.
[Text with charts here https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/12/03/do-crimeans-see-themselves-as-russian-or-ukrainian-its-complicated/]

Crimea, annexed by Russia last year - although to date the annexation is recognized by only handful of countries - is back in the news. On Nov. 22, 2015, Crimea's electricity towers were blown up, leaving the region dark. Mainland Ukraine had been supplying most of Crimea's electricity since Russia's annexation of the peninsula in March 2014, but has not stepped up since the towers blew up. Ukraine has no legal responsibility to provide the occupied territory with electricity, but refusing to help provide power of course has the possibility of alienating Crimean residents from the Ukrainian regime. Alternatively, if Russia is seen as unable to ensure something as basic as power in its newly acquired territory, perhaps this will turn more residents against the annexation and in favor of a return to Ukraine.  All of which once again points to the importance of understanding how Crimeans see themselves in terms of their own national identity.

Many observers have suggested that since most Crimeans were ethnically Russian, they were therefore loyal to Russia, and therefore welcomed annexation. But is it true? Would Crimeans have voted to join Russia if the referendum had been legal, free and fair?

As is often the case, the actual evidence suggests a much more complicated picture. Back in the 1990s, Crimean separatists had tried to secede from Ukraine, in part to be closer to Russia. They were able to organize a referendum in 1994, which Kiev declared illegal. This referendum showed mass support for a "treaty based" relationship between Kiev and Crimea, and for allowing dual Russian and Ukrainian citizenship, which was banned under Ukrainian law. However, following this peak, the movement failed to achieve secession, weakened by the egoism of its leader, Yurii Meshkov, who failed to foster ideological cohesion within the movement, nor secure enough mass support to crystallize a viable opposition to the Ukrainian state. After this, separatist politicians became the "losers" of mainstream politics in Crimea, according to those I interviewed, and popular support for separatism waned.

What's more, Crimea is not in fact populated by an ethnically Russian, pro-Russian majority. That's far too homogenized an image of the peninsula. In fact, before annexation, Crimea's Russian ethnic majority was highly fractured and contested, as I will explain in the remainder of this post. Therefore, it is important to go beyond simple explanations of ethnicity as a cause of annexation, or an indicator of support for Russia.

Five categories of Crimean ethnic identity

In 2012 and 2013, as part of my PhD research, I conducted 53 interviews in Simferopol, Crimea, to examine the meanings of being Russian in Crimea. I interviewed individuals from across the political and social spectrum, including many from the post-Soviet generation, to unpack the experiences of being Russian in relation to Ukraine, Russia and Crimea.

Russian ethnicity across Ukraine. Data: Ukrainian Census 2001, Figure: Eleanor Knott
 
Russian Language Across Ukraine
Data: Ukrainian Census 2001, Figure: Eleanor Knott

Based on this data, I constructed categories to help explain the complexity of Russian identity that I observed. Except for the final category, all respondents said that Russian was their native language and language of common communication.

Discriminated Russians
Ethnic Russians
Crimeans
Political Ukrainians
Ethnic Ukrainians

These categories offer a more nuanced look at Crimean and Ukrainian identity, going beyond the mutually exclusive ethnic and census categories of "ethnic Russian" and "ethnic Ukrainian" that most observers have used before now. Using these can help illuminate how Crimeans are actually negotiating complex questions of identity, loyalty and territorial aspirations. Let me describe these categories in more detail.

Discriminated Russians most ardently identified as Russian, ethnically, culturally and linguistically, and were supporters of Russia. They felt marginalized and threatened by Ukraine's policies of Ukrainization, and were members of pro-Russian organizations. By 2014, these organizations came to endorse annexation. That catapulted their leaders, like Sergei Aksenov of Crimea's pro-Russian party (Russkoe Edinstvo), to positions of power - and helped Russia claim some  legitimacy in its occupation. It's important to note, however, that before 2014, only these few highly politicized individuals, including pensioners, were claiming that they were the victims of discrimination.

Discrimination was therefore a sentiment of those who felt they lost out from post-Soviet politics, rather than those willing and able to adapt, in particular the younger post-Soviet generation.

By contrast, Ethnic Russians identified as ethnically Russian. But they expressed no sense of being discriminated against by Ukraine. Instead, they felt a sense of legitimacy in being Russian, and at the same time, they were not only happy to reside in, but felt a sense of belonging to, Ukraine.

Crimeans and Political Ukrainians blurred ethnic categories in ways that could not be captured by censuses.

Crimeans described Crimean ("Krymchan") as their primary identity, saying that they identified as both ethnically Ukrainian and Russian, having come from ethnically mixed families. They expressed a sense of belonging - both as individuals and as a territory - to both Ukraine and Russia.

Political Ukrainians subverted ethnic categories. They defined themselves in terms of their political connections to Ukraine, as post-Soviet citizens of Ukraine. While they identified their parents as ethnically Russian, Russia was a foreign place to them. They felt that ethnicity did not determine their life chances in Crimea or Ukraine because everyone - no matter what ethnicity - "lives badly."

Unlike Ethnic Ukrainians, Political Ukrainians saw themselves as a post-Soviet category who could conceive of themselves as Ukrainian and from Crimea.

Ethnic Ukrainians explained themselves as Ukrainian, culturally and ethnically, because they were born in parts of Ukraine that were outside Crimea.

These categories revealed a lack of association among identity, citizenship status and territorial aspirations. None of those I interviewed held, or admitted to holding, Russian citizenship, citing it as inaccessible and/or undesirable. Only Discriminated Russians wanted, but could not access, Russian citizenship; they wanted leverage against Ukraine, which they felt marginalized them. All other categories saw Russian citizenship as undesirable, offering rights they neither needed nor wanted.

None of the people I interviewed wanted to secede from Ukraine or to join Russia. They were, rather, happy with the status quo. Even Discriminated Russians, the most pro-Russian and pro-Russia category, supported the territorial status quo, preferring peace to separatism or unification, which they associated with "bloodshed" and a "cataclysm." Regardless of how they identified, my respondents said that separatist sentiments had existed only on the political margins after the failure of the separatist movement to achieve secession in 1994.

Russia's annexation of Crimea was anything but inevitable

In other words, I did not find a Crimea that was overwhelmingly identified as Russian, with residents yearning to return to the country where they truly belonged. Rather, Russian identity was complex, fractured and contested. Just because someone identified as Russian did not mean they would be politically pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian.

Further, just because someone identified as Russian, it did not mean they wanted to join Russia. All my respondents saw Ukraine as legitimate and wanted to remain within it. Even Discriminated Russians preferred a "bad peace" to a "good war," as David Laitin argued for ethnic Russians in post-Soviet Estonia.

In other words, Russia's annexation of Crimea was anything but inevitable. It was instead a critical break that came after Ukraine's Euromaidan protests. Ethnic Russian identity or mixed loyalty does not explain Crimea's annexation or the ongoing Donbas conflict. How and why did Crimea's pro-Russian organizations and Ukraine's Party of Regions become willing participants of Russia's annexation? That is a large and more complex question, and deserves an answer that's better than a simplistic recitation of ethnicity.

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 #49
http://newcoldwar.org
December 2, 2015
New York Times propaganda article on Ukraine's blockade of Crimea (updated)
By Roger Annis

Western media has published yet another doom and gloom article on Crimea, repeating a worn theme that surely, by now, the people of Crimea must be reconsidering their vote 21 months ago to secede from Ukraine and rejoin the Russian Federation.

The article was published in the New York Times on Dec 1 and is titled, 'Months after Russian annexation, hopes start to dim in Crimea'. This one  has to skate around an new, added twist to the Crimea story: the electricity and commercial road transport blockade that has been mounted by small numbers of the extreme-right in Ukraine but endorsed by the governing regime in Kyiv while Western governments turn a blind eye.

The article begins:

"SHCHYOLKINO, Crimea-When residents in this typical Soviet factory town voted enthusiastically to secede from Ukraine and to become Russians, they thought the chaos and corruption that made daily life a struggle were a thing of the past. Now that many of them are being forced to cook and boil drinking water on open fires, however, they are beginning to reconsider."

The article employs time-honored methods for when a pre-determined, negative theme is required and important facts must be obscured.

One, find disgruntled citizens in the street and cite them. That's not difficult to do-is there a country in the world without many unhappy citizens? The Times writer cites two such people in his article.

Two, make it appear that the disgruntled citizen(s) speaks for large numbers of his or her fellow citizens.

Three, negative imagery is important. Thus we read in the Times article, "Twenty months after the Kremlin annexed the Black Sea peninsula amid an outpouring of patriotic fervor by the ethnic Russian population, President Vladimir V. Putin's promise in April 2014 to turn it into a showcase of his rule now seems as faded as Crimea's aging, Soviet-era resorts." Very evocative-'aging, Soviet-era resorts'. This recalls the decades of New York Times reporting of aged-looking buildings in Cuba during the decades of the U.S. embargo of the island. The embargo made it difficult for Cuba to manufacture or obtain paint and building materials; such things as public health care, public education, international aid and solidarity, and national defense took priority. So yes, this writer visited Cuba three times during the 1990s and, indeed, many buildings in Havana looked aged. But the spirit of the people and the outlook for the country was anything but tired and worn out. To my eyes, the people were much more spirited and forward looking compared to what I experienced in wealthy Canada.

Four, the key word in all reporting of Crimea is "annex", as per the above citation. The people in Crimea voted overwhelmingly in March 2014 for secession from Ukraine, following a violent, right-wing coup against the elected president of that country (a president for whom a large majority of Crimeans had voted in 2010). The secession referendum was organized by the elected and constitutional Crimean legislature, whose legality contrasted sharply with the illegal, coup regime which came into power in Kyiv on Feb 21, 2014. Crimeans have affirmed in survey after survey that they are satisfied with the secession decision. Yet, Crimeans are presented in the Times as hapless people who have been "annexed" by Russia. The Times reference to the secession as happening "amid an outpouring of patriotic fervor" suggests that the people were so swept away by fervor as to be too dumb to realize what was really taking place. They were not choosing a future of their own free will; no, they were undergoing "annexation" without even being aware.

Five, blame the victims for their plight. Thus we read in the Times article , "... people here are not sure whom to blame more for their predicament: the Crimean Tatar activists and Ukrainian nationalists who cut off Crimea's link to the Ukrainian power grid or the local government officials who claimed to have enough power generators stored away to handle such an emergency." Here we have an absurd spectacle of the Crimean government being blamed for failing to foresee and prepare for the day that right-wing extremists in Ukraine would blow up the electricity transmission lines serving the peninsula. Even more recklessly, the Crimean government failed to foresee that the blowing up of transmission lines by right-wing terrorists (oops, "cutting off of Crimea's links" by "activists") would be endorsed and escalated by the regime in Kyiv and that Western governments would turn a blind eye and Western media would largely be silent.

Six, and finally, choice of headline to convey the negative message is key. In this case, we have "hopes start to dim". In reality, the Times headline joins a long parade of such headlines. Pick a typical, negative word, use it alongside the word "Crimea" in an internet search, and, voilà, you arrive in a world of negativity over prospects for Crimea. Here is a small sample of the trade in negative Crimea headlines and stories:

Crimea's football fans shiver at prospect of their team playing in Siberia (The Guardian, March 2014)
Why Russia's Crimea move fails legal test, (BBC, March 2014)
Crimea after annexation: 'We feel utterly discouraged,' resident says (Belsat TV, in Belarus, April 2014)
Crimea euphoria fades for some Russians (Reuters, July 2014)
Tourism suffers in Crimea as Ukraine shuns breakaway region (Washington Post, Aug 2014)
Kremlin preparing to combat demos as signs of Crimea-fatigue appear, ('Euromaidan Press', Sept 2014)
Human rights in decline in Crimea (Human Rights Watch, Nov 2014)
To many in Crimea, corruption seems no less at home under Russian rule, New York Times, Aug 2015)

Oddly-well, not so oddly-the last article in this list was about Crimean citizens trying to take back into public control Black Sea waterfront land which had been lost during Crimea's time in post-1991 Ukraine.

Funnily enough, the Times article concludes with a quotation from a Crimean woman that is supposed to show that Russians are naïve and habitual complainers who always blame others for their failings and shortcomings. But the quotation is the closest thing to truth in the entire article (leaving aside the suggestion that the extreme rightists in Ukraine who blew up electricity lines are "Tatars"):

    As often happens in Russia, some blame Washington rather than Moscow or Kiev.

    "If it wasn't for the Americans, none of it could have happened. The Tatars, who are supported by the United States, would not do a thing," said Tatyana Bragina, 57, an energetic woman who also once worked construction at a nearby, unfinished nuclear plant.

    "Please write that we are not desperate. On the contrary, we are full of joy," Ms. Bragina said, standing near a black iron kettle boiling away in the courtyard of her apartment block.

Russian legislator Konstantin Kosachev has said that Kyiv's electricity and road-transport blockades against Crimea constitute a "gesture of final farewell" to Crimea.

Update: Russia is racing to construct electricity, natural gas, road and rail links to Crimea across the 3 km wide Kerch Strait, which  separates the Sea of Azov from the Black Sea. The first of the electricity began to flow through a 200MW cable on December 3. A second supply cable of 200MW is due to open on Dec. 21. Crimea will be fully supplied with electricity by the summer 2016. Soon after that, it will be producing its own electricity courtesy of the gas pipeline under construction. By 2019, the road and rail bridge will begin to operate.

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 #50
Euromaidan Press
http://euromaidanpress.com
December 7, 2015
Six challenges Ukraine's national state faced before Euromaidan
By Maryan Pokhylyy
Maryan Pokhylyy is a Glasgow University student in Politics and Central and Eastern European Studies. He is an active member and volunteer for various NGO organisations and societies.

The current crisis in Ukraine has much more to do with long-term problems of state building in Ukraine with underlying cause being far deeper than the surprise takeover of Crimea and the sudden creation of "Novorossiya". In order to explain the current events, as well as the Ukrainian government's successes and failures in state building during the post-Soviet era, it is necessary to understand the problems of the Ukrainian state before the latest political crisis.

Historical ties with Russia and lack of national identity

One of the long-term causes for the failure of Ukraine in state building is its ties and dependency on Russia, starting from Pereyaslav Treaty (1654) until and after 1991. To sum up the 400-year history briefly, Ukraine had been developing as a "subject" nation of Russia for the most of 400 years, despite some resistance and revolts in the time period, Russia had been partly successful in creating the "Provincialism" for Ukrainians, integrating many within Russia.

"The Russian" idea of Ukrainians as part of a Russian Empire presumes that Ukraine shouldn't exist as a country and even as the idea, Ukrainian language is reduced to a mixture of Polish and Russian. Founder of Ukrainian integral nationalism Dmytro Dontsov described the idea of the resulting "provincialism" as "putting the interests of one province above the good of the whole nation. All of them were in rigorous opposition to the idea of nation building as a whole". Dontsov went on to suggest that the idea of Ukrainian state building was problematic due to the low level demands of the Ukrainians about  having more powers for their province.

One person who tried to implement reforms and take up state building in Ukraine was Viktor Yushchenko. Having won the presidential elections in 2004, with massive support of the people from Orange revolution and expertise in government from being one of the most effective Prime Ministers of Ukraine (whilst at the position, he managed to resolve record high inflation and devaluation of currency by introducing a new currency "Hryvnya" in 1996), so the initial expectations had been set high.

One way that Yushchenko aimed to establish Ukraine's national idea was via creation of museums, raising awareness about people who fought for Ukrainian national independence, and announcing reforms of the judicial system.  The Holodomor memorial and the legislation about Holodomor calling it a genocide against the Ukrainian nation aimed to create nation building as it attempted to unify the whole of Ukraine under one tragedy where everyone both from the east and west had suffered due to communism.

Robert Conquest in "The Harvest of Sorrow" described Holodomor as "the older leaders were direct accomplices in the actual killing of millions of Ukrainians and others, in order to establish the political and social order prescriber by their doctrine". The recognition of Holodomor on a wider international level can be seen as one of the successes of Yushchenko's main aims in politics, and the first attempt by a Ukrainian president to raise the issue to a worldwide level.

Languages and minorities

Another issue for any Ukrainian government that aims to create a strong nation state Ukraine's bilingualism, as any government would have to deal with the Russian language being actively used. For example, in the annexed Crimea, there was only "one school where all subjects were taught in Ukrainian" in Simferopol, whilst the rest of Crimea had only seven according to the former minister of education and science of Ukraine Ivan Vakarchuk.

The language problems for establishing a strong unitary state as Barry Buzan (a scholar on modern day Ukraine) pointed out "if societal security is about the sustainability within acceptable conditions for evolution of traditional patterns of language, cultural and religious and ethnic identity and custom, then threats to these values come much more frequently from within the state than from outside it."  The language issues had contributed to the creation of national political cleavages, and a major split in terms of Ukrainian identity.

For Ukraine it means that its southeaster border is highly unprotected to internal threats because of regions with a Russian-speaking majority and Russian influences over the area. Hence any attempts of Ukrainian government to strengthen Ukrainian language within this region could be viewed by Russian minority as a form of "oppression" as Ukraine aimed to pursue its nation-building policies in "nationalizing state".

Roman Wolchuk, a scholar covering modern day Eastern Europe, described the problem of the policies as "seen as threatening to and by the minorities, something that could trigger centrifugal tendencies. Furthermore, these centrifugal tendencies were prone to further aggravation by powers intent on causing internal turmoil in Ukraine." On the whole, from 1991 Ukrainian government failed to successfully resolve the language divisions in Ukraine, in a way that would both maintain the language of minorities and promote Ukrainian language in a long term.

Loss of military power

Ukraine reached 52 mn population in 1991 and having 3rd biggest nuclear arsenal with fully working conscription, almost 1 million troops and had all potential to become a serious world player in military field. However, due to international pressure and internal corruption, nuclear missiles had been given away by Ukraine's first president Leonid Kravchuk and army had been reduced under Viktor Yanukovych's ministers of defence by Yezhel, Salamatin and Lebedev (all of whom were ministers of defence between 2010-2014).

Wolczuk points out, that "The narrow military-defence conception of Ukraine's national security, i.e. that the military power of other states presented the main threat to the security of the state and that the state was only defensible with military power, was merely the pinnacle of a pyramid of concerns that could be labelled security issues." It is impossible to have a strong and established state without a sufficient army to protect its borders, especially considering that Ukraine is surrounded by two major geopolitical alliances.

Democracy with no legitimacy

Another attribute of a strong state is its legitimacy. Ukraine's legislative system has many practical problems but the fundamental problem for the legislative system in terms of for the state building is that it aims to react to Russian and USSR history. For example, due to Wolczuk, "the Ukrainian Left, with its strong pro-CIS, pro-Russian, anti-capitalist and anti-West orientation, tends to be elected by the ethnically Russian and Russophone constituency in the cities and rural areas of Southern, Eastern and Central Ukraine. In contrast, leaning toward the right of centre, the National Democrats have their power base in Western Ukraine with some support in Kyiv."

The fundamental problem that the disputes of pro USSR and anti USSR create is lack of sufficient political space for establishment and consolidation of democracy within the political structure.

This resulted in right wing parties, like Svoboda, UNA-UNSO and Right Sector, arising in order to counter Russian influence in the country.  Despite all the nationalistic ideals, fundamental democracy remains in danger due to the lack of a rational choice for voters of a party that could be doing "nation building" yet at the same time not aim to be right wing.  With the reaction parties being created, hence the people support not only a certain party but also tend to associate the party with the country as was the case with Party of Regions in Donbas being associated with being pro-Russian.

Russian geopolitical aims

Another problem in establishing a strong Ukrainian nation state is the Russian influence within its borders with Russia aiming to justify the influence with the high majority of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine. One way that Ukraine proposed to deal with the Russian pressure was CIS as "Russian authors and leaders look to the CIS as a restraining factor. Without the CIS they believe there would be an explosion of territorial disputes, particularly by Russia towards countries with large Russian minorities. To some degree this was one of the main reasons which then President Leonid Kravchuk sought to avoid in December 1991 when he proposed the establishment of the CIS."

Russian pragmatic foreign policy aims would fundamentally work to undermine a strong stable Ukrainian nation state. If Russia would aim to become a leading power in the region, Russia must ensure that Ukraine accepts Russia's role in the region via joining the pro-Russian international organisations.

So far, before the crisis Ukraine had applied a multi-vector foreign policy in handling Russian pressure - which in itself had worked to weaken Ukrainian state consolidation. Whilst many of Ukrainian presidents and officials proposed different political solutions on the issue of Ukraine joining or not joining union with Russia, the country as a whole maintained its status outside of "political unions". This had helped Ukraine to solidify as a nation whilst being in the middle of EU and Russia, due to the ability to manage both sides.

Controversies around the national symbols

One of the key things for any state is the confidence in national symbols. During Yushchenko's presidency, awarding Stepan Bandera and members of OUN/UPA with titles of Hero of Ukraine sparked controversy. As Timothy Snyder in The Reconstruction of Nation put it, "The UPA was part of an organization, the OUN-Bandera, which was ideologically committed to ethnic purity. ... the UPA was successful in many of its endeavours because its causes were specifically Ukrainian ones".

The question of UPA is very provocative due to its nature, foremost; UPA fought against USSR, images of Bandera had been used for decades to scare politicians in both Kremlin and Warsaw. Yushchenko was the first Ukrainian president to raise the topic of UPA due to many Ukrainians fighting for and against the force. The question became an elephant in the room until Yushchenko had decided to aim it to build "national symbol".

Without getting into a heated debate about the correctness of actions of UPA it is a way for Ukraine to create a national symbol in order to build a national idea through a "national myth". Nonetheless, the success of the idea could be put under scepticism as firstly, years of following Russian propaganda made part of the population fearful of UPA in Eastern Ukraine.

Secondly since Yushchenko had failed in terms of unifying the nation through this "myth", it would be wrong to claim that it had succeeded in state building. "A new loyalty to Ukraine can be built on the principles of political, economic and territorial unity which is inclusive and based on the Ukrainian ethnic core. A new political nation will have to incorporate all of the traditions which Ukrainians inherited." This highlights the biggest challenge for Ukrainian state building.

Euromaidan did not lead to failure; it redefined the idea of Ukraine's nation state

The Euromaidan protests in many ways redefined Ukrainian nation and helped to build upon the creation of "the nation state" as firstly it aimed to be apolitical, secondly as it was a push for a humanistic values and principles, and thirdly as it used more Ukrainian symbols in terms of flags, songs, references rather than the party rhetoric.

A study found that most people (69.6%) that went to Maidan done so because of police brutality on 30th of November 2013, whilst (53,5%) was due to Yanukovych not signing the association agreement with EU. Yet, most people (91.9%) were unrelated to any party group or political party organisation, according to a Fund for Democratic Initiatives study. This could be interpreted as a call for the people to reform the governmental institutions of judicial and executive powers and hence it helps to create a stronger state building institution.

We can't say that the political crisis in Ukraine had been a complete failure in state-building of Ukraine. To some extent yes, armed conflict in Donbas and the failure of Ukrainian government to stop Russia from taking Crimea had all long term causes due to Ukrainian state not having strong governmental institutions. On the other hand, Russia still has to take the blame for destabilizing the situation and oppressing the democratic development of Ukraine.

Euromaidan protests helped to develop nation-state building as they created a new generation of Ukrainians, those who speak Russian and yet see themselves as Ukrainians and want to continue to be Ukrainians from East to West. While Ukraine had failed in many aspects after 1991 to develop into a nation-state which many expected from the "Rukh" movement of the 90's, nonetheless, the general public view Moscow far more critically than before, and henceforth the political crisis helped Ukraine to be more unified against the occupants.

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