#2
Russia to increase fundamental research financing to $2 bln in 2016 - PM

MOSCOW, December 10. /TASS/. The Russian Government will scale up fundamental research financing to 135 bln rubles ($2 bln) in 2016, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday.

"We will increase financing of fundamental research to 135 bln rubles ($2 bln) next year," the prime minister said. "This has not taken place lately. Even in current conditions we have an opportunity of making certain changes in priorities," Medvedev said.

It is impossible to support strong and efficient economy without achievements in the field of science and technology, the prime minister said at the ceremony of granting Cabinet awards in science and technology in 2015. "Talents growing in our country have prospects and opportunities for implementation," Medvedev added.

Thirteen groups of scholars received Cabinet Science and Technology Awards this year and four more awards were presented to young scientists.

Awards were given for innovative structures of power plants pumping equipment, development of microwave diagnostics software and hardware, diamond deposits subsurface mining systems, sparingly alloyed high-strength steel technology, environment-friendly gasoline production technology, cabbage hybrids, environmentally pure drilling technologies and equipment, chronic pancreatitis treatment methods, competitive welding equipment, high-energy satellite platform, multirole patrol vessels, microcircuits for smart cards, and two-range compact onboard radar.

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 #3
Number of troops in NATO contingent in Baltic republics, Poland, Romania grows 23-fold, number of planes up 8-fold over past year - Shoigu

MOSCOW. Dec 11 (Interfax) - The number of troops deployed in the Baltic republics and Central Europe has grown manifold over the past year, and modernization of U.S. nuclear air bombs is pending.

"Over the past year alone, the NATO contingent in the Baltic countries, Poland and Romania has grown eight-fold in terms of planes and 23-fold by the number of troops," Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said at a meeting of the Russian Defense Ministry board.

In his words, about 200 U.S. nuclear air bombs have been amassed in the territories of Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Turkey. "They are planned to be modernized," Shoigu said.

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 #4
Moscow Times
December 11, 2015
Russian Women: Obey Thy Father, Husband, Son
By Daria Litvinova

Russia remains a conservative country where traditional gender paradigms dominate.

Rather than being admired for its progressive gender dynamics, Western society is seen as degenerate and ultimately doomed. As Russia has isolated itself from the West politically and economically, traditional values have been heralded as a hallmark of Russian society.

This trend has attracted businesses that capitalize on confining men and women to strict gender archetypes.

Destined to Be a Woman

"Working 10 hours a day and the right to vote haven't made women happy. [Neither have] the rights not to have children, not to get married, not to care about their homes. Women tried to achieve all this to prove something to men, but it doesn't make them happy," proclaim the writings of Olga Valyaeva, one of the gurus of the concept of Vedic womanhood, a concept that has grown in popularity among Russian women in recent years.

According to this concept - promoted by many lecturers and book authors, some of whom claim to be psychologists and doctors - the nature of a woman, as described in the ancient Indian manuscript of Veda, dictates that the only way for her to be happy is to put her husband and children first, abandoning career ambitions.

This doctrine has proven popular among Russian women. Valyaeva's group "Destiny to be a woman" on the Vkontatke social network has more than 200,000 members, and books and seminars by other prominent adepts are also successful.

Followers claim the popularity of this doctrine derives from the manuscript of Veda, but it is more likely an illustration of how patriarchal Russian society remains. When asked which are the most important things to have accomplished before reaching the age of 30, most Russians cite marriage and children, a poll released in late August by independent Russian pollster the Levada Center revealed.

Women's priorities were, first and foremost, to marry (77 percent of responders said so), give birth (75 percent) and only then receive an education (according to 60 percent of respondents).

"If you were born in a woman's body, you have certain features of your state of mind, you have certain obligations and talents. You can, of course, follow a man's path, popular nowadays, which means to achieve goals, earn money, but at some point it will impact your health, because a woman's body isn't designed for it, your mentality, because it would be overloaded, and your life," Valyaeva explained to The Moscow Times.

Valyaeva and other gurus like Oleg Torsunov, a dermatologist who now owns a health center in the southern city of Krasnodar, or Ruslan Narushevich, author of numerous online lectures on "true womanhood," claim women should first and foremost be homemakers. They should take responsibility for all housework, leave their jobs and care for their husbands and children.

Women should look attractive and always be in good spirits - because it pleases their husbands. Therefore, women should take care when selecting their clothing - long dresses or skirts are preferable - and frequent massage and beauty salons to better sustain a festive mood and nice figure, the Vedic ideology says.

Happy Husband, Happy Wife

"In 2013 my relationship with my husband almost came to a tragic end, and that's when I came across information about the Vedic view of a woman," Yevsapia Sapega, a young resident of the Karelian city of Petrozavodsk, told The Moscow Times.

"I was working a lot at the time, earned a lot and felt tired a lot. I couldn't understand why the money I earned didn't make me happy," she said.

Sapega, 22, worked as a project manager, was hostile towards her husband - she wanted him to be stronger and more powerful. "But I didn't realize back then that a man would only help a woman who needs help, not one that can do everything herself," she said.

After embracing the ideology of Vedic womanhood - she read about it in Torsunov's lectures - Sapega left her job and concentrated on her husband and home. She updated her wardrobe, wearing long skirts and was careful when conversing with her husband. "I tried to make every conversation inspiring for him and avoided complaints and scandals," she said.

Things quickly improved in her family. "Right now my husband has my job, and I support him. He agrees with me on the fact that I need to be home and not at work," she said. Sapega is mostly occupied with cooking, organizing entertainment for her husband and tailoring clothes for her family. She is happy with the changes and does not regret adopting the ideology of Vedic womanhood.

However, the ideology has been widely criticized by those who believe a woman's identity can be destroyed by subservience.

Depression as a Side Effect

The tale of Yevgenia Zadrutskaya, 32-year-old Muscovite who also tried to live the life of a Vedic woman, has a far from happy ending. Zadrutskaya was struggling through a difficult break-up when her friend introduced her to Vedic womanhood, via online materials.

"At first it all seemed very appealing - wearing beautiful dresses, indulging yourself with massages and not working, just being a happy woman," she told The Moscow Times.

She started listening to online lectures and taking part in webinars, and gradually changed her life entirely. "Over the course of it I quit my job as a psychologist and met my future husband, which was nice. I was breezing through life with my long skirts and cooking recipes, but after a year of this, I suddenly fell into a very deep depression," Zadrutskaya said.

She realized she was losing her identity and burying her hopes and ambitions - replacing the person she was before with a generic Vedic woman. "After some time I started to realize that for almost a year and a half I'd been repressing my own personal self, my true feelings, in order to follow the concept and always wear a smile. It took me another year to get over it and get back to being me," Zadrutskaya told The Moscow Times.

Zadrutskaya returned to her job and, among other things, began counseling women who also suffered from trying to be the model Vedic woman. "All sorts of disasters happen to these women - marriages ruined, families broken, relatives estranged, careers lost. A lot of women I consulted had nervous breakdowns and ended up in hospitals," she said.

Traditional vs. Unconventional

It's the usual battle between traditional values and non-traditional ones, believes Anton Sorin, a psychologist. "Since the very beginning of the 20th century people have been fighting traditions and traditional values," he told The Moscow Times.

"Traditionalism is usually blamed for being too conservative, and people call for moving in the opposite direction. That's why historically there's always been a lot of movements like feminism, for instance," he said.

Progressive movements pledging to destroy traditional values incited opposing forces to call for preserving traditions, Sorin explained. "That's why nowadays in a society torn apart by different concepts and approaches to life, movements and ideologies that set traditional paths attract such interest. They provide hope for having a clear direction in life," he said.

This is the first of a two-part report by The Moscow Times on two movements promoting a return to traditional values. Read part two below.

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 #5
Moscow Times
December 11, 2015
Moscow School Teaches Russian Boys to Look Up to Cavemen
By Eva Hartog

When Ruslan Goncharov, 25, refers back to the Stone Age, it is not for history's sake, but as an example of better days.

"Man goes out, kills a mammoth, brings the mammoth home to his wife, the wife prepares it and then saves the leftovers, salts them and so forth.

"The man takes his wife by the hand, leads her to a cave and says: 'This is our cave. We are going to live here. I found it.'

"The woman looks around the cave. It's cold, empty. And says: Here we will make a painting, here we will have our fireplace. Build it, please, darling, the rocks are too heavy."

Goncharov and Roman Ovchinnikov, 24, two clean-shaven men in slim-fit suits who look like they stepped out of Il Divo, are the founders of the School of Masculinity, a "science-based" training program that promises to turn boys into Russian men.

An educational evening has drawn several dozen parents to a trendy loft in central Moscow. Except for a handful of fathers - one boldly sports a pink silk shirt - the audience is comprised of middle-aged women. Their faces reveal a mixture of concern and guilt.

"Тhe [question of masculinity] is a problem that is really on parents' minds," Ovchinnikov said.

The Male Condition

Russian women surveyed on social media agree that Russian men take on the role of caretaker - they pay restaurant bills, carry bags, hold doors, and will certainly do jobs around the home.

But "these perks come with a collateral hazard," Valeria, 26, a lawyer who declined to give her surname, said on Facebook. "[Russian men] will inevitably be patronizing - even the best of them. This takes various forms, from not letting you perform simple tasks to barring you from having a social life," she wrote on Facebook.

Alesya, a communications coach, 33, agreed Russian men were generally dominant. "In the classical situation, a woman cannot decide for herself where to vacation, or independently buy a car. The husband will participate and control everything," she said.

Russian men are more prone to alcoholism than women, an OECD health survey earlier this year showed - and domestic abuse is not uncommon.
The School of Masculinity made no mention of that troubled reputation.

Masculinity is the "ability to move forward regardless of fear, pain or other obstacles," Goncharov said. That ability, the trainers told the parents, is under threat. And Russian mothers are mostly to blame.

Control Mania

With roughly 25 million civilian and military deaths, the Soviet Union suffered more casualties than any other nation in World War II.

The death toll, and Russia's high divorce rate, mean many women have raised their children singlehandedly, a phenomenon the School of Masculinity's founders view as the root of today's problems.

"Those women didn't raise men. And these men, who are not men, are now trying to raise the next men," Ovchinnikov said.

Oleg Chagin, 52, a gruff father of 13, oversees the "science" behind the masculinity program, summarized it for the audience: "Women raise girls," he announced.

Chagin, the self-proclaimed head of the Research Institute of Social Anthropogenesis - an institute that does not have an official website - also condemns the use of diapers, alleging they train toddlers to be weak, and says children should study at school standing up.

He claims that in many Russian boys "the male hormone" - an unspecified chemical - is never produced, leading to a condition he calls "gender perversion."

Mothers are the "ideal manipulators," always coddling their sons, he said, causing women in the audience to squirm.

"For children to become men, you need to create a stressful situation," he said. "If a man stops fighting, he turns into a baba [chick], even physically."
 
An Army of Men

Chagin and the two budding entrepreneurs co-organized a youth camp this summer at an airborne troops base on the outskirts of Moscow called "Motherland."

Teenagers dressed in camouflage lived for weeks under a military regime, with morning workouts, knife throwing and laser-gun shooting.

Many Russians believe that time in the Armed Forces strengthens boys -  42 percent of Russians said the army provided boys with training in masculinity and responsibility, the state-run VTsIOM pollster reported this year.

But reports of abuse and hazing have tarnished its reputation. "The army is the right instrument, but it has discredited itself and is not working the way it should be working," Ovchinnikov, who himself dodged conscription for medical reasons, said.

Trees

According to the masculinity trainers, 95 percent of school teachers are female. To combat the overbearing female influence at school and home, the entrepreneurs created a science-based male training camp.

Programs range from 8,000 rubles to 40,000 rubles per month - a hefty price tag compared to the average monthly wage in Moscow of 62,700 rubles ($955), according to Mosgorstat.

The course includes mental and physical coaching, and, for those with cash to burn, personal guidance from a psychotherapist for both parent and son. The all-male staff teach their pupils gender-specific life lessons on, for example, the concept of responsibility.

"I think you should recognize: this is an oak tree, and this is an apple tree and they need different approaches, and dig deeper than just saying 'these are trees,'" Ovchinnikov said.

"For girls [responsibility] is a practically non-existent issue," he said. "At first the person responsible for a girl is her father, then later when she gets married, her husband takes over," Goncharov says, introducing a significant pause between the syllables of the Russian word for "married" - zamuzham - stressing its literal meaning of "behind the husband."

The gender distinction also applies to the workplace.

"What is a job for a man? It's his path, what he does, his idea, where he wants to go [in life.] For women, what's the ideal job? That place where she is energized, it's not so important what she earns right?" he said.

European Perversion

Russians only need to look to the West to see what failure to recognize gender differences will bring, the organizers said.

"In Europe we see bearded women and other things that are impossible to understand," Ovchinnikov told the parents, presumably referring to Conchita Wurst, the Austrian cross-dresser whose participation in the Eurovision Song Festival last year caused outrage in Russia.

Traditional gender roles, for the organizers, are about more than values - they are crucial for the survival of the human species.

"If everyone would follow Europe's course then we would die out. We would stop existing. That's a fact," Ovchinnikov said.

Some of the Russian women questioned by The Moscow Times, however, said Russian men would benefit from a little less gender awareness.

Graphic designer Ksenia, 29, who declined to give her surname, said, "Russian men demand to be loved just because they were born men."

 #6
Moscow Times
December 11, 2015
Number of Orphaned Russian Children Falls by Half

The number of children in Russian orphanages has decreased by half over the past three years, the Interfax news agency reported, citing deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets.

"In 2012, we had 119,000 orphans in our database, ... now there are 73,000 orphaned children in Russia," Golodets said, Interfax reported Friday.

Despite a sharp reduction of the number of orphans, the percentage of children returned to orphanages after adoption remains high in Russia, Golodets said.

In 2012, more than 5,000 adopted children were returned to orphanages, according to statistics from usynovite.ru, a project of the Department of Education and Socialization of Children of the Russian Ministry of Education.

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 #7
Moscow Times
December 11, 2015
Majority of Muscovites Support Truck Driver Protests - Poll

More than 70 percent of Moscow residents aware of the ongoing protest by truck drivers support their action, a poll released Wednesday by the independent Levada Center indicated.

While the majority of Muscovites are familiar with the protest, 21 percent of the capital's residents said they had heard nothing about it, while another 2 percent hesitated to answer, Levada Center said in a report.

Among those who said they knew about the protest, 71 percent expressed strong or moderate support for it, the poll indicated.

Truckers are protesting a new tax system, called Platon, that levies additional fees on heavy trucks for the use of federal highways. Truck drivers, many of whom own the vehicles they operate, say the system would erode their earnings.

The Levada Center poll was conducted on Dec. 4-8 among a "representative sampling" of 1,000 people in Moscow, and gave a margin of error of no more than 4.8 percent.

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 #8
AFP
December 11, 2015
Russia keeps rates high in fight against inflation

The Russian central bank, worried about inflation even more than the ailing economy, on Friday held leading interest rates at current high levels.
At its regular monetary policy meeting, the bank kept its key interest rate at 11 percent, citing inflationary risks as its main motivation against easing credit.

The Russian economy is in deep recession, dogged by weak oil prices, a sliding ruble and Western sanctions over Ukraine and will continue to see negative growth into 2016, the central bank warned.

The bank promised that it would ease credit at "one of its upcoming meetings" but "only if inflationary risks diminish".

The Russian economy shrank by 4.1 percent in the third quarter and the government predicts that growth measure gross domestic product (GDP) will decline by around 3.9 percent in 2015 as a whole, before recovering slightly next year.

But the World Bank has cautioned that the full-year downturn could reach 4.3 percent, depending on the price of oil, and that Russia is likely to remain in recession for all of 2016.

The Bank of Russia has gradually reduced rates from a 17-percent peak a year ago, which it deemed necessary at the time to defend the spectacular slide in the ruble.

But stubbornly high inflation has stopped it from doing more.

Consumer prices were up 14.8 percent year-on-year in early December, dangerously above the government's full-year inflation target of 12.2 percent.

Worse news could be coming on the inflation front as the ruble has come under renewed attack in the wake of even weaker oil prices, which this week dipped below $40 per barrel.

Currency weakness stimulates inflation as more rubles are needed to pay for imports, pushing up prices.

Other factors likely to push inflation higher are a trade war with Ankara after Turkey downed a Russian warplane for allegedly violating its airspace, and a new tax on road transport.

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 #9
Russia still interested in attracting foreign investors despite economic, political problems - PM

MOSCOW. Dec 11 (Interfax) - Russia is still interested in attracting foreign investors despite the economic and political problems, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, opening a meeting of the governmental commission on the control of foreign investments in Russia.

"Despite certain internal economic difficulties, foreign political problems, the exacerbation of the international situation, it is obvious that Russia is still interested in attracting investors, who are ready to create businesses in Russia and develop them on a long-term basis, to produce a competitive product, which is focused not only on the domestic market but on exports," he said.

In equal measure this concerns those sectors, which according to Russian legislation are strategic, the prime minister said. However in relation to them there is a special procedure for decision-making, in particular the government commission on foreign investments makes them.

"Thanks to whole range of prompt decisions that we made lately, aimed at improving the investment climate, we have positive changes, as it is know, in international evaluations of the conditions of work in Russia," Medvedev said. He said that not everything is going smoothly, but international institutes are noting that Russia is striving to improve procedures, which are becoming more modern for a whole number of indicators.

In agriculture, transport, real estate and several other sectors, the volumes of direct investments in H1 demonstrated even certain growth in comparison with the same period of last year. Investors are ready to invest money in a quite wide range of sectors of the Russian economy - this is not only traditional commodities sectors, but also transport infrastructure, machine-building and pharmaceuticals.

"There are a number of such investments and local deals that are relatively small in volume, and these are a part of global processes and global investments in which large companies participate," Medvedev said.

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 #10
Central Bank's chief says no crisis in Russian banking system

MOSCOW, December 11. /TASS/. There is no crisis in the Russian banking system but the banks are going through a difficult period, the Central Bank chief Elvira Nabiullina told a press conference on Friday.

"In my opinion, there is no crisis in the Russian banking system, the banking system just like the economy in general is going through hard times, but it has showed an ability to quickly adjust to the current conditions. It is important that the banks began to choose borrowers carefully, this is important for boosting our economy. In other words, the trust cannot be undermined and we see at by the dynamics of the population deposits," she said.

Nabiullina also said that the measures taken by the Central Bank and the government helped banks adjust to new conditions.

"In the beginning of the year the conditions for banks changed significantly. This period was marked by an increase in interest rates and depreciation of the currency. Therefore, the banking sector was going through a period of losses and is still going through a period of growth of troubled assets.

But in general, the measures that were taken, our relief measures, the government program of recapitalization of banks and the fact that the banks managed to stay in a more or less steady condition - all this enabled them to adapt quickly enough to the new conditions," the head of the regulator said.

She added that in 11 months of the year profit of the Russian banking sector turned to be almost three times higher than it was initially expected.

"You know the recent data on profit. In 11 months - 265 bln rubles ($3.8 bln), which is much more than we forecast in the beginning of the year, we forecast 100 bln rubles ($1.4 bln). That means that the banking sector manages to find profitable projects in these conditions," she said.

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 #11
Finance Ministry expects Russia's capital outflow to be $60 bln at 2015 year-end

MOSCOW, December 10. /TASS/. Russian Finance Ministry expects Russia's capital outflow will be $60 bln at 2015 year-end, minister Anton Siluanov said on Thursday.

"The capital outflow declined considerably; this is also a measure of our activities in the budget policy sphere. The outflow totaled $53 bln in eleven months. Our estimate is $60 bln by the year-end and it is nearly twice lower than initially projected," he said.

Russia's net capital outflow provisionally amounted to $53 bln in January - November 2015 and declined nearly twofold year-on-year, the Bank of Russia said earlier on Wednesday.

According to the Central Bank's outlook, the capital outflow in 2015 will be $70 bln. The Ministry of Economic Development projects it at approximately $72 bln.

Russian Finance Ministry to not withdraw additional 500 bln rubles ($7.23 bln) from Reserve Fund in 2015

Based on the prevailing budgetary situation the Russian Finance Ministry will not withdraw additional 500 bln rubles ($7.23 bln) from the Reserve Fund in 2015, although it has that right, Anton Siluanov went on to say.

He confirmed the previous estimate that 2.6 trillion rubles ($37.6 bln) will be spent from the Reserve Fund in 2015.

"2.6 trillion rubles ($37.6 bln) will be spent from the Reserve Fund this year. This year we did not use the right to withdraw 500 bln rubles ($7.23 bln) from the Reserve Fund in case we will not have enough income," Siluanov said.

According to him, as a result of the Finance Ministry plans, by the end of the year the volume of the Reserve Fund will be at 3.4 trillion rubles ($49.15 bln), the Russian National Wealth Fund - 4.9 trillion rubles ($70.83 bln). "The total reserves amount to 8.3 trillion rubles ($119.98 bln), or 11.3% of GDP," Siluanov added.

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 #12
Russia Beyond the Headline/RBC Daily
www.rbth.ru
December 11, 2015
Russia's oil producers facing winter of discontent as prices fall again
Prices for Brent crude have fallen below $40 - for the first time in nearly seven years. With no room for maneuver and little prospect of a market recovery in the near future, Russian oil companies are being forced to postpone the development of fields.
TIMOFEI DZYADKO, RBC DAILY

As global oil prices continue to slide, Russia's embattled oil companies are being forced to further tighten their belts as they attempt to plan their budgets for 2016, with a lack of resources meaning that planned development projects are being put on hold.

On Tuesday, Dec. 8, Brent futures for January were trading at $40.44 a barrel, but during the day the price dropped to $39.85, meaning that oil had fallen for second consecutive session: On Dec. 7, quotes fell by 5.3 percent, on Dec. 8 - by another 0.7 percent (as of 19:00 Moscow time).

The reason is OPEC's Dec. 4 refusal to fix the level of production within the cartel's traditional quotas. The lack of an established limit could mean that next year will see even more oil coming to the market from OPEC countries, including sanction-free Iran, reports Bloomberg.

The average price of Urals crude has stood at $52.16 per barrel since the beginning of the year; on Dec. 8, it fell to $38.34. According to the Ministry of Energy, the economy of Russian companies allows them to earn if the price of oil is below $50 a barrel. But under the current tax system, with such prices they have no resources and incentives to invest in new fields.

Forecasts from Russian oil producers

Large companies have already decided to freeze projects, with Russia's largest oil producer Rosneft making adjustments to the timetable for developing nine fields.

Rosneft President Igor Sechin said as early as at the St. Petersburg economic forum in June that the existing oil prices (a barrel of Brent was about $63 at the time) do not provide oil producers with a steady return.

In order to avoid another price shock and critical financial losses, the cost of oil, according to him, should return to $80 a barrel. But in late November, Sechin said he did not expect a market recovery before the second half of 2017.

A spokesman for Rosneft did not elaborate on Dec. 8 what price it is setting for next year's budget.

Lukoil is drawing up its 2016 budget based on a "conservative forecast" of $50 a barrel, its vice-president and co-owner Leonid Fedun said in late November.

But oil producers could protect their investments and explore new fields, including the Arctic, if prices return to the range of between $65 and $90 per barrel, said the company's CEO Vagit Alekperov back in summer.

Among other Russian producers, Gazprom Neft is adhering to a conservative approach and setting a price of $45 per barrel for the next three years at once, said Chief Financial Officer Alexei Yankevich in November.

RussNeft, meanwhile, produced the same forecast - $45 per barrel and 70 rubles per dollar, the company's main owner Mikhail Gutseriyev said in an interview to the Russia 24 television channel on Dec. 8.

"Due to exchange rate differences and a tax maneuver we are operating almost on the verge of profitability. We hope to make a profit after 2018," he said.

Bashneft produced the most optimistic forecast, with the company drawing up next year's budget based on a price of $60 per barrel, its financial director Alexei Lisovenko said, reporting on the third quarter.

Russian oil companies are being assisted by the ruble rate, which is falling in tandem with oil prices, and flexible tax rates - on average, companies in the sector break even at an oil price of about $30 per barrel, while this threshold is even lower for Rosneft and Bashneft - less than $20 a barrel, Merrill Lynch analysts wrote in their November report. The critical level for foreign majors such as BP, Total and Eni, according to the calculations of the bank, is a fall in prices below $60 a barrel.

Government forecast

The baseline scenario of the Economic Development Ministry for 2016 expects the price of Urals oil to be $50, while the conservative forecast pitches prices at $40 per barrel. According to the conservative scenario, oil will stay at $40 until 2018.

Falling oil prices is a long-term trend associated with the loss of the key driver in the oil market - demand from China, said former finance minister Alexei Kudrin, now head of the Committee of Civil Initiatives.

According to Kudrin, oil will remain below $50 per barrel after the 2018 presidential elections, and this will be an incentive for reform.

Full article in Russian in RBC Daily.

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 #13
www.project-syndicate.org
December 11, 2015
Putin's New Prudence
By Anders Åslund
Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, and the author, most recently, of Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It.

WASHINGTON, DC - This year, the Russian economy is the G-20's worst performer, contracting by 3.8%, according to the International Monetary Fund's latest forecast. And things could easily have been worse. President Vladimir Putin claims that his economic policies remain consistent; in fact, he has wisely changed course, limiting the damage that could have been done had he not.

At the end of 2014, Russia was seized by financial panic. The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) responded to collapsing oil prices by floating the ruble, which immediately lost half its value. Desperate Russians rushed to buy whatever they could before their money became worthless. Inflation shot up to 16%.

Putin's prescription - given at his annual televised press conference last December - was not reassuring: "We intend to use the measures we applied, and rather successfully, back in 2008." He was referring to Russia's response to the financial crisis, when it carried out the largest fiscal stimulus in the G-20 - no less than 10% of GDP. The result: GDP fell by 7.8%, the largest drop in the G-20. In short, Putin was proposing to repeat a failed policy.

Fortunately for Russia, Putin did not carry out his promise. In 2008-2009, the CBR pursued a policy of gradual devaluation, bailing out all big state-owned and private corporations, regardless of their performance. This time, Russia has maintained a floating exchange rate, conserving its reserves. The CBR stabilized the market by shock-hiking its interest rate, and has since reduced it gradually, as any sound central bank would.

Russia did adopt an anti-crisis stimulus package; but, at 3.5% of GDP, it was just one-third the size of the 2008 package. And while the Russian government singled out some enterprises as "strategic," it actually gave them very little money. Many big companies, most notably in the construction and aviation sectors, were forced into bankruptcy. Creative destruction, which in the late 1990s provided Russia with a decade of stratospheric growth, has been revived somewhat. Life is a little less secure for Russia's rich.

Since the expropriation of Yukos Oil Company in 2004, Putin's policy had been highly benevolent to large state-owned firms. The state financed their purchases and investment projects with seemingly inexhaustible oil revenues. But now, with oil prices down sharply, Russia's export revenue has plummeted by 30% this year, and state funds have become very scarce.

Something had to give, and, to Putin's credit, it was not fiscal conservatism. This year, Russia's budget deficit is expected to be just 2% of GDP, rising to 3.5% in 2016 - a remarkably strong performance given that the country has had to weather a trade shock and international financial sanctions. Next year, the government is set to use $40-45 billion of its reserve fund for budget financing. But Russia can afford that: its total international reserves currently amount to $364 billion, and its public debt is barely 14% of GDP.

Accomplishing this has required Putin to abandon some of his regime's taboos. For the first 15 years of Putin's rule, Russians' standard of living rose steadily; but it has fallen sharply since November 2014. Real wages are set to plummet by 10% this year. Real pensions are also declining, and spending on health care and education is set to fall by 8% next year.

State-owned firms have been affected as well. Gazprom, Rosneft (which absorbed Yukos), and Russian Railways have been publicly begging for government money. Last December, Putin accepted a complex financing scheme for Rosneft. But by August, it was clear that all three corporate giants would receive only a small share of what they wanted. The powerful head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin, an alleged former KGB officer and friend of Putin's, was fired.

Given Western financial sanctions, Putin's effort to conserve state funds is entirely sensible. Still, the significance of these changes should not be exaggerated. Their macroeconomic impact is substantial, but no systemic reforms are on the agenda. Unlike China, Russia has made no attempt to rein in rampant corruption at the top. Nor has anything been done to strengthen the rule of law. Tens of thousands of presumably innocent Russian businessmen sit in pretrial detention because security officials want to seize their companies. Protectionism proliferates as Russia imposes ever more trade sanctions.

The big question is how Russians will respond when they realize that the decline in their standard of living is not temporary, as it was in 1998. In 2014, Russia's GDP was $2.1 trillion (at the current exchange rate). It has plunged to $1.1 trillion. These numbers do not reflect purchasing power, but the Russian middle class measure their salaries in dollars. So far, public reaction has been muted, but a two-week protest by Russia's truck drivers over a new highway toll suggests that popular quiescence may not last.

At his press conference last December, Putin laid out his expectations: "In a worst-case scenario, I believe [the crisis] would take a couple of years....After that, growth is inevitable, due to a changing foreign economic situation among other things. A growing world economy will require additional energy resources." This December, Putin stated: "The current situation is complicated but...not critical."

That is no longer believable. Russia's economy was stagnating even before the bottom fell out of global oil prices, and most experts expect energy prices to remain low for years. This confronts Putin with a challenge he has never faced: leading Russia at a time when there is light visible at the end of the tunnel.

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 #14
RFE/RL
December 11, 2015
Russian Businessman Lashes Out At Kremlin, Becomes Cause Celebre
by Carl Schreck and Mumin Shakirov

Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Potapenko's address to a recent economic roundtable in Moscow began routinely enough, with a snapshot of his retail and food businesses at home and abroad. Things escalated quickly from there.

With a Kremlin-loyal federal lawmaker looking on, the plainspoken Potapenko proceeded to upbraid the Russian government for economic policies he suggested were aimed at lining officials' pockets and strangling businesses with inspections and red tape.

The particularly blunt remarks, at the Moscow Economic Forum on December 8, provided an unvarnished glimpse of resentment and frustration on the part of business leaders that might surprise Russians more accustomed to seeing state-dominated media's glossy spin on events.

"For the past 20 years," Potapenko, 45, told the roundtable, "the dialogue between business and authorities has been that of a butcher looking tenderly into the eyes of a cow, holding a knife at its throat and asking, 'What do we have today, beef or milk?'"

WATCH: Potapenko's speech (in Russian):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo067TRl7OU

Potapenko, a veteran retailer and former executive with the Russian grocery chain Pyaterochka, is known in Moscow business circles but is far from a household name in Russia.

But an eight-minute video of his roundtable appearance has set the country's chattering classes abuzz after it went viral on social media this week.
Two separate videos of his performance have garnered nearly 800,000 YouTube views in two days, while Potapenko has drawn praise from prominent Kremlin critics, including opposition leader and anticorruption crusader Aleksei Navalny.

Potapenko has been a consistent critic of the Russian government's treatment of entrepreneurs, accusing the Kremlin of failing to make good on calls for tax inspectors and other officials to stop, as President Vladimir Putin put it in 2005, "terrorizing business."

Businesspeople in Russia have long complained that Russian officials abuse such inspections to extract bribes, and Kremlin critics accuse Putin of presiding over an economy built to benefit insiders with connections among the political elite.

Potapenko told the roundtable that racketeering gangs that had a stranglehold over Russian businesses following the Soviet collapse in the 1990s were "exceptional bastards," but that their function had been replaced by tax inspectors, customs officials, and economic-crimes police who are "significantly worse."

'Die Standing'

The resonance of Potapenko's speech is due in no small part to his verbal sparring match with Vladimir Gutenev, deputy head of the Industry Committee in Russia's lower house of parliament, that ensued following the businessman's prepared remarks.

Gutenev, a member of Putin's ruling United Russia party, challenged Potapenko's rosy portrait of doing business abroad and criticized Russian companies for using tax-avoidance schemes.

Potapenko fired back: "When you work with your own money and hands, it is something else than heading up a committee. There is a difference between holding a candle and working with your hands."

In an interview with RFE/RL's Russian Service, Potapenko said his speech had likely resonated because "people saw the true nature of the relationship between entrepreneurs and authorities."

"I didn't do this for the public. I just said what I think and say every day," Potapenko said. "I'll continue to do what I think is necessary. As they say: 'Do what you have to do, and what will be, will be.' And it's better to die standing than on your knees."

'It Wasn't Obama'

During his remarks, Potapenko took aim at the title of the December 8 roundtable, Changing The Economic Course: Responding To Outside Threats. "First of all, I don't see any outside threats, pardon me.... Our own economic authorities have delivered four knockout punches" to Russian business, he said.

These "punches," he said, include the "criminal" embargo on Western goods in response to U.S. and EU sanctions over Russia's role in the Ukraine crisis that has driven up prices, as well as "prohibitive" interest rates on loans.

"It wasn't Obama who [set these rates]," Potapenko said.

He also denounced a recently imposed controversial transport tax that has sparked protests by long-haul truckers. The levy has become known as the "Rotenberg tax" because the government has entrusted collection to a company controlled by a son of construction magnate Arkady Rotenberg, a former judo sparring partner of Putin who has landed billions of dollars in state contracts.

Potapenko told RFE/RL that the government was unlikely to budge when confronted with popular protests like those staged by truckers in recent weeks. "The authorities are doing everything right, from their perspective," he said. "If they start to negotiate, they [might appear to] lose face."

Potapenko's remarks at the roundtable were met with applause from the audience.

In a December 10 radio interview, Gutenev accused the businessman of populism. "The forum's platform has traditionally been different," he told the Moscow broadcaster Govorit Moskva. "The Moscow [Economic] Forum is a dialogue among experts, and Potapenko tried to politicize the economic agenda. This is populism."

Potapenko, for his part, told RFE/RL that he was "happy" that his remarks made a public splash. "Independent and thinking people heard this," he said. "And above all, they realized that they're not alone."

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 #15
Revolution in Russia 'Inevitable and Necessary,' Khodorkovsky Says
Paul Goble

Staunton, December 10 - Yesterday, exiled Russian oligarch and opposition leader Mikhail Khodorkovsky gave an online press conference in which he said that a revolution in Russia is both "inevitable and necessary, a declaration that has attracted broad attention in the Russian segment of the Internet.

But he said a number of other important things as well, and these have been summaried by Yevgeny Babushkin in an article on the Snob.ru portal today as "The Eight Theses of Mikhail Khodorkovsky" (snob.ru/selected/entry/101920). Taken together, they form both a cri de coeur and a political program.

On the powers that be: "The decorative role of the government is clear to all. The president and his entourage can use the means of the state without any control to buy loyalty, make war and engage in various mega-projects or simply to line their own pockets." That pattern, he suggests, shows that Russia today has suffered "a full-scale anti-constitutional turnover."

On revolution: Given the lack of honest elections, "the only means of changing power is revolution ... the issue is how to make this a peaceful one ... Revolution is inevitable; it can and must be peaceful."

On the future: Russia needs new centers of growth, better transportation, contemporary infrastructure and modern industry. "All this is impossible without escaping from the isolation which the authorities have driven us in order to keep themselves in power forever."

On the opposition: "The Russian opposition undoubtedly must unite, but this will not be sufficient" until the dictator goes.

On the Stockholm syndrome: As far as the love for Putin is concerned, a love which 90 percent of the population of Russia feels, then this is the kind of love that the residents of many countries in the world suffer from as do hostages seized by terrorists. This is an ordinary situation."

On love and politics: "Since my mother passed away in August," Khodorkovsky says, he has "no obligations before Putin." But he isn't interested in getting involved in politics. "Unfortunately, the situation has assumed a form in which the professional people who are involved in politics in the opposition now cannot fulfil this function."

On science and Africa: Russia cannot modernize or even hold its own if it doesn't integrate with technologically advanced countries, something the current Kremlin opposes.  "The main problem in the middle distance is the loss of technological schools, the loss of cadres, the loss of science, and the loss of talented young people. Will be able to exist by selling natural resources? Yes, we will be able: there are not a few countries which live that way, most of them are in Africa."

On security: Despite his travails in the past, Khodorkovsky says, his "current situation seems [to him] secure."

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 #16
Prosecutor General's Office sees signs of extremism in Khodorkovsky's statements

MOSCOW, December 10. /TASS/. The Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation has discovered signs of extremism in statements by former head of the now-defunct Russian oil company Yukos Mikhail Khodorkovsky and sent relevant materials to the Investigative Committee for a check, the Office's spokeswoman Marina Gridneva said Thursday.

Gridneva explained that the check was caused by a web-posted video recording of Khodorkovsky's press conference in the Swiss office of the Open Russia public movement, during which he publicly called for a change of power in the Russian Federation by means of a revolution.

"Making during the above-mentioned event false statements on the repressiveness and illegitimacy of the current legislation, illegitimacy of parliament, illegality of Russian presidential elections and dependency of courts, Khodorkovsky suggested sabotaging laws," she said.

"Because of the lack in the country, according to him, of the institution of fair elections and other mechanisms of legitimate change of power, Khodorkovsky called for a revolution as the one and necessary means to replace power, noting that he is already taking certain measures for that," Gridneva said.

"The actions of Khodorkovsky have extremist nature and require a procedural check under Article 144 of the Criminal Procedural Code of the Russian Federation, as they contain signs of public calls for forcible change of the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation," Gridneva said.

"Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Malinovsky decided to send the check's materials to the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation to decide on criminal prosecution of Khodorkovsky on instances of the revealed law violations," she said.

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 #17
Washington Post
December 11, 2015
Political scrutiny of education is 'reasonable,' Russia's education chief says
By Andrew Roth
Andrew Roth is a reporter in The Post's Moscow bureau.

Russian Education Minister Dmitry Livanov sat down last month with The Washington Post for an interview about the intersection between education and politics in Russia. Livanov spoke shortly before visiting the United States, where he met with the Russian-language Academic Science Association and lectured at the Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C. The following is a condensed version of the interview.

Q: You've discussed the importance of enticing Russian scholars to return to Russia. What can you offer them?

"Our approach is that science is international and scholars on the international level are in demand everywhere and they can work in any country.

"In the 1990s, Russia was probably the largest world donor of intellectuals and tens of thousands of our scientists left in search of better conditions for work. Others stayed in Russia but started to work in other fields besides science. It was a huge loss for Russian science, and now we are implementing several programs, including 'mega-grants' to set up state-of-the-art laboratories at universities, aimed at bringing Russia back to the list of the world's scientific leaders. And of course we look at Russia's scientific diaspora, at scientists who left Russia, as a very powerful resource."

Q: President Vladimir Putin this year spoke about foreign grants and funds attempting to steal talented young Russian students. Did you agree with those statements?

"There is nothing wrong with searching for bright and talented young people all over the world, and any country that wants to have first-class scientists would do that.

"For us, the most important thing is that this has nothing to do with political activity or the financing of political activity. I think that any international program implemented in our country by foreign funds in the natural sciences or humanities or public science will never cause any negative reaction as long as they are scientific programs and not linked to the financing of political activity or to drawing young people into political activity. We are not going to put up with this, and that was the argument of the president."

Q: But in social science it is very difficult to distinguish between science and politics. Let's take the Dynasty Foundation, which was recognized as a foreign agent for promoting the nongovernmental organization Liberal Mission.

"I think it is always possible to tell one from another. The Dynasty Foundation fulfilled a very important mission by financing scientific research in different areas: natural sciences, mathematics, physics, etcetera, and it did very important work in popularizing scientific knowledge. But it also financed various NGOs involved in political activity in the Russian Federation. And this became a subject of investigation by the Ministry of Justice.

"What the foundation did in science was never restricted in any way. On the contrary, I valued the foundation's activity, and in February I personally handed [founder] Dmitry Zimin an award 'For Loyalty to Science' from the Ministry of Education."

Q: How has the growing tension between Russia and the United States affected cooperation in the sphere of education?

"I can say that cooperation in the sphere of education has not suffered - it has basically stayed at the same level. There are inter-universities contacts, and we can see that our universities and American universities are interested in working together as it was last year and as 10 years ago.

"As for scientific cooperation there are certain limitations in sectors like nuclear technologies and cooperation in energy."

Q: Based on conversations I've had, there is some concern among U.S. academics doing political research in Russia that they could be detained or fined for their work, maybe evicted from the country. What has the ministry's role been in those cases?

"I don't know of many cases when an academic was fired because of certain political or ideological disagreements with the university staff with just one exception: the case in Nizhny Novgorod when the vice-rector for innovations [Kendrick White] was fired after a well-known commentator on a television show made some unpleasant remarks about him.

"I then officially expressed my point of view. I believe that every university in Russia or elsewhere should be absolutely free in its personnel policy; they can hire or fire staff as they wish. But making such decisions based just on a comment in a TV show is not smart." [White has since been reinstated as an aide to the university's rector.]

Q: There is a sense more and more that politics is playing a role in education in Russia and that there are political forces that want that to happen.

"I think that politicians are closely watching what is happening in education, and this is reasonable since we are living through a period of turbulence in the international situation. It is not related so much to Ukraine or bilateral relations but more to the global challenges that all countries are facing. And this of course causes certain polarization in the society, not only in Russia but also in America and elsewhere. That is why politicians express their interest in education, in what is going on in Russian schools, in what teachers are telling students, in what is written in textbooks."

Q: You don't see a conflict with the politicians?

"No, it is not the question of resistance. Our approach is that the system of education is part of our society and it is very important to have a dialogue between various parts of the society, including political parties, professionals in education and so on, so that people can talk, express their opinions. So our position here is not of resistance or some kind of defense."

Q: You've supported a new public initiative for Russian schoolchildren to promote Russian national values. What values in particular does Russia want to teach schoolchildren, and are they different from Western values in some major way?

"We believe that any society creates a system for raising children that cannot be formally incorporated into education at schools or universities. There should be very active public organizations which will focus on socializing young people. This existed in the Soviet Union when we had the Pioneers and the Komsomol youth groups. These organizations exist in every country.

"We lost this informal system in the 1990s. The Pioneer organization and Komsomol ceased to exist, and there was a lot that was good about them. Of course there were bad things about excessive 'politicization' and 'ideologization,' but there were good things like social projects and developing leadership skills. By the way, many of our leaders today used to hold high-ranking positions in Komsomol. So, it was a system of developing soft skills. Because schools should educate children and public organizations can work on developing leadership skills. That is why I think that a movement of schoolchildren will be a step in this very important direction."

Q: Do you see this as an attempt to resurrect those organizations, the Pioneers and the Komsomol?

"I think the only similarity we can speak of now is in the the scope of this movement, which will be active in every region, in every town, in every Russian school."

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 #18
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
December 11, 2015
Crime and punishment: 25 years in a Russian penal colony
The first inmates pardoned from the death penalty will be released in 2017. They have not seen the world outside of the colony for 25 years. Everything they know is based on what they've seen on TV and read in letters. What are they going to do, what do they feel?
By Fyodor Telkov, Denis Tarasov
[Text with photos here http://rbth.com/multimedia/pictures/2015/12/10/crime-and-punishment-25-years-in-russian-penal-colony_549765]

Penal colony #56, or Black Eagle, is a place where those convicted of serious crimes serve their sentences. 260 murderers live here under one of the strictest regimes in Russia. In the USSR it was the only colony for prisoners on death row.

In 1993 a moratorium was introduced on the death penalty (initially as a temporary measure, and since 1997 permanent). Today, Black Eagle prisoners are divided into two groups: those whose death penalty was mitigated to 25 years' imprisonment and those serving life.

The first inmates pardoned from the death penalty will be released in 2017. They have not seen the world outside of the colony for 25 years. Everything they know is based on what they've seen on TV and read in letters. What are they going to do, what do they feel?

"Of course, it's exiting! Life has changed radically. But I do a lot of texting and watch TV here...I have a nice family that will not let me down. I will try to live as a normal human being and leave something good at the end of life. I will bring up my grandchildren." Victor Lushov, 1952

"I spent 5 years on death row. When my death penalty was reduced to 25 years, I realized that I had to return to my native land. I'm a villager. I operated a wood processing machine, and was good at frame making. I can make furniture, I can do everything!" Alexey Pechugin, born 1971

"Here we learn different trades. I'm able to operate woodworking machines. I have friends in the business, so I think I'll go and work for them. My home is Udmurtia, where my wife and son are... my son also works in the woodworking trade." Aleksey Isupov, born 1973

"Some land in jail in their 20s, but I was 41 years old. There's a difference. The world is certainly scary! But, thank God, UFOs don't fly around yet. All these "smartphones" are a bit tricky... I'll have to learn how to press these keys. Unfortunately, there's no computer science class, but maybe it's better not to know everything." Viktor Zaporozhsky, born 1954
 
The colony is in the Northern Urals 615 km from Yekaterinburg, in the village of Lozvinsky, somewhere in the endless taiga. In Russia there are 4 penal colonies for life prisoners, #56 is considered the best in terms of conditions. Those sentenced to 25 years are able to communicate with relatives, receive parcels, and work on the prison farm.

Life prisoners live in a separate building, in cells for one or two. 23 hours a day they are kept in cells (6 by 4 square meters), 1 hour a day they have a walk in a special room without a roof. They sleep with the lights on, during the day lying in beds is prohibited. They can read books or write letters. No TV, no toilet in the room, shower once a week.

The prisoners should not forget what they are here for. Each morning the guards read aloud a description of their crimes, and a sign is hung on the doors of their cells with the same.

The head of the colony Subhan Dadashov has been in his post for 30 years, which is more than a long sentence. He says candidly that although he knows all the prisoners personally, he would not hesitate to bring back the death penalty: there's nobody to feel sorry for.

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 #19
Interfax
December 11, 2015
EU Council divided on procedure for prolonging sanctions against Russia

The EU restrictive measures against Russia may not be prolonged on Dec. 14, a high-ranking EU official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told reporters in Brussels on Dec. 11.

The source assumed that the sanctions will be prolonged fully, but not necessarily on Dec. 14.

The source said such a decision does not have to be made by the Foreign Affairs Council and can be made by any European Council.

The sanctions remain in place until late January, the source said, adding that there is still time left.

The source said it would now be premature to say that such a decision will be made on Monday and even that it will be ratified by Christmas (Dec. 25). The European Council is divided on the procedure for making this decision, the source said, adding that it believes any option is possible and that it is possible that the Committee of Permanent Representatives in the European Union will meet on Monday to prepare such a decision for one of the future Councils. However, there is currently no clarity on this issue, the high-ranking EU functionary said.

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 #20
Politico.eu
December 10, 2015
Renzi blocks smooth extension of Russia sanctions
Italian prime minister pushes to take talks to higher political level.
By HANS VON DER BURCHARD AND FLORIAN EDER

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Thursday stayed firm on blocking a planned extension of the EU's economic sanctions against Russia, forcing EU governments to discuss the issue at a much higher level next week.

Sanctions were set to be extended on Wednesday, but that did not happen after the Italian government instructed its ambassador to raise objections during a closed-door meeting of EU countries' delegates, which was supposed to approve the extension without much political noise.

On Thursday, the 28 EU ambassadors met again, but the delicate topic was not put to vote for a second time as Italy signaled it wouldn't change its position, diplomatic sources told POLITICO.

"It seems very clear they want to take this to a high political level," a diplomat from an Eastern European country said. "And the reason seems obvious: Make this debate as public as possible."

While Renzi is known for a Russia-friendly position, EU diplomats suggest he does not want to block the extension of the sanctions - he's out to raise his own political profile.

That is what he did this week - first on Monday with a Facebook post that criticized EU institutions for their handling of the situation and then by twice blocking the silent vote that was supposed to deliver one message, according to diplomats: The EU will keep up sanctions as long as the situation in eastern Ukraine is unchanged, but without blaming Russia publicly.

Renzi has now forced leaders to do exactly that. Italy wants Europe to take Russia's military help in Syria into account when discussing sanctions, a source said.

The sanctions could be raised again at Monday's meeting of foreign affairs ministers, but Italy could defer the decision to the highest level - a meeting of EU leaders next Thursday and Friday in Brussels, sources say.

Russian workers throw peaches off a truck outside the city of Novozybkov, Russia. In August, 2015. Russian officials began a  controversial drive to destroy Western food smuggled into the crisis-hit country

Any decision on sanctions has to be reached by unanimity of all 28 EU states.

The EU's economic sanctions on Russia were imposed in July 2014 and revised in September 2014 after a deterioration of the situation in eastern Ukraine, where the country's army was pushed back by heavily-armed separatists backed by Russia, the EU says.

EU ambassadors in June 2015 extended the sanctions until the end of January 2016, which means the EU has to make a decision on an extension now.

Brussels tied any abolition of the sanctions to the fulfillment of the Minsk peace agreement, the conditions of which have not been met as the security situation in eastern Ukraine remains fragile, diplomats from EU states say.

The EU also imposed a different set of sanctions against 149 people and 37 organizations related to the Russian invasion of the Crimea peninsula, which will come up for review in March.

Further economic sanctions against Crimea will need to be reconsidered in June.

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 #21
New York Times
December 10, 2015
A New Approach to U.S.-Russia Relations Is Needed
By Jeffrey Sommers
Jeffrey Sommers, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a senior fellow at its Institute of World Affairs, is visiting faculty at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, Latvia.

The Syrian crisis presents an opportunity for a real "reset" with U.S.-Russia relations. Policy and opinion makers in both countries poorly understand each other. The United States presents policy objectives in the normative language of democracy, delinked from concrete interests. Meanwhile, Soviet policy used a discourse of communism, untethered from its realpolitik agendas. Current Russian policy, however, is shorn of ideology; maintaining progress can only advance in a stable world, not through upending states from Egypt, Iraq, Libya to Syria, while hoping democracy follows.

The architect of U.S. Cold War policy, George Kennan, warned at the end of his life, in 1998, that President Clinton's policy of advancing NATO east risked war. By winter 2014 Russia perceived Ukraine as NATO's next entrant. An expansionist Russia could have handily taken Ukraine in response to the Maidan protests, but this would have meant a new Cold War, or worse. An unending string of U.S. policy experts predicted that annexation of Ukraine by Russia was fast forthcoming. But Putin never took Ukraine, or even the Donbass.

What happened? It's clear Putin never intended to seize Ukraine, or even the Donbass - even though domestic pressures weighed heavily on him to act. Instead, Putin's actions signaled that the status quo over NATO's forward movement must change. The Donbass was his leverage. Putin is a tough nationalist, but rather than fueling the fire of Russian revanchism, Putin is actually the one carefully dousing those flames.

U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Russia have not brought Russia to heel in Ukraine. The sanctions' effects have been muted. Sanctions only worked to turn Russia to China on trade while working toward a national import substitution-based economy at home. Both results are against U.S. and E.U. wishes. Putin wants partnership with the West, but is not willing to be its supplicant. Meanwhile, many in the U.S. and E.U. genuinely wish to support democracy in Ukraine.

The United States and Russia will not reconcile their worldviews soon. Yet they can pursue common objectives in the Syrian-ISIS crisis that over time could expedite resolution of that challenge. Ironically, a bruised Ukraine could emerge as the victor if the European Union, Russia and the United States re-establish a framework for greater cooperation. It's time to reconsider the effectiveness of U.S.-E.U. sanctions on Russia and whether they harm, more than advance, the broader goals of the United States, the European Union, not to mention Ukraine.

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 #22
New York Times
December 10, 2015
Sanctions Against Russia Are Working, Don't Give Them Up
By Kathryn Stoner-Weiss
Kathryn Stoner-Weiss is a senior fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is the author of "Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia."

The United States and the European Union must continue, and possibly even extend, the sanctions imposed on Russia in the summer of 2014 for its occupation of Crimea and support of the insurgency in eastern Ukraine.

Russia should not be rewarded in any way for taking over the territory of another sovereign state. Unless it abandons its occupation of the Crimean peninsula, and withdraws its forces from eastern Ukraine, sanctions must remain.

There is good evidence that sanctions are working. The Russian economy is already suffering from low global prices for its No. 1 export - oil - and the E.U. and U.S. sanctions have further inhibited investment, as well as the availability of imported goods. The Russian economy is in recession, and its budget deficit in 2016 is predicted to be somewhere around 3 percent. Why would we want to hand the Russian government a lifeline now, or in any way reward bad international behavior?

Beyond this, however, lifting sanctions would not make Russia reorient its bombing to focus exclusively on ISIS. Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, has repeatedly referred to Assad as the "legitimate" president of Syria. Any and all movements in opposition to his government therefore are logically "illegitimate" and should be targeted. Russia views ISIS as merely one of many insurgent forces opposed to President Assad. For now, Putin is willing to prop up the Assad government to maintain Russian influence in any Western brokered settlement with the Syrian opposition. The Syrian conflict has also given the Russian military the opportunity to trot out some new military hardware to show NATO the fruits of its military reform.

But Putin will cast Assad aside as soon as he is no longer useful and a palatable replacement is identified. The Russian president's repeatedly stated goal is not only to defend Russia from all Islamic insurgency (and ISIS is but one group among many in Putin's opinion), but to re-establish and maintain a foothold in the Middle East to counterbalance America's influence there.

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 #23
OSCE systemic crisis caused by political bias, orientation towards US
By Tamara Zamyatina

MOSCOW, December 11. /TASS/. The systemic crisis that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is experiencing has been caused by political bias and inability of this body to develop collective decisions on jointly countering terrorism and solving the Ukrainian crisis, experts polled by TASS say.

In a statement at the closing session of the 22nd meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council late last week in Belgrade, Russia's delegation said the participants of the organization failed to agree on a range of documents on the most pressing security issues, including forming a broad international anti-terrorist coalition.

The delegation also expressed regret as due to political bias, some countries failed to agree on a document on the OSCE role in solving the Ukrainian crisis and the fight against drug threat.

For many years, the OSCE has been under pressure from both the European Union and NATO led by the United States and therefore Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has made a diagnosis for the organization as a "systemic crisis," the deputy dean of the world economy and world politics department at the Higher School of Economics, Andrey Suzdaltsev, told TASS.

"Back in 2008, the expert-level council of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Federation Council, Russia's upper house of parliament, said the OSCE has turned into Russia's major foe. The senators and experts noted the anti-Russian stance of the OSCE before Georgia's aggression against South Ossetia that Russia crushed, and before the Ukrainian crisis."

"Already at that time, seven years ago, the lawmakers posed a question on Russia's possible withdrawal from the OSCE," Suzdaltsev said.

The expert said literally every meeting of the OSCE and its bodies - the Parliamentary Assembly, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the commissariat on national minorities - is devoted to criticizing Russia for various issues ranging from ecology to sexual minorities rights, "they have no other agenda."

"Meanwhile, the EU countries also have their problems, this also concerns the human rights and the refugees situation, but the OSCE meetings do not raise these issues. This one-sided, biased approach and the drive to present Russia as a 'semi-continent of evil' do not allow the Organization to agree on the true important and key decisions for the European security," Suzdaltsev said.

The expert said Russia contributes 5 million euros per year to the OSCE budget and has the right to expect the constructive cooperation with the Organization, and not the rampant criticism.

"At the same time, the Ukrainian crisis has confirmed that Russia should remain the Organization's member as amid the Donbass conflict only one international body is operating, namely the OSCE monitoring mission involving Russian representatives. Russia has allocated 1.59 million euros for its activity. Unfortunately, the mission's monitoring activity is not really objective and is in favor of Kiev. Nevertheless, Russia puts hopes on the OSCE mission's activity for implementing the Minsk agreements, and that's why is not raising the issue of leaving the OSCE," Suzdaltsev said.

The director of the Political Studies Institute, Civic Chamber Member Sergey Markov, said the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) has turned into a tool of falsifying election results in various countries.

"I worked as Russia's observer at elections in Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Greece, and I can say that the OSCE observers are politically biased. It's a shame on the OSCE that they have declared legitimate the parliamentary and presidential elections in Ukraine after the coup d'etat in Kiev last year," Markov told TASS.

"There are complaints against the activity of the OSCE monitoring mission in the conflict zone in Ukraine's south-east. The mission's members register Kiev's violations of the Minsk agreements unwillingly and insufficiently and on the contrary, constantly point to violations of these accords by the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics," the expert said.

"The main cause of the crisis seen in the OSCE is that it is dominated by the US that forces its Western allies to work to ensure American geopolitical interests," Markov said.

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 #24
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
December 10, 2015
What price will Moscow pay for its 2015 foreign policy moves in 2016?
Russia has seen ups and downs in its foreign policy in 2015. It seems to have regained the status of one of the key global players, but at a very high price, which it will keep paying in 2016.
By Pavel Koshkin
Pavel Koshkin is Executive Editor of Russia Direct and a contributing writer to Russia Beyond The Headlines (RBTH). He also contributed to a number of Russian and foreign media outlets, including Russia Profile, Kommersant and the Moscow bureau of the BBC

Russia's foreign policy has consistently been in the spotlight of foreign experts and media since the start of the Ukrainian crisis in early 2014. Most pundits agree that the Kremlin relies more on improvisation than on strategy in taking decisions, which makes its foreign policy even more unpredictable.

The Kremlin's foreign policy: 2014 vs. 2015

Despite the improvisational nature of Moscow's foreign policy, it seems to be very consistent in bringing more surprises for the West. In 2014, it was the incorporation of Crimea, followed by active involvement in the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. In 2015, Moscow started its military campaign in the Middle East against the Syrian opposition and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS).       

However, while 2014 saw more failures (economic and financial sanctions by the West, isolation and schism with its European and American partners), 2015 seems to have been a bit more successful and returned Russia to the global arena as one of the key actors whose view is not ignored, but taken into account.

The G20 summits in 2014 and 2015 are indicative in this regard. Last year Russian President Vladimir Putin experienced a very cold reception from Western leaders and was largely ignored. In contrast, this year the Kremlin seems to have actively promoted its diplomacy and Putin met with a number of Western leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron, on the sidelines of the G20 summit.      

Most experts agree that this is one of the achievements of Russia's foreign policy in 2015: mitigating the negative implications of its 2014 foreign policy gamble. Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University, argues the Kremlin seems to have managed "to mitigate some of the worst impacts of the post-Ukrainian adventure" and prove "that to a certain extent it is a regional and global player."

"Because Putin has demonstrated a capacity to play his weak hand very well, because Putin has demonstrated a capacity to be a spoiler, he has, at least, made a case that you cannot ignore Moscow," he told Russia Direct in an interview.

Aurel Braun, a professor of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Toronto, agrees that Russia insured that it is "an important player" which "is not forgotten" and "needs to be respected and consulted." However, Moscow achieved that kind of success at a very heavy cost, he added.

The cost of Russia's foreign policy improvisation

The Kremlin's aspirations to regain its status as a key geopolitical player didn't remain without response and came at a very high price: prolonged sanctions, a controversial reputation, and harsh criticism from the West. On the top of that, the potential for increased terror threats came shortly after Moscow started its direct military campaign in Syria, as indicated by the terrorist attack on the Russian charter plane in Egypt.

Moreover, the Kremlin's Middle East overtures spoiled relations with a former ally, Turkey, which downed Russia's jet in Syria in late November. In fact, this incident showed the real price of Russia's foreign policy improvisation in 2015.  Moscow's Syrian campaign "is not a cost-free operation for Russia," says Johns Hopkins University's visiting professor Dr. Robert Freedman.

"While Russian President Vladimir Putin may have hoped he could use the situation in Syria to support Syrian President Bashar Assad and demonstrate Russian influence in the Middle East, so far the Russian operation in Syria has cost Russia a passenger plane with 244 lives, a fighter-bomber, and a helicopter, with more losses likely to come," he told Russia Direct in an interview.

Given that Russia relied on Turkey previously, when its relations with the West was not in the best shape, the implications of the Russian-Turkish tensions on Russia and its foreign policy in 2016 might be unfavorable, given that the Kremlin imposed immediate economic sanctions against Ankara.

"By breaking its ties with Turkey, Russia risks moving further down the slippery slope of letting political and status consideration undermine the economic rationale of relations with the outside world," warns Mikhail Troitskiy, a Moscow-based political and international affairs analyst.

"Russian retail markets will see tangible price increases as a result of bans on imports of products from Turkey. If pushed too far, such logic could inflict major irreversible damage on the Russian economy and the well-being of Russian citizens," he said.

Meanwhile, Braun warns that the Russian-Turkish schism may put at stake "a tripling of trade and the possible construction of a huge pipeline to carry energy from Russia to Turkey and Europe" in 2016.

Given the Kremlin has threatened additional economic and possible political measures and NATO's support has emboldened Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to remain intransigent with Moscow, relations between the two are likely to worsen 2016 and "this in turn will likely damage the interests of both countries," Braun said.

Negative scenarios for the year ahead

If the Kremlin falls out with Turkey, will Moscow be able to find new partners, taking into account its relationship with the West is far from ideal? Will it initiate new coalitions and what alliances might emerge amidst the Russian-Turkish schism in 2016?

According to Braun, Russia will keep enhancing its cooperation with the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad and with Iran.  However, he argues, such cooperation will be problematic in the longer term "because the Assad regime is really not viable and Iran's long-term interests, both in pursuing Islamism and ultimately in its desire to become a nuclear power, are incompatible with Russia's best national interests."

Ironically, Russia's confrontation with Turkey is pushing the EU and NATO closer to the regime of the Turkish president - the same one, which the EU has heavily criticized in the past for its gross abuse of human rights, Braun added. At the same time, Russia may well see its relations with the West damaged in part as a consequence of the Russian-Turkish confrontation.

"Russia's anger at Turkey, even if justified, is having deleterious effects not just on its economic relationship with Ankara but also over the long term, most importantly with the relationship with the U.S. and EU, both of which are in a sense being forced into Turkey's arms," Braun said.

And this is not a positive sign, given that "Russia's true national interests lie with Europe and the West rather than with rogue leaderships like those of Iran, Syria, and earlier with the increasingly repressive Erdogan," Braun argues.

According to him, repairing relations with the EU and U.S. should be top priority for Russia in 2016, but it "does require a reorientation of Russian policy" and "its willingness to compromise on a number of issues ranging from Ukraine to the Middle East."
Troitskiy is very skeptical about the possibility of compromise between Russia and the West. "Cooperation with other major nations will prove difficult for Russia in 2016 because almost any of those nations has set forth preconditions for such cooperation," he said.

The U.S. and the EU "insist on Moscow helping to re-establish full control by Kiev over the separatist entities in Donbas and forcing the departure of Assad," Troitskiy explains. "Painful sanctions against Russia are likely to remain in place until Donbass is returned to Ukraine, while a full-fledged coalition to combat the Islamic State will not materialize until there is agreement on the shape of a post-war political settlement in Syria."

In the most general terms, Troitskiy continues, the West will keep pointing to the lack of trust with Russia as the main obstacle to extended cooperation, and Russia will continue to point fingers to the West for the existing mistrust. At the same time, in 2016 NATO will be delivering on its promises of an upgrade of its military infrastructure in Eastern Europe as a purported response to Russia's actions.

A negative scenario, as seen by Andrei Tsygankov, a professor of International Relations and Political Science at San Francisco State University, includes Russia's continued internal stagnation, growing problems in Ukraine and Central Asia's increased radicalization following Middle Eastern destabilization.

"The chances of Ukraine acting on the European Union's pressures are not very good given Kiev's apparent inability to reform the economy and a strengthened dependence on anti-Russian nationalism for regime survival," he explains. "For the U.S.-Russia proxy war in Syria to be averted and a greater progress on the broad coalition to take place, a critical intervention from the White House is required not only to compromise with the Kremlin on Assad, but also discipline Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The potential for that intervention is nowhere to be found."

Tsygankov believes that the process of changing international rules in 2016 will be very much shaped by how things will turn in Syria.

"2016 therefore is likely to be a borderline year that can go either way in terms of shaping a future world - toward building some foundations for formulating new globally acceptable rules or toward an even greater instability," he warns.

According to Tsygankov, the main drivers of Russian foreign policy in 2016 will remain the Middle East, Ukraine, Central Asia/Afghanistan, oil prices, and the state of the Russian economy.

A positive scenario for 2016 is less likely

Most pundits seem to be pessimistic about Russia's foreign policy in 2016, because a favorable outcome requires a great deal of political will among global stakeholders, but given their divergent geopolitical interests, such a scenario is almost unrealistic.  Nevertheless, Tsygankov sees the light at the end of the tunnel. He argues that might be the improvement of relations between Russia and the West amidst common threats like ISIS and the possible de-escalation of the Ukrainian conflict.

"If there is progress in Russia's engagement with the West in counter-terrorism in Syria, that there is no major escalation in Ukraine, a modest economic recovery begins, and all others (East Asia in particular) being equal, Russia's vision of world order may be vindicated," he assumes, outlining the positive scenario of how international events will develop in 2016. "That vision is based on respect for sovereignty, spheres of influence, and multilateralism."

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#25
Reuters
December 11, 2015
Putin Says Russia Backs Free Syrian Army Alongside Assad Troops

MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin said on Friday Russia supports the opposition Free Syrian Army, providing it with air support, arms and ammunition in joint operations with Syrian troops against Islamist militants.

His statement appeared to be the first time Moscow said it was actually supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's opponents in the fight against Islamic State forces. Putin said last month the Russian air force had hit several "terrorist" targets provided by the Free Syrian Army.

Western and Arab states carrying out air strikes against Islamic State for more than a year say that Russian jets have mainly hit other rebel forces in the west of Syria.

"The work of our aviation group assists in uniting the efforts of government troops and the Free Syrian Army," Putin told an annual meeting at the defense ministry.

"Now several of its units numbering over 5,000 troops are engaged in offensive actions against terrorists, alongside regular forces, in the provinces of Homs, Hama, Aleppo and Raqqa," he said, referring to the Free Syrian Army.

"We support it from the air, as well as the Syrian army, we assist them with weapons, ammunition and provide material support."

Putin said strikes by Russia's air force and navy had inflicted heavy damage on the infrastructure of Islamic State, which controls large areas of eastern Syria and western Iraq.

Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said, however, that the influence of Islamic State was increasing in Syria, where militants control around 70 percent of the country.

The number of IS fighters in Iraq and Syria totals around 60,000, Shoigu said, and there is a threat of violence spilling over into post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Talking to his generals, Putin issued a veiled warning to Turkey, whose downing of a Russian bomber jet near the Syrian-Turkish border last month sent bilateral relations to a freezing point and led Moscow to impose economic sanctions to Istanbul.

"I want to warn those who may again try to stage provocations against our troops," he said.

"I order you to act in an extremely tough way. Any targets threatening Russia's (military) group or our land infrastructure must be immediately destroyed," Putin told the generals.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu earlier on Friday called on Russia for calm, but said Turkey's patience is not unlimited.

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 #26
www.rt.com
December 11, 2015
Any targets threatening Russian forces in Syria must be immediately destroyed - Putin

Jihadists in Syria pose a direct threat to Russia, Putin has told a defense meeting in Moscow, adding that any targets threatening the country's military there should be destroyed. Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said Islamic State's influence in Syria continues to expand.

The Russian military's actions in Syria are being coordinated with Russian special services such as the FSB, who are disclosing terrorist cells, including Islamic State, Putin said.

All forces threatening Russian servicemen in Syria should be destroyed, according to the Russian president.

"Any targets threatening our [military] group or land infrastructure must be immediately destroyed," Putin said, speaking at a Defense Ministry event.

Putin said more 5,000 members of the Free Syrian Army are operating on the terrorists' side.

"In general, the actions of the Russian groups deserve high praise. This is a result of work by the Ministry of Defense, General Staff officers, Russian Air Force pilots and the Russian Navy," he added.

'ISIS influence expanding in Syria' - Russian Def Min

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu added that Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) controls about 70 percent of Syria's territory, adding that in Syria and Iraq there are about 60,000 militants.

"The Islamic State area of influence is expanding," he said, "There is a threat that their actions will be transferred to Central Asia and the Caucasus."

To date the Russian military has carried out about 4,000 sorties, striking around 8,000 terrorist facilities in Syria, he added.

Drones have proved a necessary part of the military operation against the terrorists, according to Shoigu. He said that Moscow has an about 1,720 drones at its disposal.

Both Putin and Shoigu took part in the Defense Ministry board meeting, which apart from the Syrian operation touched upon such issues as nuclear strategy, NATO expansion and Arctic military bases.

"Special attention should be paid to strengthening the combat potential of the strategic nuclear forces and implementing defense space programs," Putin said during the meeting.

Russia needs to "arm all the components of the nuclear triad with new armaments, raise the efficiency of the missile attack warning and aerospace defense systems," the Russian president said.

Shoigu added NATO has significantly expanded in Europe.

The US has sited at least 200 bombs in the Netherlands, Turkey, Belgium, Italy and Germany, according to the defense minister.

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 #27
Islamic State militants seize 70% of Syria's territory - Russian defense minister

MOSCOW, December 11. /TASS/. The area of influence of the Islamic State terrorist group (outlawed in Russia) is expanding, militants have seized about 70% of Syria's territory, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Friday.

"The Islamic State area of influence is expanding. Militants have seized about 70% of the Syrian territory. The number of terrorists amounts to about 60,000 people," he said.

"There is a threat that their actions will be transferred to Central Asia and the Caucasus," the minister said.

Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov earlier said that from 25,000 to 30,000 foreigners, including from Russia, were fighting in the ranks of Islamic State. The CIA estimated the number of militants at about 30,000 people, while the Iraqi government said there were 200,000 Islamic State fighters.

The Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed over 8,000 terrorist military facilities since the start of the operation in Syria, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu noted.

"In all, our combat aircrafts made some 4,000 sorties and destroyed more than 8,000 facilities of the terrorist military infrastructure," he said.
According to him, the Islamic State was suffering major damage after Russian air strikes.

On September 30 Russia's Federation Council unanimously approved President Vladimir Putin's request to launch a military operation in Syria against Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist groups. Russian Aerospace Defense Forces delivered first targeted airstrikes at militants' positions on the same day.

More than 50 jets and helicopters take part in the operation, including Su-34 and Su-24M fighter jets, Su-25 aircraft, Su-30SM fighter aircraft, and Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters.

Russia began to deliver strikes against militants in Syria on September 30 at the request of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The US-led international coalition has conducted a military operation against terrorists in Syria and Iraq since 2014.

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 #28
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
December 10, 2015
Turbulence over Syria's skies
The skies over Syria became more crowded last week after the UK voted to join air strikes against ISIS forces. But can countries with very different attitudes to the conflict agree on common aims?
FYODOR LUKYANOV, SPECIAL TO RBTH
The author is chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy.

The terrorist attacks in Paris and Sinai, and Russia's earlier decision to get involved in the Syrian Civil War, have raised the stakes in that regional conflict considerably. Already the international efforts in the fight against ISIS are involving new external (and not necessarily regional) actors. Last week alone, the United Kingdom and Germany joined in, although neither had previously demonstrated an enthusiasm for direct involvement. What should we expect? Is an anti-terrorism coalition really being formed? Hardly.

The main problem is that the objectives and tasks of those who form this coalition do not coincide. The situation is a paradoxical one, however: despite the huge differences in the approaches of the external players (notably the United States, France, Russia and the UK), they identify the main enemy in similar terms. This is seen to be ISIS, which should be eliminated or at least stopped. To fulfill this task, active assistance from the regional players - those inside Syria and in the Middle East as a whole - is needed. In theory, they should be carrying out the main military action.

Regional players

But it turns out that their priorities are different. For Turkey, the main threat is the Kurdish issue, which they perceive as far more dangerous than ISIS; so far as Saudi Arabia is concerned, its main fear is that of Iranian Shia expansion rather than of the threats posed by ISIS militants; Iran is engaged in a complex regional game, with ISIS being just one element; Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is not just facing the radical Islamists but a very wide range of opponents. The other countries in the region are desperately trying to maintain control over the situation at home, so they have to maneuver all the time. And they do not always see ISIS as their worst enemy. This state of affairs practically rules out a truly broad coalition. But it does create an unpleasant prospect for the external players. Everybody realizes and admits that ISIS cannot be defeated without a ground operation. The idea is that a ground operation should be conducted by Middle East players, all the more so since the countries of the region invariably condemn "colonialists" for any interference. However, if they do fight, they will be fighting not against terrorism but against each other, which cannot be allowed to happen. So there may be a need for a deeper military involvement on the part of Russia, the US, France and others. Having said that, everybody knows what risks are associated with direct interventions in the Middle East.

Moscow's motivation

Russia has many motives for its involvement in Syria. The main motive, of course, is the threat of the unchecked spread of terrorism. Another has to do with relations with the incumbent Syrian government, which is Russia's long-standing partner. Last summer, it became clear that the resources of the ruling regime were close to exhaustion. The Assad regime had turned out to be much more resilient than the West thought it would be back in 2011, but a war of attrition is not something that any country can easily cope with. The fall of Assad would be seen by all as a major setback for Moscow. There were other motives at play, too. For instance, the desire to expand the field of the conversation with the West, which for the past two years was all but limited to the topic of Ukraine and the Minsk process.

At the same time, it is important to view Russia's actions in a more global context. Moscow has claimed a right, which in the previous 25 years (since the war in response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990-91) exclusively belonged to the US. The right to use force to restore international order is the function of a so-called "world policeman". Russia has entered a sphere where issues of hierarchy are addressed. In a unipolar world, wars fought "for the sake of peace", that is, wars not aimed at achieving specific and clear goals of one's own, were waged only by the US with support of its allies. Moscow, having started the military operation in Syria, has changed the alignment of forces and prospects for resolving a major international conflict, with no real practical gains for itself. This is a prerogative of those at the top of the military and political league, who are capable of setting an agenda.

Another important factor is that the conflict in Syria is likely to end the era of a "humanitarian and ideological" approach to resolving local crises. Until recently, an important element of the discussion about sectarian conflicts consisted of such accusations as crimes against one's own people and the ruthless suppression of protests. A leader who was accused of such behavior was put in the category of rulers who had "lost their legitimacy", which made any dialogue with them either unnecessary or unacceptable. That is what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad was next on the list. However, now it seems that the humanitarian component is once again giving way to a realistic approach. The black-and-white division into good and bad guys results in a deadlock, and bargaining will have to involve everyone.

Open-ended negotiations

One important new element in resolving the Syrian crisis are the talks in Vienna. This is the second (after the marathon of the Iran nuclear talks) instance of open-ended negotiations, when the format of a settlement should emerge in the course of discussion rather than being signed in advance, leaving the sides to debate ways of achieving it. No one knows now what Syria will be like after the war, and in this case this is a good thing. Clearly, there is no guarantee of success, but conceptually it is a more sound path. Unfortunately, the acute Russian-Turkish conflict caused by the downing of the Russian warplane last month was a serious blow to the tentative settlement process that was taking shape in Vienna. Russia has neither the desire nor the resources to wage a lengthy campaign in Syria.

Moscow's interest in a political solution is as strong as that of the other players. Now, however, a political solution must take into account the fact of a considerable Russian military presence in Syria. It is hard to imagine that the Kremlin will be willing to give up the military infrastructure it has created there so quickly, just like the United States did not fully withdraw from Afghanistan once the mission there was over.

Political shake-up

Russia has a tricky balancing act to perform. First, it has to ensure its future geopolitical presence in Syria, irrespective of the configuration of the authorities there. Second, it must avoid doing any damage to its developing relations with Iran, a major regional partner for the future. For Tehran, preserving the current regime in Syria is essential: it rightly believes that any change will become fatal for Iran's dominance in Syria. The Syrian saga is perhaps the only topic that cements these relations; in all the other respects, Tehran is viewing Russia with doubt. Third, Russia must make sure not to turn into a great power that is serving Iran's regional interests, the way, for example, the US for a long time served the interests of Saudi Arabia.

However, the escalation of the past several weeks and the growing scale of events leads to another alarming conclusion. This is no longer just about Syria; this is about the future of the region as a whole. Any settlement in Syria is impossible, therefore, without a political shake-up of the Middle East as a whole. And that is a far larger task, which is fraught with far bigger risks. But it has to be said that these days, Russia is clearly not afraid of risks.

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 #29
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
December 10, 2015
Why is Russia bombing Syria?
Simplification of what's at stake in Syria and an underestimation of facts such as the growing terrorist threat from the region hinders the West from understanding the real reasons why Russia launched its air campaign in Syria.
By Alexey Khlebnikov
Alexey Khlebnikov is the Senior Editor of Russia Direct and a Middle East expert. As part of his Master's and Ph.D. studies, he has made several research trips, including to Syria, Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Hungary. He has been published on international relations topics in academic journals and media sources in both Russia and Israel. He received his Master's degree in Public Policy from the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota in the United States as an Edmund S. Muskie Scholar. Currently he is working towards his Ph.D. in international relations.

Since the very start of the Russian air campaign in Syria, most of the world is still trying to decode the rationale behind Kremlin's move, the reasons that led to such a decision and the factors that influenced the sequence of events and the outcome.

As Russia and the U.S. are the two key players in the Syrian conflict, it's important for American pundits, journalists and politicians to understand why Russia made such a move in Syria.

In a recent review of the situation in Syria [http://www.cfr.org/syria/russias-campaign-syria-three-things-know/p37219], Stephen Sestanovich, ex-ambassador and a senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies of the Council on Foreign Relations, explains the three main factors that, according to him, played the key role in defining Russia's rationale behind the increased involvement in Syria:

1. Russia's military ramp-up;
2. The support that Moscow enjoys from the Syrian Army, Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah on the ground;
3. The U.S.-led coalition's disunity on how to deal with the Syrian crisis.

In general, Sestanovich is right about these factors, although these factors alone cannot explain why Russia increased its involvement in Syria. He is also missing several very important points, which cannot be ignored or underestimated.

1. The growing terrorist threat from the region

Sestanovich does not mention at all the terrorist threat that emanates from the jihadists in Syria. Unfortunately, the majority of the U.S. media and think tanks mainly talk just about two groups: the Islamic Sate of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS) and the "moderate" rebels.
 
For the first weeks of the Russian airstrikes, major U.S. media outlets, such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post, used Syrian maps where only ISIS-held areas were depicted along with those held by Syrian official forces, the Kurds and the rebels (e.g. the Free Syrian Army). Such simplification totally avoids the mentioning of other terrorist groups such as the notorious Jabhat an-Nusra, Jaysh al-Fatah, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam, Ansar al-Sham, etc.

Such a narrative easily created a simplified vision of the conflict in which ISIS is the only terrorist force and the term "rebels" or Free Syrian Army describe all moderates.

It is at least not pragmatic to simplify the division between "moderate" rebels and terrorists in such a way. Syria has long before these months become a magnet for all sorts of extremists from over the globe. This ultimately led to the creation and rise of a large number of terrorist groups and formations.

Russia views the rise of the terrorist threat from the region in a very pragmatic way. Russia cares about domestic stability and internal Muslims unity. Russia considers all jihadist fighters in Syria and Iraq as potential militants, as agents who will further infiltrate into Russia's Caucasus, Central Volga region (where a large Muslim populations resides) and to the Central Asian republics. Ultimately, they will pose a direct threat to the security of the state. According to Russia's security services, there are estimated to be more that 2,000 Russians fighting in Syria for ISIS or other terrorist formations. This creates quite a large risk and justifies raising these kinds of concerns.

2. The absence of any real force on the ground to combat the terrorists

In his review, Sestanovich also does not mention the absolutely fragmented Syrian moderate opposition, including the Free Syrian Army (FSA). In the words of the former U.S. intelligence chief David Petraeus, the "moderates" had collapsed long ago and currently there is no strong and united force in Syria except the Syrian Army and the Kurds that can resist ISIS. Even people inside Syria are very skeptical about the Free Syrian Army and say that, as a uniting structure for rebels, it is simply not viable.

These two above-mentioned factors create huge risks. The first risk is the spread of terrorism in the region and outside of the region to Europe, Russia and Central Asia. The second risk is the absence of any solid and rigid force on the ground to fight the terrorists - with the exception of the Syrian Arab Army and the Syrian Kurds (who actually did not confront Assad and are supported by the U.S.).

This created the situation where the balance of power started to tilt towards the terrorists. It created a risk that the Syrian government and all state institutions together with the Syrian Army could be overrun by the terrorists, which would have led to the total collapse of the state and further destabilization of the region for years to come. This is because a feasible force to replace or fill the "vacuum" after regime change did not exist and does not exist.

It is important to coordinate with the Syrian Army and Kurds militia to fight ISIS. The absence of such coordination is one of the reasons of the low productivity of the U.S.-led coalition strikes against terrorists. Therefore, these two factors seriously affected Russia's decision to raise the stakes of its involvement in Syria.

3. The tacit support of the U.S. for Russian airstrikes

Further in the review, Sestanovich misses U.S. and regional actors' tacit approval of the Russian air campaign. In fact, there was no direct mention of disapproval of Russian involvement. The mere fact that Putin met with U.S. President Obama on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session (along with numerous other Western and Middle East leaders) just two days before Moscow started its air campaign in Syria suggests that two leaders definitely discussed that very possibility and the U.S. gave its tacit approval for such move.

After Sept. 30, when the first Russian bombs hit their targets, the U.S. official position was very soft: it did not harshly criticize Moscow and it did not call for an immediate halt of the campaign. Moreover, Moscow already established direct coordination in the Syrian skies with Israelis, Turks and Jordanians, who are the allies of the U.S. in the region.

Moreover, it must not be ignored that during the summer before the airstrikes started, Russia undertook an unprecedented diplomatic "surge." It hosted heads of states (in addition to Foreign Ministers and Ministers of Defense) of almost every regional country (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Iran, etc.), and held numerous talks on the level of foreign minister with every country involved in the conflict (U.S., France, Germany, UK). This indicates that Russia kept contact with every state actor involved in the Syrian crisis and communicated its ideas and plans.

So, all these reports that Russia's airstrikes took everyone by surprise have no factual basis. Certainly, the factors outlined by Sestanovich should be taken into account and should be monitored; however, ignoring or underestimating the  above mentioned factors hinders a true understanding of the reasons behind Russia's Syria air campaign.

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 #30
Counterpunch.org
December 11, 2015
Why Did Turkey Shoot Down That Russian Plane?
By Conn Hallinan
Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com

Why did Turkey shoot down that Russian plane? It was certainly not because the SU-24 posed any threat. The plane is old and slow, and the Russians were careful not to arm it with anti-aircraft missiles. And it wasn't because the Turks are quick on the trigger, either. Three years ago, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan emphatically declared that a "short-term violation of airspace can never be a pretext for an attack." There are even some doubts about whether the Russian plane ever crossed into Turkey's airspace at all.

Indeed, the whole November 24 incident looks increasingly suspicious, and one doesn't have to be a paranoid Russian to think the takedown might have been an ambush. As retired Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, former U.S. Air Force chief of staff, told Fox News, "This airplane was not making any maneuvers to attack the [Turkish] territory." He called the Turkish action "overly aggressive" and concluded that the incident "had to be preplanned."

It certainly puzzled the Israeli military, not known for taking a casual approach to military intrusions. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon told the press on November 29 that a Russian warplane had violated the Israeli border over the Golan Heights. "Russian planes do not intend to attack us, which is why we must not automatically react and shoot them down when an error occurs."

So why was the plane downed?

Perhaps because, for the first time in four years, some major players are tentatively inching toward a settlement of the catastrophic Syrian civil war, and powerful forces are maneuvering to torpedo that process. If the Russians hadn't kept their cool, several nuclear-armed powers could well have found themselves in a scary faceoff, and any thoughts of ending the war would have gone a-glimmering.

A Short Score Card

There are multiple actors on the Syrian stage - and a bewildering number of crosscurrents and competing agendas that, paradoxically, make it both easier and harder to find common ground. Easier, because there is no unified position among the antagonists; harder, because trying to herd heavily armed cats is a tricky business.

A short score card on the players:

The Russians and the Iranians are supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and fighting a host of extremist organizations ranging from al-Qaeda to the Islamic State, or ISIS. But each country has a different view of what a post-civil war Syria might look like. The Russians want a centralized and secular state with a big army. The Iranians don't think much of "secular," and they favor militias, not armies.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and most the other Gulf monarchies are trying to overthrow the Assad regime, and are the major supporters of the groups Russia, Iran, and Lebanon's Hezbollah are fighting. But while Turkey and Qatar want to replace Assad with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia might just hate the Brotherhood more than it does Assad. And while the monarchies are not overly concerned with the Kurds, Turkey is bombing them, and they're a major reason why Ankara is so deeply enmeshed in Syria.

The U.S., France, and the United Kingdom are also trying to overthrow Assad, but are currently focused on fighting ISIS using the Kurds as their major allies - specifically the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Party, an offshoot of the Turkish Kurdish Workers Party that the U.S. officially designates as "terrorist." These are the same Kurds that the Turks are bombing and who have a friendly alliance with the Russians.

Indeed, Turkey may discover that one of the price tags for shooting down that SU-24 is the sudden appearance of new Russian weapons for the Kurds, some of which will be aimed at the Turks.

A Suspension of Rational Thought

The Syrian war requires a certain suspension of rational thought.

For instance, the Americans are unhappy with the Russians for bombing the anti-Assad Army of Conquest, a rebel alliance dominated by the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's franchise in Syria. That would be the same al-Qaeda that brought down the World Trade Center towers and that the U.S. is currently bombing in Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan.

Suspension of rational thought is not limited to Syria.

A number of Arab countries initially joined the U.S. air war against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, because both organizations are pledged to overthrow the Gulf monarchies. But Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar have now dropped out to concentrate their air power on bombing the Houthis in Yemen.

The Houthis, however, are by far the most effective force fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda in Yemen. Both extremist organizations have made major gains in the last few weeks because the Houthis are too busy defending themselves to take them on.

Moves Toward a Settlement

In spite of all this political derangement, however, there are several developments that are pushing the sides toward some kind of peaceful settlement that doesn't involve regime change in Syria. That is exactly what the Turks and the Gulf monarchs are worried about, and a major reason why Ankara shot down that Russian plane.

The first of these developments has been building throughout the summer: a growing flood of Syrians fleeing the war. There are already almost 2 million in Turkey, over a million each in Jordan and Lebanon, and as many as 900,000 in Europe. Out of 23 million Syrians, some 11 million have been displaced by the war, and the Europeans are worried that many of those 11 million people will end up camping out on the banks of the Seine and the Ruhr. If the war continues into next year, that's an entirely plausible prediction.

Hence, the Europeans have quietly shelved their demand that Assad resign as a prerequisite for a ceasefire and are leaning on the Americans to follow suit. The issue is hardly resolved, but there seems to be general agreement that Assad will at least be part of a transition government. At this point, the Russians and Iranians are insisting on an election in which Assad would be a candidate because both are wary of anything that looks like "regime change." The role Assad might play will be a sticking point, but probably not an insurmountable one.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia are adamant that Assad must go, but neither of them is in the driver's seat these days. While NATO supported Turkey in the Russian plane incident, according to some of the Turkish press, many of its leading officials consider Erdogan a loose cannon. And Saudi Arabia - whose economy has been hard hit by the worldwide fall in oil prices - is preoccupied by its Yemen war, which is turning into a very expensive quagmire.

Russia's Role

The second development is the Russian intervention, which appears to have changed things on the ground, at least in the north, where Assad's forces were being hard pressed by the Army of Conquest. New weapons and airpower have dented a rebel offensive and resulted in some gains in the government's battle for Syria's largest city, Aleppo.

Russian bombing also took a heavy toll on the Turkmen insurgents in the Bayir-Bucak region, the border area that Turkey has used to infiltrate arms, supplies, and insurgents into Syria.

The appearance of the Russians essentially killed Turkey's efforts to create a "no fly zone" on its border with Syria, a proposal that the U.S. has never been enthusiastic about. Washington's major allies, the Kurds, are strongly opposed to a no fly zone because they see it as part of Ankara's efforts to keep the Kurds from forming an autonomous region in Syria.

The Bayir-Bucak area and the city of Jarabulus are also the exit point for Turkey's lucrative oil smuggling operation, apparently overseen by one of Erdogan's sons, Bilal. The Russians have embarrassed the Turks by publishing satellite photos showing miles of tanker trucks picking up oil from ISIS-controlled wells and shipping it through Turkey's southern border with Syria.

"The oil controlled by the Islamic State militants enters Turkish territory on an industrial scale," Russian President Vladimir Putin said November 30. "We have every reason to believe that the decision to down our plane was guided by a desire to ensure the security of this oil's delivery routes to ports."

Erdogan and NATO

Erdogan didn't get quite the response he wanted from NATO following the shooting down of the SU-24. While the military alliance backed Turkey's defense of its "sovereignty," NATO then called for a peaceful resolution and de-escalation of the whole matter.

At a time when Europe needs a solution to the refugee crisis - and wants to focus its firepower on the organization that killed 130 people in Paris - NATO cannot be happy that the Turks are dragging them into a confrontation with the Russians, making the whole situation a lot more dangerous than it was before the November 24 incident.

The Russians have now deployed their more modern SU-34 bombers and armed them with air-to-air missiles. The bombers will now also be escorted by SU-35 fighters. The Russians have also fielded S-300 and S-400 anti-aircraft systems, the latter with a range of 250 miles. The Russians say they're not looking for trouble, but they're loaded for bear should it happen.

Would a dustup between Turkish and Russian planes bring NATO - and four nuclear armed nations - into a confrontation? That possibility ought to keep people up at night.

Coming to the Table

Sometime around the New Year, the countries involved in the Syrian civil war will come together in Geneva. A number of those will do their level best to derail the talks, but one hopes there are enough sane - and desperate - parties on hand to map out a political solution.

It won't be easy, and who gets to sit at the table has yet to be decided. The Turks will object to the Kurds; the Russians, Iranians, and Kurds will object to the Army of Conquest; and the Saudis will object to Assad. In the end it could all come apart. It's not hard to torpedo a peace plan in the Middle East.

But if the problems are great, failure will be catastrophic. That may be the glue that keeps the parties together long enough to hammer out a ceasefire, an arms embargo, a new constitution, and internationally supervised elections.

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 #31
The New York Observer
www.observer.com
December 11, 2015
Out of Gas: Turkey Is Losing Its Battle With Russia
By Micah Halpern

Turkey has told the Reuters news agency that Russia has stopped work on its nuclear power plants.  In reality, the Turks are exaggerating.  The Russians haven't really stopped-they have really only slowed down.

It is another piece in the intensifying conflict that has enveloped Russia and Turkey over the downing of a Russian AU-24 slow moving bomber by a Turkish F-16 fighter jet.

The nuclear deal began in 2013. The Turks promised to pay $20 billion and the Russian nuclear company Rosatom promised to build four 1,200 megawatt nuclear electrical power plants in Turkey.

The first plant was scheduled to be opened in 2019, but from the very outset things have not run on schedule.  One reason is that the project confronted international regulatory problems.

The Russians have done this before-only with Iran.  They slowed down on the original proposal, Iran took the Russians to the World Court, and sued them. They wanted their nuclear plants.

Now, because of their experience with Iran, Russia realizes that stopping entirely would prove costly. Huge disincentives and penalties are built into the contract.  And Turkey has already started shopping around for someone else to finish the nuclear job. Good luck.

Here is the crux of the problem and why Turkey can never win in this conflict with Russia. Turkey is almost totally dependent on imported energy. They have been counting on these nuclear plants and should be conducting back-door diplomatic negotiations to resurrect the deal , but they do not appear to be doing that. Tensions between the Turks and Russians do not seem to be dissipating.

So much so that Russia has also stopped importing Turkish fruits and vegetables. The reason they give is poor Turkish sanitation and hygiene, but the real reason is because the jet shot down the bomber.

This isn't  just a case of no more Turkish pistachio nuts or dates. Turkish fruits and vegetables account for 20 percentof Russia's total fruit and vegetable consumption. This is a huge loss for the Turkish economy.  A $4 billion annual loss in fruit and vegetable revenue. Russia has said they will easily make up the loss by importing more from Iran and Israel.

Russia has also cancelled the junkets and all expense included holiday vacation trips that Russians make  every year to Turkey.  The numbers tell the complete story. Last year 3.3 million Russians vacationed in Turkey.  That was 10 percent of all the tourists that visited Turkey. For Russia, however pleasant they were, these vacations are not essential and they will find someplace else to fill their vacation needs.  Turkey, however, will not find 3.3 million other tourists.

Russia wants to punish Turkey.  That should be clear.  And Vladimir Putin definitely has the ability to make things difficult for Turkey.  The balance of trade is pretty clear. Russia purchases $30 billion in goods from Turkey per year. All of those services are easily replaced elsewhere.

But Turkey relies on Russia for $20 billion of natural gas every year.  If that flow is even slightly altered, even for a single day-Turkey will grind to a halt.  That natural gas engines Turkey's electric grid.

Gas is next. Russia will start pulling it.  They have already cancelled work on the underwater gas pipeline which, together with the nuclear electric plants, would eventually make Turkey more energy independent.

Turkey cannot get that much gas replaced.  They are in public conflict not only with Russia but also with alternative suppliers.  They sided with the Muslim Brotherhood so Egypt will not supply them.  They have been very aggressively critical of Saudi Arabia so they will not supply them.  There is always Israel and Israel could, potentially, help supply Turkey's natural gas needs-but Turkey, a former ally of the Jewish state, has been openly hostile to Israel.

The Russian minister of agriculture has said, "Allah has already decided to punish Turkey's ruling clique, depriving them of mind and reason."

For their part, Turkey is counting on the help of the EU and the general disdain almost everyone has for Putin and his style of leadership especially in the aftermath of Russia's land grab on Crimea and their invasion of Ukraine.

But Turkey is misreading the situation.  Just because the world criticizes Putin and Russia it does not translate into action.

This is the case even in the Middle East. Russia marched into Syria, set up a huge air-force base, and established a significant presence.  The West warned the Russians not to put boots on the ground.  Russia went in anyway and their actions were met with only a few tepid condemnations.  When the Turkish F-16 jet shot down the SU-24 Russia bomber, that's when international voices were raised- and they were raised to urge calm and deescalate tensions, not to blame Russia.

Turkey thinks that because there are UN sanctions against Russia there is a way to leverage that power and squeeze Russia.  If the world stood by when Russian military pranced into Ukraine and Crimea how can Turkey expect them to act now?

Russia will get away with everything.  And despite pressure that Turkey is trying to apply-the real pressure will be placed by Russia on Turkey.  No one is willing to step forward and help Turkey.  If this continues, Russia will destroy them.

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 #32
Dances With Bears
http://johnhelmer.net
December 10, 2015
RUSSIA FIRES MOON SHOT OVER THE BOSPHORUS - TURKS THREATEN WAR
By John Helmer, Moscow
[Text with links, footnotes, charts, and photos here http://johnhelmer.net/?p=14758]

It isn't exactly certain what the Turkish military saw on a foredeck deck of the Russian Navy's landing ship, Caesar Kunikov, as it passed through the Bosphorus Strait last Sunday. What is certain is that the Turkish Foreign Ministry declared the Russians had launched "a pure provocation" at Turkey, and that the Turks would react with matching force. "The necessary answer will be given in situations deemed to be a threat," announced Mevlut Cavusoglu, who has been foreign minister for 12 days.

Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper, identified the source of its photograph as the Twitter account of "photographer Emre Dağdeviren". The photograph has disappeared from that source, if it ever was there [1].

The London media also went on the attack. The Guardian published [2] a photograph, but the caption, "Photograph: None", failed to identify the source or the authenticity. The Financial Times reported [3] its Istanbul correspondent as saying it was "a particularly chilling incident." With more caution, Reuters claimed [4] that the Turkish television channel NTV "broadcast photographs that it said showed a serviceman brandishing a rocket launcher on the deck". Reuters wasn't sure what had happened, or whether the photographs had been fabricated; but the Reuters headline declared "Turkey [was] angered by by rocket-brandishing on Russian naval ship passing Istanbul."

The Caesar Kunikov is a Project 775-type large landing ship of the Russian Navy, built in 1986. Assigned to the Black Sea fleet and homeported at Sevastopol, it is named after a Jewish naval infantry officer who was killed in action in the Arctic in 1943. The vessel has been recorded by the Turks as making several round-trips through the Straits this year.

A Turkish Navy source claims [5]: "According to the Montreux Convention any Black Sea nation must inform Turkey 8 days before the passage of its warship. 14 days have passed since the shooting of the Russian fighter plane. If Russia wanted to reinforce its fleet off the coast of Syria with warships from the Black Sea Fleet these ship would have been passing through the Turkish Straits in last 5 days. We have seen the southbound passage of 3 military landing ships (Korolev, Saratov, Caesar Kunikov) and northbound passage of 4 military landing ships and 2 auxiliary cargo ships (Caesar Kunikov, Yamal, Minsk, Korolev, Yauza, Dvinitsa-50) in the last 15 days."

The Turkish Navy site mistook the "pure provocation", dating it two days before the Turkish foreign minister made his claim. "One of the most documented and discussed passages was the one of Caesar Kunikov. During the southbound passage of this ship on 4th December 2015, a single sailor carrying what appears to be a 9K38 Igla (SA-18 "Grouse") was photographed. The commanding officer of a warship has the duty to take all necessary precautions to protect his ship and his crew. But the show with the single Sa-18 was neither funny nor logical. If the missile was against Turkish Air Force it was definitely not enough, if the missile was against Daesh Air Force it was too much since they do not have any planes yet. So it was just a gesture to annoy."

According to the Hurriyet report [6], Foreign Minister Cavusoglu declared: "For a Russian soldier to display a rocket launcher or something similar while passing on a Russian warship is a provocation. If we perceive a threatening situation, we will give the necessary response."

The Igla [7] (Russian for "needle") is manufactured by KB Mashynostroyeniya (KBM), and is designed to defend against aerial targets at ranges of up to 6 kilometres, and altitudes of up to 3,500 metres. It is standard issue for Russian troops. It is also used by regular armies worldwide. These include the Turks, who have been reported [8] in London as having supplied the Igla rocket systems to rebel groups they manage in Syria for attacks against the Syrian government's forces.

Its infra-red homing system may also be adapted for targeting fast speedboats threatening larger warships. In the case of an explosives attack by a speedboat against the US Navy destroyer, USS Cole, in Aden port (Yemen) in October 2000, the destroyer's rules of engagement did not allow on-board guards to fire on the approaching boat without first obtaining permission from a senior officer.

Seventeen US sailors were killed in the attack. In subsequent assessments of the incident, the USS Cole's commanders and their superiors were criticized for their lack of readiness to fire in self-defence.

A Turkish Foreign Ministry summons to Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov took place in Ankara on December 7. The next day a Russian Foreign Ministry statement by spokesman Maria Zakharova said [10] there had been no violation by the Caesar Kunikov of the Montreux Convention, the international treaty of 1936 which regulates vessel passage through the Bosphorus. For more on the treaty, read this [11]. "Protection of the vessel is the legitimate right of any crew," Zakharova said. "When our diplomats asked the Turkish side what exactly it finds to be a violation [by the Caesar Kunikov], apart from anything intelligible in the abstract reference to international legal norms, we have not heard a reply."

The Russian spokesman said the ministry has photographs of a Spanish Navy mine-hunter, the ESPS Tajo (below), making its way through the Bosphorus in July of this year with its crew at gun stations.

"For some reason the picture of the armed heavy machine-gun sentry on the deck of a Spanish warship caused no questions from the Turkish side, and the media did not raise the issue", Zakharova said. "The Russian ship [Caesar Kunikov] did not violate a single article of the Montreux Convention of 1936 governing the issues of navigation in the Straits, as well as the relevant provisions of the Turkish regulations", she added.

The Montreux Convention does not grant Turkey sovereignty over the straits. Instead, it says navigation and transit are a collective security subject "in the Straits of the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmora and the Bosphorus comprised under the general term 'Straits' in such manner as to safeguard, within the framework of Turkish security and of the security, in the Black Sea, of the riparian States." Russia was,still is, one of the riparian states of the Black Sea.

The pact has several provisions regulating the tonnage of warships and the armament of auxiliary vessels defined as "specifically designed for the carriage of fuel, liquid or non-liquid". But there is no power for the Turks to dictate what arms may be carried or displayed by foreign warships. Article 13 of the Montreux explicitly exempts [12] the master of a warship sailing through the Straits from having to notify the Turks of its armament or of anything but its intention to pass. "When effecting transit, the commander of the naval force shall be without any obligation to stop, communicate to a signal station at the entrance to the Dardanelles or the Bosphorus the exact composition of the force under his orders."

Moscow's leading independent military analyst, Gennady Nechayev of Vzglyad, said of the deployment of Igla-type arms on board vessels under way in the Bosphorus, "this is absolutely unremarkable. The Montreux Convention recognizes the right to armed guards on passing ships. If you look, there are hundreds of photos of seamen with arms or manning fire control systems during passage in the Straits."

"Another point is of interest. Our ships have also been accused of the fact that now they do not make a salute when passing the flag of Turkey in its territorial waters. Yes, there is such an unwritten tradition, but it is nowhere recorded as binding. The decision to raise or not to raise the flag is taken solely by the vessel captain. Let the Janissaries rejoice that noone shows them the latrine [the head] from the deck. That was the British tradition in sailing days."

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 #33
Foreign Affairs
December 14, 2015
Putin's Power Play in Syria
How to Respond to Russia's Intervention
By Angela Stent
Angela Stent is Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University, a Senior Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy, and the author of The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-first Century. Follow her on Twitter @AngelaStent.

At the end of September, Russia began conducting air strikes in Syria, ostensibly to combat terrorist groups. The strikes constitute Russia's biggest intervention in the Middle East in decades. Its unanticipated military foray into Syria has transformed the civil war there into a proxy U.S.-Russian conflict and has raised the stakes in the ongoing standoff between Moscow and Washington. It has also succeeded in diverting attention away from Russia's destabilization of Ukraine, making it impossible for the West to continue to isolate the Kremlin. Russia is now a player in the Syrian crisis, and the United States will have to find a way to deal with it.

Once again, Washington has been caught off-guard, just as it was in March 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and began supporting pro-Russian separatists fighting Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine. For all of Russia's domestic problems-a shrinking economy, a declining population, and high rates of capital flight and brain drain-it has projected a surprising amount of power not only in its neighborhood but also beyond. U.S. President Barack Obama may refer to Russia as a regional power, but Russia's military intervention in Syria demonstrates that it once again intends to be accepted as a global actor and play a part in every major international decision. This will be a vexing challenge not only for Obama during his remaining time in office but also for the next occupant of the White House.

Why has Washington been so slow to grasp the new Russian reality? Russian President Vladimir Putin has not kept his agenda a secret. In February 2007, for example, he delivered a scathing critique of U.S. foreign policy at the Munich Security Conference. "One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way," he warned. Countless times since, Russia has vowed to replace what it sees as a coercive U.S.-led global order with one in which the West respects Russia's interests. In retrospect, Russia's war with Georgia in August 2008 signaled Moscow's willingness to use force to prevent its neighbors from drifting toward the West and to reassert its influence in areas that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. But the United States and its allies have repeatedly underestimated Russia's determination to revise the global order that Moscow feels the West has imposed on Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

As the United States gears up for the 2016 presidential election, it faces two central challenges in deciding how to deal with Russia. First, it needs to determine the nature of Russia's objectives in Syria and Ukraine. Second, because Russia depends on a highly personalized political system, Obama and his would-be successors need to decide how to manage relations with Putin, an especially difficult task given the overwhelming pressure on the campaign trail to look tough. The evidence suggests that if the next president wants to engage with the Kremlin in a way that is consistent with U.S. interests, he or she should focus on concrete areas where the two countries can and must work together-particularly nuclear and conventional military issues. Continuing to isolate Russia is not likely to work. Instead, the next U.S. administration should clearly communicate to the Kremlin what American interests and values are and join with U.S. allies in resisting further Russian attempts to unravel the post-Cold War order.

INFERIORITY COMPLEX

Over the past quarter century, Moscow and Washington have worked together most successfully when Moscow has felt that it has been treated as an equal. This explains the success, for example, of U.S.-Russian arms control treaties, such as New START, which were designed to deal with the nuclear legacy of the Cold War. Similarly, although the negotiations were arduous and drawn out, Russia and the United States successfully worked together, alongside four other world powers, to reach a nuclear deal with Iran. Indeed, Putin earned rare praise from Obama for his role in securing the agreement.

The United States has been unable to create a post-Cold War security architecture in which Russia feels it has a stake.
Moscow and Washington have also been able to work together in instances in which they shared narrowly defined common interests. In the fall of 2001, for example, Russia aided the United States in its initial military campaign in Afghanistan, providing information and intelligence that contributed to the U.S. defeat of the Taliban. As Russia's former foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, subsequently explained, "We wanted an antiterrorist international coalition like the anti-Nazi coalition. This would be the basis for a new world order."

That rather lofty goal has remained predictably out of reach. And in fact, Russia and the United States have had difficulty maintaining their counterterrorist cooperation, largely because they often disagree on which groups to designate as terrorist organizations-a problem that has cropped up most recently in regard to the various Syrian opposition groups. Nevertheless, Russia and the United States have been able to cooperate on other security issues, working together in 2013, for example, to eliminate the Assad regime's stockpile of chemical weapons. In that instance, Russia took the initiative after the United States proved reluctant to act.

Cooperation has been least successful on issues involving Russia's neighboring states and the NATO alliance. It has become clear that despite the West's numerous efforts in the 1990s to reassure Russia that an enlarged NATO would not represent a threat to Moscow, the United States and its allies have been unable to create a post-Cold War security architecture in which Russia feels that it has a stake. Perhaps doing so would have been impossible, especially given Russia's belief in its right to a sphere of "privileged interests" in the post-Soviet space and its desire to limit its neighbors' sovereignty. The wars in Georgia and Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea have represented, in part, Russia's answer to its perceived exclusion from the post-Cold War European security order. The same sense of grievance explains Putin's ongoing push to establish a new arrangement among the great powers that would give Russia more leverage on matters of European security. Specifically, Putin seeks an agreement that would ensure that no additional post-Soviet states will join NATO.

PUTIN'S BIG MOVE

Putin's decision to intervene militarily in Syria is rooted in similar concerns about Russian power and influence. Russia has justified its foray into Syria as part of an effort to reduce terrorism by shoring up the Assad regime, which by the summer of 2015 was facing military setbacks. As Putin said in October, "The collapse of Syria's official authorities will only mobilize terrorists. Right now, instead of undermining them, we must revive them, strengthening state institutions in the conflict zone." Although Moscow may not be wedded to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the long run, it is adamantly opposed to anything that would weaken the rule of secular strongmen in the Middle East-hence Putin's repeated denunciations of U.S. support for opposition forces during the Arab revolts of 2011 and his anger over the NATO military action against Libya that year, which led to the ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. In Putin's eyes, the disorder in Iraq, Syria, and North Africa, combined with the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (also known as ISIS), demonstrates the failure of the West to think through the consequences of undermining the authoritarian states in the region. Putin fears that chaos in the Middle East will strengthen Islamic extremism on Russia's borders, in the neighboring states of the former Soviet Union, and potentially in Russia itself.

At the same time, Russia's actions are designed to guarantee that Moscow will have a decisive say in who rules Syria, even in a hypothetical post-Assad future. By using military force in Syria, Moscow is sending a message to other regional players: unlike the United States, Russia will support leaders and governments against popular uprisings and will not desert them when opposition groups attempt to seize control, as the United States abandoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

The Syrian gambit is thus part of a broader move to recoup Russian influence in the Middle East. In the second half of 2015, the leaders of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all visited Moscow, and some have signed agreements to purchase arms from Russia. In July, Saudi Arabia pledged to invest up to $10 billion in Russia, mostly in agricultural projects; if Riyadh delivers on that promise, it will be the single largest foreign investment in the country. Israel and Russia have maintained a steady dialogue as the crisis has progressed in Syria, partly to ensure that Russian aircraft don't clash with the Israeli jets that have occasionally struck targets in Syria, including those associated with the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah, which has sent thousands of fighters to Syria to aid the Assad regime. Although the Israelis have no particular affection for Assad, they seem to share Russia's preference that his regime stay in place, because what comes after Assad could be more detrimental to Israel's security: Israeli officials have quietly pointed out that under Assad's rule, Israel's border with Syria has been calm.

Domestic political factors also contribute to Putin's calculations. The sanctions that the United States and the EU levied against Russia after its annexation of Crimea have hit hard, especially when combined with the global fall in oil prices and preexisting structural problems in the Russian economy. The Kremlin has sought relief by "freezing" the conflict in the Donbas region of Ukraine-a cease-fire between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists has been in force since early September, and both sides have pulled back some of their heavy weaponry, although sporadic reports of fighting have surfaced since then. Putin has calculated that the cease-fire and the decision by pro-Russian separatists to postpone local elections in eastern Ukraine may lead to the partial lifting of EU sanctions. Moreover, by making the Ukraine crisis appear to be headed toward resolution, Russia intends to shift the focus from its role as an instigator of conflict to its new role in Syria as a responsible leader in the global campaign against terrorism.

Russia has presented its intervention in Syria as a counterterrorist operation that will reduce the number of refugees leaving Syria for Europe. But Moscow's policy could have the opposite effect. In fact, by November, there had already been a 26 percent increase in the number of Syrian refugees, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, further exacerbating Europe's migrant crisis. The Russian bombing campaign may have contributed to the upsurge in refugees. Moreover, Russian air strikes in support of the Alawite-led Assad government-which Sunni extremists consider to be an apostate regime-may both encourage more Russians to join ISIS (more than 4,000 people from Russia and Central Asia have already done so) and further alienate Russia's own Sunni population, which numbers about 20 million. Putin has insisted that Russia has no interest in taking sides in a sectarian dispute and is merely fighting extremism, but this may be a hard sell domestically, as some Russian Muslims question Russia's support of a regime that bombs its Sunni population. And Russia has not acknowledged that the Assad regime's brutal treatment of its own population is a recruiting tool for ISIS.

Although it is tempting to search for a broader strategy behind Russian military activity in Syria, it's quite possible that Putin charged into the conflict without thinking through the endgame.

Putin's intervention in Syria has sent a mixed message. On the one hand, he has blamed the United States for creating the conditions that allowed ISIS to emerge; on the other, he has offered to join the United States in an anti-ISIS coalition. In remarks last October, Putin said, "Syria can become a model for partnership in the name of common interests, resolving problems that affect everyone, and developing an effective risk-management system." Yet unlike in Afghanistan in 2001, Moscow and Washington do not agree on the identity of the enemy. Although they both see ISIS as a major threat, Russia has bombed Syrian opposition groups that the United States has supported, and Washington sees Assad's rule as a major part of the country's problems. Thanks to these differences, it will be difficult for Russia and the United States to work together in Syria.

Until recently, Washington's preferred policy was to avoid clashes in Syrian airspace, cautiously increase the presence of the U.S. military on the ground, observe Russian actions from the sidelines, and wait to see whether Russia would get pulled into a quagmire. But the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris may have changed Washington's calculations and given new impetus to joint U.S.-Russian efforts to deal with Syria and ISIS. At the G-20 summit in Turkey soon after the attacks, Obama and Putin agreed to support a cease-fire in Syria and intensify diplomatic attempts to end the civil war. At the very least, Putin has succeeded in getting Washington to engage more closely with Russia and abandon policies aimed at isolating it.

If part of Putin's main goal in Syria is to force Washington to recognize Russia's importance in the Middle East, it is worth asking whether Putin sees that recognition as an end in itself or as an initial step toward a tripolar world in which China, Russia, and the United States make the major decisions-a cherished aspiration of some Russian pundits. On the other hand, although it is tempting to search for a broader strategy behind Russian military activity in Syria, it's quite possible that Putin charged into the conflict without thinking through the endgame.

GETTING REAL ABOUT RUSSIA

For the remainder of Obama's second term, tensions over Syria and Ukraine will dominate U.S.-Russian relations. The best that can be achieved in Ukraine in the near term is a "frozen conflict" in which the cease-fire holds even though Kiev remains unable to control the Donbas region and Russia continues to exercise influence there through its proxies. The most the United States is likely to do is continue its modest economic and political support for the Ukrainian government, which is struggling to address systemic problems of corruption and economic disorder. Although some in the U.S. government have argued for more economic and military assistance to Ukraine-including the provision of lethal defensive weapons-the White House has consistently refused to do this for fear of further provoking Russia, and it is unlikely to change its policy in 2016.

Meanwhile, it will be a continuing challenge for Moscow and Washington to work together in Syria to combat ISIS. But short of more robust and direct U.S. military engagement-for which there is little domestic support after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq-Washington has limited options. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has spearheaded discussions with Russia and other key players, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, on how to end the Syrian civil war and transition away from an Assad-led government. Russia and the United States will continue to work together in this way, but securing agreement on a post-Assad Syria will be a major challenge. Direct military cooperation in Syria is highly unlikely, meaning that there are few prospects for Russia and the United States to work together other than on making sure their respective military operations stay out of the other's way.

Even if the United States finds an effective way to respond to Russia's moves in Syria, or even cooperate with the Russians there, there is no guarantee that Putin won't try to assert Russia's military presence elsewhere: he has surprised the West twice in recent years and may yet have other ambitions. Iraq has hinted that it may ask Russia for help in fighting ISIS. When asked in October about whether Russia would intervene in Iraq, Putin replied that Russia had not yet received a request from Baghdad. Russia has also indicated that it will not stand by if the situation in Afghanistan deteriorates further, as this would threaten Russia's neighborhood by destabilizing Central Asia.

The next occupant of the White House will have to define U.S. interests in Syria and Ukraine; determine the extent to which Washington should counter destabilizing Russian moves in those countries and elsewhere; decide when and where the United States should cooperate with Russia; and consider, as U.S. options become more limited because of shrinking resources and public opinion, whether the West is ready to acknowledge that Moscow has in fact succeeded in modifying the rules of the game in its favor in both Syria and Ukraine.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, four U.S. presidents have tried to "reset" relations with Russia and find a more productive way to interact with Moscow, and each attempt has ultimately failed. Russia has not evolved in the way the West believed it would in the 1990s: the United States has to deal with the Russia that exists, not the one Americans might wish for. Indeed, for the foreseeable future, Washington should expect the U.S.-Russian relationship to be defined by tension and antagonism rather than cooperation.

The next U.S. president should not attempt another reset. He or she should work with Russia on issues on which Moscow and Washington share clearly delineated common goals, in Syria and elsewhere. Issues the two countries can work on together include keeping nuclear weapons from Iran and North Korea and managing emerging resource and security issues in the Arctic. But the next president should also clearly define and defend U.S. interests and accept that so long as the Kremlin continues to portray the United States as its main enemy, dedicated to weakening Russia and the primary source of all its troubles, common action on shared goals will be shaky and elusive.

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 #35
Moscow Times
December 11, 2015
Youtube Unveils Russia's Most Popular Music Videos of 2015
By Katrin Scheib
[Links to the videos here http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/youtube-unveils-russias-most-popular-music-videos-of-2015/552545.html]

The stats are in: Youtube has released a list of the music videos that were most popular in Russia in 2015. Some of them were meant to be funny, others just are, and they are all worth watching. So dig out your headphones, make sure your boss is in a meeting, and see what set the RuTube ablaze this year.

10. A pirated Eh Bee Family clip

Plenty of what happens on Youtube falls into the grey-to-black area of copyright rules. Like this Russian rip-off of a collection of clips by the "Eh Bee Family," one of Youtube's big channels with over one million subscribers. 4.3 million views for a pirated clip using other people's material? Don't tell your kids!

9. Korolyeva Krasoty

The "Beauty Queen" in this song is one half of comedy duo Boyna and Kuzmich, and she doesn't conform to current beauty standards by any measure. But watch her reign supreme in this clip, and you'll see why 4.3 million viewers enjoyed this silly, catchy song.

8. Za Molokom

They're Barbie and Ken! They're zombies! They're a bride and groom singing along to that one song from "Fifty Shades of Grey"! In this one, Boyna and Kuzmich take you on a car ride though a bunch of well-known songs, with matching outfits and choreography.

Not much point to this, but it's five minutes of fun to distract you from a bad day at work, and 4.7 million people decided this was a good use of their time. So watch, and join in. Hey, Macarena!

7. City under the soles

The name Miron Yanovich will not mean much to must Russians, but talk about Oxxxymiron and it's a different matter. A rapper working hard to cultivate his bad-boy image, he released this song in September, and it took him all of three months to make it into the year's top ten.

6. Lada Sedan

It hasn't been an easy year for Lada. The humble car has never been one to inspire dreams of racing down wide-open roads into the sunset, but in 2015, its makers also suffered from the weak ruble.

Fortunately, this clip helped to lighten the mod. Yes, it's tongue-in-cheek, but it does celebrate the "Lada Sedan", especially if it comes in a lovely aubergine colour. It also boasts an impressive collection of Russian words that rhyme with "sedan." Add some oriental music and a passing dig at Jeremy Clarkson, and you've got yourself a Youtube winner.

5. How to sell Russian cars

If you need inspiration on how to sell your car to a Russian buyer, look towards Nizhny Novgorod. This video, made for a local car dealer, pulls out all the stop. A sexy fairy godmother doing magic. A lanky salesperson breaking out his moves. A buyer so enthralled, he decides to take two cars instead of just one.

Not an easy clip to pull off, considering these aren't exactly sports cars being sold. Over 5 million people watched this video - and probably went car-shopping later that same day.

4. ЦОК-ЦОК

You won't find цок-цок (tsok-tsok) in your dictionary, but it mimics the sound of high heels on pavement. Indeed, this mix of melodic hip-hop and comedy tells the story of a man who falls for the archetypal gold digger.

After giving her every ruble he owns and suffering from her mood swings, he eventually finds himself having to make a tough decision: shoot her or marry her. How very gangsta! But this is lightweight cheerful entertainment, so you can watch the ending without being emotionally scarred. After all, over 7.5 million others also did.

3. Spoof Skype Advert

Maybe it was the fake, wide-eyed enthusiasm. Maybe it was the full-on Russian floral print. Maybe it was the company name spelled out in cigarette butts. Whatever drew over 9 million people to watch this spoof advert for the messaging and phone service, they were certainly entertained.
Watch out for that moment at the 45-second mark when it turns out the overly excited Skype user is actually sitting at a switched-off laptop.

2. Polina Gagarina's Eurovision Song

Russia and Eurovision - it's complicated. On one hand, the song contest is a chance to shine and show off the country's musical talent. On the other hand, the colorful, diverse, LGBT-friendly atmosphere is hard to take for some of Russia's political hardliners.
Polina Gagarina acquitted herself well, though. With the support of specially installed anti-booing technology, and to the sight of rainbow flags raised in the audience, she placed second in the Vienna competition, just behind the Swedish entry.

1. Imya 505

This song by Ukrainian band "Vremya i Steklo" is in a league very much its own. At over 41 million views, it is far ahead of all its competitors. Russia Youtube users appear to care more about music than about their country's conflict with its neighbor.

Listen at your own risk, because the tune will get stuck in hour head. (Also, if you understand why it features someone dancing in front of a toilet, do let us know).

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 #36
Kremlin.ru
December 10, 2015
Russia Today's 10th anniversary

Vladimir Putin toured a multimedia exhibition honouring the 10th anniversary since the start of RTTV-Russia Today's television broadcasts.

In particular, the President viewed the River of Time installation, bringing together over 100 events in Russia Today's 10-year history.

Earlier, the President sent a congratulatory message to the television company's staff, congratulating them on 10 years of broadcasts.

Speech at celebration honouring 10th anniversary of Russia Today television channel

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, friends,

I am very pleased to be here today among you to celebrate the 10th anniversary since the start of Russia Today's work. When this idea was first born, I'll tell you honestly, I did not expect that it would be implemented with such spirit, on such a large scale, and bring together such an outstanding group of talented individuals.

Just now, when I was looking at instances of your work and how you do this, I thought: our greatest merit lies in letting you prove yourselves, in liberating you, not forcing you to do anything, ensuring you work freely, giving you the chance to have fun and work at your own enjoyment. And we can see the result - which, of course, is excellent.

I want to congratulate you on your 10th anniversary, on this special date, on the fact that you have been able to achieve a great deal in these years - you know all this, but I am will say it again: creating six information channels, including a documentary channel, as well as a global video news agency.

Today, it is my pleasure to note that Russia Today is the number one TV news channel in the world on YouTube. The total number of views has exceeded three billion. Just now, Margarita [Simonyan] showed me that it's at nearer four billion - 3.6 or 3.8 billion - which is an absolute record.

Let me say that these are amazing achievements. These are real breakthroughs in the information world, in terms of developing up to date, leading content and a wide variety of topics and programmes, and creative presentation of materials.

We saw a good example of this today, it was like when our seamen rip their shirts. I can see here that this is how your correspondents work as well, fighting for points. That's really impressive. But don't rip anything else off yourselves. Just the seamen's shirts, and stop at that.

All this is truly important; you have been able to create an international team of TV stars, and that is a guarantee of success. Well-known journalists, as well as newcomers to the profession, from around the world are happy to work with you.

You compete on the same playing field as international news giants, and are already beating them according to many parameters. In some regions of the world, you have higher ratings than traditional news organisations that have long been operating in the international information market.

The Russia Today television channel is now accessible to 700 million viewers. Naturally, we do not know how many people actually watch it, but it is accessible to 700 million. This is a very large audience, but it can be even greater. But this is already a lot, so we need to tap into this audience.

Today, when the situation in global politics is, frankly speaking, complicated, it is more important than ever for your and our voice, your and our position, to be heard not only by politicians, not just the political elite, but also, first and foremost, by ordinary people around the world.

In order to increase your viewer numbers and your popularity among them, you will certainly need a high level of professionalism. And you reassert this professionalism daily through your hard work and your achievements.

No topics are off-limits to you - this is also highly important. You provide different points of view on nearly every significant event. As we say, you do not weigh viewers down with heavy, blunt propaganda cliches. Your greatest strength is presenting information freely and independently.

Of course, here in Russia we - by "we" I mean the Russian authorities - are no saints either, and we make mistakes; I suppose some things could be improved or are not as good as they could be. So objective presentation of materials concerning our nation is, again, highly important as well. I hope that it will remain this way. That is how the media should be: objective and interesting. Otherwise, there will be no demand for it.

Let me tell you something that may be somewhat unexpected and perhaps even strange. When I was viewing your materials, I looked at your questions and comments from politicians, my colleagues from other countries, and here is something I noticed: I agree with them on certain issues. Why? Because civil society, people like you, creative, free, and sometimes somewhat unbridled, have their own view of things. It may be no worse than ours, or it may, in some ways, be better. But we, the people who hold the responsibility for making decisions and the consequences of those decisions, also have our own view on things, and also have a right to our opinions.

Your objective is not to serve the interests of the Russian authorities, but to present these different points of view in order for average citizens, viewers and listeners to have a general, correct, multifaceted, three-dimensional view on whether the authorities are making the right choices, whether they are working toward the interests of society and all citizens, or in the interests of certain elites or quasi-elites, monopolistic groups, trying to gain power. This mission is highly important.

Many media throughout the world receive financial support from the government, but that's entirely beside the point. What's most important with regard to Russia Today is that we do not control you - I have already said this in different ways - and we do not meddle in your fieldwork, as well as other work. You have your own editorial policies and we respect that approach. Moreover, if somebody in the government stops respecting this and tries to control you, you will certainly be unable to reach this level of creativity. And we are deeply interested in you being effective.

At the same time, it would be strange if you ignored the position of the Russian authorities or joined your colleagues from other countries for whom informational confrontations, in this case with our country, have become a kind of trend. There is absolutely no need to get drawn into this interchange, in my view. There is no reason to get involved in this contest; we simply need to state our position - that is the power of free media.

Indeed, you broadcast our point of view on nearly all issues - with regard to Russia's internal life and international issues - but we do not hide our positions. In this respect, I feel, that is the main support for our work: the fact that our policy is entirely transparent, I assure you, with the exception of certain very specific things. We have nothing to hide. It is a truthful policy, and we have never had anything to conceal from anyone. That is the strength of our policies and, I believe, your work, because you and we have nothing to hide.

Your television channel gives people the opportunity to receive objective information about Russia and, incidentally, provides a free platform for politicians from other countries who want to express their opinion on current events. We are always ready for open, constructive discussions.

There are more than enough examples here. In recent years, so-called double standards, a clear division into "insiders" and "outsiders," (I mean countries and regions of the world), distortion of events and their causes - they are simply coming out, and this is becoming entirely clear and conspicuous. For example, silence concerning the humanitarian catastrophes in, say, eastern Ukraine, which you showed very clearly.

It is regrettable that even international human rights activists seem to be completely tongue-tied regarding many glaring facts. Whereas you provide that information. Your channel has made an enormous input into telling about the true events in Ukraine overall, and in southeast Ukraine, as well as other regions of the world.

You have the same open and objective information policy with regard to the events in Syria: today, we saw a great deal about this here as well, and overall, you are doing much to counter terrorism. It is well known that the media and the Internet are among its weapons - perhaps even its primary weapon. They use these media to recruit young people, and spread the ideological disease of terrorism. The media's responsibility in this situation increases exponentially. You understand this well and provide fair coverage of all events, promoting the unification of people in the fight against this threat.

Of course, your channel traditionally gives a great deal of attention to Russia itself. You talk about the Russian regions, the people living here, their work, their civic initiatives, our magnificent nature, our cultural heritage, the customs of our multi-ethnic nation, our values and our history, the achievements of our country, true problems rather than made-up ones, of which we have more than enough, and how they are being resolved. You approach these topics both responsibly and creatively. I want to thank you for this, wish you success and promise that we will not get in your way.

Thank you!

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 #37
RFE/RL
December 10, 2015
The Year Of The Troll
by Brian Whitmore

For much of the year, Russian bombers, warships, and submarines played chicken with NATO with provocative incursions into member states' sea and airspace.
And as the year drew to a close, Moscow finally got burned when Turkey's air force shot down a Su-24 warplane.

The incident, which has led to a tense standoff between Moscow and Ankara, wasn't necessarily inevitable -- but it was pretty predictable. Moscow has been trolling the world on so many fronts for so long that sooner or later a proverbial flame war was bound to break out somewhere.

Indeed, as Kremlin-watcher Andrew Kornbluth noted in a recent commentary for the Atlantic Council, Putin's Russia is not so much a rogue state as a "troll state."

Its aim is to "needle the West and cheer Russians," while at the same time advancing the interests of the ruling clique.

Russia's trolling, which kicked into high gear in 2015, has taken on various forms.

In addition to the provocative overflights, there have been a wave of cyberattacks hitting a range of targets including a French television network, a German steelmaker, the Warsaw stock exchange, the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. State Department, and The New York Times.

Moreover, three foreign hostages, kidnapped from their home countries -- Estonian law enforcement officer Eston Kohver, Ukrainian Air Force pilot Nadia Savchenko, and Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov -- were hauled before show trials in Russia, where they faced ridiculous charges.

Only Kohver has been released.

Russia this year also launched criminal cases against Lithuanian citizens who avoided serving in the Soviet Army -- and even asked the authorities in Vilnius to assist in locating and extraditing them.

The request was, of course, rejected.

And in Europe, the Kremlin has continued to court -- and back to various degrees -- all manner of extremists and troublemakers including separatists, neo-Nazis, and communists.

Andrew Wilson, author of the recently published The Ukraine Crisis: What It Means For The West, wrote recently that the Kremlin sees "no contradiction" in "seeking to influence both left and right, nationalists and separatists, traditionalists and postmodernists," as they all are disruptive for Europe.

"Despite now posing as a conservative power, the Kremlin no longer has a single ideology to promote. In fact it has no ideology. It is used to playing all sides," Wilson wrote.

And like any true troll, Moscow is a master of subterfuge, constantly pretending to be something that it is not.

As 2015 commenced, Russia was pretending to be a mediator in a war in Ukraine in which it was, in fact, the aggressor.

And the year ended with Moscow injecting itself into a conflict in Syria under the pretext of combatting terrorism, when its real aim was to prop up Kremlin ally Bashar al-Assad and complicate the West's efforts to end the civil war and combat Islamic State militants.

"To think of Russia as a troll state is not to assume that it has no real goals or that its targets are chosen purely on a whim. It does, however, help to explain a style of statecraft that might otherwise seem increasingly irrational and unpredictable," Kornbluth wrote.

Indeed, Russia's trolling is part of an ongoing effort to eat away bit by bit at Western resolve, European and transatlantic unity, and the post-Cold War international order.

And the unpredictability of Moscow's global trolling also serves to keep everybody off balance.

"We're all racking our brains asking: 'Have they drank their own Kool-Aid? Have they lost the plot? Are they going to do something really stupid? And this is us getting sucked into their dramaturgia. What they want to do is have us think they've drank the Kool-Aid," Peter Pomerantsev, author of the book Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible: Inside The Surreal Heart Of The New Russia, said on The Power Vertical Podcast in July.

But trolling -- like terrorism -- is a weapon of the weak.

"By tormenting others, trolls create the illusion of action and assuage their own nagging feelings of powerlessness," Kornbluth wrote.

Back in February on the sidelines of the Minsk peace talks, a live microphone picked up a conversation between Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka. The subject was Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.

"He's playing a dishonest and dirty game," Poroshenko said.

Lukashenka nodded sympathetically, replying: "I know, I know. Everybody realizes this."

Everybody realizes it indeed. And the game continued all year.

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