Johnson's Russia List
2015-#250
24 December 2015
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"We don't see things as they are, but as we are"

"Don't believe everything you think"

You see what you expect to see 

DJ: A lump of coal.
In this issue
 
  #1
RFE/RL
December 23, 2015
The End Of Russia's Mass Hallucination
By Brian Whitmore

Fresh barbed-wire fencing around the nation's main TV tower isn't exactly a sign of a confident regime.

In addition to reinforcing its perimeter, Moscow's state-run Ostankino television center also upgraded its security detail, replacing regular police officers with elite Interior Ministry forces.

"These are normal security measures that are connected to the alarming situation in Moscow, in Russia, and in the world," Denis Nazarov, a spokesman for Ostankino, told Novaya Gazeta.

Beefing up security at Ostankino -- the epicenter of the Kremlin's propaganda machine -- is just one sign that the Kremlin is getting increasingly concerned about civic unrest as 2015 draws to a close.

Russia's security services have also increased their stocks of crowd-control weapons -- including grenade launchers -- fivefold.

The State Duma, meanwhile, has passed legislation allowing the Federal Security Service to fire its weapons into crowds and lawmakers are considering a bill that would make discrediting the Russian Federation a federal crime.

But wait a minute! Why all this paranoia? Isn't this regime wildly popular? Isn't Vladimir Putin's popularity close to 90 percent?

Well, yes. But the Kremlin understands all too well that the sky-high public support is largely based on a collective hallucination -- a euphoric patriotic purple haze resulting from the annexation of Crimea and the illusion that Russia is again a superpower.

And they understand that once everybody comes down from this television-induced acid trip and hungover Russians have a clear view of their new reality, there's gonna be hell to pay.

"To ordinary people, the fruit of Putin's foreign policy is bitter," political commentator Leonid Bershidsky wrote in Bloomberg View.

"All that Russians have gotten from Putin's international activity is a boost to their pride, delivered by the Kremlin's propaganda channels -- not a tangible benefit as the economy continues to buckle under the weight of falling commodity prices."

Television, The Drug Of The Nation

Over the last year, inflation has soared, real incomes have plummeted, and purchasing power has evaporated. With oil prices at historic lows with no recovery in sight and Western sanctions remaining in place, there is little chance things will get better soon.

And if television is the drug of the nation, it may finally be losing its potency.

According to a new poll by the independent Levada Center, Russians' trust in the TV news has declined precipitously, from 79 percent back in 2009 to just 41 percent today.

Likewise, a recent report by the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology concluded that although three-quarters of Russians still blame the West for their economic woes, the Kremlin has a window of approximately one year to 18 months before they begin to blame their own rulers.

From the recent nationwide truckers protest to striking doctors and teachers in Siberia, the signs are increasing that the scales are indeed beginning to fall from people's eyes.
Mindful of the risk, Putin has reportedly tasked the Federal Guard Service, the Kremlin's Praetorian Guard, to spearhead a task force to monitor the potential for labor uprisings in Russia's far-flung provinces.

They even have a color-coded scheme that classifies regions as green, yellow, or red depending on the risk of civil unrest.

Stockholm Syndrome

In addition to fears of civic unrest, there are also signs that the business elite is getting increasingly restless.

Speaking at the Moscow Economic Forum, Dmitry Potapenko, a partner at the Management Development Group who runs a chain of supermarkets, shocked the audience by laying into the authorities.

It's not Western sanctions but the actions of Russia's rulers that are damaging its economy, he said. "It's not Barack Obama who's responsible for our prohibitively high interest rates."

A video of his rant attracted more than 1.6 million views on YouTube.

"There is obvious fear among the elite," Valery Solovei, a professor at the elite Moscow State Institute of International Relations, told Obzor.press.

"There are growing concerns about the future. All this is due to the unpredictability and irrationality of the president's actions. But at the same time, the elite feels hostage to the president. It's a typical case of Stockholm Syndrome."

If 2014 was the year Moscow went rogue, then 2015 can be described as the year that the costs of that course became manifest for Russians.

And next year should be when we learn whether Vladimir Putin's regime will be able to bear those costs -- and what lengths he will go to should they become prohibitive.

"Putin faces a harsh dilemma. He could try to make Russia more competitive by carefully retreating in Ukraine, getting Western sanctions lifted, and liberalizing the domestic economic climate. That would mean dismantling the backbone of his regime," Bershidsky wrote.

"Or Putin could drop the remaining pretense of democracy and rule openly by force, ordering mass reprisals against opponents both real and imagined. The system Putin has created is pushing him toward the second option."

The barbed wire around Ostankino is symbolic -- and it is probably just the beginning.
 #2
Foreign Policy
www.foreignpolicy.com
December 18, 2015
What Does Putin Want?
By Robert A. Manning
Robert A. Manning is a senior fellow of the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council. He served as a senior counselor to the U.S. undersecretary of state for global affairs from 2001 to 2004, as a member of the U.S. Department of State Policy Planning Staff from 2004 to 2008 and on the National Intelligence Council Strategic Futures Group from 2008 to 2012. @RManning4 on Twitter.

After Russian President Vladimir Putin took over Crimea, and then sent his little green men not-so-stealthily into Eastern Ukraine in early 2014, I thought I understood his objectives. It seemed a clear strategy of post-1990 revenge: Moscow would expand its control of the "near abroad," as in Georgia, and dominate, if not reconstitute, as much of the former Soviet Union as reasonably possible.

Now, one more frozen conflict and an unprecedented military intervention of Syria later, I am scratching my head and wondering: what is Putin thinking; what does he want? While no one has ever accused Putin of being an economist, the combination of $40-per-barrel oil and Western sanctions have crippled the already beleaguered Russian economy, expected to shrink nearly 4 percent this year with 15 percent inflation and a shriveled ruble - all with no end in sight.

In Syria, apparently airbrushing away the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, he has conducted mainly an air war. Three months and hundreds of airstrikes later, all Putin appears to have achieved is creating more murder, mayhem, and refugees in Syria. Moscow has made, by most accounts, very little progress in Syria's seemingly interminable civil war, which with multi-sided foreign interventions, increasingly seems a 21st century version of the Spanish Civil War. That may help explain Putin making nice with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Syria diplomacy. They don't call it the graveyard of empires for nothing.

After Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet that had ignored repeated warnings and overflew Turkish airspace to bomb not the Islamic State but ethnic Turkmen anti-Assad rebels, Putin responded. Applying sanctions against Turkey, cancelling a nuclear plant and Turkstream, and an important gas pipeline under construction, Putin has sacrificed multibillion-dollar economic projects desperately needed by the Russian economy. Putin also dealt a blow to an already struggling Gazprom, which was building the pipeline to maintain its tenuous hold over the European gas market.

Beyond the self-inflicted economic damage, Putin has reopened the issue of European security, which at least the United States and EU thought was closed in 1991. All to Russia's detriment: Putin's air and sea provocations have Swedes pondering NATO membership, the Baltics clamoring for permanently deployed NATO forces, NATO rejuvenated with a renewed sense of purpose, and European defense spending, waning for a decade is now moving in an upward direction.

In the Middle East, he is now competing now with the United States for Great Satan status, and for every Sunni jihadist, Putin has a big bullseye on his back (not least for Muslims in Russian Chechnya or Dagestan who are joining the Islamic State).

How is any of this in Russia's interests? The irony is that Putin could alter the trajectory of this Russian train wreck waiting to happen and consolidate a victory with one phone call. How? If he called German Chancellor Angela Merkel and said something along the lines of, Let's solve the Ukraine issue. You accept the fait accompli in Crimea, guarantee a neutral Ukraine not in NATO, allow Ukraine and Russia a trade deal with EU, but allow Ukraine into Eurasian Union. Allow maximum autonomy for Donbas, and rebuild Eastern Ukraine with a joint ECB/Russian fund. Lift all sanctions and return to pre-Ukraine relations, and I will withdraw all military forces, stop aiding rebels, and commit to no further use of force to change borders.

While the United States might choke on such a deal, the Europeans would be glad to put the sordid Ukraine episode behind them. After all, Ukraine, and especially Eastern Ukraine was integrated into the Russian economy. A failing Ukraine and a demolished Eastern Ukraine would not seem to be in Russian interests.

Or is it? Here, it may help to understand Putin's behavior by distinguishing between Putin's political interests and Russia's national interests. While the above scenario is arguably in Russia's interests, Putin believes a successful democratic Ukraine, along the lines of Poland would be an example that threatens Putin's authoritarian pluralist model's legitimacy as well as the power of the Siloviki and oligarch elite as he gears up for 2018 elections. Seeing outside events as U.S. orchestrated conspiracies to undermine Russia provides an enemy that helps legitimize Putin as the savior of Mother Russia. Thus, portraying pro-Western change in Ukraine as a U.S. conspiracy to undermine Russia with "color" revolutions is part of that pattern.

In the Middle East, Putin could form a real united front coalition against the Islamic State, and use his leverage to protect Assad's position - at least in the short run. Instead he is allying with Iran, which has a similar, though not identical agenda in Syria. And he is more likely to get sucked into the chaos of the Middle East Vortex than to peacefully resolve the Syrian mess.

So what exactly is Putin trying to achieve? I'm not entirely sure even he knows. I think the realities I have described suggest he is tactician, not a strategist. One way to think about it is a Putin driven by a bloody-minded sense of payback for the Soviet Collapse and NATO expansion. Respecting strength and seizing upon openings has been his modus operandi. He knew the United States would not risk nuclear war over Georgia or Ukraine, areas Moscow sees as vital but the United States doesn't.

In the Middle East, he saw a retreating U.S. administration more concerned with the costs of continued involvement than with the costs of inaction. Aside from a 50 year relationship with the Assad family and naval bases in Tartus, my guess is that Putin couldn't resist the opportunity to at once: show the world a Russia as world power, make a statement against U.S. regime change, and show that Russia, unlike the United States, stands behind its friends. In addition, Moscow would like to bolster its presence in the Eastern Mediterranean, where recent discoveries suggest natural gas bonanza.

Yet at the end of the day, where does this leave Russia? When I ask Russian friends where Putin thinks Russia will be in five or 10 years, they laugh and say, "He doesn't think ahead five days."

This Russian behavior is particularly troubling because it is difficult to discern motives. We can't make rational actor assumptions about Putin. That makes formulating policy all the more difficult. The only thing we know for sure is that Putin is intent on showing the world Russia is a great power and that he respects strength and takes advantage of perceived weakness. He pushes forward until there is pushback. This of course, is the story of the past 400 years of Russian history.

Rather than thinking about resets, dealing with Russia means cooperation only in areas where Putin clearly sees it as in his interest - say on counter-terrorism, climate change, or nuclear proliferation. Given the tolerance of self-inflicted economic pain that Putin appears willing to endure to pursue his political agenda, only moves that push back - e.g., stationing well-armed NATO troops in the Baltics - are likely to have an impact.

The challenge is to avoid a cycle of tit-for-tat, and to make clear that the door is open if he reaches a point of realizing his 18th century agenda can only lead Russia to ruin in the 21st century and wants instead to move toward the West and the Pacific Rim, and modernize Russia. The flip side of that is that the United States would need to rethink how to integrate Russia into security structures. But don't hold your breath waiting for either possibility. For now, the puzzling, and dangerous question is where does Putin draw the line on Russian revisionism in Europe?
 
 #3
European Council on Foreign Relations
www.ecfr.eu
December 18, 2015
Understanding modern Russia? Why European leaders should read Peter Pomerantsev
By Francisco de Borja Lasheras
Policy Fellow and Associate Director of ECFR Madrid Office

Vladislav Surkov, the demiurge of the Kremlin, surprises us all by entering from behind the university auditorium, before taking the stage in front of an audience packed with doctorate students, professors, journalists and politicians. He is wearing a white t-shirt and leather jacket, falling halfway between Joy Division and a commissar from the 30s. 'I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system.My portfolio at the Kremlin and in government has included ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernisation, innovation, foreign relations, and ..."-here he pauses and smiles-"modern art." He decides not make a speech, but instead invites the audience to pose questions and have an open discussion with him. After the first question, he talks for almost 45 minutes, leaving hardly any time for others. It's a demonstration of his political system in miniature: democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent.

In "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia", a brilliant and at times appalling portrayal of today's Russian elites, Peter Pomerantsev introduces Surkov. Often lurking in the shadows, Surkov has contributed to the Putin government's consolidation of power through Hollywood-style media stunts and through what in the post-Soviet space is known as "political technology".

Showbiz, political technology and old fashioned authoritarianism

Through his own foray into the media landscape of Russia, Pomerantsev explains how the new Kremlin, having gained control of television networks, has shown great skill in combining Western-style entertainment with authoritarianism and more or less subtle propaganda. The mistake of the TV in the USSR - being boring - is now avoided at all costs. Always centre stage, the figure of the president is in constant metamorphosis, like an actor. Putin switches between the roles of "soldier, lover, bare-chested hunter, businessman, spy, tsar, superman". Surkov would "meet on a weekly basis with the directors of the main channels, deciding who to attack and who to defend; which political leader would enjoy air time and who would not". The screen relentlessly depicts the president as the doyen of stability and efficiency in contrast to the presidential chaos of the 90s, and repeatedly puts out messages about "them" and "the enemy", meaning opposition leaders, liberals, journalists, the West, the United States and churki (a pejorative term for people from the Caucuses and Central Asia, that associates them with terrorism and black widows). In a way, this is not dissimilar to the rhetoric pumped out by Fox News and other channels, which throughout the never-ending War on Terror have disseminated the libellous opinions of Donald Trump and others like him - dressing up xenophobia, defamation and the stigmatisation of minorities as normality.

Pomerantsev describes how this public discourse, along with the Kremlin's growing paranoia regarding fifth columns, "got fiercer as the need to create panic and fear became greater, turning off rationality". In parallel, the Kremlin invested in the infrastructure to disseminateits own readings of international relations, presented as "Russia's view", through formats and platforms which are Western in appearance, such as Russia Today.

"Political technology" is a means of appropriating practically all forms of political discourse possible, their ideologies and movements, giving them visibility or ridiculing and demonising them, according to the circumstances. People like Surkov may actively support or create NGOs, parties and liberal leaders seemingly critical of the Kremlin (as long as that criticism is limited), and the next, put them under fire from ultranationalist forces and orthodox fundamentalists. Older traditions of co-opting forces that oppose the regime in power, presenting them as a live threat, are blended with twenty-first century media technology and PR strategies - something which has worked well in Russian propaganda about Ukraine's "Nazis". The dissenting voices in civil society and political forces are stigmatised, not only as anti-Russian and traitors, but, in Pomerantsev's words, as "Muscovite hipsters out of touch with ordinary Russians, concerned only by marginal issues such as freedoms or LGBT rights".

To top this off, media campaigns and the use of political technology are combined with traditional repressive action, reminiscent of past times. Hence, decisions to classify civil society organisations as "undesirable" or "foreign agents", restricting their activities to a minimum; sham trials, and the rejection of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.

But the novelty of this brand of authoritarianism is to combine sheer repression with a subtle use of modern Western strategies of media and PR for the control of the masses. Reality is deconstructed and an illusion created of a plural public space - a space that is also attractive for people outside Russia, sceptical towards the EU, Washington and the West - even though this is far from the case.

"Russlandverstehers" get it wrong: the theatre of absurd and zomboyashschiks

In our part of Europe and in countries such as France, Spain, Germany or Italy, a common message in any political debate about Russia, Ukraine or the post-Soviet space in general is the importance of "understanding" Russia and "the Russian mentality". It tends to be accompanied with learned nods to the Slavic world, the tsars, the Soviet Union and references to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. In this vein, the "Russlandverstehers" tend to cross the line between explaining events such as the annexation of Crimea, or the restrictions on freedom in Russia, and justifying them.

Classics like Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy can be useful to understand the cultural substrata of many Russians and their take on existence. Likewise, Russian foreign policy in the tsarist period and the USSR can shed some light on today's geopolitical tensions and the Russian perspective in "its backyard". But neither history nor geopolitics alone can explain today's Russia. The system described by Pomerantsev might be even more useful for our political decision-makers when it comes to understanding contemporary Russia and, especially, the nature of its elites and the power circle in question.

As Pomerantsev argues, it is difficult to appreciate the brutal impact that the consecutive destruction of various political models - from the USSR to perestroika or neoliberalism - has on a society and its elites. Today's Russian elites often combine nihilism, a Nietzschian character of �bermenschabove moral codes, and extreme materialism. Prominent pro Kremlin politicians vituperate against the West from the Duma, sometimes threatening a nuclear armageddon or ridiculing "Gayeuropa", while sending their children to Oxbridge or Costa Brava. Concepts like "Mother Russia" and the Russian world (russkiy mir) doubtless serve to mobilise the general population now and then, who - as many Westerners- are needful of collective landmarks in times of uncertainty, penury and moral vacuum. But these ideas mostly operate as instruments of power wielded by a dominant class in order to direct attention away from more immediate problems and basic governance shortcomings.

Deep down, there is an ongoing erosion of morality, something which no society is immune from, whether due to the legacies of totalitarianism and conflict, the poisonous rhetoric of leaders, or endemic impunity. A case can also be made against that US intoxicated by a politics of fear which justifies torture and votes in Congress against the acceptance of Syrian refugees. Or think of the surreal bubble of shrinking cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, where handsome youths working out by the beach just a few miles from the dramatic reality of occupation and violent death. This Russia of spin and showbiz makes a political system and way of life for its rulers out of the theatre of the lie and the absurd (like the weather forecast for bombing Syria). It prefers devoted zomboyashchiks (zombies) to politically active citizens.

Another Russia?

Bar a violent revolutionary political change (and, probably, support from within the system, as in other cases), it is perhaps utopic thinking to conceive of any possibility of reverting the Kremlin's systems and processes of collective regression - whether by well-intentioned external actors or committed local activists. At least from outside of the circle of power which constructs reality and shapes the social order.

Yet, at times, there does exist another Russia, which, when it manages to make its voice heard, harshly refutes many arguments of the "Russlandverstehers" and Putin supporters. This is the Russia of young leaders such as Ilya Yashin, critical of the war in Ukraine, whose RPR-PARNAS party suffered all kinds of boycotts in September's regional elections. It certainly was the Russia of Boris Nemtsov or Anna Politkovskaya. Or even the Russia of those thousands of Moscow citizens who took to the streets in late 2011, creating huge anxiety in the halls of power.

The Russian question and the country's assimilation in the Euro-Atlantic space will continue with or without Putin. But the future of Russia as it is should be a concern for all. Without wishing to lapse into romantic idealism or Manichean visions, this other Russia or, rather, other Russias would probably be closer to Europe, prone to cooperation and friendlier relations with the neighbours. The sad fact today is that a large part of that other Russia chooses exile.

And yet - maybe because of a generational factor or genuine respect for those dissenting voices against a hegemonic model (where protesting means risking it all) - it is inevitable to feel more empathy towards Pussy Riot, Petr Pavlensky, the iconoclast artist, or NGOs like "Memorial", than blind nostalgia about an idealised Russia (not to mention an equally idealised USSR) which no longer exists.

If that other Russia ends up disappearing and those voices are left to wither, the future of this Orwellian Russia where the world is turned on its head, will not endear its neighbours or Europe. But above all it does not bode well at all for the people who actually live there.

*Translation by James Badcock.


 
 #4
Center for European Policy Analysis
www.cepa.org
December 22, 2015
Lessons of 2015                                                                                                                                                    
By Edward Lucas
Edward Lucas is a Senior Vice President at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). Energy, Commodities and Natural Resources editor for The Economist, the London-based newsweekly, he is one of the foremost experts on Russia and Central and Eastern Europe.

Everything that happened in 2015 was foreseeable at the start of the year, was surprising during it and was still intractable by the end.

We knew in January that the Syrian war had rendered millions of people destitute and desperate, that the intervention in Libya had created anarchy in that country, that Afghanistan was getting worse not better, that Eritrea and South Sudan are hellholes and the curse of Islamist extremism was spreading over parts of west Africa-and among radicalised no-hopers in Western Europe too.

We already knew that refugees from all those countries were trying to find their way to the West-whether from a genuine fear of direct persecution, or simply because they wanted a better life, or for many reasons in between. We knew that the European Union has a habit of acting too little and too late, that Germans are bossy and idealistic and that the liberal tide was ebbing fast in Central and Eastern Europe.

We knew that Vladimir Putin's Russia was determined not to let the Assad regime in Syria fall and that it has a ruthless habit of spotting and exploiting Western weakness. We knew that the Obama administration is the weakest and worst in modern American history, that Turkey is run by a prickly and eccentric autocrat, that Britain is distracted with its own neuroses about Europe and that the Chinese growth was slowing down, and thus cooling the furnace which fired the world economy. We knew that the European Central Bank would not let the common currency collapse.

And yet we were surprised when a million or more desperate migrants made their way through Greece and the Balkans to the safety of northern Europe, where Germany and Sweden lived up to the European principles that almost all other countries have abandoned. We were surprised when the Schengen zone buckled under the resulting strain. We were surprised when the Kremlin wrongfooted us in Syria, when Recep Tayyip Erdogan killed the peace process with the Kurds and tightened repression. We were surprised at the Paris attacks.

To be fair, there were some unexpected developments. The Iranian nuclear deal marked a notable breakthrough. So did the Greek bail-out. The unflinching refusal of Germany to put an upper limit on the number of asylum-seekers marked the end of that country's guilty tip-toeing through Europe's corridors of power. We now face a new Germany: self-righteous and confident, which wants all of Europe to follow its lead.

But for the most part it is hard to credit our policy-makers with much foresight.

The public and the elite alike are exhausted by the past year and are daunted by what lies ahead. Trust in the competence of our rulers is fraying.

Yet the December gloom may be overdone. Here are some reasons to be cheerful. The biggest of these is Ukraine. Russia did not succeed in stoking an insurrection all across "Novorossiya"- the "Russian-speaking" south and east. It did not break the Ukrainian army (pitifully led and equipped though it was) or the Ukrainian people's will, or topple the elected government. All that happened for lessons which we should bear in mind in our far stronger and richer societies: Ukrainians survived because they were not scared. We are losing because we are.

That leads to a bigger point. Vladimir Putin underlined his strengths and his weaknesses. He is a brilliant tactician, with all the ruthless opportunism of a seasoned KGB officer. But he is a lousy strategist. He has not managed to modernise the Russian economy, or to build durable political alliances with countries that can help Russia protect its interests. His friends are a rogues' gallery of thugs and losers.

And the West is standing up to him. The EU did not drop sanctions. It maintained them. It is squeezing Gazprom by the throat. Russia's big energy threat-the "Abominable Gasman" -- is stumbling away from Europe. For its part, NATO is boosting its presence in the vulnerable north-eastern states. It conducted its biggest exercise-Trident Juncture-since the end of the cold war. The West is beginning to get to grips with Russian propaganda. Sweden and Finland are intensifying their own defence cooperation, their joint efforts with neighbours and are moving closer to NATO.

We can expect more of that in 2016. So long as Angela Merkel is in power, Germany will not let down its allies in the east. My first prediction for 2016 is  that the European Commission will ensure that Nordstream 2 is not built, however much German industry and the German Social Democrats may wish it. The Commission stopped South Stream-the Russian plan to build an illegal pipeline across the Black Sea and up through the Balkans. It can do the same in the Baltic Sea.

My second prediction is that Sweden's governing Social Democrats will hold a party congress in 2016 in which they will drop their opposition to joining NATO. Finland will immediately switch its position too. This may not come in time for the alliance's summit in Warsaw. But Russia's bullying manner towards its non-NATO members has made membership look all but inevitable. Having tried to divide the West, Russia is succeeding in uniting it.

My third, and more sweeping prediction is that the Schengen zone will become much more like a country-in effect Schengenland. The crisis in the Eurozone offers interesting parallels. Like Schengen, the Eurozone was built on wishful thinking. It had a central bank that could not intervene in the event of a crisis. It allowed national governments to override fiscal constraints. There was no proper regime for supervising banks. The result was recklessness on all sides (by German lenders and Greek borrowers), followed by an almighty bust-up.

But now the architecture of the Eurozone has changed. We have an interventionist central bank, a fiscal authority which clearly overrides voters' choices (ask the Greeks) and the rudiments of a common banking supervisory system. Some elements remain incomplete (such as fiscal transfers) and the economic, political and social cost has been appalling, but it is now possible to see how the Eurozone, more tightly integrated than before, can survive and perhaps even flourish.

The same process is now under way in the Schengen zone. Germany is reluctantly and belatedly pushing for a common approach to migration and to the security of Europe's external frontier. Other countries are grumpily acceding to this. There is smoke and dust over the building site, but the outlines of a new structure are emerging.

For example, the external Schengen border will be defended, so that migration takes place in an orderly way. If Greece cannot defend its island borders itself, and will not accept help from the EU, then it cannot stay in Schengen. Schengenland will need to be much tougher in establishing the identities of people who live within its borders. Social cohesion is the most vital ingredient of civilization. Most people will pay taxes, obey the law and be kind to each other so long as they know that others are doing the same. Privacy zealots may find fingerprinting, retina scans and facial-recognition algorithms distasteful. However, faced with the movement of large numbers of people, biometric identification is crucial for establishing numbers and preventing abuse. European officials should be learning from Estonia to see how a system like this works safely, securely and cheaply.

Schengenland will also make asylum applications easier for those who are most in need and harder for those who break the rules. It makes no sense to privilege the photogenic people who have struggled (or paid) to cross long distances to reach the EU border, but to disadvantage those who are stuck in refugee camps because of frailty or family commitments.

My fourth prediction is that Europe will become much tougher in projecting power beyond its borders. Security-for a country or for an alliance-does not begin at the frontier. It begins well on the other side of it. The European Union needs to start behaving like the imperial superpower that it really is. It has a bigger GDP than the United States and a bigger population. It must stabilise its periphery. If it does not, then it will be destabilized by its periphery. That means an unprecedented level of foreign-policy toughness. We need a European army (I would suggest building on the French Foreign Legion). It should take control of and pacify territory, using lethal force if necessary, and then administer these territories in trusteeship.

My final prediction is that Britain will vote to stay in the European Union. The referendum is a disgraceful gamble on the country's future. But once the campaign really starts, the balance of forces is overwhelmingly in favor of continued membership. Almost all business, almost all unions, all universities, all the cultural elite, most of local government, most people under 40, most of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and most of the media-all of them favour staying in the EU. So does every single one of Britain's foreign allies: the only country which wants Britain to leave is Russia.

None of this is guaranteed. There are many bumps ahead. In elections in France and elsewhere anti-systemic parties may do well. A reckless Putin regime may decide to raise the stakes with a military provocation, hoping that we will fail to call his bluff.

But a diet of crises is normal nutrition for Europe's leaders. I think we are going to end 2016 in a better state than we are now. On that note I wish all readers a happy holiday and a very happy new year.


 
 #5
The American Interest
www.the-american-interest.com
December 21, 2015
RUSSIA AND THE WEST
The Myth of Russia's Containment
Has the West always had it in for Russia? Hardly.
By KIRK BENNETT
Kirk Bennett is a former U.S. Foreign Service officer who spent most of his career working on post-Soviet issues.

"There can be no alliance between Russia and the West, either for the sake of interests or for the sake of principles. There is not a single interest, not a single trend in the West which does not conspire against Russia, especially her future, and does not try to harm her. Therefore Russia's only natural policy towards the West must be to seek not an alliance with the Western powers but their disunion and division. Only then will they not be hostile to us, not of course out of conviction, but out of impotence."

These words, which sound like something Russia's President Vladimir Putin might have said recently, were actually penned in 1864 by the Russian poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev. The notion of perpetual Western antipathy runs in strong currents throughout Russian thought over the past two centuries. Indeed this is a well from which Putin has drawn deeply in recent speeches to mobilize the Russian populace and to justify the Kremlin's policies in Ukraine and elsewhere. The West, according to this account, is both envious of Russia's dynamism and moral superiority and eager to profit territorially at Russia's expense. Putin has repeatedly alleged that the West has maintained a containment policy toward Russia since the 18th century; the Western reaction to events in Ukraine is merely the present manifestation of this policy. Indeed, so deep and consistent is the animosity toward the mighty Eurasian colossus that, even without Ukraine, Westerners would have seized on some other pretext, however flimsy, to try to keep Russia on its knees.

It's a tidy little narrative that seemingly explains everything, with a bit of historical perspective no less. It has the added advantage of absolving Russia from any responsibility for the current tense relations with the West. But how accurate is it?

The 18th and 19th centuries were the golden age of Russian expansion. It was during this period that the Russian Empire absorbed vast areas in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Russia's western borderlands that would later comprise most of the territory of the 14 non-Russian Soviet republics, of which Russia was supposedly deprived after the breakup of the USSR. If the Western powers had a policy of containment with respect to Russia during these centuries, then one could only call this policy a monumental failure. A Finn, a Latvian, or a Pole might well ask where containment was when they needed it.

In the 18th century Russia dealt knockout blows to two Western powers, Sweden and Poland, and began the lengthy process of dismantling the Ottoman Empire. The year 1700 saw Peter the Great's invasion of Sweden and the onset of the Great Northern War. Although the war dragged on until 1721, the outcome was decided at the celebrated 1709 Battle of Poltava, where the Russians annihilated a Swedish army led personally by King Charles XII. It has bequeathed to the Russian language the saying, "погиб, как швед под Полтавой" ("perished like a Swede at Poltava"), and it effectively eliminated Sweden as a major European power. Solzhenitsyn poignantly assessed the historical significance of the battle: Russia moved from one war of conquest to the next, while Sweden abandoned its imperial pretensions and resigned itself to neutrality, prosperity, and a dignified life for its citizens. Who indeed, wondered Solzhenitsyn, were the winners and losers at Poltava?

Russia remained largely disengaged from the major 18th-century European wars, with the notable exception of the Seven Years' War (1756-63), in which Russian forces defeated the armies of Frederick the Great, occupied East Prussia, and even briefly seized Frederick's capital, Berlin, in 1760. Frederick was saved by the timely death in 1762 of Russian Empress Elizabeth and the accession to the throne of her son, Peter III, who idolized Frederick and pulled Russia out of the anti-Prussian coalition. A decade later Peter's wife and successor, Catherine the Great-herself a German princess-teamed up with the German powers, Prussia and Austria, to begin the dismemberment of Poland, a process completed with the Third Partition in 1795. Their mutual concern to prevent any resurrection of Polish statehood created a certain commonality of interest among the partitioning states, ensuring that the 19th century would be a time of almost unbroken Russian-German comity.

The 19th century saw Russia much more engaged in European diplomacy and conflicts, beginning with the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon's ill-fated 1812 campaign is often cited as a prime example of Western aggression against Russia, but the really significant point about the period of 1812-15 is the fact that all the other major European powers were aligned with Russia against Napoleon, insofar as all of them were determined to prevent France from dominating Europe. Russia availed itself of the general state of European upheaval during the Napoleonic era to administer an additional drubbing to its old rivals Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, annexing Finland and Bessarabia in 1812. The awarding of further Polish lands to Russia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 rounded out Russia's western borders, which were to remain virtually unchanged-and unchallenged by any Western power-throughout the subsequent century.

"The policy of containment was not invented yesterday. It has been carried out against our country for many years, always, for decades if not centuries. In short, whenever someone thinks that Russia has become too strong or independent, these tools were quickly put into use."

-Putin's address to the Federal Assembly 4 December 2014

While it is difficult to discern in the 18th century even a single event that could be credibly construed as "Western containment" of Russia, there are clear instances in the 19th century of efforts by Western powers, with varying degrees of success, to check Russian expansion. The following are perhaps the most salient examples:

-Notwithstanding Russia's crucial contribution to the defeat of Napoleon, its effort to obtain the former Polish lands in their entirety was rebuffed at the Congress of Vienna. The other major powers were united in their desire to limit Russian penetration into central Europe, and Russia had to settle for Prussia's and Austria's booty from the Third Partition-a territory that was, moreover, organized as a quasi-buffer "Kingdom of Poland" with its own constitution and army.

-Alarmed at the possible consequences of a Russian death blow to the tottering Ottoman Empire, Britain and France initiated the 1853-55 Crimean War-another highlight in the litany of Russian historical grievances with respect to the West.

-Concerned by the prospect of a Russian client state dominating the Balkans, the major European powers acted in concert at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to dismember the "big Bulgaria" Russia had secured at Ottoman expense with the Treaty of San Stefano.

-In the latter half of the 19th century Britain and Russia engaged in the "Great Game," in which the former, concerned about the security of its Indian possessions and the communication routes thereto, used diplomacy and material support to local forces to check Russia's advance into the Caucasus and Central Asia-with only very modest results.

Besides these specific events, St. Petersburg's devotion to preserving the established monarchical order won Russia the 19th-century sobriquet of "the Gendarme of Europe," and consequent enmity from Western republicans and revolutionaries. In addition, during the Polish insurrections of 1830 and 1863, there was considerable public sympathy for the Polish cause in Western countries such as Britain and France-though certainly not in Prussia or Austria.

However, none of this even remotely amounted to "Western containment" of Russia. Western efforts to check Russian expansion in the 19th century were situational, episodic and largely inconsequential. Western powers did not seek to limit the Russian Empire's territorial enlargement out of some intrinsic animus toward Russia, but because at least some Russian conquests, actual or mooted, threatened specific interests of other powers. Moreover, St. Petersburg enjoyed good relations with one or more Western powers at practically all times; the only brief periods of relative isolation were during the Crimean War, when traditionally friendly Prussia and Austria maintained neutrality, and in the late 1880s and early 1890s, as Russia's entente with the Germanic powers withered, but before the alliance with France had been concluded. No Western country laid claim to any Russian territory; even Napoleon's invasion was not intended to "detach juicy morsels" from Russia, but to force Russian adherence to his Continental System. Russia continued to conquer vast territories in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East, and only sporadic efforts were made by Western powers even to moderate Russia's appetite, not to speak of attempting to hem the country in.

"The events in Ukraine are the concentrated expression of the policy of containing Russia. The roots of this policy go deep into history, [and] it is clear that this policy, unfortunately, did not end with the Cold War."

-Putin's speech to Russian diplomats 1 July 2014

In this historical context, the Kremlin's "Western hostility" story begs a question: of which specific territories was Russia unjustly deprived by 19th-century "Western containment?" Should Russia rightfully have expanded deep into the Balkans? Should it have legitimately annexed the Turkish straits, large portions of eastern Anatolia, or perhaps southern Azerbaijan and the southern Caspian littoral? Was it Russia's due, cruelly denied by malign Westerners, to expand into Afghanistan, India, Xinjiang, or Manchuria?

The 20th century saw major new developments in Russia's relations with Western powers. The long period in which Prussia acted as Russia's partner (and usually a junior one at that) drew to a close once Prussia morphed into Germany. The German invasion in the second year of World War I was the first attempt by a Western power to seize Russian territory in at least two centuries. However, the German success embodied in the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk proved fleeting, and was reversed with the collapse of the German monarchy, the November 11 armistice, and the Treaty of Versailles. The fitful, half-hearted Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1918-21 was certainly anti-Bolshevik but hardly anti-Russian. The Western interventionist powers did not lay claim to any Russian territory and were even loath to recognize or support independence-minded groups like the Balts, Ukrainians or Georgians; indeed, the Allies were fighting with the White armies for a Russia "one and indivisible."

The 1941 Nazi invasion was a still more ambitious land-grab at Russia's expense, but ended even more catastrophically for Germany than its eastern campaign in World War I. Once again, the seizure of Russian territory by a Western power was extremely brief, and on this occasion was followed by an unprecedented extension of Russian control deep into Central Europe - and, for the first time in history, a genuine Western policy of containment.

Purveyors of the Russian victimization narrative portray the French and German invasions of Russia and the Cold War policy of containment as different facets of the same relentless, age-old Western antagonism toward Russia. All of these events do, in fact, reflect a pronounced tendency in European history, but it is not the anti-Russian monomania that some observers imagine. The most remarkable point is the fact that, when Russia was invaded in 1915-18 and 1941-44, exactly as in 1812, the other major Western powers were on Russia's side. Whenever Russia defeated Western invaders, it was in broad alliance with other Western countries. Indeed, in the centuries prior to the Cold War, Western powers never once ganged up to wage war against Russia, but rather against whichever power was threatening to dominate Europe-France in the early 19th century, and Germany in the first half of the 20th. The Crimean War was the only conflict against Western powers in which Russia had no Western allies-but the Western coalition arrayed against Russia consisted only of Britain, France and Sardinia-not exactly a united Western front. The Cold War, which was the only authentic period of Western containment of Russia, fits the historical pattern exactly-not as a manifestation of animosity toward Russia, but as yet another example of European states uniting against any power attempting to control the continent. Western solidarity in the face of a real Soviet threat simply followed the familiar model of European balance-of-power politics, but people of a certain mindset discern instead an anti-Russian conspiracy-and even project it centuries back in time.

But even if Putin has badly mischaracterized the historical context, surely Russians have legitimate grievances about collective Western behavior since the end of the Cold War, do they not? The dismemberment of the Soviet Union, the expansion of NATO, the serial humiliation of Russia, and Western disregard of its interests: Are these phenomena not sufficient evidence of the West's perfidy and fixation on keeping Russia down?

There is not enough space in an essay to treat all of these themes in detail, but a couple of points should provide some salutary perspective.

The Soviets used to refer to the agencies of state power in the USSR as "organs." Accordingly, one might say that the Soviet Union died of multiple organ failure. Its demise was the result of internal breakdown, not the hammer blows of Western military or even economic policy toward its Cold War adversary. Indeed, the collapse came precisely in the context of receding East-West tensions, when the Cold War had essentially ended and Soviet citizens were no longer mobilized by fear of foreign aggression-a fact perhaps not lost on the current Russian leadership.

As for the post-Soviet borders that Russian nationalists find so grossly unjust, they were drawn not in Washington or Brussels, but in Moscow, and the West had no input into them whatsoever. There was no diktat like Versailles or Trianon. Victoria Nuland was not serving up sandwiches at Belovezha.

Moreover, the great bogeyman of Western imperialism proved to be the dog that didn't bark following the Soviet collapse. How is it possible that the covetous West, lusting for centuries after Russian land, failed to rush in for the kill at the obvious moment of Russia's maximum historical weakness? Yet there were no Western vultures circling the Soviet carcass. Not one Western country annexed, or so much as laid claim to, a single square centimeter of Russian territory after 1991-not even regions like Kaliningrad or Karelia, wrested from Western countries a mere half-century before. Notwithstanding all the overwrought Russian angst about supposed U.S. designs on Siberia, Americans curiously failed to advance any scheme to reunify the Alaskan Eskimos with their Siberian kinfolk, or even so much as contrive a narrative about fraternal peoples cruelly separated by an artificial boundary capriciously drawn down the middle of the Bering Strait.

This Western restraint is inexplicable from the perspective of the Russian victimization narrative, but is entirely comprehensible in light of actual historical reality. Russia did not become the largest country in the world by being the object of constant Western depredations or containment. In fact, the only Russian territory that has been permanently ceded to a Western power in the last three centuries is Alaska, which was voluntarily sold to the United States. The only existing claim on Russia territory is the Japanese pretension to a few miserable little islands. Frankly, the fear-verging on paranoia-that Western powers will jointly plunder and partition Russia if it shows the slightest weakness would seem to be based on Russia's own historical practice toward Poland, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire rather than on any actual experience at the receiving end of concerted Western aggression.

The charge that the West reneged on a pledge not to enlarge NATO at the end of the Cold War has been authoritatively rebutted by a 2009 study that examined declassified Soviet and Western written accounts of key meetings in 1990 rather than relying solely on the memory of participants. Statements about NATO not moving "one inch to the east" were referring to the alliance's military infrastructure in the context of a reunified Germany as a NATO member. Neither side at the time understood these statements as precluding Central European membership in NATO, for the simple reason that neither the Soviets nor the West could imagine such a prospect in early 1990.

There is another vitally important aspect of NATO enlargement that its detractors gloss over: Central European countries have not been dragged or lured into NATO by the West; they've been pushed by Moscow. Russian revisionism and great-power chauvinism constitute the finest NATO recruitment tool ever devised. Just one interview by the likes of Aleksandr Dugin, or one conference by Konstantin Zatulin's CIS Institute, does the trick better than the cumulative work of all the NATO information centers over the past 25 years. If Moscow doesn't like NATO enlargement, it might usefully stop creating the conditions that make NATO membership such an attractive proposition for so many of Russia's neighbors. An exaggerated fear of hostile encirclement drives Russian policies that antagonize other states, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy; by definition, Russia can never have secure borders as long as it keeps making enemies of its neighbors.

Stripped of its massive overlay of mythology, pathos, and historical misinterpretation, the Russian victimization narrative nevertheless does contain a kernel of truth. Western powers have indeed pursued their own interests, choosing to advance them even when they clash with Russia's, and have failed to consult or even inform Russia at key junctures. But to be honest, this is exactly what Russia has done with respect to the West. Western blindsiding of Russia on Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya finds its counterpart in unilateral Russian moves such as the 1999 seizure of the Pristina Airport in Kosovo and the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine. Supposedly generous, unrequited Russian gestures toward the West were either unavoidable, such as the withdrawal of Russian troops from the former Soviet satellite states, or clearly in Russia's own interest, like support for the U.S./NATO campaign against the Taliban.

An honest look at post-Cold War Western and Russian interests prompts us to ask two sets of questions. First, what specifically would it have meant for the West to accommodate Russian interests over the past 25 years? Acquiescing in ethnic cleansing in the Balkans? Watching Qaddafi's forces drown Benghazi in blood? Cheering from the sidelines as Russia absorbed neighboring regions, or even entire countries, under the guise of supposedly indigenous, "popular" movements for Eurasian integration or reunification of the Russian World? Eschewing NATO enlargement and leaving Central Europe in a security vacuum, where the smoldering embers of old conflicts could burst once more into flames? Second, if the goals and interests of the West and Russia differ radically, as they clearly do in so many areas, then how, as a practical matter, are the two of them supposed to partner? How can they cooperate when they're pulling in different directions?

Unfortunately, when it comes to European security, Russian and Western interests are largely at odds. The post-Cold War Western effort to "export security" to the east runs directly counter to Moscow's predilection for weak, divided neighbors that it can dominate. Russian great-power chauvinists persist in seeing 1991 as a historical aberration, tragic but reversible, while the rest of the world-and above all, Russia's post-Soviet neighbors-perceive it as the new normal. Actually, for all the vilification of the West, Moscow's effort to upend the post-Cold War order is not being thwarted by Western resolve (if only!), so much as by Russia's own inability to re-gather the post-Soviet lands by either attraction or compulsion.

The major division among Western observers of Russia is not between those who understand Russia's perspective and those who do not. It is between those who accept the Russian narrative more or less uncritically, and those who find that narrative distorted, self-serving, and riddled with errors of fact and interpretation.


 
#6
European Council on Foreign Relations
www.ecfr.eu
December 18, 2015
How to talk with Russia
By Kadri Liik
Senior Policy Fellow

After Russia's annexation of Crimea, many policymakers in Europe concluded that it had been a mistake to let Russia get away with the 2008 Georgian war. "We were not clear enough on Georgia, that's why they moved to Ukraine," was the gloomy conclusion. In all likelihood, similar conversations took place also in Moscow. "We were not clear enough in Georgia, that's why they moved to Ukraine," people would say, having in mind the expansion of Western outreach.

This example illustrates the problem that Russia and the West now face. We have fundamentally different understandings not only of what constitutes acceptable international behaviour, but also of the goals and "natural" drivers that underpin it. And we are unable to have a direct conversation about our differences. Different frameworks combined with miscommunication have grown, over time, into self-perpetuating antagonistic narratives.

In Russia, where decision-making is concentrated in the hands of a narrow and like-minded group of people, a coherent anti-Western narrative has emerged that is already nearly impossible to penetrate. At delicate moments, this can be highly dangerous: if both sides consider the other side the aggressor, misreading the other side's intentions can lead to reckless action.

In this context of cultural alienation, is it still possible to talk to Russia, and what would that take?

This is the question which now plagues both NATO and the EU. While in the NATO context the dangers of miscommunication are sometimes recognised, EU discussions are all too often driven by bureaucratic political logic. A desire to have "a positive conversation" alongside (or instead of) sanctions, fosters the hope that, if engaged positively, Russia will mellow and a "new deal" might be found that turns Russia towards co-operation again. In the latter context, cooperation between the EU and Eurasian Economic Union is often mentioned as a potential deal-maker.

While the desire to have "a positive conversation" is in itself understandable, and cooperative co-existence with Russia should definitely remain Europe's long-term strategic goal, a shallow approach to the issue holds considerable dangers. Our differences run so deep that they cannot be papered over with another bureaucratic initiative, however well-intentioned. Worse still, in the context of mutual miscommunication, raising expectations based on false assumptions will not just lead to disappointment. Given our history of disillusionment, each future disappointment is likely to be more emotional than the last, and cause a more dangerous backlash.

America's experience with its reset policy is an instructive example here. For the US, the reset was just such a "positive conversation." It was pragmatic policy - an attempt to work with Russia on areas of common interest and therefore to limit publicity around disagreements. But in Russia, the reset - coming so soon after the Georgia war - was interpreted effectively as a geopolitical apology: as America's admission that it had ventured too close to what Russia considers its sphere of influence. It was seen as a promise to change course.

As a former Russian diplomat, speaking under Chatham House rule, later acknowledged:

"The concept of the reset was misinterpreted by Russia. Russia thought it was finally accepted among the great powers, but in fact the reset turned out to be about a narrow set of issues. This was a great disappointment. The concept of tactical co-operation is alien to the Russian elite. Relations with other countries have always been emotionally charged. Recognition is an important concept and Russia wants to be treated as an equal."

The nature of the disagreement

That Russia wants to be treated as "an equal" is a phrase that often comes up in conversations with Russian policymakers and experts. However, the definition of "equal" is elusive. Institutionally, one could argue that Russia has been treated as more than equal: it has been admitted to all the Western organisations it wished to join without necessarily qualifying for them. The West has also done its utmost to link Russia up with the EU and NATO as a like-minded "strategic partner". But Russia still feels less than equal and humiliated. How come?

The truth seems to be that Russia has never wanted to be treated as an equal partner inside the Western OSCE-based system. Rather, for Moscow, being "equal" means having the right to set and tweak the rules, not just to advance its own interests within the post-Cold War European system with its common set of rules. It means having geopolitical veto rights and uncritical acceptance of the nature and practices of its domestic regime - neither of which the OSCE principles can provide.

Contrary to what many would claim, Russia is not an expansionist power. It does not want to dominate the world, conquer Europe or even restore the Soviet Union. But it wants a sphere of control in the area that the EU calls its Eastern neighbourhood, and it wants spheres of control as such to be accepted as an organising principle of international life. Russia does not have an ambitious global agenda: its approach to the Asia-Pacific region is inspired more by its Western and great power relationships than by any local context. Likewise, its actions in the Middle East have less to do with the region itself than with Moscow's counter-revolutionary stance and the "principle of inviolability of regimes". These are issues that have troubled Russia in the Western context, rather than the Eastern one, as Russia views the West as having engineered most of the popular revolutions of the last few decades.

While these actions thus do not constitute a global challenge to the West - reminiscent of the Cold War times - they nevertheless do constitute a sharp clash of paradigms that is bound to manifest itself again and again.

The nature of the miscommunication

This clash is magnified by the accompanying misunderstandings and miscommunications. Decision-makers in Russia view Western actions through their own paradigms: they seem to sincerely believe that the West is engineering "colour revolutions" with the aim of weakening Russia's sphere of influence and strengthening its own. They suspect that the ultimate goal is to bring about regime change in Russia.

The West in turn has until recently been largely oblivious of the extent to which Russia sees the world and its working principles differently. It has interpreted Russia's actions as aberrations, misunderstandings, or as inspired by domestic political considerations. There has been a strong belief that as Russia experiences the benefits of co-operation, it will eventually become a fully paid-up member of the OSCE-based order.

It is entirely normal that the abyss between our world views should have deepened as the authoritarian regime consolidated itself in Russia. However - and this is not entirely logical -, the West's ability to grasp the depth of it did not catch up, at least until the annexation of Crimea served as a wake-up call. This ignorance is rooted not only in intellectual laziness and wishful thinking. It also has to do with the decline in the quality of communication - and this in turn has something to do with the personalities of leaders, first and foremost with the personality of Vladimir Putin.

A Russian expert who for a long time has been advising the Foreign Ministry, has pointed out that the reason why Russia acquiesced to the first two rounds of NATO enlargement was the fact that these had been discussed with Moscow in terms that were understandable to them:

"They did not like enlargement, but they saw that stopping it had an unacceptable price, and so they negotiated compensation. All Russia's wishes that Moscow managed to articulate were met - whether Russia managed to make use of what it got is a different matter. But it was a deal that Russia knew it had accepted."

These talks, however, had mostly taken place between the Yeltsin government and the Clinton administration. With the advent of the Putin and Bush presidencies, both Russia's ability to articulate its wishes and the West's ability to understand them started to decline.

And here one comes to Putin's personality. Putin's worldview and his modus operandi have been shaped by Soviet norms and hagiography to a greater extent than is necessarily common among Russians, even of his generation. His communication habits bear some unmistakable Soviet characteristics, which when used in conversation with the West, are often misunderstood and make him seem deceptive. This is not necessarily intentional.

In Soviet life, hypocrisy was the norm, characterised by the famous Soviet saying: "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us". Adherence to the nominal state of affairs - pretending to work, pretending to believe in Communism - was a social obligation, but everyone knew that this was just a pretence. In these circumstances, there were just two ways of discussing the true state of affairs: between the lines (using official rhetoric), or in a trusted environment, abandoning the pretence.

In his communication with the West, Putin has used both: he has used Western liberal rhetoric to get across his own - often quite illiberal - messages. He has also resorted to the crude naked truth - exposed in statements such as "Ukraine is not even a country". The West, however, tends not to hear his message: in "politically correct" statements we miss the double speak; the more "naked" messages can be so crude as to be grotesque, or they are dismissed as bullying and blackmailing not worth engaging with.

This is not to say that the West never uses double speak itself. It does, but of a different kind. In the West, double speak may be used to cut some corners and solve some thorny real-life problems, but it has never become a norm nor led to a sustained double reality. Rules can be breached, but they still remain rules, even in the eyes of those who breach them. In the Soviet system, it was vice versa: rules were known to be fictional even in the eyes of those who followed them.

This logic may also explain why Russia is so unhappy with many of the international rules and norms it has voluntarily signed up to, be it the OSCE charter or WTO rulebook: it never thought that these were meant to be followed in letter as well as in spirit.

Russia has an interesting double-track behaviour when it comes to rules and norms. While it can be very rigid and legalistic in clinging to the letter of the law, it can also freely ignore its spirit. It can also use the letter of the law to evade the spirit. But such behaviour is often driven by Russia's notion that by so doing, it in fact engages with the "real conversation," beneath the veneer of public norms - as the Soviet Constitution covered the realities of Soviet policy making.

Its special operation in Crimea bears all the hallmarks of such logic. It was important to observe the "letter of the law" - that is, to pretend that Crimea referendum had local roots, to have at least implausible deniability of Russia's involvement.

Seeing what was happening, many Europeans concluded bitterly that "Putin lies". But there is a logic to his lies. They are not just intended to deceive, but to communicate. The Crimea operation communicated that Russia was willing and able to set rules in its neighbourhood. It was not just physical, but also a mental demonstration of force, telling the West that: "you may know we are there, but you cannot prove it, so you cannot do anything and so you had better accept our terms"

It is often said that Putin is a good tactician with no strategy. Perhaps. But he knows very well where he wants to get, makes use of the openings he sees and often uses escalation as an invitation to talk or a demand that his wishes be taken seriously. Doing so is often his substitute for direct discussion. As one astonished Brussels official acknowledged:

"Russia never said it wanted a sphere of influence in Ukraine! Has they said so, we would have approached the issue differently."

But neither Russia nor Putin said it. They thought it was self-evident, too obvious to be put into words.

After Putin's first years in power, a Russian media article characterised his foreign policy as "Bulgakovian," referring to the famous sentence from Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita: "You should never ask anyone for anything. Never. Especially not from those who are more powerful than you". Contrary to expectations, Putin did not pick a fight over the Baltics joining NATO; he did not ask for money or for a sphere of influence. After 9/11 he sided with the US without asking for anything in return. But the fact that he did not articulate demands does not mean that he did not have expectations. After all, Bulgakov's next sentence reads: "They will make the offer and they will give of their own accord".

This offer, however, never materialised. What for Putin were great concessions on his part, the West interpreted just as common interests, and instead of coming up with a payback of a suitable nature and magnitude, or - rather - explaining why the latter could not be offered, it simply said "thank you". And so the cycle of miscommunication started.

What next? Policies and problems

After the annexation of Crimea exposed the depth of differences, three different policy options have been put forward in the West.

The first focuses on constraining Russia. It suggests beefing up the defence plans for NATO territory, trying to limit Russia's leverage in its non-NATO neighbourhood, and sticking to economic sanctions that supposedly sooner or later will bring down the ever more brittle regime in Moscow.

The second approach - advocated, among others, by US foreign policy gurus Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger - is essentially a geopolitical deal with Russia, which focuses around a permanent non-aligned status for Ukraine.

The third approach is a mix of carrots and sticks. This is the position often heard in Europe: we need to be firm on sanctions and use them to regulate the situation in Ukraine, but at the same time we should look out for ways to offer Russia a new stake in the European order. This could be done by legitimising the Eurasian Union by allowing it to co-operate with the EU.

All these suggestions have been made with the best of intentions, but people remain unaware as to what it would really take to adopt any of these concepts as a policy.

While constraining Russia is clearly necessary, one needs to resist the temptation to draw excessive parallels with the old Cold War. Doing so would encourage people to apply old solutions to new challenges; instead of informing thinking it would risk making one blind to current realities. The memory of the Cold War has also now become an "edited" memory in the minds of many Westerners - a heroic time with great clarity about good and evil. The real dangers and confusions have largely been forgotten.

In reality, a new containment policy may not be such a smooth success. Compared to the old days, Russia is a lot weaker than the West, but the West is a lot more distracted. A new Cold War would thus be an "asymmetric" one; and so far, the West has done a lot worse in "asymmetric" wars than symmetric ones. In fact, a proper public Cold War would actually suit Russia's regime pretty well: prolonging its life expectancy through the ability to consolidate the people against an external enemy. And the fall of the regime in itself is not a solution either. For good things to take root on its ruins, the regime needs to first discredit itself in the eyes of the population, and then be changed by that same population.

However, doing a geopolitical deal with Russia would not be any more straightforward. Not only would such a deal run counter to a whole array of documents that regulate the international behaviour of European countries (the OSCE charter, the principles of the Council of Europe, the founding documents of the EU and NATO), it would also be impossible in practice. While after the Cold War the spheres of influence could be held together by coercion, these days some attraction is needed. Moscow may lay a claim to a sphere of influence, but it cannot really hold on to it without this being accepted by the societies of the countries concerned. These societies, in turn, are starting to mature and demand more accountability from their elites who have often run their countries in a self-interested and corrupt manner.

This manifests itself in a bumpy, but inevitable evolutionary process that the EU did not launch and does not control, but cannot do anything other than support. Moscow, on the other hand, is fixated on the elites it can control - and is therefore bound to resist the change. Furthermore, it would interpret any difficulties with the societies as subversion originating in Europe. That way, even if the West did concede Russia a sphere of influence, it would never reap the desired benefits in terms of stability - but it would have lost the OSCE-based principles of the European order.

Finally, the third option - a combination of firmness and an appealing project - runs the risk of being misunderstood by Russia in the same way the reset was misunderstood. The EU-EEU cooperation especially has its natural limits can cannot be ignored. For the time being, the EEU Commission has a mandate to handle just the trade issues, but one of the Union's members, Belarus, is not a member of the WTO. For the EU, all trade negotiations are based on WTO rules. This means that is hard to find an actual agenda for any discussion with the EEU: one can think only of low-level technical issues, such as standards and customs procedures. To invest such low-level interaction with expectations of a major break-through would be not just futile, but also dangerous.

It might happen that Russia would just fail to appreciate the proposal, but in a worst-case scenario it would misinterpret it altogether. It may hope that the West has finally granted it its due geopolitical entitlement and other sorts of unconditional acceptance. But this would not be the case. Unconditional acceptance is something that the EU does not give even to its member states.

The EU might too hope that limited cooperation with Russia would, over time, grow into something bigger and make Russia a cooperative partner in a Western system. This would not be the case either. A semi-symbolic gesture of goodwill would not "buy" Russia's acquiescence. If we look at the proposals that Russia is making - on geopolitical order, or even on the DCFTA with Ukraine - we quickly realise that to really meet Russia's expectations, we would need to accept a profound overhaul of the principles of most post-Cold War institutions; not just NATO and the OSCE would need to change their principles, but so would the WTO, possibly the Bretton Woods system, and so forth.

Focus on differences and talk

In the absence of a workable policy with an acceptable price tag, what should Western dialogue with Russia look like? Counterintuitively, we should start the Russia-West conversations not with commonalities - as would be a diplomat's instinct - but on the differences.

The primary aim of communication should be to rationalise the context and to agree on the nature of disagreements. If this could be achieved, then the differences would still be there, but they would be less dangerous. Once Moscow is convinced that even though the West tries to defend its principles in Ukraine, it is not in fact plotting an attack on Moscow, then the chances of a pre-emptive attack on Western allies or assets would be much reduced. Likewise, once Russia is convinced that even though the West may be desperate for cooperation with Russia, it is ready to be tough when it comes to defending some basic principles, then the danger of a "next Ukraine" will be much reduced.

Such a conversation should take place at different levels and in various formats. Starting from the top - it is important to keep the conversation going with President Putin. Even though he "lives in a different world", as famously stated by Angela Merkel, it is still important to let him know how his actions are understood by the West.

To reduce dangers stemming from misunderstandings on the political level, it is important to have working contacts among the military. These need to be calibrated carefully. Russia must not be able to use any conversations, military or otherwise, to legitimise its actions in Ukraine - but it should know for certain that while the West is preparing to defend the NATO territory, it is not preparing to attack Russia's territory.

On the diplomatic front, the West should be very clear on its vision as concerns implementation of the Minsk agreement: only full implementation would qualify as a condition for removal of the sanctions. Up until now, the West has tried to force-feed Russia a face-saving exit from Donbas, while Russia has still been eager to eat Kyiv, to gain control over its decision making. This must not succeed and the EU needs to be clear on it. That said, if one day Russia indeed wants a face-saving way out, it should be granted - but again, with full clarity on what it is: saving face and not a solution on Russia's terms. Russia's (mis)interpretation of the Western-mediated agreement between Viktor Yanukovych and his opposition should serve as a warning example on how mediation can be misunderstood.

On the institutional level, we should consider re-shaping some of the discussion formats to suit today's needs. Most, if not all formats that unite Russia and the West are based on the assumption that we share interests or even values. That has been the source of much frustration on both sides. Russia has felt permanently criticised, while Western allies have felt they need to choose between good relations with Russia and their sense of truth. We could get rid of that frustration by redesigning the discussion in ways that do not imply like-mindedness. The Russia-NATO Council would be the obvious first candidate for such an overhaul, but there are others.

We should also try to engage with Russia's civil society, even though the Kremlin has made it difficult. Some Russian NGOs are remarkably active and well-organised, and clearly incubators of Russia's future elite. Their activities in Russia are hindered, but many have branched out to the West, while still maintaining influence in Russia. Europe should support such organisations and socialise the activists into Western discussions. For the time being, it is impossible to reach out to wider Russian audiences who are recipients of the information the Kremlin chooses. But NGO activists are usually eager to have contacts. And it is they who will almost certainly become opinion leaders in Russia when the TV dictatorship ends.

We should also continue the conversation with Russia's expert circles. While many experts undoubtedly serve as spokespersons for the regime, many others have retained a desire to actually understand events, and some are balancing between the two. It may be hard to change these people's minds, but it is possible for good personal relationships to emerge, which - at time of crises - will be useful to get a better understanding of the other side's thinking and policy drivers.

In short, Europe should launch a multi-layered conversation with Russia about our differences without the immediate aim of solving them via some grand bargain. We should talk about differences in order to rationalise them. To compartmentalise the relationship and find areas for co-operation would still be fine, but only if such co-operation is understood by both sides for what it is. But embarking on a symbolic positive project in the framework of misunderstandings will be dangerous, as raised expectations, if unfounded, are bound to generate a dangerous backlash - more dangerous each time it re-occurs.


 
 #7
Moscow Times
December 23, 2015
Open Society and Its Enemies in Putin's Russia
By Victor Davidoff
Victor Davidoff is a Moscow-based independent journalist and editor of the human rights website Chronicle of Current Events (ixtc.org).

What's going on in Russia? It's simple to understand if you remember history.

In 1921, the Soviet Union was experiencing a terrible famine, the likes of which hadn't been seen since the Middle Ages. The Soviet government had to ask foreign governments and international organizations for aid. The American Relief Administration, the precursor of USAID - the United States Agency for International Development - responded with tons of food and medicine. In two years the ARA provided $42 million of aid, a huge sum at the time, and saved almost 10 million people from dying of starvation or disease. The ARA only stopped their work in Russia when the situation ceased to be critical.

But instead of being grateful, the Soviet government began a campaign to discredit the organization. First they declared it "a spy organization." Then members of the committee to aid famine victims - the Soviet organization that liaised with the ARA - were arrested and exiled - some abroad, some to Siberia.

Fast forward to 1991. There wasn't a famine, but the country was deep in crisis, and once again Western governments and private foundations came to the rescue.

The Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute was one of the first Western charities to begin work in the Soviet Union. Activities began in 1987 with educational projects. In 1991, the foundation switched to direct funding of people who had suffered most from the crisis - what had been the Soviet middle class. The new government had simply stopped fulfilling their responsibilities to anyone dependent on the state budget. Hyperinflation had wiped away their savings, and scientists, teachers, librarians, and doctors found themselves in dire economic straits. And so the Soros Foundation initiated an enormous program to provide direct financial aid to Soviet scholars and scientists.

I remember going into a bank in those years and seeing a line of scholars and scientists standing at a special window for their "Soros checks." These people were once the Soviet elite, but now they looked like a crowd of refugees who had lost their property and status. Their once stylish Polish jeans and Romanian shoes looked pathetic next to the Christian Dior suits worn by the fashion-forward New Russians.

The Academy of Sciences was in a state of permanent disintegration. Research centers and universities paid their employees $5-$10 a month. One person couldn't survive on that salary, leave alone support a family. But when they got those "Soros checks," scientists, scholars, and professors could return to their universities and continue to do what they had done all their lives: conduct research and teach students.

It's no exaggeration to say that those "Soros checks" saved Russian science in the early 1990s. But they couldn't save everyone. I still recall a newspaper headline from the 1990s: "Math Teacher Jumps Out a Window, Unable to Support His Family."

And then Putin came to power and everything changed. The new regime began with an attack on independent media, but its next targets were foreign charities. First the Soros Foundation was unceremoniously kicked out of its office space in an old manor house that they'd leased for 49 years. Suddenly documents appeared showing that the owner of the house had sold it just a few days before signing the lease with the Soros Foundation.

The new owner tore up the lease and locked up the house. For several days the Foundation's employees had to climb in windows to get into their offices. In 2003, it finally closed its representative office in Russia, but it continued to support civil society institutions.

Finally, at the very end of November this year, the Prosecutor General's Office declared the Soros Foundation an "undesirable organization" on the territory of the Russian Federation. This ruling does not just prohibit the Foundation's work in Russia. According to a new article in the Criminal Code, Article 284.1, not only Foundation staff but also their grantees and even people who have provided consulting services are threatened with prison sentences of up to six years. To put this into perspective, the same sentence is prescribed by the Criminal Code for rape.

It's pretty clear why the Kremlin declared war against the Open Society Foundation. It's the same attempt to turn the country into a closed system that obsessed Soviet leaders in the last century. People are just waiting for the next measures taken against Soros grantees. The Sova Human Rights Center has reported that for several years some books on history - including books funded by Soros - have been removed from research and other libraries. And when they are removed, the libraries and their directors have been forced to pay significant fines.

But fines aren't all. Since October Natalya Sharina, head of the Library of Ukrainian Literature, has been under house arrest. In a search conducted of the library, they found two banned books including one written by one of the leaders of the Maidan uprising in Kiev. Now she is facing up to five years in prison for "inciting hatred or enmity."

In this situation, Russians have been trying to console themselves with the famous axiom Karl Marx attributed to Hegel: History repeats itself first as a tragedy and then as a farce. But this was said about Europe. In Russia, history repeats itself over and over again as tragedy.


 #8
Kennan Institute
www.wilsoncenter.org
December 15, 2015
Russia's Moving Targets
By Maxim Trudolyubov  
Maxim Trudolyubov is a Senior Fellow at the Kennan Institute and the Editor-at-Large of Vedomosti, an independent Russian daily

Measuring the success of Russia's largest and most recent "cross-border" projects-Ukraine and Syria-is extremely difficult. What could be considered Russia's ultimate goals there?

We often assume that Russia has fixed, clearly defined goals and then judge Moscow's progress accordingly. In theory, the Kremlin is aiming at a stabilized, safely pro-Russian Ukraine and a pre-2011 Syria, complete with Bashar al-Assad's fully restored government with no militant opposition or ISIS on the horizon. If achieved, both of these goals would lead Russia back into history's superpower hall of fame.

If we use these (or similar, less ambitious) goals as a yardstick, we would inevitably arrive at disastrous conclusions. Only modest gains have been made on the ground in Syria. Russia is still not accepted as a full partner by the West. Moscow is embroiled in cold-war style confrontation with a previously friendly Turkey and has to brace itself for an extended war effort in the Middle East. "Putin's 'crafty' Syrian chess move has left him with a lot more dead Russians; newly at odds with Turkey and Iran; weakened in Ukraine; acting as the defense lawyer for Assad - a mass murderer of Sunni Muslims, the same Sunni Muslims as Putin has in Russia; and with no real advances against ISIS," Tom Friedman of the New York Times writes in an imaginary dialogue with a Putin apologist.

The Ukraine settlement may be seen as fragile and politically unprofitable. "With no more quick and easy Crimea-style operations on the horizon, the Kremlin finds itself stuck in a psychologically unsatisfactory holding pattern," writes former U.S. diplomat Kirk Bennett. "Waiting for oil and gas prices to recover, for the West to fragment, and for Ukraine to implode."

Meanwhile, the economic costs of Russia's escapades in Ukraine and Syria are huge and growing. Russia's isolation from the West is becoming more entrenched, relations with China are cooling, and Russia is suffering economically. No end is in sight to the slowdown caused by a combination of adverse oil prices, Western sanctions, and a failure to attract investment. Oil prices are down 60 percent from their peak in June 2014, and the downward pressure is only accelerating. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is continuing to defend its market share by any means necessary: the price of oil went down 14 percent in a week since the cartel indicated it would no longer cap its members' levels of production. "[Oil below $40] is possible," Russia's Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said only two weeks ago. "Oil may reach $30. Low prices may dominate the entire coming year," Siluanov is saying now.  Today's ruble would buy you, roughly, 50 to 70 percent of what it would a year ago.

The Russians should be very upset and, yet, the majority of my countrymen seem to be comfortable with what's going on. Putin remains popular. Many of the staunchest Putin critics are now his allies, precisely because he has given them that sense of a resurging Russia. "We bared our teeth; we made them respect us; we made them pay attention; they don't like us but let them at least fear us." These are typical phrases that arise in focus-group discussions of the current state of affairs, says Denis Volkov, sociologist with the Levada Center, an independent pollster.

Many Russians feel better about their lives despite the deteriorated economic conditions. In 2015, despite a decline on every economic count, Russia has gone up from the 68th to the 58th place in the Legatum Institute's Prosperity Index. (The Prosperity Index measures overall prosperity as a combination of material wealth and subjective impressions of wellbeing). "In many countries, objective and subjective data track one another: when conditions are good, citizens perceive them to be good (and vice versa)," Peter Pomerantsev and Nathan Gamester of the Legatum Institute write in explaining their data. "But sometimes, it is the gap between perceptions and reality that tells the most interesting story."

To my mind, what's happening is not bad planning and missed targets. These are shifting plans and moving targets. The most important goals, the ones the Kremlin really cares about, are the domestic ones. But Putin has long run out of domestic means of reaching those goals. That's why he decided to go beyond Russia's borders.

Foreign policy objectives are not ends in themselves. That is why Russia's actions in Ukraine or in Syria may be seen as failures. These actions are not meant to be successful in a straightforward sense; they are means to maintaining regime security. The goals are negative, rather than positive. Action is taken to prevent something from happening, not to make something happen. Putin went after Crimea and on into Ukraine because he felt he could not afford not to. Putin went into Syria because he felt he could not afford to stay isolated. Isolation would be deadly for his political system, which is tied to the West via thousands of business and personal bonds. During its two-month campaign in the Middle East, Moscow shifted its focus a few times already: the target has been moving with the political wind. Turkey was needed in one situation, but became a means to scoring immediate goals in another situation. Russia's economic outlook does not even enter this picture. The Russians' incomes and wellbeing (material, not symbolic) are expendable.

The Russian politician thrives on conflict, not on achieving policy objectives or specific military targets (just like your typical Russian high-ranking official thrives on expenditure, rather than revenue). Targets are movable. No one will judge Putin domestically for aiming at Homs instead of Raqqa, or for sending the ruble down 60 percent instead of 20 percent-as long as his regime is in place. He will always be right as long as he controls regime security. He will be wrong on every count as soon as he loses control. This is how he himself must be thinking. Otherwise he would not be pulling frantically on the control levers and constantly changing his direction.


 #9
RFE/RL
December 23, 2015
10 Laws Putin's Foes Say Russia Needs To Scrap
By Claire Bigg

A group of prominent Russian dissidents has identified what it says are Russia's 10 most harmful laws. Their project, "Sanatsia Prava," or Sanitation Of The Law, calls for the abolition of legislation that they say causes extensive harm to Russian society.

The project's initiators include writer Grigory Chkhartishvili, better known under his pen name Boris Akunin; Yelena Panfilova, vice president of Transparency International; exiled opposition politician Vladimir Ashurkov; and lawyer and human rights advocate Pavel Chikov.

'Foreign Agents' Law

This controversial law, which came into force in November 2012 on the backdrop of mass opposition protests, requires nongovernmental organizations to register as "foreign agents" with the Justice Ministry if they receive foreign funding and are deemed to engage in "political activity."

Failure to comply is punishable by fines of up to $4,215 and prison terms of up to two years.

The law has led to the closures of more than 20 NGOs so far, many of which chose to cease their activities rather than be labeled "foreign agents" -- a term associated with the word "spy" in Russian.

A nonprofit group supporting independent media and headed by Boris Zimin, a member of Sanatsia Prava, was one of the NGOs blacklisted as a "foreign agent." The Dynasty Foundation headed by Zimin's father, telecommunications magnate Dmitry Zimin, shut its doors this year after being slapped with the label. The foundation provided grants to young scientists, and its closure caused dismay in Russia's cash-strapped scientific community.

Sanatsia Prava says the vague definition of what constitutes political activities "allows law enforcers to interpret almost any public activity by an NGO as political."

The law, it says, "significantly restricts the rights of citizens to unite and engage in civic activities" and violates both the Russian Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Russia is a contracting party based on its membership in the Council of Europe.

'Dima Yakovlev' Law

One of the most divisive laws adopted by Russia in recent years, this 2012 legislation bars U.S. citizens from adopting Russian orphans.

It is named after Dmitry Yakovlev, a Russian-born toddler who died of heatstroke in the United States in 2008 after his adoptive father left him in a parked car for nine hours. A U.S. court ruled the death an accident.

The ban came in response to U.S. sanctions targeting alleged human rights abusers in Russia and named in memory of Sergei Magnitsky, a whistle-blowing Russian lawyer who died in pretrial detention after exposing alleged government tax fraud.

The Dima Yakovlev law effectively blocked the departure of about 200 Russian orphans who had already been told they would soon go home to their adoptive families in the United States.

Many of those children have severe diseases and disabilities.

Sanatsia Prava says the law was passed "with numerous procedural irregularities" and violates the Russian Constitution, the Russian Family Code, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The ban, it adds, "runs counter to common sense and universal ideas of justice, when orphaned children become bargaining chips in foreign-policy games and are deprived of the chance to acquire a full-fledged family."

Law On 'Undesirable Organizations'

Under this legislation, signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in May, authorities can shut down "undesirable" NGOs without a court order if the prosecutor-general determines that they threaten national security.

The measure is widely seen as part of a deepening crackdown on democracy and human rights advocates in Russia.

In July, the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED) became the first NGO to be banned under the law.

The Prosecutor-General's Office said NED, whose stated goal is "the growth and the strengthening of democratic institutions around the world," posed "a threat to the constitutional order of the Russian Federation and the defensive capability and security of the government."

In November, Russia banned two branches of Open Society, a pro-democracy charity fund founded by U.S. billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, as "undesirable."

Sanatsia Prava says the law "significantly complicates the activities of NGOs and hurts the development of Russian civil society."

Ban On Offending Religious Believers

Officially intended to protect the religious beliefs and feelings of Russian citizens, this amendment to Russia's Criminal Code was drafted shortly after the punk dissident collective Pussy Riot staged an anti-Kremlin performance at Moscow's largest cathedral in March 2012. The three activists were later jailed on hooliganism charges.

Under the law, "public activities expressing clear disrespect to society and carried out with the aim of insulting the religious feelings of believers" are punishable by fines of up to $4,215, up to 200 hours of community service, or up to three years in prison.

Sanatsia Prava says the legislation contradicts the principle of a secular state and violates the rights of Russian citizens to free speech and freedom of conscience.

So far, it has targeted mostly art and media, with a number of Internet pages blocked under the law.

In one of the most high-profile cases to date, a Russian Orthodox cleric filed a lawsuit against Boris Mezdrich, the head of the Novosibirsk State Opera, on the grounds that its production of Richard Wagner's 19th-century opera Tannhauser contained scenes allegedly offensive to Christians. Thousands of conservative activists protested against the production outside the opera house.

Although a court closed the case, the Culture Ministry fired Mezdrich for ignoring "the values prevalent in society" and showing "contempt for the opinion of citizens."

Sanatsia Prava says the law "is being actively used to introduce censorship on the Internet and in mass media, and also serves as lever to pressure the artistic community."

Countersanctions On Food Products

Sanatsia Prava calls for the full removal of the embargo slapped by Russia on a range of Western food imports in August 2014 and the trade sanctions introduced against Turkey last month.

"The food embargo has an uneven and generally limited negative effect on the economy of the countries against which it is introduced," the group says on its website. "On the other hand, it causes more significant harm to Russia's economy and citizens."

Sanatsia Prava points out that prices for food products rose by almost 17 percent in 2014 in Russia, with a 40 percent increase on the price of sugar and a 20 percent increase on prices for meat, poultry, fish, fruit, and vegetables.

It says the sanctions constitute a breach of Russia's obligations to the World Trade Organization, which it joined as a full member in 2012.

Extrajudicial Blocking Of Websites

This December 2013 law allows the authorities to block websites deemed to feature content inciting mass riots or extremism without a court ruling. The law puts Roskomnadzor, Russia's state agency for media oversight, in charge of maintaining a blacklist of banned sites and making sure that Russian Internet providers block access accordingly.

Russia has since blocked three major opposition news websites -- EJ.ru, Kasparov.ru, and Grani.ru -- that all sharply criticized the Kremlin's policies, including the occupation of Crimea by Russian troops that led to the Ukrainian peninsula's annexation in 2014.

The popular LiveJournal blog of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was also targeted.

Sanatsia Prava says the law violates freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and "is actively used to combat manifestations of dissent under the pretense of fighting extremism."

Gay 'Propaganda' Law

This contentious law, passed by the State Duma in June 2013, criminalized the "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations" to minors.

Lawmaker Yelena Mizulina, the law's co-author, has said its aim is to protect Russian children from information that contradicts "traditional family values."

Although the authorities have fined only a handful of people under the law so far, rights advocates say the legislation has encouraged antigay discrimination and has coincided with a spike in violence against sexual minorities.

Sanatsia Prava calls the law discriminatory and says it further marginalizes Russia's already embattled lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community.

Criminalization Of Repeated Protests

Drafted during the pro-democracy Maidan protests in the Ukrainian capital, this law was signed by Putin in July 2012. It prohibits "holding meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets" multiple times during a six-month period.

Penalties range from hefty fines to a maximum of five years of prison or forced labor.

The first person to be sentenced under the law was Ildar Dadin, who was ordered to spend three years in jail by a Moscow court earlier this month.

Three more people have been barred from leaving the country for breaching the new rules, including Vladimir Ionov, a 76-year-old pensioner who was detained in January for holding up a sign saying "Je suis Charlie" close to the Kremlin.

Ionov fled to Ukraine earlier this month and plans to seek political asylum there.

Sanatsia Prava says the law not only violates the rights of Russian citizens to free speech but "effectively criminalizes this right."

Defamation Law

This law criminalizing certain types of libel was adopted in July 2012, rolling back former President Dmitry Medvedev's earlier reform making defamation an administrative offense.

The legislation provides harsh financial penalties of up to $70,240 for public statements deemed libelous and includes a special article on libel against judges, jurors, prosecutors, or law enforcement officials.

Media outlets republishing such remarks also face punishment.

The legislation has been criticized as move to silence Kremlin critics and deter whistle-blowers.

Electoral Law

This 2014 law, which changes the way the Russian parliament is elected, has been criticized for unfairly bolstering the ruling United Russia party. The party's reputation was damaged by fraud allegations during the 2011 election.

Under the new law, half of the 450 seats in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, are now filled by voters choosing individual candidates in districts rather than through the party-list system, seen as less advantageous for United Russia.

Sanatsia Prava says the new system limits access of independent or candidates or candidates from small parties to the State Duma and allows authorities to "eliminate undesirable candidates."

According to the group, the new law was actively used during the February national elections and led to the sidelining of opposition candidates in a many regions.


 
#10
The National Review
December 22, 2015
Who Is Murdering Russian Journalists?
When it comes to Russian politics, Donald Trump is a useful idiot.
By David Satter
David Satter's latest book, The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin, will be published this spring by Yale University Press.

There is powerful evidence that Vladimir Putin is guilty of the murder of journalists, but it is impossible to "prove" his guilt because there is no police force in Russia that will investigate him and no court where he can be held to account.

Under these circumstances, Donald Trump's statement (to critics who took exception to the mutual praise between the two men) that there is no proof that Putin is guilty of murder is an absurdity. Proof presumes the existence of a state based on law.

Journalists and human-rights advocates in Russia have long been blocked in their attempts to investigate the murders of their colleagues. The authorities make no serious attempt to bring the persons who ordered the killings to justice, although they may arrest the triggermen. More ominously, when underlings are charged, they turn out to have a maze of connections to the security services themselves.

Nonetheless, persons interested in the truth can form a realistic impression of Putin's guilt on the basis of three well-known murders, those of Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, and Alexander Litvinenko. In each case, the pattern is the same: a serious political opponent, clear evidence of official involvement, and extraordinary efforts to sabotage the investigation. If one adds to this, Putin's statement in his inaugural speech in 2000 that "in Russia, the President answers for everything," the reality of the situation becomes completely clear.

Shchekochikhin was a member of the State Duma and a reporter for the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. He investigated the mysterious 1999 Russian apartment bombings that brought Putin to power and, in his capacity as a journalist, he also investigated the case of the Grand and Three Whales furniture stores, which were founded by the father of a high-ranking FSB (Federal Security Service) official and had reportedly evaded millions of dollars in import duties. He had been in perfect health but became sick after returning to Moscow from a trip to Ryazan in July 2003. The illness progressed catastrophically, from peeling skin to "edemas of the respiratory system and brain" and finally death. His relatives were denied an official medical report about the cause of his illness and forbidden to take tissue samples. At his funeral, no one was allowed to approach the body.

Perhaps the best-known killing of a political opponent was that of Alexander Litvinenko, a fugitive FSB agent who wrote about the 1999 apartment bombings and the FSB's links to organized crime. Litvinenko became ill on November 1 after drinking tea with Andrei Lugovoy, the owner of a Moscow security company, and Lugovoy's associate, Dmitri Kovtun, in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London. For the next two days, he began to suffer from vomiting and diarrhea. His hair began falling out and he experienced a sharp drop in his white-blood-cell count. Litvinenko's doctors suspected radiation poisoning, but only gamma and beta particles can penetrate the skin and there was no gamma or beta radiation in his blood. On November 23, he was pronounced dead.

Before he died, Litvinenko wrote a statement in which he accused Putin of his murder. "You may succeed in silencing one man," he wrote, "but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life."

After Litvinenko's death, British experts discovered polonium-210, an alpha emitter, in his urine. Polonium cannot pass through the body but is deadly when taken internally. Traces of polonium were subsequently found by the British police at the Pine Bar, at a sushi restaurant where Litvinenko dined with Lugovoy and Kovtun on October 16, and on the seat occupied by Lugovoy on a British Airways flight from Moscow to London on October 25.

At a news conference after Litvinenko's death but before the polonium was discovered, Putin said there was no indication that Litvinenko had died a violent death and that the case was being used for political purposes. Six months after Litvinenko's death, the British prosecutor officially requested Lugovoy's extradition. Putin refused, saying the Russian constitution barred sending citizens abroad for trial, even though Russia had signed the Council of Europe Extradition Convention in 2001. In December 2007, Lugovoy was elected to the Russian parliament. He insisted he was being framed by Britain's MI5. In an interview with the Russian press about requests that he go to London for questioning, he said, "Why should I drop everything and rush off to England?"

Another well-known dissident who was murdered was Anna Politkovskya, who reported for Novaya Gazeta on Russian atrocities in Chechnya. On October 7, 2006, she was shot four times in her apartment building after stepping out of the elevator on her floor.

After her death, Putin said that Politkovskaya's influence was "minimal." He also said that her murder "caused much more damage to the authorities than her reporting" - raising the possibility that, in his mind, if it had caused less damage, killing her would have been acceptable.

In November 2008, three persons were put on trial for Politkovskaya's murder: two Chechen brothers, Ibrahim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov, and Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former member of the Russian internal ministry's organized-crime unit. A fourth person, Pavel Ryaguzov, a former FSB lieutenant colonel, was suspected of taking a leading role in the plot but was not charged due to a lack of evidence. A third brother, Rustam Makhmudov, the suspected triggerman, escaped abroad. Putin hinted that the mastermind was the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a political enemy of Putin's.

The trial ended on February 19, 2009, with the acquittal of all three defendants amid signs that the FSB had sabotaged the prosecution. The FSB leaked information about the identity of the suspects, making it possible for the triggerman to escape, and prevented investigators from seizing Ryaguzov's office computer. The ties between the assassination team, the FSB, and the police were also found to be far more extensive than was first revealed. Sergei Sokolov, the deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, which conducted its own investigation, testified that Dzabrail Makhmudov was an FSB agent and that he and his brothers were recruited by their uncle, Lomi-Ali Gaitukayev, also an FSB agent, who reported to Ryaguzov and was in prison for the attempted murder of a Ukrainian businessman.

In June 2009, the acquittals were overturned by the Russian Supreme Court, which cited procedural errors. In the meantime, Novaya Gazeta found evidence that Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, a high-ranking Moscow police officer and witness at the first trial, had been hired by Gaitukayev to place Politkovskaya under surveillance. He gave the assassins her address and the weapons and bullets they used to kill her.

In August 2011, Pavluchenkov was arrested and charged with Politkovskaya's murder. He struck a deal with the prosecution: In exchange for naming the mastermind of the crime, the charge against him was reduced from organizing the murder to involvement in it. But he never testified about the supposed mastermind. Instead, Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the Investigative Committee, said that "Pavlyuchenkov . . . testified that he was told by Gaitukayev that the masterminds were Berezovsky and [Akhmed] Zakaev" (Zakaev is the head of the Chechen government in exile).

In fact, Pavluchenkov's deal with the prosecution made it possible to cover the trail leading to the mastermind. There is no evidence to support the official story that Berezovsky was behind the crime. On June 20, 2014, five persons were convicted. Gaitukayev, who recruited the gang, and his nephew Rustam Makhmudov, the gunman, received life in prison. Ibragim and Dzabarail Makhmudov were sentenced to 12 and 14 years respectively for following Politkovskaya on the day she was killed. Khadzhikurbanov received 20 years as an accomplice. None of them is likely to have known who ordered the killing.

The cases of Shchekochikhin, Litvinenko, and Politkovskaya are among the best-known of the political murders in Russia under Putin, but there are many others where the pattern of likely regime or FSB involvement and a subsequent sabotage of the investigation is clearly evident, including the cases of the American journalist Paul Klebnikov, human-rights activist Natalya Estimirov, Duma deputy Sergei Yushenkov, and others. Seen as a whole, these cases make clear that what is involved is deliberate terror against the opposition that, in the unitary Russian system, could only be directed by Putin.

Unfortunately, American presidential candidates are often not interested in understanding the details of what is happening in Russia, and a particularly reckless candidate can become what Lenin described as a "useful idiot." This is a person whose superficiality makes him ideally suited to serve Russian purposes and whose self-confidence is constantly stoked with signs of esteem from the Russian leaders, who assure him that whatever others may think of him, they are and will remain his true friends.

 
 
 #11
Free Russia
www.4freerussia.org
December 22, 2015
INFANTILISM AS RUSSIA'S OFFICIAL IDEOLOGY
By Arkadiy Babchenko
Journalist, Author of Journalism Without Middlemen project

"Putinism is perhaps the first regime in history where the official ideology is deviant behaviour," writes Russian independent journalist Arkady Babchenko, publisher of the Iskusstvo Voiny ("Art of War") magazine.

If you asked me to characterise the "Russian World" (Russky mir) in one word, I would not hesitate to call it infantilism. This term best describes the current state of Russian society.

Infantilism is, first and foremost, the inability to take responsibility for one's own actions; the inability to draw causal links and to understand that such-and-such actions lead to such-and-such consequences.

It is an infantile directness in perceiving the world. The world of an infant is utterly simple:

"The Americans let the price of oil fall. The Americans organised a revolution in Ukraine. America hates Russians. Because of this, they sent us Jews and liberals. And the Jewish Rotenberg brothers stole all the money. But Putin is good."

There is no place for any semitones or complicated intellectual constructions in this world. Its main characteristics is primitiveness.

Its cruelty is equally infantile. Usually, adults do not reach to such levels of hatred, aggression, and willingness to inflict damage, hurt, or do wrong without cause.

In the adult world, - with its families, children, and responsibilities, - such behaviour is not customary. There is a system of checks and balances. Such deeds are excesses. Only infants can fall into such a state of cruelty and change their target of hatred so suddenly.

The absolute lack of understanding of the value of life is just as infantile.

It is not acceptable for adults to inflate a frog with a straw, to decapitate a puppy, to pound residential neighbourhoods with weapons of indiscriminate destruction, or to shoot down passenger jets with surface-to-air missiles while thinking:

"What difference does it make whether it was a passenger jet or not? The birdie is down, hooray! We did warn them not to fly in our skies!"

The failure to grasp the value of life, including one's own, is perhaps the main characteristics of an infantile person. In addition to the lack of any logical thinking.

That is a world where causal links are broken, where actions and consequences are not related in any manner, and where throwing eggs from the window and a cuff on the ear are two totally unrelated developments - just like the occupation of a part of a neighbouring country, sanctions, and the collapse of oil prices.

That was all just because "the Yankees hate everything that is Russian," and not a due penalty for one's idiotism.

Yes, if you are a hereditary alcoholic whose neural synapses have all been damaged by generations of ethanol consumption, it is obvious: You are beset by an absolutely crystallised, varnished, and generational primaeval stupidity. An adult personality simply has nowhere to grow on. This is all quite clear.

The thing is that in Russia, this infantilism has permeated the whole society, from top down, regardless of social rank, income, or caste. This is what is so astonishing about it.

Here are just some manifestations of Russian infantilism:

Throwing a cloth over a lamp in the maternity clinic and burning newly-born babies in the fire. Abandoning one's own burnt child.

Refusing the adoption of an disabled baby to a German family just because he could theoretically end up with a gay couple.

Publishing videos about a crucified boy and believing in them. Showing support for robbing the weak.

Talking about "Eurofascism," "Bandero-Fascism," "Turko-Fascism," and "Liberal Fascism."

Killing "Banderites" because they persecute the Russian language and doing television shows about it.

Distributing election leaflets at one's own hospital. Trampling food products and then picking up the quashed food.

Expelling Turkish students from the university. Sacking a professor for an article he wrote.

Recognising the priority of national legislation over international law and then taking Turkey to court.

Signing sycophantic odes to the authorities.

An adult person has something called "dignity." It is an absolutely immaterial concept which does not generate any profit. A child is capable of doing demeaning things just to get some candy. The child's personality - the basis for his/her dignity - is still lacking.

An adult, on the other hand, is an individual - a person whose consciousness has already formed a personality - and will not make an idiot of him/herself for personal gain. A strong personality ascribes higher value to this abstract notion than to material wealth.

An adult person will not trample tomatoes with a tractor and will not bulldoze geese confiscated from a village store. Because it is shameful to do so. That is yet another abstract notion that does not exist in an infantile world.

One can see why it is impossible to explain to a three-year-old child why one cannot shoot the sun with a slingshot or to explain to the rabble why it is bad to ride a tractor over tomatoes.

Yet the fact that it is equally impossible to explain to a professor, a writer, a doctor, or an engineer why one cannot take something that belongs to someone else is simply mind-boggling.

Let us say that there is an adult man standing before you. Let us say that he is an intelligent one. Yet some part of his brain has been utterly consumed by an infantilism driven to the extreme by television. The moral imperatives accepted in any normal adult society simply fail to penetrate his consciousness.

It is impossible to carry on a conversation with such a person. Impossible to discuss things. He is like a capricious child who has fallen into a state of hysteria:

"Why did you take Crimea away from Pete? It is wrong to take something that is not yours. Give it back. You have to follow the rules."

"No! I won't! It's mine. My Crimea! I want it! Not gonna give it away! It's my toy!"

That is all there is to it.

To go to war in eastern Ukraine to pay off debts is not the behaviour of an adult. To disown one's fallen husband in exchange for money is not the behaviour of an adult.

To serve in the special forces of military intelligence, to enter the enemy rear as part of a group of saboteurs, and when caught, to bleat that I am not me, the horse is not mine, I did not know, I was set up, - is not the behaviour of an adult.

To yell, "Putin, send in the troops!", and then be surprised at Ukraine's use of artillery, is not the behaviour of an adult.

My god, what can one say when the Commander-in-Chief renounces his own troops, claims that "they are not there," sends in his army to fight and die without insignia, and dispatches his aircraft without colours.

This is infantilism elevated to the level of state policy. I think there has never been anything like it in history.

The main distinctive feature of an adult person is the ability to bear responsibility. Responsibility for others, responsibility for one's country, and - most importantly - responsibility for one's own actions.

Even the Soviet Union taught us to do so. Even the Soviets, while suppressing any demonstration of individual personality, still taught us to be honest, not to lie, and take responsibility for our own deeds.

The quintessential manifestation of this is, of course, the war in eastern Ukraine. I suppose only the war in Congo, where 11-year-old children chopped off the limbs of local residents with machetes, may compete with this war.

"We took part in a referendum and voted in the hope that Putin would take us in like he did Crimea. We voted mostly for Putin."

This is a quote from Radio Svoboda's interview with refugees from eastern Ukraine who were now being evicted from a hotel in the Russian city of Pskov.

I kept staring at this phrase for several days and could not find an angle to make a comment. Because the phrase, "we hoped that Putin would take us in," from the point of view of an adult person, is devoid of any common sense at all.

It is an absolutely incoherent jumble of words that have no meaning whatsoever. What does it mean to "take in"? Do you mean that you would like to live in Russia? Then do buy a ticket and off you go! What is the problem?

Or maybe you wanted that the military forces of a neighbouring country occupied part of your country, overthrew the constitutional order and state authority, organised armed groups of bandits, and began to destroy cities with weapons of indiscriminate destruction, killing tens of thousands of people?

If so, then it is called something completely different. It is quite far from "we just wanted for Putin to take us in."

It is collaboration, treachery, and high treason. It is participation in a terrorist organisation. It is crimes against life, against humanity, against public safety and civil order, and against the constitutional order and national security. It is terrorism.

It is planning, orchestrating, initiating, and waging a war of aggression. It is 20 years in jail, in a best-case scenario; in the worst, being liquidated with deadly force.

You are common criminals. Do you even realise this?

What you are now experiencing is happening for the very reason that you "simply took part in a referendum." It was far from "simple." Do you understand?

No. Not in the least. All I can see in your eyes is absolute incomprehension.

I have seen the phrase, "take us in," many times before. What does it mean to "take us in"? To one's arms, is that it? Children. An absolutely immature consciousness.

I can see the very same bewilderment when I watch YouTube videos of the interrogations of combatants of the "Donetsk People's Republic."

"Why did you come here?"

"I fell under the influence of propaganda."

What influence of propaganda?! Are you living in the Germany of 1933? With just one newspaper, V�lkischer Beobachter, and no other sources of information?

Well, we have the internet. We have Radio Echo of Moscow, RBC, Novaya Gazeta, The New Times, Dozhd TV. We have Pavel Kanygin, Timur Olevsky, Andrei Piontkovsky.

We have Alexei Navalny, for Pete's sake. You do know who Navalny is? Do you know what he is talking about? Then what the hell, you idiot?!

This is what: There was no "influence of propaganda." These people were the first to cry out on internet forums: "Thank God someone whacked that liberal journalist bastard!"

They have all the sources of information they need. They all know it. It is just that when they receive some piece of information, they are unable to utilise or analyse it.

They lack the ability to think logically or to draw causal links. They have a primitive view of the world: "Aunt Valya told me on television that the Banderites are bad."

So now you can mount divisions of undeveloped personalities and send them to slaughter people in a neighbouring country.

In fact, this "aunt Valya on television" is at the root of it all. It did not begin with propaganda. Propaganda fell on a stage that was already set.

No [television propagandist] Dmitry Kiselyov with his talk of "turning America into radioactive ash" or of "incinerating the hearts of gay people" would be possible if idiotic talk shows and television series had not prepared the ground over a period of ten years.

Do you remember the now forgotten idea of "dumbing down the population"? When 99% of all television content, including the advertising, sold just one single bestial pattern of behaviour: Moral idiocy.

When all programmes on television reduced the variety of human emotions to just two primitive reflexes: Clamour and hysteria. In other words, the very same infantilism; the very same capricious child who has fallen into an uncontrollable state.

All I can say is that we can confirm that the experiment of dumbing down a whole nation has been brought to a successful completion.

For the umpteenth time, the most dreadful weapon that Russia has are not its ballistic missiles, submarines, or nuclear arsenal. Russia's most dreadful weapon is the "idiot box."

I had better say nothing about online comments. If you care to read them, you realise that you can only reply to them if you begin from the very basics, from the formation of planet Earth four and a half billion years ago. Otherwise, it is impossible.

I have to admit that this round-the-clock existence in the online remedial class for people with arrested development 24 hours per day and 7 days per week has turned out to be damn difficult.

You begin to value the possibility of meeting a person who still has his brains intact very high indeed. They represent a new species in a ghetto of absolute absurdity.

An entire country of aggressive, brutal, developmentally challenged minors. A country where white trash is the hegemonic class. Make no mistake: Putin the street urchin has made it!

However, such constructions cannot last for long. They are incapable of self-organisation without external control.

How will all this end? It is quite clear how: With flunking the class and going through the course material yet again.

Life is the best teacher. It knows how to explain things. You learn the hard way. Life knows how to teach and educate each and every one of us. It puts our brains back in place.

It will pull your ears, stand you in the corner, and whip you with a belt. But it will teach you how to behave in a society of adults, and it will teach you the bounds of what is acceptable without fail.

No matter how much you cry out that "I don't want to." No matter if you are completely incapable of learning. You will grow up - no matter what. But it will be very painful.

* The text was published with the permission of the author as part of the project, "Journalism Without Middlemen." The original article in Russian was first posted here.


 
#12
Institute for Modern Russia
http://imrussia.org
December 17, 2015
Who is to blame for what happened to the Russian Constitution, and What do we do about it now?
By Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, founder of the Open Russia movement, discusses why the Russian Constitution is "no more than a piece of paper-a sham symbol of federalism, freedom and democracy."
 
December 12, Russia's Constitution Day, was marked by the detention of one of the Constitution's authors for organizing a peaceful protest, prompting many commentators to decry the fact that the regime is virtually ignoring the country's Basic Law, and it's absolutely true.

In 2015, twenty-two years after the adoption of its Constitution, Russia is once again mired in a profound constitutional crisis-one precipitated no less by the regime's own conscious attempts to distort the Constitution's principles and objectives, than by weaknesses inherent in the Constitution itself.

Today, Russia's Constitution is no more than a piece of paper-a sham symbol of federalism, freedom, and democracy. In practice, Putin and his associates treat it however they see fit-and if the regime had at least notionally complied with convention in previous years (as it did, for example, when extending presidential terms), convention now doesn't concern it in the slightest.

The destruction of the Constitution was actually already underway fifteen years ago, having begun when the makeup of the Federation Council was changed, and governors and regional speakers lost their seats. Putin gradually subjugated the regions and, taking advantage of the Beslan school hostage crisis to further consolidate power, abolished gubernatorial elections in 2004. It became increasingly apparent that his goal was to comprehensively dismantle the country's federal structures and assume personal vertical control. The Constitutional Court's 1996 ruling that there were only two ways of securing a governorship-direct election or appointment by the federal subject's legislature-was pointedly ignored.

Further nails were hammered into the Constitution's coffin during Dmitry Medvedev's presidency. The presidential term of office was extended from four to six years, and the Duma's legislative period from four to five, under the laughable pretext that presidential elections and those to the lower house of parliament ought to be held at maximally large intervals from one another. What was stopping the regime from solving this problem by technical means, without tampering with the Constitution? Nothing other than Putin's desire to lord contentedly over the country for twelve years straight without being distracted by such trifles as election campaigns.

After this, Putin stopped bothering with the Constitution, the way one might cease to bother with an elderly relative who's finally lost her marbles. He introduced significant restrictions on freedom of assembly and the media, while also rolling back privacy provisions-all under the pretext that such measures would contribute to the fight against external (or, more rarely, internal) enemies.

Now, judging by the events of early December 2015, we can assert that the Constitution as Russia's Basic Law has ceased to exist altogether. At the Kremlin's behest, the State Duma passed a law allowing the Constitutional Court to decide whether or not Russia must comply with international court rulings, thereby reversing the priority of international law over domestic legislation. This represents an outright overthrow of the Constitution-particularly its first chapter, which cannot be revised other than by the Constitutional Assembly. The assembly can either retain the current version of the text or draft a new version and put it to a general referendum.

What we have here is a comprehensive rejection of the Constitution as the legal foundation of the country. Its overthrow has already taken place, though this fact has not yet been formally announced by a single Kremlin press secretary.

In such a situation, should we be defending the existing Constitution, a course of action many are calling for?

The answer, in my opinion, is no.

This Basic Law, inconvenient for the regime in many respects, can and should be used to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the Kremlin, which is exhorting society to obey repressive laws passed by illegitimate authorities. But to attempt to revive a corpse in such a situation would be futile.

Having lived a long (though not particularly happy) life together, the current political regime and the 1993 Constitution must also leave the stage together.

To see why, one must understand the fundamental causes of the current crisis: the lack of safeguards in the Constitution against its own violation; the irremovability of the regime; and the degradation of constitutional justice in Russia. The last fifteen years have clearly demonstrated that the Basic Law is incapable of withstanding the blows of the ruling elite, which is prepared to take any measure to perpetuate its dictatorship.

In order to ensure the irreversibility of the democratic and constitutional processes, the executive branch must be subjected to political and legal constraints. Mechanisms must also be devised to protect the Constitution-mechanisms, that is, that would protect it from the state. We won't, I assume, be able to proceed without firmly securing the nation's right to rise up against usurpers by means of the requisite legal instruments, although this in itself will clearly not be enough. After the mechanisms of implementing and defending the Constitution have been elaborated, Russia's constitutionalists will face fresh challenges, such as how to constitutionally support a strong government; how to construct genuine federalism; and how to organize local government.

Most importantly, we must ensure the country's transition to a parliamentary democracy wherein the totality of executive power in Russia is exercised by the federal government, formed in accordance with election results. Under such a system, the president does not wield the power of any of the branches of government, and primarily performs the functions of supreme political arbiter and guarantor of citizens' rights.

For almost a century, Russia has proclaimed itself a federation, and it possesses the superficial secondary hallmarks of a federal system: a bicameral parliament and regional legislatures. But Russia is not a federation in the true sense of the word, because the real bedrock of federalism-decentralization-is nowhere to be seen.

It is clear that the decentralization of economic and political life is an absolute prerequisite for Russia, and that, in the absence of decentralization, a country like Russia can only develop along imperial lines. The federalization of Russia-the genuine rather than notional variety, involving the creation of a dozen or more new centers of economic and political life-must therefore become a constitutional priority. The country requires more than Moscow alone.

Finally, the development of local government represents a major strategic goal for Russia. We must, as far as possible, endow the public itself-or, more precisely, the organs of authority created and directly controlled by the public-with the power to coordinate its own existence.

This is the sole means of ensuring the country's unity in a variety of local forms of political and cultural life, and of making certain that its society's resources are used to cater to people's actual needs.

If this undertaking is to be a success, powerful political and legal stimulants must be put in place: first of all, budgetary independence should be constitutionally guaranteed to local governmental authorities.

If the acutely pressing task of restoring constitutional order can and must be fulfilled by means of previously prepared urgent constitutional amendments, any long-term objectives can be achieved only within the framework of a project to devise a new Constitution.

To lay the groundwork for this project, we must convene the Constitutional Assembly. (The current Constitution makes provisions for this, but it is as yet impossible-over the course of the last twenty-two years, neither the previous nor the present regime has taken the trouble to pass the relevant constitutional law.) The Constitutional Assembly must then put together and approve the text of the new Constitution, as well as put forward a mechanism for its adoption.

This will be a long and difficult road. But the most important thing is to get moving. It's been a year now since Open Russia began its discussion of the Russian Constitution. We must now go several steps further: working towards two distinct objectives, with the help of a community of experts, we must first prepare a set of urgent amendments to the text of the existing Constitution, and, second, lay the foundation of a long-term project to devise the future Constitution of a free and democratic Russia.

When Russia finally witnesses a change of regime, we must be well prepared.

This op-ed was first published at khodorkovsky.com.
 
 #13
Forbes.com
December 22, 2015
A Donald Trump Moment Is Developing In Vladimir Putin's Russia
By Paul Roderick Gregory

Last weekend, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin expressed mutual admiration for each other. But their similarities go deeper. Donald Trump's lead in the race for the Republican nomination reflects the widespread disenchantment of America's blue collar families with "politics as usual." Trump's followers believe that the professional political class has given us crony capitalism, a captive media, unsustainable debt, foreign Main Street; we should remove them and get America moving again. Russia could be on its way to a Donald Trump moment.

At first glance, Vladimir Putin's Kremlin Inc. seems immune from the Trump "throw the bums out" movement. For the fifteen years of his tenure, Putin has had the support and loyalty of the 85% of Russians who get their news from state TV. They are working-class Russians and "biudzhetniki"-government workers or state pensioners-who are paid from federal or regional state budgets. The 85% are not particularly interested in politics; they dislike cerebral regime opponents who, they think, only want to stir up trouble.

Russia's 85% seem firmly under thumb of the state. The Kremlin controls TV, from which they get their news. The Kremlin's electoral commission decides what parties and which candidates can run for office. The Kremlin's internal security apparatus costs more than national defense. Regime opponents are silenced by jail terms or house arrest. Investigative journalists are murdered. The Kremlin's liberal opposition is like a gnat, which Kremlin leaders must swat when it gets irritating.

Russia's Trump danger to the Kremlin elite comes not from liberals, but from Russia's 85%. They expect Putin to deliver rising living standards, jobs, and economic stability. In return, they'll not take notice of corruption, mismanagement of state enterprises, favoritism, patronage, or nepotism. They will put up with the convoys of Mercedes, BMWs, and Audis that disrupt traffic or the special license plates for restricted-zone parking as long as they can have their beach vacation in Egypt or Turkey, and their paychecks keep up with inflation. If the Kremlin delivers, they'll keep their mouths shut and vote for Putin's United Russia Party in 2016 and Putin himself in 2018.

The Putin-85% compact has unraveled The Russian economy has shrunk for six quarters with no real recovery in sight. Real wages and living standards are falling at annual rates of ten percent, and inflation is in the high teens. Stagnation will worsen if the price of oil falls further. In a word, Putin is not delivering on his promises at a time when trust in Russian TV news has fallen from four in five to two in five. With a loss of public trust in its news broadcasts, the Kremlin will no longer be able to sway public opinion as it has in the past, an example being the tepid support for Putin's Syria operation.

Seven signs of the developing Trump moment in Russia

There are seven signs that the Trump moment is developing in Russia. First, the 85% now rate economic higher than political concerns. On the list of Russians' top 10 concerns, 78% list inflation, 42% poverty, 36% unemployment, and only 22% mention the strife in Ukraine. Putin's so-called push to make Russia great again, it appears, has become less important than bread and butter.

Second, Russia's long haul drivers are in the midst of a nationwide protest that began in early November against a new federal highway tax that will depress their incomes while benefitting one of Putin's favorite oligarch families. The Kremlin had to use force to halt the protest action outside Moscow's ring road, but demonstrations continue throughout Russia, and new protest actions are expected when the tax goes into effect. Ominously, the people of Moscow overwhelmingly support the truckers. That 3 million truck drivers can act as an organized interest group that can gain the support of an organized political party (the Communists) is a step towards a politically-diverse society.

Third, the fiery speeches of three Russian businessmen at the Moscow Economic Forum lambasting the red tape, corruption and indifference of Russia's economic elite went viral on the Russian internet.Their public rebellion exposed the deep dissatisfaction of the disappearing middle class with Putin's kleptocracy. Surprised at the uproar, one of the businessmen declared that "I did what everyone dreams of doing themselves."

Fifth, a poll of the residents of the city of Barnaul (population 650,000) showed that of the nine candidates put forward for post of mayor, 90% of the votes were cast for a Siamese cat. Although the poll was informal, such a result shows that citizens have basically given up on a rigged and absurd political process.

Sixth, anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny put together an expose of the family of Russia's prosecutor general, Yury Chaika, which was shown on RainTV. The documentary went viral, prompting an investigation and threat of suits by the prosecutor's family. Based on legal documents, the documentary shows the family's huge business empire amassed thanks to Chaika's influence, rigged auctions, and the family's dealings with one of Russia's most notorious criminal gangs.  The documentary prompted one of Russia's most respected newspapers, Vedomosti, to declare that the charges must be investigated insofar as they suggest that corruption runs deep in the Russian state.

Seventh, Putin, in his annual press conference (December 17), faced tough questions from the press concerning the state of the economy and the charges of corruption against his inner circle. Putin was forced to admit that his earlier expressions of optimism about the economy proved false, and the Russian people were in for more belt tightening Putin was reduced to delivering mind-numbing statistics and the mumbo-jumbo that  "Statistics show that the Russian economy has generally overcome the crisis, or at least the peak of the crisis, not the crisis itself." Putin had to defend members of his inner circle against charges of favoritism and corruption. In the course of his defense, he falsely stated that 100% of the proceeds of the road tax go to highway construction and none to his childhood friends collecting the tax. He dismissed the charges against the Chaika family by stating that the Chaika sons "hold no official position," as if the father's position as chief prosecutor has no influence on business decisions.

The security arrangements of Putin's kleptocracy are designed to liquidate political opposition, such as liberal opponents or investigative journalists. The Kremlin's vast security apparatus cannot tame a Trump-like apolitical movement of the 85% fed up with the crooked, inefficient, and indifferent political elite. The Kremlin applied administrative force to neutralize the truckers' strike. They will not forget. There are three million of them, and they and their colleagues can come back to haunt the Kremlin.
 
 #14
HBO
December 8, 2015
What to do About Russia
Experts discuss U.S. foreign policy options toward Russia
[Video here http://www.cfr.org/russia-and-central-asia/hbo-do-russia/p37303]

Speakers:

Heidi Crebo-Rediker
Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations

Ivo H. Daalder
President, Chicago Council on Global Affairs; Former U.S. Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

Kimberly Marten
Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University

Presider:
Richard N. Haass
President, Council on Foreign Relations

Description

Experts discuss U.S. foreign policy options toward Russia.

The Home Box Office What to Do About... series highlights a specific issue and features experts who will put forward competing analyses and policy prescriptions in a mock high-level U.S. government meeting.

Transcript

HAASS: Well, good evening. I'm Richard Haass. And I'd like to welcome all of you to the Council on Foreign Relations.

And tonight is the latest in our What to Do About Series. The subject is What to Do About Russia. And this is a series that is focused on essentially a foreign policy challenge. And we look at it in some ways akin to how the National Security Council would look at it, where we begin with analysis and we end up with prescription. We'll do some of the work up here and then we will open it up to you all. This is all made possible by HBO, for which we are eternally grateful.

We've got you all in the room, our members here. We've also got members around the country and the world, thanks to the wonders of modern technology. It's about 6:00 here in the east now. We will finish up at 7:15. Let me just very quickly introduce the three people how are going to help us navigate this really important, and timely, and complex subject. When I used to teach at the Kennedy School, I used to sometimes remind my students that foreign policy can be hard. This is a case study in foreign policy being hard, but also important.

To my immediate left here is Heidi Crebo-Rediker. Heidi has all sorts of hat. Most important, she's a senior fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations. She's also CEO-and I will do my best to get it right-of International Capital Strategies. And prior to this, she was the first person to hold the position of chief economist at the Department of State. And she also has a background on Capitol Hill. So she is one of these-I think a really wonderful example of what we have in America, the in-and-outer. And I think it's one of the things that makes the American system special, is that you can do that.

To her left is another person of-also an in-and-outer-Ivo Daalder. Ivo now heads up the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He's been in that job for about two, two and a half years. And prior to that, Ivo represented the United States at NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for more than four years. He also served on the staff of the National Security Council. He's a widely published author. And Ivo and I used to work together at the Brookings Institution when we were both young.

Third, and far from least, is Professor Kimberly Marten. Kimberly is the Ann Whitney Olin professor of political science at Barnard. And she's also a faculty member of both the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and SIPA, the School of International Public Affairs, at Colombia. And there, she directs the program on U.S.-Russian relations at the Harriman Institute. And she's written more books than most of us have read. (Laughter.)

So what we're going to do is begin with a conversation amongst the four of us. Then we'll open it up. The timing is good. Just as I was, you know, preparing for this and reading some of the latest, you know, if you look at the price of oil and you look at it denominated in ruble terms, it's basically at something of a five- or six-year low. We have lots going on in Europe and the Middle East geopolitically. So I don't think we will-we will lack for things to talk about.

Professor Marten, Kimberly, why don't we start with you for a second, just to say some things about-before we get into the particulars of the policy debate we've got to grapple with, how do you see Russia right now? How should we see this country of 140, 145 million people with a shrinking economy? What should we make of it? What should we take of it?

MARTEN: Thank you, Richard. Well, I think that we have to keep in mind that there are really two Russias. There is the Russia that feels humiliation and betrayal. It feels that the West did it wrong because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and what has happened over the last 25 years. And there's no question that President Putin plays on that feeling of that part of Russia. And that helps explain his popularity as his militarism continues.

And then, on the other hand, we have the Russia that is truly the Russia of great power status, where we have phenomenal contributions to the arts, and culture, and technology, and science, by brilliant people, and increasingly really good businesspeople. And those are people who don't want to be isolated from the West. They want to be a partner with the West. They want to have the West pay attention to them, but they-not for the same kind of militaristic reasons that the Putin faction has in mind. And they have been decreasing in their ability to express their views publicly, but we have to remember that they're there.

And so the challenge that the United States faces is that we have to be able to defend our interests, and defend our allies, and deter all kinds of militaristic actions that come from that one part of Russia, while keeping our hand welcoming to the partner Russia that is going to be there long after Putin is gone. And so working that kind of dilemma is what the United States has to do.

HAASS: So to say that that part of Russia will be there long after Mr. Putin is gone begs two questions. One is, while he is here, to what-what is the dominant of your two Russias? And second of all, just what date are you assuming Mr. Putin is gone? (Laughter.)

MARTEN: Well, I'll answer the second one first. Mr. Putin is mortal and so eventually he will be gone. He will not live eternally, even if he manages to stay in power for another full term as president, which a number of people think is the very likely outcome. So we may be stuck with him for a while. But meanwhile, his particular view of the outside world is, no question, the dominant one. He keeps it dominant by his control of the mainstream media. He doesn't control media quite the way that China does at this point. If somebody wants to look, they can find other perspectives in Russian language media. But people don't tend to look. So mainstream television, the mainstream Internet gives Putin's point of view on the world.

And he also has the ability to control things because he controls the former KGB, now the FSB. And those people can destroy anybody they want to destroy. They can destroy a career. They can destroy a life. And everybody knows that. And that means that even if there are people who are eager for there to be change in Russia, because they believe that Russia is not following Russian national interests under Putin's leadership, they recognize that there's not much that they can do about it. And there's this feeling of hopelessness. And so one of the things that we have to do as the United States is try to figure out how can we give a sense of hope to people who are looking within Russia at what's happening and saying things are going in a direction that they don't like?

HAASS: I want to hold off a bit before I get to what we should try to do or not do. So, Heidi, let me turn to you for a second, just to give the economic take. The numbers are quite stark in terms of the shrinkage of the economy. It's still a heavy-concentrated-what we used to call a cash-crop economy, the cash crop being oil and gas. Why don't you give us your take on the reality? How bad is it?

CREBO-REDIKER: So I think-I think the Russian economy is in trouble. And one of the reasons that it is in trouble, and I have a long-term pessimistic view, is that you have-you had the grinding down of growth before you had dropping commodity prices and the sanctions layered in. So you already had a pretty steep decline. There's an overreliance, as Richard mentioned, on commodities. So oil and gas, about 50 percent of the budget, two-thirds of exports. Very, very highly reliant on commodities. Whereas for years, and this is really for years, it's been an ambition to try and diversify the economy. And I think there have been stages in Russia's development where we've seen some diversification, but right now we have an outlook where poverty levels are rising, particularly outside of Russia and St. Petersburg. So it's a very big country.

HAASS: Outside of Moscow, you mean.

CREBO-REDIKER: I'm sorry, outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg. So I spent a lot of time working in the Russian far-east and living there. And so my perspective is often more from outside of the big cities. And poverty rates are going up. Standard of living is going down. Incomes are going down. Inflation was coming down, but on the back of the sanctions on Turkey you're probably going to see it come up again. And so those are sort of the immediate issues. Long-term demographic issues are going to start to kick in. You have some big challenges, I think.

And where the biggest-my biggest fear is that they have an immensely talented population, and they're moving out. So in a-in a global economy where-a very competitive global economy where you need talent and you need innovators and you need expertise and you need high tech, they are all, you know, moving out right now. And so the numbers that I've seen, about 200,000 this past year, of really, you know, I think some of the elite of Russia that are coming, you know, to Silicon Valley, and Cambridge, and London, and other places.

And that's going to be-that's going to end up taking a big hit down the road. So there are a lot of things that if you layer in I'm pretty pessimistic. And if you read Richard's book on foreign policy begins at home-(chuckles)-

HAASS: The Russian translation is foreign policy begins at homesky. (Laughter.)

CREBO-REDIKER: Yeah. It's going to have an impact on foreign policy eventually.

HAASS: What is the price of oil that the Russians plug into their budget calculations, that they think they need? And more broadly, the International Energy Agency just came out with a long-term assessment, many other have concluded, that essentially low oil prices are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and then some, for lots of structural reasons, from reduced supply and far greater supply because of new technologies and the like. Where are the Russians in terms of their assumptions now?

CREBO-REDIKER: So the new-the most recent budget that just went through the Duma, I think last night, was the budget's at $50 a barrel. So they're anticipating a much-a much lower price. And the challenge, and I think even the central bank governor has been-has been vocal about the fact that they need a new growth model that reflects a new reality in oil prices.

HAASS: But in the meantime, with the poverty, with the shrinkage of the economy-I guess people are voting with their feet. But to the extent people vote other ways and we see polls, so far, at least, Mr. Putin's popularity seems fairly robust, if not stratospheric.

CREBO-REDIKER: So I also think that Russians are very resilient. I think that over time there will be-there will be some price to pay, because one of-one of the bargains was I will give you growth and a better standard of living, but there are-there are rollbacks and there are prices-there are prices to pay. I don't think that the prices to pay have really been that big of an-you know, if an issue for a lot of Russians. But I do think when you start having hits to pensions, when investment that doesn't get made starts to-starts to really show, and living standards really start to decrease, that you're going to see some reaction.

HAASS: Before we turn to Ivo on the threat that Russia poses, I'm sorry, one last question of Professor Marten then. To what extent does Mr. Putin specifically turn do you believe-and, Ivo, I'd like to hear you on this as well-to foreign policy as a valve, as something of a way to compensate for the lack of economic return and political openness. This is a way to satisfy, shall we say, national longings?

MARTEN: I think you're right. And there's no question that his populism gets expressed through this militaristic foreign policy of showing the United States that they're not going to take it anymore. And the best sign of that was his complete ignoring of the truckers' protest that has been galvanizing that community in Russia over the past several weeks. They managed to shut down the Moscow ring road for several hours one day last week. And yet, it didn't, again, get expressed in the mainstream press, even though if you read some of the other Russian language press you could learn about it. If enough of that sense of unhappiness by ordinary people in outlying areas becomes strong enough, and that FSB can't control it, that is one thing that could lead to a turnover in the top leadership.

HAASS: But before that, but to what extent do we think that-and this is probably a natural segue to Ivo then, that what he has done over the last, what, year or 18 months in Ukraine, Crimea, what he's more recently been doing in the Middle East, to what extent do we think a more assertive Russian foreign policy is motivated by a kind of let's distract attention away from the home front?

DAALDER: Well, I think clearly that is a, if the, motivating factor. I mean, I would describe Russia as a declining power, for all the reasons that we heard here. For 25 years, the bargain was internally to-the bargain was, as Heidi said, to provide for the economic growth in the society. It hasn't come. The modernization that was necessary hasn't been instituted. And as oil prices fell and sanctions have now been imposed, the economic consequences of the 25 years of mismanagement of the economy, of a reliance-an overreliance on oil and gas where, as you rightly said, the prices are not only down but they're going to stay down for quite a while-leads you to wonder where you're going to get your political power from.

And it's going to come from nationalism. It's a traditional way in which declining powers act. And there's no surprise that he's acting in this way. Whether it will work is, of course, the big issue. But clearly, Ukraine had very little to do with either Ukraine, or the West, or anything else. It had everything to do with what's happening in Moscow, and a declining power, and a need by the president of Russia to find a valve for the unhappiness of its population. And nationalism became the way to do that.

HAASS: And given that, and more broadly given the capability of Russian forces, given what we've seen in Ukraine, to what extent should we see Russia as a threat, either because of its objective capability or because of what we also see as a greater willingness to use whatever capabilities they have?

DAALDER: I think the Russian military has for the last 10 years invested quite a bit in modernizing its capabilities. So it is-it has a more capable military than it did 10 years ago.

HAASS: So it's not-it's very different than, say, what we-the kind of obituaries written about Afghanistan and the Russian military. This is a fundamentally-

DAALDER: Exactly-well, no. So it is a-it is a more capable, a more modernized military. But it's a very modest military by standards, certainly, of the United States, or even the standards of the West in general. It has certain capabilities. We are seeing that displayed in certain ways, particularly in Syria, a little less so in Ukraine, in part because it's hidden. But it is-it is a capability that will-you can deploy aircraft into Syria and bomb certain targets. Can you actually fight a war against a well-armed adversary like the United States? That is a question that is still out there. The difference is, he's willing to use force. He's demonstrated he's willing to use force. He is seemingly not deterred by anything that other people might be willing and capable of doing. And as a result, he is dominating, at least in the short-run, the battlefield.

HAASS: But is he at all deterred, or might he be deterred by the economic or human costs of using force? Is that something that could come back, if you will, to haunt him somewhat politically at all?

DAALDER: I think we've had a debate among the Russian experts to the extent to which casualties in particular-because we know that casualties were very important when it came to Afghanistan-the extent to which casualties in particular would be a deterring effect on him. One of the reasons why he was hiding the Russian presence in Ukraine, and has denied that there was-continues to deny the Russian presence in Ukraine, was by the belief that casualties is something that he can't sustain.

In Syria, he has sustained casualties. And he has done so openly. Not only when the Turks shot down the airplane, but before they had a number of casualties. And they were recognized as casualties in a way that soldiers and infantrymen who were-who died in Ukraine were not recognized. They were buried in the middle of the night without any recognition that they had suffered the casualties in this conflict. But that points at least to some extent that there is a limit to the degree to which you can use this valve of foreign expansion and foreign military adventurism as a means to distract attention from your local problems.

HAASS: I want to turn to the two principle arenas of Russian activism, one being Ukraine the other being the Middle East. And then I want to turn-and then after we discuss that for a minute, I want to talk about the tools that we've used, or might use. In terms of Ukraine, if I had to sort of encapsulate what seems to be the conventional wisdom these days, is that Russians have zero intention of changing anything with Crimea, but they slightly dialed down the temperature in eastern Ukraine. Is that a fair description, or is that missing-is that missing-is that missing things? Kimberly.

MARTEN: They've been dialing it back up in the last few weeks. And so I think it's an open question what Putin intends to do. Putin loves pulling surprises. And it was very interesting that he didn't mention Ukraine and he didn't mention Crimea in a major speech that he gave on the state of the nation last week. And there have been Russian analysts who have said, oh, it's because he's losing in Ukraine. And there have been other Russian analysts, inside Russia, who have said, no, it's because he's accomplished what he wanted to in Ukraine so he has nothing left to say.

I think the truth is, he's probably planning some sort of a surprise in Ukraine, and we just have to wait and see what it is. And the surprise could be negotiation and some form of negotiated settlement in order to get the sanctions lifted and to get Western attention back in a positive direction in Russia. Or, it could be the intention to ramp things up and to really make Ukraine suffer.

HAASS: But, putting on my national security advisor hat, that's not very helpful.

MARTEN: I know it's not. (Laughter.)

HAASS: So I want to know, what are you betting on? Are you betting that he has basically decided he doesn't want to dial up in Ukraine because right now he's got what he wants there, or he's more concerned with the Middle East? That essentially his attention has pivoted, or? I mean, at some point we got to make a bet about what he-what we're seeing and what we're likely to see. So what is your bet?

MARTEN: My bet for the last year and a half hasn't really changed, which is that he will continue to have low-level conflict in eastern Ukraine without expanding it very much. He has a very strong incentive to try to keep Ukraine weak, to try to make it seem as though the Ukrainian government has failed, to try to keep the fact of there being rebels in eastern Ukraine something that is still on people's agenda. But as Ivo said, what the evidence indicates is that he really doesn't have the strength right now to try to fight two major wars simultaneously.

And at the moment, you know, Western attention on Ukraine is sort of at a low point. He's told people in this-in this speech that he gave last week that we should expect sanctions to endure for the foreseeable future. So nobody is thinking that sanctions policy is going to change. But keeping things sort of unstable but not really dangerous is something that probably serves his interests. So if I had to place a bet, that's what I'd bet.

HAASS: Do you agree with that, Ivo?

DAALDER: Yeah. I think his number-one priority is to maintain the initiative, and in order to make sure that the domestic situation remains one where people will support him. His number-two priority is to make sure that Ukraine does not succeed as a Western state. That's why he went into Ukraine. He couldn't allow it to succeed. And he will dial up the tension on Ukraine if he believes that the reform that has taken place in Ukraine actually starts to succeed. And so I think that's what I would look for to see whether or not that is succeeding.

Number three, I think he is trying to find a way to get out of sanctions. And the Middle East move is fundamentally trying to make the case not only to maintain his presence in Syria, which is important in the long term, but making the case that the West needs him. And therefore, why don't you give up on sanctions with regard to Ukraine so that-so that we can move forward?

HAASS: I just want to push, if I can-push Heidi on the sanctions, which is: Is it too soon, or is it-do we have enough transparency to have a sense about what the impact of these sanctions have been on Russia, how significant they are?

CREBO-REDIKER: Yeah. I think, you know, there's a huge debate out there about whether or not the sanctions are actually effective or not. My-you know, my first reaction is if they were so ineffective why would Putin jump to use them in Turkey? But the reality is, we didn't use-we didn't escalate the sanctions tool very much. And there has been an impact, particularly in the ability to access markets and for companies and banks to refinance. So think, you know, what we did see is very minimal escalation in terms of the very scalpel-like, you know, Treasury and State Department-led sanctions policy that was put in place. And I think it was very thoughtful. It was done extremely reluctantly. It was done together with European partners in lockstep. And that was a diplomatic feat in and of itself. But in terms of whether they've been effective, I would say, you know, the central bank has plowed through a significant amount of reserves trying to assist Russian banks and companies to help them finance and recapitalize them on the back of a number of different things.

HAASS: But they still have a couple hundred billion dollars' worth of reserves left.

CREBO-REDIKER: Sure, but they've gone from-they've gone from about-from 400-plus-from 500-plus about two years ago to about 366 right now. So they've run through-they still have a-it's a pretty robust, you know, among to be working with. And I think the team at the central bank of Russia is actually a very talented team, but I think they are-they would be the first to say that there have been challenges because of the sanctions that are in place. I also don't think that these sanctions are going to be rolled off on the back of any grand deal on Syria, certainly not in the next six months-

HAASS: I want to come back to that in a minute, because I want to ask my question on not so much predictive but prescriptive, whether any situation whether we should be willing to do that. But I want to come to that in a minute. Kimberly, you want-you've been anxious to-

MARTEN: Yeah, just a couple of thoughts on sanctions. The sanctions that Putin has put in place have been on goods. We have not put sanctions against Russia on goods. The reason that that matters is that we know from the experience of Saddam Hussein and other dictators that it's often in the interests of authoritarian leaders to put sanctions on goods that are being imported because it allows their inner network to engage in smuggling that is against the law. And it actually gives another economic boost to their inner network.

The second thing to keep in mind about the sanctions is that they give Putin an excuse for what the economy looks like right now. The evidence indicates that the biggest impact on the Russian economy has come from the collapse of oil prices, which is completely unrelated to the sanctions. But he can point to the sanctions and say, see, look how terribly the West is treating you. It's the West's fault that the economy is in the current state that it's in. And so we have to be strong against the terrible West that is once again betraying us.

HAASS: Let's-I'm sorry.

CREBO-REDIKER: Just one last point on sanctions. As a signal, as well as, you know, how we have effective behavior, I think both of those are very important to keep in mind when you're thinking why do we actually put these sanctions in place? We responded to military with economic tools. And those tools have been effective, and they were limited. But how were they-how were they effective? It wasn't just hitting various parts of the immediate circle of friends and family of President Putin. It was financial institutions. It was also behavior, I believe, in Ukraine in terms of where the line was drawn in terms of whether or not there were going to be further military moves.

HAASS: OK, so let's just look at Ukraine for a few minutes in isolation, then I want to look at it in the larger context of what also is going on, and look it more broadly in Europe. So the questions are still what's going on in Ukraine something we can live with, at this level of boil? Should we be doing more to help Ukraine economically or militarily? What other things might we be doing in Europe in terms of NATO? I mean, essentially, to what extent ought we to stay the course with where we are at the whole Ukraine-Russia standoff, and to what extent ought we be introducing new elements to our policy now? Ivo, why don't we start with you?

DAALDER: Well, I think we have two fundamental goals, it seems to me-three. First, most importantly, Russia cannot succeed. It has-

HAASS: The definition of success being?

DAALDER: So it cannot-the status quo is success on Russia's part. It has fundamentally violated a core tenet of the European security order, which is you don't change borders by force. It hasn't been done since 1945. It was central to the bargain of 1975 on the Helsinki Final Act. It was central to the recognition at the end of the Cold War and the Paris Charter that led to the creation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. And it was central to the denuclearization of Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum signed by the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and Ukraine. In return for giving up its nuclear weapons, the United States, Britain, and Russia recognized the borders of Ukraine as it was. Those have been violated. So number one, we need to come to a situation where that violation is in one way or another reversed, preferably through a diplomatic process.

Number two, this is a fight about the soul of Ukraine. And the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian people have demonstrated that if they have a choice, they would like to reform their country and become part of the large Western club of which all their neighbors have become a part-certainly the neighbors to their West. And number three-

HAASS: Just so I understand it, are you-

DAALDER: So the economic and political success of Ukraine, it's fundamental transformation, is a key interest for the United States.

HAASS: But does that mean that either EU membership or NATO membership ought to be-

DAALDER: It doesn't-so I will leave the issue of EU or NATO membership for the Ukrainians to decide.

HAASS: To decide? Is that the decision?

DAALDER: To decide whether they want to seek it. It is then for NATO and the European Union to decide whether they will let them. I don't think it is necessarily about NATO or EU membership. It is necessarily about Ukraine deciding that it reforms its economic and political system to enable it to become like, say, Poland. I think NATO membership and EU membership facilitates that, as it did with Poland. But that's a decision not for today, but for down the road.

HAASS: What about arming Ukraine in the short run? What's your-this is something the administration has kicked around for several years.

DAALDER: I am-you know, I'm on the record, and have been for a long time, that I think the provision of defensive lethal equipment to Ukraine is important. I believe this is a country that has been attacked. It doesn't have a NATO guarantee. It's not a member of NATO. It does have an Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, right for not only individual but collective self-defense. And as a country that has been attacked, it should have the arms to defend itself. And particularly if we in the United States or NATO countries are not willing to defend Ukraine, a decision with which I don't have a problem, preventing them-imposing in de facto an arms embargo on Ukraine when they want to buy the weapons in order to defend themselves, I think is the wrong policy.

HAASS: Professor Marten, if we were to provide what we would describe as defensive arms to Ukraine, what do you think the Russian reaction would be?

MARTEN: Well, I'm on the record as opposing sending lethal military assistance to Ukraine, even though I very strongly support the institutional assistance that we're giving in reforming the Ukrainian military, especially because when I was there in May I heard from a lot of people who are involved in the fighting that the real problem that Ukraine faces is an absence of good quality command and control that's coming from the military officers at the top of the Ukrainian military. And what they all said is that it's not about the technology of command and control. It's about the psychology of the commanders. It's about the ability to communicate and to have an understanding of what's actually going on in the field.

I'm also against the sending of lethal weapons to Ukraine because Ukraine is already awash in weapons and Ukraine is also awash in militias that are not really under government control. And if at some point-we already saw this a little bit in September-but if at some point the reformists really manage to get traction in Ukraine and to move the country in a new direction, some of those militias are associated with large enterprises in Ukraine that have a very strong interest in not having the Ukrainian economy become transparent. And they have a very strong interest in using those weapons against the government in Kiev.

In terms of what Russian would do, I think, you know, in a sense, the argument that we've heard a lot is that it doesn't really matter what we do, Russia will do what it wants to do anyway. I think there is a problem with the U.S. publicly supplying weapons to Ukraine, which is that if the U.S. publicly supplies lethal assistance to the Ukrainian forces what Putin will say is, see? What I've been telling you all along was correct. This really isn't about a Ukrainian civil war. This is really about the United States trying to encroach on Russian borders. And at that point, his major problem with casualties disappears.

At this point, Ivo and others are absolutely right, that there is this very strong sense that Russian boys shouldn't be sent to die in Ukraine. And so it's being kept private. But if Putin can make a case that what's actually happening is that the U.S. is threatening Russian borders by trying to have Ukraine be a launching point for attack on Russia, his casualties problems disappear. And at that point, he can be very public and say, yes, I couldn't tell you before, but our boys have been fighting and dying all along. And it's time to mobilize ourselves against the United States, which is now trying to destroy Russia.

HAASS: Can I just do a follow up on that, because I'm glad to have this opportunity. If Putin were to be faced with such a situation, are there any constraints on his decision making? In the old days, say during the Cuban missile crisis, there's been endless studies that the Soviet leadership of the time was actually quite institutionally constrained, with the Politburo and so forth, and others. The question is now, whether the degree of personal leadership of Mr. Putin is such that he is actually under fewer institutional constraints than his predecessors were in the old Soviet system? What is your take on that?

MARTEN: I think that's absolutely true, although the more that we are delving into Soviet history, the more we get an understanding that the institutions we really always kind of a little bit of a sham. They had some impact on things, but in fact that personal network connections always explained a lot of what was happening throughout the Soviet period, starting with the Stalin era, and certainly continuing into the Khrushchev era and beyond as well. But you're right that there are fewer institutional constraints.

One thing that's very disturbing is that Putin has put a lot of his old friends from the KGB and the FSB into leadership positions, into a reconsolidated defense industrial sector in Russia, which means that they have a very strong interest in Putin producing more and more weapons. When we hear about the S-300 going to Iran, the S-400 that's going to be deployed in Syria, the Buk missile that shot down that plane-the Malaysian plane over eastern Ukraine, keep in mind that all of those weapons are manufactured by the Almaz-Antey corporation, which has a lot of Putin's close friends at the top. And that means that every time a contract is signed, they can take their little bit, or sometimes more than a little bit, off the top of that contract.

So there certainly are constraints. I mean, the Russian budget is not limitless. We've seen with the truckers' protest that at some point popular unhappiness might rise up against spending too much on defense industry. And I also think we have to keep in mind that Ukraine and Russia have always had a relationship that doesn't really make them different countries, to some extent. So that if you start saying that Russians are supposed to be killing Ukrainians, that creates a psychological problem for Russia. And that would be a constraint on him. But the institutional constraint is not what it was.

HAASS: Heidi, you want to weigh in, and then Ivo, and then I want to do one last pivot.

CREBO-REDIKER: So I would-I would very much agree with the case that it is absolutely the creation of a success story in Ukraine so that it 10 years from now is a Poland. And a great deal of that comes down to their ability to reform their economy. And a great deal of the reform of the economy comes down to the Ukrainians. So we're talking a lot about Russia, talking about a lot of different parties. But right now, there's actually, you know, as we speak, a battle going on so that the next tranche of their IMF program can come through, and the potential for, you know, a political reshuffle right now on the back of questions around this economic reform.

Corruption is really hard to tackle to Ukraine. There is-you know, it is-it is from top to bottom one of the most corrupt places on the planet. It has been challenged with corruption and rule of law for a very long time. And so there are so many different interests that stand to lose. However, that is one of-one of the things that the protests at the Maidan were actually going after in the first place. So the population in Ukraine has actually paid a pretty significant price based on the reforms that Ukraine's already done. But what they're not seeing is the price to be paid for many of the elites that have been corrupt. And that's something that puts their IMF program, and then every other bit of funding that's linked to their IMF program, at risk right now.

And that's actually one of the reasons the vice president is there with a we stand by you but here's a tough love message. You really need to do what you have to do to get your own economy right. We can't-we'll be there for you, but we can't do it for you.

HAASS: All right. Want to say something on this?

DAALDER: Yeah. So I agree with that. And the success of Ukraine is about the economic change and reform, and the end of corruption, and the political process that needs to happen. And that's the battle, because that's what Russia wants to prevent. And that's why, in fact, providing defensive capabilities to Ukraine is important. It is important to the success of Ukraine being able to make the change in order-it needs to do economically, in order to raise the costs to Russia of putting on the pressure and undermining the capacity of the Ukrainian system to succeed. So the two-the two are in fact linked. The capacity of Ukraine to defend itself as Russia tries to escalate-as that goes up, your capacity to reform and continue the process of political and economic reform is more likely to succeed.

HAASS: Let me spend the last few minutes before we open it up on Syria. Russia has now clearly invested fairly heavily on strengthening the current regime with Bashar al-Assad. I guess the question is whether that is an independent or dependent variable. And it would seem to me it's obviously in our interests to make it something that we can change with time. So the issue is, what, if anything, can we put on the table to get Russia to do-both to do, certainly, to make sure that the bulk of its targeting is on ISIS rather than other groups, and to think about supporting a political transition in Damascus, and maybe evening offering a dacha to Mr. al-Assad outside of Moscow.

Are there things that you believe we could-we could potentially offer to the Russians that would make them feel that their core interests, however they define them, would be protected under a scenario under which Mr. Assad would not be in power much longer. Is that-is that in the realm of the achievable, because it's obviously in our interest that that were the case?

DAALDER: So my view is on-that if you think Ukraine is hard, try this one, right? (Laughter.) In part, because, it seems to me, Russia-the Russian action is both a dependent and an independent variable. The independent variable is the fact that Russia wants to maintain a military foothold in this region. It has had a military foothold. We forget that but it's true. They've had a naval base in Syria for a long time. But they now have a physical military foothold in Syria. That, they want to maintain no matter who is the president of Syria. And that, in some ways-if that can be guaranteed, the fate of Assad becomes less central to what they're trying to achieve. It is a dependent variable in the sense that if you can demonstrate to the West, to the United States in particular, that you are an ally in the fight against ISIS, you may be able to-and not only the United States, the French and the Germans, you may be able to change the equation in Europe. And I think he has tried to do both at the same time.

So what is our counterpunch? The reason we need to get rid of Assad at some point is because Assad is fueling the very Sunni extremism that is fueling ISIS. And that how you're going to get a moderate, Sunni governing structure in Syria, which is what is necessary in order to fight ISIS-how you do that with Assad in power is something we haven't quite-

HAASS: I'm actually not sure I agree with that. I think actually-I think that's a bridge too far. One could also think about an alternative governing structure that was still Alawite-dominated, but not Mr. Assad-dominated.

DAALDER: And that-so you may be able to get to that point. Are we able to play these games with Russia playing its presence as both an independent and a dependent variable? That's the big question.

HAASS: But you would-but it seems-I guess the question would be, why not try? Why would we not have a conversation-

DAALDER: I think in some ways we are trying. I mean, I think that's what we're doing in Vienna, it's what we're going to do in New York in a couple of weeks, or in a week.

HAASS: And why not then give Mr. Putin standing in the Middle East? Why not basically make it clear we're not against him keeping their naval access? Why not concede-I'm just putting it on the-not saying advocating-are there any circumstances under which we would change any of our policy in Ukraine in order to get what we want against ISIS? I mean, at some point, foreign policy is about priorities. Are there any circumstances under which we need to think that way?

DAALDER: So that's a linkage I would not make, on the Ukrainian side, in part because the Ukrainian fight is a fight against fundamental order, in a near-existential way. It's about how do we construct the order in Europe. So I wouldn't trade that for Russia. The question of what you would trade for Russia with regard to Assad, with regard to a military presence of Russia in the region, which it already had so it's just maintaining that, I think are all issues that should be on the table in one form or another as you think through what your political strategy is to get to-

HAASS: Just as a package, would you ever be open to thinking about the idea that we would not necessarily be against some of what Russia's doing in the Middle East, we would provide defensive weaponry to Ukraine, and we would reduce sanctions? Is that a package-

DAALDER: Reduce sanctions?

HAASS: Is that a package you can contemplate?

DAALDER: Well, I think sanctions are linked to a political process, which is the solution of the Ukrainian problem, minus Crimea. There are separate sanctions for Crimea. And if we can have that political process implemented, the Minsk Agreement in full, then I think we are all agreed that sanctions can be lifted. But it's that political process that determines that, not what happens in Syria.

HAASS: So you don't want to have linkage in that sense?

DAALDER: I don't want to have linkage in that particular sense.

HAASS: Kimberly?

MARTEN: Yeah. There's an organization called the Institute for the Study of War, based in Washington, that keeps track of where all the airstrikes have been happening in Syria over the weeks. And the last weekly report that they had, that came out a few days ago, indicated that absolutely nothing has really changed in Russia's approach to airstrikes in Syria. It wasn't enough that the airplane in Egypt was bombed out of the skies, apparently by the Islamic State.

What we see instead is that Russia is concentrating its airstrikes against the rebel groups that are fundamentally the most challenging to Assad, either in the southwestern part of Syria where they are targeting groups that are funded and supported probably by Jordan, and in the northwest part of Syria, where they are targeting groups that are funded and supported by Turkey. And so if the fact that a Russian plane was, you know, bombed out of the sky by the Islamic State is not enough to turn the predominance of Russian strikes towards the Islamic State in Syria, I don't think there's anything we can do to make it happen.

HAASS: Want to weigh in on this?

CREBO-REDIKER: So I think that where the rubber hits the road is that we're working with a number of partners in Europe that are looking at life a little bit differently. And so, you know, I do believe that in terms of not linking that we will continue to have side-by-side steps with the Europeans on maintaining sanctions, especially because Chancellor Merkel has really staked a lot on the implementation of Minsk in order to get relief from sanctions. So I think, you know, that is one thing that-when you're sitting in New York it's a little bit easier to have these discussions. If you're sitting in Germany, with refugees flooding in, it's a different perspective.

HAASS: OK. I want to bring-I'm going to expand the NSC at this point, and open it up to our members on the floor. And then we'll come back here for the last few minutes. So raise your hand. We'll get a microphone to you. Make your questions or your comments. Please keep it relatively brief. Evelyn, up front.

Q: Evelyn Leopold, journalist at the United Nations.

On Ukraine, what do you think-if negotiations really continue or step up, do you think Russia is thinking of a Moldova solution, or a Republika Srpska one?

HAASS: Why don't you in your answer make clear-take 30 seconds to define what that choice might suggest, for those of us who are not real aficionados.

DAALDER: So, a Moldova solution, I take it, has Russian peacekeepers on the territory of Ukraine. And Republika Srpska is a negotiated settlement that has been agreed to all sides, but not maybe fully implemented by all sides.

MARTEN: Yeah.

HAASS: I'm sure I'm the only one in the room who didn't know that, but-(laughter)-

DAALDER: So I think they would love to have a Moldova solution. And our goal is to get to a Ukrainian solution, which is to say I think the only acceptable resolution is the one that is in the Minsk Agreement, which is that Ukraine controls the borders with Russia. That is the final step of Minsk. I think the administration has worked exceedingly hard to get the European Union to agree on the full implementation of Minsk, including the restitution of the border control by Ukraine as the condition for lifting sanctions. And that ought to be the conditions for lifting sanctions.

Frankly, I don't think that's likely, because I don't think the Russians will accept a Republika Srpska, if that's the right analogy, solution, which is some kind of autonomous, independent entity that is part of a full-sovereign, recognized Ukraine, because Russia's goal is to make sure that Ukraine is destabilized sufficiently that it doesn't turn West. And that is the most important thing that has motivated its policy since February of 2014.

 MARTEN: And can I just add, we have to keep in mind that the reason we've had the level of European unity on sanctions, in spite of the fact that the European economy and some European sectors are being harmed by the lack of business with Russia, is the fact that Russian-backed actors shot down that Malaysian airplane that had over 100 Dutch citizens onboard. And Holland-the Netherlands are one of the greatest trade partners of Russia. And the Netherlands is not going to give in until Russia takes responsibility for that. And you know, that is another part-not directly the sanctions, but another part of the European unhappiness.

HAASS: Yes, sir. On the second row. Joel.

Q: Thank you. Joel Mentor, Barclays.

My question is about the state of the Russian and Iranian relationship. So we know there's arms cooperation. But Iran and Russia, potentially energy competitors for supplying to Europe. And then, their interests are aligned, but not necessarily identical, in Syria. So what are your thoughts?

MARTEN: Good question.

HAASS: Do you want to take-I'll weigh in at the end, but go ahead.

DAALDER: So, I-you know, one of the interesting things is that during the entire time we had a growing confrontation-not military, but political and economic-between the United States-between the West, really, and Russia, the four most important Western powers sat down with Russia and China to negotiate a remarkable deal on Iran. And nothing that happened in the Ukrainian theater, or for that matter what's happening in the Syrian theater, has so far affected the capacity of those six countries, if you include China, to have that-have that negotiation.

I think what the Russians would like from Iran-they're a little wary about Iranians. They're a potential competitor, I think in the way you put it, both with their influence in the Middle East and, importantly, on the energy market. But they're trying to co-opt them. And they're trying to co-opt them in the bigger game that is Russia against the United States, Russia against the West. By the way, that confrontation is one way in which Russia demonstrates that it is a great power. It's by us taking them seriously as a great power that they can go back home and say, we are still a-we are still an important power, because people are paying attention to us. The worst thing you can do to Putin is not to pay attention to him. It is what is driving him as part of his motivation.

HAASS: Can I just follow up on that, because Kimberly began actually the whole session just talking about the Russian sense of resentment and humiliation, I forget what words you used, over the history of the last few decades. Is there anything-we haven't talked, really, about process or modalities, we've talked about policy. Is there anything we're not doing in the way of showing Russia, respect, playing into Putin's concern for status and standing, that we could do that wouldn't really cost us anything, but might buy us something?

MARTEN: I think we have been doing things more recently that are a very good step, that we weren't doing early on in the Ukraine crisis, which is keeping channels of communication open. And so, for example, just about six weeks ago there was a major agreement reached between the coast guards of the various countries in the Arctic about cooperation on issues that are not security-related, but that are, you know, search and rescue, and the kinds of things that coast guards do that are not directly related to security. Early on, after Ukraine happened, we cut off all military-to-military contact, except at the very highest level. And a lot of military officers in the United States were unhappy about that. And now that seems to be being restored. And I think that's a very good thing.

HAASS: What about more-I mean, that's pretty technical. What about-I mean, U.S.-Russian relations are not going to be moved by coast guard contacts. They're going to move by contacts between an extremely senior American and Mr. Putin. And the question is whether there's any scope for something more along those lines.

MARTEN: I don't think that Mr. Obama necessarily has the ability to do it, because Mr. Putin has said several times publicly that he thinks that Obama is a weak leader who can't control his own country, and therefore is not worth negotiating with. And I know that some people have criticized President Obama for not playing a more public role in what is happening with the Ukrainian negotiations. I think they're actually more likely to succeed if Obama stays out, because I think that Putin cannot ever be seen as giving in and compromising to Obama. And so I'm not sure that over the next year and a half there's much that the United States can do in that regard.

HAASS: Robin. I'll get someone towards the back next. I apologize.

Q: Hi, Robin Hessman, documentary filmmaker.

I'd like to return to what Kimberly said in the beginning about life potentially past Putin, he's not immortal, and the partners that we have in the country. While he isn't immortal, too many people, surprise, the generation coming up is not as pro-Western as, say, the Perestroika generation. And they are much, much more patriotic, having had a lot of great television propaganda and a different kind of education in school. And the partners who are so Western-oriented, as Heidi mentioned, are leaving in droves. I know people who for 20 years have stuck it out and are now moving. So what are things that we can do, I guess in terms of soft power, with more limited opportunities, considering NGOs being shut down, foreign agent laws, the Internet kill switch perhaps being rehearsed, and other elements?

MARTEN: I think the answer is, there's not much we can do. Soft power is not going to make much of a difference. Hard power is not going to make things any better. We just have to wait it out and, as I said at the beginning, defend our interests, deter the militaristic side of Russia from doing things that would harm us, including by really building up our NATO defenses much more than they have been.

I'm sure that Ivo would agree with me that even though the Russian military may not be capable of waging a full-scale war against NATO and wining, what they can do is increasingly deny NATO having easy access to coastal areas and to small pits of territory, which would just make it very expensive for NATO in both terms of monetary things, in terms of lives, in terms of keeping the agreement of the alliance going. There's an outstanding article in the latest issue of Survival Magazine, the London International Institute for Security Studies-Strategic Studies talking about that. And so we need to do much more on concentrating defending and deterring, even though we're keeping communication open.

CREBO-REDIKER: Just on the soft power side, though, I mean, what I find really tragic is the lack-there's been a lack of even interest in the U.S. to study Russia and to go and stay-you know, go to school there. And the exchanges are getting more sparse. And I think that that-if you're looking forward to another generation that is listening to, you know, a whole different set of information than we're seeing over here, then that is one of those-that's part of the web you really need to, you know, making sure stays in place. And I don't see it-I don't see it there. So I would be very encouraging of pushing as much as possible educational exchanges, but all of the soft power parts that don't touch on any of the sensitive-the sensitive parts of the presidency in Russia right now.

MARTEN: And inviting Russians to come here, so that they get a real view of what the United States is, rather than what the textbooks and the media are telling them.

HAASS: OK, someone in the-yes, sir, in the back.

Q: Thank you. Robert Abel, SC Magazine.

 My question is more so on the cyberspace. What do you see the U.S. doing in the future to help curb both cyberespionage and cyberattacks against U.S. interests from both state-sponsored organizations within Russia and criminal organizations that are based in Russia?

DAALDER: That's a-you know, this is an NSC meeting, right? Are they cleared? (Laughter.) You know, this is-this is one of the new battlefields of the future. And it's a very complicated battlefield because it is, in one sense, a state-owned, public-it has a public interest, but it's a privately owned entity. This is the fundamental problem we have with cyber. It's very different from the normal ways we think about the use of hard military power. That is owned by the state. It is operated by the state. This is not owned and operated by the state. It's operated by private companies.

And it is the private companies that have that-have the data, have the capabilities, that are running the infrastructure that is being attacked, being stolen from. And as a result, our capacity to put together a counter-cyber strategy is extremely-you know, we've been trying to do it now for 14, 15, 16, 17 years; when did you start doing it, back in the mid-1990s-is extraordinarily complicated because what you can do is limited by what the government possesses. You need the cooperation of private industry in order to do it. And we had cooperation up to certain points, and we have a little less cooperation these days because of Mr. Snowden and the revelations that came with that.

So this is a new-this is our new battlefield. But this is a strategic battlefield that we will have, irrespective of what's happening in Syria or in Ukraine, in part because of the nongovernmental entities that are involved in in it, and in part because this is a new-this is a great area of competition between us, and the Russians, and the Chinese, and other countries that have that capability.

HAASS: And in no way is this limited to a U.S.-Russian problem.

DAALDER: Exactly.

HAASS: Coming up with the rules of the road, shall we say, and that we can continue to do some of the things we want to do and discourage some other things is a-it's not a bilateral problem. It really is a global foreign policy problem.

I wanted to make sure some people in the back-yes, sir, in the back, next to law row there. I want to be equal geographically here.

Q: So-

HAASS: Do you want to introduce yourself?

Q: Evan Smith. I work for-

HAASS: Thanks, Evan.

Q: Hi. (Laughter.) I work for Doug Schoen.

You mentioned earlier that Moldova-you know, a Moldovan solution is what the Russians would desire in Ukraine, even if they can't necessarily, you know, get the Republika Srpska outcome that we would maybe advocate for. Is that something that's sustainable for them? You know, eastern Ukraine is not Transnistria. It's not going to be 1,400 peacekeepers and a couple million rubles every year. Could they even sustain that outcome over the long term, both economically, and politically, and militarily?

 DAALDER: I'll start, since you asked me the question. And I think the answer is no. And I think we're seeing already in Crimea what the cost is of trying to sustain that annexation, which we seem to have ignored until the electricity started going off as a result. So, no, it's not sustainable for them. And it will be the kind of-the same kind of drain, although perhaps not in lives, but economically and politically the same kind of drain that they had when-the last time they deployed their troops outside of their-the borders of the then-former Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

And this is not a wise move for Putin, it seems to me, in the long run. He may be-stay there as a president for a long time. But in the end, he is a declining power and we're stronger. And as long as we maintain our policy, and the consistency of our policy, and remember what our goal is, which is to make sure that Putin does not succeed in destabilizing Ukraine and that we succeed in having Ukraine emerge as a vibrant Western-oriented society, he's going to lose and we're going to win.

HAASS: The danger with analogies, just to you, I would think of declining powers, if that trajectory is recognized by the declining power in question, they might have a certain incentive to interrupt that trajectory of history.

MARTEN: Can I just add something? I'm not sure I agree with Ivo because, again, when I was there in May, the sense I get is that the Ukrainian population is not really focused on eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian-American and the Ukrainian-Canadian populations are focused on eastern Ukraine. But the Ukrainian-Ukrainian population is much more focused on domestic reforms. They've never felt that eastern Ukraine, with its, you know, large both Russian ethnic population but also its relationship with Russian industry, has really been part and parcel of Ukraine that they see as being Ukraine. And so I think that there is a possibility of some kind of negotiated arrangement in the future that might not look exactly like Moldova, but that also wouldn't look like a completely sovereign Ukraine on the borders that it had before. That could be acceptable, if you could get somebody in Russia who was not against Ukraine becoming a stable country.

HAASS: Good luck on that. (Laughter.)

DAALDER: That's a big if.

MARTEN: Yes. (Laughter.)

HAASS: I've got-in about 10 minutes, I'm going to come back to you all-eight minutes-to sort of ask you what-and the basis of this conversation in your thinking about this-you would introduce into U.S. foreign policy, if anything, that is not now-is not now present when it comes to U.S.-Russian relations. What would you-what would you want to change?

Sir.

Q: Michael Oppenheimer at NYU.

We'll have a new president fairly soon. It sounds like most candidates favor a more robust posture in Syria. That may change, obviously, once they take office. But accept that premise for a moment. What do you think that looks like? Can a larger presence be leveraged to achieve a political settlement without trading off Ukraine versus Syria? What's the risk/reward of that-of a large presence, whatever form it might take, in Syria?

HAASS: Why don't I take that quickly because I don't think the kind of presence that the United States is contemplating would give it that kind of leverage. I think the bulk of a ground partner can't come from the United States. If there's going to be a serious ground partner in Syria, it's going to have to be local. And I don't think it's going to come from neighboring Arab states. I think it's going to have to be largely Syrian. You're more likely to get it if the bombing is intensified and if special operations force presence is intensified and people sense that associating themselves with us is a good bet for the future. But I still think the bulk of that is going to have to come locally. And we haven't talked about it today.

I think in terms of the government it's not just going to be trying to persuade the Russians to rethink their relationship. As difficult as that I actually think it's more difficult to get the Iranians to rethinking their relationship with the current Syrian government. So I can actually imagine a time when the Russians might be somewhat tempted and the Iranians would say, not so fast. And so I think we've got-we've got two factors that are supporting this government.

But I think there's a ceiling on what not just the U.S. will do, which is predictive. I think there's a ceiling on the United States should do, given the nature of the adversary, because again it's not simply a question of, quote-unquote, defeating ISIS, in the sense that it's an entity that holds territory. You then got to hold that territory yourself. And that is not something we want to be in the business of doing. I would think that we need a local partner. And at the moment, I don't-I don't' see one. And I think the real challenge to our policy is how do you generate the emergence of such a partner.

Q: You give yourself a local partner by a larger presence-

HAASS: Well, again, I think only up to a certain point. And after a certain point, I actually think it becomes counterproductive. But that's a serious conversation, which is what type of U.S. policy would make it more likely for such a local partner to emerge? And at what point does it discourage it, or does it actually play into the narrative that ISIS has? And I think that's one of the basic elements of the debate that we are-that we're having.

Lucy Komisar.

Q: Yeah.

HAASS: Want to wait for a microphone, please?

Q: Oh, OK. Lucy Komisar. I'm a journalist.

So in a totally unscientific survey in the reception before this event I asked several people, do they think this meeting was going to be an expression of Cold War 2.0. And two people said yes, and one person said no. So listening to-

HAASS: What is your question?

Q: No, so listening to the things what people said, Heidi talked about-

HAASS: No, Lucy, what is your question?

Q: I want to know whether or not what people are saying about what's going on in Russia is a reflection of Cold War 2.0 or something else. And I wanted to give an example. Heidi talked-

HAASS: No, actually, no that-

Q: Let me give one example. Heidi talked about standard of living going down, hits to pensions, living standards-that's the United States. You talked about things happening to distract people from the homeland. That's the United States.

HAASS: Lucy, it's times for questions not for statements.

Q: So is what we're talking about Cold War 2.0, where things are being used to attack the Russians which, when you look at them, are actually problems that the United States also has?

HAASS: OK. Enough. We'd like questions please.

MARTEN: I have an answer on Cold War 2.0. There are three things that are fundamentally different right now between the Cold War and the current situation. One is that outside of its nuclear weapons, Russia is no longer a superpower, OK? The nuclear weapons are still there, but it doesn't have alliances all of the world, it doesn't have this major alliance in Eastern Europe that it used to have. That's gone. It's not really an equal power to the United States, and certainly not an equivalent economic power.

The second thing is that Russia right now does not have an ideology. And Putin has changed every few months how he looks at the outside world and how he uses a framework to describe it. And nothing seems to have stuck, that there's no ideology yet at the moment. And the third thing, as we've already discussed, is that there's no Communist Party. There's no institution that is guaranteeing what happens, that there is some kind of a discussion among elites in some kind of a formal framework, about everything from succession that follows Putin to the question of policymaking. And so I think all of those things make it, in one sense, less dangerous, because there's not the same kind of adversary that there was before, but in another sense much more dangerous for U.S. interests because the outcome is much less predictable.

 HAASS: Ivo, I was going to ask you a slightly different version of that, which is you were very tough, as I understood it, on Ukraine, what Russia's doing. But in your reaction to things-what Russia's up to in Syria, I think there your arguments, if you will, I don't know if the world is modulated, but there's nothing per se that the United States should not get up every morning and necessarily resist what Russia is going in Syria. There, it depends more on what it's doing, which is qualitatively different than what Russia's up to in Ukraine.

DAALDER: Well, I part because what Russia's doing in Syria doesn't violate any international norm, or even an international law. It's defending a-the government, which we happen to not think should be there-but it was invited by that government to defend whatever is left of the territory that it still controls. So in a fundamental ordering sense about what was going on, Ukraine and Syria are different. I don't know if you want to get to the larger question of what we should do. I mean, because I-

HAASS: Let me take one more question before we get to that.

MARTEN: Can I just-

HAASS: Yes, ma'am.

CREBO-REDIKER: Because I think this is-it's interesting, the question you just asked, because it all depends on your framework. I think that for those who think that dealing with Russia is something that is transactional, that it is-you know, that we see common interests in certain places, not common interests in others, but it is a transactional relationship, then that puts you sort of with one kind of framework about how you engage. And then the second is really taking into consideration whether or not you're listening to the fact that part of the-part of the thinking behind this government is it's an anti-U.S. as a unipolar leader of the-of the world, and it's specifically anti-U.S. in its rhetoric, that a sphere of influence and an ability to control both the rule writing and the common space outside of Russia is part of the ethos of what President Putin actually stands for.

Now, if that is your starting point, then that is-then that is front and center. And you can find areas to act together, for example, the way that Ivo was describing, the engagement in Syria. But Ukraine is fundamentally different. It is part of the sphere of influence. There is a world order question around it that I think needs to be front and foremost in everyone's thinking. So I would look at those two frameworks differently.

HAASS: Yeah. I'm going to change that. I'm sorry, we're going actually going to not have one more questions. I want to go ahead and make sure people on the panel, OK, so we've had this conversation for 85 minutes. So what would we-what would introduce into U.S.-Russian relations on the assumption that what is-unless you feel comfortable with either where we are-with both where we are and where we're heading I would assume you would want some things to change. So what is it-what is it we would like to introduce? And I'll start with Professor Marten.

MARTEN: The thing that we can't change is what the political candidates say about Russia. I wish we could change that, but we can't because we live in a free society. I think that's making the relationship worse. The one thing I would say is that the more we can look for even very small areas of agreement, the better that we will be. The more that we are emphasizing-

HAASS: Such as? Where do you see some that are particular ripe?

MARTEN: The Arctic. I think that we have some forward motion there, and that's going to be a common problem. I think the environment is a common problem that's going to be affecting everybody. You know, I think that there are a variety of creative things looking at space cooperation. You know, there are astronauts and cosmonauts circling above us on the Mir Station as we speak. I think that there are all kinds of ways that in little ways we can keep communication open and say we respect Russia and treat it as a worthy partner in all of these things that are happening, and that they have equal status on these various sorts of things, while making sure that our defenses are up and keeping things strong, and not trusting what happens in the military sphere.

HAASS: So implicit then in what you're saying is-I'd almost say you're arguing for a policy of non-linkage, that just because we don't agree on certain things that should not preclude our ability to cooperate on other things.

MARTEN: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

HAASS: So it's a decentralized or disaggregated relationship you think we ought to pursue?

MARTEN: Yep.

HAASS: OK, Ivo. Just want to understand.

DAALDER: So I don't necessarily disagree with that de-linkage, but I-step back for a second. We've just gone through a 25-, 24-year experiment of trying to integrate Russia into Western institutions, the global economy, the security order through the U.N. Security Council, and a variety of other things. That was the promise of the end of the Cold War. And I think it's clear that that didn't succeed. We'll leave it to historians why it didn't succeed, but it hasn't succeeded. So we need to have a new policy. It's not Cold War 2.0, for all the reasons Kimberly laid out. It just very different. But we are dealing with a big power. And it seems to me, that we need to do-a big power, declining and dangerous.

We need to do two things. We need to reestablish deterrence. We need to actually think about deterrence in deterrence terms. What is noteworthy is that both in Ukraine and in Syria, deterrence wasn't part of our thinking, wasn't part of our policy. We weren't trying to deter Russia from moving in militarily. The president took military response in Ukraine off the table. I don't think it should necessarily be on the table, but that's not the same thing as taking it off the table. So we need to think back on how we reinstitute deterrence, which we were very good at in the '60s and particularly in the '70s and the '80s, and we're not very good at it today.

But the second one, what came with the deterrence, was the willingness to have a dialogue at a very high level to make sure that that relationship wouldn't spin out of control. I also agree with Kimberly that I think the relationship today between the United States and Russia, between the West and Russia, is perhaps more dangerous than any time since the mid-1960s. In the mid-1960s, we started talking to the Russians. And because we were starting to talk to the Russians at a whole variety of different levels, the chances of an accident were less, although we're now finding some interesting documents about 1983 and the possibility that the Russians were misinterpreting what we were doing there.

Just think what the kinds of situations that we are now in, where Russian aircraft are flying deliberately through Turkish airspace. Don't say it wasn't deliberate. Of course they were. Where they are flying without their military transponders on, so that civilian aircraft can't see them, where they're buzzing naval vessels. This is all ripe for an accident. And if you don't talk to each other, if you don't have the capacity to find ways in which you can communicate with each other, deterrence becomes a spiraling relationship, potentially, that is extremely dangerous.

So what I would reintroduce into the equation is an explicit thinking about deterrence. I'm very pleased that the NATO-Russia Council-the NATO folks decided at the ministerial meeting to restart the NATO-Russia Council discussions on the military side. So you have to have the conversations that the U.S. is now doing with Russia when it comes to targeting Syria, not about the de-conflicting of flights in Syria, that you need all over the world, because the one thing we don't want is this confrontation leading to an all-out war between us and the Russians.

CREBO-REDIKER: So what Russia showed us over the past several years is that it uses multifaceted levers of power, whether it's gas pricing, whether it's bond markets and the 3 billion bond that was negotiated with the Yanukovych government prior to its fall which has become a very big issue just resolved literally today in terms of how the IMF was going to look at it, trade policy, sanctions. I mean, the whole basket of issues on the economic side that forced a lot of people in the U.S. government that tend to be more siloed-and since this is an NSC format, we do-we do tend to silo our different parts of government. And I think what this called for was a serious stepping up and engagement of the people talking about national security-traditional national security, with economic and other issues, wo thinking more across platforms of leverage of power.

But I do think we need to step that up significantly. I think that the establishment of an energy security department at the State Department so that we could start thinking about how we can work on energy security issues was a very smart idea and has been very useful. We should continue to not only ramp that up, but also talk to our partners in other countries about doing something similar, because I think we're one of the few countries that actually has without our foreign policy establishment a big department focused on energy security.

And then the one last thing I would say, and this is, again, from the perspective of the far east, is that don't forget that Russia is a Pacific, not in a kinder and gentler way, but that it actually just announced it's going to be building up military capacity in the Kuril Islands, much to the chagrin of Japan, about two days ago. So let's just not forget because we're all-we all focus on the Atlantic and the transatlantic that we don't forget the Pacific.

HAASS: And under what circumstances, if any, would you be willing to rethink sanctions policy, or do you think it ought to remain totally based upon what happens in Ukraine?

CREBO-REDIKER: I firmly believe that the commitment to not relieve sanctions until Minsk is implemented is something that has been a red line not only for Europe, but the U.S., and that to backtrack on that would be sending a very bad signal. I do think that there are probably other ways to figure out how we think about Minsk, but at the end of the day any rollback of sanctions that is not-that does not check at least, you know, a good chunk of the boxes there-and the last two are pretty substantial, meaning the pull back of heavy armaments and the turning over of the border-I think if you don't see something akin to that happening, then it's going to be-it's going to show that we're not able to stand by our commitments.

HAASS: And just for clarity's sake, Ivo, for 30 seconds, when you talk about reestablishing deterrence, what would it take to do that? Are you talking about more U.S. forces in NATO? What is it you're-

DAALDER: So I mean, the-it's actually a mindset. It is how you think about the use of military-the deployment of military forces, how you talk about military force, about being clear about where your goals are so that if they-if there's-to clearly communicate: Don't cross this line. And then when you do cross the line, make sure that there is something you do against it. It is actually less. I actually am perfectly happy, more or less, with what NATO has done in response. I think there's a very bright red line that the Russians understand that divides NATO territory from non-NATO territory.

We now have a NATO flag in every single East European country and a command and control. And we have U.S. troops in every single country in Eastern Europe, which we didn't have before Ukraine. And frankly, we were able to defend East Berlin with very little troops because of deterrence. We are able to defend the Baltics because of deterrence. It's understanding that it is about deterrence, rather than the-rather than the particular capability you need to have there. It's about the communication capability. We kind of lost that because we thought we were in an integrating policy where we were trying to get the Russians to be part of our Western institutions. We didn't talk in those ways. We need to re-learn how to do that.

HAASS: So on that positive note, let me thank our three panelists and thank you all for attending this session. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.