#2
Medvedev

http://government.ru/en/news/16508/
The 6th Gaidar Forum
14 January 2015 12:30 RANEPA, Moscow
The Gaidar Forum is an institutional platform for discussing the key challenges facing the world today. The central theme of the 2015 forum is Russia and the World: New Dimensions.

http://government.ru/en/news/17768/
Government report on its performance in 2014
21 April 2015 12:00 The State Duma of the Russian Federation, Moscow
"The Government of the Russian Federation (...) shall submit to the State Duma annual reports on the Government's performance, including on issues formulated by the State Duma." (Constitution of the Russian Federation, Article 114, Clause 1, Subclause "a")

http://government.ru/en/news/18220/
Dmitry Medvedev's interview with Rossiya 1 TV network
23 May 2015 12:30 Moscow region
Prime Minister gave an interview to Sergei Brilev's programme Vesti v Subbotu.

http://government.ru/en/news/19772/
The new reality: Russia and global challenges
23 September 2015 20:00
Article by Dmitry Medvedev.

http://government.ru/en/news/20488/
Dmitry Medvedev is interviewed by Rossiiskaya Gazeta on the paper's 25th anniversary
11 November 2015 00:00
Dmitry Medvedev has presented an Honorary Certificate of the Russian Government and responded to questions from RG General Director Pavel Negoitsa, Editor-in-Chief Vladislav Fronin and correspondent Vladimir Kuzmin.

http://government.ru/en/news/20945/
In Conversation with Dmitry Medvedev: Interview with five television channels
9 December 2015 12:00 Moscow
Prime Minister answered questions from TV anchors Irada Zeinalova (Channel One), Sergei Brilyov (Rossiya), Kirill Pozdnyakov (NTV), Yelizaveta Osetinskaya (RBC TV) and Mikhail Fishman (TV Rain).
 

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 #3
Lavrov

http://www.mid.ru/en/web/guest/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/1475621
3 June 2015
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's Exclusive Interview with Bloomberg Television's Ryan Chilcote, Moscow, June 2, 2015

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 #4
Russia Direct
January 5, 2015
The Ukraine crisis has become more dangerous than just a new Cold War
RD Exclusive: Russia Direct sat down with eminent Russia scholar Richard Sakwa of the University of Kent to discuss his new book Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands and to analyze the geopolitical challenges ahead in 2015.
By Pavel Koshkin

With no end in sight for the Ukrainian crisis in 2015, leading academics are beginning to offer their insights on how to address this geopolitical standoff. Among them is Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent. His new book Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands provides an explanation of the origins of the crisis in Ukraine and tracks down the circumstances that provoked the intense confrontation between Russia and the West, which has been described by some experts as a new Cold War.

"The asymmetrical end of the Cold War effectively shut Russia out from the European alliance system," Sakwa said. "The failure to establish a genuinely inclusive and equal European security system imbued European international politics with powerful stress points, which in 2014 produced the international earthquake that we call the Ukraine crisis."

He sees this crisis as "the worst international crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold War." As Sakwa sees it, the current crisis has called into question the idea of a Greater Europe, or a way of bringing together all ends of the European continent into a new grouping that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev once called the Common European Home. According to Sakwa, the crisis is a major challenge to a multipolar and pluralistic concept of Europe.

Russia Direct conducted a Skype interview with Sakwa to find out about the major ideas of his book and how they can be applied to minimize the current tensions in relations between Russia, Europe and - more broadly - with the West.  In addition, Sakwa talked about the U.S.-Russia geopolitical face-off, the current economic crisis in Russia and its implications for the rest of the world.

Russia Direct: You say that your new book is "an attempt to explain how Europe got into this mess." So, how did Brussels and Moscow get into this mess?

Richard Sakwa: There are several levels to this, and the first level is the overall geopolitical one, the failure of the European Union to achieve what many people nowadays call the Greater European vision of uniting the continent after the end of the Cold War. And there is the failure of all sides that I call the asymmetrical end of the Cold War. The two came together to create the crisis.

And so, instead of a Greater European vision that is built on Gorbachev's idea of a Common European Home, we had an extension of what I call the Wider European agenda, a Brussels-centric view of the world, according to which the European Union is the main form of European unity. And, of course, this by definition excludes Russia. So, there was an exclusive dynamic. And the final element of that is that Europe itself became more deeply embedded in what I call the "new Atlanticism" - the effective merger of the European Union with NATO [and the U.S.] And this is a whole new constellation of power that systematically excludes Russia.

There was another level: the internal crisis in Ukraine. We had two visions of Ukrainian statehood that have been contested. Basically, the struggle has been between the monist vision - that is, an Ukrainianizing version - and a more pluralistic vision. And today's battle is not over individual forces but the struggle over who will decide what it means to be Ukrainian. So, these two crises came together with devastating consequences.

The monist vision appeals to the tradition of Ukrainian statehood that stresses separation from other east Slavic countries, above all Russia and Belarus. It stresses Ukraine's distinctive development. On the hand, the pluralist tradition draws on the idea of Malorussianism to suggest that Ukraine is a multicivilizational community of different nations, although all can be equally loyal to the idea of an independent sovereign state.

RD: To what extent do these ideas help to find the roots of the current crisis in Ukraine and understand it?

R.S.: We need to adopt a more pluralistic vision in understanding the internal Ukrainian issues, but also a more pluralistic vision of Europe as well. What I am saying in the book contradicts those who see Atlanticism and NATO enlargement as the only game in town. I am saying that there are more options available, above all the idea of a multipolar and pluralist Europe.

This would help transcend the negative logic of "Russia vs. the West" and offer the idea of a more pluralistic Europe. You can begin to move to what I would argue for is the need of a Helsinki 2 Meeting, a peace conference didn't take place at the end of the Cold War. This would be a meeting of equals within Ukraine and Europe with equally different views - Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Ukraine - about the challenges facing the continent.

RD: One could argue that multipolarity is a sort of buzzword, used by the Kremlin in its publicity campaign to account for its recent foreign policy initiatives to undermine the United States' global influence and political heft. In fact, it can be seen as a tool of Russia's propaganda to justify its controversial policy in Ukraine.

R.S.: Of course, multipolarity is used instrumentally by some Russians on some occasions. But the debate today isn't so much about substantive issues, it's about who has the right to have different views. There is not so much a geopolitical debate: Discussions today are above all "geoideological," a type of contestation in which everybody tries to de-legitimate the views of others - not to defeat them in terms of logic (as it were), but to de-legitimate the very existence of an alternative view. That is a fundamental danger that the world faces. In a nutshell, it is hegemonism vs. a pluralist reality.          

RD: Yes, but again the war against hegemonism is used by the Kremlin to point fingers at Washington and blame its policy, while U.S. attempts to exert its influence can be just seen as an attempt to maintain its leadership that it achieved thanks to its economic and geopolitical clout.

R.S.: Leadership is a code word. Others would call it hegemony. And, of course, the United States tries to maintain its hegemony in the form of a claim to world leadership. On the one side, the United States considers its leadership as a guarantee of a range of liberal universal public goods.

But there is another side of the U.S. hegemony which is far darker, far more imperialistic. There is a constant battle going on within the United States between its liberal universalism and militaristic hegemonism. My final point is that the world is changing and the U.S. has to learn to share leadership with others. And this is the biggest challenge for it.

RD: Do you agree that now we are witnessing a new (full-fledged) Cold War between Russia and the West, or is it just a cyclical confrontation, provoked by the Crimea tussle?

R.S.: It is not a Cold War, but is not cyclical either; it is more substantive than just normal ups and downs, far more substantive, this is the moment of truth. So, we are into a new ball game entirely reflecting some fundamental economic and political shifts in world power. However, I wouldn't call this a "Cold War" because the term "Cold War" focuses attention on the past, whereas today's conflict is something fundamentally new.

RD: So, how should we call it?

R.S.: You can call it an intensification of the cold peace; however, I am averse about the term "Cold War" because if you use the term means that you lose the intellectual specificity of the present situation, the constructional framework of what makes this conflict epochal. This term is misleading. Again, we are into a new ball game. What is the new ball game called? I don't know, but I am working on it.   

RD: Previously, you mentioned two origins of the Ukrainian crisis - geopolitical (the failure of the Greater Europe project, NATO expansion) and internal ones (the failure of agreement on the nature of Ukrainian statehood). Given all this, what should we do to minimize the implications of the crisis in Ukraine?

R.S.: Everybody has to make compromises. On the one side, Russia has to make unequivocal commitment to Ukrainian integrity without Crimea. Of course, there should be compromises from the Western side as well. However, at the moment, there is no intellectual framework in the West to understand what is going on in Russia's foreign policy and, more broadly, to the structure of international power. The point is that if the crisis had not been provoked by the situation in Ukraine, then no doubt something else would have acted as the catalyst. As we saw before the Sochi Olympics, there was an extraordinarily tense environment for at least two years before Euromaidan and Crimea's annexation.   

And Atlanticists are instrumentally using this crisis this now. It has to be a very patient intellectual work explaining that the situation is more complex than the Atlanticists - including neo-cons in Lithuania, UK, the U.S. and elsewhere - would present it. It is a very dangerous constellation of power dominating at the moment in Western thinking, and there is a disturbing absence of critique - the lack of intellectual challenge.

RD: Given the Republicans' domination in the U.S. Congress, their hawkish attitude to the Kremlin and Putin's hawkish intransigence, will Moscow and Washington be able to find common ground?

R.S.: I don't think things are going to be better for the next few years. It is a complete stalemate. On the one hand, the major goal is to understand the dynamics of the standoff. And by understanding the dynamics, you can develop alternatives. With Russia's relations with the United States going to be bad for many years, the European Union and some leading European states could act as intermediaries to begin to de-escalate the current conflict.

RD: Previously, Germany has been a sort of the intermediary state that could help Russia and the West find common ground. But now, Berlin seems to have been disappointed by Russia's reluctance to come up with a compromise, as indicated by a recent interview of Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel. So, who will help the Kremlin in this case, if even its traditional and reliable partners seem to be giving up?   

R.S.: I think that Germany is still able to act as an interlocutor in a geopolitical sense to regulate the Ukrainian crisis. However, Germany under Merkel has to take big decisions: Now it is more important for Berlin to maintain its alliance and allegiances within the Atlantic community, to ensure the consolidation of its influence within the European Union.

The special relations between Russia and Germany for the time being are over, but Germany is still an important actor in regulating both the Ukrainian and the broader European crisis. Yet, it doesn't mean that today Russia has almost no one to work with within the European Union.

RD: What about France? Does it have the potential to be an interlocutor between the Kremlin and the West, given the December visit of French President Francois Hollande to Moscow to find common the Ukrainian crisis?

R.S.: Previously, France invited Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko to Normandy in June, which was quite useful. So, there is the potential for France. But on the other hand, President Hollande's position is exceptionally weak internally. So, he won't be able to do much.

RD: So, what other European countries can be seen as intermediaries in this case?

R.S.: Equally, Italy could be also a good partner, with strong economic links to Russia and an independent position in European politics. There are few countries that may be able to find a way out from the immediate conflict and, most importantly, an immediate solution of the Ukrainian crisis, because it is a permanent source of crisis in the European body politic.

There are no other countries that can effectively act to regulate the European crisis; indeed, the UK, Lithuania and others have been able to turn the European Union from a peace project to one that continues the Cold War by other means.

RD: How do you see Resolution 758 adopted by U.S. House of Representatives and the Ukraine Freedom Support Act, both aimed at condemning Russia for its policy in Ukraine? Do you agree that these documents could fuel further U.S.-Russia confrontation and lead to a war, as some predict?             

R.S.: One and the other resolution obviously only exacerbate the situation. They reflect a very narrow vision of the world. These documents are not helpful at all. They are basically declarations which could lead to renewal of conflict in Ukraine. We are in a situation of extraordinary danger for humanity; we are in a pre-war situation now and we need to find arguments for politicians to calm them down. These resolutions might bring us closer to the abyss. We shouldn't underestimate the danger that humanity finds itself in.    

RD: Do you agree that Russia's current economic turbulence (falling ruble, shrinking GDP, gloomy forecasts for 2015) is the result of the Western-led sanctions and "the price for Crimea," as the Kremlin's political opponents argue?

R.S.: Absolutely. Russia's weak economy becomes weaker after sanctions: It has been punished for its actions and the tensions of a larger geopolitical and European situation.

RD: If a full-fledged crisis hits Russia in 2015-2016, will Russia's current political regime survive?

R.S.: The crisis could get far worse. Nevertheless, the regime has enormous popular support, as indicated from public opinion polls. But this support is built on delivering public goods - security, rising standards of living and so on. The regime will survive, although it may be forced to change some of its characteristics. The system is very complex, with many dark sides as well as positives aspects. The danger is that Moscow will overreact and provoke a chain reaction. In this situation, Russia should adopt a calm position and react without excesses.

RD: Some argue that the economic and political crisis in Russia might backfire and have negative implications for the rest of the world. Is it really the case?

R.S.: It could. Even though Russia is not the world's biggest economy, it is one of the biggest: It represents 4 percent of the world's GDP and was the 8th largest economy in the world (before the ruble collapse). In 1997, even the relatively small economy of Thailand was enough to cause an economic meltdown in Southeast Asia and, then, a global crisis; so a major economic crisis in Russia could have a devastating effect on the European and world economy, while destabilizing world economic and global governance.

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 #5
Moscow Times
April 20, 2015
Putin Wants Peaceful Coexistence With the West
By Fyodor Lukyanov
Fyodor Lukyanov is editor of Russia in Global Affairs.

The latest live call-in show in which President Vladimir Putin answered questions from ordinary Russians did not have any sensational high points, but it was an important indicator of the leader's mood.

Putin repeated all of his standard phrases and ideas, but without the passion and tension seen in many of his public appearances in recent years. His comments revealed no desire for an escalation of the current conflict. If anything, they conveyed a certain calm fatalism, though not hopelessness.

Putin conceded that, yes, a certain situation had arisen due to sanctions and worsening relations with the West, but that Russia must look for new opportunities and use the current circumstances to its advantage.

Putin almost completely refrained from his usual accusations and recriminations against the United States, not because he had a change of heart, but because his position is so clear that it requires no further explanation or repetition. And judging from the comments from viewers that appeared in a continuous rolling text on the screen, nobody needed any convincing with regard to the United States.

A typical exchange concerned the fate of the Mistral warships. Putin said that the failed deal was not a problem, that Russia did not really need the ships anyway and had only ordered them to strengthen relations with France. He added that Russia does not need France to pay a penalty for breach of contract, that Paris should simply return the money Moscow has already paid for the ships.

A more interesting moment came with a question about recent attempts to equate Stalinism with Nazism. Putin initially gave a traditional explanation of why "the ugly nature of the Stalin regime" was incomparable to the crimes of the Nazis.

And then he made this unexpected remark: "In truth, we, or rather our predecessors, gave cause for this. Why? Because after World War II, we tried to impose our own development model on many Eastern European countries, and we did so by force. This has to be admitted. There is nothing good about this and we are feeling the consequences now. Incidentally, this is more or less what the Americans are doing today, as they try to impose their model on practically the entire world, and they will fail as well."

That put an interesting twist on the government's massive campaign to forbid any denigration of the past - in other words, to prohibit casting doubt on the actions of the Soviet Union. It would normally be unacceptable to compare the past actions of the Soviet Union with what the United States is doing today, but that is exactly what Putin did.

And it sends a wake-up call to those who had been hoping to build Russia's future out of its Soviet past.

And although the show lacked any remarkable highlights, it offered plenty of food for thought and marked a conclusion of a period packed with emotions and events. For the authorities to maintain the strong anti-Western sentiment they have manufactured, they must now take the conflict to the next level, and that is dangerous and extremely expensive.

Turning back is impossible. The Crimean decision is irreversible, without putting the entire political model at risk. Any backtracking on support for eastern Ukraine would lead to serious political repercussions at home and would generally be perceived as a clear defeat for the Kremlin.

Moscow cannot restore its former relations with the West. Regardless of whether sanctions are lifted, the basis for cooperation that was rooted in the balance of powers of the 1990s has been lost. And Russia has no analogous relations left with other partners. Its only choice now is to look for such opportunities elsewhere, with no guarantee it will find them.

That is why Moscow prefers the status quo that developed between Russia and the West following the acute phase of the war in Ukraine. To use a term that is once again in vogue, Russia is entering into a "frozen conflict" with Europe and the United States that none of the parties like, but that they all prefer to open conflict.

It is no coincidence that Putin devoted a great many of his comments to macroeconomic indicators in Russia. He seemed to be pleasantly surprised that the situation is under control, and that things are actually improving in some areas - especially because the economic outlook at the end of last year was bleak, to say the least. The president mentioned several times that Russia's economy had withstood the heavy blow it received, and he apparently concluded that it could therefore continue on in its current condition for quite some time.

The Kremlin does not want to provoke the West into applying greater pressure, but it will refrain from doing anything to reduce the current pressure. That is a fatalistic approach that essentially says: "Whatever will happen, will happen, but the worst is behind us."

In the Cold War terminology that is again gaining currency, the confrontation is moving into a phase of "peaceful coexistence." That is not a rapprochement, but recognition of the fact that neither side can fully gain the upper hand. And that means both must cooperate wherever possible to minimize the risks, even if that interaction is limited to certain, specific areas.

Ratcheting down the conflict does not necessarily mean that the two sides want to end it, but rather that it they want to contain it within a manageable framework. This is especially important now because the number of provocative incidents involving warships and military aircraft flying with their transponders off has increased markedly in recent months, indicating that both sides have largely forgotten and must quickly relearn the "safety measures" that were in place during the first Cold War.

The history of the second half of the 20th century suggests that, inevitably, relations alternately "warm" and "cool" in a global "frozen conflict." "Peaceful coexistence" always follows heated confrontation whenever one or both sides feels it has gathered enough strength to gain a little ground.

On the other hand, during that Cold War, a balance of powers existed that guaranteed neither side could achieve complete victory over the other. That mechanism is missing now, but there is a "larger world," an international community pursuing its own ambitions and coping with its own problems quite independently of Russia's confrontation with the West.

That fact exerts a moderating influence on the contending sides because the interests of that "larger world" might or might not coincide with theirs. That counterbalance did not exist during the first Cold War because global politics were completely tied up in the U.S.-Soviet confrontation.

The downside of the current phase of "peaceful coexistence" is its lack of inner reflection and debate. During the call-in show, Putin categorically rejected the very idea that Russia's policy toward Ukraine had failed. His message was essentially: "Russia is not to blame. It did what it had to do."

Western leaders take a similar approach, heaping all of the blame on Russia and claiming that they only wanted the best for Ukraine. Apparently the two sides will begin formulating a new policy only when the situation in the world becomes so bad that they finally understand that old Cold War-era approaches are inadequate to the current situation.

China's rising influence, the widening havoc that the Islamic State is wreaking and the greater potential for both progress and destruction that new technologies have unleashed - along with numerous other factors - are hastening the advent of that terrible day.

#6
Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
www.carnegiecouncil.org
February 27, 2015
The United States, Russia, and Ukraine: Report from Moscow
Interview with Dmitri Trenin

DAVID SPEEDIE: I'm David Speedie, director of the program on U.S. Global Engagement here at the Carnegie Council. It's a very special pleasure to welcome today someone who has been a good and trusted friend for two decades, I would think, Dmitri Trenin.

Let me just briefly say that Dmitri Trenin served in the Soviet and Russian armed forces for two decades, from 1972 to 1993. He then taught at the War Studies Department of the Military Institute from 1986 to 1993. He retired from the Russian army in 1993 and then held a post as a senior research fellow at the Institute of Europe in Moscow. In 1993, he was also a senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome. Then, of course, he joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he now directs the Carnegie Moscow Center.

So with Dmitri Trenin, we have truly a seasoned perspective, both from the point of view of military policy and intellectual analysis of the developments in Russia at the moment.

Dmitri, a warm welcome to the Carnegie Council.

DMITRI TRENIN: It's a great pleasure to be with you here at the Council.

DAVID SPEEDIE: We spoke a few months ago, Dmitri. At that time you said something that was very striking, and that is that we would look back on the period of 1992 to 2014, barely more than 20 years, as the inter-Cold War period. I would assume that not much has happened in the intervening weeks and months to change that analysis.

DMITRI TRENIN: Unfortunately, I think we have more evidence that this is what I thought it was and still think-a period between two confrontations between Moscow, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other hand. Of course, you cannot have the Cold War repeat itself, but the confrontation that one experiences today could be every bit as cold and potentially could even be more dangerous than the Cold War of the 1940s through the 1980s.

DAVID SPEEDIE: What has been lost at this moment in time, it seems to me, is the ability that has been at times halting and incomplete, but even, starting towards the end of the Cold War-the ability to find some kind of accommodation between the two sides, as it were. The Russian specialist Robert Legvold spoke recently of the loss of what he called "useful ambiguity in the relationship." Instead, we are kind of in what might be seen as the Cold War at its height, placing all blame for all that is wrong in the relationship on the other side, rather than recognizing shortcomings on both.

Is that pretty much on target?

DMITRI TRENIN: I think it's a fair analysis. I think what has changed is also the idea that I think both sides shared very much at the end of the Cold War that no one was perfect, that mistakes were made by both sides, that both sides, if you like, lost the benefit of a jointly fought and jointly gained victory in the Second World War, that they stumbled into the Cold War that they didn't need, and that they could only get out of that predicament through joint efforts, recognizing again one's own mistakes.

I think we now have a situation in which each side believes it has a monopoly on truth, a monopoly on what's right, and the other side is basically doing things all wrong. That is potentially, as I said, a dangerous situation.

DAVID SPEEDIE: We are not here, obviously, to assess blame. It would be wrong to fall into that trap of saying that one side is all in the wrong and the other is in the right. However, there are some commentators here who feel that there have been measures taken certainly in what you now call the inter-Cold War period that were designed, if not to humiliate Russia, at least to get the message across that the Cold War is over and we won. There are other serious thinkers, like Ambassador Jack Matlock, for example, who served under Ronald Reagan, who bridle and are indignant at that notion. He has written very eloquently as to the shortcomings of that view.

On the other hand, President Putin at one point proposed a new post-Cold War security architecture. I think "from Lisbon to Vladivostok" was the sort of catchphrase there. I think I'm right in saying that he, and indeed Yeltsin before him, even inquired about NATO membership for Russia and were fairly singularly rebuffed. Putin has been one of the most-one of the favorite things attributed to Putin is his description of the tragedy of the fall of the Soviet Union, but he also says that the Soviet Union can never be reconstructed.

What's going on in that whole blame-game scenario from the Russian point of view?

DMITRI TRENIN: I don't think one should focus very much on the apportionment of blame. Let's try to take the situation more or less objectively.

Russia, at the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, was intensely interested in being drawn into the Western community. There was a very clear, very broadly supported notion that Russia belonged in the West, that Russia was a European country coming home. President Yeltsin talked about NATO membership for Russia. His prime minister talked about EU membership for Russia. President Yeltsin also asked then-president George H.W. Bush for a bilateral U.S.-Russia military alliance.

So Russia was interested in two things-actually, in one thing: integrating itself into the Western system. It also was ready to accept U.S. primacy in that system, which was extraordinary, if you like, given Russia's attitude to its sovereignty, independence, and stuff like that.

But this was not really appreciated in the West, in the United States, for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons are pretty serious. One was,"Well, we don't have to do that now, because we are not pressed into it." NATO did not come about as someone's intelligent design, but rather as a response to the perceived threat of a communist takeover in Western Europe and the aggressiveness or whatever of Stalin's Soviet Union. That was a response, rather than a policy that the United States had at the time of the end of the Cold War.

The situation was absolutely dissimilar at the end of the Cold War. The United States was not threatened by anyone. Russia's assistance was not needed in order to repel that threat.

Secondly, I think people realized, even though not everyone talked about it, that Russia may be weak today, Russia may accept U.S. primacy for the time being, but look 20 years down the road. Russia will be stronger. It will challenge, one way or another, U.S. leadership. If Russia is coming to the club, it will not be coming the way Germany and Japan were coming-overtly, obviously defeated powers, the U.S. occupation. Russia was going to position itself essentially as a co-leader alongside the United States. That was a clear threat to U.S leadership in NATO and other Western councils. People thought Russia within Western councils was not going to do much good to the United States. Potentially it could be a very disruptive force.

DAVID SPEEDIE: NATO, of course, is interesting in a number of ways. I remember in the early to mid-1990s, there was a whole self-analysis of NATO and its future. In fact, it may have been Senator Lugar who said, "Out of area or out of business." In other words, NATO had to-and, of course, with Afghanistan and elsewhere, to whatever extent one wants to say successfully, it has tried to reconfigure, to some extent.

I want to come back to the perception question a little bit, on both sides, in a minute, but clearly we ought to talk about Ukraine, because that's where the mutual angst comes into sharpest focus, currently what's going on in Ukraine. Let me just throw out a couple of thoughts.

First of all, in our last conversation, you talked about movements into Ukraine as a humanitarian intervention on Russia's part. Is that an opinion you still share?

DMITRI TRENIN: There are many elements to Russia's involvement in Ukraine. There is an element of humanitarian intervention. There is an element of geopolitical struggle. There is an element of all the civil war in which Russia is supporting one side within Ukraine. So there are many elements here.

"Humanitarian intervention"-I think is how this is presented to the Russian people. Russia is there because the Ukrainian military, through its indiscriminate use of force, is threatening the livelihoods and lives of so many people in Eastern Ukraine, and Russia has to support those people.

Again, this is only part of the story, but this is the part of the story that gets the most traction in the Russian media these days.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Of course, it gets no traction in the Western media. What happens in the West is that Poroshenko, as I remember when he was elected, pledged to engage the people of Donbass, of Eastern Ukraine. Of course, the engagement turned out to be military engagement.

Again, what we tend to read in the Western media is how Russia, for example, did not live up to the Minsk agreement from September of last year, will probably not live up to the Minsk agreement just concluded, the second round. Yet there are all sorts of ways in which Poroshenko and the Kiev regime have also not lived up to the Minsk agreements in terms of looking toward federal arrangements, humanitarian assistance, some degree of federal accommodation of various things that were in Minsk, and I think were taken out, but now ratified by the Rada or whatever have you. So again, we get the blame game coming into play.

In addition to just what's not reported in the Western media, obviously there are other things that seem to be relevant. There are what are called the "Iron Horse" armed cavalry units in the Baltics, the Western military units. There are U.S. warships and aircraft in the Black Sea supporting Georgia. Are these not just elements of controversial behavior on our part that stoke the fire even more?

DMITRI TRENIN: I think we are witnessing a return of a Cold War military standoff "lite." That is very sad, of course. But more than sad, this could lead to military miscalculation. This could lead to too close engagements, too much provocation that could amplify the moves of the other side. You have a dynamic which is not only unhelpful, but which is actually dangerous.

I will add to what you have just said. The Russian moves of increasing the number of flights by the Russian Air Force-sometimes those flights come close to Western aircraft, and Western aircraft come close to Russian bombers. People scramble to defend their airspace against an intruder. Sometimes that may lead to a collision. It may lead to an emergency situation. It's one thing to deal with that situation when the general environment is calm and sort of peaceful.

Of course, military people need to train, no question. They need to exercise, no question. But under the conditions of a quasi-permanent crisis in the relationship, accidents of that kind could lead to serious breaches of peace.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Again we are back to the future, back to the Cold War, in the sense that, yes, they have to train. But when relationships are better, shall we say, when there is dialogue, when there is back-channel, when people know what the other is doing, there is a way of sharing, "We're going to be doing this. We're going to be carrying out these exercises." In a time like this, the sharing of what you are doing in terms of military exercises may be lost. Is that true?

DMITRI TRENIN: I think it's true. I think it's very true. I think what you said is also very true-back to the future. We are revisiting some of the elements of a landscape that we thought was long gone. We thought that it all belonged in history. We see that history is haunting us. History is coming back. That is pretty depressing.

DAVID SPEEDIE: The other thing is, we are, after all, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and one of the ethical documents that we like to refer to with some frequency are Morgenthau's principles of realism. There are various excellent principles contained therein: avoiding the crusading spirit in foreign policy, being able to see things from the other side's point of view-not capitulating or automatically giving in, but understanding where the other side is coming from-and don't get yourself into a position from which there is no turning back.

These are all sort of ethical as well as strategic questions that I think we fail to take into account when it comes to Russia, and particularly the question of understanding the other point of view. I wrote something recently and really focused on this. That is, there is no country on the planet with which the United States has a relationship that compares to Russia's relationship-historical, cultural, ethnic, strategic-with Ukraine.

You said something in our last discussion that I really would like to repeat, because it was fascinating. You pointed to a situation 100 years ago in the civil war in Russia involving units in the eastern part of Ukraine that were on the side of the communists at that time. It was an interesting slice of history that shows how far this goes-well, it goes back further than 100 years. Can you just restate that?

DMITRI TRENIN: The civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 perhaps was fought most intensely in Ukraine. Ukraine had a whole range of groups who fought for power. Some of them were bona fide Ukrainian nationalists, let's say of a Western Ukrainian school. That's the hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism, in the former confines of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Lemberg, which was then the name for what is now Lviv.

But Ukraine also had its fair share of communists, all sorts of socialists, and also all sorts of pretty anarchistic elements, some of them simply bandits. All this went for three years, more or less, the territory of Ukraine, with its various governments succeeding one another in places like Kiev, and sometimes people aligning not so much with somebody, but against somebody. There were some figures that really inspired awe in law-abiding citizens that remained, people like Symon Petliura, because of the clearly anti-Semitic element in his group.

DAVID SPEEDIE: And, of course, Lemberg was also a large Jewish population.

DMITRI TRENIN: Yes, but Lemberg in those days was outside of the Russian empire. It was given to Poland as a result of the First World War.

So it was a hodgepodge of different groups. It's interesting that in those days Ukraine had several competing governments. What's now Donbass was known in 1918-1919 as the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog People's Republic. The Donetsk People's Republic did exist. It's not a new name. It's very interesting. We are now discussing it as if it's just a recent phenomenon. It is a recent phenomenon, but it has some history behind it.

There was another republic in Lviv. It was called Western Ukrainian People's Republic. Before the area was attached to Poland, they used to have their own government-very briefly, of course.

There were some Russian generals, Ukrainian Hetmans, Bolsheviks, whoever, who ruled the various parts of Ukraine and vied for power. And, as I said, there was a very strong anarchistic element.

I'm saying all that because not all of that is history. If you think that Donetsk and Lugansk are simply proxies of the Kremlin, you will be deluding yourself. There is much more to it than just being Kremlin-friendly or "pro-Russian." There are many other things. I believe that history matters, and it matters a lot in Ukraine.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Exactly, and it's not just that that part of it is not new, is history, but in the current situation, clearly in Western Ukraine and in Kiev you have a fairly motley assembly of genuine reformers of some rather nasty forces. Some of them are represented in the post-Maidan government-Svoboda, which has been condemned by the European Union as racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic as recently as 2012. So there is this hodgepodge of characters, in what is now, as it was then, as you described, a profoundly divided country.

DMITRI TRENIN: Right. This situation, to some extent, continues. We're sitting here in March 2015. We don't know what will happen in Ukraine over the next 12 months, to what extent Ukraine will remain in one piece, what the combined result will be of heightening economic hardships, mounting social tensions, intensifying political infighting.

Even if you leave the war in the East to one side and focus on the rest of Ukraine, things are not going to be very easy. Things are not going to be very quiet. As Ukrainians address those very difficult and serious issues, quite a few of them may be led by this or that version of an ideology that seeks simple solutions to things.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Back just for a moment to the question of perceptions, a military presence in the Black Sea, the lack of recognition of the importance-clearly, some have written that Ukraine is far more important for Russia than it is for the West. That's seen in some of the indecisive attitude among some Europeans, for example, on the question of arming Ukraine. There is a fairly healthy debate going on in this country about whether we should be sending heavy arms to Ukraine.

Again, how is the Western perception seen in Russia? Clearly there are some notable exceptions to the average commentator in the mainstream press. John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt at Harvard wrote a piece last week. "Why Arming Kiev Is a Really, Really Bad Idea," was the fairly evocative title. I mentioned Jack Matlock before.

But there is also a fairly prevalent view that Russia should just get over all this sense of post-Cold War angst, NATO expansion, the bombing of Serbia, missile defense-"It's all over and done with; just get over with it."

My distinct sense is that it's not that easy for Russians to take up that point of view, particularly in the current situation with Ukraine. Again, my sense is that the condemnation of Russia on all sorts of fronts, from human rights to conduct in Ukraine, the sanctions, of course, and the threats-this is a sort of cocktail that only plays into the hands of anti-Western feeling.

DMITRI TRENIN: I think that it has already done that job. Anti-Western feeling has never been as strong in the post-Cold War years as it is now. I think that for a vast number of Russians, the United States has reemerged as the principal adversary, which is a very, very sad fact.

In some ways, this is a judgment that-let me put it this way. It would be wrong to ascribe everything to the Kremlin propaganda. A lot of pretty well-educated Russians, people with enough time and enough resources to study international relations themselves, have come to the conclusion that Russia is essentially seen as the country that lost the Cold War, the country that had to pay the price of defeat, the country that had basically no right to protect its geopolitical interests outside of its borders; that there were no limits to how far NATO expansion should go. Russia was not to be consulted on that issue. Russia was not to be consulted on the issue of the enlargement of the European Union.

Again, the sovereignty of all states between Russia and the West mattered a lot. But Russia's unease or suspicions or what have you with regard to the West coming closer and closer to its own borders was seen as essentially evidence that Russia has not been able to reform itself. If a country like Russia sees the United States and its allies as potentially an adversary, then there is something wrong with Russia. If the Russians militate against NATO enlargement, it means that they have some new imperialist designs themselves.

So you have that.

DAVID SPEEDIE: That's an odd sort of switching of roles, isn't it? One side is expanding to Russia's borders, but when Russia protests, they are the ones who are the new imperialists. There is a logical fallacy there somewhere.

DMITRI TRENIN: This whole argument is built on, I think, a very important statement, a very important foundation, and that statement runs like this: There can be no moral equivalence between Russia and the West. That, I think, is key to the new narrative. If there is no moral equivalence, it means that the West can do anything because whatever it does, it is either good or will be corrected by the West itself. Russia has absolutely no right, no moral right at all, to question anything, because it's still a country on probation. It used to be a country on probation. Now it's the criminal again. The old criminal has come back, the old convict.

That, I think, is key. It does not only pertain to Russia and the West; it pertains to Russia and anyone else-Russia and Ukraine. There can be no moral equivalence. Ukraine is always higher. Georgia is always higher. You name any country with which Russia may have a problem; it would stand on a higher moral ground in the eyes of the people who adopt that vision than Russia itself.

DAVID SPEEDIE: In the State of the Union address in January, President Obama was pretty much dismissive, both in terms of substance and time allotted to Russia. He said two things. The first was that basically Russia was chronically isolated from the rest of the world, and the second was that Russia was an economic basket case; Russia was in economic freefall. I can't remember the exact wording.

Just to take a look at these in order, it seems to me that-well, what's interesting is that about 30 years ago, I remember it being claimed that we were pushing China into the Soviet camp. Now it seems it's the other way around; we're pushing Russia into the China camp. It has always been argued that Russia-China together is not a logical partnership, but it was one that was being rendered inevitable or bound to happen.

Obviously you had the big oil deal a few months ago, the $400 billion oil deal, and then the joint naval exercises that were announced, I guess, last month or earlier in the year, where the Chinese official was quoted "resulted from concern with U.S. attempts to reinforce its military and political influence in the Asia-Pacific Region."

So not just China, but it seems that with Russia reaching out to Vietnam, to India, even to Japan-is Russia really so isolated at this point?

DMITRI TRENIN: Russia is not isolated, I don't think. I don't think it's possible to isolate a country of Russia's size internationally. Even in the West, it's not isolated. There are very clear problems in Russia's relations with Western countries, but I think, as the chancellor of Germany said many times, you cannot have security in Europe without Russia, or even against Russia, you cannot have security in Europe. When the going got tough in Ukraine, the chancellor of Germany and the president of France flew to Moscow to discuss things with Vladimir Putin.

Later this year, Vladimir Putin will be hosting two forums in the city of Ufa, which is just west of the Urals. One forum will be that of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that unites China, Russia, the countries of Central Asia, and to which two major countries are acceding this summer. One is India. The other one is Pakistan. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, with Russia in the chair, is moving to become the principal forum for continental Asia. It will have in the second half of this year all the major powers of continental Asia as members: China, India, Russia. We can add Pakistan. We can add a few other countries. Turkey and Iran are very interested in getting closer to that organization.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Hasn't Iran had an observer status at some point?

DMITRI TRENIN: Iran has an observer status. Iran has desired for a long time to join. There is a formal obstacle of UN sanctions imposed on Iran that prevents Iran from being accepted. But at some point, this thing may give and Iran may be welcomed as a member.

The other group that Putin will be feting in Ufa is BRICS, of course-Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. That's the club of the non-Western emerging economies.

Russia is also reaching out to several U.S. friends and allies. Mr. Putin's visit to Japan is on. Just last month, a Japanese deputy foreign minister was in Moscow preparing ground for that trip. Russia is actively pursuing relations with South Korea, another U.S. ally, as well as North Korea. Russia has signed major economic deals with Turkey, another U.S. ally, which is an important economic partner to Russia, also a partner in energy trade. Egypt has seen its relationship with Russia improve over the last year or so. Iranian-Russian relations have rarely been so actively pursued by the two governments.

Apart from that, Russia has been trying to win new friends in places like Latin America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. Even within Europe, Mr. Putin has made a rare visit these days to Hungary to talk energy. He has received the president of Cyprus in Moscow, who basically offered Russia basing rights for the Russian navy on his island. Russia's relations with Israel are solid, and they have not been affected so far by the rapid and massive deterioration in U.S.-Russian relations.

So the picture is very different from Russia being a rogue state, in isolation, reeling in its own cage and unable to move anywhere. The situation is quite, quite different than that.

DAVID SPEEDIE: That's terrific. Thank you.

Briefly on the economy, the idea that Russia's economy is collapsing-it was reported not too long ago that Moody's, the respected evaluation-type firm, has said that Russia's reserves are enough to cover external debt, and the move to the floating currency will to some extent mitigate, obviously, the spiraling down of oil prices, the fluctuations in oil prices. Clearly oil is stabilizing a bit. It's not just Russia that is suffering from this.

Again, it would seem to me that it's Ukraine and the collapse of the hyrvnia that perhaps ought to be regarded as the economic basket case, not necessarily Russia at this point.

DMITRI TRENIN: Well, Russia and Ukraine are in very different economic situations. There's no question that Russia is facing the most severe economic test in 15 years right now. The kind of response that the Russian government will ultimately give to that crisis will determine the future of the Russian economy, and maybe more than just the future of the Russian economy in the years to come. So I wouldn't want to minimize the challenges that Russia is facing.

On the other hand, this crisis could be a salutary one, if properly used. If you want to reform your economy, diversify it, make it modern, oil at $100 is not your friend, not even oil at $80. If oil hits $60, $50, or $40, this is when you have no choice but to diversify, but to innovate and do other things. Whether Russia will do it or not will depend very much on the Russian government and on the Russian people.

What I'm saying is that the crisis for the first time is giving Russia an opportunity to wean off this overly big reliance on oil and gas and hydrocarbons more broadly.

I think, as a Russian, you feel that you have not done a great job with your economy when the economic situation was good. The Russian economy today is not what it can be. If you use the crisis to change the economy, to start producing more, to develop your own domestic market more, to develop your particularly medium- and small-size enterprises; if you manage to de-monopolize your economy so that it's not totally controlled by a few monopolies here and there, then I think this crisis will go down in history as a good crisis for Russia.

I think people are prepared to suffer, but they will not suffer simply to please the fat cats. If they see that something good is coming out of the government's policies, then they would accept a temporary loss in living standards, and they will be compensated by a different kind of an economy and a different kind of a future for themselves and their children.

DAVID SPEEDIE: It's an excellent prescription, Dmitri. Is it going to be filled, especially when you talk about monopolies?

DMITRI TRENIN: I have a problem with that. Russia is ruled by the same people today as it has been ruled for the past 15 years. The people who missed the previous 15 years, in my view, should not necessarily be trusted to reform now.

But I'm keeping an open mind. Things are changing. People may change. People may be rotated out of power. Russia may find itself in a situation in which it will have run out of all bad options. When you have your back to the wall and all the bad options that you had exercised to try to buy yourself more time so that things remained the same, all these options have been exercised, then you have only the good options. But the good options always tend to be the hardest and the most difficult ones.

I don't know. As I said, I have no illusions about the people in power in Russia today, not the people who would be able to do-I think there is capacity for reform, no question. Russia has a body of very professional, very experienced people. I'm talking more about the political masters. The political masters have little interest, frankly, in reform, because it goes against the grain. It goes against their own interests often. We'll see.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Two final questions, one of which deals with in Russia itself. You have indicated that there are various sort of levels or, shall we say, different kinds of forces who are pulling strings or have the ear of the Kremlin and so on.

I think you know that we here at the Council for the last two years have been embarked on a major project that looks at the new Eurasianism in Russia and the way that has spread into some of the extreme right movements in Europe, basically across Europe as far as France, the Netherlands, and so on and so forth. It's a little complicated in a place like Greece, where there seems to be some dialogue with both the extreme right and the new leftist government, Syriza. It's clear they have a very complicated situation.

Can you say a little bit about this movement that clearly is "anti-Atlanticist," which, of course, means the UK and the U.S. basically? How connected is it in the corridors of power? To what extent do its chief proponents-and here, obviously, the name Aleksandr Dugin has come up with some frequency-what sort of role do these people play? How influential are they?

DMITRI TRENIN: I think that they have been able to rise from being marginal, underdogs, almost irrelevant in the 1990s, to being very much part of the mainstream, to being very close to President Putin and his entourage. The people who share those views-many people who share those views-form part of what is known as the Izborsk Club, which is named after a fortress on the Russian western border in the Baltics, a medieval fortress. I think these people have seen their theories vindicated by what happened in the last 25 years. They are having a ball today.

Again, this is more of an intellectual movement. It feeds into the general philosophical environment that informs the leadership of Russia. I wouldn't exaggerate the specific influence of individual members on the decision-making process. They may be among Mr. Putin's favorite intellectuals today, but Mr. Putin has remained, above all, a pragmatist.

Eurasianism also has a good answer, at least from the standpoint of Eurasianism itself, about the West. The West is not to be trusted. You need to stand up to the West. They will only respect force and they only respect strength. So you have to be strong, not only militarily, but also in economic and other ways.

I don't think they have a good answer to the rise of China, another great power that merits a lot of attention. Russia traditionally insists on being independent and sovereign. It doesn't matter sovereign toward whom, sovereign toward the most powerful nation of the time. Today it's the United States of America, so sovereignty vis-à-vis the United States is a top goal.

But in Eurasia, it is China that's rising. It's China that is becoming the hegemon of Eurasia. You mentioned Putin's ideas of "Lisbon to Vladivostok" as Greater Europe. The reality today is the emergence, in my view, of what I would call Greater Asia, from Shanghai to St. Petersburg, with China very much driving the process. Eurasianists are yet to give an answer to the China issue.

DAVID SPEEDIE: A big question.

DMITRI TRENIN: It is, and a serious one.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Finally, back to the Bob Legvold's "the loss of our useful ambiguity" and the finger-pointing and so on, and what that has meant. Clearly there are numerous missed opportunities in terms of global issues in which the United States and Russia really have to engage each other, everything from climate change to catastrophic terrorism-Russia, I think, has had more incidents of terrorist attack than any other country since the end of the Cold War-and, of course, very obviously, an issue that you think about a lot, the arms control, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and others that may be unraveling. Is there no back-channel communication at this point?

Look into your crystal ball and try to give us some hope.

DMITRI TRENIN: I think it's very sad that we don't have this back-channel. It's very sad that the only channel that seems to be working, at least visibly, is the one between Secretary Kerry and Minister Lavrov. The presidents talk over the phone, but very infrequently, and I don't think the conversation pleases either party.

I think that in order for the relationship to be stabilized-before it gets improved, I think we need to have it stabilized and have it follow some mutually agreed upon temporary rules. For that, I think we need some legwork and we need some brainwork. This can hardly be done by people who are formally on government's duty, either in Washington or in Moscow.

I think that, rather than that, trusted representatives of the two countries' political establishments need to be encouraged to engage in serious discussions of various issues, totally open-eyed, without any illusion whatsoever, but with a clear aim of establishing areas where U.S.-Russian interaction is actually feasible, where there is enough of common interest that would make the two countries cooperate in a bona fide fashion. It's important that the people who are leading that charge have easy access to their presidents.

I have some thoughts and ideas about who might fulfill that role. I know that a few attempts, early attempts, have already been made in that direction. Much of that, I think, will have to remain, for the time being at least, off the record, and people will not be giving many interviews. But unless we manage this mechanism, install it and manage it, we're going to have a relationship that will be subjected to surprises and that can be suddenly wrecked by a stray bullet. And then god help us.

DAVID SPEEDIE: I will resist the temptation to ask you for names of these constructive individuals, since, as you say, it has to be off the record.

Our guest has been Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Dmitri, thank you so much for your time, for your insights on so many elements of this very complex situation that prevails, and for your wisdom.

DMITRI TRENIN: David, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much,


 

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 #7
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
March 7, 2015
Legvold and Trenin: How to fix the US-Russian relationship
At a recent symposium hosted by Tufts University, two leading Russia experts - Robert Legvold and Dmitri Trenin - discussed the future of the U.S.-Russia relationship and what it will take to solve the Ukrainian crisis.
Ekaterina Zabrovskaya

There is little chance for moving U.S.-Russia relations forward out of the current crisis due to fundamental differences in how both nations view the world, say Robert Legvold of Columbia University and Dmitri Trenin of Carnegie Moscow. The only way out is to start expert dialogue between the two countries to help decision makers from Moscow and Washington come up with a mutually agreeable solution.

The discussion between Legvold and Trenin was a centerpiece of the four-day EPIIC (Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship) Symposium "Russia in the 21 century" last week. Organized by the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University, with the support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the conference attracted leading Russia experts to discuss topics related to Moscow's role in the modern world order and the future of Russia-U.S. relations.

Here is an abridged version of the Legvold-Trenin dialogue at the EPIIC Symposium.

Is this a new Cold War?

Robert Legvold: I am somebody who's arguing - not to the entire pleasure of my professional colleagues, people in government whether in Moscow or here - that we are indeed in a new Cold War.

There are features of what is happening now in the relationship that does have close resemblance to the early phases of the original Cold War.

Why I have started thinking in these terms was because Dmitri Trenin in March of 2014 wrote a piece that was called "Welcome to Cold War II."

Within a few months he changed his mind. He said the Cold War was not the right comparison. While the original Cold War for the most part remained cold, it's not entirely clear that this one will.

So, Dmitri, where do you stand today?

Dmitri Trenin: I stand by what you've just described. I believe that historical analogies could be useful but only to an extent.

It was important last March to sound alarm bells that Crimea and Ukraine were not just temporary transient phenomena, that there was something very serious happening just in front of our eyes.

The Cold War analogy in those days was an appropriate one. But the deeper you look into that, the more this analogy becomes unhelpful.

We are in confrontation. The bad thing about this confrontation is that it's held very much on the Russian side. I don't think that the U.S. believes that this is a confrontation with Russia. For a lot of people, Russia is a threat but not a big one. As [U.S. President Barack] Obama said, something between Ebola and ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria].

The stakes are very different for Washington and Moscow. This injects a very important aspect of asymmetry into the situation.

So, I am deeply worried and concerned. I think this confrontation could be more dangerous; it could get out of hand. It could push us in a direction that people do not anticipate. Because during the Cold War there was a feeling shared by everyone that it was dead serious.

If it's not a new Cold War, then what is it?

R.L.: From my point of view, the relationship has gone over the cliff.

There is something that has changed in the last year.

Throughout much of the post-Cold War period, there was a tendency on both sides to operate with a "useful ambiguity." That is, we didn't know whether the other side was friend or foe.

Now there is a symmetry, Dmitri. Each country has defined the other side as an adversary. This is determining our policies more than anything else in the past and will affect the way in which we redesign NATO to deal with Russia as a threat.

The reason why I use the phrase "Cold War" is because only with that notion can you begin to convey the consequences of what's happening.

The tendency in the U.S. is to start with an assumption that this is utterly unequal: Russia doesn't matter to us in the way we may matter to them.

But the consequences of having gotten to this point are not merely the dangers around Ukraine but around instability in Central Europe as a whole. It is the unpredictable region suddenly again.

D.T.: One other distinction between the situation today and the Cold War is that, as seen from this part of the world, no compromise is possible.

In the Cold War you could compromise with [Soviet leaders Joseph] Stalin, [Leonid] Brezhnev, and [Nikita] Khrushchev. Compromising with [Russia President Vladimir] Putin is somehow not acceptable.

So, I am pretty pessimistic on where we are.

This is clearly more than just about Ukraine. It's about two fundamental things.

The thing fundamental for the U.S. is that Russia is challenging U.S. leadership, essentially the world order that the U.S. leads. No major things can go unpunished if they go against the grain of the people here. The fundamental thing for Russia is the ability to move around without any constraints and do what the Russian leadership thinks is important for the Russian national interest.

How did Russia and the US get to the current crisis?

D.T.: We've been badly served by the idea - a very popular one in both countries - that the U.S., as seen from Russia, is in a deep decline and that Russia, as seen from the U.S., has been in decline for the past 25 years and will continue to be in decline.

This misinforms us and pushes us along a pretty narrow and dangerous road.

R.L.: Frankly, it doesn't make any sense that the U.S.-Russian relationship is where it is today.

I was at a meeting and one of the participants said to me: "So, are you going to go and try to make sense out of senseless?" And that's essentially what's involved.

How did we go over the cliff in our relationship? I am prepared to place primary responsibility for the final push over the cliff to the decision to annex Crimea for two reasons.

It's the first time a major power has literally seized the territory of a sovereign country since World War II. Secondly, in 1994 when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and signed the Budapest memorandum, the commitment in the U.S., Great Britain, and Russia was to guarantee Ukrainian sovereignty. And now we are trying to control the Iranian nuclear program and part of the deal is security assurance.

But we didn't get here only because of what happened between November-December of 2014 and February of 2015 in Ukraine.

Whatever the nature of the regime in Russia, whatever you think of its motivations, we got here by the things we did and we didn't do for 20 years. Because we didn't understand what the stakes are.

D.T.: I would agree with you that the conflict in Ukraine is a result of 20 plus years of failures.

The best way to make sure that the there is no longer a confrontation between two powers is to integrate the power that found itself a difficult situation into a wider system that it would feel comfortable with.

This was done to France a couple of years after the Napoleonic wars and to West Germany after the Second World War. That was not done to Germany after the First World War.

For a number of reasons people didn't think that Russia was worth spending too much money, capital, energy to make it a solid partner within an integrated system.

The integrated system that the Russians wanted was supposed to be a security system.

One good reason was that people were not sure that Russia would play by the rules if integrated into this system.

Whatever we can say about alliances that the U.S. leads, whatever you think about Russia it has never so far recognized a leader to itself in the outside world.

That's where I see a fundamental problem.

I thought that we got here because we failed to integrate Russia. But then I'm asking this question: "Was it possible to integrate Russia on the terms that would have been acceptable for the U.S.?" And the answer that I have is: "Unlikely."

How can we get out of the current crisis?

D.T.: I don't know whether we can even talk about a way forward now.

I think the best we can hope for is that the more dangerous path will not be taken.

We have to make every effort to make sure that the pretty shaky cease-fire in eastern Ukraine today stays, that it's solidifies over time, that the conflict doesn't escalate, enlarge or become a real large-scale war.

R.L.: In terms of Dmitri's pessimism, I think in the near term the likelihood of either side backing down from its current position and taking significant steps to move off the road we are on is very unlikely.

Not the least because in the U.S. the pressure in the media and Congress is in the other direction even if the administration was willing to go in a more constructive direction.

I am not optimistic at the moment either. But I do think it is time in these circumstances when universities and research organizations need to begin doing something.

How do we go in another direction? You can't begin doing it unless we think that it's urgent. Unless we think that the stakes are high.

It's not just about the Russia-U.S. relationship. It is going to affect others.

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 #8
Irrussianality
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com
December 31, 2014
THE NEED FOR STRATEGIC EMPATHY
By Paul Robinson
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Paul Robinson holds an MA in Russian and Eastern European Studies from the University of Toronto and a D. Phil. in Modern History from the University of Oxford. Prior to his graduate studies, he served as a regular officer in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 1989 to 1994, and as a reserve officer in the Canadian Forces from 1994 to 1996. He also worked as a media research executive in Moscow in 1995.

Among the books waiting to be read on my bookshelf is A Sense of the Enemy: The High-Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind, by Zachary Shore. This caught my attention because fifteen years ago Shore lived on the same corridor as me at St Antony's College, Oxford, while we were both writing our doctoral theses. Also, the subject matter fits well into my forthcoming course on Irrationality and Foreign Policy Decision Making. The book is a study in decision making, and judging from what I have skimmed so far, it advances a fairly simple thesis: successful foreign policy depends upon what Shore calls 'strategic empathy', that is to say an ability to understand what motivates your enemy. This does not mean imagining what you would do if you were in your enemy's place. Rather it means really understanding them, their desires, the constraints under which they operate, and so on.

I would take this further and say that strategic empathy is important not just when dealing with 'enemies' but in politics more generally, and that it is precisely the lack of such empathy which has pulled Russia-West relations into the mess which they are today.

The response of both Russia and Western states to the crisis in Ukraine has been to throw insults at one another and to resort to conspiracy theories. To many in the West, Russian behaviour in Ukraine is the product of a deliberate plan of imperial expansion; to many Russians, the civil war in Ukraine is the result of a long-term American strategy to destabilize and weaken any potential rivals. Within Ukraine, the current government views the war as solely the consequence of Russian aggression, whereas the rebels view themselves as victims of government barbarity. No matter who you are, somebody else is entirely to blame. No effort is made to understand, let alone empathize with the other side's point of view.

Underlying all this is a sense on both sides of moral righteousness. The division of the world into good guys - us - and bad guys - them - discourages any effort to promote strategic empathy, for the latter comes to be regarded as appeasing evil. But strategic empathy does not require that one concede that the other side is right. Rather, through a better understanding of others' actions, one increases one's chances of pursuing successful policies.

So, for instance, the government which came to power in Ukraine in February 2014 arrogantly ignored the concerns of those protesting against it on the grounds that they were simply stooges of Moscow and did not represent genuine public opinion. The result was civil war. The government would have done better to understand that some of its citizens did reject it and needed reassurance.

Meanwhile, Western states failed to understand how important Ukraine is to Russia, and thus failed to understand how Russia was likely to react to the forcible overthrow of the Ukrainian government. Fixated on 'Russian aggression', Western leaders made no effort to understand the opinions of those fighting against Kiev. Consequently, Western leaders reinforced the inflexibility of the Ukrainian government, and so made a bad situation even worse.

Russian leaders have also made mistakes. The annexation of Crimea incited the governments in Kiev and the West to see the events in Eastern Ukraine as a repetition of those in Crimea, and so to view the protests against Kiev as being not an expression of legitimate opinion but rather a precursor to Russian invasion. Russian actions instilled fear and encouraged intransigence. Moscow does not seem to understand this.

If I have a blogging wish for 2015, then, it is for both Russia and the West to try harder to understand how the world looks from the other's point of view. Moral certitude may be emotionally satisfying, but strategic empathy is far more likely to lead to peace.

[return to Contents] 

 #9
Subject: What is going on in Russia? The views and values of ordinary Russians
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2015
From: Karen Hewitt <karen.hewitt@conted.ox.ac.uk>

I am attaching the talk which I have given (with adaptations) to various groups of non-professionals who are interested in Russia. Some professionals in the audience, sometimes, but it was not intended for them.

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What is going on in Russia?
The views and values of ordinary Russians (2nd July 2015)
By Karen Hewitt
Lecturer,Oxford University Department of Continuing Education

I have spent the last 26 years trying to explain Britain to the Russians and - to a more hesitant extent - Russia to the British. Since I spend up to two months a year in cities all over Russia, living and talking with Russians, and not seeing or speaking to other westerners, I may misunderstand a lot, but I am not like a journalist looking for a story and listening to other journalists.

What we hear in Britain - and in Western media generally - about what is going on in Russia is so different from what I observe in all those cities and towns, in the universities and schools and public offices, in the shops and markets that I feel an obligation to challenge our media. The situation has been hugely exacerbated by the Ukraine crisis - in which outrageous things have been said on both sides - but with far less evidence and far more falsification on the 'Western side'. That there are significant lies in the mass media of both countries is clear. That there is disturbing ignorance on our side is clear. So I decided to be more systematic than usual in exploring what ordinary thoughtful Russians believed was going on. To ask lots of questions and to take lots of notes.

A brief history of Russia as seen by Russians since the 1970s.

Many generations among my correspondents but this background should help

Anyone born in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s would have spent their childhood in a predictable world. They had a home, albeit often a communal home, food, electricity and (usually) running water, paid employment, serious education, a national health service, cheap travel within the country, long holidays in the summer, and an ethos which encouraged 'joining' things and doing things together. Lots of summer camps, lots of sport, lots of group 'voluntary work', lots of joint projects in which grown-ups and children joined (such as building community centres.)

This life was reassuring in many ways. It did not encourage individual decisions, work based on enterprise and personal initiative. It did not encourage dissent. By European standards (though not by the standards of most of the world) what was available in homes and domestic products was limited and shoddy; stepping out of line could be and often was punished though with nothing like the widespread ferocity of the Stalin years. For most grown-ups it was a matter of looking over your shoulder and teaching your children to be discreet. But for most children themselves, the virtues of the Soviet system - stability, lots of attention to children as a group, and a firm ideology or belief couched in optimistic and cheerful terms - gave them a happy childhood.

In my early years in Russia (I went first in 1984) and then annually or more often from 1988) I was at first suspicious of these widely prevalent accounts of happy childhoods. What about those who were often unhappy or traumatised - by families, by individuals, by social expectations?. The Soviet Union must have had numbers of unhappy children, especially those trapped by illness or the alcoholism of their parents. But the system was child-friendly in its values and practices. The difficulties and restraints become much more obvious as those children grew up - if you were somebody who wanted to argue, who wanted to go your own way, who wanted to take initiatives or who loathed committees.

Most adults were probably reasonably content within work groups - and there was work for everyone, even if it was not very strenuous and involved long holidays; going on holiday in groups was also normal. More people were able to move out of communal flats where they had just one room of their own into their own flats. In terms of getting hold of things - the system worked like a black market - a deficit market - people learnt how to use the system. Prosperity seemed to be gently increasing even as Brezhnev slept.

But Brezhnev died in 1982 by which time the economic problems of the Soviet system were becoming all too obvious, at least to those in power. He was followed by Andropov who died in 1984 and Chernenko who died in 1985, leaving the way clear for Mikhail Gorbachev to become General Secretary and hence leader of the Soviet Union. Russians - and the other Soviet peoples - were about to enter years and years of chaos after decades of stability and stagnation.

Gorbachev had to deal with the consequences of economic stagnation and the collapsing price of oil. There were no resources left. He tried to liberalise markets - and politics. Political liberalisation was more exciting, especially for educated people, and went far farther than anyone had envisaged, very quickly. That's what most Westerners remember.

But how does anyone turn a black market into a capital market? If what you can buy is regulated by a lack of goods rather than a lack of money, how do you free up and double or treble your domestic production - and keep some kind of control of money so that people learn what you can spend and what you have to save. How, in fact, to change totally the relationship between work, productivity and money, if the people governing the country and trying to do this have had no experience of our kind of economy and social structures?

And just as important -how do you teach people about money who have lived all their lives with rationing? Rationing is fair - and also get-roundable. Getting round it depends on what you can barter. Money is not so significant.

The Soviet perestroika reforms meant that people started losing their jobs. People were paid less. Inflation took hold. But at the same time there was nothing in the shops, because if you were controlling supplies and it seemed likely that they price would go up, you held back the goods in the warehouses. People were worried about the increasing lack of control and responsibility as other people started showing initiative.

For at least two years before the Soviet Union was broken up - deliberately by Soviet leaders - in December 1991 - people were getting more and more confused by different economic and value systems that were co-existing, though they made no sense operating together.

On 2nd January 1992, Yeltsin, now President of the Russian Federation, divorced now from all those other countries which had made up the Soviet Union, declared that prices were liberalised. Sellers could charge what they wanted. With a few exceptions prices would not be controlled by the state. (Rather too late, he realised that in fact state assets technically belonged to the people.) By the time his advisers had devised vouchers for the population so that they could realise some of their assets, the vast wealth of the country was in the hands of really clever ruthless entrepreneurs - the people whom we call 'oligarchs' and their slightly lesser ranks of the very rich, called 'New Russians'. Naturally these people were helped by the advisers who flooded in from Western countries and who were eager to turn Russia into a 'Western-style' country which would be helped/controlled by experienced 'democracies'. (Lots of money was put into Russia to help with developing civil society, but it was a tiny fraction of the money put into Russia in order to exploit an economic situation which was devastating the population.) And so began what the Russian refer to as 'the nineties'.

The country suffered hyperinflation and therefore the people lost all their savings; they lost their jobs; industry collapsed as did the agricultural farms. One disaster fuelled another: for example the Soviet welfare system vanished since it made no sense in a new entrepreneurial world. The creaky but universal national health service was - Russians were told - not the way to solve health problems. Everyone except the British explained you should privatise the health system - which meant that most people could not afford doctors except those brave doctors who went on working without pay. Nobody could pay the school teachers either, but teachers were old ladies who went on working anyway, and who were officially despised for it.

Most of the population lived on organic vegetables grown on their own dacha plots. But they could buy Mars bars and Snickers bars and increasingly cheap computers which the children demanded. Meanwhile the shops began to fill with posh foreign goods bought with dollars by those (mostly in Moscow) who had managed to land jobs with foreign firms. So this society which had in Soviet times been based on pretty equal distribution of wealth became the most unequal of societies - the fabulously rich; the very rich, and the vast majority of the struggling poor who wondered every month whether they would get paid. And then the homeless.

The death rate shot up - the majority of men were dying before they reached 60 - of illness, alcohol, joblessness, and essentially of broken hearts. The birth rate went right down: why have babies in this chaos? And there was no cheerful ideology to keep people together. In fact there was no coherent system of values at all which, even when most people are essentially decent, is deeply traumatising.

By 1997, with Yeltsin, an alcoholic in thrall to the squabbling courtiers around him, the economy looked briefly as if it was slowly normalising. Inflation had come down to, say, 25% - and people were finding ways to work. But then there were world economic convulsions, and Russia (by now hugely in debt to the money institutions of the world) defaulted on its debts in 1998. Once again there was serious inflation and this time - because foreign investors were affected - the world took notice. But the Russian population mostly laughed. They had lost all their savings, their assets, their right to public assets and their security six years earlier. They had little or nothing left to lose. And so Russia staggered into 1999, with the people, on the whole, disillusioned, confused, ashamed and exhausted. At the very end of 1999, Yeltsin announced that he was resigning, and that, until proper elections should take place, he was appointing someone else to take over - someone virtually unknown to the people - Vladimir Putin.

Putin has been in power as President for 11 years, and in tandem with President Medvedev for 4 years from 2008-2012. From the Western point of view - for reasons which are, I think, deep in US geopolitics, Putin was rather quickly demonised.

From the point of view of ordinary Russians he brought stability, coherent policies and a doubling, trebling, of their personal incomes and the wealth of Russia. He made the oligarchs pay taxes, he broke up some of the illegal empires of energy wealth and nationalised them, He dealt with local warlords in distant parts of the Russian federation and insisted that governors should be appointed from Moscow, so that he could keep an eye on them. With the oil money his government built up a huge emergency reserve so that it would never again be the basket-case of world economies, and he and his ministers devised and largely carried out federal-wide improvement projects in Education, Health, Agriculture and Infrastructure. People are hugely better off than they were, and although of course there are plenty of poor people, they too are better off than they were. (The homeless have gone from the streets of Perm, where - as with everywhere else in Russia) they were obvious and pitiful and shameful to their fellow-citizens in the 1990s.) Not all of this is attributable to the policies of the Government, still less to President Putin - oil prices are important - but from the ordinary Russian's point of view, they have much to be thankful for under Putin.

There is more censorship than there was in Yeltsin's years when there was no censorship at all - about anything. There are opposition websites and some newspapers but other opposition newspapers have their editors replaced by the authorities. There are state television channels which follow the government line with daily focus on the President and the kind of 'analysis' by which the decisions of the government are always shown to be correct; on the other hand, these news programmes show - on the whole - more of what is going on in the world than our national BBC programmes, for example.

[As for other domestic problems: I have yet to hear a teacher in higher education in Russia who does not complain about the Minister of Higher Education, the lowering of standards, the lack of attention to the humanities, the chasing after money rather than scholarship, etc etc. (When I tell these indignant people that you can hear exactly the same complaints in Britain, they are astounded. Surely Britain is a civilised country?!.)

Corruption is also a complaint: why haven't Putin and Medvedev done more to combat it? In fact they are doing something. Russia is slowly - but too slowly - climbing up the list where the least corrupt nations are at the top. 136 out of 175 countries. But there are interesting observations by ordinary Russians about this corruption.]

So where are we now: or rather where were we in late February 2014 when the crisis in Ukraine erupted.?

What can I say about this which won't be shouted down by one side or the other?

Ukraine is an unhappy country, put together out of several large areas with different histories, cultures, faiths and loyalties. In 23 years its leaders, mostly quarrelling oligarchs from all sides, have failed to think about Ukraine as a pluralist country that can develop its own pluralist sense of pride. The economy has dropped more than that of any other post-Soviet country and many people live in real desperate poverty.

Ukraine is related to Russia. If you ask how - my analogy is to say: take Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, roll them into one and say this is a nation which has a long, long relationship with England. Imagine what you would say about that. It would not be easy. Ukraine's relationship with Russia is intimate, historical, full of love and solidarity, but damaged by bitterness and a sense of oppression. Lots and lots of family and friends on both sides. And three million Ukrainians working in Russia.

Now for the questions which I have asked Russians - hundreds of Russians from the Arctic to the Caucasus, from Smolensk across European Russia, across the Urals, to Siberia and on to the far east, to Vladivostok. I have been to all these places and I have talked. I have extensive notes. But I know that I can be biased as we all can, in what I want to hear. So I circulated about 300 university teachers of English with 8 questions, and asked them - entirely optionally - for their answers and those of their friends and relations. Later I turned the questions into Russian and asked especially for the opinions of men. As a result I have about 70 detailed answers from teachers, lawyers, engineers, IT specialists, business people, journalists, students, pensioners. Educated people - so not sociologically accurate BUT typical, it seems to me, in the range of answers and the kind of answers that they give.

Some people would say that in their answers, these ordinary thoughtful Russians were unduly influenced by mass-media propaganda. To that I would say two things: a startlingly high proportion of Russians use the internet and watch foreign TV channels. They have access to many sources of information and misinformation - more than their British equivalents. And even more important, millions and millions of Russians including probably more than 50% of this sample have friends and relations in Ukraine whom they phone or write to or skype with, often daily. They are living in a complicated connected world. Of course their views are not just parroted.

(1) Are you more or less satisfied with the annexation of Crimea? The vast majority, about 9 out of 10 approved of Crimea seceding from Ukraine. They objected to my word, 'annexation'. The Crimea used to belong to Russia, its inhabitants had long wanted to return to Russia, they held a referendum and they voted to leave Ukraine and then - to ask Russia to accept the autonomous republic as part of the Russian Federation.

Although Russian special forces popped up all over the place, no violence took place and no-one was killed. (I was surprised that my respondents did not make much more of the peaceful change of power)

The Russians said 'It was right to let them decide: they have decided.'

A number complained that their own hard-earned salaries were being taxed to pay for economic aid to Crimea. This was not ideal for Russia and some of my respondents should be put down as 'against the inclusion of Crimea'. But they did not doubt that it was a very good move for the people of Crimea.

One or two pointed out that probably the main aim of the Russian government which was certainly active in the process, was to ensure the integrity of Sevatopol.

As for the small minority of those who disapproved, they did not explain Why - except one who said that it was against international law. Perhaps the others felt the same objection, but they answered with a vigorous 'No', and left comments and explanations to those who supported what happened.

I spoke at length to a thoughtfully sardonic Crimean teacher who said 'Most of us voted to leave Ukraine and then to join Russia because we were terrified of becoming victims of violence like the wretched eastern Ukrainians. Even in those early days we could see what was happening as the Kiev government turned against the people in Donbass. And we said, No way! We must escape that. So thank you East Ukrainians for showing us what would have been our fate!

She said the Crimean Tartars were worried at first, but after a year most of them have stopped being worried.

(2) Would the Annexation of eastern Ukraine be a good idea. A large majority said, 'Certainly not! What for? Russia has never sought to grab eastern Ukraine which belongs to another country - utterly unlike Crimea.' This big majority insisted that this was an internal problem which Ukraine must sort out for itself. But of course this opinion, pure as it might be is difficult - remember my analogy with Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland/Ireland. Many Russians frequently expressed pity for the victims. And many knew relations and friends in the Donetsk and Lugansk separatist regions who were hoping for some kind of support.

A year ago, answers such as 'It is nothing to do with us.' 'It is unimaginable that we would invade Ukraine' were even more common. In April last year (2014) I met no-one who thought that Russia would or should invade eastern Ukraine. But my most recent responses have included some long and thoughtful ruminations on the problem. Only one said firmly, 'Invade Ukraine and bring the civil war there to a quick halt!' and one said ' so many people are suffering, so many civilians. Perhaps we ought to do something to avoid genocide.' But there was more of 'If the separatists think they can no longer live within Ukraine, after a year of fighting, what should Russia do then? If there is no hope for peace?'

Here is one such response.

'I honestly do not know. The Ukrainian government is set on not granting any degree of autonomy to the region, and the Russian language has been denied the status of the second official language consistently, despite the fact that a large proportion (more than half according to some sources, both Russian and foreign) of the population there speaks Russian as their first language. However, to me that does not mean that Russia should take over by military force, as this would be an invasion of another country's territory, which is completely inacceptable. At the same time, I am appalled at the double-standard the EU has shown in this matter: while upholding the rights of ethnic minorities in European countries, the EU openly supports a government that discriminates against their own people. I believe that the Russian government is right to apply political and economic leverage in order to support the large Russian community in Eastern Ukraine.'

Two people took what I would call a Ukrainian line. They explained that the east Ukrainian separatists are 'terrorists'.

And various people in Rostov who are going backwards and forwards across the frontier pointed out that after a year of fighting, the militias fighting for Donetsk and the separatists were almost as bad as the Ukrainian Nazi militias.

Several respondents had experience of the refugees who came to Russia. One said that 19 members of her husbands family had now moved across the border to Russia where they had relatives. Maybe they were not exactly refugees - but they had left their homes and jobs and ordinary life to escape to Russia. [I have personally interviewed at length a shy 20-year-old refugee from Ukraine, living now in Perm. His own story showed that militias (probably on both sides) lose all sense after a time. ]

(3) Do you believe your government when it says the Russian army is not fighting in Ukraine?

This was a tricky question. Few people simply said, 'I believe them' or 'they are liars'. They all know that 'the West' accuses Russia of using its military to destabilise Ukraine. They all know that Putin and his ministers say this is not true. So who is right?
Some people said 'I know lots of people in the army and they do not know anyone who is fighting in Ukraine. Rumours are bound to be flying about, so if they say they know nothing, then there aren't any soldiers there.'

Another argument was as follows:

'The claim is true. I'm not a person to take on trust whatever the authorities and mass media say. I've witnessed bitter moments of blinding my nation (Afghanistan, Chechnya), but those lies were evident: mothers buried their sons in Siberia, Nizhny Novgorod, Volgograd, Rostov, Ekaterinburg... and with that, you understand, the army presence in an aria was impossible to conceal. I'm 45 now and belong to the generation of mothers whose sons are draft age. Since 2014 I've heard of not a single case of a mother losing her son in military operations in Donbass.'
[In fact mothers have protested, but there have been small numbers, and government efforts to suppress comment. So that isn't quite true. ]

Others said, 'Of course the Russian army isn't there. If they were they could defeat Ukraine in a week. OR Why doesn't the Kiev government present proof - photos, satellite evidence, captured prisoners. Not just two prisoners and five passports, - as if soldiers would have their passports anyway. The Americans keep talking about this huge Russian army, but they have not seen it, and they cannot identify it.

A lot of people said, 'I don't know'.

Many said - 'we know that there are Russian volunteers. I know of people who have volunteered to help the east Ukrainians.'

And who are these volunteers? Well they may be enthusiastic idealistic students; friends have talked to me of several such students and have described their accounts. Other comments: If there are real army people there, I bet they have been sent by exasperated officers who want us to DO something. Not chief command, but lower down where they feel Russia is not responding to a disaster as it should do.

Some one said: I know those boys who drive the lorries full of humanitarian aid to Donetsk. They are not against the aid but they are so frustrated. 'Why let the Ukrainian militias destroy all these civilians without responding.' And somebody else said 'Veterans can't live without war. If they were professional soldiers once they will get to Ukraine somehow. '

But is the Russian government lying?

One inspired person said - 'I think what they say is 80% true.

And here is a provincial journalist who seems to know what he is talking about:

'It was a habit in the USSR to conceal the presence of its military in war zones. [He gives examples] People living in Russia well understand their recent history. They know that if our weapons are fired in Ukraine, there are Russian soldiers firing them. Not the army, not thousands of companies, not whole divisions. Not the airforce, not ballistic missiles. But special forces, signallers, reconnaissance troops, tank drivers. They are there. Not in the statistics. But the coffins arrive back in Russia.

I suspect that respondent saying 'it's 80% true' would agree with him. Small numbers of special forces. The Russian government is 20% lying. Others, in their answers suggest something similar.

'I think it's not completely true. It would be a lie to say, that there are large groups of Russian soldiers fighting for Donbass, but it would also be a lie to deny Russian army's participation. I do not know to which extend our army is involved and it's hard to find out amongst all this propaganda from both sides. But still I believe, that most of rebels fighting for Donbass are Donbass people.'

And then comes the troubled justification.

'It is hard for me to judge as, obviously, we are brainwashed (as well as all the others). I think there might be someone from Russia fighting in Donbass but I also think people from Donbass need someone to help them. What we see is the Ukrainian government oppressing the Russian population in their historically multicultural country. For me it's like oppressing people who speak French in Canada. Europe is not willing to help Donbass and when I see (on TV) the civilian population of Donbass (the old, women and children) being killed by the Ukrainian government I can't but justify the presence of Russians in Donbass helping their "brothers".'

(4) What more of practical action can Russia take to help solve the crisis in Ukraine?

To this question there was widespread gloom -'There is nothing more that we can do.' 'This is a questions for the Ukrainians, it is nothing to do with us; and they do not want to solve it.'

The minority who thought that Russia was actively meddling in Donbass said 'Withdraw all our military, and the Ukrainians will defeat the separatists, so the war will stop.' Or 'Russia wants a destablised Ukraine under its control. So it does not want the war to stop.' I had perhaps 3 answers like that. I wrote to one of the respondents asking if he could explain how a destablised Ukraine could be in the interests of Russia: expensive, messy, very unpopular with the majority of Russians, inviting the wrath of western countries, and ruining even further the Ukrainian economy so that it cannot pay it debts to Russia. My respondent replied that there were several theories - he listed 7 - all of them ingenious, far-fetched, and miles from real-politik which is what Putin is usually accused of.

Many people mentioned continuing humanitarian aid - which is getting more urgent, not less; decent treatment of refugees, long-term visitors and immigrants from Ukraine.

The gloom included assumptions about American intentions. 'The war will not stop because the US does not want it to stop. Probably the EU would like it to stop, but the EU is - and has been for a long time - America's poodle."

This thoughtful answer - from another sceptic -sums up many responses:

'I think that Russia has done more than enough. In 1995 Russia managed not to fully stop, but at least kick start the peace process in Chechnya at the very brink of obvious military victory over the Islamists. Still our government was wise enough to see further than immediate political gain. So Poroshenko's team as well as other negotiators have a lot to learn from Russia who, unlike many countries in Europe knows how to deal with such problems. I think that Poroshenko had better chances in the beginning when Donbass claimed more autonomy for local authorities and especially tax freedoms. The situation is worse now. It would be best for both parties to stop fighting and start negotiating. Jaw-jaw is always better than war-war. But nobody cares.'

One person was blunt: 'I don't know what Russia can do. But I'm sure that to stop artillery firing in the east Ukraine there will be enough one telephone call to Ukraine from the US.'

(5) What about the sanctions. Should they be lifted?

Three months ago I was in a car with a lawyer aged about 60. The conversation had turned to sanctions. The lawyer was rapidly becoming apoplectic, not so much with rage as with the extreme frustration of the intelligent having to deal with the stupid. He kept taking his hands off the wheel, and I feared that we might be serious victims of this international device to make Russia 'behave'.

'Sanctions!' said my friend. 'What on earth have sanctions to do with us! We didn't start the war! We are not prosecuting the war! The war is being fought on Ukrainian territory by Ukrainians against other Ukrainians. By what logic should the US impose sanctions on Russia which has nothing to do with the trouble that America itself stirred up. How are we to blame?'

If in less vigorous terms, that view is almost universal. Even the strong anti-Russian-Government respondents think that the sanctions are illogical, ineffective, and causing unnecessary trouble to business trying to develop internationally. The pain to ordinary people has been the Russian government's reverse sanctions in which food from the EU is barred from entering Russia. Interestingly no-one objected to this in the sense of saying that the Russian response should be abolished. Sanctions and counter-sanctions were part of the package.

Almost nobody expected them to be lifted; people regularly pointed out that the US is not hurt by them, and wishes to go on hurting Russia, while the EU is hurt by them, and many European countries, let alone their businesses and producers would like to see them lifted, but the EU is America's poodle. (This view is certainly drawn largely from Russian media and propaganda. It also happens to be true.)

Given that they are here to stay, how have sanctions affected ordinary Russians. There was a distinct divide between the responses of people from Moscow and St Petersburg and those of the rest of the country. The people in the capitals miss the foreign cheeses, and chocolate and the doubling of the cost of foreign travel. Most of the rest of the country is less troubled: I couldn't afford those foreign goods anyway. I always buy Russian food and there is plenty of it and it is good.

Also, many people argued that the sanctions have thrown the Russian economy back on its own resources and productions. So there are more local businesses, more initiative, less dependence on imports generally. So the sanctions are actually improving the economy.

Now that last point is certainly part of what the government tells the people. I don't know how far it is true. Probably the government doesn't know either, because Russia is a huge country. But one or two people mentioned specific new activities in their areas.

Everyone said that prices had gone up - partly because of sanctions, partly because of low oil prices. But this was part of life. No financial difficulties were like the disasters of 15 years ago. A nuisance, a tightening of belts, a pulling-together.

It's strange but the fact is that sanctions imposed on Russia have united our country.

Or from someone more sceptical, and in other answers critical of the government:

'If you hate Putin, punish him, but if you hate all the Russians, we will also hate you. The most severe sanctions were imposed after the MH-17 tragedy. [The Malaysian airliner crash] The West was not right. We don't know who was really to blame! The other sanctions have not much angered me and my friends. I hope the sanctions will be lifted.'

NOW FOR FOUR MORE GENERAL QUESTIONS.

Question 6. Is a drawing together of the Russian Orthodox Church and State a good idea?

I got a wide range of answers to this, but rather little analysis. If I divide them into three, the smallest group - but still a reasonable number - said 'Surely this is a good thing'. 'What is the problem?" 'Russians have always been spiritual'.

The next group - a third, say - said that they did not understand my question because they did not recognize the situation. The Russian Constitution insists on a separation of Church and State; different religions are recognized within the constitution; the political elite sometimes make official visits to Mosques and Buddhist temples and Synagogues as well as the Orthodox Church with which a big majority of the ethnic Russian population identify. The papers publish photos of political leaders with lots of leaders of different faiths: that is part of acknowledging the varied cultures that make up the Russian Federation. Russia is - and is recognized - as a multi-faith and no-faith culture.

Many pointed out that they thought of themselves as Russian Orthodox, but this was for them a cultural identification rather than a spiritual one. They didn't expect to go to Church, but it was useful for the soul to take the fast seriously. [Fasting in Lent has recently become almost an obsession; I am in Russia during April each year, and so I arrive at the height of the Fasting Season. Fasting means cutting out meat, butter and dairy produce, sometimes fish but rarely alcohol. So in the bakery they will warn you that such and such a loaf is not good for Lent Fasting because it contains milk; in restaurants and in canteens there are special Lent menus. With a mixture of moaning and enthusiasm much of the population joins in, at least during the week before Orthodox Easter. Then they have huge feasts with eggs and special decorated cakes and a glorious cream cheese dish flavoured with many good things. At such moments many Russians will look at you solemnly and say they are Orthodox at heart - but in the next breath they can begin to mock fat corrupt priests.]

Anyway, this group can't understand my question because they don't really think it is happening.

And then a slightly larger group admit that they are worried. Most of them are not worried very much. When I have asked friends who are religious themselves, they have shaken their heads slowly and said, ' I don't like it. I think religion is a private thing and it is no part of my religion to be reflected in what our government does.'

Others - non-believers - were more scathing. The Orthodox Church is an institution which is always trying to get more power. That's a tendency in all countries but it should be resisted.

Several said that the Orthodox Church is now de facto an arm of government - 'And what I hate most about it is that these elites used to be atheists and now they adore the church.'
and
'It's a very worrying influence, mostly due to the Russian Orthodox Church's long connections to the FSB (former KGB).'

The actual views that the Church seeks to impose on the people - or at least it declares its position with seeming Kremlin complicity - include strong disapproval of gay people, strong disapproval of 'western moral standards', and a belief that Russia must take its own spiritual path. Which tends to proud isolationism.

So some of the objections by this group are to 'Mediaeval opinions - but what can you expect of the Church?;' resentment that any institution is telling you what to do with that kind of authority; attacks on the assumption that there is a connection between the Church and the 144 million Russians - who are diverse with diverse opinions. Still, this moderate answer was most typical.

'I don't think it's a good idea. But right now (as I see it) Russian people do not see any threat in that. A lot of people from Russia do not believe in saintliness of clergy. We have seen a lot of photographs in our press and blogosphere showing priests in luxurious cars and wearing hugely expensive cloaks. We may go to church, we may skip church. It's not a big deal. That's why most of us do not care about the problem.'

That was certainly the view of students in classes where I asked the question. 'No big deal.'

Finally I had several respondents who retorted, reasonably enough - What about your Queen in Westminster Abbey? What about your Archbishop in Canterbury? Our constitution is secular; yours is not.

Questions 7 and 8 On Active students and on the Immortal Legion.

These were alternative Questions; I was wanting to find out if there was an increase of civic activity in Russia recently, and 3 people from 3 different cities spontaneously mentioned the increased enthusiasm of their students. But the question was obviously irrelevant for non-university respondents so I replaced it by one about the Immortal Legion walks on Victory Day. Neither turned out to be an ideal question but they raised some interesting points.

Plenty of university teachers said that students are students, they vary, some years are more active than others; they are ignorant and immature except for a few.... 'A very dull lot this year...' Etc.

But a significant number said that more and more of their students (at least in the humanities) were taking up voluntary work such as helping in orphanages, visiting elderly people, donating blood. The students organize such activities themselves, but clearly there is a national mood going round the country. It is certainly helped by government-approved media. But that doesn't mean that it is less real. Two years ago there were really devastating floods in the Russian Far East Thousands of homes destroyed, tens of thousands homeless. Through TV channels there were appeals for money and help, and thousands of students volunteered. Normal decent responses. But many teachers thought that the response was more vigorous than it would have been in earlier years. Also, following the example of Britain, much was made of student volunteers at the Sochi Olympic Games. I spoke to lots of students who went there as volunteers and they were as excited as their British counterparts. As a result it has become fashionable to be helpful and to volunteer for Russian activities. (And I do not use 'fashionable' cynically but as a way of tracing a trend.)

Moreover several respondents noted that students are more politically active. Of course they are a small minority, but bigger and noisier than they were. Here is an enthusiastic comment from one teacher in her thirties.

'My students are very inquiring, I've been teaching for 11 years already and do think that the young people are more open, sensitive and what is really amazing - patriotic! About 10 years ago 90% of students of Foreign Languages Department wanted to leave the country and now they all want to stay, they broaden their horizon, get involved into many voluntary projects, they help so many people!'

Now I want to look at the other question. What do you think of the Immortal Legion. In Soviet times there were two important national holidays - 1st May and 9th May. 1st May - workers' day - was so linked with the Soviet Union that it could not be celebrated except as a communist festival. So it is still a public holiday, but most of the population who can do so rush off to their dachas to begin planting for the summer season. It's a spring break of several days.

9th May was celebrated in Soviet times as the great Victory Over Fascism Day. Military hardware was brought out onto Red Square, and in cities and towns up and down the country the army paraded and people both rejoiced in the repelling of invaders from their homeland and mourned the millions who had died. It has always been a public holiday but in the 1990s not so much was made of the display. The Russian Federation was not at war, the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union was about a different world in a different country, and Russians had other things to worry about.

In Putin's time, not immediately but slowly, Victory Day has been brought back as a patriotic holiday, with the idea of uniting all the people. With 27 million dead, every Soviet family suffered deaths, let alone the wounded and traumatized who did return. And 'Soviet people' included of course the peoples living in what is now the Russian Federation. So this seemed to be a day to bring them all together.

Is it a day for showing off the military? Not nearly so much as it used to be - until this year when Putin made it clear that the display of military equipment did have a political agenda.

This year there was a huge official build-up to the 70th Anniversary. Everywhere were posters, declamations, exhibitions, people-participation in events before the great day. But also in response to aggressive and hostile actions by the west, there was also a lot of military stuff on display.

Several times, as carefully as I could, I raised the question of whether this was an appropriate public holiday 70 years after the event. 'You no longer celebrate throwing Napoleon out of Russia. When are you going to stop celebrating throwing the Nazis out of Russia?'

And almost always the answer was as if I had seriously hurt the person I asked.

'Karen, surely you understand - so many people died. And they died for us, and we must not forget that. Children forget so much these days so it is very important to tell them about their great-grandfathers.'

'But why Victory? Isn't this a bit too late for Celebrating Victory?'

'It doesn't mean that we are thinking of other peoples as enemies. It means that we are proud of ourselves.'

Now to the Immortal Legion or the Immortal Regiment. About four years ago in some Siberian city, a group of people decided to walk behind the usual marching soldiers and youthful cadets, holding home-made posters with a photograph of someone in their family who had been killed in the war. It was a local initiative which caught on very quickly and spread across the country. By 8th May 2015 (when I was in Perm as part of an official Oxford city delegation) thousands of Permians spent the evening making posters ready for a walk in a procession the next day. And so in Perm on May 9th, out in the big parade area we had ballet and soldiers, children, and a Perm-made tank that went all the way to Berlin, mounted on a lorry - that got big applause - and largish crowds. But after these displays there came, walking down Komsomolsky Prospect 30,000 Perm citizens, carrying posters. [Population - one million.]
It was entirely people-led; it was entirely civic, and it was very moving.

What did my respondents say. Almost all of them said that this was a wonderful idea that came from the people, represented the people, and gave pride and love to everyone. Even the most extreme sceptic said 'On this matter I have not yet made up my mind' which was some kind of grudging approval. But one young pacifist-humanist could not quite approve.

'Again, a difficult question. On the one hand - Immortal Legion is a good idea for national rejoicing and preserving the national historical memory. It caught public's attention and was widely shown on TV. But on the other hand - isn't it better to show national rejoicing in some more socially useful arrangements? Helping the poor, orphans or even just planting trees. To my mind it was better, when some years ago we had a celebration of Victory day planting a pine tree and placing a sign with a name of relative, who died during the war. I think, our ancestors would have approved it more.'

One of the words that appeared in answers to these two questions about Civic Society was 'patriotic'. It occurred quite often. And it raises the question of when 'patriotism' is a good thing and when it is not.

One of the accusations levelled against Putin by 'the West' is that he has encouraged nasty kinds of nationalism; that in order to bolster up Russia he has given quiet support to various neo-Nazi Russian groups.

I want to say something about this immediately. I do not doubt that there are unpleasant Russian 'nationalists', just as there are unpleasant British 'nationalists' quite a number of whom expect to see increasing attention to their views in this country. Russian neo-nazis have their websites, their anti-Muslim, anti-Semite, anti-Caucasian, anti-Ukrainian views. They have drunken fracas and they can be murderous. But I have never seen or heard any Russian approving of such groups - including the most fiercely patriotic and enthusiastic followers of official Russian propaganda. Of course I meet a selected number of people both in Russia and in Britain. I don't meet extreme nationalists in Britain. But in both cases these people seem to be fringe groups, not welcomed at all by governments or officials.

On Victory Day in Moscow, as I said, the government brought out missiles and advanced armaments - the biggest display ever. In that sense Russian nationalism was to the fore. In a short speech Putin thanked the Americans, the British and other allies for helping to defeat Nazism in 1945 - and quietly indicated that they had chosen not to come on this 70th anniversary. He talked about the fight for humanity to which all these Russian citizens' ancestors had contributed, And he showed off Russian strength to the foreign dignitaries.

Then - advancing on Red Square came a mass of ordinary people. And to the confusion of the Chinese President, Putin got down off the tribunal and went to join the walkers, carrying a picture of his own father who fought in the war. In this crowd he was one of half-a-million.

Is this an example of grotesque government propaganda? Is it an example of the President taking over the local civic demonstrations of the people? Or is it a way for the President to be part of the people. (He was after all, walking in the midst of thousands some of whom probably did not feel totally enthusiastic about him.)

Would Obama do this? Would Cameron? Does it matter?

I ask these questions as I come on to the last question which I sent out to my readers.

(8) Has Russia changed recently. And if so, for the better or the worse.

Some people said nothing much had changed except prices had gone up. Usually the implication seemed to be - life is generally dull or gloomy and we have to put up with it.

A smallish minority said it had definitely changed for the worse: no respect for human rights, too much Church-propaganda, terrible mass-media, a generally brain-washed population.

"Russia has changed for the worse because of the active governmental propaganda: all those talks about 'external enemies of Russia', 'Russian spiritual bonds', and 'greatness of Russia' make me sick."

The majority however said, 'Yes, something has changed. A coming together of people, a sense of being Russian with pride.' So what makes one respondent sick is obviously related to the pride felt by others. Is it, though, more than grand words from top people transmitted through the population?

Here is a comment by a very thoughtful correspondent.

'Russia has changed a lot for the last twelve years (not many changes since 2013, as I can see). There are very good things - for example, in bigger cities rather successful work against corruption is being held; people have become "sated" with food, goods and pleasures and are looking for something else. And still, there are things that seem to me sad and savage - the mentioned "closeness" of State and Church, some types of discrimination, censorship in media, for example.'

And now, from a provincial city - and I could have picked up many other comments:

'I think Russia has changed and is changing for the better. People are becoming more patriotic, they are more confident in their future (you can see that by the number of babies being born) - our birth rate is definitely going up! More people are willing to work for the benefit of the country. Not only for their personal survival.

'Another thing that I notice, since I am in touch with this sphere, is that they are closing down a lot of orphanages, because there are just too few children in them. They are merging several orphanages into one, because we don't need that many any more. One reason is that less and less babies and children are abandoned and the other thing is that a lot are being adopted. There is a whole boom of adoptions, I know several families, who have adopted children even having their own ones. That is another positive tendency that says that people are becoming more empathic to others, they are not only centered around their personal lives, but looking outward, trying to help their "neighbours".

'A national idea is being formed again, which has been sadly lacking after the fall of the USSR.'

Or as someone else put it:

"This did not happen overnight but gradually. The people are straightening their shoulders..."

I could go on but I will leave it there and wait for questions.

Answers came from: Arkhangelsk, Barnaul, Belgorod, Blagoveshensk, Chelyabinsk, Chita, Khabarovsk, Kolomna, Krasnodar, Kurgan, Kursk, Magnitogorsk, Moscow, Naberezhny Chelny, Novgorod, Omsk, Perm, Piatigorsk, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, St Petersburg, Tomsk, Tula, Tver, Ulan-Ude, Vladivostok and Yekaterinburg.

Extra contributions which are of interest:

Are you more or less satisfied with the annexation of Crimea?

'Yes. In 2010 (!!!) I had a backpacking summer travel in the Crimea and stayed overnights at dozens of ordinary homes I had never known before. I returned to Russia rather startled with the poverty and despair those people lived in, as well as with their strong resolution to start military actions against Kiev, in case the Ukrainian government proceeded with the pro-NATO policy and turned their back on Russia. Lots of people were keeping arms in the cellars (I saw that!!) and men spoke about their readiness to defend "Crimea, the Russian land" (as one Cossack, aged 30 said, "We are Russian, and if Kiev ever trenches on our right to be Russian, we are organized, armed and ready to combat, we'll defend our land"). The atmosphere of hatred between various parts of Ukraine was shocking and really frightening. It was evident, it couldn't last long.'

'So, what I want to say is: 1) the conflict in Ukraine is a result of long-time domestic tensions; 2) any forces that have been fueling the conflict are merely using the ground that became badly ill because of unwise actions of the Ukrainian leaders in the 00s; 3) the other scenario in March 2014 would have probably meant severest civil war in Ukraine, with much more drastic consequences for Ukrainians than they are having now.'

(4) The Russian government has repeatedly called for a negotiated peace settlement in Eastern Ukraine, and worked at the Minsk 1 and then the Minsk 2 agreements. Is there anything more - anything practical - that the Russian government can do to bring about peace?

'I think no, because it's not our problems, really I don't understand why whole World asks Russia to make something for peace. The problem first considered Ukraine, their politic, economic and social habits, they make it by own causes. Many of Ukraine people wants to live in Russia, EC and other countries, because they can't live in Ukraine. What and why should we do else. Russia helps refugees, but EC and USA don't, so why?'

Has Russia changed for better or worse?

(An extreme view, but one which is supported (or seems to be supported) by official government propaganda.) 'I do not want my children to live according to European stereotypes and standards - and they, to put it mildly, have degraded recently, if to recall only the gay policy!!! This is DEGRADATION of the moral values and this is diseased mind which is being imposed on Russia, a strong and independent nation. I do not want to live among gays and lesbians. These are abnormal cases which are popularized by mighty Europeans and Americans, who want to control the world, but are actually losing the game, because it's impossible to oppress people who have their own identities (Russians, Muslims, Jews...).'

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 #10
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
September 21, 2015
My First-Hand Account of a Provincial Russian City (It's Bustling!)
Travelling along the Trans Siberian Railway from Moscow to Perm reveals a bustling modern city - totally different from the dark provincial Russia of western fancy
By Alexander Mercouris
Alexander Mercouris is a writer on international affairs with a special interest in Russia and law. He has written extensively on the legal aspects of NSA spying and events in Ukraine in terms of human rights, constitutionality and international law. He worked for 12 years in the Royal Courts of Justice in London as a lawyer, specializing in human rights and constitutional law. His family has been prominent in Greek politics for several generations. He is a frequent commentator on television and speaker at conferences. He resides in London.

As I reported for Russia Insider a few weeks ago, I have recently visited Perm, an important industrial city in the Urals.

This is my first visit to a Russian city other than Moscow or St. Petersburg.

The trip was made possible by the Oxford Russia Project. This is - amongst much else - an academic exchange bringing together heads of English Departments from across Russia and Belarus for seminars and meetings with major figures in the literary scene in England.

I am not a writer and I do not teach English literature, but through the kindness of Karen Hewitt - the extraordinarily gifted coordinator of the project - I was able to accompany my wife, who heads an English literature department at a University in England, and who is a regular participant in the project.

Though I did not take part in any of the seminars, through the kindness of the staff of Perm State University (I would specially mention - and thank - my outstanding hostess Svetlana Polyakova, together with the dean of history, Igor Kirianov and his daughter Olga Kirianova) I had an exceptionally full series of meetings, meeting an extraordinary variety of people who were kind enough to give me their time and to answer my many questions.

The result was an exciting and stimulating visit, which answered many questions, and posed new ones.

Over the next few weeks I intend to write a series of pieces setting out my impressions.

Before however I do so however there is one general point I want to make.

The overwhelming impression the Western and Russian liberal media convey of life in Russia outside Moscow and St. Petersburg is one of grinding poverty and harshness.

A recent article in The Economist, with the ominous title "Russia's Economy: The Path to Penury", is a case in point. The article starts with a typically gloomy opening paragraph:

"Almost 500km (310 miles) separate Moscow, Russia's glittering capital, from its lesser-known namesake, a dying village deep in the forests of the Tverskaya Oblast.

The road that connects them begins as smooth asphalt beside the red walls of the Kremlin and ends as a rutted dirt track amid abandoned wooden homes.

The characters that populate the towns and cities along the way often live very different lives.

But as Russia's recession deepens (the country's GDP shrank by 4.6% in the second quarter measured year-on-year), the effects resonate across every stratum of society. "
It proceeds to paint a picture of misery and hopelessness, with the clear implication that this is how life is lived beyond "Russia's glittering capital" - Moscow.

Having now actually seen Perm and met with people from across Russia who were attending the various seminars, and having also seen one of the small settlements on the railway linking Moscow to Perm, I can say this is complete nonsense.

There is poverty in Russia, rural depopulation does occur, and there are poor villages and regions. To suppose that the whole country outside Moscow and St. Petersburg is like that is however so wrong as to be grotesque.

The reality of Perm is of a bustling modern city, with powerful industries, a dynamic university, and a highly developed cultural life. Based on what people from other regions told me, it is by no means untypical.

That is not to say that Perm - like the country as a whole - is free of problems. Over the course of the series of articles I intend to write I shall touch on some of them.

However a proper understanding of the country and of its problems is only possible once the myths are banished away. Given the immense traction these myths have - and the interest some have in perpetuating them - banishing them is not easy. However the effort has to be made, and Perm is as good a place to start as any.

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 #11
The National Interest
September 24, 2015
Russia's Moral Framework and Why It Matters
A look into Russia's moral framework and the relationship it has with religion and state values could help us better understand what makes Moscow tick.
By Nicolai N. Petro
Nicolai N. Petro is a professor University of Rhode Island.

Russia's moral framework, particularly as it applies to contemporary Russian foreign policy, differs markedly from that of the West.

While post-Soviet Russia has no guiding ideology, it does argue that certain values, if adopted as shared principles of behavior, are more congenial to international order than others. Russia would like to see such principles of behavior be more widely adopted, but, recognizing that each nation's cultural development is unique, it very much opposes efforts to promote any one set of ethical values beyond its borders. Hence, the only time that the international community may legitimately appeal to transnational ethical norms, is when such are sanctioned by the United Nations. This is a high bar, but, Russia argues, it has been set high on purpose, to avoid abuse.

The specific values that Russia sees as more congenial to international order are those shared by Russia's four traditional religious communities-Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Their comfortable interaction with each other and with the state, Russia argues, demonstrates that religion need not be a source of conflict in the modern world. Indeed, Russian spokesmen have often argued that Western nations could learn a lot from the Russian model.

This moral framework has led to four areas of friction with the West.

The first involves the nature of the international order. Since the rise of human rights and democracy as explicit U.S. foreign-policy objectives in the 1970s, Western political leaders have argued that, in the best of all possible worlds, foreign policy is a reflection of domestic politics. The theory built around this assumption-"democratic peace theory"- in its most popular form is taken to suggest that democracies do not go to war with each other. States that promote democracy are therefore promoting a morally desirable international order, whereas states that object to such efforts are deemed immoral.

As Western concern for democracy and human rights has outpaced that of international institutions, the United States and its allies have sought ways around these institutions, by asserting that Western values are the de facto, if not de jure, international standard. When several Western nations act in concert, therefore, they do not require any explicit mandate from the United Nations. This has been a source of considerable friction between Russia and the West.

A third source of tension stems from the erosion of traditional religions as the arbiters of morality in the West. For some in the West, it follows that international society must now find some alternative normative framework. Since the values of individualism, secularism and modernization led to the rise of the West, according to this line of thinking, they serve as appropriate benchmarks for the rest of humanity.

Finally, in today's Russian Orthodox Church is closely partnered with the state. It provides both intellectual and moral support to many state policies, not because it has to, but because it wants to. The current moral framework of Russian foreign policy is, indeed, its view, which the Church promotes because it is convinced that creating a "congenial international order" will assist it in its threefold salvific mission-to save individual souls, to save all national cultures that have been baptized into Christ, and to save all mankind. Needless to say, this is as far from the doctrine of separation of Church and State as East is from West.

The moral contours of the present East-West conflict should now be readily apparent. Russia opposes the adoption of any single set of cultural values as the standard for international behavior. Many in the West counter that Western values are not just a lone cultural standard, but the de facto universal standard. Russia labels this unilateralism and advocates a multipolar world order based on pluriculturalism as a better alternative.

Pluriculturalism argues that there is an inherent ("God-given," according to Vladimir Putin) value to diversity among nations. This is distinct from multiculturalism which values diversity within nations. Russia assigns diversity within nations a lower priority than it does diversity among nations. By contrast, Western states more typically prize diversity within nations (the rights of the individual), whereas among nations they seek to subordinate national cultural differences to standards, such as human rights, that express modern Western values.

The potential for international conflict is obvious, but it is hardly inevitable. For one thing, if we look at this debate in historical and religious context, we see that it has deep roots in the West.

Thus, Russia's pluriculturalism, which argues that national cultural distinctions impose certain moral limits on the conduct of foreign policy, used to be called "American exceptionalism" in this country and was typically cited as the reason America does NOT go abroad, as John Quincy Adams put it, "in search of monsters to destroy." Contrast this to president Obama's assertion last year at West Point that "America must always lead on the world stage. If we don't, no one else will," which takes it for granted that subjecting all nations to American leadership is a moral good.

Just how much our moral framework has shifted over time can be gleaned from the fact that today the best known articulator of Adams' concern that, should America become "the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer be the ruler of her own spirit," is not even American. It is Vladimir Putin.

Nor is the Orthodox Church's moral framework as "anti-modern" or "anti-liberal" as it appears to be at first blush. The writings of senior Russian clergy on these subjects quite nuanced, arguing that both the Enlightenment and liberalism were both valuable and progressive social ideals in their day, but that having abandoned the moral framework provided by the Church, they have deformed and become monstrous.

What the Orthodox Church does reject, and this wholeheartedly, is secularism. And the fact that contemporary Western societies tend to regard secularism, along with modernity and liberalism, as forming the quintessential Western trinity of values, is something that the Russian Orthodox Church is keen to reverse.

This is, of course, a conflict of visions, and some political fallout from it is inevitable. It is also understandable that, in secular discourse, the Russian Orthodox Church is often treated as a political actor, because it clearly is. It is also an economic actor, a legal actor, a cultural actor, an educational actor, in sum it is active in literally every sphere of public life. The question we ought to ponder, however, is how best to prevent this conflict of ideals from spilling over into outright hostility. One way to mitigate the political repercussions that derive from our conflicting eschatologies might be to recognize just how little this secular activity means to the Orthodox Church.

We should never lose sight of the fact that the Church sees itself, first and foremost, as a supernatural actor-the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in history. What do political battles matter when one is competing for every individual soul, for the very soul of mankind? This latter is the only struggle that has meaning for the Church, that is its raison d'etre, and its outcome will not be decided by politics.

Moreover, in this all-defining battle, the Church has an almost insurmountable advantage over all political actors, governments, and even nations. Its time frame for success is eternity, which is awfully hard to beat.

But how successful can Russia be in its efforts to propagate its moral framework? How attractive is it? The answer depends on which region of the world one is talking about.

If soft power is thought of as the use of religious and/or cultural affinity to achieve foreign policy objectives, then it is not surprising that most of Russia's neighbors remain quite receptive to Russian soft power. Sometimes, as in Ukraine and Georgia, this mutual dependency is manifested in a "love-hate" relationship that keeps Russia at the center of public attention, even as national elites desperately seek to distance their country from Russian cultural influence.

Culture and religion therefore remain powerful assets in Russia's efforts to establish a Eurasian Union and to impede alternatives, since it is always easier to forge political and economically attractive options from a common cultural foundation, than to attempt the reverse.

But the real test for Russian soft power will be whether it can shape preferences in areas of the globe that have traditionally been outside its cultural influence. To expand its reach, Russia is promoting two simple messages that are likely to resonate deeply with many non-Western states.

The first, is that it is alright for non-Western nations to be true to themselves. To succeed in the world, one does not have to move in lockstep with the Western model of development. The rise of the BRICS, Russia argues, has proven that diverse approaches to development can compete very successfully with "the Washington Consensus," and that local traditions can provide a reservoir of social resources that can be used to enhance global competitiveness.

The second message is that it is alright to challenge prevailing Western notions concerning the advantages of a consumer oriented society. In many non-Western societies, consumerism is blamed not only for leading directly to spiritual crisis, but also to resource, demographic, and ecological crises. The common response has been to seek a sustainable, autochthonous spiritual development, upon which to build a sustainable, autochthonous economic development.

In his book, The Righteous Mind, professor Jonathan Haidt highlights the vast values gap that exists between the "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic" nations (WEIRD), and nations that prefer an "ethic of community" or an "ethic of divinity." In these latter, Haidt writes, "the personal liberty of secular western nations"-including the unrestrained freedom of expression-"looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity's baser instincts."

What has transformed this rather amorphous values consensus into a discernible global agenda for a new world order is the growing sense that the West, though still dominant in power, wealth, and resources, lacks the cultural and spiritual capacity to deal with many emerging global crises. Traditional religions also typically reinforce the idea that there is a limit to humanity's ability to transform itself and its environment, and that to assert the contrary, as "WEIRD" values do, is dangerous hubris.

Most Western analysts, however, cannot fathom why this would lead to a confluence of interests among countries as diverse as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.[1] Perhaps a better way to think of it is this-the soft power of the BRICS is an expression not of any one set of national values, but of the common values that, according to these states, ought to underlie a new international order.

Russia's moral framework fits this agenda like a glove, magnifying the impact of Russian soft power. Russia now believes that it can rely on a core constituency of states to assist it in the face of intense western hostility, since its efforts benefit not only Russia, but indirectly all nations that share the desire for a new international order.

This is an extended version of the author's presentation on "Russia's Soft Power: A Matter for Church and State" at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York City, September 10, 2015.

[1] A notable exception is professor Gilbert Rozman whose latest book, The Sino-Russian Challenge to the World Order, argues that a deep cultural affinity has emerged between China and Russia that is based on the common goal of reshaping the present Westphalian international system.

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 #12
http://gordonhahn.com
December 8, 2015
Putin: A Russian Neo-Traditionalist, Not a Western Conservative
By Gordon M. Hahn

Many in that small but not insignificant minority of Western, including American conservatives who to one degree or another support many of Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions do so often under the illusion that he is a conservative. To what extent do Putin's positions correlate with Western conservatism and to what extent do they differ?

Putin is not a conservative in the Western or American sense of the term. (Neither is he a Stalinist or restorer of the Soviet or even Russian emoire of old. Indeed, Putin has just approved a new monument and museum to be built in downtown Moscow dedicated the victims of Stalinism and communism.)

Russian Neo-Traditionalism, Not Conservatism

Although some of the positions Putin stakes out in building a post-Soviet Russian traditionalism overlap with views held by some Western conservatives, Putin is a Russian traditionalist and statist rather than a Western-style conservative.

Putin's new Russian traditionalism or neo-traditionalism is based on several principles: (1) statism, (2) stability, (3) freedom of, not freedom from religion, and (4) cultural and social conservatism or traditionalism.

Putin's Statism

Putin is a statist in politics, economics, and sociocultural matters. In politics, the state and political stability are almost always to be given preference over individual liberty and freedom when these principles clash. For example, if mass public demonstrations run the risk of devolving into violence or attempts to overthrow the authorities, then those demonstrations will be banned or other wise restricted.

This is not to say there is no freedom of association and speech in Russia. There are political protests held somewhere in Russia everyday, and all points of view can be heard on the state and private airwaves, print media, and Internet. Another example is the state's willingness to block the participation of some political parties in elections for fear they may destabilize the legislative and political process. Another is the state's complete control of national television broadcasting or 'airwaves' (excluding satellite and Internet television), though ownership in radio, print and Internet is decentralized and includes private vendors.

In simple terms, Putin and many Russians are willing to restrict political and civil rights in order to ensure there is no risk of political instability whatsoever. This is an approach almost all American conservatives abhor. Russian liberals and leftists, on the other hand, are quite eager to put controls on media, especially conservative-dominated talk radio shows, to enforce political correctness (conformity) in the media, schools, universities, and the workplace in order to ensure 'balance,' and to enforce reverse discrimination against white males, calling it affirmative action and breaking the glass ceiling. On this last category, Putin would most certainly not aver.

The same is true with 'Putinomics'. Since Putin's arrival in the Kremlin in 2000, the state's role in the economy has steadily expanded. Putin nationalized large chunks of major industries, creating national giants, and increased the state's share in the economy from minority-ownership to majority-ownership. There has been no major restructuring through privatization or significant sectoral diversification. Exports of energy (mostly oil and gas), natural resources (gold, diamonds, coal) and unfinished products (steel and other metals) comprise most of Russia's trade exports and budget revenues. Exceptions are the nuclear energy industry (state-owned) and the private but highly subsidized (as in the West) agricultural production and food manufacturing industries, where real reforms have produced globally competitive industries. Regardless, fully or partly state-owned companies account for some 60 percent of Russian stock market valuation, compared to 80 percent in China. State-owned banks control over half of Russia's banking operations.

In 2011, the Russian business weekly Biznes i vlast' (Business and Power) examined the state's share in companies' total shareholder value in order to determine the level of state participation in key economic sectors. The research showed that state participation was greatest in transportation (railways, oil and natural gas pipelines) with the state holding 75 percent of assets. Other sectors registered as follows: aerospace and shipbuilding - 57 percent, electricity - 50 percent or more, natural gas production - 50 percent, production of electronic hardware - 27 percent, machine-building - 15 percent, telecommunications - 14 percent, construction - 9 percent, oil industry - 23 percent, oil refining - 8 percent, and non-ferrous metals production - 3 percent. The steel industry's assets are completely under private ownership (http://rbth.com/articles/2012/03/23/what_kind_of_capitalism_has_russia_built_15160.html). However, much of the privatization in these spheres occurred in the 1990s not under Putin. Indeed, in 2004 the Kremlin nationalized one of Russia's largest oil companies 'Yukos', and in 2011 Putin reversed most the privatization of electricity production and supply, which was a test case of privatization for major sectors in the economy.

Beyond sectoral ownership analysis, there are some areas where the economy has seen liberalization in the Putin era, but it has been achieved by way of a state-driven modernization that seeks to keep any economic liberalization from affecting the political economy and politics proper. This can be seen from the spheres where liberalization has occurred: business freedom, trade freedom, fiscal freedom, labor freedom, and freedom from corruption (www.heritage.org/index/country/russia). Another caveat here is that almost all these successes are the results of reforms carried out during Dmitrii Medvedev's presidency. Thus, it depends on how much free rein one thinks Medvedev had in order to determine how much credit then Prime Minister Putin deserves. Medvedev billed himself as a Reaganite/Thatcherite conservative in economics at the outset of his presidency, but the promised robust privatization program never materialized, leaving the economy largely state-run and state-owned.

It is really only in the social and cultural realms that many of Putin's views approximate Western conservatism. He defends religious freedom against attempts by Russian liberals to restrict religious freedom. For example, rather than banning religious education in public schools, Putin's Education Ministry implemented a program of choice, whereby parents could choose from courses on Russian Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and ethics for their children. Official state functions and chaplains for the military include the clergy of Russia's other traditional religions - the ROC, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. State funds help finance the building of churches, synagogues, mosques, and datsans. To be sure, Putin has given pride of place to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) but only slightly, and 80 percent of believers in Russia identify themselves as Russian Orthodox.

Inconsistent with his pro-religious socio-cultural position is Putin's tolerance of free, state-funded abortions, which remains a non-issue in Russian politics - a holdover from the Soviet era that Western liberals do not challenge.

Consistent with his religious stance, Putin has put modest limits on homosexuality, specifically the banning of propagandizing homosexuality and transgenderism to children. As an aside: clearly, any sane gay person would much prefer to live in Russia than in the many repressive Islamic countries with which the U.S. has had close ties. As another aside: I do not recall U.S. President Barack Obama lecturing the Saudi King about the need to observe gay rights, including gay marriage, the stuff of fun, prosepctive Saturday Night Live sketch.

One area where some conservatives seem to suffer from military envy is their sometimes support or understanding for Putin's robust foreign policy and military adventures. Conservatives tend to be more hawkish than liberals and leftists, putting aside the fact that some liberals are becoming rather gung ho when it comes to humanitarian interventions that often do not involve a vital American interest. Most conservatives, excluding libertarians and some others, respect a leader willing to stand up for the country's national interests and security. The conservative critique of President Obama's foreign policy is sometimes couched in terms such as: 'At least Putin defends his country.'

Conclusion

Putin is a Russian traditionalist and statist rather than a Western-style conservative. His views, while closer to those of American conservatives on social issues, are much closer to American liberal and leftist positions regarding state interference in the economy. Putin has achieved in the Russian economy what President Obama and other American and even European leftists can only dream of, for now. Even in politics, Putin is closer to the increasingly intolerant left than the right.

So which is greater - the extent to which Putin's positions correspond with conservatism or differ from conservatism? It appears the latter and by a considerable, not conservative margin.

Gordon M. Hahn is an Analyst and Advisory Board Member of the Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, Chicago, Illinois; a Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California; and an Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View - Russia Media Watch, http://www.russiaotherpointsofview.com.

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 #13
Forbes.com
April 25, 2015
Russia's Economy: Not Just Natural Resources
By Mark Adomanis
[Charts here http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2015/04/25/russias-economy-not-just-natural-resources/]

Russia's economy doesn't get a lot of love. It's "Nigeria with snow," "Burkina Faso with rockets," or, in John McCain's oft-repeated quip, "a gas station masquerading as a country."

To be sure, natural resources genuinely play a large role. It would be foolish (and inaccurate!) to try to totally discount the huge influence of companies like Gazprom, Rosneft, and several other state-run resource extractors. The Russian state's finances really are based on the heavy taxation of energy producers, and the Kremlin would be in a world of trouble if the oil/gas spigot ever truly ran dry.

But Russia, despite what you often hear, is more than just a gas station. It's manufacturing and service sectors aren't particularly competitive by world standards (very few people in North America are buying Russian cars) but they do exist.

Using World Bank data on natural resource rents, officially defined as "the difference between the value of commodity production at world prices and total costs of production," it's instructive to compare Russia's level to those in the members of OPEC, the prototypical petro states.

As is clear from the chart, natural resource rents are a non-negligible percentage of Russian output. But these rents are nowhere near as high as in many of the world's largest oil producers. Russian resource rents aren't even particularly large compared to other post-Soviet states: Azerbaijan (36%), Kazakhstan (29%), and Uzbekistan (20.1%) all had proportionally larger rents.

It's also interesting to compare Russia's actual GDP per capita with what it would have been if all natural resource rents were eliminated. Here, again, Russia just doesn't appear to be particularly exceptional when compared to OPEC members.

Indeed after adjusting for resource rents, Russia's GDP per capita would be roughly $19,000, a level that is broadly similar to post-communist countries like Bulgaria ($15,600), Poland ($22,800), and Romania ($18,000). Russia's adjusted GDP per capita also compares reasonably well with adjusted per capita incomes in other resource-dependent post-Soviet states like Azerbaijan ($10,500) and Kazakhstan ($15,500) or major oil producers to which it is often compared like Libya ($12,000), Venezuela ($13,500), or Iran ($9,000).

So what is the takeaway? Is it that Russia's economy is some kind of budding hegemon? No. The important thing to remember is that, when you compare it to those of other post-Soviet states or OPEC members, Russia's economy is not uniquely primitive or resource dependent. We need to keep this in mind not to bolster Russians' tender feelings but because if you formulate policy based on the assumption that Russia is a "gas station masquerading as a country" that policy won't work very well because Russia is much more than just a gas station.

Indeed, as shown above, Russia minus all of its income from oil, gas, timber, and minerals is basically a much larger version of Romania. Romania, of course, isn't exactly an economic miracle, but it is a democratic member in good standing of the European Union and NATO.

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 #14
Christian Science Monitor
May 18, 2015
Spurred by Western criticism, Russians experience something new: patriotism
In the past, Russia was an empire, then a communist colossus, then a 'defeated' power expected to adopt Western ways. But current tensions with the West are fostering what may be the birth of a distinct Russian nationalism.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent

MOSCOW - The snapping point came for Pavel Melikhov, he says, when he heard President Obama compare Russia to a disease.

In a speech to the UN last September, the president listed the top threats to global security, with Ebola coming first, "Russian aggression in Europe" second, and the Islamic State group in third place. Mr. Melikhov, a middle-aged Moscow-area businessman, says that moment crystallized his way of thinking about his country and its place in the world.

He had felt supportive when Moscow annexed Crimea last year - as did a huge majority of Russians - and says he believed that President Vladimir Putin was defending Russia's natural interests by backing Russian-speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine against a revolutionary, anti-Moscow government that took power in Kiev last year. But Mr. Obama's remark jolted him by revealing a gaping chasm between what seemed obvious to him, as a Russian, and the way people in the West seem to perceive the same events.

Recommended: Sochi, Soviets, and tsars: How much do you know about Russia?
"It wasn't just me. All my co-workers were stunned," he says. "The leader of the US put our country on a blacklist with a virus and a terrorist organization. That says it all. The masks are off. The US is not a friend; it's 'us' and 'them' now. I have finally and completely understood that."

Melikhov is not an outlier in today's Russia; indeed, he appears to be part of the new normal. Over the past year something has happened in the broad public mind, which looks to some experts like the birth of a distinct Russian nationalism for the first time in history.

In the past, Russia was an empire, then a communist colossus, then a "defeated" power that was expected - even by its leaders - to adopt Western ways. To be a "Russian" always meant being part of a state with grand ambitions and an ideology that did not address, or even admit, a separate Russian existence.

But amid a global geopolitical crisis over Ukraine, its pro-European revolution, and the civil war it triggered, "we see Russians groping for an identity more intensely than ever before in the past quarter century," says Masha Lipman, an independent political expert.

"There's a clear nationalist drive, yet still no clarity on what the new identity is. Russia is no longer an empire, but not yet a nation state," she says.

Patriotism, awakened

It's not that Melikhov was unpatriotic before. When he was a boy, he was a regular at Desantnik, a private downtown Moscow military-patriotic club started in the 1980s and run by former special services officers. There, young people are taught paramilitary skills like hand-to-hand combat, flying, parachuting, and marksmanship.

The club's president is Yury Shaparin, a veteran of the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan, who says he founded the club to foster patriotic values among young people in practical ways, mainly through physical training. He kept it going through the bitter years following the USSR's collapse, when the economy imploded and then-President Boris Yeltsin led Russia down a path that seemed to accept not only the West's hegemony, but also its political, economic, and cultural values.

"There seemed like no room for being a Russian. It was hard to feel patriotic under Yeltsin," Mr. Shaparin says, standing in Desantnik's gym, where about a dozen young people are learning to kickbox. Nearby there is a rack of Kalashnikov rifles, for shooting practice.

The past decade-and-a-half under Mr. Putin have been years of relative prosperity, when people got on with their private lives and paid little attention to politics. But, according to Shaparin, the events of the past year have awakened a sense among Russians that they are not like people in the West, their country has its own interests, and they have no one to rely on but themselves.

"We don't wish for war, and we don't feel the West is an enemy, but many people now see that they are trying to force us into a box, surround us with military bases, make us give up Ukraine, and break up what's left of our country," he says.

"What we teach here is that Russia can be saved, and all these sanctions and NATO threats can be defeated, if Russians grow more aware, learn to be strong and fit, and be willing to work together to build a better country. Nothing good will come from giving in to outside pressure."

Anti-Americanism

Public opinion surveys offer snapshots of this emerging mood.

Most frequently cited are the approval ratings of Putin, which have remained at a stratospheric 80-plus percent over a year - a span that started with anti-Moscow revolution in Kiev. That was followed by fallout of all kinds: the hasty annexation of the mainly Russian-populated Crimean peninsula; covert Kremlin support for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine's bitter civil war; increasing Western sanctions on Russia's economy along with efforts to isolate Moscow on the world stage; a harsh economic crisis; and a near-catastrophic plunge in the value of the national currency, the ruble.

A year after the annexation of Crimea, a poll by the state-run VTsIOM agency found that two-thirds of respondents approved of the action, and 89 percent believed the territory shouldn't be returned to Ukraine under any circumstances. A March survey by the independent Levada Center found that 68 percent believe that Russia is a "great power," up from 30 percent in an identical poll taken 10 years ago.

Another recent VTsIOM poll found only a slight majority of Russians were even aware of Western sanctions against the country, but of those, well over 80 percent believed the sanctions were imposed with ill intent toward Russia. Less than 1 percent thought the West had "good intentions."

Most alarmingly, anti-American sentiment is at its highest peak since reliable polling of Russians began in the mid-1980s. According to a March Levada survey, 73 percent of respondents had a "negative" attitude toward the US, up from 56 percent a year earlier.

'A process, not an accident'

These data points connect to make a coherent picture, say experts. The Ukrainian crisis was just a trigger for a process that was waiting to happen, says Olga Kamenchuk, an expert with VTsIOM. "Such changes in popular views do not come out of the blue."

Russians have been mentally distancing themselves from the Western model of life for some time. But the Ukrainian crisis brought forth a flurry of reactions, including solidarity with Russian-speaking "compatriots" such as Crimeans and eastern Ukrainians, the sense that a hostile West is working to surround Russia and thwart its regional interests, and vaguer yearnings for a deeper sense of national purpose.

"Whatever is happening in modern Russia is a process, not an accident, and it can be expected to unfold further," says Ms. Kamenchuk.

The Kremlin has worked hard to shape these perceptions and harness them to ensure its own political survival. Some basic concepts of the new patriotism have been initially expressed by Putin, then amplified by the vast state propaganda machine, which dominates what most Russians see and hear.

They include the notion of the "Russian World," whose geography extends beyond Russia's borders to embrace people whose language, culture, and mindset - though not necessarily ethnicity - are Russian, such as Crimeans, Abkhazians, Transdnistrians, and quite a few other far-flung groups.

The assertion that Russia has a responsibility to protect such populations, and perhaps gather them back to the Motherland, has set nerves jangling around Eastern Europe. Another, also originating with Putin, is the claim that liberals, gays, and other "Westernized" Russians represent a "fifth column" that threatens to subvert Russian society from within.

"For Russian mass opinion, the appeal to force is very popular. Force increases respect," says Alexei Grazhdankin, deputy director of the Levada Center. "Russians easily accept that the West's antagonism toward our country is based on pure hostility. Even if living standards are worsening, they don't doubt the official explanation that it's due to 'enemy action' and not our own policies. Basically, Russians have always wanted to live in a strong country, and they are prepared to pay a price for that."

The limits of patriotic sentiments

But while Russians may be more patriotic than ever in their hearts, most have yet to express that patriotism through action. Attempts to convince Russians to actually join patriotic organizations and stage huge, Soviet-style pro-Kremlin street demonstrations, have not proven to be so successful.

Nikolai Starikov is a writer and organizer of the apparently independent Anti-Maidan movement, which seeks to raise patriotic consciousness and actively oppose any sign of Ukrainian-style, pro-democracy revolution in Russia.

He presided over a small demonstration of his supporters outside the US embassy, on a blustery April afternoon in Moscow. About 50 protesters, mainly university students, held up banners decrying NATO expansion and "US interference" in Ukraine.

"Our American partners have unleashed a war inside the Russian World and at Russia's frontiers. They do not conceal their plans to change the regime in Russia," he says.

But most Muscovites, hurrying by in the late winter snowstorm, seemed completely oblivious. It was a tiny turnout - though the Anti-Maidan movement debuted in February with a march of about 35,000 supporters through downtown Moscow - and the entire group folded their banners and hurried away after about 15 minutes.

"It's difficult to organize people, so that they get together" Mr. Starikov laments. "Public opinion is changeable."

In fact, the Kremlin directly sponsored several youth movements to oppose any domestic pro-democracy revolt following the 2004 "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, including Nashi and the Young Guard, but despite the infusion of considerable official resources, those attempts petered out after a few years leaving little trace behind.

A massive Red Square rally in March to commemorate the annexation of Crimea, led by Putin personally and themed "We Are Together!", was slightly marred by social media postings showing hundreds of participants, mainly young people, lining up later to receive their payouts.

'A time of great opportunity'?

"Of the two pillars of the current nationalist consensus, one is transient. That is the extremely broad support for Putin, but Putin will not be forever, right?" says Ms. Lipman. "The other is too negative. Anti-Western sentiment may be deep and genuine, but being anti-Western does nothing to help shape a sense of who we are."

Melikhov, the businessman, has a tentative answer to that.

"We should use this situation, and all this energy," he says. "I've never seen a time when people felt so consolidated and ready to be constructive. For me, patriotism means to go out and build something, improve my business, help others to start something. This could be a time of great opportunity for our country, and ourselves."

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 #15
http://warontherocks.com
December 23, 2015
The Seven Deadly Sins of Russia Analysis
By Michael Kofman
Michael Kofman is an Analyst at the CNA Corporation and a Fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute. Previously he served as Program Manager at National Defense University. The views expressed here are his own.

As the clock counts down to the end of another tumultuous and difficult year of dealing with Russia, the natural instinct is to look back on the battles and surprises of 2015 with an eye to making predictions for the coming year. There is material aplenty: the battle of Debaltseve, Moscow's operations in Syria, a crisis with Turkey that still burns bright. A new year offers new opportunities for prognostication: Where will Russia strike next? What is Putin thinking? What are the likely flashpoints of 2016? Instead of this traditional exercise, Russia experts should reflect on a year of discussions, briefings, round tables, merciless PowerPoint decks about hybrid war, and occasional spats in the virtual pages of outlets like War on the Rocks. What are the nagging questions, questionable assumptions, and unknowns that beset the analytical and policymaking community?

Experts and policymakers who deal with Russia are living in a high-tempo environment, keeping pace with military interventions, crises, and the frequent twists in bilateral relations. However, in any such endeavor, it is possible to learn lessons that are not true. This is my own attempt at presenting a list of questionable bits of analysis and assumptions that exist within the community. In doing so, I hope to push people to critically examine how they look at Russia. Why do we say some of these things, and more importantly why do we think them?

1. The Russian Government is Brittle. Or is it?

Presenting Vladimir Putin's regime as brittle is often analytical shorthand for arguing that his regime is dangerous in the near term, but equally likely to implode in short order, with Russia descending into turmoil and instability. Indeed, Moscow has accumulated so many domestic and foreign policy problems that it would make this a logical assessment were it not for the poor track record of such predictions. With each new outbreak in what has become an almost routine series of political, economic, or foreign policy crises, a segment of the Russia-watcher community invariably begins to make predictions of Putin's imminent demise. Unfortunately, the science of predicting regime change seems to lag significantly behind astrology. We should remember that few predicted the Soviet Union's rapid demise, the start of the Arab Spring, or anticipated the rapid fall of Victor Yanukovich in Ukraine following the start of the Maidan.

There are two ongoing case studies on the merit of such predictions. The first is Pakistan, a country that by the same theory should have collapsed long ago under the weight of its many problems. The second is North Korea, which soldiers on despite decades of predictions and estimates of the regime's imminent implosion. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates remarked on our ability to predict the nature and location of the next conflict, "our record has been perfect" given that "we've never once gotten it right." The same should be said of our ability to judge regime brittleness. The point is not that neo-Kremlinology or assessments of political stability are a waste of time, but that this is a single layer of analysis that should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Undoubtedly those who regularly predict Putin's downfall will one day be vindicated, but for planning and analytical purposes, our expectations should be tempered. The next test of political brittleness comes in 2018 when we will see how ready and willing the Russian public is to accept Putin's automatic re-election. Nobody knows what the state of the economy, currency valuation, foreign exchange reserves, oil prices, or international position of Russia will be that year.

2. The United States has a Putin Problem, not a Russia Problem. Or Does it?

The individuals in power matter, and another Russian leader may not have chosen to annex Crimea or invade Ukraine in response to the Maidan's victory. That being said, the lingering debate on whether the United States has a Putin problem or a Russia problem is an unsettled one. If one assumes that the real problem is Putin's regime, however long it might last, then the natural course of action is to avoid any bargains with Russia, cauterize the damage to the bilateral relationship and wait for another leader. My personal view is that whoever succeeds Vladimir Putin will not prove to be all that different, and will likely follow a similar policy path.

Russian history suggests that Putin is anything but an aberration in leadership, pursuing security dilemmas in the same manner of many previous occupants of the Kremlin. Seeing Russia's security space as a zero-sum game and securing it by limiting the sovereignty of its neighbors is almost canon for Russian foreign policy (as it was for Soviet policy). We should ask if Putin's foreign policy is fundamentally so different from that of Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first democratic leader, or if Russia was simply too weak during Yeltsin's rule to challenge the post-Cold War security arrangements in Europe. In early 2014, Henry Kissinger warned Washington not to fixate on Putin when he wrote that "For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy, it is an alibi for the absence of one."

Yeltsin too believed in the application of force to achieve desired political ends in Russia and on its periphery. Examples are found among Russian interventions in Transnistria and Tajikistan in 1992 and Abkhazia in 1993, the use of tanks to suppress a constitutional crisis in Moscow, the First Chechen War in 1994-96, and the Russian paratrooper deployment to seize Pristina International Airport in 1999 ahead of NATO's deployment in Kosovo. In retrospect, that administration was not short on military gambits, complaints about NATO expansion, or gripes with U.S. military interventions. The character of Yeltsin's government was quite different from Putin's regime, but arguably it was under his leadership in the 1990s that Russia began and ended its brief flirtation with democracy. In truth, we have Yeltsin's presidency to thank for Putin.

Putin's view of the world may have evolved during his rule, but there is little evidence that we should expect his successor to travel a different path. Thus far, there is nothing to suggest that the next Russian leader, when faced with a similar international and regional environment will not attempt to engage the West, leave disappointed and revert to the ruthless pursuit of Russian national interest. Another question seldom raised is whether U.S. policy towards Russia would truly change if its troublesome leader were to disappear tomorrow.

3. Moscow Cannot Keep This Up. Or Can it?

Current discourse on Russia's economic frailty folds into the broader discussion on whether or not Moscow can sustain the current state of confrontation. In other words, how long can Moscow keep this up? The underlying question is whether Russia will cease being a problem in the near- to mid-term by succumbing to its economic woes. The narrative that Russia will run out of money is prevalent in the West, even though Moscow's foreign reserves have both stabilized and shown a modest rebound in recent months. The bigger question is why do we talk about Russia as though it was a bank or a company? Did Russia go out of business after the 1998 default?

What is the actual connection between Western security considerations vis-a-vis Russia, its foreign and national security policy, and the amount of money it has on hand? Putin announced ambitious military reforms in 2009, when the price of oil fell to $35 per barrel. Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014 even though the Russian economy was clearly entering a recession in late 2013. Looking further back, Russians persevered through the financial default and currency crisis of 1998, many going the better part of a year without salaries. Putin was anointed as Yeltsin's successor following this economic carnage, and in the aftermath launched the Second Chechen War in 1999, a prolonged conventional and counterinsurgency campaign.

This discussion begs a more essential question as to whether or not the economy has ever been a foundation of Russian power in the international system. In a previous article for War on the Rocks, I argued that Russia has often appeared to be the sick man of Europe, technologically backwards, with a lackluster economy, and a political system that consistently lags behind the needs of its society. That being said, despite Western fears to the contrary, the Soviet Union was never a superpower by virtue of being a serious economic competitor to the United States, let alone the West, at best attaining 57 percent of America's GNP in the late 1960s before falling behind.

Today, plenty of senior U.S. officials consider Russia to be a strategic threat and a serious opponent to NATO even though its GDP is barely a tenth of America's. In a recent interview discussing Russia, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work applied Mearsheimer's definition of a great power to Moscow, highlighting the return of great power politics in the international system. Granted, he said this was a narrow lens, but if the United States considers Russia to be a great power (or regional power with a big nuclear arsenal) when its economy represents a mere 3.3 percent of global GDP, then the connection between economic fundamentals of power and Russia's position in the international system merits further discussion.

4. Russia Cannot Sustain Military Operations. Or Can it?

Following closely the discussion of economic weakness is a general sentiment that Russia is unable to sustain military operations due to financial or force constraints. Going back to early 2015, the notion that Russia's armed forces are tied down or "stuck" in Ukraine seems to have dissipated. The merit of such estimates was cast into doubt when, in September of this year, Russia was simultaneously sustaining its deployment in Ukraine, conducting the expensive strategic exercise Center 2015, and deploying an expeditionary operation to Syria. I too was wrong in arguing that logistical and financial constraints would limit Moscow's involvement in Syria given its lack of assets to sustain expeditionary operations.

Much to my own surprise, Russia surged sea lift by reflagging Turkish commercial ships to support its increasing troop presence and base expansions. For Moscow, necessity is the mother of invention, whereas for the United States it is usually the mother of procurement. Russia also found plenty of funding to test expensive land attack cruise missiles of almost every variety. In a recent press conference, Putin showed no signs that economic constraints would impact military operations. Instead, it seems Russia can sustain this and all other lines of effort for at least a few years. At 4.2 percent of GDP, or 3.3 trillion rubles, Russia's defense budget is the highest it has been since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Too often we trade in our analytical expertise for an accountant's glasses, as though we could count the Russian Ministry of Defense's money or its available troops better than it can. On the issue of sustainment of military operations we need a dose of analytical humility.

5. Russia is Still a Power in Decline. Or is it?

I fundamentally believe that Russia is a power in structural decline, but increasingly I wonder about the relevance of that assessment. It seems with each year we can infer less and less from such a statement. Celeste Wallander and Eugene Rumer, two longtime Russia experts whom I hold in the highest regard, once wrote:

"Despite several years of economic growth and a new dynamic leader, Russia remains a power in decline. Neither its recent economic success nor its vigorous leadership is sufficient to make up for the long-term losses the country has suffered or to compensate for the contemporary shortcomings that belie key elements of Russian power."

The only problem with this remarkable piece in The Washington Quarterly is that it was published in late 2003. Roughly a decade later, President Obama similarly opined that Russia is a "regional power" acting out of "weakness." Many of Russia's underlying weaknesses were as true then as they are now, but if Russia is declining, it is doing so very slowly, and its leadership does not accept such a predestined fate. As improbable as it may be, absent a sudden Russian collapse, at some point we may be forced to admit that Russia is declining so slowly the country might just be muddling through.

6. Demography Will Determine Russia's Fate. Or Will it?

Russia's demographic problems are commonly referenced as one of the drivers of its supposedly assured structural decline. Analysts often mention demography to either blithely support the notion that Russia will simply cease to be a problem for the West in the long term, or worriedly speculate that the country will become dangerously unstable. But what might Russia's demographics truly determine? Will Russia somehow be less of a strategic threat or a concern for the United States if it has a smaller population? It is almost certain that Russia will have enough manpower to maintain 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons, along with a conventional force to overmatch any of its neighbors, save China. Perhaps counterintuitively, in the short term, Russia's armed forces have steadily increased in size from roughly 667,000-700,000 in 2012 to 900,000 today.

When considering long-term alternative futures it is worth noting that Russia's economy and national budget is inexorably dependent on energy and resource extraction. These are industries that are not labor-intensive. At the same time, Russia is the beneficiary of a large labor influx from former Soviet Republics, often making it the third- or second-highest recipient of migrants in the world. Can Russia nationalize such labor at the cost of internal social cohesion? How much will its government budget truly suffer following a labor force contraction? Is it even fair to assume that warfare or similar state tasks will remain manpower-intensive 30 years from now? Are Russia's demographic problems fundamentally different from those of other developed states, including many U.S. allies? It strikes me that Russia's demographic decline is more of an open-ended question than a definitive statement on the future of the country.

7. For Putin, It's All About Regime Survival. Or is it?

Moscow's annexation of Crimea, invasion of Ukraine, and launch of operations in Syria are sometimes explained as the throes of a falling political system engaged in a "survival project." The underlying theory unifying these actions is regime survival, brilliantly advocated by Lilia Shevtsova in a number of articles and op-eds. The problem with this approach is that regime survival circularly explains everything and absolutely nothing at the same time: There is no political regime on earth that is not interested in its survival. Regime survival is a constant motivation for many, if not all, political systems and politicians. It is so fungible an analytical approach that it lends itself useful to explaining any and all policy choices by Putin.

At its core, this argument arbitrarily takes the domestic political outcomes of Moscow's actions, such as high approval ratings at home, or a resurgent sense of nationalism, and moves them back in time to become the primary objectives of foreign and national security policy. That could be true, but it seems impossible to prove or disprove. Regime survival may not be an incorrect explanation of Moscow's motives, but it is certainly incomplete as an analysis of the real sources of Russian decision-making.

Russia Analysis in Perspective

In my own narrow lane of Russian military analysis, there is always room for a more balanced, informed, and nuanced understanding of Russia. Perhaps the greatest woe of discussions on Russian military, strategy, and decision-making (other than debates on hybrid warfare) is the constant seesaw between two extremes. Too often, we are engaged in an asinine debate as to whether Russia's military is five feet tall or 12 feet tall. Assessments tend to track more closely with where one sits in the policymaking or national security establishment, versus where the Russian military actually is, and what it can do. Here I believe the starting point should always be Bismarck's observation that "Russia is never as strong as she looks nor as weak as she looks." When it comes to decision-making analysis, Putin is regularly cast in stark terms as either a brilliant strategist, outfoxing the West at every turn, or completely incompetent without any notion of what he will do next.

Perchance the broadest and most vexing question for U.S. decision-makers and experts today is this: How do we deter Russia? It is as vague as it is recurrent. The short answer is that the United States does deter Russia, which is why we're all still here 70 years after nuclear weapons were first used. A more analytically interesting - and politically valuable - question would be how the United States should manage great-power competition in the international system and keep confrontation with Russia from escalating into war. If crises are inevitable among the major players, and it seems they are, then managing escalation dynamics is paramount. When faced with a problem, bureaucracies have a predilection for pursuing activity and confusing it for achievement, to paraphrase Fareed Zakaria. To better structure a policy or a strategy towards Russia we should confront our own underlying assumptions and the merits of prevailing narratives, and more rigorously seek to fill existing gaps in analysis.

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 #16
The National Interest
December 14, 2015
Putin's Popularity, Explained
By Matthew Dal Santo
Matthew Dal Santo is a Danish Research Council post-doctoral fellow at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, where he is leading a project on history and identity in modern Russia. This article was originally published on the Interpreter.

If nothing else, Vladimir Putin is a great political survivor. When protests broke out in Moscow four years ago against his return to the presidency, many in the West wrote him off (a widely cited work proposed to tell How Russia Fell in and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin). However, on December 3 Putin delivered yet another annual 'State of the Nation' address as President of Russia. Rarely has he been so popular.

Even today, Western commentators often give the impression that they've 'seen the future and the future is not Putin.' But surveys by Russia's independent Levada Centre provide little evidence of a brewing people's rebellion. On the contrary, the Kremlin is one of only three institutions that more Russians trust than distrust (the army is at 64 percent, and the Church and other religious organizations are at 53 percent). Fully 80 percent of respondents said they 'completely trust' Putin.
How should this be understood?

Mainstream Western media usually cast Putin's popularity as the result of Russians' heavy reliance on government-controlled television, i.e. 'brain-washing.' But such a one-sided view may misrepresent the relationship between power and public opinion. Tellingly, only 34 percent of Russians say they trust the media.

The 'brain-washing' theory also misses what is possibly the most significant feature of modern Russia: for the first time since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union (if not the 1917 revolution) government policies reflect the attitudes and opinions of the conservative majority of Russians rather than a Westernizing, neo-liberal (or Marxist) elite.

Since 1996, the Levada Centre has been asking Russians what they want of their presidents. Their expectations have changed little. In 2012 (that is, even before the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis), Russians' top four priorities were: restoring Russia's great-power status (57 percent versus 54 percent in 1996); law and order (52 percent versus 58 percent); a fairer distribution of the national wealth (49 percent versus 37 percent); and increasing the state's role in the economy (37 percent, unchanged).

Such attitudes reflect continuing nostalgia for elements of the Soviet system and dissatisfaction with the Westernizing path followed after the USSR's collapse. In 2012, only a minority (16 percent, up from 13 percent in 1996) believed Russia should continue to pursue the liberal reforms of the Yeltsin era and even fewer (5 percent down from 6 percent) thought convergence with the West something to be desired.

Today, however, 70 percent of Russians say they're proud of their country, whereas less than half did so a decade ago. Significantly, since 2014, 68 percent of Russians believe their country to have regained great power status.

Overwhelming support for 'buying Russian'-above all, when it comes to groceries (91 percent)-confirms consensus around import substitution (a self-imposed response to Western sanctions) as a long overdue helping hand to Russian industry and, especially, farms.

Of course, this coincidence of government policies and public opinion doesn't make Russia a democracy. But such polls frequently function as democracy's proxy in the West, so why not in Russia?

The main point is, however, that Russia's 'conservative turn' since Putin's return to the Kremlin in March 2012-widely deplored in the West as a creeping authoritarianism with roots only in the wiles of Putin's mind-may be closer to the world view of Russia's conservative and patriotic majority than most Western governments would care to admit.

In foreign and economic policy, Russia's post-Soviet government may never have cleaved as close to the views of the majority as it does now. That's the view of Igor Okunev, a vice-dean at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, whom I spoke with recently in Moscow.

"Historically, the Russian government has always been more liberal than the Russian population. Unlike Gorbachev and Yeltsin, what I think Putin has decided to do is accept this and use it as the basis for his support. That's been his strategy since the protests of 2011. That was when he decided to abandon the liberal minority and embrace the conservative majority."

Mikhail Remizov, director of Russia's Institute of National Strategy, shares this view, saying in a recent interview: "Russian democracy must by definition be conservative, populist, nationalist and protectionist." Until 2012, he said, the conservatives "who really enjoy the sympathies of the majority of the nation occupied the place of an opposition. Real power remained in the hands of the neo-liberal elite that had run the country since the 1990."

This has now changed. "Putin is falsely presented as a nationalist," said Remizov. "In a Russian context, he's a sovereigntist. But in general, the agenda of the Kremlin today is formed by the opposition of the 2000s: the conservative, patriotic majority."

Yet Western governments often treat Russia's minority liberal opposition as the avant-garde of a hidden liberal majority. To Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, however, this is betting on the wrong horse. "This isn't just about Putin," he told a group I was with in Moscow. "It's about the nature of society as a whole. Putin has been able to rule this country in an authoritarian way with the consent of the governed." The imagined liberal majority looking to the West for emancipation doesn't exist. Russian liberals, he said, "have the same problem the revolutionaries have always had in Russia: they look down on the rest of the country as dupes."

But Trenin is just as pessimistic about the ability of Russia's present rulers to address the country's underlying problems. "We will have to expect some sort of upheaval. The dams will have to be broken somehow."

For all his popularity, then, has Putin returned Russia to its pre-revolutionary impasse?

In tsarist times, a bourgeois, liberal elite eager to imitate Western Europe socially, politically and economically clashed with the conservative and collectivist world view of an Orthodox peasantry (and their educated Slavophile patrons, most famously Dostoyevsky) unwilling to see Russia renounce its distinctive ways.

Between them, the Imperial government arbitrated ham-fistedly until, in 1917, the First World War swept it away, and a disciplined band of revolutionaries seized power in the name of a different Western ideology, Marxism.

Some think revolution will be Russia's fate again. Others (notably Chatham House expert Richard Sakwa) believe Russia's path to democracy lies in modifying the system that Putin has created. Indeed, the country's very consensus behind its president could mean that the next step in such a 'democratic evolution' is closer than we think. "This could be an ideal moment for Putin to experiment with political competition," says Remizov, "precisely because of the strength of his position."

All the same, Western governments shouldn't have too many illusions. If Russians' present sentiments are anything to go by, the catch-22 of Russian democracy, when it arrives, may be that it looks rather like Putin's Russia.

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 #17
Financial Times
June 1, 2015
Europe's problem is with Russia, not Putin
Moscow is not a rising revolutionary force but one seeking to restore power
By Thomas Graham
The writer is a former senior director for Russia on the US National Security Council staff

The west acts as if it had a Vladimir Putin problem. In fact it has a Russia problem. The Russian president stands within a long tradition of Russian thinking. His departure would fix nothing. Any plausible successor would pursue a similar course, if perhaps with a little less machismo.

The Russia problem is not new. It emerged 200 years ago, at the end of the Napoleonic period, with the opening up of what we would today call a values gap. In the 19th century Russia maintained an autocratic regime as Europe moved towards liberal democracy.

Yet Russia remained a great power, essential to European security. How to protect Europe in the presence of a powerful state that is alien in worldview? That was the problem then, as now.

European states seek security in balance; Russia seeks it in strategic depth. That view grows out of its location on the vast, nearly featureless great Eurasian plain, across which armies have moved with ease.

Historically, Russia has pushed its borders outward, as far away as possible from its heartland. It did not stop when it reached defensible physical borders, but only when it ran into powerful countervailing states. Where the west saw imperialism, Moscow saw the erection of defences.

Over time, resistance from the Germanic powers in the west, Great Britain and then the US in the south, and China and Japan in the east, came to define Russia's zone of security as north central Eurasia, the former Soviet space.

For Moscow, states there face a choice not between independence and Russian domination, but between domination by Russia or a rival. That struggle,
Moscow believes, is playing out in Ukraine.

Also out of security concerns, Russia has opposed the domination of Europe by a single power and remains uncomfortable with greater European unity. The reason is easy to grasp: Russia can be the equal of Great Britain, France, or Germany, but it can never be the equal of a united Europe, which in population, wealth, and power would dwarf it as the US does today. Driving wedges between European states, and between Europe and the US, might forestall the emergence of a serious threat.

Russia's fears are amplified by a sense of vulnerability. Its economy is stagnating, its technology is no longer cutting-edge, and outside forces - China, the west and radical Islam - are challenging it in the former Soviet space. The temptation is to act tough to cover up the doubts by, for example, flaunting nuclear capabilities.

After more than 20 years of hope that Russia could be brought into the west-led international order, the re-emergence of the Russia problem has shocked the west. But the threat is limited. This is not a rising revolutionary force but a declining state seeking to restore its power.

It can be managed. One way is to revitalise the European project. That means dealing vigorously with the issues fuelling anti-EU forces - the democratic deficit, immigration and inequality.

To be sure, steps such as a Nato presence in the Baltics and robust planning for hybrid-war contingencies are necessary, but the west needs to avoid over-militarising its response to what is largely a political challenge.

At the same time, more should be done to help Ukraine repair its economy and build a competent state as a barrier to Russia's assault on European norms and unity.

Yet containment will not work in our globalised, increasingly multipolar world , as it did during the cold war. The west cannot contain one of the world's largest economies, and it is geopolitical malfeasance to weaken unduly a power critical to the equilibrium we hope to create out of today's turbulence, particularly in Asia.

The hard truth is that Ukraine cannot be rebuilt without Russia. It is simply too reliant on Russia economically, and Russia has too many levers of influence inside Ukraine, for it to be otherwise. Containment has to be leavened with accommodation. Finding the right balance is the challenge.

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 #18
The Independent (UK)
May 4, 2015
Once again, the West fails to understand Russia
Western leaders are staying away from this year's Victory Day, which mourns the loss of 20 million Russians who died to defeat Nazi Germany
By Mary Dejevsky
One of the country's most respected commentators on Russia, the EU and the US, Mary Dejevsky has worked as a foreign correspondent all over the world, including Washington, Paris and Moscow. She is now the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent and regularly appears on radio and television. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham.

Why are Western countries by and large so indulgent of the anniversaries that contribute to their own nationhood, and so insensitive towards those of others?
On Saturday, President Vladimir Putin will take the salute at a grand military parade in Moscow's Red Square. Victory Day - 9 May is when Russia commemorates its part in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany - is at once the most solemn and overtly patriotic occasion. It is one of the few public holidays to have made the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet calendar intact.

Victory Day was a highlight of the year I spent as an exchange student in Voronezh - a city rarely mentioned without the accompanying phrase "the last front before Stalingrad". Preparations took weeks: placards were painted; bunting and flags adorned the streets. It was a huge honour to bear the university standard. Food stocks in the shops miraculously improved.

Reporting from Moscow over a decade later, I recall the barriers piled up around Red Square, the overnight arrival of the tanks and, above all, the suffocating stench of their fuel, as the iron monsters waited to join the triumphal formation. The Victory Day parade was something to cling to, even as the Soviet Union neared collapse.

This year's commemoration will be second to none. As the 70th, it is a round-number anniversary. As with the plethora of Second World War anniversaries being commemorated this year, this is probably the last time that there will be anything like a quorum of those who actually participated in or witnessed these events able to attend.

Then, of course, there is the trickier, most contemporary and specifically Russian, aspect. This year is an opportunity for the Kremlin to demonstrate that Russia, as a great power, is back. The advance of the decadent West has been halted in Ukraine and the sacred territory of Crimea has been returned to the motherland.

All this is why Western leaders - who went to Moscow en masse for Victory Day's 60th anniversary - are staying away. They do not wish to associate with Putin - certainly not while Ukraine's very existence as a sovereign state is under threat. They especially do not want to appear at a Russian military occasion, which could be seen as signalling acceptance of the events of the past 18 months.

Strictly speaking there is no Western boycott, and there are degrees of absence. The Czech president will go to Moscow, but not attend the parade. Angela Merkel will arrive a day later and lay a wreath - an act that might anyway seem more appropriate for a German Chancellor at a wartime anniversary. As for the UK, who knows who the prime minister will be by Saturday? Declining the invitation was excusable, regardless of Ukraine.

Some may see the attendance list, headed by the Chinese and Indian leaders - but not by North Korea's Kim Jong-un, who has just cried off - followed by the autocrats of Central Asia, as evidence of where Russia's foreign policy is now heading. Maybe. But the Kremlin's response to the Western stay-away suggests otherwise. It has been peevish, but also shot through with incomprehension. For Russians, what is happening in Ukraine and Russia's part in the victory of 1945 are qualitatively and quantitatively quite different things.

Each 9 May, Russia does not just celebrate victory over Nazi Germany; it mourns the loss of more than 20 million war dead, and it reconsecrates the idea of Russian suffering to save Europe. In conversation with Russians in recent weeks, I have had to field a stream of injured questions along the lines of "has the West ever understood Russia's sacrifice?" and: "Will the West ever appreciate it?" The notion that Ukraine is a real stumbling block here is beyond comprehension; the stay-away is rather seen as further proof that Russia will never, ever, be considered "one of us".

Countries keep memories alive, often unrealistically flattering ones, for many reasons. Last June, in a recognition of the wartime alliance, Putin was controversially invited to join the Allied commemoration of the Normandy landings, at a time when Russia's seizure of Crimea was even fresher in the memory than it is now. But this offered an opportunity for Western leaders and for Putin to speak their minds, while preserving dignity on either side. One result was the first formal meeting between Putin and Ukraine's newly elected president - without which Ukraine's situation might be even worse than it is today.

To join Putin on the podium for Saturday's parade would not be politic; but to dine in the Kremlin or take part in a wreath-laying would surely not be out of place. Most Westerners might not fear any resurgence of fascism in Ukraine, but discussion with Putin and others - whose fathers fought on that front and others - could afford an understanding of why many Russians might. In recent years, the West has missed one opportunity after another to understand how Russia's past influences its present. And here is another gone.

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 #19
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
November 2, 2015
Two Centuries of Russian Surprises -- Why Are We Surprised?
Underestimating Russia will surprise you
By Shellback
Shellback is the pseudonym of someone who started working for a NATO military structure in the Brezhnev years.

The USA/NATO has been surprised - or is stunned a better word? - by the Russian operation in Syria. The fact that it intervened; the speed with which it did it; the secrecy with which it did it; the numbers of sorties being flown; the accuracy and effectiveness of the strikes. But especially by the discovery that insignificant boats in the Caspian Sea - of all places - have a surprisingly long reach. McCain's gas station or Obama's negligible Russia couldn't possibly be expected to do such things. And, if half the rumors about Russia's "A2/AD bubble" are true, there's another huge surprise as well.

Russia, over its millennium of history, has been usually successful in war, and especially so when defeating invaders. The Mongols were eventually seen off, the Teutonic Knights sent home, the Polish-Lithuanian invaders driven out, the Swedes defeated and Napoleon and Hitler were followed home by avenging armies. The West is only faintly aware of this record: it tends to remember Russia's rare defeats like the Japanese war or World War I and, when Russia (or the USSR) wins, the common opinion in the West is that victory was really owed to factors like "General Winter" or endless manpower. In short, the Western meme is that doesn't really win, the other side loses.

This is, to put it mildly, incorrect. Dominic Lieven's book "Russia Against Napoleon" destroys the meme. The author establishes the case that the Emperor Alexander and his government foresaw that war with Napoleon was inevitable, studied how Napoleon fought and made the necessary preparations to defeat him. And defeat him they did. Fighting an army as big as the one that invaded in 1812 led by as brilliant a commander as Napoleon is never going to be easy and Alexander probably didn't envisage a battle as bloody as Borodino, so close to Moscow, to be indecisive. I'm sure nobody planned for Moscow to be occupied and burned. But, even so, Alexander held to his purpose. He knew that Napoleon's typical campaign was a swift battlefield victory, followed by negotiations, perhaps the loss of a few bits of territory, a relative or two being made into a prince, and then the gathering of the defeated power into the French camp. In short, Napoleon's expected he and Alexander would meet again when Alexander had been taught a lesson: Russia would then rejoin the "continental system" and its navy would keep the Royal Navy out of the Baltic. Something limited like that. But Alexander was fighting a different war and never came to him. Moscow burned and Napoleon gave up waiting and went home. Certainly, "General Winter" played his part, but the French retreat turned into a rout as they were driven faster and faster by the menacing proximity of the rebuilt Russian Army, harried by warmly dressed Cossack raiders with endless remounts and enraged partisans roused into the first Great Patriotic War. This famous graph tells the story: four hundred thousand went in, ten thousand came out and the Russian army followed Napoleon all the way back to Paris. Lieven explains the planning and the enormous logistics operation which sustained a large army all the 1500 miles from Moscow to Paris. Very far indeed from the Western story of masses of men hurled at a freezing enemy.

In short: Alexander understood how Napoleon did things and surprised him with proper preparation and a full strategy. This, I believe, is the essence of the "Russian way in warfare". Know and understand the enemy and surprise him. We have just seen this again in Syria. And, for that matter, over and over again in the Ukraine crisis where nothing has gone the way Nuland & Co intended. And in Ossetia in 2008.

While the First World War was a disaster for Russia, surprise and intelligence was present. Germany's plan to deal with enemies both east and west assumed Russia would take so long to mobilize that the bulk of the German Army could be sent west to knock France out - as it had done in 1870 - and return in time to meet the Russians. The Russians, who perhaps knew this, attacked early and threw the Germans into consternation. Their attack, however, went wrong: the Russian commanders were incompetent, the German commanders weren't and the Germans were saved. Intelligence and surprise were there, but the execution was bungled. A second intelligence/surprise was the Brusilov Offensive in 1916 (again something not much known in the West). The attack was notable for two innovations later adopted in the Western front: a short, intense, accurate artillery bombardment immediately followed up by attacks of small specially trained shock troops. Very different indeed from the synchronous Somme offensive on the with its prolonged bombardment and the slow advance of thousands of heavily burdened soldiers. But, in the end, Russia was overwhelmed by the strains of the first industrial war and undermined by German and Austrian subterfuges and collapsed. Intelligence and surprise weren't enough.

Intelligence and surprise returned in the Soviet period. In the Far East we saw the perfect combination of surprise in 1939 with the annihilation of a Japanese army at the battle of Khalkin-Gol and intelligence in 1941 with Richard Sorge's discovery that Japan was turning south. This intelligence allowed Stavka to transfer divisions, that the Germans had no idea existed, to Moscow and surprise them with the first Soviet victory at the Battle of Moscow. Certainly Hitler surprised Stalin with his attack (although he shouldn't have because Soviet intelligence picked up many warning signs) but that appears to have been the last German surprise of the war. From then on it was the Soviets who foresaw German plans and surprised them time and time again - the counter attack at Stalingrad and the entire Battle of Kursk being two of the most dramatic examples of the Soviets preparing for what their intelligence told them was coming and achieving complete surprise with their counter-attack. Again, surprise and intelligence, almost all of it on the Soviet side. (Which should make one wonder what Reinhard Gehlen, head of the German Army's Soviet intelligence section had to sell the Americans in 1945, shouldn't it?)

So then, Syria is just the latest example of something that has been present in Russian and Soviet war-fighting doctrine for at least two centuries.

A good piece of advice, then: if you are contemplating a war (even a non-shooting war) against Russia you'd better assume that they have a pretty good idea of what you are doing but that you have very little idea of what they are doing.

It's much more likely that you will be surprised than you will surprise them.

Lots of people in lots of places over lots of years have underestimated Russia. Most of them have regretted it.

Is there anything in the last couple of years in the West's anti-Russia campaign that would cause anyone to think otherwise?

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 #20
Counterpunch.org
November 13, 2015
Perpetrators Honoring Their Victims, or An Incomprehensible Logic Concerning Donbas "Terrorists"
By HALYNA MOKRUSHYNA
Halyna Mokrushyna is currently enrolled in the PhD program in Sociology at the University of Ottawa and a part-time professor. She holds a doctorate in linguistics and MA degree in communication. Her academic interests include: transitional justice; collective memory; ethnic studies; dissent movement in Ukraine; history of Ukraine; sociological thought. Her doctoral project deals with the memory of Stalinist purges in Ukraine. In the summer of 2013 she travelled to Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Donetsk to conduct her field research. She is currently working on completing her thesis. She can be reached at halouwins@gmail.com.

A monument to the insurgents and civilians who died in the war with the Ukrainian army in 2014-15 was solemnly opened on November 4, 2015 in Debaltsevo, a small city on the territory of the Donetsk People's Republic. The ceremony was presided by the leaders of the DPR, the head of the Debaltsevo city administration and deputies to the DPR legislature. Many hundreds of local citizens took part.

Alexander Zakharchenko, the head of the DPR, gave an address to the ceremony in which he stated that the Donetsk People's Republic should honour those who defended with arms their city and their children. A solemn liturgy was served by the provost of the Alexander Nevski Orthodox Church of Debaltsevo. He stated, "We are gathered here, on the Day of Our Lady of Kazan, for a prayer to honour our dead warriors who sacrificed their lives for our land."

The plaque on the monument reads: "Eternal memory to the brothers and sisters who gave their lives for the liberation of Debaltsevo from Ukrainian aggressors, 2014-2015". The news is reported by the Donetsk News Agency (DAN). It refers to Debaltsevo as a "hero city" for having resisted an "occupation" by Ukrainian aggressors, a title reminiscent of the Soviet tradition of bestowing the title on cities that became centres of active fighting against Nazi invaders during WWII.

The pro-Ukraine information agency OstroV, which publishes analysis of events in Donetsk and Lugansk in Russian language, published a short item on the November 4 ceremony which was taken from DAN. OstroV calls DAN a "separatist" agency. The item on OstroV's website has a telling title: "The height of cynicism! Ringleaders of the "DPR" opened in Debaltsevo a monument to civilians that they themselves killed brutally". Then the agency proceeds to explain that while "liberating" (its own quotation marks) Debaltsevo from the Ukrainian army, the rebels shelled the city with heavy weaponry, killing a large number of civilians.

Quoting U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, the OstroV agency explains that about 500 corpses of civilians were found in basements of Debaltsevo. The victims were said to be seeking cover from the shelling of their "liberators" (quotation marks by the agency), that is DPR forces. OstroV does not say when Power made this claim, nor on what occasion. It also quotes her as saying that civilians were risking their lives by either hiding in basements or fleeing the city because roads were also shelled by the "terrorists" of the DPR. One wonders why OstroV does not quote Ukrainian sources and instead relies on the US representative for finding out what is happening in Ukraine.

The short OstroV short article states that the leaders who spoke at the solemn opening of the Debaltsevo monument on November 4 "traditionally shifted the responsibility for their crimes onto Ukraine".

"The monument... is located in a public promenade adjacent to the occupation 'city administration' of Debaltsevo", informs OstroV. Again, quotes around the "city administration" and the qualification "occupation" clearly show the agency's interpretation of the DPR as "terrorists" who took Debaltsevo by force and hold now all the citizens as hostages. Not only do the terrorists blame the Ukrainian army for their crimes, they purportedly shell their own positions because they do not give a damn for the lives of civilians! These terrorists are so wicked and cynical in their perfidity that they even erect a monument to their own victims!

The authors of the OstroV website report did not bother to explain why the DPR "ringleaders" would engage in such an act of commemoration. Indeed, why did they stage a commemoration?

When and where in human history have perpetrators erected monuments to their victims? There are innumerable instances of commemoration of victims by their relatives, social groups representing the victimized strata of the population, or the state claiming to represent them. But I have never heard of an instance where an executioner would erect a monument to his own victims, going so far as to call them "brothers and sisters"! But these Russia-backed terrorists from the DPR are so evil that their cruelty is inhumane and transcends our common understanding of human motivation. Or so we are expected to believe.

That is the only plausible explanation of the DPR leaders' act from the OstroV point of view. The publication does not spell this out, but it is easily discernible from the way in which it presented the news.

The aforementioned title of the OstroV report strikes me as yet another example of the dehumanization of Donbas residents by the Ukrainian government and much of the country's media. I analyzed this phenomenon in some detail in my presentation at the 2015 annual conference of the Canadian Association of Slavic Studies and at the inaugural conference in Winnipeg in September 2015 of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG) at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in September 2015. You can read my presentation here at the GERG conference website.

Pro-Western, "civilized" Ukrainians deny the DPR insurgents their humanity. It is made crystal clear in Ukrainian media interpretations who is the good and who is the bad. Pro-Western Ukrainians who claim to respect human life and freedom of opinion cannot accept any suggestion that the DPR leaders and the population of the DPR sincerely mourn their fellow combatants and citizens who died in the civil war in Donbas. People on all sides died from the shelling of the Ukrainian army and, yes, also from shells fired by DPR forces. This was a war in which casualties were unavoidable, tragic as that was. But it is exceedingly rare to find reported in Ukrainian media that this civil war was unleashed by Kyiv government and brought to the Donbas homeland precisely because Euromaidan Kyiv could not tolerate dissenting opinion there.

OstroV's coverage of the opening of a monument in Debaltsevo is an example of such blindness and non-respect of the Other. It cannot see that the DPR is a legitimate expression of political self-determination, not a "terrorist" project imposed on the population by "Russia-backed rebels". OstroV does not mention that some 500 people were present at the November 4 ceremony in Debaltsevo, and that after the opening of the new monument, the procession then went to the Memorial of Eternal Glory consecrated to those who died in the Great Patriotic War. On that day, for the first time in many years, the Eternal Flame was relit thanks to the efforts of the local authorities. The head of the DPR, Alexander Zakharchenko, spoke and gave thanks to the veterans still alive and those who died for passing to the generations that follow them the spirit and strength with which they fought in the Great Patriotic War.

The speech by Zakharchenko is but one of numerous official proclamations of the DPR which trace a continuity between the present-day combatants of Donbas and their grandfathers and great grandfathers who defeated Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War. As the Soviet army fought 70 years ago, today the DPR army is fighting against Ukrainian extreme nationalists who were Nazi allies in the past and who now want to invade Donbas and to destroy its historic memory. Present-day civilians and insurgents to whose memory the monument in Debaltsevo is dedicated died for victory in this fight.

In today's Maidan Ukraine, celebrations of the Soviet victory in WWII are fading away. In the memory politics of the new Euromaidan Ukraine, the notion of the Great Patriotic War is increasingly called a myth. And yet, this "myth" remains a fundamental building block of the collective identity of millions of Ukrainian citizens. The heroism and patriotism of Soviet Ukrainian soldiers, praised in history manuals and glorified in song, is now dissolved into an interpretation of Ukraine as having been caught between twin evils -Nazi Germany and the Stalin-led Soviet Union (read present-day Russia). New commemoration rituals have being created in Ukraine which are copied from European habits with little or no bearance on Ukrainian history. This year, in addition to marking May 9, traditional Victory Day in Ukraine, May 8 was officially marked for the first time in Ukraine's history as a day of WW2 memory and reconciliation.

I doubt very much that this new commemoration date can assist reconciliation for a country that is divided not only by the memory of the past but also by divergent visions of the future. Donbas does not want to integrate into Europe, as many in the rest of Ukraine seemingly want. And for that dissenting opinion, pro-European Ukraine is dehumanizing Donbas. As long as the Ukrainian political and intellectual elite refuse to recognize Donetsk and Lugansk residents as human beings with views and values different from their own but no less authentic, there will be no peace in Ukraine.

Notes:

(1) Debaltsevo is a small city, population 25,000, in the east of the Donetsk oblast of Ukraine, near the border with the Luhansk oblast. It is a strategically vital road and railway junction. The city became the location of very heavy fighting between Ukrainian armed forces and militias and the DPR insurgency in the summer of 2014. Ukraine succeeded in capturing it for a time. In January of 2015, after Ukraine had renewed a military offensive against Donetsk and Lugansk, its forces became vulnerable after they had overextended themselves in and around Debaltsevo. A counteroffensive by DPR forces succeeded in recapturing the city on February 18, 2015, destroying the occupying Ukrainian forces who suffered hundreds of casualties. This fight became known as the Battle of Debaltsevo.

(2). It is stated on the OstroV website that it is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Media Development Fund of the US Embassy to Ukraine, and the International Renaissance Foundation, whose founder and sponsor is George Soros. It is part of the Polish-Canadian Program of support for democracy, co- financed by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Polish Republic and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development of Canada.

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 #21
Fair Observer
www.fairobserver.com
December 4, 2015
Is Europe's Buffer Zone in Ukraine Keeping it Safe?
BY OLENA LENNON AND BRIAN MILAKOVSKY
Olena Lennon is an adjunct professor of Foreign Policy and Conflict Resolution at the University of New Haven. Brian Milakovsky works on humanitarian issues in eastern Ukraine. He has been living and working in Russia and Ukraine since 2009

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

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

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

MAINTAINING THE ILLUSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON THE GROUND IN DONBAS

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

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

Just give us peace.

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

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

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

PEACE IS VICTORY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 #22
www.rt.com
February 19, 2015
"Kiev govt resists only solution to Ukraine crisis- full autonomy of Donbass"

The Kiev leadership, at least PM Arseny Yatsenyuk, is resisting the only solution which can end the Ukraine conflict - full autonomy for the Donbass region, Anatol Lieven, of Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, told RT's In the Now.

RT:Last year Western governments claimed they would be able to bring prosperity and democracy to Ukraine. Could Ukrainian leaders and their foreign supporters predict war and disorder after mass protest in the country a year ago?

Anatol Lieven: No, I don't think they predicted it. Clearly the American government was trying to bring about the fall of [Viktor] Yanukovich but I don't think that they predicted what would follow. One could say that they should have predicted it, but that is a different matter. One of the striking things is that there were so many so-called experts in the West who were completely reckless and irresponsible in this regard.

RT:What do you think was the initial plan or hopes for Ukraine?

AL: The thing is that different people had different plans. When it all started America was not really involved. This was something that the EU pushed, above all by Poland, and to some extent by the EU politicians like Carl Bildt, initiated this European association agreement which was intended to block possible Ukrainian membership of the Eurasian Union. This was a new thing. The US essentially got on board later, as the crisis developed. But as the crisis developed clearly the US, or at least the US diplomats on the ground, like Victoria Nuland followed their old playbook of trying to promote what they saw was freedom, trying to create an anti-Russian regime in Ukraine. Eventually the intention was clearly to take Ukraine into NATO.

RT:How do you evaluate the job that Petro Poroshenko and Arseny Yatsenyuk are doing considering how and what has evolved in the East of Ukraine?

AL: Of course not a brilliant job at all, but then they are in a very difficult position above all economically. The Ukrainian economy is collapsing; Western aid is only enough to keep it ticking along. Ukraine is still much more dependent on Russia and of course relations with Russia have deteriorated badly. From that point of view they are in a very difficult situation. There are also strong differences between Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko. It appears that Poroshenko is considerably more moderate and pragmatic.Yatsenyuk, possibly with the encouragement of the American hardliners, is a great deal more nationalistic. The problem is that they are strongly resisting the only kind of deal, at least Yatsenyuk is, which can actually bring an end to this conflict...the full autonomy for the Donbass. They've dragged the heels and tried to block that. One could say that the separatists' leaders are doing the same thing. But clearly without an agreement on autonomy there can't be even a halfway successful end to this war from the Ukrainian point of view. Yatsenyuk seems to be fantasizing about the possibility of a military victory.

RT:What about Wednesday's retreat of Ukrainian forces from Debaltsevo? Does it mean that we're looking at the end of the war?

AL: I think that is possible. What has now been established is a much more viable frontline. Clearly as long as the Ukrainians held Debaltsevo there was going to be endless trouble. Hopefully, the pro-Russian side now has what they could see as a defensible border. Therefore, perhaps, will be willing to accept the ceasefire and go forward along the lines of autonomy. But of course that also depends on the Ukrainian government being willing to accept the present situation.

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 #23
Rossiiskaya Gazeta
August 27, 2015
Bidding Farewell to the Civil War
A nation that has not buried its perished fellow citizens cannot respect itself and move forward
By Sergei Karaganov, Doctor of History, head of the working group on historical memory at the presidential Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights

Many encouraging changes are taking place in Russia's historical memory policy, with all its contradictions, sensations and false sensations. Efforts are being made to restore the memory of the "forgotten war" (WWI), which for many years was referred to as "imperialistic." A monument has been unveiled in Moscow, to be followed by many more, and local museums are setting up relevant exhibitions.

Another major step in recreating a comprehensive picture of Russian history was taken in August 2015 when the federal government, on orders from the President, adopted a concept of state policy for perpetuating the memory of the victims of political repressions. The document was drafted by government agencies and public organizations, above all, by the presidential Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights (SPCh).

As is often the case in our country, the document did not come easy. Almost five years ago a group of enthusiasts associated with the SPCh initiated and presented a program for commemorating the victims and restoring historical memory. We were driven by several principal convictions.

First, a nation that has not buried its perished fellow citizens cannot respect itself, stand tall and go forward. Likewise, a person who has not buried his beloved ones does not deserve either self-respect or respect of other people.

Second. For all its achievements, the 20th century was one of the most terrible periods in the history of Russia. World War I, the fratricidal Civil War, and the Great Patriotic War claimed dozens of millions of lives. Plus repressions that killed not just many millions of people, but the best men and women of the country, members of the gentry, the clergy and intelligentsia - the keepers of historical memory and national identity - as well as peasants who were the backbone of the nation. They were followed by many intellectuals, administrative cadres and members of the military. Entire peoples were deported. Traditional values, faith and morals were destroyed. In point of fact, the best citizens and the best in country`s soul were systematically eliminated for several decades. Russia must part with that period.

Third, a considerable part of national history, the basis of the people's identity, was either expurgated or distorted in their minds. Restoring the memory of the victims is part of the work to be done to recreate history in its entirety.

Our document at first drew strong opposition from part of society and was attacked in mass media which for some reason called it a program of de- Stalinization even though I and my colleagues made it clear that it was a program to restore identity through respect for the memory of the fallen. Besides, we did not think it right to hold only Stalin responsible for many fellow citizens who had plunged the country into the revolution and repressions.

But the attack, obviously supported by someone influential, judging from its intensity, helped rather than harmed by making the idea more popular. It was sad though that young people, a new creative class, did not support the program four years ago. Apparently, it did not excite them. But thousands of people and about a dozen of public organizations familiar with the project, above all the International Memorial, worked with unprecedented selflessness and energy. About 800 local monuments have been erected across the country, and dozens of books and articles were published. The work of our group helped to unite many separate historical memory movements. I still cannot help smiling when I recall the first meeting we helped to organize between the heads of Memorial and the Butovo Shooting Range, who also represented the Orthodox Church. Until then both sides had commemorated their victims separately. Now they do it together. Philanthropists' donations allowed us to launch and operate the website www.istpamyat.ru, which has consolidated many sources of information concerning victims of repressions. We also drafted a commemoration program which then served as the basis for the present concept. We thought the country needed a sign of state support for the goals and objectives declared in the program that would send a signal to both bureaucrats and society.

The concept sends such a signal to all of us. There is no need to describe it here, for it can easily be found on the Internet. I will only mention its underlying principles: recognizing the continuity of the historical development of the country; acknowledging the tragic consequences of the societal split that triggered the turmoil of 1917, the Civil War, and mass political repressions; admitting the need for an objective analysis of the Soviet period's achievements and tragic chapters, including mass repressions; condemning the ideology of political terror.

At one of the meetings with the President in 2013 we suggested building a national monument to the victims of political repressions in Moscow. The President supported the idea that had been too long in coming. A contest of designs was organized, and about 300 projects were submitted. The winner will be announced soon, and the construction will start at the site selected by the Moscow city authorities at the intersection of Sakharov Avenue and the Garden Ring road. The federal government will meet part of the costs, for our state is the legal successor of the one that prosecuted and killed people. The rest will come from people's donations as a sign of personal grief for the fallen and recognition of the responsibility born by our fathers and grandfathers for the repressions they carried out.

The big and modern GULAG Museum will open in Moscow on October 30 designated as Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions. The project was initiated by the Moscow city government. The Garden of Memory has been set up at the Butovo Shooting Range, and its museum will get a new building to expand its exhibitions. Work on a bill fully rehabilitating the victims of political repressions is in its final stage.

In another encouraging development, people united in the "Last Address" public movement have installed memorial plaques on several dozen houses in Moscow and St. Petersburg to commemorate those who had lived there and been killed during repressions.

But there are still many dangerous voids in Russian historical memory. One of them is how society and the state perceive the Civil War precipitated by the split of society and its elite, its incapability and loss of responsibility for the country, with all the tragic consequences that followed. A quarter of a century ago, the majority of people in the country supported the Reds, then the Whites. It's time to understand that both were wrong by allowing the split and starting a fratricidal war. Now society is divided again, even though differently, and needs to be reminded of the dramatic results of the previous spilt and irresponsibility of elites. But most importantly, that the country and Motherland are above personal convictions and individual fates.

Spain is an example of how to bid a dignified farewell to a civil war, which was also tragic but not as disastrous as ours. It built a large memorial complex where people from both warring sides were laid to rest. On top of the memorial are a cross and an epitaph reading "They loved Spain."

It's time we put an end, at least a symbolic one, to our own Civil War that started almost a hundred years ago, in 1917. I think there should be a monument too. I visualize it quite clearly: Mother Motherland is bestowing forgiveness on the knelt White officer and the Red commissar wearing a budyonnovka. One of them had failed to defend the old Russia and died ignominiously abroad; the other one had won to perish in repressions. This is a hard issue for national conscience. But it is time to bid farewell to the Civil War through discussion, at least deep within us, and fill this void in history.

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 #24
Running for Office in Siberia: And the winner is.....
Last in a series covering the District #35 Novosibirsk City Council election.
September 17, 2015
By Sarah Lindemann-Komarova
[Founder, Siberian Civic Initiatives Support Center 1995 - 2014. Helped to establish this as the hub for the first civil society development support network in the former Soviet Union.]

Article with pictures:
https://medium.com/@ECHOSiberia/running-for-office-in-siberia-and-the-winner-is-980b2b069ccb

Earlier episodes:
https://medium.com/@ECHOSiberia

Election Day: The glorious days of 30 degree Siberian Indian Summer sunshine were over. It was six degrees and raining, the weather you do not want if your chances of winning depend on a large turnout. This was the case with Natalia Pinus in District #35. Nikita Galitarov, her major opponent, aggressively targeted pensioners, the certain voters in Russia. She was counting on inspiring a new group to become active. The big dare. A chance to prove the potential of grassroots democracy in Russia and build on the legacy of this community. Akademgorodok, the place where perestroika was born at the Institute of Economics across the street from the coffee shop that would serve as Election Day headquarters for Natalia's campaign. Two posters stuck on the wall were the only indication this was not your ordinary café. One was a sign, "Headquarters for Natalia Pinus supporters". The other, a chart, listed polling places and time intervals. Natalia was there along with Alla, her good friend, who was in charge of registering the voter count reported by observers every 2 hours from each of the 15 stations. Another man was hunkered down in the corner. Galitarov's guy, he looked exactly like a thug sent by a construction company to intimidate you should look. At least in Russia because he was drinking tea and playing with a fancy phone and computer. Worlds were colliding at Headquarters highlighting the stakes. Was it possible a 29 year old candidate, who did not live or work here, whose only distinguishing characteristics were a pile of money and masterful dirty trick skills, could end up representing this community in the City Council? The only certainty was the weather and it was raining. For an election that had morphed from an eight- person race to a mythical battle between good and evil, this was not good.

Initially, the polling stations had more official personnel than voters (election commission members, observers, police and doctors). If anything was really off, it would be noticed by allot of people. By 10 AM, the Galitarov people had plastered a new batch of posters on my building, a clear violation of the rules. I got a call from a friend just as it started to hail. She was emphatic several days ago, "never for Natalia". Now, she was outraged, "What is going on? What ugliness! A NIGHTMARE is happening!" She was going out to vote for Natalia. Maybe they had taken the step too far, not in this community, the Akademgorodok wagons were circling.

Hypothetically, anything over the official 24% turnout estimate would be in Natalia's favor. The 2PM count was good with 18.99%. Bets had been placed and Danil, a supportive presence throughout the campaign, took the high- end position with 31%. Natalia was talking to the no chance, but nice guy, candidate from the democratic socialist A Just Russia party. They compared notes about the cell phone terrorism their teams experienced this morning. Supporters were playing a building block tower game. The objective was to remove a wooden piece without causing the structure to collapse. The perfect way to kill time, practicing the strategy and discipline that kept Natalia's campaign from collapsing when she said "no" to United Russia after winning the primary. The Galitarov thug was gone when the tower fell. This reminded me of a quote by the recently elected, first female Mayor in Barcelona. "In the story of humanity, everything is impossible until it becomes possible". Just like the building game, you will not know if you got the balance right until the block is completely removed.

By 6PM turnout was 27.3%. Natalia was out voting and delivering dinners to volunteers throughout the district. Leonid, campaign coordinator, is in charge talking to volunteers in the field and scanning the Internet for news. A 30 year old physicist at the Nuclear Physics Institute, politics is his hobby. Meanwhile, a man I never saw before was holding court. He described how a Professor in Tomsk sold his vote and then outsmarted the buyer. He organized two pieces of black thread to look like a checkmark on the ballot, took the confirmation picture and then removed them. Since this man seemed to know everything about elections I asked, "What's the deal with Galitarov? Why is this man so intent on representing Akademgorodok? " According to Akadem's version of Deep Throat, United Russia was really interested in Natalia's primary performance. Nobody votes in primaries so they were impressed with the tiny number of votes she turned out (204), and even more with the gap between her and second place (65). Then, Natalia politely declined. In her account, the Party representative took the news calmly and wished her well. In Deep Throat's account, that was it for her. They told Galitarov to take the 18 million rubles he was planning to spend in another district and use it to defeat Natalia. He estimates that Natalia's surprising staying power forced the final cost of his campaign to 20 million.

Polls closed at eight but City Council votes are the last of four races counted. Sometime after midnight the official winner would be declared. Headquarters was staying open tracking results until the café closed at midnight. Natalia was busy on the phone getting updates. Alla occupied the corner seat formerly held by the thug. She filled in charts drawn on Xerox paper using a magnifying glass to see. The first result was from a school located in Natalia's base territory. The news was promising, the size of the win significant. It gave her a 40 vote cushion to make up for losses elsewhere. I asked one of her supporters what he thought was going to happen. He said any attempt to influence the vote would happen before the ballots are counted because Novosibirsk doesn't have a "system". He defined a "system" as no accepted hierarchy with power to intervene. Breaking an election law procedure is a criminal offense. If there isn't a "system", no one will risk doing it. I asked how you know if there is a "system"? A friend of his was an observer in a neighboring region. A police officer ordered him to stand three meters away in a corner while they counted the votes. They would arrest him if he ignored the police order. That is a "system". It was possible to make small adjustments during the count. Legally the commission is required to hold up each ballot and announce the name before placing it on a pile (think chads in 2000). Sometimes, experienced commission members speed up the process. They make piles first and then count the ballots but he expected an honest count tonight.

At 11:30 PM Alla was perched over her sheets, magnifying glass in hand, counting. Results from Galitarov territory were surprisingly good for Natalia. Losses were only by a few votes. In other news, Communist Party wins in territories Natalia carried as Deputy demonstrated the confused nature of Russian politics. Andre, the Director of Academ.info and Akadem TV, was there. He pledged to shave his beard and share what looked like water in a beautiful corked glass bottle if she won. Closing time, Andre grabbed the mysterious bottle and invited everyone to continue the vigil at his office. Natalia went shopping for snacks. There was no sense of excitement, just time to move on. Out on the street Andre revealed the bottle was his personal recipe samogon (Russian moonshine), 50 proof. "You never had anything like it, no headache".

There is a unique atmosphere created when you switch on office lights in the middle of the night. That florescent intensity applies to whatever is going on because otherwise you would be home sleeping like everyone else. Alla was the first to settle in spreading her charts across the best desk and claiming the best chair. Natalia arrived and laid out a spread of delicacies that constitute the secret to Russians capacity to sop up alcohol (fish and meat, pickles and eggplant rolls, almonds and pistachios). They are also disciplined drinkers. There is a ritual to it. Nothing gets uncorked until there is something to toast, victory or defeat. The results already in should have been good enough to inspire giddy confidence among the campaign staff. There was none. I was sure they all knew what I learned tonight, 20 million rubles spent to defeat her. Someone must have a trick up their sleeve. Natalia worked the phones, Alla counted and recounted, the coordinator collected signed official tallies from observers while the rest made small talk. I wondered, if not the count, what will be the signal it is ok to start drinking?

Natalia's phone rang. Whoever was on the other side was doing most of the talking. Natalia uttered short, somber replies ending with "Thank you" before clicking off. The gang stared at her waiting until someone finally asked, "who was that?" Natalia answered "Galitarov", again silence until she added, "he congratulated me". No one whooped, it was so anti-climatic I forgot to capture the moment on film. Andre started to uncork the champagne, the only one with a smile, as Alla said something about a missing signature and Natalia started to eat pistachios before returning to look at what she was working on. This was actually it. I turned on the camera and got a business as usual scene while Andre worked on the cork so I decided to prompt.

Me: Natalia, who was just on the phone?
Natalia: My opponent.
Andre (laughing): MAIN opponent.
Natalia (slight smile on her face as she continues to pick at the pistachios) : Yes, main opponent, Galitarov.
Me: And what did he say?
Natalia: He said I congratulate you for the honest win and then some kind of thoughts about things I had charged him with...

She shifted focus back to Alla mumbling, " I don't remember accusing him of anything". Andre emptied the entire bottle filling seven water glasses. Natalia turned around and asked, "Why did you do that?" I assumed she disapproved of the portions because she wanted to pace the drinking. It turned out she wanted just a sip of champagne for the traditional first toast. Then, move on to the samagon without risking a 50 proof headache. I continued to wait for behavior I associated with an electoral fairy tale ending. Was it exhaustion, shock, Russian pessimism ever triumphing over victory? No, no one knew how to react. There was no precedent for this. The response to this victory should be different. Barbra Streisand's version of FDRs rousing up-tempo victory song. "Happy Days are Here Again" as a contemplative, defiant ballad that acknowledges the fight is not over yet. The third toast and I get the triumphant sound bite. A synchronized clinking of glasses, "To the FIRST victory!" and everyone laughs.

Epilogue

In the end, after all the promises, Galitarov's "I do it now", Heating/KGB Man's "Warmth in your home", Science man's "Continue the work of Lavrentev the towns founder", it was Natalia's simple, "I love Gorodok", that took the politics out of it and won. Another major factor, the Galitarov campaign strategists misjudged this community. Of the 31% of eligible voters who participated in Akademgorodok, 26.13% supported Natalia. Galitarov squeaked out second place with 16.77% to Science man's 16.27%. The A Just Russia nice guy came in fourth and the invisible United Russia candidate fifth.

Emotional Facebook messages made clear the meaning of her victory. They also appreciated its source, an honest campaign, many describing it as beautiful. The techniques she used are well known, easy to understand, can be taught and replicated. More problematic, the qualities Natalia displayed as a candidate. They are rare, hard to understand and impossible to teach. Like trying to catch lightning in a bottle, but that is what makes them so powerful when they appear. She will need all of them, and then some, as a Deputy if she is going to achieve anything at all. The new 50 member Novosibirsk City Council met for the first time three days after the election. The Party count is: 32 United Russia, 12 Communist Party, 2 right-wing ultra nationalist LDPR, 1 social democratic A Just Russia, 1 neo-liberal (but who really knows) Civic Platform Party and two independents (including Natalia). I am confident of only three things. Natalia will try her hardest to get the results she campaigned for, it will be interesting to see what happens and for, it will be interesting to see what happens and the shoreline of cynicism has receded.... at least in Akademgorodok.

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 #25
www.belgraviadispatch.com
March 14, 2015
REALISTIC APPRAISAL OF RUSSIA'S POLICY ISN'T TANTAMOUNT TO A PUTIN APOLOGIA
By Gregory Djerejian
Gregory Djerejian is Managing Director and Head of Asia-Pacific for a global asset management firm, particularly active in commercial real estate, hotel & resort development, company acquisitions/disposals and alternative investments.

Gideon Rachman is perhaps the most perceptive foreign affairs columnist writing today, but he gets it badly wrong in his column ("Vladimir Putin's survival strategy is lies and violence", March 2), succumbing to speculation in the wake of Boris Nemtsov's tragic murder.

Mr. Rachman seeks to tar as Putin "apologist" anyone who believes the Russian President is driven by legitimate national interests. Instead, Putin is solely out to "save his own skin" with this the "red thread" driving all his actions (including Mr. Nemtsov's murder, it is all but pronounced). As with the Soviet Union, we must now adopt a containment policy with Russia, his argument goes.

This would be a historic tragedy, but one from which we can still step back. To avoid Pavlovian recourse to neo-containment we must cease spilling endless ink castigating a noxious Mr. Putin (as Henry Kissinger has written, "demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one."). Instead we should adopt a broader purview that elevates policy-making away from serial recrimination, perhaps with some of the below three observations to inform us.

First, realism advises one avoiding protracted cogitations around the potential motivations of statesman. Behind the niceties of myriad communiques & pronouncements, international politics remain rooted in interests defined by power, and in precincts well beyond the walls of The Kremlin. Policy should be guided by this reality, rather than heated speculations around the precise motivations of individual statesman.

Second, we should be reminded that Putin, as a Western-facing Saint Petersburgian, proffered his hand to the West in the past (indeed, even Mr. Nemtsov previously supported Putin). We saw this openness after 9/11 when Putin assisted the U.S. in its anti-terror campaign, notably with respect to Afghanistan. Alas, rather than build on such momentum, Putin was paid back with rounds of NATO expansion, a pull-out from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the overstepping of U.N. authorizations in both Iraq and Libya, and cookie dispensations in Maidan.

Third, a shaky cease-fire will likely ultimately fail-to Ukraine's grave detriment-unless world powers move from tactical crisis management to more strategic conflict resolution. This must involve Ukraine forsaking NATO membership in return for restoration of its borders (ex-Crimea), as well as provision of bona fide language and minority rights in a decentralized Donbass. Not least given the paramount NATO issue, one suspects the U.S. cannot continue to get away with largely subcontracting its Ukraine policy to Angela Merkel.

Today the rhetoric from Washington and London (thankfully not yet from the White House) resounds with the dogs of war: arming Ukraine, "frontline states" with NATO "command & control centers", essentially a renewed military trip-wire bestriding Moscow's (shrunken) frontiers. How do we expect a declining, humiliated power to respond in the circumstances? Vladimir Putin's approval ratings are very high for a reason beyond able propaganda. Deeper historic currents and realities are afoot that we ignore at our own peril.

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 #26
The Unz Review
www.unz.com
August 21, 2015
Russia and the Depression That Wasn't
By Anatoly Karlin
[Charts and links here http://www.unz.com/akarlin/russia-not-in-depression/]

Nearly every other day brings another scary headline about Russia's economic apocalypse. Inflation is robbing Russians of buying power and Putin propagandists are denying it. The "wheels are coming off" the regime according to our friends at the RFERL, the end of the regime is nigh according to Bill Browder, and Putin's days are numbered, at least in the creative imagination of Ukrainian nationalist academic Alexander Motyl.

Masha Gessen's friends can no longer get their little Gruyères, the "legendary" (primarily for losing his clients' money) Moscow investor Slava Rabinovich is predicting food shortages, and things are only about to get worse with oil falling to $25 per barrel and the ruble to 125/$1, at least according to the Khodorkovsky-funded Interpret Mag's Paul Goble, who has made something of a professional career forecasting Russia's takeover by Muslims and the Chinese.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the guy who has predicted all twelve of China's past zero recessions amongst other forecasting accomplishments, says that Russia is "in a full-blown depression."

One would think from all the noise that we are looking at some sort of Greece-like depression, or an imminent rerun of the collapse of the post-Soviet economy in the 1990s.

Now for the rather banal reality. Real GDP is expected to contract by around 2.7% this year according to the World Bank, but then recover to 0.7% in 2016 and 2.5% in 2017.

The reasons behind this are likewise pretty banal. They don't have a great deal to do with Western sanctions, which hurt the ability of Russian companies to raise capital but otherwise have had little bite, and they have even less to do with any particular feature of Russia's political system/kleptocracy/lack of economic freedoms that both anti-Russian establishment pundits like Ariel Cohen and pro-Western liberals in Russia like former Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin like to claim as dooming it to economic stagnation. If they were right, then East-Central Europe - most of which is rated as a lot economically freer and less corrupt than Russia on the various indices that proclaim to measure such - would not also have been stuck in a relative economic rut since around 2007.

No, the reason for Russia's recession is quite simple and boils down to the sharp collapse in oil prices from ~$100 in 2014 to ~$50 this year.

Though the Russian economy is about far more than just oil - natural resource rents are 18% of GDP - it is true that oil is the key component of Russia's export basket. So when oil prices collapse, in the absence of massive and unsustainable interventions, the ruble devalues. This is indeed what happened. Imports went down, goods became more expensive, and inflation rose. The Central Bank jacked up interest rates in order to prevent runaway inflation, but at the price of a decline in aggregate demand and consequently a short-run decrease in the GDP. If one is really searching for a comparison, the correct one would be not to Greece (which is locked in a monetary straitjacket by the ECB) nor to the late Soviet Union (wholly irrelevant) but to the Volcker recession in the early 1980s US.

There is now a very substantial output gap. Dependence on Western credit is now much reduced relative to 2013, to say nothing of 2007. Meanwhile, there are active and serious efforts to develop Russia's own financial system, which remains woefully underdeveloped for an economy of its size and scope.

Finally, even if oil prices drop permanently to $50 - which is entirely possible, given the removal of the Iran sanctions, this would not mean the Russian economy would be necessarily doomed to years of stagnation. To the contrary, econometric modeling by Russian economist Sergey Zhuravlev indicates that it would result in a ~1.5 year recession (which began in mid-2013, versus 2012 in his model; but otherwise it remains very relevant) followed by accelerated GDP growth thanks to exports.

Otherwise, macroeconomic indicators remain unremarkable. Corporate debt repayments scheduled for the second half of the year are twice lower than in the first half. The budget deficit is forecast to be 3-4% of GDP for the year and overall state debt levels continue to be very low. (Incidentally, this figure is 20% for Saudi Arabia. Which should put the nail in the coffin of the idiotic conspiracy theory that the fall in oil prices has been orchestrated by them and the US to undermine Russia).
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Unemployment has barely budged, not even reaching 6% at its peak. In comparison, it was at 10% throughout much of the 1990s. This is almost entirely an output recession.

Now inevitably when recessions occur, living standards tend to fall, and people have to live more frugally. Reading the Western media, one would think that the recession has led to a tsunami in worker protests, criminality, and elite intrigues against Putin.

But in statistical terms, the real impacts of the downturn have been modest. According to Levada opinion polls, the percentage of people having difficulty buying food and clothing increased to 32% this year from 21% in 2014, but this is still lower than the figure for (pre-crisis) 2012, when it was at 33%, to say nothing of the early 2000s (higher than 50%) or the 1990s (around 80%). The percentage of Russians who spend either "almost all" or "two thirds" of their incomes on food, another measure of poverty, is 26% this year, completely unchanged from 2014, and actually lower than in 2013 (33%) or the 2000s in general (40%-50%), to again say nothing of the 1990s (consistently around 80%). These numbers have been confirmed credible by observers such as Russia Insider's Gilbert Doctorow and Alexander Mercouris, who have personally assessed the situation on the ground, in stark contrast to the New York Times' Masha Gessen's reliance on her "Je suis fromage" liberal Russian friend.

It is deeply unfashionable to say this but Russian living standards have improved astronomically in the 15 years of Putin's rule - more so than the headline GDP figures. As such, even a recession like the current one only kicks living standards back by one or two years.

As such, it is not surprising - if deeply disappointing to the Western elites who want to stir up a color revolution in Russia - that Russia's level of "protest potential" (the percentage of Russians saying they would be willing to participate in protests, or rating the likelihood of protests as being high) is currently near record lows.

Naturally, any such attempts to put the effects of an ultimately modest ~3% drop in GDP into statistical perspective will be met with accusations of callous indifferent to the plight of the Russian people, and the work of Olgino trolls to boot. I have seen this replayed numerous times on the Internet, even when the people making such arguments were Russians living in Russians, whose only sin was to recount their own (generally modest) experiences and impressions of the recession.

Make no mistake - there is a well coordinated media effort in the West to leverage any Russian economic problems to destabilize the Kremlin. Note the chorus of condemnation around the destruction of food illegally imported from the EU in contravention of Russian sanctions, even though the destruction of excess food is routine under the EU's Common Agricultural Policy.

Naturally, this is driven by their altruistic and heartfelt commitment to the wellbeing of the Russian people. Though isn't it just a wee bit strange that those journalists and "activists" who tend to shout loudest about the burning of European food also tended to be the ones who maintained the thickest silence about the burning of Russian people in Odessa in the new European Ukraine.

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 #27
Valdai Discussion Club
http://valdaiclub.com
June 9, 2015
Is the Russian Federation a Threat to the International Order?
By David Lane
David Lane is Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Vice-President of the European Sociological Association
[Charts and footnotes here http://valdaiclub.com/russia_and_the_world/78040.html]

President Putin is widely portrayed as a threat to peace and the international order. One might distinguish between two ways of analysing a threat posed by a state in its conduct of foreign affairs. First, there are positive drivers in the form of aggressive actions. These stem from the actions of state leaders who are motivated to attack other states for purposes of their own or their countries' economic or political advantage. Such policies may be driven by national or universalistic ideologies or by the ambitions of leaders. Hitler's Drang nach Osten and Britain's colonial conquest of India may be cited as examples an active policy [1]. Second, there are actions which are reactive to the policies of other states. These actions are driven by anxiety or fear derived from a belief that other states are behaving, or likely to behave, maliciously. States with such perceptions may react aggressively to defend their interests. An example here is the placing of intercontinental missiles on Cuba by the USSR. Though Cuba claimed that the missiles were purely for defensive purposes, the USA perceived them as a threat and retaliatory aggressive action to defend its interests followed.

The debate about 'Russia as a threat' to the international order hinges on which of these two approaches one believes determines Russia's behaviour.

The 'Positive Drivers' Interpretation

The case for an active 'threat' has been put by academics, political leaders as well as journalists writing in the quality news journals. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, in March 2015 called for the formation of a 'European army to face up to the Moscow threat' [2] . The objective is to 'defend the values of the European Union'. Timothy Garten Ash, in The Guardian (1 February 2015) revealed the evils of Vladimir Putin whom he described as 'the Slobodan Milosevic of the former Soviet Union: [who is] as bad, but bigger. Behind a smokescreen of lies he has renewed his drive to carve out a puppet para-state in eastern Ukraine' [3].

In the academic sphere, Michael McFaul contends that Russian foreign policy changed under Putin as a consequence of 'Russian internal political dynamics' [4]. For McFaul, the motivating factor is the public's disapproval (expressed in voting, demonstrations and the fear that Putin would be confronted with a popular 'coloured revolution') which led him to adopt policies that would 'mobilise his electoral base and discredit the opposition' (p.170). The USA was recast as an enemy, a 'sinister force in world affairs' (ibid).

A prominent theme explaining Russian action in foreign affairs is the drive to fulfil its geo-political goals. Russia is regarded as a country intervening militarily 'to maintain its influence across the domains of the former Soviet Union' [5] . In Hillary Clinton's view: 'We know what the goal [of the Eurasian Union] is and we are trying to figure out ways to slow down or prevent it' [6]. The objective here is to halt the spread of (supposed) Soviet norms which contaminate the values of liberal democracy and a market society.

The popular media message is one of personality and 'motive'. Russia's President is a demon combining the worst characteristics of Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler and Slobodan Milosevich (occasionally reaching back to Ivan the Terrible). 'Putin's Russia' is expansionist, nationalist, imperialist, dictatorial, and hypocritically anti-Western. It thrives on strategies to destabilise neighbouring countries, as well as NATO and the EU. The ideology of Eurasianism and the formation of the Eurasian Union are indications of the desire to reinvent the Soviet Union. Consequently, 'Putin's Russia' is the cause of the civil war in Ukraine which is a precursor to the active destabilisation of the Baltic new member states of the EU and NATO. This is a scenario of active aggressive politics.

The antidote prescribed by President Putin's critics is to escalate economic, political and military sanctions. Following the economic restrictions against Russian firms and persons, in March 2015 the advanced parties of the American and British military arrived in Ukraine.

Through the rhetoric one might identify four major issues underlying Russian policy. Firstly, I consider whether its leaders are motivated to promote their own interests by de-stabilising the international order; secondly, whether its ideology entails any threat to other states, nations or groups; thirdly, whether in its actions, it has promoted a military build up; and finally, whether the Russian Federation or the Eurasian Union possess the military capacity to pose a serious danger to the international order.

A 'Reactive' Interpretation

After the dismantling of the Soviet Union, Russia in foreign affairs was faced by two major challenges. Whereas Russia was in decline and its regional bloc (The Commonwealth of Independent States) was moribund, the former adversaries of the Soviet Union were being considerably strengthened. NATO and the European Union were enlarged. Moreover, both organisations had moved significantly to the east. Ironically perhaps, none of the reasons put forward for the expansion of NATO to the areas of the former USSR, were framed in the context of a possible (let alone likely) Russian move to seize former territories. NATO's expansion to the east started in 1999 with the entry of the Visegrad countries, followed in 2004 by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Albania and Croatia joined NATO in 2009. Economically, politically and military, 'the West' had arrived at Russia's borders. At the urging of the USA, in April 2008 NATO considered the addition of Ukraine and Georgia. Following opposition from Germany and France, they were not admitted. But the alliance did issue a statement that 'These countries will become members of NATO'. If so, the encirclement of Russia would be complete. NATO's enlargement was justified in terms of the creation of a zone of peace. The Russian 'threat' surfaced later.

From Russia's position, the expansion of NATO poses a serious threat to its security. The enhanced security of the New Member States is at the cost of less security to Russia. Russia has been reactive and defensive rather than actively aggressive. The policy of the Russian Federation under Putin and Medvedev entailed a major change towards the West which infringed some established Western assumptions. In its Foreign Policy Concept (2000), Russia's objectives were to preserve the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country. It noted critically 'a growing trend towards the establishment of a unipolar structure of the world with the economic and political domination of the United States.'

Policy did not seek to overturn the hegemony of the USA or the neo-liberal framework in which it operated. It does not entail economic autarchy or political isolation. Russia sought an alliance with the USA in its war 'on terror' - with his own concerns about Chechnia in mind - and allowed US planes to use Russian airspace to fly to Afghanistan. Russia voted to support the UN Security council's sanctions against Iran. Even in 2002, Russia was pragmatic about the admission of the Baltic states into NATO. Russia also abstained from voting on the UN Security Council resolution authorising the use of force against the Qaddafi regime in Libya in 2011.

The European Union

The second major challenge facing the states of the former USSR was the enlargement of the European Union to include the post-Soviet countries of central Europe. Its initial objective (bearing in mind the history of two world wars) was to preserve peace in Europe by containing possible aggression by enveloping nation states within a common economic unit, the European Economic Community. The leadership of the EU justified enlargement as bringing not only economic wealth but also democratic European values. The development of a supra-national state, the European Union, has outgrown the original conception and has imperial pretentions. It is now effectively a federal state composed of 28 'member states', including eleven post communist states [7]. Its membership makes it an economic counterpart to NATO.

As the European Commissioner, Jose Manuel Barroso on 10 July 2007 put it: 'We are a very special construction unique in the history of mankind. Sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimension of empire. What we have is the first non-imperial empire. We have 27 countries that fully decided to work together and to pool their sovereignty. I believe it is a great construction and we should be proud of it' [8]. Here, in perhaps an unguarded moment, he raises the spectre of the European Union as an empire, and this view has led many to define it in terms of cultural and economic imperialism.

Membership requires the subordination of sovereignty of member states to a common economic, political and social policy framed in terms of neo-liberalism and competitive electoral polyarchy. In such a union, formal wars between member states cannot take place. In keeping with the institutional arrangements of the EU, new states had to conform to 31 chapters (35 since 2013) of the Acquis which range over the whole area of economic and political life. Foreign and defence policy must also be in keeping with EU norms and policy. As a customs union, the EU has common tariffs with outsiders. The driving forces for expansion are economic interests seeking markets (for products and labour) as well as geo-political concerns.

The Case of Ukraine

After the dismantling of the USSR, Ukraine found itself positioned between two blocs - the strongly entrenched EU and the weak association formed by the Commonwealth of Independent States. As shown in the two following diagrams, commerce was greater between Russia than the European Union.

Ukrainian governments have sought agreements with the EU which would not prejudice relations with its major trading partner, Russia. Things began to change after the Orange Revolution which brought to power President Yushchenko. The leaders of the proposed Eurasian Union sought to maintain and enhance links with Ukraine which would have precluded Ukraine from joining the EU. In the autumn of 2013 the EU, to counter Eurasian influence, offered Ukraine an association agreement (Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA)). To be effective the agreement would have extended the EU's tariffs to Ukraine's borders and consequently would have greatly restricted trade with the CIS.

The DCFTA presented Ukraine with a choice. It was contended by the EU that two sets of rules could not operate in the EU economic space [9]. Russian policy, basing the argument on common membership of the WTO, contended that both the EU and the Eurasian Union would be able forge a wider pan-European association. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister suggested that both blocs could work together. 'We must work for a union of unions, an alliance of the EU and the Eurasian Union' [10].

The EU's objective was to prepare Ukraine for full membership (at some unspecified future date). Moreover, even without becoming a member of the EU, agreements between it and other states were increasingly embedded in conditions which sought to make their institutions and processes compatible with EU norms. These conditions were defined in terms of Washington Consensus ideology - free markets, private property, the rule of law (particularly concerning property), multi-party politics and electoral competition. EU strategy is to weaken gradually the sovereignty of states and to promote the power of the Union over its 'member states'. The Eastern Partnership was a device to extend the power of the EU over third parties, this time driven by the geo-political interests of the EU and consistent with American power wielded through NATO. The objectives were to be achieved through enlargement.

Negotiations between President Yanukovich and the European Union were conducted on the basis of the DCFTA. While Yanukovich did not rule out signing the agreement at some future date, on 29 November 2013, he expressed a wish to achieve an agreement which would maintain relations with Russia. Future anticipated damage to Ukrainian producers (supporting Yanukovich), insufficient EU financial backing for economic reforms, as well as promised Russian financial support underlay his decision to withdraw from the EU proposal.

This became the fuse for the Maidan demonstrations in favour of EU membership supported on the streets in person by some prominent US and European politicians. EU made Ukraine choose, when Yanukovich did not take the right decision, the EU supported the opposition of the Maidan to make the decision. The demonstration turned to violence and the President's and Parliament's buildings were occupied by the armed opposition. The EU supported the then opposition (which had refused to participate in a government when offered posts in it). Their goal was to install the pro-EU opposition forces. President Yanukovich fled for his life from Kiev on 22 February 2014. The context of armed uprising, of intimidation of pro-Yanukovich deputies in the Rada and as well as the illegal seizure of power leads one to define the change of political power as a coup d'état legitimated by mass demonstrations.

Following the flight of President Yanukovich, a new pro-EU nationalist government was installed. On the one side it signed agreements with the EU, on the other it was confronted by the secession of Crimea and civil war in the eastern territories.

Western media explain the underlying causes of Ukraine's break-up as a consequence of Putin's policies. Such an interpretation of events, derived mainly from statements originating in the Kiev pro European Union lobbies and government, can be dismissed or qualified in many respects.

There is no evidence before the putsch replacing the Yanukovich government in Ukraine that the policy of the Russian Federation was to destabilise the country. During this time the Russian minority suffered language discrimination. In the period following the Orange Revolution of 2004, in which the administration of Yushchenko moved closer to the EU, as well as the period in which the Yanukovich administration intended to sign an association agreement with the EU, there were no actions from Russia destabilising Ukraine. The economic consequences, however, might have had a destabilising effect. Indeed, there was no designation by the media of a 'corrupt' President Yanukovich when he was predisposed to sign the association agreement.

The Ukrainian civil war was precipitated by the illegal removal of Yanukovich and his government following the putsch of February which installed a government hostile to Yanukovich's supporters concentrated in the industrial Russian speaking east of the country. Their initial actions, particularly rescinding the language laws, which had given the right to regions under certain conditions to use the Russian language, strengthened the separatists who asserted their own power in Crimea and led to a revolt in Donbass and Lugansk.

These 'anti-Kiev' movements were supported by the Russian Federation but they were not part of a planned policy to 'destabilise' Ukraine. Ukraine became destabilised by the actions of the pro-EU insurgents who had illegally replaced the elected President with Acting President Alex Turchinov. Despite Western insistence on Russian military involvement, there is no firm evidence of the involvement of the Russian army (though there certainly were, and are, volunteers) in east Ukraine in armed combat roles. On Jan 29 2015, the head of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Army, General Viktor Muzhenko, stated that "only individual Russian military personnel and citizens of the Russian Federation" are participating in military activities. "We are not currently conducting any military operations against units of the regular Russian army." [11] Such unofficial Russian involvement is considerable and has been decisive in maintaining the separatists. It is not however part of a preconceived Russian 'plan' to destabilise Ukraine and NATO.

The official line of newly elected President Poroshenko was to pursue war by all means. As he put it in his statement of 14 November 2014: "We [in Ukraine] will have work they - [in Donbas] won't. We will have pensions - they won't. We will care for our children and pensioners - they won't. Our children will go to school, to kindergartens - their children will sit in cellars. They don't know how to organize or do anything. This, ultimately, is how we will win this war." [12] He repeated his obdurate principles on 22 January 2015: 'Ukraine must remain a unitary state; there will be "no discussion" of Ukraine's European choice; and the only state language is and will be Ukrainian'. [13]

A Military Threat?

NATO's expansion to the east was legitimated in the first instance as a means to secure an area of peace in Europe, not as a necessary defence mechanism against an aggressive Russia. However, following the Ukraine crisis, views changed. Anders Rasmussen, NATO's previous secretary-general, said in January 2015 that there was a 'high probability' that Mr Putin would test NATO's article 5, which regards an attack on any member as an attack on all. On 20 February 2015, NATO's deputy commander opined that Russia's expansionist ambitions could become 'an obvious existential threat to our whole being'. (Reported in The Guardian 21 Feb. 15).

The geo-political goals of strengthening the hegemony of NATO underpin this policy. The Russian military 'threat' is an assertion about 'motives' and is not based empirically on any assessment of military capacity. Russia as a military threat is illustrated by commentators by the fact that its defence spending has risen by 190 per cent between 2007 and 2014, whereas NATO's has fallen by some 20 per cent (The Economist, 14 Feb 2015, p. 20).

Russia's defence expenditure has increased in recent years. But the increase was from a low base. Given the size of population and the economic level of the country, comparatively its defence expenditure per capita is not excessively large. In total outlays, Russia is outmatched in every area of defence spending by NATO. In 2014, according to statistics provided in the The Military Balance [14] , defence budgets for Russia was just over 10 per cent more than that of the UK. Its defence efforts are comparable to Western European NATO countries. Planned expenditure (2015) for USA is 581 billion US dollars; China 129.4; Russia 70; UK 61.8; France 53.1; Germany 43.9. As a proportion of state budgets (data for 2014), the USA accounted for 36.1 per cent, Russia 4.4 per cent, UK 3.8 per cent, France 3.3 per cent, Germany 2.7 per cent, other NATO countries 7.6 per cent. China 8 per cent and Japan 3 per cent.

NATO's weaponry is also greater in all areas than Russia and Eurasia, only China has more battle tanks than NATO. A telling comparative indicator is the amount spent expressed as a proportion of world defence and security spending which is shown in Figure 3. If armaments' spending is the criterion, then expenditure is very much weighted towards the West with NATO greatly outspending its rivals. Of course, Russia is a nuclear power and certainly more than a match for its immediate neighbours but not for NATO.

It is pure speculation (probably motivated to justify NATO's military role) to suggest that Putin is planning to test NATO's resolve. Despite the denial of citizenship rights to a significant part of Russian speaking people born and living in Latvia and Estonia, Russia since the Baltics gained independence, has shown no intention or willingness to support the Russian minorities by the use of force.

The enlargement of the EU and NATO are dangerous if they threaten war between Russia and Ukraine. A fundamental value of the EU is to secure peace and there are ways of doing this without expanding the Union. It is unjustifiable hypocrisy to advocate peace and knowingly to pursue policies which threaten to lead to war. Clearly alternative strategies were available to the EU. But they were ignored as the entrapment of Ukraine in the EU was a major objective of EU policy. EU enlargement and NATO expansion are greater threats to peace than the Russian Federation.

This article is based on two public lectures given in Leiden University and also in Greenwich University.

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 #28
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
December 22, 2015
Russia avoids revolution again
Naysayers are keen to predict Russia's demise, but despite a difficult year politically and economically, the country has failed to fall apart.
By Bryan MacDonald
Bryan MacDonald is a Moscow-based commentator.

For at least the past decade, every year some expert inside or outside of Russia has predicted that the country will erupt in revolution, or at least that it is ripe for "regime change." Numerous books and articles are published annually specializing in forecasts of imminent doom for the Kremlin.

Starting in 2014 analysts began to look for signs of this revolution in the country's economic troubles. Last year, British Prime Minister, David Cameron, spoke of "turn(ing) the ratchet" on Vladimir Putin and suggested that Western sanctions would "permanently" damage Russia's financial health.

This trend only continued in 2015. In January, U.S. President Barack Obama declared the Russian economy "in tatters" and in September, CNN reported that Russia's economy was "failing." Just this month, opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky warned that a revolution is "inevitable" in Russia.

However, despite the warnings, the country somehow manages to go on.

What revolution?

In 2015, there were numerous potential triggers for a political breakdown. The murder of prominent opposition voice Boris Nemtsov in central Moscow in February was one. It produced prevailing sadness at the horrible end of this public figure, but little else.

Another flashpoint could have been this winter's protests by long-haul truckers, which have threatened to block major roads across the country. But so far their displeasure has remained confined to a small disruption of traffic on Moscow's ring road and a very calm meeting with police.

The blackout of Crimea might have sparked restlessness on the peninsula, which Russia absorbed last year, but there was hardly a peep of vitriol against Moscow.

The publication of documents by newspaper Novaya Gazeta and opposition activist Alexei Navalny accusing Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika's family of being involved in deep-seated corruption could have caused some rage. Chaika's son has been linked to the mafia and reportedly owns expensive homes in Switzerland and Greece. The general public, however, seems to accept official reassurances that Chaika himself is not involved in any illegal acts and the investigation is the product of dirty political intrigues.

Then there is the currency crisis. Last year, a dollar was worth around 35 rubles; now it's around 70. Many Russians have lost much of their savings. Opportunities to travel abroad have been snatched away and imported goods have more or less doubled in price. Inflation stands at around 19 percent and 6 million people are expected to fall out of the middle class, which has been the mainstay of Putin's personal popularity; the number of Russians living below the poverty line has risen to 14 percent.

A different reality

And yet none of these issues has provoked comprehensive protests or popular resistance to the government. Instead, recent opinon poll data from the analytical Levada Center shows that, rather than hurtling into disarray, Russia is actually pretty stable. More than 80 percent of Russians believe that Russian citizenship is preferable to any other, and two-thirds consider themselves "free'." Fifty-seven percent hope to see Putin re-elected to another presidential term in 2018.

The reasons for such calm are pretty elementary. Firstly, the mixed results of Ukraine's revolution and the dramatic collapse in living standards there has spooked Russians. They genuinely fear that violent upheaval could lead to a repeat of the chaos of the 1990s.

Another problem is the weakness of the liberal opposition. Sure, the Kremlin makes life tough for its opponents. State TV doesn't acknowledge them to a great extent and official newspapers largely ignore them. However, the Internet is open, and liberal Dozhd TV and Ekho Moskvy radio allows opposition figures to express their views. But the main obstacle is their lack of unity and the deep fractures in the liberal movement, in addition to a lack of a clear leader and a specific policy platform.

Instead, the opposition offers hopes and dreams with no tangible explanations of how they might actually work and who would direct the policies. Furthermore, leading personalities, with the exception of Navalny and a few others, seem to spend more time courting foreign attention than domestic audiences.

Then there is Putin's genuine personal popularity and a belief that, no matter how bad things are presently, Russia has improved immensely during the 15 years that he has been in power.

Many Russians who spend time abroad speak of almost entering a parallel universe when they compare Western media coverage of Russia and their own practical experiences at home. Most Russians would never claim their country is perfect by any measure, but they do largely believe that foreign impressions of Russia are far too negative. Without question, these are challenging times in Russia, but the people are already accustomed to upheaval and don't seem to be panicing. The revolution has been postponed. Again.

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 #29
Moscow Times
October 21, 2015
West Has Lost the Right to Lecture Putin
By Mark Galeotti
Mark Galeotti is professor of global affairs at New York University.

While at home, President Vladimir Putin is the world-bestriding colossus, wise tsar and benevolent father of the nation, abroad he is once again facing a familiar vilification, as warmonger, kleptocrat and tyrant. Yes, corruption is deeply embedded in Russia's economic and political systems, and the Kremlin regards military force as an instrument of national interest. But the West needs to avoid simple and misleading stereotypes if it is to construct effective policies to deal with Russia, especially when it comes to its Syrian gambit.

Of course, Russia's involvement in Syria embarrassed above all Washington. So far Russia's air strikes have established Moscow's claims to be taken seriously as a global power, and done so in a way demonstrating not just military power but also ruthless will.

But Western complaints about Russian actions - above all Putin's - also reveal a dangerous hypocrisy.

"Russia has no mandate to be in Syria." However unpleasant, Bashar Assad's is still the internationally recognized government of Syria - with an embassy in Washington - and they invited Russian assistance. If anything it is Turkey, the U.S. and the other belligerents who actually have no mandate, and it would be a stretch to portray their actions as directly humanitarian.

To be sure, if the Assad regime fell it might be replaced by one less brutal and more legitimate. But then again, experiences of other military regime changes in North Africa and the Middle East suggest that the result could just as easily be chaos and extremist terror.

"The Russians are bombing the 'wrong' rebels." Apart from the fact that many of the "moderate rebels" touted as Syria's great hope are not that moderate, Moscow makes no bones about the fact that it is trying to preserve the Assad regime, one of its few allies. Islamic State forces are more heavily concentrated in the northeast of the country, the regime in the west and the south. No wonder most of the air strikes target the rebels posing a direct and immediate threat to Damascus.

"Moscow is acting 'dangerously,' potentially bringing Russian and Western jets into close proximity." Yes, there is a faint risk, especially as the Russians are more aggressive than Syrian pilots. For example, even if their incursions into Turkish airspace were indeed accidental, as they claimed, then they certainly must have been pretty close for such a mistake to happen. But given that U.S. and allied aircraft have less legal right to be in Syrian airspace, is the onus not on them to "deconflict"?

Of course the Russians are in Syria for the most self-interested of reasons, not to protect Syrian civilians, nor primarily an ally, but to distract a domestic audience from stalemate in the Donbass and force the West to deal with them. The Syrian regime is brutal to the point of evil, and just because the Islamic State may be worse, Putin has no serious moral justification.

But since when has self-interest been a novelty in geopolitics?

How does fueling a lengthy and vicious proxy war against both Assad and the Islamic State help ordinary Syrians, though, especially when so many of the West's allies in this campaign, from Turkey to Saudi Arabia, have serious human rights problems of their own?

This is not simple "whataboutism," that classic trick of deflecting criticism through raising the other side's real or alleged flaws. Rather it is to note that Washington is currently seeking to have its cake and eat it. It can choose to base its foreign policy on strict moral principles or geopolitical pragmatism.

At present, it seems happy to act pragmatically but think morally. Thus it genuinely considers Putin not simply an antagonist, but an immoral one.

This is dangerous and foolish. Just as Putin's Russia cannot simply be written off as a kleptocracy - roads are still being built, universities funded, and so forth, even while some plunder - so too it is not some uniquely aggressive "rogue state." Castigating it on moral grounds, without behaving in an unimpeachably moral way, is simply going to alienate Moscow, undermine Western credibility, and create a wholly false series of assumptions on which to base policy.

The uncomfortable truth is that in Syria, as in so many other ways, Putin is simply ruthlessly exploiting and expanding precedents already set by the West.

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 #30
Journalitico
http://journalitico.com
March 8, 2015
The Problem With Propaganda
By Danielle Ryan
Reporter, The Sunday Business Post (Ireland). Danielle is an Irish journalist and blogger. She has a degree in Business and German from Trinity College Dublin and studied political reporting at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism in Washington, DC.

What is propaganda?

Is it the deliberate exclusion of crucial information in an attempt to mislead? Is it the deliberate inclusion of information in an attempt to confuse? Is it a deliberate attempt not necessarily to mislead, but to put forth a perspective which differs from the mainstream? Is it simply outright lying?

Or is it all of the above?

I sit here trying to identify one mainstream newspaper or broadcaster that I could legitimately and confidently argue does not engage in this elusive phenomenon we call 'propaganda' - by any of the above definitions.

I call it 'elusive' because no one seems to have settled the debate on its meaning - or at least, if they have, it's not the meaning they are using in practice.

In this so-called 'information war' between 'the West' and Russia over the crisis in Ukraine, a simple, but dangerous definition seems to have developed: Propaganda is the dissemination of information that provides any legitimacy to the arguments of the enemy.

That appears to be the accepted meaning of the word in today's geopolitical climate. The interesting thing about this definition is that the trueness or falseness of the information in question is irrelevant. If it legitimizes the other side in any way, it is propaganda.

Neither side will admit that this is the definition they are using, of course. That would undoubtedly damage their credibility. Instead, both sides will stick to the mantra that propaganda simply means the deliberate distribution of 'lies' and will claim that they are fighting against those liars with their incontrovertible 'truth'.

That makes both sides feel better, and more justified. People want to believe they can 'know' things in their entirety. To not be able to grasp the complexities of the world makes us feel out of control.

But in using this definition of propaganda as 'anything the enemy says' we are left in somewhat of a conundrum when it comes to unraveling the 'truth'.

When Russia puts forward its arguments and they are echoed by journalists or analysts who are sympathetic to those arguments, for whatever reason, those writers are immediately branded as 'Kremlin trolls' or propagandists for Vladimir Putin.

Similarly, when the West puts forth its arguments, they are dismissed by Russian press as 'anti-Russian propaganda'.

So, who is right? Which information is 'propaganda' and which isn't? Is it simply all propaganda? Do both sides have legitimate arguments? Is one side more 'right' than the other? And how can we know, if every piece of information that conflicts from the mainstream gets labeled as propaganda, regardless if its origin or its factual accuracy?

To answer any of those questions, we would need an accepted definition for the word, with which we could evaluate every scrap of information presented by both sides and come up with an objective 'truth'.

What are our options?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines propaganda as: "information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view".

Cate Haste, in The Machinery of Propaganda, defines it as "the task of creating and directing public opinion".

The Random House dictionary defines it as "information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc."

In their book, Age of Propaganda, Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson write that propaganda was "originally defined as the dissemination of biased ideas and opinions, often through the use of lies and deception" ...but continue to say that the word has since evolved to mean mass "suggestion" or "influence" through the manipulation of symbols and the psychology of the individual.

None of that is particularly helpful, is it?

Those definitions don't answer any of the above questions. All they reveal is that both sides engage in serious, no-holds-barred propaganda efforts, which we already knew.

At this point, if we have no accepted definition - and if definitions are useless anyway - it comes down to deciding what our goal is in using the term.

If our goal is to discredit the other side in a debate, we will happily use any of the above definitions, failing to recognize when they can be applied to ourselves.

If the goal however, is to come to a nuanced understanding of what is happening in Ukraine, we would be less inclined to use the word at all, at least not so flippantly.

We would recognize that defining everything that goes against our own perceived best interests as 'propaganda' is itself a form of propaganda - one that won't result in any progress whatsoever.

It will simply leave both sides in stalemate.

In other words, propaganda works, but accusing someone of using it to mask your own bias is generally useless, if your intention is to make any real progress. It's our staggering propensity to do just that which has been one of, if not the biggest hindrance to diplomatic progress on Ukraine.

At this point, I can't conceal the fact that I believe the Western side has been the worse offender in this.

When the US State Department flings the 'propaganda' grenade at the Kremlin every time it hears a counter-argument, they are effectively relieving themselves of the responsibility to think. They are demonstrating how entrenched they have become in their positions and showing us that they have no intention of budging.

They are entirely unreceptive to the legitimate concerns of those with a different perspective. They have demonstrated that they will do nothing to alleviate the fears of a nation that feels under threat - and have engaged in a massive information campaign to discredit those fears as nonsense.

Given the history of the last fifteen years and the numerous US foreign policy mistakes legitimized through groupthink, that entrenchment should be worrying.

Battling cognitive dissonance

If we, as consumers of news and as journalists, fail to properly scrutinize that, we run the risk of similarly barricading ourselves behind our in-built biases because it makes us feel stronger - and look, so many people agree, we must be right.

Humans tend to believe that the arguments they have chosen - based on their own self-interest, as they best understand it - are also the best thing for the world at large. To believe anything else, for most people, would seem illogical.

As humans, we also generally don't enjoy the unpleasantness of cognitive dissonance, so we try to avoid it. We don't want to have to deal with too much conflicting information. We've picked a side in an argument and that's the end of it.

This leads to what psychologists call 'motivated reasoning', whereby we will cherry-pick information and subconsciously eliminate anything that challenges our argument too deeply.

So, what can we do about it?

First of all, this no doubt, is the point at which you will accuse me of being a hypocrite. But rest assured, I agree with you. We all use motivated reasoning, and to tell ourselves we don't is simply self-delusion. The problem is, some of us can better recognize when we're doing it and some of us can't.

For instance, I can tell you that I'm doing it right now. I'm asking you to reconsider your opinion and adopt something similar to my own. That's totally hypocritical, isn't it? It is, but it doesn't mean you still shouldn't consider it. And I should do the same.

Dr David Robert Grimes, a science writer and physicist at Oxford University wrote in a piece for the Irish Times last year, that rather than viewing conflicting concepts with apprehension and contempt, we should regard them with the "exhilaration of discovery".

Admittedly, it's highly doubtful that anyone reading this is going to be "exhilarated" at the prospect of changing their mind on Ukraine - a conflict which elicits such strong emotion from so many. I have already once changed my mind on it - from an entrenched Western perspective to developing a deeper understanding and sympathy to the Russian perspective. I'm sure others have gone in the opposite direction.

It was not an exhilarating process.

An aerial view shows Independence Square during clashes between anti-government protesters and Interior Ministry members and riot police in central Kiev

Grimes also wrote in his piece:

"There is nothing wrong with being wrong, provided we are willing to adapt our views in the light of evidence and constantly revise them. Black-and-white thinking can be challenged by noticing that there are more than just binary positions on issues or people, and a spectrum lies between those extrema.

"The blade of correction should cut both ways; we should aim to spot reasoning flaws not only in the arguments of others but also in our own logic, even when this jars us."

The inability of our leaders - and more disappointingly, our journalists, to do this, is exactly why not much progress has been made in Ukraine.

Journalists, by their very nature, strive to understand the world. It's what they do. They are interested and curious. They live by asking questions in the hope that they'll find answers. Individual journalists are very rarely trying to be 'propagandists' or liars for anyone.

Unfortunately, they are also human - and that's where it gets complicated. The world is too complex to understand in its entirety, so they have to focus on little nuggets here and there.  And if the 'other side' is lying outright -  as both sometimes do -  we shout 'Look, the other side is lying!' because it makes us feel good.

It validates us and allows us to feel justified in not admitting that maybe we have done it, too. That maybe we have not always been as right and noble as we desperately want to believe we have. That maybe if we can focus on the 'lies' of the other side, we can stay more dedicated to the 'truth' and that too makes us feel good.

We are routinely bombarded with stories about Ukraine and Russia that don't give us the full picture. Each author will omit information they feel is not relevant or crucial. But what is crucial to one side may seem inconsequential to the other. It's all journalism, and by the definitions used earlier, yes, it's all 'propaganda'.

But there has to be a right and wrong, doesn't there?

Right and wrong often exist only in so far as people's perceptions of a situation allow them to understand it - and like it or not, this is a lot about perception.

Both sides must be challenged relentlessly - with evidence, incontrovertible fact and perhaps most importantly, a decent, honest attempt to understand other human perspectives.

Both sides have failed at this, but I believe the Western side has failed worse, as they say.

It doesn't help to label Russians as blind dogs, the entire Russian media as propagandists and Vladimir Putin as an evil dictator that would give Adolf Hitler a run for his money. That's a cop-out and quite frankly, it's lazy.

The mainstream view is frequently the view that needs most rigorous challenging, because it has often achieved that prevalence through groupthink and a form of Western propaganda that is more insidious simply because it is often not recognized as such.

The prevailing mainstream view is that Russia is wrong, is a provocateur and has 'invaded' Ukraine under the leadership of an 'expansionist' and dangerous president. The minority view - and the one I share -  is that in fact NATO has been the provocateur and that the US is leading Europe towards instability to suit its own purposes.

There is a misconception that the prevailing view is the correct view, simply because so many people hold it. The second misconception is that one side is entirely right and one side is entirely wrong - and within that, the the 'enemy's' side has only bad intentions.

Our leaders would do well to rid themselves of both misconceptions if any progress is to be made for the people of Eastern Ukraine.

Fairy tale or reality?

In a fascinating piece about the border city of Narva, Estonia - a place which I just recently passed through myself - journalist Mark MacKinnon introduces us to Elvira Nyman.

The 77-year-old gazes across the Narva River, which separates the Estonian city from Russia, the "strong country".

Elvira lives in a world that has been "created for her" by Kremlin-controlled television, MacKinnon writes. In her mind, the West holds the blame for the crisis in Ukraine, Crimea was always Russia and Putin is a leader to be respected.

Except that this is not just in her mind - it's a view held by plenty who aren't 'under the influence' of Russian TV - and it's an insult to put the entire life experience of ethnic Russians in the former Soviet Republics down to some fairy tale which has been manufactured for them in Moscow.

The Russian world exists. It is not a creation of Putin's Russia as a prelude to an expansionist adventure. Their narrative has been created for them by history - and Tallinn-controlled TV could do no more to change that than Kremlin-controlled TV could to create it.

In a round-about way, MacKinnon admits this later in the piece. He quotes a representative of Narva's municipal government, who says it's "too simple" to blame Russian TV for why so many in the city feel alienated by the Estonian state.

"They wonder why the street signs in their city are only in Estonian when just 4 per cent of residents call it their first language," he says. "And they hate the sanctions that are destroying business ties with the Russian Federation across the river."

The solution is not to approach these people with blind self-righteousness and batter them over the head with the "right" world view until they see sense.

Western propaganda is not the antidote to Russian propaganda.

Grimes, the Oxford physicist, ended his piece with this line:

"We should feel zero shame in revising our positions in the light of new evidence or understanding. This is how progress is made."

I can't help but think we all might be better off if we tried it more often.

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