#1
The Stanford Political Journal
http://stanfordpolitics.com
January 7, 2016
Michael McFaul on Europe, Russia, China, and the Middle East
BY JAKE DOW
JD: You've stated that the key to a strong Ukraine is good governance and low levels of corruption. Achieving this has been difficult for all former Soviet republics, but some have had more success than others. What do you see as the key difference between the countries that have had success and the ones that haven't?
MM: The key is democratic institutions. The places that have gone the farthest the fastest with democratic reform also have the lowest levels of corruption in the region. Why is that? Who is most motivated to show corruption? The opposition party. What does an independent press do? It exposes bad things that happen in society. Independent courts expose corruption.
JD: In 2014, the big story in international security was Russia and Ukraine, but now it's shifting to the Middle East and ISIS, especially after the Paris attacks. Now, it seems there's a desire, especially from the French, for a unified front against ISIS. Do you think there's the political will to deal with both problems at once?
MM: I know there's only so many hours in the day for senior national security officials, and obviously what's happening in the Middle East makes ISIS our focus, but the government is big enough to walk and chew gum at the same time. The people [in the United States government] in charge of Russia and Ukraine are not the same people who are in charge of the Middle East. I think the administration is trying, rather deliberately, to signal that they aren't going to do that kind of linkage. When I was in government, we very explicitly had a policy of no linkage. We debated it in 2009, starting the Reset [of United States-Russia relations]... it was a very explicit policy...in fact I remember July 2009 we flew to Moscow and had this very positive meeting with with President Mededev and in September of that year we very deliberately sent the Vice President to Ukraine and Georgia with the message that we're not going to do this kind of linkage. It so happens that today, the Vice President is in Ukraine again. I went with him in 2009, not with him now, but his message most certainly is we are not abandoning you because of collaboration with the Russians in Syria. All the more so because, so far, Russia is not cooperating in Syria."
JD: There seems to be two narratives about dealing with Russia in Syria: one side says that because Putin is a key supporter of Assad, he's the key to a peaceful political settlement, and we have to negotiate with the Russians. The other side says Putin wants to negotiate to distract us-he's not negotiating in good faith-and we shouldn't negotiate with Putin. Which side do you lean towards? Do you think there's a potential deal that satisfies both US and Russian interests?
MM: I've heard Putin himself say he has no special relationship with Assad. We also said, when I was in the government (and I have no reason to believe the policy has changed) that the United States (at least the Obama administration) is not for regime change in Syria. That's an incorrect way to frame it. They want the regime and the state institutions to remain intact but to change the governance structure at the top and to have a coalition of some former Assad people and some opposition figures to form an interim government.
JD: Is that policy in place because of lessons learned from Iraq?
MM: Partly, partly just learned from more successful transitions. The Chilean transition for example allowed Pinochet to stay in the regime for decades, as a senator. "Assad must go" doesn't mean the regime must go. The problem is we have never been able to figure out the arrangement by which you can square that circle. There are two or three reasons for that. One is there is no alternative to Assad. If you think about the Egyptian transition-for all of its faults-there was the military who came in: General Tantawi took over after Mubarak stepped down. There's no figure like that in the Syrian regime, and second, if there might be, I think we tend to overestimate the Russian influence over the Syrian regime. It's not as if Putin could just call up Assad and say he must go. Assad would say "to hell with you, I'm not your puppet," and I do think we have tended to overestimate the influence Russia has over the Syrian regime.
JD: There were regional elections in France and the National Front did really well, the latest continuation of a longer term trend of a resurgence of nationalism in Europe. A characteristic of these nationalist forces is they are often less anti-Putin or even pro-Putin when we're talking about Le Pen. If this nationalism continues, how does that affect European-Russian relations?
MM: Well it's too early to tell in the long term, but there's no doubt in my mind that Putin himself, for several years, has been positioning himself ideologically as the leader of a worldwide conservative movement-small 'c' conservative. Both on the social conservative side, being close to the Church (the values stuff), and he has for a long time considered that's his role in the world against the decadent liberal parties of the West-Europe and the United States. And with Le Pen in particular, I can't remember the details off the top of my head, but one of the big Russian banks lent that party millions of dollars. It's not just rhetorical support; it's actual support....and of course Putin has a strategic objective to weaken the EU and to dissolve NATO. He's always wanted to do that.
JD: It's a tumultuous time in Europe-migration issues, economic problems, terrorism, and Russia. Is there enough political will to take on the Russian challenge given that there are so many other problems at home for Merkel, Hollande, and others?
MM: Generally speaking, I was impressed, even surprised, by how much European unity there was in response to the intervention in Ukraine. There was never a time in history-you have to go back to the crackdown on Solidarity in 1981 to remember there was a time when there were sanctions against Russia/the Soviet Union. I think Merkel should get credit for keeping that coalition together, but I'm nervous of it becoming unraveled because of the forces you just described.
JD: You've mentioned a couple times that NATO was an effective deterrence. Putin's aggression did not extend into NATO territories. In that sense, it's effective and not obsolete, as some have offered. But it is an old organization that was launched in very different times. How should NATO adapt to new challenges in the 21st century?
MM: I think it's going back to NATO's original intent...it's back to making sure NATO allies are not threatened by external actors and the biggest external actor-it's not the only one, but the biggest external threat to countries in the alliance-is Russia. That means strengthening deterrence, and that also means going back to the original stuff.
JD: We're seeing signs of greater Russian-Chinese cooperation. How do you see that relationship evolving? Is this a strategic threat to the US? What can or should the US do to prevent a unified Russian-Chinese bloc?
MM: I spent last summer at the Stanford Center at Peking University, a fantastic place. The main subject I was looking at was the triangular relationship between China, the United States, and Russia. I guess my preliminary take away is that China is running a brilliant foreign policy right now. They have convinced the Russians that they have a strategic relationship when in fact the most important bilateral relationship for them is with us, and that's smart; that's good diplomacy. I don't know what will happen in the long run, but I think that's a great position to be in. They fully understand that the management and deepening of their relationship with US is way more important than any other bilateral relationship, including with Russia. Just because trade levels, for economic and security reasons, the bilateral relationship is the most important for them. Russia is peripheral in that respect. Having said that, maintaining good relations with many countries is in the Chinese interest, and that's what they're doing.
JD: You've said that the legitimacy of the Putin regime initially was [bringing] economic progress and that recently he has transitioned to more of a populist nationalist. Do you worry about greater irrationalism if Russia's recent economic woes continue or if Putin feels more cornered politically, maybe by economic elites or by what's happening in the markets?
MM: Yes, I worry about it. I think after he came back as president, he was frustrated he didn't have an argument for legitimacy. He made us the enemy, he criticized the opposition for being our puppets as a way to consolidate his power base, and it most certainly worked well enough to get him reelected. But he always hovered around 60% in terms of approval rating (which was very low). Therefore after going into Ukraine, this more external argument for why he should be in power has become more important to him. That can be dangerous, that means you have to have perpetual conflict. If you don't have perpetual conflict, what is the argument? Especially at a time where they've probably hit the bottom-a long period of stagnation, maybe 1 or 2% growth but not the 7% growth we've seen.
JD: I want to turn back to something you said earlier, about Putin painting himself as the conservative opposition to the liberal world order. Do you think that's a Putin thing or-because of the origins of the liberal order, NATO/EU/US etc-is there a fundamental distrust of this system woven into the collective psyche of Russia, or is there a future in which Russia is a responsible member of that system?
MM: That's the fundamental question of the 21st century when it comes to Russia. There have been periods of Russian history where they were moving to integrate and be part of that Western community of democratic states, and that they had those periods suggests that it's not inevitable that they would be in confrontation with it-it's more individual leaders and circumstances than these long term cultural differences. Having said that, it's surprising to me how quickly Putin has been able to mobilize society against the West, and that suggests to me that maybe there are some deeper factors at play here. That suggests it's going to take a lot longer to undo.
JD: The strategic objectives were very clear for the US during the Cold War. In today's age, does the US have a grand strategy? What are our ends? What are we ultimately doing in the world? Not necessarily what you think we should be doing, but since the Cold War ended, what are we doing? Is there more than a fundamental incoherence?
MM: I would say the strategy of containment, in retrospect, has been grossly overrated. I think that's important to remember. First of all, it didn't work in the beginning. There were lots of critics of it. Communism grew for 30 years, the Chinese fell, and then two decades later Indochina fell, and then the Angolans fell, and the Mozambicans. So the idea that we had this policy in place and it eventually worked, well it didn't feel that way throughout the time. Moreover, under the guise of containment, you had radically different policies that in today's terms would sound like totally different policies. Nixon and Kissinger's policy was basically to accept the new distribution of power in the international system and to engage with the adversaries. Detente meant reaching out to the Chinese, that sounds a lot like Barack Obama today. Whereas Ronald Reagan, Republican, under the guise of containment, had something called the Reagan Doctrine, where he tried to overthrow the regime in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua. Both of those policies, regime change and detente were considered part of the same strategy called containment. I think there actually was a lot of variation under containment.
In terms of today, it feels most like-in terms of one word to describe, not to advocate-it's retrenchment, it's pulling back. We're frustrated with our inability to achieve our outcomes, either militarily or in the state construction business, and we're focusing on trying to get our own house in order.
There's a great book [Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama] by a guy named Stephen Sestanovich, that talks about these pendulum swings. I think it's a great book, which suggests there is a rhythm to this; it's not Democrat or Republican; and it's not Obama-I think there's something to that. What I guess I would say, having read that book and thought about this in other forums, is that we tend to look at these moments of retrenchment and think that they are going to last for decades, but they tend not to be.
So I'm pretty optimistic myself about America's leadership role at least for decades to come. We are in a period now of retrenchment, but we're still rising. We're not falling, we're rising. China's also rising. Maybe the rest aren't keeping up. So there's two rising powers, and actually a Chinese scholar pointed this out to me this summer. That's the better metaphor. If you look at our GDP rates, our military spending, our education-whatever your metric of power is-we're not declining; we're still going up. China's also going up at a faster pace, but it's not apparent that they'll keep up that pace for the next fifty years. These other periods of retrenchment worked themselves out.
When I was your age at Stanford, I remember I was a Stanford undergraduate and everyone was learning Japanese because they were the rising power, and they were going to translate economic power into military power, and thirty years forward that turned out not to be such a good bet. Now everyone's learning Chinese. My son is learning Chinese. I just think we're pretty bad at making these long term projections, and we underestimate the power of renewal of our political and economic system. That said, I've never been more pessimistic about our political system than I have been today, and even yet, I think we have the basic infrastructure in place to have this kind of renewal.
JD: You helped launch the Stanford European Security Initiative. Where did that idea come from and what are the goals of the project?
MM: There was a false notion, from myself included, where we believed that issues of European security were over, they're done, they'd been solved. Europe is whole and free except for the periphery. And that turned out to be a premature assumption. If you look out in the world, in terms of major challenges in international politics, European security has to be on the list of one of the top three challenges. We as a community are not doing enough on the subject. We used to do a ton. We used to be one of the best places in the world on these sets of issues. However, partly we atrophied, partly some of the people who were working on it, like Condoleezza Rice, were doing other things, and so we came together last spring and said we need to have a little more concentrated effort on this: (A) both for our own self nourishment and self awareness, we faculty members, to talk to each other again, bring people in to talk to us, and then (B) over the long term to create interest among undergraduates in these sets of issues because they have also faded in terms of course offerings and student interest, for good reason.
JD: You are always asked about Russia and Putin. I want to give you a platform more as a generalist to speak on a topic of your choice. You come from a unique position in that you do media stuff, you have an academic background, and you've spent time in government-what is one issue in international security/international relations, that you don't think get's covered enough? We only talked about a few things-the rise of China, terrorism, Russia-what's something that's underreported that you want to talk about?
MM: There is one very specific, narrow thing that I want to know more about, and I find it hard to find it, which is related to Syria: the moderate opposition. What is the moderate opposition in Syria? Who are they? What's their relationship to al Nusra? What's their relationship to ISIL? Sometimes there are 100 of them. Sometimes there's a thousand of them. I would want to ask the same thing about the struggles in the Middle East more generally. The nuances of the different groups, I feel as a consumer is really underreported, and I'm on TV all the time where I have to use the phrase "moderate opposition," and I don't know what it means. The President gave a speech yesterday-we're supporting "Syrian forces" he said, right? Who are they? What are they? How do they line up in terms of their ideology? I would say the same thing of about a half dozen countries in the Middle East. That's just an empirical question. That's not a theoretical question. We don't have enough nuanced understanding of these groups.
In terms of the big, longer term story, that I hope will still turn out to be true is that basic trends in what I would call modernization theory are still holding. And there's been more poverty reduction in the last thirty to forty years than there has been in the previous 1000 years.
Today people say, "well the American model has run out and nobody really talks about democracy anymore and there are these challengers." I'm struck by the opposite, that even the Russians, they don't say, "we have an alternative model." They say, "we just have a Russian style democracy." The Chinese don't say "we want to be not-democratic." They say, "just be patient with us, we need to go slow." And the only radical alternative, the only real alternative, to a democratic system of government is al-Qaeda and ISIS and that kind of set of ideas, and I'm impressed with how little they are attracting people, not how many people are attracted to them.
I know that other people have a different view but I don't see this. It's not like communism in the last century where literally half the world was (and at times half of Stanford campus) was interested in this alternative way of setting up a political system and an economic system. I just don't see it that way. I do think that because we are in this moment where these challenges are rising, we tend to think we're on the decline, but in terms of this ideological component, I think it's probably in a better place than most people think. And it needs more work. The thing that worries me is that we used to take it for granted, definitely the ideas about democracy.
JD: The idea of ideological superiority?
MM: Yeah. "The End of History," that is, the idea that it's inevitable to go this way. I still think the forces are pushing us that way, but it takes more attention and conscious attention to keep moving us in that direction.
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#2
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
January 7, 2016
Unwrapping Christmas in Russian literature
The decorations are up, the nights are drawing in - in the northern hemisphere, at least - and gift-hunters are braving the crowds ahead of Christmas. In Russia, however, this celebration has a different meaning.
PETER BEECH, SPECIAL TO RBTH
The majority of Russians celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7, as the Orthodox Church follows the Julian calendar. For Russian kids impatient for presents, New Year's Eve is the date to look forward to, leaving Christmas as a solemn, religious celebration that rounds off the festive season. Celebrations begin in earnest on 6 January, when the faithful attend a Christmas Eve service before breaking a 40-day meat and dairy fast with kutya (sweetened cooked grain), served as part of a 12-dish Holy Supper - one for each of Christ's disciples - after the first star appears in the sky.
Gogolian irreverence
Festivities; food and drink; families coming together at the dark heart of the year: Christmas has, as you can imagine, provided fertile ground for Russian writers over the centuries, even if they haven't always fully respected the piety of the occasion. In The Night Before Christmas, a much-loved story from 19th-century master of mischief Nikolai Gogol, the Devil himself - taking advantage of the one night he has "to prowl around the world filling the heads of good people with sinful thoughts" - decides to pocket the moon and wreak havoc on the remote village of Dikanka one snowy Christmas Eve.
The local Cossacks, devout Christians, are at home "eating their kutya with their families"; the drunks are crawling on all fours out of the roadhouse. Meanwhile, the town's respectable elders steal one by one over to the house of a scheming local widow - and end up, in Chaucerian fashion, unceremoniously hidden in coal sacks. A warped fairytale of debauchery, drunkenness and secret shenanigans, culminating in a magical flight to St. Petersburg to pilfer the Tsarina's slippers, The Night Before Christmas shows Gogol at his satirical best, poking fun at the gulf between public piety and private perversion.
Poverty and prestige
Dostoevsky's The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree, which turns the reader's attention on the plight of the poverty-stricken at this time of celebration and plenty, is far more downbeat. A starving boy, newly arrived in a provincial town, stumbles out of the cellar where his mother lies "as cold as the wall"; gobsmacked by the town's decorations, he reels between the window displays, showing Christmas trees and "cakes of all sorts - almond cakes, red cakes and yellow cakes" - only to be brought back to earth by the gnawing in his belly and the terrible cold. Shooed away from the crowds one last time, he curls up in a courtyard, where he has a vision of Christ's Christmas tree, surrounded by countless "bright and shining" children who fly around him and kiss him. You guessed it: he's frozen to death. His new playmates are the unfortunate fellow-victims of the savage Russian winter.
Sobering stuff. Things are scarcely always better at the other end of the social scale, however. Set among the privileged circles of early 20th-century Moscow, Boris Pasternak's novel Dr Zhivago features one of the most explosive Christmas scenes in all literature, when the heroine, Lara, arrives at a Christmas party intending to confront the sleazy lawyer, Komarovksy, who has manipulated her into an affair. "The dancers twirled and spun dizzily," writes Pasternak, before "the hotly breathing Christmas tree with its several tiers of lights". In their finery, the guests scoff tangerines and other delicacies; Komarovsky plays cards in the "Pompeiian" sitting room. The dancing is in full swing when the conviviality is shattered by the report of Lara's pistol - the perfect metaphor for the jarring of private pain against the season's confected bonhomie.
Annual reflections
Any look at festive Russian writing would be incomplete without a mention of Joseph Brodsky - a poet who, like Pasternak, was targeted by the Soviet authorities but went on to win the Nobel prize. Brodsky was in the habit of marking each Christmas with a poem; in his "24 of December, 1971", written the year before he emigrated to the US, he overlays the Nativity story with a rather less elevated scene of shoppers scrapping for bargains at a grocery store. "When it's Christmas," he writes, "we're all of us magi / At the grocers' all slipping and pushing / Where a tin of halva, coffee-flavored, / is the cause of a human assault-wave."
Though he was Jewish himself, Brodsky's poems about Christmas are defiantly religious - at a time when faith was discouraged - understatedly moving and determinedly unsentimental. They describe the birth of Jesus with narrow-focus realism, cutting through the myth and ritual to give us a frank account of what the Nativity is, at root: the first moments of a baby boy's life. In "Star of the Nativity", Brodsky writes: "all things seemed enormous: His mother's breast, the steam out of the ox's nostrils... the team of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar". It is Brodsky's determination to transcend the gluttony and the gaiety, the crassness and the commercialization of Christmas that take us back to the simple message of unity, empathy and generosity that are so important at this time of year, whatever our faith.
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#3
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
January 7, 2016
Back to the USSR: Lamenting the loss of the everyday
While the range of consumer goods available to ordinary Soviet citizens was notoriously narrow, some of those goods were - and still are - so dear to people that they couldn't have imagined life in the Soviet Union without them. RBTH interviewed a number of people who lived through the era to find out what they miss the most.
MARIA GRIGORYAN, RBTH
Milk on tap
"The thing I remember most fondly is how milk was sold on tap," said Polina Maslovskaya, a retiree. "You had to buy it before going to work, around 7 a.m., since stores used to run out of a day's supply by the afternoon. This kind of milk would turn sour very rapidly, and if that happened, my mother used it to cook pancakes.
"Nowadays," said Maslovskaya, "you can store a milk carton for an entire month, and it will still be drinkable, even if it's past the expiration date. We used to store glass bottles for milk - we sterilized them and then put them on the radiator to dry. It was sometimes difficult to carry several liters' worth of milk in bottles, so we also used to bring barrels and little buckets to be filled. That was the tradition."
Cologne
"Russian writer Ivan Bunin once said nothing brings memories back quite as well as smells. That's probably why I thought of the Troinoi (Triple) cologne," said Irina Dubtsova, a pediatrician.
"This is the scent of my childhood. There was a rumor at the time that Troinoi was Joseph Stalin's favorite perfume. My grandfather, my dad, my first boyfriend, a university professor of mine, a cab driver I once met - all of them used Troinoi.
"It was cheap and came in a sizeable bottle. My mother used it to treat cuts, and my dad cleaned his scissors with it. So, I guess you could say that everyone smelled the same in the USSR", added Irina, laughing.
Postage stamps
"I, for one, miss collecting things", said journalist Yury Kravchenko. "I used to collect stamps, and also ice hockey-themed badges. Later, I started collecting lighters. I'm now remembering how fascinated I was when I saw a rare stamp in my friend's album - it was incredibly stressful, it was probably easier to swim a kilometer than to find this cursed stamp! Nowadays, there is really no point in collecting anything - you can buy whatever you want without too much trouble."
The Nu, Pogodi! video game
"My generation had no personal computers or consoles. My son plays "Counter-somethings" and "Whatnot-crafts," and my daughter is feeding animals at the farm she has in her phone," said Alexei Belevich, an engineer.
"We had more interesting games - we used to arrange secret rooms in our house, we played in our yard and in my father's garage. That said, I can think of one video game I miss - it was Nu, Pogodi! ("Well, Just You Wait!," the name of a popular Soviet cartoon the game was based on).
"It was actually an unofficial clone of a Nintendo handheld electronic game. There was a rumor that after you scored 1,000 points, you would be rewarded with a cartoon that would be shown on the screen. I used to play it until my fingers got covered with calluses, and I did manage to get to 1,000 points once, but there was no cartoon! I was devastate," said Belevich.
Portable mechanical scales
"When we went to our local market, we always took our mechanical scales. It was really convenient, since we could be sure no vendor could deceive us," said retiree Larisa Yegorova.
"No-one uses scales like these today. I could only imagine how surprised people standing in the line at the store would be if I were to get those scales and start checking the weight of every vegetable bag."
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#4
Interfax
January 7, 2016
Patriarch Kirill sees no tragedy in current economic crisis
Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia has called on people not to despair over the economic problems in Russia.
"Problems are now generally relative: people earn a little more or a little less (only God forbid that the economic situation should worsen), but generally there is currently no tragedy in the country," the patriarch said in an interview that will air on Rossiya 1 television (VGTRK) on Thursday.For this reason, he believes that "people who get disappointed are weak and futile."
"If you measure your wellbeing only in money, if your wellbeing is measured by the quality of your vacation, your living standards, then the slightest reduction of consumption may seem like a horrible tragedy. And what does that mean? That means that the person is not very viable," the patriarch said.
He believes that there is currently "a synthesis of people's material, scientific, technical nature, people's aspiration to a good life with the increase of their spiritual needs" going on in Russia.
"I cannot say we have achieved a lot. We may be at the very beginning of this path, but it's a very correct path," the patriarch said.
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#5
Interfax
Russian bombing of Syria "defensive" and just, top cleric says
Moscow, 7 January: Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill has expressed support for the Russian military operation in Syria.
"What is happening today in Syria, which appears to be far away but is in actual fact literally our neighbour [as received], is what the defence of the Fatherland is about," the patriarch said in the interview to be shown on [official state] television channel Rossiya 1 (VGTRK) on Thursday [7 January].
If terrorism wins in Syria, "it will have a very good chance if not of winning then at least of marring the life of our people a great deal, of bringing misery and adversity," the primate said.
"This war is therefore a defensive one - it is not so much a war as pinpoint strikes. And yet it is our people's involvement in military operations, and as long as this war is defensive, it is just," he said confidently.
According to Christianity, "military operations are justified when they defend the individual, society and the state," the patriarch said.
"Moreover, we all know very well what terrible ills terrorism brings. Our people have gone through terrible trials - Beslan, Volgograd, one cannot list everything. We have been seared by this pain, we know what it is. And what about our plane that was shot down over Sinai [as received; the official Russian version is now that the flight was destroyed on 31 October by a bomb on board]? Therefore everything that is happening is a defensive response. In this sense we can safely speak of a just struggle," he stressed.
Besides, the patriarch said, Russia participates through its actions in saving those living in Syria and the Middle East in general, including Christians.
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#6
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
January 7, 2016
How do changes in Russian legislation impact doing business in Russia?
Introduction of new legislation - such as a new law on foreign media ownership that goes into effect in 2016 - can play an important role in changing how Western investors perceive the risk-reward trade-offs in Russia.
By Luke Johnson
Luke Johnson is a project manager at Schneider Group which supports companies on matters concerning doing business in Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and Germany, irrespective of their size or industry sector.
As Russia heads into 2016, a lack of access to Western financial markets and the general overhang of economic sanctions have forced the Russian government to take a closer look at the current investment climate. What can be done to convince Western investors that now is a good time to invest in Russia?
When it comes to Russia, fear of the unknown can have an outsized effect on incoming businesses. It does not help matters that the Russian legislator can work quite quickly. It is not only what is passed in the Russian Duma, but what could be passed, and, almost more importantly, how it would be enforced. These are extremely difficult questions for prospective market entrants to answer.
Admittedly, this is a subjective, but still highly influential, component. Some new laws have raised questions about the importance placed by the Russian legislator on the current investment climate. One example is the media law which will be put into effect in February 2016: the law will force foreign media companies to sell their assets to local Russian players until a maximum of only 20 percent remains under foreign control (this is down from the previous maximum of 50 percent). This law, which acts almost like a retrospective quasi-expropriation of assets, has been a source of concern for many new potential Russian investors. Fortunately, organizations and associations are currently working on certain amendments to the bill.
Besides uncertainty in the future, there is also uncertainty with regard to interpretation of the laws. The new personal data policy law concerns the processing of personal data using databases in Russia. Of course, while the concept is not unique to Russia (the EU also has their version), the question of enforcement and interpretation is still open (for instance, to interpret the law conservatively, one could say it prohibits storing the personal data of Russian citizens outside Russia in many cases).
Also, because it is a new law, there are few, if any, cases from which to draw examples, so lawyers are forced to be conservative in their consultations. It does not help that wording and definitions are vague in the legal text as well. The result is an overhanging fear that their company is infringing on a law which they do not (nor many others) really understand.
Because these events are not regular (nor frequent), it is extremely challenging to quantify them, meaning evaluating the risk objectively is almost impossible. The consequences for these "black swan" events are always grossly exaggerated. This indirectly may result in a company deciding not to enter the market for fear of a perceived sense of excessive instability and unfairness, even though the chances of something like that happening are almost zero.
Moving to something more concrete (and positive), taxes have been decreasing in general over the last decade or so. This trend began in 2001 with the introduction of a flat personal income tax rate of 13 percent, then to the abolition of sales tax of 5 percent in 2004, to the reduction of VAT and social insurance contributions in 2005, to a decrease of profit tax in 2009, among others.
On another note, the heavy hand of bureaucracy weighs heavily on Russian businesses. But, the authorities are aware of this and are taking steps to ease the burden. Discussions are in the pipeline for a standardized Business-to-Business (B2B) and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems, which would make the transition of necessary accounting documents electronic and thereby much simpler. Currently, there are several different solutions on the market, which is not practical for manufacturers with more than one supplier. By standardizing this, they will be able to greatly streamline their accounting and administration departments.
Beyond taxes and efficiencies in business, a third way that legislation positively affects companies doing business here is by providing them with preferential conditions in the form of subsidies, support for export, preference for public procurement, special utility rates, etc. Federal Law No. 488-FZ, in combination with other resolutions, has come into effect at the beginning of this year and is designed to attract foreign manufacturers into Russia.
This legislation is relatively new, and the details and definitions are still currently being worked out. The whole project may take longer than expected since the authorities are trying to walk a very fine line: they want to attract foreign investors, but still protect local ones.
One solution for this is to require foreign investors to demonstrate that they are making products that are not "analogous" to Russian-made ones (or the noun form, "analog," which is seen more in the legal text). Naturally, the details here can be technical, with layers of reviews and complications. However, once demonstrating that they have a unique product (and some others), foreign companies would be eligible for a "special investment contract," which would be fairly customized for each applicant, offering a range of preferential conditions.
Another way to affect businesses is via changes to business conditions or corporate law. The "Amendments to the Russian Civil Code" 42-FZ, which came into force on June 1, 2015, has introduced concepts that are prevalent in the West. A notable one includes article 381.1, which allows (and better regulates) security payments (financial collateral). This will make some types of agreements (e.g. lease agreements) less risky. For example, in a lease agreement, this collateral can secure the obligation of the lessee to pay the rent or pay the damages. Before this, a pledge of money was a more opaque and controversial issue under Russian law.
Perhaps more importantly, article 431.2 introduces representations and warranties for the first time in Russian law. The representing party now bears full liability for misrepresentations given to the other party under a contract. Essentially, this means that if Party A gives a representation in a contract (e.g. about its own good standing, or the quality of the premises in an agreement for sale of real estate; or absence of debts or claims from third parties to a target company that is selling its shares, etc.), then this statement can be regarded as true by Party B. If it is later evident that it is not true, then Party A has to compensate all the damages to Party B.
This subtle addition of inherent faith or trust into the document could improve the amount of integrity throughout the system. Integrity is regarded as an extremely important factor for businesses to operate efficiently and effectively. This is an important step towards making the business environment more credible, and thereby addressing a negative perception of Russian business held in the West.
Overall, legislation is a very important consideration for businesses at every stage - from perception to interpretation to enforcement. This also refers to the laws that could be passed in the future. Russia, like the vast majority of countries, is a country that wants to be attractive for investors, and recent legislative changes are in place - or being put in place - to advance this cause.
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#7
Forward
http://forward.com
January 8, 2016
How Russia Created a Jewish Tolerance Center Even Vladimir Putin Can Tolerate
By Olga Gershenson
Olga Gershenson is the author of "The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe" (Rutgers University Press, 2013) and a co-editor of a special issue of the journal East European Jewish Affairs, dedicated to new Jewish museums in post-Communist Europe.
Today, post-Communist Europe is experiencing a museum boom. Countries are trying to consolidate a collective identity in museums that tell their nation's story in a way that was not possible under communism. Jewish museums and Holocaust memorials offer not only histories of Jewish communities in a given town or country, but also a perspective on the place of those communities within a larger national history and a country's self-understanding. For decades, the subject of Jewish history and memory was largely off-limits in the Eastern bloc. However, since the fall of communism there has been a revival of public Jewish culture and institutions in the region. New museums, memorials and education centers have emerged all across Central and Eastern Europe as well as in the former Soviet Union.
One of the most ambitious is the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012. A multimillion dollar endeavor, the museum is supported by Jewish donors as well as by non-Jewish benefactors, foundations and local authorities. Its core exhibitions, which rely on the expertise of both local and international scholars and designers, offer an affecting multimedia narrative of Russian Jewish history. In the short time since it was established, Moscow's Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center has become part of the international museum scene and a tourist attraction, with 85,000 visitors in 2014.
Major museums are usually expensive undertakings, involving legislation, fundraising and planning, and as such they reflect a society's agenda. The elements of a museum - architecture, curatorial choices and exhibit design - all convey its political narrative. History museums are cultural documents offering a glimpse of the past, which they are ostensibly trying to preserve, as well as of the present. Naturally, a Jewish museum in Russia has to grapple with local historical and cultural heritage and to stake a claim in the national past: Which stories are told in its displays? What is highlighted and what is omitted? How is the Jewish story integrated with the broader national narrative?
While in early Soviet times, synagogues (as well as churches) were turned into stables and barns, in Moscow a garage was turned into a Jewish museum. Granted, this was no ordinary garage. The Soviet avant-garde architect Konstantin Melnikov designed the historic Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage in 1926.
The museum project was initiated by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia - the umbrella organization for Chabad-Lubavitch in Russia - supported by the Kremlin and financed by a handful of Russian Jewish oligarchs at a cost of $50 million. The journey to museum from garage began in 2001, when Moscow City Hall donated the dilapidated building to the Hasidic Jewish Community Center. The idea was that the building would house a cultural center, including an exhibition on Jewish culture and an art gallery. While this site is neither central nor easily accessible to tourists, it is part of an entire campus of Jewish religious and cultural organizations that sprouted in the post-Soviet era in the traditionally Jewish neighborhood (to the extent that Moscow has Jewish neighborhoods) of Maryina Roshcha. The museum building shares its territory with a Jewish day school, a yeshiva, a medical center and several Jewish charity organizations.
Several years of faltering attempts to renovate the garage building ended in 2007, when Roman Abramovich, a federation board member, restored it. In 2008 it opened its doors to the public as the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, managed by Dasha Zhukova, Abramovich's girlfriend at the time. While the art center was there only temporarily, the name stuck. The institution is still known in Moscow as "the Garage."
The federation had a vision for the future museum, which the Russian chief rabbi, Berel Lazar of Chabad-Lubavitch, discussed in an official conversation with Vladimir Putin in June 2007. Lazar, known for his close relationship with Putin, emphasized the necessity of creating a museum that would not only educate new generations of Russians in the spirit of tolerance, but also celebrate Russia as a model of the co-existence of different religions in a multinational and multi-confessional society.
Putin was so moved by this idea that he donated one month of his salary toward the creation of the museum. Shortly after this, the FSB (the Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB) pledged its support by providing documents from its archives. Close ties between the Chabad-Lubavitch leadership and Putin's regime, as well as Putin's widely publicized support, created the perception that the museum-in-the-making would be an officially sanctioned institution, even though it would be created with private funds. Indeed, the final exhibits tell a story that is consistent with the regime's customary positive portrayal of Russia to the West. To that end, the museum positions Jews as a model minority.
To implement this vision, the federation wanted the museum to be designed on the principles of "edutainment," where visitors could learn the history of Russian Jewry in a fun way. The federation retained Ralph Appelbaum Associates, an international design firm with experience working on major Holocaust and Jewish museums. RAA was charged with creating a world-class museum using cutting-edge digital technology and interactivity. The exhibition was to address the widest possible audiences to appeal not only to Russian Jews, a very small minority today, but also to non-Jewish Russians, tourists and, most important, young audiences.
Aside from a modest collection of Judaica and art, the new museum had no curators, collections or research, only a budget, a building and a deadline.
To create the museum content from scratch, RAA put together a content committee consisting of five international scholars in the field of Russian Jewish history and in Jewish religion and culture. Many other scholars were brought in for consultation and for filmed interviews, which were later featured in the exhibits.
The museum was created in record time - less than four years from start to finish; by contrast, the core exhibition of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews was more than 10 years in the making. To satisfy the client's vision of a museum as a popular educational attraction, RAA decided to use a multimedia narrative approach. The starting point would be not only original, valuable objects or works of art, but also reconstructed artifacts, film, sound, immersive installations and interactive presentations of various kinds.
The exhibition, located on a floor of enormous size, about 92,000 square feet, presents more than 2,000 years of history, including a detailed multimedia timeline of 230 years of the history of Jews in Russia. There are about 5,000 photographs, 200 artifacts, 34 films, 32 digital interactives, six listening stations, eight custom maps and a 4-D theater with an animated film. The texts are in Russian and English, with occasional Hebrew and Yiddish. The multimedia exhibits are supplemented with some original objects collected in the area of the former Pale of Settlement. To say the least, this is an unprecedented undertaking. Although there are other smaller and more traditional Jewish museums in Russia, this is the first one on such a scale. It is also the first interactive and multimedia museum anywhere in the country.
The original historic building reflects the modernist avant-garde sensibility of the architect. The bus garage is a parallelogram, a design decision consistent with Melnikov's constructivist aesthetic and a way to help buses maneuver in and out of parking spaces. RAA's design maintained the original diagonal sensibility and organized the central space in the shape of an inverted V. The spaces along the sidewalls are similarly dynamic in shape.
A ramp at the entrance leads to the Beginnings Theater, a 4-D experience dedicated to the history of the Jewish people as told in the Bible. A multimedia installation on Jewish migrations, starting with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and ending with the partitioning of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the 18th century, shows how Jews found themselves in the Russian Empire. A large exhibit presenting traditional life in a shtetl occupies the very center of the floor. Along the sidewalls of the space are exhibits dedicated to the history of Russian and Soviet Jews, with World War II and the Holocaust occupying the entire back wall. The Tolerance Center, a separate area furnished with tablets and a screen, concludes the museum.
The federation made clear to the designers that the three most important parts of the museum were the Beginnings Theater; the gallery, "The Great Patriotic War and the Holocaust," and the Tolerance Center. The stories told in these three areas express the tensions between Jewish and Soviet/Russian narratives. The Beginnings Theater is dedicated fully to presenting the biblical history of the Jewish people. "The Great Patriotic War and the Holocaust" combines the Soviet story of the war and the Jewish story of the catastrophe. The Tolerance Center promotes a universal idea of multiculturalism in the New Russia. Tensions between Jewish and dominant cultures are emblematic of every Jewish museum, but the question is how the Moscow Jewish museum resolves these tensions.
The Beginnings Theater is the most Jewish and least historical of the exhibits. Using immersive animations and an ambient soundtrack, a 20-minute film presents the biblical narrative from the creation of the world to the destruction of the Second Temple, in 70 C.E., explaining the origins of the Jewish people and the major tenets of Judaism. This 4-D multimedia extravaganza is designed to be particularly appealing to young audiences. As animated images fill the circular screen that surrounds the viewers, the seats of the theater rock to the scenes of biblical destructions; droplets of water are sprinkled on the audience to signify the flood, and, in the story of the Exodus, laser projections of locusts fill the space.
In the main exhibition space, the tension between Jewish and Soviet/Russian narratives starts to emerge. That can first be felt in the spatial organization of the exhibit, presenting two conflicting approaches to time. In the words of the museum's own narrative, "In the first case, it is linear historical time, in another case, it is time of tradition - the circle of life and Jewish holidays." Jewish time is a sacred time - cyclical and eternal.
The emotional heart of the museum is an exhibit called "Shtetl: A Jewish Home," framed on one side by "Storyline"- a chronological narrative of Russian Jewish history told through texts, images, maps, timelines and short videos - and on another by an exhibit called "Judaism - a Living Religion," an overview of the Jewish lifecycle and holidays, with nods to local observances in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Located between the axes of history and religion, "Shtetl" functions as both a historical exhibit about a Jewish town in the Russian Empire and a chance to experience, through re-created environments and interactive technology, such Jewish settings as the synagogue, Heder and Sabbath table.
In the interactive exhibits, touch-sequence videos bring the shtetl to life. In a Sabbath tableau, a mother blesses the candles and a father says the Kiddush. Attractive actors portray the parents, and equally attractive children surround them, creating an idealized nostalgic picture of a traditional Jewish family. In the next gallery, visitors can inhabit the space of the synagogue, sit in a pew while immersed in a soundscape of prayer and song, and even imagine themselves as Jewish scholars, as they scroll through the pages of a digital Torah.
Contrasting with this eternal Jewish time, the events of Russian-Soviet Jewish history, from the 19th century to the 21st, are arranged according to a secular historic timeline. The first gallery is designed like a cafe, with interactive displays at each table. It covers events of the late imperial period, including urbanization, migration and the entrance of Jews into politics. The next gallery shows World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution and the pogroms that followed the post-Revolutionary Civil War, The gallery, "Soviet Union: 1922-1941," depicts the rise of Soviet Yiddish culture and its figureheads. Next comes "The Great Patriotic War and the Holocaust." The two remaining galleries focus on the postwar and current periods. "Postwar Era" covers the anti-Semitic campaigns of late Stalinism, as well as Khrushchev's liberalization, represented through a re-created Soviet apartment, home to an average Jewish family. The Brezhnev period is portrayed through a re-created birch forest where Soviet Jewish activists gathered for underground celebrations of Jewish holidays and culture. The final gallery features a lavishly produced film that portrays Russian Jewish experiences during Perestroika, Yeltsin's era and the current regime, culminating in a celebratory speech by Putin. The narration emphasizes the revival and flourishing of Jewish culture and religion in contemporary Russia, including synagogues, organizations and schools.
While this is the part of the museum where the national narrative of the "New Russia" becomes palpable, it is present in the other historic galleries. Whether these events cover tragic occurences, like anti-Semitic persecutions, or joyous ones, like the stories of Jewish accomplishments, the museum inscribes them on the larger canvas of general Russian history, moving forward, in contrast with circular and eternal Jewish time. The takeaway is that Jews in the past endured antagonism and discrimination, but they nevertheless succeeded in the face of these trials and tribulations. Thus the museum delivers on Lazar's promise to Putin to "truly show the difference between the historical past and today's reality."
Moreover, the Soviet part of the exhibit demonstrates clearly not just that Jews contributed to Russian/Soviet culture, but also that they shaped the very core of it, through music, literature, cinema and other arts. By creating this narrative the museum asserts that Jews are part and parcel of the Russian nation, and their triumphal story makes them a model Russian minority, a facet of the new multinational, multi-religious Russia, tolerant of Others (although high fences around the museum and a security checkpoint at the entrance suggest otherwise).
The tension between Soviet and Jewish narratives is felt most acutely in the exhibit on World War II and the Holocaust. Holocaust memorialization in the West, including museums and memorials in the United States, Germany and Israel, is a well-explored subject. But in the Eastern bloc, the subject of the Holocaust, and Jewish history in general, was largely off-limits. In Soviet historiography, the Holocaust was universalized -subsumed as part of the overall Soviet tragedy, with Jewish victims euphemistically labeled "peaceful Soviet citizens." To the extent to which the history of the Holocaust was discussed, only crimes against Jews in Germany or Poland were mentioned, thus absolving the Soviet Union of any historic responsibility for mass Jewish losses on its own soil. Since perestroika and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, this has been changing. But the question of Holocaust memory in Russia is a new one, and how to integrate it with the memory of the war is not yet clear.
If the Soviet story of the war leaves little space for the Jewish catastrophe, the Jewish (and Western) narrative of the Holocaust largely excludes the tremendous Soviet losses - about 27 million lives, including 12 million civilians. In the Western memory and popular culture, the history of the Holocaust on Soviet territory - so-called "the Holocaust by bullets" - is often overshadowed by representations of ghettos and camps, mainly Auschwitz.
The Moscow museum tries to reconcile these two approaches, as the gallery name shows. The gallery keeps the Soviet name and dates of the war - the Great Patriotic War, 1941-45 - but appends to it the term "Holocaust," a word that was introduced into Russian circulation only in the mid-1990s, and one that is still not well known there.
In a departure from a Soviet discourse, the museum highlights the particular significance of the war for Jews, representing both its heroes and its victims. The story of the Jewish war effort in the Red Army and partisan movement features prominently in the gallery. A large screen shows video testimonies of former fighters. Two enormous objects illustrate their heroism: a real T-34 tank, a legendary Red Army weapon and a life-size model of a Po-2 airplane, famous for being flown by "night witches" - female military aviators, some of whom were Jewish. These large-scale videos and artifacts are complemented by such intimate documents as letters, photographs and personal papers of Soviet Jews who fought at the fronts. Such memorialization would have been unthinkable in Soviet times, and yet its framing retains Soviet strategies. Jews are simply added to the heroic Soviet story. The introductory text of the display reads, "Like the entirety of the Soviet people, Jews participated in the defense of their motherland."
The gallery also tells the story of Jewish loss. The main exhibit, a panoramic film projected on a massive, curved screen, interweaves wartime archival footage, testimonies of Holocaust survivors and scholarly commentary to tell the history of the war, as well as the story of Jewish death and suffering in the occupied Soviet territory. Survivors' testimonies became familiar in the West, thanks to the work of such organizations as the USC Shoah Foundation, but they are entirely new in Moscow. Throughout the Soviet era, the identity of "Holocaust survivor" did not exist. In fact, survivors had to conceal the history of their imprisonment in ghettos or camps to avoid being suspected of treason.
At the same time, the museum avoids dealing with more difficult subjects, such as relations between Jews and non-Jews during the war. In the entire exhibit, there is only one brief paragraph about local collaborators "in some Lithuanian and Ukrainian towns." In that story, Russians are not implicated in the anti-Jewish violence. It is true that most Jewish victims in the occupied Soviet territory were killed in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Lithuania. But even within the contemporary borders of Russia there were also dozens of ghettos and numerous sites of mass executions. The museum, however, presents the Holocaust as part of the heroic narrative of the war, according to which the good Soviets defeated the evil Germans. Consequently, the museum succeeds in glorifying and mourning, but without raising more controversial and relevant questions that would require the viewer to come to terms with a nation's difficult past.
Issues of memory and dealing with the past also emerge in the memorial part of the exhibit, the Remembrance Space. Comprising a partially enclosed cube, it is a space with an entrance on one side that faces the panoramic film, and with candles on the interior wall. Projected above the flames of the candles are the names of victims. Although reminiscent of a conventional Holocaust memorial, with its candles and inscribed names, this treatment differs because the identities of the victims, other than their names, are missing. When I pressed the tour guide, I was given a number of 5 million victims but was not sure who they were - Jews? Civilians? Prisoners of war?
It turns out this ambiguity is by design. Instead of a Holocaust memorial, the federation envisioned the Remembrance Space as an ecumenical space. In fact, according to the original concept, the inscribed names should represent all 27 million Soviet lives lost. However, technical limitations made projections of 27 million names impossible, forcing the media designers to cull together a selection of names from the three databases of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the war, accessible from the computer monitors installed in the space. Here, memorializing overall losses arguably continues the Soviet legacy of universalizing Jewish victims. According to the logic of the Remembrance Space, Jewish victims are a part of the larger losses of the Great Patriotic War, and it is sufficient to focus on the generalized story of the entire event.
It is in the Tolerance Center, the least specifically Jewish part of the museum, where the narrative of the "New Russia" comes to the fore. This open space, with minimalist white seating, is reminiscent of the Museum of Tolerance, in Los Angeles. Here, too, visitors can watch educational videos on individual stations and take quizzes to assess their own tolerance of minorities based on disability, race and religion (but not sexual orientation). The Tolerance Center can be read as an attempt by the Russian state to respond to Russia's growing xenophobia, which is aimed today at new ethnic and religious minorities, including people from Central Asia and the Caucasus. In today's Russia, members of these groups face hostility and discrimination at the personal, social and state levels, including race-motivated riots.
The Tolerance Center is a distinct and separate part of the museum. Its videos and texts were initiated and produced entirely by the federation, without the involvement of RAA designers or scholars.
The Tolerance Center is not the only semi-autonomous entity within the museum; the historic building also houses a children's center, with programs and classes for young visitors, and the Schneerson Collection, a library of precious Jewish books and manuscripts assembled by the early rabbinic leaders of Chabad which were moved to the museum on Putin's initiative. The museum also houses the Avant-garde Center, with a library and public programs dealing with contemporary art (not necessarily Jewish).
What makes the Tolerance Center stand out is that, unlike the Avant-garde Center and the Schneerson Collection, it is positioned as a crucial part of the museum. Its importance is further emphasized by the museum's reported plans to open 11 more tolerance centers across Russia, an initiative for which it will seek both private and public funding.
Moscow's Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center represents both the cutting edge and the essential paradox of a new generation of Jewish museums in post-Communist Europe. In attempting to align Jewish and national narratives, tensions arise that show how in many Eastern European countries, true integration of Jewish history is still a work in progress.
The article's publication coincides with the Center for Jewish History's symposium "Jewish Museums in the 21st Century," on January 10 and is based on Olga Gershenson's contribution to that publication.
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#8
www.rt.com
January 8, 2016
NATO logic: Russia is a grave threat, but expansion 'nothing to do' with Moscow
By Danielle Ryan
Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance journalist and media analyst. She has lived in the US and Germany and is currently based in Moscow. She previously worked as a digital desk reporter for the Sunday Business Post in Dublin. She studied political reporting at the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism in Washington, DC and also has a degree in business and German. She focuses on US foreign policy, US-Russia relations and media bias.
The 28-member western military bloc has once again "categorically" denied that it poses any threat to Russia, arguing that its ongoing enlargement is "not directed against anyone".
The comments are just the latest in the war of words between NATO and Russia, but it's another example of how nonsensical the alliance's conflicting talking points are.
Foresight from 1949
First, let's backtrack for a moment. About three and a half months after NATO was established in 1949, then US Senator Robert A. Taft - the son of President William Howard Taft - made a speech in which he explained his reasoning for voting against the establishment of the alliance.
By arming nations against the Soviet Union, Taft said NATO would simply exist as an "offensive and defensive military alliance against Russia". He added: "I believe our foreign policy should be aimed primarily at security and peace, and I believe such an alliance is more likely to produce war than peace."
Taft even suggested that provoking the Russians in such a way could lead to the outbreak of a third World War, one which would have the potential to "destroy civilization on this earth".
On this matter, Taft had something which is lacking in today's Washington: the benefit of foresight. Without necessarily agreeing with all of it, he managed to put himself in Russia's shoes and understood that it would be illogical to dismiss Moscow's concerns out of hand. He worried that if Russia began to feel it had been "ringed" in by "so-called defensive arms" that this could lay the groundwork for war.
"Unfounded" criticism?
Fast forward sixty-six years to a world without the Soviet Union, but with a variety of other very real and pressing problems. Today, the heads of present-day NATO are adamant that while the Soviet Union may have been the reason for its initial existence, its military might is now directed against no one in particular. Any suggestion that NATO or its policies could be viewed as a threat are "unfounded" and no one need worry; this is a purely "defensive" alliance.
But here's what doesn't add up.
How seriously can we take the claim that NATO's enlargement in Europe has had nothing to do with Russia, when for the last year various heads of state and high level officials within the EU and the US - including Barack Obama - have been citing Russia as one of the gravest threats to humanity? How can NATO cite Russia as a grave threat one minute, and then claim that its expansion has absolutely nothing to do with Russia the next?
Recall that Obama named Russia as one of the top security threats in 2015 - alongside ISIS and Ebola. US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has labelled Russia a "very, very significant threat" and a selection of other Pentagon generals have lined up to wax lyrical about the fact that Russia is not only a threat, but an "existential" one, at that. On the other side of the pond then, you had British foreign secretary Philip Hammond last year naming Russia potentially the "single greatest threat" to the UK's security. In what universe Russia decides to attack Britain, it is hard to imagine, but trumpeting the 'threat from Russia' seemed to be all the rage last year.
Of course, when the Pentagon starts naming potential boogeymen, it can easily be chalked up to the usual 'give us a bigger budget' spiel - despite the fact that the Pentagon spends about 10 times more than Russia does on defense. If you're running out of ideas, the specter of war with a menacing Russia bent on world domination is probably always a good way to stave off cuts. But when the president himself starts listing Russia as a threat on almost the same level as bloody and barbaric terror groups, that's quite a pronouncement.
It's also why it makes little sense to believe NATO spokespeople when they are trotted out to let everyone know that expansion has absolutely nothing to do with Russia. By the same token, we should take it with a pinch of salt when Washington says anti-missile defense systems in Europe are also - of course - absolutely nothing to do with Russia.
Interestingly though, when the tables are turned and Vladimir Putin names the US and NATO as national security threats for the first time, this apparently is outrageous. It is "fundamentally wrong" for the Russians to view the US as a threat, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis says. There is simply "no reason" to label the US a threat to Russia's security. Man, that crazy Putin guy just does not know which way is up.
So let's recap: Russia is a threat to the US, but the US is not a threat to Russia and it would be terribly silly to even suggest such a thing.
Improbability of war doesn't negate the threat
While it remains extremely unlikely that we will see an all-out conflict between Russia and NATO - given that neither have any real interest in attacking each other - NATO expansion still presents a genuine problem for Russia. After all, the world can take unpredictable turns. Ensuring Russia's lasting security and stability is the foremost priority of any Russian president.
This is an analogy that's been made a million times, but really, just imagine for a moment how the US would react if a Russian-led military alliance had marched up to its borders in Canada or Mexico, or both. Would any number of assurances from Moscow that it was 'no threat' to the US fly in Washington? Of course not.
Think of it this way: NATO blows a gasket when Russia flies its military aircraft over the Baltic Sea near its own borders. It's "provocative" when Russia stages military exercises on its own territory, and imaginary Russian submarines have more than once caused all-out panic.
To really familiarize yourself with the illogic that permeates the White House and Pentagon thinking on the NATO/Russia question, consider that former US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel actually complained that Russia was "on NATO's doorstep" and appeared to be utterly baffled as to how it got there. When questioned by AP reporter Matt Lee about the strange comment, then Pentagon press secretary John Kirby didn't have much to say, because he "barely got a history degree".
But this brings us to a wider, less amusing point. Washington's attitude towards Russia since 1991 and the fall of the USSR has been that of a victor; we won, you lost and now you are no longer entitled to have your interests taken into account. Russia, in the eyes of those in the White House, is simply not allowed to conduct a foreign policy. Any attempt by Moscow to assert itself at any time, for any reason, is simply "aggression" and Putin an unruly "antagonist" - because, simply put, any effort to alter the current unipolar order will be met with huge resistance.
The real problem with the NATO spokesperson's comments this week is not so much that anyone is accusing it of getting ready to launch a sneak attack on Russia - it's that it's not always up to one party to decide what is or isn't a threat. NATO may indeed believe Russia should not regard it as a threat, but if Russia feels that it is or that it could foreseeably be, then that must be taken into account.
Here's an idea for 2016: With a refugee crisis that sees no end in sight and the continuing threat of terror blow-back in European cities combining to shake the entire foundation of the EU project, NATO states would be better off spending far less time thinking about Russia and a little bit more time thinking about themselves - because the sad irony is, NATO may now be as much a threat to itself as it is to anyone else.
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#9
Valdai Discussion Club
http://valdaiclub.com
January 8, 2016
2015 RESULTS: TRANSFORMATION OF GLOBALIZATION, REGIONALIZATION OF GOVERNANCE
By Dmitry Suslov
Dmitry Suslov is Director of the Valdai Club program "Globalization and Regionalization: General State of the World Economy and Global Governance".
The main economic trend in 2015 was a decisive turn towards regional and macro-regional tools of economic governance. Globalization has not stopped, but it is rapidly losing its positions as a universal trend in the sphere of rules and institutions.
Global players are moving quickly to change the focus of economic governance from global to macro-regional and trans-regional levels.
The main events in this sphere were the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement signed by the US, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru in Atlanta, USA, on October 5, and the Russian-Chinese declaration on cooperation in coordinating the development of the Eurasian Economic Union and the Silk Road Economic Belt, signed in Moscow on May 8.
The United States and the European Union continued discussing the creation of a macro-regional economic union, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), though less energetically than the TPP project. China, Japan, India and the ASEAN countries considered creating an alternative to the TPP for Asia, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).
These events have turned a new page in the development of global economic order and global history and mark the end of globalization and global economic governance as we have known it for the past 25 or 30 years. Global mechanisms such as GATT or WTO will not expire, but they will cease to be political priorities of key players in creating favorable conditions for their development. They are yielding their positions to regional and macro-regional communities with different rules and standards, a trend that will increase the fragmentation of the economic governance system in a globalized and interdependent world.
This process is led by the United States. Unwilling to give up global leadership and facing resistance from the new centers of power to the promotion of the rules that suit Washington, the United States is imposing its rules on individual regions and macro-regions. The TPP comprises traditional US allies and close partners and countries that seriously fear China's economic and subsequently political domination. Beijing did not attend the TPP negotiations and was only invited to join it after the TPP agreement had been signed. The EU members and associated countries, but not Russia, are likely to be invited to join the TTIP.
On the one hand, the non-Western centers of power are not barred from the US-led regional associations. Rather, China, Russia and India have been offered to choose between accepting Washington's rules and facing marginalization. The policy of involving them in the US-centered economic world order has not been abandoned but has been tightened and extended: instead of adjusting this world order to the new centers of power, these countries are being encouraged to accept the rules that were developed without due consideration for their requirements. Washington continues to work towards a global economic order but through the back door, by creating regional associations in the hope that the other centers of power will come around, eventually joining them sooner or later.
On the other hand, there is little chance, at least in the short and medium term that the non-Western leaders will humbly accept these rules and join the US world order through regional associations. Rather to the contrary. China has proposed creating a regional economic community, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which would unite the leading Asian economies less the United States. Chinese experts and diplomats say off record that even if and when China joins the TPP, it will be only on its own terms and not those that have been coordinated in Atlanta without its participation.
Therefore, economic order in Asia Pacific, which has become the main global economic center, will remain fragmented for a long time due to the fact that it precludes the participation of China and the United States in the same economic community. Many experts believe that the TPP can operate without China and the RCEP without the United States for an indefinite period of time. Likewise, the TTIP, if created, will exist for quite a long time without Russia. Since it is not the WTO but these regional instruments that will determine the rules of economic relations for the United States and China as the two main poles of the global economy, economic governance will be further fragmented and the global economic order will split into several regional communities.
This process spread to Eurasia in 2015, although the coordination of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) radically differs from the US-led regional economic blocs. These blocs' rules are formulated by the United States and reflect the US's priority goal of in-depth liberalization, whereas the coordination of the EAEU and the SREB implies a flexible and mutual adaptation of these groups for the purpose of mutual development: the SREB will be used as an instrument for deepening Eurasian economic integration, while the EAEU development will offer huge advantages to China.
Therefore, this is neither a regional bloc nor an association when one of the players forces its own rules and standards upon the other members. Moreover, the coordination of the EAEU and the SREB will not produce a closed institution. The SREB transport routes will not be limited to the EAEU countries, because China's priority partner is the EU and so the SREB's goal is to connect the EU, the EAEU and China. That said, this is obviously a regional project that can result in the creation of an economic community of Greater Eurasia with China and the EAEU as the core, but also including India, Iran, the RCEP countries and the EU.
That the TPP was established and the coordination of the EAEU and the SREB was launched in 2015 point to a new stage of globalization and economic governance. The weakening global regimes and institutions are being replaced with macro-regional communities, some of them US-led and others rallying around Russia and China. These communities will continue to maintain close economic ties with each other and will actually depend on one another, but the fragmentation of the global economy into zones of different economic rules and standards will grow stronger. This process runs parallel with the revival of an open great-power rivalry and is essentially part of it. The world, while being interdependent, is breaking up into fragmented parts in terms of governance (the rules and institutions of global economic and political regulation).
Although the main element of fragmentation is the transfer of the center of gravity in economic governance to the regional and macro-regional level, you can also detect elements of fragmentation on a global level. The creation of alternative mechanisms of global economic governance continued in 2015 as a reaction of the non-Western centers of power to the unwillingness of the United States and the West as a whole to share powers within the framework of traditional institutions and the tendency to use their leading positions at these institutions for political purposes. Take for example, how the US and the EU approved unilateral sanctions against Russia in 2014 and then extended them in 2015. On the heels of this decision, the West also decided to change the IMF rules in order to prevent Ukraine's default. Given the US and EU's long-time inability to adjust the IMF to the new lineup of forces in global economy, the hurried change in the IMF rules designed to prevent Ukraine's default is proof that these traditional global governance institutions are used in the political interests of the United States and its closest allies.
In this situation, the non-Western parties are forced to create their own governance systems. The brightest examples in 2015 were the creation of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
Russia and China have already ratified the NDB agreement, under which the bank will have initial capital in the amount of $100 billion and will be governed by the participating countries on a rotating basis. This has paved the way for the launch of the NDB in 2016. In June 2015, a group of 57 countries signed an agreement on the establishment of the AIIB, with three largest shareholders - China, India and Russia - holding 26.6%, 7.5% and 5.92% share packages, respectively.
The NDB and the AIIB are being promoted as direct rivals of the IMF, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that is controlled by Japan.
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#10
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
January 5, 2015
The world on the edge: Russian and foreign experts reassess world order
Experts from the Valdai Discussion Club outline the most important challenges facing the world today and suggest how to deal with them in a new book, The World on the Edge: The Coil Unwinds.
By Pavel Koshkin
In 2014 and 2015, all the controversies of the post-Cold War world came to light. During this time, the Kremlin was increasingly outspoken and vocal about what it calls the "world order." The Kremlin's attempts to reassess this world order became the focus of Russian and foreign experts of the Valdai Discussion Club. At the end of 2015 they released a book in Russian with an apocalyptic title: The World on the Edge: The Coil Unwinds. [http://valdaiclub.com/publications/books/world-on-the-edge-the-coil-unwinds/]
The title of the Valdai book appears to allude to the title of another famous book, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, by prominent American environmental analyst Lester Brown. In that book, Brown argues that, "We are facing issues of near-overwhelming complexity and unprecedented urgency" and "our challenge is to think globally and develop policies to counteract environmental decline and economic collapse."
"Can we change direction before we go over the edge?" This question asked by Brown is also addressed by Valdai's experts in their book, but through the lenses of a different field: international relations. In fact, they try to straddle between two extremes - between the positions of doomsayers and eternal optimists - and look at the problem from a half-full, half-empty perspective.
"The world is always in a state of transformation and on the edge of survival, because human existence is fragile," writes Andrei Bystritsky a professor at Higher School of Economics in Moscow in the forward to the book. "The 21st century is no more stable than the world in the times of Attila [King of the Huns from 434-453]."
Well-known Russian expert and head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of the book, echoes Bystritsky's view. "The fascination of long-waited economic and political polycentrism is fading away with its real emergence," he wrote in the forward. "After all, multipolarity itself doesn't resolve the problem, but rather exacerbates it."
Explaining the metaphor of the unwinding coil, Lukyanov argues that the changes in the post-Cold War world have been "dormant and they were everywhere and took place very quickly." Far from strengthening the world, this dormant energy of the unwinding coil is increasing pressure on the global security architecture. And without wise leaders, who are ready to come up with a roadmap of a new project, the power of the compressed coil "threatens to destroy the building," Lukyanov argues.
The book brings together the articles of the Valdai Club written by both Russian and foreign pundits, including San Francisco State University's Andrey Tsygankov, University of Kent's Richard Sakwa, Dartmouth College's William Wohlforth, Hudson Institute's Richard Weitz and others.
One of the advantages of this book is that it gives a broad perspective on global affairs and presents the problem of the world order from different angles.
The coverage of this book ranges from the role of strong government in domestic and international affairs to emerging institutions and alliances; from the political and economic challenges of the multipolar world to the role of the West in this changing world; from nonproliferation to innovation, technologies and social problems.
However, skeptics could raise their eyebrows at the content of the book and see such diversity of topics as its major flaw. Indeed, this book is very eclectic in its nature, much like a patchwork quilt.
On the other hand, this may be seen not only as a disadvantage, but also as an advantage, depending on the perspective one looks at the book. After all, it brings together articles on various topics under one clear, primary idea: The world seems to be coming apart at the seams. Such an approach makes this intellectual collaboration interdisciplinary and complex, an approach that cannot help being welcomed in such a sophisticated field as global affairs.
What the book lacks
Despite the book bringing together foreign and Russian experts who present different perspectives and in-depth analyses on global affairs, it lacks an opposite take from those Western pundits who are inherently skeptical of the Kremlin's interpretation of international events. For example, almost all the articles in the book seem to present a one-sided view of the role of the West and particularly, the U.S., in destabilizing the world.
The key idea that penetrates the book seems to be not only the triumph of multipolarity and its challenges, but also the destructive role the U.S. and the West play in pushing the world to the edge. Many of the book's contributors try to persuade the reader that the U.S. is driven by double standards and to a certain extent is negligent of international law, that Washington tries to maintain what the authors of the book call U.S. hegemony and impose its values and principles on others.
However, the book contains no articles that would look to point out Russia's double standards and its role in destabilizing the world and redrawing the map of Europe. There seem to be attempts to justify Russia's policy in Ukraine, but no words about the fact that the incorporation of Crimea, the Kremlin's intransigent support of the Donbas rebels and Syrian President Bashar Assad contributed to making the world even more turbulent and unstable as well.
Although the book makes a convincing argument based on facts, it would be still more persuasive if it presented a more balanced approach rather than a not-so-subtle finger pointing at the West's flawed foreign policy mistakes
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#11
The Guardian
January 7, 2016
Nuclear weapons risk greater than in cold war, says ex-Pentagon chief
William Perry lists a series of factors that he says mean the chance of a 'calamity' is higher today than in the 1970s and 80s
Julian Borger World affairs editor
The risks of a nuclear catastrophe - in a regional war, terrorist attack, by accident or miscalculation - is greater than it was during the cold war and rising, a former US defence secretary has said.
William Perry, who served at the Pentagon from 1994 to 1997, made his comments a few hours before North Korea's nuclear test on Wednesday, and listed Pyongyang's aggressive atomic weapons programme as one of the global risk factors.
He also said progress made after the fall of the Soviet Union to reduce the chance of a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia was now unravelling.
"The probability of a nuclear calamity is higher today, I believe, that it was during the cold war," Perry said. "A new danger has been rising in the past three years and that is the possibility there might be a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia ... brought about by a substantial miscalculation, a false alarm."
Alongside the risks stemming from cyber-attack, North Korea's nuclear programme and volatility between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, Russia's military interventions in Ukraine and Syria and the increasingly assertive posture of its air and sea patrols have brought Russian forces into close proximity to their western counterparts.
In a new study, the arms control advocacy group Global Zero analysed 146 such incidents over the past 21 months, classing two of them as high risk. It deemed 33 provocative in that they "stray from the norm of routine incidents, resulting in more aggressive or confrontational interaction that can quickly escalate to higher-risk incidents or even conflict".
Over the same period, the group counted 29 incidents between North and South Korea, including three high-risk incidents, and 40 military encounters around disputed islands in the South China Sea, which brought confrontations and near-misses between Chinese forces and those of the US or its regional allies. Ten of the incidents were deemed provocative.
In south Asia, where three nuclear-armed states face off , the study counted 54 significant military incidents between India, Pakistan and China, including 22 border clashes in and around Kashmir.
Pakistan is outnumbered by India in terms of conventional forces and is growing increasingly reliant on the threat of the early use of tactical weapons to deter an attack. Such weapons would have to be deployed to border positions in a crisis to represent an effective deterrent, but it is not clear if or when launch authority would be delegated to field commanders.
Kashmir remains the most volatile nuclear frontline, but the zone where Russia and the west rub up against each other is also becoming increasingly precarious, underlining the inherent risks of US and Russian nuclear doctrine.
Twenty years after the cold war, neither nation has ruled out first use of its nuclear arsenal and both maintain a launch-on-warning, keeping a combined total of 1,800 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.
Barack Obama would have less than 30 minutes to decide whether early warning satellite data showing an incoming missile attack was credible. His Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, would have under half that time to make up his mind because Russia does not currently have a working early warning satellite.
"These weapons are literally waiting for a short stream of computer signals to fire. They don't care where these signals come from." said Bruce Blair, a former US missile launch officer and co-founder of Global Zero.
"Their rocket engines are going ignite and their silo lids are going to blow off and they are going to lift off as soon as they have the equivalent of you or I putting in a couple of numbers and hitting enter three times."
The risks are compounded by inexperience. Neither the US nor Russian presidents, nor the overwhelming bulk of the military leadership in both countries, had to deal with the near-misses and constant pressure of the cold war standoff. Communication between Nato and Russian chains of command is at a new low, far worse than in the 1970s and 80s.
The shooting down of a Russian warplane by the Turkish air force over the Turkey-Syria border in November - the first time a Nato member had downed a Russian warplane since the Korean war - exposed the breakdown. "It showed how our institutional memory and understanding of Russia has been allowed to atrophy. We believed our own propaganda about partnership," a senior Nato official said a few days after the incident.
Referring to the possibility of a nuclear exchange triggered by a military incident that spiralled out of control, the official said: "It is still remote, but it is no longer trivial."
Nuclear experts say the growth of cyberwarfare potentially poses the biggest threat to the integrity and reliability of automated command and control systems.
"In the cold war we were not contemplating how a cyber-attack might go awry. Its hard to be specific about that risk, but it seems to be very real and a growing danger," said Perry, who has written a book, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, which highlights the increasing risks. "Some kind of cyber-attack on our nuclear command system either in the United States or Russia could be the basis for a miscalculation made about a launch."
US Strategic Command headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, had not provided comment by the time of publication, but the generals in charge of the nuclear arsenal admit they do not know the extent to which it has been compromised because the threat is so new.
"The sophistication of the cyberthreat has increased exponentially" over the past decade, the command's former head, retired general James Cartwright, told the Associated Press in April. It was "reasonable to believe that that threat has extended itself"to nuclear command and control systems," he said. "Have they been penetrated? I don't know. Is it reasonable technically to assume they could be? Yes."
A 2013 review by the Pentagon's defence science board found that US nuclear weapon control systems had not been properly assessed for their cyber-vulnerabilities.
The then head of US Strategic Command, General Robert Kehler, told the Senate armed services committee in 2013 that there was "no significant vulnerability" in the nuclear command and control system, but later conceded: "We don't know what we don't know." When asked whether Russia and China could prevent a cyber-attack from launching their nuclear missiles, he replied: "Senator, I don't know."
The threats of cyber and nuclear warfare collide at a time when momentum is draining away from the arms control effort under way at the beginning of Obama's presidency, when he vowed to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Moscow has made increasingly frequent reference to Russia's nuclear arsenal in combative rhetoric directed at its perceived adversaries. The country's ambassador in Copenhagen has said Danish warships would be "targets for Russian nuclear missiles" if they installed advanced radar equipment. The US has accused Moscow of violating the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty by secretly developing a medium-range cruise missile.
On 9 November, Putin was filmed meeting some of his generals in Sochi, and the cameras captured a glimpse of a graphic presentation of what appeared to be an alarming new weapon. Codenamed Status-6, it was a large drone submarine designed to carry a huge thermonuclear dirty bomb into a foreign port.
"If detonated, Status-6 would be capable of dousing cities like New York in massive amounts of radioactive fallout," Jeffrey Lewis, of the James Martin Centre for Non-proliferation Studies, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine. "At the risk of understating things, this project is bat-shit crazy. It harkens back to the most absurd moments of the cold war, when nuclear strategists followed the logic of deterrence over the cliff and into the abyss."
In its efforts to reassure its eastern European allies over the threat of Russian encroachment, the US has also been mixing its conventional and nuclear signalling. For the first time since the cold war, it flew formations of strategic bombers over the Arctic last year.
Over the next decade, the Pentagon is planning a $355bn (£243bn) spending spree to fund 12 new nuclear-armed strategic submarines, as many as 100 new strategic bombers, new land-based, intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of deployment on mobile launchers, and more than 1,000 nuclear-capable cruise missiles.
The missiles are described as uniquely destabilising, as they come in conventional and nuclear variants, so an adversary would have no way of knowing which was being launched. The UK rejected a cruise-based deterrent in 2013 because, as the then defence secretary Philip Hammond said, it "would carry significant risk of miscalculation and unintended escalation".
Perry said: "In the cold war, we and Russia were in the process of dismantling nuclear weapons ... Today, in contrast, both the Russia and the US are beginning a complete rebuilding of the cold war nuclear arsenals. And today Russia is threatening the use of nuclear weapons ... Those are very dramatic steps between today and the 90s. That is a major difference."
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#12
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
January 7, 2016
Debates: How should the next US president deal with the Kremlin?
Russia Direct highlights the best comments about the impact of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign on Russia and the optimal policy the new American president should follow in U.S.-Russia relations.
By Pavel Koshkin and Ksenia Zubacheva
The U.S. presidential campaign is in full swing and will come to an end in 2016. With current U.S. President Barack Obama seen as a lame duck, Russia experts are already trying to assess the potential impact of different Republican and Democrat challengers as the next U.S. president.
Russia Direct presents the best comments from well-known Russian and American experts to find out their take on the campaign. What is the impact of this campaign on U.S. policy toward Russia? And, more importantly, what should the next American president do to deal with the Kremlin?
Aurel Braun, professor of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Toronto and an associate of the Davis Center at Harvard University:
It is very important to find common interests where both sides can emerge as winners. It is necessary to look in terms of a non zero-sum game - of a multi-sum game, if you will.
And that is possible, because there are joint interests: radical Islam is a threat to everybody in the world; environmental issues are a threat to the entire world; exploration for energy resources in the Arctic is a common interest, I mean keeping the Arctic area environmentally safe, and a nuclear-armed Iran would also be a threat to Russia.
In terms of China, there are mutual interests: The interests of Russia and the United States in many key areas are closer than the interests of Russia and China. Russia, moreover, is making a mistake if it believes that it could use China as a tool, because a powerful China is not a natural ally of Russia.
There is the belief, at least in the case of some Russian policy makers, that if Russia succeeds in making the United States weaker in the Middle East, Moscow gets stronger there. But such an approach is counterproductive in international affairs: It is possible in some instances that both parties get weaker and it is conceivable in other that they both could get stronger.
The comment is based on Russia Direct's interview with Aurel Braun.
Vladislav Zubok, professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a fellow of the Wilson Center:
However difficult it is, you have to start with summitry and personal contacts with the country's leader which, I suspect, will be Vladimir Putin. They need a realistic approach and limit their expectations of what the opposition can do to Putin.
Americans limited these expectations quite substantially, but they still keep their own rhetoric about Russia moving in the wrong direction, although they themselves inadvertently contributed to that direction during the last 25 years.
And even sanctions definitely contributed to various fatal changes to Russia's policy and economy that take Russia further away from the development of small business, a prosperous middle class and democracy. So, it is always difficult to advise: But I would recommend to give it a little bit more time, there shouldn't be any pressure right now to solve any issues.
In this sense, Obama is doing the right thing by not prioritizing Russian-American relations, because in the current climate if you are prioritizing the relations, then the pressure from Washington is likely to be tough. So, we have to take a step back. The question of sanctions, of course, comes up and the Putin government increasingly desperately wants to get rid of those sanctions. And it is a very, very tricky issue, because it is connected to the question of Ukraine for obvious reasons. So, it is important for the next leadership to show much more clearly whatever America does is not against the Russian people.
The comment is based on Russia Direct's interview with Vladislav Zubok.
Kathryn Stoner, senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies:
How should the next American president deal with Russia? There should be a kind of neo-containment strategy in terms of political actors unless Russia pulls out of Ukraine. I think [returning] Crimea would be ideal as well, but at least, withdrawing from Donbas would be good.
But I would recommend looking beyond the immediate administration in Russia or in the United States, because Russian society is complex, there are different strains of opinion within Russian society and I think what we'll have to do is fostering more person-to-person, peer-to-peer dialogue and all sorts of such programs as we did in the 1980s and the early 1990s.
The comment is based on Russia Direct's interview with Kathryn Stoner.
John M. Evans, retired American diplomat, former director of the Russian Affairs Office at the U.S. Department of State (2002-2004):
I am an unapologetic advocate of working with Russia. I think the United States and Russia have many common interests, although we went through very difficult days in the Cold War, and still view the world in different ways.
Let's remember that we got through the Cold War without actually going to war. So, rather than a war, it was a long period of tense peace, you might call it, as [American foreign policy analyst] Strobe Talbott has, a "nuclear peace," because it was a peace enforced by the fact that we knew we had the possibility of ending life on earth. Fortunately, we had the wisdom not to do that.
The fact that we finally got through the Cold War is our common inheritance. And I think that we can get through other things too. I do not believe that the current tensions truly constitute a new Cold War.
The evidence of that is the fact that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov are still in close communication; they are able to work together and share some common goals, although, as former hockey players, they know they will occasionally collide on the ice.
The comment is based on Russia Direct's interview with John M. Evans.
Timothy Colton, chair of the Government department at Harvard University:
What to recommend [the next U.S. president] do when dealing with Russia? Treat Russia like a normal country with its own interests. It's not just going to do what we say or want it to do - it's too big, too independent and proud. And you have to accept that you have to make compromises and think in a very long range terms. This country is too large to change overnight.
It's in the interests of the U.S. for Russia to be a normal country. It's a modern country with, in my view, an arcane political system, but it's not something we can change. Eventually it will move in a more open direction. But if it doesn't, the U.S. can't really prevent that, it's not American responsibility, and only Russians can decide that.
I think one area that we never really made good things happen is trade. Looking at the next 10 years of U.S.-Russia relations, efforts should be made to create a strong economic basis. In certain markets we are actually rivals - we are both exporters of energy, we compete with one another on that market.
But there are other areas where there it is a bit more complementary - in areas of science and technology, Russia is in many ways an unexplored frontier for U.S. multinational corporations, there should be more of their presence here. The Russian government has not done enough to make them feel welcome.
The comment is based on Russia Direct's interview with Timothy Colton.
Andrei Korobkov, professor at Middle Tennessee State University:
The U.S. is now facing a very difficult period with the start of the 2016 presidential campaign. Most Republicans are likely to compete from the point of view of their intransigent positions toward Russia, no matter what the real consequences will be. The only exception is Rand Paul, who suggests an isolation policy and is reluctant to be involved in any foreign policy gambles, including Ukraine.
Hillary Clinton is tougher on Russia and dislikes President Vladimir Putin, so we should expect anti-Russian rhetoric to be fueled during the upcoming pre-election campaigns. So, we cannot rely on a new reset now.
However, there are shifts, they are paradoxical and interesting. There has been the trend of decreasing interest in Russia for the last 20 years, with the closures of Russian language programs, de-funding of research in Russia Studies [Title VIII program - Editor's note], and the resignation of officials from intelligence agencies and U.S. State Department.
But recently, the Congress decided to resume the Title VIII program, which finances research in the field of Russia and post-Soviet Studies. Of course, it doesn't necessarily mean that the U.S. attitude toward Russia will be friendly, but, at least, there will be more interest and more organizations that deal with this region.
We should keep in mind that Obama is also a tough and very realistic politician, who - despite all stereotypes and the perception of him as a person who came out of the left wing civil rights movement - he is conducting a cynical policy when it comes to many issues and looking at them from the point of view of the balance of power.
However, as a pragmatist, Obama is much more beneficial for Russia than any other presidential candidate of the current campaign. So, after the 2016 presidential campaign, changes are highly likely to be negative of any new change in thinking about Russia.
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#13
RIA Novosti
December 15, 2015
Russian diplomat interviewed on relations with Latin America
Interview with Aleksandr Shchetinin, director of the Russian Federation Foreign Ministry's Latin America Department, by RIA Novosti special correspondent Tatyana Kukushkina, date and place not specified: "Foreign Ministry: Russian Federation Makes Contact with All the Political Forces in Latin America
In an interview for RIA Novosti, Aleksandr Shchetinin, director of the Russian Federation Foreign Ministry's Latin America Department, has talked about how Russia's relations are shaping up with the new political forces in Latin America, what the results of the parliamentary elections in Venezuela will lead to, and what prospects remain for energy cooperation with Argentina.
The domestic political situation has become complex in several countries of Latin American - a region with which Russia traditionally maintains friendly and close contacts - at the same time. The opposition has come to power in Argentina in the form of a new president and has gained the majority in Venezuela's parliament while in Brazil protest moods are growing in connection with the case of corruption in regard to the country's president. Aleksandr Shchetinin, director of the Russian Federation Foreign Ministry's Latin America Department, has talked to RIA Novosti special correspondent Tatyana Kukushkina in an interview about how Russia's relations with the new political forces in Latin America are shaping up, what the results of the parliamentary elections in Venezuela will lead to, and what prospects remain for energy cooperation with Argentina.
Brazil
[Question] The head of the lower chamber of Brazil's parliament accepted the opposition proposal to launch the procedure for the impeachment of the country's president. After this mass actions began in several major cities calling for the immediate dismissal of the head of state who is suspected of using state resources to finance her 2014 election campaign. In your view, might the complex domestic political situation in Brazil not influence our cooperation within the BRICS framework and on a bilateral basis?
[Answer] First of all, the impeachment procedure in Brazil has not formally begun yet. We shall see what happens next. Undoubtedly we are following the events that are happening in Brazil now with a sense of great solidarity with this country and we wish that it gets through this difficult period peacefully and without serious domestic political upheavals.
Brazil is a weighty player in Latin America and not just because this is the region's leading economy and one of the world's leading economies. A stable and strong Brazil that has its own weighty voice in international affairs accords with our interests.
It is noteworthy that the leaders of all the branches of power in Brazil - President Dilma Rousseff, Vice President Michel Temer, both speakers of the two chambers of congress, and the chairman of the Supreme Court - have visited Russia this year. We maintain good relations with all of them. Many of them are at different ends of the spectrum in the current alignment of forces but the important thing - and this is our principled position in regard to the other countries of the region too - is that we maintain contacts with all the leading political forces. And the development of constructive relations and cooperation with the region's countries is a political constant for us. Just like for them and furthermore independently of the political hue of the government which at the present concrete moment characterizes each concrete country of the region.
[Question] There has been talk of Russian Gazprom's plans to acquire a share of Brazil's Petrobras in a number of Brazil's hydrocarbon deposits. Could the judicial investigation into the corruption case wreck these plans in some way?
[Answer] It is not only Gazprom that is cooperating with Petrobras - this is one of the world's biggest oil giants. Our other energy companies are cooperating with it. As for the individuals maintaining contacts with representatives of our economic structures - yes, the individuals at Petrobras have changed but the company remains. And it is not going away from the world market and we are continuing to cooperate with it. At least no direct negative effects have reached us or had a direct influence.
[Question] At the beginning of November two dams burst at an iron ore mine in the state of Minas Gerais which resulted in seven deaths and around 20 more counted as missing, villages were destroyed, and local inhabitants were evacuated. According to the experts' assessments, it could take decades to clear up the aftermath of the ecological disaster and, in addition, there are increasing fears of an acute deterioration in the quality of drinking water and the undermining of the water supply on the territory of the whole state. Has Brazil not asked Russia for help in clearing up the aftermath of the major ecological disaster in the state of Minas Gerais?
[Answer] No, they have not appealed to us. The Brazilians intend to resolve this ecological problem independently, by their own efforts. Our procedures in such instances are very simple - we provide assistance when we receive an official request from the corresponding country's government. If they make a request we will examine it. But there have been no appeals yet.
[Question] Against the backdrop of the growing threat of terrorism are Russia and Brazil now cooperating in the prevention of incidents at the 2016 Olympic Games? What assistance is Moscow giving Brazil on this question?
[Answer] We are collaborating closely with the Brazilians on questions of the organization of major sports competitions including on a range of security measures. We study their experience and they study ours. We hosted the [Winter] Olympics in Sochi and they hosted the world soccer championship. Now we are trading places: They are hosting the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and we are hosting the World Cup. We believe that Brazil's experience in ensuring the security of major sports competitions is extremely valuable.
[Question] Is progress being made in the talks on the acquisition of Pantsir S-1 systems which are planned for use in ensuring the security of the Olympic Games among other things? Previously it was reported that the conclusion of the contract had been postponed to the beginning of 2016: Are talks on this question continuing now?
[Answer] The talks are proceeding. The Brazilians are stating a readiness to acquire them but what is going to happen next with their domestic situation including the economic one? From the viewpoint of the qualitative parameters we have full mutual understanding. As for the political and economic component, we shall wait for a signal from our Brazilian colleagues. We proceed from the Brazilians' statements and they are saying that their decision to conclude such a contract is unchanging.
Venezuela
[Question] How does Russia assess the results of the Venezuelan parliamentary elections that have been held? Could the inflaming of the situation from outside have influenced the election results in some way?
[Answer] The election campaign in Venezuela was very tense for a number of factors. Society proved to be extremely electrified and split. At the same time a significant and, perhaps, even decisive section of society supports the political and social policy of Hugo Chavez and his successors. However, that part of society lives in the real world and is aware of the serious economic problems that the country has faced in recent years. It is right to believe that the vote that took place was determined to a considerable extent by this specific section of the population. A population which objectively wants to resolve the social questions that exist.
In our view, aside from the political context of the confrontation between the supporters of Nicolas Maduro and his equally committed and politically engaged opponents, the cranking up of the hullabaloo around the elections was an undoubted element in the election campaign. We saw clearly how much this was cranked up from outside as well. The idea was foisted on people that the elections would not be democratic and that the government would never allow an outcome that did not correspond to its interests.
The worsening of Venezuela's relations with its neighbours began completely "unexpectedly." Yes, there are chronic territorial disputes in Latin America but here, in such a complex situation, they began to crystallize completely unexpectedly and to acquire additional impulses.
Or, for example, the idea began to be clearly promoted that the legitimacy of the elections could be verified only by international observers. Although the people are the repositories of sovereignty under any legislation and any constitution, of course.
One of the main conclusions of the election campaign that has now taken place is this: Venezuela's electoral system confirmed its democratic nature. The government has also confirmed its democratic nature because despite all the results that went against it, it recognized them without hesitation. The most interesting thing is that all the doubts about the democratic nature of the electoral system that were voiced externally by a considerable segment of countries suddenly and unexpectedly evaporated. And everyone acknowledged everything - without any opinions from the observers.
A new reality has now formed in the country in which the government will have to work in a situation with a parliament in opposition to it. Furthermore, the present opposition in parliament will have a constitutional majority. In our view it is very important that both forces - both the government and the opposition - realize that they bear joint responsibility for the country's future. The future will show how far the forces that now hold a majority in parliament are ready for this.
A post in parliament gives an opportunity to act differently which includes rocking the boat. This will determine the responsibility of the political force that has declared a readiness to act in the country's interests by being not simply an opposition but the force which leads the legislative organ of power. Herein lies the main question that we will monitor attentively.
[Question] But, according to our assessments, is the opposition ready for this?
[Answer] An opposition that finds itself in the stage of a political struggle and an election campaign, and a former opposition that bears state responsibility - these are two big differences. The reality is considerably more diverse than the heat of political battles. There were many things including political statements - very heated and harsh ones - too. We shall see what happens in practice.
[Question] Are there some risks for our bilateral agreements with Venezuela?
[Answer] We have a very developed and diverse economic cooperation. Primarily, in the sphere of hydrocarbons but this is not all. There are social and agricultural projects too. They are implemented between economic components so that there is no question of a revision of contracts in this context because parliament does not participate in this. How their implementation is going to take place subsequently in the light of the new realities I do not want to guess but the government remains the same and the president does too. We have state mechanisms of support for such cooperation - there is a high-level Intergovernmental Commission. It continues to operate. I see no complexities here.
The main task - and our interest lies here too - is that Venezuela should turn the page of very active rally-based political battles and jointly embark on the solution of tasks in the interests of the country's development. Political stability is an undoubted factor for the advancement of cooperation including economic cooperation. We have no agreements with Venezuela that have not been ratified by parliament. As for the revision of the existing agreements - this is hypothetical at the moment.
[Question] And the cooperation in the sphere of military-technical cooperation is not suffering at all? There is talk of the creation of Russian military bases in Venezuela...
[Answer] We maintain contacts in various areas including the military-technical sphere. Our relations in military-technical cooperation are transparent in character and are based on absolutely open and published intergovernmental agreements. They must be mutually beneficial. If the continuation of such cooperation meets Venezuela's interests we are ready to discuss the corresponding subsequent steps.
As for the question of the bases there is a strange logic here. First there are some information leaks that appear unexpectedly from somewhere. Then they acquire their own inertia and begin to be discussed and the specialists who engage on such questions professionally can only wonder: Where did all this come from? There has never been a question of bases with Venezuela in any form if only because the existence of foreign military bases is not envisaged by the existing Venezuelan constitution and is contrary to it.
Potential for boosting trade
[Question] Against the backdrop of the new economic restrictions that Russia is introducing in connection with the worsening of relations with Turkey, is it expected that commodity exchange with the Latin American countries could grow?
[Answer] Relations with Latin America and furthermore with all the region's countries are relations that are based on a win-win concept. And whatever the political hue of the government and the alignment of political forces within this or that country, the development of relations with Russia is beneficial to each of them. They note this and stress their readiness to develop such cooperation. None of the Latin American countries supported the policy of sanctions in regard to Russia. Furthermore, they have seen good opportunities in the existing situation for the expansion of their export. And we welcome this line, of course, in light of the policy of import substitution and support for our domestic producers. In those places where domestic producers cannot fill the niche we are ready to help - and such steps are being undertaken actively - to fill the corresponding segment, primarily agricultural, by means of import from the Latin American countries. This refers to meat output, vegetables, and fruit. The Latin Americans are very active here despite the pressure that is being exerted on them by those countries to which the corresponding niches in our market previously belonged.
Despite the complexities that are emerging in our countries in light of the current economic situation we and the Latin Americans are finding forms, including in terms of financial support, that enable progress to be made in technological and investment cooperation projects. Furthermore, both from the viewpoint of our investments in the region and investments by the region's countries in our country.
Another area is the Latin Americans' interest in the establishment of contacts with the Eurasian Economic Union. They have clearly seen the opportunities that are shaping up in this connection and at the same time have understood the need for work with the Eurasian Economic Union in the interests of achieving accords, in particular on phytosanitary norms. After all, our phytosanitary norms are determined by the Eurasian Economic Commission so that if there is talk of the expansion of supplies of fruit and vegetables it is impossible to proceed without the Eurasian Economic Union here and contacts with the Latin Americans are already underway in this direction. Memorandums of collaboration have now been signed between the Eurasian Economic Commission and the governments of Peru and Chile. A protocol on trade and economic cooperation between the Eurasian Economic Commission, which acts on behalf of the Eurasian Economic Union countries, and the member countries of MERCOSUR is now being examined by the MERCOSUR partners. Our coordinated position of all the Eurasian Union members has been submitted to the Latin Americans' examination and we are expecting to arrive at an accord next year. This will essentially be the first document on cooperation between the Eurasian Economic Union and an integration association outside our region.
[Question] And nevertheless after the curtailment of cooperation with Turkey, which countries have expressed a desire to boost supplies to Russia even further?
[Answer] We are talking about commercial contracts. The Latin Americans are attentively monitoring all the conditions that exist in our markets. We shall see from the concrete indicators but the interest that is being expressed and the concrete steps that are being undertaken are obvious.
Colleagues from the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Oversight are working very actively with the Latin Americans.
Argentina
[Question] According to the results of the elections that have been held in Argentina, an opposition has come to power in the country which has brought the "era of Kirchnerism" to an end. As a candidate Mauricio Macri did not rule out that energy projects with Russia could be suspended. Are there now actually signals from the new government about the freezing of such projects?
[Answer] We shall wait for concrete steps and an exposition of the new government's position on the organization of its international line. We proceed from the fact that our countries are linked by long years of good strategic cooperation which bears a stable character. This year we marked 130 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations which, I want to stress, developed independently of the direction of the governments that were in power. Here is an historical example: In Soviet times the greatest commodity exchange was achieved in the 1980s when there was a military government in power in Argentina which absolutely did not prevent us from intelligently and pragmatically organizing ties that corresponded to the common interests.
Much water has flowed under the bridge since then but our cooperation with Argentina is not short-term in character. In recent years we have taken a considerable leap forward. The accords between us and the Argentine Government correspond to the mutual interests of the two countries' development. I shall cite an example: One-fourth of Argentina's electricity is produced using our turbines which have been supplied to this country since the 1970s.
For us the people who have come to power in Argentina are not strangers. If only because it is difficult to develop relations with a country without developing them with its capital and, as is well known, in recent years Mauricio Macri was chairman of the Buenos Aires city government. As an example I shall cite the Matushka Rus [Mother Russia] festival, an extremely wide-ranging and representative festival of Slav culture that is held by our follow countrymen annually on the Buenos Aires streets with the support of the city authorities.
We are ready for cooperation with Macri in his capacity as president of Argentina now. An eminent Russian delegation headed by Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev took part in the transfer of power ceremony. A message from the president of Russia has been sent to President Macri. We are ready for cooperation and further collaboration, primarily at the United Nations and within the G-20 framework.
Judging from the statements that we have been hearing from President Macri and Ms Susana Malcorra, who has been appointed foreign minister, Argentina's foreign policy postulates remain the same. A change of emphasis is possible but there are constants that the Argentines have had, have, and will have. We are ready to work according to these constants.
I have not heard any statements that the new government is going to suspend energy cooperation with Russia. This is very hard to imagine because, first, I repeat, one-fourth of Argentina's electricity is produced using Russian turbines and it is necessary to maintain and develop them and build new power stations.
Second, there can be certain nuances, not only stylistic ones, between the statements of a candidate and the statements of a state figure. And we proceed from the fact that Mr Macri apart from being a politician has substantial business experience which is based on the criteria of mutual advantage. And everything that we do in Argentina consists of mutually beneficial projects.
Russia "not trying to compete" with United States
[Question] But nevertheless, the domestic political situation is clearly heating up in Venezuela and Brazil, there has been a change of leadership in Argentina, where the opposition has come to power, and pro-American sentiments are growing in Central America: Is there not a sense that Russia could lose a part of its influence in the region?
[Answer] I do not think that this is how it is. One of the criteria with which we approach cooperation with this region, unlike the way it was several decades ago, is the recognition of its self-worth and our absolutely deideologized position in regard to the Latin American countries. When this was proclaimed in the 1990s it perhaps did not even sound as relevant as it does now. The fact is that the Latin Americans by means of their political evolution, sometimes a very complex and even tragic one, have been able to elaborate approaches that are very important for us.
First, there is the readiness to seek and elaborate joint positions. For all the difference in the hue of this or that government the idea of Latin American unity is a significant factor.
Second, there is adherence to the principle of non-interference in internal affairs and the rejection of coups d'etat as a form of changing power. This is enshrined in the founding documents of all the regional integration associations. The unacceptability of the extraterritorial application of national legislation is added to this. If we look at these positions and at what we are now persistently pursuing within the UN framework, the Latin Americans are our allies. Furthermore, we propose that the principles that they have inscribed in their documents should be universal.
There is a whole series of areas where our cooperation is absolutely pragmatic and mutually beneficial in character. Yes, the intensity of contacts depends on this or that government - we are realists in this regard but we are ready for and open to the development of cooperation with all political forces and they, in their turn, and they really are in the majority in the region, are ready for cooperation with us. These are objective facts and this is not an attempt "to paint" some kind of reality.
[Question] In other words, do you not believe that there is a struggle in progress between the Russian Federation and the United States for influence in the region?
[Answer] I cannot speak for the United States but we have our own agenda in the region. We have our own approach to the Latin Americans and we see that this approach is valued. We are not trying to compete with anyone there - the political, economic, and humanitarian niche in the region is very broad and we have things to offer the Latin Americans.
Cuban-American relations
[Question] Almost a year has passed since the moment of the historic beginning of the process of the resumption of relations between Cuba and the United States, several rounds of consultations have been held, Cuba has been removed from the list of countries that are sponsors of terrorism, and embassies have been opened. Does Moscow also see any movement in the solution of Cuba's main questions - the complete lifting of the economic embargo and the return of the base at Guantanamo?
[Answer] Indeed, a dialogue has begun between the two countries on various aspects of cooperation and it is proceeding actively. As for the embargo, I believe that many of the emphases in the recent [UN] General Assembly vote on the draft of the corresponding resolution were realistic. Thus despite the mood in favour of cooperation and the broadening of contacts it was demonstrated that by voting against it, the US Administration as such has restrictions on its own freedom of action.
At the same time the election campaign has begun in America and it is not conducive to the solution of questions. Especially since the embargo question is a question of a change in US legislation. Everything depends on the extent to which this step corresponds to the interests both of US business and the development of US relations with Latin America as a whole.
As for the Guantanamo base, this is a topic that Cuba sees increasingly acutely. Politically we support them. As for the legal aspects the Cubans themselves must determine which legal arguments they are going to use to justify this demand.
The main thing is that we believe that the process of normalization is an objective process that we have advocated for a long time and the fact that this has happened signifies the elimination of one of the Cold War relics. The process of the normalization of Cuban-American relations does not cast doubt on the Cuban leadership's desire for the development of contacts with Russia. We are linked by the fraternal and friendly relations of many years of mutual support and cooperation. I am sure that we have good prospects.
[Question] What top-level and high-level visits are planned for next year?
[Answer] I believe that we must proceed from the fact that top-level dialogue this year was very active. In various formats the Russian president met with his colleagues from Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil. I believe that next year it is possible to expect the intensive Russian-Latin American political dialogue at various levels to continue especially since in Latin America there will be important international forums including the APEC summit in Lima.
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#14
RFE/RL
January 5, 2016
Russia Seeks To Drive Wedge Into Central Asia
by Bruce Pannier
Russia appears to be practicing a bit of "divide-and-conquer" politics in Central Asia, and state-owned Gazprom is spearheading the campaign.
On January 4, Russia's main news agencies quoted a "source" within Gazprom Export, the Gazprom wing charged with handling gas imports from other countries, saying Russia would not be importing any gas from Turkmenistan this year. Shortly after, those same Russian news agencies quoted what they said was the same source saying a new deal had been reached for gas supplies from Uzbekistan.
At the time, the "source" provided no further details. He or she did not need to; the reasons seem clear enough.
Turkmenistan has been a thorn in the Kremlin's side for many years now. Turkmenistan downgraded its participation in the CIS to "associate" status a decade ago and Ashgabat does not participate in any of the Russian-led intra-CIS groupings, such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) or Eurasian Economic Union (EEU).
More recently, Turkmenistan, which has the world's fourth-largest gas reserves, has been pushing to open new export routes, including one to Europe that would put Turkmen gas in direct competition with Russian gas.
And all this happened as Turkmenistan continued to sell gas to Russia. In fact, not so long ago Russia was Turkmenistan's primary gas customer, buying some 45 billion cubic meters (bcm) of Turkmen gas in 2008.
That amount has dwindled, and Gazprom announced at the start of 2015 it would purchase only 4 bcm of Turkmen gas, not the 10 bcm the Russian company bought in 2014. Ashgabat complained bitterly about the 2015 reduction and later accused Russia of failing to pay for gas it received.
Small wonder that Gazprom, already with more of its own gas than it can sell, has now canceled all purchases of Turkmen gas.
But at the Qishloq, we think there is more to this development than just gas purchases.
As mentioned, the Gazprom Export "source" said the company would continue to buy gas from Turkmenistan's neighbor Uzbekistan. In 2015, Gazprom also reduced the amount of gas it bought from Uzbekistan, from 4 bcm in 2014 to 1 bcm.
Gazprom chief Aleksei Miller confirmed a new agreement for gas purchases from Uzbekistan on January 5 and sources in his company said Gazprom would buy at least 3.1 bcm from Uzbekistan this year.
Uzbekistan's ties with Russia are not much better than Turkmenistan's ties with the former colonial master, and like Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan is not a member of the CSTO or EEU.
Not surprisingly, the Turkmen and Uzbek leaders have seen in recent years they share much common ground and the relationship between the two countries is probably the best it's been since 1991 independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And not only has that left Russia with little influence in either country, it is an example of how some former Soviet republics in Central Asia can do without Moscow's help, the sort of example the Kremlin would rather not see.
By rejecting any more purchases of Turkmen gas while at the same increasing the amount of Uzbek gas, Gazprom is creating a rift between the two Central Asian countries.
Turkmenistan only has two other customers for its gas at the present -- China and Iran -- and the Turkmen economy is beginning to show strains from lower prices of gas on world markets. It is a symbolic slap in Ashgabat's face that Turkmenistan will not be selling even modest amounts of gas to Russia, and instead that revenue will be going to Turkmenistan's neighbor.
There is more subtext here. Although Uzbek-Russian ties have never been great since the fall of the Soviet Union, Tashkent has allowed Gazprom and Russian company LUKoil to explore and develop gas and oil fields in Uzbekistan. This makes it difficult for Gazprom to cut ties totally with Uzbekistan. In fact, the gas Gazprom said it will buy from Uzbekistan is probably coming from gas fields Gazprom is developing.
Ashgabat has never allowed Russian companies to develop the huge onshore fields in Turkmenistan. The only company that has such a contract is the China National Petroleum Corporation. That makes it easy for Gazprom to cut ties with Turkmenistan.
There is one more point worth considering when reviewing Russia's refusal to buy Turkmen gas, and it has nothing to do with hydrocarbons.
On January 3, the Russian news agency Interfax reported, Aleksandr Sternik, identified as the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Third CIS Department, announced Russia is ready to assist Turkmenistan with security problems along the Turkmen-Afghan border. Sternik said, "Russia, Turkmenistan's neighbors, its partners in the CIS have been monitoring with friendly attention the efforts of Turkmen friends to strengthen what actually is our common southern borders." (Qishloq Ovozi has reported on these security problems, for instance, here, here, and here.)
Ashgabat denies there is any security problem along the Turkmen border with Afghanistan.
Sternik also mentioned that along the Turkmen-Afghan border "more resources are needed for solid protection than, for instance, on the Uzbek-Afghan border." Again, Russia draws a distinction between the situations in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Gazprom's January 4 announcements were a low-cost move that could pay big political dividends for the Kremlin in its effort to restore some of the lost Russian influence in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
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#15
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
January 5, 2016
Masha Gessen: The Woman Without a Clue
Masha Gessen proves yet once more that she's almost as unstable as the radioactive isotope that she so greatly esteems
By Lisa Marie White
Recently, Russia Insider posted an exclusive video detailing some little-published facts about the Litvinenko case. Masha Gessen is a chief proponent of the "Putin-Dun-It" theory, with little to no evidence to support her claim. Gessen is a known prevaricator to people in the know, but the Western press keeps her on call due to her anti-Putin stance.
Gessen's most recent escapade was featured in the New York Times, in which she expressed her hope that Moscow would be blockaded by truckers in a bid to unseat Putin. Angry mobs worked out so well for the French, as we all know. No revolution is in the works, so she will have to hang out in her cozy New York home until called upon to lead her people in a revolt against tyranny.
It would be one thing if Masha Gessen were another one of these "Russia analyst" hacks who pollute mainstream media with their delusional hogwash, but her influence over the Western narrative vis-a-vis Russia has had a far more sinister impact. Everyone in the West "knows" Putin had former FSB agent Aleksandr Litvinenko poisoned to shut him up.
Facts Be Damned
In her expose, Putin: The Man Without a Face, Gessen directly blames Putin for the death of Litvinenko. Her evidence? Due to various treaties and international agreements, Russia owns all of the polonium-210.
Gessen, bless her heart, isn't a physicist, and for that matter, neither am I. But I do know unscientific poppycock when I see it.
Polonium is a highly radioactive element; all of its isotopes are radioactive. It is not at all difficult to produce the isotope known as 210. You go in your bathroom and bombard polonium with bismuth neutrons and voila. Okay, maybe by "bathroom," I mean "nuclear reactor." Anyone with access to a nuclear facility can produce Po-210. It is suspected as the cause of the death of Yassir Arafat, so unless Gessen wants to use the same logic to suggest that Vladimir Putin is somehow also responsible for the death of Arafat, Gessen might want to walk back the assertion that the Kremlin had to be the culprit behind the Litvinenko poisoning because Russia is somehow hoarding polonium-210. The truth is that about 100 grams of Po-210 are legally produced every year, mostly, but not entirely, in Russia.
Even if Russia was the only country entitled to produce Po-210, why would it matter? All the assassins I know definitely get their polonium-210 through legal and proper channels. Someone looking to make a dirty bomb could acquire it on the black market if they were willing to pay the premium price.
Po-210 is actually the easiest to acquire of all of polonium's isotopes. Russia does not have exclusive rights to produce or even utilize polonium-210. Polonium-210 is definitely needed to make a nuclear weapon, but there are other practical uses for the substance. Industrial polonium-210 is less harmful than the fresh-out-of-the reactor variety, but it is still radioactive. However, it has been used for quite a while for various manufacturing purposes, including but not limited to: nuclear reactors, oil production, small satellites, synthetic fibers, sheet plastics, rolling paper, and removing static from photographic film. It's also found in cigarettes. Phosphate fertilizer, used in industrial farming, has been found to contain particles of polonium-210.
Despite the risks due to its unstable molecular structure, It can be safely handled if done so properly. Most of the time, glass and even plastic will provide a barrier between a human and polonium-210. If you are, say, smuggling it and your vial breaks and an aerosol finds its way into your respiratory tract, then you have some problems. Litvinenko's associate, Dmitri Kovtun, apologized for bringing traces of polonium into Germany, and was being investigated by German authorities in 2006 for illegally handling radioactive material.
Pants On Fire
As reported by the excellent blog Moon of Alabama, Gessen pitched a fit on the set of a radio show because one of the other guests, Anna Arutunyan, was identified by the hosts as a "Russian-American journalist" whom Gessen claimed had at one point worked for Russia Today. Gessen's assertion was that working for Russia Today meant that Arutunyan was a "state propaganda agent" and not a journalist -- conveniently forgetting that Gessen herself had worked for the U.S. government agency Radio Liberty. It turned out that Gessen's protests were for naught -- Arutunyan had never worked for RT and is actually a Putin critic:
"Since Masha Gessen decided to bring this up, I need to clarify some of her incorrect claims: I have never worked for RT. I have never worked for Voice of Russia. The quotes about Pussy Riot that she ascribes to me actually belong to Anton Fedyashin (all of which can be Googled). I worked at The Moscow News for ten years, until Dmitry Kiselyov took over RIA Novosti and work there became impossible due to my critical reporting. As I understand, Gessen was informed of who would be on the show well in advance."
Arutunyan and Moon of Alabama are not the only journalists who have taken Gessen to task. Mark Adomanis of Forbes wrote a detailed article reporting all of the factual inaccuracies in a Gessen piece about Russian demographic trends.
Given Gessen's difficult relationship with facts, it's not really surprising that this decidedly integrity- and science-challenged journo would want to jump on the Putin-killed-Litvinenko bandwagon. However instead of providing her readers with a cogent argument and some solid evidence linking Putin to the crime, she instead claims that Putin has exclusive access to a radioactive isotope found in your average Vietnamese sweatshop. It would be one thing if Gessen could offer us some valid, intelligent critiques of Kremlin policies, but as it stands now, most of her output is based on spurious accusations and outright fabrications.
On second thought, I don't think she's completely devoid of good ideas. Perhaps we can shelve her Moscow blockade proposal in the event of a zombie plague outbreak in Russia.
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#16
Center for Global Interests
http://globalinterests.org
January 7, 2016
Russia's Worsening Economy Means Less Aggression Abroad, More Repression At Home In 2016
By Maria Snegovaya
Maria Snegovaya is a PhD candidate in Comparative Politics and Statistical Methods at Columbia University and a columnist for Vedomosti. Follow her on Twitter at @Msnegovaya.
For Russia in the new year, trends shaped by earlier developments in 2015 will continue to intensify.
Russia's domestic economic situation will steadily worsen, although according to many analysts, at least in 2016, the Kremlin will have enough resources to sustain the status quo. The number of local protests (such as the recent protests by Russian truck drivers against new highway tolls) will steadily increase across the country. But in 2016, they are not yet likely to reach the level that would create real problems for the system.
Nonetheless, the regime's paranoia about its survival will keep intensifying in light of the worsening economic situation. Hence a new set of more repressive laws is likely to follow, and the overall intensity of the repressions will increase. Expect more opposition activists jailed, more limitations on civil and political freedoms, and more prohibitive laws. Some remaining quasi-independent media may become victims of a new wave of repressions.
In the economic domain, currency control laws (which have already started to emerge) might multiply due to the scarcity of dollars. This would include new bans on imported products (Russia's so-called "anti-sanctions") and bans on holding foreign accounts. The same lack of rubles might induce higher taxes, fines and fees, as well as delays in salary and pension payments.
In the foreign policy dimension, the important development is that the Kremlin is running out of resources in light of collapsing oil prices and a deepening recession. This could lead to less aggressive Kremlin adventures on the international stage. Experts already predict that Russia's military budget will soon be downsized. As I have shown elsewhere, Russia is a typical petrostate: it tends to get more aggressive when oil prices peak, and tends to avoid military escalation when oil prices are low. Therefore the scarcity of oil revenue in 2016 might push Russia towards a more compromising stance on its Ukraine and Syria policy. The recent appointment of Boris Gryzlov into Ukraine's contact group may indicate a step in that direction. It is unlikely that the Kremlin has resources for a substantive military escalation in Ukraine as of now.
The Kremlin desperately needs higher oil prices to refill its budget. In an attempt to inflate oil prices, the Kremlin may attempt to rekindle conflicts in the Middle East, for example between Saudi Arabia and Iran. But despite recent tensions between the two countries, experts suggest that military escalation between them is unlikely, as neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia wants to engage in a military confrontation with each other.
To ensure that Russia stays in line, however, it is necessary for Western sanctions to remain in place. The Kremlin's engagement in Syria doesn't seem to have influenced Washington's position on sanctions, but in the EU the situation is more complicated, as the Kremlin has been courting some of the EU members and lobbying for their abolishment. Moscow had some success with Italy when Rome unexpectedly blocked the automatic extension of EU sanctions in December 2015 (although Italy's foreign minister later denied this). For now, the sanctions will remain in place for at least another six months. But we can expect to see greater resistance to emerge from countries whose leadership is closer to Putin (such as Hungary) or whose trade is more closely intertwined with Russia the next time that sanctions come under reconsideration.
Finally, the development of shale oil might have fundamentally altered geopolitical realities. As hydrocarbon markets become increasingly competitive, the petrostate politics that had a dramatic influence on international trend in the past few decades might fundamentally change. The very concept of a "petrostate," of which Russia is a prime example, might eventually fade out. We may be at the beginning of this process in 2016.
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#17
Counterpunch.com
January 8, 2016
Russia, as Explained to Russians by Americans
by WILLIAM BLUM
William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power . His latest book is: America's Deadliest Export: Democracy. He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com
There is a Russian website [inosmi = foreign mass media] [http://inosmi.ru/] that translates propagandistic russophobic articles from the western media into Russian and publishes them so that Russians can see with their own eyes how the Western media lies about them day after day. There have been several articles lately based on polls that show that anti-western sentiments are increasing in Russia, and blaming it on "Putin's propaganda".
This is rather odd because who needs propaganda when the Russians can read the Western media themselves and see firsthand all the lies it puts forth about them and the demonizing of Putin. There are several political-debate shows on Russian television where they invite Western journalists or politicians; on one there frequently is a really funny American journalist, Michael Bohm, who keeps regurgitating all the western propaganda, arguing with his Russian counterparts. It's pretty surreal to watch him display the worst political stereotypes of Americans: arrogant, gullible, and ignorant. He stands there and lectures high ranking Russian politicians, "explaining" to them the "real" Russian foreign policy, and the "real" intentions behind their actions, as opposed to anything they say. The man is shockingly irony-impaired. It is as funny to watch as it is sad and scary.
The above was written with the help of a woman who was raised in the Soviet Union and now lives in Washington. She and I have discussed US foreign policy on many occasions. We are in very close agreement as to its destructiveness and absurdity.
Just as in the first Cold War, one of the basic problems is that Exceptional Americans have great difficulty in believing that Russians mean well. Apropos this, I'd like to recall the following written about George Kennan:
"Crossing Poland with the first US diplomatic mission to the Soviet Union in the winter of 1933, a young American diplomat named George Kennan was somewhat astonished to hear the Soviet escort, Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, reminisce about growing up in a village nearby, about the books he had read and his dreams as a small boy of being a librarian.
"'We suddenly realized, or at least I did, that these people we were dealing with were human beings like ourselves,' Kennan wrote, 'that they had been born somewhere, that they had their childhood ambitions as we had. It seemed for a brief moment we could break through and embrace these people.'"
It hasn't happened yet.
Kennan's sudden realization brings George Orwell to mind: "We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."
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#18
www.foreignpolicy.com
January 7, 2016
What to make of the Putin fan club?
By Thomas F. Remington
Thomas F. Remington is a professor of political science at Emory University. He is author of numerous books and articles on Russian politics, including Presidential Decrees in Russia, The Politics of Inequality in Russiaand The Russian Parliament. He is also an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Research at Harvard University.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump recently went out of his way to praise Vladimir Putin as a man "highly respected in his own country and beyond," and "a leader, unlike what we have in this country."
Trump is not alone. Trump's views echo those of a number of other political figures in the United States. In 2013, former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan asked on his blog, "Is Putin One of Us?" Putin has a point, he wrote, when he asserts that the "'destruction of traditional values'" has been "imposed undemocratically." Putin, he wrote, "may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm."
Putin also has many admirers on the right in Europe. Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orban, cites Russia (and China and Turkey) as models of the "illiberal state," based on "national foundations" and achieving economic success. Nigel Farage, leader of Britain's UKIP party, called Putin the world leader he most admired, "as an operator, but not as a human being." French National Front Leader Marine LePen, Geert Wilders of the Dutch Freedom Party, and other leaders of European far-right parties have condemned the European Union and the United States for "encircling" Russia. LePen's party has acknowledged receiving a $10 million loan from Russia, suggesting that her sympathies are requited. Russian oligarchic funds have also been lavished on allies in Greece and elsewhere. What's in this for Putin? Russia's efforts to cultivate support among Europe's anti-EU fringe movements are not part of an effort to propagate a "Putinist" ideology, but rather are aimed at weakening and dividing the European Union.
And Russia's fellow-travelers have done well in the past few years. Thanks to broad-based frustrations with centrist responses to the challenges of recession and slow growth, immigration, and terrorism, their fortunes have thrived. In Putin's Russia, the extreme nationalists have found in Putin's Russia a tactically useful counterweight against the traditional American-European liberal democratic alliance.
But more is going on than geopolitics. Many on the right project their idealized conception of leadership onto Putin: decisiveness, ruthlessness, pragmatism, manliness. In truth, Putin does have many skills as a political leader. He is extremely well informed on a wide range of subjects (indeed, he would put many American candidates to shame) and he is capable of explaining difficult issues to the public in a simple and persuasive way. He has a quick, acid wit, and immense self-discipline. He is a skillful tactician, maintaining ties with the multiple factions competing for power and wealth (as they say in Russia, "the Kremlin has many towers") and keeping opponents off balance with unexpected initiatives.
Bold, unscrupulous and calculating leadership, unfettered by a moral compass, fits a certain Machiavellian mold to which right-wing politicians have long been attracted. European fascism in the 20s and 30s elevated the leadership principle to the status of an ideology. Fascism responded to a populist longing for order in a world out of joint.
That longing still lingers today. Putin has been adept at projecting the image of the tough-guy, bad-boy leader, contemptuous of liberalism, universalism, and political correctness. Keenly attentive to every contradiction between Western ideals and practices, he uses his defense of Russian state sovereignty and national pride to justify political repression at home and adventurism overseas.
Strategically, however, Putin has failed to solve the deeper complex of crises to which Russia has again succumbed: the syndrome of statism, deepening dependency on natural resource exports, endemic corruption, bureaucratic over-centralization, the suffocation of civil society. Putin is a magic mirror in which his admirers see reflected their own resentments and ambitions. There is no Putin ideology, just a Putin style of leadership and a Putin policy. Some admire the swagger, others the policy. Neither response does its admirers any credit.
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#19
www.foreignpolicy.com
January 7, 2016
Yuri Andropov Would Drop Assad Like a Hot Kartoshka
And four other lessons Putin could learn from his hero, the Soviet Union's most ruthless reformer.
By Mark Galeotti
Mark Galeotti is a professor of global affairs at New York University's Center for Global Affairs.
Vladimir Putin knows that Russia is in trouble, but he doesn't seem to know what to do about it.
In both his recent epic three-hour press conference and his New Year's address, the normally bullish Russian president appeared uncharacteristically sober. Instead of the bombastic, confident tsar, we saw an engaged chief executive doing his best to reassure stockholders of his resolve. "The Russian economy has generally overcome the crisis," he said. Debt is down and the population is up, he added - "a very good figure that speaks of the people's [positive] state of mind."
But if he was seeking to calm jittery citizens, it was with limited success. Putin seems to realize that Russia is teetering on the brink, its assertive global agenda held together by momentum, bluff, and duct tape. The country has had two years of recession; real incomes have taken a beating; labor unrest is on the rise. Yet there is no strategy beyond waiting for world oil prices some day to recover.
With Putin facing an economy in crisis, a restive public, and an elite more interested in furthering its interests than those of the state, maybe it's time he took some unexpected lessons from one of his heroes: the ruthless reformist Yuri Andropov.
Putin has made no bones about his admiration for Andropov, the man who headed the KGB when Putin first joined the organization and who served as Soviet general secretary for just over a year, from November 1982 to February 1984. One of Putin's first acts when he became prime minister in 1999 was to reinstate the plaque to Andropov on the former KGB headquarters building (now home to its successor, the FSB). In 2004, to mark the 90th anniversary of Andropov's birth, Putin had a 10-foot statue erected in the town of Petrozavodsk, where Andropov had led the underground resistance against the Nazis.
Andropov was a complex figure - hard to like, but impossible to ignore. He could be vicious in his unswerving commitment to the Communist Party. As KGB chief, he had dissidents locked up in psychiatric hospitals, whistleblowers silenced, and journalists hounded and muzzled, while before that, as Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, he had been instrumental in the crushing of the Hungarian uprising against the country's neo-Stalinist government.
At the same time, Andropov was equally responsible for the relatively liberal economic system that Budapest was subsequently allowed to adopt in 1962, which meant that Hungarians enjoyed a quality of life greater than elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. He had been appointed to head the KGB precisely to drag it out of Stalin's shadow, to professionalize and modernize it. Rather than thugs and sadists, the KGB began recruiting the best and the brightest from Soviet universities, and while still an agency of repression, its watchword became to pre-empt rather than to punish, whenever it could. He was also pivotal in engineering the rise of a new generation of liberalizing reformists, including Mikhail Gorbachev, who probably would never have made it to the Kremlin without his patronage. This helps explain why Andropov is still positively regarded in unexpected quarters such as imprisoned liberal former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who, in published correspondence from 2008 to 2009 with Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, expressed his respect for Andropov "despite his excesses in some situations."
But Putin, despite his admiration, seems to appreciate only some of Andropov's qualities - his intellect, his determination, and his ruthlessness - while ignoring the steadying traits that helped temper his character. Worse, he has adopted the worst tactics of Andropov-the-Secret-Policeman - not least, the targeted repression of a few in order to deter and dismay the many - when what he really needs now is to take some lessons from Andropov-the-Leader.
Here are few to get him started.
Tackle corruption at the top. (That means you, Vladimir.)
Putin talks tough on how corruption "erodes society and the state system" - but then does nothing against the senior figures engaging in the kind of embezzlement that is bleeding the country dry. Part of the problem, of course, is that Putin himself has been closely involved in corrupt businesses ever since he got into politics at the start of the 1990s (whether or not he is indeed personally worth $200 billion, as outspoken Kremlin critic Bill Browder alleges).
By contrast, Andropov was distinctive among his peers for his ascetic lifestyle and his lack of interest in so many of the perks available to top party bosses. When one of his deputies presented him with a crate of cognac to mark the KGB's anniversary, Andropov - who was not much of a drinker and was notoriously unwilling to accept self-serving gifts - contemptuously refused it. As a recent panegyric documentary put it, "One suit, one overcoat, and his children and grandchildren rode the metro.
Even before coming into power, the anti-corruption zealot used his control of the KGB to launch a campaign that would go into overdrive once he was general secretary, cutting a bloody swath through the upper echelons of the government. He sacked 15 ministers, including the interior minister. By tackling corrupt officials at the top of the system, not only was he trying to attack a real problem, but he was also showing ordinary Soviet citizens that this was not just a PR exercise.
In part, Andropov was driven by personal zeal, but he also understood that the Soviet economy by the late 1970s was in serious decline, not least thanks to a fall in world oil prices. (Sound familiar?) Then, as today, the masses were forced to swallow austerity. Unlike then, however, under Putin the elite is getting off lightly. Russian oligarchs hit by Western sanctions, for example, are compensated by the government even as pensions and welfare payments fall behind inflation, ostensibly due to a lack of funds. This disparity of treatment is at the heart, for example, of recent protests by truckers forced to pay a new tax; the contract to collect this tax went to the son of one of Putin's cronies. Not a good look - and the sort of thing Andropov took great pains to avoid.
Realize that Russia loses from conflict with the West
Andropov was a Marxist-Leninist hard-liner who mistrusted the West and everything for which he thought it stood. Nonetheless, he realized that he needed to improve relations. The Cold War was dangerous and unaffordable: Moscow could not withstand a lengthy confrontation with a richer, more dynamic West
He made, for example, the first serious overtures aimed at extracting the Soviets from their war in Afghanistan, opening up tentative lines of communication with Washington even before Moscow was willing to admit that it was fighting there. He was willing to sacrifice a questionable and erratic foreign ally in the name of ending a commitment that was costly, not just economically and militarily but - more importantly - politically. (Assad, are you listening?)
And even still, Andropov made only limited progress in foreign relations. Ideological blinkers, mutual suspicion, and sheer bad luck all led to stumbles, especially after the 1983 shootdown of a South Korean airliner that had wandered into Soviet airspace. By then, the West wasn't willing to trust him, and by that stage Andropov was already too ill - in February 1983, he had suffered total renal failure and never recovered - to restart his campaign from scratch.
Putin, who likewise is trying to challenge the West and reshape the global order on the back of an ailing economy and a corrupt, inefficient system, should take heed. He has his own undeclared, unacknowledged war in Ukraine, which continues to cost him dearly in international credibility, and even his own downed airliner: Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, shot down by his Ukrainian proxies in 2014. His most recent adventures in Syria were meant to help rebuild bridges with the West, but so far even leaders, such as France's François Hollande, who want greater cooperation with Russia are acting out of pure pragmatism. A Pew Research Center survey released in August 2015 found trust in Putin around the world at its lowest ebb - even lower than that for Russia as a whole.
It's the economy, Vlad
One of the main reasons for Andropov's interest in improving relations was that he understood that Western investment, technology, and know-how would be essential to turning around an economy in stagnation that was excessively dependent on oil and natural gas exports.
Andropov adopted initial solutions that were contradictory and ineffective. On the one hand, he allowed some abortive early steps toward small-scale liberalization. At the same time, he took authoritarian measures to improve budgeting and quality control, and he pushed to overhaul the major industries. It didn't work, but he was working against 60 years of Soviet orthodoxy; the key was that he started trying to do something about a problem talked to death over the previous decade.
Today, economic reform is again being talked to death under Putin. He squandered the opportunity to invest and diversify in the 2000s, when oil prices were high, and today he seems more interested in protecting his cronies than addressing real challenges. Monopolies and cartels abound, and the Kremlin turns a blind eye. The commercial arbitration courts, one of the few bright lights in the Russian legal system, have been rolled back into the corrupt regular courts. Even former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, a personal friend of Putin, has warned that there has been a complete lack of reform of the economic system: "We need another economic model," he said. Same as it ever was.
Build a broad-based team, not a group of clones
Three months into his tenure, Andropov's kidneys failed; six months later, he was plugged permanently into a dialysis machine. But Andropov still managed to make a difference even from his hospital bed, from which he laid the groundwork for Gorbachev's rise. How? In part, he pulled together a broad-based reform team, ranging from liberal economists and party reformers to nationalists and hard-liners, who were disgusted by the corruption or convinced of the need for change. They differed on what that change should be but at least agreed that the status quo was unsustainable.
Although Putin originally was willing to appreciate multiple perspectives, over time he has steadily narrowed his inner circle, which is now composed, generally, of people like him: veterans of the security apparatus, equally as cut off from the reality of life in Russia. Putin - who reportedly prefers to not even come into the Kremlin these days, instead running Russia from his country palace - appears increasingly to live in an echo chamber, producing much reassurance but few new ideas.
Face the facts, however difficult
Putin's team of clones is just a symptom of his wider unwillingness to see the world - Russia included - as it really is. It is hard to know precisely what Putin is told by his team, but word is that Kremlin employees have learned that you do not prosper by taking bad news or contrarian opinions to the tsar's table. Thus, he can reel off macroeconomic statistics on everything from grain output (103.4 million tonnes) to projected new electricity generation (4.6 gigawatts) at his press conference, yet his off-the-cuff remarks increasingly betray an inability to understand the pressures and realities of life in today's Russia. He angered the protesting truckers, for example, by essentially accusing them of making money off the books, instead of addressing the very real concerns that are driving many of them out of business.
One of Andropov's defining characteristics, by contrast, was a willingness to go beyond the propaganda that not only swaddled ordinary Soviets but also infantilized an elite who chose to believe its comforting lies. Official crime figures, for example, skyrocketed during his time as general secretary. It was not that the streets were any more dangerous; rather, for years the party had artificially downplayed the problem. Andropov was not willing to continue this charade.
He did not always get it right, not least because of his Marxist-Leninist prejudices.
Yet he broke with tradition in his public acknowledgment that even his ideology still did not have all the answers. Even as general secretary he was willing to admit this: "Frankly speaking, we have not yet studied properly the society in which we live and work, and we have not yet fully discovered the laws governing its development, especially economic laws." In short, he was willing to see the problems ahead rather than be blinded by propaganda and flattery.
Of course, Andropov was one of the last defenders of a moribund and oppressive system. His specific prescriptions were probably too little, too late even 30 years ago, and they would do little to help today's Russia reform into the kind of modern, liberal state that could best meet the aspirations of its people, who at heart are neither comfortable with kleptocracy nor eager for empire.
Putin's Russia is a product of the 2000s, a decade of high hydrocarbon prices and a West wholly distracted by the post-9/11 threat. Those years are gone. Putin can no more bring back his glory days than even a healthy Andropov could have saved the USSR. But if he learns some of Andropov's lessons - the need to cleanse the system from the top, build the economy, and listen to the kind of eclectic team that will give it to him straight - then there is still the faint chance Putin will do more than preside over a slide into a stagnation only temporarily masked by flashy and risky foreign adventures.
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#20
Moscow Times
January 6, 2016
Sanctions, Khachapuri, Burgers - Moscow's Year in Food
By Andrei Muchnik
Despite the various sanctions, counter-sanctions, inflation and other economic and gastronomic woes, 2015 was a pretty good year for food lovers in Moscow.
With all those economic problems, it's no wonder that cheap but good fast food emerged as the main trend of the year. Georgian cuisine, previously associated with old-school restaurants - white tablecloths, live music that sounds more like karaoke, a bit of taxidermy - made another step towards monopolizing Muscovites' stomachs. After the march of chain after chain of similar sounding cafes - Khinkalnaya, Khachapuri, Saperavi - Georgian cuisine forayed into fast-food territory.
The ACDC in Tbilisi kiosk in Gorky Park started serving burgers with suluguni cheese and tkemali plum sauce. Then a couple of Vai Me cafes opened, which serve proper Georgian traditional dishes in small portions and use a buzzer system similar to Shake Shack.
But that's not all. In 2015 the capital got a new batch of relatively inexpensive Asian self-service places specializing in noodle and rice dishes, like Kitai-Chi, Lucky Noodles, and Wok House. The other fast-food trend was burger joints, like Ferma, which moved from a location near Belorussky Station to Patriarch's Ponds, an area famous mostly for high-end restaurants. B&B Burgers also opened several new places.
When the ruble collapsed, diners could no longer afford imported meat. But all was not lost for carnivorous Muscovites. New restaurants sprang up, serving Russian-produced meat. The best of them is Voronezh, named for the region where most of the restaurant's meat originates, with three floors of meat cooked to perfection.
This year Russians came home gastronomically to the new Russian cuisine - a creative approach to traditional Russian dishes. The Lavkalavka restaurant is so popular that it's practically impossible to get a table without a reservation. Dich (Game) was recently opened at Danilovsky Market by Sergey Yeroshenko, owner of another new Russian cuisine restaurant called Chestnaya Kukhnya (Honest Cuisine). The new cafe serves a seasonal menu that includes deer, goat, goose and even elk meat. Another new restaurant, Kutuzovsky 5, serves delicious food that seems too modern and too good, to be from old cookbooks - but it is.
What do you wash all this great food down with? Craft beer. In just a few years, the movement has taken over the city. Check out Glavpivmag, Varka, Craft and Draft, Cans and Beer or Kraftwerk Bar.
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#21
The Daily Telegraph (UK)
January 3, 2016
How Tolstoy rewrote the history of Russia
As War and Peace comes to television, Rosamund Bartlett reveals the games the book's author plays with the truth
Rosamund Bartlett is the author of Tolstoy: A Russian Life. Her translation of Anna Karenina will be published by Oxford World's Classics in April
As one of the longest novels ever written, vast in scope and intellectually challenging, War and Peace is an intimidating prospect. But it is also a great story, as becomes clear during our first encounter on the page with Pierre and Natasha, two of the most engaging literary characters ever to have been created.
At the beginning of the novel, Leo Tolstoy's alter-ego Pierre Bezukhov, an absent-minded bear of a man, bumbles his way into a Petersburg high-society salon, says all the wrong things, picks up someone else's hat on the way out, and then goes on to behave with even greater impropriety at a wild officers' party.
Meanwhile, the irrepressible Natasha is all of 13 years old when we first meet her at home in Moscow a few chapters later. So anxious is she to grow up that she bestows a disarming kiss on the lips of the young officer Boris Drubetskoy, believing their lives will be forever intertwined
The most emotionally open and spontaneous of all his fictional creations, Pierre and Natasha are central to the sprawling narrative canvas Tolstoy unfolds before us, which tells of Napoleon's war with Russia in 1805 and its recurrence in 1812, when the French army invaded and briefly occupied Moscow.
They are also key figures in Andrew Davies's new adaptation of the novel for the BBC, which whittles down myriad convoluted plot lines into six succinct episodes, starring Lily James, Jim Broadbent, Gillian Anderson and Greta Scacchi.
War and Peace is a work that lends itself well to television, as Tolstoy not only neatly breaks his story into short chapters, but approaches it from different angles, almost like a film director. One moment we feel that we have been "set on a mountain top and had a telescope put into our hands", as Virginia Woolf famously put it, while the next he brings his characters into such close focus we can almost feel them breathing.
But it is Tolstoy's unerring ability to see what we see, both during the humdrum times in our lives, and at moments of crisis, that transcends boundaries of both time and nationality. It is why E.M. Forester readily conceded that no English novelist had ever "given so complete a picture of man's life, both on its domestic and heroic side".
And it is also why Alan Turing, the code-breaking hero of the Second World War, was able to find consolation in the pages of Tolstoy's novels during the harrowing final years of his life, after being convicted for indecency as a homosexual. It was particularly in War and Peace that Turing recognised himself and his problems: great literature has the ability to reassure us that we are not alone.
Tolstoy was 35, recently married, and the father of a newborn baby when he began War and Peace in 1863. He was already a well-known writer, but he had come to prominence writing short works of fiction, as well as some celebrated pieces of reportage from Sevastopol, where he had fought as an artillery officer in the Crimean War against the British and French.
No one, not least the author himself, could have predicted that he would spend the next six years working on one of the longest novels ever written. By 1869, when he finally completed War and Peace, he and his wife Sofya, who had dutifully made multiple copies of his manuscripts, had three more children to bring up in their idyllic rural retreat at Yasnaya Polyana.
It had all begun with Tolstoy's interest in Russian history, and in particular the fate of the Decembrists, former noble officers and veterans of the Napoleonic Wars who staged an abortive uprising in 1825, three years before the writer was born. They had hoped to bring about political reform of the tsarist autocracy, but instead were punished with either execution or lifelong exile in Siberia.
In 1856, as part of his liberalisation of Russian society after the disastrous defeat in the Crimean War, the new tsar Alexander II gave an amnesty to the surviving Decembrists. Among them was Tolstoy's distant relative Prince Sergey Volkonsky, who first gave the author the idea of writing a novel about an ageing Decembrist returning to Moscow in the 1850s.
Tolstoy soon discovered that he needed to write about the Decembrists' experience fighting for the Russian army in 1812 in order to bring their story to life, and that, in turn, led him back to 1805, when Russia first went to war with Napoleon, and lost. Eventually, Tolstoy ended up concentrating on the events leading up to the French invasion in 1812 and its immediate aftermath, and never brought his story into the present day.
As a member of Russia's titled aristocracy himself - he was born Count Tolstoy - the author was also determined to celebrate the values of his class in the face of their erosion by the radical new plebeian intelligentsia.
War and Peace followed other novels which dealt with the Napoleonic Wars - such as Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and Hugo's Les Misérables - but it was the first to chronicle the French invasion of Russia, and Tolstoy undertook exhaustive research in order to provide a realistic backdrop to his depiction of historical events.
His sources ranged from patriotic Russian and French official histories, to the memoirs of serving officers and foreign ambassadors, while elderly friends and relatives shared their personal memories, and helped track down the unpublished correspondence of people who had lived in Moscow in 1812.
Tolstoy also did some primary research of his own. The Battle of Borodino was the decisive day of confrontation between Napoleon's Grand Army and the Russian forces led by General Kutuzov. It's also a pivotal moment in War and Peace, coming roughly halfway through.
In order to get the details of the battle right, Tolstoy spent two days wandering around the village and surrounding fields where it had taken place. By sketching out a plan of the battlefield, and establishing the movements of the 250,000 soldiers who had taken part, he was able to work out such vital details as exactly in whose eyes the sun had shone when it came up on that fateful day.
The 20 chapters Tolstoy eventually devoted to the Battle of Borodino combine the lofty perspectives of historical figures with the ground-level viewpoint of his fictional characters, such as his other alter-ego Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, who is in charge of a regiment, and Pierre, a civilian caught up in the maelstrom. There is also discursive commentary from the author himself through the mouthpiece of his narrator.
The death-toll at Borodino was enormous; in a single day, the Russian army lost as many as 44,000 men, and the French 58,000. Technically the victory was Napoleon's, as he was able to march on to Moscow after Kutuzov withdrew, but his forces were fatally weakened. "The direct consequence of the Battle of Borodino," writes Tolstoy's narrator, "was Napoleon's groundless flight from Moscow, his retreat along the old Smolensk road, the defeat of the 500,000-strong invasion, and the defeat of Napoleonic France, on which had been laid for the first time the hand of an opponent whose spirit was stronger."
In other words, all of Napoleon's military strategies came to nothing when pitted against Russian patriotism.
Tolstoy was quite unabashed about authorial pronouncements of this kind. Indeed, in two epilogues he goes on to articulate a highly idiosyncratic philosophy about the forces behind historical events. Tolstoy took issue with the sort of conventional accounts which suggested that events were determined by the actions of great leaders.
The writer scoffed at the vain assumption that any one individual could have such power. He believed that the course of history, like the lives of his characters Pierre and Natasha, was unpredictable, and could not be altered by human strategies and machinations. Scientists, professional historians and military leaders who believed otherwise did not command his respect.
To support his views, Tolstoy champions characters who ultimately desist from engaging in intellectual inquiry. His whole novel can be read as a sustained invective against abstract thought, which emerges as the province of social upstarts - among them Napoleon himself, representing the egalitarian ideas of the French Revolution. Even the French language, whose foreign alphabet steadily invades the Russian text along with Napoleon's troops until they abandon Moscow, is portrayed as a morally dubious instrument of communication.
It is a spectacularly subjective view of history, but such has been the great novelist's myth-making power that his version of events was generally accepted by readers for at least a century. Modern-day historians like Dominic Lieven perform an important service by reminding us that Tolstoy got parts of the history wrong, and was also extremely selective about what he depicted: the messy final stages of the war in 1813 and 1814, which would be considered crucial by historians, are simply missed out.
In 1879, when the first French translation of the novel appeared, Turgenev went out of his way to make a case for his younger contemporary, a generous gesture from a novelist whose relations with Tolstoy had mostly been fractious.
In the passionate appeal he published in a Paris newspaper, Turgenev urged French readers to not be "put off by certain longueurs and the oddity of certain judgements". War and Peace, he declared, would provide them with "a more direct and faithful representation of the character and temperament of the Russian people, and about Russian life generally, than they would have obtained if they had read hundreds of works of ethnography and history". Turgenev's assessment still stands.
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#22
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
January 5, 2016
What's behind the new investigation into the murder of the Romanovs
In September 2015 the Russian Investigative Committee resumed an investigation into the death of the family of the last Russian tsar. Investigators exhumed the remains of the Romanovs, who had been buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and took DNA samples from Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna. Official accounts states that the Romanovs were murdered on the night of July 16, 1918. However, their deaths remain clouded in legend. Could any members of the family have been saved? RBTH responds to the most important questions concerning the death of the last Russian royal family.
DARYA LYUBINSKAYA, RBTH
How were the remains discovered?
The remains of the five members of the royal family and their servants were found near Yekaterinburg in 1991. The remains of Tsarevich Alexey and Grand Duchess Maria were missing. Experts were divided in their opinions on the burial: some said it was the royal family, others denied it. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office carried out an investigation that helped identify the remains. After this they were buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg.
Why has the investigation begun anew?
In 2007 excavators found the remains of the other two family members - Alexey and Maria. Since then they have been kept in the Russian State Archive, but experts are fighting for them to be buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral together with the royal family.
At the end of November the case was transferred to the Department of Investigation of Extremely Important Matters and the remains of Tsar Alexander III were exhumed in order to conduct further genetic analysis.
Who investigated the matter before?
There were two investigations. The first one was carried out by White Guard (royalist) investigators Nametkin, Sergeev and Sokolov. The latter collected most of the material that played a key role in the investigation.
The second investigation was conducted in 1993, when the Russian Prosecutor's Office launched criminal proceedings in the case.
Russian law has no statute of limitations for premeditated murders, which is why the case of the royal family was investigated.
Why is the new investigation important for the Russian Orthodox Church?
In 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the members of the royal family, who are now venerated as "royal martyrs." That is why it is of great importance that no mistake is made in whose remains are buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
The church supports the position of historian and academician Benjamin Alexeev, who doubts that the "Yekaterinburg remains" belong to the royal family.
Why does the historian doubt it?
The academician cites a waitress who said she served lunch to the daughters of Nicholas II's after the official date of the murder.
Moreover, information found in an archive belonging to former investigator Sokolov points to the fact that after the Romanov's death, the Soviet government conducted talks with German diplomats on the "defense of the life of the royal family."
Tsar Nicholas II in 1914, with his wife Alexandra and his children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei. Source: Getty ImagesTsar Nicholas II in 1914, with his wife Alexandra and his children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei. Source: Getty Images
Citing foreign colleagues, Alexeev also says that former German Emperor William II, being Grand Duchess Olga's godfather, provided her with a pension until 1941.
Another confusing fact is that next to the bones of the remains of Alexei and Maria the excavators found coins dating from 1930.
And is the historian mistaken?
Many think so. For now each of his arguments has found a counter-argument: the waitress was intentionally confusing the "white investigation;" the Bolsheviks wanted to keep the murder of the royal family a secret and continued the negotiations; the 1930 coins found their way into the ground after burial.
Could someone from the royal family have survived?
Such a version does exist. Many believe that the burial was faked, staged by the Soviet government after the revolution, while the royal family managed to entirely or partially save themselves.
A Polish-American woman by the name of Anna Anderson used to present herself as Grand Duchess Anastasia. This was confirmed by Grand Duke Andrey, Nicholas II's cousin. However, other members of the royal house issued a Romanov Declaration in which they refused to acknowledge kinship with her.
Were there other impostors?
There were at least 230 of them: 34 Anastasias, 53 Marias, 33 Tatyanas and 28 Olgas. Alexey had the most "clones" - 81. Two women even said they were the tsar's non-existent daughters: Alexandra and Irina.
What did they want?
It is believed that the royal family had savings in European banks. That is what the impostors ultimately sought. Anna Anderson fought the banks in court for 40 years without success.
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#23
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
January 7, 2016
Ukraine's corruption at a crossroads
The scale and scope of official corruption in Ukraine only seems to have increased under the Poroshenko government, leaving some to wonder: Who's actually benefiting - and why?
By Mikhail Molchanov
Mikhail Molchanov is professor and former chair of the Department of Political Science at St. Thomas University, Canada. His research focuses on international relations in Eurasia and the international political economy of regional integration. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, a Master's in Public Administration from New York University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Alberta.
Ukraine's elite is in disarray. About a month ago Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov threw water at the reformist Odessa governor and former president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili, who accused the whole Cabinet of Ministers of corruption. He was intent on proving Avakov is a "thief," Saakashvili said, before getting the water from Avakov's glass in his face.
Meanwhile, the insults continue to fly. Avakov calls Saakashvili "a circus performer," Saakashvili insists that Avakov is a thief and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk chimes in with his own, "You're a visiting performer and a blabbermouth!", addressed to Saakashvili.
It seems, however, that this time around Saakashvili is sorely on the mark. Corruption in Ukraine has actually worsened since the departure of its notoriously corrupt President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted as a result of the Euromaidan revolution. In the Transparency International Corruption Perception indices, Ukraine ranked 134 out of 178 countries in Yanukovych's first year as President, 2010, and placed 20 positions higher than Russia.
In Poroshenko's first year in the office, 2014, Ukraine ranked 142, which was on a par with Uganda, 6 positions lower than Russia and 23 positions lower than Belarus.
The downslide continues. Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko, who promised Ukraine's electorate to sell all of his business assets save the TV-5 channel if elected, is still in control of his business empire and still officially one of Ukraine's richest oligarchs.
By Forbes' estimate, Poroshenko, who is worth $750 million, ranks the eighth among the country's richest magnates. Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, albeit not on the official list, has recently celebrated his first billion, according to a well-reputed activist and TV personality Oleksii Mochanov. Mochanov, who made a name for himself supporting Ukraine's war effort against the separatist Donbas, has emphasized that it was war profiteering that made Yatsenyuk and his cronies rich.
Two years ago, Euromaidan protesters fought the government under the anti-corruption, anti-oligarchy slogans. The "revolution of dignity" promised to change all that. Alas, yesterday's protesters still face oligarchs in power, bent on robbing the country blind. As any Ukraine watcher knows, corruption starts at the very top.
Two years ago, it was Yanukovych and his "family" of friends and relatives that ran Ukraine as a personal fiefdom. Today, it is a new "family" of cronies and supporters, yet the country is once again ruled by a clique, a new aristocracy of sorts where, according to a Ukrainian journalist, "only kinsmen and one's time-tested 'own people' are admitted."
According to Transparency International, Ukraine is now the most corrupt country in Europe. The European Union demands that Kiev intensify its fight against corruption and institute a special anti-corruption prosecution bureau before the coveted visa-free regime with Europe is implemented.
If corruption is Ukraine's number one security threat, as Transparency International argues, why would Ukraine's reformist leaders not throw all they've got on combating this threat, rather than spending millions of dollars on fighting the home-rule activists in Donbas under the banner of the so-called "anti-terrorist operation (ATO)"?
The ATO is ruinous for the economy, destructive of society and counterproductive for the task of national unity it allegedly serves. No matter how often and how loudly Kiev repeats its mantra of an external aggression, the simple truth of a government fighting its regional opposition in a low-level civil war remains, and cannot be crossed out by the fact that the local oppositionists do get external help.
Then why destroy the country you were sworn to protect? The former Maidan activist may have got it right: Because the war brings profits to those in power on a scale no other activity may be able to bring. The war demands extraordinary expenses, and their very scale and extraordinary character disguises thievery and misappropriation of funds.
The war devalues assets that can be bought cheaply after it ends. The war devastates the land that can be sold with profit to the right person with little, if any, local objection. The war disguises the fact that the officially designated rehabilitation funds were never spent on any projects in the target area. The list goes on and on.
Unfortunately, this sort of logic, and not the logic of the national interest or national unity seems to be behind Kiev's procrastination with implementation of the Minsk agreements. The European Union would be well advised to add the sixth requirement to its list of conditions that must be met before the visa free-regime with Ukraine will have been enacted - the requirement of full cessation of hostilities in Donbas and full implementation of the Minsk agreements on decentralized, multicultural and ethnically and ideologically tolerant Ukraine.
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#24
www.opendemocracy.net
January 8, 2016
After the ban: a short history of Ukraine's Communist Party
You can ban Ukraine's communists, but you can't beat them.
By Denys Gorbach
Denys Gorbach is a leftist activist and researcher working on the Ukrainian labour movement.
On 16 December, Kyiv's district administrative court approved a claim by Ukraine's Ministry of Justice. It sought to ban the country's Communist Party (KPU).
Ukrainian society has come to see this court hearing as a 'trial of communism', and people's sympathies have been divided precisely along these lines. However, the ministry's claim, submitted in summer 2014, accused the KPU of aiding separatist movements in Ukraine's east. That is, the claim contained no formal clause regarding the party's ideology.
The ban has provoked mixed feelings from the Ukrainian left. Some celebrate the fall of the KPU: deemed the main barrier to the emergence of a real leftist movement in Ukraine, the party's activities have discredited the very concept of left-wing politics here. Others have a gloomier outlook.
In the coming months, the KPU will appeal against the ban at a higher court-this story is far from finished. But to understand its significance for contemporary Ukraine, we need to understand where the KPU came from.
Whose/what opposition?
In the Soviet era, the Communist Party of Ukraine was the republican branch of the of the Soviet Communist party. After the August coup of 1991 brought the Soviet Union to an end, Ukraine's Supreme Court declared the country independence and banned the communist party for attempting a state coup. Two months later, though, a new Socialist Party of Ukraine had been formed, and it became a refuge for many former members of the now banned KPU.
In 1993, the ban on communist party activity was lifted, and the first congress of a new Communist Party of Ukraine was held in Donetsk. The newly-created party declared itself the heir to the old Communist Party. And as the former 'first faces' of the USSR's ruling party had found themselves successful post-communist careers, the leadership of the new KPU consisted mostly of middle-rank party functionaries, such as Petro Symonenko, the former second secretary of the party's Donestk regional committee who leads it to this day.
Against a background of falling living standards in 1990s Ukraine, the KPU's criticism of the government's economic policy and manipulation of Soviet nostalgia quickly made it an influential force in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament.
During the 1998 elections, for instance, the party won with aplomb, taking 25 per cent of the vote. Nevertheless, a significant part of Ukraine, which openly associated itself with the Soviet past, considered the party anathema. Instead, this electorate opted for the centre-left Socialist Party (SPU) led by Oleksandr Moroz.
Then came a watershed moment in the history of the Communist Party of Ukraine-the 1999 presidential elections. Its rivals the SPU had all the chances of winning , and this is why Leonid Kuchma did everything to lever the 'unelectable' KPU leader Symonenko into the second round of voting, rather than face the more popular Moroz.
With this in the bag, Kuchma frightened the electorate with ease. Scare stories of Soviet restoration did their work. Despite criticising Kuchma for years, nationalist voters in western Ukraine ticked the box for the incumbent en masse, helping Kuchma remain president for a second term.
The 1999 election transformed the KPU into a convenient party of opposition-a safe channel for protest that posed little risk to the authorities.
Changing landscape
The 2000s saw Ukraine's political landscape change. After the return of economic growth in 2000 and the Orange Revolution of 2004, populist movements with vague political programmes and slogans began to squeeze out the socially conservative 'left-wing' parties. In this environment, the KPU's popularity understandably fell. But it retained representation in parliament, and managed to avoid political oblivion thanks to its final and complete transformation into a right-wing conservative party.
Two points guided the KPU's rhetoric in these years: pro-Russian nationalism and social equality. But while it condemned nationalism in words, in effect, the KPU became the main supporter of pro-Russian nationalism, coming out for the superiority of Slavic people over other ethnic groups and spreading Islamophobia in Crimea.
This left the communists ideologically similar to Europe's other right-wing populist parties. For instance, on the basis of their programmes, it's hard to differentiate between the KPU and France's Front National-nationalisation of strategic industries, strengthening the role of the state in the economy, raising social welfare. Both parties can attribute their success to identity politics and playing on the conservative phobias of their economically vulnerable electorates.
Despite positioning itself as an heir to the Bolsheviks, the KPU usually sides with the powers that be. Leaving actual class analysis by the wayside, it claims to defend the interests of the 'people' against the 'oligarchs', yet combines this rhetoric with social conservatism (death penalty, pro-natalism and persecution of LGBT people). Meanwhile, the party also maintains close links with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), and it has always stressed the need to 'defend the rights of canonical Orthodoxy'.
The KPU is not averse to conspiratorial geopolitics, either: in response to Kazakhstan's violent suppression of oil workers in Zhanaozen in 2011, the party newspaper condemned the rebellion for disturbing political stability at the possible behest of the American security services.
In the heady days of 2014, the KPU showed its true colours again. It voted for the 16th January laws, which the government of Viktor Yanukovych and Nikolai Azarov wished to use to introduce Internet censorship, seriously limit freedom of speech and assembly and expand the repressive powers of state organs. Most ironically of all, one of these laws sought to criminalise the act of 'spreading social hostility', a legal norm long used to persecute labour and left-wing activists in Kazakhstan and Russia.
Niche politics
Having built a niche for themselves as right-wing populists, Ukraine's Communist Party were guaranteed a place in parliament right up until 2014. In the 2000s, the KPU easily converted the votes of their supporters into administrative and financial capital-with ministerial posts and the ability to guarantee votes in parliament. As one politician described it: 'The communists weren't always cheap, but they were reliable.'
For many years, the finance oligarch Konstantin Grigorishin sponsored the KPU. But Grigorishin, by his own admittance, stopped funding the party in 2012 after the KPU joined the governing coalition. They had 'learned to support themselves', with a leading party member appointed head of Ukraine's customs service (a post with a reputation for corrupt rent).
The overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, however, caught the KPU by surprise. Many party functionaries did in fact support separatist movements, but on the whole the party refrained from publicly stating a position. Officially, they condemned the 'anti-state coup', but supported Ukraine's territorial integrity.
Regardless of the ban, though, the party is in crisis. Many influential members broke ranks shortly after Maidan, and other prominent figures previously popular with the grassroots left the party in late 2015, taking three regional party organisations with them. The party leadership has reacted badly to the split, which has placed its future survival in doubt.
This has been reflected in its election results. At the October 2014 parliamentary elections, the KPU didn't make it into parliament for the first time. And the reason isn't repressions. (In the 'Donetsk People's Republic', for instance, they were barred from participating.) Instead, the annexation of Crimea and armed conflict in the east have left a large part of the KPU's traditional electorate in the south east without access to the ballot box-and the KPU out of the Rada.
Since then, the KPU has had to make new allies. In October's regional elections, it balloted together with the newly-forged 'Left Opposition' movement together with parties considered even more nationalist and religious. (Confusion warning: Ukraine has two parties called 'Left Opposition'.) The KPU has also started a new 'non-communist' project, the New State party, which aims to tap into concerns over rising tariffs and the government's plans for privatisation.
While it received disappointing results at the recent elections, the ex-KPU still has a chance of continuing its political life. After all, the oligarchs are still interested in pro-Russian protest voices at election time, and the 'new and improved' KPU will be merely less independent than before.
A popular cause
As stated before, some people see the removal of the KPU a necessary step towards building a left-wing movement in Ukraine. Indeed, we can expect 'pro-Ukrainian' left-wing projects to emerge. There's has always been demand for this kind of party following the demise of Moroz's Socialist Party, and today, given Ukraine's socio-economic situation, investing in this kind of project makes sense for those who'd like to channel protest votes their way.
Others doubt the expediency of such a plan. Despite all the (deserved) criticism of the KPU, banning the party hits the left as a whole. The hopes for the emergence of a 'real' communist party appear naïve: the Kyiv court made its decision amidst a distinctly anti-communist atmosphere whipped up by both the opposition and pro-government forces.
Indeed, the tragicomic laws on 'decommunisation' passed earlier this year have sought to ban even using the word 'communism' in a non-pejorative fashion. Yet this campaign isn't born of ruling class fear for their property or money, but the desire to take up a cause that is popular with 'the people'. The current taste for anti-communism is no different from the homophobic hysteria of the Yanukovych era. It is a source of political capital.
Another question is why anti-communism is a 'popular' cause at all. Of course, the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine is one reason: the war has intensified the identification between 'communism' and a 'pro-Russian' position in Ukrainian society.
The current taste for anti-communism is no different from the homophobic hysteria of the Yanukovych era. It is a source of political capital.
But if prior to 2014 communist ideology was considered to be the preserve of nostalgic pensioners-a transient phenomenon irrelevant to actual politics, then the conflict has made Ukrainian society take both 'professional Ukrainians' and 'communists' seriously. The former have become-unexpectedly even for them-a respectable political force, and the latter have come to be seen as a dangerous enemy.
That left-wing ideas are now a casualty of geopolitics isn't unique to Ukraine. And the divisions between radical nationalists, moderate patriots and pro-Russian forces will set the course of Ukrainian politics for the foreseeable future.
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#25
The Guardian
January 5, 2016
The Ukrainians starting a new life - in Russia
About 1.5 million have fled the conflict in Donetsk, with their choice of destination largely set by their allegiance in the war
Shaun Walker in Magadan, Kiev and Donetsk
"It's a scary feeling when you land at the end of the earth and you literally know nobody," said Tatyana Kurlayeva while sipping a cappuccino in a cafe in Magadan, a bleak city in the far east of Russia.
Kurlayeva, 32, fled to Magadan in 2014 from her hometown of Komsomolsk, near Donetsk in east Ukraine. She was one of dozens of refugees from the conflict zone to make a new life in Russia's former Gulag capital. Across Russia, hundreds of thousands of east Ukrainians have arrived since the conflict started.
Some want to return now the fighting has stopped but many more want to stay. Icy Magadan is more than 4,000 miles from east Ukraine, but Kurlayeva has chosen to make it her new home.
She decided to leave Komsomolsk in August 2014, after her brother was kidnapped by the far-right Azov volunteer battalion. Although he was later released, the experience had shaken up the family and made them unwilling to stay.
Her husband wanted to join the pro-Russia rebel militia, but she persuaded him that the pair of them should take their daughter and flee. She closed down the children's clothing shop she ran and the three crossed the border, then spent a week in a refugee camp near the city of Rostov.
"It was horrible, I'm not used to living like that. I never thought I would be a refugee. We wanted to get out as soon as possible, and I had always read that Magadan was an interesting and friendly place, so we spent all our savings on tickets from Rostov via Moscow to Magadan. It was the first time I'd ever been on a plane."
On arrival, Kurlayeva made a video appeal to ask locals for help, and the director of the local television station decided she was camera-friendly and offered her a job. "When people found out where we were from, they immediately helped us. Everyone here is so friendly," she said.
Now, Kurlayeva reads the news on local television and never wants to return to Ukraine. The family is applying for Russian citizenship. She is thankful to Russia, and to Vladimir Putin personally. "Look at Putin: he's strong, intelligent, manly. It's impossible not to be overwhelmed with emotion when you look at him. He's done so much for us," she added.
Many other refugees in Magadan also never plan to return home. Alexander Burlakov, 37, Tatyana Spivak, 38, and their son Sergei, 12, left their home in rebel-held Gorlovka in August 2014, and flew to Magadan, leaving their parents behind.
"At the start it seemed cold, depressing and scary, but we soon realised how nice the people are here," said Spivak, in the kitchen of the small apartment the family rents in Magadan. Working as a supermarket cashier in Gorlovka, she earned about £60 a month; doing the same job in Magadan she earns £300.
"It's just like in the Soviet Union - everyone is so helpful and friendly. I miss home but I am delighted I am not part of Ukraine," she added.
While some Donbass refugees feel at home in Magadan, those whose sympathies lie more with Kiev than with the pro-Russia separatists have generally gone the other way.
"I understood I didn't feel comfortable in my own city," said Evgeny Vasili, who ran a bar called Spletni in Donetsk. "For me, what was going on in Donetsk was wild, and I didn't understand it, and was disgusted by the behaviour of rebels. I realised I couldn't keep living there."
Vasili moved to Kiev and took Spletni with him. The bar is now open in Kiev, with the same furniture, the same lighting and even the same weathered Soviet hardback books that propped up the bar in Donetsk. He rented a truck to take everything across the frontlines in late 2014 and reassembled the bar in central Kiev.
Many of the clients at the new Spletni are also from Donetsk - internally displaced persons (IDPs) who miss their home town.
"When you leave a place you have feelings of nostalgia, people come here and they feel freer, more at ease," Vasili said. "It's hard to rent a flat when you have a Donetsk registration. People are suspicious of you. We have had no help from the government or anyone else."
Vasili said that even if peace came to eastern Ukraine, he did not see himself returning to Donetsk. "My house has been destroyed, I have nothing to go back for. We will stay here, and try to integrate as well as we can," he said.
Because of the vagaries of the Ukrainian registration system, there are no reliable statistics on the number of IDPs but NGOs estimate there could be as many as 1.5 million. Around 300,000 are believed to have moved to Russia. Moscow has said it will begin deporting Ukrainians who are in Russia illegally, but will make an exception for those from the conflict zones. Some are able to apply for Russian citizenship if they do not want to return.
The huge number leaving for Russia and other parts of Ukraine has had a huge effect on the Donetsk region.
Enrique Menendez, a businessman in Donetsk, said: "The population profile has completely changed, the small middle class that had just started to appear has disappeared."
Menendez used to manage an internet marketing company with 10 employees. The other nine have left, and the company has closed. Now, he works on distributing humanitarian aid. "There was a building across the street where 200 programmers work," he said. "They've all gone now. Nobody will need this kind of business for three to five years at least."
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#26
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
January 7, 2016
Russia Versus Ukraine: The Court Case and the IMF
In the legal dispute over Ukraine's $3 billion debt to Russia, it is Russia that has the advantage
Alexander Mercouris
As had become inevitable, Ukraine at the end of the year defaulted on the $3 billion bond held by Russia.
As discussed previously, the Ukrainian default became inevitable following Ukraine's failure to achieve better terms from its private creditors.
Without a default on the Russian debt the numbers of Ukraine's IMF bailout simply don't add up.
When it became clear that neither the IMF nor Western governments were prepared to provide Ukraine with the extra money or the guarantees needed to pay the debt and cover the shortfall on Ukraine's IMF programme, a default became inevitable.
As was also inevitable, Russia has responded to Ukraine's default by bringing legal proceedings against Ukraine in London.
In this article I will discuss briefly the legal claim Russia is bringing against Ukraine, before turning to an article on the subject by the US economist Michael Hudson, which has attracted a lot of attention.
Russia's legal claim against Ukraine
The claim has not been brought in London's High Court - the court that decides the law for this sort of debt - but in the London Court of International Arbitration.
As its name implies, the London Court of International Arbitration is not properly speaking a court at all, but is an arbitration tribunal set up in the City of London in the nineteenth century to deal with international commercial disputes.
The reason the Russians have brought their claim to the London Court of International Arbitration rather than the High Court is almost certainly because the terms of the Eurobond contract between Ukraine and Russia require it.
It is now almost routine for commercial contracts to contain a clause requiring the parties to seek to resolve their disputes by arbitration, and it is quite often the case that the relevant arbitration panel - in this case the London Court of International Arbitration - is named in the contract.
The reason for choosing arbitration in preference to litigation in the High Court is that the procedures are generally faster and simpler.
The law is however the same, and the lawyers and arbitrators involved in cases in the London Court of International Arbitration are the same people who conduct cases in the High Court.
Though decisions of the London Court of International Arbitration do not have the force of law that Judgments of the High Court do, there is no practical difference since decisions of the London Court of International Arbitration can be converted into High Court Judgments without difficulty.
Once converted, they can be enforced in the same way that British High Court Judgments can be, including in other jurisdictions, such as those of the European Economic Area - which includes Switzerland - and in the British Commonwealth, where British High Court Judgments are recognised.
Reciprocal arrangements also mean that decisions of the London Court of International Arbitration can also generally be converted and enforced by the courts in the US.
Some reports of the claim the Russians are bringing talk about the legal proceedings lasting a long time.
Since it is difficult to see what defence to the claim the Ukrainians have (no lawyer I know of thinks they have one) this may not actually be true.
Needless to say, the London Court of International Arbitration - as an arbitration tribunal - is even less likely to accept the various political arguments made in Ukraine's defence by some of its supporters than the High Court would be.
As an arbitration panel it would be almost certain to say that consideration of such arguments lay outside its jurisdiction and competence.
What is probably more true is that whilst the Russians may find it relatively easy to obtain a Judgment in their favour, they may find it more difficult to enforce that Judgment.
However saying it might be difficult is not the same as saying it would be impossible.
I am not an expert in this area, but one possibility might be for the Russians to enforce their Judgment against any money held in any commercial bank or financial institution which that bank or lending institution might be lending to Ukraine.
If so then a Judgment in Russia's favour would effectively lock Ukraine out of Western financial markets, since it beggars belief any compliance officer in any Western financial institution would authorise a loan to Ukraine in those circumstances.
A more incendiary possibility is that the Russians might enforce the Judgment against any of Ukraine's IMF bailout funds that passed through the European Economic Area - which is to say most of them.
I do not know whether that is legally possible - it would depend on whether IMF funding has sovereign protection (my guess is it doesn't) - but I am sure there are armies of lawyers currently studying that possibility.
Needless to say either of these developments - should they ever happen - would be a disaster for Ukraine, and potentially a major embarrassment for the IMF.
Ukraine has up to now point-blank refused to negotiate about this loan with Russia. Instead it has made Russia a take it or leave it offer, demanding that Russia accept repayment on the same terms as Ukraine's commercial lenders.
Given the high risks for Ukraine - and the IMF - arising from the court case, I suspect Ukraine will now come under mounting pressure from the IMF to come to a settlement with Russia. It is by no means impossible the IMF could threaten to withhold funding if Ukraine does not do so.
The IMF, China and the "Paris Club"
This brings me to a recent article by the US economist Michael Hudson in which - quite rightly - he excoriates the IMF's decision to continue lending to Ukraine despite its default on the debt to Russia.
In this article Michael Hudson sees in the recent IMF rule change a US plot ultimately targeted at China.
According to this view the recent change in the IMF's rules - allowing the IMF to continue lending to states that default on debts they owe other states - is intended to make it impossible for China to obtain payment of the debts other countries owe it.
China has become a major lender in the last few years - a fact that has alarmed the US.
What Michael Hudson is saying is that the US - by getting the IMF to change its rules - is intending to short-circuit Chinese lending by making Chinese loans irrecoverable.
Michael Hudson's article has attracted a lot of attention and deservedly so because overall it is a fine article that rightly condemns the way the IMF is being used as an instrument of Western - or rather US -geopolitical interests - a fact just illustrated by the role it has played in the Ukrainian crisis.
Michael Hudson is however an economist rather than a lawyer and in one or two places he misunderstands the law. That is hardly surprising since this is a pretty arcane subject.
Having said that, the situation - though bad - is not quite as bad as Michael Hudson thinks.
Unfortunately this requires a rather technical explanation of the legal difference between the two ways states borrow money.
Briefly, there are two ways states borrow money.
One is the straightforward way of borrowing money from other states.
That generally involves an agreement between the state that is lending the money and the state that is borrowing the money.
The agreement involves a straight transfer of money from the treasury of the state that is lending the money to the treasury of the state that is borrowing it.
The important point to understand about this sort of loan is that it is made pursuant to an interstate agreement between two sovereign states.
As such, because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity - which means states cannot be sued in the civil or commercial courts of other states - there is no court in any state other than (sometimes) the courts of the state that has borrowed the money that can enforce this sort of loan.
Since states that default on loans invariably impose moratoriums on their repayment - which are binding on their courts - that means that in practice there are no courts that will enforce this sort of loan.
The second way for a state to borrow money is by issuing a bond.
A bond - like a cheque - is a sort of IOU.
It is a form of private property bondholders can - and do - buy and sell to each other.
A bond is subject to the law of the place where it is issued. Mostly in the West that is the capital of the state that has issued it.
In the case of some other states - Ukraine being one - it is the law of one of the major financial centres where it is issued. In Europe the City of London and Frankfurt normally fulfil this role.
Bondholders - unlike states that make loans to each other - can sue in the courts of the place where the bonds are issued against a state that defaults on them.
It is because of the difference between these two types of debt - one legally enforceable through the courts, one not - that the IMF has created the distinction between "public" and "private" debt.
Since no court will enforce debts made purely through inter state agreements, that role falls upon the IMF.
If the IMF recognises such a loan - calling it a "public" debt - then its practice until just a few weeks ago was to refuse to lend money to a state in default on it until a restructuring had been agreed or the loan was paid.
Since no mainstream private lender will lend to a state to which the IMF refuses to lend money, that would in effect close a state in default on a "public" debt from the international money markets.
That is a powerful sanction, which effectively cut a state off from external funding. Since no state wants to be put in this position, most states will do almost anything to avoid it.
It is important to say however that contrary to what Michael Hudson appears to think, the IMF has never at any time in its history recognised all debts states owe to each other as "public" debts, nor has it ever said that it would do so.
By way of example, during the Cold War the USSR regularly made large loans to many states - China, Egypt, Vietnam and Cuba being some of the better known examples.
The USSR however stood entirely outside the system operated by the IMF. As a result, the IMF never recognised any of its loans as "public" debts, and never said it would.
The result was that countries that borrowed from the USSR could default on their Soviet loans without facing sanctions from the IMF, and without being barred from borrowing from the IMF or from the international money markets.
Many in fact did so, Egypt being perhaps the most famous - or notorious - example.
The loans the IMF recognises as "public" debts tend in practise to be principally those made by states that are members of the so-called Paris Club.
This is a semi-formal body in which the IMF itself participates.
It provides a venue and mechanisms that enable a state that owes money to a Paris Club member to negotiate restructuring of the debt, with the IMF itself usually directly involved.
The Paris Club also sets out guidelines on how such debts should be treated, and what sort of rescheduling arrangements are appropriate.
Russia is a member of the Paris Club. That fact alone made it effectively impossible for the IMF to deny the $3 billion Ukraine owes Russia is a "public" debt.
China however is not a member of the Paris Club.
China operates in an intermediate position. Unlike the USSR it is an active member of the IMF, with a representative on the IMF's Executive Board and with its currency recognised by the IMF as suitable for use in international transactions. However it does all these things without being a member of the Paris Club.
Given China's position - inside the IMF but outside the Paris Club - it is understandable that there has been some uncertainty over how the IMF should treat the loans it makes, and that the IMF should want to clarify this.
The discussions around this issue that Michael Hudson talks about in his article are not therefore quite as sinister as he appears to think.
That the IMF should say it will not always insist on repayment of loans to China as a condition for its own lending is not quite as great a departure from previous IMF practice as Michael Hudson thinks it is.
That does not mean that states that default on their loans to China face no sanction. The sanction they face is that they cannot borrow further from China.
Since China - unlike the USSR - is a major hard currency lender, whose currency is increasingly being used in international transactions, that is a heavy sanction regardless of what position the IMF takes on defaults of Chinese loans.
In reality China has - to US alarm - been steadily gaining ground in the IMF.
Recently it managed to get the IMF to recognise its currency as one suitable for use in international transactions.
Despite US opposition the day when China will join the Paris Club cannot be far off, at which point the anomalies caused by China's present position will end.
The IMF and Russia's loan to Ukraine
It is quite a different matter however when the IMF takes the approach that it will continue lending to a country that has defaulted on a loan owed to Russia - a Paris Club member - which is indisputably "public" debt.
That is a major departure, yet in relation to the $3 billion debt Ukraine owes Russia it is one the IMF has now made.
What makes the situation very complicated is that the Russians did not simply rely on the fact the debt is "public" debt in order to secure it.
Instead they took the precaution of securing their interest by making the loan through the purchase of a Ukrainian Eurobond that is protected by English law.
The Ukrainians actually tried to use the fact that the Russians had doubly insured the loan in this way in order to argue that it was not "public" debt at all, but was "private" debt.
Their argument was that the Russians should not be allowed to call the debt "public" (thereby rendering it enforceable by the IMF), whilst having the advantages of a bond that is legally enforceable through the English courts - something the Ukrainians say is more typical of "private" debt.
As I have said previously, the fact a creditor has taken added precautions against the debtor's default, is not usually considered a reason to make a debt easier to default on. Unsurprisingly, the IMF has rejected the Ukrainian argument and confirmed that the debt Ukraine owes Russia is indeed "public" debt.
What that means in practice is that the IMF has admitted that the Russians are not bound by the terms of the restructuring agreement Ukraine concluded in August with its private creditors.
However the fact that the debt takes the form of a Eurobond does mean that the Russians can enforce the debt by taking legal action in London, which is what they are now doing. Moreover, since they are not bound by the restructuring agreement Ukraine has concluded with its private creditors, they are free to enforce any Judgment they obtain in any way they can.
As I discussed above, that potentially puts the IMF in a very awkward position, and it is not at the moment obvious what its way out is.
For that reason, as I said previously, I expect the IMF to do everything it can to force the Ukrainians to settle, and it is not impossible that the IMF could threaten to withhold funding unless the Ukrainians do so.
If so then the IMF's rule change may turn out to be of less benefit to Ukraine than appears to be the case at the moment.
Prospect of Western Courts Refusing to Enforce Loans Owed to China and Russia
In his article Michael Hudson worries that before long no Western court will recognise a loan owed to China or Russia, allowing states to default on loans to those countries with impunity.
One day it may indeed come to that. However for the moment the situation is not quite as bad as Michael Hudson thinks.
Western courts already do not enforce loans made directly between states as a result of inter state agreements because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity I discussed above.
That already covers the majority of loans made by China and Russia to non-Western countries like Argentina or Venezuela.
As I said previously, the sanction for these countries if they default on their debts to China is that the Chinese will not lend to them in future.
In the case of the (far fewer and smaller) debts these countries owe Russia, since these are indisputably "public" debts, the IMF - despite its recent rule change - would probably enforce them.
By contrast barring Western courts from enforcing debts that take the form of government bonds - like the $3 billion Ukrainian Eurobond - simply because China or Russia are the bondholders, would be a radically new departure and a very extreme step.
Given that government bonds have been around since the seventeenth century (some say the sixteenth century) that would be a fundamental change in the law, with huge implications, striking at the very root of modern international commercial and banking law.
It would in fact be at one and the same time a legalised form of mass default and a declaration of economic war against two of the world's most powerful economies.
Given that China and Russia are major holders of US treasury bonds the financial implications of doing something like that would be nothing short of momentous, and the sort of crisis it would give rise to hardly bears thinking about.
Whilst it may one day happen, things will indeed be very bad if it ever comes to that.
Certainly it is not going to happen soon enough to help Ukraine.
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#27
Euromaidanpress.com
January 7, 2016
Moscow Patriarchate Church in Ukraine headed toward the dustbin of history, Chapnin says
By Paul Goble
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is headed toward disintegration, and the only question is whether Moscow will simply watch as this happens or take the lead in organizing this change, according to Sergey Chapnin, who was recently fired as editor of the "Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate."
Patriarch Kirill fears this because the loss of his church's Ukrainian branch will not only mean that the Moscow Patriarchate will lose many of its bishoprics and parishes but also much of its influence and because he will then "go into history" as the Russian churchman who lost Ukraine, Chapnin says.
But the looming loss of Patriarchal churches in Ukraine is interrelated with two other problems that Kirill has in fact created:
-The overly rapid expansion of bishoprics in Russia which has led to bureaucratism and degeneration
-The acceptance of the Soviet past by the church which has led to "Orthodoxy without God," the Russian version of a civic religion.
Much of this has been hidden in recent years, Chapnin says, because of Kirill's insistence on loyalty and obedience; but the firing of Vsevolod Chaplin [from the post of the chairman of the Synodal Department for the Cooperation of Church and Society of the Moscow Patriarchate he occupied for over six years - Ed.] and his own dismissal, Chapnin says, are opening the floodgates of criticism not just of Kirill but of the Russian Church itself, something that will lead to many changes and may make recovery possible.
Thirty years ago, Chapnin says, Kirill himself was someone who campaigned for changes in the Russian Orthodox Church because he recognized that "Orthodox consciousness had been frozen in Soviet times and the Orthodox themselves had been kept in isolation." He wanted to change that and was even viewed as the supporter of "dangerous" ideas.
And at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, there seemed to be "a certain chance" that the church would come together and take advantage of all the new opportunities that the end of the communist regime gave it, the ousted editor says. But "unfortunately, all this ended in 1994 at a conference when Father Georgy Kochetkov and his community were condemned for 'liberal experiments.'"
At that time, then-Metropolitan Kirill was harshly criticized by Russian Orthodox nationalists, the same group that now celebrates him in all ways given that he has changed sides from the reformers to that of the conservatives and come to share their view that everything is a battle between "us" and "them."
Now, the results of Kirill's turn to the right are coming home to roost, Chapnin says; and he suggests that the meeting of the Synod on December 24 when Chaplin was dismissed marks "the beginning of a settling of accounts of seven years" of Kirill's patriarchate, a process that will affect both the church inside Russia and abroad.
The most obvious reason for that conclusion, he suggests, is that after a period of enormous bureaucratic growth, the Moscow Patriarchate is having to engage in retrenchment because the resources it had have drawn up - and that development is leading to fights among those within the hierarchy.
Under Kirill, the number of bishops in Russia has more than doubled from approximately 70 to about 200, a reflection of the patriarch's view that "there should be 100 to 150 parishes" in each bishopric so that "the bishops will be closer to the clergy and to the people." But things have not worked out as planned.
Part of the reason for that is the diversity of the Russian Federation and the difficulties of drawing church borders different from political ones. But a larger part reflects problems of personnel, Chapnin says. Young men, often with minimal training and experience, all too easily rise to the status of bishop; and many of them are not ready for such positions.
"Almost all the bishops who have been installed over the last six years do not have the necessary experience and habits of administration. Some are learning but some aren't." They need to know both civil and canon law, bookkeeping, and the needs and requirements not only of monks but also of the married clergy."
And the situation has been made worse by the fact that priests are completely subordinate to the whims of their bishops. They don't have labor agreements and so can't go to court. "In fact, this is a kind of slavery. If the bishop is good, this slavery perhaps will remain latent, but if he isn't, he will pressure priests and parishioners" to extract money from them.
The war in Ukraine has also put pressure on the Moscow Patriarchate, Chapnin says. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) had conducted itself correctly for such a long time that many in Ukraine dropped the qualifier "of the Moscow Patriarchate" and simply referred to it as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
It was until recently "the largest and most authoritative church in Ukraine" and its canonical subordination to Moscow was "not very essential." "But after Crimea, a reassessment of the role of the church took place: the non-canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate is now considered the national church [by Ukrainians - Ed.], and the UOC-MP is called 'the Moscow church'" - or more pointedly "'not ours.'"
"The problem of self-identification for the Orthodox is a very sharp one," Chapnin continues. "Even in the UOC-MP, there are many parishes which have ceased to recall the Patriarch of Moscow in the liturgy." And a week ago, the UOC-MP officially and "unexpectedly" declared that its priests have "the right not to honor Patriarch Kirill in this way."
According to Chapnin, "this is one of the signs of a serious geopolitical catastrophe for the church," especially since it is now clear that "Moscow cannot in any way influence the situation in Ukraine" and is increasingly only an outside onlooker there.
"It is dangerous to mix religious and national identities," Chapnin says. These are different things because "the church is above all a community of those who believe in Christ as savior and jointly participate in the liturgy. Everything else including politics, citizenship, nationality and culture must assume a secondary role."
This has always been a problem in Christianity, but recently it became worse when people began to insist that "the Russian church is on the territory of Russia and that which unites altogether is the Moscow Patriarchate. This was a beautiful move, but it hasn't worked."
At the same time, the ousted editor continues, the Russian Orthodox Church has undergone another revolution under Kirill in terms of its attitudes toward the Soviet past. "Today, without any pressure from the outside, the Church recognizes the general secretaries of the Communist Party as great rulers of the Soviet era" and that their achievements overwhelm any misdeeds.
Many in the church have even convinced themselves that Lenin and Trotsky destroyed the church and Stalin rehabilitated it, but "this is not so. In the 1920s, the Church existed both legally and illegally in the catacombs. In fact, it was destroyed in the 1930s" by Stalin, who only changed tactics in 1943 because of necessity.
"'The flourishing of the Soviet' is blocking the formation of contemporary Orthodox culture and a new Orthodox identity," Chapnin says; and Russian believers must make a choice between praising the Soviet past and rebuilding their faith. This is an "either-or" situation that ultimately cannot be avoided.
"By not making this choice, Russia has fallen into 'hybrid religiosity,' that is we are reviving both Orthodox traditions and Soviet ones." Such a mix, he argues, is leading "to the formation of a post-Soviet civic religion which exploits the Orthodox tradition but in its essence is not Orthodox at all."
Instead, "it is a new version of 'Orthodoxy without Christ." Some compare this with America's civic religion, but there is one important difference: in the US, this religion still has a place for God. In the post-Soviet version, "there is no God."
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#28
Ombudsman: Donetsk republic prepares for prisoner swap with Ukraine
MOSCOW, January 6. /TASS/. The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic is preparing for a prisoner swap with Ukraine due shortly, republic's ombudsman Darya Morozova said on Wednesday.
"In spite of all, we are preparing a prisoner swap, expected shortly," the Donetsk News Agency quoted her as saying. She did not specify the date and the format of the planned prisoner exchange, confirming that unlike the self-proclaimed Lugansk People's Republic, the DPR was not planning a unilateral gesture of good will to release Ukrainian prisoners.
"We would be glad to make this gesture of goodwill ahead of Christmas, but we won't," she said citing "strong reasons". "I would like to note that within the past year we all in all returned 65 people on similar holidays, but we saw no response from Ukraine," she noted.
Earlier on Wednesday, LPR leader Igor Plotnitsky said he had given instructions to release Ukrainian military held prisoner in the republic ahead of Christmas.
Adviser to the chief of the Ukrainian Security Service, Yuri Tandit, said for his part that the Ukrainian side was ready to hand prisoners over to Donbass militias within several hours. He said the Ukrainian authorities knew about 57 military taken prisoner by militias in the LPR.
The LPR envoy at the Contact Grout resolving the conflict in eastern Ukraine, Vladislav Deinego, said the two self-proclaimed republics had handed over to Kiev the lists with the names of more than 2,000 people believed to be held by the Ukrainian side.
The "all for all" prisoner swap is one of the key points in the Package of Measures on implementation of the September 2014 Minsk agreements, signed in Minsk on February 12.
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#29 Huffingtonpost.com January 7, 2016 Inside The Trauma Centers Treating Ukraine's Veterans Since the onset of the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, some 9,000 soldiers have died and at least 20,000 have been injured. By Alexandra Ma Editorial Fellow, The Huffington Post [Photos here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ukraine-veterans_568d35bae4b0cad15e62d4be] Since early 2014, tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops have taken part in a bloody war with pro-Russian separatists in East Ukraine. Over 9,100 soldiers have died and over 20,000 have been injured, according to a December 2015 United Nations report. But for many Ukrainian soldiers returning home, there is a battle that can't be fought with rifles and tanks: psychological trauma. And it isn't getting the attention it deserves. Over the past year, experts have recorded an increase in domestic violence and high levels of alcohol abuse and suicide among Ukrainian war veterans, the Wilson Center noted in a report published Tuesday. Yet Ukraine's soldiers have been reluctant to seek treatment for post-war mental trauma, Ioana Moldovan, a photojournalist who visited Ukraine in 2015 to document soldiers receiving psychological treatment, told The WorldPost in an email Wednesday. Many soldiers feel that psychologists will prevent them from serving in the army, the International Business Times reported in April. Others avoid talking about emotional problems in general, as mental illnesses have typically been considered a taboo in Ukrainian society. "In Ukrainian society, the word 'psychologist' scares people," Moldovan said. Psychologists in Ukraine are working to change that. In April 2015, Col. Dr. Vsevolod Stebliuk, a medical adviser for Ukraine's Ministry of Defense, founded a center to treat physical and psychological traumas at the Irpin Military Hospital, located in a forest outside Kiev. Stebliuk himself suffered a period of psychological trauma after working as an anesthesiologist at Ilovaysk, where over 600 people died in clashes between troops and separatists in August 2014. "From my experience, near 50 percent of the soldiers who took part in ATO [anti-terrorist operations] need psychological help," Stebliuk told Moldovan. The center provides soldiers with ergotherapy, or treatment through physical efforts, as well as an Interactive Rehabilitation and Exercise System (IREX), where patients receive therapy through virtual reality and video games. The center also has a meditation room. Over 500 soldiers have visited the center since its founding, Moldovan said. Similarly, the nonprofit Wounded Warriors Ukraine trains servicemen to become Combat Shock Trainers, so they can help treat both their own and their friends' military-induced psychological shock and PTSD. Stebliuk's center and Wounded Warriors Ukraine are two of many Ukrainian initiatives to help soldiers with trauma. Founded in August 2015, Hero's Companion sends dogs to Ukrainian war veterans to help them through their PTSD. Take a look at Moldovan's photos of Stebliuk's team and Wounded Warriors Ukraine's work below. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ukraine-veterans_568d35bae4b0cad15e62d4be |
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#30
Kyiv Post
January 8, 2015
Ukrainian journalists still not guaranteed justice under new regime
By Isobel Koshiw
Since the fall of President Viktor Yanukovych, the media environment in Ukraine has notably improved. Freedom House reported "profound changes in the media environment" and the country's press freedom status went from "Not Free" in 2014 to "Partly Free" in 2015. But despite these changes, journalists in Ukraine still feel the judicial system fails to protect them.
On Dec. 31, military prosecutors closed a case against the State Security Service (SBU) employees who attacked the journalists of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, known in Ukraine as Radio Svoboda, the media organization reported on Jan. 6.
The case was initiated after members of the security forces attacked a crew of journalists on Oct. 2 while they attempted to shoot an episode of Schemes, a Radio Svoboda television program which investigates corruption, outside the Kyiv headquarters of the SBU.
The incident occurred when the journalists were filming cars owned by SBU employees as part of a program about the discrepancy between SBU salaries and their vehicles.
Despite the fact that the crew identified themselves as journalists and showed their credentials, SBU officers smashed the camera and forcibly detained cameraman Kyryll Lazarevych and reporter Mykhailo Tkach for half an hour.
Even though the incident was caught on SBU surveillance cameras and presented in court, the prosecutors said they were closing the case because of "the absence of any criminal violations committed by the security service staff."
Ukraine's Criminal Code imposes a punishment of up to three years of jail time for obstructing a journalist's work. However, the prosecutors said there was no obstruction in the actions of the SBU.
"Officers of the Security Service of Ukraine ... did not realize that their actions interfered with the lawful professional activities of the journalists and they did not intend to damage the camcorder," read the decision of the Military Prosecutor's Office.
Media lawyer Vera Krat of the Institute of Regional Press Development told Radio Liberty that she considers the ruling illegal:
"The investigation found that (the SBU officers) applied physical force and did not specify the grounds for their actions.... Moreover, the journalists repeatedly identified themselves," she said.
After the attack, SBU sent Radio Svoboda an official letter warning the media against releasing the program about the vehicles that belong to the SBU employees, saying that the footage can contain the information about the SBU officers involved in the operations in eastern Ukraine. The program was released anyway.
The staff of Radio Svoboda is unhappy about the prosecutors' decision and say there will be an appeal.
"In short, Anatoliy Matios (the head military prosecutor overseeing the case) gave a New Year gift for (Head of SBU Vasyl) Grytsak by closing the case," the editor of the investigative projects at Radio Svoboda, Katya Gorchinskaya wrote on her Facebook page on Jan. 6.
Earlier, Grytsak had requested the attack to be cut from the footage, according to Radio Liberty.
This was shortly followed by news on Jan. 6 that the Kyiv Court of Appeal upheld the life sentence passed on former police general Oleksiy Pukach for the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze.
Gongadze disappeared on Sept. 16, 2000 in Kyiv and his beheaded torso was later discovered in woods in the Kyiv oblast. Secret recordings later released by the bodyguard of then president Leonid Kuchma from the presidential office implicated the president, the ex-head of the presidential administration, Volodymyr Lytvyn, and the ex-interior minister, Yuriy Kravchenko, in the murder.
The lawyer for Gongadze's relatives, Valentyna Telychenko, told Radio Liberty she agreed with the court's latest verdict: "Pukach is the organizer and executor of the murder of Georgiy Gongadze."
Though Pukach is thought to have organized the murder, the investigation never discovered and punished those who ordered it.
Investigators concluded that Pukach had carried out the murder on orders from Kravchenko, who was found dead shortly before his planned interrogation in Gongadze case in 2005. It was officially determined as suicide. But Pukach insisted during the trial that Kuchma and Lytvyn are also responsible.
"Kuchma and Lytvyn should be in prison with me," said Pukach in an appeal hearing on Jan. 29, 2013.
Telychenko also told Ukrainska Pravda at the time that Pukach's evidence against Lytvyn and Kuchma should be used in the investigation into who ordered the killing.
In 2011, under former president Viktor Yanukovych proceedings were brought against Kuchma. However, it soon became clear that the investigation was just for show. Soon after proceedings were initiated the Constitutional Court ruled that that evidence collected illegally can't serve as the grounds for criminal charges. This eliminated the recordings from the president's office and therefore, the trial.
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#31
The New Yorker
January 7, 2016
The Russian Tom Clancy Is on the Front Lines for Real
BY JACK HITT
In early 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, pro-Russia separatists in the north of Ukraine, with Russian President Vladimir Putin's backing, seized parts of the border area near Donetsk. After those rebels were blamed for shooting down a Malaysian passenger jet flying over eastern Ukraine that summer, President Obama convinced Europe to impose economic sanctions, which have devastated the Russian economy. Putin also withdrew many of the Russian military advisers, allowing local fighters to assume high-ranking positions in the leadership.
One of those local fighters, Fyodor Berezin, became the deputy defense minister of what the rebels call the Donetsk People's Republic, and now trains new recruits in tank artillery. Berezin is an unlikely leader in any war: before all this took place, he was known as a sci-fi novelist in the genre of "historical fantasy." Readers may be familiar with the American version of this style of writing, which includes books about, for instance, how the outcome of the Civil War might have changed if Robert E. Lee had machine guns. Berezin's novels typically involve heroic struggles between an imaginary U.S.S.R. spreading triumphant Communism all over the world while kicking around a weakened and marginalized U.S.A.
The fantasist of war is now waging one. I got word to Berezin on the front lines and he agreed to journey to a Donetsk pub known as Three Fat Men. We both fired up our Skype software and had the following conversation, which has been edited and condensed.
Q: How did you transition from being a writer in the field of historical fantasy to a soldier in the field of Ukraine?
That was easy. In 2009, I had already written a novel about war in the Ukraine: "War 2010: The Ukrainian Front."
Q: In some of your novels, local conflicts escalate to world wars. Do you think that will happen in the real world in Ukraine?
Thank God, tension has dissipated now. When I wrote the novel, I thought we were going to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of World War I with World War III.
Q: Do you think the current tensions between the U.S. and Russia will lead to a third world war?
There is no direct conflict between the U.S. and Russia. There is not even direct conflict between Ukraine and Russia. I am a representative of military forces of the Donetsk People's Republic. We might have weapons and ammunition supplied by Russia, but we fight against Ukraine. By ourselves. As rebels.
Q: Has becoming a soldier changed your life as a writer?
Last month, I was accepted for publication in an American anthology that was to be published by M.I.T., in Boston. At the last minute, when they found out who I was, they removed my short story. They didn't publish it, even though a half-year before we had an agreement.
Q: In Moscow, Dmitry Lvovich Bykov, the author of biographies of Pasternak and Gorky, called the conflict in Ukraine a "writer's war." Do you agree, and what does he mean?
Bykov is an odious personality. He is just trying to draw all the attention to himself. That is his personal position. He is very surprised that there is a part of the intelligentsia that participates in the war. He supports the Ukrainian government.
Q: You don't read him?
Recently I have been reading a lot of Neal Stephenson.
Q: The author of "Cryptonomicon."
I used to read a lot of Tom Clancy. Some publishers here call me the Russian Tom Clancy. Like me, he has predicted a lot of things that have come true. In one of his books published a long time ago ("Debt of Honor," 1994), he described a plane crashing, not into a skyscraper, but a joint session of the U.S. Congress. The difference is not that big. And in another book ("Executive Orders," 1996), he also predicted the war in Iraq.
Q: Your latest novel is "Ukrainian Hell." Can you tell me more?
This is a reprint of a novel, which came out in 2011, under a new title, and was written before the war.
Q: Are your fellow-soldiers reading your book?
I have met several dozen people who have read them and who were very surprised that I had made several predictions and gotten them right.
Q: Such as?
In my novel "Big Black Ship," I write about a non-human civilization that is not on planet Earth, and this civilization is developing according to its own history. I invented this big black submarine in it, armed with a huge torpedo thirty-three metres long and two-and-a-half metres wide. It blows up only when it approaches the enemy harbor, and then it destroys the entire city. About ten years after it was published, I was talking to some Soviet engineers, and I found out that these things I invented secretly existed.
Q: In Clancy's books, the U.S. always beats the Soviet Union, so who got that prediction right? Clancy or Berezin?
In my novels, it's Russians beating Americans, so it's obvious which side I'm on! There is also alternative history in my novels. It says that a weak United States fights with the mighty and powerful Soviet Union that controls nearly all the world on the globe.
Q: How has being a soldier changed the way you might write your next novel?
Let me say that the main canvas of my novels won't change. As a writer I am enriched by seeing lots of events which define an external, outer character. But there is the internal soul, the imagination, and other impressions that will help me write my next books. Also, I would like to write some books that would be non-fictions-not documentary, not fiction, but autobiography, just about this war.
Q: Have you encountered anything on the battlefield stranger than the things you have made up in your books?
I have seen a lot of things that are more horrifying than anything I have written in a novel. For example, barbarian shootouts in inhabited urban cities that are nowhere near those in my books.
Q: Horrifying, yes. But stranger than fiction?
If I were describing losses in a particular battle, and I said that our losses were one to one thousand for the enemy, I would be mocked as a fiction writer. But things like this have happened to us. When we engaged in an operation in Slavyansk we had a similar ratio with losses. Another time, a young fifteen-year-old militia man on our side, with just one flare gun-the kind you use in sports-dropped a helicopter in the Ukrainian army by firing into a half-open window.
Q: Your novels include mystical forces and miracles. Do such things ever happen to you on the battlefield?
Because I am atheist, I look at these things with sarcasm. Nevertheless, a lot of events that you could ascribe to mystical coincidences have happened in my life, and at war especially.
Q: For example?
There was a conflict with some neighboring troops, a territorial quarrel, and they showered me with a box of bullets from a machine gun. I was covered in dirt from the dust kicked up by the shells, but not one bullet touched me. And then, one week later, the general in charge of this unit and I were drinking cognac.
Q: What force do you think is responsible for that? God or something else?
For a long time I have held to my theory of a cosmic matrix, that all of us are part of a computer matrix. What happened to me was a failure, a glitch in the algorithm of the matrix. The bullets just disappeared before they got to me. And this was a failure of the computer software of which we are a part. Matrix error, we might say.
TQ: his is kind of a philosophical question: Are we free people-you, me-or are we trapped in a computer matrix run by someone else?
We are part of the computer program, but we are the small programs within the big program, and in the borders between them, there are outlets, pathways and thresholds. Say you have just lost your pen, and a moment before, it was just in front of you. Then you find it behind your ear. What happened is that the pen disappeared altogether, and the chief programmer intervened and inserted the pen back into the moment.
Q: How else has the matrix involved itself in your war?
When I was deputy defense commander, I was checking up on one of the troops who was wounded in the arm. He told me that he and another soldier had only one gun between them and only five bullets. They accidentally fell into a trap. They somehow found their way into a block post that wasn't theirs. There were five Ukrainian soldiers, and he managed to kill all five with those five bullets. And they were armed with shotguns! He did this before they could shoot back. This is one more example of the matrix, I believe.
Q: Who do you think controls the matrix: Jesus, Obama, Putin, Berezin?
I have a short story I sent to an American publication, but it didn't fit with their needs, content-wise. It was about a black calculator in a black hole, and it counted the entire universe. It operated the universe.
Q: So instead of an intelligent designer, an intelligent computer programmer? Does the programmer inside the black hole have a sense of humor?
Good question. I will write about this subject.
Q: Can you give me a sense of what the personality of the programmer is like?
Let me ask you: What kind of face can a computer program have? It is a huge computer program. An uber-program that doesn't actually have a face, doesn't have a personality. It just calculates. It is a very big enormous software program that is just doing what it is doing-just counting and so on. There is no personality, as we imagine a personality.
Q: I am from the Deep South of the United States, and a century and a half ago, we also tried to form a breakaway nation. I have seen your flag, the New Russia or Novorossiya flag. It looks astonishingly similiar to the one flown in the South. Is that a coincidence?
I think most likely it is a coincidence. I was a pen pal with Bruce Sterling, the famous science-fiction writer from Texas. And he said that the people of Texas agreed that the rebels fighting against the Ukraine as separatists were like the Texans and the Southern part of the U.S.A., which also fought for separatism.
Q: How are things going with your war?
The front line is where it was last year, same geographical position. It's just a repetition of the First World War. It's a position war, not an active war. The small towns are more for Russia than for Ukraine. In Donetsk, people are divided fifty per cent for Russia and fifty per cent for Ukraine.
Q: How do you think this will end?
Best result for Russian-speaking people in Donetsk is the complete destruction of the regime in Kiev. When the capital is ruled by normal, adequate people who are in pursuit of Ukrainian-and not American-goals, then we can exist with them in peace. If Russia would have taken part in the war, then the war would end very quickly and with bad results for Ukraine. Maybe I can tell you a joke one hears on the front lines?
Q: Sure.
A Ukrainian soldier was asked, "Why are you fighting in Donbass?" And he says, "Because there are Russians there." The soldier says, "And why are you not fighting in the Crimea?" And he says, "Because there are Russians there."
Q: Your books are largely about the old Soviet Union. Why?
We can compare the fall of the Soviet Union to the fall of the Roman empire. A whole civilization of a new type died. Now there are just these leftovers of it, countries that are different but not that different from the Soviet Union. It was a special civilization, and now I mourn for it. Russia today is a capitalist country like the United States-not like the Soviet Union, which represented a new type of civilization in which you can live without undermining or exploiting other people. One day I hope it will be reborn. Maybe in some other country.
Q: How might that unfold?
We have different types of crises in humanity-ecological, population, financial-and when one of these crises peaks, it's not going to be possible to sustain a world with somebody living with a billion dollars and others with nothing. There are two different story lines-progress for everyone or progress for the chosen few. Today we are following the route of progress for the chosen ones, and that is how we are going to reach war.
Q: Is that happening now?
In 2001, when the Twin Towers fell, the peaceful postwar existence was disrupted, and in this case, the U.S.A. has begun its war for sources of energy across the whole globe.
The war for resources will be endless, because every time the U.S. needs resources, it will fight for them. Every country will protect itself and its resources as well. I believe we should explore space, because in the human being's imagination, space is endless, and there is no need to fight against each other. We can consolidate our efforts and explore this part of the universe we live in. Otherwise, there will be a war for resources. The world is going to find a fair way to distribute these resources. Or there will be no world at all, and that will be the end of our story.
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#32
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
January 7, 2016
Klim Podkova: Don't worry. Things here in Ukraine are going just super
Klim PODKOVA
http://www.rusfact.ru/node/48540?utm_campaign=transit&utm_source=mirtesen&utm_medium=news&from=mirtesen
Translated from Russian by Tom Winter
Hi there, Ivan!
Thank you for your happy New Year greetings! I'm glad you did not forget me, or turn away. I am sure that there's no scum that could destroy our friendship and that the truth will prevail, despite the machinations of your Putin.
I realize from your letter that you worry about me. I am pleased about your concern, but I hasten to disappoint you: here in Ukraine, things aren't just going good, but great!
You won't believe this, but in the past two years since the Maidan Ukraine has made great strides in absolutely all areas! Do not trust your Russian TV! Does it say Ukraine is on the decline? False! Yes, export of Ukrainian goods to Russia has really dropped. Will the Russian economy survive this blow? I do not know.
Actually Ukraine, by quitting its cooperation with Russia, will surely win a place in the European markets. Just look at these numbers over the past year for export of Ukrainian goods to the EU: Nuts, up 25%! Wool up 10%! Products made of straw, up 21% !!! What can you say against these numbers? - Nothing.
Ukraine is driving Russia out of the market even in Russia! Can you imagine?! In your own in St. Petersburg, by Russian statistics, every third prostitute is Ukrainian, and in Moscow - every second! The ones from Ukraine, Moldavia, and the Baltics have all but monopolized the market, and have driven the Russians out (Please note that the palm goes to representatives of countries that have broken with Russia and oriented to the EU!)
According to the St. Petersburg porno chief, director and producer Sergei Pryanishnikov, whereas earlier "the adult film performers were 70% of them Ukrainians, now their number has gone up to 90%"!
While you're there, don't miss seeing lifestyles film "Gay-guy Sparkler" -- Ukraine has adapted to the values of European culture: already it's been decided to rebroadcast three European porn channels! I am sure that soon we will legalize marijuana and cigarettes with "grass" will be available right in the school cafeteria.
My dream is to see a new generation of Ukrainians who have grown up in western style freedom - I am sure Russia will be blown away!
A concern for the common man? If the Russians get no break from working in the factories of oligarchs, the Ukrainians are free of it. Many Ukrainian companies offer their employees multiple months of vacation! And even forcibly send them to furlough 5, 6, 8 months on end! I just see you bite your elbows.
No surprise that Ukraine has become one of the most attractive countries in Europe. Here's something for you to worry over: they're saying the Poles want to regain Western Ukraine. Do not look at Russian TV - it distorts the truth, because actually it's the other way around: the Poles want to join to the western regions of Ukraine, and thus become part of our country. I am personally against it, After all, what are these hicks to our prosperous country?
I see you touch upon the topic of visa-free regime, that they're not going to give it to Ukraine. Vanya, you want to know the real reason they won't? The EU is afraid that when a visa-free regime with Ukraine comes into force, Europe will go belly-up: hundreds of thousands of Europeans will leave and will rush to Ukraine. And leave only the elderly and young children there, as all the able-bodied citizens abandon them for us.
By the way, here's something you didn't know: already for many years in the building trades, the guys from Voronezh, Kursk, and Rostov are going to Ukraine to work. Therefore, in these regions there's great excitement: people see the truth and want to secede from Russia and join up with Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow is littered with applications to take Ukrainian citizenship. But in Ukraine there simply aren't enough certificates to hand them out to everybody, so we give citizenship only to those who really deserve it, giants like Mikhail Saakashvili, Maria Gaidar, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
And they're putting you on about the blockade of Crimea, too. Well lately there was this youtube in which a the resident of Kherson invited UAF soldiers to visit his wonderful city. He said into the camera: "Go to KHER-son" ["Kher" meaning "d#ck" in Russian] It's just that your journalists cut out the last part. So typical of your Putinian false propaganda!
In conclusion I would say that Ukraine is well on its way. We do not need your Santa Claus, we have St. Nicholas, we have Verka Serduchka.
And if Russia greets 2016 as the year of the red monkey, in Ukraine it's the white fox ...
P.S. In memory of our old friendship, send $200.
Glory to Ukraine!
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