tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16110351868962387722024-02-20T06:26:20.465-08:00Harry the Great blogharry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.comBlogger146125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-65717642027566847402015-10-02T14:35:00.005-07:002015-10-02T14:35:53.215-07:00Why the West should listen to Putin on Syria<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>By Simon Jenkins</i><br /><br />As everyone knows, the only way to stop the slaughter in Syria is for the US and its allies to work with President Assad – and to stop worrying about what looks good<br /><br />Putin is right. Everyone knows Putin is right, that the only way forward in Syria, if not to eternal slaughter, is via the established government of Bashar al-Assad and his Lebanese and Iranian allies.<br /><br />That is the realpolitik. That is what pragmatism dictates. In the secure west, foreign policy has long been a branch of domestic politics, with added sermonising. “What to do”, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, even Ukraine, has been dictated not by what might work but what looks good. The megaphone is mightier than the brain.<br /><br />The result of American and British grandstanding at the UN this week – seeing who can be ruder about Assad – is that Vladimir Putin has gathered ever more cards to his pack. Putin has already performed the two primary duties of a Russian leader, bringing stability and pride. He now faces turbulent Russian minorities across his European frontier and a serious menace from Muslim states to his south. He is perforce becoming a player on a wider stage. He has read Iran, India and Syria correctly. He is no fool.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />On a visit to London last June, the veteran diplomat Henry Kissinger pleaded with his audience to see Russia as an ally, not an enemy, against Muslim fundamentalism. Russia and the west shared a civilisation and long-term interests, he said. They had to work as one. It is easy for western democracies, centuries in the making, to sneer at Russia’s imperfections and at Putin’s cynical antics in Ukraine. But the idea that economic sanctions were going to change Moscow’s mind or weaken its kleptocracy was idiotic.<br /><br />Syria is experiencing the most ghastly anarchy anywhere on earth. If ever there were a case for humanitarian “troops on the ground” it must be here. Those who seek this end cannot pick and choose their merchants of atrocity. All sides in war kill innocent people, including western addicts of air bombing (such as Hilary Benn at the Labour party conference yesterday). Russia has accepted that the forcible toppling of Assad – which Britain has predicted since 2011 – is not a realistic path to peace. If he is to go, it will be after his enemies have been driven back, not before.<br /><br />The true nature of the west’s commitment in Syria was revealed in Barack Obama’s remark to the UN that “because alternatives are surely worse” is no reason to support tyrants. In other words, American feelgood is more important than Syrian lives. That cosy maxim has guided western policy in the region for over a decade. It has been a disaster. If we have nothing more intelligent to say on Syria, we should listen to Putin. He has.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/29/west-vladmir-putin-syria-us-assad" target="_blank">Source</a> <br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-21955486006191672032015-09-18T03:09:00.000-07:002015-09-18T03:09:29.954-07:00Putin shifts fronts in Syria and Ukraine<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Jackson Diehl<br /><br />Throughout the summer, Russia’s forces in eastern Ukraine kept up a daily drumbeat of attacks on the Ukrainian army, inflicting significant casualties while avoiding a response by Western governments. On Sept. 1, following a new cease-fire, the guns suddenly fell silent. Optimists speculated that Vladimir Putin was backing down.<br /><br />Then came the reports from Syria: Russian warplanes were overflying the rebel-held province of Idlib. Barracks were under construction at a new base. Ships were unloading new armored vehicles. Putin, it turns out, wasn’t retreating, but shifting fronts — and executing another of the in-your-face maneuvers that have repeatedly caught the Obama administration flat-footed.<br /><br />It’s not yet clear what Russia’s intentions are in Syria — or, for that matter, in Ukraine, where it continues to deploy an estimated 9,000 regular troops and 240 tanks on top of more than 30,000 irregulars. Some analysts claim that a floundering Putin is meddling in the Middle East out of desperation because his bid for Ukraine has failed. But another way to see it is this: Putin’s use of force succeeded in inducing the West to accept his Ukraine demands — and he is trying to repeat his triumph in a second theater.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />Certainly, no one looks more fooled by the latest Kremlin stunt than the man assigned to call Moscow to protest, Secretary of State John F. Kerry. In May, Kerry traveled to Putin’s favorite resort, Sochi, to confer with him on Iran, Ukraine and Syria. When the meeting was over, Kerry publicly recommitted himself to the proposition that the wars in Ukraine and Syria could be solved through U.S.-Russian cooperation. To begin with, a special diplomatic channel was set up between Moscow and Washington for coordination on Ukraine, with the goal of ending the conflict by the end of the year.<br /><br />Over the summer, while Washington was preoccupied with the Iran nuclear deal, U.S. and European diplomats quietly leaned on the democratically elected, pro-Western Ukrainian government of Petro Poroshenko. In Sochi, Kerry had offered full-throated U.S. support for the implementation of an accord known as Minsk 2 — a deal hastily brokered by Germany and France in February, at a moment when regular Russian troops were cutting the Ukrainian army to ribbons. The bargain is a terrible one for Kiev: It stipulates that Ukraine must adopt a constitutional reform granting extraordinary powers to the Russian-occupied regions, and that the reforms must satisfy Moscow’s proxies. That gives Putin a de facto veto over Ukraine’s governing structure.<br /><br />Though Russia wasn’t observing point one of the Minsk deal — a cease-fire — Poroshenko was pushed hard by the Obama administration to submit a constitutional amendment to the Ukrainian parliament. He did so, then won preliminary approval for it by warning legislators that his fragile administration risked losing U.S. support. The cost was high: Violent demonstrations outside the parliament resulted in several deaths. But it looked like the United States had delivered on Kerry’s commitment to Putin.<br /><br />Putin, however, rejected the concession. The reform, he publicly complained, had not been worked out with his proxies and did not “change the essence of Ukraine’s structure of power.” His demand to dictate Ukraine’s political system could not have been more blatant. Yet rather than dismiss it, Western leaders are promising more appeasement. “It is imperative to overcome those differences” with Russia, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in her most recent meeting with Poroshenko, according to her office. Kiev is now being pressed to allow elections next month in the occupied territories, even though they remain under the control of Russian troops and much of the Ukrainian population has been displaced.<br /><br />How does this translate to Syria? There, too, Putin has an agenda as clear as it is noxious. He wants to block any attempt by the West and its allies to engineer the removal of Bashar al-Assad and force his regime’s acceptance as a partner in a new “coalition” fighting the Islamic State. Putin apparently pitched that idea to Obama during a phone call in June. Obama, like Kerry, concluded — wrongly — that Putin was ready to cooperate.<br /><br />Now, suddenly, Russian boots are appearing on the ground in Assad’s ethnic stronghold, Latakia . Some analysts say Russian planes and drones could be used to carry out attacks on the regime’s behalf. Kerry’s protests have been brushed off.<br /><br />Perhaps Putin really is improvising or bluffing in desperation. But maybe he is calculating that the Obama administration will respond to his belligerence in Syria the same way it did to that in Ukraine: by broadly conceding his demands and trying to get its Syrian and Arab allies to accept them. Of course, Putin has yet to get his way fully in Ukraine, in spite of the West’s lobbying, and he’s unlikely to succeed in saving Assad. But if one of his aims has been to show that he can push the United States around, he’s doing pretty well.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/putin-shifts-fronts-in-syria-and-ukraine/2015/09/13/ab872574-57ea-11e5-abe9-27d53f250b11_story.html" target="_blank">Source</a><br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-52327447730045024632015-08-09T13:46:00.000-07:002015-08-09T13:46:04.575-07:00Russian Hawks Win in Failed Warship Deal<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Leonid Bershidsky<br /><br />The saga of the two Mistral helicopter carriers France built for Russia, but refused to hand over because of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, is finally over. The net result is that a French shipyard has been saved at the French taxpayer's expense, while Russian taxpayers will pay to retool the country's wharves so the country can build more of its own warships. <br /><br />The Kremlin said Wednesday night that Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Francois Hollande have agreed to terminate the 2011 contract; that Russia has already received compensation for its expenses; and that it is preparing to dismantle Russian equipment installed on the ships. Russia, according to the statement, considers "the Mistral matter fully settled."<br /><br />The Kremlin didn't say how much France paid to break its contract, the subject of months of back-and-forth, but the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that "more than 1.1 billion euros" ($1.2 billion) has landed in the Russian government's account. This fits with French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian's statement that the compensation was less than the contract's initial 1.2 billion euro price tag.<br /><br />Russia had so far paid 785 million euros for the warships, one of which was to be delivered last fall and the other later this year. Last September, Hollande suspended the deal under pressure from North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, as Russia looked increasingly involved in the eastern Ukraine fighting. Russia initially talked of a multi-billion-dollar indemnity prescribed by the contract. In April, however, Putin said he wouldn't demand "any indemnities or over-the-top punitive damages." Instead, Russia asked France to compensate its outlay for new port infrastructure and the upkeep and training of the ships' crews.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />If Kommersant's number is correct, France has accepted some of these claims to Moscow's satisfaction, avoiding a diplomatic spat. Moreover, the newspaper reported that the French government did its best to transfer the funds quietly, lest they be arrested by the shareholders of the defunct oil company Yukos, who won a $50 billion verdict against Russia and are hunting for Russian state assets throughout Europe. The deal was struck "in a spirit of partnership," tweeted Dmitry Rogozin, deputy prime minister for Russia's military industrial complex.<br /><br />Rogozin never liked the Mistral contract. "I have always considered it essentially the private affair of Comrade Serdyukov," he said last year, referring to disgraced former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, who was fired in the midst of a corruption scandal in 2012. The Defense Ministry has never been able to adequately explain why it needed the Mistrals. In 2009, Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky, then Russian navy commander, said the Mistrals could have been helpful in the brief 2008 war between Russia and Georgia. They would have allowed the Russian Black Sea Fleet to seal off Georgia's sea border in 40 minutes, rather than the 26 hours it actually took, he said. Russia, however, didn't necessarily need to spend 1.2 billion euros on that kind of time gain, especially since the war was already won. <br /><br />This doesn't necessarily mean the contract was the result of a kickback. The ships might have been useful for international exercises and to show the Russian flag on the seas. There was also a theory circulating in Moscow that the deal was political payback for then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy's role in settling the 2008 conflict with Georgia. Sarkozy brokered the surrender of Georgia's then President, Mikheil Saakashvili, aiding Russia to avoid international sanctions -- an outcome that may have encouraged Putin to act in Crimea and eastern Ukraine years later. <br /><br />The payback idea makes sense. The French shipyard that built the Mistrals -- the former Chantiers de l'Atlantique in Saint-Nazaire -- was in a poor financial state before the huge contract arrived. Its owner, STX France, in which the French government has a significant minority stake, faced growing losses in the years before the Mistral deal was signed. In 2010, the company lost 66.3 million euros on revenue of 538 million euros. Since then, STX France has been breaking even, and in 2014, the French government helped it to line up another big contract (this time for two giant passenger liners), which should keep the shipyard running for the next four years. Now the French government has refunded the Russian payments, the construction of the two helicopter carriers amounts to a taxpayer-funded bailout of the wharf.<br /><br />France will eventually sell the Mistrals (the government says there are interested buyers). But it will probably take a loss, even if Canada, India or some other country acquires them, because this would be a distressed sale. In Russia, meanwhile, Rogozin succeeded in convincing Putin that the Mistral fiasco proves Russia needs to build its own warships. Russia's new naval doctrine, which Putin signed into effect last month, deems it necessary to ensure "the Russian Federation's technological independence in the areas of shipbuilding and naval equipment in accordance with the state armaments program."<br /><br />The Russian Finance Ministry has been calling for cuts to the ambitious, 23 trillion ruble ($359 billion) rearmament program Russia has approved until 2020, but the Defense Ministry said last month it didn't expect any drastic reductions this or next year. In its naval part, the program centers on localizing the production of equipment Russia used to buy from Ukraine or the West, such as marine diesel engines.<br /><br />This won't necessarily be easy. Last month, the navy's commander, Admiral Viktor Chirkov, told a high-level meeting on the rearmament program that so far, import substitution wasn't working in engine production: Local factories cannot build engines and other sensitive equipment without imported parts. "They squandered all the technology," Chirkov said. "You understand that everyone sitting here is spending the government's money, but there's no upshot." Rogozin agreed that billions of rubles had been spent on research and development without obvious results.<br /><br />That doesn't means billions more won't be spent, despite Russia's recession. The failed Mistral deal will lead to increased investment in Russian shipyards -- just as it did for Saint-Nazaire -- and has already strengthened hawkish proponents of Russian autarky, such as Rogozin. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-06/russian-hawks-win-failed-mistral-warship-deal" target="_blank">Source</a><br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-44533346781884123892015-07-09T14:57:00.001-07:002015-07-09T14:57:55.366-07:00Russian veto of U.N. resolution on Srebrenica infuriates U.S.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>By Karen DeYoung</i><br />
<br />
Russia vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution Wednesday commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys and recognizing it as an act of genocide.<br /><br />Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, called the resolution a “confrontational and politically motivated” attempt by its sponsors, including the United States and Britain, to blame one side for the many atrocities committed during the 1990s Balkans conflict.<br /><br />The vote was the latest controversy between Russia and the United States and its European allies. Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in a statement that the veto was “a further stain on this Council’s record” and called it “madness” to deny what happened in Srebrenica.<br /><br />The Security Council has never formally recognized the massacre as a genocide. Previous U.N. statements and member states have done so, and they have taken responsibility for the failure to protect Srebrenica, which had been declared a U.N. safe zone and was protected by peacekeeping forces.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />An international gathering is to be held in the Bosnian city Saturday to honor the victims of what former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan called the worst genocide in Europe since World War II, carried out by Bosnian Serb forces beginning July 11, 1995.<br /><br />As he opened the Security Council meeting, Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson said, “We gather in humility and regret to recognize the failure of the United Nations and the international community to prevent this tragedy.”<br /><br />Officials from countries supporting the resolution said it was the subject of intense negotiations this week to avoid a veto. It named no group as responsible for the Srebrenica genocide, and the text acknowledged responsibility for atrocities during the war by all sides.<br /><br />But Russia, one of the five permanent Security Council members with veto power, balked at using the term “genocide,” said officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the closed-door negotiations. China, Venezuela, Angola and Nigeria abstained, while the 10 other members voted in favor of the resolution.<br /><br />International tribunals long ago placed the blame for the Srebrenica killings on an autonomous Bosnian Serb republic that existed at the time; its political and military leaders are facing war crimes trials. The Dayton Accords in late 1995 brought an uneasy end to the three-year Bosnian war.<br /><br />Russia has retained close ties with Serbia, whose leaders have charged that attempts to highlight the Srebrenica genocide undermine their nation’s reputation and impede reconciliation efforts in the Balkans.<br /><br />Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic said Russia proved itself a true friend by preventing attempts to “smear the entire Serbian nation as genocidal,” according to news reports from Belgrade.<br /><br />Churkin, the Russian envoy, opened his Security Council remarks by asking for a moment of silence to “honor the dead of Srebrenica,” and he said Russia fully recognized the tragedy that took place there.<br /><br />“We tried to make sure the document was balanced,” he said of the resolution, and “proposed an alternative option.” Instead, he said, its authors had opted for wording that was “not constructive, confrontational and politically motivated,” an approach that he said “singled out one party for a war crime.”<br /><br />Power, who wrote extensively as a journalist and author about genocide in the Balkans and elsewhere, said in her statement after the vote that “this Council did everything in its power to get Russia on board,” including “not even mentioning the perpetrators.” But Russia, she said, considered a reference to genocide a “redline” and vetoed “a well-<br />established fact documented by hundreds of thousands of pages of witness testimony, photographic evidence and forensic evidence.”<br /><br />“A number of countries today have chosen to remain neutral” by abstaining in the vote, Power said, asking “how any country could use the privilege of permanent membership on this Council to negate what happened.”<br /><br />Britain, whose delegation drafted the resolution, expressed outrage. “Genocide occurred at Srebrenica. This is a legal fact, not a political judgment,” said Peter Wilson, the country’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations. “On this, there is no compromise.”<br /><br /><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-veto-on-srebrenica-infuriates-us-and-allies-at-the-united-nations/2015/07/08/7458df6c-25a8-11e5-b72c-2b7d516e1e0e_story.html" target="_blank">Source</a><br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-85412354250047538202015-06-23T15:43:00.002-07:002015-06-23T15:43:49.694-07:00Are European Companies Ignoring E.U. Sanctions On Russia?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>By Kenneth Rapoza</i><br /><br />It’s been nearly a year since sectoral sanctions were slapped on Russia for its involvement in helping create a frozen conflict in Eastern Ukraine. European and American companies banned financing of Russian energy firms, and banks. They banned any joint venture deals with Russian oil and gas companies that involved exploration and production, or the selling of technologies used in E&P. But if a string of memorandum of understandings signed during last week’s St. Petersburg International Forum puts anything in the spotlight this week it is this: some very powerful entities in the E.U. have had it with sanctions.<br /><br />For example, Gazprom, Shell, E.ON and Austria’s OMV Group signed a memorandum last Thursday for a joint venture deal involving a new pipeline that will hopefully one day have the capacity to ship 55 billion cubic meters to European each year. That is bigger than the existing Nord Stream pipeline that takes Russian gas westward.<br /><br />“Extra gas transmission facilities along the shortest route connecting gas fields in Russia’s north to European markets will provide for higher security and reliability of supplies under new contracts,” Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller said in a statement last week.<br /><br />
<a name='more'></a>Gazprom shares have outperformed the Market Vectors Russia (RSX) exchange traded fund over the last five days, up 3.66% in dollar terms. The market is being reminded just how important this company is to keeping air conditions firing and baseboards heated throughout Europe.<br /><br />On one hand, European energy companies are getting ready for the end of Western sanctions, which are not expected to end until next January. On the other hand, lawyers at these firms are working overtime to make sure they’re successful at loopholing the E.U.<br /><br />Ben van Beurden, CEO of Shell, said Gazprom will remain an important part of Europe’s energy matrix for some time to come. “Natural gas will remain an integral part of the European energy mix, that’s why such new projects are important to satisfy the demand for energy carriers, especially with an account of the declining domestic gas production in Europe,” he said.<br /><br />Shell and Gazprom also signed an Agreement of Strategic Cooperation last week. The document provides for developing the strategic partnership between Gazprom and Shell across all segments of the gas industry, from upstream to downstream, including a possible asset swap.<br /><br />Absent from the St. Petersburg Forum were any announced deals with American oil and gas. ExxonMobil has been cut out of its $700 million joint venture with Rosneft in the Kara Sea because of Washington’s sanctions against the company. Meanwhile, its European rivals are muscling in on one of the cheapest places in the world to drill for hydrocarbons.<br /><br />The St. Petersburg International Forum, which concluded in the northwestern Russian city on June 20, is a testament to how Russia remains a one trick pony. The deal making is all Gazprom and Rosneft. It’s as if Russia’s private sector, including investor favorites like pay processing firm Qiwi and Russian supermarket player Magnit, does not exist.<br /><br />Gazprom also inked a sanction breaking 300 million euro loan from UniCredit Austria, state media reported on Sunday.<br /><br />Last July, the E.U. banned its companies to sign any new financing deals with Russia. In September, the E.U. placed even more restrictions on Russia’s access to E.U. capital markets. The sanctions state that individuals and corporations from the E.U. are banned from providing loans to five major Russian state-owned banks, including Sberbank and VTB Bank, and the three state owned energy companies, of which Gazprom tops the list.<br /><br />The September sanctions, which went into effect on the 12th of that month, said that companies could no longer provide services related to the issuing of financial instruments, including broker relationships.<br /><br />In addition, certain services necessary for deep water oil exploration and production, arctic oil exploration or production and shale oil projects in Russia were also banned.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/06/21/are-european-companies-ignoring-e-u-sanctions-on-russia/" target="_blank">Source</a><br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-74458046133282140302015-05-21T15:03:00.001-07:002015-05-21T15:03:46.514-07:00Nazis Triumph Over Communists in Ukraine<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>By Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg</i><br /><br />It's goodbye Lenin, hello Nazi collaborators in Ukraine these days. Laws signed into effect by President Petro Poroshenko require the renaming of dozens of towns and hundreds of streets throughout the country to eliminate Soviet-era names. At the same time, Ukraine will begin to honor groups that helped Hitler exterminate Ukrainian Jews during World War II.<br /><br />Ukrainians' desire for a European identity and a break with the country's Soviet past is Poroshenko's biggest political asset, but these latest steps should worry the country's Western allies.<br /><br />A law Poroshenko signed May 15 bans all Soviet and Nazi symbols, even on souvenirs, and criminalizes "denying the criminal character" of both totalitarian regimes. It bans place names, monuments and plaques glorifying Soviet heroes, Soviet flags and communist slogans. Statues of Lenin have been toppled in many Ukrainian cities since the "revolution of dignity" last year, but the new law goes further. <br /><br />Big regional centers such as Dnipropetrovsk (named after Grigory Petrovsky, who ran Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s) and Kirovograd (bearing the name of Sergei Kirov, a Bolshevik leader whose popularity rivaled Stalin's, causing the latter to have him killed), as well as dozens of smaller towns, will need new names. Lots of towns have streets named after Lenin and Soviet saints, and these will also be erased in the next few months, creating lots of confusion for anyone using old maps (or Google maps, for that matter). Soviet emblems will be removed from buildings and bridges, murals in the subway will be altered. <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />Ukraine doesn't need the expense, which former Tax Minister Oleksandr Klimenko put at 5 billion hryvnias ($236 million), though, as a fugitive to Russia, he is hardly impartial. But cost, or even local residents' nostalgia, are weak arguments against Ukraine's "decommuinization." The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, however, has some more relevant ones.<br /><br />“While I fully respect the often sensitive and painful nature of historical debate and its effect on society, broadly and vaguely defined language that restricts individuals from expressing views on past events and people, could easily lead to suppression of political, provocative and critical speech, especially in the media,” Dunja Mijatovic, OSCE representative on freedom of the media, wrote Poroshenko in April, urging him not to sign the law.<br /><br />On Monday, she called his decision to sign it "discouraging." The Ukrainian law is broader than any similar ones passed elsewhere in eastern Europe after the fall of communism: In some countries, communist symbols also are outlawed, but trying to whitewash the overthrown Communist regimes is not a crime, whereas in Ukraine, violations of the "decommunization" law are punishable by a maximum of five years in prison.<br /><br />Ukraine's attempts to eliminate its past as a Soviet republic are as extreme as some of the the actions taken by Vladimir Putin's hated post-modern empire, where the parliament is now considering a bill that would ban likening the Stalin regime to Nazism.<br /><br />To make matters worse, having banned all kinds of foreign totalitarian symbols, Poroshenko also signed a law prescribing that Ukrainians honor a number of nationalist organizations that operated before and during World War II. The law calls them "20th century fighters for Ukraine's independence," but some of these groups, such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) fought alongside the Nazis, and followed the German occupier's orders. In an open letter to Poroshenko and Ukrainian legislators, 40 historians from major Western universities wrote:<br /><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Not only would it be a crime to question the legitimacy of an organization (UPA) that slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles in one of the most heinous acts of ethnic cleansing in the history of Ukraine, but also it would exempt from criticism the OUN, one of the most extreme political groups in Western Ukraine between the wars, and one which collaborated with Nazi Germany at the outset of the Soviet invasion in 1941. It also took part in anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine and, in the case of the Melnyk faction, remained allied with the occupation regime throughout the war.</blockquote>
<br />By quoting this letter, I have just violated the Ukrainian law. The punishment is not clear: A separate law will be required for that.<br /><br />The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum condemned the bill because it bans media criticism of the nationalist groups. "As Ukraine advances on the difficult road to full democracy, we strongly urge the nation's government to refrain from any measure that preempts or censors discussion or politicizes the study of history," the museum said in a statement.<br /><br />It's easier to legislate on history than to fix Ukraine's many current problems, from a Soviet-style bureaucracy to the Russian-backed insurgency in the east that appears to be part of Putin's Soviet revival project. The "decommunization" laws are not only pointless, they also show the chasm that still separates Ukraine from its goal of joining the Western world.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-19/nazis-triumph-over-communists-in-ukraine" target="_blank">Source</a></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-21645288887768609712015-05-13T06:38:00.000-07:002015-05-13T06:38:08.277-07:00Something Truly Amazing Happened at the V-Day Parade<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br /><i>Never before has a Russian Defense Minister done anything like it </i><br />
<br />
<i>By The Saker</i><br />
<br />
Today will go down in Russian history, as a truly historical celebration of the victory over Nazi Germany. The parade – by far the most beautiful I have seen (alas, only on video, not in person) – was superb and for the first time included the Chinese PLA [People’s Liberation Army]. Clearly, we see history in the making. But something else, no less amazing, also happened today: Defense Minister Shoigu made the sign of the Cross before the beginning of the celebrations:<br />
<br />
This is an absolutely momentous moment for Russia. Never in the past history had any Russian Minister of Defense done anything like it. True, the old tradition was to make the sign of the Cross when passing under the Kremlin’s Savior Tower, if only because there is an icon of the Savior right over the gate. However, everybody in Russia immediately understood that there was much more to this gesture than an external compliance to an ancient tradition.<br />
<br />
The Russian journalist Victor Baranets puts it very well when he wrote:”At that moment I felt that with his simple gesture Shoigu brought all of Russia to his feet. There was so much kindness, so much hope, so much of our Russian sense of the sacred [in this gesture]“. He is absolutely correct. To see this Tuvan Buddhist make the sign of the Cross in the Orthodox manner sent an electric shock through the Russian blogosphere: everybody felt that something amazing had happened.<br />
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For one thing, nobody in his right mind would suspect Shoigu of ever doing anything just “for show”. The man has an immense capital of popularity and credibility in Russia and he has no need for political hypocrisy. Furthermore, those who saw the footage will immediately see that Shoigu was very concentrated, very solemn, when he did this. Personally, I believe that Shoigu quite literally asked for God’s help in one of the most dangerous moment in Russian history in which he, the Russian Minister of Defense, might be called to take momentous decisions from which the future of the planet might depend.<br />
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For centuries Russian soldiers have knelt and asked for God’s blessing, before going into battle and this is, I believe, what Shoigu did today. He knows that 2015 will be the year of the big war between Russia and the Empire (even if, due to the presence of nuclear weapons on both sides, this war will remain 80% informational, 15% economic and 5% military)<br />
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Does that mean that Shoigu converted to Orthodoxy? Not necessarily. Buddhism is very accepting of other religions and I don’t see much of a contradiction here. But the fact that the first Russian government official to begin the historical Victory Day parade by making the sign of the Cross and appealing for God’s help is a Buddhist, is, in itself, quite amazing (even if it shames his nominally “Orthodox” predecessors who never did so).<br />
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I can only imagine the horror, outrage and despair Shoigu’s gesture will trigger in the pro-Western Russian “liberal intelligentsia” and in the western capitals. In placing himself and all of Russia in God’s hands, Shoigu declared a spiritual, cultural and civilizational war on the Empire. And just for that, he will go down in history as one of Russia’s greatest men.<br />
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<a href="http://russia-insider.com/en/history/something-truly-amazing-happened-today/ri6696" target="_blank">Source</a></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-24227639090017514372015-05-09T08:41:00.000-07:002015-05-09T08:41:09.401-07:00Don’t forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>By Ishaan Tharoor</i><br />
<br />In the Western popular imagination -- particularly the American one -- World War II is a conflict we won. It was fought on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, through the rubble of recaptured French towns and capped by sepia-toned scenes of joy and young love in New York. It was a victory shaped by the steeliness of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the moral fiber of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the awesome power of an atomic bomb.<br /><br />But that narrative shifts dramatically when you go to Russia, where World War II is called the Great Patriotic War and is remembered in a vastly different light.<br /><br />On May 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin will play host to one of Moscow's largest ever military parades to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany. More than 16,000 troops will participate, as well 140 aircraft and 190 armored vehicles, including the debut of Russia's brand new next-generation tank.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />It's a grand moment, but few of the world's major leaders will be in attendance. The heads of state of India and China will look on, but not many among their Western counterparts. That is a reflection of the tense geopolitical present, with Putin's relations with the West having turned frosty after a year of Russian meddling in Ukraine. When Russia's T-14 Armata tank broke down at a parade rehearsal on Thursday, the snickering could be heard across Western media.<br /><br />Unfairly or not, the current tensions obscure the scale of what's being commemorated: Starting in 1941, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and played perhaps the most important role in the Allies' defeat of Hitler. By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same.<br /><br />Of course, the start of the war had been shaped by a Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up the lands in between their borders. Then Hitler turned against the U.S.S.R.<br /><br />The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction," writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses fighting the Red Army.<br /><br />"It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings.<br /><br />The epic battles that eventually rolled back the Nazi advance -- the brutal winter siege of Stalingrad, the clash of thousands of armored vehicles at Kursk (the biggest tank battle in history) -- had no parallel on the Western Front, where the Nazis committed fewer military assets. The savagery on display was also of a different degree than that experienced farther west.<br /><br />Hitler viewed much of what's now Eastern Europe as a site for "lebensraum" -- living space for an expanding German empire and race. What that entailed was the horrifying, systematic attempt to depopulate whole swaths of the continent. This included the wholesale massacre of millions of European Jews, the majority of whom lived outside Germany's pre-war borders to the east. But millions of others were also killed, abused, dispossessed of their lands and left to starve.<br /><br />"The Holocaust overshadows German plans that envisioned even more killing. Hitler wanted not only to eradicate the Jews; he wanted also to destroy Poland and the Soviet Union as states, exterminate their ruling classes, and kill tens of millions of Slavs," writes historian Timothy Snyder in "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin."<br /><br />By 1943, the Soviet Union had already lost some 5 million soldiers and two-thirds of its industrial capacity to the Nazi advance. That it was yet able to turn back the German invasion is testament to the courage of the Soviet war effort. But it came at a shocking price.<br /><br />In his memoirs, Eisenhower was appalled by the extent of the carnage:<br /><br />
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When we flew into Russia, in 1945, I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow. Through this overrun region, Marshal Zhukov told me, so many numbers of women, children and old men had been killed that the Russian Government would never be able to estimate the total.</blockquote>
<br />To be sure, as Snyder documents, the Soviet Union under Stalin also had the blood of millions on its hands. In the years preceding World War II, Stalinist purges led to the death and starvation of millions. The horrors were compounded by the Nazi invasion.<br /><br />To be sure, as Snyder documents, the Soviet Union under Stalin also had the blood of millions on its hands. In the years preceding World War II, Stalinist purges led to the death and starvation of millions. The horrors were compounded by the Nazi invasion.<br /><br />"In Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus, and the Leningrad district, lands where the Stalinist regime had starved and shot some four million people in the previous eight years, German forces managed to starve and shoot even more in half the time," Snyder writes. He says that between 1933 and 1945 in the "bloodlands" -- the broad sweep of territory on the periphery of the Soviet and Nazi realms -- some 14 million civilians were killed.<br /><br />By some accounts, 60 percent of Soviet households lost a member of their nuclear family.<br /><br />For Russia's neighbors, it's hard to separate the Soviet triumph from the decades of Cold War domination that followed. One can also lament the way the sacrifices of the past inform the muscular Russian nationalism now peddled by Putin and his Kremlin allies. But we shouldn't forget how the Soviets won World War II in Europe.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/05/08/dont-forget-how-the-soviet-union-saved-the-world-from-hitler/" target="_blank">Source</a></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-65164763169185774912015-04-28T11:23:00.001-07:002015-04-28T11:23:51.397-07:00The Atlas Of Beauty<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Politics apart, the post is about the Beauty!<br />
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<a href="http://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/women-portraits-atlas-of-beauty-mihaela-noroc-noroc-8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/women-portraits-atlas-of-beauty-mihaela-noroc-noroc-8.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.boredpanda.com/women-portraits-atlas-of-beauty-mihaela-noroc/" target="_blank">Source</a></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-4004969507545252202015-04-21T14:55:00.000-07:002015-04-21T14:55:55.064-07:00Political Murders in Kiev, US Troops to Ukraine<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>By Ron Paul</i><br /><br />Last week two prominent Ukrainian opposition figures were gunned down in broad daylight. They join as many as ten others who have been killed or committed suicide under suspicious circumstances just this year. These individuals have one important thing in common: they were either part of or friendly with the Yanukovych government, which a US-backed coup overthrew last year. They include members of the Ukrainian parliament and former chief editors of major opposition newspapers. <br /><br />While some journalists here in the US have started to notice the strange series of opposition killings in Ukraine, the US government has yet to say a word.<br /><br />Compare this to the US reaction when a single opposition figure was killed in Russia earlier this year. Boris Nemtsov was a member of a minor political party that was not even represented in the Russian parliament. Nevertheless the US government immediately demanded that Russia conduct a thorough investigation of his murder, suggesting the killers had a political motive. <br /><br />
<a name='more'></a>As news of the Russian killing broke, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Ed Royce (R-CA) did not wait for evidence to blame the killing on Russian president Vladimir Putin. On the very day of Nemtsov’s murder, Royce told the US media that, “this shocking murder is the latest assault on those who dare to oppose the Putin regime.”<br /><br />Neither Royce, nor Secretary of State John Kerry, nor President Obama, nor any US government figure has said a word about the series of apparently political murders in Ukraine.<br /><br />On the contrary, instead of questioning the state of democracy in what looks like a lawless Ukraine, the Administration is sending in the US military to help train Ukrainian troops!<br /><br />Last week, just as the two political murders were taking place, the US 173rd Airborne Brigade landed in Ukraine to begin training Ukrainian national guard forces – and to leave behind some useful military equipment. Though the civil unrest continues in Ukraine, the US military is assisting one side in the conflict – even as the US slaps sanctions on Russia over accusations it is helping out the other side! <br /><br />As the ceasefire continues to hold, though shakily, what kind of message does it send to the US-backed government in Kiev to have US troops arrive with training and equipment and an authorization to gift Kiev with some $350 million in weapons? Might they not take this as a green light to begin new hostilities against the breakaway regions in the east?<br /><br />The Obama administration is so inconsistent in its foreign policy. In some places, particularly Cuba and Iran, the administration is pursuing a policy that looks to diplomacy and compromise to help improve decades of bad relations. In these two cases the administration realizes that the path of confrontation has led nowhere. When the president announced his desire to see the end of Cuba sanctions, he stated very correctly that, "…we are ending a policy that was long past its expiration date. When what you’re doing doesn’t work for fifty years, it’s time to try something new.”<br /><br />So while Obama is correctly talking about sanctions relief for Iran and Cuba, he is adding more sanctions on Russia, backing Saudi Arabia’s brutal attack on Yemen, and pushing ever harder for regime change in Syria. Does he really believe the rest of the world does not see these double standards? A wise consistency of non-interventionism in all foreign affairs would be the correct course for this and future US administrations. Let us hope they will eventually follow Obama’s observation that, “it’s time to try something new.”<br /><br /><a href="http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2015/april/19/political-murders-in-kiev-us-troops-to-ukraine/" target="_blank">Source</a><br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-32694944804694877092015-04-12T02:26:00.000-07:002015-04-12T02:26:00.112-07:00Sahra Wagenknecht: EU Policy Has Destroyed Ukraine and Damaged Europe<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Excellent speech the charismatic Sahra Wagenknecht, the vice president of the German Left party and German MP, gave in the German parliament March 18. Highlights:</i><br />
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<li><i>"The chief interest of the United States is to prevent coordination between Germany and Russia"</i></li>
<li><i>"Resultantly Ukraine has lost the great part of its industry. Today, the country is a bankrupt state, where people go hungry, shiver, and have salaries lower than people have in Ghana."</i></li>
<li><i>"Furthermore, the US and Britain sending military advisors and delivering weapons is not a matter of supporting the peace process, but of torpedoing it. But do you now envision sanctions against the US and Britain?"</i></li>
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<br /><i>This article <a href="http://fortruss.blogspot.ru/2015/04/wagenknecht-eu-policy-has-destroyed.html" target="_blank">originally appeared</a> at <b>Sahra Wagenknecht Blog</b>. It was <a href="http://fortruss.blogspot.com/2015/04/wagenknecht-eu-policy-has-destroyed.html" target="_blank">translated</a> by Tom Winter at the <a href="http://fortruss.blogspot.com/2015/04/wagenknecht-eu-policy-has-destroyed.html" target="_blank">Fort Russ blog</a>.</i><br /><br />Mr President, honored ladies and gentlemen, Frau Chancellor. <br /><br />At your best times, German foreign policy had two priorities: Unity for Europe and a good neighbor policy with Russia. It should give you food for thought, Frau Merkel, if you would listen,<br /><br />[Volker Kauder: That’s rude!]<br /><br />that nationalism and strife in Europe, during your ten years in office, are thriving like never before, and as regards Russia, a policy of outreach has given way to a new Cold War.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />Not long ago, the head of the influential think-tank Stratfor, with striking bluntness, explained the US interest in Europe: <b>The chief interest of the United States is to prevent coordination between Germany and Russia</b>, since, literally “united they are the only power that can threaten us,” i.e. threaten the US.</div>
<a name='more'></a><br />This perceived threat to US interests has been achieved successfully for the foreseeable future. That started as the EU tried to get countries out of their economic and political cooperation with Russia in the framework of the Eastern Partnership.<br /><br />[Claudia Roth, Greens: That’s absurd!]<br /><br />Frau Merkel, naturally this was aimed at Russia, but it was also contrary to the interests of the countries involved. You, not Russia, pushed them to the either-or.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />Resultantly Ukraine has lost the great part of its industry. <b>Today, the country is a bankrupt state, where people go hungry, shiver, and have salaries lower than people have in Ghana</b>.<br /><br />But the confrontation with Russia has not only destroyed Ukraine, it has damaged all of Europe. It is, in fact, an open secret that the United States is stirring the conflict with Russia on economic grounds. <b>When the US administration talks about Human Rights</b>, they’re actually meaning drilling rights or mining rights. Right now in Ukraine there is in view a hell of a lot of shale gas to frack.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />If now, in the framework of the Energy Union of other pipeline routes, we’re talking increasing independence from Russian gas, then you should tell the people in honesty what that means: increasing dependence on much more expensive and ecologically devastating US fracked gas. I do not consider that a responsible view.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />The list is long, Frau Merkel, of earlier chief politicians who criticise your Russia policy. In that list we find the names of your predecessors Gerhard Schroeder, Helmut Kohl, Helmut Schmidt, and even Hans-Dietrich Genscher. Perhaps this is what led to your backing off. In any case, it is correct, that you, with French President Hollande, took the initiative: <b>Minsk II has really led to significantly fewer deaths there in recent weeks than in the weeks and months preceding; the door to a peaceful solution has been opened</b>.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />This is naturally an important new situation, and you, Frau Bundeskanzlerin, and the French President deserve recognition.<br /><br />[Tino Sorge, CDU/CSU: Then say so from time to time!]<br /><br />However, the person that the peace and security in Europe depend on must now go forward, with follow-through, and with backbone. This is naturally a problem, since follow-through and backbone haven’t exactly been your strong suit.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left; grumblings from CDU/CSU]<br /><br />Of course, it is not acceptable, when the shooting persists from the ranks of the insurgents,<br /><br />[Tino Sorge: Not acceptable!]<br /><br /><b>but when Ukrainian troops — or the Nazi battalions fighting for them -- keep right on shooting, then it is quite less unacceptable, and no critical word from you is heard</b>.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />Why do you not come forward with words of censure when the Ukrainian regime, notwithstanding its foreseeable bankruptcy, budgets four times as much for arms as it did last year? This doesn’t assure us that the road to peace has any actual support in the Ukrainian regime!<br /><br />Furthermore, the US and Britain sending military advisors and delivering weapons is not a matter of supporting the peace process, but of torpedoing it. <b>But do you now envision sanctions against the US and Britain?</b> I believe that this whole business of sanctions was a huge mistake through which Europe shot itself in the foot. The sanctions should not be extended.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />We do not need any more tanks. We do not need a 3,000-man NATO intervention troop in Eastern Europe, that protects nobody, but instead puts all Europe further at risk.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />Helmut Schmidt got it right when he warned already in 2007, that, when it comes to world peace, <b>there is far less risk from Russia than from America, and that NATO is only a tool for maintaining US/American hegemony</b>. And if that is correct, then we are left with one set conclusion: that Europe must finally make policy separate from, and independent of, the United States.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />Mr Juncker has put forward the thesis, that we need a European Army to show that we are in earnest about defending European values against Russia. This shows just one thing, how very far we have come from what the founding fathers of European Union wanted.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />Back then it was all about — as you yourself have often said — peace, democracy, and solidarity. Never again should nationalism and hatred separate the lands of Europe. But to defend these values, no armed battalions are needed!<br /><br />If you want to defend democracy, Frau Merkel, then see to it that the lands of Europe are at last ruled by elected governments rather than financial markets, not by the one-time investment banker Mario Draghi, and, further, not by you.<br /><br />[Applause from the left; interjection from Michael Grosse-Bromer: Disassociate yourself from the violence right now. That would be a big step!]<br /><br />If you want democracy, then stop the so-called Free Trade Agreements, stop the TTIP that would make elected governments just a farce<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />That would be the defending of European values! That would be a defence of democracy, exposing these unspeakable TTIP negotiations and comparable dealings.<br /><br />If you want to see a unified Europe, then stop humiliating other countries and imposing programs that rob the young generations of their future<br /><br />[Manuel Sarrazin, Greens, “You’re right with Greece!”]<br /><br /><b>Stop prescribing so-called structural reforms in Europe, that only lead to growing inequality and an ever growing low-wage sector. Here in Germany meanwhile, in consequence of these policies, three million people, in spite of having a job, are so poor they can’t stay warm, haven’t enough to eat — let alone afford going on a vacation!</b> Instead of trying to explain this export-bashing policy, it is high time — and very much in Europe’s interest — to correct it. And it is not least the German wage-dumping that is stifling the other countries of the monetary union.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />Finance Minister Schaeuble has recently instructed the Greek government: <b>“Yeah, governing is always just a rendezvous with reality.”</b><br /><br />[Michael Grosse-Broemer (CDU/CSU): Right! Max Straubinger (CDU/CSU): And so it is!]<br /><br />So one can only say “That would be good” well, <b>that would be a good thing when the German government could only experience its own rendezvous with reality</b>. Because it was not Syriza, but instead, the sister parties to the CDU/CSU and SPD that over the decades stacked up the huge deficits, so that they and the upper crust could stuff their pockets.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left]<br /><br />The reality is also that under the protectorate of the troika that you still treasure so much, whose criminal activities you can see in the documentary by Harald Schuman, the Greek debt just got bigger and the Greek billionaires got richer.<br /><br />And you want to keep it up? Then I can only say "Good night!"<br /><br /><b>And if you want our money back, get it from those that took it, and that was not the nurses, nor the Greeks on pensions: it was the international banks and the Greek Upper Crust</b>. It's from these you could help the Greek government recover its money. <br /><br />Who advances credit to one already overloaded with debt will never see his money again, but the responsibility is on you, Frau Merkel, and you, Mr. Schaeuble, and not on the new Greek government which is now hardly two months in office. <br /><br />As for the whole debate over possible reparations, I can only say that, no matter how the question gets juridically evaluated, the least one should expect from the German State is some minimum of sensibility in dealing with the issue.<br /><br />[Applause, Left; laughter, CDU/CSU]<br /><br />I must say, you still laugh. That is sad. In view of how German occupiers ravaged Greece, and that a million Greek men and women lost their lives in this dark chapter of German history, I find the flip remarks from you, Mr. Schaeuble, and from you, Mr. Kauder, simply disrespectful, and I am ashamed.<br /><br />[Applause from the Left as well as from Juergen Tritten, cries from CDU/CSU: Oh!]<br /><br />In order to recall that the unrolling of history also goes the other way, may I, in closing, quote from the speech of Richard von Weizsaecker on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Liberation — I am just finishing, Mr. President — the speech concerned principally Russia and Eastern Europe, but it naturally also holds good for Greece:<br /><br />“When we think about what our eastern neighbors had to suffer during the war, we understand better that balance, easing up, and a peaceful neighborhood with these lands abide as the central given of German foreign policy. What matters, is that both sides remember, and that both sides have respect for the other.”<br /><br />Yes, only when we remember, and only when we respect each other -- only then will we get back a policy of being good neighbors, both inside the EU, and with Russia.<br /><br />[Sustained applause from the Left]<br /><br /><a href="http://russia-insider.com/en/wagenknecht-eu-policy-has-destroyed-ukraine-and-damaged-europe/5516" target="_blank">Source</a><br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-33777222458441788982015-04-08T01:07:00.003-07:002015-04-08T01:07:57.339-07:00Russian Matryoshkas<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The first Russian matryoshka dolls were made in Sergiyev Posad and to this day the town still has a factory which produces high quality matryoshkas<br />
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harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-15836105594079208132015-03-17T12:20:00.000-07:002015-03-17T12:20:01.820-07:00Debaltsevo: life in ruins - in pictures<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Reuters photographer Baz Ratner has visited the towns of Debaltseve and Vuhlehirsk in eastern Ukraine to document the destruction caused by fighting between pro-Russian and Ukrainian forces<br />
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<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/28/debaltseve-life-in-ruins-in-pictures#img-4" target="_blank">More pics...</a><br />
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harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-45145931773777890172015-03-08T14:22:00.000-07:002015-03-08T14:22:24.674-07:00Dana Rohrabacher Truth Tells<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4530163/dana-rohrabacher-truth-tells" target="_blank">Good!</a><br />
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harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-7950412250248580952015-02-28T04:06:00.002-08:002015-02-28T04:06:52.340-08:00Reflections on the murder of Boris Nemtsov<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The crime is horrific. But there is something a little too convenient for Washington in all of this. Politically, Mr Nemtsov was a spent force – he had a real following in the 1990s, where he was briefly a major player. Unlike Navalny, who is opportunistic, smart and frankly dangerous, Nemtsov’s following was largely limited to foreign journalists and a small group of Russian liberals. <br /><br />Had the Kremlin wanted him out of the way there were other ways – especially in Moscow. A car crash. An (induced) heart attack. Poisons. Why do a public hit within sight of St. Basel’s Cathedral on Red Square so as to provide a public feast for the foreign press picture editors?<br /><br />The timing is equally suspicious. Perfectly timed to draw maximum attention to the upcoming opposition March which had risked falling flat. The March itself is no conceivable threat to Mr Putin – who now enjoys the sort of popularity common to wartime leaders in any country – but it is the best shot the West has, knowing that any political murder in Moscow will be systematically attributed to the Kremlin by the tame Western press – whether of a Putin opponent (Politkovskaya) or a fervent supporter (Paul Klebnikov, Forbes). By some odd coincidence, several of these killings took place immediately before President Putin was to address some particularly high-profile international meeting. <br /><br />The fact that this horrific murder is most beneficial to the anti-Russian factions does not, of course, prove that Washington was in any way involved. It suggests it - which is a very different matter…<br /><br />There is another – less conspiratorial – theory. The Kiev regime – openly supported by Mr Nemtsov and his followers - is genuinely very unpopular in Russia. Live television coverage of the savage bombardment of Lugansk and Donetsk has evoked some strong passions. There is a hardline, nationalist faction, and Russia can be a violent place. It is entirely possible that someone decided to take revenge for the people of Novorossiya, answering one barbaric crime with another. <br /><br />There is only one certainty: this murder will be exploited by the Western press which will largely not even bother to formally attribute it to the Kremlin – but simply do a quick montage – Red Square, Putin opponent lying dead. It’s an easy sell.<br />
We can only hope that the murders will be found and punished – and that political violence – in Moscow as in Lugansk - will be universally condemned. RIP<br /><br />By <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Truth-Beauty-and-Russian-Finance/161448950542575" target="_blank">Truth & Beauty (and Russian Finance)</a></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-16988181717569906842015-02-24T08:23:00.004-08:002015-02-24T08:23:45.807-08:00Washington's Foolish Foreign Policy: American People Must Say No To More Wars<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>By Doug Bandow</i><br /><br />American foreign policy is controlled by fools. What else can one conclude from the bipartisan demand that the U.S. intervene everywhere all the time, irrespective of consequence? No matter how disastrous the outcome, the War Lobby insists that the idea was sound. Any problems obviously result from execution, a matter of doing too little: too few troops engaged, too few foreigners killed, too few nations bombed, too few societies transformed, too few countries occupied, too few years involved, too few dollars spent.<br /><br />As new conflicts rage across the Middle East, the interventionist caucus’ dismal record has become increasingly embarrassing. Yet such shameless advocates of perpetual war as Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham continue to press for military intervention irrespective of country and circumstance. For instance, they led the Neoconservative mob clamoring for war against Libya less than two years after supping with Moammar Khadafy in Tripoli, when they discussed providing U.S. aid to reward his anti-terrorism efforts.<br /><br />Anne-Marie Slaughter, another cheerleader for war in Libya, recently defended her actions after being chided on Twitter for being a war-monger. She had authored a celebratory Financial Times article entitled “Why Libya sceptics were proved badly wrong.”<br /><br />
<a name='more'></a>Even then intervention looked foolish since Libya was a conflict in which Americans had nothing at stake. Today, however, Washington’s Mediterranean adventure looks a good deal less successful. But this experience has had no apparent impact on her support for promiscuously bombing, invading, and occupying other countries.<br /><br />Slightly more abashed, perhaps, is Samantha Power, one of the Obama administration’s chief Sirens of War. She recently pleaded with the public not to let constant failure get in the way of future wars: “I think there is too much of, ‘Oh, look, this is what intervention has wrought’ … one has to be careful about overdrawing lessons.” After all, just because the policy of constant war had been a constant bust, people shouldn’t be more skeptical about a military “solution” for future international problems. What are a few bloody geopolitical catastrophes among friends?<br /><br />President Barack Obama also appears to be a bit embarrassed by his behavior. The Nobel Peace Prize winner has been as active militarily as his much-maligned predecessor. The former increased real military outlays through most of his administration, twice hiked troop levels in Afghanistan, initiated intense drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, joined war against Libya, planned to attack Syria over chemical weapons, and took the country into combat against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.<br /><br />Yet he may owe his election to his 2002 speech against the Iraq invasion. In 2013 he admitted that “I was elected to end wars, not to start them.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself when he added: “I’ve spent the last four and a half years doing everything I can to reduce our reliance on military power.”<br /><br />Washington long has been a town in which past performance is irrelevant. Most celebrated political pundits are constantly and even ostentatiously wrong. Yet every year they make new predictions. Which again invariably end up in error.<br /><br />So it is with foreign policy practitioners. The bipartisan consensus is constant intervention. There is disagreement around the edges—exactly who should get aid money and how much? What is the best way to meddle in another nation’s affairs? Should military action be unilateral or multilateral?<br /><br />Every once in a while there even is a clash over substance, such as the Iraq War. But these differences almost always are partisan. Had President Bill Clinton proposed the Iraq invasion, most congressional Democrats would have signed on. Most Republican legislators opposing his earlier Balkans adventures would have backed that war had George W. Bush been president then.<br /><br />On the issues of the day the two parties usually attempt to one-up each other when it comes to reckless overseas intervention. Confront the Russians over Ukraine! Bomb Syria over chemical weapons! Attack ISIL insurgents threatening Mideast countries! Oust Khadafy after he made a nuclear deal with the West! Invade Iraq to “drain the swamp”! Occupy Afghanistan to bring democracy to Central Asia! Attack Serbia to redraw Balkans’ borders!<br /><br />Yet Uncle Sam has demonstrated that he possesses the reverse Midas Touch. Whatever he touches turns to mayhem. Whenever and wherever Washington gets involved, the situation worsens.<br /><br />In the Balkans the U.S. replaced ethnic cleansing with ethnic cleansing and set a precedent for Russian intervention in Georgia and Ukraine. In Somalia America left chaos unchanged. In Afghanistan the U.S. rightly defenestrated the Taliban but then spent 13 years unsuccessfully attempting to remake that tribal nation. Invading Iraq to destroy nonexistent WMDs cost the lives of 4500 Americans and 200,000 Iraqis, wrecked Iraqi society, loosed radical furies now embodied in the Islamic State, and empowered Iran. The bombing of Libya prolonged a low-tech civil war killing thousands, released weapons throughout the region, triggered a prolonged power struggle in the artificial state, and offered another home for ISIL killers. Yemen’s pro-American government was overthrown despite persistent U.S. support, leading to the collapse of anti-terrorist cooperation, increased Iranian influence, and descent toward civil war. The only certain result of Washington’s new war against the Islamic State is increased jihadist recruiting.<br /><br />Not only has virtually every bombing, invasion, occupation, and other interference made problems worse. Almost every new intervention is an attempt to redress problems created by previous U.S. actions. And every new military step is likely, indeed, almost guaranteed, to create even bigger problems. Which will spark proposals for new interventions likely, indeed, almost guaranteed, to generate new problems, messes, crises, and catastrophes. Which then will yield another round of suggestions for wars, drone strikes, occupations, bombing campaigns, aid transfers, invasions, diplomatic pressure, and other forms of meddling.<br /><br />Yet virtually never do foreign policy practitioners admit that things hadn’t gone well. While the outcome in Iraq horrified the American people, few Neocons acknowledged that anything had gone awry or that their plan had the slightest flaw in conception. Slaughter is not the only war advocate to ignore the implications of the ongoing disaster in Libya. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) responded to criticism of his support for the Libyan misadventure that everything would have been fine had the U.S. “engaged fully and decisively.”<br /><br />Most of official Washington simply takes the Samantha Power position: “What, me worry?” There may have been a mistake or two, but one certainly wouldn’t want to “overdraw” a lesson from these multiple and constant failures. No responsible policymaker would want to suggest that even one problem elsewhere was not America’s responsibility. No self-respecting denizen of the nation’s capital would admit that there was any problem Washington was incapable of solving. No patriotic believer in American Exceptionalism would suggest that there was anything the U.S. government should not demand of or impose on the rest of the world.<br /><br />Academics spend their entire careers debating grand strategy. However, creating foreign policy in practice isn’t difficult. Washington’s elite might disagree about details, but believes with absolute certainty that Americans should do everything: Fight every war, remake every society, enter every conflict, pay every debt, defeat every adversary, solve every problem, and ignore every criticism. Unfortunately, over the last two decades this approach has proved to be an abysmal disaster.<br /><br />There’s an equally simple alternative. Indeed, the president came up with it: “don’t do stupid” stuff. Too bad he failed to practice his own professed policy. Washington should stop doing stupid things.<br /><br />But, as noted earlier, U.S. foreign policy is run by fools. Only the American people can change that. They must start electing leaders committed to not doing “stupid” stuff. Only then will Washington end the endless cycle of intervention, disaster, intervention, and disaster.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/dougbandow/2015/02/21/washingtons-foolish-foreign-policy-american-people-must-say-no-to-more-wars/" target="_blank">Source</a><br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-68136502728339013432015-02-15T01:55:00.006-08:002015-02-15T01:55:49.992-08:00Financial Times Finally Prints the Unvarnished Truth: Kiev Is the Violent Aggressor in East Ukraine<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Even those in Donetsk who originally supported Kiev have come to realize that Ukraine is waging a war against its own people<br /><br />Although this article tries to make the people of Donetsk appear gullible and indoctrinated, it does make one incredible admission: Kiev is waging a vicious war against its own people—something that East Ukrainians will never forget, and probably never forgive. This article <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e53188e8-b392-11e4-9449-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=uk#axzz3Rh253OJ3" target="_blank">originally appeared</a> in <b>Financial Times</b></i><br />
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As world leaders convened in Minsk this week to decide the fate of east Ukraine, Tatiana Prussova, a teacher at Khartsysk school number 23, stood in front of her class, a map on the wall behind her.<br /><br />For 10 minutes, she led a group of 15 and 16-year-old students through the day’s lesson: a review of the recent developments in the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). She explained a new local holiday — February 8: Day of the Young Anti-Fascist Heroes — and recounted a pivotal week in which the US was considering arming Kiev while the rebel army had gained ground around the crucial rail hub of Debaltseve.<br /><br />“Thanks to the gains of our Donetsk People’s Republic rebels, the road to Debaltseve has been closed and the town has been encircled,” Ms Prussova told the students, gesturing at the map in the same way other history teachers might point to the battle lines in Flanders or the Napoleonic War.<br /><br />The class is one of dozens of so-called political information lessons now being taught at schools across rebel-controlled east Ukraine. It is a Soviet tradition that was disbanded following the fall of the USSR but has been revived by the pro-Russian DPR’s education ministry.<br /><br />
<a name='more'></a>“We decided to inform the children from an objective point of view about the current developments of what’s happening inside the Donetsk People’s Republic,” said Lidiya Aksyonova, the school’s principal. “The beliefs that we form here in school will in 10 years become the political views of our government.”<br /><br />While some may see this week’s Minsk memorandum, which calls for a ceasefire in east Ukraine and the eventual re-establishment of national borders, as the first step towards the DPR’s disbandment, there are few signs in the region of a rebel leadership preparing to relinquish control — or a society that wants them to.<br /><br />After a months-long siege that has destroyed local infrastructure, and left the population under the near-constant percussion of artillery, a new sense of regional identity has taken hold in Donetsk. Though some of it is being transmitted through top-down initiatives such as Ms Prussova’s class, much of it has come through the Ukrainian army’s shelling, which has turned many formerly pro-Ukrainian locals against Kiev.<br /><br />Another source of anger for many was an October speech by President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, in which he declared that the region’s citizens would suffer for the rebel leaders’ actions. “Our children will go to school and nursery school, and theirs will sit in basement!” he declared, waving a finger.<br /><br />“As a student, as the future generation, I was for a united Ukraine. We really believed in Poroshenko,” said Yekaterina, a 20-year-old student at Donetsk National University. While her family fled to the Ukrainian side during the summer, they were forced to return to Donetsk in September after they ran out of money. It was then that her feelings changed.<br /><br />You don’t need to be a soldier to understand from what direction artillery fire is coming. We have access to the internet. We’re not in the stone age. We’re not zombies<br />- Yekaterina, 20-year-old student<br /><br />“We thought [Mr Poroshenko] would come to Donetsk, but he didn’t come once,” she said. She dismissed claims that Donetsk locals were being brainwashed by the rebel leadership and Russian television. “You don’t need to be a soldier to understand from what direction artillery fire is coming,” she said. “We have access to the internet. We’re not in the stone age. We’re not zombies.”<br /><br />In Donetsk’s Kievsky district, one of the most heavily bombed parts of the city, a middle-aged worker named Svetlana said she had been living underground in a cold war-era bomb shelter with 50 of her neighbours since the bombing began in May. While she refused to take part in the separatists’ referendum and appeal to join Russia in May — “I could tell that something smelt funny,” she explained — her views changed during the months underground.<br /><br />“How can I be for a united Ukraine when Kiev has spent the past six months bombing us?” she asked. “They came to power and destroyed the entire infrastructure of southeast Ukraine.”<br /><br />Enrique Menendez, a Ukrainian-born businessman with Spanish roots, said one of Kiev’s biggest mistakes was to vilify the people of southeastern Ukrainian rather than open a dialogue.<br /><br />“At the beginning, a lot of journalists, bloggers, opinion leaders — most of them pro-Ukrainian — left Donetsk. But when they got to Kiev, the rhetoric [about southeast Ukraine] was very negative,” said Mr Menendez. “This aggression and lack of understanding of what was going on here really offended the people that stayed behind.”<br /><br />One of a dozen organisers of a March rally for a united Ukraine, Mr Menendez eventually decided to stay in Donetsk to set up an organisation that delivers humanitarian aid.<br /><br />In August, there were only five people left in his apartment building. They would crowd into the corridor during the worst of the shelling. Now, nearly all the 80 or so former residents have returned.<br /><br />“The wartime mentality has changed us,” he explained. “We’ve stopped valuing the superficial things in life. We’ve lost everything: our savings, our prospects, our businesses. Some people lost their relatives. But we’ve become more pure.”<br /><br />Even though the rumble of artillery fire could still be heard in central Donetsk this week, much of city life felt normal. A ghost town for much of last year, most of the city’s residents have now returned. Restaurants and shops are reopening, and most local schools are in session.<br /><br />Igor Kostenok, the DPR’s education minister, appears determined to use his post to encourage a lasting regional identity. In addition to the new political information classes, Mr Kostenok said schools would also teach students about the experience of youngsters who fought for the rebels during the summer.<br /><br />“Our story of the Great Patriotic War [second world war] tells us that many children who were forced to grow up early because of the war took up arms and defended their home. History is doomed to repeat itself,” he said.<br /><br />One such youngster is Alexander Vasin, a 16-year-old student from the Donetsk suburbs who fought at Donetsk airport over the summer in a rebel battalion called the 15th International Brigade, despite his parents’ objections. He returned when school resumed in September, but said he would go back to the battalion later this year if the war had not ended. Of the fighting, he said: “It’s difficult at the beginning, but you get used to it.”<br /><br />A video of the fighting he shot on his mobile phone won a prize from the DPR education ministry and is now being shown at schools across the region.<br /><br /><a href="http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/02/14/3489" target="_blank">Source </a><br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-60241649607406699942015-02-08T13:06:00.006-08:002015-02-08T13:06:42.702-08:00One Year Later, Crimeans Prefer Russia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>By Leonid Bershidsky</i><br />As European leaders engage in shuttle diplomacy to still the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, Crimea, where the Russian onslaught began almost a year ago, has become all but forgotten. It isn't the subject of any talks, and the international sanctions imposed on Russia for annexing the Ukrainian peninsula are light compared to the ones stemming from later phases of the conflict. Yet Crimea provides a key to understanding the crisis and its potential resolution: Ultimately, it's all about how the people in disputed areas see both Russia and Ukraine.<br /><br />Ukrainian political scientist Taras Berezovets, a Crimea native, recently started an initiative he called Free Crimea, aided by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives and aimed at building Ukrainian soft power on the peninsula. He started by commissioning a poll of Crimean residents from the Ukrainian branch of Germany's biggest market research organization, GfK. The poll results were something of a cold shower to Berezovets.<br /><br />GfK Ukraine's poll wasn't based on actual field work, which is understandable, since a Ukraine-based organization would have a tough time operating in today's Crimea, which is rife with Russian FSB secret police agents and ruled by a local government intent on keeping dissent to a minimum. Instead, it conducted a telephone poll of 800 people in Crimea.<br /><br />The calls were made on Jan. 16-22 to people living in towns with a population of 20,000 or more, which probably led to the peninsula's native population, the Tatars, being underrepresented because many of them live in small villages. On the other hand, no calls were placed in Sevastopol, the most pro-Russian city in Crimea. Even with these limitations, it was the most representative independent poll taken on the peninsula since its annexation.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />Eighty-two percent of those polled said they fully supported Crimea's inclusion in Russia, and another 11 percent expressed partial support. Only 4 percent spoke out against it.<br /><br />Berezovets is inclined to credit Crimea's "Orwellian atmosphere" for some of that near-unanimity. He's probably right. Given the ubiquitous FSB attention and the arrest of some pro-Ukrainian activists -- the persecution of filmmaker Oleg Sentsov is the cause celebre -- as "extremists," few people are likely to be brave enough to condemn the annexation on the phone, especially when the caller is a stranger. In Russia itself, polls show 85 percent support for Putin, but it's hard to calculate how much of that is motivated by caution: it's best to treat those numbers as an indication that most people are willing to acquiesce rather than to protest.<br /><br />Yet answers to other, more neutral questions show Crimeans are not interested in going back to Ukraine.<br /><br />Fifty-one percent reported their well-being had improved in the past year. That especially concerns retirees, who started receiving much higher Russian pensions. Being part of a wealthier state -- and, despite its recent economic woes, Russia is still far wealthier than Ukraine -- is a powerful lure, despite a drop-off in tourism revenues, the peninsula's major source of income. Berezovets' group estimates they dropped to $2.9 billion in 2014 from $5.1 billion the year before -- but that is being compensated by transfers from Moscow. In 2015, the peninsula will receive 47 billion rubles ($705 million), or 75 percent of its budget, from Russia, not counting the increased pensions. Ukraine never financed the peninsula at that level: in 2014, it planned to transfer 3.03 billion hryvnias ($378 million at the time) to Crimea.<br /><br />Crimeans' year of upheaval has made them sophisticated news consumers: They have learned to reject the propaganda flying at them from all sides. Eighty percent say Ukrainian coverage of their region is all or mostly lies. While 84 percent watch Russian television from time to time, only 10 percent say they trust it. Social networks have become the most trusted source of information: 29 percent say they rely on them.<br /><br />The armed conflict in eastern Ukraine was the biggest worry for 42 percent of respondents. It's more important to them than inflation, which 40 percent of the respondents named, or the peninsula's de facto transport blockade by Ukraine, which worries 22 percent of those asked. <br /><br />Taken together, these answers suggest that a majority of Crimeans see Ukraine as a poor and unstable country where the media are hostile toward them. That's largely an accurate assessment that has nothing to do with fear or brainwashing from Moscow. All things considered, Ukraine is not at this point a welcoming alternative to Russia. As Berezovets pointed out, the Kiev government has not even passed a single legislative act to help the Ukrainian patriots who fled the peninsula after the annexation. It's true they are a smaller group, by two orders of magnitude, than those displaced by the fighting in the east -- the government puts their number at 19,941 people -- but they are still a sizable community of pro-Kiev people who were left to fend for themselves after leaving their houses and other property in what is now Russian territory.<br /><br />Legal and diplomatic matters aside, people want to live in countries that they see as wealthy and safe. It's hard to imagine anyone thinking of today's Russia in these terms, but people's thinking is often relative. That's why, according to Russian data, 850,000 people from Ukraine's eastern regions have fled across the border. Fewer refugees -- 610,174 people -- chose to resettle in other parts of Ukraine. <br /><br />Kiev's claims on Crimea and the rebel-held areas are legally indisputable, and the March 2014 referendum that Russia used as justification for Crimea's annexation was a half-hearted imitation of a ballot carried out in the sights of Russian guns. Still, Ukraine has a long way to go before people in these areas actually want to be governed from Kiev. A year after what Ukrainians call their "revolution of dignity," many of them appear to believe even Moscow is preferable. Propaganda can't solve this problem: It takes money, political will and a friendly attitude toward wary, disillusioned citizens.<br /><br /><i>Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View contributor. He is a Berlin-based writer, author of three novels and two nonfiction books.</i><br /><br /><a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-02-06/one-year-later-crimeans-prefer-russia" target="_blank">Source</a><br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-55009714176637440672015-01-29T14:41:00.003-08:002015-01-29T14:41:45.714-08:00How can the West solve its Ukraine problem?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>By Anatol Lieven, Professor, Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Qatar</i><br /><br /><b>Russia badly overplayed its hand last year when it tried to bring Ukraine into the Eurasian Union against the passionate opposition of many Ukrainians.</b><br /><br />The European Union is now risking the same thing by trying to bring Ukraine into the West without reference to economic reality or the willingness of European publics to bear the enormous costs involved, and at a time when the EU itself is in deepening crisis.<br /><br />Russia is suffering badly as a result of Western economic sanctions - but Ukraine's situation is far worse, with a predicted fall in GDP of 7% this year.<br /><br />If this decline continues, the Ukrainian state will face collapse.<br /><br />Throughout the 23 years since the end of the Soviet Union, too many members of the Western media and policy worlds have ignored or misrepresented key aspects of the Ukrainian-Russian economic relationship.<br /><br />This allowed them in turn to ignore crucial features of the economic balance of power in Ukraine between Russia and the West.<br /><br />In their zeal to denounce Russia for putting pressure on Ukraine over gas supplies, Western commentators usually neglected to mention that, through cheap gas and lenient payment terms, Russia was in fact subsidising the Ukrainian economy to the tune of several billion dollars each year - many times the total of Western aid during this period.<br /><br />This allowed the same commentators not to address the obvious question of whether Western states would be willing to pay these billions in order to take Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence and into that of the West.<br /><br />
<a name='more'></a><b>Russian trade vital</b><br /><br />Western commentators were not wrong to portray Russia as supporting a deeply corrupt and semi-authoritarian system of government in Ukraine - but they too often forgot to mention that trade with Russia has also been responsible for preserving much of the Ukrainian economy.<br /><br />It is not just that Russia remains Ukraine's largest partner, with trade in 2013 exceeding that with the whole of the EU; it is also a question of what is being traded. Ukraine exports manufactured goods to Russia, thereby supporting what is left of Ukrainian industry.<br /><br />To the European Union, Ukraine mostly sends raw materials and agricultural products - with the latter in particular heavily restricted by EU quotas and tariffs.<br /><br />Ignoring this enabled Western commentators to ignore the question of how - in order to move towards the EU - Ukraine could restrict its trading relationship with Russia without ruining its economy in the process; or, on the other hand, whether the EU would be willing to change its own rules so as to admit Ukrainian imports.<br /><br />Finally, very few Western commentators indeed have mentioned what is perhaps the most significant aspect of the Ukrainian-Russian relationship, namely that Ukrainians are entirely free to move to Russia to work, and to work in the vast majority of jobs and professions.<br /><br />As a result of Russia's much more successful economy, more than three million Ukrainians are now working in Russia, and sending remittances to their families in Ukraine - a vital contribution to the economies of several Ukrainian regions.<br /><br />This is at least three times the number of Ukrainians working legally in the whole of the European Union.<br /><br />In order to bring Ukraine into the West, would EU members be willing to allow free movement of Ukrainian labour?<br /><br />And - as is necessary if the EU is to turn Ukraine into a strong anti-Russian ally - to do so not in some almost impossible future of Ukrainian EU membership, but tomorrow?<br /><br />The answer is obvious.<br /><br /><b>No integration</b><br /><br />The UK Independence Party is soaring in the polls and mounting a strong campaign to take Britain out of the European Union in a referendum backed by the Conservatives and scheduled for 2017.<br />All over the EU, right-wing parties are gathering strength.<br /><br />In France, sober commentators are warning that there is a real chance that in 2022 the National Front could win the French elections and Marine Le Pen could become President of France.<br /><br />And all of these developments are driven above all by hostility to immigration.<br /><br />On the one hand, therefore, the West is clearly not prepared to make the economic sacrifices necessary to support the Ukrainian economy in the face of Russian hostility.<br /><br />On the other, the existing conflict in Ukraine makes it impossible for any Ukrainian government to conduct the kind of economic and political reforms on which the EU is insisting, and on which Ukrainian progress towards the West depends.<br /><br />By slashing subsidies and closing down much of Ukrainian industry, such reforms would drive much of the population of eastern and southern Ukraine into the arms of Russia.<br /><br />By attacking corruption, they would destroy the position of oligarchs in those regions who are key to enforcing Kiev's authority there.<br /><br />Kiev's dependence on these oligarchs and on nationalist militias to fight the war in eastern Ukraine represents a serious and growing threat to Ukrainian democracy and to the spread of liberal values in Ukraine.<br /><br />A worrying sign in this regard was the appointment last month of Vadim Troyan as regional chief of police in Kiev. His regiment, the Azov battalion, is known for links to the far right and his promotion seems largely in reward for his group's participation in the fighting in eastern Ukraine.<br /><br />This was counter-balanced by the appointment of a Jewish speaker in Parliament.<br /><br /><b>Compromise needed</b><br /><br />But the lessons of all this should be obvious.<br /><br />The West simply does not have the means or the will to integrate Ukraine into the West while isolating it from Russia.<br /><br />The effort to do so is not strengthening but undermining Ukrainian democracy.<br /><br />If there is to be any chance of Ukrainian economic and political progress, a compromise must be found whereby Ukraine can continue to trade as openly as possible with both the EU and Russia and Ukrainians can continue to work freely in Russia.<br /><br />That would leave Ukraine free to carry out the internal reforms that it needs to undertake, whether or not it is headed for EU membership.<br /><br />This will be impossible unless at the same time there is a political compromise with Russia; and the terms of such a compromise are equally obvious.<br /><br />In the first place, Ukraine should be neutralised.<br /><br />This cuts both ways. Russia would formally have to abandon - as in effect it already has - hopes to bring Ukraine into a Russian-led bloc.<br /><br />The West would formally have to abandon the possibility of bringing Ukraine into Nato; and the West too has in effect already done this by demonstrating again and again its unwillingness under any circumstances to fight to defend Ukraine.<br /><br />As far as Ukraine's eastern Donbass region is concerned, any solution has to involve very extensive autonomy for the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, guaranteed by the international community - not the ridiculous offer of temporary three-year autonomy which Kiev has offered so far.<br /><br />In addition, the EU should back the guarantee of Russian language rights in Ukraine - not because Moscow is demanding it, but because the West badly needs to assert its own values in the face of the growing power of neo-fascist groups in Ukraine.<br /><br />Opposition to such a deal in certain Western quarters will be bitter; but once again, these opponents need to ask themselves just how much they are prepared to sacrifice and to risk in order to turn Ukraine into a pro-Western and anti-Russian state.<br /><br />The time for blowhard posturing is over. The time for hard economic calculation has begun.<br /><br /><i>Anatol Lieven is a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Qatar. He is author among other books of Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry.</i><br /><br /><a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30278606" target="_blank">Source</a><br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-56236294105190562632015-01-20T14:09:00.001-08:002015-01-20T14:10:06.866-08:00"De-Dollarization" Deepens: Russia Buys Most Gold In Six Months, Continues Selling US Treasuries<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The rumors of Russia selling its gold reserves, it is now clear, were greatly exaggerated as not only did Putin not sell, Russian gold reserves rose by their largest amount in six months in December to just over $46 billion (near the highest since April 2013). It appears all the "Russia is selling" chatter did was lower prices enabling them to gather non-fiat physical assets at a lower cost. On the other hand, there is another trend that continues for the Russians - that of reducing their exposure to US Treasury debt. For the 20th month in a row, Russia's holdings of US Treasury debt fell year-over-year - selling into the strength. <br />
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Buying low...<br />
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Russia gold reserves jump the most in six months in December, near the highest since April 2013...<br />
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and selling high...<br />
<a name='more'></a>Russian holdings of US Treasuries are now at the 2nd lowest since 2008...<br />
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It would appear the greatest rotations that no one is talking about are the fiat to non-fiat and the paper to physical shifts occurring in China and Russia.<br />
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Charts: Bloomberg<br />
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Some have commented on the "unprecedented" capital flight from Russia, but as Dr. Constantin Gurdgiev explains - Western 'analysts' appear to have forgotten a few things...<br />
Central Bank of Russia released full-year 2014 capital outflows figures, prompting cheerful chatter from the US officials and academics gleefully loading the demise of the Russian economy. <br />
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The figures are ugly: official net outflows of capital stood at USD151.5 billion - roughly 2.5 times the rate of outflows in 2013 - USD61 billion. Q1 outflows were USD48.2 billion, Q2 outflows declined to USD22.4 billion, Q3 2014 outflows netted USD 7.7 billion and Q4 2014 outflows rose to USD72.9 billion. Thus, Q4 2014 outflows - on the face of it - were larger than full-year 2013 outflows.<br />
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There are, however, few caveats to these figures that Western analysts of the Russian economy tend to ignore. These are:<br />
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<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li> USD 19.8 billion of outflows in Q4 2014 were down to new liquidity supply measures by the CB of Russia which extended new currency credit lines to Russian banks. In other words, these are loans. One can assume the banks will default on these, or one can assume that they will repay these loans. In the former case, outflows will not be reversible, in the latter case they will be.</li>
<li> In Q1-Q3 2014 net outflows of capital that were accounted for by the banks repayment of foreign funding lines (remember the sanctions on banks came in Q2-Q3 2014) amounted to USD16.1 billion. You can call this outflow of funds or you can call it paying down debt. The former sounds ominous, the latter sounds less so - repaying debts improves balance sheets. But, hey, it would't be so apocalyptic, thus. We do not have aggregated data on this for Q4 2014 yet, but on monthly basis, same outflows for the banking sector amounted to at least USD11.8 billion. So that's USD 27.9 billion in forced banks deleveraging in 2014. Again, may be that is bad, or may be it is good. Or may be it is simply more nuanced than screaming headline numbers suggest.</li>
<li> Deleveraging - debt repayments - in non-banking sector was even bigger. In Q4 2014 alone planned debt redemptions amounted to USD 34.8 billion. Beyond that, we have no idea is there were forced (or unplanned) redemptions.</li>
</ul>
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So in Q3-Q4 2014 alone, banks redemptions were scheduled to run at USD45.321 billion and corporate sector redemptions were scheduled at USD72.684 billion. In simple terms, then, USD 118 billion or 78 percent of the catastrophic capital flight out of Russia in 2014 was down to debt redemptions in banking and corporate sectors. Not 'investors fleeing' or depositors 'taking a run', but partially forced debt repayments. <br />
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Let's put this into a slightly different perspective. Whatever your view of the European and US policies during the Global Financial Crisis and the subsequent Great Recession might be, one corner stone of all such policies was banks' deleveraging - aka 'pay down of debt'. Russia did not adopt such a policy on its own, but was forced to do so by the sanctions that shut off Russian banks and companies (including those not directly listed in the sanctions) from the Western credit markets. But if you think the above process is a catastrophe for the Russian economy induced by Kremlin, you really should be asking yourself a question or two about the US and European deleveraging policies at home.<br />
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And after you do, give another thought to the remaining USD 33 billion of outflows. These include dollarisation of Russian households' accounts (conversion of rubles into dollars and other currencies), the forex effects of holding currencies other than US dollars, the valuations changes on gold reserves etc.<br />
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As some might say, look at Greece… Yes, things are ugly in Russia. Yes, deleveraging is forced, and painful. Yes, capital outflows are massive. But, a bit of silver lining there: most of the capital flight that Western analysts decry goes to improve Russian balance-sheets and reduce Russian external debt. That can't be too bad, right? Because if it was so bad, then... Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, France, and so on... spring to mind with their 'deleveraging' drives...</div>
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<a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-18/de-dollarization-deepens-russia-buys-most-gold-six-months-continues-selling-us-treas" target="_blank">Source</a></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-70492893851752673882015-01-15T13:24:00.001-08:002015-01-15T13:24:09.868-08:00Lessons from Paris<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>By Ron Paul</i><br /><br />After the tragic shooting at a provocative magazine in Paris last week, I pointed out that given the foreign policy positions of France we must consider blowback as a factor. Those who do not understand blowback made the ridiculous claim that I was excusing the attack or even blaming the victims. Not at all, as I abhor the initiation of force. The police are not blaming victims when they search for the motive of a criminal.<br /><br />The mainstream media immediately decided that the shooting was an attack on free speech. Many in the US preferred this version of “they hate us because we are free,” which is the claim that President Bush made after 9/11. They expressed solidarity with the French and vowed to fight for free speech. But have these people not noticed that the First Amendment is routinely violated by the US government? President Obama has used the Espionage Act more than all previous administrations combined to silence and imprison whistleblowers. Where are the protests? Where are protesters demanding the release of John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the CIA use of waterboarding and other torture? The whistleblower went to prison while the torturers will not be prosecuted. No protests.<br /><br />If Islamic extremism is on the rise, the US and French governments are at least partly to blame. The two Paris shooters had reportedly spent the summer in Syria fighting with the rebels seeking to overthrow Syrian President Assad. They were also said to have recruited young French Muslims to go to Syria and fight Assad. But France and the United States have spent nearly four years training and equipping foreign fighters to infiltrate Syria and overthrow Assad! In other words, when it comes to Syria, the two Paris killers were on “our” side. They may have even used French or US weapons while fighting in Syria.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />Beginning with Afghanistan in the 1980s, the US and its allies have deliberately radicalized Muslim fighters in the hopes they would strictly fight those they are told to fight. We learned on 9/11 that sometimes they come back to fight us. The French learned the same thing last week. Will they make better decisions knowing the blowback from such risky foreign policy? It is unlikely because they refuse to consider blowback. They prefer to believe the fantasy that they attack us because they hate our freedoms, or that they cannot stand our free speech.<br /><br />Perhaps one way to make us all more safe is for the US and its allies to stop supporting these extremists.<br /><br />Another lesson from the attack is that the surveillance state that has arisen since 9/11 is very good at following, listening to, and harassing the rest of us but is not very good at stopping terrorists. We have learned that the two suspected attackers had long been under the watch of US and French intelligence services. They had reportedly been placed on the US no-fly list and at least one of them had actually been convicted in 2008 of trying to travel to Iraq to fight against the US occupation. According to CNN, the two suspects traveled to Yemen in 2011 to train with al-Qaeda. So they were individuals known to have direct terrorist associations. How many red flags is it necessary to set off before action is taken? How long did US and French intelligence know about them and do nothing, and why?<br /><br />Foreign policy actions have consequences. The aggressive foreign policies of the United States and its allies in the Middle East have radicalized thousands and have made us less safe. Blowback is real whether some want to recognize it or not. There are no guarantees of security, but only a policy of non-intervention can reduce the risk of another attack.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2015/january/12/lessons-from-paris/" target="_blank">Source</a><br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-66743655447384880632015-01-13T13:02:00.002-08:002015-01-13T13:02:47.984-08:00The New York Times Explains Why Kiev Sniper Massacre Was Likely a False Flag<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>-Describes Yanukovich as a flabby leader whose willingness to appease his opponents demoralized his police<br />-Means it's not very believable he would order a massacre, or that the police would carry it out for him<br /><br />By Mark Nicholas</i><br />
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Last Sunday The New York Times had an in-depth article on the overthrow of Yanukovich in Ukraine.<br />
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That is if you can call in-depth an article that is full of omissions. Which you can't. So let's just say it was a very LONG article.<br />
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We should still be thankful for it, however, because it reminded us of the real Yanukovich.<br />
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This was a guy who took it upon himself to negotiate an association treaty with the EU and came within inches of signing it.<br />
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Yet in the western Maidan narrative he is cast as a pro-Russian authoritarian hardliner who would rather send out police to pile up bodies of demonstrators than let Ukrainians have democracy.<br />
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In reality Yanukovich was a centrist who approximated the policies of pro-western Ukraine politicians to the point where he had lost the active support of eastern Ukraine. Moreover during the Maidan standoff he proved himself an indecisive and timid leader. <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
He amnestied street-fighting radicals and let them keep control of public spaces in the capital for far longer than would be the case in any western or eastern country. Moreover he bent backward to appease the opposition. <br />
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In late January he offered to take them into a new national unity government and name a PM from their ranks. It was a sweet deal they would have probably taken, but for fear of running afoul of the protest movement themselves.<br />
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Despite the rebuke Yanukovich still accepted the resignation of his PM Azarov – a reliable loyalist hated by the opposition.<br />
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A little earlier in the month his government passed a set of laws it believed would give it the power it needed to deal with the situation, but then just as quickly backed away from them. <br />
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This was typical Yanukovich. Hapless, in over his head, and wishing problems would just go away so he wouldn't need to deal with them.<br />
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And that is precisely the Yanukovich we meet in the New York Times piece:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Ashen-faced after a sleepless night of marathon negotiations, Viktor F. Yanukovych hesitated, shaking his pen above the text placed before him in the chandeliered hall.<br />
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Then, under the unsmiling gaze of European diplomats and his political enemies, the beleaguered Ukrainian president scrawled his signature, sealing a deal that he believed would keep him in power, at least for a few more months.</blockquote>
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The Times does another thing. It explains Yanukovich was so timid it was having a demoralizing effect on his police. By 21st February, a day after he went so far as to agree to gradually hand over power, his policemen grew so frustrated they abandoned him in disgust:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The security officers said in interviews that they were alarmed by language in the truce deal that called for an investigation of the killing of protesters.<br />
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They feared that a desperate Mr. Yanukovych was ready to abandon the very people who had protected him, particularly those in the lower ranks who had borne the brunt of the street battles.</blockquote>
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The Times covers just the last two days of Yanukovich's reign, but it's safe to say police doubt built up gradually. 21st February was certainly not the first time Yanukovich attempted to appease his enemies at the expense of his police. <br />
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During the first half of February Maidan protesters arrested by the police were released and amnestied on Yanukovich orders in return for protesters vacating occupied government buildings and lifting some of their barricades.<br />
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Literally just days later, on February 18th violent clashes broke out in which 8 riot police and some 14 protesters were killed.* Over a hundred policemen were injured. Additionally, 2 other policemen were killed in an attack on traffic police unit elsewhere in the city. (Yanukovich responded by ordering national mourning for slain policemen and street-fighting protesters alike.)<br />
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Indeed, as The Times itself reports, all along police resented Yanukovich for not having been sent in to disperse the protesters encampments early on, when they believed it would have still been relatively easy. <br />
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All in all the NYT shows Yanukovich on the evening of February 21th was a flabby, indecisive leader who did not comprehend the seriousness of the situation. Left unstated by the NYT is that that was the picture of Yanukovich throughout the standoff. <br />
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The idea that on the February 20th this timid and wavering man woke up, rang his police chief and ordered himself a radical escalation of the standoff in the form of a mass slaughter of protesters is preposterous. It is at odds with everything about Yanukovich's record during the crisis.<br />
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It is also not believable his demoralized police would carry out such an order from him. It was a force thoroughly discouraged with what it saw as having been held back, undermined and under-supported. <br />
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It is simply not very likely the very same policemen who the NYT shows abandoned Yanukovich to his fate on February 21st would just a day earlier be willing to murder dozens and dozens of civilian protesters for him in cold blood.<br />
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That leaves the possibility police snipers did it on their own as vengeance for the losses suffered on the 18th and the 20th. However, this is not much more believable either. <br />
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The Times piece makes it clear policemen were actually highly conscious of the possibility they would be hung out to dry by Yanukovich and face judicial charges for their conduct. Going rogue would make that all the more certain. <br />
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Also let us be very clear. Nobody on the western and pro-western side ever tried to argue that is how the massacre went down. The story has always been that Yanukovich himself was responsible.<br />
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In writing the report the NYT has its own agenda. It is trying to argue Yanukovich was "not so much overthrown as cast adrift by his own allies" due to the "panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych’s own efforts to make peace". <br />
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We get it. NYT wants us to know Yanukovich toppling was immaculate. It wasn't so much that he fled the capital because he had good reason to fear for his safety, it is just that his regime simply dissipated into thin air due to his own flabbiness. <br />
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However, isn't it the case that leaders who in their "efforts to make peace" go so far as to cause their allies' desertion generally do not order the mass murder of their enemies? <br />
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<a href="http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/01/11/2325" target="_blank">Source </a></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-18337550288992249312015-01-05T17:02:00.000-08:002015-01-05T17:02:04.850-08:002015: The Year of the Bear? 5 Ways Russia Can Regroup<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>By Nikolas K. Gvosdev</i><br /><br /><i>Russia closed out 2014 hurt by sanctions and its economic crisis. 2015 offers hope if Moscow can limit the damage in its Western vectors, push ahead with its Eurasian dream and strengthen its Asian options. </i><br /><br />If I were a strategist advising the Russian government on key national-security objectives for 2015 (and I am not), here would be five priorities for the year:<br /><br />First, the Kremlin needs to beat back the so-called “Maidan challenge” in Ukraine. Any consolidation of a westward-leaning administration, especially one that successfully undertakes the economic and security reforms that would make it easier to contemplate closer and more meaningful relations between Ukraine and NATO and the European Union, without also guaranteeing Russian equities, remains a critical danger to Moscow’s interests. This challenge, after the Orange Revolution in 2004, was met by the implosion of the coalition that spearheaded the dramatic political shift and by its subsequent inability once in government to deliver on any substantial reforms. While former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych is now a spent force and unlikely to return from his Russian exile, what is critical (from Moscow’s perspective) is that Ukrainians develop the sense—particularly in the east and central portions of the country—that, compared with current developments, his administration wasn’t that bad after all. Moreover, it will be critical to show that the promises made at Maidan were empty, and the commitments offered by Western governments will not be fulfilled.<br /><br />Even with the fall in oil prices and the economic crisis now underway in Russia, Moscow still has many levers to pull in Ukraine, from its support for the separatists to its control of energy resources. There are also many fracture points in the current coalition—reformers versus business figures, nationalists versus those who are open to some sort of practical accommodation with Moscow. Some of the Maidan activists are angry at what they see as a slow pace of change and may be inclined to put pressure on the government as 2015 continues. But there is also a risk that a growing number of Ukrainians in the east who did not cast their lot in with the separatists and supported both the presidential bid of Petro Poroshenko and his party in the Rada elections will become alienated from a government that does not succeed in restoring some degree of normalcy and predictability in the country’s relations with Russia.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />Of course, Russia is now under sanctions from the West because of its efforts in Ukraine, so its toolbox for exerting pressure on its neighbor is impacted by a second priority for 2015: a partial repair of its frayed relationship with Europe. Russia needs two things in 2015: a partial relaxation of the sanctions regime, at least in clearing the way for financing and developing new energy projects, and stopping Ukraine’s further westward movement by having enough members of the EU and NATO categorically opposing any further contemplated moves to extend the possibility of full membership in both organizations. It’s clear that Russia’s traditional partner in these matters, Germany, is less reliable now as long as Chancellor Angela Merkel remains in charge. This is due to the fraying of her relationship with President Vladimir Putin over her perception that she was misled by him at several points in 2014 over events unfolding in Ukraine—so while Moscow will continue to cultivate interlocutors within the coalition, particularly among the Social Democrats, Russian efforts will shift to some of the smaller Central European EU states (among them Hungary and Slovakia) and concentrate on Francois Hollande, deploying the argument that continued sanctions and instability in EU-Russian relations over Ukraine is damaging to the economies of both sides. Russia will need to show more flexibility in its negotiating stance over Ukraine and exert more pressure on the separatists to accept political deals, but in so doing, will hope to have demonstrated by spring sufficient progress in pushing Ukraine towards the decentralization/neutralization solution to get some of the EU pressure on Russia relaxed.<br /><br />Even if the EU continues with its efforts to diversify its energy sources, European investment and technical support is useful in developing the Russian energy complex to be in a better position to supply Asian markets, as the Total-Novatek gas complex project in Yamal so aptly demonstrates. This brings us to the third priority: forging the Chinese-Russian partnership on the best terms possible for Moscow. Russia had already announced its own “pivot to Asia” well before Maidan, but events in 2014 gave the impression that Russia was becoming more desperate for Chinese support and that Moscow would, on a number of issues, agree to terms that were less favorable for Russian interests because of that need. Russia needs the Chinese relationship just as China finds security in having its northern and western frontiers secured by a strong Russia capable of standing up to the West, and having in Russia a secure source of energy and raw materials that cannot be interdicted or sanctioned by the United States. But Moscow also needs to preserve some balance in its relationship with Beijing, which is why Putin’s planned summit in Tokyo later this year and further movement on Russian projects in the Korean peninsula are so important.<br /><br />It helps, of course, that Putin has in President Xi Jinping a dynamic interlocutor who understands the long-term value of the Russia partnership for Chinese interests, even if it means compromising on shorter-term issues (such as price for Russian products). The irony is that the relationship Putin may have hoped to have with George W. Bush after 9/11 will be the type of partnership he will enjoy with Xi, given the fact that they will both be shaping the Sino-Russian relationship for the rest of the decade.<br /><br />An interesting test of the Xi-Putin relationship is whether Russia can help defuse some of the existing tensions between India and China. This is a fourth priority. An improved relationship between Asia’s two giants—but not too improved—serves Moscow’s interests by creating the political trust needed for the ambitious trans-Xinjiang pipeline project that would finally open a direct energy connection between Russia and India. Reduced Chinese pressure on India—and perhaps even progress towards a final settlement of lingering border issues—would also reduce some of the impetus for New Delhi’s improved relations with the United States, particularly in the security sector. A certain degree of competition between India and China is useful to Russia—allowing Moscow to balance between the two and to continue its extensive and lucrative weapons-development partnership with India—but if China is too overbearing, then Russian efforts to continue to develop the BRICS into a more-effective counterweight to the G-7 and to diminish enthusiasm in India for pushing ahead with closer relations with Washington (even given the U.S. sporadic attention to India during the Obama administration) will falter.<br /><br />Finally, a fifth priority is to get the entire Eurasian integration project back on track. The Ukraine intervention and Russia’s economic woes did much to damage the attractiveness of the Eurasian Union. Moscow will now need to convince key regional leaders—starting with Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev—that the “alternate” EU remains a good deal and has legs.<br /><br />Russia closed out 2014 boxed in by Western sanctions and its own economic crisis. It needs to regain its freedom of movement in 2015 by limiting the damage in its Western vectors, push ahead with its Eurasian dream and strengthen its Asian options. The APEC summit in Beijing and the G-20 summit in Australia this past fall showed that Putin is under pressure, but not completely isolated and not without options. If the Obama administration intends to continue its efforts in 2015 to make Putin more of a pariah on the international stage, it will need much-more-intensive efforts to reach out to a whole cadre of leaders—from Hollande to Shinzo Abe to Narendra Modi and Nazarbayev—to make Washington’s case. It will also have to decide how much to invest in the success of Poroshenko’s government in Ukraine—and balance desired outcomes with achievable objectives. But the most critical point is this: Washington cannot sit back and assume that the problems of the Russian economy will decrease Russian activity on the global stage.<br /><br /><i>Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national security studies and a contributing editor at The National Interest, is co-author of Russian Foreign Policy: Vectors, Sectors and Interests (CQ Press, 2013). The views expressed here are his own.</i><br /><br /><a href="http://nationalinterest.org/feature/2015-the-year-the-bear-5-ways-russia-can-regroup-11957" target="_blank">Source</a><br /></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-1348736853199426302014-12-23T14:35:00.005-08:002014-12-23T14:36:44.015-08:00Now’s the time to shake hands with Vladimir Putin<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>By Tony Brenton</i><br />
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Russia’s president is here to stay and his weakened country is looking to do a deal<br />
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For a man whose country is reportedly on the economic rocks, President Putin looked remarkably confident at his annual press conference yesterday. These conferences have become a high point of the Russian political year. Putin, without notes, fields unscripted questions from more than a thousand journalists. This year, inevitably, the major issues were the economy and Ukraine. On the economy, he acknowledged problems caused by the collapse in the oil price but claimed that Russia would adjust within two years. On Ukraine, he was uncompromising. Russia’s actions were legitimate. Sanctions were wrong. The West wanted to “chain and defang” the bear, but would never be able to do so.<br />
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A brave performance. But in a week where the value of the rouble has oscillated by more than 30 per cent, how justified by the facts? To what extent were we looking at a sort of reincarnation of “Comical Ali” – the Iraqi information minister who continued to proclaim ultimate victory for Saddam Hussein even as Western tanks rolled into Baghdad? The list of problems that Russia now faces is formidable, from the halving in price of its principal export commodity to the imminent tightening of both the EU and US sanctions. To what extent are the skids under Putin and his regime?<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Things could of course get a lot worse; it is not wise to try to predict the oil price. But barring catastrophe Mr Putin is likely to be around for a while yet. There are three reasons for this. First, the Russian people in adversity show dogged resilience rather than active revolt. They endured the catastrophic Forties and hungry Eighties – and can be expected to get through the current downturn, too. Their pain threshold is high and their patriotism strong – so it helps that Putin can blame the West for much of their discomfort.<br />
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Second, the Russian constitution is explicitly designed to keep power in the hands of the president. Even in the dismal Nineties, when things were much worse than they are now, and the popularity of then president Yeltsin was in single digits, attempts to impeach him failed. There is simply no workable mechanism to remove a president who wants to stay.<br />
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The obvious alternative is some sort of palace coup. But, thirdly, the Russian elite fear and mistrust each other far more than they dislike the effect of Putin’s policies. When Putin announced his intention to withdraw from the presidency in 2008 the system nearly imploded as rival baronies sank their teeth into one other. Putin is the essential equilibrator of the system. He had to stay then and they are not going to get rid of him now. Finally, even if Putin decided to go his successor would have to be someone trusted by the security services, comfortable for the key state bureaucrats and business leaders, and patriotic enough for the Russian people. In effect another Putin.<br />
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So Putin is likely to be around for the foreseeable future. What does this mean for policy? There have been widespread fears that an economically weakened Russia is also a more dangerous Russia; that the patriotic rush given to the Russian people by the seizure of Crimea may need to be repeated, perhaps in the Baltics or Moldova, to take their minds off their forthcoming economic pain.<br />
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This is nonsense, largely propagated by commentators who only a few weeks ago were arguing that it was a strong Russia that was a menace to the international system. Even before the collapse in the oil price, Putin was plainly keen to get back to business as usual. That is why a country addicted to reciprocity has responded in such a limited way to Western sanctions, and has maintained cooperation in a host of other important areas, such as dealing with Iran. If anything, the Russians are now working harder at this.<br />
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Meanwhile, the ceasefire in East Ukraine at last shows signs of holding, and recent speeches by top Russians have shown an increasing recognition that Ukraine will go its own way provided Russian concerns (essentially neutrality and protection of the Russian-speaking population) are met. The fact is that the seizure of Crimea and support for the insurrection in East Ukraine, illegal and destabilising as they both undoubtedly were, were the product of a unique set of historical and political circumstances. They offer no template for Russian aggression elsewhere.<br />
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Given all this, how should the West handle what looks increasingly like stalemate over Ukraine? There is an evident temptation, not resisted in recent statements by No 10 and the White House, to enjoy Putin’s economic discomfort and sit tight until something in Russia changes. It could be a long wait – uncomfortable no doubt for Russia, but disastrous for pulling Ukraine out of the pit into which it has fallen. A wait too which, at least for the foreseeable future, will merely intensify the hyperpatriotism, statism and isolationism that increasingly predominate in Russian political discourse.<br />
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In the days when foreign policymakers thought long term, there would have been real discomfort at the prospect of Europe permanently landing itself with an embittered, nuclear-armed neighbour, with fast growing links with China. Wasn’t it Churchill who talked about magnanimity in victory? Isn’t now the time to start engaging with an undoubtedly weakened Russia on a way out in Ukraine in which everybody’s concerns are taken into account?<br />
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Tony Brenton is a former British ambassador to Moscow<br />
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<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11302151/Nows-the-time-to-shake-hands-with-Vladimir-Putin.html" target="_blank">Source</a></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1611035186896238772.post-83828759615421759382014-12-22T11:17:00.003-08:002014-12-23T14:36:28.692-08:00Viewing Russia From the Inside<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>By George Friedman</i><br />
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Last week I flew into Moscow, arriving at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 8. It gets dark in Moscow around that time, and the sun doesn't rise until about 10 a.m. at this time of the year — the so-called Black Days versus White Nights. For anyone used to life closer to the equator, this is unsettling. It is the first sign that you are not only in a foreign country, which I am used to, but also in a foreign environment. Yet as we drove toward downtown Moscow, well over an hour away, the traffic, the road work, were all commonplace. Moscow has three airports, and we flew into the farthest one from downtown, Domodedovo — the primary international airport. There is endless renovation going on in Moscow, and while it holds up traffic, it indicates that prosperity continues, at least in the capital.<br />
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Our host met us and we quickly went to work getting a sense of each other and talking about the events of the day. He had spent a great deal of time in the United States and was far more familiar with the nuances of American life than I was with Russian. In that he was the perfect host, translating his country to me, always with the spin of a Russian patriot, which he surely was. We talked as we drove into Moscow, managing to dive deep into the subject.<br />
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From him, and from conversations with Russian experts on most of the regions of the world — students at the Institute of International Relations — and with a handful of what I took to be ordinary citizens (not employed by government agencies engaged in managing Russia's foreign and economic affairs), I gained a sense of Russia's concerns. The concerns are what you might expect. The emphasis and order of those concerns were not.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Russians' Economic Expectations<br />
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I thought the economic problems of Russia would be foremost on people's minds. The plunge of the ruble, the decline in oil prices, a general slowdown in the economy and the effect of Western sanctions all appear in the West to be hammering the Russian economy. Yet this was not the conversation I was having. The decline in the ruble has affected foreign travel plans, but the public has only recently begun feeling the real impact of these factors, particularly through inflation.<br />
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But there was another reason given for the relative calm over the financial situation, and it came not only from government officials but also from private individuals and should be considered very seriously. The Russians pointed out that economic shambles was the norm for Russia, and prosperity the exception. There is always the expectation that prosperity will end and the normal constrictions of Russian poverty return.<br />
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The Russians suffered terribly during the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin but also under previous governments stretching back to the czars. In spite of this, several pointed out, they had won the wars they needed to win and had managed to live lives worth living. The golden age of the previous 10 years was coming to an end. That was to be expected, and it would be endured. The government officials meant this as a warning, and I do not think it was a bluff. The pivot of the conversation was about sanctions, and the intent was to show that they would not cause Russia to change its policy toward Ukraine.<br />
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Russians' strength is that they can endure things that would break other nations. It was also pointed out that they tend to support the government regardless of competence when Russia feels threatened. Therefore, the Russians argued, no one should expect that sanctions, no matter how harsh, would cause Moscow to capitulate. Instead the Russians would respond with their own sanctions, which were not specified but which I assume would mean seizing the assets of Western companies in Russia and curtailing agricultural imports from Europe. There was no talk of cutting off natural gas supplies to Europe.<br />
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If this is so, then the Americans and Europeans are deluding themselves on the effects of sanctions. In general, I personally have little confidence in the use of sanctions. That being said, the Russians gave me another prism to look through. Sanctions reflect European and American thresholds of pain. They are designed to cause pain that the West could not withstand. Applied to others, the effects may vary.<br />
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My sense is that the Russians were serious. It would explain why the increased sanctions, plus oil price drops, economic downturns and the rest simply have not caused the erosion of confidence that would be expected. Reliable polling numbers show that President Vladimir Putin is still enormously popular. Whether he remains popular as the decline sets in, and whether the elite being hurt financially are equally sanguine, is another matter. But for me the most important lesson I might have learned in Russia — "might" being the operative term — is that Russians don't respond to economic pressure as Westerners do, and that the idea made famous in a presidential campaign slogan, "It's the economy, stupid," may not apply the same way in Russia. <br />
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The Ukrainian Issue<br />
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There was much more toughness on Ukraine. There is acceptance that events in Ukraine were a reversal for Russia and resentment that the Obama administration mounted what Russians regard as a propaganda campaign to try to make it appear that Russia was the aggressor. Two points were regularly made. The first was that Crimea was historically part of Russia and that it was already dominated by the Russian military under treaty. There was no invasion but merely the assertion of reality. Second, there was heated insistence that eastern Ukraine is populated by Russians and that as in other countries, those Russians must be given a high degree of autonomy. One scholar pointed to the Canadian model and Quebec to show that the West normally has no problem with regional autonomy for ethnically different regions but is shocked that the Russians might want to practice a form of regionalism commonplace in the West.<br />
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The case of Kosovo is extremely important to the Russians both because they feel that their wishes were disregarded there and because it set a precedent. Years after the fall of the Serbian government that had threatened the Albanians in Kosovo, the West granted Kosovo independence. The Russians argued that the borders were redrawn although no danger to Kosovo existed. Russia didn't want it to happen, but the West did it because it could. In the Russian view, having redrawn the map of Serbia, the West has no right to object to redrawing the map of Ukraine.<br />
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I try not to be drawn into matters of right and wrong, not because I don't believe there is a difference but because history is rarely decided by moral principles. I have understood the Russians' view of Ukraine as a necessary strategic buffer and the idea that without it they would face a significant threat, if not now, then someday. They point to Napoleon and Hitler as examples of enemies defeated by depth.<br />
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I tried to provide a strategic American perspective. The United States has spent the past century pursuing a single objective: avoiding the rise of any single hegemon that might be able to exploit Western European technology and capital and Russian resources and manpower. The United States intervened in World War I in 1917 to block German hegemony, and again in World War II. In the Cold War the goal was to prevent Russian hegemony. U.S. strategic policy has been consistent for a century.<br />
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The United States has been conditioned to be cautious of any rising hegemon. In this case the fear of a resurgent Russia is a recollection of the Cold War, but not an unreasonable one. As some pointed out to me, economic weakness has rarely meant military weakness or political disunity. I agreed with them on this and pointed out that this is precisely why the United States has a legitimate fear of Russia in Ukraine. If Russia manages to reassert its power in Ukraine, then what will come next? Russia has military and political power that could begin to impinge on Europe. Therefore, it is not irrational for the United States, and at least some European countries, to want to assert their power in Ukraine.<br />
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When I laid out this argument to a very senior official from the Russian Foreign Ministry, he basically said he had no idea what I was trying to say. While I think he fully understood the geopolitical imperatives guiding Russia in Ukraine, to him the centurylong imperatives guiding the United States are far too vast to apply to the Ukrainian issue. It is not a question of him only seeing his side of the issue. Rather, it is that for Russia, Ukraine is an immediate issue, and the picture I draw of American strategy is so abstract that it doesn't seem to connect with the immediate reality. There is an automatic American response to what it sees as Russian assertiveness; however, the Russians feel they have been far from offensive and have been on the defense. For the official, American fears of Russian hegemony were simply too far-fetched to contemplate.<br />
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In other gatherings, with the senior staff of the Institute of International Relations, I tried a different tack, trying to explain that the Russians had embarrassed U.S. President Barack Obama in Syria. Obama had not wanted to attack when poison gas was used in Syria because it was militarily difficult and because if he toppled Syrian President Bashar al Assad, it would leave Sunni jihadists in charge of the country. The United States and Russia had identical interests, I asserted, and the Russian attempt to embarrass the president by making it appear that Putin had forced him to back down triggered the U.S. response in Ukraine. Frankly, I thought my geopolitical explanation was a lot more coherent than this argument, but I tried it out. The discussion was over lunch, but my time was spent explaining and arguing, not eating. I found that I could hold my own geopolitically but that they had mastered the intricacies of the Obama administration in ways I never will.<br />
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The Future for Russia and the West<br />
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The more important question was what will come next. The obvious question is whether the Ukrainian crisis will spread to the Baltics, Moldova or the Caucasus. I raised this with the Foreign Ministry official. He was emphatic, making the point several times that this crisis would not spread. I took that to mean that there would be no Russian riots in the Baltics, no unrest in Moldova and no military action in the Caucasus. I think he was sincere. The Russians are stretched as it is. They must deal with Ukraine, and they must cope with the existing sanctions, however much they can endure economic problems. The West has the resources to deal with multiple crises. Russia needs to contain this crisis in Ukraine.<br />
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The Russians will settle for a degree of autonomy for Russians within parts of eastern Ukraine. How much autonomy, I do not know. They need a significant gesture to protect their interests and to affirm their significance. Their point that regional autonomy exists in many countries is persuasive. But history is about power, and the West is using its power to press Russia hard. But obviously, nothing is more dangerous than wounding a bear. Killing him is better, but killing Russia has not proved easy. <br />
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I came away with two senses. One was that Putin was more secure than I thought. In the scheme of things, that does not mean much. Presidents come and go. But it is a reminder that things that would bring down a Western leader may leave a Russian leader untouched. Second, the Russians do not plan a campaign of aggression. Here I am more troubled — not because they want to invade anyone, but because nations frequently are not aware of what is about to happen, and they might react in ways that will surprise them. That is the most dangerous thing about the situation. It is not what is intended, which seems genuinely benign. What is dangerous is the action that is unanticipated, both by others and by Russia.<br />
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At the same time, my general analysis remains intact. Whatever Russia might do elsewhere, Ukraine is of fundamental strategic importance to Russia. Even if the east received a degree of autonomy, Russia would remain deeply concerned about the relationship of the rest of Ukraine to the West. As difficult as this is for Westerners to fathom, Russian history is a tale of buffers. Buffer states save Russia from Western invaders. Russia wants an arrangement that leaves Ukraine at least neutral.<br />
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For the United States, any rising power in Eurasia triggers an automatic response born of a century of history. As difficult as it is for Russians to understand, nearly half a century of a Cold War left the United States hypersensitive to the possible re-emergence of Russia. The United States spent the past century blocking the unification of Europe under a single, hostile power. What Russia intends and what America fears are very different things.<br />
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The United States and Europe have trouble understanding Russia's fears. Russia has trouble understanding particularly American fears. The fears of both are real and legitimate. This is not a matter of misunderstanding between countries but of incompatible imperatives. All of the good will in the world — and there is precious little of that — cannot solve the problem of two major countries that are compelled to protect their interests and in doing so must make the other feel threatened. I learned much in my visit. I did not learn how to solve this problem, save that at the very least each must understand the fears of the other, even if they can't calm them.<br />
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<a href="http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/viewing-russia-inside" target="_blank">Source</a></div>
harry_the_greathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09795197964235381902noreply@blogger.com0