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Russia's Return (1 Viewer)

Ditka Butkus said:
Chadstroma said:
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Russia has supposedly bombed US armed moderate rebel positions. They're taking out what we've plugged x million to arm and support.
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The 8 guys that we trained and still are alive or just some group we gave stuff to?
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How much did it cost to train those eight guys?...$550 million.....We have failed at almost every turn in the middle east....Go Russia!
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Well, to be fair, we trained more but they were mostly killed off.

 
Ditka Butkus said:
Chadstroma said:
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Russia has supposedly bombed US armed moderate rebel positions. They're taking out what we've plugged x million to arm and support.
Click to expand...
The 8 guys that we trained and still are alive or just some group we gave stuff to?
Click to expand...
How much did it cost to train those eight guys?...$550 million.....We have failed at almost every turn in the middle east....Go Russia!
Click to expand...
I was going to say 500 mill, but wasn't sure it was that much. Yeah I guess it was.

 
The Syria crisis Russia and Israel cosy up over Syria Though on opposite sides of the Syrian conflict, Binyamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin agree on a lot Sep 30th 2015 | JERUSALEM | Middle East and AfricaAS Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, was on his way to speak at the UN General Assembly in New York this week, where he stressed that Russia is supporting the Syrian army against Islamic State (IS), Israeli forces launched three guided missiles at outposts of that army.

The attack, in retaliation for two Syrian mortar rounds landing on the Israeli side of the Golan Heights, was a clear indication that Israel does not feel that Russia’s new and growing military presence in Syria inhibits its own operations there. On September 30th, Russia’s newly-deployed fighter-jets carried out their first strike on IS and other jihadist positions, but that is hardly likely to bother Israel either.

The emergency meeting in Moscow between Mr Putin and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu on September 21st, seems to have put Israeli minds at ease. The Russians will not endanger Israel’s strategic interests in Syria. For his part, Mr Netanyahu assured the Russians that Israel would not help those trying to remove their ally—“we are neither for or against (Syrian president Bashar al-) Assad” he said.

At the same time Mr Netanyahu sought assurances that Israel could continue to operate in Syria, particularly interdicting Hezbollah convoys transferring advanced weapons to the organisation’s arsenal there. According to Israeli sources, he was satisfied that Russia, despite cooperating with Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons in protecting what remains of the Assad regime, would not help them increase their already significant influence in Syria.

“Russia’s main interest in Syria is maintaining its warm-water port in Tartus” says one Israeli official. “That has been Russia’s overriding strategic concern for centuries. In addition they want to make a geopolitical point by keeping Assad in power.”

Israel is reaping the fruits of a long and delicate engagement with Mr Putin, in which its leaders have heeded his warnings not to sell arms to his rivals in neighbouring countries, Ukraine and Georgia. At the same time Israel has supplied Russia with drone technology.

Israel has also largely turned a blind eye to Russian activities on its border, including the maintenance of a GRU (Russian military intelligence) listening-base on the Syrian side of the Golan. Russia has continued supplying weapons to Israel’s enemies, but despite various statements to the contrary, has so far heeded Israeli warnings and not (yet) supplied Iran advanced systems such as S-300 anti-aircraft missiles.

While the United States remains Israel’s main strategic ally, despite a difficult personal relationship between Mr Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, Israel has been working hard in recent years at diversifying its alliances. It has courted not only Mr Putin, but the leaders of other regional powers including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and farther afield the prime ministers of India and Japan. As America’s influence in the Middle East declines, this should serve Israel well.

“The last thing Putin needs now is a fight with Israel, he’s too busy scoring points against the Americans,” says Zvi Magen, a former Israeli ambassador to Moscow. “Israel made clear to him that we have no real problem with Assad, just with Iran and Hizbullah, and that message was understood.”
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http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21669563-though-opposite-sides-syrian-conflict-binyamin-netanyahu-and-vladimir-putin-agree

 
Mr Netanyahu assured the Russians that Israel would not help those trying to remove their ally—“we are neither for or against (Syrian president Bashar al-) Assad” he said.
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Whatever you no spine having POS.

 
Chadstroma said:
The Russians said they bombed Daesh but the area where they bombed is not controlled by Daesh.
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Turkey is bombing Kurds and Russia is bombing rebels. This isn't some giant coordinated campaign against ISIS. They are trying to solidify power.

 
jonessed said:
Chadstroma said:
The Russians said they bombed Daesh but the area where they bombed is not controlled by Daesh.
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Turkey is bombing Kurds and Russia is bombing rebels. This isn't some giant coordinated campaign against ISIS. They are trying to solidify power.
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The Turks have their own agenda (checking the Kurds) and the Russians have theirs (keeping their warm water port around, influence and political points) in bombing the rebels. Meanwhile, they say "we are fighting the terrorists" and I still haven't figured out what the hell our plan there is.

 
Putin keeps metaphorically whipping his junk out and laying it n the table n front of us over and over again and we turn tail and take it over and over. If anyone thinks it's a good idea to keep appeasing that man and letting him get away with murdering our allies repeatedly, then they're either crazy or stupid.

Our policy for the last 4 years has been to support regime change in Syria by supporting the moderate rebels. Russia comes in, tells us to leave because they're bombing ISIS, immediately bombs our allies instead, and we just smile and take it. Our President has made no secret that he does not care for the U.S. To be a superpower anymore, but the problem is that psychos like Putin will gladly fill that vacuum.

 
GroveDiesel said:
Putin keeps metaphorically whipping his junk out and laying it n the table n front of us over and over again and we turn tail and take it over and over. If anyone thinks it's a good idea to keep appeasing that man and letting him get away with murdering our allies repeatedly, then they're either crazy or stupid.

Our policy for the last 4 years has been to support regime change in Syria by supporting the moderate rebels. Russia comes in, tells us to leave because they're bombing ISIS, immediately bombs our allies instead, and we just smile and take it. Our President has made no secret that he does not care for the U.S. To be a superpower anymore, but the problem is that psychos like Putin will gladly fill that vacuum.
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That is so not true. We didn't just smile and take it. We told them that that was not very nice. Very sternly. Which I am sure was quickly followed by an apology.

 
chauncey said:
So were we arming "moderate rebels" in Syria or were we arming ISIS, or are these the same people?
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We trained like 60 rebels and out of those about 8 are alive (or were... it's been a few weeks). We have given aid to a bunch of other rebel groups short of al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda affiliated), Islamic Front and Daesh etc

Pretty much the only reason Assad is still in power is that the billion different rebel groups fight amongst themselves pretty much as much as they fight Assad's forces if not more.

 
History's Back Ambitious autocracies, hesitant democracies.One wonders whether Russia's invasion of Georgia will finally end the dreamy complacency that took hold of the world's democracies after the close of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union offered for many the tantalizing prospect of a new kind of international order. The fall of the Communist empire and the apparent embrace of democracy by Russia seemed to augur a new era of global convergence. Great power conflict and competition were a thing of the past. Geo-economics had replaced geopolitics. Nations that traded with one another would be bound together by their interdependence and less likely to fight one another. Increasingly commercial societies would be more liberal both at home and abroad. Their citizens would seek prosperity and comfort and abandon the atavistic passions, the struggles for honor and glory, and the tribal hatreds that had produced conflict throughout history. Ideological conflict was also a thing of the past. As Francis Fukuyama famously put it, "At the end of history, there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy." And if there were an autocracy or two lingering around at the end of history, this was no cause for concern. They, too, would eventually be transformed as their economies modernized.

Unfortunately, the core assumptions of the post-Cold War years have proved mistaken. The absence of great power competition, it turns out, was a brief aberration. Over the course of the 1990s, that competition reemerged as rising powers entered or reentered the field. First China, then India, set off on unprecedented bursts of economic growth, accompanied by incremental but substantial increases in military capacity, both conventional and nuclear. By the beginning of the 21st century, Japan had begun a slow economic recovery and was moving toward a more active international role both diplomatically and militarily. Then came Russia, rebounding from economic calamity to steady growth built on the export of its huge reserves of oil and natural gas.

Nor has the growth of the Chinese and Russian economies produced the political liberalization that was once thought inevitable. Growing national wealth and autocracy have proven compatible, after all....

... In the long run, rising prosperity may well produce political liberalism, but how long is the long run? It may be too long to have any strategic or geopolitical relevance. In the meantime, the new economic power of the autocracies has translated into real, usable geopolitical power on the world stage. In the 1990s the liberal democracies expected that a wealthier Russia would be a more liberal Russia, at home and abroad. But historically the spread of commerce and the acquisition of wealth by nations has not necessarily produced greater global harmony. Often it has only spurred greater global competition. The hope at the end of the Cold War was that nations would pursue economic integration as an alternative to geopolitical competition, that they would seek the "soft" power of commercial engagement and economic growth as an alternative to the "hard" power of military strength or geopolitical confrontation. But nations do not need to choose. There is another paradigm--call it "rich nation, strong army," the slogan of rising Meiji Japan at the end of the 19th century--in which nations seek economic integration and adaptation of Western institutions not in order to give up the geopolitical struggle but to wage it more successfully. The Chinese have their own phrase for this: "a prosperous country and a strong army."

The rise of these two great power autocracies is reshaping the international scene. Nationalism, and the nation itself, far from being weakened by globalization, has returned with a vengeance. There are the ethnic nationalisms that continue to bubble up in the Balkans and in the former republics of the Soviet Union. But more significant is the return of great power nationalism. Instead of an imagined new world order, there are new geopolitical fault lines where the ambitions of great powers overlap and conflict and where the seismic events of the future are most likely to erupt.

...Unfortunately, Europe is ill-equipped to respond to a problem that it never anticipated having to face. The European Union is deeply divided about Russia, with the nations on the frontline fearful and seeking reassurance, while others like France and Germany seek accommodation with Moscow. The fact is, Europe never expected to face this kind of challenge at the

end of history. This great 21st-century entity, the EU, now confronts 19th-century power, and Europe's postmodern tools of foreign policy were not designed to address more traditional geopolitical challenges. There is a real question as to whether Europe is institutionally or temperamentally able to play the kind of geopolitical games in Russia's near-abroad that Russia is willing to play.

There is some question about the United States, as well. At least some portion of American elite opinion has shifted from post-Cold War complacency, from the conviction that the world was naturally moving toward greater harmony, to despair and resignation and the belief that the United States and the world's democracies are powerless to meet the challenge of the rising great powers. ####uyama and others counsel accommodation to Russian ambitions, on the grounds that there is now no choice. It is the post-American world. Having failed to imagine that the return of great power autocracies was possible, they now argue there is nothing to be done and the wise policy is to accommodate to this new global reality. Yet again, however, their imagination fails them. They do not see what accommodation of the great power autocracies may look like. Georgia provides a glimpse of that future.

The world may not be about to embark on a new ideological struggle of the kind that dominated the Cold War. But the new era, rather than being a time of "universal values," will be one of growing tensions and sometimes confrontation between the forces of liberal democracy and the forces of autocracy.

In fact, a global competition is under way. According to Russia's foreign minister, "For the first time in many years, a real competitive environment has emerged on the market of ideas" between different "value systems and development models." And the good news, from the Russian point of view, is that "the West is losing its monopoly on the globalization process." Today when Russians speak of a multipolar world, they are not only talking about the redistribution of power. It is also the competition of value systems and ideas that will provide "the foundation for a multipolar world order."

International order does not rest on ideas and institutions alone. It is shaped by configurations of power. The spread of democracy in the last two decades of the 20th century was not merely the unfolding of certain ineluctable processes of economic and political development. The global shift toward liberal democracy coincided with the historical shift in the balance of power toward those nations and peoples who favored the liberal democratic idea, a shift that began with the triumph of the democratic powers over fascism in World War II and that was followed by a second triumph of the democracies over communism in the Cold War. The liberal international order that emerged after these two victories reflected the new overwhelming global balance in favor of liberal forces. But those victories were not inevitable, and they need not be lasting. Today, the reemergence of the great autocratic powers, along with the reactionary forces of Islamic radicalism, has weakened that order and threatens to weaken it further in the years and decades to come.

Does the United States have the strength and ability to lead the democracies again in strengthening and advancing a liberal democratic international order? Despite all the recent noise about America's relative decline, the answer is most assuredly yes. If it is true, as some claim, that the United States over the past decade suffered from excessive confidence in its power to shape the world, the pendulum has now swung too far in the opposite direction.

The apparent failure in Iraq convinced many people that the United States was weak, hated, and in a state of decline. Nor has anyone bothered to adjust that judgment now that the United States appears to be winning in Iraq. Yet by any of the usual measures of power, the United States is as strong today, even in relative terms, as it was in 2000. It remains the sole superpower, even as the other great powers get back on their feet. The military power of China and Russia has increased over the past decade, but American military power has increased more. America's share of the global economy has remained steady, 27 percent of global GDP in 2000 and 26 percent today. So where is the relative decline? So long as the United States remains at the center of the international economy, the predominant military power, and the leading apostle of the world's most popular political philosophy; so long as the American public continues to support American predominance, as it has consistently for six decades; and so long as potential challengers inspire more fear than sympathy among their neighbors, the structure of the international system should remain as the Chinese describe it: "one superpower and many great powers."

...

...Whether or not China and Russia are susceptible to outside influence over time, for the moment their growing power and, in the case of Russia, the willingness to use it, pose a serious challenge that needs to be met with the same level-headed determination as previous such challenges. If Moscow is now bent on restoring its hegemony over its near neighbors, the United States and its European allies must provide those neighbors with support and protection. If China continues to expand its military capabilities, the United States must reassure China's neighbors of its own commitment to Asian security.

The future is not determined. It is up for grabs. The international order in the coming decades will be shaped by those who have the power and the collective will to shape it. The great fallacy of our era has been the belief that a liberal and democratic international order would come about by the triumph of ideas alone or by the natural unfolding of human progress. Many believe the Cold War ended the way it did simply because the better worldview triumphed, as it had to, and that the international order that exists today is but the next stage in humanity's forward march from strife and aggression toward a peaceful and prosperous coexistence. They forget the many battles fought, both strategic and ideological, that produced that remarkable triumph.

The illusion is just true enough to be dangerous. Of course there is strength in the liberal democratic idea and in the free market. But progress toward these ideals has never been inevitable. It is contingent on events and the actions of nations and peoples--battles won or lost, social movements successful or crushed, economic practices implemented or discarded.

After the Second World War, another moment in history when hopes for a new kind of international order were rampant, Hans Morgenthau warned idealists against imagining that at some point "the final curtain would fall and the game of power politics would no longer be played." The struggle continued then, and it continues today. Six decades ago American leaders believed the United States had the ability and responsibility to use its power to prevent a slide back to the circumstances that had produced two world wars and innumerable national calamities. Reinhold Niebuhr, who always warned against Americans' ambitions and excessive faith in their own power, also believed, with a faith and ambition of his own, that "the world problem cannot be solved if America does not accept its full share of responsibility in solving it." Today the United States shares that responsibility with the rest of the democratic world, which is infinitely stronger than it was when World War II ended. The only question is whether the democratic world will once again rise to the challenge.
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/426usidf.asp?page=3

 
Want to move your tank battalion to take on a threat? NATO’s got a form for that.Increasing NATO’s speed has become Lieutenant General Ben Hodges’ mantra.

Every time that Russia holds snap exercises moving tens of thousands of men across vast distances, the United States is surprised, the commander of the U.S. Army in Europe said in an interview last week. By contrast, the 28 countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are so tied up in red tape that it typically takes 15 days to get diplomatic clearance to move military equipment from one member state to the next. Cold War-era regulations mean Hodges still needs special permission to travel from his base in western Germany to Berlin.

“What we want is like a military Schengen zone,” the three-star U.S. general said, referring to the border-free travel regime adopted by most European Union countries. “Right now refugees can move across Europe faster than military convoys.”

While Europeans have become riveted on the terrorist menace of Islamic State following the Paris attacks, Hodges remains just as focused on new threats posed by Russia. Even as the Kremlin reaches out to cooperate militarily in Syria, he warns, the Russian intervention in Ukraine exposed vulnerabilities in NATO that urgently need to be remedied.

“When you look at the weapons systems that they have put into Crimea, they can range about 90 percent of the Black Sea,” Hodges said. “If they wanted to, they could affect what goes in and out.” Three NATO allies — Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania — border the Black Sea.

At the same time, Russia has the ability to block the Baltic Sea using forces based in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, according to Hodges. After the lightning occupation of Crimea in March 2014, Western military planners started considering the possibility of Russian shock troops sealing the 50-mile border between Poland and Lithuania, creating a land bridge from Kaliningrad to Russian ally Belarus and cutting off the three Baltic states from their NATO allies.

Hodges talks about the “Suwalki Gap,” named after the Polish town on the Lithuanian border, in the same way that U.S. strategists used to refer to the Fulda Gap, once one of the most likely paths for a Soviet attack on West Germany. Is it likely that Russia would try to close the Suwalki Gap? “No,” said Hodges. “But I didn’t think Crimea was likely either. Nobody expected that.”

Speed of assembly is just one aspect of the needed change. NATO also needs to increase the speed with which it recognizes what’s happening on the ground to give political leaders more time to make decisions, Hodges said. Russia’s hybrid tactics in Ukraine created so much confusion in Western capitals that the Kremlin could present the annexation of Crimea as a fait accompli. NATO’s nightmare scenario is a Russian move on the Baltics to test the alliance’s resolve in defending its most vulnerable members.

To disabuse the Kremlin of any temptation, the Obama administration has dug up deterrence as the cornerstone of its European strategy. Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced in June that the United States would pre-position heavy equipment, including 250 tanks, in Eastern Europe.

“Deterrence is not always a popular word. For some it contains echoes of the Cold War,” Alexander Vershbow, NATO’s deputy secretary-general and a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, said during a visit to Berlin last week. “Being strong enough to prevent others from attacking you is not an act of aggression.”

The U.S. build-up is a reversal after more than two decades of gradual withdrawal. Hodges commands 29,000 U.S. troops, down from 213,000 who were based in Europe in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. The last U.S. Army tank left Germany less than a year before Russia seized Crimea.

Although the Kremlin officially denies any military involvement in eastern Ukraine, NATO planners are keen to learn from the reality on the ground, where Ukrainian soldiers have been exposed to the latest in Russian tactics and weaponry.

“There’s an opportunity for us to learn and increase our understanding of the full sweep of Russian unmanned aerial systems, the type of munitions they’re firing, how their equipment performs,” Hodges said. “We’ve formalized that process to share it not just inside the United States but across the alliance.”

At the same time, the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade is leading a training program for Ukrainian forces that will continue through 2016, Hodges said. Earlier this month, the United States delivered mobile radar stations to help the Ukrainian military locate enemy artillery.

While many European governments are hoping for a shaky ceasefire to hold in eastern Ukraine and a normalization in relations with Russia, the Obama administration is taking no chances. The United States has been wary of calls by France to unite with Russia in defeating Islamic State.

“I think it’s important that the world doesn’t separate what the Russians are doing in Syria with the rest of their behavior,” Hodges said. “It’s not impossible to work with them in some areas while we have difference in other areas. That’s as old as nations.”

Besides seeking to maintain its foothold in the Middle East and present itself as a global power, Hodges said, Russia declared war on Islamic State to distract attention from Ukraine.

He refused to be called on whether Islamic State hadn’t surpassed Russia as the main threat to European security. While Russia has the capability to destroy the United States and its allies with its nuclear arsenal, it hasn’t expressed intent, Hodges said. Conversely, while Islamic State doesn’t come close to Russia’s destructive potential, it has made its intentions clear.

“To say which one’s the number one — to me it’s different categories of prioritization,” Hodges said. “You have to deal with each.”

As a symbol of the United States’ commitment to the pro-Western government in Kiev, Hodges carries a blue and yellow ribbon on his black backpack. An old woman gave him the miniature Ukrainian banner during joint military exercises in Ukraine last year.
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http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/11/26/want-to-move-your-tank-battalion-to-take-on-a-threat-natos-got-a-form-for-that/

 
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SaintsInDome2006 said:
Want to move your tank battalion to take on a threat? NATO’s got a form for that.Increasing NATO’s speed has become Lieutenant General Ben Hodges’ mantra.

Every time that Russia holds snap exercises moving tens of thousands of men across vast distances, the United States is surprised, the commander of the U.S. Army in Europe said in an interview last week. By contrast, the 28 countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are so tied up in red tape that it typically takes 15 days to get diplomatic clearance to move military equipment from one member state to the next. Cold War-era regulations mean Hodges still needs special permission to travel from his base in western Germany to Berlin.

“What we want is like a military Schengen zone,” the three-star U.S. general said, referring to the border-free travel regime adopted by most European Union countries. “Right now refugees can move across Europe faster than military convoys.”

While Europeans have become riveted on the terrorist menace of Islamic State following the Paris attacks, Hodges remains just as focused on new threats posed by Russia. Even as the Kremlin reaches out to cooperate militarily in Syria, he warns, the Russian intervention in Ukraine exposed vulnerabilities in NATO that urgently need to be remedied.

“When you look at the weapons systems that they have put into Crimea, they can range about 90 percent of the Black Sea,” Hodges said. “If they wanted to, they could affect what goes in and out.” Three NATO allies — Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania — border the Black Sea.

At the same time, Russia has the ability to block the Baltic Sea using forces based in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, according to Hodges. After the lightning occupation of Crimea in March 2014, Western military planners started considering the possibility of Russian shock troops sealing the 50-mile border between Poland and Lithuania, creating a land bridge from Kaliningrad to Russian ally Belarus and cutting off the three Baltic states from their NATO allies.

Hodges talks about the “Suwalki Gap,” named after the Polish town on the Lithuanian border, in the same way that U.S. strategists used to refer to the Fulda Gap, once one of the most likely paths for a Soviet attack on West Germany. Is it likely that Russia would try to close the Suwalki Gap? “No,” said Hodges. “But I didn’t think Crimea was likely either. Nobody expected that.”

Speed of assembly is just one aspect of the needed change. NATO also needs to increase the speed with which it recognizes what’s happening on the ground to give political leaders more time to make decisions, Hodges said. Russia’s hybrid tactics in Ukraine created so much confusion in Western capitals that the Kremlin could present the annexation of Crimea as a fait accompli. NATO’s nightmare scenario is a Russian move on the Baltics to test the alliance’s resolve in defending its most vulnerable members.

To disabuse the Kremlin of any temptation, the Obama administration has dug up deterrence as the cornerstone of its European strategy. Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced in June that the United States would pre-position heavy equipment, including 250 tanks, in Eastern Europe.

“Deterrence is not always a popular word. For some it contains echoes of the Cold War,” Alexander Vershbow, NATO’s deputy secretary-general and a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, said during a visit to Berlin last week. “Being strong enough to prevent others from attacking you is not an act of aggression.”

The U.S. build-up is a reversal after more than two decades of gradual withdrawal. Hodges commands 29,000 U.S. troops, down from 213,000 who were based in Europe in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. The last U.S. Army tank left Germany less than a year before Russia seized Crimea.

Although the Kremlin officially denies any military involvement in eastern Ukraine, NATO planners are keen to learn from the reality on the ground, where Ukrainian soldiers have been exposed to the latest in Russian tactics and weaponry.

“There’s an opportunity for us to learn and increase our understanding of the full sweep of Russian unmanned aerial systems, the type of munitions they’re firing, how their equipment performs,” Hodges said. “We’ve formalized that process to share it not just inside the United States but across the alliance.”

At the same time, the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade is leading a training program for Ukrainian forces that will continue through 2016, Hodges said. Earlier this month, the United States delivered mobile radar stations to help the Ukrainian military locate enemy artillery.

While many European governments are hoping for a shaky ceasefire to hold in eastern Ukraine and a normalization in relations with Russia, the Obama administration is taking no chances. The United States has been wary of calls by France to unite with Russia in defeating Islamic State.

“I think it’s important that the world doesn’t separate what the Russians are doing in Syria with the rest of their behavior,” Hodges said. “It’s not impossible to work with them in some areas while we have difference in other areas. That’s as old as nations.”

Besides seeking to maintain its foothold in the Middle East and present itself as a global power, Hodges said, Russia declared war on Islamic State to distract attention from Ukraine.

He refused to be called on whether Islamic State hadn’t surpassed Russia as the main threat to European security. While Russia has the capability to destroy the United States and its allies with its nuclear arsenal, it hasn’t expressed intent, Hodges said. Conversely, while Islamic State doesn’t come close to Russia’s destructive potential, it has made its intentions clear.

“To say which one’s the number one — to me it’s different categories of prioritization,” Hodges said. “You have to deal with each.”

As a symbol of the United States’ commitment to the pro-Western government in Kiev, Hodges carries a blue and yellow ribbon on his black backpack. An old woman gave him the miniature Ukrainian banner during joint military exercises in Ukraine last year.
Click to expand...
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/11/26/want-to-move-your-tank-battalion-to-take-on-a-threat-natos-got-a-form-for-that/
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Seems odd that in how many years of NATO they never hammered out free (or freer) movement of troops and equipment within member nations. The joys of a Democratic bureaucracy.

 
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Mystery Deepens Over Death of Former Putin Ally Mikhail Lesin


WASHINGTON — Mikhail Y. Lesin once occupied the upper stratosphere of Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, an advertising executive turned cabinet minister who helped carry out the state takeover of the country’s independent media and later created the Kremlin’s global English-language television network.


Until late 2014 he ran the media wing of the state’s energy giant, Gazprom, before stepping down or, more likely, being forced out. He ended up in the United States, where he and his family owned properties in Los Angeles said to be worth far more than the salary of the former government minister. And then, in November, he was found in a hotel here in Washington, the victim, the Russian state media he had helped build said, of a heart attack.


On Thursday, more than four months later, one of the questions surrounding Mr. Lesin’s death was answered: The office of the chief medical examiner in Washington announced that he had not died of a heart attack, but rather of blunt force injuries to his head. But the mystery surrounding his rise and fall only deepened.

Although the examiner and the police did not declare his death a criminal act, the authorities clearly no longer consider it to be the result of natural causes. Mr. Lesin’s body also showed signs of blunt trauma to his neck, torso, arms and legs, the result, according to one official, of some sort of altercation that happened before he returned to his room at the Dupont Circle Hotel on the night in November when he died at the age of 59.

The medical examiner’s office did not explain the timing of its announcement, nor why the findings took so long. Officials there had said as recently as Wednesday that it would not imminently release its findings, only to reverse course the next day. His death remains the subject of a police investigation, though spokesmen for the Metropolitan Police Department and the F.B.I. in Washington declined to comment.

For months, Mr. Lesin’s fate has been the subject of much speculation. In the Russian news media, he was said to have had a falling out with a major shareholder of Gazprom Media, Yuri V. Kovalchuk, an even closer business ally and friend of Mr. Putin’s. Some speculated that he had fled to the United States in a kind of self-exile, one that is not unknown among ministers and businessmen who once were in favor inside Mr. Putin’s Kremlin.

Karen Dawisha, a professor at Miami University and the author of “Putin’s Kleptocracy” about corruption among Putin’s allies, said that Mr. Lesin’s close ties to the Kremlin and its formal and informal controls over the media made him an improbable exile in the United States. “He knew more than most about the system’s dark center,” she said.

Mr. Lesin began his rise to power in the Russian media after the fall of the Soviet Union, leveraging a successful foray into advertising into a top government post and, eventually, a lucrative job as an executive at Gazprom’s media branch. He served as a minister overseeing the media from 1999 to 2004, a period that coincided with Mr. Putin’s first term as president and a steady expansion of state control over television in particular. Mr. Lesin was an instrumental figure in those efforts to take control of the country’s media. He later served as a presidential adviser, with a mandate to help develop the government’s growing technology and media apparatus.

Mr. Lesin’s wealth, and his holdings in the United States, had already attracted suspicion. In July 2014, Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, asked the Justice Department to investigate what he said was suspicion of wrongdoing under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. He cited Mr. Lesin’s properties in Europe, the British Virgin Islands, and Los Angeles, saying the Los Angeles properties were worth $28 million. He also suggested that his close ties to Russians subject to sanctions, including Mr. Kovalchuk and the bank he built, Bank Rossiya, warranted an investigation. “That a Russian public servant could have amassed the considerable funds required to acquire and maintain these assets in Europe and the United States raises serious questions,” Mr. Wicker wrote.

Mr. Lesin, for his part, denied that he had purchased the properties, telling the Russian edition of Forbes that the properties belonged to his children. He called the accusations slanderous.

It does not appear that Mr. Wicker’s accusations prompted any investigation. In the days after his death on the night of Nov. 4, neither the local police nor federal investigators appeared overly alarmed. One law enforcement official said there were no obvious signs of forced entry or foul play in his hotel room. Mr. Lesin did, however, appear disheveled when he returned to the hotel, according to the video surveillance cameras, the official said. But the Russian state media, including the English-language state television network that Mr. Lesin helped found, known as RT, reported that he had died from a heart attack.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/11/us/former-putin-aide-found-in-washington-died-from-blows-to-head.html?_r=0

- Lesin was essentially a defector, at one time he was Putin's no. 1 aide and confidante.... basically Right Hand of the King, then something happened, he left, came to the US, and started working with the FBI.

Now: dead, blunt force trauma, IOW had his brains beat out in a DC hotel room.

 
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Ex-aide to Putin died of blunt force trauma at D.C. hotel, medical examiner says


A former aide to Russian President Vladi­mir Putin who was found dead in a Dupont Circle hotel room in November died of blunt force trauma to the head, the D.C. medical examiner’s office said Thursday.

Mikhail Lesin, 59, also suffered injuries to his neck, torso and upper and lower extremities, the medical examiner said in a statement. The medical examiner had not concluded whether the injuries were the result of a crime, an accident or some other means.

Dustin Sternbeck, the D.C. police department’s chief spokesman, said the case remains under investigation. He would not say whether the medical examiner’s ruling means a crime may have been committed. “We’re not willing to close off anything at this point,” Sternbeck said.

... Lesin’s body was found before noon Nov. 5 in a room at the Dupont Circle Hotel, in the 1500 block of New Hampshire Avenue NW.  ...
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/former-aide-to-russian-president-died-of-blunt-force-trauma-to-head-medical-examiner/2016/03/10/8a61dc16-e702-11e5-bc08-3e03a5b41910_story.html

 
A Baker’s Dozen of Neglected Russian Stories – No. 44



 


Staunton, VA, August 12, 2016 -  Like Hitler, Vladimir Putin believes that the West will not live up to its commitments, Andrey Piontkovsky says, a view that some in Western governments are unwittingly encouraging by continuing to send senior officials to Moscow to seek agreement with him much as Neville Chamberlain did with the Nazi leader by going to Munich.





The Russian commentator now in exile makes this argument in an essay on the Kasparov.ru portal, drawing on what he suggests are Ekho Moskvy chief editor Aleksei Venediktov’s remarkable statements about Putin’s thinking in an interview given last week to the Polish journal, Nowa Europa Wscodnia.


(Piontkovsky’s commentary is here. Venediktov’s interview appeared in Polish. A Russian translation of the Moscow editor’s remarks can be found here.)
In his interview, Piontkovsky says, Venediktov explained that he sees his task as a journalist not to justify or judge those in power but rather to penetrate, understand and communicate “their internal logic.” That makes his comments about Putin’s intentions even more interesting and valuable because they are really Putin’s rather than Venediktov’s.
 
Given that, the Russian commentator says, one can conclude that the Kremlin leader has some specific views that the West and Russians as well need to focus on and figure out how they should react.
 
First, it is now clear from Venediktov’s remarks, that Putin “wants to return to the international arrangements of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements. Such a model makes the world more secure because the powers divide among themselves responsibility and control,” with Moscow having responsibility “for the Donbass and for all Ukraine.”
What is occurring in Ukraine, in this Putinist view, “is creating a disbalance in international relations.”

Second, according to the editor relaying what Putin thinks, Poles do not need “to fear Russian tanks.” If anyone should be concerned about their movements, it should be the Baltic countries because “our main idea is the defense of ‘the Russian world.’” That doesn’t exist in Poland, but it does in Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic countries. 

And third, when his Polish interviewer pointed out that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are members of NATO and thus beneficiaries of the Washington Treaty’s Article 5, “Putin-Venediktov” responded with an updated version of Hitler’s question, “’Are you prepared to die for Danzig?’”

Piontkovsky suggests that Venediktov’s interview represents “an exceptionally concentrated performance of ‘The Triumph of Putin’s Will,’” one that confirms the arguments of others that the Kremlin leader has long been living “in another reality.” And from that interview, the Russian commentator draws three conclusions.

First, he says, “Putin as before is demanding the impossible.” He wants complete control over the entire former Soviet space. That is “impossible not because the West would never agree to that.” Some there, like “the useful bourgeois idiot Trump have agreed.” But it is impossible because the peoples of that region will never agree to such a restoration of Russian dominance.
 
Second, Venediktov’s words show that Putin’s “insane conception of ‘the Russian world’ hasn’t been discorded by the Kremlin despite its crushing failure in Ukraine,” but only dropped for a time from Moscow’s propaganda arsenal and is ready to be used again this time to justify Russian intervention in the Baltic countries.
 
And third, according to Piontkovsky, Putin despite all the statements by NATO leaders remains “firmly convinced just as Hitler was in 1939 that the fat, hedonist and decadent West is not ready to die for any Narva” but will yield and seek to force countries on the former Soviet space to yield in the face of Russian nuclear power.
 
Putin certainly knows that Russian conventional arms are not capable of competing with Western militaries and consequently, as he has said for a long time, he “places his hopes on nuclear weapons considering that his regime has qualities which will allow him to outplay the West in a direct clash of wills and force it to retreat.”
 
In this, the Russian commentator says, the Kremlin leader “intends to play with the West not nuclear chess but nuclear poker, raising the stakes and hoping that the other side will fold and retreat, surrendering its allies in the process.” And his hopes are based on his willingness to act aggressively and without regard to the loss of human life.
 
Putin believes this, Piointkovsky continues, because he has seen the way the West has reacted to North Korea which has only a tiny nuclear arsenal and thus believes that as “Krim Put In” with “an enormous nuclear arsenal” he will be able to achieve his goals of reordering the world’s geopolitical arrangements.
 
Venediktov has thus performed a useful service with his August 4 interview. Now, the West has been “forewarned” about Putin’s intentions to act aggressively a la Hitler and as a leader armed with nuclear weapons. “This is a very serious challenge,” and the West needs to figure out how to respond so as not to allow either a nuclear war or a Putin victory.
 
According to the Russian commentator, “in the era of Krim Put In, nuclear containment must be personal,” that is, based on the necessity of recognizing what Putin is about and what he is prepared to do rather than assuming that he is a member of the club with whom foreign leaders can negotiate with others who present difficulties.
 
The constant visits to Moscow of Western diplomatic leaders to seek agreement with Putin are “senseless and tragicomic” because they only serve to convince Putin that he is right, that threats work, and that the West will not stand up but rather be willing to sacrifice almost anything in order to maintain peace in our time.
 
Of course, Piontkovsky says, the West must talk with the Kremlin leader, but it must do so “very carefully” and in a language he understands rather than assuming that he speaks the same language with the same meaning they do.
 
Russians also need to draw conclusions from all this, he concludes. They must recognize that once again there country is ruled by “a maniac who is driven by his deviant complexes and who is pursuing absurd foreign policy goals which not only have nothing in common with ensuring the security of the country but also put under threat its very existence.”
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A Baker’s Dozen of Neglected Russian Stories – No. 44
 
 


Staunton, VA. August 12, 2016 - The flood of news stories from a country as large, diverse and strange as the Russian Federation often appears to be is far too large for anyone to keep up with. But there needs to be a way to mark those which can’t be discussed in detail but which are too indicative of broader developments to ignore.





Consequently, Windows on Eurasia presents a selection of 13 of these other and typically neglected stories at the end of each week. This is the 44th such compilation. It is only suggestive and far from complete – indeed, once again, one could have put out such a listing every day -- but perhaps one or more of these stories will prove of broader interest.


 
1. Putin Losing ‘Sympathy’ of Russians. A new poll shows that Vladimir Putin is losing the sympathy he has enjoyed with Russians, an indication that his political support is softening even if other polls show it to remain at high levels. But the promotion of a Putin cult continues, with tours now being offered to “Putin places” in his native St. Petersburg. And there are reasons to think that his strongman tactics will continue to garner him the backing of many Russians. After all, according to some surveys, one Russian in five thinks even Putin’s regime is too weak.
 
2. How Bad is the Russian Economy? Russians Again Stealing Power Lines. In the 1990s, some Russians stole power lines to earn money for food. Now that practice is back. Other economic news is equally bleak: Russia is exporting 45 percent less electric power than a year ago, trade with China in which Putin has placed such hopes continues to fall, migrants are bringing more money to the Russian budget than are oil and gas revenues, Russia pumping more oil even though prices have fallen – just as Soviets did in 1987, Moscow can find only 16 percent of money needed to prevent disaster in company towns, foreigners are pulling money out of Russian stock funds at an unprecedented rate, the North Caucasus has sunk into an economic depression, and sales of apartments in new Moscow highrises have stopped because there is no money and no demand.
 
3. Is Foreign Ministry Spokesman Revealing Everything but the Truth? Some Russians are outraged that Maria Zakharova, Sergey Lavrov’s spokesman, has appeared in a fetching pose in an American fashion magazine, something they suggest does little or nothing to improve Moscow’s image, although it might improve hers given her track record as far as truthfulness is concerned.
 
4. First Russian Gold Medal Winner at Rio Doesn’t Sing National Anthem. Beslan Murdanov, a judoist from the North Caucasus, infuriated many Russians when he failed to sing the Russian national anthem after winning gold at Rio games. He explained that he simply doesn’t know how to sing but some suspect more is involved. In other sports news, officials in St. Petersburg have changed the construction company responsible for building the delay-plagued facility there so that it may be ready for the 2018 World cup.
 
5. Another New Crime in Russia: Sitting Too Long on a Public Toilet. Russian officials seem committed to finding new things to criminalize perhaps to display their loyalty to the Kremlin with good and easy to boost anti-crime statistics but also to extract bribes from the population. The latest move in this direction was the detention of a woman for allegedly remaining in a public toilet too long.
 
6. Two-Thirds of Russia’s HIV Infected Not Receiving Treatment. According to experts, two out of every three of the 1.3 million Russian infected with the HIV virus are not receiving treatment, either because the authorities no longer have sufficient supplies of medicines or because those who suspect they are infected are afraid to apply for them. That failure to treat a disease that could be controlled points to an explosion of full-blown AIDS cases in the future as does the increasing hostility, in the name of the defense of “Russian national values,” against the use of condoms.
 
7. Russians Upset by False Report that Moscow has Blocked Access to ‘Protocols of Elders of Zion.’ Russians turned to the Internet to complain about the decision of Russian officials to block access to sites featuring the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The rumors proved untrue. Russian officials have blocked access to many sites, including those promoting democracy; but they haven’t blocked those carrying this infamous work.
 
8. Three Russians in Four Favor Limiting Religious Freedom to Combat Terrorism.A new poll shows that Russians are quite prepared to sacrifice religious freedom if the authorities tell them that that is the only way to combat the spread of radicalism and terrorism.
 
9. Yabloko Party Criticism of Islam Prompts Ingush Officials to Defend It. Religion has entered the Duma campaign but in a somewhat unexpected way. The liberal Yabloko Party has criticized Islamic leaders for failing to condemn terrorism. That has prompted officials in the North Caucasus republic of Ingushetia to come to the defense of Islam far more than they ever have in the past (onkavkaz.com/news/1174-islamofobija-jabloka-neozhidanno-prevratila-chinovnikov-ingushetii-v-zaschitnikov-islama.html).
 
10. ‘I’m Siberian’ Brand Denounced as Separatism. Russian officials have accused those who sell or display the “I’m a Siberian” brand of promoting separatism, something that the latter absolutely deny. They argue that they are doing no more than Russians elsewhere who want to boost the status of their regions. But this could lead to serious consequences: SOVA reports an ethnic Russian was found guilty in 2015 of promoting separatism in the Komi Republic.
 
11. Some Extremists Escape Punishment by Paying Off Officials. Russian police and siloviki have long profited from Russian laws against this or that phenomenon, extracting bribes from those against whom they might bring charges in order to ignore what the latter have done. This week, a case was opened in Samara against officers responsible for fighting extremism who agreed to look the other way after being paid off .
 
12. Another Russian Official with a Geography Problem. A senior Russian official visiting Kazan referred to Tatarstan three times as Kazakhstan, to the amusement and anger of many Tatars who are definitely not Kazakhs.
 
13. ‘Pokemon Raped Me,’ Moscow Woman Says. The Pokemon Go craze continues to sweep through Russia with millions of people now playing the game. For some, it has had some bad consequences, including arrests for trespass and the like. But perhaps the worst case, if true, is a report by one resident of the Russian capital that she had been “raped by Pokemon”.
 
And six more from countries near Russia:
 
1. ‘If You Think It’s Hard to Be a Russian in Kyrgyzstan, Try Being a Kyrgyz in Russia!’ Infuriated by a rising tide of Russian articles complaining about how Russians are mistreated in their country, some Kyrgyz have responded by pointing out just how difficult life is for Kyrgyz who live and work in the Russian Federation.
 
2. Central Asian Governments Putting Internet Access Out of Reach by Price. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have found a way to restrict the access of their populations to the Internet that is less likely to be criticized by Western governments and rights activists: they have raised the price of Internet access to the point that most of their citizens can’t afford it.
 
3. A New and Welcome Form of Friendship of the Peoples. In Soviet times, it was sometimes said that friendship of the peoples meant that representatives of two or more nationalities would come together to beat up a third. Now, in Kazakhstan, there is a new form: Kazakhs have come to the aid of a Ukrainian being beaten up by Russians.
 
4. Kazakhs Say They Too Were Victims of a Terror Famine. Angering some in Russia, Kazakhs are now insisting that like the Ukrainians, they were victims of a terror famine, and they are demanding that Moscow recognize and apologize for that action as well as for the tsarist government’s brutal suppression of the 1916 risings.
 
5. Russian Occupiers Tell Crimean Imams Even Their Traditional Prayers May Be Illegal. The Russian occupation has told leaders of the Muslim communities on the Ukrainian peninsula that even the prayers they have long offered may be declared illegal, an indication that the Russian authorities there are imposing a system of controls over religious life that increasingly recalls one of the worst features of the Soviet system.
 
6. For Lukashenka, No Polls Means No Problem. The government of Alyaksandr Lukashenka is moving to close down the last independent sociological service in Belarus apparently on the principle that if there are no polls, there is no public opinion and thus no problem from the population for the regime.
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Putin Has Finally Reincarnated the KGB


Twenty five years after the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s most infamous spy agency is back in all but name.

This past Sunday, as most of Russia focused its attention on parliamentary elections, the country’s most popular daily, Kommersant, broke news of a story that, if true, could have consequences that last far beyond this latest round of Duma reshuffling.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Kommersant, is planning a major overhaul of the country’s security services. The Russian daily reported that the idea of the reforms is to merge the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, with the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which keeps an eye on domestic affairs. This new supersized secret service will be given a new name: the Ministry of State Security. If that sounds familiar, it should — this was the name given to the most powerful and feared of Joseph Stalin’s secret services, from 1943 to 1953. And if its combination of foreign espionage and domestic surveillance looks familiar, well, it should: In all but name, we are seeing a resurrection of the Committee for State Security — otherwise known as the KGB.

The KGB, it should be remembered, was not a traditional security service in the Western sense — that is, an agency charged with protecting the interests of a country and its citizens. Its primary task was protecting the regime. Its activities included hunting down spies and dissidents and supervising media, sports, and even the church. It ran operations both inside and outside the country, but in both spheres the main task was always to protect the interests of whoever currently resided in the Kremlin. With this new agency, we’re seeing a return to form — one that’s been a long time in the making.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Russian leaders sought to create a depoliticized security structure. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the reform of the KGB became an immediate, pressing issue. The agency was not reliably under control: The chairman of the KGB at the time, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had helped mastermind the military coup attempt aimed at overthrowing Mikhail Gorbachev that August. But new President Boris Yeltsin had no clear ideas about just how he wanted to reform the KGB, so he simply decided to break it into pieces.

The largest department of the KGB — initially called the Ministry of Security; then, later, the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK); then, even later, the FSB — was given responsibility solely for counter-espionage and counterterrorism operations. The KGB’s former foreign intelligence directorate was transformed into a new agency called the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR. The division of the KGB responsible for electronic eavesdropping and cryptography became the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information, or FAPSI. A relatively obscure directorate of the KGB that guarded secret underground facilities continued its functions under a new name: the Main Directorate of Special Programs of the President, or GUSP. The KGB branch that had been responsible for protecting Soviet leaders was renamed the Federal Protective Service, or FSO, and the Soviet border guards were transformed into an independent Federal Border Service, or FPS.

The main successor of the KGB amid this alphabet soup of changes was the FSK. But this new counterintelligence agency was stripped of its predecessor’s overseas intelligence functions. The agency no longer protected Russian leaders and was deprived of its secret bunkers, which fell under the president’s direct authority. It maintained only a nominal presence in the army. In its new incarnation, the agency’s mission was pruned back to something resembling Britain’s MI5: to fight terrorism and corruption.

But Yeltsin’s team never formed a clear strategy for how to transform what had once been the secret services of a totalitarian state into the intelligence community of a democracy. In a 1993 executive decree, Yeltsin lamented, reeling off a list of acronyms for various incarnations of the security agencies, that “the system of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-NGKB-KGB-MB turned out to be incapable of being reformed. Reorganization efforts in recent years were external and cosmetic in nature.… The system of political investigation is preserved and may easily be restored.”

It was a prescient comment: By the mid-1990s, various component parts and functions of the old KGB had begun to make their way back to the FSK, like the liquid metal of the killer T-1000 android in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, slowly reconstituting itself after having been blown to bits.

First to return was the power to conduct domestic investigations. In November 1994, Yeltsin restored the investigative directorate of the FSK and placed the infamous Lefortovo prison, which had once held political prisoners and had been used for interrogations that involved torture, back under its remit. The next year saw a crucial name change: The FSK was rechristened the FSB. The shift from “K” (kontrrazvedka, or counterintelligence) to “B” (bezopasnost, or security) was more than cosmetic; with the new name came a broad mandate for the FSB to become the guardian of “security” for Russia.

Over the course of the next five years, the FSB would win back many of its old functions. It would once again be given responsibility for pursuing dissidents, who were now branded “extremists,” and would be given its own foreign intelligence directorate, duplicating the SVR’s.

When Putin came to power in 2000, he initially appeared to follow the route laid out by his predecessor, Yeltsin. His main concern, at least at first, seemed to be minimizing competition between the secret services; as a result, in 2003, he allowed the FSB to absorb responsibility for the border troops and FAPSI — the electronic intelligence agency — and gave the service expanded powers over the army and police.

But the president, himself a former KGB officer, was too taken in by KGB myths about the role of the Cheka in Russian society to be satisfied with the FSB being a mere security organ. He was determined to see it become something bigger. Putin encouraged a steady growth in the agency’s influence. The president began using the FSB as his main recruitment base for filling key positions in government and state-controlled business; its agents were expected to define and personify the ideology of the new Russia. When FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev, in December 2000, called his officers Russia’s “new ‘nobility’” — a nickname that agents in the KGB could have hardly dreamed of being applied to them — he was taking a cue from his boss.

By the late 2000s, it was clear that Putin had bigger changes in store, but it wasn’t yet clear whether those changes would elevate the FSB or destroy it. Putin began making it apparent that he wasn’t happy with the agency’s effectiveness. In 2007, he asked another service, an antidrug agency led by his personal friend Viktor Cherkesov, to look into the FSB’s dealings, in the hope, it seems, of bringing it down. The attack on the agency failed utterly — and Putin was forced to fire his friend. Then Putin launched a new agency and gave it enormous powers: The Investigative Committee, a sort of Russian FBI, was tasked with conducting the most sensitive investigations, from the murders of Kremlin critics like Anna Politkovskaya and Boris Nemtsov to prosecuting political activists. This was accompanied by an expansion of the Internal Troops — army units charged with operating within the country — and the launch of a new Department to Counter Extremism, housed within the Interior Ministry. Finally, this year, Putin created the National Guard, which is a massive and armed-to-the-teeth military force tasked with fighting internal dissent.

Throughout the 2000s, and for much of the 2010s, it looked as if Putin’s response to concerns about FSB ineffectiveness would be simply to create new agencies. With this weekend’s news, that strategy appears to have come to an abrupt end. If the Kommersant story is true, it would mean Putin has finally made up his mind about the fate of the FSB: It is to once again be restored to its former glory, as the most powerful security organ in the country by far.

There’s some method at work here. It’s been clear for some time that Putin is getting nervous about his political future. With elections pending in 2018, he’s started selective repressions, placed governors and officials in jail, and removed old friends from key positions, in moves seemingly aimed at what his role model Yuri Andropov once called “improv[ing] labor discipline.” Efforts to strengthen the security services fit within this pattern of centralizing control; what’s new is that he’s decided the best way to strengthen them is to merge them into one gigantic service, with a fearsome name and a reputation that reminds any would-be dissidents of the most frightening days of the Soviet era.

At the same time, the FSB has lost a certain something in this transition: Gone is any talk about a “new nobility,” and the agency is no longer being used as a recruitment base for other sectors of the government and economy. Putin has made it clear that what he needs is an instrument, pure and simple, to protect his own regime — just like the Politburo had its instrument in the KGB.

Ironically, however, it seems likely that the announced reforms will not actually improve FSB effectiveness — if anything, they’ll do the opposite. The agency will now be forced to spend resources to eliminate duplication (over the years, the FSB developed its own strong foreign intelligence branch, and it’s not clear how it will merge this with the SVR’s, for instance), to find new positions for generals who are out of jobs, and to deal with renaming departments, rewriting regulations, and the various other forms of bureaucratic chaos that accompany big mergers. That could paralyze the new mega-siloviki for an undetermined period — just at the time Putin needs it most.
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Solzhenitsyn Effigy Hanged In Front Of Gulag Museum In Moscow


An effigy of Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has been hung up in front of Moscow's gulag museum.

A group calling itself the Revolutionary Communist Union Of Youth took responsibility for the October 9 action.

The effigy was found with a noose around its neck before it was removed by museum staff.

A letter fastened to the Solzhenitsyn dummy said:

Here, the traitor Solzhenitsyn has been hanged,
The one, who liked to mock the sacred truth,
Who shamelessly lied about the gulag,
He is a terrible enemy of the Motherland!
The gulag museum goes ahead with lies
And former dissidents are being glorified
Now here they are embracing as two pals:
The traitorous man and the treacherous museum!

Solzhenitsyn -- whose most famous works include One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago -- spent many years in the Soviet gulag prison system for his anticommunist activities.

He was expelled to the West in 1974, where he spent 20 years before returning to Russia.

Solzhenitsyn died in Moscow in 2008 at the age of 89.
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http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-solzhenitsyn-effigy-hanged-moscow-gulag-museum/28045703.html

- Heartbreaking.
 
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Why Vladimir Putin Hates Us



Western inability to grasp what motivates our enemies is nothing new


He’s done it again. The honey badger in the Kremlin just moved more advanced missiles into position on Russia’s most westerly fringe to own the Baltic Sea. This week Moscow admitted it has deployed cutting-edge Bastion anti-ship missiles to the Kaliningrad exclave, north of Poland, plus equally advanced S-400 air defense systems to shoot down aircraft and missiles as far as 250 miles out.

With this move, the Kremlin has established control over the Baltic Sea, most of Poland and the Baltic republics—NATO members all. Russia now can exert anti-access and area denial—what the Pentagon calls A2AD for short—at will, meaning that any NATO aircraft or ships entering the region can be hit long before they get close to Kaliningrad. For Western military planners, this is nothing short of a nightmare, since Moscow can now block NATO reinforcements headed east to counter, say, Russian military moves on the vulnerable Baltic republics.

That scenario, wherein Moscow’s forces overrun a Baltic republic or two before NATO can meaningfully respond, is judged alarmingly plausible by Alliance planners, yet nobody should be surprised that Vladimir Putin has done this. One month ago, when he moved nuclear-capable Iskander-M ballistic missiles into Kaliningrad last month, initiating a Baltic version of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Obama’s response was…nothing.

...

For good measure, this week the Russian defense ministry indicated that the deployment of Iskander-M systems to Kaliningrad, which Moscow has said was merely part of a military exercise, will be staying there permanently. Since those missiles can launch nuclear or conventional warheads as far as 300 miles with stunning accuracy, Russia now holds a powerful military advantage over NATO in the Baltic region.

Predictably, the Kremlin maintains that moving state-of-the art missiles into Kaliningrad is a response to American ballistic missile defenses which have been deployed in Eastern Europe. As usual, Moscow depicts all its military moves, even ones which are destabilizing to regional security, as cosmically defensive, so great is the Western threat to Russia.

...

Of course, why Putin is doing all this, playing dangerous games which could provoke a major war, looms as a big question here, albeit one that Western foreign policy gurus have trouble answering. Our academic international relations experts, who indulge in silliness like game-theory or realist fantasies to explain Putin’s increasingly aggressive policies, have difficulty explaining why the Kremlin—which after all in military or economic terms is vastly weaker than NATO—is acting so brazenly.

Western inability to grasp what motivates our enemies is nothing new. Fifteen years ago, in the aftermath of al-Qa’ida’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, everybody wanted to know “why they hate us.” President George W. Bush spoke the received Beltway wisdom when he explained that jihadists and Islamists hate us because of our “freedoms.”

Such escapism, while flattering to American self-perceptions, was completely wrong. The answer was right there since jihadists talk nonstop (especially online) about their worldview. Their hatred for Americans and the West has nothing to do with our freedoms, which radical Muslims care nothing about. It has everything to do with our policies—especially our support for Israel and our military presence in Muslim countries—plus our decadent way of life, particularly Western post-modern sexual mores, which jihadists see as literally invading their countries through media and entertainment.

Misunderstanding what makes our enemies tick is old hat in Washington. During the Cold War, our academic mavens, highly paid by the Pentagon to prognosticate about the Kremlin’s inner workings, paid little attention to Soviet public statements. Such aggressively anti-Western Marxist-Leninist pronouncements, often threatening nuclear war, were dismissed by our experts, academics plus Intelligence Community eggheads, who insisted that these ravings were just for show: in private, Soviet political and military leaders were calm and rational men just like us.

Of course, after the Cold War we learned that the Kremlin leadership said the same nutty things in private, dripping with Communist hatred for the capitalist West, that they yelled in Red Square. It’s tough enough for any person to maintain a completely different public persona than his private one, while for a whole regime it’s impossible. Therefore, pay attention to what your enemies state openly—there’s a good chance they believe it.

It’s not like Putin and his minions have been hiding what they believe. Putin himself is very much a KGB man—what Russians call a Chekist—cunningly conspiratorial to his bones. Yet over the last decade, he has become an open Russian nationalist with strong religious overtones. Regime outlets pontificate nonstop about the evils of the West, castigating our decadence and depravity, reflecting a nationalism that is deeply grounded in Orthodox Christianity.

Putin has talked warmly about what he calls “spiritual security“—which means keeping versions of Christianity other than Russian Orthodoxy out of the country—even stating that Russia’s “spiritual shield” is as important to her security as its nuclear shield. His inspiration for this comes from Orthodox thinkers, above all Ivan Ilyin, who hated the West with vigor and passion. This anti-Western worldview seems strange and even incomprehensible to most Americans, its reference points are utterly foreign to us, yet is grounded in centuries of Russian history and spiritual experience.

In this viewpoint, which I have termed Orthodox Jihadism, the West is an implacable foe of Holy Russia with whom there can be no lasting peace. For centuries—whether led by the Catholic Church, Napoleon, Hitler or the United States—the West has tried to subjugate Russia and thereby crush Orthodoxy, the one true faith. This is the Third Rome myth, which became very popular in 19th century Imperial Russia, postulating that it is Russia’s holy mission to resist the Devil and his work on earth.

Putin has reinvigorated such throwback thinking, making the Russian Orthodox Church—the de facto state religion—the ideological centerpiece of his regime. After Communism fell, the country needed a new ideological anchor, and Putinism found it in a potent amalgam of religion and nationalism which has far greater historical resonance with Russians than Communism ever did.

Western skeptics invariably note that Putin’s can’t really be an Orthodox believer and, besides, most Russians don’t bother to attend church regularly anyway. I have no idea what Putin actually believes—unlike Dubya I can’t see into his soul—but he certainly knows how to look like a real Orthodox, while the fact that regular church attendance in Russia isn’t particularly high doesn’t change that three-quarters of Russians claim to be Orthodox. The political reality is that Putinism has successfully convinced most Russians to go along with the official ideology, at least tacitly.

To get a flavor of what Putinism’s worldview looks like, simply listen to what Moscow says. It’s easy to find fire-breathing clerics castigating the West and its pushing of feminism and gay rights, which they openly term Satanic. The Russian “think tank” (in reality it’s just a website) Katehon is a Kremlin-approved outlet which offers heavy doses of geopolitics suffused with militant Orthodox nationalism. Significantly, its name comes from the Greek term for “he who resists the Antichrist”—and Katehon makes perfectly clear that the decadent, post-modern West is what they mean.

Then there’s Tsargrad TV, which is Russia’s version of Fox News, if Fox News were run by hardline Russian Orthodox believers. It’s the project of Konstantin Malofeev, a Kremlin-connected hedge funder-turned-religious crusader who wanted to give the country a news outlet that reflected traditional values. Its name is the traditional Slavic term for Constantinople—the Second Rome in Russian Orthodox formulation. A few months back, when Putin visited Mount Athos in Greece, one of Orthodox’s holiest sites, accompanied by Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Tsargrad TV gave it wall-to-wall live coverage.

The anti-Western animus of this ideology would be difficult to overstate. There are rational-sounding complaints—for instance, Russian harping on NATO expansion up to their borders—but much of it boils down to depictions of the post-modern West as Satan’s project designed to subvert traditional religion and family life. These complaints sound a lot like what hardline Muslims say about the West. Just like Islamists, Kremlin ideologists claim that, since the West is spiritually attacking Russia and Orthodoxy with feminist and LGBT propaganda, all of Moscow’s responses—including aggressive military moves—are therefore defensive.

To be fair to Putin and his ilk, we’ve been doing a good job of making their anti-Western polemics seem plausible. Under President Obama, the State Department really has pushed feminism and LGBT rights hard—including in Russia. Washington’s official effort to coerce small, impoverished countries like Macedonia into accepting our post-modern views of sexuality has raised Russian ire, not least because Macedonia is a majority-Orthodox country.

The bottom line is that Putin’s Russia is driven by a state-approved ideology which hates the post-modern West and considers us a permanent existential threat. President Obama’s insistence that we can’t be in a new Cold War with Russia because there’s no ideological component to the struggle is completely and utterly wrong. The Kremlin sees that spiritual-cum-ideological struggle clearly, and says so openly. Indeed, Putin explained it concisely, in public, before he seized Crimea, but nobody in Western capitals took him seriously:


Another serious challenge to Russia’s identity is linked to events taking place in the world. Here there are both foreign policy and moral aspects. We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.

The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote pedophilia. People in many European countries are embarrassed or afraid to talk about their religious affiliations. Holidays are abolished or even called something different; their essence is hidden away, as is their moral foundation. And people are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.



The coming of Donald Trump to Washington, with his affection for Russia and its leader, gives some cause for optimism that things might improve between us and Moscow. There’s no doubt that the Kremlin thinks of Trump as a man with whom they can do business. However, the deep-seated conflict between Putinism and the post-modern West will remain. If Trump decides to get the State Department out of the business of exporting our sexual mores to countries where they’re not wanted, that might cool things down with Moscow somewhat. However, the hard-wired strategic rivalry between the West and Russia will remain, no matter what pleasantries get exchanged between our leaders.

It would be wise to counter Russian adventurism before it causes a major, perhaps nuclear war. Deterrence works, when applied properly. It would be even wiser to stop ignoring what Moscow says about its worldview—they probably mean it. Above all, stop provoking the Russians needlessly. This week, Senator John McCain rehashed his line that “Russia is a gas station run by the mafia masquerading as a country,” omitting that it’s a country with several thousand nuclear weapons. For this reason, Russian remains an existential threat to the United States in a manner that jihadists simply are not, no matter what Islam-alarmists say. A first step to dealing wisely with Putin would be actually understanding what makes his regime tick.
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- I think it's an open question if Putin was a true nationalist who believed in these cultural claims before he started his push into aggression or if he employed it to motivate his country and justify his power, domestic takeover and military adventurism, but I do agree that like the age of communism we are again faced with an ideological foe and frankly in many ways it does not look unlike what we have been facing in the middle east since the 90s.

 
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kblitz said:
Just noticed that the same topic is also covered in this weeks Economist´s lead story. Unfortunately subscriber material. But thats what a newsstand is good for ;)
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I thought it might be useful or interesting (to myself of course) to repost this article, from 2006:


 


The G8 summit



Living with a strong Russia



The best approach to the host of this weekend's G8 summit is wary engagement


Jul 13th 2006

FORGET the formal agenda at this weekend's G8 summit, given over to energy security, infectious diseases and education. The really awkward issue for the leaders of the seven rich democracies gathering in St Petersburg concerns their host: how to live with a strong, but increasingly undemocratic, Russia.

Since Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, Russia has in many ways been a remarkable success. Thanks largely to high oil prices, its economy has grown by an average of 6.5% a year. Living standards have improved and a sizeable middle class has emerged. The stockmarket has boomed. Russia is running a huge current-account surplus, it is paying off the last of its debt and the rouble has just been made fully convertible. At the summit Russia also hopes to surmount the last hurdles to its joining the World Trade Organisation.

Russians are grateful for these things. They like the stability that Mr Putin has brought in place of the chaos under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. They welcome their country's bounceback from the dark days of August 1998, when it defaulted and devalued. They are proud that, as the summit demonstrates, Russia once more counts for something in the world. No wonder Mr Putin has a popularity rating in the 70% range—an achievement that none of his guests can match.

Yet as well as these steps forward Russia has taken steps backwards (see article). In Mr Putin's early years optimists hoped that stability and prosperity would not come at the expense of liberty and democracy. Western leaders gave him the benefit of their doubts over such matters as the war in Chechnya or curbs on the media. But it has become ever clearer that Russia is moving in the wrong direction. Greater state control of the economy, especially in the energy industry, has bred corruption and inefficiency. Any serious political opposition has been crushed. The broadcast media have been shut down or taken over by the government and its allies. Regional governors have been squashed—one of the last elected governors was arrested recently—and parliament has been emasculated, continuing the Kremlin's drive not merely to centralise, but to monopolise, political power.


Those were the days


There is much debate over when Mr Putin started to go wrong. Many date it to the attack on Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky's oil firm, that began three years ago this month; others say the clampdown started after the Beslan school siege in September 2004; still others point to the “orange revolution” in Ukraine at the end of 2004, when Russia's choice for president, Viktor Yanukovich, lost to the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko. In an irony of timing, only days before the summit, the Chechen terrorist who was responsible for Beslan, Shamil Basayev, was killed (see obituary); and Mr Yanukovich re-emerged as a possible prime minister of Ukraine (see article).

Yet the truth is that there was no particular moment when Mr Putin “started to go wrong”. Even Kremlin insiders admit that he was determined from the outset to control the television channels and to stamp out political opposition. They concede that Mr Khodorkovsky is in prison for political reasons. Such things reflect Mr Putin's background as a KGB officer. To him, restoring order, staying in charge and reviving Russia's influence are what matter—not wishy-washy worries over democracy and human rights.


What to say to Putin


So what can the West do? The short answer is, not a lot. In the 1990s an economically enfeebled Russia needed help from abroad. Unless the oil price unexpectedly collapses, no such leverage will be available in the near future. Politically, too, pressure from outside is likely to rebound. With the Kremlin once again firmly in control, Russia will almost certainly change only from within—or not at all.

This is not to say that the West has no influence. Mr Putin, like other Russian leaders before him, is sensitive to outside criticism. The Kremlin was this week in high dudgeon because senior Western officials attended a conference in Moscow organised by some of Mr Putin's few remaining opponents. The Russians are also neurotically keen to curtail the activities of non-governmental organisations.

Here lie some clues to what Western leaders should and should not do about Russia. They should speak out against Mr Putin's moves away from democracy, against his policy in Chechnya, or against Russian use of energy to bully its neighbours (many west European countries have been too timid in their criticism). They should continue to help NGOs and others who are trying to establish a civil society that may, one day, provide an alternative to the dead weight of the Kremlin. As the next presidential election of March 2008 nears, they should insist that any move to amend the constitution so that Mr Putin can run again is unacceptable—and would result in Russia's expulsion from the G8. They should do what they can to press for free and fair elections, even if the Kremlin's chosen candidate seems sure to win.

There are things they should not do, as well. Russia's membership of the G8 may be an embarrassment, since it is supposedly a club of democracies. But to throw it out now would only push Russia farther out of the West's orbit, and risk making it even less helpful over such issues as curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions. Equally, Americans and Europeans are right to assist countries in Russia's near-abroad that want to escape its baleful influence. But to push for Ukraine or Georgia, say, to join NATO before they are ready would serve no good purpose. Above all, Western leaders should avoid giving the impression that what they really object to is not an illiberal and undemocratic Russia but a strong and rich one—a paranoia that even Russia's few remaining liberals all too often share.

Sixty years ago a wise American diplomat, George Kennan, proposed that the right policy of the West towards an expansionary Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin should be “containment”. Russia today is clearly no such threat. But it still matters, and the West should care about where it is going. The best policy now is no longer containment but “wary engagement”.
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http://www.economist.com/node/7164828

- 2006

 
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Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy


Trump isn’t the end of Russia’s information war against America. They are just getting started.

In spring 2014, a funny story crossed our social media feeds. A petition on whitehouse.gov called for “sending Alaska back to Russia,” and it quickly amassed tens of thousands of signatures. The media ran a number of amused stories on the event, and it was quickly forgotten.

The petition seemed odd to us, and so we looked at which accounts were promoting it on social media. We discovered that thousands of Russian-language bots had been repetitively tweeting links to the petition for weeks before it caught journalists’ attention.

Those were the days. Now, instead of pranking petitions, Russian influence networks online are interfering with the 2016 U.S. election. Many people, especially Hillary Clinton supporters, believe that Russia is actively trying to put Donald Trump in the White House.

And the evidence is compelling. A range of activities speaks to a Russian connection: the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign officials, hacks surrounding voter rolls and possibly election machines, Putin’s overt praise for Trump, and the curious Kremlin connections of Trump campaign operatives Paul Manafort and Carter Page.

But most observers are missing the point. Russia is helping Trump’s campaign, yes, but it is not doing so solely or even necessarily with the goal of placing him in the Oval Office. Rather, these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy. Unfortunately, that effort is going very well indeed.

Russia’s desire to sow distrust in the American system of government is not new. It’s a goal Moscow has pursued since the beginning of the Cold War. Its strategy is not new, either. Soviet-era “active measures” called for using the “force of politics” rather than the “politics of force” to erode American democracy from within.  What is new is the methods Russia uses to achieve these objectives.

We have been tracking Russian online information operations since 2014, when our interest was piqued by strange activity we observed studying online dimensions of jihadism and the Syrian civil war. When experts published content criticizing the Russian-supported Bashar al Assad regime, organized hordes of trolls would appear to attack the authors on Twitter and Facebook. Examining the troll social networks revealed dozens of accounts presenting themselves as attractive young women eager to talk politics with Americans, including some working in the national security sector. These “honeypot” social media accounts were linked to other accounts used by the Syrian Electronic Army hacker operation. All three elements were working together: the trolls to sow doubt, the honeypots to win trust, and the hackers (we believe) to exploit clicks on dubious links sent out by the first two.

...

The Russian Social Media Approach: Soviet Union’s “Active Measures” On Steroids

The United States and its European allies have always placed state-to-state relations at the forefront of their international strategies. The Soviet system’s effort to undermine those relations during the Cold War, updated now by modern Russia, were known as “active measures.”

A June 1992 U.S. Information Agency report on the strategy explained:


It was often very difficult for Westerners to comprehend this fundamentally different Soviet approach to international relations and, as a result, the centrality to the Soviets (now Russians) of active measures operations was gravely underappreciated.



Active measures employ a three-pronged approach that attempts to shape foreign policy by directing influence in the following ways: state-to-people, people-to-people, and state-to-state. More often than not, active measures sidestep traditional diplomacy and normal state-to-state relationships. The Russian government today employs the state-to-people and people-to-people approaches on social media and the internet, directly engaging U.S. and European audiences ripe for an anti-American message, including the alt-right and more traditional right-wing and fascist parties. It also targets left-wing audiences, but currently at a lower tempo.

Until recently, Western governments focused on state-to-state negotiations with Putin’s regime largely missed Russian state-to-people social media approaches. Russia’s social media campaigns seek five complementary objectives to strengthen Russia’s position over Western democracies:

  • Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance;
  • Foment and exacerbate divisive political fractures;
  • Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and democratic institutions;
  • Popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations;
  • Create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction
In sum, these influence efforts weaken Russia’s enemies without the use of force. Russian social media propaganda pushes four general themes to advance Moscow’s influence objectives and connect with foreign populations they target.

Political messages are designed to tarnish democratic leaders or undermine institutions. Examples include allegations of voter fraud, election rigging, and political corruption. Leaders can be specifically targeted, for instance by promoting unsubstantiated claims about Hillary Clinton’s health, or more obviously by leaking hacked emails.

Financial propaganda weakens citizen and investor confidence in foreign markets and posits the failure of capitalist economies. Stoking fears over the national debt, attacking institutions such as the Federal Reserve, and attempts to discredit Western financial experts and business leaders are all part of this arsenal.

...
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http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-russia-is-trying-to-destroy-our-democracy/

 
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Pakistan approves Russia's request to use strategic Gwadar Port


Pakistan has approved Russia's request to use the strategic Gwadar Port for its exports, signalling a new alignment in bilateral relations after decades' of sour ties during the Cold War era. Following Iran and Turkmenistan, Russia has also decided to use the Gwadar Port for trade to have an access to warm waters, a top Pakistani official privy to the development was quoted as saying by Geo News.

"On top of it, Russia also wants to join the USD 46 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor to reap the maximum dividends. In addition, Russia aspires to develop strategic defence ties with Pakistan," the daily said.

Pakistan decided to broaden its foreign policy options after its relations with the US deteriorated following secret CIA raid in Abbottabad that killed al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

Its relations with the US were soured recently when US lawmakers blocked funds for the sale of eight Lockheed Martin Corporation’s F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan. Pakistan is eager to improve its ties with Russia to diversify its defence purchase options in the event of any stalemate in ties with Washington, experts say.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who is on a two-day visit to Turkmenistan, said that he welcomed the Russia's interest in becoming part of the CPEC and maintained that Pakistan would welcome participation of any country in the gigantic project. He told journalists that many countries wanted to join CPEC as half of the world would benefit from the project.

China and Pakistan are building the nearly 3,000-km-long economic corridor linking Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea with Muslim-majority Xinjiang province to improve connectivity between the two countries.

The move would open up a new and cheaper cargo route for transporting oil to China as well as export of Chinese goods to the Middle East and Africa. Sharif also announced building railways, road and fiber-optic along with Turkmenistan-Pakistan-Afghanistan-India (TAPI) 1,680-kilometer-long gas pipeline to enhance connectivity between South Asia and Central Asia.

He said that TAPI would supply 400 billion cubic feet gas to the three member states in which Pakistan’s share would be three hundred billion feet of gas. Sharif said TAPI, which is the largest gas project in the region, would help meet the gas demand in Pakistan. In the Turkmen capital, Sharif announced today Pakistan's decision to join the Ashgabat Agreement and the Lapis Lazuli Corridor.

The Ashgabat agreement is a transport agreement between Oman, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and seeks to create an international transport and transit corridor. The Lapis Lazuli Corridor seeks to foster transit and trade cooperation between Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey by reducing barriers facing transit trade.
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http://defence.pk/threads/pakistan-approves-russias-request-to-use-strategic-gwadar-port.463323/#ixzz4RMp1irGM
 
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Men who carved up USSR attack ‘imperialist’ Putin


Huddled in a hunting lodge in a forest in Belarus on a winter’s day 25 years ago, six men met in secret and signed a deal to break up the Soviet Union.

Their hope was to bring down the curtain on an already stumbling superpower without bloodshed or total collapse and lay the groundwork for future fraternity between 15 republics that — for better or worse — had spent decades in each other’s embrace.

A quarter of a century on, three signatories of the Belavezha Accords have emerged as critics of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its war in eastern Ukraine. They say that Moscow’s intervention breaks the spirit of their agreement and that Russia is showing imperial tendencies amid nostalgia for the Soviet period.

“The Kremlin has started really missing the empire,” Stanislav Shushkevich, the former president of Belarus, said. “Russia’s leadership wasn’t running the country in such a way as to improve people’s lives, so its authority was falling and they decided a small victory was needed to make it rise again. The result was Russian aggression against Ukraine.”

Mr Shushkevich initiated the meeting in Belavezha forest in southwest Belarus on December 8, 1991 by inviting his counterparts from Russia and Ukraine, Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, was kept in the dark although it has been claimed that the KGB learnt of the clandestine meeting and had the lodge surrounded.

The initial plan had been to discuss the economic woes of the Soviet behemoth. That summer, the state had begun to disintegrate after hardliners launched an abortive coup in an attempt to oust Mr Gorbachev and reverse perestroika.

“I wanted to get help from Yeltsin with oil and gas so that our people didn’t go cold that winter,” Mr Shushkevich, 81, said “Soon a wider political discussion broke out. We realised that after the August putsch the country had become ungovernable and Gorbachev was doing nothing to bring real unity. We had to do what could not be left undone — to announce the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and to let the world know what we were going to do with our nuclear weapons, our borders, our peoples, our debts.”

After hours of talks the director of the nature reserve in which the lodge was situated called in his secretary, who nervously typed up the document. The three presidents signed along with one other person from each of their republics. The accords announced the end of the Soviet Union, which would disappear at the end of the month, when Mr Gorbachev resigned. They also created the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose alliance based on the British Commonwealth. That body has since faded into irrelevance: the Baltic countries refused to join, Georgia left in 2008 after its war with Russia over the South Ossetia region, and Ukraine stepped back from most participation two years ago.

Among the signatories to the accords was Russia’s state secretary, Gennady Burbulis, an ally of Mr Yeltsin.

“The break-up of your motherland is a tragedy, doubly so when you take part in it,” Mr Burbulis said in an interview this week. “It was a colossal responsibility for us and I’m glad we did not shy from it. Knowing that the state that was ending was built on violence and repression, it was an optimistic tragedy. And it happened peacefully.”

Mr Burbulis, 71, is also troubled. He believes that “everything that happened in Crimea and Ukraine radically contradicts the spirit and the essence of the Belavezha consensus”. The annexation was “a mistake” and demonstrated the lack of sensible dialogue between ex-Soviet states, he said.

“The empire died but imperial attitudes and mentality, complex spiritual-cultural codes, habits – they all remained,” he said. “Sometimes in the new story of Russia they die down and sometimes they flare up. And now we are in a moment of these phantom imperial pains.”

Mr Kravchuk, 82, recently urged the US and the EU to maintain sanctions on Moscow over the Ukraine crisis.

In 2005 President Putin said that the fall of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Results of an opinion poll by Levada-Center, a research organisation in Moscow, published on Monday, showed that the proportion of respondents who regretted its demise was 56 per cent, up from 49 per cent in 2012.

The economic downturn in Russia was partly to blame, said Mr Burbulis.

Mr Shushkevich added: “The Kremlin is pushing propaganda of Soviet values, getting people used to the idea of struggling for the motherland even when you’re cold and hungry. People don’t remember now about the murdered innocent people, they remember that it was a big country and we all sang happy songs.”
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http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/men-who-carved-up-ussr-attack-imperialist-putin-nr2fkrr7b

 
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Sobchak knows well the toll of a Kremlin campaign of torment. She remembers how Boris Yeltsin turned against her father, Anatoli Sobchak, a law professor who rose to prominence amid the Soviet ruins with the bearing and look — tall, lean, erudite-sounding — of a Western European politician. He seemed the opposite of Yeltsin, the mercurial bear. In August 1991, during the coup that sought to topple Gorbachev, Sobchak rallied the crowds in Leningrad, where he was the mayor. Putin, formerly a middling lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B. who had been given his first job in politics by Sobchak the year before, rarely left Sobchak’s side in those tense hours. They seemed an odd pair, but Sobchak, who taught Putin in the 1970s, shrugged off his aide’s K.G.B. past, even vowing to make him an ambassador. After the coup was put down, Putin became a top deputy, in charge of foreign commercial relations in a city besieged by European suitors.

By 1995, Yeltsin, who ascended to power after the coup, was enfeebled and beleaguered, facing long odds of re-election. He called in Sobchak to ask if he should run. Sobchak recommended that, given Yeltsin’s health, a successor be found. It was a loyalty test, and Sobchak failed. In the months that followed, a sordid string of accusations against Sobchak appeared in the press. Whether a Kremlin smear campaign, as Sobchak maintained, or a series of legitimate state inquiries, the toll became real. In 1996, as Sobchak ran for re-election in the mayoral race, a Kremlin proxy and former Sobchak deputy defeated him by less than 2 percent of the vote. With an indictment looming, Sobchak was hospitalized in 1997 for heart trouble. A secret rescue ensued; a charter plane from Finland spirited him away to Paris. Whatever Yeltsin thought of Sobchak, he admired Putin’s loyalty to him, and in his memoirs he credited Putin with orchestrating the escape.

In the summer of 1999, with Putin atop the security services, Sobchak came home. That fall, Yeltsin named Putin his acting prime minister, then, in a New Year’s Eve surprise, turned the Kremlin over to him. When Putin faced his first election, for president, he named Sobchak a campaign representative. The charges against him, miraculously, were dropped. Then, in February 2000, Sobchak died of a heart attack while stumping for Putin in Kaliningrad. “We used to talk a lot,” Putin said. “He was a friend and mentor to me.”

Muckrakers raised the specter of poisoning, but the coroner ruled it a natural death. To his daughter, the cause of death was obvious: the stress caused by the Kremlin’s persecution. Days before he died, Sobchak told Russian television that Yeltsin had given the original command, “Sic him!” At the funeral, Putin cried. “They put the screws to Sobchak for four years,” he said, “and then hounded the poor guy all over Europe.”

...
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/ksenia-sobchak-the-stiletto-in-putins-side.html

 
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