Source: https://www.dianaswednesday.com/2019/03/russia-in-2017/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 02:11:09+00:00

Document:
(NPR) Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a new law which will allow the punishment of individuals and online media for spreading what Russia calls “fake news” and information which “disrespects” the state.
(New York Review of Books) On Thursday, a Moscow court denied an appeal by defense lawyers for American financier Michael Calvey requesting his release on bail pending a mid-April hearing on serious fraud charges that carry a possible sentence of up to ten years’ imprisonment. Calvey, the founder of Baring Vostok Capital Partners, one of Russia’s oldest and largest investment firms, was arrested on February 14, along with five colleagues, for allegedly defrauding Vostochny Bank, in which Baring Vostok has a majority stake (52.5 percent), of 2.5 billion rubles (or about $38 million).
The very day of Calvey’s stunning arrest, the Russian Investment Forum, a platform for promoting Russia’s business and investment opportunities, was holding its annual meeting, in Sochi, attended by world business leaders and top Russian officials. Just days later, in his 2019 state of the nation speech, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, declared that “we must rid the system of everything that restricts freedom of enterprise and business initiative. Honest businesses should not face the risk of criminal or administrative prosecution.” Just as incongruent was Putin’s statement that “we need to strictly limit the grounds for extending the term of detention during the investigation of so-called economic criminal cases.
(Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin calls improving the Russian navy’s combat capabilities a priority.
The unfinished husks of three guided-missile frigates that have languished for three years at a Baltic shipyard show that is easier said than done.
Earmarked for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the frigates fell victim to sanctions imposed by Ukraine in 2014 after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, prompting Kiev to ban the sale of the Ukrainian-made engines needed to propel them.
With Moscow unable to quickly build replacement engines for the Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates, construction stopped. Russia is now cutting its losses and selling the three ships to India without engines.
The navy’s problems stem largely, but not exclusively, from the Ukrainian sanctions. There are also problems, for different reasons, with new equipment for the army and air force.
The scenario of Russia trying to force a land corridor to Crimea or Transnistria is extremely unlikely at the moment. At the same time, such developments cannot be completely excluded, Senior Eurasia Analyst at Stratfor Eugene Chausovsky said in an interview with the Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian Service.
… it would be a grueling positional war against Ukrainian forces and, perhaps, forces supported by NATO, the expert says. In case Russia tries to break through a wider corridor to Transnistria, Moscow would need to deploy hundreds of thousands of soldiers or even more. For Russia, it would be a very significant military involvement, according to Chausovsky.
(Atlantic Council) Four factors make further tensions between Russia and Ukraine along the shores of Crimea and mainland southern Ukraine probable. They include the West’s lack of reaction to the recent tensions, the absence of international organizations in the Azov Sea, the functionality of the Kerch Strait Bridge and its symbolism for Putin, and the unresolved issue of supplying fresh water to occupied Crimea. All four of these factors distinguish this area from the Donbas, where the OSCE is heavily present, a more or less stable front line has emerged, and the conflict has become partially frozen. Also, the EU’s most serious sanctions introduced in the summer of 2014 have later been linked to the fulfillment of the Minsk Agreements concerning exclusively the Donbas. … Will Ukraine and its Western partners be willing to provide some plausible stability guarantees and security mechanisms to those businesses engaged in the region? If not, Ukraine as well as various national and foreign companies should start preparing for a gradual decline of Mariupol and Berdyansk as well as for the grave social and political consequences this will have for southern Ukraine and eventually the whole country.
American Intelligence believes that a large-scale attack by Russia against Ukraine in 2019 is “operationally possible but not likely,” stated Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats during a hearing at the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Voice of America reported.
In December 2018, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution called “The problem of militarization of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol (Ukraine), as well as parts of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.” Ukraine initiated the project and represented it on behalf of the group of States.
The document urges Russia to stop hindering freedom of navigation in the Black and Azov Seas and Kerch Strait and to stop persecution of merchant vessels. It also condemns the illegal construction of the bridge across the Kerch Strait.
(Window on Eurasia) – Only one Russia in three – 33.4 percent – trusts Putin, according to a new VTsIOM poll, his lowest rating ever (censoru.net/32705-istoricheskij-minimum.html) and one that is prompting Russians to discuss his “fatal mistakes,” what his sudden departure from power might mean, and whether it would change the system or leave it largely in place.
Political fragmentation, fights between the elites and a total absence of a positive domestic agenda. Political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya signals three key domestic risks of the year 2019 for those in power.
2018 was a breakthrough year for Russia. Despite the predictable presidential elections and Vladimir Putin’s easy win, the relative stability of global oil prices and the absence of critical consequences of sanctions, there is a sense that the country is on the brink of profound internal changes. Looking ahead, there are three key domestic political risks that the country will face in the near to medium term.
Mark Galeotti: So who ‘won’ 2018?
Of course, Russia is the aggressor in the current political conflict. It stole Crimea, stirred up a toxic mix of rebellion and proxy war in the Donbas, unleashed its spies, trolls and assassins in the West, encouraged all manner of populists, racists and demagogues, and covered up atrocities such as the rebels’ downing of the MH17 airliner. Most recently, it has begun treating the Azov Sea as its private lake, strangling the port trade of Mariupol and Berdyansk and shooting up Ukrainian ships that tried to run the gauntlet of the Kerch straits.
It is not, however, engaged in an attempt to reconstitute the USSR (or the tsarist empire), trying to shatter the whole global order, hell-bent on territorial expansion (beyond Crimea), or even that effective in magnifying the very real internal tensions and divisions of the West. The Kremlin is driven by insecurity, isolation and the belief that it faces a terrifyingly competent and powerful enemy determined to see it humbled.
Russian and Ukrainian naval forces have clashed in the Black Sea. Though the region lies on NATO’s weak southeastern flank, the alliance is unlikely to intervene in an area where Russian and Western interests collide.
In Cold War times, Bulgaria — then a staunch ally of the Soviet Union — and Romania were members of the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Today, however, a new geopolitical situation presents itself, as both Bulgaria and Romania have switched sides and joined NATO. Their Black Sea coasts, meanwhile, are NATO’s long-ignored weak spot.
Romania has long warned not to allow Russia to militarily dominate the Black Sea. As such, Bucharest has emphatically urged the deployment of NATO forces in the region, including that of a multinational naval fleet.
Sofia, in turn, rejected calls to deploy NATO forces in the region — after all, Bulgaria still maintains close cultural ties to Russia. This makes Bulgaria NATO’s weakest link.
Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko of orchestrating a naval “provocation” in the Black Sea at the weekend in order to boost his flagging popularity ratings before an election next year. European Union leaders meeting for a summit in Brussels in December are expected to extend for another year the bloc’s main economic sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.
(Reuters Commentary) When Vladimir Putin opened a new bridge linking Crimea to the rest of Russia across the Azov Sea in May, Russian officials said it was intended to integrate the disputed peninsula – seized by Moscow from Ukraine in 2014 – into Russia’s transport infrastructure. By limiting ships transiting the Kerch Strait beneath the giant central span of the bridge, however, it also gave the Kremlin the ability to control maritime access to an area of water roughly the size of Switzerland.
Russia has now reopened the strait, but the clash was another demonstration of Moscow’s ever-mounting appetite to use unorthodox, partially nonmilitary and sometimes nonlethal techniques to redraw the geopolitical map.
The mounting Azov Sea crisis will now feed into this week’s G20 summit in Argentina, which both Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump are scheduled to attend.
As in the South China Sea, where Beijing has also used giant engineering works to reclaim islands and build military bases in disputed waters, the Azov Sea conflict has been long building in plain sight.
(BBC) After an hour in custody he was released because the warrant was no longer valid, Spanish police said.
Mr Browder is widely credited with the creation of the Magnitsky Act – a 2012 range of sanctions from the United States on top Russian officials accused of corruption.
The act was named after his former lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered an alleged tax fraud in Moscow – and died in a Russian prison in 2009.
(New York Magazine) On Tuesday, Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, was reportedly shot and killed in Kiev. On Wednesday, at a news conference organized to give reporters updates about his assassination, he showed up alive. The 41-year-old appeared Wednesday with the head of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) to admit that he faked death in order to foil a very real plot to murder him. Vasily Gritsak, chief of the SBU, said investigators have nabbed a Ukrainian man who was recruited by Russia’s security service and paid $40,000 to kill Babchenko.
Comment from a European observer: An absolutely brilliant operation perfectly executed. The object of the planned hit lives and the perpetrators are neutralised. I bet that Putin is not amused, however Lavrov was for once not lying when he assured that the Russians did not kill Babchenko. Putin hates to loose face, so expect an encore.
(WaPost) Russia banned a popular messaging app, threatened to pirate U.S. goods, and claimed Great Britain had orchestrated a staged chemical attack in Syria — all on the same day.
Friday’s rapid-fire series of events underscored the intensity with which Russia’s estrangement from the West and its rollback of domestic freedoms continues to play out. Analysts warned that rock bottom is still far off.
Pro-Kremlin politicians blamed the United States and its allies for the rising tensions and said that the West should stay out Russia’s domestic affairs. Even opponents of the regime said that President Trump’s tweet this week telling Russia to prepare for a missile strike on its ally Syria didn’t help reduce tensions, and warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin has many ways of increasing them even more.
(Open Canada) If ever a situation called for diplomacy, this is it. Effective “diplomacy” does not mean avoiding confronting facts in order to appease an adversary. It means deploying them in private to detoxify a crisis. Once it is communicated that Putin cannot continue as he has without real damage to Russia’s interests, there needs to be agreement for new rules and a roadmap for going forward, bearing in mind new technologies have new vulnerabilities to novel attacks.
The Atlantic: Russian Repercussions: The Trump administration expelled 60 Russian diplomats on Monday in response to the poisoning of a Russian former spy and his daughter on British soil, which many in the international community have accused Russia of perpetrating. (The Kremlin has denied the country’s involvement.) The expulsion, which marks a turning point in President Trump’s stance on Russia, is part of a unified international response that could seriously undermine Russian intelligence networks—but it may take different strategies to change the Kremlin’s ways.
(European Council on Foreign Relations) The events of recent years have shattered quite a few foreign policy assumptions in Moscow. The Russian leadership did not expect the West to introduce strong sanctions after Crimea and to stick with them for years. Then, it expected China to compensate for lost Western investments. It expected Hillary Clinton to win the US elections and become a tough anti-Russian president. Then it expected Donald Trump to become a soft Russia-friendly president. It expected the EU to collapse under the weight of its own in internal contradictions at the wake of Brexit. It expected Ukraine to collapse under the weight of its unreformed economy, corruption and unruly political passions. It expected the settlement in Syria to be a lot easier. Alas, the world turned out to be more unpredictable and complicated than many Russians thought.
These failed predictions have occasioned a lively foreign policy debate in Moscow – on the meaning of Donald Trump, on the fate of the European Union, on what to expect from China, on what next in Syria and Donbas.
… these questions [re poisoning of Sergei Skripal ]are now wedded to the question about the course of Russia’s foreign policy. Just two weeks ago, the various factions in Russia assumed that after the elections, Putin would choose his course and then we will know. Now, whoever committed the crime seems to have chosen for him.
(The Guardian) Putin’s victory, with a 76.7% share of the vote, comes amid high tensions between London and Moscow over the nerve agent attack in Salisbury. Investigators from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons arrived in the UK on Monday to begin testing samples from the 4 March attack, which Putin has denied was Moscow’s doing.
(Reuters) Putin’s victory, which comes at a time when his relations with the West are on a hostile trajectory, will extend his political dominance of Russia by six years to 2024. That will make him the longest-serving ruler since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and has raised Western fears of spiralling confrontation.
(Globe & Mail) Britain has escalated its growing feud with Russia, kicking out 23 diplomats and raising tensions to levels not seen in decades. Canada and other Western allies offered little more than words of support and Russia hit back with a vow to retaliate.
“Russia will not respond to London’s ultimatum until it receives samples of the chemical substance,” an embassy spokesman told Reuters.
(The Guardian) Nikolai Glushkov, 68, was discovered by his family and friends late on Monday night. The cause of death is not yet clear. One of his friends, the newspaper editor Damian Kudryavtsev, posted the news on his Facebook page.
(CNN) Russian President Vladimir Putin will win the election — that’s a given. He maintains the overwhelming support of the Russian people, while the state has kicked his main opponent out of the race and sanctioned other candidates in the running.
The outcome is so deeply etched in stone, even Putin himself seems bored. His campaign has been woefully lackluster.
Putin’s road from Damascus: After the “victory,” what?
What is obvious is that the maturing partnership with and dependency on Iran—caused by the intervention in Syria—is not helpful at all for developing the Saudi connection.
(Brookings) 2018 will mark the seventh year of civil war in Syria, with around 400,000 Syrians dead and over 12 million displaced. Although the so-called Islamic State has been militarily defeated in Raqqa, no one party is in control of the country—and there is hardly much hope that the tragedy will end soon.
It was somewhat incongruous, therefore, that Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to declare Russian victory in Syria last month—Russia hasn’t even met the very narrow definition of “victory” as ensuring the survival of the Bashar Assad regime. He ordered the withdrawal of the main part of Russia’s military grouping, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported that 38 planes and some support units had returned home. The thing is: This amounts to less than half of total Russian forces there, not even counting the private contractors. The planned expansion of Russian air and naval bases demands more troops for keeping them secure, and it is necessary to increase the number of Russian advisers if the Syrian army aims at launching new offensives, for instance against the Idlib enclave.
Putin’s ability and readiness to talk with all parties to the multiple Middle Eastern conflicts—from Hamas to the Syrian Kurds, and from the Saudi royals to the Libyan warlords—has been a major asset for his personal policy in the region. The intervention in Syria was supposed to reinforce these communications, granting Moscow a prominent regional position for advancing its interests. Now, however, it has to decide how and whether the “brotherhood in arms” with Iran aligns with these interests. The usual trick of telling every dialogue partner what he (in this male-dominated milieu) wants to hear cannot help in making this decision.
The Putin government’s unpredictable and provocative behavior may appear threatening, but it really amounts to an effort to compensate for the Kremlin’s inability to project real power.
(Project Syndicate) The danger now is that valid concerns about Russian interference in the US political system will give way to conspiracy theories, as in past Red Scares.
All of these claims are focused strictly on US politics, rather than on larger geopolitical considerations. But, given that Soviet communism collapsed more than a quarter-century ago, it is worth asking what threat the Kremlin really poses to the US.
… we should remember that Russia is dangerous only so far as Western societies allow it to sow confusion in their midst.
Russia’s smaller neighbors, not least Georgia and Ukraine, have real reasons to regard Russia as a threat to their sovereignty. Britain, the US, and Germany do not. Russia’s GDP is half that of California. Its defense budget is one-tenth that of the US. And the channels through which it exports its propaganda, RT and Sputnik, are marginal media outlets that few in the West watch.
Moreover, Putin’s Russia, like Xi’s China, has a paucity of strategic allies. At the United Nations General Assembly in March 2014, only 11 small countries – including Armenia, North Korea, and Zimbabwe – opposed a resolution condemning Russia’s seizure of Crimea. That is a far cry from the influence the Soviet Union once enjoyed.
… If the US and European governments really want to demonstrate that their version of Western culture is the better one, they need to devise policies for reaching out to Russia’s urban middle class. The message should be that the West’s problem is with Putin’s regime, not Russia itself.
(Windows on Eurasia) The failure of Vladimir Putin to get a sit down with Donald Trump represents “the agony of [the Kremlin’s] ‘Putin is Ours’ special operation” and is leading some in Putin’s entourage to think about some kind of “hybrid capitulation” that both the US and the Russian people will accept, according to Andrey Piontkovsky.
(NYT op-ed) The common sense in Moscow foreign policy circles today is that Russia can regain its great power status only by confronting the United States, not by cooperating with it. Speaking two weeks ago at the Valdai International Discussion Club, President Vladimir Putin declared that post-Communist Russia’s gravest mistake was “putting its trust in the West.” In the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin’s Russia wanted to imitate the West, its values and institutions; today Moscow is focused on mirroring Western policies with respect to Russia, doing to the West what Russians believe the West is doing to them.
(Forbes) The Russian government has a balancing act to do: they want to show that crypto-currencies will not be tolerated as a money laundering unit, on one hand, while on the other hand want to show they are rolling out the welcome mat for bitcoin and similar technologies. It’s the latter, or risk losing out on major, global, life changing opportunities going forward.
According to Ministry of Internal Affairs press officer, Irina Volk, the three defendants illegally cashed the millions in bitcoin and are being brought up on charges of “Illegal Banking”. The exchange came to light after investigators found an unusual amount of activity in bank accounts stemming from 300 bank cards and sim cards used to store the digital currency. The money was being shifted into different accounts owned by family members, prosecutors believe.
(NYT) The police detained the architect of the national protests, the Kremlin critic Aleksei A. Navalny, as he emerged from his apartment building to attend a rally that he had forced into the center of Moscow. There were scattered reports of hundreds of detentions elsewhere, too.
The protests were the broadest antigovernment outpouring in Russia in years, with people in more cities heeding Mr. Navalny’s call than his last series of demonstrations in March.
(The New Yorker) Crimea, … [is] connected to Ukraine by a narrow isthmus to the north but is separated from Russia by a stretch of water called the Kerch Strait. Ukraine, to which Crimea had belonged, viewed Russia’s occupation as illegal, and had sealed off access to the peninsula, closing the single road to commercial traffic and shutting down the rail lines.
In response, Putin convened a council of engineers, construction experts, and government officials to look at options for connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland. They considered more than ninety possibilities, including an undersea tunnel, before deciding to build a bridge.
… the bridge would span nearly twelve miles, making it the longest in the country, and would cost more than three billion dollars. When completed, it would symbolically cement Russia’s control over the territory and demonstrate the country’s reëmergence as a geopolitical power willing to challenge the post-Cold War order.
The bridge would be a demanding and technically complex project. … in January, 2015, the Russian government announced that Arkady Rotenberg, a sixty-three-year-old magnate with interests in construction, banking, transportation, and energy, would direct the project. In retrospect, the choice was obvious, almost inevitable.
(Project Syndicate) The adversarial relationship between Russia and the West began over a century before the Cold War. Back in the 1820s, Russia emerged not only as the principal victor in the Napoleonic wars, but also as the most conservative – or, more accurately, reactionary – force in Europe. Under Czars Alexander I and Nicholas I, it stood ready to counter any sign of a renewal of the “revolutionary plague” infecting the continent’s monarchies.
By 1830, the rift between the “Holy Alliance” countries (Russia, Prussia, and Austria) and the rest of Europe was deep. And, when Russia suppressed two “color” revolutions – the Polish revolt of 1830-1831 and the Hungarian revolution of 1848-1849 – it became even deeper. Both interventions incited a massive surge in anti-Russian sentiment across the continent.
What most people think of as the Cold War began nearly a century later, after World War II, when the Soviet Union, seeking to expand its sphere of influence, installed communist governments from Poland to Bulgaria. In 1946, it began to destabilize Greece, and at the Council of Foreign Ministers, established under the 1945 Potsdam Agreement, the Kremlin demanded control over Tripolitania in North Africa – a demand that Western leaders rejected. The next year, the Soviet Union prevented its satellite states from participating in the Marshall Plan, aimed at restoring Europe’s economy after the war. Joseph Stalin subsequently imposed a blockade on West Berlin, in a failed effort to enforce compliance with that decision.
The Cold War brought the Soviet Union and the US to the brink of war over Korea in the 1950s and Cuba in 1962. But, as in the nineteenth century, the confrontation was mostly about control of Europe, exemplified in the Soviet interventions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. … The war in Afghanistan in the 1980s finally exhausted the Soviet Union’s military and economic potential, impelling it to abandon its satellites in Europe and finally to collapse.
Today’s cold war has much in common with the two previous confrontations. For one thing, as was the case in the 1820s and late 1940s, Russia is aggressively rejecting Western values and opposing the US. Though no one is threatening to attack Russia, anti-Western hysteria is being used once again to divert attention from domestic economic challenges and consolidate support for the country’s leader.
(Global Markets) Although EBRD’s decision not to lift its ban on new loans to Russia was expected, the country’s reaction was not: its economy minister attacked the bank as a tool of foreign policy and claimed that its finances did not deserve a triple-A rating.
In many respects, Iran and Russia aren’t natural allies. There’s much that divides them, not least hundreds of years of historical rivalry. Both countries are energy exporters vying for similar markets. Both governments harbor larger ambitions of geopolitical dominance in the Middle East. And, of course, there are always going to be limits to any alliance between the Islamic republic and a Russian leadership partially animated by a brand of Christian nationalism.
But Russia and Iran need each other in Syria to buttress Assad. “The glue is their common enmity toward the United States” and Washington’s imperatives in the region, Vatanka said.
“At the moment, it is going to be difficult to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran,” wrote Anna Borshchevskaya of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in February. “Too many interests hold them together.” And after the events of the past few days, those bonds seem even harder to unwind.
Repressive policies of Kyrgyzstan and other former-Soviet central Asian republics have led to radicalisation of some Muslims there.
The latest bombing in St Petersburg comes after two decades of terrorist attacks in Russia.
By Leonid Ragozin, freelance journalist based in Moscow.
(Al Jazeera) Putin could have gone into history as Russia’s most successful leader in two centuries, but he chose to stay in power and preside over an economic recession that was caused by an oil price slump in 2014 and the country’s international isolation over its intervention in Ukraine.
The last thing he needed in those circumstances was another terror attack in a large urban centre. But it happened in his native city, and on the day of his visit. There is hardly a way for him now to pull the old trick of consolidating in the face of perceived adversity – the way he did in 1999 or when he seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. The best he can do is to mitigate the negative PR impact and pray there are no new calamities in store.
(BBC) Eleven people have been killed and 45 injured in an explosion between two underground stations in St Petersburg.
Navalny may not be able to beat Putin in next year’s presidential election, but he is inspiring a new kind of thinking in Russia.
(Open Canada) Putin may not be losing sleep now because Navalny’s growing popularity makes him a threat for the presidency in 2018. But the president may have tremors of worry at 3 a.m. about all those kids who aren’t buying the contrived and staged official narrative.
The odds are not huge that there will be political changes in Russia in the next few years. But the odds are pretty good that as younger Russians move up, they won’t buy any longer the condition of political infantilism to which they have been assigned by Citizen Putin.
(The Economist) VLADIMIR PUTIN won his first presidential election on March 26th 2000. Exactly 17 years later, tens of thousands of Russians across the country came out to protest the corruption that has come to define his tenure. The demonstrations, the most significant challenge to Mr Putin’s regime since 2012, began on Russia’s Pacific coast, where hundreds marched through Vladivostok. … Mr Navalny’s selection of Mr Medvedev as a target was a strategic calculation. Mr Putin remains popular, and even Russians who dislike him would hesitate to protest against him directly. Mr Medvedev is widely disliked and seen as weak. Many Russians hold him responsible for the weak economy. Over the past three years, as the oil-price collapse and Western sanctions tipped Russia’s economy from stagnation into recession, consumers have been hit hard. Though GDP growth has turned a corner and is projected to return to positive territory again this year, retail sales continue to fall and inequality is growing. Nonetheless, the protests were not restricted to Mr Medvedev; they were a statement of general dissatisfaction with the system.
(Politico Eu.) The show of force by anti-corruption protesters came after Navalny’s foundation published a video accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of having acquired a number of mansions and yachts through illicit means. In the video, which has been viewed nearly 12 million times, Medvedev is accused of having used charities and NGOs to collect large bribes, which were then allegedly used to buy acquire the assets.
(NYT) The Kremlin plans to sit out the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
Never mind that the upheavals of 1917 transformed the country and the world, abruptly ending the long rule of the czars, ushering in the Communist era and spawning an ideological confrontation with the West that still resonates.
The official reason proffered for ignoring the event is that Russia remains too divided over the consequences of that fateful year.
The more likely explanation, some Kremlin officials, historians and other analysts say, is that President Vladimir V. Putin loathes the very idea of revolution, not to mention the thought of Russians dancing in the streets to celebrate the overthrow of any ruler. Moreover, 1917 smudges the Kremlin’s version of Russian history as a long, unified march to greatness, meant to instill a sense of national pride and purpose.
One hundred years after the Russian Revolution, an emboldened Putin regime is embracing its czarist past. Could 1917 happen again?
(Maclean’s) St. Petersburg, whose paradisiacal pastel facades often hide musty decay within, is one of Europe’s greatest treasuries of art and architecture. And now, what began here a century ago—the abdication and murder of a God-empowered czar and the slaughter of his children; the red-flagged overthrow of the czar’s overthrowers; decades of civil war and a century of siege, invasion, repression, disintegration and upheaval—is returning to haunt the living and the consecrated dead.
It has been precisely 100 years since Nicholas II, czar of all the Russias, abdicated from the throne that his ancestors had held for three centuries, his palaces surrounded by citizens crying “There is no bread!” Condemned in Soviet textbooks as “Nicholas the Bloody,” a bumbler whose personal command of Russian troops in the First World War caused the senseless death of millions, the last czar has been revivified by the regime of Vladimir Putin as a nationalist paragon, and canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as a martyr, passion-bearer, saint, a symbol of unity and love of the Russian folk.
Fifty years later, National Geographic calls the state of the Russian soul “a hapless search for a uniting idea.” In place of Nicholas the Bloody, the Russian nation has repeatedly chosen Vladimir the Barebreasted—seizer of enclaves, annihilator of opponents, hacker of emails, hater of Hillary, fan (real or feigned) of U.S. President Donald Trump. If you’ve got the rubles, there is no shortage of bread. Or Bentleys.
(Quartz) As the investigations pile up, we’ve put together a compendium of Trump and his advisers’ ties with Russia. We will update the list as warranted (and please let us know if we’ve missed anything).
We begin with Trump’s cabinet picks and current or former advisors. Next we move onto Trump’s own business and personal connections with Russia, followed by the specific speculation that has arisen since Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency.
(Ceasefire) Christopher Westdal has the distinction of being the only Canadian diplomat to have served both as Canada’s Ambassador to Ukraine (1996-98) and Russia (2003-06). Below is a slightly edited version of his remarks as spoken to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Commons of Canada.
His testimony was straight, a lot straighter than members were used to no doubt.
There’s a lot of hysteria over Russia – which is not the USSR re-invented. (Nor imperial Russia.) What is Russia? A mess of grievances, hubris, delusions, and some justified national pride. As someone wrote these last days, we maybe made a condescending error in identifying Russia as a state in stumbling transition toward what we assumed is the natural human social condition, a democracy. For most Russians (I regret to admit), it’s not a transition – they like where they are. It’s hard today to persuade them the US is the city on the hill.
Their intentions for the neighbourhood? Their sense THEY are under pressure from NATO, etc., is real. They push back. They are disrupters.
If I were Estonian I’d be nervous, but Russia has no intention of testing NATO art 5 by invading. They will test Estonian resolve, though, on their treatment of Russians. Ukraine was sui generis. Did Russia start the war with Sakashvili? I think Cheney did, to tell the truth.
The Trump factor is more than odd. His campaign question “Wouldn’t it be nice if we got along with the Russians?” Was a seductive one, and reasonable, but totally superficial.
Putin’s behavior is explainable but very risky. He’s gone too far on interfering in the election. He didn’t swing it and couldn’t have expected to. His motive seems to stem from his obsessive need to expose US hypocrisy. He believes the US tried to change regime in Kiev (because he never takes reformers’ ideals at face-value, having none to speak of, and in any case he knows that Ukrainian reformers’ anti-corruption positions are equally an indictment of his own regime.) See my post yesterday in a discussion on FaceBook.
(Quartz) US president Donald Trump continues to be dogged by concerns about his connections to Russia and suggestions that several of his advisers were in contact with the Kremlin during his election campaign.
(Quartz) Amid intensifying demands for action to combat an offensive by Moscow against the West, US president Donald Trump has reportedly appointed a paramount expert on Russian president Vladimir Putin as his chief Russia adviser.
Fiona Hill, a dual US-UK citizen and the co-author of a seminal psychoanalysis of the Russian leader called Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, is to serve as Trump’s Russia adviser on the National Security Council, reports Foreign Policy.
Hill, who runs the Europe program at the Brookings Institution, did not respond to a request for comment; nor did Brookings. But Hill formerly served as the Russia expert for the National Intelligence Council, the coordinating body for the 17 US intelligence agencies.
If he has indeed chosen Hill, Trump will at least in part inoculate himself from suspicions that he is too cozy with Putin. A mile-a-minute dispenser of minutiae on Russia and much of the former Soviet Union, Hill and her co-author, Russia economic expert Clifford Gaddy, may know Putin as well or better than anyone in the US.
(Reuters) The Kremlin said on Monday it did not agree with U.S. President Donald Trump’s assessment of Iran as “the number one terrorist state” and a Russian diplomat said any U.S. attempt to reopen an Iran nuclear deal would inflame tensions in the Middle East.
Trump and Vladimir Putin, his Russian counterpart, have made clear they want to try to mend U.S.-Russia ties, which have slid to a post-Cold War low in recent years. But starkly different approaches to Iran, as set out by a raft of top Russian officials on Monday, could complicate any rapprochement.
Their comments also suggest that a policy idea Trump and his aides are reported to be considering — to try to drive a wedge between Moscow and Tehran — may be a non-starter.
(LA Times) Once again, President Trump’s professed admiration for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin is causing headaches for fellow Republicans and drawing fire from Democrats – but this time, with a twist.
Vice President Mike Pence, asked in several talk-show appearances about the president’s seeming comparison of officially sanctioned extrajudicial killings in Russia with unspecified U.S. actions, said Trump had merely intended to stress his own desire to re-engage the Kremlin.
(NYRB) Amid the political and diplomatic chaos in the US since Donald Trump assumed the presidency, Russian leadership has been experiencing its own turmoil, until recently kept under wraps, but now emerging into the open. To be sure, Russian President Vladimir Putin is still firmly in power, as evidenced by his hour-long conversation last Saturday with Trump and by Putin’s high ratings in opinion polls (which far surpass Trump’s). Yet we have now learned that, since the US election, there has been an unprecedented, and perhaps still continuing shakeup of top officials in Putin’s main security agency, the FSB, and that a top former intelligence official in Putin’s entourage died recently in suspicious circumstances.
A day of whirlwind diplomacy for Donald Trump on Saturday, including calls to five world leaders such as the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was overshadowed by a global backlash against his ban on refugees.
The “congratulatory call” with Putin lasted an hour, the White House said in a short statement, and ranged from discussion of “mutual cooperation” to defeat the terror group Isis to negotiating an end to the Syrian civil war.
“The positive call was a significant start to improving the relationship between the United States and Russia that is in need of repair,” the White House said.
In the Kremlin’s more detailed account, Trump and Putin discussed “partnership” on a wide range of international issues, including wars in the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran’s nuclear programme, the Korean peninsula and the simmering war in Ukraine.
(Middle East Monitor) Russia has agreed for the United States to be involved in the Syrian peace talks planned for 23 January in Astana, though notably only after US President Barack Obama has left office.
Cavusoglu was speaking to journalists in Geneva yesterday after an international conference to thrash out a deal on Cyprus’ reunification.
Moscow and Ankara last month brokered a fragile Syrian ceasefire, but without the involvement of Washington.
The truce – which does not include Daesh or Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham (JFS), formerly known as the Al-Nusra Front – has brought a reduction in hostilities to large parts of the country.
(The Guardian) Unverifiable sensational details aside, the Trump dossier is a good reflection of how things are run in the Kremlin – the mess at the level of decision-making and increasingly the outsourcing of operations, combined with methods borrowed from the KGB and the secret services of the lawless 1990s. That is not the picture projected by the Kremlin externally – namely, that the Russian government is an effective bureaucracy, strategic in foreign policy planning and ruthless in execution. And that, whatever the truth of Putin’s connections with Trump, makes it all pretty scary.
The Kremlin has hit out at the biggest deployment of US troops in Europe since the end of the cold war, branding the arrival of troops and tanks in Poland as a threat to Russia’s national security.
The deployment, intended to counter what Nato portrays as Russian aggression in eastern Europe, will see US troops permanently stationed along Russia’s western border for the first time.
The move was billed as an attempt to reassure eastern European states who have been calling for the permanent deployment of US troops in the belief that Russia would be less likely to encroach on territory where US troops are present.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the ceasefire in late December and said Russia would pull back some of its forces in Syria, where its military intervention has turned the tide in favour of President Bashar al-Assad.
2 Comments on "Russia 2017 – 2019"
A former Canadian Ambassador to Russia comments: “Amy Knight made a life writing earnestly about the Soviet-era KGB. She hasn’t changed technique or assumption because she hasn’t ever accepted there has been any change in Russia. This story is full of holes and unknowns, propped up by cherry-picked journalistic quotes from here and there with nary a fact to go on except that three or four Russian state and specifically cyber-security managers have been jailed. The fact is we have no idea why: it’s surely not that they leaked the Russian strategy of upending the US election to US officials. It may be that their activities to hack and frame were reckless enough to enable the damaging charges against Russia to gain credence – in other words, like Thomas a Becket’s killers, they went too far. The Christopher Steele “dossier” is a case-study of a report by a consultant trying like hell to keep the contract going. We’ve all seen them. … Putin plays hardball. His motives are rooted in psychological grievance that seems now to be core part of the Russian public mentality. He is a disrupter. There need to be costs. But he is rational and tactical, not strategic, and it is unlikely he will over-reach by tempting NATO Art 5, for example.
There’s a lot of hysteria over Russia – which is not the USSR re-invented. (Nor Christian imperial Russia.) What is Russia? A mess of grievances, hubris, delusions, and some justified national pride. As someone wrote these last days, we maybe made a condescending error in identifying Russia as a state in stumbling transition toward what we assumed is the natural human social condition, a democracy. For most Russians (I regret to admit), it’s not a transition – they like where they are. It’s hard today to persuade them the US is the city on the hill.
If I were Estonian I’d be nervous, but Russia has no intention of testing NATO art. 5 by invading. They will test Estonian resolve, though, on their treatment of Russians. Ukraine was sui generis. Did Russia start the war with Sakashvili? I think Cheney did, to tell the truth.
Putin’s behavior is explainable but very risky. He’s gone too far on interfering in the election. He didn’t swing it and couldn’t have expected to. His motive seems to stem from his obsessive need to expose US hypocrisy. He believes the US tried to change regime in Kiev (because he never takes reformers’ ideals at face-value, having none to speak of, and in any case he knows that Ukrainian reformers’ anti-corruption positions are equally an indictment of his own regime. J.K.

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