Russia is moving its nuclear-capable missiles closer to the heart of the West to be able to hit Western cities within the range of over 720 kilometers.
If the nuclear-capable Iskander missiles are launched from Kaliningrad, Russia’s enclave bordering Poland and Lithuania, Moscow could easily destroy Berlin (~510 km), Hamburg (~670 km) and other major cities of Germany.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
It also means that Russia will now be capable of destroying Denmark’s Copenhagen (~490 km), Sweden’s Stockholm (~515 km) and burning the entire territory of Poland to the ground.
And while the United States is far away from Kaliningrad (unless Russia launches missiles from its Cuban bases, read below), it sure seems like Americans, who are about to elect their new President, are worried about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear plans.
What’s on Putin’s mind – war or peace?
The Iskander missiles have long been up Putin’s sleeve and Russian officials have threatened the West with the nuclear-capable missiles over the past two years. But Moscow is finally making the move, now that their defense ministry confirmed sending the Iskander missiles closer to the border with the West.
The news comes just several days after Germany’s foreign minister, whose country faces the greatest risk from the missiles, warned that tensions between Russia and the West are “more dangerous” today compared to the Cold War era.
Steinmeier, who has been interacting with Russia’s top-ranking officials since he was elected Germany’s foreign minister in 2013 and has seen it all (Russia’s annexation of Crimea, invading troops into Ukraine and killing civilians there, launching airstrikes in Syria and killing civilians there), sure knows what’s on Putin’s mind right now.
“It’s a fallacy to think that this is like the Cold War. The current times are different and more dangerous,” Steinmeier told Bild newspaper. “This danger has not been as strong in decades and the confidence between West and East has never been so low.”
Steinmeier added that he has been keeping an eye on the crumbling relations between the West and Russia with dismay.
Are we actually on the brink of World War 3?
Relations between the West and Russia have reached its lowest since a truce they agreed on last month collapsed within a week, and now the U.S. is accusing Russia of staging “war crimes” in the Syrian city of Aleppo, where over 250,000 civilians are facing deadly bombing on everyday basis.
In September, Russian-backed Syrian government launched an offensive to retake Aleppo, and it sure seems like Russia is going all-in: to retake the city with the people there alive or dead.
NATO defense ministers will discuss Russia’s wrongdoings in Syria as well as Moscow’s recent decision to deploy Iskander nuclear-capable missiles to the Polish border during a meeting on October 26-27 in Brussels.
Although NATO meetings are usually useless and don’t stop Putin even a bit, at least the Alliance is acknowledging the fact that Russia is getting closer to Western borders with its every move.
Last week, Russia’s Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper predicted that the tensions between Russia and the West in Syria could lead either to World War 3 or something similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to the International Business Times.
The newspaper suggested that if the Americans do what they wanted to do “for a long time” and strike against Syria’s government army “on purpose and openly,” Russia would unleash a World War 3.
“Russia can win big in Syria but it can also lose big too. We must not forget that in Syria we are playing an astonishingly risky game,” the newspaper noted.
Putin, who wholeheartedly believes in his mission to oppose the U.S. missile defense shield in Europe, would surely not hold back his actions anymore and would engage in a direct confrontation against American soldiers in Syria.
Russia warns citizens to ‘prepare for war’
Just last week, Russia warned the U.S. about its potential all-out nuclear attack after the U.S. cut talks with Putin over his deadly bombings in Syria. To prove Russia’s might, Putin’s officials said they now have nuclear bunkers capable of holding 12 million people.
If the reports are true, it means Russia is dead-serious about preparing for an imminent nuclear strike against the United States.
Reports also indicate that Putin’s ministers warned its citizens to “prepare for war” as they held massive military defense drills involving over 40 million people.
But that’s not Putin’s only actions that indicate he’s preparing for an all-out nuclear mission against the world, as Russia has recently moved its naval power into Vietnam and intensified its bomber patrols around the U.S. border.
Nuclear Putin will make Trump or Clinton his Toy
Earlier this month, Russia announced its intentions to reopen Cuban bases from the Cold War era.
The problem with those bases is that they sit just 90 miles (~145 km) from the U.S. border. And since Russia has Iskander nuclear-capable missiles (which are – for now – stationed in Kaliningrad) it’ll be capable to launch nuclear strikes on U.S. if it sends those Iskanders to its newly reopened Cuban bases.
If the U.S. allows Russia to operate on its Cold War-era military bases in Cuba, it could face a deadly risk from Putin, who has proved that he is able to sneak in his military hardware without the world even noticing it.
If that happens and Putin indeed moves his Iskander nuclear-powered missiles just 145 km from the U.S. border, he may as well start calling himself the king of the world and turn the United States with its newly-elected president, whether it’s Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, into his toy.
And while that scenario suggests that Putin couldn’t care less who would be the next president of the U.S., the Russian President still takes precautions.
Russia has recently been blamed by the U.S. for hacking the Democratic National Committee and about twenty American voter registration databases in an attempt to influence the presidential vote in the U.S. on November 8.
But with his nuclear-powered Iskanders pointed at Washington D.C. and the White House, it sure seems it would make no difference for Mr. Putin to make either Trump or Clinton take his orders.
Russia & Turkey: Putin And Erdogan Make Up In Istanbul, To A Point by Dorian Jones, EurasiaNet
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan are keen to demonstrate their political friendship is back on track. But behind the smiles and shared jokes during their October 10 meeting in Istanbul, the rivalries that caused relations to nosedive remain.
Putin used Istanbul’s hosting of the World Energy Congress as the venue for his first visit to Turkey since Turkish jets shot down a Russian bomber operating from Syria last November. Prior to the shootdown incident, the two countries had managed to compartmentalize their support of rival sides in the Syrian civil war, and had managed to expand economic and political relations.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan
After a four-hour meeting in Istanbul’s ornate Yildiz Palace, the two leaders announced that they were ready to put the shootdown behind them, and try again. “Today has been a full day with President Putin of discussing Russia-Turkish relations,” Erdogan declared, speaking at a joint news conference. “I have full confidence that the normalization of Turkish-Russian ties will continue at a fast pace.”
The most visible sign of robust trade ties is the $11-billon Turkish Stream gas pipeline. The 900-kilometer pipeline circumventing Ukraine will deliver gas to Turkey under the Black Sea and, potentially, onward to European markets. Putin announced the project in December 2014 during a state visit to Ankara. At the time, he raised eyebrows around the world by describing Turkey as a “strategic partner.”
The pipeline project was frozen after the Russian jet downing, but on October 10, the Russian and Turkish energy ministers signed an agreement to build it.
“I don’t think the Russians can find a better partner in the region, a better market for their goods, for their tourists,” said Murat Bilhan, deputy chair of the Ankara-based Turkish Asian Centre for Strategic Studies. “For their energy source it’s the shortest, most economic, and safest route. … Fluctuations in Turkish-U.S. relations have forced Turkey to find new friends or at least reconstruct its relations with its other neighbors.”
Putin and Erdogan exhibited powerful personal chemistry in Istanbul, and both are at ease dismissing criticism from Western countries over human rights. In what appeared to be a careful piece of diplomatic choreography, during the energy summit Erdogan posed for photos flanked by Putin and another bogeyman of Washington’s, Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro.
Despite the outward signs of friendship, powerful and conflicting forces continue to influence Russian-Turkish relations, analysts caution. “It’s a misnomer to characterize this as a rapprochement,” said Sinan Ulgen, a visiting scholar at the Brussels-based think tank Carnegie Europe. Ulgen pointed out the
differences over the Syrian civil war that culminated in the downing of the Russian bomber remain unaddressed.
“Many of the opposition groups that Turkey supports, along with Saudi [Arabia] and Qatar, are viewed as terrorist entities by Russia and they have been bombed by Russian forces. That is a source of tension that remains today,” Ulgen said.
In September, Erdogan rolled out the red carpet – although in Turkey, it is turquoise – for the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, as Turkey continues to build ties with countries with goals contrary to Russia’s in Syria. The Saudi visit was the latest in intensifying diplomatic traffic between the countries. Ankara has again been calling for the immediate removal of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, a demand that walks back a gesture to Moscow in which Ankara suggested the Syrian dictator could play a role in a transition of power.
The apparent flip-flop is fueling questions about the coherence of Turkish foreign policy. “You cannot, as a juggler, juggle with six balls, and keep all six balls in the air, all the time,” said former Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen. “You cannot have your way with Russia, with Iran, with Damascus, with Baghdad, with Saudi Arabia, with the United States.”
But for now Ankara continues to juggle with some success. “We should be clear that it is the normalization of the relationship with Russia that enabled Turkey to undertake the Syrian cross-border military operation,” Ulgen noted. Ulgen was referring to Operation Euphrates Shield, which Turkey launched in August. The military move was ostensibly designed to target the Islamic State and to thwart Syrian Kurdish efforts to create an independent state, while also positioning Ankara as a player in Syria.
The intervention remains subject to Moscow’s whims, however. “The scale of Turkey’s military
endeavor may expand in future weeks,” said Ulgen, and “that presents a challenge because that will require a degree of acceptance by Russia, and therefore this is becoming a more challenging situation
given the regional dynamics.”
Rumors abound in Turkey of a deal struck between Ankara, Damascus and Moscow. “When Turkish forces entered [the Syrian town of] Jarabulus, Deriya, a stronghold of the rebellion near Damascus, changed hands, leading some to believe there was agreement between Ankara and Damascus, that for Turkish forces entering Syria in exchange for rebels leaving Deriya.” Erdogan has also avoided joining the
outpouring of western-led condemnation of Russian forces’ recent bombing of Aleppo.
During his Istanbul visit, Putin seemed intent on adding to speculation on greater coordination in Syria. “Together with the Turkish president, we agreed to do everything to support de Mistura’s initiative on the
withdrawal of military units, which refuse to lay down their arms, from Aleppo in order to end violence,” Putin said, referring to the United Nations’ Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura. That comment will likely unnerve rebel forces dependent on Turkey as a supply route.
But talk of a new regional strategic relationship between Ankara and Moscow could well be premature. Both sides appear aware of the limitations and risks, making bilateral ties, for now at least, more transactional than strategic.
On Russia’s part, Putin is only slowly easing the painful economic sanctions on Turkey. Meanwhile, when Erdogan addressed the Energy Congress, he reaffirmed his country’s commitment to continue to reduce its dependence on Russian energy, while highlighting the potential of Eastern Mediterranean gas fields as an alternative. On October 13, Israel’s energy minister Yuval Steinitz is scheduled to visit Turkey for the first time in six years.
It seems clear both Putin and Erdogan are keeping their powder dry.
Editor’s note: Dorian Jones is a freelance reporter based in Istanbul.
U.S. Launching Cyber War Against Russia Over Election Interference
Unprecedented Action Highlights Vulnerability of Presidential Election to Hackers
According to NBC news, the CIA is currently preparing to launch an unprecedented Cyber War against Russia and some top Russian leaders as retaliation for what has now been clearly identified as Russian interference in the forthcoming U.S. presidential election.
This definitely includes the recent hacking of the election systems in Arizona and Illinois, and probably the release of emails damaging to Democrats for which Russia is also believed to be responsible.
All this serves to further strengthen and validate a report that the U.S. faces a “perfect storm” of possible election fraud in the forthcoming presidential election, according to Professor John Banzhaf.
Banzhaf started hacking in the late 1950s, and his computer technique for determining the chance that any particular voter or small group of voters could change the outcome of a presidential election – now called “The Banzhaf Index” – has been widely adopted and utilized.
Just weeks after the release of a report showing how easy it would be for Russians or even high school nerds to hack a presidential election, two other professors have just proven it, notes Banzhaf.
Professor Alex Halderman was able to infiltrate a voting system from 500 miles away, and, in another demonstration, manipulate voting results with only a screwdriver and some memory chips.
Princeton professor Andrew Appel was able to hack an election machine in only 7 minutes.
There is a “perfect storm” – an unusual combination of at least five factors drastically heightening risk – heading towards our coming elections, perhaps even the presidential election, says Banzhaf.
Cyber War – Scary revelations
First, one of the scariest revelations of the FBI report on the recent hacking of election systems in two states shows that the hackers did not require much sophistication or secret hacker knowhow. On the contrary, notes Banzhaf, the intruders used hacking tools widely available and easily obtained from the Internet. Thus, our vulnerability is not limited to a group of master hackers or foreign countries with vast resources, he notes. The FBI shows how and why we could be hacked by teens from many countries.
The second element of the perfect storm into which our presidential election may be heading is that we use the Electoral College rather than have a direct election for the president.
That’s important, he explains, because, under our Electoral College system, any rigging or hacking which resulted in a change in even a very small number of votes, and perhaps even only a small number of votes in one individual state, could change the outcome of the presidential election, something very unlikely to occur were there to be a direct nationwide presidential election.
He reminds us of how the 2000 presidential election was decided by fewer than 1000 votes out of almost 6 million cast in Florida; so a hack of 600 votes could have resulted in a different president.
A third element of the perfect storm facing the presidential election, and well as many state and local ones, is the increased use of electronic voting machines (especially where they leave no paper trail).
While some electronic voting machines do generate paper records so that some type of audit trail is available if hacking is suspected, too many do not. This can create what Wired’s Brian Barrett terms a “technological train wreck” because, if some one tampered with the machine’s software, there would be no way to prove it by comparing real votes with machine tallies.
A fourth factor making the perfect storm an even greater threat is that more and more of the computers and data processing devices used in the election process are connected to the Internet.
After all, if the Pentagon, Sony, the White House, the Iranian nuclear centrifuge control system (which was reportedly not even connected to the Internet), SWIFT (the international banking exchange system), the State Department, Aramco oil company, Yahoo, and many other large seemingly impregnable computer systems – with strong firewalls, updated malware protection, etc. – can be hacked, what guarantee is there that the more primitive systems in any large city or county aren’t at least as vulnerable.
If these mighty fortresses of system security can be breached, it seems clear that many state and local systems – which do not have highly trained experts watching over them, insuring that all their software is up to date, constantly checking for malware and intrusions, etc. – are at least as vulnerable.
Actually, say some experts, even computer systems which are not connected to the Internet may be vulnerable to hacking. One way is through the use of voting cards – cards which look and act somewhat like credit cards which permit citizens to vote on voting machines into which the cards are inserted.
Simple alterations of the data recorded on such cards could permit a single voter to cast hundreds of votes on one visit to the voting machine. Depending on the software’s sophistication, the proper card in the hands of a hacker might even permit him to alter the software, change the vote totals directly, etc.
A fifth on-line vulnerability is that some states permit residents to cast their votes from home over the Internet. Thus, in addition to sending in fraudulent votes from a hacker’s computer, scammers might be able to trick voters into sending in their votes for a different candidate, or to providing scammers with the necessary information to send in a phony vote – just as scammers now get their victims to provide credit card numbers and other vital information, or even to have their computers serve as “slave” computers.
Cyber War – The Godfather
It was said in the Godfather movie that “The lawyer with a briefcase can steal more money than the man with the gun.” Today what’s even more scary is that a teenage hacker with easily available malware may be able to steal more votes than any corrupt mayor or governor.
So, to the extent that we are worried, or even concerned. when experts warn that hackers could hack into and even take over our electrical distribution system, banking and stock trading computers, flight control operations, etc., we should take the threat of a hacked 2016 presidential election at least as seriously.
CNN reluctantly reports that “we’ve officially entered the era of the hackable [presidential] election.” Mother Jones reports that “the concern that somebody might try to hack voting machines no longer seems outlandish.” Politico says a computer expert remarked that if some of the more susceptible voting machines hadn’t yet been hacked, “it was only because no one tried.”
Money magazine says we’ve officially entered the era of the hackable election. Wired claims that the move toward electric voting machines turned out to be a “technological train wreck.” And ABC TV News featured a piece entitled “Yes, It’s Possible to Hack the Election.”
Cyber War – Preventing future attacks
Ironically, some of the biggest risks could be eliminated by taking a few simple steps, says Banzhaf. Using only election machines which create an audit trail, disconnecting election machines and related computers from the Internet, eliminating voting from home over the Internet, insisting that all voting systems be maintained with up-do-date firewalls and malware detection programs manned by experts, etc. would be important steps which could make a big difference, he says.
Banzhaf notes that hackers and others don’t have to actually alter the outcome of the presidential elections to do incalculable harm. Simply casting doubt on the validity of the results, especially if the losing nominee and/or his supporters voice suspicion concerning the outcome, could undermine the faith of millions in the entire election process, he predicts.
If some results appears suspicious, or only a few voting machine display clearly exaggerated results, or if the word “hacked” or a picture of Guy Fawkes appears on the screens of a few computers used to compile votes, disappointed voters could become very upset, and then riot or worse to express what appears to be justified outrage.
A few bytes of prevention may be more important than megabytes of attempted cure, says former hacker, well-known mathematician, and now public interest law professor John Banzhaf.
He adds that a first strike by the CIA would also be important, especially considering that it may be too late to significantly strengthen our current election system.
The threat of a Russian attack on Belarus and Kazakhstan may be among the greatest challenges of the new president’s first term.
A key aim of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy is to expose America as a paper tiger, emboldening other states, and increasing the possibility of Russia’s all-out confrontation with U.S.-led NATO. If unchallenged by the United States, Putin’s assault on two large post-Soviet states after his war on Ukraine would mean further unravelling of the post-Cold War world order of which the United States is the key guarantor. Russia’s control of Belarus would bring the Russian military to the borders of two NATO member-states, Poland and Lithuania.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
At first glance, Belarus and Kazakhstan could hardly be more different. Belarus, with an overwhelmingly Slavic and Russian Orthodox population of 9.5 million, borders Russia to the northwest; Kazakhstan abuts Russia in the southeast and its 18 million citizens are majority Muslim and Turkic. Yet, in the next two years, both nations could face potentially severe domestic political and economic troubles, leading to foreign policy choices that could tempt Putin to invade in order to address Russia’s “security issues,” or boost his popularity at home.
Despite being Russia’s most loyal allies among the post-Soviet states, Belarus and Kazakhstan may soon put this allegiance to the test. No longer able to count on Russian support as Russia’s subsidies and loans dry up because of low oil prices, negative GDP growth, and Russian economic straits, longtime authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka has begun tentative liberalization inside the country, opening to the West to secure loans and investments, eager for the early 2016 removal of European Union sanctions, and becoming markedly friendly toward Kiev.
To the increasingly paranoid Putin, these policies may signal an erosion of the military reliability of the country that lies between Russia and NATO’s eastern flank. An even larger danger, in Putin’s eyes, might stem from Lukashenka’s liberalization bringing about a full-scale democratic revolution, with a sharp turn away from Russia and toward the West.
Liberalization is not an issue in Kazakhstan, but with autocrat Nursultan Nazarbayev having turned 76 this year, a succession crisis is looming. Given the increasing participation of Kazakhstan’ s nationals in ISIS and the attacks on police stations and gun stores by Islamic militants, instability could be fraught with Islamic extremism. With the death of key Central Asian secular dictator, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan’s 4,000-mile border with Russia may soon become the frontier between Russia and failed Central Asian states riven by militarized Islamism — especially if the Taliban succeeds in subverting Afghanistan.
Because Belarus and Kazakhstan previously existed as Soviet republics; each has large ethnic Russian minorities, “abandoned” after the Soviet Union collapse. Russia could also use the defense of Russians from Belorussian “nationalists” or Kazakh “religious extremists” as an excuse for aggression, as it has done with Ukraine.
Putin has been fairly explicit in reminding Minsk and Astana of these facts. The Russian president has criticized the arbitrary nature of post-Soviet borders and put the Kazakh leadership on notice, implying that Moscow will be watching Kazakhstan’s succession very carefully.
The prospect of Russia exploiting, stoking, or even engineering political and social instability in Belarus and Kazakhstan as an excuse for a military intervention has additional urgency because of the Kremlin’s domestic political imperatives. Russia’s presidential election is scheduled for 2018 and while Putin’s re-election is not in doubt, it is not going to be an easy win, even with what Russians call “administrative resources” fully mobilized.
Five years of negative or low growth have stalled social mobility in Russia, depressed oil prices, gutted education and health care for defense budget increases, and caused pensions to be indexed below inflation rate. The prospect of Putin extending his stay in power to 24 years, to the end of his term in 2024 (matching Stalin’s 1929-1953 rule) when he will turn 72, may be too much for even his most devoted supporters. Today, there are increasingly plausible rumors that the election will be moved up a year, to 2017, in order to prevent the “negatives” from accumulating even further.
Thus a crisis in a neighboring state “requiring” a Russian military intervention either for the “protection of the motherland” from NATO or to defend ethnic Russians from “extremists” (or both) may be the only way to rally the country around Putin as the protector of the Motherland. Economic, political, social concern and criticism would be drowned out in the rising tide of militarized patriotism.
A Rigged Media Is The Death Of Democracy by Dave Kranzler, Sprott Money
A press that is free to investigate and criticize the government is absolutely essential in a nation that practices self-government and is therefore dependent on an educated and enlightened citizenry . – Thomas Jefferson
The control of the mainstream media by the wealthy elitist Establishment is nothing new. If Watergate served any purpose, it was to send a message to those who wanted to take complete control of the political and economic system that control of the mainstream media was imperative.
Source: Flickr
Mainstream Media
The use of propaganda to shape public perception is as old as civilization. Religion is the paramount example. But the extreme bias in the mainstream media – especially CNN, Fox News, MSNC, New York Times and Washington Post – has become so blatant that even the hoi polloi is taking notice.
It’s become impossible to ignore all of the evidence pointing at Hillary Clinton’s overt, unabashed criminal activities. Those who continue to support her choose to ignore the evidence and blame the information on Putin or on “conspiracy theorists.” The fact that CNN refuses to report anything that runs contrary to the party line supporting the HRC narrative reinforces the “conspiracy theory” storyline.
It’s easier to swallow lies because recognizing truth would destroy the myths about America that were pounded into our brains starting in kindergarten. Surely humans can’t be as evil as the tinfoil hats would have us believe…
In today’s Shadow of Truth episode, we discuss the attempt to rig the election in favor of HRC. Hillary managed to use control of the media to defeat Bernie Sanders. We also discuss our predictions for gold and silver:
BUDVA, Montenegro — When the commander of the newly created “Balkan Cossack Army” addressed his officers last month, he needed a translator. Photo by New York Public Library
Self-styled Cossack General Viktor Zaplatin, a Russian, was “unanimously” selected to head the new organization at its founding meeting in the Montenegrin port town of Kotor on September 11.
“The Orthodox world is one world,” Zaplatin said. “Here we see Serbs, Montenegrins, Russians, and Belarusians.”
The solemn ceremony was presided over by Serbian Orthodox priest Momchilo Krivokapic and a phalanx of bikers from the pro-Kremlin Russian motorcycle gang Night Wolves — whose leader, Aleksandr Zaldostanov, is close to President Vladimir Putin.
Members of some 26 Cossack organizations attended, each claiming to represent some 50 Cossack “fighters.” The organizations were from Serbia, the ethnic Serbian entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Republika Srpska), Montenegro, Macedonia, Greece, and Bulgaria. The purpose of the Balkan Cossack Army is unclear, and representatives of the member organizations declined to discuss it with RFE/RL.
Cossacks, who originated as self-governing, militarized communities that played an important policing and defense role in the Russian Empire’s sparsely populated border regions from the 16th to the early 20th centuries, have few historical ties to the Balkans. After the 1917 Bolshevik coup in Russia, about 5,000 Cossacks found their way to the Balkans, but most of them soon continued on to Western Europe.
The main Cossack organization in Serbia now, the St. Sava Cossack Stanitsa, was formed only in 2011 by the Russia-based Central Cossack Army, whose commander is appointed directly by Putin. The Serbian affiliate declares on its website that Western values are “distant and foreign” to Serbs and that “Putin’s Russia is like a beacon in the darkness surrounding the peoples of the Balkans.”
The organization’s purpose is “to counter the destructive, anti-Serb historical project.”
Resisting the ‘Foreign’ West
Kotor was selected as the site of the creation of the Balkan Cossack Army because it hosted a Russian Consulate during the imperial era. Moreover, pro-Russian media in the Balkans have been actively creating the impression that the town will become a NATO base after Montenegro completes the process of joining the alliance. Montenegro, whose pro-Western ruling party won the most votes in the October 16 parliamentary elections but fell short of a majority, is also a candidate for European Union membership.
The Kotor meeting was also addressed by representatives of Russian Cossacks fighting alongside separatists in eastern Ukraine, who passed on greetings from Aleksandr Borodai, a Russian citizen who helped engineer Moscow’s annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea and foment the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Balkan Cossack Army leader Zaplatin, who served in the Soviet Army in the 1980s, is a veteran of many armed conflicts that erupted in the wake of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. He fought in Bosnia in 1992-93, as well as in conflicts in the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in the Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh, and in the Moldovan region of Transdniester.
In a 2013 interview with a publication in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska, Zaplatin advocated the partition of Bosnia and called the 1995 Dayton agreement that ended the war there “a historical injustice.”
“The Serbian nation is defending itself, but this is interpreted as separatism and war crimes,” Zaplatin said. “I think that the independence of Republika Srpska is inevitable. The Serbian people must decide its own fate. It is very important that the friendship between the Serbs and Russia always be a top priority. We must always help them by all possible means.”
Zaplatin is described in the pro-Russian press in Serbia as “the official representative of the Union of Volunteers, which is directly associated with Vladimir Putin.” Sources told RFE/RL that Zaplatin coordinates the activities of Cossacks and Russian “volunteers” in the Balkans under the direct supervision of Borodai.
Advancing the ‘Russian World’
In February, Zaplatin participated in a gathering of Serbian veterans of the Balkan wars and of Russian “volunteers” in the Russia House cultural center in Belgrade, the offices of the Russian state aid agency Rossotrudnichestvo. He told the meeting that he and his comrades “are on the front line in the fight against fascism in the Balkans, on the front line of the fight against the imposition of the values of the so-called West.”
One activist with a U.S. Cossack organization, who asked not to be identified because the individual is not authorized to speak for the organization, told RFE/RL that the Kremlin had been actively trying to co-opt the Cossack community abroad for years, both by influencing the leadership of existing organizations and by creating new ones.
“The new organizations which have been created on behalf of the Russian government have a crystal-clear goal, which is clearly aligned to the agenda of the Russian World [Russky Mir],” the activist wrote in an online interview. “They also offer in some cases paramilitary training to young children in the form of ‘summer camps.’ They are home to extremely revisionist, racist, and dangerously nationalistic ideologies. Especially in the Balkans, the pan-Slavic and oddly Eurasianist rhetoric is predominant.”
Sarajevo-based psychologist and political analyst Srdjan Puhalo says that the presence of the Balkan Cossack Army is divisive, although “they haven’t created any problems yet.”
“On the one hand, there are Russophiles, particularly among Serbs, who see the activities of the Cossacks as signals that Russia has not forgotten them and that it is worried about the situation in the Balkans,” he says.
“On the other hand, many people see their activity as some sort of folklore nostalgia. Some people view them as tourists and some see them as a special-operations unit with unknown missions.”
RFE/RL’s Russian Service correspondent Yulia Petrovskaya contributed to this report.
Editor’s note:
Robert Coalson covers Russia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Send story tips to coalsonr@rferl.org.
Kremlin foe Garry Kasparov says President Vladimir Putin is resorting to “external aggression” and increased confrontation with the West to bolster his image as Russia’s leader and maintain a “dictatorship” in the country.
kasparov
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Vladimir Putin
Talking to RFE/RL’s Russian Service correspondent Mikhail Sokolov on the sidelines of a forum in Vilnius organized by the Open Russia online opposition group on October 15, the former world chess champion and Russian opposition figure said Putin had managed to impose “one-man rule” backed by a “fascist ideology” that helped destroy perceived enemies within the country.
But with economic conditions worsening, Kasparov said, the Kremlin had been forced to point out “enemies” outside Russia.
Russian authorities have intensified their crackdown on independent media, civil society, and the political opposition since Putin began his third term as president in 2012.
Kasparov fled to the United States after he was detained by Russian police at a 2012 rally in support of the punk art collective Pussy Riot, three of whose female members were on trial for an anti-Kremlin disturbance at the time.
“Confrontation with the West is Putin’s No. 1 goal,” Kasparov said in Vilnius, adding that Putin needs to “maintain his image of an invulnerable leader who is the only one capable of defending the country from external threats.”
Moscow’s relations with the West have sunk to levels of acrimony unseen since the end of the Cold War following Russia’s military seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and an ensuing war between Kyiv’s forces and Russia-backed separatists.
Ties have deteriorated further over the conflict in Syria, where a Russian bombardment campaign is backing President Bashar al-Assad, as well as U.S. accusations that Russia is behind hacking and electronic leaks targeting U.S. electoral institutions ahead of next month’s U.S. elections.
“Putin not only needs permanent confrontation with Europe and America, he needs to demonstrate constantly his own superiority to everyone,” Kasparov said.
He said that in the case of Syria, Putin’s moves were aimed at demonstrating that Western leaders’ repeated calls for Assad to step down over his brutal treatment of Syrians since unrest began nearly six years ago “mean nothing.”
On Ukraine, Kasparov said Crimea’s annexation was a “crime” that was committed in violation of the Russian Constitution, Russian laws, and international treaties at a time when Russia’s internal political opposition was “practically fully destroyed.”
“Crimea for Putin was part of a large-scale aggression against Ukraine, a violation of its sovereignty,” Kasparov said, adding that Kremlin-guided actions in Ukraine constituted “bandit activities.”
Putin eventually admitted to sending covert troops into Crimea, but Moscow continues to deny direct involvement in the fighting in other parts of eastern Ukraine despite what Western leaders say is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Kasparov also described as a “crime” Russia’s “de facto annexation” of Georgia’s separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia after a lightning war in August 2008, while Putin was prime minister in between presidential terms. Georgia and Russia broke off diplomatic relations over the conflict, and Moscow maintains troops in both regions under what Tbilisi and Western allies regard as an occupation.
More recently, Kasparov said, alleged cyberattacks on U.S. political institutions look like “an attempt [by the Kremlin] to create some sort of chaos” ahead of the November 8 elections in the United States.
Putin and other Russian officials have dismissed the U.S. allegations and suggested that more attention be paid to the substance of the leaks and hacks.
Kasparov warned that nothing restricts Putin from expanding his power beyond Russia because the West “has always stepped back” in order to avoid a potentially large confrontation.
Kasparov called on Western leaders to show “political will” and oppose Putin’s foreign policies, including through maintained financial and other sanctions imposed over Moscow’s actions in Ukraine.
“We see many politicians and businesspeople in Europe who say that the sanctions against Russia should be lifted and Crimea’s illegal annexation from Ukraine should be ignored for the sake of doing business with Russia,” Kasparov said. “But I think that this situation is gradually changing.”
Written by Antoine Blua in Prague based on an interview by RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Mikhail Sokolov.
Editor’s note: Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
Article by Mikhail Sokolov and Antoine Blua, EurasiaNet
‘When it comes to World politicians, it’s no secret that they aren’t shy of a penny or two, with most earning high end salaries which we could only ever dream of. So, with the US election soon drawing to a close, we wanted to investigate how much various politicians around the world, including leading candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are really worth.
In order to put their significant wealth into perspective, we didn’t only examine their net worth, but also had a look at what they would be able to do with their rather outrageous levels of money. From the soon-to-be Ex-President of the USA who has a net worth which would allow him to purchase his very own Caribbean island, to the former Prime Minister of the UK who’s significant wealth once amounted to more than the GDP of an entire country.
When you compare the personal wealth of this years leading candidates in the US election, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the latter is the clear winner. With a net worth over $3.6 billion greater than that of Clinton, Trump has enough money to purchase himself a total of eight double decker Boeing 747s, whereas Clinton wouldn’t even be able to afford one.
If you think these statistics are impressive, just wait until you hear about the unbelievable wealth of Russian President, Vladimir Putin, who owns enough money to build himself another International Space Station…
[drizzle]
In second place comes an Italian politician who many have compared to Donald Trump (no not the one you are thinking of), followed by the crazy dictator of North Kora.
So if you want to learn more about the outrageous wealth of our politicians around the world and what they might be able to do with their money, look no further than the useful infographic below.’
MOSCOW — As the news of Donald Trump’s upset victory in the U.S. presidential election rolled into Russia, there was jubilation among many allies of President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin — which has demonized Hillary Clinton and seemed to root for the Republican candidate — while some politicians predicted the stunning result would have little effect on badly strained U.S. ties.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Russia
State Duma deputies broke into applause after lawmaker Vyacheslav Nikonov broke the news to the lower parliament house on the morning of November 9: “Colleagues, three minutes ago Hillary Clinton acknowledged her defeat in the U.S. presidential election, and a second ago Trump began his speech as president-elect of the United States.”
Trump won a race that had more focus on Russia than any since the Cold War and was very closely watched in Moscow, with the United States accusing Putin’s government of stealing and releasing e-mails “to interfere with the U.S. election process” and the Russian state media taking aim at both Clinton and U.S. democracy as a whole.
Trump had praised Putin during the campaign and suggested he would improve relations, while Clinton vowed to be tough on Russia over its assertive actions in Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere.
Flamboyant ultranationalist lawmaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky — who recently said a Clinton win would lead to nuclear war — told the Duma he would be sending Trump a telegram with the message: “Dear Donald, congratulations with this deserved victory, let grandma Hillary get some rest” and saying that “the majority of Russians are for Donald Trump.”
Putin congratulated Trump in a telegram shortly after Clinton conceded.
He “expressed hope for joint work to lift Russian-American relations out of a state of crisis, and also to address pressing international issues and search for effective responses to challenges concerning global security,” the Kremlin said.
‘A New Page’
Prominent pro-Kremlin lawmaker Aleksei Pushkov, a vocal critic of the United States, tweeted that a “reset” of Russia-U.S. relations is “unavoidable.”
“Relations with Russia and Putin were a key issue in the election,” Pushkov said. “Trump identified himself as anti-Obama. He will not leave everything as it is.”
Putin came across as less certain and seemed to place the onus on Trump to take steps to lift ties out what he called a state of “degradation,” saying “it is not our fault that Russian-American relations have reached such a condition.”
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, praised Trump for a victory speech in which the political novice promised to deal “fairly” with all other nations and “seek common ground, not hostility, partnership, not conflict.”
“This is absolutely, phenomenally in line with the basic position that Putin himself holds: that, with the Russian Federation’s national interests as the unconditional priority, we seek good relations with all countries that want to have them with us,” Peskov said.
Sergei Mironov, who heads the pro-Kremlin Just Russia party and who on November 9 was placed on a European Union sanctions list over Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine, was quoted by state radio station Vesti FM as saying that a “new page” in ties with Washington has been turned, and that the Kremlin has traditionally had better relations with the United States when a Republican is in office.
The ruling United Russia party tweeted a press release quoting a senior lawmaker, Sergei Zheleznyak, as saying the U.S. election results “show that people are tired of artificial confrontation.”
“Despite all the intrigue and provocations which the current U.S. authorities created for Trump, people supported his intention to seek to resolve the serious problems that have accumulated in America and to move from confrontation to partnership with Russia and the world,” Zheleznyahk said.
‘No Watershed’
But Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said Trump’s election was no watershed, and made clear his party would continue to portray the United States as a global aggressor.
“I assure you that nothing serious will change: the times have changed, the technology, the weather, but the strategy of the Americans has not,” he said. “That is: expansion, the assertion of their dominance, and in recent years — global policies with the aim of subordinating the main strategic resources — whether raw materials, information, or financial flows — to themselves.”
Russia’s Culture Ministry turned to Winnie the Pooh for its assessment of the U.S. election outcome and its potential effect on Russian-U.S. ties, posting a tweet of the Soviet cartoon version of the British children’s classic — Vinny Pukh. It shows Clinton as Eeyore the donkey and Trump, as Piglet, befriending Pooh, the bear symbolizing Russia.
The caption parodies Pooh’s song: Instead of tram-param-param, it reads: “Trump-param-param-param-param-pam-pam! The Ministry of Culture has made its choice :)”
The pro-Kremlin tabloid site LifeNews cited lawmaker Vitaly Milonov, who campaigned for antigay laws that U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has criticized, as saying that the United States will now longer be a “global thug.”
“Of course, the prospects of an improvement in ties under Trump are much higher. He is a much more pragmatic person. He understands that the States does not gain from being a thug. The gain from normal ties is much higher than militarized ones,” Milonov said.
“Often, election campaign rhetoric has nothing in common with reality, but we have to say there are good signs that America will again make itself, as they say, great and not get wound up in all the sorts of adventures that Obama dragged it into.”
Kremlin pool journalist Dmitry Smirnov tweeted: “Comrades! The Great American revolution that no one believed in has happened! Now everyone to the disco!”
Smirnov also posted a picture of Trump standing with Russian mixed martial arts champion Fyodor Yemelyanenko, with the caption: “A little something on the secrets of Trump’s victory.”
In a wry reference to the alleged Kremlin interference in the U.S. campaign, several Twitter users posted a photograph of Putin signing a decree and added the caption: “Appoint Trump Donald Fredovich the authorized envoy to the North American Federal District.”
Another tweet played on images of Russia’s cavernous spaceflight Mission Control center and a military operations center in Moscow, showing Putin and senior officials watching screens in “the Moscow Mission Control Center for the U.S. Elections.”
‘Political Warrior’
Most opinion polls in the days before the election favored Clinton, and Trump’s win was as much of a surprise in Russia as it was for many Americans.
A commentary posted on the website of the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia at about 8 a.m. Moscow time — midnight in Washington — appeared to call the victory for Clinton: It said she had been chosen by the elite as the winner from the very beginning and that Trump’s presence was designed to “create the illusion of competition” — a charge often mounted in the West about Putin’s election opponents.
“We’re already almost celebrating,” pro-Kremlin activist Maria Katasonova — whose Twitter handle features a banner with Putin, Trump and Marine Le Pen, the nationalist French politician running for president in April 2017 — wrote on Twitter as the returns increasingly pointed to a Trump victory.
“I admit I was wrong in my predictions, I didn’t believe in a Trump victory. Not because he is weaker but because he went against the System,” Konstantin Kosachyov, chairman of the International Affairs committee in the upper parliament house, wrote on Facebook. He added that it is unclear how much change Trump will bring.
“Americans have taught me that the System there is always stronger. And this is the main sensation of the elections — in its own country, the System didn’t deal with the new non-standard challenges. In exactly the same way that…the United States of America is not dealing with the new, nonstandard challenges on a global scale,’ he wrote.
“It’s not a fact that Donald Trump’s America will turn out to be more successful in this sense – after all, his main slogan was ‘Make America great again’. How?”
Meanwhile, a noticeable theme in pro-Kremlin commentary was the idea – set out without any evidence – that Trump’s life is now in danger.
An article in the mass-circulation tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda warned that Trump could be assassinated by his opponents, saying “the degree of danger after the election will only grow!”
Igor Korotchenko, an anti-Western military analyst, tweeted: “Trump showed himself a real political warrior. Now the U.S. secret services must provide him reliable security for the next four years.”
While many allies of Putin celebrated Trump’s win, that response was far from universal.
A photograph posted on Twitter by a Russian journalist showed flowers laid outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow with the message “Je suis USA,” implying that the election of Trump was a tragedy worthy of collective international mourning.
Tom Balmforth covers Russia and other former Soviet republics. He can be reached at balmfortht@rferl.org.
Editor’s note: Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
A large number of Americans are out there criticizing President-elect Donald Trump. But some enterprising souls in Russia have already started creating high-end fashion items banking on Trump’s controversial victory. Russian firm Caviar has launched a special edition gold-plated Trump iPhone 7 as part of its Supremo collection. Caviar’s Supremo collection celebrates “great men” like Vladimir Putin and Ilham Aliyev.
Image Credit: Caviar (screenshot)
Trump iPhone 7 is cheaper than Putin iPhone
Caviar said the “Changeover iPhone” is a “material expression” of hopes for re-establishment of good relations between Russia and the United States. The Trump iPhone 7 is outfitted with a gold plate on the rear, and has the US President-elect’s portrait etched on the upper half of the device. His full name “Donald John Trump” encircles Trump’s portrait.
Just below the giant “TRUMP” branding at the rear bottom of the handset, you can also see Donald Trump’s tagline “Make America Great Again.” Caviar didn’t forget to place the United States’ coat of arms in the middle of the golden slab on the back. The custom Trump iPhone 7 costs 197,000 rubles or about $3042.
Caviar said it would do its best to get the special edition of the device in the hands of Donald Trump himself. If you are a Trump fan, you may want to place an order. It’s worth pointing out that the Trump iPhone 7 costs less than Caviar’s top-tier Putin iPhone, which is priced at $3,766. The company says buying a Putin iPhone was the “best way to express patriotism.” Putin has become the symbol of the new generation. People see him as a strong-willed and decisive leader, said Caviar.
Trump and Putin bromance
But it is too soon to imagine Trump and Vladimir Putin calling each other with their respective Trump iPhone and Putin iPhone. Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Trump on his US Presidential election win using the telegram. According to Phone Arena, the Trump iPhone 7 could be a hit among oil oligarchs as the device comes from the same company that makes Putin phones.
Donald Trump is believed to have cozy relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the past, Trump has hailed Putin as “very much of a leader” and gave him an A for his presidential work. The Russian President has said he was looking forward to working with Trump to bolster Russia-US relations.
The two men may or may not have met in person, but they have been vocal about their support for each other. There have been suggestions that Putin might have been involved in WikiLeaks’ revelations about Hillary Clinton’s emails, which might have helped Trump.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has fired Economic Development Minister Aleksei Ulyukayev, whose arrest on charges of large-scale bribe taking has jolted Russia’s ruling elite.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on November 15 that Putin dismissed Ulyukayev due to a “loss of trust,” Russian news agencies reported.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Putin
Ulyukayev’s dismissal comes less than 24 hours after he was detained on charges of taking a $2 million bribe for facilitating state-owned oil giant Rosneft’s takeover of another state-held oil company, Bashneft, in October.
His arrest sent shock waves through the country’s ruling elite.
A Moscow court on November 15 ordered Ulyukayev under house arrest.
Ulyukayev’s detention in connection with the case is the highest-level arrest to have occurred during Putin’s 16 years in power and has stunned the political and financial classes. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said it was “beyond my comprehension.”
The charges come amid a high-profile antigraft campaign and recent shake-ups among senior Russian officials that observers have tied to the presidential election due in March 2018, in which Putin is widely expected to seek a new six-year term.
Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for Russia’s federal Investigative Committee, said Ulyukayev “was caught red-handed as he received a bribe.”
The agency, a Russian analogue of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, said Ulyukayev has been charged with extortion and “grand bribe taking” and that it asked the court to allow him to be held under house arrest.
Moscow’s Basmanny District Court on November 15 granted that request, ordering Ulyukayev to remain under house arrest until mid-January.
Ulyukayev’s lawyer, Timofei Gridnev, said that Ulyukayev has “not admitted his guilt” and that he thinks his detention is “a provocation against a state official.” Russian investigators also said Ulyukayev has denied that he is guilty.
The Investigative Committee said the case was initiated after Rosneft reported extortion of $2 million.
It added that Bashneft’s $5 billion sale to Rosneft is indisputable.
Rosneft is controlled by Igor Sechin, a Kremlin insider who is regarded as one of the most powerful people in Russia.
Medvedev told pro-Kremlin lawmakers on November 15 that “what has happened” in the Ulyukayev case “is beyond my comprehension” but added that “neither a minister, nor a lawmaker, nor a governor, nor any other state servant has immunity if they are involved in corruption-related crimes,” the state-owned TASS news agency reported.
Medvedev issued a statement earlier in the day calling for a “thorough investigation” and said he had discussed Ulyukayev’s case with Putin. He also appointed Deputy Economy Minister Yevgeny Yelin as acting economy minister.
The criminal charge Ulyukayev faces is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
Aleksandr Shokhin, head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, which is often labeled “the oligarchs’ union,” said he believes Ulyukayev is innocent.
“This could trigger a serious government shake-up,” he told Gazeta.ru.
Ulyukayev, 60, has overseen the massive privatization of state companies, capped by regional oil firm Bashneft’s sale to state-controlled Rosneft in a controversial deal last month.
The deal was postponed in August after Ulyukayev and other ministers objected to Rosneft’s participation, arguing that a state company cannot participate in a privatization process. Putin himself intervened, ruling that Rosneft could participate because it is partially owned by British Petroleum.
Rosneft was the only bidder for the stake after rival Lukoil dropped out shortly before the deadline.
Interfax quoted an unnamed law-enforcement source as saying the government is not investigating Rosneft. Rosneft spokesman Mikhail Leontyev told TASS that no one is questioning the Bashneft privatization, which was “absolutely aboveboard.”
Ulyukayev was appointed economic development minister in 2013 and had been deputy chairman of Russia’s central bank for a decade before that. He is seen as a member of the more liberal camp in circles surrounding Putin, who observers say seeks to maintain power and control by balancing various forces in the elite and playing them off one another.
Ulyukayev’s detention is the latest in a spate of high-profile official corruption cases in Russia in recent weeks. In June, then-Kirov Oblast Governor Nikita Belykh was arrested and accused of accepting a 400,000 euro bribe. In September, Interior Ministry Colonel Dmitry Zakharchenko was arrested after police found $120 million during a raid on his Moscow apartment.
With reporting by RFE/RL’s Russian Service, Reuters, TASS, AFP, Interfax, and Business FM.
Editor’s note: Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
But, the key here is to understand the real issues that exist between the US and Russia. At the heart of this matter is Ukraine.
The National Security Argument
The Russian view of what happened in Ukraine is that the US engineered an uprising in Kiev that drove out the legally elected government. The US says it did not engineer a coup. Rather, it supported human rights activists opposed to a corrupt government in Ukraine.
After the change in Ukraine’s government, the Russians took formal control of Crimea. They tried to foment an uprising in eastern Ukraine. The US charged that the Russians were interfering with the internal affairs of the Ukrainian nation. The Russians countered that the US was audacious in making the claim.
The US claimed the Russians were not only arming and directing the rebellion, but also had military designs on the country. So, the US and Europe placed sanctions on Russia. Russia demanded sanctions be removed.
All this can be summed up by two charges. The Russians declared the US was backing activists masquerading as human rights groups in order to destabilize those countries it wanted to control. Russia stated that the goal of the US was to install pro-US regimes.
The US claimed that Russia was becoming internally more repressive. The Obama administration feared that Putin wanted to recreate the former Soviet Union with a new ideology. To the US, it was a matter of national sovereignty and liberal democracy.
Russia’s Historical Buffer
There is also a historical level to this issue. Russia has survived for almost three centuries because of strategic depth. Historically, control over the Baltics, Belarus, and particularly Ukraine was essential for Russia’s survival.
Without this buffer zone, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Adolf Hitler would have destroyed Russia.
In this context, the move by the US into Ukraine was a challenge to Russian strategic interests. Further, because the US knew it was a challenge, it appeared that the US sought to destabilize Russia itself. A pro-US government in Ukraine (with forces trained and supplied by the US) was not acceptable to Russia.
US strategic interests also operate under a historic context. If all of Europe were to unite under a single hegemonic power, it would pose a threat to the survival of the US. Russian natural resources and manpower coupled with Western European technology and organization could more than match US power.
In addition, the only force that could challenge US Naval power would be a united Europe. US national security has depended on control of the seas in terms of commerce and defense. US intervention in Europe in WWI, WWII, and the Cold War was designed to prevent the conquest and amalgamation of Europe.
The Reason Behind Putin’s Posturing
Because Russia failed to build a modern economy after 1992, it remained an energy exporter. When the price of oil crashed, the Russians faced an economic crisis of epic proportions.
Putin first had to maintain national morale. He had to show that regardless of economic problems, he had made Russia a great power. He was not in a position militarily to wage war in Ukraine, but he could still appear powerful.
Engagement with American and European aircraft as well as bold military exercises near borders increased the sense of Russian power at home and abroad.
This was also the key to Russia’s involvement in Syria, which has no strategic value to the Russians.
The intervention in Syria allowed Putin to appear to be engaging the US on equal terms… in a place where the prospect of a clash appeared great but had little chance of happening. Putin needed to buy time for his military to mature, or oil prices to rise, or both. Neither was likely to happen quickly.
An unofficial truce took hold in Ukraine. The Kiev government stayed in place, Russia held Crimea, and fighting in the east was reduced to a low, yet constant, level. A reality had been produced.
For Putin, this was a reasonable basis for an agreement.
Given this view, Trump would likely agree that Russian hegemony over Europe is unacceptable. At the same time, Trump would not plan to engage so early and so deep in a region of Russian interest.
For Trump, a neutralization of Ukraine would be acceptable. The personal dimension, Putin hoped, would eliminate Obama’s desire to see him fall.
Beneath the jabber of the US election and the public charges and counter-charges, the situation between the US and Russia can be seen. The basis for a mutual agreement comes from those facts.
The reality is that Russia is not in a position militarily to conquer Ukraine, nor is the US in a position to defend it. Both sides know that conflict in the future is possible, but neither is ready for it now.
Trying to figure out Trump’s and Putin’s thinking isn’t easy. True goals are buried under layers of bluster. But intent is clearer than many might think. It would be a quick success for both sides and would strengthen two weak political hands.
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Is a new Cold War in the cards now that Donald Trump has been elected the next U.S. President?
With Trump’s election victory, Eastern Europe feels as if it’s hanging by a thread. Trump is one of the most unpredictable people to ever win the U.S. presidency, and that uncertainty raises big worries all over the world. Many are saying that Russia and the U.S. are already in a state of undeclared Cold War. The two nations don’t know what to expect from Trump – a friendly reset or a violent offense?
Image: Flickr
Trump has been repeatedly labeled as “Russia’s puppet” and has been criticized for his pledges to become friends with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Eastern European countries which think their independence is being threatened by Russia are grasping for any string of hope that the U.S. is still standing by their side.
But Trump’s protectionist and isolationist remarks urge Europe and NATO to wonder whether the U.S. will still have its allies’ backs? Would Trump, who has repeatedly slammed NATO for being “obsolete” and inefficient, really send American soldiers to die to save some Eastern European country’s independence?
NATO feels vulnerable amid Trump’s presidency
A new video by CNN shows that Norway is preparing for all kinds of outcomes. After Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and is said to have been fueling the deadly conflict in Eastern Ukraine, European nations – especially those bordering Russia – feel vulnerable. The video shows Norwegian and U.S. soldiers holding military drills on the Norway-Russia border near Kirkenes. Meanwhile, Russia is closely watching the drills as multiple drones – believed to be from Russia – were spotted observing the drills. So in what is reminiscent of the Cold War era, one player is trying to scare off its opponent, while the other one is closely watching every single step of his enemy.
Norway is one of NATO’s most easterly members, which is why the U.S. feels the need to protect its ally. Some 300 U.S. Marines are expected to be sent in January to Norway, where they’ll serve on a rotational basis.
The move comes the same month Trump will be sworn in as U.S. President. Many experts believe that Trump will significantly decrease U.S. commitments – both military and economic – to NATO and its members. In that case, it’s believed that NATO could even cease to exist, because without the U.S., it would struggle to keep itself running, let alone protect any of its members from Russia’s potential threats.
How likely is Cold War 2?
So how likely is Cold War 2? At this point, it’s tough to say. During his presidential campaign, Trump has made a series of comments that suggest the new U.S. President could take a pro-Russia and anti-NATO stance.
Trump’s slightly pro-Russia views are actually echoing sentiments in Europe. The Obama administration has been pushing the rest of the world to join forces against Russia to counter Putin’s threat, but U.S. allies have become less and less enthusiastic about having to further isolate Russia.
Many European countries are trading with Moscow and have lucrative military deals with Putin. Imposing sanctions on their economic partner has proven counterproductive for many European countries, which is why they are trending away from U.S. hard-line policies toward Russia.
Hungary, France, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, and even Germany are the most notable examples of countries that are becoming less anti-Russian for the sake of their own national interests. And Trump comes at the very time when the U.S. needs to decide if it’ll be pursuing its – as many believe – unjustified hard-line policies toward Russia or start dealing with Moscow.
The U.K.’s vote in favor of leaving the European Union is yet another indication of Europe’s changing sentiment. European nations are expressing their desire to be making decisions by themselves and not be told by the U.S. what to do and who to partner with.
What’s Trump’s opinion about U.S.-Russia relations?
Since outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama started isolating Russia in 2014, everyone thought it was the beginning of a new Cold War because Russia won’t survive as a pariah state. But that’s not actually what has happened. Two years later, Putin is actually one of the busiest national leaders in the world. In addition to that, he has received high praise from Trump for his leadership values.
Since 2014, Putin has traveled all over the world, from China to the Middle East and Europe. There are still those – like Norway – who believe Putin is a big threat to the world. There are also those – like Ukraine – who believe they’re being engaged in a direct military confrontation with Putin. But there are also those – like Pakistan and China – who believe dealing with Russia can actually be lucrative business.
So what’s America’s stance now that Trump is the new President? Will he be among those who believe in Putin’s threat? Or is he prepared to officially declare a Cold War or even engage in a direct military confrontation with Russia? Or will he actually sit at one table with Putin and finally start figuring out what to do with Syria, Iran and North Korea – the three most pressing issues of our time?
Trump’s actions as President: attack Russia or be friends with it?
Following the example of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev, Trump and Putin could begin with nuclear and other military issues. To prevent a Cold War and nuclear war between the two nations, Trump and Putin could finally agree to take nuclear arms off high alert and possibly adopt a mutual policy of no-first-use of nuclear warheads.
Current tensions between the U.S. and Russia prevent the two nations from hammering out any nuclear or military agreements. Every time the two nations sit at a negotiations table, they tend to start accusing one another of ramping up their military strength.
Until Trump’s presidency, the U.S. establishment has been divided into those who want to be strict towards Russia but remain sensible,and those who want to take extreme measures in dealing with Russia’s potential threats. Starting January 20, Trump will be the new U.S. President. In addition to that, he will have a Republican-dominated Congress and Senate. During Obama’s presidency, the Republicans couldn’t adopt some of their measures because of Obama, and vice versa – Obama couldn’t pass some of his measures because of the Republicans blocking his policies in Congress and Senate.
Thus, Trump will have more freedom of action and fewer constraints in foreign policy. But what will Trump choose to do with all that? Will he attack Russia and start a Cold War or actually reset U.S.-Russia relations?
One of the quirks about being an expat in a faraway land is that, whenever something unusual happens in your home country, your local friends look to YOU for answers.
You become, by default, the de facto expert of your home country’s nuances.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Martin Sheen
Case in point: this weekend we had an intercompany Christmas party down here at the farm for two of the businesses that I run.
(Sadly there may be some video floating around YouTube of me singing “Lost that lovin’ feeling”)
The first is Sovereign Man, whose Chile-based staff consists of highly eclectic, internationally-minded folks from the US, Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Germany, Australia, Argentina, etc.
Then there’s the agricultural business that I co-founded in 2014; it’s one of the fastest growing companies in the industry, and we currently have around 350 employees, most of whom are Chilean.
Even though I’ve spent more than the last decade traveling to over 120 countries and living outside of the United States, I’m one of the only US citizens that these guys know.
So you can probably imagine that I’ve spent the last few months fielding their questions about Donald Trump and the US election.
Now the conversations has turned to the Electoral College, which meets today.
It’s difficult to explain to foreigners why the United States, which they perceive as the most advanced country in the world, still uses an electoral system that was designed in the 1780s.
It’s even more difficult to explain to foreigners why Hollywood celebrities are trying to interfere with America’s political process.
In Latin America, celebrities do normal celebrity stuff.
They score goals on the soccer field, date pop starlets, and engage in childish antics that make the cover of sports and entertainment magazines.
But nobody actually takes these people seriously.
Nor do the local celebrities have a self-righteous sense of entitlement to influence a national election. They stick to their TV shows and Gooooooooooooooals.
But a lot of my employees have seen this video of Hollywood celebrities trying to convince 37 “Electors” from the Electoral College to NOT vote for Donald Trump.
I don’t have a good answer to explain to a foreigner why Martin Sheen feels like he’s entitled to influence the outcome of the election– seemingly because he once played at President on television…?
It would be like Jane Seymour, who used to play Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, feeling entitled to influence national healthcare legislation.
Or Scrooge McDuck wanting to set monetary policy.
This isn’t about celebrities voicing an opinion; it’s about brazenly trying to manipulate the election.
Ironically, the media has slammed Russia and its President Vladimir Putin for allegedly trying to manipulate the election.
So if Russia messes with the political process to advance Donald Trump (as the official narrative goes), it’s evil.
Yet when Martin Sheen blatantly tries to manipulate the election against Donald Trump with a pathetic piece of propaganda, the New York Times is noticeably silent.
Look, it’s fair to debate the merits and drawbacks of the incoming President, as well as the anachronistic Electoral College system itself.
But in trying to manipulate the process, these celebrities and their media cohorts prove they’ve failed to understand anything that’s just happened.
People are sick and tired of self-righteous elites trying to control the system.
This is what voters have been viscerally rejecting.
It’s a big reason why Donald Trump was elected to begin with, why Brits voted for Brexit, and why Italians rejected constitutional reform.
They’ve had entitled, out of touch moral crusaders pushing them around for years.
These people act as if they’re taking up some honorable burden to make decisions on your behalf because you’re too stupid and infantile to make up your own mind.
It’s insulting. Voters are tired of it. And these whiny celebrity activists are just digging themselves deeper.
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As Russia prepares to celebrate Orthodox Christmas, Russian leader Vladimir Putin has many reasons to be pleased this holiday season. Russia, after all, has received an abundance of geopolitical gifts over the past year. But for all the bounty that Putin reaped, Ded Moroz did not deliver the New Year’s present that the Russian leader really needed – a vibrant economy.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Russia
In foreign affairs, Putin certainly had a very good year in 2016. Most notably, the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election as US president sowed uncertainty in the West, paving the way for Russia to assert its political interests and social agenda on a global scale. Things went so well that even Estonia – a Baltic state and NATO member that traditionally views Russia as a bogeyman – installed a coalition government in late November led by a Moscow-friendly prime minister.
The string of geopolitical successes, which includes Russia’s Syria gambit and a rapprochement with Turkey, makes it clear that Putin’s personal brand of illiberalism, dubbed sovereign democracy, is ascendant. Meanwhile, Western liberalism appears tired and in disarray, unable to adapt fast enough to the Digital Age, in which any dumbass with a smartphone can spread hate, lies and confusion.
But all is not well with Russia. Behind the façade of renewed greatness, there is a very soft underbelly – one that Putin has been ignoring during all his presidential terms and his stint as prime minister. While Putin’s Kremlin has focused in recent years on projecting Russian power abroad and advancing its concept of “traditional,” i.e. anti-liberal values, the Russian economy has been tanking.
The disturbing economic reality is that Russia is more dependent on the export of natural resources than ever before in the post-Soviet age. Despite lagging prices, Russia in 2016 produced a record amount of oil (11.21 million barrels per day) and exported a record amount of natural gas (614.5 million cubic meters per day). At the same time, Russia’s industrial base is floundering, having difficulty producing goods, other than arms, that can compete in the global marketplace.
In other words, Russia has an economy these days that more resembles a colony than an imperial power.
Putin seems preoccupied with restoring Russia to what he sees as its rightful role as a global force, but his reluctance to carry out structural reforms at home is throttling the economy and having damaging social repercussions. He is pushing a growing number of Russians to the brink, or over the edge, of the poverty line.
State-controlled Russian media in recent weeks have tried to paint a rosy macroeconomic picture, with an array of experts contending that the worst of Russia’s economic woes, brought on by the crash of energy prices, are over. They go on to predict Russia will experience slight growth in 2017. “A positive trend has emerged,” Putin announced during his annual television address in late December.
According to the official TASS news agency, which cited Finance Ministry and Central Bank estimates for 2017, the Russian economy should grow at about a 1 percent rate, while inflation should slow to a 4 percent rate. The budget deficit for 2017 is projected to be about 3.2 percent of GDP, based on an average annual price of Urals crude oil of $40 per barrel.
Setting aside all this macro happy speak, the view from street level remains grim. The most alarming statistic, or at least what should be alarming for the Russian government, is the fact that Russians’ disposable income has declined for 25 straight months, shrinking by about 16 percent during the period. By comparison, during the Great Recession in the United States during the late 2000s, the longest stretch of declining disposable income lasted for seven straight months.
In November, the World Bank reported that 14.6 percent of Russia’s population (about 21.4 million people) had incomes below the national poverty line, as of the end of the first half of 2016. The report added, however, that the share of Russia’s population hovering dangerously close to the poverty line had reached 51 percent. Many had lost the “shared prosperity gains of recent years,” the World Bank report stated. Russia presently defines its poverty line as those earning less than 9,889 rubles per month (about $160).
Poverty statistics do not tell the whole story. The suffering is far more widespread. According to a report in November by Russia’s leading national research university, the Higher School of Economics, 41 percent of individuals surveyed reported not having enough money to afford food and clothes. Overall, 73 percent of the respondents reported having to cut spending on essential goods and services due to financial problems.
For most Russians, the economic picture is unlikely to get much better anytime soon. Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development forecast in November that disposable income would grow by 0.2 percent in 2017 and 0.5 percent in 2018. But even this measly growth prediction must be taken with a grain of salt. The ministry, after all, has a horrendous track record when it comes to forecasting: it predicted that disposable income in 2016 would decline at a 0.7 annual rate, when the actual annual rate turned out to be 5.6 percent.
In a bizarre twist, Putin seems to be banking on the United States, or more accurately the incoming Trump administration, to help rescue the Kremlin. In his annual New Year’s address, Putin expressed hope that bilateral relations could reach “a whole new level.”
“Acting in a constructive and pragmatic manner, [we] will be able to take real steps to restore the mechanisms of bilateral cooperation in various areas,” Putin said. If you take a moment to decode that statement, the translation would be: I expect the Trump administration will lift sanctions on Russia, and let me do as I please when it comes to Russian internal affairs, and not create any foreign policy headaches for me.
Putin clearly hopes to get a helping hand from Team Trump. Yet as a majority of American voters have already found out to their dismay, Trump is an expert at confounding expectations. Counting on Trump to act in a consistent and reliable manner is like expecting the Pope to convert to Islam.
Putin and his minions also seem to be optimistic that the price of oil will rise and stabilize, and thus give the state’s coffers a welcome infusion. But such optimism rests on a shaky foundation. Uncertainty is the byword – at least in the near and medium term.
And even if high energy prices, and a pliant Trump administration, do provide a boost to Russia’s financial fortunes, the ones who will gorge are the crony capitalists and the kleptocrats who serve as the foot-soldiers of the sovereign-democrat-in-chief. The masses will not get much nourishment from the leftovers.
The only solution to the challenge is structural reform. If Russia is ever to reach solid financial ground, and foster widespread prosperity, the economy needs to diversify to reduce its vulnerability to swings in energy and commodity prices, and the country’s labor market and welfare system need to be overhauled. Most importantly, property rights need to be secure: in particular, entrepreneurs and investors have to have confidence in the rule of law and believe that Russia’s judicial system can act as an independent arbiter of disputes.
The problem for Putin is that liberalizing the economy is at odds with his illiberal agenda. Structural reform would entail relinquishing a significant degree of political control over the economy, but any self-respecting sovereign democrat is constitutionally incapable of letting go. From Putin’s perspective, sovereign democracy should never be confused with the concept of popular sovereignty.
So what does it all mean? The Russian population’s capacity for suffering is the stuff of legend. And since Putin is the master of Russia’s media landscape, and has a vast state security system at his disposal, the danger to his rule from widespread popular discontent would seem minimal – at least when compared to what the situation would be if Russia had a genuine form of representative government.
But history shows that Russian suffering does have limits: in the early 1920s, for example, Lenin felt compelled to abandon War Communism and introduce the New Economic Policy. If living standards in the Putin era continue on their downward spiral, or even just stagnate, the population could lose faith in sovereign democracy, just like what happened in the early 1990s, when the chaos that accompanied the Soviet Union’s implosion shattered popular illusions about Western-style democracy.
Something to consider is that even sovereign democratic systems must hold elections, and Russia’s next presidential vote is scheduled for 2018. While the vote itself will not be free or fair, the process will provide an opportunity for the venting of any pent-up frustrations. Putin would do well to start addressing the question of the population’s plummeting living standards soon; otherwise, Russia could experience the kind of political surprise that rocked both the United States and the European Union in 2016.
That is not to say Putin, or his assignee, could be voted out of office in an election – such a preposterous notion does not compute in a sovereign democracy.
Yet there are other possibilities. While a successful revolution from below seems far-fetched, it is worth noting that over the course of the last three centuries of Russian history, two Romanov monarchs and two communist general secretaries have been taken down in palace coups.
If Putin is intent on maintaining the upper hand, both at home and abroad, he needs to remember the maxim minted by the American political strategist James Carville: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Editor’s note: Justin Burke is the Managing Editor of EurasiaNet.
The centennial of the Russian revolutionary events of 1917 is presenting the Kremlin with a difficult dilemma. Vladimir Putin’s regime simply cannot ignore one of key points of Russian history, and yet it seems to be struggling to fit the story of 1917’s political upheaval into its preferred historical narrative, which puts a premium on stability.
One saying goes that revolutions are started by politicians, but it is historians who end them. Myths often shroud revolutions, and it is left to historians to peel away the layers of fable to expose facts that can disturb long-held assumptions. This was the case with the French Revolution: Francois Furet, an outstanding 20th-century French historian, challenged revolutionary myths in a series of highly influential books, and famously liked to proclaim that “the French Revolution is over.” It also holds true for the American Revolution. The understanding of the American rebellion against King George III has undergone a vast shift in the past 50 years, thanks to historians like Bernard Bailyn, who famously recast the revolution not only as a war for home rule, but also one over who should rule at home.
In present-day Russia, however, historians are not in the lead when it comes to interpreting the past. It is Russia’s political and security elite that is in charge of elaborating a “correct” interpretation of history.
According to Russian media reports, Putin’s Kremlin considers the question of how the 1917 centennial is observed to be a matter of national security. Late last year, media outlets reported that experts on the scientific committee at Russia’s Security Council discussed the centennial, and determined that the government needed to take steps to control the narratives, driven by a belief that outside forces were intent on intentionally distorting the revolutionary era, as well as other important periods of Russian history. The committee reportedly concluded that historical memory becomes an object of “deliberate destructive actions on the part of foreign government agencies and international organizations which seek to pursue their geopolitical interests through conducting the anti-Russian policy.”
Besides the Russian revolutions of 1917, the Security Council’s experts identified several other significant historical themes as vulnerable to falsification and in need of protection. These are the nationalities policy of the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union’s role in the defeat of Nazi Germany; the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; and the Soviet reaction to the political crises in the GDR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other former East bloc countries.
It is eminently telling that the Russian General Staff drafted the key presentation at the Security Council’s session on the national security implications of the manipulation of history. Remarkably, speaking in late January at the first meeting of the Jubilee Committee for the preparation of the 100th anniversary of the Great Russian Revolution, Vitaly Tretyakov, a conservative political commentator, bluntly suggested that Russia’s national interests would be better served if historians were sidelined in the process of appraising the sociopolitical outcomes of 1917. It would be “unwise and unfair,” he contended, to give historians a free hand in shaping public attitudes towards the revolution. Tretyakov cited two reasons to support his argument: “First, for the most part today, as always, historians are ideologically biased. … And second, they are not political thinkers.”
Whatever the shortcomings of professional historians, Russian authorities appear to be at a particular loss when it comes to marking the centennial of the Bolshevik Coup in November 1917 (October under the old style). Prior to that event’s 90th anniversary, the Kremlin opted for a seemingly “simple” solution: in 2004, it swapped an old revolutionary holiday on November 7 for a newly invented nationalist one on November 4 – National Unity Day, which commemorated the expulsion of Polish occupation forces from Moscow in 1612.
Curiously, this decision coincided with the publication of a book, titled Sociosophy of Revolution, by Igor P. Smirnov, a Russian literary scholar based in Germany. In his study, Smirnov offered a highly unorthodox interpretation of False Dmitry’s reign and the Time of Troubles, contending that it was Russia’s first revolution. It is unlikely that the Smirnov study had any impact on the Kremlin’s politics of memory, but the routing of the Poles, and the establishment of an autocracy in the form of the Romanov dynasty’s 300-year rule obviously seemed like a good thing to celebrate.
However, the new holiday idea proved to be highly unpopular, and the Kremlin, unnerved by “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, shifted its approach in a clear attempt to bring subversive revolutionary ideology into public disfavor. On February 27, 2007, the government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta published Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Reflections on the February Revolution. For Solzhenitsyn, a conservative-monarchist, February 1917 was nothing more than a ruinous prelude to the catastrophic October. So his essay (originally penned in the early 1980s) unambiguously cursed the entire revolutionary period and mourned the loss of stability, sovereignty and the statehood of “historic Russia.”
Ten years on, political upheavals in the world, including Ukraine’s Euromaidan uprising, seem to indicate that the specter of revolution cannot be ignored. At the same time, Russian leaders do not have a clear message to convey. A sign of this confusion is a recent article written by Sergei Mironov, a Putin ally in the State Duma.
Mironov’s essay, titled February – a Harbinger of October and published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, seems to demonstrate the Kremlin’s growing “poverty of philosophy.” It is a disjointed assembly of contradictory theses. Mironov acknowledges the February Revolution’s positive achievements, including the establishment of a republican form of government and the recognition of political rights. But he also bemoans the downfall of tsarism, claiming the February Revolution caused the erosion of traditional Russian values. “Power lost its sacredness” in 1917, he also laments. He goes on to add, referring to the chaos that accompanied the Soviet collapse, that “the same devastating effect of the spiritual and ideological crisis we observed in the 1990s.”
The chief lesson Mironov draws in his analysis of 1917 is that Russia requires a strong hand at the helm of state. “Russia is not a country that can afford to have a weak power, led by such a weak-willed ruler like Nicholas II,” he wrote. “It is a great boon for all of us that in the current difficult times the country is ruled by such a strong personality as President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin.”
Mironov’s conclusion fails to take into account an important fact: as 1917 (and 1991) showed, autocratic regimes may be outwardly strong, but can be inwardly brittle, and can therefore collapse with startling speed. Autocracy tends not to supply enough glue to keep the social fabric together during times of economic and political stress. “Rus’ has faded away within two days. At most, within three,” the Russian writer Vasily Rozanov incredulously noted in 1917.
The divergence between the image of the Russian Empire’s greatness and its ingloriously swift demise should raise uncomfortable questions for those who support a new form of autocracy in Russia. The history of the 20th century shows that autocracies and authoritarianism can be more brittle and more susceptible to sudden breaks than other systems that allow for broader public participation.
Editor’s note: Igor Torbakov is Senior Fellow at Uppsala University and at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs in Stockholm, Sweden.
In a mini-warehouse in the Stockholm neighborhood of Skarpnäck, a district with a reputation for outsider politics, is the office of a man on a mission.
Surrounded by dictionaries and reference books in Swedish and Russian, Stefan Lindgren, a translator in his late sixties, is one of a small but vocal band of Swedes who think that Swedish mainstream media has misrepresented Russia as a foe rather than a friend, and want to present an alternative view.
“If you look at developments in Russia, it by and large meets the criteria we would have for a democracy — they have elections, anyone can form a political party, and they have a media that is actually more pluralistic than our own here in Sweden,” Lindgren claimed during a recent interview.
That means, he argued, that “the same old anti-Russian propaganda” no longer makes sense.
An avowed socialist, Lindgren, like others in left-leaning circles, believes that Swedish media’s negative portrayal of Russian domestic and foreign policies is linked to Sweden’s need to justify to the population its partnership with NATO. Opposition to NATO and a commitment to neutrality run strong among Swedes.
The current government is skeptical about joining the alliance, but, with an eye on Russia’s muscle-flexing, last year signed a cooperation agreement that allows NATO operations in and around Sweden in time of war.
Nonetheless, Lindgren, who considers himself an expert on Russia, maintains that the establishment has got it all wrong. He has set up a news site which seeks to expose “false” reporting on a range of topics, including about Russia.
Lindgren did not address such a role — or the “systematic trolling” which these journalists and academics supposedly endure — but does not conceal his antipathy for mainstream Swedish media coverage of Russia.
“In Sweden, it’s like the Soviet Union, with the newspapers DN as Pravda and Svenska Dagbladet as Izvestiya,” Lindgren protested, referring to two of the largest Swedish dailies. “Bearing that in mind, I don’t think we’re in any position to go shouting at Russia.”
A common complaint from Sweden’s political fringes is about “åsiktskorridoren,” or “the opinion corridor,” a narrow space for debate in which commonly held views that diverge from establishment opinions are unwelcome and consensus encouraged.
To share their own views, Russia sympathizers don’t count only on leftists. They look also to a string of hardline conservative news sources that have emerged over the past several years since the populist Sweden Democrats, supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump, began to gain elected office. Such outlets routinely reprint Lindgren’s writing, including from his opinion blog.
One of the re-publishers is Fria Tider (Free Times), an online newspaper founded in 2009 with the slogan “Give Swedish media a swift right hook!”
With a strongly anti-EU line, it publishes op-eds by libertarians and members of the anti-immigration, isolationist right, peppered with news stories refuting mainstream reporting on crime and corruption, among other topics. Two of its favorite targets are the publicly funded TV channel SVT and Radio Sweden.
Lindgren’s latest contribution to Fria Tider, from last September, focused on “debunking” a series of media claims about the presence of Russian ground troops in Syria and the risks of Russia’s Nordstream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea.
Nothing suggests that Fria Tider, which is registered in Estonia, is controlled by Russia. But its view of Sweden is one the Kremlin would happily endorse.
It routinely promotes content from sites such as the radical right-wing Breitbart News Network, formerly run by chief Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, that have a taste for cultural nationalism, media-bashing and sensationalist crime stats.
It actively promoted content from the Kremlin-financed news site Sputnik until 2016, when Sputnik dropped its Swedish-language coverage. (Sputnik, however, still uses Fria Tider as a source for Swedish news.)
Fria Tider’s content reaches more than a fringe. Global ranking service Alexa places the outlet among the country’s top 200 sites, with a popularity comparable to regional newspapers.
What effect, if any, outlets like Fria Tider can have on Swedish voters is not clear. But its coverage could prove of increasing interest as Sweden approaches its 2018 general election.
In January, the security services announced an operation to prevent Russian disinformation from affecting the election’s outcome. Security analysts have identified the Sweden Democrats as among the likely potential beneficiaries of any such manipulation.
Lindgren maintains, though, that even the Sweden Democrats, once positive about Putin, have begun to toe the line on Russia since entering parliament in 2010.
Others are not so sure.
Last fall, a public debate erupted over the government’s vulnerability to Russian intelligence operations after a Russia-born parliamentary aide for the Sweden Democrats was reported to have been involved in a property deal with a Russian businessman reportedly married to a Russian tax official.
Fearing a potential security risk, Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist asked the party to review the transaction, media reported. The episode, and the aide’s practice of writing op-eds under pseudonyms, also prompted the press to raise larger questions about parliamentary security.
Claiming that he had been smeared by the media, the aide eventually left his post. He denies any wrongdoing, insists that he opposes Russian President Vladimir Putin, and has remained in Sweden, running a “whistleblowing” blog.
Yet the right wing is not the only cause for controversy over alleged disinformation about Russia, according to the Swedish Institute for International Affairs. It also pointed the finger at the left-wing Aftonbladet.
The report unleashed a war of words between different branches of the media, with the national tabloid Expressen publishing a list of alleged Kremlin sympathizers.
Martin Aagård, one of the Aftonbladet culture journalists identified as pro-Russian, hit back.
“I don’t think this is an evil conspiracy. I think it is a question of sheer incompetence, and a substantial misunderstanding of journalism,” he wrote in a January 9 response in Aftonbladet to the accusations. “Whatever the cause, this witch-hunt has to stop now.”
Last July, Aagård authored an article called “The Invasion That Never Happened” about how Swedish media snap up reports about alleged Russian aggression and preparation for attacks on Sweden. He had also written about extreme Ukrainian nationalists, but said that highlighting such individuals merely reflected a commitment to pluralism.
Aftonbladet, however, now senses the need to add disclaimers that qualify all its culture reporters’ articles as “opinion content.”
Lindgren and his fellow Russophiles, though, have no issue with traditional media’s concerns about legitimacy and trustworthiness.
“We need people who know more about Russia,” Lindgren said, “and, over time, those people will change [their] opinion maybe, and make it harder to isolate Russia in the future.”
Editor’s note: Dominic Hinde is an academic, journalist and author specializing in Scandinavia.
The handshake of U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia President Vladimir Putin during the G20 meeting showed who has the dominant hand in U.S.-Russia relations.
President Trump and his Russian counterpart Putin reached Syria deal during their G20 summit meeting. President Trump met with Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg on Friday. The two world leaders sat down to discuss Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election and ending violence in Syria.
Trump and Putin reached a Syria deal to curb violence in the war-torn country, as revealed by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson addressing reporters after the meeting. The historic meeting between the two presidents lasted for more than two hours, though they were expected to meet for only 30 to 40 minutes on the first day of the G20 summit.
As the attention of hundreds of reporters was glued to the Trump-Putin meeting, there was a fair share of speculation in the media about the two world leaders’ body language during the summit. The body language of Trump and Putin is coming under increased scrutiny, with people trying to find the hidden meaning in their behaviors.
A Lot of Patting from Trump, A Dominating, Upper Hand from Putin
Reporters noted that there was a lot of patting from Trump’s side and a dominating, upper hand handshake from Putin. As the two world leaders sat down for a bilateral behind-the-closed-doors meeting, Trump and Putin briefly addressed G20 media reporters in the room.
During the sit-down, the U.S. President extended his hand with his palm facing upwards, giving Putin the freedom to shake his hand with a dominating, upper hand. Even bizarrely, Trump extended his hand in this manner twice in less than two minutes. Body language experts interpret this type of handshake as giving the upper-hand to the other party.
In the particular case of Trump-Putin meeting, Trump was the one who initiated the lower-hand handshake, suggesting that he was himself willing to let the Russian President dominate the conversation.
Trump Gets His Revenge After Bizarre Handshake with French President Macron
Trump is no stranger to having his handshakes with world leaders analyzed by the media, as the U.S. President shared an abnormally prolonged handshake with French President Emmanuel Macron in May. From the looks of it, it was Macron who refused to let go of Trump’s hand to prolong the handshake.
On Friday, Trump seemingly got his revenge by using a ‘bro clasp’ to greet his French counterpart. In what is seen in the video captured by reporters, the U.S. President is seen clasping Macron’s hand and seemingly pulling the French President toward himself, showing his own strength. Macron, who reportedly weighs nearly 100 pounds less than the U.S. President (161 lbs. vs 236 lbs., according to the media’s estimations), was easily pulled by Trump to his side.
Trump and Putin Exchange Multiple Handshakes During G20
Before their sit-down for a bilateral meeting at the G20, Trump and Putin briefly met in what seemed to be a collegial encounter. Although it’s unclear if the U.S. President and his Russian counterpart were aware that they were recorded, the two world leaders shook hands with sheer enthusiasms and smiled. The video was originally posted by the German government.
Right before the video cuts away, the U.S. President is seen patting Putin on the back, while the duo stand side-by-side, smiling. During their collegial encounter, the U.S. President and his Russian counterpart exchanged a standard handshake that symbolizes that the two parties are on equal grounds – though Trump did pat Putin on his elbow during the handshake.
Putin Vehemently Denies Meddling in U.S. Election by Russia
The meeting between Trump and Putin was expected to be more tense, as the two presidents exchanged bitter remarks about one another in the lead-up to the G20. The day before the summit, the U.S. President was in Poland, where he criticized Russia’s use of energy as its force as well as took a swipe at the Russian government for its alleged military actions in Eastern Ukraine.
The Russian President did not leave Trump’s needling unnoticed, and slammed his American counterpart for his trade policies during the G20 summit, according to various reports in the Russian media.
The two parties, however, are reportedly confident that the Trump-Putin meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit was quite productive, as the two world leaders reached an agreement on the brutal Syrian war. Quite unexpectedly for the media, Trump even brought up the widely-discussed topic of Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election, according to the U.S. Secretary of State. The Russian President vehemently denied being involved in the alleged interference, as told by Tillerson in a post-meeting press briefing.
The discussion of Russia’s alleged interference in the U.S. election on the sidelines of the G20 summit comes amid a report released earlier this year, in which U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Moscow was responsible for an “influence campaign” to attack Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the election, and it allegedly helped Trump become the U.S. President.
Trump and Putin Reach a Syria Deal
Tillerson also revealed that the tone of Trump-Putin indicated that the two world leaders wanted to move past Russia’s alleged meddling in the U.S. election and agreed that the issue has become an obstacle to improved U.S.-Russia relations.
The Secretary of State also told reporters that the ceasefire was a “defined agreement” and could lay out the groundwork for further cooperation on Syria between the two nations.
“This is our first indication of the US and Russia being able to work together in Syria,” Tillerson said, adding that Trump and Putin had a “lengthy discussion of other areas in Syria where we can work together.” According to the Secretary of State, Russia’s alleged meddling in the U.S. election became the first topic the two leaders discussed, as Trump opened their meeting by “raising the concerns of the American people regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election.”
Putin, for his part, told media reporters before the meeting that he was “delighted” to finally meet the U.S. President face-to-face.
Vladimir Putin praises Trump quite often, whether you like it or not. Just days after returning from Syria where he declared “victory” for Russian forces in aid of Bashar al-Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin held a four-hour-long annual press conference on Thursday. Unsurprisingly, Putin had a lot of good things to say about the US President Donald Trump. The two call each other by their first names, according to Putin. The Russian President also dismissed the allegations of links between the Kremlin and Donald Trump.
Vladimir Putin praises Trump: ‘Look at the US stock market’
Putin told media that the allegations of collusion between the Kremlin and Trump’s election campaign were “invented” by the US President’s opponents. Talking about Trump’s presidency, Putin said he was “not the one to evaluate” the US President’s work. That’s up to the American people. But Trump has “some quite serious achievements, even in the short period of time he’s been working,” added Putin.
The US stocks have soared under Trump’s presidency. “That shows investors’ confidence in the American economy, it shows they believe in what President Trump is doing,” said the Russian President. Trump has also pointed to the rising US stocks as proof that his agenda was working. Putin added that there are a few things such as reforming the US healthcare system that Trump had been unable to achieve because of domestic opposition.
Putin said Thursday that the US was gripped by a fabricated “spy-mania” created by Trump’s opponents. Accusations of links between members of President Trump’s administration and Russia were “all invented by people who are in opposition to Trump in order to make his work look illegitimate,” said Vladimir Putin. He called these accusations “very bizarre.”
Those behind such allegations were trying to “impede” Trump’s agenda. In fact, they were damaging the American political system by not respecting voters who chose the president. A number of contacts between Russia and Donald Trump’s election campaign surfaced during Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian meddling in the last year’s US Presidential election.
It’s not that only Vladimir Putin praises Trump all the time. The US President has also praised his Russian counterpart on many occasions. We wouldn’t be surprised if Putin praises Trump again publicly sometime soon.
It’s pretty common for governments to meet foreign candidates
Putin said it was a “common” practice for governments to meet the overseas representatives and candidates. The US Congress is investigating the ties between Moscow and Trump’s election campaign to see if Russia indeed influenced the US Presidential election. Relations between the US and Russia were expected to improve after Trump’s election, but the ties have hit bottom amid investigations. President Trump has denied the allegations on many occasions.
Vladimir Putin hopes the US-Russia ties would improve in the future. He said the two countries should “go forward without trying to be at one another’s throats.” He also took potshots at the US lawmakers for their handling of international relations. The Americans put Russia in the “same category alongside Iran and North Korea.” And now they want to persuade Putin to help resolve the issues with Iran and North Korea’s nuclear program.
Vladimir Putin seeks re-election as an independent
65-year-old Putin has also declared that he would run for re-election in March 2018. If he gets re-elected, which he will because there is no strong opponent, he will become the longest-serving Russian leader since the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Putin has been in power for 18 years. The re-election would extend it by another six years.
Surprisingly, he announced that he would run as an independent candidate rather than as a candidate of the ruling United Russia Party. The move makes sense considering Putin himself has a much higher support rating than the United Russia Party. According to Levada, the Russian President has an approval rating of above 80%. Putin is hoping that “some popular groups, movements, parties” would support him.
He began Thursday’s conference by pledging to improve the incomes of the Russian people. He assured his countrymen that the Russian economy had recovered from the worst recession in years caused by Western sanctions and falling oil prices. Putin said domestic issues such as infrastructure, health, and education would be his biggest electoral priorities.
Not my duty to create opponents
Putin has no strong opponents to make the 2018 election interesting. When reporters asked him whether it was “boring” not to have any real opponent in the upcoming elections, Putin said it was not his responsibility to create an opposition. However, he believes that the country’s electoral system “should be competitive.” Putin said the lack of opponents was due to the economic improvements under his tenure.
Noted anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny has announced that he would run for the presidency. Navalny has been jailed many times in the last few years for organizing protest rallies. Without directly mentioning Alexei Navalny, Putin said the Kremlin would not allow opponents to create instability.
“To be a Eurasianist should be cool, it should be stylish.”
“Cool” is not the first word you would use to describe the scene. I am in a small conference room in Minsk, at the Belarus office of a Russian government agency called “Rossotrudnichestvo.” Linked to the Foreign Ministry, you could translate it as the “Russian Cooperation Agency,” and some describe it as the soft-power arm of the Kremlin. The crowd, divided roughly evenly between Russians and Belarusians, is a wonky-looking mix of rumpled middle-aged academics and eager students.
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The advocate for Eurasian cool is Yuri Kofner, a fresh-faced 20-something from Moscow. The topic is how to make the Eurasian Union more popular in Belarus. It is one of the five member states of the supranational body launched by Russia in 2014 with great fanfare. Since then, depending on your perspective, it is either becoming a Russia-centered counterweight to Western groupings like the European Union, or drifting into irrelevance,
Kofner is dedicated to making sure it’s the former. “We need to do the same thing that attracts people to Europe,” he tells his audience. A Eurasianist is “a new patriot,” he argues, loyal to the idea of Eurasia, with Russia at its heart. “Europe has become boring for us,” he continues, “but that’s what we need to develop, that style.”
The Eurasian Union did seem to have style, even swagger, in its early days. In the run-up to its launch, Russian President Vladimir Putin called it “epoch-making,” imbuing it with the grand, anti-Western ideology of Eurasianism. Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. Secretary of State, helped feed that narrative by describing the Eurasian Union as a cover for Russian efforts to “re-Sovietize the region.”
But so far, it hasn’t lived up to that billing. No more states want to join its five members — Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Russia. There’s even a faint sense of embarrassment in Moscow over the whole project. And the West is now more concerned about Russia’s cyber-meddling and continuing war on Ukraine. Meanwhile, China’s ambitious “One Belt, One Road”program, which covers much of the Eurasian Union’s territory, seems to be advancing decisively.
Yet in the meantime the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), as it is formally known, has become a fact of life. At least 1,000 people work at its Moscow headquarters, engaged in workaday bureaucratic tasks like coordinating financial markets and standardizing pharmaceutical regulations across the five member states. It has cut red tape for Kyrgyz labor migrants in Moscow and spawned an ersatz banana export industry in Belarus. But its economic impact has been negligible, analysts say. And Putin rarely mentions the EEU these days. So rarely, in fact, that I thought he had quietly abandoned his grand geopolitical ambitions for the organization.
But when I suggested this to people studying it, I got some pushback. If the Kremlin talks about the geopolitical side, it “only makes people upset,” said one economist I met in Kazakhstan. “They’re still doing this ideological work,” he added, “just more quietly.” And the person leading this effort, I was told repeatedly, is Yuri Kofner.
So that’s how I found myself in the conference room in Minsk.
There are really two Eurasian Unions. One is economic — based on a free trade pact. The other is geopolitical and ideological, driven primarily by Russia’s desire to remain a global power.
Kofner is a standard-bearer for both. He is doing his PhD dissertation on non-tariff barriers to trade in the Eurasian Union, and is the head of a new Center for Eurasian Studies in Moscow. He also runs the Eurasian Movement of the Russian Federation, which is devoted to promoting the idea that there is a unique “Eurasian” civilization in Russia and its neighbors, distinct from both East and the West.
In the corner of the conference room hangs a purple flag with an eight-pointed star, which some Eurasianists have informally adopted as their banner. Kofner’s Eurasian Movement website explains that it is a symbol common to Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, while the colour represents “a synthesis between Europe (blue) and Asia (red), Slavs (red) and Turks (blue), tradition (blue) and revolution (red), the market (blue) and planning (red).”
Kofner explained that his initiation into Eurasianism began while he was a student at the Moscow Institute for International Relations (MGIMO), the elite university training ground for Russia’s future diplomats. Reading the writings of classical Eurasianists and Slavophiles was an eye-opener. “They expressed what I had always thought about Russia, but couldn’t put into words,” he said. “It’s not an underdeveloped Europe, but an independent, unique world — a Eurasian civilization.”
That led him to set up a student “Eurasianist Club.” It is clearly the civilizational side of the Eurasian idea that most animates him, as he repeatedly referred to its economic agenda as “boring.”
But Eurasianism can be a hard sell. For many outside Russia, talk of trying to make Eurasianism “cool” just sounds like a new way of dressing up Russian chauvinism and imperialism. That strain of Eurasianism is exemplified by Russia’s most prominent Eurasianist, the controversial philosopher Alexander Dugin, who is also known for his openly ultra-nationalist and anti-Western views.
Kofner knows him personally, but tells the Minsk gathering that Dugin “distorts the true ideas of Eurasianism.” He goes further in his writings, arguing that the philosopher is wrong to focus so much on the perceived threat of Western liberalism. The real divide, Kofner says, is between “Eurasian authoritarian liberalism and Western monetary fascism.”
Far from being a Russian imperialist project, Kofner argues, Eurasianism offers a way for smaller Eurasian states to protect themselves against the imposition of foreign, Western values. (He does not address the fact that this could still be seen as another kind of Russian imperialism). To support his case, he points out that the vote of each member — from tiny Armenia to giant Russia — has equal weight. Focusing on Belarus for his audience, he argues that it should maintain “an identity that looks both to the West and to the East.”
Yet even this friendly crowd is skeptical. One young Belarusian academic, Igor Avlasenko, highlights what he sees as the “contradictions” in Russia’s position, ostensibly promoting the Eurasian Union while acting very much as a lone big power. He pointed out that Putin had recently approvingly quoted Tsar Alexander III’s famous line that “Russia has only two allies, its army and its navy.” None “of the other members of the Eurasian Union were mentioned,” Avlasenko adds.
Another participant perhaps unwittingly highlights the central contradiction of the project — as he calls for other member states to have a greater role in driving the Eurasian Union and its ideology. If Russia comes up with an idea, “that is imperial ambition,” says Kirill Koktysh. “But who could accuse, say, Belarus of having imperial ambitions?” he continues. “It’s kind of funny, right?”
Outside of think tank conference rooms, it’s hard to measure the real-world impacts of the Eurasian Union. Its launch has coincided with a number of other large economic trends in the region: an economic crisis caused in large part by low oil prices, Western sanctions against Russia, and many EEU currencies seeing significant devaluations.
It is hard “to decouple” these trends from the effects of joining the EEU, said Roman Mogilevskii, an economist at the University of Central Asia in Bishkek. “If you clean out these major shocks, the effects of the Eurasian Union are not as big as everyone expects. You have some positives and some negatives.”
Adding to the confusion is the fact that the debate around the EEU is highly politicized, with proponents tending to be pro-Russia, and opponents anti-Russia. The volatile economic situation therefore makes it easy for both sides to cherry pick data to prove that the union is either a great success or a disaster.
A Russian European Union
The EEU is run day-to-day by the Eurasian Economic Commission from a nondescript office park in Moscow. Led by former Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan, the commission is developing plans to further integrate the member states’ economies — a common market for pharmaceuticals this year, electricity by 2019, and financial markets by 2025. It has signed a free trade agreement with Vietnam and has started negotiating similar pacts with Egypt, Iran, India, and Singapore.
The commision wouldn’t give me an interview. So I got a coffee at the Starbucks next to the main entrance instead, and people-watched as staff, dressed in business casual and carrying briefcases and backpacks, bustled in and out of the brick-and-glass headquarters building. The scene would not have looked out of place in, say, Brussels.
That is no coincidence. In spite of its ostensibly “Eastern” ideological orientation, the EEU is explicitly modeled on the European Union and its ethos of integration. Many of its key officials are also steeped in EU thinking, having been educated at European universities in the 1990s, according to Vasiliy Kashin of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “They know the European bureaucracy in detail,” he added. “They are not some Orientalists.”
And for all the political tumult these days over the merits of free trade and concerns about the EU’s long-term viability, its Russian counterpart is not offering anything radically different.
It is important to remember that the EEU was also borne out of rejection by Europe — as the Kremlin sees it. In the early years of his presidency, Putin tried to persuade the EU to allow Russia to integrate on its own terms, recognizing its special size and influence. This was “a really sincere” goal, according to Alexander Gabuev, a Russian foreign policy analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center.
But as the 2000s progressed, Putin decided such efforts were futile, and that the West had no intention of treating Russia as an equal. President George W. Bush’s unilateral invasion of Iraq cemented his view that the U.S. wanted to monopolize global power instead. And he saw the revolutions in neighboring states like Ukraine and Georgia — leading to anti-Russian leaders gaining power — as the start of a Western conspiracy aimed ultimately at Russia. He cracked down on domestic opposition in response, further alienating Europe.
The Kremlin concluded that Russia needed to be “the center of gravity in the post-Soviet space,” says Gabuev, enabling it “to talk on an equal footing” with the EU and the wider West. And this became the major political idea behind the EEU.
Gabuev was wearing a hoodie when we met. He is a former journalist who used to cover Russian foreign policy and speaks fluent, American-accented English. He reminded me of a 2011 piece Putin wrote for the newspaper Izvestiya — during his brief period as prime minister — in which he laid out his vision of the EEU as a “supranational union that could become one of the poles of the modern world.” It would be a bridge, he hoped, “between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific region.”
Yet even those hopes for the Eurasian Union’s role faded, as Putin saw new threats coming from the West. By 2013, he had returned to the presidency, and the EU was preparing to sign “association agreements” with Armenia and Ukraine.
Moscow responded by announcing a major arms deal with Armenia’s enemy, Azerbaijan, and floated rumors that it might increase the cost of gas supplies to the country. Yerevan got the hint: it abandoned the EU and said it would join the Eurasian Union instead.
Putin also began to put more emphasis on the concept of a Eurasian identity and civilization. In a landmark speech in 2013 — only two weeks after Armenia had turned its back on Western Europe — he said the EEU was not just about mutually beneficial agreements, but “a project for maintaining the identity of nations in the historical Eurasian space.” But his efforts to woo Ukraine into the Eurasian fold ended in disaster.
Putin still sounds bullish about the project when he mentions it—most recently in his annual marathon news conference. It is “our huge joint achievement,” he told his live audience, before adding: “there is always a lot of criticism, but the numbers show that our decisions were right and that we are moving in the right direction.” But gone now are the lofty references to identity and new civilizations.
Some believe the EEU has become as much a defense mechanism as a mask for imperialist expansion. A key reason for its launch was to prevent “another Ukraine,” according to a “Kremlin-connected insider” quoted in a study of the Eurasian Union for an EU-linked security think tank. The goal is to lock member states into a Russian orientation, even when their leaders change. Putin’s nightmare is the death or removal of Lukashenko in Belarus and Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, the EU report’s source said. They are both strongmen leaders, but presiding over weak institutions and Putin wants to ensure their successors “have no choice” but to stay inside Moscow’s embrace.
The EEU also helps the Kremlin block member states from pursuing bilateral relationships that it regards as threatening its interests. For example, if Armenia wanted to sign a free trade deal with its neighbors Georgia or Iran, it couldn’t. That authority is now vested in the Eurasian Union. Being a member is “not allowing us to develop our economy, our ties with other countries,” complains Edmon Marukyan, an Armenian MP leading a campaign to pull out.
But by the same token, Russia’s freedom of manoeuvre is also constrained. The group operates on a consensus basis, with every state getting a veto, a concession the Kremlin agreed to because it thought that was the only way it could get Ukraine to join. It means, for instance, that Armenia has veto power over Russia’s trade policy. “For me that’s insane,” Gabuev says, before adding this telling caveat. “Ok, Armenia is not a problem because you can always pressure them and they literally never object to anything.”
Belarus, however, is different in Gabuev’s view, because it has “tough, nationalist-oriented people on the commission who are pushing the interests of Belarusian industry.” This, he says, “definitely limits Russia’s ability to do stuff it could be doing on its own.”
In fact, member states have proved frustratingly independent from Moscow at times. When the West imposed sanctions on Russia in response to its annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin tried to get the EEU to impose its own counter-sanctions. But the other member states refused to go along, forcing Russia to go it alone in blocking certain Western products. Belarus responded creatively, importing Western goods and re-exporting them, duty-free, to Russia, resulting in “Belarusian” bananas and salmon appearing in Russian supermarkets.
Even the structure of the union represents a major Russian concession to the demands of its other members, particularly Belarus and Kazakhstan. Both states demanded that it was only a free trade agreement, specifically excluding any political component, and this was enshrined in the formal name: the Eurasian Economic Union.
But the Kremlin has not given up on turning the EEU into something bigger. One proposal that regularly comes up is to start a common currency, in spite of Belarus and Kazakhstan regularly insisting that they want to keep with their own money.
Less than three years into its existence, proponents of the Eurasian Union say it is still too early to judge its record. “The EU has existed for 60 years and only this year has it eliminated mobile phone roaming charges,” says Yuri Kofner.
His work is a sign that the Kremlin still harbors big ambitions for the union, even if they have been put on hold for the moment. Kofner is one of the Kremlin’s “intellectual entrepreneurs,” says Yuval Weber, a professor at the Higher School of Economics. They are people who can be funded relatively cheaply and kept in reserve in case they are useful one day. The government may need another “Dugin-like figure” in the future, says Weber, but someone who is “cleaner and more presentable to foreigners.”
Kofner barely hides his impatience for the Eurasian Union to move faster and be bolder. He acknowledges the anxieties of other members, but argues that working with Russia is in their long-term interests. “Russia in its bigness, in its vastness, is of course taking bigger steps than other countries,” he told me, trying to distil his thinking. Russians “want to go forward, but they know if they go forward at the normal Russian pace the other countries will say wait, it’s imperialism again. And Russia doesn’t want people to think that, Russia doesn’t need this. It just wants to go forward normally.”
And this new face of Eurasianism says he is not alone. Kofner tells the Minsk gathering that many of the EEU’s top technocrats have Eurasianist sympathies. And his Eurasianist Movement includes a cross-section of business-people, NGO staff and civil servants, as well as people working directly for the EEU.
“We have people wearing their insignia under their jackets,” Kofner says. “This is a long-term effort to promote ideologically patriotic Eurasianists, not oddballs but people who really want to make this happen.”
Eurasia may not be “cool” yet, but it still has plenty of life in it.
