Category Archives: Russia

The myth of the West’s threat to Russia

Alexander J. Motyl writes: Much Western thinking about the causes of the Russo-Ukrainian War is rooted in a myth. It posits that the West — or, more specifically, NATO — attempted to wrest Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence, thereby forcing Vladimir Putin to defend Russia’s legitimate strategic interests by going to war with Ukraine.

The logic is impeccable. The only problem is that there isn’t a shred of truth to this claim.

Was the West determined to integrate Ukraine into its institutions? Until the Maidan Revolution broke out in late 2013, Ukraine “fatigue” had characterized Western policy since about 2008, when the government of then-President Viktor Yushchenko lost the reformist zeal it had inherited from the 2004 Orange Revolution. Even before that, Western policymakers never talked of including Ukraine in the European Union. Indeed, the EU’s Eastern Partnership program and its offer of an Association Agreement to Kyiv were supposed to placate Ukraine without promising it even the distant prospect of membership in the EU. The reluctance to offer that prospect remains unchanged.

Was the West determined to transform Ukraine into a pro-Western democracy? The United States and Europe pumped several billions of dollars into Ukrainian civil society projects since 1991, while remaining indifferent to the Leonid Kuchma regime’s slide toward authoritarianism in the late 1990s, the abandonment by Yushchenko’s “Orange government” of its democratic reform agenda, and Viktor Yanukovych’s establishment of a full-fledged authoritarian regime in 2010-2013. Some Western policymakers supported the Maidan Revolution rhetorically and insisted that Yanukovych seek a compromise with the democratic revolutionaries; but most did not. No Western state actually provided any material assistance to the Maidan. And no Western presidents or prime ministers called on Yanukovych to step down during the revolution: quite the contrary, they travelled to Kyiv in late February 2014 with the express purpose of saving him. Once he abandoned his office, many Western policymakers welcomed his move — but that was after, and not before, the fact. [Continue reading…]

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Two charged with Nemtsov killing include Chechen officer: report

Reuters: Russian authorities said on Sunday they were holding five men over the killing of Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov, one of whom served in a police unit in the Russian region of Chechnya, according to a law enforcement official.

The five men were frogmarched into a Moscow courtroom on Sunday, forced by masked security officers gripping their bound arms to walk doubled over, a Reuters reporter at the court said. They stood in metal cages in the courtroom as television crews were ushered in to film them.

A judge ruled that all five should be held in custody and said that one of them, Zaur Dadayev, had admitted his involvement in the killing when questioned by investigators.

Dadayev served for a decade in the “Sever” police battalion, part of the interior ministry in Chechnya, Russian news agencies reported. They cited Albert Barakhayev, a senior security official in the neighboring region of Ingushetia, where several of the men were detained.

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Berlin alarmed by aggressive NATO stance on Ukraine

Der Spiegel reports: It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn’t holding perfectly, but it was holding.

On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again “upped the ante” in eastern Ukraine — with “well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery” having been sent to the Donbass. “What is clear,” Breedlove said, “is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.”

German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn’t understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn’t the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

The pattern has become a familiar one. For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove’s numbers have been significantly higher than those in the possession of America’s NATO allies in Europe. As such, he is playing directly into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO.

The German government is alarmed. Are the Americans trying to thwart European efforts at mediation led by Chancellor Angela Merkel? Sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove’s comments as “dangerous propaganda.” Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even found it necessary recently to bring up Breedlove’s comments with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg. [Continue reading…]

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Russian soldiers ‘dying in large numbers’ in Ukraine, says NATO

BBC News: Nato’s deputy chief says Russian leaders are less and less able to conceal the deaths of “large numbers” of Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

Alexander Vershbow said Russia’s involvement was becoming more unpopular with the Russian public as a result.

Russian officials dismissed on Thursday a US claim that Moscow had sent “thousands and thousands” of troops to fight alongside separatists.

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Evidence mounting of Russian troops in Ukraine

Deutsche Welle reports: It was a surprising confession. In an interview with the opposition Russian newspaper, Nowaja Gaseta, (from Monday, March 2) a wounded Russian tank operator confirmed what many have long assumed: That contracted Russian soldiers are fighting alongside the separatists in Eastern Ukraine against the Ukrainian army.

And not just a few soldiers. A day after the interview was published, US General Ben Hodges said in Berlin that the US military was working on the assumption of 12,000 Russian troops in the region.

It’s not the first time such reports have surfaced. On Feb. 19, the Russian newspaper Kommersant published a surprisingly frank feature about the deployment of Russian soldiers in Eastern Ukraine. The article appeared in the online version of the paper, which belongs to oligarch Alisher Usmanov, known to be loyal to the Kremlin. Reporter Ilja Barabanov recounts how he met three Russians who had until recently been professional soldiers. In the second half of January, they went to Eastern Ukraine to fight.

The men said they had fought since Jan. 20 on the front in various units of the separatist army of the “People’s Republic of Donetsk.” Before they left, they applied to end their army contracts and be officially discharged.

Whether or not they were actually discharged, and what their current status is, is unknown. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. commander says some 12,000 Russian soldiers in Eastern Ukraine

RFE/RL reports: The U.S. military estimates some 12,000 Russian soldiers are supporting pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine.

U.S. Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges said the Russian forces are made up of military advisers, weapons operators and combat troops.

Hodges also said some 29,000 Russian troops are in Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine last year.

Hodges said in Berlin on March 3 that helping Ukraine with weapons would increase the stakes for Russian President Vladimir Putin at home.

He added that “when mothers start seeing sons come home dead, when that price goes up, then that domestic support begins to shrink.”

Hodges said what Ukraine wants “is intelligence, counterfire capability and something that can stop a Russian tank.”

The White House still hasn’t decided whether to send arms to Ukraine, and Hodges reiterated Washington wanted a diplomatic solution. [Continue reading…]

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Alexey Navalny on the murder of Boris Nemtsov

Alexey Navalny, the opposition leader and anti-corruption blogger, writes (translation by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick): 1. I believe that Nemtsov was killed by members of a government (intelligence) or pro-government organization on orders from the political leadership of the country (including Vladimir Putin).

It is a question only of how this order was formulated:

– You must kill Nemtsov.
– You must do a hugely sensational action.

2. That’s enough repeating the nonsense about how “Boris was killed by an atmosphere of hatred.” What atmosphere, exactly, eh? We’ve had the atmosphere of hatred since 2007, and in recent months, we have seen the organized construction of pro-government extremist-terrorist groups, directly declaring as their goal combating the opposition where the police cannot. [Continue reading…]

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Kremlin Murder Inc.

Nina L. Khrushcheva writes: One by one, Putin’s critics have been eliminated. In 2006, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in an elevator, and Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent who had been critical of Putin, died of polonium poison while in exile in London. In 2009, Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer campaigning against corruption, died in prison after being denied medical care for life-threatening conditions. The same year, another lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, a champion of human rights, was shot following a news conference.

The murder last week of Boris Nemtsov, a leading opposition politician and a former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, should come as no surprise. But it should come as a shock – and as a wake-up call for those Russians who until now have tolerated a culture of lawlessness and impunity, unseen since the darkest days of Stalin’s personal rule in the Soviet Union.

Before his death, Nemtsov was said to be working on a report titled “Putin and the War,” providing proof of Russia’s involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. He was scheduled to lead a protest against the war two days after his murder. Some have wondered if Putin was afraid of what Nemtsov had uncovered, and thus ordered the assassination.

That is unlikely, at least in terms of someone receiving a direct order from Putin. Simply put, orchestrating Nemtsov’s murder was not worth the trouble; after all, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine would have had little problem twisting Nemtsov’s report to Putin’s benefit.

Indeed, even Nemtsov’s brazen murder is unlikely to hurt Putin politically. His popularity now stands at 86%. For many Russians, Nemtsov’s opposition to the war in Ukraine made him a traitor, whose death was justified – indeed, almost demanded – by national necessity.

Putin has announced that he will personally oversee the investigation into the assassination. But those leading the effort have already indicated its likely conclusion: Nemtsov’s murder was an attempt to destabilize Russia. We can be all but certain that some culprit or another will be “found,” and that his crime will be part of a conspiracy by the CIA or Ukrainian authorities.

The Kremlin is no stranger to twisting the truth to fit its needs. Before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, it argued that the United States had hired snipers to fire at pro-Western protesters in Kyiv in order to blame Russia for their deaths. When a Malaysian airliner was shot down over Ukraine – most likely by pro-Russia rebels – the official Kremlin story was that Western secret services downed it to undermine Putin’s reputation. Allegations like these have whipped up nationalism, hatred, and anti-Western hysteria, distracting Russians from Putin’s culpability for their country’s economic crisis.

As menacing as Putin’s Russia may be, however, nothing about it is original. In 1934, Joseph Stalin, too, ordered a thorough investigation into the murder of a rival: Sergei Kirov, the head of the Communist Party in Leningrad. The NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, orchestrated the assassination on Stalin’s order, but the inquiry gave the Soviet dictator a pretext for eliminating other opponents. The search for Kirov’s murderers eventually culminated in the Great Terror, a massive purge of Party leaders, military commanders, and intellectuals. [Continue reading…]

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CIA veterans finger Putin in Nemtsov assassination

Newsweek reports: Four shots, expertly placed. A perfectly timed getaway car. Nearby security cameras turned off “for repair.”

The murder of prominent Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, say CIA veterans, many with long experience in Moscow, was obviously a professional job, inspired, if not explicitly ordered, by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s allies and Russian-controlled media, rejecting any state hand in the affair, have floated a variety of alternate villains responsible for the murder of Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and an outspoken critic of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. They range from fellow reformers who wanted to create “a martyr” to personal rivals to “fascists” in Ukraine.

CIA veterans with long experience with Russia were having none of it. Nearly all spoke only on terms of anonymity to discuss such sensitive issues.

“Clearly the Putin government either ordered this, or accepted it, as in the case of Thomas Becket – ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’” says one former top CIA operative, alluding to the plea attributed to Henry II, England’s 12th-century monarch, for someone to kill the archbishop of Canterbury.

The absence of any nearby close-circuit video recordings of Nemtsov’s murder, which occurred just a few hundreds yards outside a Kremlin wall just after midnight on Friday, Feb. 28, also suggests official complicity in the crime, he and other CIA veterans say.

Government-controlled media has said that all the nearby security cameras were turned off for repairs or pointed the wrong way when Nemtsov was killed by a lone gunman, who then jumped into a passing car and sped off. [Continue reading…]

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Nemtsov’s murder presages a grim new era of darkness in Russia’s political life

Christian Caryl writes: It’s no stretch to say that [Boris] Nemtsov’s career exemplified both the promise and the weaknesses of Russia’s liberal opposition movement. In the early 1990s, the young Nemtsov – then a governor of the region around Nizhny Novgorod — made a name for himself as an ardent supporter of President Boris Yeltsin’s reform course. In 1997, a year after Yeltsin’s re-election to a second term as president, Nemtsov joined his cabinet, part of a “dream team” of young reformers who were celebrated by western politicians and investors for their liberal economic policies and their embrace of democratic values. Nemtsov’s energy and charisma made him a particular hit with voters, and there was a time when he was even touted as the great hope of the reformist camp, perhaps even as a possible successor to the increasingly erratic Yeltsin.

Yet these were also the very years when the dream of a new Russia based on free markets and liberal values foundered fatally. Most Russians remember the 1990s as a decade of shocking industrial decline, salaries left unpaid for months or years, and savings lost to hyperinflation. Organized crime ran amok, and life expectancy plummeted. The newly minted “oligarchs,” the small circle of well-connected businessmen who benefited disproportionately from the privatization of the nation’s prime assets, paraded their wealth and influence.

The liberal politicians favored by Yeltsin either abetted these developments or proved powerless to stop them. Their dream ended with a bang on Aug. 17, 1998, when the government, headed by baby-faced Prime Minister Sergei Kirienko, devalued the ruble and defaulted on its debts. Nemtsov was Kirienko’s deputy prime minister, and it was a moment he would never quite live down. Amid the chaos, the general yearning for a “strong leader” became almost palpable. The Russian financial crisis marked the real start of Putin’s path to the presidency.

The liberals’ subsequent exile from power wasn’t made much easier by their own fractiousness and all-too-frequent contempt for political realities. Nemtsov himself played a starring role in one of the most notorious examples of opposition obliviousness. A 2003 campaign ad for his political party depicted Nemtsov and his two colleagues, Anatoly Chubais and Irina Khakamada, flying over Russia in a cushy private plane as they discussed their plans for the country’s future. Few images could have better summed up the popular image of the liberal opposition as arrogantly detached from the gritty realities of everyday life.

In a truly democratic society, of course, politicians have the chance to learn from their mistakes, giving them the hope of returning, revived, to the give-and-take of honest competition. Russia’s Putin-era opposition has never had this luxury. Its adherents have been thrown into jail, hounded into silence, driven into exile. Yet even these crimes pale against the killing of Nemtsov, whose death presages a grim new era of darkness in the country’s political life. [Continue reading…]

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How a single nuclear strike on Manhattan would end all life and destroy almost everything else

After the end of the Cold War, the political movement striving for nuclear disarmament lost most of its momentum. Supposedly, even though enough missiles remained armed that life as we know it could be destroyed in minutes, the threat of Armageddon had fallen away because there was no plausible reason why the two largest remaining nuclear powers, the United States and Russia, should risk mutual destruction.

Because of this nuclear complacency, the opportunity provided by the 1990s, when giant strides towards disarmament could have been made, was wasted.

As animosity between the United States and Russia is once again on the rise, it’s worth being reminded of exactly what would happen if, for instance, a single 800-kiloton intercontinental ballistic missile (of which Russia possesses 700 such warheads) were to be detonated over Manhattan.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describes the effects: The warhead would probably be detonated slightly more than a mile above the city, to maximize the damage created by its blast wave. Within a few tenths of millionths of a second after detonation, the center of the warhead would reach a temperature of roughly 200 million degrees Fahrenheit (about 100 million degrees Celsius), or about four to five times the temperature at the center of the sun.

A ball of superheated air would form, initially expanding outward at millions of miles per hour. It would act like a fast-moving piston on the surrounding air, compressing it at the edge of the fireball and creating a shockwave of vast size and power.

After one second, the fireball would be roughly a mile in diameter. It would have cooled from its initial temperature of many millions of degrees to about 16,000 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly 4,000 degrees hotter than the surface of the sun.

On a clear day with average weather conditions, the enormous heat and light from the fireball would almost instantly ignite fires over a total area of about 100 square miles. [Continue reading…]

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Does Boris Nemtsov’s assassination represent the turning point for Russian politics?

Julia Ioffe writes: On Friday evening, Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader and former first deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, went on a prominent Moscow radio station to exhort his fellow citizens to come out to protest President Vladimir Putin’s policies. There would be a rally on Sunday, a spring march, to demonstrate against the deepening economic crisis and Russia’s involvement in Ukraine. The most prominent Russian opposition leader, Aleksei Navalny, had been put in jail for 15 days, which just happened to be long enough to keep him from attending the rally. Nemtsov, who was older and, by now, less influential, had handed out leaflets in the metro and encouraged people to come anyway.

After the radio show, on which Nemtsov warned that too much power in the hands of one man would “end in catastrophe,” he met Anna Duritskaya, his girlfriend of three years — and, as the police would later pointedly note, a citizen of Ukraine. They had dinner and then headed home, strolling across Red Square and past the swirling domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, adjacent to the Kremlin. Just before midnight, as they crossed the bridge toward the historic Moscow neighborhood where Nemtsov lived, a white car pulled up, and, according to investigators, someone inside fired seven or eight shots. Four of them hit Nemtsov in the head, heart, liver and stomach, killing him on the spot.

Duritskaya was unharmed and immediately taken in for questioning. Nemtsov, a big, broad man, was left on the pavement in the rain, his shirt yanked up to his chin.

On Russian social media, liberal Moscow has struggled to wrap its head around something that seemed like it simply couldn’t happen, until it did. It had been years since Nemtsov, a rising star in Yeltsin-era politics, had been the standard-bearer of Western liberalism, and he could be a silly bon vivant. But he was deeply intelligent, witty, kind and ubiquitous. He seemed to genuinely be everyone’s friend; when I lived in Moscow as a journalist, he was always willing to jaw over endless glasses of cognac. And he was a powerful, vigorous critic of Vladimir Putin, assailing him in every possible medium, constantly publishing reports on topics like the president’s lavish lifestyle and the corruption behind the Sochi Olympics.

How could such a prominent politician — a founder of the opposition Solidarity Party, a sitting member of the Yaroslavl city parliament — be gunned down so brazenly, within steps of the Kremlin? “We didn’t kill members of government,” Gleb Pavlovsky, an independent political consultant who used to work for Putin, told me over the phone. “It’s an absolutely new situation.” Olga Romanova, a prominent opposition activist and a close friend of Nemtsov, said, “There are more cameras in that spot than there are grains in a packet of grain.” When I called her last night, she had just come from the scene of the crime, where her friend still lay on the ground, surrounded by laughing policemen. “It’s the first time I’ve seen a very close person murdered, lying on the pavement,” she said. “It’s terrifying.”

Putin promptly called Nemtsov’s mother to offer his condolences and threw what seemed like the entire Ministry of Internal Affairs on the case. Yet we can be sure that the investigation will lead precisely nowhere. At most, some sad sap, the supposed trigger-puller, will be hauled in front of a judge, the scapegoat for someone far more powerful. More likely, the case will founder for years amid promises that everyone is working hard, and no one will be brought to justice at all. This has been the pattern for other high-profile killings, like those of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky. [Continue reading…]

The Economist notes: Given the level of security in the vicinity of the Kremlin, it is hard to imagine why Mr Nemtsov’s killers would have picked that spot for the shooting, unless they had reason to believe they would be able to escape. The assassins did not try to cover their traces; they did not shoot the woman who was walking with Mr Nemtsov. It is by far the most significant political assassination in recent Russian history. Many have drawn parallels between this crime and the fates of other recent victims, such as Galina Starovoitova, a democratic reformer killed in 1998. Yet the atmosphere in Russia is increasingly reminiscent of darker days from a more distant European past.

It is an atmosphere Mr Nemtsov himself described 10 months ago, when nationalist euphoria was building on the back of the annexation of Crimea and an escalating war in Ukraine. “I can’t remember such a level of general hatred as the one in Moscow today,” Mr Nemtsov wrote on his Facebook page…

Not in 1991, during the August coup, not even in 1993 [during Yeltsin’s stand off with parliament]. Aggression and cruelty are stoked by the television while the key definitions are coming from the slightly possessed Kremlin master. “National traitors”, “fifth column”, “fascist junta”—all these terms are coming from the same Kremlin office…The Kremlin is cultivating and rewarding the lowest instincts in people, provoking hatred and fighting. People are set off against each other. This hell can not end peacefully.

In the past year, the atmosphere of aggression and intolerance has only become stronger.

Ilya Ponomarev, a Russian left wing politician and member of the Russian parliament, says: I think this is indeed a turning point for Russian politics. Some would say just another turning point but I think this is the turning point.

I think that, for the future of Russia, the murder of Boris Nemtsov will mean the similar thing as the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934 [the a prominent Bolshevik leader in the Soviet Union who was shot dead in his own office. — Editor’s note]. That murder was a trigger for the great terror of 1937.

The audience of this crime is not the Russian people. For the overwhelming majority of Russians, Boris was a very honest and straightforward guy, but he was a personification of the 1990s and the ill-manifested reforms of Boris Yeltsin. All the hatred against Yeltsin was personified in Nemtsov.

I think that the target audience for this murder is within the elites. It’s within the Russian elites who knew Nemtsov very well… and within the elites in the West — which probably is even a greater target.

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The atmosphere of hate in which Boris Nemtsov was murdered

Michael Weiss writes: “We need to talk about Magnitsky.”

The last time I saw Boris Nemtsov, in Tallinn, Estonia in 2013, he had wanted to find a way to tack on more Putin regime officials to a U.S. law that would ban them from entering the country or freeze whatever assets they held here. The former first deputy prime minister of Russia, who was brutally shot to death within eyeshot of the Kremlin this evening, had many enemies, not least of them the president of Russia. He was handsome, charismatic and popular in the West and in Eastern Europe. “First we liberate Belarus, and then Russia!” former Belarusian presidential candidate, dissident and Lukashenko torture victim Andrei Sannikov told him on that same occasion. Nemtsov joyfully agreed. On Sunday he had planned to lead a march against Vladimir Putin’s unacknowledged dirty war in Ukraine. He was shot repeatedly in the back by several assailants emerging from a car while he walking down the Moskvoretskiy bridge with Anna Durickaya, a Ukrainian model.

Two years ago, Nemtsov and his colleague Leonid Martynyuk released a report titled, “Winter Olympics in the Sub-Tropics: Corruption and Abuse in Sochi,” which alleged that Putin had personally overseen the enormous, profligate project and was therefore responsible for the estimated $26 billion frittered away in “embezzlement and kickbacks.” They named names. Nemtsov, who was born in Sochi, and Martynyuk debunked the myth peddled by the Kremlin that the bulk of the costs for the Olympics was borne by private investors, showing that actually only two — aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska and nickel magnate Vladimir Potanin — were the private financiers of the world’s most expensive Winter Games.

Moreover, they showed how brothers Boris and Arkady Rotenberg, childhood friends of Putin, were awarded 15 percent of the money controlled by Olimpstroy, the state company created to finance the Olympics; and that the bulk of this percentage was spent in awarding no-bid sweetheart contracts. They also suggested that Vladimir Yakunin, the chairman of the state-owned Russian Railroads, who along with Putin helped found the St. Petersburg Ozero Dacha Cooperative, commanded 20 percent of the Olympstroy budget and then purchased property which, according to his official declared income, he simply could not afford.

“Putin is part of a mafia,” Nemtsov told me and my colleague Olga Khvostunova, in an interview about his report. “They do not turn in their own. He gave his friends an opportunity ‘to earn some cash.’” [Continue reading…]

Joshua Yaffa writes: Without knowing who gave the orders, it’s possible to understand that the current political environment allowed for this to happen. Over the past year, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine, Russia has seen the rise of a new, much coarser and more doctrinaire political language. During the first decade of Putin’s rule, the Kremlin depicted its opponents as freaks or idiots, but now they are portrayed as outright enemies of their country. In a triumphant address to parliament last March, as Russia was formalizing its takeover of Crimea, Putin warned of “a fifth column,” a “disparate bunch of national traitors” determined to sow discord inside the country. Its members were obvious, if at first unmentioned: people like Navalny, an anti-corruption activist who had become the most popular leader in the country’s fractured opposition; Aleksei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow, a long-beleaguered radio station that is one of the last homes for critical and liberal voices; and of course Nemtsov, a recognizable face​from all his years in politics, and a favorite opponent of pro-Kremlin activists and propagandists.

It wasn’t long before the political technologists in the Kremlin and those who do their bidding in the media — whether at state-run television channels with national reach or on pro-Kremlin Web sites that publish memes and jokes disparaging the West and Russia’s small number of liberals — seized on the idea, releasing pseudo-documentaries on the evils of the fifth column and designing graphics that surrounded their disembodied heads with images of space aliens. For a while, a giant poster hung on the side of Moscow’s main bookstore with the face of Nemtsov, among others. “The fifth column: there are strangers among us,” it read. The most apocalyptic and vile of Russia’s television hosts, Dmitri Kiselyov, a man who once warned that Russia could turn the United States into “radioactive ash,” took pleasure in naming and insulting members of the so-called “fifth column.” “Putin legalized that term in the political language of Russia,” he said. “We know their names.”

That act of legalization, as Kiselyov aptly put it, means any number of people or factions could have murdered Nemtsov. In an interview two weeks ago, Nemtsov admitted that he was afraid Putin could have him killed, but “not that much.” In the hours after Nemtsov’s death, Vladimir Ryzhkov, a co-founder of R.P.R.-PARNAS with Nemtsov, told Echo of Moscow that he blamed “the atmosphere of hate that was artificially created” by the state and its supporters. Putin, for his part, called the killing a “provocation,” and said that he would personally oversee the investigation, evoking Stalin’s oversight of the prosecution of Sergei Kirov’s supposed killers in 1934. Will Nemtsov’s death similarly presage a wave of political purges? In the current climate, almost anything seems possible. Either the authorities would kill someone who poses little real political danger, or they have given rise to a venomous hatred that they can no longer control.

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South Africa spied on own government to get facts on joint project with Russia

The Guardian reports: South Africa’s intelligence service relied on a spy “with direct access to the Russian government” to find out details of its own government’s involvement in a $100m (£65m) joint satellite surveillance programme with Russia, the leaked spy cables obtained by al-Jazeera and shared with the Guardian reveal.

The satellite system, known as Project Condor, which was launched into orbit by Russia in December last year, provides surveillance coverage of the entire African continent. The project has been shrouded in secrecy, with Russia originally refusing to reveal who its client was.

Those in the dark appear to have included South Africa’s intelligence agency. But a South African agent with access to Russian military intelligence was able to help, according to a leaked espionage report marked “top secret” and dated 28 August 2012. [Continue reading…]

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Russian news report: Putin approved Ukraine invasion before Kiev government collapsed

McClatchy reports: A Russian newspaper claims to have an official government strategy document outlining the invasion of Ukraine that was prepared weeks before the Ukrainian government collapsed last year.

The editor of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitri Muratov, reported the document during an interview with Echo of Moscow, a radio station. In the interview, which was reported by news outlets Saturday, he did not reveal how the newspaper came into possession of the document in the media unfriendly Russian world, but said he had confidence it was authentic.

Novaya Gazeta is considered a rarity in Russia these days, an independent investigative newspaper that’s known to anger the Kremlin on a regular basis. The editor said the paper’s plan is to publish the full details of the strategy document next week.

Muratov said the document characterized then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych as “a person without morals and willpower whose downfall must be expected at any moment.” Yanukovych fled Ukraine for Russia on Feb. 22, 2014. [Continue reading…]

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Bank hackers find haven in Putin’s Russia

The Hill reports: The diplomatic standoff between the United States and Russian President Vladimir Putin is hobbling efforts to prosecute cyber crime against American banks.

Russian hackers played a major role in the newly exposed worldwide cyber heist, where thieves learned how to imitate bank employees to withdraw more than $1 billion from 100 banks.

While analysts suspect the heist originated in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, that information is of little use to American law enforcement officials who are getting no help from Moscow when it comes to catching cyber thieves.

“Trying to get cooperation from law enforcement in that area is, in many cases, actively hampered by the Russian government,” said Stu Sjouwerman, CEO of cybersecurity training firm KnowBe4, which most often works with banks.

“Given the current relationship between the United States and Russia, [cooperation] does not seem likely,” added Peter Toren, a cyber crime attorney who was part of the Department of Justice’s original batch of computer crimes prosecutors.

Last August, Russian digital thieves were blamed for the cyber attack on JPMorgan that exposed sensitive data on over 83 million households. Reportedly, the same attack infiltrated up to nine other major banks.

“Harassment of U.S. financial firms is just part of the bigger picture and it is the price of business to some degree,” Sjouwerman said.

Experts believe much of the hacking occurs either at the behest of Putin’s government, or with its tacit approval. Some speculated the JPMorgan hit was retaliation for the new U.S. sanctions that were slapped on Russia as the country amassed troops on the Ukraine border. [Continue reading…]

Wade Williamson writes: For several years now, cybercrime in the financial sector was synonymous with banking botnets such as Zeus and Carberp. By and large, these malware families and their many descendants worked by infecting banking customer’s computers and either stealing passwords or manipulating online banking sessions to steal funds.

A recent report from Kaspersky Lab shows that criminals have significantly raised their game with a new strategy focused on infiltrating and stealing directly from more than 100 different banks. Kaspersky named the operation the Carbanak APT and early estimates put losses in the range of $1 billion USD.

As you might expect, robbing a bank can be more lucrative than stealing from its customers. Even highly successful Zeus operations would typically net in the range of $100 million USD or less. Carberp, the banking botnet progenitor of Carbanak, was estimated to have earned a total of $250 million over years of use in the wild. This makes the $1 billion dollar Carbanak heist one of the most successful financial cybercrimes in history. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine ceasefire in tatters as fighting escalates in east

The Guardian: Fighting has escalated in eastern Ukraine as government and pro-Russia forces struggle for control of the besieged town of Debaltseve, leaving the new ceasefire in tatters on its second day.

The Ukrainian military said on Monday that rebels had fired on its troops 112 times in the past 24 hours. At least five Ukrainian fighters have been killed and 25 wounded since the ceasefire began on Sunday, a military spokesman, Vladislav Seleznyov, told the Guardian.

Most of the fighting was concentrated around Debaltseve, where thousands of soldiers have been cut off from the main Ukrainian lines near Artemivsk by rebel artillery. Pro-Russia forces have been trying for weeks to take the town, which holds a rail junction connecting the main rebel centres of Donetsk and Luhansk.

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Why does Putin want Ukraine’s rust-belt?

The Economist: Many Westerners find Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine mystifying. It has brought Russia economic woe (sanctions and a shattered credit rating) and international isolation. Why fight so hard for a slice of another country’s rust-belt? Is it part of a sinister strategy to divide and weaken the West, an irrational outbreak of paranoia about an imagined outside threat to Russia, or a desperate attempt to distract domestic opinion from the regime’s political and economic failure?

The Kremlin has annexed the Crimean peninsula (the site of an important Russian naval base) and stoked a separatist rebellion in two of Ukraine’s easternmost provinces, Lugansk and Donetsk. The rebels, with strong Russian military and intelligence backing, have proclaimed “people’s republics” there and have continued to advance into the rest of Ukraine, in defiance of a ceasefire agreed in Minsk in September. Ukraine is losing the war and is desperate for financial and military help from the West. America is mulling arms deliveries, but holding back to see if a last-ditch Franco-German diplomatic deal can bring a truce. Few outside Russia believe the Kremlin’s justification for the war. Russians in Ukraine were not being persecuted. The government in Kiev is not “fascist” (extreme-right parties fare worse in Ukraine than they do in Western Europe). Far from menacing Russia, NATO countries have slashed defence spending, just as Russia is rearming. The three main theories about Vladimir Putin’s motivations could be summed up as “bad”, “mad” or “sad”.

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