Category Archives: Russia

Russians revealed among Ukraine fighters

The New York Times reports: For weeks, rumors have flown about the foreign fighters involved in the deepening conflict in Ukraine’s troubled east, each one stranger than the last: mercenaries from an American company, Blackwater; Russian special forces; and even Chechen soldiers of fortune.

Yet there they were on Tuesday afternoon, resting outside a hospital here: Chechen men with automatic rifles, some bearing bloodstained bandages, protecting their wounded comrades in a city hospital after a firefight with the Ukrainian Army.

“We received an invitation to help our brothers,” said one of the fighters in heavily accented Russian. He said he was from Grozny and had fought in the Chechen War that began in 1999. He said he arrived here last week with several dozen men to join a pro-Russian militia group.

The scene at the hospital was new evidence that fighters from Russia are an increasingly visible part of the conflict here, a development that raises new questions about that country’s role in the unrest. Moscow has denied that its regular soldiers are part of the conflict, and there is no evidence that they are. But motley assortments of fighters from other war zones that are intimately associated with Russia would be unlikely to surface against the powerful will of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, experts said. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine says hundreds of armed militants have crossed border from Russia

McClatchy reports: The Ukrainian army said Tuesday that it had evicted armed separatists from the international airport in Donetsk after a 24-hour gun battle, but the government in Kiev warned of a new threat as truckloads of armed Russian volunteers reportedly crossed the border.

Donetsk Mayor Oleksandr Lukyanchenko said 48 people were killed, including two civilians, in the fighting at Sergei Prokofiev International Airport.

The pro-Russian rebels said they had suffered more than 50 fatalities, many of them the result of an army attack on a truck evacuating wounded. A government spokesman said the incident was under investigation.

Shots still were being fired near the airport Tuesday afternoon, and it wasn’t clear when the facility would reopen. If the Ukraine military has cleared the facility of insurgents, it would mark a rare and swift success for a force that repeatedly has failed to dislodge separatists from city halls and police stations in eastern Ukraine.

The unity of Ukraine is riding on how the government handles the separatist uprising in the east, the latest installment of which began at 3 a.m. Monday, just hours after the conclusion of national elections that installed candy billionaire Petro Poroshenko as president. Dozens of armed insurgents of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic stormed the airport terminal, closed it to passenger traffic and then sent in a truckload of reinforcements. [Continue reading…]

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Russia joins global dash for shale oil in policy volte-face

The Telegraph reports: Russia is launching a strategic drive to unlock its shale oil wealth as crude output stagnates and reserves run low in the West Siberian fields, aiming to replicate America’s technology leap in a near total reversal of policy.

The Kremlin has launched an “action plan” to master fracking methods and lure investors into the Bazhenov prospective, a shale basin the size of France to the east of the Urals. Officials are no longer dismissing shale’s promise as a mirage. “We are clearing away the administrative barriers to exploration. This is the urgent challenge we are now facing,” said Kirill Molodtsov, the deputy energy minister.

The US Energy Department estimates that Russia has 75bn barrels of recoverable shale oil resources, the world’s largest deposits. The Bazhenov field is 80 times bigger than the US Bakken field in North Dakota, which alone produces 1m barrels a day.

BP joined the scramble on Saturday by signing a deal to explore for shale in Volga Urals with Rosneft, even though Rosneft’s chairman Igor Sechin is on the US sanctions list. [Continue reading…]

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Poroshenko a leader Moscow ‘ready’ to work with

AFP reports: Russia said Monday it was ready to talk to Ukraine’s new president Petro Poroshenko, raising hopes that after months of tensions Moscow sees in the billionaire a leader it can work with.

“We are ready for dialogue with Kiev’s representatives, with Petro Poroshenko,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Russia’s first reaction to his victory in Sunday’s vote.

Lavrov was cautious, saying Moscow was ready for “pragmatic dialogue, on an equal footing” and warned that for Kiev to continue its military operations against pro-Russia rebels in the east would be a “colossal mistake”.

But Poroshenko — a billionaire with strong Russian business interests and a history of working with both pro-Western and Moscow-backed Ukrainian governments — is the kind of figure analysts say the Kremlin can see as a partner.

“Poroshenko is an extremely attractive president for the Kremlin… This is a person who will be able to negotiate with Moscow and find compromise,” said Alexander Konovalov, president of the Institute of Strategic Assessments.

“There was a camp in the Kremlin that wanted to feed the fire in Ukraine. Now I think they will move into the shadows,” he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has not yet reacted himself to Poroshenko’s victory, but he did say he will “respect” the result of the vote and promised to work with Kiev’s new authorities. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, Reuters reports: Ukrainian government warplanes carried out airstrikes against pro-Russian rebels who seized Donetsk international airport on Monday, triggering a battle in and around the complex in a show of force by both sides after the election of a new president.

Reuters journalists saw black smoke billowing from the area of the airport after repeated explosions and gunfire, while jets roared overhead. A security official also said paratroops had landed in one of the fiercest clashes since violence broke out in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine some two months ago.

Loud thuds sounded from the area but after four to five hours Ukrainian soldiers appeared to have pushed back at least some of the separatists towards the town, though it was not clear if the army had recovered control of the airport.

There was no full account from either side of casualties. But the press service of the regional administration said one man had been killed and two injured from shrapnel of a shell which struck a part of the railway station serving the airport.

Saying that a deadline had passed at 1 p.m. (1000 GMT) for separatist militants to lay down their arms, a spokesman for the Ukrainian joint forces’ security operation in the region said two Sukhoi Su-25 jets had carried out strafing runs, firing warning shots around Sergei Prokofiev International Airport. [Continue reading…]

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How Ukrainian arms-dealing connects to Syria’s bloody civil war

Tim Fernholz reports: All the ingredients are there for a proper arms deal: A former government official with connections to the military-industrial complex. A stockpile of Soviet arms in Ukraine. Soldiers in Syria with a yen for ammo and cash to burn. The biggest problem? Getting the arms from eastern Europe to the battleground without alerting international authorities or tipping off your enemies.

The story isn’t about Russia or the United States. It’s about Russia and the United States.

This week, the Wall Street Journal shone a light (paywall) on one American’s thwarted effort to run guns into Syria for the anti-regime Free Syrian Army. Last fall, analysts at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) in Washington assembled public data to identify a network of businesses (pdf) in Ukraine and Russia at the heart of Russia’s efforts to arm the Syrian regime. The two stories have a lot in common, with a key difference being that Russia’s government is a lot more invested in arming its side of the conflict.

While weapons of all kinds have cropped up throughout the Syrian conflict, from the chemical weapons that made president Bashar Al-Assad an international pariah to homemade rockets, the rebels have two main problems: Getting enough rifles and ammunition to give them a basic infantry force, and—the bigger problem—countering the regime’s vast military advantage, especially as it has aircraft and the rebels don’t.

Many weapons in the conflict hail from the former eastern bloc, according to surveys of small arms in Syria (pdf) that are admittedly unscientific. There’s a reason for this: The Soviet Union cranked up a massive arms machine, and when it collapsed, the combination of chaos, weapons stockpiles and criminal entrepreneurship gave men like Viktor Bout and Leonard Minin careers as arms dealers. [Continue reading…]

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Looking for Ukraine

Tim Judah writes: Every now and then I can hear distant explosions and bursts of gunfire. But most of the time, here in the center of Sloviansk, which since early April has become eastern Ukraine’s separatist stronghold, everything is quiet. Since the small town is chopped up by barricades and many businesses and factories have closed down, there is not much going on, so that when the wind blows you can hear it shimmer the leaves of the silver birches that line the streets. If you were looking for war here, it would be hard to find.

Ice creams are still getting through the checkpoints around town and there is a steady stream of people buying them. As I chose a chocolate bear, Irina, aged fifty, who sells them, told me that she liked being here among people, because the worst thing in this situation was being at home, alone and anxious.

When we come to look back on the Ukrainian conflict, it will be hard, if it moves from its current low-level state to a full-blown war, to say that such-and-such a date marked its beginning. Was it the day that some forty people died, many after being trapped in a building that then caught fire in Odessa? Was it the day that seven people or was it more than twenty or perhaps more than one hundred died in Mariupol, another Black Sea town? For people here the numbers they believe depend on whether they follow the Russian or Ukrainian press and, since both are lying and distorting slivers of truth, it is not surprising that people are being dragged down into a vortex of war.

But while it will be hard to agree on a date, it is already easy to say what is happening in people’s heads. Six months ago everyone here just went about their normal business. They were worried about the things that everyone worries about, and here especially: low salaries, scraping by, collecting money for all the bribes one has to pay, and so on. And then something snapped. The rotting ship of the Ukrainian state sprung a leak and everything began to go down. In people’s heads a new reality has gradually begun to take shape and, in this way, everyone is being prepared for war. [Continue reading…]

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The man who gave Ukraine’s army 1,000 bulletproof vests

David Patrikarakos reports: “What you have to understand is that the state as a European or an American understands it, doesn’t exist in Ukraine,” Yuri told me on a sunny afternoon in Kiev two weeks ago.

As Ukraine continues to grapple with insurrection within its own borders, its military has become the most visible and important instrument of the new government — and it’s failing badly.

Despite the launch of an anti-terror operation last month, its army has yet to clear pro-Russia separatists from the buildings they occupy in cities across eastern Ukraine. But this is hardly surprising because soldiers are woefully underprepared. They lack basic equipment, medicine and even food.

That’s partly why Yuri, a 40-year-old IT investor, turned to Facebook when he wanted to help give his country a fighting chance. [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s China pivot: All tactics, no trust

Following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state visit to Beijing this week, Minxin Pei writes: The fragility of the budding Sino-Russian partnership was on full display during Putin’s visit, the centerpiece of which was supposed to be the signing of a long-term agreement for China to purchase Russian natural gas.

At first, negotiations were deadlocked, with neither side willing to budge on prices. The Russians were insisting on setting a high price while the Chinese, sensing Russian weakness, were trying to bargain the rate down significantly. Disaster was averted at the last minute when both sides reached an opaque agreement that would enable Russia to export $400 billion worth of gas to China over 30 years, starting in 2018.

Although the price was not disclosed, Russian media reported that it will be around $350 per thousand cubic meters, roughly the average for Russian gas exports to Europe but lower than the price for gas exported to Germany and other rich Western European countries (which have to pay over $400 per thousand cubic meters).

If anything, the Sino-Russian gas deal epitomizes the nature of the ties between Moscow and Beijing. Their relationship is purely utilitarian and lacks enduring foundations of mutual interest and shared values.

Nations become strategic allies not simply because they share the same potential opponents. They need to have deep trust in each other. At a minimum, trust is easier to build when potential allies have no fear of each other. And such trust becomes unshakeable if they share the same values.

Unfortunately, none of these conditions applies to the Sino-Russian relationship. Russia fears China, which borders on Russia’s sparsely populated far eastern region, part of which was, in the eyes of the Chinese, stolen from China in the late 19th century. Many Russians worry that China will take over that land, either through migration or more sinister means. Unlike the West, which has facilitated China’s rise and has come to recognize it as a reality, the Russian elite has trouble accepting China, impoverished and impotent only a generation ago, as a great power. [Continue reading…]

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Russia at critical crossroads as business turns its back

Chris Weafer writes: The crisis in Ukraine and the political dispute with the U.S. and EU could not have come at a worse time for Russia’s economy.

Economic growth had been sliding across most key sectors for more than twelve months, before the crisis escalated in late February as previous drivers of growth become exhausted.

The country clearly needs to boost both the volume of inward investment and the participation of international companies, with their expertise and technologies, if it is to pull out of the long slump into which it is now seriously in danger of heading.

The St Petersburg Economic Forum was supposed to be a showcase for Russia’s invigorated approach to business and investment reforms. It was intended to mark the start of the next phase of investment led growth intended to boost average annual GDP expansion to at least 4% to the end of the decade.

Instead, because of the sanctions already imposed by the EU and its partners in the G7 — but particularly because of the concerns over the risk of even tougher sanctions to come — many of the international companies which Russia needs to come have decided to delay Russia entry or expansion. Many of their CEOs, originally slated to attend the forum, are staying at home. [Continue reading…]

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Intense fighting flares in eastern Ukraine

The Wall Street Journal reports: Pro-Russian separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine mounted four simultaneous attacks against government forces Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, officials in Kiev said. The violence comes just days before presidential elections that separatists have vowed to block.

The attacks resulted in some of the highest number of casualties since the conflict began, officials said. The overall death toll in the latest fighting wasn’t immediately available but Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said eight servicemen were killed in one of the battles.

“Today a major operation was prepared on all fronts and it was repulsed,” Andriy Parubiy, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told a briefing in Kiev, according to the Interfax news agency. He said the separatists are expected to increase their attacks in the days ahead of Sunday’s presidential elections.

In a separate briefing, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Kiev is calling for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council to address what he said were efforts by Russia to “escalate the conflict” and sabotage the elections. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman dismissed the allegations as “groundless.” [Continue reading…]

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Ukrainian tycoon’s call for rally against separatists goes largely unheeded

The Washington Post reports: A plea by Ukraine’s richest man for demonstrations against Russian-backed separatists met with a mixed response Tuesday as many of his own workers stayed on their jobs.

But many Ukrainians still saw the gesture by billionaire Rinat Akhmetov as a welcome, if symbolic, attempt to end the country’s fraternal strife while European leaders searched for diplomatic solutions to the crisis before Sunday’s presidential election.

Akhmetov, whose coal, steel and other holdings are the industrial might of the Donets Basin in eastern Ukraine, asked his 300,000 employees to join a noon peace rally against the separatist movement that, he said, could wreck the region’s economy. The call followed Akhmetov’s decision last week to form worker patrols to help police restore order on the streets of Mariupol, an industrial port city in southeastern Ukraine.

In Donetsk, several hundred pro-Ukrainian residents rallied just before noon at Donbas Arena. Organizers played the noise of a deafening factory whistle and urged the crowd to download a version of it that they could sound at noon every day as a show of unity.

But at the entrance to Akhmetov’s Ilyich steel plant in this city on the Sea of Azov, nobody stepped outside the factory gate when the plant whistle sounded at noon. [Continue reading…]

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Russia says it will veto UN resolution on Syria

The Associated Press reports: Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations said his country will veto a U.N. Security Council resolution to refer the crisis in Syria to the International Criminal Court, calling it a “publicity stunt” and warning that it will harm efforts to end the violence by political means.

The conflict is now into its fourth year, and tense peace talks have gone so poorly that the joint U.N.-Arab league envoy who tried to broker them has announced he will resign.

Dozens of countries are urging the Security Council to refer the Syria crisis to the world’s permanent war crimes tribunal so it can investigate allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by all sides.

France has called for a vote on the resolution Thursday. But permanent council member Russia has vetoed three previous resolutions on Syria, and Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters his country would do the same with this one. Moscow is Syria’s closest ally. [Continue reading…]

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The unfolding Ukraine crisis signals a new world order

Tony Brenton, former British ambassador to Russia, writes: A way out of the Ukraine crisis may now be faintly discernible. The round-table negotiations promoted by the Germans has the support of all the key governments. It is intended to produce a ceasefire, discussion of future Ukrainian constitutional arrangements, and the election of a new Ukrainian president on 25 May. There are still all sorts of ways it could go wrong: the east Ukrainian dissidents are not yet involved and will need to be; and polarisation continues, with both sides gradually losing control of their thuggish surrogates. But things now look marginally more hopeful than they have since the ill-fated Geneva agreement of a month ago.

The west has had to learn some hard lessons to get to where we are now.

It is generally accepted that the EU (in a mode splendidly described by one commentator as of “impotent megalomania”) precipitated matters by blundering into the most sensitive part of Russia’s backyard without seriously asking itself how it might react. This was not an isolated error but the culmination of 20 years of the west simply not taking Russia seriously, most notably with the Kosovo war and the expansion of Nato. When Russia did react in the (legally indefensible, but historically understandable) form of annexing Crimea and destabilising east Ukraine, the western view then swung 180 degrees to focusing on the need to “contain” a revanchist Russia intent on rebuilding the Soviet Union.

In the absence of any willingness among western publics to fight for the independence of Simferopol, the only weapon available was sanctions. These allowed western leaders to claim they were “doing something”, but in fact cruelly exposed their unwillingness to take real economic pain on Ukraine’s behalf. They have also become something of a badge of patriotic pride for those Russians targeted by them – of the six uses of sanctions by the west against the USSR/Russia since the second world war none have worked.

Happily, we now seem to be waking up to the reality that we are dealing not with a revanchist Russia, but with a coldly calculating one – a Russia that is neither patsy nor praying mantis. They don’t want to fight a war or take on the economic burden of rebuilding eastern Ukraine, but they do have a minimal list of requirements – Ukrainian neutrality, more autonomy for Russian speakers – which have to be met before they will back off. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered troops deployed near Ukraine to return to their home bases and praised the launch of a dialogue between the Ukrainian government and its opponents even as fighting continued in the eastern parts of the country.

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Ukraine is all for dialogue, but not under the barrel of a Russian gun

Andrii Deshchytsia, Ukraine’s acting minister of foreign affairs, writes: Last week Russia’s President Putin said he believed referendums should not take place in the eastern regions of Ukraine on 11 May. Remarkably, the change of Putin’s rhetoric has inspired some hope in many European capitals.

Putin distanced himself publicly from pro-Russia armed separatists in the east, pretending Russia had no influence over them. Unfortunately, his posturings are nothing more than a diplomatic trick and are indicative of the long-term game the Kremlin is playing.

As many European diplomats have observed, Putin’s acts regarding Ukraine belie his words. Despite his claims to withdraw troops from Ukraine’s border, he did not – according to all the independent intelligence reports of Ukraine, Nato and the Pentagon. A few hours after his “goodwill” commitment, an armoured Russian “Tiger” (wheeled troop transporter) crossed Ukraine’s border by force to join armed militants in the Luhansk region. This is just one of a multitude of examples of Russia’s direct involvement in the unrest in Ukraine’s east. However, this fact is often lost in the western media because of the Kremlin’s highly coordinated information campaign on Ukraine. [Continue reading…]

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China, Russia on verge of gas deal

The Associated Press reports: China plans to sign a multibillion-dollar deal to buy Russian gas during a visit by President Vladimir Putin next week despite U.S. pressure to avoid undermining sanctions on Moscow over the Ukraine crisis.

Washington has appealed to Beijing to avoid making business deals with Russia, though American officials acknowledge the pressing energy needs of China, the world’s second-largest economy.

Negotiations that began more than a decade ago had stalled over price. But analysts say Moscow, isolated over its role in Ukraine, faces pressure to make concessions in exchange for an economic and political boost.

“We are still exchanging views with Moscow and we will try our best to ensure that this contract can be signed and witnessed by the two presidents during President Putin’s visit to China,” a deputy Chinese foreign minister, Cheng Guoping, told reporters on Thursday. [Continue reading…]

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Steelworkers unite against separtists in eastern Ukraine

The New York Times reports: Thousands of steelworkers fanned out on Thursday through the city of Mariupol, establishing control over the streets and banishing the pro-Kremlin militants who until recently had seemed to be consolidating their grip on power, dealing a setback to Russia and possibly reversing the momentum in eastern Ukraine.

By late Thursday, miners and steelworkers had deployed in at least five cities, including the regional capital, Donetsk. They had not, however, become the dominant force there that they were in Mariupol, the region’s second-largest city and the site last week of a bloody confrontation between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian militants.

While it was still far too early to say the tide had turned in eastern Ukraine, the day’s events were a blow to separatists who recently seized control here and in a dozen or so other cities and who held a referendum on independence on Sunday. Backed by the Russian propaganda machine and by 40,000 Russian troops just over the border, their grip on power seemed to be tightening every day.

But polls had indicated that a strong majority of eastern Ukrainians supported unity, though few were prepared to say so publicly in the face of armed pro-Russian militants. When President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia withdrew support for the separatists last week, calling for a delay in the referendum and for dialogue on Ukraine’s future, the political winds shifted, providing an opening that the country’s canny oligarchs could exploit. [Continue reading…]

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Inside eastern Ukraine’s make-believe republics

The Daily Beast reports: Two months ago a band of chanting pro-Russian separatists marched past commuter traffic into the state treasury building in Donetsk—the east Ukrainian city they now say they rule following Sunday’s flawed secession referendum. Their first order of business: instructing startled officials to stop transferring the region’s tax money to Kiev and to give it to them instead.

Twelve days before, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had fled Kiev, ousted after months-long protests by pro-European agitators. Revolution was in the air and now a bunch of pro-Russian protesters faced the state treasurer of Donetsk oblast, a province with 4.3 million people—10 percent of Ukraine’s population—and much of the country’s heavy industry. At first nervous, the portly state treasurer’s confidence grew as he realized the emphatic would-be revolutionaries were ignorant of the complexity of state finance and didn’t even realize revenues were not physically stored in the treasury but were deposited in various commercial bank accounts.

What started out as a confrontation turned swiftly into a noisy class on the intricacies of taxes and pensions, with the state treasurer switching from sitting defensively in his chair to standing up, smoking a cigarette and teaching.

“Would there be enough revenue to cover all the obligations in Donetsk without Kiev’s contribution?” the state treasurer asked them. And in a Saturday Night Live moment, the revolutionaries protested they were sure there would be.

Well, “pretty sure,” they amended.

The leader of the group, Pavel Gubarev, a man who declared himself the “people’s governor” of Donetsk oblast at a rally four days before, can be spotted in an online video of the confrontation student-like scribbling notes as the state treasurer lectures. The would-be revolutionaries are finally advised to open bank accounts and to set up a country before they can demand tax.

That surreal moment of revolutionary play-acting by a motley group of Moscow-backed insurrectionists is now being performed every day in what feels to increasingly frustrated locals like a make-believe state. [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s Nixon strategy is just beginning and it’s going to get uglier

Mark Ames writes: It goes without saying that Putin didn’t plan this crisis to happen — he already had his man in power in Kyiv. But Putin did exploit the situation, turning a major humiliating defeat in February into a massive political victory within Russia by doing what the Silent Majority would’ve wanted Putin to do: Redress grievances, air out resentments nonstop against the West and against west Ukraine fascists, and screw whatever the West thinks.

There’s not much comfort here for any side in the West when you frame Putin’s actions through local politics. Here, in our proxy war way of framing Ukraine, either Putin’s a crazy evil empire-r looking to reestablish his empire, meaning we better stop him now; or Putin’s merely reacting defensively to our aggression (or, according to the faulty thinking of a lot of people sick of American interventionism, Putin is heroically defying the US Empire, acting as a counterweight).

What he’s doing is shoring up his new political base while tightening the screws on whatever remained of liberal freedom in Russia, taking control of the Internet, seizing control of the handful of opposition online media sites, and ramping up the culture war against liberals, gays, the decadent West… The fact that we, the US and EU and a few billionaires, funded violent regime change groups in bed with west Ukraine fascists and Russophobes has only made Putin’s domestic job easier. You can see it in the aftermath of the Odessa fire massacre that killed over 40 pro-Russian separatists: It shut up even Navalny.

The liberal-yuppie elites’ momentum is over. Putin’s popularity among the rest of the country has never been higher.

So if Putin is neither the defiant counterweight hero or the neo-Stalinist imperialist, but rather playing a Russian version of vicious Nixon politics, what should the West do?

That’s easy: Stay the Hell out of Russia’s way for awhile, its version of Nixon politics is just beginning, and it’s going to get uglier. Russia has a history of turning inward in ways that will strike us as feral and alien, something the abandoned Silent Majority will welcome, but no one else will. (Our sanctions only helped speed up that process of inward isolationism.)

America’s Silent Majority was crazy enough in the Nixon years: the Silent Majority cheered Nixon on when college students were gunned down on campuses; 80% of Americans sided with Lt. William Calley, the officer in charge of the My Lai massacre. [Continue reading…]

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