Category Archives: Russia

Ukraine, Putin, and the West

The editors of n+1 write: There’s a reason Ukraine is at the heart of the most significant geopolitical crisis yet to appear in the post-Soviet space. There is no post-Soviet state like it. Unlike the Baltic states, it does not have a recent (interwar) memory of statehood. Nor, unlike every other post-Soviet state aside from Belarus, does the majority population have a radically different language and culture from the Russians. In many cases, for these countries, the traditional language suggests a natural political ally—Finland for the Estonians, Turkey for the Azeris, Romania for the Moldovans. These linguistic and cultural affinities are not without their difficulties, but they do give a long-term geopolitical orientation to these countries.

Ukraine has this to some extent in its western part, formerly known as Galicia, which has cultural and linguistic affinities with Poland. But the country’s capital, Kyiv, has much stronger ties to Russia: Russians consider Kievan Rus, which lasted from the 9th to the 13th century (when it was sacked and burned by the Mongols), to be the first Russian civilization. Russian Orthodoxy was first proclaimed there. Most people in Kyiv speak Russian, rather than Ukrainian, and in any case the languages are quite close (about as close as Spanish and Portuguese). On television, it is typical for any live broadcast—whether it’s news, sports, or a reality-TV show—to go back and forth seamlessly between Russian and Ukrainian, with the understanding that most people know both. Russians all too often assume that these cultural affinities mean that there is no such thing as a separate Ukrainian people. There is. But the closeness of the two peoples makes forging an independent path for Ukraine extraordinarily difficult.

Adding to this difficulty has been the Soviet legacy, which in Ukraine as everywhere else is always and everywhere visible. The Ukrainian historian Giorgy Kasianov has written that Ukrainians are forced to exist in several historical and semantic fields simultaneously: the roads they drive on, the factories they work at, the social relations they engage in—all are part of the Soviet heritage. As in the rest of the former Soviet Union, including Russia, this heritage is crumbling, but in Ukraine in particular it remains formidable.

As a result, Ukraine has essentially been frozen in time since independence. Nationalist and pro-Russian political parties (each bankrolled by a handful of oligarchs) have passed the presidency back and forth between them, neither getting much done while they ruled. The country’s two countervailing forces—Ukrainian-language nationalists in the west, and Russian-language nationalists in the east and Crimea—have ensured that neither maintains the upper hand. Because of this, Ukraine has consistently had a better, more lively public sphere than most of its neighbors—more freedom of speech, more freedom of assembly, more diverse political actors. Ukraine was also distinguished by the repeated, and usually peaceful, transfer of power from one party to another (something that post-Soviet Russia has still not achieved more than two decades in). And yet these positive democratic indicators did not, as contemporary dogma would predict, lead to positive economic results. Instead, Ukraine, a country that in 1991 had hope that, left to its own devices, it could flourish—with its highly educated workforce, proximity to Europe in the west and the Black Sea to the south, and many industrial enterprises inherited from the USSR—has instead lagged miserably behind its neighbors. Its per capita GDP is half of Russia’s, one fifth that of the US. Its economic performance is worse than that of its authoritarian neighbors Kazakhstan and Belarus. It is a country about as poor as El Salvador. And the poorest regions are in the west, which sends many undocumented migrant workers farther west, to Europe, and north to Russia. It is the disjuncture between Ukraine’s solid democratic performance and its miserable economic one that provided the protests with much of their pathos and durability. [Continue reading…]

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Triumph of the will: Putin’s war against Russia’s last independent TV channel

Tikhon Dzyadko writes: Vladimir Putin won the war in Crimea without a bullet being fired. But to triumph in a very different war – that against independent Russian media – he didn’t even have to bring in the army. In today’s Russia, there are very different instruments for this kind of thing.

My colleagues and I know this from first-hand experience: the only Russian independent television station where we work, Dozhd, or “Rain”, has been operating on the edge of extinction for the past couple of months.

Dozhd first aired in Russia in 2010, when, after the first two tough presidencies of Putin, there was a strong demand for unbiased information and rigorous journalism. Thanks to this, within four years it became one of the main information resources in the country. We didn’t have to do anything particularly cunning to achieve this – we just filmed the kinds of things that had disappeared from Russian television over the previous 15 years: live broadcasts, cutting-edge interviews with politicians and public figures, live feeds from different parts of the world.

During the past four years we not only interviewed members of the opposition who have been in effect blacklisted by state-run media, but also representatives of the leadership who answered incisive and uncomfortable questions live that simply wouldn’t get asked on state television.

We interviewed the then president, Dmitry Medvedev, and Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. In contrast to others, we covered the social protests in Russian cities during the winter of 2011-2012, just by installing cameras and broadcasting the demonstrations live. Mikhail Khodorkovsky gave his first interview on being freed from prison last December to us. And it was Dozhd, alone among Russian media outlets, that covered the riots in Kiev last winter live, giving airtime to opposition figures and the authorities.

Our audience has grown with every month: we broadcast on the internet and our channel is carried by the biggest Russian cable and satellite networks.

On the face of it, we weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary but for one fact: this is Russia, where the Kremlin’s media agenda does not presuppose the existence of independent media. And so it became essential for the Kremlin to find a reason to start a campaign against unwanted media. [Continue reading…]

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Russia plotting for Ukrainian influence, not invasion, analysts say

The New York Times reports: The separatist demonstrations again churning through eastern Ukraine have raised fears of a Crimean-style invasion by the 40,000 Russian troops coiled just over the Russian border. But Moscow’s goals are more subtle than that, focused on a long-range strategy of preventing Ukraine from escaping Russia’s economic and military orbit, according to political analysts, Kremlin allies and diplomats interviewed this week.

Toward that end, the Kremlin has made one central demand, which does not at first glance seem terribly unreasonable. It wants Kiev to adopt a federal system of government giving far more power to the governors across Ukraine.

“A federal structure will ensure that Ukraine will not be anti-Russian,” said Sergei A. Markov, a Russian political strategist who supports the Kremlin. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. troops may be sent to Eastern Europe

The Associated Press reports: NATO’s top military commander in Europe, drafting countermoves to the Russian military threat against Ukraine, said Wednesday they could include deployment of American troops to alliance member states in Eastern Europe now feeling at risk.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove told The Associated Press he wouldn’t “write off involvement by any nation, to include the United States.”

Foreign ministers of the 28-nation alliance have given Breedlove until Tuesday to propose steps to reassure NATO members nearest Russia that other alliance countries have their back.

“Essentially what we are looking at is a package of land, air and maritime measures that would build assurance for our easternmost allies,” Breedlove told the AP. “I’m tasked to deliver this by next week. I fully intend to deliver it early.”

Asked again if American soldiers might be sent to NATO’s front-line states closest to Russia, the four-star U.S. general said, “I would not write off contributions from any nation.” [Continue reading…]

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Why Crimea matters

Mark Leonard writes: “We have spent thirty years trying to integrate Russia into the international system, and now we are trying to kick it out again.”

These words — from a senior British official — sum up the disappointment and bewilderment of western diplomats struggling to handle Russia. They face two imperfect options: inaction in the face of Russia’s territorial aggression, and reacting so strongly that they unravel the international system that has sustained order for the last five decades.

As pro-Russian protesters declare a “people’s republic” in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, Western leaders are smart to focus on deterring Putin from expanding beyond Crimea. But the West needs to think more about how its actions are seen beyond the Kremlin. The consequences of Crimea could be even more dramatic at a global level than within the post-Soviet countries.

In his March 18 speech, Putin expressed three ideas that Europeans have rejected since World War Two — nationalism that is not tempered by the guilt of war; identity defined by ethnicity, rather than geography or institutions; and social conservatism based in religion.

Yet these ideas remain popular outside the West. Just look at the Middle East, where Iran and Saudi Arabia are both defending their “people” across borders. China may one day want to defend its citizens overseas, in the same way that Putin sees himself as the defender of ethnic Russians. If other countries view Russia’s actions as cost-free, they could carry out copy-cat incursions.

America’s allies could also react in worrying ways if they lose trust in western deterrence. I recently spoke to well-connected military strategists in Tokyo and Seoul, who were disappointed by the West’s reaction to Russian expansionism. They predicted that within Japan and South Korea, security hawks might call for nuclear weapons as a hedge against American withdrawal from the world.

But if the West’s attempts to preserve its credibility are too clumsy, they could also lead to disorder — in particular, if the West throws Russia out of the global economy and the institutions that govern it. [Continue reading…]

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Eastern Ukraine: ‘Local’ protesters storm theater thinking it was Kharkiv City Hall

The Moscow Times reports: Pro-Russian demonstrators in eastern Ukraine mistook a theater for the city hall and stormed the wrong building, a local journalist said, citing the case as evidence that the protesters were not local.

Protesters who took over Kharkiv City Hall over the weekend first broke into the town’s opera and ballet theater, but left upon finding a concert hall inside, journalist Vyacheslav Mavrichev said on his Facebook page.

Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has accused the Kremlin of orchestrating “separatist unrest” in Kharkiv and eastern cities Donetsk and Lugansk, while officials say that many pro-Russia protesters in east Ukraine may in fact be Russian.

The New York Times reports: As the government in Kiev moved to reassert control over pro-Russian protesters across eastern Ukraine, the United States and NATO issued stern warnings to Moscow about further intervention in the country’s affairs amid continuing fears of an eventual Russian incursion.

Secretary of State John Kerry accused the Kremlin of fomenting the unrest, calling the protests the work of saboteurs whose machinations were as “ham-handed as they are transparent.” Speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he added: “No one should be fooled — and believe me, no one is fooled — by what could potentially be a contrived pretext for military intervention just as we saw in Crimea. It is clear that Russian special forces and agents have been the catalysts behind the chaos of the last 24 hours.” [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine’s Muslims don’t want to be part of Russia

Paul Goble writes: Muslims are quite comfortable living in Ukraine and have no interest in having the regions where they live be annexed to the Russian Federation where relations between Muslims and others are known to be far worse, according to a Daghestani native who has been living 35 years in Luhansk.

Seyfulla Rashidov, head of the Muslim community there and a professor at the Eastern Ukrainian University, told Vadma Byurchiyev of Kavpolit.com that he and his fellow Muslims are happy to be part of Ukraine and won’t support Moscow’s efforts to annex portions of their country.

Saying he would favor a tougher and more professional response by Ukrainian officials to pro-Russian demonstrators, Rashidov noted that he “had not seen a single acquaintance in the crowd of [pro-Moscow] demonstrators. I am certain that they came from other cities. I have no evidence that they are citizens of another state, but they clearly are not Luhansk people.” [Continue reading…]

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Among Ukraine’s Jews, the bigger worry is Putin, not pogroms

The New York Times reports: From his office atop the world’s biggest Jewish community center, Shmuel Kaminezki, the chief rabbi of this eastern Ukrainian city, has followed with dismay Russian claims that Ukraine is now in the hands of neo-Nazi extremists — and has struggled to calm his panicked 85-year-old mother in New York.

Raised in Russia and a regular viewer of Russian television, she “calls every day to ask, ‘Have the pogroms happened yet?’ ” Rabbi Kaminezki said. He tells his mother that they have not, and that she should stop watching Russian TV. “It is a total lie,” he said. “Jews are not in danger in Ukraine.”

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, added his own voice to the scaremongering in a speech at the Kremlin on March 18, when he described the ouster of President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine as an armed coup executed by “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites” who “continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day.”

But instead of reeling in panic at any fascist resurgence, the Jewish community of Dnipropetrovsk, one of the largest in Ukraine, is celebrating the recent appointment of one of its own, a billionaire tycoon named Ihor Kolomoysky, as the region’s most powerful official.

“They made a Jew the governor. What kind of anti-Semitism is this?” asked Solomon Flaks, the 87-year-old chairman of the region’s Council of Jewish Veterans of the Great Patriotic War, a group of a rapidly shrinking number of World War II veterans. [Continue reading…]

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Russia resuscitates ‘Greystone in Ukraine’ story

The Guardian reports: Ukraine’s leaders have shown unusual restraint in the face of multiple Russian provocations during and since last month’s seizure of Crimea. But their restraint is unlikely to survive an attempt by Moscow to provoke a similar separatist insurrection in south-east Ukraine, which officials in Kiev believe may already be under way. An escalating confrontation in the east could in turn draw in the western powers.

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s fightback began. The acting interior minister, Arsen Avakov, deployed police special forces to eastern cities where pro-Russian activists have occupied government buildings and appealed for Russian military intervention. And yet even now Kiev is exhibiting extraordinary self-control. Demonstrators in Kharkiv were arrested but protests in Lugansk, Mariupol and Donetsk were allowed to continue unmolested.

Ukraine’s calibrated approach contrasts with that of Moscow, which quickly denounced the arrests in Kharkiv as confrontational. The official news agency Ria Novosti claimed that the official Ukrainian deployments included Right Sector radical nationalists and freelance American Blackwater (Greystone) mercenaries. There was no independent confirmation of this claim. [Continue reading…]

As shameless practitioners in disseminating disinformation, the Russians know exactly what they are doing. Promote the story about Greystone (which is actually the rebirth of an earlier conspiracy theory), knowing that it will prompt a swift denial:

“We do not have anyone working in Ukraine nor do we have any plans to deploy anyone to the region,” said Coreena Taylor, a Greystone representative at the company’s headquarters in Chesapeake, Va.

Those who are receptive to the idea that the U.S. might be intervening in Ukraine in this way, will of course dismiss Greystone’s statement. Likewise any statements from the State Department will be disregarded.

A resolute unwillingness to believe anything coming from any American speaking in an official capacity, now gets coupled with a stunning willingness to take seriously virtually any claim coming from Russia.

No doubt the representatives of Western governments bear the primary responsibility for the fact that they have come to be viewed with such suspicion, but everyone is responsible for sustaining and refining their own critical awareness.

There’s no value in learning how not to be fooled by your own government if you then easily get fooled by another government.

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Putin’s rejection of the West, in writing

Leonid Bershidsky writes: What kind of country is Vladimir Putin’s Russia? The third year of his third presidential term has offered plenty of clues: the Crimea invasion, the shuttering of uncensored media outlets, prison terms for protesters. Now, Putin is planning to put the intellectual and ideological foundations of the new regime into words.

A document called “Foundations of the State Cultural Policy” has been under development since 2012. A special working group under Putin’s chief of staff Sergei Ivanov will soon roll it out for a month of “public debate” before Putin gets to sign it. Quotes from the culture ministry’s draft, presumably the basis for the final one, have leaked out.

“Russia must be viewed as a unique and original civilization that cannot be reduced to ‘East’ or ‘West,'” reads the document, signed by Deputy Culture Minister Vladimir Aristarkhov. “A concise way of formulating this stand would be, ‘Russia is not Europe,’ and that is confirmed by the entire history of the country and the people.”

Russia’s non-European path should be marked by “the rejection of such principles as multiculturalism and tolerance,” according to the draft. “No references to ‘creative freedom’ and ‘national originality’ can justify behavior considered unacceptable from the point of view of Russia’s traditional value system.” That, the document stresses, is not an infringement on basic freedoms but merely the withdrawal of government support from “projects imposing alien values on society.”

The draft goes on to explain that certain forms of modern art and liberal Western values in general are unacceptable and harmful to society’s moral health. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine implicates ousted president in shooting of protesters

The New York Times reports: The Ukrainian authorities said on Thursday that former President Viktor F. Yanukovych had been involved in plans for elite police units to open fire on antigovernment protesters in February, killing more than 100 people in the days immediately before the downfall of Mr. Yanukovych’s government.

The police have already arrested several members of one elite riot police unit responsible for the killings, said Arsen Avakov, the country’s interim interior minister, but some others under investigation have fled to Crimea, which was annexed by Russia last month.

The findings of the inquiry, which were presented by Mr. Avakov as well as by the country’s new general prosecutor and the head of the security services, are the first attempt by the government in Kiev to give a comprehensive answer to the shootings that caused the overwhelming majority of deaths that took place on the Ukrainian capital’s main square, the Maidan, in mid-February. [Continue reading…]

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In Crimea, Russia showcases a rebooted army

The New York Times reports: The soldiers guarding the entrances to the surrounded Ukrainian military base here just south of the capital, Simferopol, had little in common with their predecessors from past Russian military actions.

Lean and fit, few if any seemed to be conscripts. Their uniforms were crisp and neat, and their new helmets were bedecked with tinted safety goggles. They were sober.

And there was another indicator of an army undergoing an upgrade: compact encrypted radio units distributed at the small-unit level, including for soldiers on such routine duty as guard shifts beside machine-gun trucks. The radios are a telltale sign of a sweeping modernization effort undertaken five years ago by Vladimir V. Putin that has revitalized Russia’s conventional military abilities, frightening some of its former vassal states in Eastern Europe and forcing NATO to re-evaluate its longstanding view of post-Soviet Russia as a nuclear power with limited ground muscle.

Across Crimea in the past several weeks, a sleek new vanguard of the Russian military has been on display, with forces whose mobility, equipment and behavior were sharply different from those of the Russian forces seen in the brief war in Georgia in 2008 or throughout the North Caucasus over nearly two decades of conflict with Muslim separatists. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine isn’t worth another Cold War

Pankaj Mishra writes: The Cold War credentialed a kind of “thinker” who cannot think without the help of violently opposed abstractions: good versus evil, freedom versus slavery, liberal democracy versus totalitarianism, and that sort of thing. Forced into premature retirement by the unexpected collapse of Communism in 1989, this thinker re-emerged after Sept. 11, convinced there was another worthy enemy in the crosshairs: Islamic totalitarianism. Unchastened by a decade of expensive, counterproductive and widely despised wars, these laptop generals have been trying to reboot their dated software yet again as Russian President Vladimir Putin formalizes his annexation of Crimea.

As laments about Western weakness and spine-stiffening exhortations fill the air, it’s worth recalling the legacy of the central episode of the Cold War: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

The invasion was promoted by the Soviets’ serious misjudgment of the U.S.’s intentions in the region. As the U.S., along with Saudi Arabia, helped consolidate history’s first global jihadist campaign, it came to be prolonged by actual American actions. Questioned in 1998 about the U.S. role in the making of Islamic extremists, Zbigniew Brzezinski could confidently retort, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

Three years later, of course, a handful of stirred-up Muslims launched the most devastating attack ever on U.S. soil, provoking the George W. Bush administration into such hubristic projects as eliminating “terror” worldwide and bringing democracy at gunpoint to the Middle East.

Muslims stirred up and radicalized by these blunders have subsequently ravaged Pakistan and large parts of the Middle East and Africa. U.S. citizens, too, have had to pay a high price — the loss of civil and legal rights — to protect themselves from what was originally a small band of cave-dwelling criminals and fanatics. Meanwhile, as the events of the last month show, the Soviet empire that had allegedly collapsed has returned under a different guise.

It is very likely that Putin’s land grab in Crimea will fail disastrously. As the Russian economy slows down, capital flees the country and domestic unrest grows, Putin’s position will become less than secure. The one thing certain to keep him in power longer, as well as weaken his opponents, would be a Western overreaction like those of the Jimmy Carter and Bush administrations in 1979 and 2001. [Continue reading…]

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Russian authorities want to criminalize public criticism

Human Rights Watch: Russia’s State Duma should drop proposed amendments that would further restrict the law on public gatherings, Human Rights Watch said today. The draconian amendments and other recent pernicious legislative initiatives to suppress critics of the government take Russia even farther astray from its international human rights obligations.

The proposed amendments, submitted by the lower chamber of Russia’s parliament on March 31, 2014, would increase the already significant fines for violating rules on holding public events and provide that a participant of an unauthorized public gathering can be punished by administrative arrest, and, if a repeat offender of the rules, can be subject to criminal sanctions. According to the amendments, “repeated violations of the established order of organization or conduction of a gathering, rally, demonstration, march, or picket” would constitute a criminal offense punishable by up to five years of imprisonment. The penalty would apply to those who have been sentenced for organizing or participating in an unauthorized public gathering more than twice in 180 calendar days.

“The Russian authorities want to criminalize public criticism,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director. “They’re threatening peaceful demonstrators with prison time.” [Continue reading…]

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Dmitry Medvedev visits Crimea as Russia’s army begins border withdrawal

The Guardian reports: Russia flaunted its grip on Crimea on Monday, with the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, flying in to the newly annexed territory for a cabinet meeting, cementing the sense of resignation in Kiev and the west that the seizure of the territory is irreversible.

At the same time, Russian forces appeared to be pulling back from the border with eastern Ukraine. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said in a phone conversation with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, that he had ordered a “partial withdrawal” from the border, according to Berlin.

The developments came after a four-hour meeting on Sunday between the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and the US secretary of state, John Kerry, in which both sides put their visions for resolving the Ukraine crisis on the table. After the meeting in Pairs, Lavrov said Ukraine should introduce federalisation of power.

“Both sides had very concrete positions, and it was perhaps the first time over the past few months that things were called by their real names,” said a source in the Russian delegation, who did not elaborate further on whether this left the sides closer or further away from an agreement.

Kerry said after the meeting that any decisions on federalisation ought to be made by Ukrainian authorities, and the Ukrainian foreign ministry released a vicious riposte to the Kremlin, telling it to keep its nose out of Ukrainian affairs: “Do not attempt to teach others. Better bring order to your own country. You have plenty of problems,” read the statement. Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, said on Monday that he saw no reason for the country to introduce a federal system. [Continue reading…]

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Kerry, Russian counterpart meet on Ukraine crisis

The Associated Press reports: Russia on Sunday set out demands for a diplomatic resolution to the crisis in Ukraine, saying the former Soviet republic should be unified in a federation allowing wide autonomy to its various regions as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met in Paris in another bid to calm tensions.

After a brief call on French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, Kerry sat down with Lavrov at the residence of the Russian ambassador to France to go over Moscow’s response to a U.S. plan to de-escalate the situation as Russian troops continue to mass along the Ukrainian border.

The men said nothing of substance as they shook hands, although after Kerry ended the photo op by thanking assembled journalists, Lavrov cryptically added in English: “Good luck, and good night.”

Appearing on Russian television ahead of his talks with Kerry, Lavrov rejected suspicions that the deployment of tens of thousands of Russian troops near Ukraine is a sign Moscow plans to invade the country following its annexation of the strategic Crimean peninsula.

“We have absolutely no intention of, or interest in, crossing Ukraine’s borders,” Lavrov said.

Russia says the troops near the border are there for military exercises and that they have no plans to invade, but U.S. and European officials say the numbers and locations of the troops suggest something more than exercises.

And, despite the Russian assurances, U.S., European and Ukrainian officials are deeply concerned about the buildup, which they fear could be a prelude to an invasion or intimidation to compel Kiev to accept Moscow’s demands. [Continue reading…]

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Putin calls Obama to discuss Ukraine

n13-iconThe New York Times reports: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia reached out to President Obama on Friday to discuss ideas about how to peacefully resolve the international standoff over Ukraine, a surprise move by Moscow to pull back from the brink of an escalated confrontation that has put Europe and much of the world on edge.

After weeks of provocative moves punctuated by a menacing buildup of troops on Ukraine’s border, Mr. Putin’s unexpected telephone call to Mr. Obama offered a hint of a possible settlement. The two leaders agreed to have their top diplomats meet to discuss concrete proposals for defusing the crisis that has generated the most serious clash between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War.

But it remained uncertain whether Mr. Putin was seriously interested in a resolution that would go far enough to satisfy the United States, Ukraine and Europe, or instead was seeking a diplomatic advantage at a time when he has been isolated internationally. While the White House account of the call emphasized the possible diplomatic movement, the Kremlin’s version stressed Mr. Putin’s complaints about “extremists” in Ukraine and introduced into the mix of issues on the table the fate of Transnistria, another pro-Russian breakaway province outside his borders. [Continue reading…]

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