Category Archives: Ukraine

Freedom in Russian exists only in Ukraine

o13-iconTimothy Snyder writes: Last weekend Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the most famous of Russia’s political prisoners, spoke to tens of thousands of Ukrainians on the main square in Kiev, the Maidan. Khodorkovsky told them what they already knew: that Ukrainian citiznes from all walks of life, of all ethnicities, had suffered for and won their freedom in a revolution for dignity and decency.

What language did Khodorkovsky speak in Kiev? Russian, of course, his native language, and a language most Ukrainians speak. Most Ukrainians are bilingual and many Ukrainians in Kiev speak Russian rather than Ukrainian at home. Ukrainians are cosmopolitan in a way that most of us are not. Unfortunately, we reward them for it by not noticing that they are bilingual, dividing them into groups of Russian- and Ukrainian-speakers, drawing the conclusion that there are two nations instead of one — and thereby preparing ourselves for Putin’s war propaganda. [Continue reading…]

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The ties that bind the U.S. and Russian oil and gas industries together

a13-iconSteve Horn reports: In a long-awaited moment in a hotly contested zone currently occupied by the Russian military, Ukraine’s citizens living in the peninsula of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to become part of Russia.

Responding to the referendum, President Barack Obama and numerous U.S. officials rejected the results out of hand and the Obama Administration has confirmed he will authorize economic sanctions against high-ranking Russian officials.

“As I told President Putin yesterday, the referendum in Crimea was a clear violation of Ukrainian constitutions and international law and it will not be recognized by the international community,” Obama said in a press briefing. “Today I am announcing a series of measures that will continue to increase the cost on Russia and those responsible for what is happening in Ukraine.”

But even before the vote and issuing of sanctions, numerous key U.S. officials hyped the need to expedite U.S. oil and gas exports to fend off Europe’s reliance on importing Russia’s gas bounty. In short, gas obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) is increasingly seen as a “geopolitical tool” for U.S. power-brokers, as The New York Times explained.

Perhaps responding to the repeated calls to use gas as a “diplomatic tool,” the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced it will sell 5 million barrels of oil from the seldom-tapped Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Both the White House and DOE deny the decision had anything to do with the situation in Ukraine.

Yet even as some say we are witnessing the beginning of a “new cold war,” few have discussed the ties binding major U.S. oil and gas companies with Russian state oil and gas companies.

The ties that bind, as well as other real logistical and economic issues complicate the narrative of exports as an “energy weapon.”

The situation in Ukraine is a simple one at face value, at least from an energy perspective.

“Control of resources and dependence on other countries is a central theme connecting the longstanding tension between Russia and Ukraine and potential actions taken by the rest of the world as the crisis escalates,” ThinkProgress explained in a recent article. “Ukraine is overwhelmingly dependent on Russia for natural gas, relying on its neighbor for 60 to 70 percent of its natural gas needs.”

At the same time, Europe also largely depends on Ukraine as a key thoroughfare for imports of Russian gas via pipelines.

“The country is crossed by a network of Soviet-era pipelines that carry Russian natural gas to many European Union member states and beyond; more than a quarter of the EU’s total gas needs were met by Russian gas, and some 80% of it came via Ukrainian pipelines,” explained The Guardian.

Given the circumstances, weaning EU countries off Russian gas seems a no-brainer at face value. Which is why it’s important to use the brain and look beneath the surface.

The U.S. and Russian oil and gas industries can best be described as “frenemies.” Case in point: the tight-knit relationship between U.S. multinational petrochemical giant ExxonMobil and Russian state-owned multinational petrochemical giant Rosneft. [Continue reading…]

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Sevastopol voters turned out in record numbers — not a single complaint was registered

Voter turnout in Sevastopol, Crimea, yesterday was a whopping 123%! It’s hard to understand why the referendum fell short of 100% support for joining Russia when there were so many “surplus” votes floating around.

But seriously, given that Tartars, who make up slightly more than 10% of the population were expected to boycott the vote, and a portion of the rest of Crimea’s pro-Ukrainian population probably did likewise, this “landslide” clearly had the assistance of Russian bulldozers.

What the outcome might have been of a free and fair (even though unconstitutional) vote with real choices for or against secession, we’ll never know.

The Associated Press reports: Final results of the referendum in Crimea show that 97 percent of voters have supported leaving Ukraine to join Russia, the head of the referendum election commission said Monday.

Mikhail Malyshev told a televised news conference that the final tally from Sunday’s vote was 96.8 percent in favor of splitting from Ukraine. He also said that the commission has not registered a single complaint about the vote.

The referendum was widely condemned by Western leaders who were planning to discuss economic sanctions to punish Russia on Monday. Ukraine’s new government in Kiev called the referendum a “circus” directed at gunpoint by Moscow.

But Valery Ryazantsev, head of Russia’s observer mission in Crimea and a lawmaker from the upper house of the Russian parliament, said Monday that the results are beyond dispute. He told the Interfax news agency that there are “absolutely no reasons to consider the vote results illegitimate.” [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s imperial road to economic ruin

o13-iconSergei Guriev writes: Russia’s response to events in Ukraine has exceeded the worst expectations of those who were already questioning whether Putin is, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel put it, “in touch with reality.” The move to annex Crimea has reversed any soft-power benefit that Putin might have gained from the Sochi Olympics and the pardons he granted (as recently as December) to imprisoned opponents like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the members of Pussy Riot.

The sacrifice of these gains suggests that the Crimea adventure was not part of long-considered plan. On the contrary, since the crisis began, Russia’s leaders have repeatedly contradicted their previous statements, backtracked, reversed decisions, and denied easily verifiable facts. All of this indicates that Russian political leaders have no strategy and do not foresee the consequences of their decisions. Even the Kremlin’s own supporters acknowledge that Putin “is improvising.”

It is also clear that the decisions to violate international law, despite the risk of economic isolation, were made in an ad hoc fashion by Putin’s innermost circle. For example, Valentina Matviyenko, the chairwoman of the Federation Council (the parliament’s upper house), announced that Russia would not send troops to Ukraine – just two days before she and the Council voted unanimously to authorize Putin to do precisely that. And Matviyenko is one of the 12 permanent members of Russia’s National Security Council, the supreme decision-making authority on such matters.

Regardless of whether the Kremlin is irrational or simply uninformed, its policy in Crimea sends an unmistakable signal to investors: Russia’s political leaders are impossible to predict. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. steps up sanctions on Russian officials

n13-iconThe New York Times reports: The United States, working in coordination with Europe, imposed a new round of sanctions on prominent Russian officials on Monday as the showdown over Ukraine reached a new stage of confrontation between East and West.

President Obama signed an executive order freezing the assets and banning visas for a number of Russians deemed to be responsible for the seizing of Crimea or otherwise interfering in Ukrainian sovereignty. Among those targeted were several officials in President Vladimir V. Putin’s inner circle, and the White House threatened to go after more if Russia did not back down.

“We have fashioned these sanctions to impose costs on named individuals who wield influence in the Russian government and those responsible for the deteriorating situation in Ukraine,” the White House said in a statement. “We stand ready to use these authorities in a direct and targeted fashion as events warrant.”

In a conference call briefing reporters, a senior administration official who was not permitted to be named under the ground rules said, “These are by far the most comprehensive sanctions applied to Russia since the end of the Cold War — far and away so.” [Continue reading…]

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State TV says Russia could turn U.S. to ‘radioactive ash’

n13-iconAFP reports: A leading anchor on Russian state television on Sunday described Russia as the only country capable of turning the United States into “radioactive ash”, in an incendiary comment at the height of tensions over the Crimea referendum.

“Russia is the only country in the world realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash,” anchor Dmitry Kiselyov said on his weekly news show on state-controlled Rossiya 1 television.

Kiselyov made the comment to support his argument that the United States and President Barack Obama were living in fear of Russia led by President Vladimir Putin amid the Ukraine crisis.

His programme was broadcast as the first exit polls were being published showing an overwhelming majority of Crimeans voting to leave Ukraine and join Russia.

He stood in his studio in front of a gigantic image of a mushroom cloud produced after a nuclear attack, with the words “into radioactive ash”.

“Americans themselves consider Putin to be a stronger leader than Obama,” he added, pointing to opinion polls which then popped up on the screen.

“Why is Obama phoning Putin all the time and talking to him for hours on end?” he asked.

Kiselyov has earned a reputation as one of Russia’s most provocative television news hosts, in particularly with his often blatantly homophobic remarks.

But he is also hugely influential with his weekly news show broadcast at Sunday evening prime time.

Putin last year appointed Kiselyov head of the new Russia Today news agency that is to replace the soon to be liquidated RIA Novosti news agency with the aim of better promoting Russia’s official position. [Continue reading…]

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Foes of America in Russia crave rupture in ties

a13-iconThe New York Times reports: As Russia and the United States drift toward a rupture over Crimea, the Stalinist writer Aleksandr A. Prokhanov feels that his moment has finally arrived.

“I am afraid that I am interested in a cold war with the West,” said Mr. Prokhanov, 76, in a lull between interviews on state-controlled television and radio. “I was very patient. I waited for 20 years. I did everything I could so that this war would begin. I worked day and night.”

Mr. Prokhanov is an attack dog whose career has risen, fallen and risen again with the fortunes of hard-liners in the Kremlin. And it is a measure of the conservative pivot that has taken place in Moscow in Vladimir V. Putin’s third presidential term that Mr. Prokhanov and a cadre of like-minded thinkers — a kind of “who’s who of conspiratorial anti-Americanism,” as one scholar put it — have found themselves thrust into the mainstream.

For centuries, Russian history has been driven by a struggle between ideas, as reformers and revanchists wrestled over the country’s future. Mr. Putin keeps a distance from the ideological entrepreneurs clustered around the Kremlin, leaving his influences a matter of speculation.

But it became clear last week, as the United States threatened to cut off Russian corporations from the Western financial system, that influential members of the president’s inner circle view isolation from the West as a good thing for Russia, the strain of thought advanced by Mr. Prokhanov and his fellow travelers. Some in Mr. Putin’s camp see the confrontation as an opportunity to make the diplomatic turn toward China that they have long advocated, said Sergei A. Karaganov, a dean of the faculty of international relations at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

“This whole episode is going to change the rules of the game,” Mr. Karaganov said of Crimea, which is holding a referendum on secession on Sunday. “Confrontation with the West is welcomed by all too many here, to cleanse the elite, to organize the nation.” [Continue reading…]

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Putin wins in Russia only by escalating his war rhetoric

o13-iconMasha Gessen writes: Vladimir Putin has won. In Russia, support for his war in Ukraine is overwhelming. And his approval rating has finally recovered after falling drastically in December 2011, when the Russian protest movement erupted.

Putin claimed reelection to his third term as president in March 2012, as mass demonstrations were taking place in cities and towns across Russia. Official tallies said he won with 63 percent of the vote, but independent exit polls suggested he captured about 50 percent — hardly a show of overwhelming support for a virtually unopposed candidate (none of the four opponents he handpicked for the ballot had campaigned).

After the election, Putin began cracking down on opponents while mobilizing his shrinking constituency against an imaginary enemy: strong, dangerous, Western and, apparently, homosexual. Laws were passed restricting public assembly and the activities of nongovernmental organizations; about three dozen people of various political and social stripes were jailed for protesting.

The crackdown proved effective: When the risks of demonstrating became extremely high and the benefits apparently nonexistent, the number of protests and protesters dwindled; the loose leadership structure of the 2011-12 protest movement dissolved in a haze of mutual recriminations.

As for the mobilization effort, the results were mixed: Putin’s approval rating, as measured by the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent polling organization, bounced back soon after his reelection but sank again and then plateaued. The high approvals that he enjoyed in his first decade at the helm, around 70 percent, were a distant memory. [Continue reading…]

For many of those observers who view Putin as having been pushed into a corner by Western governments who recklessly and foolishly hijacked Ukrainian politics, the Russian president is a cool realist acting in Russia’s national interests, doing what any responsible leader would do.

One of the multiple problems with this interpretation of what is currently unfolding is that it discounts the effects of the psychological imperatives to which Putin is now strapped.

A full-scale invasion of Ukraine might seem irrational now that Crimea is already fully under Russian control — 93% of voters are reported to have supported Crimea becoming part of Russia. But Putin’s next choices may be shaped much less by his assessment of Russia’s geopolitical interests than they are by the image of a strong leader around which he has drummed up so much popular support. He has been stacking up more and more reasons to continue his military advance, leaving less and less room to climb down without appearing to have lost his courage.

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Ukraine’s fallen statues of Lenin are not just a rejection of Russia

o13-iconSrećko Horvat writes: A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Lenin.

Back in 2011 Ukraine was preparing to host Euro 2012. The government decided to release a promotional video titled Switch On Ukraine. Among the sites shown in the video was Liberty Square in the north-eastern city of Kharkiv. But something was missing. When the sun rose over the square, instead of an 8.5 metre-high statue of Lenin there was only an empty plinth. Someone had digitally erased the politically problematic icon.

In 2013 another statue of Lenin, this time in Kiev’s central plaza – once known as October Revolution Square and now known as Euromaidan – was smashed by angry protesters using sledgehammers. Many have correctly identified this as the key point in Ukraine’s political crisis. According to one estimate, of the nearly 1,500 Lenin memorials across Ukraine, protesters have destroyed around 100 of them, from Poltava to Chernihiv, from Zhytomyr to Khmelnytskyi.

This is nothing new of course. During the very beginning of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, I remember vividly how communist and anti-fascist monuments were torn down by nationalists who believed that democracy had finally arrived. Some urinated on them, others blew them up. In the period from 1990 to 2000 at least 3,000 monuments were torn down in Croatia alone.

Is the monument mayhem in Ukraine any different? It is: last week, residents of Kharkiv – the same town where the symbolic erasure of Lenin started in 2011 – installed barricades around the statue of Lenin after fending off an attack by Euromaidan revolutionaries. Even if the protesters weren’t defending the image of Lenin so much as exhibiting their attachment to Putin this is a remarkable state of affairs.

To return to the former Yugoslavia for the moment: according to the last statistics from the World Bank, the unemployment rate among young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina is 57.9%. This ex-Yugoslav state is not yet part of the European Union, but is already approaching Greece’s 60% rate. The newest member of the EU, neighbouring Croatia, is third in the union when it comes to youth unemployment, at 52%.

So this is what we got by getting rid of communism and entering the EU. [Continue reading…]

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Will Russia risk an all-out invasion of Ukraine?

a13-iconAndrew S Bowen writes: In September 2013, Russia unnerved the Baltic States and several NATO countries by holding military exercises on the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and in the Kaliningrad enclave that involved an estimated 70,000 troops. Earlier, in April, the Russian Air Force had practiced mock bombing runs near Swedish air space. The unease caused by these events — along with many others, including the resumption of a Russian Naval task force in the Mediterranean and international flights of strategic bombers — was considerable, prompting many analysts to remark on the Russian military’s resurgent confidence and capability. It was confidence and capability born of a massive modernizatsiia program designed to remedy the inadequacies exposed by the 2008 war with Georgia, and to create a modern, professional military capable of protecting Russia’s status as a great power.

Today, Russia is flexing that newfound military might in Crimea and on its eastern border with Ukraine, where it is massing troops and carrying out a series of military exercises. As the clock ticks down toward a referendum on secession for the Black Sea peninsula, fear is mounting about a full-scale invasion of the Ukrainian heartland — this time, involving Russian troops with insignias on their uniforms. But as analysts speculate about Moscow’s intentions, the question that led most observers to discount the possibility of a Russian takeover of Crimea remains unanswered: To what end?

The most likely answer is that the Crimean invasion — and the current military exercises along the Ukrainian border — is intended to signal to the new government in Kiev that Russia’s interests are not to be ignored. In that case, they would represent a continuation of Russia’s efforts to negate any incipient relationship between Ukraine and the EU that would threaten Moscow’s influence in the region. As my colleague and FP columnist Michael Weiss notes, “That’s why the Kremlin has created a shadow EU known as the Customs Union, which includes Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and whose sole mission seems to be keeping ex-satellites from being lured into Brussels’ orbit.” [Continue reading…]

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50,000 rally in Moscow against Putin’s intervention in Ukraine

moscow-antiwar

AFP reports: Around 50,000 people rallied in central Moscow Saturday in protest at Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, a day before the Crimean peninsula votes on switching to Kremlin rule.

Waving both Ukrainian and Russian flags and shouting slogans heard during the anti-government protests in Kiev, the demonstrators urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to pull troops back from a Cold War-style confrontation.

Marchers carried placards reading “Putin, get out of Ukraine” and others comparing Russia’s move on Crimea with the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland as Europe rushed headlong into World War II.

Many of the protesters adopted the chants and slogans of Ukraine’s popular uprising that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych last month.

University professor Yelena Orlova, 47, whose sign read “Ukraine is a sovereign state”, said she did not expect the rally would change her government’s position, but believed it was her duty to speak out.

“I don’t agree with the policy of Putin,” she told AFP. “I am against the annexation of Crimea. I think Russia should respect the borders of Ukraine.” [Continue reading…]

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Which march would you join?

A reader here just left a comment complaining about my “frothing support for the heathens who took Kiev by force,” and said, “I wish the people of Crimea the best and hope the vote tomorrow goes for separation from the u.s. / e.u.”

I can only imagine what kind of Manichean worldview lurks behind the reference to “heathens,” but the general sentiment here seems to one that is not uncommon among stalwart critics of American power. It seems to work like this:

If a prominent political leader antagonizes the U.S. and its European allies (I refer of course to the well-known demons de jour: Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milošević, Hugo Chávez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin) and that individual is then vilified in the media, the mere fact that this person is being targeted in this way is taken as a sign that he must be doing something right. He symbolizes the rejection of Western hegemony and is conferred honorary membership to a select group of über-rebels who have the courage take a dramatic stand defying Western imperialism.

I am not immune to experiencing this sentiment, since power needs to be poked in the eye occasionally, yet that doesn’t mean that we should ignore the failings of those who are doing the poking.

But that’s what all too often happens when criticism of the US/the West becomes an obsession: it makes authoritarian rule become excusable.

To anyone who thinks that tomorrow the people of Crimea are about to release themselves from the stifling grip of European influence in exchange for a warm embrace from Russia, I simply ask: who do you imagine you would have felt more comfortable marching alongside in Moscow today?

The disciplined young men in the “Brotherhood and Civil Resistance March,” or with activists like Ilya Yashin who have the guts to say: “We are patriots and Putin is Russia’s enemy”?

Brotherhood-and-Civil-Resistance

Reuters: “The pro-Russian patriotic procession was held to express support to Russian speakers living in Crimea and Ukraine and protest against the policies conducted by new Ukrainian authorities, according to organisers.”

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Russia preparing for full-scale invasion of Ukraine

n13-iconThe Interpreter: Russia now has a massive force of tanks, troops, artillery, aircraft, and naval forces in position to potentially invade mainland Ukraine from Crimea in the south, but also from positions east and north of Ukraine. However, today reports are pouring in from across Russia of even more firepower on the move:

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Should Ukraine have given up its nuclear arsenal?

e13-iconThe Guardian reports: Ukraine’s prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has accused Russia of demonstrating unacceptable “military aggression” which has “no reason and no grounds”.

Moscow has deployed 10,000 troops along its border with Ukraine, deepening the crisis in Crimea ahead of a last desperate effort by the US secretary of state, John Kerry, to broker a deal with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in London on Friday.

Yatsenyuk told the UN security council on Thursday he is convinced Russians do not want war. He urged Russia’s leaders to heed the people’s wishes and return to dialogue with Ukraine. “If we start real talks with Russia, I believe we can be real partners,” Yatsenyuk said.

He said Ukraine gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for guarantees of its independence and territorial integrity. After Russia’s recent actions, Yatsenyuk said, “it would be difficult to convince anyone on the globe not to have nuclear weapons”. [Continue reading…]

In an op-ed for the New York Times yesterday, John Mearsheimer wrote: The West has few options for inflicting pain on Russia, while Moscow has many cards to play against Ukraine and the West. It could invade eastern Ukraine or annex Crimea, because Ukraine regrettably relinquished the nuclear arsenal it inherited when the Soviet Union broke up and thus has no counter to Russia’s conventional superiority.

No doubt, if Israel’s leaders are ever pushed into a position where they need to defend retaining their own nuclear arsenal, they will surely be tempted to cite Professor Mearsheimer’s position — that giving up such weapons can turn out to be regrettable.

Let’s suppose, however, that Ukraine was still bristling with nuclear weapons — at its peak its arsenal was larger than those of Britain, France, and China combined — are we to imagine that its interim government would now be making veiled threats to incinerate Moscow? Are we to suppose that Russian forces would have stayed out of Crimea? After all, how many wars have Israel’s nuclear weapons prevented?

It seems just as likely that in the current situation, Putin would be arguing that Russia had no choice but take over the whole of Ukraine — not under the pretext of protecting ethnic Russians but in the name of defending global security, his argument being that in an unstable Ukraine, “loose nukes” pose a threat to everyone.

What seems regrettable is not that Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons but that the security guarantees it was given for doing so appear to have been worthless.

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Russia blocks access to major independent news sites

Electronic Frontier Foundation reports: Russia’s government has escalated its use of its Internet censorship law to target news sites, bloggers, and politicians under the slimmest excuse of preventing unauthorized protests and enforcing house arrest regulations. Today, the country’s ISPs have received orders to block a list of major news sites and system administrators have been instructed to take the servers providing the content offline.

The banned sites include the online newspaper Grani, Garry Kasparov’s opposition information site kasparov.ru, the livejournal of popular anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny, and even the web pages of Ekho Moskvy, a radio station which is majority owned by the state-run Gazprom, and whose independent editor was ousted last month and replaced with a more government-friendly director.

The list of newly prohibited sites was published earlier today by Russia’s Prosecutor General, which announced that the news sites had been “entered into the single register of banned information” after “calls for participation in unauthorized rallies.” Navalny’s livejournal was apparently added to the register in response to the conditions of his current house arrest, which include a personal prohibition on accessing the Internet. [Continue reading…]

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