Category: PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE

Debunking the Latest Rumour: Manas Airbase

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn ACCUSATIONS, PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE

Note Feb 2016: I think this was a contribution to a section in ROPV that never quite took off.

http://www.russiaotherpointsofview.com/2009/02/debunking-the-latest-rumor.html#more

Manas Airbase.

ISSUE. In 2001 the USA leased part of the Manas airfield in the Kyrgyz Republic to support US and Allied operations in Afghanistan. This month, President Bakiyev announced that he would seek to close the base. The Kyrgyz Republic Parliament will discuss the issue on 19 February.

INTERPRETATION: Many in the West saw Bakiyev as a puppet and the whole thing orchestrated in Moscow so as to embarrass President Obama. “Bakiyev Pleases Moscow” (Jamestown Foundation) “Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has been trying to reclaim the influence it once had in the former Central Asian Soviet republics, so Russian pressure on Kyrgyzstan is not unexpected.” (BBC) “”I think that the principal motivation is to reassert Russian influence and get visible U.S. presence out of former Soviet republics,” said retired Adm. William J. Fallon” (Huffington Post) “Russia Offers Kind Words, but Its Fist Is Clenched” (NYT). Most of these accounts mention Bakiyev’s objections but seem to regard them as just a cover for Russian machinations

COMMENT. But Bakiyev has long been tired with the relationship with Washington. “The president said he had repeatedly suggested that the US side should review the airbase agreement and raise the leasing fee for the airbase, but the suggestion was ignored. He added that the base closure was also caused by violations of law by US military personnel, including the killing of a Kyrgyz national by a US soldier in December 2006.”

But there are other reasons why the issue has become a significant irritant.

  • The possibility that US forces might use the base to attack Iran or gather intelligence on China: support of the effort in Afghanistan is one thing, being draw into these issues is quite another.
  • The lack of the “trickle-down” benefits that, perhaps naively, were expected.
  • Concerns over the initial, possibly corrupt, agreement with the former President of the Kyrgyz Republic.
  • Growing scepticism about the effectiveness and length of the Afghanistan operation.
  • But, probably most important, the conviction that Washington regards the Kyrgyz Republic as a third-rate country to be taken for granted and fobbed off with indifference, patronising promises and extra-territorial arrogance. Media treatments that assume Bakiyev is Moscow’s puppet will not help this impression.

CONCLUSION: To regard Bakiyev’s decision (which may yet be reversed) as something dreamed up in Moscow is to grossly oversimplify the issue and make the common error of assuming that Moscow is the only actor.

FURTHER READING: John CK Daly: “The Manas Disillusionment”.

Has Russia Been Vindicated? (Ossetia War)

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, SOUTH CAUCASUS

http://www.expat.ru/analitics.php?item=514

Russia Profile Weekly Expert’s Panel

Patrick Armstrong, retired Russian Affairs Analyst for the Canadian Government, Ottawa:

Saakashvili seems to have completely lost his credibility among most of his Western supporters, who uncritically bought the line that Russia – in his own words – wanted to extinguish the shining city with tanks. This is best illustrated by the derision with which his claims that the Russians tried to assassinate him the other day have been received: even a Georgian news outlet showed lightly veiled disbelief. His versions of the reasons for the attack on South Ossetia are fading quickly, as he invents ever earlier Russian movements. The inquiry in Tbilisi on the causes of the war is falling apart – the testimony of Georgia’s former ambassador to Russia is particularly devastating.

In that respect, Moscow has been vindicated: its story, which has not changed, is holding up, while Saakashvili’s is collapsing. Even the U.S. State Department is trying to change the subject: “I think we need to get away from looking at, you know, who did what first, because as I said, I don’t think we’ll ever really get to the bottom of that,” said Robert Wood, a deputy spokesman of the Department of State, at a news briefing on November 7. “Who did what first” was very important indeed to the State Department a month or two ago.

“Have Russian media strategies proven more successful than those of Georgia?” I would say that it wasn’t clever “media strategies” that triumphed, it was the simple truth. Tbilisi’s attack on the sleeping inhabitants of Tskhinvali is too recent and too well attested to be forgotten: this is not something that slowly came to light as, for example, did the truth of Moscow’s allegations about the Pankisi Gorge; we can, in fact, “get to the bottom of that.” But it has nothing to do with Moscow’s rather poor skills of news management – despite fantasies in official Tbilisi which intimate that the OSCE observers were bought or suborned. Tbilisi had been preparing an invasion for some time, it lied about the sequence of events, and there is evidence to prove it and people who are angry enough to want to do so.

The West is still absorbing the fact that “Saakashvili lied 100 percent to all of us, the Europeans and the Americans.” The process will be slow and it will take time for Western governments to absorb this reality. Paris – perhaps because it has access to Salome Zurabishvili and Irakli Okruashvili, both former Saakashvili cabinet ministers now in opposition to him – understood the reality sooner than others. Perhaps people will start to learn that while, like most governments, Moscow lies some of the time, it does not lie all of the time.

My suspicion is that there will be a quiet replacement of Saakashvili by someone who is, how shall we put it, less volatile, but the real question will then be: will the West take a more realistic and fact-based view of Georgia and its problems with its large neighbor after he is gone?

The West has been gulled for years by Tbilisi. One can only hope that this latest Georgian catastrophe brought on by chauvinism and violence will finally destroy the Panglossian view of Georgia as a “shining city” menaced by Moscow.

Saakashvili’s story is sinking fast

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, SOUTH CAUCASUS

http://www.russiaotherpointsofview.com/2008/11/saakashvilis-st.html

Moscow’s version of events in the recent Ossetia war has not varied. It says that Georgia attacked on the night of 7 August and that Russian troops did not arrive until the next day. It is clear, furthermore, that they did not appear in South Ossetia in strength until at least 24 hours after the first Georgian shots were fired.

Saakashvili’s story, on the other hand, has changed several times. On the 7th, a few hours before his forces opened fire, he made a speech on TV in which he said he had ordered a ceasefire adding “And I am offering the Russian Federation to be a guarantor of the South Ossetian autonomy within Georgia… I offer a very important role to Russia in resolving this conflict… Georgia is a natural ally for Russia… We need a real mediator.” The next day, when he believed victory was at hand, he made another speech. A Georgian source reported him saying that Georgian forces now controlled “most of South Ossetia” and that “A large part of Tskhinvali is now liberated and fighting is ongoing in the centre of Tskhinvali”. In this he made two assertions to justify the attack: first that “South Ossetian militias responded to his peace initiative on August 7 by shelling Georgian villages” and second that “Georgia had come under aerial attack from Russian warplanes”. No mention of Russian troops entering South Ossetia then.

Of course, his victory announcement was premature and a few days later, he needed a bigger justification for the catastrophe. It was then that he started claiming that the Russians moved first. “‘I am sickened by the speculation that Georgia started anything,’ Mr Saakashvili told a conference call with journalists days later on August 13. ‘We clearly responded to the Russians . . . The point here is that around 11 o’clock, Russian tanks started to move into Georgian territory, 150 at first. And that was a clear-cut invasion. That was the moment when we started to open fire with artillery, because otherwise they would have crossed the bridge and moved into Tskhinvali.’”

Then the story changed again: on 23 September in a piece he wrote in the Washington Post, he claimed that “Russia then started its land invasion in the early hours of Aug. 7, after days of heavy shelling that killed civilians and Georgian peacekeepers.” He expected his readership to believe that the Russians had had an 18-hour head start on a 60-kilometre race and that Georgia had invaded anyway. Too preposterous and it seems to have been quietly forgotten.

Saakashvili’s stories are collapsing one after the other: the first story about a response to heavy Ossetian shelling is directly contradicted by two former British officers who were part of the OSCE team in the area: they report “Georgian rockets and artillery were hitting civilian areas in the breakaway region of South Ossetia every 15 or 20 seconds” and deny that there was the shelling of Georgia villages that Saakashvili claimed on the 8th.

The second story of the Russians entering South Ossetia just before – “supported” with the laughable claim of an intercepted telephone call which was mysteriously “lost” for several weeks – collapses in the BBC program of a couple of weeks ago (Part 1, Part 2). Americans were finally introduced to the accurate version in the New York Times nearly three months after the war began.

Early Thoughts on Litvinenko Case

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn ACCUSATIONS, PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, PUTIN DERANGEMENT SYNDROME

The initial story, which developed over a few weeks, was that Alexander Litvinenko, a former “spy” and opponent of Putin, met in a London sushi bar on 1 Nov 2006 with an Italian professor, Mario Scaramella, who had urgent information for him about the murder of the Russian reporter Anna Politkovskaya. Litvinenko returned home, became sick, was taken to hospital and died three weeks later from radiation poisoning. His last words were to accuse Putin of having had him killed. This story was widely disseminated in suspiciously similar wording. It, together with the murder of a Russian reporter Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow, has become woven into a story that Russian President Putin routinely has his opponents murdered. Some were more sceptical, but the January piece in the New Yorker magazine reiterates the thesis that Putin’s enemies tend to die suddenly. (Summaries of some of the UK and US reactions).

Russians are strongly irritated at the way the immediate consensus that Russia is run by a sort of Murder Inc has been accepted so uncritically. The more suspicious believe that the story is a consciously manufactured plot to defame Putin and Russia.

From the first reports, there were reasons to be sceptical of the initial story. 1) all the sources, Litvinenko himself, (and Tim Bell, a major British PR and advertising executive, who handled the publicity) were people who worked for Boris Berezovskiy (see below); 2) Litvinenko was known to be a very unreliable source; 3) Even if Putin were in the habit of murdering his opponents, there were many more profitable targets in London alone; 4) the death bed accusation appears to exist only in English, which Litvinenko’s widow said he “couldn’t really speak”, and was given out by Alexander Goldfarb, another Berezovskiy employee.

In 1997, while working in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), in a section providing protection services, Litvinenko met Berezovskiy; shortly after, he was fired from the FSB (after dramatically stating that his superiors had ordered him to murder Berezovskiy) and began working for him openly. He moved to the UK and eventually became a British citizen. He had made a career of dramatic accusations – murder plots against Berezovskiy; Putin was responsible for the apartment building explosions in Russia in 1999; Italian politician Romano Prodi is a Soviet agent; al Qaeda is a KGB plot; Putin is a pedophile. He was never able to produce any convincing proof of these accusations and few paid much attention to him. There is also a claim that he was short of money and trying to blackmail people.

No single point of the original story has stood up in subsequent revelations

  • Improbability – If Putin were in the habit of murdering his opposition, in London alone, there are three people who would be much higher on his list. Oleg Gordievskiy (one of the highest-ranking KGB officers ever to defect), Berezovskiy himself and Akhmed Zakayev (an apologist for the jihadists in Chechnya). And would he choose such a complicated means and assign the job to people inept enough to poison themselves?
  • Mario Scaramella, the man with whom he met in the sushi bar in the original story. 1) denied his information was connected with Politkovskaya’s death); 2) none of the universities he claims to be associated with have heard of him; 3) is today under arrest in Italy accused of giving false evidence on a case involving arms smuggling.
  • Polonium-210. Traces of polonium-210 were found all over London: in numerous hotels and offices and in Litvinenko’s home. Further traces were found corresponding to the movements of Dmitriy Kovtun (see below). In this connection, Berezovskiy’s statement in 2005 that the jihadists in Chechnya were close to building a nuclear weapon may be relevant (polonium can be used as a trigger). There is some evidence that Litvinenko was exposed to polonium-210 more than once. The material is, in fact, not that hard to obtain.
  • Islamic Jihadist connections. Litvinenko 1) converted to Islam shortly before his death; 2) the rebel forces in Chechnya awarded him their “highest decoration” – what had he done for them and where were his loyalties?
  • Boris Berezovskiy. Berezovskiy made a great deal of money in the Yeltsin years (when he was known as the “godfather of the Kremlin”) and was driven out of Russia by Putin because he violated Putin’s declaration that the shady billionaires from the Yeltsin period could keep their money so long as they stayed out of politics. Berezovskiy was granted asylum in the UK and has said that he is trying to overthrow Putin. Litvinenko was employed by Berezovskiy when he left the FSB; it appears that Berezovskiy kept him on a retainer but had recently cut it leaving him eager for money. Alexander Goldfarb, the source for much of the original story, who has been naively described as Litvinenko’s friend, is Berezovskiy’s “right hand”.
  • Lugovoy and Kovtun. Andrey Lugovoy is another former FSB officer who quit to work for Berezovskiy; apparently he had known Litvinenko for some years. Dmitriy Kovtun is an associate of his. They were some of the people with whom Litvinenko met on the fatal day and traces of polonium-210 have been found on aircraft and in Germany associated with Kovtun’s movements. Both were reportedly made sick, but have recovered.
  • Coverage. The media likes simple stories and that is what it was given in the beginning: brave opponent of Putin’s dictatorship murdered. As the story grew, with new characters, multiple appearances of polonium-210, Chechen connections, Scaramella’s arrest, it has become so complicated that media attention has wandered. But the simple story has lingered, and many people are not aware of the details that cast doubt on it.
  • The three most significant new facts are: 1) the jihadist connection; 2) the widespread traces of radiation; 3) several cases of sickness of the principals (especially the case of Scaramella who met Litvinenko before Litvinenko met Lugovoy and Kovtun). What this evidence fits best is a story of nuclear smuggling in which the principals managed to contaminate themselves and spread radiation traces wherever they went. Clearly, the mystery remains, but all new evidence makes the simple original hypothesis that Putin murdered an enemy less probable.

Note: Feb 2016. In February 2009 I added this introduction

The death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former low-level KGB agent and employee of Boris Berezovsky, created scandalous world press. Western media were quick to intimate that President Putin had orchestrated the death, quoting, among other things, a deathbed letter written in English despite the fact that Litvinenko’s English was poor. More astute commentators observed Litivinenko’s connections with jihadists in Chechnya and the fact that Polonium, the radioactive material that killed him, can be used in making nuclear weapons; this theory is strengthened by Litvinenko’s deathbed conversion to Islam. Others concentrate on the fact that every story – and many appeared to be later discarded – came from one of Berezovsky’s employees: the original statement that he was sick with thallium poisoning, the Scaramella connection and the famous deathbed accusation. Berezovsky has publicly stated that he would do anything to bring down Putin; if Litvinenko was trying to smuggle the material to his friends in Chechnya, then Berezovskiy successfully spun the story so as to do great damage to Putin. The murder remains unsolved, but Russian state involvement seems the least likely explanation today.

And this final point:

  • Last year, an American reporter, Edward Jay Epstein, actually visited Moscow to look at the evidence the British police had given the Russians to support their accusation of Lugovoy and came away very unconvinced: “After considering all the evidence, my hypothesis is that Litvinenko came in contact with a Polonium-210 smuggling operation and was, either wittingly or unwittingly, exposed to it.” His account summarises the case very well.