JRL/2013/ 117/42

Is Putin really as isolated on Syria as we are told? There is plenty of evidence that he is in general agreement with world opinion. He is in better agreement with Americans about intervention than Obama is: a number of polls show opposition to US involvement in the 60s. Better with the British than Cameron is: similar results in the UK. As to the rest of the world, a recent Pew survey shows there is little support for intervention anywhere else either. Putin’s opposition to outside interference much better reflects world opinion than the interveners do. Which may be why there is such an intense campaign against Russia and Putin: he must be discredited.

He does not “support Assad” – that is an accusation to drown out what he is really saying. Putin opposes intervention in Syria (and Iraq… and Kosovo… and Libya…) for three reasons: principled, practical and personal. Intervention violates a key international principle because, like it or not, Assad’s regime is the recognised government of the country. By what right does a fraction of NATO, unsupported by its population, decide to pick a side in a vicious civil war? Once upon a time, interventions were legitimised by the UN (1st Gulf War); then by NATO (Kosovo); now by only some of NATO (Libya). Secondly, there is nothing to suggest that the end result will benefit anyone. Russia is a cautious country that plays by primum non nocere – first, do no harm. Previous Western/NATO interventions have done little for stability and have often resulted in aiding and comforting their enemies (a definition of treason in most countries). Finally, he fears that Russia might be on the list of undesirable governments to be overthrown. He has seen the appetite for intervention grow with the feeding.

Therefore, Putin opposes intervention in Syria because it is questionably legal, sets (another) dangerous precedent, will almost certainly leave behind it a more chaotic, miserable and dangerous situation (vide Kosovo or Libya) and because he fears the extension to Russia. It has nothing to do with any “alliance”, “support” for Assad, the so-called naval base or arms sales. There is no alliance, he does not “support” Assad, the naval base is a corner of a small port with few facilities and most of the arms sales contracts have been placed on hold. But it is necessary to demonise Putin to drown this out. The fuss about the Russian air defence missiles which never appeared was a useful distraction from the (US-crewed) air defence missiles which did appear. The fuss about the so-called naval base distracts attention from new US bases. The ritual reiteration of Putin’s support for Assad smokescreens the surreptitious support for his enemies.

So: not only will Putin be proven correct in that some-of-NATO’s interference will not have a happy ending, not only is his condemnation of intervention in accord with majority world opinion so far as can be determined but it is even in accord with opinion in the countries whose leaders are cheering on NATO’s next adventure in “humanitarian interventions”.

While Putin may be out of step with the G8 majority (somewhat smaller than it pretends to be – does anyone seriously think Tokyo has signed on? Berlin kept out of the last adventure, who expects it to participate in this one? Is Rome on board?), that pseudo-majority is itself out of step with public opinion in its own countries and, so far as can be determined, out of step with world opinion.

Calling him isolated is an attempt to shout down the reality that the interveners’ own electorates do not support intervention.

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 20 June 2012

On June 20, 2013January 24, 2016 By Patrick ArmstrongIn RF SITREP

SYRIA. So the West doing it again, intervening in a fight by trying to pick the right side on the foolish assumption that if Assad is wrong the others must be less wrong; this will lead to more involvement because mere arming won’t do the job. It will, as before, wind up giving aid and comfort to the very people it’s fighting elsewhere in the world. Especially as they are strengthening their position in Syria. The triumph of hope over experience. Even such a reflexive supporter of the present US Administration as the NYT can see this. And, somehow, it’s all Putin’s fault. Incredible. The CW excuse is not believable as Ron Paul explains. I rarely agree with Brzezinski but he’s right to call it propaganda. And what you hear about Russia is part of the information “battlespace preparation”. And it’s been a successful distraction campaign: the S-300 fuss covered up the deployment of Patriots and today’s headlines read “Putin opposes West” rather than “Another military adventure to benefit our enemies”.

G8 MEETING. Much abuse of Putin at the G8 meeting over Syria. But as to Harper’s “G-7 plus one” I would be surprised if Japan supported this new “humanitarian intervention” and Germany hasn’t in the past. Maybe Italy’s not too enthusiastic either so I suspect it’s more like G4 ½ plus 3½ . Interventions were once legitimised by the UN (1st Gulf War); then by NATO (Kosovo); now by some of NATO (Libya). Apparently there is still supposed to be an effort to be led by Moscow and Washington to produce some sort of political solution.

TRIAL. A protest last year against Putin’s re-appearance led to violence. All my sources agree it was started by a small band of protesters; the police may or may not have over-reacted. (BTW one of the best pieces of evidence that it was pre-planned is Ksenia Sobchak’s live journal entry in which she says she will not be attending because she knows an incident is planned.) The trial of the alleged ringleaders has begun (“Bolotnaya Case”). By the way, contrary to what you hear in the West, Putin’s support rating, according to Levada, while perhaps declining a bit, remains at levels most other politicians can only dream of.

NGO LAW. Putin says it can be improved. He doesn’t mention them, but I hope he means that polling companies like Levada and VTsIOM will be clearly exempted. They’re not NGOs; they’re companies which do occasional work for foreigners. BTW, for those of you who wonder if the US FARA law is active, here’s the evidence. Concerning, oddly enough, John McCain’s foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann and Saakashvili’s government. (Hyperlinks for PDF copies). We are indeed all Georgians (or were, see below).

GOODBYE RUSSIA. A prominent economist has stated that he is frightened to return to Russia and Garri Kasparov says he won’t either. I know nothing of the first (a sympathetic view of his plight) but I can’t help the suspicion that the latter may be motivated by the fact that he has been superseded by Navalniy (coverage of his trial for embezzlement here) as the West’s approved opposition leader.

ENERGY. If the US Energy Information Administration is correct that Russia has the world’s largest shale oil resources then, given its known enormous oil and gas reserves, it looks as if Russia Inc will be making money out of energy production for years to come.

DIVORCE. The Putins are divorcing. The official line is that with Putin’s work hours they have hardly seen each other for years and that there is no one else. Some Western reactions erecting the usual structures on the head of this pin. Orthodoxy permits divorce and remarriage in some circumstances.

CORRUPTION. A couple more cases have been begun but the reporting has grown quiet of late. Two possibilities: the investigations are proceeding (these things can take a long time) or the investigators have bitten off more than they can chew and digest. We will see.

AT LAST. Medvedev says the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill will finally be closed down. It has been polluting this pristine area since 1966.

GEORGIA-RUSSIA. Two good steps. Tbilisi was invited to participate on security for the Sochi Olympics and has accepted and the first Georgian wine has finally arrived in Russia and will be followed by much more.

GEORGIA. And now it transpires that in Saakashvili’s “democratic Georgia” thousands of phone taps and secret recordings of his opponents were made. The Western view is crashing fast.

Does the Prism scandal challenge America`s democratic values?

On June 18, 2013March 18, 2016 By Patrick ArmstrongIn CONTRIBUTIONS TO GROUP DISCUSSIONS, WORLD POWER RELATIONSHIPS

http://us-russia.org/1342-does-the-prism-scandal-challenge-americas-democratic-values.html

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_06_17/We-can-never-be-sure-when-gathered-information-can-become-vital-2367/

In connection with the PRISM scandal, we should remember the Venona intercepts. Back in The Day, a number of broadcasts to Soviet agents in the US, Canada and the UK were intercepted and saved. They were in a code that was never completely broken but they were pondered over and over again, for years – decades – by Western intelligence agencies. Bit by bit parts of the messages were understood. But never completely; full understanding came only after the collapse of the USSR opened the original messages.

Those charged with the security of their country had better take this source of information seriously. The Enemy communicates. After 911 (and lots of it before, truth be known) all this stuff – ie everything – was vacuumed up and stored in case it had to be searched later. The PRISM data collection effort is, as it were, the gathering of a mountain of dross in which there may be a few nuggets of ore. John Smith’s phone calls (or yours) hold no interest today and there is no reason to take the enormous effort to look at them, but they might be later when we find out who he really is. Billions of phone calls, tweets, twitters, e-mails and everything else. It’s all out there, it’s all recordable, almost all of it is of no interest at all, but we don’t know today which is and which isn’t. So keep it all, because we can. Perhaps it might have been better to have explained the process openly at the beginning but intelligence organisations do have a bias towards secrecy.

Putin’s comments are carefully chosen and honest as far as they go. One can be quite certain that Spetssvyaz, the Russian signals intelligence organisation, is doing the same thing to the best of its abilities and budget. Putin said nothing that he will have to apologise for later. But he said nothing very informative either.

The point is that this stuff is all collected and stored and, maybe, later, a bit is looked at in detail, in theory, when a judge or other legal authority grants permission. In theory. The practice, of course could easily be different. Some rogue breaks into the database; security requirements are twisted into industrial espionage; the tax people want information on somebody the authorities don’t like; some other government authority – with, of course, the very best and purest of motives – needs to know something.

Contemporary technology allowed Sir Francis Walsingham to intercept only letters. But modern technology makes possible the collection of enormous amounts of information: he intercepted hundreds of letters; his successors intercept millions of tweets. Simply put: you either trust the authorities to make the correct judgement to look only at the bad guys or you don’t. There is no easy answer. If you trust the authorities to create the right safeguards, and follow them, you can sleep peacefully. If not, not; the future will tell whether you were right or wrong.

But the USA under Obama is not the only one doing this, and no one should be simple enough to think it is.

Is Russia’s ‘foreign agents’ law justified?

On June 7, 2013March 18, 2016 By Patrick ArmstrongIn ACCUSATIONS, CONTRIBUTIONS TO GROUP DISCUSSIONS, WAR ON RUSSIA

http://us-russia.org/1317-is-russias-foreign-agents-law-justified.html

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_06_07/Russia-s-NGO-law-is-an-act-of-self-defence-1794/

How one reacts to Russia’s NGO law depends on what one thought those NGOs were doing in the first place. If they were disinterestedly and objectively advocating for and monitoring universal human rights, then the Russian law is objectionable. But if they were functioning as an arm of a foreign country’s policy then the Russian law must be seen as an act of self defence.

Which leads us to the Russian law’s model: the American Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. This act is still in force and has a section of the US Department of Justice charged with its enforcement. Note that the official description has many of the words that opponents of the Russian act claim to find so offensive: “agents of foreign principals”, “political or quasi-political capacity” “foreign agents” “Counterespionage” “National Security”. In 1938 the coming war was visible and there were many foreign interests that wanted to shape American public opinion. FARA was, therefore an act of self defence.

Is the Russian act also an act of self defence? Consider the reaction to Russia’s Duma election; despite results consistent with the findings of numerous opinion polls that Putin’s pedestal party was losing support but still commanded half the vote, US Secretary of State Clinton condemned the result instantly and the foreign-funded NGOs produced supporting “evidence” which did not stand up to later investigation (Vedomost’s examination of Moscow results, the only serious examination of which I am aware, found nothing much). Consider Suzanne Nossel, smoothly moving between government and NGOs, committed to using “human rights” as part of the arsenal of US power. Consider a US official admitting that countries that don’t cooperate get “reamed” on human rights. It’s not “human rights”, it’s realpolitik.

Sceptics should ask themselves two questions: after all, it wouldn’t be the first time that reporting on Russia was stage managed. The first is why, in the endless think pieces about the Russian law, is the American law never mentioned? Second, why won’t the NGOs register under the law? In theory, once registered, they can still operate even if labelled, to quote FARA, as “agents of foreign principals”; shouldn’t they want to test whether this is true? Think how much stronger their case would be if they complied with the law and were shut down anyway. If they are, as they claim, objective seekers after truth, shouldn’t they be confident that the truth will out? Why are they folding without a struggle? Makes one wonder whether they are flaming out as a last obedience to their foreign masters because the truth is that they have no existence on their own. You should be suspicious: truthful reporting would mention that Russia is not alone with such a law and brave human rights supporters would forge on anyway. All this makes me more confident that the Russians are correct: it’s not human rights, it’s Nosselism.

Oh, and just as a matter of interest, Nossel has been associated with three NGOs: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and, today, PEN. (and not, by the way, to universal acclaim “Humanitarian imperialism” “cooption of the Human Rights movement by the U.S. government” and plenty more). In the last month the three have run pieces on Russia’s NGO law, AI still wants to free Pussy Riot and PEN has something on writers in Russia. But none of them, curiously enough, has anything to say about tax authorities harassing political opponents and legal authorities listening in on reporters’ conversations.

Which, a simple person would think, are quite serious human rights violations.

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 6 June 2013

On June 6, 2013January 24, 2016 By Patrick ArmstrongIn RF SITREP

SYRIAN PROPAGANDA WAR. A week of hysteria – Russia is selling S-300s; they’re here; they’re not here; they’re coming; they’re game-changers. Huge flap (97 million Google hits). What was the evidence for any of it? S-300s date from 1979 (although many improvements) and are not some hitherto unknown super weapon. BTW Syria has lots of Soviet/Russian AD systems and none seems to hamper the Israeli Air Force. In any case Putin has just said no. Like most of the news out of Syria this is misdirection away from something that actually was happening. What would that have been? Assad’s successes (only a year ago he was a goner)? The EU arming the opposition? Ah, this must be what we weren’t supposed to see: the US is deploying its equivalent system in the neighbourhood and may keep it there. And fighter planes too. Well, well, those nasty Russians make useful distractions.

NGOs. The polling company Levada is saying that it is being told to register as a foreign agent under the new law and that it may have to close down. Its director says it receives a trivial amount of its budget – a couple of percentage points – from foreign sources. It is also reported that VTsIOM is hearing similar things. I find this a little fishy. One, who’s telling it? Two, why would it have to close down? Three, take this to court and see what happens and then complain. Four, while Levada is independent (and its boss no fan of Putin), VTsIOM is government-owned; why would the government want to “shut down” both? It’s also worth saying that both come up with similar results – I see no bias in either. As I say, something doesn’t sound right.

POLITKOVSKAYA. The authorities are trying again. They are sticking with the same story: one Lom-Ali Gaitukayev organised the murder at the request of an “unknown mastermind” for $150,000; he hired three relatives and a former policemen to do the actual killing. The trial failed the last time around but the prosecutors are confident they can bring it off it now. The difference presumably is that another former policeman, Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, hired as the “spotter” for the killers, cut a deal for a reduced sentence in return for telling what he knows. I have always believed that she learned something some powerful player didn’t want known (perhaps without realising it) and that the murder had nothing to do with the authorities. Who’s the “unknown mastermind”? Berezovskiy was always a popular candidate but there is no proof. But now that he’s dead maybe we’ll find out. (I still wish Putin would tell us what was in the letters).

LITVINENKO. We have never had an official finding in the cause of his death and we may never: the coroner has agreed to allow the British intelligence establishment to keep its information secret. But he is now asking for a public inquiry, so it’s not over just yet. We’re told MI6 was paying him money (maybe not – his wife said no in 2007 but yes in 2012). If so, what for? Golly! There sure is a lot more to this story than we were fed originally, isn’t there?

INTERNET. Penetration is approaching the limits in Moscow and St Petersburg and high overall. A remainder that, despite all the perennial assertions that media freedom is crushed, Russians are quite able to find out what’s going on at home and abroad.

MAKHACHKALA MAYOR. Arrested and charged with murder. Clearly some interesting background there.

MOSCOW MAYOR. Has just announced he will resign. The reason seems to be that he wants to run and be elected. He had previously been appointed but now that the system for selecting regional heads (Moscow and St Petersburg count as these) has been changed (again) to election rather than appointment, I guess he wants to legitimate himself this way (and add some time to his term too). I expect that others will do the same.

GEORGIA. The former PM and very close Saakashvili ally, Vano Merabishvili, was arrested last month and charged with numerous crimes including election fixing. Lots of developments in Georgia which are causing cognitive dissonance among Saakashvili’s former shills (Response to that one from Georgian Minister of Justice). (My bit of schadenfreude is here).

CUSTOMS UNION. The Ukrainian government has approved a memorandum applying for observer status in the Customs Union (Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan). This will be welcomed and likely approved. Probably the final nail in the coffin of the “Orange Revolution” fantasy.

Georgian Reflections

On May 23, 2013March 16, 2016 By Patrick ArmstrongIn ACCUSATIONS, PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, SOUTH CAUCASUS, WAR ON RUSSIA

http://www.russiaotherpointsofview.com/2013/05/georgian-reflections.html

http://us-russia.org/1282-georgian-reflections.html

http://ruvr.co.uk/2013_05_29/Georgia-favourite-stick-Russia/

My readers will have observed that I talk about Georgia a lot when ostensibly talking about Russia. There’s a reason: for two decades Georgia has been the favourite stick with which to beat Russia; for two decades we have been told Moscow is trying to eat Georgia; for two decades Georgia has been the contrast to illustrate what Russia could be if it weren’t so Russian; for two decades Georgia has been painted as the victim of Moscow’s worst impulses; for two decades Westerners have believed everything from Tbilisi and nothing from Moscow. A cornerstone of the anti-Russia edifice indeed and the “mine canary” of Russian intentions.

For two decades Russia has been interpreted through memes; assumptions deemed so true as to need no evidence; assumptions that reveal the facts that prove them; assumptions so resistant to reality that they create reality; assumptions that are non-falsifiable. Of the many memes three important ones are: Moscow wants its empire back; Moscow wants to control energy routes; Moscow hates democracies. Georgia was the perfect demonstration: formerly part of that empire, it had a pipeline route and was a stout democracy. QED. Facts were hammered to fit the memes. I have set the larger argument out in The Fire Below ($10 e-book). (Here)

We were told three things about Saakashvili’s Georgia (Shevardnadze, fêted in his day as a great democrat, was immediately forgotten). It was a true democracy improving in all ways, as true democracies should, not least economically; Saakashvili had courageously taken a serious bite at corruption; Georgia was a true ally of the West – worthy indeed of NATO membership and a proud contributor to the War on Terror. These Georgian merits were contrasted with Russian deficiencies: Georgia was a democracy, Russia wasn’t; Georgia was overcoming corruption, Russia was sunk in it; Georgia was an ally, Russia was an enemy, of us but especially of our new Georgian friend. Western media, Western politicians lapped this stuff up.

Until August 2008. Many noticed that Moscow had its chance to do what it supposedly wanted to: its victorious army was on the ground; the Georgian army had fled; the West was flubbing. But it didn’t: didn’t seize Georgia, didn’t seize the pipeline, didn’t drive to Tbilisi and overthrow the government. The memes were shaken. The August 2008 War shattered Saakashvili’s veracity, bona fides and reliability. I and others have written much about this; three references will suffice. As the war changed from the expected victory march into a disaster, Saakashvili’s explanations became ever less credible. The US Embassy, despite a serious clue, swallowed Saakashvili’s story whole. Even the exquisitely precious EU report scoffed at Saakashvili’s stories. Altogether an embarrassing display of the West’s credulity and one better forgotten.

As it pretty well has been forgotten.

But the new government is proving to be a much more effective destroyer of Saakashvili’s cornerstone myths of democracy, anti-corruption and reliable ally. Based on the large opposition Saakashvili created over the years (his adulators seldom noticed how many former colleagues and allies had given up on him), members of the new government know reality better than Western consumers of Saakashvili’s propaganda. And ordinary Georgians, living in that reality, overwhelmingly support the new government and approve its actions as this poll, carried out in April by a Swedish organisation, shows.

Democracy. Objective observers had already observed the improbable turnout figures for Saakashvili’s first election after the “Rose Revolution”. The OSCE described enough finagling in its 2008 report to have given Saakashvili the three or four percentage points he needed to avoid a runoff election against a single opposition candidate. In a case that even the Saakashvili-worshiping media could not ignore, an anti-government demonstration was suppressed with far more violence (and a remarkable array of expensive technology, paid for by whom?) than we have ever seen in Moscow. Critical media outlets were squashed – in one famous case, by armed police in mid-broadcast. The media was tightly controlled. Georgia had political prisoners in its over-stuffed prisons. Not so “democratic” after all.

Corruption. Saakashvili eliminated the Soviet-era traffic police; an organisation that did little but extract bribes from drivers. A good step indeed. However, corruption exists in several forms. There is the low-level highly visible form of a traffic cop with his hand out but there is also the higher, more important but less visible, form of money disappearing at the top power levels. We are now hearing about this in Georgia. Saakashvili’s elaborate presidential palace is hardly appropriate for a poor country; neither are his personal expenses. Charges and arrests are coming: two of Saakashvili’s allies; the Mayor of Tbilisi; a governor. A couple of days ago the former Prime Minister and former Health Minister were arrested; the charges include election-fixing and several other crimes. There is a gigantic disparity between the claimed growth rate and the staggeringly high unemployment rate: the survey mentioned above has nearly 50% claiming to be unemployed and looking for work. I can think of only two ways high growth can be consistent with spectacular unemployment rates: either the growth is a façade of luxury hotels and other fripperies or corruption and cronyism have kept the money locked in a tiny group of connected people.

Ally. There have long been stories that Tbilisi was encouraging, training and/or hosting jihadists. A claimed conference in December 2009, Russian accusations; a former Georgian parliamentarian summing up more assertions. Formerly, I filed these away in the “possible but not proven” file. In August 2012 several Georgian soldiers were killed in a firefight; the official story was that it was an operation against kidnappers who had infiltrated from Dagestan in Russia. But today’s Public Defender has a different theory: he says the “armed group, involved in the clash, was formed, armed and trained by then leadership of the Georgian Interior Ministry, which recruited members of the group mainly from Chechen exiles by promising them to give free passage to Russia’s North Caucasus via Georgia.” Both Prime Minister Ivanishvili and the US Ambassador (made suddenly wiser by the Boston Marathon bombing) think this accusation should be investigated. Just what would such an investigation find? And, more interesting, would any of Saakashvili’s loyal sponsors in Washington have been aware of this?

And there are more questions still. Ivanishvili thinks the August 2008 war should be investigated; Saakashvili, of course, does not. Will the death of Zurab Zhvania be satisfactorily investigated? there are those who think he was murdered. Will we ever find out who paid for the significant number of weapons Georgia acquired under Saakashvili? (From Ukraine 12 2S3 152mm self-propelled guns, 40 BMP-2 IFVs, 23+ BTR-80 APCs, 6 Mi-24P/Mi-35P/Hind-F combat helicopters, 2 Mi-8/Mi-17/Hip-H Helicopters, 16 T-72 Tanks, 1 9K33 Osa/SA-8 Mobile SAM system, 48 9M33/SA-8 Gecko SAMs. It obtained from the Czech Republic, over the same time, 55 T-72 tanks, 24 Dana 152mm self-propelled guns, 6 RM-70 MRLs and 55 guns or large mortars.) None of these (well, OK, maybe the HIPs and BTRs) is appropriate to the alleged purpose of the US training scheme. Will we ever learn the inside details of the “Rose Revolution” that brought Saakashvili to power in the first place? And how about Georgia as a conduit of efforts to de-stabilise Russia? (Fanciful? Read this Dear Reader and ask yourself, if you think it credible: Georgia has no money, from where did it get the sums Lebedev is talking about?) It’s all melting away.

Washington’s schemes for Russia and its neighbours are not looking so good now. The “Orange Revolution” is dead and Ukraine will not be joining NATO (not that Ukrainians ever wanted to in the first place). The “Tulip Revolution” was always DOA. Putin turns out to have been telling the truth when he said Chechnya was a jihadist war. Russians still prefer Putin to the oppositionists by a substantial margin. Moscow has checkmated the foreign N“G”Os by replicating Washington’s own law designed at a time when powerful foreign interests were trying to sway American opinions. The Russian economy is still in business. Latest news suggests Washington has accepted Moscow’s line on Syria; namely that Assad and his government cannot be excluded if there are to be meaningful talks.

And Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” was a sham: not democratic, not incorruptible, not an ally. Believers were manipulated. As were the Georgians, who have had a pretty wretched time of it since 1989.

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 16 May 2013

On May 16, 2013January 24, 2016 By Patrick ArmstrongIn RF SITREP

RUSSIAN MEDIA. Anatoly Karlin has opened a website translating stuff from the Russian media into English. It’s intended to counter the notion that Russian media is drearily pro-Putin and show its actual variety.

DIRECT LINE. Putin gave his annual marathon phone-in session a couple of weeks ago. Far too many questions of the nature “Little Father, my roof leaks, please repair it”. Two conclusions, I suppose. One is that Russians are most concerned with mundane issues (a large portion of which seem to involve unresponsive government structures) The other is that, despite the anti-Russia crowd’s conviction that he controls everything, Putin spends a lot of time pushing on ropes. There was a pretty frank explication of disagreements on economic strategy and a respectful exchange with Kudrin. Those who think these things are staged should read the exchange with Aleksey Venediktov who challenged Putin on “Stalinist control methods”. By the way, Venediktov seems to thrive despite the dark premonitions in this New Yorker piece from four years ago. Ah well, another prediction gone bad; never mind, no one remembers, time for another one.

OPPOSITION. An authorised opposition march on Moscow pulled 20K or so and passed off without incident. The anti-Russia mob likes to see the cause of the decline in protests as machinations of the evil government but a poll gives better guidance. Levada (no government stooge) asked its respondents which of 11 opposition leaders they trusted. 65% said “none” (8 points more than a year ago). None of the 11 got better than 3%. Yavlinskiy and Prokhorov warned them months ago that they had to come up with something more than mere opposition. They haven’t.

NAVALNIY TRIAL. Live coverage in English. Not many watching I’m told. Mind-numbing minutiae.

BEREZOVSKIY. Putin confirmed that he had received two letters. Asked what they said, all he would say is: “he wrote that he had made a lot of mistakes and caused great damage, and asked for forgiveness and the opportunity to return to his homeland… Some of my colleagues wanted me make the letter public immediately. I am very grateful to the Lord for keeping me from doing that.” I wish he had: there’s lots to be learned about Berezovskiy’s influence on a multitude of anti-Putin stories; Litvinenko and Politkovskaya in particular. Maybe if the Litvinenko inquest ever happens we will learn about his (extensive) involvement in that. We are told that the full investigation of his death could take another couple of months, although no suspicious circumstances have been found.

GOLOS. Golos continues to refuse to call itself a “foreign agent”. It has been fined and may be forced to close. Of course it could just agree that it is foreign-funded but evidently its principle seems to be that “human rights” organisations don’t have to obey the laws of the land in which they operate if they don’t want to. I have little sympathy with Golos and I do believe that “foreign agent” is an appropriate descriptor.

CORRUPTION INVESTIGATIONS. Fewer new ones started it seems; but there is a lot to digest already. The law Putin just signed prohibiting certain officials from holding foreign assets is also a move to reduce corruption.

SATISFACTION. A VTsIOM poll shows 77% of Russians satisfied with their lives. A somewhat similar question gets only 21% in the USA. No one would have expected this 10 years ago.

SPIES. True? False? Haven’t a clue. Strange story but the equally silly-sounding “spy rock case” did turn out to be true. Interesting that whatever it was seems to have concerned Chechnya and the North Caucasus. But Washington could have got good information closer to home from my colleague Gordon Hahn: everything he has been saying for years was validated in Boston.

SYRIA. Has Moscow won its point at last? Or is it just a change of command at the US State Department? Moscow has always called for no preconditions, while Washington and its followers have always insisted that Assad must go. Now Kerry and Lavrov have agreed to call for talks with the participation of the government. It won’t make any difference on the ground of course: the fantasy that outside powers have any influence short of joining in on one side is puzzling to me after so many disastrous interventions.

GEORGIA. I’ll be writing about this elsewhere but the question of whether Saakashvili was supporting jihadists against Russia has come up. From the PM no less. Even the US Ambassador thinks an investigation would be good. Of course the Boston bombing provides another learning experience for Washington.

What are the prospects for effective US-Russia anti-terror cooperation in the wake of the Boston bombings?

On May 13, 2013March 18, 2016 By Patrick ArmstrongIn CONTRIBUTIONS TO GROUP DISCUSSIONS, WORLD POWER RELATIONSHIPS

http://us-russia.org/1239-what-are-the-prospects-for-effective-us-russia-anti-terror-cooperation-in-the-wake-of-the-boston-bombings.html

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_05_08/Anti-Russia-bias-and-political-correctness-are-too-deeply-embedded-for-there-to-be-true-cooperation/

It would be good if the Boston attacks were to lead to serious cooperation. It is possible this will happen. I hope it will. It would also be good if Americans came to understand that almost everybody in Chechnya’s leadership today fought against Moscow in the first war. A fact that shatters the conventional view.

But we have seen this movie before.

Moscow warned the West about the common enemy it was fighting at the Munich Security Conference in 2001, no reaction. Putin told Bush the USA was on the target list, no reaction. Taliban sought an anti-American alliance with Moscow and was stoutly rejected. After 911 Putin used Moscow’s considerable influence with the Northern Alliance to establish cooperation and, it was the Northern Alliance, using weapons provided by Moscow, which actually overthrew Taliban – admittedly with considerable US support. Without Moscow’s influence the swift overthrow of Taliban would have been much harder, if not impossible. The two then tackled another problem: for years Moscow had been saying that jihadists had infiltrated the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia and for years Washington accepted Tbilisi’s claims that this was just another lie. But Moscow was telling the truth; a joint operation drove the jihadists out of Pankisi.

This was Washington’s opportunity to learn that Russia has the two essential requirements to make it an ally: a common enemy and experience and knowledge to bring to the alliance.

But, if learned, this was forgotten as Washington reverted to its instinctive anti-Russian position. Jihadists in Chechnya were called “rebels” as if it was just a revolt against Russian heavy-handedness; Russian elections were excoriated; the “human rights” weapon was deployed; “colour revolutions”, missile defence and NATO expansion continued; Russian concerns were contemptuously ignored or re-branded as “threats” (as in Russia threatens to react to missile defence). American animosity to Russia seems impenetrable to reality.

The “Rose Revolution” was especially hallucinatory: Bush was completely taken in by Saakashvili. (Medvedev tells us the first thing Bush ever said to him was: “You know, Misha Saakashvili is a great guy.” During the South Ossetia war Bush said: “It was clear the Russians couldn’t stand a democratic Georgia with a pro-Western president”. Pretty foolish sounding these days as the new government in Tbilisi reveals the reality of Saakashvili’s regime.) The jihadist centre in Pankisi, Tbilisi’s lies and Moscow’s truth, were forgotten and further chances for cooperation against the common enemy were lost as Washington believed everything Saakashvili told it. The US training program for Georgia’s armed forces – begun when Moscow’s allegations about Pankisi were confirmed – transformed into encouragement for Saakashvili’s military ambitions.

So here we are again: Boston has shown that the North Caucasus is a theatre of the world-wide jihad: after all, the Tsarnaevs may have hated Russia but they actually attacked the USA. Jihadists driven by the familiar ideology from ibn Taymiyya, through al-Wahhab, through Qutb, to Khattab and bin Laden; their Chechen connection is as incidental as the “underwear bomber’s” Nigerian origin or the “beltway sniper’s” American origin. Again Russia’s warnings were dropped; again Putin offers cooperation.

Will this opportunity for improving mutual security be dribbled away again? Perhaps the climate is better in that NATO expansion is dead and Saakashvili is gone.

But I expect little: the causes of these errors – anti-Russia bias and political correctness – are too deeply embedded to be overcome yet and we will never know, therefore, what true cooperation could achieve.

Breaking the code of human rights

On May 9, 2013March 16, 2016 By Patrick ArmstrongIn ACCUSATIONS, WORLD POWER RELATIONSHIPS

http://media.washtimes.com/media/misc/2013/05/08/130509-voiceofrussia.pdf

Many countries like to think of themselves as a shining example to others but the USA seems more prone to this belief than most. Often present in its foreign policy – “Wilsonian” is a common name for the trend, “a city upon a hill” another – the tendency was given new emphasis by Carter and, since his time, an annual human rights report has been produced by the State Department. The USA is also home to many “human rights” organisations, ever quick to judge. Russia under Putin is a frequent target of these judgements. Russian elections, never mind that they are accurately predicted by numerous opinion polls over time, are always “irregular” and suspect. Although Russian reporters seem oddly free to complain and criticise, the press in Russia is always tightly controlled. Despite the largest anti-government protests for years, protest is always impossible. A Russian version of FARA is unacceptable. Russia is rated by Freedom House ever trending downwards even when it reverses actions Freedom House formerly condemned. Moscow always threatens its neighbours even though they remain independent and some are in NATO, where one would think they were well protected. And so on and on: the details change but the denunciations never do.

But, every now and again someone gives the game away.

The Executive Director of the US branch of Amnesty International when Pussy Riot was declared to be prisoners of conscience was Suzanne Nossel. In and out of US administrations and NGOs, at AI she boasted she was the author of a 2004 article in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled “Smart Power”. “Progressives now have a historic opportunity to reorient U.S. foreign policy around an ambitious agenda of their own… the great mainstay of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalism… liberal internationalists see trade, diplomacy, foreign aid, and the spread of American values as equally important.” She now heads PEN American Center and still boasts of “smart power”. She evidently sees no conflict of interest advancing “human rights” inside the US government structure or outside.

Another revealing quotation appeared in April in the Washington Post in a piece on US policy in Africa, specifically Niger. The author mentions several countries in which, notwithstanding certain human rights difficulties, Washington provides the governments with substantial money and keeps silent. Propping up the governments, in fact, as this government critic understands: “There is a need for change in our country, but our government doesn’t want to do what is necessary. Having a foreign military presence protects them”. “Human rights” are not so pre-eminent in these cases. Cynics have long suspected that Washington deploys “human rights” as a tool according to the conceptions of national interest but the author of the Washington Post piece found someone who actually admitted it: “‘The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass,’ acknowledged a senior U.S. official who specializes in Africa but spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. ‘Whereas other countries that don’t cooperate, we ream them as best we can.’”

So, let us see what we deduce from these two statements. Nossel, who happily moves between US administrations and NGOs – the G in NGO is apparently used here in a Pickwickian sense – lets us in on the secret that “human rights” are contingent and the “senior official” tells what they are contingent on. The phrase “human rights” is a code word: follow Washington’s lead and your “human rights” score will be OK, thwart it and the score will be bad. Quite easy to understand, isn’t it? (I can’t help wondering what became of our “senior official” – I don’t think you’re supposed to be that frank.)

Let us apply what we have learned to the case of Russia. Does Russia cooperate? No it does not, or at least not as completely as it apparently should. Therefore its “human rights” performance must be condemned and all Nossel’s N“G”Os will do so. Loudly.

So, Dear Reader, the next time you read a headline, or State Department utterance, saying “Russia’s Human Rights practice is bad” you now know what it really means: “Putin isn’t cooperative”. QED.

Are the international stances of Russia and the US inherently incompatible?

On April 19, 2013March 18, 2016 By Patrick ArmstrongIn CONTRIBUTIONS TO GROUP DISCUSSIONS, THE WORLD IS CHANGING, WORLD POWER RELATIONSHIPS

http://us-russia.org/1193-are-the-international-stances-of-russia-and-the-us-inherently-incompatible.html

http://globaldiscussion.net/index.php?/topic/291-are-the-international-stances-of-russia-and-the-us-inherently-incompatible/

http://www.facebook.com/AmericanUniversityInMoscow/posts/514076858651580?notif_t=like

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_04_18/Russia-is-not-very-pertinent-to-Washington-s-strategic-and-security-concerns-it-is-not-threatening-nuclear-war-today-expert/

JRL/2013/ 73/32

Countries enjoy claiming highfalutin values and principles as justification for their often sordid actions. But these principles are usually pretty malleable. Washington, for example, was firm on the principle of inviolability of borders in the Georgian case in 2008 but not so much in Yugoslavia in 1999; Moscow firmly held the opposite position each time. Moscow was supportive of the human rights of Ossetians but not so much about those of Kosovars; Washington, again, the opposite. Each was adept at manufacturing reasons why the inviolable principles of one case did not apply in the other.

But it is pleasing to one’s to self esteem to claim high motives. For years Washington has claimed the moral high ground of “democracy” and now we see Moscow claiming to be the home of stability. These noble self-portraits look most convincing at some distance. For Moscow to claim to be the thumb keeping the scales of world power balanced is to slip over its partial responsibility for the transformation of another Balkan squabble into a world war in 1914 and ignores most of the years between 1917 and 1990. Washington focuses its moral quizzing glass on Russia rather than say, Saudi Arabia: an “Arab Spring” for Libya but not for Bahrain.

But above this normal level of sanctimony-cloaked interest, the USA goes father with its bizarre obsession about Russia. It is bizarre because Russia is not very pertinent to Washington’s strategic and security concerns: it is not threatening nuclear war today; nor is Obama considering using force against it; neither does he see it as the greatest threat. Russia has surely seldom appeared in White House threat briefings for a decade and a half. If not a real opponent, then, Russia must fill some other need: a cost-free shadow opponent; a contrast that can be painted as dark as you like; an object of feel-good moral righteousness; a sullen teenager who must be brought to obedience.

Americans seem to need a rival, an opponent, a type of geopolitical chiaroscuro: the light can only shine against the darkness. Russia is large, significant and gives a contrast more substantial than, say, Venezuela.

Because US-Russia trade is pretty inconsequential, Russia is a low-cost object of periodic American fits of moral censure. An issue as trivial as Pussy Riot can be played up as a momentous violation whereas any sustained condemnation of the treatment of Shiites or Pakistani and Filipino servants in Saudi Arabia would come with a cost. Outrage against Russian “occupation” of parts of Georgia is cheap; outrage about Chinese occupation of Tibet is not. Russia’s sins are a perfect fit: giving a pleasing moral superiority without expensive consequences.

Or is Russia an ungrateful child? In the 1990s there was much talk about US aid and advice reforming Russia and some saw it as on the edge of becoming “just like us”. But it didn’t and such back-sliding cannot be forgiven.

And, of course, when you are looking down from a moral prominence, disagreement is sin. Moscow cannot just be disagreeing about the Syrian nightmare; it must be blocking “the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people.”

So, the differences do seem incompatible so long as the curious American obsession endures.

As for global realities, how are the last two “humanitarian interventions” working out? The Guardian quotes reports identifying Hashim Thaçi, put into power by NATO, “as one of the ‘biggest fish’ in organised crime” in Kosovo and the less said about the “success” in Libya, the better. In these two cases, therefore, it doesn’t seem to be Moscow that is out of touch with global realities.

Russia Observer

Russia and the G8: Is Russia isolated or does it represent the global majority?