From [TBC] To The Polar Lands - Rolling Russia / "Near Abroad" News Thread

Late in the year to be starting a rolling news thread but plenty of news around.

New law to limit foreign ownership of media outlets to 20%, down from 50%, proposed, likely to strengthen pro-government sources:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/23/us-russia-media-idUSKCN0HI1U120140923

Fairly large anti-war protests in Moscow last week:

http://rt.com/news/189472-moscow-opposition-march-ukraine/

Depressingly, polling suggests that Putin might actually be winning back support from 'liberal' Moscow and St Petersburg, though - traditionally the only real focal points for opposition. How long that will last if rouble continues to decline remains a question.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky has formed a new political platform in exile and says that he'd be willing to lead Russia, if called upon. For the record, i would also be willing to lead Russia if called upon and would estimate my chances of it actually happening to be roughly the same. Note the shift from "oligarch" to "tycoon" in the western press over the last few years.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/21/mikhail-khodorkovsky-breaks-political-silence-prepared-lead-russia

In other exile news, Saakashvili now lives in Williamsburg and is still kind of a dick:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/world/europe/mikheil-saakashvili-georgias-ex-president-plots-return-from-williamsburg-brooklyn.html?_r=1

In other oligarch news, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, owner of Bashneft, and one of the richest men in Russia is still under house arrest:

http://en.itar-tass.com/russia/750974

Seen by some as a warning shot to oligarchs to think twice about trying a 'palace coup' vs Putin to head off further economic losses. More likely a warning shot to the west that tightening the vice on Russia's economy with sanctions might be met with further moves to consolidate Kremlin control domestically.

Speculation that Russia has signed a $10bn agreement with South Africa to build nuclear power stations, denied for the moment by the SA government.

The most popular foreign leader, according a poll of Ukrainians, is...Alexander Lukashenko!Despite widely being thought of, in Russia, and the west, as a moron, Lukashenko has played both sides pretty well in the Ukraine crisis and is apparently gaining popularity in Belarus. idk if his wife is still under house arrest.

http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2014/09/23/7038653/

Gulnara Karimova has hired a UK-based PR company to highlight her own house arrest in Tashkent. Still a really weird situation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-29251609

ShariVari for president of Russia, I support

Depressingly, polling suggests that Putin might actually be winning back support from 'liberal' Moscow and St Petersburg

polling by whom? given that the media is coming more closely under kremlin control, how reliable can these conclusions be?

Polling conducted by the Levada Center is generally thought to be fairly reliable outside of Russia. They are independent of government and tracked Putin's decline in popularity before he bounced back up.

Sanctions starting to hit Muscovites where it hurts:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-25/sushi-bubble-pops-for-moscow-middle-class-as-ruble-drops.html

Fish costs jumped 30 percent in the past month, according to Dve Palochki’s Sukhochev. Customers at the 40-restaurant chain, which uses 15 tons of salmon a month, also have complained about the pale color of the Chilean salmon, he said. Sukhochev plans to roll out a new menu next month that will pass some of the added costs on to consumers.

Feel like this is a good thread to link to this http://mariaturchenkova.com/projects/putins-rule/

The series from Dagestan on her site is very good.

New report on political prisoners in Uzbekistan.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/26/thousands-jailed-uzbekistan-politically-motivated-charges

The Prosecutor General has requested that Bashneft be returned to state control:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/sep/26/russian-oligarch-vladimir-yevtushenkov-stake-bashneft-oil-seized

Yevtushenkov, who was previously the 15th richest Russian with a net worth of £5.5bn, according to Forbes Russia, was unexpectedly charged with money laundering and embezzlement earlier this month. The accusations relate to his 80% stake in Bashneft, acquired over almost a decade from structures controlled by Ural Rakhimov, who has been placed under an international search warrant. Rakhimov initially purchased Bashneft in 2003 from the government of Russia’s republic of Bashkortostan, which was at that time led by his father.

Yevtushenkov’s case has been labelled “Yukos 2.0” by the business community and likened to the case against oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose leading Yukos oil company was broken up and absorbed by state energy champion Rosneft after he was sent to prison for a decade in 2003. President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman has denied the case is politically motivated.

A suicide bombing in Grozny killed five police officers yesterday:

http://en.itar-tass.com/russia/752809

Ramzan Kadyrov has his own commemorative coin:

http://i.imgur.com/Gw3Bp8Z.jpg

The Latvian ruling coalition (a mixture of centre-right, agrarian and hard-right parties) won about 60% of the vote in the election last week but the single largest party was broadly pro-Russian 'Harmony', on about 23%. Worth remembering that about 14% of Latvia's population (or 320,000, almost all of them Russian) aren't eligible to vote as 'non-citizens'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-citizens_(Latvia)

Wow that's a messed up status

Yes, it's the same in Estonia. Some people prefer it as it allows for easier movement to and from Russia but lots just find the naturalisation process (which requires competency in the absurdly complex Estonian language) too great a barrier. They can live there but have no right to vote.

This is bonkers and already receiving pushback from members of the ruling party.

http://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-could-sack-million-officials-ties-russian-past-231947924.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory

Far-right clashing with police / government in Kiev:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-29611588

Tipping point seems to have been the failure of the government to formally recognise the wartime contribution of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army who allied themselves with the Nazis during WW2.

Sure it'll blow over before i'm there on Thursday.

oh hey I missed this thread before, bookmarked and thank you!

Things are perversely quiet at Maidan Nezalezhnosti at the moment. I'm used to it being a hub of activity, commerce and, particularly in the run up to an election, political campaigning but there's nothing much happening now. There are some small shrines to those killed earlier in the year and enormous banners masking the most heavily damaged building proclaiming "long live Ukraine, long live the heroes". You can see where stones and bricks were prised up to use as weapons but there are few other visual signs anything happened.

My hotel doubles as the Ukraine Crisis Briefing Centre though most of the journalists seem to have gone elsewhere now. There are quite a few soldiers in fatigues sitting around outside - presumably back from the East and with nothing much to do now but drink beer and scratch up some money. There are plenty of people 'collecting for the war effort' but most are just using it as a ruse to scam some change.

The campaigning that is going on ahead of the election next week seems really subdued compared to normal. Blok Poroshenko, Timoshenko's group, Svoboda and the National Front are all present but there's very little energy and activity. I'm used to huge tents, lots of noise and lots of people but it's very quiet at the moment. The one huge element missing is the Party Of The Regions, of course.

There's more nationalist kitsch about and some Pravy Sektor graffiti here and there but no sign of the huge far-right presence that was here earlier in the week.

The one really obvious difference from the last time I was here is the sense of economic decline. Lots of shops in the glitzy malls are vacant, the main shopping streets are very quiet and Bessarabsky Rynok looks almost like a normal fruit and veg market. The combination of uncertain incomes and rampant inflation has hit hard. Also fewer adverts for new flats and high-interest savings accounts.

Radek Sikorski apparently told Politico that Putin had offered to partition Ukraine with Poland in a meeting with Donald Tusk in Moscow in 2008.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/20/us-ukraine-crisis-poland-sikorski-idUSKCN0I92A720141020

He's currently backtracking and getting rinsed by his own Prime Minister:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/polands-sikorski-under-fire-over-russia-interview/2014/10/21/d2d4ef24-5932-11e4-9d6c-756a229d8b18_story.html

Looks like the Russia / Ukraine gas deal has stalled. The price has been agreed but Ukraine simply doesn't have any money to pay either outstanding debts or for winter deliveries.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/10/22/uk-ukraine-crisis-gas-idUKKCN0IA16V20141022

Russia has said the EU should cover immediate costs, the EU isn't particularly keen. I was discussing this with a Ukrainian colleague the other day, someone fully behind the move towards closer ties with Western Europe, and we both came to the conclusion that the EU had vastly understimated how much money it would cost to bring Ukraine out of Russia's orbit. If the intention was to rebuild the country's economic and financial structure to ensure it wasn't predominantly reliant on Russia in the future and could, one day, be a candidate country for membership, there needs to be an international commitment to supporting that with hundreds of billions of Euro. Weaselling out of offering €2bn to keep the lights on this winter isn't a good sign any real effort will be made to follow through on the hints and half promises made earlier in the year. Ultimately, the EU probably can't afford to back Ukraine properly and is justifiably concerned about where a lot of the money would go if it did.

"from the southern seas to the Polish lands" amirite guys

sv what do you think of kaspaov

*kasparov*

Not a fan. I think he's broadly sincere but extremely naive. On paper a lot of his proposals have sounded reasonable in the past but his alignment with US neocons and various dubious oligarchs have always given the impression that he's being used as a palatable front for much more sinister interests. He has become increasingly hysterical in his rhetoric in recent years too. The Other Russia concept of a broad anti-Putin alliance spanning the whole political spectrum was interesting for a while but at this stage he's just an irrelevance playing to a Western gallery. He doesn't even have any real support from Russian liberals. Navalny is a more significant figure these days.

If the exit polls are to be believed, Poroshenko has done much worse than expected and Yatseniuk much better.

БПП (23%), "НАРОДНЫЙ ФРОНТ"(21,3%), "САМОПОМИЧ"(13,2%), ОБ (7,6%), РАДИКАЛЬНАЯ ПАРТИЯ(6,4%), "СВОБОДА"(6,3%), "БАТЬКИВЩИНА"(5,6%) НАЦ ЭП

Real success for the Samopomich party too. Lyashko's Radical Party was polling at around 12% previously, so to see them take only half of that is a relief. Timoshenko polling behind Svoboda looks like total humiliation.

Hopefully this will mean a fairly stable Poroshenko / Yatseniuk coalition that doesn't need to draw support from the further-right.

Should probably post that in English, really:

БПП (23%) - Blok Petro Poroshenko (centre-right, pro-European, nationalist) - party of the current President.

"НАРОДНЫЙ ФРОНТ"(21,3%)- People's Front (hard-right, pro-European, nationalist) - party of former PM Arseniy Yatseniuk. Previously closer to Poroshenko but turned increasingly to the right as the relationship faltered.

"САМОПОМИЧ"(13,2%) - Samopomich (Christian Conservative, pro-European, nationalist) - effectively a regional party with a lot of supporters in the West of the country. Hanna Hopko, who headed their party list, is one to watch out for in the future, she was very active in the protests and has picked up a lot of attention internationally. Second on the list was Semen Semenchenko who was the head of the anti-separatist Donbass Battalion militia.

ОБ (7,6%) - Opposition Block (conservative, pro-Russian) - disorganised remnant of the Party Of The Regions, previously the largest party in Ukraine.

РАДИКАЛЬНАЯ ПАРТИЯ(6,4%) - Radical Party (far-right, pro-European, nationalist) - wildcard party led by Oleh Lyashko, an antisemitic vigilante nutcase.

"СВОБОДА"(6,3%) - Svoboda (neo-Nazi, nationalist)

"БАТЬКИВЩИНА"(5,6%) - Bat'kivshina (conservative, pro-European, nationalist) - Yulia Timoshenko's party. Seems to have completely collapsed.

Turnout was around 40% nationally, though as low as 16% in Odessa.

http://i.imgur.com/IfZYfc2.png

Anyone interested can keep track of the results as they come in here:

http://www.cvk.gov.ua/pls/vnd2014/wp300pt001f01=910.html

With a third of the vote counted, Yatseniuk's party is actually fractionally in front of Poroshenko's, though to all intents and purposes, it's a dead heat.

good luck ukraine

Still only 72% of ballots counted but it looks like the proportion of the Fascist vote going to Lyashko was underestimated and Svoboda might just miss the 5% threshold for PR representation as a result. They are at 4.7% at the moment.

Positives, if things stay as they, are would be that between them, the three main parties should be able to form a stable government in the short term. The worst case scenario of Lyashko getting 15% and getting to act as kingmaker has been avoided. Svoboda will probably miss out on PR seats. Timoshenko faces at least a couple of years in the wilderness. There are a few interesting new faces (Mustafa Nayem, Hanna Hopko, etc). Yatseniuk's rep as a safe pair of hands might mean the EU is more likely to open the purse strings if he is PM.

Negatives are zero representation from parties that can credibly be called liberal, progressive or leftist. No parties that can credibly claim to bridge ethnic gap. Only voices for Russian Ukrainians are the dregs of the party run out of town (meaning most had nobody worth voting for, and didn't bother). Nobody to act as a break on the rush to IMF austerity. Approx 14% of the vote for Fascist parties. Two of the six parties explicitly controlled by oligarchs, at least three of the remaining four covertly controlled by them (not sure about Samopomich but wouldn't be surprised). No sign of grass roots politics taking hold.

Despite his recently discovered appreciation of WW2 war criminals, Poroshenko is probably the closest thing to a European moderate and losing so much ground to Yatseniuk isn't good news either.

kinda lol but mostly sad

RT is going to launch a dedicated UK channel this week:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/oct/28/kremlin-rt-uk-news-channel-russia-today?CMP=twt_gu

Not a huge amount of bespoke programming but they've apparently been spending a lot on recruitment so it's likely to grow. No doubt my dad, who watches it religiously for some reason, will be thrilled. If the price of oil keeps dropping the spending on propaganda might scale back, though.

Balkanist has been running some great cultural content recently, particularly about turbofolk in Serbia. They're going to do a horror film supplement for Halloween in the next day or two as well.

http://balkanist.net/

RT is kinda fascinating as a repository of stuff which would otherwise never make it onto television in any semi serious form but is instead lent the authoritative news-channel-sheen. max keiser flatly explaining to russell brand how a newly independent scotland should adopt bitcoin as its currency and there's not even really a hint that there might be another credible view

RT guy on R4 just now not really doing a good job of selling it

rt >>>>> r4

no, come on, you can't seriously be comparing the craven and mendacious propaganda arm of an authoritarian government with Russia Today ho ho ho

That's what the RT guy said

Kyiv's oldest and best cinema, Zhovten, burned down last night in what's thought to have been an arson attack.

http://www.kyivpost.com/content/kyiv/kyivs-oldest-cinema-burns-370001.html

It had been the subject of an ongoing land dispute but the suspicion is that it's linked to the fact it was showing Mario Fanfani's Les Nuits d'Ete as part of an LGBT-friendly film festival.

cool that ukraine has detached itself from the corrupt, bigoted, authoritarian Russian sphere of influence tho

Russia / Ukraine deal on gas has been finalised with the EU acting as guarantor. Someone has come up with $3bn from somewhere to cover old debts and down payment. Means the heating will stay on through the winter, which is great news.

Quid/Ag Moscow style

http://russia-insider.com/en/business_society/2014/10/31/10-25-10am/oligarchs_daughter_shares_priceless_tips_how_manage_armies?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

The number of people who say they'd vote for Putin again if there was an election tomorrow has dipped below 50% for the first time since the Ukraine crisis started - possibly a hint that there are concerns about sanctions hitting the economy.

http://rt.com/politics/200159-putin-rating-september-peskov/

It's still substantially higher than the 26% he was polling earlier in the year and with Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party in second place (with 7%) it's not exactly a sign of greater plurality.

This guy has just been made Chief Of Police in Kyiv

http://i.imgur.com/qtKJFsR.jpg

Note the insignia on his shirt.

http://i.imgur.com/YFYCBLx.jpg

He's Deputy Commander of the neo-Nazi Azov militia.

Neither of the two main parties are Fascist in any meaningful sense but clearly there's a perceived need to pander to the extreme right.

Reports are coming through suggesting that the suspected Moscow "Grand Theft Auto" killers have been caught.

They were apparently putting spikes on roads late at night and shooting anyone whose cars got stopped by them, for no apparent reason. Nothing was ever stolen. They were thought to have killed at least 14 people in the last few months. It sounds a bit like an urban legend but is supposedly 100% true.

http://i.imgur.com/O5Jw9hE.png

The Rouble has gone crazy. Was about 50 to the GBP this time last year. Was 71 yesterday, 76 today.

Banks are reportedly running out of foreign currency (as they did in Ukraine months ago) because so many people are trying to take their savings out in Dollars and Euro. If it hasn't happened already, i wouldn't be surprised to see them follow Ukraine in limiting the amount of cash people can take out in a day.

yikes

The "ceasefire", which was never really a ceasefire on either side, looks officially over now. Ukraine has claimed separatists in Donetsk have received a resupply of heavy weaponry from Russia and the Ukrainian army has stepped up shelling of the area. ITAR-TASS says that they've hit a kindergarten, killing several children. The Netherlands have donated €500k worth of what are euphemistically in Ukraine called "wearable anti-cold-systems" (which means warm coats and boots without holes in them) but nobody has committed to donating arms yet. There's speculation that the US Republicans might try to force something through, though idk if they would be allowed to even if they wanted to.

Interesting things happening in Georgia. The firing of the Defense Minister has been seen by some, particularly the fired Defense Minister, as a shift away from Europe and towards Russia. The government has restated that EU membership remains a priority though.

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/70781

Azerbaijan has shot down an Armenian helicopter that was apparently flying close to the border of Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan proper.

More on the Armenia / Azeri helicopter thing:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-12/azerbaijan-says-armenian-helicopter-shot-down-in-conflict-zone.html

“This is the worst military incident in more than 20 years since the cease-fire,” Thomas de Waal, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said by e-mail from Washington.

Seen as a continuation of the incidents that killed around 20 people in the summer, that's probably true.

http://i.imgur.com/k2QHZ7m.png

Not really region-specific but the ability of any currency to drop about 15% in an hour and a quarter when the automated trades are triggered is fairly terrifying. Ukraine keeps ploughing money into trying to stabilise the UAH and the effects last about a week before being totally wiped out. I'm not sure what you can do in that situation.

Interesting piece from the excellent Alec Luhn on 'domestic' politics in Novorossiya and the Kremlin's fear that socialist populism could spread across the border into actual Russia.

http://www.thenation.com/article/189137/eastern-ukraine-becoming-peoples-republic-or-puppet-state

Highlights the tension that comes when, what is to some extent at least, a genuine popular revolution is backed / bankrolled by a government like Putin's.

Reports are coming through suggesting that the suspected Moscow "Grand Theft Auto" killers have been caught.

They were apparently putting spikes on roads late at night and shooting anyone whose cars got stopped by them, for no apparent reason. Nothing was ever stolen. They were thought to have killed at least 14 people in the last few months. It sounds a bit like an urban legend but is supposedly 100% true.

This gets stranger. The police appear to have arrested a gang of 'Islamist terrorists' from Central Asia for the crimes, with the leader being killed during an attempt to take him in.

Quite why a terror cell would have done all this and not bothered to tell anyone hasn't been explained.

Needless to say, they've been "linked with ISIS".

A+ response from Mykki Blanco after a Moscow club he was scheduled to play at got raided by the police.

https://www.facebook.com/MykkiBlanco/posts/881332838551591

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/19/-sp-uzbekistan-political-prisoners-human-rights?CMP=share_btn_tw

A piece on the current human rights situation in Uzbekistan.

The cotton situation there is crazy. Last year the government agreed, under international pressure, to ban child labour in the cotton fields so, to make up the shortfall of workers, 4m people (doctors, teachers, university students, etc) are forced under threat of fines or jail to take their place during the picking season. This is apparently seen as progress by the international community.

http://i.imgur.com/vqFGF0M.jpg

Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia, has made a new home for himself in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I
used to look at this place from Manhattan, it was such a pity, it was mafia, a place where hit men dump bodies,” he
said. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Williamsburg hipster went to war with Russia before it was mainstream.

i think you or someone else i read linked to this a couple of months ago but i didnt read it then

the nyt writer does a creditable job of getting him to say hubristic and inane things like “they shut down traffic for us and our 20-car escort” and generally making him seem delusory and unpleasant

his lack of secrecy about his daily life would probably be noted by various former opponents, is he too far gone for putin to even care?

and did nobody in america do due diligence on him before they made him a brief cause celebre

He drew a crowd of about 3000 in Tbilisi this week, via audio link, but that's peanuts. He's still facing charges of abuse of office and there's no immediate prospect of him setting foot in the country again.

On paper, he was ideal for a US-backed leader in the region - American education, neo-liberal economics, fewer overt ties to organised crime than many, pro-NATO, etc. They've overlooked much worse than rampant corruption, delusions of grandeur and a mile-wide authoritarian streak. The objective was to have someone who'd reform the economy and bring Georgia closer to NATO membership, which he accomplished. The mystery is why nobody stopped him from trying to retake South Ossetia. To some extent he was a more obvious choice than Yushchenko, who was both corrupt and tainted by association with Kuchma, or Bakiyev who went round murdering his opponents the first chance he got.

He reminds me a lot of Sikorski - that kind of brash sociopathic arrogance. Like Sikorski, i'm not sure you could ever really rule him out in perpetuity.

They've overlooked much worse than rampant corruption, delusions of grandeur and a mile-wide authoritarian streak.

those are all potentially useful assets but saakashvil is just a fantasist

is there anyone in eastern europe with an anglo education and a subscription to the economist who isn't unremittingly dreadful

There's a fairly fine line between 'fantasist' and 'visionary idealist' and it's not too hard to convince people you fall into the latter camp if you're telling them what they want to hear and getting results. The line becomes less fine when your 'visionary idealism' leads you to invade Russia with the world's 64th most powerful army.

xp

I'm struggling to think of anyone.

visionary idealism is a good warning sign, people with ideas are unreliable
america seems to love these chalabi types when it is full of bright ideas and good intentions

Looks like i was overoptimistic in thinking that it should be easy to form a new Ukrainian governing coalition. Getting on for a month later, there's still no agreement, although there's talk of one being in place within the next week or two. There's suggestion that Timoshenko and Lyashko might be invited to join, even though, numerically, there's no need for them to be involved.

There are still substantial disagreements, though. Poroshenko has been talking a lot about ending the war / averting a worse crisis and is getting called out as a coward from sections of the nationalist right. Euromaidan PR, which internationally is often seen as the voice of the revolution - even if the reality is more complex, published an editorial calling for total war earlier in the week and there's a suspicion that that's what Yatseniuk would prefer. Poroshenko wants to buy coal in Hryvnia from Donbass, Yatseniuk is insisting it's bought at a 50% premium in USD from South Africa. There's still no guarantee Russia will send any gas as nobody has actually fronted up any money for it yet.

Poroshenko did take one radical move this week and that was finalising the proposal to remove state support from Donbass, meaning that state employees and pensioners won't get anything from the Kyiv government until the crisis is over. Russia is refusing to bankroll the region so pensioners who were struggling along on $100 a month from the state will now get nothing. It's one potential way of trying to get the people to turn against the DNR but it's a massive, massive risk. Starving your babushki isn't going to win hearts and minds. To some extent it would be fair enough if companies were paying tax to the tinpot warlords but, by and large, industrial revenue is still going to the central government as far as i can tell.

This is a really sweet personal interest story though: http://balkanist.net/lyonya-loves-vika/

http://boingboing.net/2014/11/20/something-big-exploded-in-russ.html

???

That's amazing. The two competing theories are that it was a meteorite strike or the army detonating a stock of old explosives but they've denied the latter. Seems incredible that it was only 200km away from the huge Chelyabinsk impact earlier in the year. Sadly my grasp of physics is pretty much non-existent but i'd be interested to know whether some parts of the world are more vulnerable than others.

Interesting piece on the collapse of the EU / Yanukovich discussions prior to his removal from power:

http://m.spiegel.de/international/europe/a-1004706.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=

i'd be interested to know whether some parts of the world are more vulnerable than others

For small impactors that detonate in the atmosphere, the poles are safer.
For medium impactors (1 per 100k years) that generate tsunamis, inland areas are safer.
For extinction event impactors (1 per ~200+ million years) only some burrowing creatures and deep ocean detritovores are relatively safe, as the raining ejecta heats the entire surface above boiling for a few hours, then the dust from fires freezes the world for a couple years.

x-post: It's obviously smarter to focus on our own mistakes and what we can do better in the future, but... boy does Yanukovich and Putin come off as complete idiots in that telling.

Nobody comes out of it well. Russia was needlessly vindictive in threatening a trade war, the 'naïveté' of the EU was definitely undercut with a level of cynicism in the proposed terms (which doesn't come across fully in that report)', the IMF was typically uninterested in the practical consequences of the harsh measures they were demanding and Yanukovich, as a bumbling con artist, was clearly unqualified to try to pick a way through it. It is hard to know what he could have done that wouldn't have been disastrous for the economy. What's pretty clear though is that there was no ideological turn away from the EU. He'd have probably signed the deal if it was the best one on the table.

Xp, thanks!

The USD / RUB exchange rate is hovering just under 50 (49.99 at one point), which has always been the symbolic indicator of catastrophe. Seems likely to cross the rubicon today. OPEC's decision yesterday not to cut oil output is presumably one of the key factors. There are reports of queues at high-end jewelers across Moscow as people convert cash into diamonds.

The Ukrainian parliament met for for the first time since the election yesterday and the coalition looks settled now. The core is Poroshenko's bloc, Yatseniuk's bloc, Timoshenko's bloc and the far-right Lyashko bloc. Samopomich are playing a very clever game by working with them on some committees but, as far as i can tell, remaining outside of government. I think they're rightly calculating that this is going to be an extremely unpopular government irrespective of what happens so maintaining distance is likely to stand them well in the long term. It also allows them to deny they're part of the 'old politics' of oligarchs and autocrats.

Also, Misha Saakashvili has been charged for his role in covering up a high-profile murder:

http://www.rferl.org/content/georgia-charged-saakashvili-abuse-office/26714046.html

He's supposed to have colluded with the prosecutors to falsify evidence. He also released the killers after about two years in jail for no particular reason.

Elections in Moldova over the weekend.

The pro-Russian Socialist Party seems to have picked up the most votes with the pro-EU Liberal Party and pro-Russian Communist Party (the same party that was running the country in the Soviet era) roughly neck and neck in second and third.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30265985

It's pretty finely balanced as the parties in fourth and fifth place are both pro-EU so even if the Socialists and Communists finish first and second, the other parties could potentially form a coalition. Another pro-Russian party was banned prior to the election for allegedly receiving overseas funding. Transnistria didn't vote.

tbh, although it would be a struggle to convince the rest of the EU to let them in, i'm not sure what else could materially improve the quality of life in Moldova at this stage. GDP per capita is around $2000, compared to $18,000 across the border in Romania. It's the closest thing Europe has to a failed state. After agriculture, i wouldn't be surprised if the most important industries were organised crime and people-trafficking.

I am not sure I'd ever thought about Moldova before but I have this as-yet unrealized fantasy of visiting local tourist sites in Eastern Europe, like chilling on the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea and the like. and thus the Moldova tourism wiki page offers this gem:

Lower Prut Nature Reserve is the synonym of nature's virginity. It is composed of Beleu Lake and a network of ponds that, on the whole, form a unique ecosystem of importance not only national but international.

and this blog entry by someone who seems to be a Moldovan national; she writes

While driving down the highway to the Reserve, I felt like we were part of the contest “worst highway experience in your life”. I highly doubt tourists would be able to handle the excitement and suspense until the Reserve.... [T]he boats that are supposed to offer tourists an unbelievably great experience on the lake are not even equipped with life jackets, let alone a first aid kit.

her blog is awesome btw

Irllol. Prut is 'fart' in Danish, helps a bit.

That blog looks great.

I've been to Moldova but didn't really make it out of Chisinau. The quality of the road between there and Odessa didn't really give me much hope for the rural network.

The Bulgarian Black Sea resorts are meant to be ok but i've heard very good things about the Albanian Adriatic coast. The Belarussian forests and lakes are high on my list of places to go too.

From June:

http://www.voanews.com/content/ukraines-fight-against-corruption-may-be-toughest-struggle-yet/1941943.html

Fighting corruption is not easy, says anti-corruption crusader Alexander Kostrenko, who travels with a retinue of armed guards. He questions Poroshenko’s vow to fight corruption from within.

“Authorities shouldn’t establish anti-corruption committees inside their ministries," he said. "How can state authority organize their own state officials to fight against themselves? It’s ridiculous.”

Kostrenko was reportedly murdered yesterday.

A new ceasefire has apparently been agreed in Lugansk and possibly Donetsk, which is good news.

Kyiv Post, which is heavily government-leaning most of the time, was reporting on Saturday that Misha Saakashvili might be offered the role of Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine, which would have been absolutely astonishing, but it looks like he has turned them down (if it was true). What does seem clear is that various posts have been offered to members of his administration.

The Rouble slipped to an unheard of 54 to the USD yesterday but is back at a still appalling 50 now.

Russia has scrapped the South Stream pipeline and will run a route through Turkey instead.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30283571

Russia says its a defeat for the EU, the EU says its a defeat for Russia, everyone agrees it's bad news for Bulgaria and a massive win for Erdogan.

Russia has been throwing money at stabilising the rouble, without much apparent success. It is back at 54 to the USD.

The interesting news of the day is that Ukraine has made an American hedge fund manager Minister of Finance, a Lithuanian hedge fund manager Minister of Economics and appointed an ex-Saakashviki ally Minister of Health. All three got Ukrainian citizenship this morning and were made Ministers a few hours later. As a break from Ukrainian politics as usual it is a bold move but I'm not sure how well it's going to go down.

Three police officers killed in Grozny at a routine traffic stop. Kadyrov is reporting gun battles have killed at least six militants.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30323751

Yatseniuk announced that there had been an accident at a nuclear power plant in Ukraine yesterday and scheduled an emergency press conference. The press conference clarified it was just an issue with a generator and nbd but we there was half an hour of blind panic before that.

Death toll up to 13 police, 9 militants now.

Russia has requested that France deliver the first of two Mistral helicopter carriers they ordered or provide a refund on the down payment. It is quite brave of Hollande (pictured looking pretty baller in Kazakhstan) to risk having to give Russia $1bn, plus potential compensation, and be landed with a ship customised for Russian specs France might have trouble shifting to anyone else. Moral stances from western EU leaders are usually less costly.

http://i.imgur.com/VZD3HO4.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/XVEiAYC.jpg

Netrebko unlikely to win many friends back at the Met like this. She's probably the closest thing to a prima donna assoluta around at the moment so I'd be surprised if it severely hurt her career though.

http://rusemb.org.uk/consnews/29

British and Irish citizens now need to have fingerprints taken to get a Russian visa, meaning you have to physically go to the visa office yourself. Not a nuisance for me, as it is on my way to work, but will be a nightmare for most of the people I send there for business. There's one in London, one in Edinburgh and one in the Dublin suburbs, that's it. As they point out though, any Russians coming to the UK need to do the same thing (Moscow, SPB, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk being the only options).

New low for the Rouble today - hitting 90 to the Pound.

If you'd had $1000 worth of Roubles in January, they'd be worth $579 now.

If you'd have $1000 worth of Ukrainian Hryvnia they'd be worth about $500 now.

You can see why there has been so much investment (much of it illegal) in Cyprus, London, etc, especially in property over the years.

wow, good time for a trip to the Hermitage on foreign currency, no?

Yes, absolutely. Moscow has always been horrendously expensive and should now be pretty reasonable. Everywhere else will offer some pretty great bargains.

New low for the Rouble today - hitting 90 to the Pound.

101 to the GBP now.

122! This is ridiculous.

103 to the GBP now. I was tempted to invest in Roubles at 120 yesterday in the belief they'd bounce back to 100 today but i had no idea how to go about that so didn't. There's no logical reason the currency should have devalued more than the Ukrainian Hryvnia. Of course, i wouldn't bet against it going back to 120 by lunchtime.

What the hell is this!?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xai7ttzbx5M

what the hell, indeed!

Makes me wanna invade somethin' ...

Haven't seen it yet but it's his big national press conference today. Should be interesting.

The leaders of Dagestan's insurgency have sworn an oath of loyalty to ISIS. Not entirely sure what the implications would be but they are probably the most consistently troublesome of Russia's various terrorist groups.

Navalny's fraud trial is coming to an end, and working on the reasonable assumption he's going to be convicted, protesters pre-emptively organised a gathering via Facebook. 12,000 signed up before the page was blocked, by Facebook, for all users in Russia. This seems to be the first time they've removed information about peaceful protests without any public justification at the request of the government.

Ukraine's parliament has voted 303 to 8 to end non-aligned status and work towards membership of NATO. This has traditionally been one of the most divisive issues in the country. Around a year ago support for the proposal was in the mid-thirties, percentage-wise, and now it's closer to the mid-40s but it's clearly not an overwhelmingly popular idea and is likely to alienate Russia and ethnic Russian Ukrainians even further.

Looks like Navalny's verdict will be delivered tomorrow rather than on the 15th, possibly in a futile bid to catch protesters on the hop. There's speculation that he'll be convicted and 'magnanimously' pardoned within days but i'm not sure where that's coming from. The original date clashed with the next round of Ukraine / Russia peace talks.

Things have been crazy in Ukraine over the last week. Someone threw a grenade at an MP in Kyiv and two people (one probably a politically-motivated vandal and one a suspected robber) managed to blow themselves up in separate incidents in the South. The latter was initially reported as a suicide bombing but seems to have been an idiot trying to hold up a currency exchange with an explosive vest. Ukraine has always had a certain number of mysterious bombings, even during peace time, but the proliferation of weapons over the last year seems to have made things worse.

The liberal / Maidan-affiliated opposition to the actions of the Ukrainian parliament seems to be growing, with Hromadske - a press agency which is part-funded by the governments of the US and Netherlands and part-funded by George Soros, doing a surprisingly good job of highlighting the deficiencies. The Rada voted at 4:30 this morning local time in favour of an austerity budget which none of its members had seen but which seems to have been a condition for receiving further IMF funding.

Alex Navalny has been found guilty and given a suspended 3.5 year term but his brother Oleg has been jailed for the same duration. He's calling this a 'hostage-taking' and urging street protests.

Reportedly around 3k protesting in central Moscow, including Navalny who is meant to be under house arrest, now. Might be more if it wasn't 18 degrees below zero.

Interesting piece on Khodorkovsky by Julia Ioffe in the New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/12/remote-control-2

Looks like the suicide bombing in Istanbul on Tuesday may have been carried out by a Russian member of a Turkish Marxist-Leninist terrorist organisation. Turkish terrorist cells and their links to the 'deep state' have always been confusing.

http://www.todayszaman.com/latest-news_sultanahmet-bomber-identified-as-russian-citizen_369205.html

If the interpretation in the press is correct, Russia appears to have banned pretty much everyone with what the government deems to be personality disorders from driving. This includes, but is not limited to, gamblers, kleptomaniacs, people who have received treatment for substance abuse, voyeurs, fetishists and, most notably, trans ppl. There might be clarification pending, idk, but I'd be surprised if this wouldn't fall foul of Russia's domestic and international human rights obligations.

11 civilians dead in an apparent separatist shelling of a checkpoint in Eastern Ukraine.

In other horrifying news, ISIS has released what purports to be a video of a ten or eleven year old Kazakh kid 'executing two Russian spies' .

Another bus hit my mortar fire, this time in central Donetsk.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/22/donetsk-bus-stop-shelling-kills-13

*by mortar fire*

Had a surreal moment coming out of the metro to see central Madrid for the first time and emerging straight into a Svoboda / Pravii Sektor demonstration, a minute ago.

The civilian casualties are mounting again with at least thirty dead in Mariupol yesterday. Almost certainly the separatists this time. It doesn't look like either side is actively targeting civilians at the moment but they are both so technically incompetent they can't keep their heavy artillery to the intended targets, which is almost inevitable when you give irregulars hugely powerful weapons and tell them to get on with it.

Old-school spy ring fun!

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/attorney-general-holder-announces-charges-against-russian-spy-ring-new-york-city

Just want to say thanks for this thread, interesting stuff.

Long piece on corruption in Ukraine:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/04/welcome-to-the-most-corrupt-nation-in-europe-ukraine

It focuses on healthcare but could be applied to pretty much everything at every level in the Ukrainian state sector.

There's not much sign that anything has changed since the overthrow of the previous government. Ukrainian papers were leading on stories of billions of Dollars having been stolen after the revolution.

The Merkel / Hollande proposal for a DMZ while talks continue about autonomy / status seems sensible, although whether it will work any better than the original Minsk agreements remains to be seen. Merkel has clearly stated that she doesn't support supplying more weapons to Ukraine and has echoed Poroshenko's original position that there is no military solution to the crisis.

A leaked German intelligence report has suggested the death toll might be closer to 50,000 than 5,000 but its not clear what that is based on.

THe Ukrainian parliament seems to have gone temporarily nuts with new laws this week that authorise the execution of army deserters and corporal punishment for any soldiers found drinking alcohol. They have also banned all Russian films made after 2013 from being distributed in Ukraine - meaning even the likes of Leviathan, which is widely seen as being critical of the Russian state, can't legally be screened. The security services have just arrested a journalist critical of the "Anti-Terror Operation" for treason.

In context, especially given the failure to transition away from corrupt factionalism, George Soros' statement that "Ukraine is now what the EU should aspire to be - a participatory democracy" seems ludicrous - particularly to many of the pro-Maidan liberals he had initially backed. Even Hromadske, the news agency that he partially funds, was critical.

http://tchaykovsky.ru/rusphobi_1/simon_heffer.jpg

Ukraine has finally stopped trying to prop up the Hryvnia, with the market rate falling from 24 UAH to 38 UAH vs the GBP, over the last three days.

The last time i was there before the crisis, it was around 12.

There's confusion over exactly what is going on in Minsk at the moment. The Guardian was reporting an hour ago that Poroshenko had rejected Russian conditions for an agreement but some fairly reliable journalists on Twitter are suggesting that a deal was agreed between all the leaders eventually and the separatists have said no.

The IMF has agreed a $17.5bn bailout deal, though, with talks on restructuring debt to follow.

http://www.ft.com/fastft/276661

Developments!

Ceasefire to start on the 15th.
Heavy weapons to be withdrawn to fixed lines.
POWs, including Nadiya Savchenko, to be released.
Some form of constitutional reform agreed to placate East.

No mention of Crimea, as far as i can tell. Not sure whether separatists have agreed but Putin and Poroshenko seem on the same page.

http://i.imgur.com/usGTPQi.png?1

Not even a mention of there not being a mention of Crimea in the deal. Perhaps a fait accompli at this stage.

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_2QY2S_czQ2k/Tbk2QTsmMII/AAAAAAAABpc/_6WfLDFwp6k/4_Portrait_of_Giovanni_Arnolfini_and_his_Wife_detail_1_Renaissance_Jan_van_Eyck_thumb%5B9%5D.jpg?imgmax=800

https://twitter.com/vpkivimaki/status/565652936962084865

Also good value from that link: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B9me_43IQAE0Sl1.jpg

do you watch any of this series

https://news.vice.com/show/russian-roulette

I haven't seen many but probably should catch up with them. Vice's reporters are a mixed bag but Harriet Salem is consistently good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rnSF4h22XU

The UAH is still collapsing, despite the peace accords and IMF funding agreement:

http://i.imgur.com/lXLnTR0.png

Nov 2013: 12 UAH to the GBP
Jan 2015: 22 UAH to the GBP
Feb 2015: 50 UAH to the GBP

The decline against the USD is probably even worse, and more relevant as debt is largely paid, and gas largely bought, in Dollars. Horrific situation.

Yesterday: Russia agreed to provide stabilisation loans to Cyprus.

Today: Cyprus has agreed to let the Russian navy use its ports

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-31632259

"Our friendly ties aren't aimed against anyone," President Putin said. "I don't think it should cause worries anywhere"

Yep, let's see how that works out.

boy i sure hope there aren't any other countries in that part of the world desperate for a loan on favourable terms

This morning alone the UAH went from 50 to the GBP to 43 and then back up to 53. Property is typically priced in USD and a lot of people took out Dollar mortgages when the currency was stable. I can't imagine living with that level of uncertainty.

http://www.euronews.com/2015/02/18/dollar-mortgage-crisis-in-urkaine/

Currently reading an extraordinary story about a Russian guy who ran away from an orphanage in the 1980s and was given a passport in 2004 despite not having a birth certificate. He was arrested in 2013, accused of using false documents, and has been in jail ever since. The Russian police have apparently used an expert in facial matching from photographs to accuse him of being a Ukrainian bank robber / murderer who is thought to be on the run in Russia. Nobody knows where the real criminal is, or if he's still alive, and the dude in prison has no way of proving that it's not actually him. Russia plans to extradite him.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fopenrussia.org%2Fpost%2Fview%2F2974%2F&edit-text=

rip boris nemtsov, shot dead in the street

Footage from the scene showed police experts examining the corpse of a man, dressed in jeans and lying on the tarmac, with the domes of St Basil’s in the background.

My wife: "God, they're so obvious about everything." Me: "The obviousness is the point."

“Putin noted that this was a cruel murder and bears all the signs of a contract killing which appears exclusively provocative,” Peskov told ITAR-TASS.

Blimey. For context, he was an extremely marginal figure in electoral terms these days but a very well known activist / critic. Pretty much zero chance that the government was directly involved but entirely plausible the political atmosphere at the moment might have have prompted someone on the fringes to do it. The murder of critics isn't condoned but their demonisation as enemies of Russia is.

Peskov / Putin statement pretty much translates to 'someone did this to make us look bad', which is the line taken by the rabid pro-Kremlin bloc online. The idea that Putin ordered the killing, dominating a lot of the chatter outside Russia, is equally unlikely and misses the point.

Given the timing, there is a strong probability this relates to his organisation of protests against Russia's position on Ukraine / Crimea. Those protests would probably have drawn a couple of thousand people (though more now) which is tiny in the context of a country that is, for the most part, supportive of reclaiming Crimea, etc. However, you can't give tacit approval to a legion of bikers, Cossacks, 'orthodox jihadis', military fantasists, rabid nationalists and assorted other cranks and malcontents to fight over the border, stand by while people like Zhirinovsky, the anti-Maidan protesters, and sections of the right-wing press describe their critics as traitors, and then be surprised when they start picking up guns on their return.

There has been a lot of talk about what happens in Ukraine when the neo nazi battalions stop fighting the rebels. Less about what happens in Russia when their nutcases stop fighting with them.

yeah, i wouldn't be surprised if all the heavily-armed wackjobs riled up by the ukraine situation become a major problem. putin may regret the forces he's set in motion.

Looks like the police have found a car with Ingush number plates and they're trying out a Charlie Hebdo link for size. Will probably have a couple of confused day labourers in custody by the end of the week.

This is quite interesting:

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/britain-gives-russian-tycoon-fridman-7-days-to-justify-ownership-of-gas-fields/517031.html

Mikhail Fridman has bought a load of North Sea gas fields as part of the €5bn takeover of a German energy company and the UK government has given a strong indication that it plans to force him to sell them to someone else. He has a week to convince them not to.

Fridman is not affected by the sanctions so, depending on how you look at it, it's either a precautionary measure in case sanctions are extended at some point in the future or another lever to put pressure on Russian business to, in turn, put pressure on the government.

The FSB has detained two Chechen men on suspicion of the Nemtsov killing, which will come as a huge surprise to absolutely nobody. They were apparently traced through the getaway car and wire taps.

No word on motive so far, thought there rarely is. A large proportion of hitmen are either Chechen or Russian soldiers who fought there, but they tend not to flip on who paid them.

Pretty much zero chance that the government was directly involved but entirely plausible the political atmosphere How did you figure it to be zero?
Maybe not Putin personally or explicitly, but, so close to the Kremlin and St. Basil, sure seems like some level of complicity: at the very least, looking the other way. So either blatantly Look What We Can Do and Fuck You, or a significant hole in the security system.

The streets around the Kremlin are open and not all that heavily guarded unless it's right on the perimeter. There are definitely questions around why it took several minutes for anyone to show up on the scene and why some of the security cameras were not working that play into conspiracy theorising but you could shoot someone and drive off pretty easily.

There is no obvious benefit to the goverment in having a minor protest figure shot and a lot of domestic and international risk. The memorial protest was probably at least 20 times bigger than the one he was organising. The treatment of Navalny is much more in line with the Kremlin's standard operating procedure - quashing dissent through targeted legal action. Had Nemtsov been seen as a major threat he would probably have been jailed over 90s corruption allegations. Unless he had something spectacular to reveal, it seems unlikely to me that they would want to bring the negative publicity. Even the most fervent pro-Putin commentators agree this looks terrible - they just claim it was done for that purpose.

There's no obvious benefit to a lot of the government's involvements, other than appealing to the worst elements, for political and financial profits, although the resulting sanctions have taken bites out of the latter. Doesn't seem like they care much about how things look to non-Russians. Supposedly, he was about to circulate another pamphlet, with more details about government corruption. Maybe it was just the last straw, for somebody, in or out of the government,

There are so many theories it's impossible to ever know for sure. The latest is that it was done to discredit Kadyrov rather than Putin, with the accused shooter being a serving Chechen soldier under his command. Commentators are largely winging it these days.

One political murder that certainly looks somewhat less ambiguous:

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/72416

Four suspects now in custody and a fifth apparently killed himself with a grenade when the police came for him in Grozny, which is likely to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Kadyrov has issued an odd statement on Instagram (obvs) calling Zaur Dadayev, who has apparently confessed, a great patriotic hero for his service in antiterrorist operations in Chechnya but also saying that he had had left the army for unknown reasons a while ago and hinting he might have gone off the deep end about Charlie Hebdo.

There's definitely something odd going on. Putin hasn't been seen for ten days and will, in theory, return for a meeting with the Kyrgyz president today.

Separately, a number of high-profile opposition activists, including Ksenia Sobchak, have been apparently given a heads-up by the FSB that the people who organised the Nemtsov murder are also after them. Sobchak has left Russia but it looks like a few very close Putin allies have also left abruptly with no explanation, including Vladislav Surkov - Putin's chief advisor on a number of issues, including the Caucasus.

This has led to speculation about attempted coups, rogue units in the Chechen special forces, a Kadyrov power-grab, an anti-Kadyrov campaign, etc, etc.

Kadyrov has affirmed his loyalty to Putin via Instagram but fueled the speculation by saying that the loyalty was independent of whether he was president.

It may well all be blown up out of proportion but the failure to manage the sense that something strange is happening is telling in itself.

For example, Hromadske, the Ukrainian US-backed new organisation:

http://youtu.be/f358z2_PMXo

The suggestion there is that there is an open conflict between the Kadyrov clan and the FSB (Russian state security bureau) and that Putin, who has very strong ties to Kadyrov, is caught in the middle.

Viktor Yanukovich Jr. may or may not have drowned at the weekend. Nobody seems to know for sure.

Lots going on in Ukraine. The oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, governor of Dnipropetrovsk, seems to have led an armed gang into the headquarters of a state oil firm to take issue with the sacking of the director. He funds a variety of militia groups at the moment, which Poroshenko is attempting to tame. The president is quoted as saying there will be no "pocket armies" and has sent two battalions of special forces troops to the city to "keep order". It has the capacity to turn uglier.

Separately, Kolomoisky was accused of a string of murders in a civil case in London between him, Bogolyubov and Pinchuk.

More on the Kolomoisky / Poroshenko spat:

http://www.kyivpost.com/content/kyiv-post-plus/fight-between-kolomoisky-and-state-turns-ugly-384323.html

Kolomoisky has now officially been fired as governor of Dniepro for the armed raid on the gas company. That was kind of inevitable if the President is going to have any kind of meaningful authority but you now have a guy with no formal ties to the state bankrolling private militias with approx 15k soldiers. Even before he was fired, some of his supporters were talking about a new anti-Poroshenko Maidan. Hopefully won't come to anything but it's a grim prospect.

http://i.imgur.com/iqNufkG.jpg

lol

"
There's definitely something odd going on. Putin hasn't been seen for ten days and will, in theory, return for a meeting with the Kyrgyz president today.

Separately, a number of high-profile opposition activists, including Ksenia Sobchak, have been apparently given a heads-up by the FSB that the people who organised the Nemtsov murder are also after them. Sobchak has left Russia but it looks like a few very close Putin allies have also left abruptly with no explanation, including Vladislav Surkov - Putin's chief advisor on a number of issues, including the Caucasus.

This has led to speculation about attempted coups, rogue units in the Chechen special forces, a Kadyrov power-grab, an anti-Kadyrov campaign, etc, etc.

Kadyrov has affirmed his loyalty to Putin via Instagram but fueled the speculation by saying that the loyalty was independent of whether he was president.

It may well all be blown up out of proportion but the failure to manage the sense that something strange is happening is telling in itself."

― Rainbow DAESH (ShariVari), lunes 16 de marzo de 2015 7:26

So any idea what all that was about? Seems too odd for it to have been nothing.

To be honest, not really. A lot of the speculation was overstated apparently - Sobchak never left, Surkov turned up two days later, etc.

The underlying theme of tension between Kadyrov and the FSB seems to have more weight to it, though, and there doesn't seem to be any explanation for Putin's vanishing act. There have been a lot of articles about Kadyrov pushing for a wider national role and issues with his militia being active outside of Chechnya (both overtly in Ukraine and covertly with targeted assassinations) but most of it has been from the Western press a lot is quite contradictory.

thought this was interesting, on battery farming/crowdsourcing propaganda:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-inside-russian-troll-house

Yep, Shaun Walker has been doing some good stuff lately.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/face-the-coming-war-between-armenia-azerbaijan-12585

This seems to be kicking off again. Idk whether all-out war is likely.

http://i.imgur.com/dhXBbCD.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/eHpDA0V.jpg

^ senior delegation from the Armenian-American community meeting the PM in Yerevan for crisis talks.

Kim was certainly learning a lot on her day sight-seeing in Armenia's second largest city.

Indeed the 34-year-old looked genuinely moved, not to mention a little overwhelmed, as she later visited the overgrown ruins of her modest ancestral family home.

With rusted sheet metal walls, no roof, and piles of rubble and debris littering the site, the long neglected location was surely a stark reality check for the pampered reality star.

As a way to boost awareness of the Armenian genocide for its 100th anniversary this seems slightly more dignified and effective than i would have expected on paper.

Good article from the pro-Ukraine, pro-free-speech Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group on the astonishing new laws being put through the Rada:

http://khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1428632777

They appear to not just give full legal status to the wartime Ukrainian Insurgent Army (who massacred Poles and Jewish Ukrainians) but will ban questioning their legitimacy as a 'denigration of the dignity of the Ukrainian people'.As things stand, the Wiesenthal centre, for example, would fall foul of this.

At the same time, communist symbols / propaganda and the denial of the 'criminal nature' of the 1917 - 1991 regime have been prohibited.

The package of bills was presented in parliament and largely drawn up by the head of the Institute for National Remembrance Volodymyr Viatrovych. The latter was head of the SBU [Security Service] archives under Yushchenko and became widely known for his strong support for nationalist leaders Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, and OUN-UPA. His works as a historian, for example, his attempts to present the Volyn Massacre “in a wider context” as part of an alleged Polish-Ukrainian war from 1942-1947 have prompted criticism, both from historians and from the wider public. Concern has often been expressed, including by the author of these words, over historical manipulation of facts or downright inaccuracies.

Poland has similar(ish) laws on the books but a much less divisive context. Aside from whether they are right or wrong, it's difficult to see this as anything other than another potentially destabilising move and a boost to the Russian propaganda machine selling the Ukrainian government as far-right ethno-nationalists.

Will read that, but not before expressly wishing that SOAD had been there with Kim et al

Anyway, good article. I especially like how it loses its composure when speaking with no little implication of 'other totally fascist ideologies'. That first law seems utterly bonkers and creepy as fuck.

a boost to the Russian propaganda machine selling the Ukrainian government as far-right ethno-nationalists.

weird how the latter keep falling into this trap huh

Despite some odd provocations (like being pictured with a Stepan Bandera patch on his military shirt) i don't think Poroshenko could really be classed as a far-right ethno-nationalist and there is a fair proportion of the new Ukrainian political set-up that is reasonably liberal but they're over a barrel at the moment.

On one side, you've got the armed right-wing militias who have propped up the army and expect something in return, on the other you've got a lot of nationalist parliamentarians who have been itching to do things like this for twenty years and are going full steam ahead now that the Russian-leaning population is no longer able to provide a democratic block on it.

It leads to stuff like this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32216738 Dmytro Yarosh, leader of Pravii Sektor, being appointed to a senior military role.

Clearly a terrible idea, clearly divisive at home and abroad but no political will / ability to stop it.

Putin is doing his annual call-in, which apparently had 2.5m questions from the public raised this year. He's currently being dragged by a British dude who has been farming in Russia for 23 years over milk prices.

http://i.imgur.com/PmkTB1i.jpg?1

He has also confirmed the sale of the S-300 air defense system to Iran.

It looks like the Ukrainian journalist Olesya Buzina has been assassinated in Kyiv this morning.

This is either the ninth or the thirteenth suspicious death of people linked to the former government over the last few months, depending on who you ask. A former MP in Yanukovich's party, Oleg Kalashnikov, died of a gunshot yesterday:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/15/ousted-ukraine-president-ally-shot-dead

Many of the deaths have been determined to be suicides by the authorities but fuel conspiracy theories about scores being settled. Suicide obvs not a plausible ruling in the Buzina case.

Anton Gerashenko, a senior official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs updated something along the lines of the following on his Facebook page:

It appears that the shooting of witnesses to the Anti-Maidan continues. Anyone who was involved in organising or financing the Anti-Maidan or any other illegal activities against the Maidan revolution and fears a threat to their life should contact the police so as not to follow Kalashnikov and Buzina

I'd imagine it's meant to suggest an internal squabble between anti-government forces but it's not exactly a good look.

Second journalist murdered in Kyiv in 24 hours. This is nuts.

!?!?

Poroshenko statement:

The Head of State has emphasized the need for prompt and transparent investigation of those murders. “It is evident that these crimes have the same origin. Their nature and political sense are clear. It is a deliberate provocation that plays in favor of our enemies. It is aimed at destabilizing the internal political situation in Ukraine and discrediting the political choice of the Ukrainian people,” the Head of State said.

Petro Poroshenko has also noted that solving these resonant crimes was a matter of honor for the law enforcement bodies. “I demand the law enforcement bodies to find the executors and organizers of these murders in no time. Given the resonance of crimes, law enforcers should regularly inform the society on the results of their investigation,” the Ukrainian President emphasized.

It's practically a word-for-word copy of the Peskov statement on Nemtsov's murder - a "provocation" by enemies to "destabilize the internal political situation of the country".

Nazarbayev re-elected with 97.5% of the vote.

Kazakh leader likely to win new five-year term Nice call BBC!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/LukParad9maj.jpg

Dmytro Firtash, the Ukrainian oligarch with ties to everyone from Yushchenko to Yanukovich to, allegedly, Semion Mogilevich, has been stuck in Austria for over a year pending an extradition request from the US related to bribery charges. It's just been announced the Austrian court has refused on the grounds the charges were politically motivated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSAEhGnRg5Y

Between 5 and 8 police officers were killed in Macedonia over the last 24 hours:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32680904

Kumanovo is mostly Albanian and the fear is that the border region near Serbia might try to go the same way as Kosovo. There are a lot of the same economic and political grievances.

I'm with about a dozen people from Skopje at the moment who traveled by coach through the region just before it all kicked off on Friday night and they're worried all land borders will be closed by the time they need to go back on Monday.

macedonia is a bit of a stretch for the near abroad but low it

yesterday i was thinking of doing a list of top, top atrocity anecdotes i have read from balkan history going from the ottomans torturing macedonian guerillas to death in caves, apis' subaltern mutilating the breast of the dead serbian queen, ustase collecting boxes of eyes in jasenovac, chetniks killing a partisan in sumadija through heart extraction, tito's secret police torturing to death dissidents in goli otok, serb irregulars sexually torturing to death bosniak conscripts.....as much as foreigners have gilded the brutality lily from ibn saqaliba to malaparte, there's a demonstrable recurrence of this sort of thing

/ibn yacub's/

Someone explained to me once that about 50% of the problems in the Balkans were caused by the jugo wind making people crazy. Not sure how convincing that was.

Anyway. It looks like 22 dead in Macedonia with the blame being put on Kosovars. Supposedly the remnants of the KLA.

Google news alert for "chetnik" finally pays off:

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/serbia-rehabilitates-wwii-chetnik-leader-mihailovic

http://qz.com/403307/russia-is-quite-literally-drinking-itself-to-death/

I've been meaning to read The Last Man In Russia for a while but haven't had the energy. Russian demographics are looking a bit better now than they have for a while (or at least, not much worse than a lot of European countries) but the damage done by alcohol during the 90s was immense and it remains a problem. A lot of those excess deaths (and 30% seems pretty high) are likely to be people who started drinking heavily in their thirties and pegged out not long after 50. There was a 60% increase in alcohol consumption between the late eighties and mid nineties, iirc. There are still countries with higher consumption of alcohol per capita (including Ireland) but they don't have huge Muslim populations to bring the average down.

The government has increased the price and is getting much tougher with retailers selling alcohol to minors (i have to take my passport everywhere if i want a drink and i haven't been 18 since Yeltsin) but it's going to take a long, long time to change.

It is a pretty dramatic jump from some of the quite hard drinking former Imperial Russia countries that are 6-7% to the 21-30% of Estonia and Russia. It might be an idea to encourage people to switch from the hard stuff to red wine because I get the feeling putting the price of vodka up will just encourage the unregulated stuff on the black market.

i remember reading a few years ago that about 60,000 a year in russia die from illicitly produced vodka laced with methanol or what have you

Samogon is mostly ok if it's genuinely homemade but illegal industrial stills often add methanol and other stuff. Not just in Russia - some guys were jailed in the Czech Republic today for killing 50 people with methanol vodka last year. There's always a fear that it'll end up in shops so all vodka bottles are now tamper-proof and can't be refilled.

Another fairly common problem is people drinking cheap 99% alcohol "aftershave" or "muscle rub" - both sold in handy 250ml screwtop bottles.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CFJP8hWWoAANvvw.jpg:large

The Duma has decided against a political investigation into the Nemtsov murder, apparently on the basis that it's not within their remit and should be left to the police. It was always highly unlikely / never gonna happen but it removes the only option I can see for openly questioning Kadyrov about his connections. Post-Nemtsov, it definitely looks like government critics are shifting some of the focus away from Putin and on to his problematic fave. The big scandal this week has been the lavish wedding Kadyrov oversaw between a decrepit 57-year-old chief of police and an understandably morose-looking 17-year-old girl.

Interesting piece on Peter Pomerantsev by Mark Ames at Pando:

http://pando.com/2015/05/17/neocons-2-0-the-problem-with-peter-pomerantsev/

Highlights that even some of the critics who are better, smarter and more nuanced than the shrill neocon cheerleaders have some very shady connections writing the cheques.

he doesnt look too bad for 57 though

Yeah, tbf, he has taken care of himself.

There seems to be some confusion over whether he's still also married to his first wife.

Alexei Mozgovoi, construction worker turned leader of the separatist Lugansk Prizrak brigade, has been assassinated along with his press secretary. He was probably the most visible face of the rebellion, post-Strelkov. He had been talking a lot over the last few days about the chances of the ceasefire holding being slim. Could have been offed by either side.

Saakashvili is being strongly tipped as the next governor of Odessa, presumably on the basis that they didn't suffer enough with the massacre.

#Spokesman for Odessa regional Governor's office confirms on Facebook that Saakashvili to be introduced as Governor at 2.30 pm tomorrow.
9:09pm - 29 May 15

Absolutely astonishing.

maybe they convinced it him it was little odessa, brooklyn

All the Hromadske journalists I follow on Twitter are horrified. The competing theories are:

1. Poroshenko needed to remove a key Kolomoisky ally but didn't have any Ukrainian allies of his own who he trusted to take over
2. The central government fears an invasion from Transdniestr and wants someone to organise resistance
3. Poroshenko was sick of having him in Kyiv and wanted to keep him busy
4. It's pure provocation - putting a fervent anti-Russian "reformer" in the biggest Russian-speaking city to stir the pot

None of these is all that convincing but each is more plausible than Poroshenko thinking he's going to clear up the city's notoriously complicated mix of corruption and organised crime. Various EU-leaning journalists and campaigners are claiming that Saakashvili attended a gathering of Georgia's leading Mafia clans in Kyiv last week, which is interesting if true.

http://i.imgur.com/PJINtWN.jpg

^ Kyiv Pride march was attacked by Pravii Sektor today.

Looks like it was a very moderate step forward despite the participants being bussed miles away from the centre of the city, asked not to hold hands and being attacked by neo-Nazis. Klitchko, the Mayor of Kyiv, and the city's police had apparently refused to meet with marchers and refused to guarantee protection until Poroshenko gave a speech yesterday telling them they had to. The police defended the marchers when they came under attack and, as the picture shows, did so at a cost. Compared to what happened in Moscow last week where three people were arrested for trying to hold an unauthorised protest march, it's a limited success.

This may or may not be interesting:

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/series/guardian-moscow-week

The Guardian is having a "Moscow week".

“The difference is huge — in reaction speed, memory, hand tremor — and in how they recover,” Vladimir Nuzhny, of the Health Ministry’s National Narcology Research Centre, said. “On average, 50 per cent of people in Moscow have this Mongoloid gene. So this, we think, is part of the problem.”

As part of the study, the scientists paid 12 volunteer students to drink 350 grams, about a third of a bottle, of vodka in an hour, and then monitored their behaviour.

“That’s a lot by Western standards, but it’s normal for Russia,” Dr Nuzhny told The Times. “At first they thought it was great, because they were being paid to drink, but after a while they realised it was more like work.”

Lumpen is a Russian modelling agency challenging the contemporary conceptions of beauty. Set up by Avdotja Alexandrova at the age of 24, it now has a look book of models from Moscow to Minsk.

Models have frizzy hair, bags under their eyes, and scratches on their faces. Not because they’ve been “dressed-down” to look normal, she says, but because they that’s the way they are.

Nothing says 'padding it out' like having three members of the same underground supper club in your 30 under 30 power list but the articles about migrant workers and the Kapkov development project have been decent.

About half the Polish government has been sacked, including Radek Sikorski, following a long ongoing scandal which started when waiters recorded key politicians bitching about everyone from David Cameron to low-paid workers over dinner:

http://www.politico.eu/article/a-polish-game-of-tapes/

If you believe the statisticians, Poland is probably the best run country in Europe in terms of economic efficiency. The cost of living increases over the last few years have ground people down immensely though.

The events in Moldova over the last few months illustrate the challenges the EU / US face in implementing effective reform in other post-Soviet states like Georgia and Ukraine.

Until 2009, Moldova had effectively kept voting in the Communist party that used to run it when it was a Soviet republic. For much of the last decade, the official GDP per capita was less than $1000. The main source of income was probably remittances from Moldovans working abroad, often illegally - typically in construction or sex work. It was pretty clear a lot of the cash, even the money that was made within Moldova, wasn't filtering through official channels. I remember staying in a 'fully-booked' ex-Soviet hotel that only had about six actual guest - it was almost certainly a front for money laundering.

GDP picked up (I'd guess thanks to the construction boom in neighbouring countries) and dipped again after the stock market crash. The Communists were voted out and replaced with great fanfare in the West by a pro-EU, pro-free-market reformer who, like Yanukovich around the same time, promised to make Moldova more investment-friendly in return for loans. GDP reached its highest ever level (to put it in perspective, that's around $2000 - somewhere between Cameroon and Senegal in the rankings) with higher consumer spending partly driven by access to more credit.

It recently came to light, however, that local oligarch Ilan Shor (who is married to the Russian pop star Jasmine) had been running a massive loan scam through the bank he owned and three others owned by his associates. It's estimated that he stole $1bn - around 12.5% of the country's entire GDP in 2014. He had close links to both governments.

The new PM, who came in demanding that bank chiefs and senior prosecutors be fired or charged for their involvement has quit after three months in the wake of an investigation over whether he forged his school leaving certificate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/world/europe/moldova-bank-theft.html

Igor Dodon, the leader of the Socialists, said the disappearance of so much money showed how the European Union had backed the wrong horse by supporting Moldova’s pro-European forces, which have held power since 2009. “The more money Europe gives, the more money our oligarchs steal,”

All the animals have escaped from Tbilisi Zoo in the flooding!

http://i.imgur.com/TcX2sBb.jpg

There are lions and hippos roaming the streets.

http://www.repstatic.it/content/nazionale/img/2015/06/14/100251697-5b7cdde9-01d9-4e9d-8b49-39ec8bd84150.jpg

Over 200 arrested as police broke up the biggest protest in recent Armenian history with water cannons this morning. There were thousands in the central square in opposition to an increase in electricity prices.

Interesting piece about a Russian informant's difficulties with the FBI:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/26/russian-defectors-spies-dead-end-american-dream?CMP=share_btn_tw

Protests in Armenia are spreading:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/01/armenia-yerevan-electricity-protests-russia

The government agreed to cover the electricity price hike out of state funds but the complaints run much deeper than that. It's not entirely clear what the objectives of the protesters are at this stage, though, other than more transparency.

Three couples have used the protests as a venue for their weddings:

http://i.imgur.com/lgAppCa.jpg

There's apparently some renewed optimism that Ukraine won't default in three weeks, according to Bloomberg. The root seems to be the fact that the Finance Minister, Natalie Jaresko, has scheduled negotiations with creditors for the first time. As far as i can tell, the government has been doing something similar to Syriza and calling for immediate restructuring but only via the press - there have been no discussions with the people they owe the interest payments to. That's probably partly because a fairly large amount of Ukrainian debt is privately held - the country's single largest creditor isn't Germany or the IMF, it's Franklin Templeton investments. One of their fund managers sunk $7bn in to the country a few years ago:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/24db6bec-b1dd-11e4-8396-00144feab7de.html#axzz3eqW634YG

Separately, the parliament has just voted to convert all consumer / mortgage debt to the Dollar rate when the loans were taken out - so if you took out a mortgage in USD when the rate was 5 UAH to the dollar, you'd pay 5UAH now, rather than the current exchange rate of 22 or 23. Jaresko has called it catastrophic as it'll come at a cost of $6bn to domestic banks that have been closing at a rate of one a week over the last year. Poroshenko will probably have to veto it, even though 72 of his own MPs voted in favour. Some have claimed they didn't know what they were voting on or that nobody explained the implications to them.

Good longish pieces on the authenticity / sustainability of Putin's poll ratings:

http://carnegie.ru/eurasiaoutlook/?fa=60849

and the underlying divisions around identity in Ukraine:

http://harpers.org/archive/2015/07/fugue-state/

Interesting piece on Lithuania's absurd attempt to prosecute the Director of Tel Aviv's Holocaust museum for war crimes and the national identity issues driving it:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/07/lithuania_and_nazis_the_country_wants_to_forget_its_collaborationist_past.html

"The myth that Soviet citizens of all ethnicities had united to valiantly resist the Germans became the official party line" Ditto throughout Ukraine, Estonia as well where initially there were some of the worst WW2 era pogroms and from where large numbers of people volunteered to do the Einsatzgruppen's dirty work.

I meant to say pogroms occurred

The investigation also succeeded in muddling the historical narrative by positing a moral equivalence: Lithuanian paramilitaries may have paved the way for the Nazi’s Holocaust, but Jewish partisans had committed atrocities that helped pave the way for the Soviet “genocide.”

Yep, and that denial followed by generations of ignorance has played into the hands of revisionist historians across the region. This is good background reading on the situation in Lithuania:

http://www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7B54d385e6-f1b9-4e9f-8e94-890c3e6dd277%7D/%20LITHUANIA%202012-%20HOLOCAUST%20DISTORTION%20AS%20BACKGROUND%20FOR%20INCREASED%20FOR%20ANTI-SEMITISM-FINAL-%204-19-2012%20.PDF

The adoption of the UON-B as national icons in Ukraine has been equally grim.

Latest polls for Ukrainian regional elections are interesting:

http://i.imgur.com/sktKEeJ.png

Poroshenko is still going well but Yatseniuk (the PM and leader of the party that came a very close second last year with 22%) has dropped to 3.2%, behind Pravy Sektor. Tymoshenko's party seems to be the main beneficiary.

Klitchko's party, UDAR, is polling behind the Communists who have been banned from even taking part.

UKROP (which means "dill" in Russian, oddly) is the party of the restive oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and currently in last place.

Perry Anderson writing on Russia, if anyone has an afternoon to spare:

http://newleftreview.org/II/94/perry-anderson-incommensurate-russia

This report on the perceptions focus groups in various former Soviet republics have about the US is interesting. Some of the framing is questionable but the fundamental point that the US shouldn't be investing in NGOs that 'promote democracy' or direct political change if it wants to be seen in a positive light seems like a sensible one. The argument is that the US can do more good through other forms of soft power - cultural exchange, study abroad programmes, etc, which can help shape opinions and build civil society but don't come off as 'meddling' in the same way.

http://wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/summer-2015-an-age-of-connectivity/what-18-focus-groups-in-former-ussr-taught-us-about-americas-pr-problems/

The supposedly 'last ditch' talks to agree a deal on Ukrainian debt restructuring have ended in failure.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-14/ukraine-creditors-say-talks-to-continue-on-debt-restructuring

They averted a crisis in July by coming up with $120m from somewhere but look fairly certain to default in September when another $500m is due unless they can find a way to get debt relief. Half the $19bn debt is held by private US companies and the second largest creditor is Russia - neither has any incentive to make life easier. With the economy contracting by 15% in the last quarter, there's no money to finance the loans. Ukraine has asked for a 40% haircut, the private US creditors have offered 5% - conditional on future economic performance. If the US and EU are really serious about bringing the country into the fold, there needs to be something akin to a new Marshall Plan but there doesn't seem to be any appetite for that at the moment.

There's plenty of belligerence in the US press though, with the Washington Post using an editorial to rail against the international proposal, largely backed by Poroshenko, for discussions around federalism as a solution to the military crisis:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/putting-ukraine-in-an-untenable-position/2015/08/08/db76bba6-3c5a-11e5-9c2d-ed991d848c48_story.html

Former Bush advisor Kristofer Harrison accusing John Conyers of being "Putin's man in Congress" for demanding that US aid to Ukraine be withheld from the Neo-Nazi Azov brigade:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristofer-harrison/putins-man-in-congress_b_7957480.html

An aggressive PR defense would have been helpful when a couple of their soldiers allegedly sported swastika or SS patches, and it would have helped to counter Russia's smothering propaganda campaign aimed at convincing people that the Azov's emblem is a Nazi "Wolfsangel" (it's not, it an "N" and an "I" transposed over one another -- the resemblance is merely coincidental). As a result, they have some PR spade work to do. But let's be clear: We're talking about a unit at war, not a daycare. The Azov Battalion should not have to be responsible for defending itself against lies thrown over the transom from Moscow and repeated by irresponsible Members of Congress and reporters. Much of what little support the Obama administration has provided Ukraine is focused on integrating these volunteer units into Ukraine's National Guard. That is helping them regain some much needed legitimacy.

Heck of a coincidence:

http://i.imgur.com/ndsLgh3.jpg?1

I realise they need numbers but integrating Nazi idealogues is a very dangerous game. I bet some of these people are descendants of the genocidal trigger pullers of the 40's and proud of it.

Pretty much the only Ukrainian speakers eager to fight in the Donbas. The pre-2014 Ukrainian military was largly officered by ethnic Russians, and fell apart last March.

Not unlike the situation with the Iraqi military - the Sh'ia rank and file were there to collect paychecks, and only some Shia militia and their Iranian RG pals are willing to engage.

Russia continuing to make friends and influence people:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-33986733

An Estonian border official has been jailed in Russia for 15 years on charges of espionage and gun-running. Estonia claims he is innocent and was not in Russian territory when he was seized - which would be a clear violation of international law.

The FSB might not be as scary as their Cheka/NKVD precedents, but they sure do seem to be slowly getting there.

If you believe a quarter of the rumours about what they were up to from the early 90s to the early Putin era, they're arguably a lot less scary now than they were back then, but it's very difficult to get a read on them. There has been a lot of talk this year about the FSB consolidating its behind-the-scenes power to jockey for influence against Kadyrov but i never get the impression anyone writing about this stuff in the West or in Russia really knows what's going on.

The crazy Night Wolves nationalist biker gang are putting on a show in Crimea and it looks like it has been art-directed by a combination of Laibach and the WWE Federation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XioHZPdCvU

In other weird Russian news, the country's widest man and a troupe of Cossacks have been going into supermarkets and destroying what they (incorrectly) believe to be sanctioned goods:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_1ZBmYNny8

Ukraine reached a deal with the private creditors for restructuring and more debt relief than was expected, so that's great news. The biggest risk of default now is the $3bn bond they have to pay back to Russia. Ukraine wants a 20% haircut on the not unreasonable grounds that they can't pay and Russia has annexed their peninsula, Russia isn't playing ball:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-27/forget-templeton-ukraine-still-has-putin-s-bond-to-contend-with

This clarifies things, kind of...

http://i.imgur.com/rafc4r8.png

In Chechnya, the deputy commander of of Kadyrov's Sever battalion has been murdered, along with his wife, and there's inevitable speculation it's part of the ongoing game between the FSB and Kadyrov's forces - not least because it happened six months to the day from the Nemtsov killing.

Interesting conversation between the excellent Maxim Eristavi and Jaresko on the IMF, bonds and future of the Ukrainian economy:

http://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-natalie-jaresko-debt-deal-russia-crimea-war-donetsk-hryvnia-inflation-crisis/

There's a brave face being put on it but heavy industry was a key part of the Ukrainian economy and the admission that a lot of it probably won't come back is big. The model seems to be Estonia - rapid cutting of spending and taxes to drive inward investment and a shift towards an IT and service economy. It's something that Russia and Ukraine have both failed to properly capitalise on - each trains more computer programmers than almost anywhere else but they tend to emigrate to higher-paying markets. I'm not sure that's going to be easy to change.

The Ukrainian parliament just voted to allow greater regional autonomy with a view to making rule from Kyiv less divisive in the regions. Svoboda / Pravyi Sektor clashed with police in protest, throwing a grenade at them. 100+ people are injured, some apparently seriously.

One member of the National Guard died in the grenade attack outside parliament, another lost a leg.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/31/blast-kiev-parliament-ukraine-mps-back-more-autonomy-for-rebels

The man who threw it has been provisionally identified as a member of Svoboda and the Sich militia. This is what a lot of people had feared - Kyiv is full of disgruntled nationalist ex-paramilitaries with nothing much to do since the fighting largely stopped.

Two more members of the National Guard who were defending the Rada died as a result of their injuries in the grenade attack.

Svoboda have called it a "pre-planned provocation" on the part of the government against "Ukrainian patriots" despite the fact that the guy filmed throwing the grenade appeared on their election campaign posters:

http://i.imgur.com/dpxfQaE.jpg?1

Pravii Sektor following the same unapologetic line:

"I say that today we saw that Poroshenko has shed this blood," Right Sector spokesman Artem Skoropadskiy told 112 Ukraine TV on August 31. "This is exactly the same thing that happened during the regime of Yanukovych -- the use of force, the violent dispersal of peaceful protests, beating the opposition, and so on."

Oleh Lyashko, the head of the Radical Party who were part of the ruling coalition and provided the Vice-Prime-Minister, has just echoed the Svoboda line and called the attack a provocation. They have now left the government and moved into opposition. Between the two of them, the Radical Party and Svoboda got about 13% of the vote at the election last year and i'd expect that might be higher now that the People's Front has gone from 22%+ to being so unpopular they aren't even bothering to stand in local elections.

Huge protests in Moldova over the bank fraud referred to upthread:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34174028

It's being talked up as another 'Maidan' situation in some sections of the press but the current government is broadly pro-EU and the two main Russia-aligned political parties are encouraging their supporters to join in. Like Electric Yerevan, it seems to cross partisan lines.

Ukraine has banned three BBC journalists, including Steve Rosenberg and Emma Wells, along with loads more from El Pais, Zeit and others from entering the country as a "threat to national security". Can't even imagine the rationale behind this.

They banned two of the three Spanish journalists who are currently being held captive by ISIS!

It's the day Belarusians gather together to tell Lukashenko how much they love him.

Seems like there's a good chance he might break the 80% barrier this time around.

http://i.imgur.com/AKrz984.jpg

it's true what they say - everybody looks good harvesting potatoes

84% with an 87% turnout!

If he can get the sanctions lifted and bring peace to Ukraine I see no reason he shouldn't be aiming for the full 100 next time.

My sister is leaving for Ukraine next week to work as an election observer (think she's working for OSCE this time). Expecting some good emails ahead....

Which part of the country?

Not sure yet.

Former Moldovan PM Vlad Filat, leader of the pro-EU Liberal Democratic party, was taken away from Parliament in handcuffs yesterday in relation to the ongoing $1bn fraud investigation.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/15/us-moldova-protests-filat-idUSKCN0S91BY20151015

Plenty of local colour in the UKrainian elections:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/21/ukraine-elections-dirty-tricks

“We need to create Mossad-style special operative groups to enter Russia and kidnap Yanukovych and his associates, and bring them back to face trial,” said Korban, a businessman, who is barely 5ft and speaks in whispers

Five policemen trying to handcuff Chewbacca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ6yF1N4JLY&feature=youtu.be

The ongoing process of decentralising the government means the local politicians will have more power than ever before, so the local elections are getting a) more important and b) dirtier, with the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky leading on the latter.

Another oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, is the key figure behind the cancellation of the vote in Mariupol, the second biggest city in Donetsk oblast. For some bizarre reason, the ballot papers were being printed at a company he owns (though having said that he may own most of the companies) and Poroshenko has cancelled the whole election on the belief that too many ballots were being printed to enable fraud.

The hawkish PM Yatseniuk, whose party got 22% in the general election last year, decided not to put up any candidates this time as they've slumped to about 2%.

http://tinyurl.com/pss24xz

Good update on the Ukrainian election, though votes still being counted:

http://www.politico.eu/article/petro-poroshenko-hobbles-on-ukraine-local-election-vote-rigging/

The short version is that everyone lost. None of the major parties put in a good showing and a lot of big cities, including Kharkiv, Odessa and Dniepropetrovsk (the second, third and fourth largest in the country) either went with ex-Yanukovich men or Kolomoisky's pick, if initial results are right. Klitchko, running for Poroshenko's bloc, seems to have taken Kyiv though.

Kramatorsk, which was on the front line of fighting, stuck with Yanukovich allies.

There is some brilliant stuff in the new Snyder book Black Earth about how in double occupied Soviet zones people became compliant in murder for both the Nazi/Soviet regimes, even triple collaborators in some cases. Also stuff about members of the Polish Home Army who fought partisan warfare against the Nazis and were either shot or shipped off to Lubyanka as "Facists" by the Soviets in the post war years. Ukranians that initially were shooting Jews into death pits in '42 being recruited to swap sides, revelatory to me type stuff anyway.

It looks interesting but seems to have been quite controversial - though I don't know much of that is a hangover from Snyder's recent foray into contemporary political commentary.

I trust him but admittedly am not the most nuanced judge of historians, but for better or worse he has changed the way I look at 20th century Eastern European history and the holocaust and I think he is a great writer.

This David Bell piece highlights some of the main concerns with his work - particularly the apparent effort to shift blame onto ex-Communists rather than non-Communist Poles and Ukrainians and the broader sense that the Holocaust was a reaction to the Soviet Union rather than something that sprang from German society and European anti-semitism. idk, i'm not an expert. I might pinch Black Earth from the office if i see it around.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/history%E2%80%99s-black-hole-the-holocaust-eastern-europe-13645

He's one of the worst commentators on contemporary CEU politics but has a better rep in his day job.

Jesus, a Kogalymavia plane with 200 tourists on board has reportedly crashed after taking off from Sharm el Sheikh on route to St Petersburg.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-34687139

Hennady Korban, the five foot tall ' businessman' who was speculating about sending a Mossad style squad into Russia to get Yanukovich upthread has just been arrested, either for embezzlement or for running a private army (!). Nobody seems sure.

http://khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1446335891

He's obviously a crook but there is concern that the arrest is political. He is the leader of UKROP, Kolomoisky's party and a thorn in the side of Poroshenko. It is a tough position as these guys are a genuine threat to government security but any attepts to squash them are going to read as partisan politics.

Hard not to feel sorry for Poroshenko in these situations.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/05/ukraine-visa-free-european-travel-anti-gay-law

The EU had effectively promised visa free travel to all Ukrainians, which would be an unbelievably huge deal for tourists and business, if the Rada passed legislation stopping workplace discrimination again gay people. 75% of MPs refused.

One apparently capped the day by bottling another MP, a 62 year old woman, inside the debating chamber. She's now in hospital with concussion.

I am considering spending a tenner on Anna Bikont's The Crime and The Silence, mainly on the strength of the first few paragraphs of the NYRB review (until I hit the paywall) and it seems to be getting a lot of good reviews elsewhere. It is an account the Jedwabne massacre that has only just now been translated into English 11 years after the Polish edition.

Looks like Russia might be suspended from the 2016 Olympics over doping.

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/14918/production/_86584248_86584195.jpg
"Pyotr Pavlensky set the door of the Lubyanka building alight and was pictured standing in front of the blaze holding a petrol can."
That is just taking the piss! I could imagine decades later it will be revealed that this was his first stunt after the FSB recruited him.

It's interesting as he's quite well regarded by the state-sponsored art sector. I went to an exhibition of his stuff at the Tretyakov gallery about two years ago, which might not happen again for a while.

Poland looks set to appoint as Minister of Defence a guy who thinks Russia deliberately caused the 2010 plane crash that killed the President along with lots of other senior Polish officials.

http://news.yahoo.com/polands-pm-waiting-taps-controversial-defence-minister-183353053.html

Even more fun, he also believes Donald Tusk, PM at the time and current EU President, is an undercover agent and was in on it.

http://carnegie.ru/2015/10/29/silence-of-cis-russia-s-neighbors-and-syria-crisis/ikmb

I'd take that with a pinch of salt. The US has very pointedly just congratulated Kazakhstan on its 550th anniversary after comments from Putin that were interpreted as implying that it didn't have a pre-Soviet history of statehood but relations between the countries seem relatively good on the whole, with the biggest problem being the ongoing economic crisis. There hasn't been any public division over Syria and a couple of the leaders, particularly Rahmon are fanatically opposed to ISIS to a degree that makes Putin look mild. Public cheerleading for the bombing in countries already leaking fighters to ISIS and Al-Nusra is probably nagl though.

Thoughts on http://www.interpretermag.com/moscow-seen-laying-groundwork-to-annex-belarus-open-second-front-against-ukraine-next-year/ ?

That's embarrassing. It's worth remembering that The Interpreter is a project run by Pavel Khodorkovsky and funded by his father. Most Russian journalists, even those who are actively anti-government, won't touch it.

Lukashenko appears to be normalising relations with Europe (political prisoners released, playing peacemaker in Ukraine, getting sanctions lifted) rather than moving in the other direction. There doesn't seem much appetite for deepening hostilities in Ukraine at the moment, let alone annexing other countries to make it easier.

Pavlensky is going admirably all-in with this and demanding that the charges against him be changed from vandalism to terrorism:

http://calvertjournal.com/news/show/4971/russian-art-activist-pyotr-pavlensky-asks-to-face-terrorism-charges

The objective seems to be highlighting the Sentsov case where a Ukrainian film director was convicted of terrorist offences in Crimea on the basis of very shaky evidence.

Dmytro Yarosh has resigned as leader of Pravii Sektor. The rationale is a little unclear but there's speculation that there are splits in the organisation and his authority had been fatally undermined. Some of the analysis following his resignation has suggested that he is too 'moderate' for the hardline wing of the party, which is worrying.

It turns out the new Polish Defence Minister doesn't believe that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are real but he also doesn't *not* believe that they're real.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/10/polish-defence-minister-condemned-over-jewish-conspiracy-theory

What a difference a week can make.

Putin seems to have acknowledged that the plane was bombed, Cameron and Putin have both suggested they work together to fight ISIS and the US and Russia are apparently "closer" on agreeing a plan of action for a political settlement in Syria. Putin and Obama had both said they wouldn't meet each other at the G20 summit but had a "productive" chat over coffee (as seen in this great gif):

http://gfycat.com/ReflectingLargeFurseal

Putin has also said that he'll offer Ukraine full debt restructuring which will enable them to avoid default and take the current round of IMF funding. Rather than paying $3bn before the end of this year, they will pay $1bn per year in 2016 - 2018.

what is going on there? that is my favorite recent gif

is that guy supposed to be getting a secret scoop about the coffee meeting?

That's what it looks like. I love his attempt to sidle backwards inconspicuously.

the bag helps add to the effect

The TurkStream gas pipeline has been suspended, for obvious reasons:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34995472

Suspect it's too big not to go forward after an appropriate delay though. Turkey needs gas and Russia probably needs to sell it to someone.

Ukraine is having great fun trying to stop Dmytro Firtash coming back. He's an oligarch who was arrested in Austria on a U.S. warrant that was dismissed by the Austrian courts as politically motivated. It was thought he'd fly back on a charter plane so Ukraine banned all charter planes from entering the country. He's not charged with anything domestically so the Interior Minister was reduced to stationing the neo-Nazi Azov militia on the tarmac at Borispol to dissuade him from taking a regular plane.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/ukrainian-billionaire-cancels-trip-home-after-threat-of-arrest

I'll be there tomorrow so I hope they have cleared off.

Biden's over here at the moment trying to gee up the Rada in the fight against corruption:

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/biden-warns-ukraine-backsliding-corruption-35640048

The message boils down to 'the international community has bent over backwards to help Ukraine so don't fuck it up again'.

Slightly awkward that Hunter Biden is on the board of a company run by a guy who stole $23m from the state and whose prosecution the current authorities have been aggressively stalling.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ukrainians-see-conflict-in-bidens-anticorruption-message-1449523458

It's the crucial message to send, though whether it'll have any impact remains to be seen.

Khodorkovsky officially charged with two murders from 1998.

One side says it is because he has refused to stay out of politics following his release, another that he killed loads of people and deserves to pay for it. Both are probably correct.

The Ukrainian Parliament's war on its own dignity continues with gusto.

http://i.imgur.com/HO4eqg8.jpg?1

^^ highlight from this round of "mass brawl in the Rada". That's the PM getting manhandled.

Full fight on Youtube, of course:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/sCsnSuf5vaQ

These guys are all in the same coalition.

http://i.imgur.com/gUODdyP.jpg?1

Beautiful shot.

The guy trying to grapple Yatseniuk is Oleh Barna - a member of the President's party.

Interior Minister Avakov throws water in Saakashvili's face, apparently on the basis that he was 'hysterical' in accusing Yatseniuk + co of corruption and the only other option would have been to punch him.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/15/ukrainian-minister-throws-water-in-odessa-governors-face

MP Mustafa Nayyem wrote on his Facebook page: “This hell will keep going until Poroshenko states his position. A governor can’t accuse the prime minister of corruption and keep his post! Or if he does, it means either he is telling the truth, or people are scared of him, or they are using him.”

He added that in the case of Saakashvili, it appeared the president was using him, and the prime minister was scared of him.

Meanwhile if you want to sum up everything that is wrong with Russia in two news stories:

Alex Navalny reveals allegations that the country's top prosecutor is involved in a criminal conspiracy extending from high financial fraud to the massacre of a family in the sticks:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35044224

Alex Navalny reveals that his opposition bloc will be led at the next election by Mikhail Kasyanov:

http://www.rferl.mobi/a/russia-kasyanov-leading-opposition-elections/27422618.html

Kasyanov is universally known as "Misha 2%" thanks to his policy of taking a personal commission on every corrupt deal passing through government when he was Prime Minister. Idk why anyone would bother voting for any party.

sounds like they're in a strong position to resist russian challenges to ukrainian sovereignty.

Pretty much the only thing that they can do in a divided nation is try to convince people who didn't buy in to the overthrow of the previous government that they are competent technocrats who will improve quality of life and, as you can see, they're absolutely nailing that right now. Perversely, Saakashvili, who is a corrupt, stupid megalomaniac, in addition to not being Ukrainian, appears to be the most respected politician in a lot of national polls. He at least gives the impression that he wants reform and isn't beholden to the same oligarchs who have been running the country behind the scenes since independence.

Do you have any opinions on Anna Bikont, SV? Only asking because I just bought her well received book about the Jedwabne pogrom and thought you might have some take on it.

Haven't read any of her stuff yet but I've heard a lot of good things from people I trust. There's no doubt in my mind that the central idea of her book is correct.

Thanks. I'm glad I spent the money then.

https://www.rt.com/news/327907-poroshenko-economist-putin-photoshop/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35581708

"The bill would make it illegal to say that Poland "took part, organised or was co-responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich"

Fair enough as long as long as that doesn't also apply to the numerous Polish led massacres that occurred without any Nazi presence or coercion.

The omens don't look good:

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/1.703568

They are looking at stripping Jan Gross of his Order of Merit for his Jedwabne book to send a message that he is "an enemy of Poland".

Poroshenko has finally lost patience with PM Yatseniuk and the Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and told both to resign, threatening to dissolve the Rada if they don't.

They've both been almost universally loathed for a long time but the trigger is the resignation of Aivaras Abromavicius, who had been brought in from Lithuania as a clean pair of hands to be Minister of Economy and Trade, and the Deputy Prosecutor General Vitaliy Kasko this week. Both had said there is no point trying to work for reform as corruption is too entrenched and senior figures within the government were blocking any attempts at normalising the economy.

In the grand scheme of things Poroshenko is probably also one of those senior figures blocking meaningful reform but depending on who he replaces them with, getting rid of them could be a very positive step.

Yatseniuk has survived a vote of no confidence so remains as PM. 2 members voted in favour of him, 194 voted against, but they didn't get the 226 they required to boot him out. This is partly because the Opposition Bloc (broadly pro-Russian) all abstained. Yatseniuk is wildly anti-Russian but he's so widely disliked that having him there makes everyone else in government look bad by association.

On the subject of Poland's growing right wing

https://twitter.com/gullivercragg/status/700017077323767808

and a useful long read from The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/16/conspiracy-theorists-who-have-taken-over-poland

Many find the Law and Justice phenomenon utterly bemusing. Although still a relatively poor nation by western European standards, by any objective measure Poland’s recent history is one of triumph. It has the most successful and dynamic economy of any former communist country. After centuries of occupation and partition, Poland is now an independent state anchored in western political, economic and security institutions such as the EU and Nato. Poles have never been as prosperous and secure in more than 1,000 years of existence, and they now enjoy individual and collective rights their ancestors could only dream of.

And yet a significant minority of Poles believe that Poland and Polishness remain subject to foreign control and malign internal forces.

This is true to some extent but ignores the huge rise in the cost of living that is driving a lot of the disaffection with mainstream parties.

The madness continues. This is why PiS have been keen to stuff the institute of national remembrance with their own ppl.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-19/rewriting-history-in-warsaw-turns-walesa-legend-into-a-spy-story

Ramzan is stepping down!

http://uatoday.tv/politics/leader-of-chechnya-kadyrov-unexpectedly-says-time-has-come-to-step-down-600103.html

Nobody really knows what is going on with him so it could be anything from Putin pushing him out as a liability (timed with the anniversary of the Nemtsov assassination) or bringing him in closer to take a major role in Moscow. Alternatively, he might just want more time to play in the autumn leaves, cradle ducklings or dress up as a medieval knight.

Yatsenyuk is still clinging on to his role as PM but it's being strongly rumoured he will be gone this week and replaced by either Natalie Jaresko, the Finance Minister (who is American but has been resident in Ukraine for 10+ years) or, amazingly, Leszek Balcerowicz, the former deputy PM of Poland who has no obvious link to Ukraine at all. Balcerowicz was responsible for Poland's 'shock therapy' reforms in the 90s.

U.S. authorities are saying Mikhail Lesin, a very close ally of Putin who died last year, was killed by blunt force injuries.

http://sputniknews.com/world/20160311/1036099700/lesin-died-blunt-force-head-injuries.html

Background: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/the-mysterious-death-of-the-man-behind-putins-media-machine/548764.html

The Lesin business is a good, old-fashioned mystery.

What we know for sure is that he was Putin's closest media advisor and played a key role in bringing his influence to bear on the Russian press. In 2013 he was appointed as head of the media arm of Gazprom but quit a year later following an argument with the head of one of Russia's main liberal news outlets about an editor he wanted fired. He had spent most of the time since at his home in California but was in DC in early November attending an event held by another oligarch, Pyotr Aven. At some point, he was reported to have been found dead in his hotel room. RT, the station he helped found, and the Russian Embassy announced he had died of heart failure after a long illness. Last week the autopsy results appeared to show that he had sustained blunt force trauma, though the cause of death is still open.

There are dozens of conspiracy theories circulating, the main ones being:

Lesin did actually die of a heart attack and the U.S. is just trying to stir things up, or the medical examiners are mistaken
Lesin was murdered by Putin
Lesin was murdered by Kadyrov
Lesin was murdered by the CIA
Lesin was murdered by another oligarch he owed money to
Lesin faked his own death to escape a potential criminal charge in the U.S.
Lesin is in witness protection and will give evidence for the FBI against parties unknown

Adding weight to the idea that he might not be dead, his email account appears to have been accessed weeks after he died and there is a border control record of him 'leaving the U.S.' in mid-December. Apparently, this isn't uncommon, though, and people who bought return tickets are quite regularly listed as having exited the country even if they haven't due to admin errors.

There was a short program about Kharms on R4 the other day. They were reading some ordinary tales of everyday violence and murder from some contemporary Russian tabloid and showing how if you append "And that's just about it" on, they actually would pass as Kharms' own work.

all of putin's enemies to be pushed into a pit

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/19/passenger-jet-crashes-on-landing-in-russian-city-of-rostov-on-don

Gah! I use FlyDubai quite regularly and they are a pretty good airline. Looks like it was a problem with landing rather than anything more sinister.

http://www.factmag.com/2016/03/19/i-ran-the-official-record-store-soviet-azerbaijan

That's great!

Nadiya Savchenko, the most high-profile Ukrainian POW held by Russia, has been found guilty of involvement in the deaths of two journalists.

Background: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35860038

She has taken on the aura of Joan of Arc for Ukrainian nationalists despite some very dodgy connections and plausible involvement in war crimes. The Russian trial (which almost certainly only came about because she was illegally taken over the border) has been a farce, though, and in violation of all sorts of international norms. This could potentially lead to a new round of sanctions.

Karadžić has been found guilty of numerous war crimes. Was found not guilty of genocide in regions but guilty of genocide in Srebrenica specifically.

Kadyrov has decided he rather likes running his own fiefdom and will stay on after all.

https://www.rt.com/politics/337202-putin-backs-kadyrovs-candidacy-in/

It looks like he was just mooting the idea of leaving to get Putin to come out and back him in public.

There has been understandable outrage from pro-reform outlets like Hromadske and the Kyiv Post about Poroshenko not just entrenching corruption but actively fucking with the people dedicated to fighting it. Two former members of his party who were scrutinising the actions of oligarchs he is allied with are being kicked out of the Rada and the office of the Prosecutor General launched a raid on the offices of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau on Friday:

http://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/critical-lawmakers-to-be-expelled-from-parliament-after-exposing-corruption-410735.html

Kyiv Post has traditionally been sympathetic to Poroshenko so when they start floating the "worse than Yanukovich" line, it's not glib propaganda. It's hard to see how the U.S. and EU can fight this without turning off the money tap, which would carry negative repercussions elsewhere - not least the prospect of default.

A large majority of voters in the Dutch referendum on ratifying the EU trade deal with Ukraine have rejected the idea:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35976086

Many commentators in Ukraine are now wondering whether Kiev has done enough to counter the No campaign, whose efforts included the distribution of free waffles in wrappers with slogans urging the Dutch to vote against the agreement.

Obvs can't compete with free waffles. The referendum didn't really have much to do with Ukraine in the grand scheme of things. It was the first opportunity anti-EU voters had to test out a new law requiring a vote to be called on anything that garnered 300k petition signatures. The negative stories coming out of Kyiv about corruption, homophobia, etc probably didn't help but there's a fairly solid chance they would have lost anyway just on the strength of the EU protest vote.

This story about the murder of Yuriy Grabovskiy, a lawyer who defended everyone from neo-Nazis to Russian separatists - essentially unpopular causes who struggled to get anyone to touch their cases with a bargepole - was horrific.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/06/the-mystery-of-the-gay-jewish-defense-lawyer-murdered-in-ukraine.html

The degree of organisation - including taking his mobile phone to Sharm-el-Sheikh after his kidnapping and posting photos from the beach to his Facebook timeline - points a lot of people towards some kind of state actor being involved.

yatsenyuk resigning??

https://twitter.com/thomaswatkins/status/720325821358084096/

Yatsenyuk going is ostensibly a good thing but the critical issue is who comes after him. It looks like Groysman has just about managed to get the support he needs to form a new government but he is the most establishment pick imaginable and it is almost certain that most of the people seen as reformers in the west will either refuse to work with him or be pushed out. Natalie Jaresko is already out.

The Russian airforce buzzes US warships pretty frequently in the Baltic and Black Sea. Russia obviously argues that putting ballistic missile defense enabled warships in the Baltic and Black Seas is a provocation in itself but it is very easy to imagine a fighter crashing in to one while showing off and all hell breaking loose.

Groysman’s Jewishness is not very unusual, even for a mayor and senior politician in Ukraine, where 360,000 Jews live. But his openness about it was not customary in a country where anti-Semitism and decades of Communist repression once made it undesirable for politicians to be seen as too Jewish, said the local rabbi, Shaul Horowitz.

Last year, his reputation as an honest and effective administrator earned Groysman the title of speaker of the Ukrainian parliament before Thursday's vote that made him the first openly Jewish person to hold the country’s second highest post and, at 38, the youngest person to have the job.

Josef Zissels, a leader of the Vaad organization of Ukrainian Jews, pointed to Groysman’s ascent in politics as proof of the absence of serious anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Russia regularly points to the country’s alleged anti-Semitism to justify its conflict with Ukraine, including the annexation of Crimea.

“Clearly, Groysman’s nomination shows the opposite,” Zissels said of the claims.

http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/1.714378

Endeavoring to jump-start his city’s economy, Groysman has made use of his ties in Israel. He has family in the city of Ashdod, which his 69-year-old father, Boris, visits regularly. In 2012, Groysman welcomed Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman to Vinnytsia for the opening of a state-of-the-art medical diagnostic center that Israel built there.

That project demonstrated Groysman’s knack for using his broad network to meet the needs of his constituents and partners, according to one Ukrainian official who spoke to JTA under condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to speak to the media.

kinda amazing to me that the ukraine now has an openly [proud] jewish PM.

Yes, it is a negative appointment overall but that is definitely a positive. Fradkov, who has already been PM of Russia, is sometimes talked up as a successor to Putin but I think he is less openly religious.

The Czech Republic is rebranding as Chechnya Czechia and has put up a website to explain in great detail why this is not stupid:

http://www.go-czechia.com

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36090882

The Hague award of $50bn in compensation to three Yukos shareholders has been overturned. Russia signed but never implemented the charter they were claiming under and argued, correctly imo, that the business was never acquired in a legal manner to begin with.

The US-based Turkish Institute for Progress is putting the efforts of all other genocide deniers to shame atm. There was a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal earlier in the week, followed by skywriting over the Statue of Liberty plugging their website and now they're flying Turkish flags over the Armenian memorial services in LA.

https://mobile.twitter.com/natashavc/status/724335286965014528

I'm sure Obama - as the highest profile genocide denier - won't be losing any sleep over such foul offence against genocide victims on his own patch.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/upload/photos/large/2007_05/2007_05_24/front_2.jpg

This is kind of nuts:

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/78496

A bus was bombed in Yerevan last night, killing two people. This is in the week of the genocide remembrance, with various international figures in town, and obviously shortly after the Nagorno-Karabakh conflagration, so the assumption a lot of people made was that it was Armenia's first terrorist attack in recent memory, with Turkish or Azeri nationalists to blame. It looks like it was just a guy who wanted to blow up his parents and accidentally killed himself on the way there.

The Turkish / Russian divorce seems to be getting even more bitter:

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/78741

Erdogan has called the Black Sea 'almost a Russian lake' and has urged NATO to create a rival 'Black Sea Fleet'.

The big news in Ukraine at the moment is that Poroshenko cancelled his trip to the anti-corruption conference in London at 24 hours notice so he could stay behind and push the Rada into appointing his friend Yury Lutsenko (who has a conviction for embezzlement and no law degree) as Prosecutor General. This hasn't worked yet as they rejected an amendment to the law requiring the Prosecutor General to have the appropriate qualifications but efforts are ongoing.

long interview with pevear/volokhonsky on translating, russian:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6385/the-art-of-translation-no-4-richard-pevear-and-larissa-volokhonsky

https://twitter.com/RussianEmbassy/status/730701444823826432

Nadiya Savchenko, the Ukrainian pilot elevated to Joan of Arc status when she was arrested (or kidnapped) for alleged participation in the murder of Russian journalists and given a transparently unfair trial over the border, has been released today.

She's being swapped with two Russians arrested for alleged participation in separatist activities in Ukraine. This was always more or less inevitable but will be a huge deal in Kyiv - expect processions, etc.

Ukraine claims to have foiled an anti-Muslim / antisemitic terrorist plot targeting Euro 2016 in France.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/06/ukraine-detained-french-citizen-plotting-euro-2016-attacks

A man was caught trying to cross from Ukraine into Poland with 125kg of TNT, 100 detonators, RPGs and various other hardware he'd picked up in Eastern Ukraine. Although his identity hasn't been formally announced, he's apparently a former livestock inseminator / farmhand who went to fight for an extreme-right, pro-Ukrainian militia. If true, and the French seem to be taking a while to confirm the story, it would be the first example of a foreign fighter in a Ukrainian militia planning attacks abroad.

It goes both ways, though, as the recent profile of the pro-Russian militia leader, Igor Strelkov, in the Guardian shows:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/05/russias-valiant-hero-in-ukraine-turns-his-fire-on-vladimir-putin

The big unknown is how influential Russia's own militaristic irregulars will be on domestic politics and how they'll seek to make that influence felt. It has often been said that the biggest threat to the current government is more likely to come from the extreme right or the extreme left than centrist 'liberals' and Ukraine has been a fairly effective way for them to network and gain a profile.

he's apparently a former livestock inseminator / farmhand not to read too much into this but there is a weird kind of synchronicity that someone so intimately involved in the insemination / reproduction of animals should have such intense opinions about human populations, presumably miscegenation, etc.

http://i.imgur.com/WVJGKG0.png

Certainly looks like a deep thinker.

I'm not current on Russia/Mongolia political news posturing right now, but nevertheless: http://siberiantimes.com/ecology/casestudy/features/f232-extreme-warnings-issued-that-lake-baikal-could-drain-dry-like-the-aral-sea/

Newspaper Izvestia this week was blunt in assessing the eco-damage threat to Baikal, a natural reservoir which contains around 20% of the world's unfrozen freshwater.

'Baikal might share the destiny of the Aral Sea,' it stated. 'Construction of three hydro power stations on the Selenga River and its tributaries can cause the unique lake to dry out.'

The 25 million year old lake - a UNESCO world heritage site - is 'on the edge of environmental catastrophe and if certain measures are not taken, it might disappear just like the Aral sea.'

The impact of proposed Mongolian hydro projects could also be to threaten the Buryatian capital city, Ulan-Ude, in the event of an accident to one of three planned dams.

Environmental activist Sergey Shapkhayev warned: 'Potential damage from the third hydro power station which will be located on the Eg River (a Selenga tributary) could cause a huge catastrophe. Hydrological experts believe that this power station is the most dangerous of all.

The Aral, once one of the four largest lakes in the world, has substantially dried up due mainly to Soviet planners diverting rivers to use for irrigation projects. Pictures: Anna Baranova, Satellite images USGS

'This power station will be located in the seismically active part of Mongolia. And any seismic activity can cause all the stored water to wash away part of Mongolia and in half a day it would reach Ulan-Ude' - a city with a population of 415,000. At the same time, speed of water will be compatible to tsunami.'

The warnings come amid new hopes in Russia that ways can be found to persuade Mongolia not to go ahead with the the hydro schemes - see our earlier story here.

Izvestia said that the claims about an Aral-like denuding of Baikal were aired at a closed doors meeting at the Energy Ministry. Crucial to the dams not being built are an offer acceptable to Mongolia of guaranteed cheap energy - from Russia.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/22/poland-to-dig-up-bodies-of-victims-of-2010-smolensk-presidential-jet-crash

A reminder that the Polish Defence Minster (and probably the government itself) seems to believe that EU Council president / former Polish PM Donald Tusk is a Stasi sleeper agent who conspired with the Russian secret service to blow up Lech Kaczynski.

"Turkish sources" have said that all the participants in the Ataturk Airport attack were from the former USSR - Russia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36670576

The suspected mastermind is meant to be Akhmed Chatayev - a Chechen militant who switched to recruiting for ISIS. Russia is predictably pointing out they've had an arrest warrant out for him for over a decade, during which time he was arrested and jailed for a year (!) in Sweden for being found in possession of high explosives and assault rifles, arrested in Ukraine with bomb-making plans and a manual on the destruction of buildings (where the ECHR blocked his deportation to Russia) and granted political asylum in Austria.

Erdogan and Putin seem to have settled some of their differences. Erdogan apologised for the unfortunate incident with the Russian jet and Putin, after six days of making him wait, has accepted and loosened restrictions on trade and travel.

Something going down in Armenia:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-armenia-violence-idUKKCN0ZX06S

Armed men have seized a police station and there is talk of an attempted coup (though this seems a stretch).

There have been protests in Freedom Square and mass arrests.

protests in Freedom Square and mass arrests.

kinda lol but mostly sad

Pavel Sheremet, a top Belarussian journalist, was killed with a car bomb in Kyiv this morning. He was driving the car of the head of Ukrainian Pravda, possibly one of the most important papers looking into political and corporate corruption in the wider region. He was a critic of Putin and Lukashenko and a friend of Boris Nemtsov, so fingers will inevitably be pointed in that direction, but in the current situation there is unfortunately no shortage of people with the means or motive to kill investigative reporters.

Ukrainian Pravda was founded by Georgiy Gongadze, another investigative journalist, who was murdered (it is assumed) on the orders of former Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko and President Leonid Kuchma in 2000.

It's thought the current editor, Olena Pritula, who was Sheremet's partner may have been the target. She wasn't in the car but he borrowed hers to get to work.

trump to baltics: drop dead

As mentioned on the other thread, Estonia (and Poland fwiw) do meet the spending requirements. An argument could be made that Lithuania and Latvia consistently requesting more activity but contributing less money does need to be addressed - though it would also apply to 21 other NATO members iirc. It's a stupid question to ask though - Russia isn't going to invade the EU and the US wouldn't fail to assist if it did. The more interesting policy decisions would be around things like NATO expansion - would Trump continue the US press for Ukraine and Georgia to obtain full member status, etc?

It seems fairly odd for "would probably not invade Russia" to be a key plank of a Democrat argument against Trump given all the other ammunition he has provided them with. Assuming Clinton wants to improve relations in Eastern Europe, running a scare campaign around Trump being soft on Russia is probably not a good way to go about it. It also paints them into a corner if things do kick off in more plausible places like Ossetia and Abhkazia - given a re-run of the 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict, would they support bombing Russian troops, as Cheney apparently did?

I assume it's pitched at Polish and Ukrainian communities in swing states like Pennsylvania though.

having grown up in a heavily polish pennsylvania neighborhood, i would be very surprised if the community finds any of this of much concern

Pavel Sheremet's paper is reporting that the Prosecutor General has opened a criminal case into illegal surveillance of Sheremet and Prytula by the Deputy Head of the Ukrainian police force.

http://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2016/07/25/7115801/

Vadim Troyan, the guy in question, was a leading figure in the Neo-Nazi Azov battalion and his appointment was widely criticised at the time. Sheremet's last major story was an investigation into Azov acting above the law.

The surveillance and the murder aren't necessarily linked but he'll be questioned about both when he returns from holiday.

Not taking a view on who hacked the DNC but if it was Russia the level of incompetence is genuinely absurd.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/why-security-experts-think-russia-was-behind-dnc-breach-1.2736031

1. Not clearing metadata
2. Not getting one of the agents fluent in Romanian to pretend to be Romanian
3. Using "Felix Edmundovich" (Dzerzhinsky), founder of the Cheka secret police, as the name in the document editor.

It's like MI6 having "James Bond" as a code name. If it was a state actor, they either wanted to get caught for some reason or the capabilities of the Russian intelligence services are amazingly terrible.

So who do you suspect it is? If it isn't a Romanian civilian, and isn't the Russians, who is it?

Roger Stone

It's definitely possible it was Russian intelligence and they are just really bad. Another possibility would be Russian amateur hackers - and there are plenty of them tied in with Wikileaks.

According to the link you posted, the Guccifer character, and the first leaks, was created 24 hours after the Dems revealed the hack, which could explain a lot of the ineptitude. And if it's just amateur hackers, why go through the Guccifer deception?

If they can't get a Romanian speaker and wipe metadata within 24 hours it's still a pretty damning indictment of their abilities.

I've seen a few people suggesting a third position - that it could be government-linked online propagandists not operationally connected to the GNU or FSB - a 'troll factory' or something similar. It looks like the VPN IP address has only been used for a few things in the past - predominantly nuisance attacks and a Russian bride scam. It might explain the lower level of tech savvy.

Well, a lot of is still unknown, so who knows. But that would still make it government-linked, quite scary, and a really bad look for wiki-leaks.

Yes, it would still make it government linked. It would be quite reassuring if it was the FSB and they're staffed by bumbling incompetents these days. I'm sure they get up to much worse before breakfast though.

Assange has his own show on RT - which probably makes RT looks worse by association than Assange these days tbh.

Something going down in Armenia:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-armenia-violence-idUKKCN0ZX06S

Armed men have seized a police station and there is talk of an attempted coup (though this seems a stretch).

There have been protests in Freedom Square and mass arrests.

This siege is still going on, btw. They have held the police station for ten days and added more hostages today when they captured an ambulance crew.

The "Primorsky Partisans" have been released, following their acquittal at retrial last week:

https://themoscowtimes.com/news/jury-rules-not-guilty-in-primorsky-partizany-retrial-54654

It's a fascinating rabbit hole to go down.

What has always widely been assumed is that they were a group of around eight men who went on a rampage in Eastern Russia - shooting / stabbing police officers and raiding a station. They'd been convicted of two murders, along with a variety of other crimes, and were thought to have killed at least another four people.

The question had always been whether they did so as part of a wider criminal enterprise - essentially that they were bandits who killed police officers who were on their trail - or, as was claimed by associates, that they were leading a civilian fightback against corrupt police involved in drug trafficking. They got quite a lot of local support and have been picked up by some higher-profile Kremlin critics as counter-cultural heroes.

Sympathetic coverage of the "Sassoun Daredevils" in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/30/armenia-hostage-police-station-fourth-summer-of-protest

Doesn't mention the group actually killed one of the policemen.

The 'Daredevils' apparently killed another police officer with sniper fire from within the compound today.

Fairly balanced statement from the EU:

http://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/armenia/press_corner/all_news/news/2016/2016_07_21_en.htm

Crowds of protesters are gathering in the central square again so there will be a lot of scrutiny of how the police respond. They were widely condemned for heavy-handed tactics last night.

Siege in Yerevan over!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36937346?ns_mchannel=social&ns_campaign=bbc_breaking&ns_source=twitter&ns_linkname=news_central

Interesting piece on Manafort's activities in Ukraine:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/us/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html?_r=0

It suggests that he was actually pushing Yanukovich to move closer to Europe and lobbying the US to support EU membership - advice Yanukovich ultimately ignored.

Also covers some of his business activity - including the private equity company he founded with Rick Davis that drew a huge amount of money from Oleg Deripaska, who has an interesting and colourful business history.

It's worth noting that Rick Davis (and Davis-Manafort inc.) had a major role in John McCain's 2008 presidential run. He set up a meeting between Deripaska and McCain too.

A fairly blunt assessment of the current state of government in Ukraine from a pro-Euromaidan, anti-Yanukovich journalist:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/01/kiev-in-denial-ukraine-poroshenko-corruption/

The gist is that corruption is deepening and the elites are banking on Ukraine's notional position as a bulwark against Russia to ensure indefinite, unscrutinised foreign funding. Also a dark hint towards the end that the nationalists currently fighting separatists could easily turn on the government.

Crimea a flashpoint again:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/10/russia-accuses-ukraine-of-armed-crimea-incursion

Notwithstanding the fact that Crimea is technically still Ukraine, Russia has accused Ukrainian border guards of starting a firefight with soldiers to distract from a group of 20 saboteurs crossing over. Two Russian soldiers were supposedly killed. Ukraine denies any of this took place and says it's 'hybrid warfare' / a provocation designed to justify retaliatory action at some point in the future.

Saboteurs have apparently bombed power lines supplying Crimea before, though i think they were located in 'mainland Ukraine' rather than Crimea. There have been quite a few minor bombings blamed on Ukrainians / Tatars.

I've seen a few people suggesting that if it did take place, the fact that it took them two or three days to catch two of the twenty and the rest were able to cross and recross the border at will would be pretty embarrassing to Russia.

Putin has replaced Sergei Ivanov, his chief of staff, with Anton Vaino. Ivanov was generally thought of as one of the three or four most powerful people in the government..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37058751

The takes range from 'Ivanov was trying to defuse tension over Ukraine in the face of renewed adventurism from Putin' to 'replacing a former FSB chief with a diplomat shows that Russia wants to refocus on negotiation and engagement', which goes to show how remarkably little anyone really knows about what goes on at the Kremlin.

There's speculation that Islam Karimov may have popped his clogs. He was taken to hospital in a "serious condition" last night.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-37208407

Good, fairly balanced profile piece on Ukrainian journalists-turned-political-reformers Mustafa Nayyem and Sergei Leshchenko in The New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/05/reforming-ukraine-after-maidan

thanks for that link

Looks like today could be the day someone finally opens the box on Schrödinger's Karimov, though the new Reuters headline "Karimov dies - diplomatic sources" still links through to an article about him being critically ill and Nazarbayev going to pay him a visit.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-uzbekistan-president-health-idUKKCN1180A8?il=0

It appears to have been confirmed by his family (in true Central Asian style) via Instagram.

There is a lot of speculation that the succession was more or less finalised when Gulnara was given the boot for being too fabulous but nobody seems to know who is taking over.

Was he the one with the crazy pop star plutocrat daughter?

Yep - who hasn't been seen for two years.

Yeah I just read that! Good luck Uzbecks.

tbh, as long as whoever comes in doesn't boil dissidents alive and shorten the school year so nine-year-olds can do extra unpaid forced labour in the cotton fields they at least have a shot at being an improvement.

Former Gawker co-owner Viktor Vekselberg is currently having his offices raided and top management staff interviewed by police over allegations of corruption. His mining business is accused of bribing the regional government of Komi.

It's presumably linked to the criminal case against the former governor of Komi, Vyacheslav Gaizer, who's accused of running an organised crime ring. When police searched his property, they found 60kg of jewelry and 150 watches - worth between $30k and $1m each.

The offices of Kiev oligarch Dmytro Firtash's TV station, Inter, were set on fire in an arson attack yesterday - with staff still inside. It has been accused of being too sympathetic to Russia.

http://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/inter-tv-studios-set-ablaze-in-arson-attack-422228.html

Depressing to see the very good polling operation Levada potentially blacklisted by the Russian government under laws designed to give extra scrutiny to NGOs receiving money from foreign actors - in this case, allegedly, the U.S. government:

https://themoscowtimes.com/news/levada-center-blacklisted-55217

Hopefully they will win the appeal. There is speculation it has been timed to stop them reflecting a dip in a United Russia's ratings ahead of the election.

idk whether it's connected to the Vekselberg investigation but the police raided the home of one of Russia's top anti-corruption officials at the weekend and found $122m in cash, which will take some explaining.

https://www.rt.com/news/358891-russia-corruption-officer-dollars/

He was keeping it safe from evildoers

State Duma elections today - the most notable thing seems to be a vastly reduced turnout so far. Moscow region has consistently registered about 50% turnout by 6pm in recent elections, down to 29% today. No obvious enthusiasm for opposition parties but potentially a weaker show of support for United Russia than in years.

First exit polls have United Russia on 45, the far-right Liberal Democratic Party and the ghastly Communist Party on 15 apiece, the far-right/centre-left mishmash of A Just Russia on 8 and the main liberal party, Yabloko, on 3.5 - likely to miss the cut to get any state funding.

https://mobile.twitter.com/olliecarroll/status/777569666436915200/photo/1

https://themoscowtimes.com/photogalleries/election-2016-vote-for-55364

I came across these campaign posters today. My favourite is the PARNAS party one.

This is interesting:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-corruption-idUSKBN12V1EN

There's a new e-declaration system which Ukrainian politicians are meant to use to list their assets - tied to the ongoing IMF threats to turn off the money tap if corruption isn't tackled. The Prime Minister, who is 38, has a salary of $3000 a year and afaik has only ever held similarly-paid public sector jobs, declared 15 properties and $1.8m in bundles of physical cash. Others have been declaring million-dollar wine collections, luxury watches and sports cars.

I'd still assume it's only a fraction of their actual wealth but it's interesting, and probably positive, that it's being done at all.

Moldova's presidential election is going to a second round with neither of the candidates getting the 51% they needed in the first vote. Igor Dodon, who's a great admirer of Putin, should win comfortable barring an upset - having got 48.5% vs the pro-EU candidate's 38%.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37814503

It also looks like Georgian Dream, possibly the only political party named after a rap track released by the founder's son, has taken a huge majority in their elections - trouncing the corpse of Misha Saakashvili's party.

They're generally in favour of the EU (both parties are) but seen as much closer to Russia than the opposition.

*comfortably*

Lots of strange goings-on in Montenegro at the moment.

The government claims to have foiled a plot to take over parliament on election day (16th October) and kill the newly-installed PM, replacing them with a nationalist coalition. Supposedly, 500 people were set to storm the building with the help of 'hired sharpshooters'. The police seized barbed wire, knuckle-dusters and baseball bats and arrested twenty people, all Serbian nationals afaict, on the 16th - including a former police commander. The special prosecutor has said that at least two Russian nationalists were involved in organising / directing the plot.

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/montenegro-s-prosecution-says-nationalists-from-russia-behind-coup--11-06-2016

Seventeen of the twenty people have been released without charge already and the three still being held have not been charged, as yet.

Misha Saakashvili has quit as head of the Odessa region:

https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/saakashvili-resigning-post-odesa-regional-state-administration-head.html

He claimed the Kyiv government are "filth, scum, traitors to the revolution and war profiteers" and seems to have accused Poroshenko of being in league with the Odessa mafia:

https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/saakashvili-resigning-post-odesa-regional-state-administration-head.html

He's pretty popular with a section of the public but has had next to no official support for months and can't get anything done.

idk why i posted that link twice.

His (Dutch) wife Sandra Roelofs - once first lady - is running for parliament in Georgia and it looks like she will get a seat. Which I find rather odd since her husband is exiled from the country isn't he?

That's interesting.

There is an open case against him for abuse of power so, if he did go back, he'd be arrested. iirc one of the reasons he gave up his Georgian passport and took Ukrainian citizenship was to avoid being deported.

There are competing theories as to why he quit - one is that he still has his eye on going back to Georgia and feels that the problems in Ukraine are going to taint that. Another is that he's naturally impulsive and easily frustrated and just wasn't cut out for the slow grind of systemic reform.

*Extradited, rather than deported.

Thanks SV. Those theories do not necessarily compete though, they're probably both not far off from the truth.

https://www.ft.com/content/0c129a2c-81a0-3e3a-b17b-792646ea85eb

Estonia’s prime minister has lost a parliamentary no confidence vote, opening up the possibility that a pro-Russian party could join a new government at a sensitive moment.

They're pretty benign for a "pro-Russia" party, tbf, and have mainly won their support from the portion of Russian-Estonians allowed to vote by campaigning on economic issues like increasing the minimum wage, iirc. They're pretty firmly European and would just be one partner in a coalition (though i would guess they'd become the senior one).

Igor Dodon has won the Moldovan election, as expected:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37970155

Describing it as 'pro-Russia' vs 'pro-Europe/US' is an oversimplification. There's a lot of domestic politics that gets glossed over. This probably didn't help though:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/world/europe/moldova-vlad-plahotniuc.html?_r=0

The Bulgarian presidential election has also gone to someone aiming for a pragmatic balance between Russia and the EU - and capitalising on disenchantment with membership:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bulgaria-election-idUSKBN13801Q?il=0

This is an interesting piece on the arms race between Armenia and Azerbaijan:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-13/kamikaze-drones-russian-missiles-jolt-oldest-ex-soviet-conflict

Azerbaijan's military budget is higher than Armenia's entire state budget. Both sides are buying from Russia - with Azerbaijan also using Israel as a supplier of weaponised drones.

Azerbaijan look the odds on favourites in terms of GDP, military strength, powerful allies etc if it kicked off. But they didn't seem to do so well last time.

Wasn't that before the oil boom?

Alexei Ulyukayev, the Russian Economy Minister, has become the first serving minister to be arrested since Beria:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37983744

It looks like the FSB might have run a sting operation culminating in him being caught asking for $2m to make sure the sale of Bashneft to Rosneft went through.

As the BBC article indicates, it's an odd one to start with - Bashneft and Rosneft are both mostly owned by the government.

Sceptics are split between "nobody is going to try to shake down Igor Sechin" and "$2m seems unrealistically small".

so SV or someone else, can you recommend a good English-language book on Putin and/or his rise to power?

i have seen masha gessen's 'man without a face' praised but have not read

I don't think there will be a good Putin book until after he is dead tbh. I tried a couple of them, including the Gessen one and found it quite sketchy/gossipy and not very compelling.

I keep meaning to go back to Kotkin's Armageddon Averted but I don't think that was in the same class as his Stalin book and don't feel compelled to finish it.

I would steer clear of Gessen, tbh.

From what I have seen of it, and her journalism more generally, Anna Arutunyan's The Putin Mystique might be a good bet in his popularity and leadership style but idk how much it deals with his rise to power.

Alex Navalny has announced he will run against Putin for the presidency in 2018.

His first set of policy announcements includes banning people from Central Asia and the Caucasus from visiting Russia without a visa.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/world/europe/vladimir-putin-russia-fake-news-hacking-cybersecurity.html

CAMBRIDGE, England — His indomitable will steeled by a dozen years in the Soviet gulag, decades of sparring with the K.G.B. and a bout of near fatal heart disease, Vladimir K. Bukovsky, a tireless opponent of Soviet leaders and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, is not a man easily put off his stride.

But he got knocked sideways when British police officers banged on the front door of his home on a sedate suburban street here early one morning while he lay sick in bed and informed him that they had “received information about forbidden images” in his possession.

In April last year, the veteran Soviet dissident, a onetime confidant of Margaret Thatcher, finally found out what was going on: The Crown Prosecution Service announced that he faced five charges of making indecent images of children, five charges of possession of indecent images of children and one charge of possession of a prohibited image.

The case was supposed to go to court in May in Cambridge but, after Mr. Bukovsky, 73, entered a not-guilty plea it was delayed until Dec. 12. This followed a prosecution request for more time to review an independent forensic report on what had been found on Mr. Bukovsky’s computers and how an unidentified third party had probably put it there.

“The whole affair is Kafkaesque,” Mr. Bukovsky said in an interview. “You not only have to prove you are not guilty but that you are innocent.” He insisted that he was the victim of a new and particularly noxious form of an old K.G.B. dirty trick known as kompromat, the fabrication and planting of compromising or illegal material.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/dec/12/soviet-dissident-vladimir-bukovsky-downloaded-thousands-of-child-abuse-images-uk-court-told

In an interview, Bukovsky told detectives he had become interested in child abuse images in the 1990s in the context of a debate on the control and censorship of the internet. “He became curious,” Carter said. Bukovsky then looked for and discovered this material online, the prosecutor said.

“Bukovsky said his initial curiosity turned into a hobby, rather like stamp collecting,” Carter said. The dissident continued to download images between 1999 and 2014, and estimated that he had accumulated a collection of “1,500 movies”. His interest varied year by year. The last downloads took place days before his arrest.

“His computer was looking for material constantly,” Carter told the jury. “Mr Bukovsky said in essence he didn’t see what harm he was doing. He said the children in most of the material looked as if they were enjoying themselves.”

I have an excellent bridge going cheap if anyone at the New York Times is interested.

http://deadline.com/2016/12/game2-winter-rape-murder-russian-reality-series-yevgeny-pyatkovsky-1201871444/

Astonishing activities in the Polish parliament last night.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38347674

The ruling party held the vote on the 2017 budget late at night in a meeting room outside of the main chamber of parliament - the first time that had ever been done. Armed parliament security guards were allegedly asked to keep some opposition MPs and the media out of the hall and the vote was passed on a show of hands. The opposition alleges that people who are not MPs were in the room and were counted as being in favour.

In a separate vote, the number of reporters allowed to cover parliament next year has been severely curtailed.

The attack was a rare instance of an assassination of any Russian envoy. Historians said it might have been the first since Pyotr Voykov, a Soviet ambassador to Poland, was shot to death in Warsaw in 1927.

This is horrific:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/19/russia-irkutsk-surrogate-alcohol-siberia

48 people have died in Irkutsk after drinking a tainted, counterfeit batch of bath tincture. The government introduced a minimum price of 220R for 500ml of vodka (currently about £2.75) and reduced it to 185R last year because so many people were drinking "aftershave" or "bath tincture" instead.

Bath products are still less than half the price so it hasn't really helped much. They're often absolutely sold with the intention of being drunk. I have yet to see a 500ml screw-top bottle of cologne outside of low-end Russian minimarkets.

I have drank some awful blended whiskies in my time, and known some suicidal boozers. But I never met anybody so far gone that they had become inured to the absolute awfulness of casual aftershave drinking.

Grim new chapter in the Petr Pavlensky saga:

https://twitter.com/NataliaAntonova/status/820939051167531008

Interesting stuff being reported about the FSB agents arrested for treason this week. None of it is verified yet but it's plausible.

The theory is that the (arrested) FSB cyber security deputy chief Sergei Mikhailev figured out who was leading the Anonymous-style Russian hacker collective Shaltay Boltay (a journalist called Vladimir Anikeev) and pressured them into targeting particular government figures, culminating in the Surkov email leak. Anikeev was lured back to Russia by the FSB and arrested in October - and is presumed to have ratted out the FSB agents he was working with, including Mikhailev.

There is some background on Shaltay Boltay here:

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2015/02/02/a-man-who-s-seen-society-s-black-underbelly

So that refutes speculation by TPM etc if I'm reading you correctly

If correct, yes. The idea being floated at the moment that the FSB agents were involved in hacking the DNC, etc, wouldn't really square with the allegation that it was the GRU that was leading it anyway.

Over/under odds on a Russian invasion of Belarus?
https://warisboring.com/belarus-prepares-for-hybrid-war-as-europes-last-dictator-knocks-russia-86384fd2a468#.w1swn03dk

This is mostly about a dispute over the price of gas. Russia sells it to Belarus at a heavy discount - which they see as subsidising the Belarussian economy. The decline in the price of gas has hit the revenue Belarus gets for transporting it to Europe, so Belarus increased transport tariffs by 50% - pretty much trying to hardball Russia into cutting the (historically fixed) price of gas Belarus buys for domestic use. They are currently negotiating prices and tariffs in Minsk and the Lukashenko seems to be playing a similar game to Yanukovich in using overtures towards the EU to extract a better deal. I don't think it's anything to be particularly concerned about and the upside is visa free travel to Belarus.

*the Lukashenko camp.

I don't think even Lukashenko refers to himself as "The Lukashenko"

It looks like Navalny has been convicted of embezzlement again so will be barred from running for President. I assume he'll appeal via the ECHR again, though.

Dmitro Firtash is being extradited to the US!

http://news.trust.org/item/20170221133243-grpm3

The first extradition request, on a charge of bribery, was rejected by an Austrian court on the grounds that it was politically motivated, but this has been overturned on appeal.

This could get very interesting. Firtash has alleged ties to politicians all over the world, business people of all shapes and sizes and - allegedly - the capo di tutti capi of the "Russian mafia" Semion Mogilevich.

it kind of was politically motivated, though, right? i mean i have no doubt that he probably did bribe this titanium company or whatever but the timing of the arrest warrant was.. interesting

i met a guy recently who, a few years ago, drove out to broker the sale of a vinyard and it turned out firtash was the buyer. bristling with gun-toting heavies, etc. He found out more about him and decided not to return his calls.

Sure, it was almost certainly done at the request of the Ukrainian government as part of a clan vs clan power struggle. He's likely to be guilty though. It'll be interesting to see how hard the Trump administration wants to push him.

ok what's going on now

Jehovah's Witnesses ban?

loads of ropey oligarchs making discreet Trump donations via limited liability companies?

brave britain making a stand against russian menace by escalating baltic situation it seems

SV will this end in war pls tell us

The last time we were fixing for war in Europe the Jehovah's Witnesses were getting banged up in the German KL system, so maybe Russia planning to ban them for their apolitical peacenik tendencies is a bad omen.

Never say never but there is no realistic prospect of war. There is no incentive for Russia to invade Estonia, no particular separatist sentiment and nothing much for British soldiers to do.

what the hell are we playing at then

NATO being NATO. "Showing commitment " to the Baltic states and giving soldiers something to do.

shouldn't they be peacekeeping and feeding the starving in somalia or something

here, let me have control of the armed forces

It is unusual that the UK is less than half the population of the Russian Federation and our population has grown by about 3 million more than theirs since the cold war era. If we could just knock a decade or so off avg life expectancy the housing/social care problems would be slightly improved - I'm doing my bit for that cause!

This dude has just been shot dead at a hotel in Kyiv:

http://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-voronenkov-maksakova/28313807.html

This is nuts.

"Thank god! They should have shot him for treason long ago," says Voronenkov's mother-in-law

Ice cold.

http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-soviet-nkvd-greatgranddaughter-seeks-painful-truth/28382571.html

I like the karmic balance of that Great Terror story linked on the same page, the overenthusiastic NKVD officer who makes the mistake of trying to implicate Stalin's fave writer in some bogus Cossack intrigue and ends up getting shot for "violating socialist legality".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/gunman-in-ukraine-kills-putin-foe-in-attack-denounced-as-state-terrorism/2017/03/23/72ddd20e-0fc7-11e7-ab07-07d9f521f6b5_story.html

Washington Post interviewed Voronenkov Tuesday night:

“For our personal safety, we can’t let them know where we are,” he said toward the end of the hour-long interview. “It’s a totally amoral system and in its anger it may go to extreme measures. There’s been a demonization of us. It’s hard to say what will happen.

“The system has lost its mind,” he added. “They say we are traitors in Russia. And I say, ‘Who did we betray?’ I gave testimony against the citizen of another country who was president, who fled his country, created a bloodbath, betrayed his country.”

As he left the interview, he added: “It’s hard to imagine we will be forgiven.”

The guy who shot him died a couple of hours ago in hospital. It's rumoured that he's an ex Ukrainian National Guard soldier but that wouldn't tell us anything, if true. Hired killers often have a service background.

Died from what?

He was shot by Voronenkov's bodyguard during the attack.

What happened to the bodyguard?

He is fine, apparently. Was wounded but only lightly.

Seems more or less confirmed that the killer was ex-Ukrainian army now. The Kyiv police chief says they are working under the assumption it was a contract killing.

Separately, this is interesting:

http://www.rferl.org/a/former-ukraine-finance-minister-jaresko-to-manage-puerto-rico-financial-crisis/28387912.html

Natalie Jaresko, the former Ukrainian finance minister has been appointed by the US to overhaul Puerto Rico's budget. Expect lots of privatisation and cuts to services / pensions.

Local media and the nationalist MP Oleh Lyashko are claiming the killer was a member of the far-right / ultranationalist Azov battalion but again that doesn't shed much light on whether there was a nationalist motive, he was a hired gun or, as the eccentric Interior Minister claims, he was a Russian government plant in the Ukrainian militia. Hired gun is substantially more likely than anything else.

The big news over the last few days has been the Navalny protests centred around Medvedev. The numbers are still low - 10k-15k in Moscow - but for the first time they have been coordinated across the country in places as diverse as Tomsk and Makhachkala, adding up to an estimated 60k people nationwide. There is a profile of him here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-28/inside-alexei-navalny-s-long-shot-bid-to-beat-putin

He is still probably barred from standing for election but there is speculation that this might be reversed and that it could be better for him to stand and be defeated.

With perfect timing, Nadia Savchenko has given a pretty good reminder of why pinning your political hopes on unpredictable nationalists to fight oligarchy might not be the best idea. She is the Ukrainian pilot who was jailed in Russia, released to a hero's welcome, courted by politicians and hyped as a potential president by the western press.

In a phone-in, she agreed with a caller who claimed Ukraine was under 'the Jewish yoke' and she used it as a springboard for an antisemitic rant about how Jews have 80% of the power in Ukraine and she "doesn't like yids". This will hopefully be the end of the puff pieces about her but it's another depressing reminder that there are no easy saviours waiting in the wings.

Jesus that's messed up.

At least 10 people killed in two separate bomb attacks on the St Petersburg metro.

Reports that it could be three.

Seeing just one now.

Yes, there has been discussion of two devices that didn't explode but i think some of the confusion was initially caused by the practice of interchange stations having two names.

Poot is in StP to give a speech

That's an interesting choice to replace Scott Weiland.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/86/The_Wire_Poot.jpg
http://www.kshe95.com/sites/g/files/exi371/f/styles/large_730/public/article-images-featured/773541-386141.jpg?itok=NjWg4Rly

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/world/europe/chechen-authorities-arresting-and-killing-gay-men-russian-paper-says.html?_r=0

By ANDREW E. KRAMER
APRIL 1, 2017
MOSCOW — First, two television reporters vanished. Then a waiter went missing. Over the past week, men ranging in age from 16 to 50 have disappeared from the streets of Chechnya.

On Saturday, a leading Russian opposition newspaper confirmed a story already circulating among human rights activists: The Chechen authorities were arresting and killing gay men.

While abuses by security services in the region, where Russia fought a two-decade war against Islamic insurgents, have long been a stain on President Vladimir V. Putin’s human rights record, gay people had not previously been targeted on a wide scale.

The men were detained “in connection with their nontraditional sexual orientation, or suspicion of such,” the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, reported, citing Russian federal law enforcement officials, who blamed the local authorities.

By Saturday, the paper reported, and an analyst of the region with her own sources confirmed, that more than 100 gay men had been detained. The newspaper had the names of three murder victims, and suspected many others had died in extrajudicial killings.

A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, denied the report in a statement to Interfax on Saturday, calling the article “absolute lies and disinformation.”

“You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” the spokesman, Alvi Karimov, told the news agency.

“If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” Mr. Karimov said.

Yeah this is a horrible situation. Even if the details aren't entirely clear, dozens of people definitely seem to have been arrested despite no legal grounds for doing so and there are credible reports of assault/ torture, at the least, which reinforce the idea that Chechnya is a law unto itself.

The spokesman's quote is one of the most chilling things I've ever heard.

It is such a brazen admission of murderous intent, it seems quite shocking even by Kadyrov regime standards.

Long piece by Oliver Bullough on Ukraine, the UK, Yanukovich, Poroshenko, corruption, Panama papers, Hunter Biden, the Atlantic Council and more is worth a read:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/12/the-money-machine-how-a-high-profile-corruption-investigation-fell-apart

Reports are coming through suggesting that the suspected Moscow "Grand Theft Auto" killers have been caught.
They were apparently putting spikes on roads late at night and shooting anyone whose cars got stopped by them, for no apparent reason. Nothing was ever stolen. They were thought to have killed at least 14 people in the last few months. It sounds a bit like an urban legend but is supposedly 100% true.

..........

This gets stranger. The police appear to have arrested a gang of 'Islamist terrorists' from Central Asia for the crimes, with the leader being killed during an attempt to take him in.

Quite why a terror cell would have done all this and not bothered to tell anyone hasn't been explained.

― Wristy Hurlington (ShariVari), Thursday, 13 November 2014 13:59 (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

!!!!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/01/three-moscow-grand-theft-auto-gang-suspects-shot-dead-trying-to-flee-court

Ukraine revoked Misha Saakashvili's passport a few weeks ago and, to much mockery, has been beefing up border security with Poland in case he tries to get back in. He has, according to reports, literally just run through the line of border guards and broken back in. This is completely ridiculous/ amazing.

I heard that. He's stateless now isn't he?

Yes. He says that Ukraine revoked his passport illegally, they say he lied on his application for citizenship and that he failed to disclose he was under criminal investigation- which, tbh, everyone always knew.

He had to give up Georgian citizenship to take a place in the Ukrainian government. I assume he will be American before too long.

Aargh. A Krasnodar couple in their mid-thirties have apparently been arrested for killing and eating dozens of people over the course of twenty years.

The man lost his phone - which someone found and took to the police when they saw it had selfies of him posing with body parts.

Amazing reporting on the battle over a Kazakh oligarch's assets / the spies and counter spies brought in to fight it

https://amp.ft.com/content/1411b1a0-a310-11e7-9e4f-7f5e6a7c98a2

hey shari can you shed more light on the krasnodar killers? my bf does a murder podcast this’d be nice for

(apologies if it’s too soon and thus in bad taste)

Honestly, i don't think a lot more has come out yet, in terms of official statements. The main report was from a Russian site called Mash and most of the Western coverage has been, more or less, a verbatim translation. The only apparently developments are that the woman has been determined to be mentally competent and they have confessed to killing 30 people. The investigators are currently going through their freezer to determine how much of the meat is human.

The local tabloids have suggested that Nataliya had previously been a nurse but had been applying for jobs as a cook at local bistros (thankfully unsuccessfully). The man (Dmitry) is apparently an orphan who was adopted at the age of three - which i imagine will lead to speculation about the link between lack of affection in early years and psychopathy. Again, this is all from the tabloids to take it with a pinch of salt but the adoptive parents apparently had a biological child four years later and paid less attention to Dimitry. His adoptive mother died when he was fifteen and his father kicked him out of the house - around the same time he took up with Nataliya (who would have been in her early twenties). They're both described as heavy drinkers and it's thought that a lot of their victims would have been people they drank with.

What's the podcast btw?

it’s called Bloody Murder, and thanks that’s an effed up sounding story!

Ha I just mentioned this to my podcast friends and one was all "oh yeah I already heard about this" - its all over the news!

I'll definitely give the podcast a listen.

In other true crime news, Newsweek has a report on the Grand Theft Auto killings around Moscow:

http://www.newsweek.com/2017/10/06/death-russia-grand-theft-auto-killers-moscow-notorious-gang-673110.html

They're still a complete mystery - a series of terrorist attacks with no attempt at communicating a public message vs a series of robberies in which nothing was stolen vs something else entirely.

i've been enjoying The Putin Interviews on Showtime. that was cool to see him and Oliver Stone watch "Dr. Strangelove" together in part 2.

afterward Stone gifts the DVD to him but as they are departing Putin turns to the camera to reveal the DVD case was empty and jokes "Typical American gift". lol

Russian opposition figures say Ksenia Sobchak’s presidential bid is a Kremlin-organized sham.

Any thoughts on this 3d chess theory, SV?

I think Sobchak is probably entirely sincere and is an 'opposition figure' of sorts but it plays into the Kremlin's hands. She generally appears out of her depth in political interviews and represents everything the bulk of the country tends to resent about 'liberal' figures - ultra-rich jet-setting Muscovite, links to the corruption and chaos of the 90s, perception of snobbery, etc. The reason Navalny has been relatively successful is that he represents, for better or for worse, a break from that.

The nature of the presidential election process means that left-field candidates pretty much need the support of established political infrastructure to generate the 300,000 signatures required to be in the running and there's a strong suspicion that United Russia will help Sobchak along with that. I don't think it's a fix, as such, but it couldn't really be much better for Putin if it was.

Thanks. Could fathom why they offed Navalny like they did for obvious reasons, I cannot imagine they see Sobchak as a threat, and if anything, could (ab)use her to show they do allow opponents, they are a democracy etc. Especially in the light of the recent Navalny trial condemnations from the EU. Sobchak could be a perfect "See? She's running and we're not stopping here innit? Nothing to see here" candidate that will never amass an amount of votes that would mean something.

She is following a pretty familiar path - it was Prokhorov last time.

It’s a shame as the grass roots liberal / centre left parties made a pretty good showing at the local elections (albeit mostly in Moscow and on a tiny turnout) by engaging with communities, using the internet to ensure that voters were aware of issues and who their candidates were, etc. There was a sense that, at least to some degree, they were figuring out some quasi-effective strategies, as limited as their reach may have been. Sobchak tanks that by having no platform and offering no reason to vote for her other than as a vote against *whoever it may be* that is backed by United Russia.

I can understand why people are suspicious but never underestimate the egotism and general cluelessness of the kind of ‘liberal’ figures with the money and standing to make a challenge at the moment.

nuclear accident in September?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-nuclearpower-accident/french-institute-suspects-nuclear-accident-in-russia-or-kazakhstan-in-september-idUSKBN1D92LJ

This is an obvious, blatant attack on the freedom of the press in the US.

Of course the US government is not forcing state media outlets from allied countries to register as foreign agents.

This is a dangerous precedent meant to silent critical media. https://t.co/ot9wBB5oRs

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 9, 2017

The implications for RT are probably quite minimal in reality - they can play the victim in the short term and possibly win a humiliating court case in the longer term.

The real impact is the 99.5% probably that Russia is going to extend its own foreign agent laws to the international media in retaliation - which is likely to mean RFE/RL, Radio Svoboda, etc journalists kicked out of the country or, at the very least, under pressure to disclose every contact they make to the government under pain of arrest.

It’s a terrible move for the US to make and will end up hitting state-funded American reporters hardest.

Xps,

Looks like there might have been a leak near the Mayak processing plant in September:

https://www.rferl.org/amp/report-russia-confirms-radioactivty-ruthenium-106-emanating-southeastern-urals/28865773.html

Some context on Mayak from a while back.

https://apnews.com/ba820f02074247fc8486b63b7c87d6cb/russias-nuclear-nightmare-flows-down-radioactive-river

Ozyorsk is still a ‘closed town’.

thanks

Poroshenko had Saakashvili arrested today. Misha’s supporters busted him out of the police van and whisked him off. No border can stop him, no jail can hold him.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gSdb2c0Eve4

Well, a prison probably could but not a two-door Ford transit, certainly.

In another bizarre twist, Jane Collins of UKIP - an MEP last seen getting rinsed for £358k in libel damages she claims not to be able to pay (having defamed a number of people wrt the Rochdale grooming saga) - has just turned up in Kyiv to defend Misha.

http://www.eurointegration.com.ua/news/2017/12/5/7074665/

Saakashvili is safely in jail, having been arrested by armed police at his home, and is now on hunger strike.

The Prosecutor General, Yuri Lutsenko, has said the Ukrainian authorities have taped evidence of him accepting money from ‘criminal gangs linked to Yanukovich’, which Misha says has been fabricated.

The nature of Ukrainian domestic politics means there is a reasonable chance it is true - but ‘criminal gangs’ and ‘linked to Yanukovich’ have extremely elastic meanings. Odessa, where he was governor, has a large and sophisticated organised crime network linked to the ports and Saakashvili was often rumoured to be working with them.

However, the shakeup of oligarchs, many linked to crime networks, has left former Yanukovich associates like Rinat Akhmetov closely allied with either Poroshenko or his rival Yatseniuk.

Nobody is innocent and picking on Saakashvili, who has about 3% support for his party nationally, looks like weakness. idk how much trouble his anti-corruption campaign was likely to cause but a high-profile ‘political prisoner’ with good ties to the US is the last thing a leader still needing massive financial and political support from the international community should be looking to get.

This is going on in the background:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/12/07/its-time-for-the-west-to-get-tough-on-ukraine/?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.71994705e8db&__twitter_impression=true

"He is a super president and a super leader" - New "SuperPutin" exhibition opens in Moscow with the Russian leader portrayed in various heroic roles; from riding a bear to firing missiles in the colours of the Russian flag pic.twitter.com/LxQ9WZOxfD

— AFP news agency (@AFP) December 10, 2017

it is pretty awesome living in the year 250 BC

For context, this ‘museum’ seems to be a rental space in an arts complex on the outskirts of town and opened in November. The ticket price (higher than the Pushkin and the Tretyakov put together) suggests they don’t expect many visitors and it is more of a publicity stunt on the part of the gallerist or, like most of the Putin tat in Moscow, aimed at the irony tourism market, than much else.

fwiw, the Kremlin seems a bit rattled this election cycle - not really because there is an expectation people will rush out to vote for Zhirinovsky, Sobchak or (given the chance) Navalny but because there is a very strong chance of a low turnout. Some of the Navalny messaging around corruption has hurt Medvedev and, by association, the whole Putin cadre and there isn’t really a sense of much natural excitement about the prospect of an extended Putin run. His approval numbers will stay high unless something extraordinary happens but the percentage of people going out to vote will probably diminish. There are plans to basically turn the day of the election into a big national holiday with civic events and funfairs or w/e to try to get people out of the house.

Oddly, the LDPR seems to have spent a hell of a lot of money on advertising recently. They’re everywhere. I’m not sure where they get the cash from. One theory might be that they are being boosted to give people the impression that they need to go out and vote for United Russia to stop them but idk.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2017/12/21/russian-lawmakers-want-to-make-it-possible-to-blacklist-individual-people-literally-anybody-with-internet-access-as-foreign-agent-mass-media-outlets

Good piece on how, as everyone predicted, elements within the Duma want to use the Foreign Agent designation of RT in the US to justify a wave of new regulations against everyone from major news outlets to individual bloggers who take money from abroad.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/20/politics/us-ukraine-weapons-export/index.html

The US has lifted Obama’s ban on selling small arms to Ukraine. This is not particularly huge in itself (Ukraine is a net exporter of small arms) but is seen as a potential precursor to what they are really after, which is a bunch of free anti-tank missiles.

https://www.ft.com/content/4bc2f436-e5d9-11e7-8b99-0191e45377ec

The English High Court has just frozen the assets of one of Ukraine’s biggest oligarch / power-broker / media magnates - Ihor Kolomoisky - after he was accused of stealing $2bn from a bank he owned. He flits between different factions, and has his own political party, but is currently aligned with Poroshenko’s main rival Yatsenyuk iirc.

He was caught meeting with Ukraine’s Prosecutor General (or rather the PG was caught meeting with him) in Amsterdam last week - something they both tried to pass off as two tourists bumping into each other. It’s strongly suspected the PG is helping him evade domestic charges related to the (now state owned) bank.

something they both tried to pass off as two tourists bumping into each other

Lol this feels like at some point it will be Trump's endgame if his frequent (secret) meetings with Russians come up

It's a bit of a classic is that one!

BREAKING: US officials: Trump administration approves plan to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine, including anti-tank missiles.

— The Associated Press (@AP) December 23, 2017

This is not good.

Pee-tape in 3, 2, 1...

They’ve also banned Kadyrov from Instagram under the terms of the new sanctions, perhaps the most damaging blow yet.

Yeah, no more pee-tape screenshots. Those devious bastards!

Russian submarines are prowling around vital undersea cables. It’s making NATO nervous.

Feel like I've read this ^^ story multiple times since 2014. Has anything changed this year?

The Soviets/Russians would be remiss to not already have means of severing critical undersea cables in the case of conflict. There are plenty of places, particularly southwest of Ireland, where the seabed is shallow enough to permit emplacement of explosives in the muck below the cables, without assistance. They could also just be splicing into the cables, as the U.S. has long done in Russian Baltic/White Sea/Caspian Sea cables.

Starting in 90s, NSA used underwater drones, delivered by submarine, to tap undersea cables. https://t.co/mkqjW4pT8Q pic.twitter.com/ASfgshBEuX

— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) March 31, 2016

^ without assistance from surface ships

The chairman of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, has claimed that banning Kadyrov from Instagram violates international law and has demanded a symmetrical response. All the Chechen parliament have deleted their accounts in solidarity. It’s popping off.

Seems like every time I'm glancing at non-collusion related russian news, it's Navalny getting arrested again.

Leonid Ragozin at Bloomberg is worth following for sympathetic coverage of Navalny:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-26/navalny-s-followers-see-putin-s-weakness-in-russia-s-heartland

Though, as suggested elsewhere, disaffection is more likely to lead to people not engaging with politics / bothering to vote than a groundswell of opinion in favour of Navalny.

The US has just published a list of ‘Kremlin-linked oligarchs’ ahead of potential future individual sanctions and they have literally just copied and pasted from a Forbes article about the 96 richest people people in Russia. This was supposed to have taken the State Department six months:

So the 96 “oligarch” names on the US Treasury list correspond EXACTLY to the 96 billionaires on this Forbes list of the Russian rich. https://t.co/VtjUJHXpro

— Tom Parfitt (@parfitt_tom) January 30, 2018

The list includes at least two people who have claimed their businesses have been expropriated by the state.

Vladimir Putin earned 38.5 million rubles (roughly $673,000) between 2011 and 2016, according to information publicly released by the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation on Tuesday, giving the Russian president an average yearly salary of about $112,000.

The president also listed a number of assets on his forms, including 13 bank accounts with a combined balance of 13.8 million rubles ($241,000), a roughly 800-square-foot apartment in St. Petersburg, 230 shares in Bank Saint Petersburg and two Soviet-made sports cars — Volgas made in 1960 and 1965 — and a 2009 Lada 4x4.

Putin was required to give details of his income and assets as part of his registration for the upcoming presidential election, due to be held March 18. Putin completed his registration Tuesday, according to reports in Russian state media.

lol

Wow this was sloppy wetwork:

Britain Threatens Retaliation Against Kremlin After Russian Spy Collapse: Fears of an assassination attempt on ex Russian agent Sergei Skripal with a toxic substance deepened when it emerged that emergency workers were hospitalized after treating him.

There's a suggestion that more details, including the nature of the substance they encountered, are going to be released this afternoon. There were rumours in the press it was Fentanyl - though nothing official yet.

It's an odd one if it was a state-backed assassination attempt - i think it would be the first time Russia had tried to knock off anyone involved in a spy exchange. There'd be little point in good-faith trading of spies if they're just going to get killed.

The witness statement is very British:

“There was some blonde bird laying on an old man's shoulder doing this hand thing in the air,”

How would Fentanyl have put first responders in the hospital? Unless those were bogus reports. Which I could easily believe.

They could be exaggerated reports but you can apparently turn something very similar to Fentanyl into an aerosol / gas.

Is fentanyl soluble in dimethyl sulfoxide? One can get just about anything through the skin in DMSO solution, indeed, you can rub it on your skin and taste the garlicy sulfur note in a few seconds. In the 60s there were plans to wipe doorknobs at Republican conventions with LSD/DMSO solutions, for laffs.

So, a passerby walks close to Skripal and daughter with a pump bottle, sprays them in their faces, and first responders unaware that DMSO will also slip right through latex gloves also get a dose.

Or they didn't put on gloves, given no blood was visible.

3-Methylfentanyl was also reported by media as the identity of the anaesthetic "gas" Kolokol-1 delivered as an aerosol during the Moscow theater hostage crisis in 2002

More likely:

In 2012, a team of researchers at the British chemical and biological defense laboratories at Porton Down found carfentanil and remifentanil in clothing from two British survivors of the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis and in the urine from a third survivor

OT aside, yikes!:

In June, 2016 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police seized one kilogram of carfentanil shipped from China in a box labeled "printer accessories". According to the Canada Border Services Agency, the shipment contained 50 million lethal doses of the drug, more than enough to wipe out the entire population of the country, in containers labeled as toner cartridges for Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printers.

A couple of journalists are saying police have confirmed it is a nerve agent and that a police officer is also in a serious condition.

Tabloid press are going to have a field day with a British bobby being poisoned by the dastardly Russkies.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said foreign media had used the incident as part of an anti-Russian campaign.

"It's a traditional campaign. The tradition is to make things up. We can only see it as a provocation," she said.

Just another enemy of the Russian state poisoned in England, this time a nerve agent. nbd.

It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia.

This is part of a group of nerve agents known as ‘Novichok’.

Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down; our knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent and would still be capable of doing so; Russia’s record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations; and our assessment that Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets for assassinations; the Government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DYGzAysX4AEZMLH.jpg

Atropine auto-injectors are useless against this.

The UK government has apparently given Russia a deadline of midnight tonight to respond meaningfully to the situation - which seems fair enough. They've issued nothing but flat denials so far.

Most of the pundits i follow are still struggling with the 'why?' though. There doesn't seem to be an obvious logic to offing an old spy in such an outrageous and public way - guaranteed to strengthen sanctions and with a narrow window for plausible deniability - a few days before the election. Most people think this is more likely to suppress the vote and bring out the protest vote than drive people to the polls.

Even if it wasn't intended to go down the way it went, a former Russian spy dying suddenly with unusual symptoms a ten minute drive from Europe's largest stockpile of chemical and biological weapons is always going to get a full investigation.

The main theories seem to be the Kremlin sending a message to its spy network and hang the consequences, some kind of steer from the top but mid-level FSB people running with a completely stupid plan off their own bat or, potentially most worrying, hardline militarist / nationalist factions within the Russian security services going rogue in order to undermine Putin and force a confrontation. I don't know how any of that ranks in terms of credibility.

If you listened to BBC propaganda you might think Putin had absolute control over the FSB.

that bbc 2 Putin doc was abysmal, really waiting with bated breath to hear William Hague's next earth shattering insights on the intrigues within the Russian Federation, not.

xp the hardliner theory is indeed worrying, but why bother forcing a confrontation with the UK? I suppose because it's currently diplomatically isolated as a result of Brexit and Trump's Russian ambivalence?

I think the assumption is that an attack in / on the UK is going to trigger a response from the EU, NATO and the US. The UK is also the base of a large proportion of Putin's closest allies - there's already talk of targeted reprisals against Abramovich, etc. Squeezing the people who keep Russia tied to Europe, and Europe tied to Russia, could be an effective way to cause a more definitive rift. Again, idk how credible this is.

gotcha, thx.

"there's already talk of targeted reprisals against Abramovich"

an assassin could be concealing deadly nerve agents within his hair-weave, security will have to be stepped up.

Anything that harms Chelsea FC is obviously a good thing.

Margarita Simonyan has just said it is “Хайли лайкли” that OFCOM will pull RT’s license (backed up by hints from OFCOM itself) - which will mean the reciprocal removal of BBC Russia’s ability to operate, another blow to independent reporting in the country.

well that's a result for putin innit

Yep, it’s the one area in which tit for tat sanctions / closures actively work in his favour.

The idea of BBC Russia being a bastion of quality reportage and impartiality seems quite odd from a UK perspective.

They’ve done really well with it, tbf. They hired a bunch of smart young Russian reporters who had worked at some of the independent papers that got bought out by oligarchs and gave them a reliable outlet for investigative reporting. Would be nice if they did the same here.

Their reportage on Corbyn rightly calling out all the Tory MPs on the payroll of Russian oligarchs has been fucking disgraceful so far.

Sergei Lavrov has apparently said that the UK can stuff their deadline as they haven’t shared any case details / evidence and have not given Russia a chance to analyse the nerve agent to verify / trace it - so there is nothing to respond to. This is not going to end well.

Another notable success for Theresa May on the horizon.

Gavin Williamson had been doing yapping lots of implausible hardman talk about Russia pre-Skripal, but now shit has got live it's all about taking on the domestic evil of the SNP!

At this point, anyone who gives Russia the benefit of the doubt is a complete idiot.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/13/russian-exile-nikolai-glushkov-found-dead-at-his-london-home

https://medium.com/@leftoutside/six-reasons-i-dont-see-this-russian-poisoning-playing-out-well-for-theresa-may-s-tories-bbb08350ec96

^ i'd strongly disagree with almost all of that, tbh. The most relevant point may be no.5 - the idea that there is too much Russian money in the UK to hit back effectively with domestic reprisals, but even then, it seems like a massive risk to assume that there won't be a strengthening of international sanctions, for example. A bunch of European countries (Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, France to some extent) are experiencing a certain amount of sanctions fatigue but the UK has been relatively steadfast, tbh, and there's going to be an expectation that May will continue with that line or double down.

I'm sympathetic to the perceived need to defend Corbyn against NatSec smears but using trashy, ludicrous Buzzfeed pieces about the Tories turning a blind eye to murder is not the way.

A possibility? But he seems to be evading the specific puported role of Porton Down. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/03/russian-to-judgement/

Oh no, not Craig Murray now.

Murray’s not the only one who has pointed out it’s a strange coincidence that Skripal lived and was poisoned a few minutes away from the only place in the UK, and one of the few in Europe, producing nerve agents but it’s difficult to see it as anything but that. I’d guess there’s just a lot of top secret stuff around Salisbury and they settle ex-spies around there for the sake of convenience.

Yeah, I don't find it convincing re Porton Down but I wondered whether any of the rest of it (Mossad, Miller) made any sense. I'm not a regular Murray reader so not sure how this sits within his broader world view.

I think he’s just pulling theories out of his hat to suggest that they’re not much more implausible than the prevailing wisdom, tbh. He is occasionally worth listening to but generally more of a devil’s advocate than a serious analyst these days.

Interesting in passing , Kommersant has dug up a story from 1995 in which a lab tech sold Novichok to a hitman who used it to kill a banker on behalf of one of his rivals. You’d hope that Russia keeps a better check on their stocks now than they did back when Aum Shinrikyo were able to buy military attack helicopters on the black market though.

i was mildly irritated* by the constant reference to "military grade nerve agents", viz not the kind you can buy across the counter in boots i guess

*lol #subeditorproblems

and my feeling -- admittedly on rereading after SV's mild snort of mockery -- abt the medium piece is that it's less abt "omg all these overlooked assassinations add up to a story that will topple may" than "this is a tougher headwind for the tories than they quite seem to have grasped yet", given what the public are exercised by (high-street poisoning in a salisbury zizzi's)* and cross about (a plague of billionaire oligarchs owning football clubs and whatever else)**

*which fair enough tbh
**bcz this crosses over into territories politicians anxiously want to have a good profile in but mostly only access viz crappy authentocrat posturing

(the weird thing is in the last week or so the alerts i've been getting on my laptop are all from RT, and no one else)

I've been so oblivious to them I thought they were called Russian Times.

it stands for ReTweet iirc

The Medium piece, to me, aligns with a lot of the attacks i've been seeing from the amorphous left (Owen Jones, Paul Mason, arguably Corbyn, etc) suggesting something on a continuum from 'the Tories are too weak to stand up to Russia' to 'Russia did this because they know the Tories are compromised' - with 'compromised' meaning anything from 'have taken money so are unwilling to criticise' to 'have covered up multiple murders'.

In terms of the optics, the bulk of the criticism i've seen of Corbyn recently hasn't been around the 'robust dialogue' line being too weak, it has been the idea that in a serious crisis situation, he was trying to score party-political points.

maybe, but that last is a critique from inside the er horse-race bubble i think

I am not sure that's entirely true. My suspicion, which admittedly isn't based on a great deal, is that there are lots of people out there who might like or agree (to some extent) with Corbyn but won't vote for him on the basis that he's not a 'serious politician'. Certainly more than the number who won't vote for him based on the idea that he's a Czech spy. The fetishisation of 'statesmanship' is still a big thing and May's cluelessness over Brexit, etc, has damaged her in that area as well but i'm not sure going on the attack at a time when May was, in theory, fronting up to a dastardly enemy threatening the lives of British bobbies and Zizzi diners alike, is going to go down well.

apparently Corbyn was ashen faced after getting jeered in parliament the other day, and didn't get much support from his own, either. But I still think that MP's taking bungs from Russian oligarchs is very pertinent and should be called out. But if it is a losing strategy, then perhaps stfu for the time being.

there's no way to tell in the medium term if it's a winning or a losing strategy -- i like that corbyn is unflappable and completely ignores the conventional wisdoms of commentators (which are always about TODAY'S PANIC and generally forgotten in five days time), and in the VERY long-term he's been right over quite a lot of very big things (such as various wars he opposed, or gay rights or whatever)

the idea that the lesson he's learned from this -- a lesson that done reasonably well for him over recent months -- is suddenly in this instance the wrong lesson is entirely possible! but i think he would look a lot less convincing changing tack and being all hilary benn about this situation

I'm sorry, it seems to me Corbyn is completely bungling this moment. He is both calling for dialogue and allowing the Russians to do their own tests of the nerve agent (which, yeah, that'll be a believable result...) while going on the offensive over Russian donations. It seems hypocritical? And also stuck in 2003.

or to put it another way (xp to me), most modern politicians inhabit the space between tactics and strategy, while corbyn largely inhabits the space between strategy and ethics: how this will work out for him here depends on the degree to which the government fuck things up, or i suppose possibly don't fuck things up (but as far as i can see not fucking things up means tacking closer to his line than to sating the yells of the backbenches)

corbyn was of course correct in 2003

And we are not in 2003 anymore

i know reading other people's posts carefully isn't part of your skillset fred but why not try and put my argument together based on what i just wrote

Because it's boring and banal. Sorry.

The idea that somewhat nonsensical statements from Corbyn aren't as bad because it's Corbyn being Corbyn and he is interested in long run things and was right fifteen years ago. It's besides the point of what to do in this specific situation.

OK:
corbs believes that he really doesn't need to "win the day", day after day (this would be tactics): he believes that sticking to his line -- his ethos -- will gradually win him the medium-term argument: the evidence over the past year suggests that to date he's right about this and that this strategy has worked for him (partly of course bcz may's govt has so effectively worked for him). this is why suddenly shrieking "may is a genius and war is now good!" will (a) not actually advance his own cause here and now, and (b) not at all advance his politics. even if he did it, he wouldn't win the day, he'd just hand the win to her

the idea that the lesson he's learned from this… is suddenly in this instance the wrong lesson is entirely possible!

the most boring and banal point of all presumably^^^

A bunch of the Shadow Cabinet are apparently poised to resign over his statement today.

He is right on following proper international / legal processes, though - if only because it gives the Russian government less room to argue it's a stitch-up. iirc there's an obligation to hand over samples in cases where a party to the non-proliferation treaty is accused of a breach and the more eyes on this (UN, EU, etc) the better in making the case.

Fred seeing how many continents he can be wrong on at once.

another really good reason for not judging world events in terms of the very short-term is surely donald trump's approach to, well, everything

Leonid Ragozin on Twitter made the points wrt May's response that you can't "partake in the robbery of Russian people and display outrage at the criminal acts of your business partners in this lucrative enterprise" and "can’t reform Russia without reforming the West as a whole". Looking towards the longer term, it'll be interesting to see how much focus Corbyn puts on that idea.

London is a safe haven / clearing house for ill-gotten wealth from across the world, not just the former Soviet Union, and tbh, it's a cost/benefit that works out massively in our favour. Lobbying cash isn't close to being as big an issue here as it is elsewhere, there's minimal direct impact on politics / foreign policy - other than in the few cases, potentially like this one, that something unexpected flares up (and possibly the impact of house prices in London). It's a virtually risk-free license to print money and it's appallingly immoral. Other than hints at new taxes on non-doms, it's not something Labour has really focused on out of power - and was massively complicit in power.

what does "partake in the robbery of Russian people" refer to exactly? oligarchs transferring money from russia to london?

Yes, absolutely.

iirc there's an obligation to hand over samples in cases where a party to the non-proliferation treaty is accused of a breach and the more eyes on this (UN, EU, etc) the better in making the case.

― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), 14. marts 2018 17:11 (forty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The British government says this is wrong.

Leonid Ragozin on Twitter made the points wrt May's response that you can't "partake in the robbery of Russian people and display outrage at the criminal acts of your business partners in this lucrative enterprise" and "can’t reform Russia without reforming the West as a whole". Looking towards the longer term, it'll be interesting to see how much focus Corbyn puts on that idea.

London is a safe haven / clearing house for ill-gotten wealth from across the world, not just the former Soviet Union, and tbh, it's a cost/benefit that works out massively in our favour. Lobbying cash isn't close to being as big an issue here as it is elsewhere, there's minimal direct impact on politics / foreign policy - other than in the few cases, potentially like this one, that something unexpected flares up (and possibly the impact of house prices in London). It's a virtually risk-free license to print money and it's appallingly immoral. Other than hints at new taxes on non-doms, it's not something Labour has really focused on out of power - and was massively complicit in power.

― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), 14. marts 2018 17:47 (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This I agree with completely, and it would be great if Corbyn pursued this point going forward. But right now he seems to be undermining it with his other responses. You can't both find the situation so dire that it calls for the kind of reforms that needs to be put in place, while also alluding to it maybe being a governmental lie.

The position is that there's overwhelming evidence that it was either a state-sanctioned attack or that Russia has lost control of some of its stock and, either way, the onus is on Russia to respond and, at the same time, there should be a full, comprehensive and transparent investigation. That seems entirely proper. The rationale for May's position (which, again, is that it's "highly likely" that the Russian government was involved, not conclusively proven) is at least partly based on inference. Corbyn's call to "follow the evidence" doesn't imply that it's a government lie, just that the case would benefit from being strengthened.

counterpoint from an unexpected corner:

I can’t believe that Putin is so stupid ( which he isn’t ) as to kill on the streets in The UK. The timing is ridiculous !
Let’s give him the sample he’s asking for as it’s plausible that it’s a plot to smear him and Moscow before the Worlld Cup !! Please be careful @theresa_may

— Peter Stringfellow (@PJStringfellow) March 13, 2018

lol

My secret identity revealed at last.

based on my own experience in the closely related field of, like, life, each time i think "naw i don't need to check that, it's probably the way i think it is" i am 100% wrong every time

Here is the statement from Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman about his stance on Russia - via PA pic.twitter.com/VESaFCZo2T

— Sam Coates Times (@SamCoatesTimes) March 14, 2018

Corbyns spokesman definitely implies that the government is lying.

And as ShariVari says, it's not really a difficult question whether or not Russia is to blame. If it's Novichok, they are to blame. They either did this, or lost control. It's nothing like 2003.

https://www.thecanary.co/global/2018/03/15/new-evidence-left-theresa-mays-russian-spy-story-tatters/

no that shit doesn't necessarily exist and if it does can be made in a garage pron. garridge.

but its a Canary link!

In other news, Ukrainian domestic politics is still 0_o.

https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-savchenko-terror-plot-accusations/29101770.html

The “Ukrainian Joan of Arc” Nadezhda Savchenko, who was hailed by the international media as a potential future President and garlanded with accolades by Poroshenko when she was released from Russian prison has:

a) been accused of plotting a coup / to massacre the Ukrainian parliament
b) accused (possibly accidentally) the Speaker of the Rada of orchestrating false flag sniper killings during the Maidan protests

The exit polls suggest Project 70/70 (Putin winning 70% of the vote from a 70% turnout) has fallen short of the mark. It’s currently looking like 72% vote share from what would be considered a disappointing 59% turnout, despite the prospect of discounted buckwheat at polling stations.

I find such blatant electoral blackmail completely bulgur tbh.

*snort*

Good luck rossiyskaya federatsiya

I find such blatant electoral blackmail completely bulgur tbh.

― calzino, Sunday, March 18, 2018 3:46 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you spelt that funny

A video is now being shown in Ukraine's parliament of MP Nadia Savchenko talking with alleged co-conspirators - she's talking about killing the country's President and other leaders in parliament...

— Jonah Fisher (@JonahFisherBBC) March 22, 2018

Savchenko currently chuckling to herself, sitting in parliament, as the video of her describing where to put the grenades is being played. The whole thing is very odd.

In other news, Kommersant, RBK, Ekho, Dozd and RTVi, some of Russia’s leading press orgs, are boycotting all future coverage of the Russian parliament after an MP who’d essentially admitted to sexually harrassing three women was cleared by the ethics board.

Is it significant or unusual that so many press orgs are boycotting, or par for the course?

Absolutely unprecedented afaict.

That's insane about the terrorist/coup plot. She's ... anti-Russian, pro Ukraine independence? So she wanted to blow up a bunch of Russian gov't proxies?

She’s a fierce Ukrainian nationalist but beyond that, it’s not entirely clear what she is up to. Her position is that politicians are weak / cowardly and that a military coup to clear the decks, possibly followed by some kind of military rule, would get the country back on track.

I don’t think she views the government as a Russian proxy, just the wrong kind of Ukrainians. Inevitably other Ukrainian nationalists who back the government are accusing her of being a Russian plant, etc.

Savchenko has been stripped of her immunity and arrested now.

On a more positive note, Ryanair has announced it is going to start flying to Kyiv Borispil this year. A previous agreement had fallen through under pressure from the Ukrainian state airline. It will be interesting to see how much uptake there is. It’s seen as a symbolic victory for those pushing for closer integration with Europe. Hopefully it can boost tourism beyond stag groups and sex pests, etc.

The Russian media boycott now has 22 participants including, rather strangely, Spetznaz Rossii - an outlet that appears to mostly cover commandos / special forces and related news. It isn’t just the usual list of liberal / opposition places.

On a related note, a male journalist has accused Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the far-right leader and presidential candidate, of groping him.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/03/29/its-time-to-go-after-vladimir-putins-money-in-the-west/

Fine article on what could be done, that should dovetail with wishes for better financial regulation quite nicely.

This is great:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43797176