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After Stormy 2014, Putin's Russia Braces For Fateful New Yearby noreply@rferl.org (Robert Coalson)
The Ukraine crisis in 2014 brought Vladimir Putin's Russia to loggerheads with the West. With so many of Russia's gambles still up in the air, 2015 could be a year of reckoning.
The al-Khansa brigade, the female religious police in Raqqa, the insurgency's de facto capital in Syria, is said to use the bear trap-like device to punish women who defy their strict laws.
WASHINGTON — It was one of Capitol Hill’s most salacious scandals, featuring a senator’s affair with a campaign aide, an outraged husband, tens of thousands of dollars in hush money, illicit lobbying deals with Las Vegas power brokers and a dramatic intervention by a leading Christian ministry.
Now, three years after the fall of former Senator John E. Ensign of Nevada, thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents reveal new details about the evidence the F.B.I. gathered against Mr. Ensign, who briefly flirted with running for president in 2012. The documents, which show that Mr. Ensign’s behavior was more brash than known at the time, also offer new specifics about the intense debate within the Justice Department over the decision to not prosecute Mr. Ensign, despite an aggressive F.B.I. investigation into the scandal.
The Justice Department recently turned over some 3,000 pages of internal documents from the case to a public watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW, after the organization sued under the Freedom of Information Act. The group provided the files to The New York Times, which in 2009 published an investigation of the Ensign case that prompted the F.B.I. inquiry.
Some of the documents from the F.B.I.’s investigation of former Senator John Ensign of Nevada reveal that Mr. Ensign used “extremely brazen tactics” to find lobbying work for his mistress’s husband.
OPEN Document
Although the broad outlines of the case against Mr. Ensign have been made public, the documents disclose for the first time how much Mr. Ensign strong-armed political donors and business associates in 2008 to find lobbying work for Douglas Hampton, a top aide and close friend. Mr. Ensign was seeking the work in an attempt to placate Mr. Hampton because Mr. Ensign had an affair with Mr. Hampton’s wife, Cynthia Hampton, a campaign aide.
One executive, unnamed in the documents, called Mr. Ensign’s demands on behalf of Mr. Hampton “extremely brazen” and turned him down, the F.B.I. found. When an Ensign aide later called to say the senator was unhappy that the executive did not give Mr. Hampton a job, the executive screamed at the aide to “tell the senator to pick up” the phone, adding a vulgarity for emphasis.
As was known at the time, the documents show that when the senator contacted business and political associates to line up jobs for Mr. Hampton, he made no mention of the affair. But he did tell many of the executives that Mr. Hampton would make a good Washington lobbyist because of his Senate connections, the F.B.I. records show.
Some executives agreed to hire Mr. Hampton as a lobbyist. “Make Ensign happy,” an executive at a Nevada energy company told investigators in explaining the hiring.
The records make clear that the F.B.I. originally focused on Mr. Ensign to determine if he had conspired to violate lobbying laws by finding tens of thousands of dollars in lobbying work for Mr. Hampton on Washington issues. As one of Mr. Ensign’s top Senate aides, Mr. Hampton was barred from lobbying the Senate for one year under a federal “cooling off” period after his employment ended.
But the records indicate that the investigation took a sharp turn as prosecutors ultimately decided not to charge Mr. Ensign, even though his colleagues on the Senate Ethics Committee, in a rare step, urged the Justice Department to consider seeking criminal charges. Instead the departmentprosecuted Mr. Hampton for violating the one-year lobbying ban — specifically for repeatedly contacting Mr. Ensign’s office in 2008 and early 2009 to seek assistance for two Nevada companies that the senator had helped him get lobbying jobs with.
Mr. Hampton pleaded guilty to a charge of illegal lobbying in 2012.
The Justice Department’s decision not to charge Mr. Ensign was widely seen as a sign of its skittishness about prosecuting and potentially losing public corruption cases in the wake of stinging courtroom defeats against former Senators Ted Stevens of Alaska and John Edwards of North Carolina. The documents confirm that speculation: In an internal email in 2011 assessing the chances of prosecuting Mr. Ensign, a top prosecutor wrote that “the legal theory is possible with the right facts” but that the “mere response” of helping a former Senate employee to find work “is not enough.” Another prosecutor wrote that “this is a really tough case to win.”
The documents show that the investigation was also complicated by a legal conflict; Lanny A. Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division at the time, had worked with a defense lawyer in the Ensign camp at Mr. Breuer’s prior law firm, Covington & Burling. Mr. Breuer was temporarily recused from the Ensign investigation as a result of the conflict, the records show, but later got a waiver that allowed him to oversee it with certain restrictions, officials said.
In 2012, Mr. Breuer and the Justice Department decided not to bring criminal charges against Mr. Ensign.
Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said the internal documents made the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute Mr. Ensign — and charge his aide instead — even more perplexing.
“This case more than any other public corruption investigation we’ve seen is just so troubling,” said Ms. Sloan, a former federal prosecutor. “If you’re powerful, it makes it look as if you can get away with anything.”
Peter Carr, a Justice Department spokesman, said “the department follows the evidence where it leads, and brings charges when the evidence warrants it.”
Mr. Ensign, a veterinarian who opened an animal hospital in Las Vegas last year, did not respond to emails or phone messages left at his practice.
The son of a Las Vegas casino magnate, Mr. Ensign was a rising Republican star. But his affair with Mr. Hampton’s wife, who was close friends with Mr. Ensign’s wife, ultimately forced him to resign his Senate seat.
While the affair was still going on, conservative political allies from the Fellowship Foundation, a Christian group, confronted Mr. Ensign at his home in Washington in 2008 and demanded he end the relationship.
He eventually did, but what happened afterward drew the F.B.I.'s scrutiny.
In addition to the lobbying work that Mr. Ensign found for Mr. Hampton, Mr. Ensign’s father gave the Hamptons a $96,000 payment as an informal “severance” after the senator fired the couple — a payment that might have violated congressional ethics rules.
F.B.I. investigators examined Mr. Ensign’s discussions with about a dozen firms he had contacted to find lobbying work for Mr. Hampton, the records show.
The documents also reveal that the Justice Department focused particular attention on a lobbying contract that the senator arranged for Mr. Hampton to represent Allegiant Air, a regional carrier in Nevada run by a major Ensign donor.
At a lunch and in other conversations held with top Transportation Department officials, Mr. Hampton and Mr. Ensign helped Allegiant Air make its pitch, with some success, for federal help on two big issues threatening the company: an investigation into deceptive pricing and an airline turf fight.
The work for Allegiant Air was seen as perhaps the most direct evidence that Mr. Ensign and Mr. Hampton had conspired to violate the one-year “cooling off” period on lobbying by former Senate aides.
Mr. Hampton, for his part, remains bitter that Mr. Ensign was never prosecuted, while he was charged with violating the lobbying law. He ended up on probation after he pleaded guilty. He also declared bankruptcy, and he and Cynthia Hampton divorced.
“This has crushed me,” said Mr. Hampton, who is jobless and living in Las Vegas. “John Ensign orchestrated everything — the affair, my dismissal from his Senate staff, the lobbying work, everything — but at the end of the day, I’m the one who lost everything.”
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Seven weeks to the day after his re-election to Congress, Representative Michael Grimm, a Republican of Staten Island, pleaded guilty to felony tax evasion. That should be more than enough to persuade Mr. Grimm to resign from Congress immediately.
But this is the congressman who once told voters that 20 charges of tax fraud, lying under oath and essentially keeping two sets of books were politically motivated.
It was thus no surprise when he said after his guilty plea in federal court in Brooklyn that he was “absolutely not” planning to resign. Such bravado might be a negotiating tactic on his part. He could be holding out his resignation as a potential bargaining chip in sentencing on June 8. For now, he is clutching his House seat for dear life, promising that he will stay as long as he is “able to serve.”
That is technically possible, even after a felony conviction. But is it right? A statement from the office of United States Attorney Loretta Lynch says that while running a health food restaurant from 2007-9, Mr. Grimm concealed more than $900,000 in gross receipts, paid his workers “off the books” and cheated workers of compensation insurance premiums. While serving in Congress, Mr. Grimm also lied under oath about this criminal behavior.
Republican leaders — starting with House Speaker John Boehner — should now do the right thing and persuade Mr. Grimm to go away. They could do this by threatening to ostracize him by denying him committee slots. Alternatively, the House could vote to throw him out, adding to his embarrassment and his party’s. Mr. Grimm should do everyone a favor by packing his bags now.
WASHINGTON — Michael G. Grimm, the Republican Party’s lone congressional representative in New York City, announced late on Monday that he would resign effective Jan. 5, two weeks after he pleaded guilty to felony tax evasion.
The decision to call it quits by Mr. Grimm, of Staten Island — perhaps best known for threatening to break a reporter in half and throw him off a Capitol Hill balcony — came after a conversation on Monday with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, which a person close to the speaker confirmed.In a statement released by Mr. Grimm’s office just before midnight, he said, “I do not believe that I can continue to be 100 percent effective in the next Congress, and therefore, out of respect for the Office and the people I so proudly represent, it is time for me to start the next chapter of my life.”
Mr. Boehner appears to have done what a midterm election, constant ridicule in the news media and a guilty plea in federal court in Brooklyn could not: persuade Mr. Grimm to go away.
The decision, reported by The Daily News earlier Monday night, is an about-face for Mr. Grimm, a former F.B.I. agent. Minutes after pleading guilty last week for underreporting his employees’ wages during a previous iteration as owner of the Manhattan restaurant Healthalicious, and admitting culpability, as part of his plea deal, to all the charges in a 20-count indictment that haunted him throughout his re-election campaign, Mr. Grimm told clamoring reporters he would “absolutely not” resign.
But Mr. Grimm’s mind apparently changed after speaking with Mr. Boehner. House rules dictate that a member convicted of a crime for which a prison sentence of two years or more may be imposed should not participate in committee meetings or vote on the floor until winning re-election. The stricture could have left Mr. Grimm’s 11th District effectively disenfranchised until 2016.
Mr. Grimm, 44, is expected to seek probation for tax evasion, despite sentencing guidelines that recommend as much as three years in prison. Judge Pamela K. Chen of United States District Court in Brooklyn made it clear in court that she would not be bound by the guidelines during Mr. Grimm’s sentencing, set for June 8. And federal prosecutors did not renounce other potential investigations into Mr. Grimm’s alleged campaign finance violations as part of his plea. But they will no longer be his political party’s problems.
(Mr. Boehner, who has sought to clean up his party’s reputation as Republicans prepare to take over both chambers, had a new headache to consider when the House majority whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, acknowledged on Monday that he had addressed a gathering of white supremacist leaders in 2002.)
As for Staten Island Republicans, their thoughts have already turned to electing Mr. Grimm’s replacement when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, calls a special election to fill the seat. The top contenders are expected to include the Staten Island district attorney, Daniel M. Donovan Jr., though his star has dimmed since a grand jury failed to hand up an indictment of police officers in connection with the politically and racially explosive death of Eric Garner, who died in July after a police officer trying to arrest him placed him in a chokehold. Other names that have surfaced include Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis and State Senator Andrew J. Lanza.
Democrats, who saw their last candidate, Domenic M. Recchia Jr., falter badly during the fall and lose to Mr. Grimm, whose district includes Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, are expected to look to former Representative Michael E. McMahon and Assemblyman Michael J. Cusick. In the run-up to the last election, Representative Steve Israel of Long Island, who was given the task of winning House seats for the Democrats, approached both of them. Both passed.
Whoever takes Mr. Grimm’s seat will be unlikely to match his track record as a source of national fascination, or satire. A tough-talking politician with a clenched jaw and an intense stare, a fondness for dark-tailored suits and Brooklyn wine bars, Mr. Grimm brought with him a reputation for controversy, including the time — back in his law enforcement days — when he reportedly waved a gun around a Queens nightclub. He carried himself with a bravado that was on display until the end.
“As I said before, as long as I am able to serve I’m going to serve,” he said after his court appearance last week. “As of right now, I’m still in a capacity to serve, and that’s exactly what I plan on doing.”
Correction: December 30, 2014
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a restaurant that Michael G. Grimm owned. It was Healthalicious, not Healthilicious.
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President Obama’s surprise effort to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, concurrent with an economic embargo, recalls the two-track approach — economic and sometimes military force, along with secret, sporadic attempts to find some kind of accommodation — that formed American policy toward Cuba during the most dangerous years of that relationship.
On Monday evening, Nov. 18, 1963, at the Americana Hotel in Miami Beach — four days before his assassination — President John F. Kennedy, wearing black tie, told the Inter-American Press Association that only one issue separated the United States from Fidel Castro’s Cuba: Castro’s “conspirators” had handed Cuban sovereignty to “forces beyond the hemisphere” (meaning the Soviet Union), which were using Cuba “to subvert the other American republics.” Kennedy said, “As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible.”
The president had asked his speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, for language that would open a door to the Cuban leader, although, as Sorensen later observed, the audience was “a very tough anti-Castro group.”
That same day, Ambassador William Attwood, a Kennedy delegate to the United Nations, secretly called Castro’s aide and physician, Rene Vallejo, to discuss a possible secret meeting in Havana between Attwood and Castro that might improve the Cuban-American relationship, which had been ruptured when President Eisenhower broke diplomatic ties in January 1961.
Attwood had been told by Castro’s U.N. ambassador, Carlos Lechuga, in September 1963, that the Cuban leader wished to establish back-channel communications with Washington. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy worried that such talks would leak and embarrass his brother on the eve of his 1964 re-election campaign, but the president quietly encouraged Attwood to pursue the matter.
Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, told Attwood that J.F.K. wanted to “know more about what is on Castro’s mind before committing ourselves to further talks on Cuba.” He said that as soon as Attwood and Lechuga could agree on an agenda, the president would tell him what to say to Castro; in the meantime, J.F.K. had to make a trip to Texas.
Had Kennedy survived, the Attwood back channel might conceivably have led to some improvement in the relationship between Havana and Washington, but the odds against it were formidable. By allying Cuba with the Soviet Union, Castro was in flagrant defiance of America’s Monroe Doctrine, and Kennedy was eager to stop it.
In April 1961, he had authorized an invasion of Cuba by C.I.A.-supported Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. When that failed, Castro’s regime jailed more than a thousand members of the invasion brigade, who were released in December 1962 in exchange for $53 million in medical supplies and food. President Kennedy greeted the freed prisoners at the Orange Bowl in Miami. They presented him with their battle flag, which J.F.K. pledged to return to them “in a free Havana.”
Trying to recoup from the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Kennedy administration covertly unleashed Operation Mongoose, which included sabotage, paramilitary raids, guerrilla warfare and – although differences remain to this day over how much the president knew about them – efforts to assassinate Castro.
Kennedy saw Operation Mongoose as a substitute for authorizing a full-fledged American invasion to remove Castro from power. But the Cuban leader mistakenly presumed that Mongoose was actually the prelude to such an invasion, and he asked the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to do something to keep the Americans out. Castro’s request was one of the reasons that, in the fall of 1962, Khrushchev ordered nuclear-capable missiles sent to Cuba, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Kennedy settled the crisis, in part, by pledging that the United States would not invade Cuba; however that pledge was conditioned on the presumption that Castro would stop trying to encourage other revolutions like his own throughout Latin America. But Castro was furious that Khrushchev had not consulted him before making his bargain with Kennedy to end the crisis — and furious as well that U.S. covert action against him had not ceased. (In fact, on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, the C.I.A., in Paris, gave a disaffected comrade of Castro’s a poison pen that was to be used against the Cuban leader.)
In September 1963, Castro appeared at a Brazilian Embassy reception in Havana and warned, “American leaders should know that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, then they themselves will not be safe.”
Late on Tuesday, Nov. 19, 1963 — the evening before President Kennedy’s final full day at the White House — the C.I.A.'s covert action chief, Richard Helms, brought J.F.K. what he termed “hard evidence” that Castro was still trying to foment revolution throughout Latin America.
Helms (who later served as C.I.A. director from 1966 to 1973) and an aide, Hershel Peake, told Kennedy about their agency’s discovery: a three-ton arms cache left by Cuban terrorists on a beach in Venezuela, along with blueprints for a plan to seize control of that country by stopping Venezuelan elections scheduled for 12 days hence.
Standing in the Cabinet Room near windows overlooking the darkened Rose Garden, Helms brandished what he called a “vicious-looking” rifle and told the president how its identifying Cuban seal had been sanded off.
Helms (who died in 2002) told me in 1987 that he realized that in response to this evidence, Kennedy “wasn’t going to invade Cuba,” but that he was certain the president’s “real energy” on Cuba was directed toward covert action. Helms insisted that J.F.K.'s quiet efforts to communicate with Castro were at best “a feint” — “like most two-track policies, try everything.”
Helms’s skepticism about Kennedy’s back channel to Castro no doubt reflected the president’s careful efforts to show no sign of weakness on Cuba in front of his covert action director. And indeed, as Helms later related to me, Kennedy responded to the sight of the Cuban rifle by telling him, “Great work!”
The president reminded the C.I.A. man that he would be leaving on Thursday morning for Texas. He told Helms, “Be sure to have complete information for me when I get back from my trip.”
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WASHINGTON — Of all the tense moments in the year and a half of secret negotiations to free Alan P. Gross from Cuba, none may have matched a meeting in Ottawa early last June between a two-person White House delegation and their Cuban counterparts.
Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the American soldier imprisoned for nearly five years in Afghanistan, had just been freed in return for five Taliban commanders held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Cuban negotiators seized on his release as a precedent that would allow a reluctant White House to agree to a swap of Mr. Gross for three Cuban agents jailed in the United States, according to a senior administration official.
The Cubans were panicked: At that moment, in Plano, Tex., Mr. Gross’s mother, Evelyn, was in the last stages of a battle with lung cancer. (She died on June 18.) The Cubans were fearful that her death would drive Mr. Gross to kill himself, depriving them of their most valuable chip to win the freedom of their agents, who had become folk heroes in Cuba.
For the White House, however, Sergeant Bergdahl’s release was a new roadblock. Freeing the soldier, who had walked off his post, in exchange for hardened Taliban fighters provoked such a barrage of criticism in Congress that White House officials told the Cubans that any deal would have to be more than a simple quid pro quo.
“We made the point: ‘This shows you how controversial swaps are. This is something we are only willing to consider in the context of an appropriate exchange,'” said a senior official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal negotiations. “The important thing was not to see the swap as the end, but the gateway to the policy changes.”
In the end, the deal for Mr. Gross also included the re-establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and Cuba after 53 years of estrangement, an agreement to release 53 political prisoners and the freeing of a Cuban intelligence officer, Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, who had worked for the C.I.A.
But it also took another six months, and the personal intercession of Pope Francis, to nail down the details. People close to Mr. Gross attribute that delay largely to the shadow of Sergeant Bergdahl. During that period, Mr. Gross’s emotional condition continued to deteriorate, and the White House became as worried as the Cubans about his survival.
“The Cubans thought the Bergdahl prisoner exchange made it easier,” said Tim Rieser, a senior aide to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who conducted his own negotiations with Cuban officials for two years on behalf of Mr. Gross. “I told them it made it harder for the president and they needed to make it easier.”
Mr. Rieser, who was not involved in the White House talks but was briefed regularly on them, said he tried to explain to the Cubans the political sensitivities of the Bergdahl case for President Obama. Having witnessed the toxic reaction on Capitol Hill, Mr. Rieser said he made it clear to them that a deal for Mr. Gross could not look like a replay.
“I told them you’ve got to put yourself in Obama’s shoes,” Mr. Rieser said. “It’s a politically difficult decision for him, and he’s got 50 other more important issues on his desk right now.”
The two White House officials, Benjamin J. Rhodes and Ricardo Zúñiga, flew to Ottawa right after Mr. Obama returned from a trip to Europe that had been dogged by the Bergdahl case. Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, came under fire after saying that Sergeant Bergdahl had served with “honor and distinction,” regardless of the questions about why he walked off his military outpost in a remote corner of Afghanistan.
There were distinct parallels between the two cases. For more than a year, until early 2012, the Obama administration had tried to negotiate Sergeant Bergdahl’s release as part of a broader political settlement with the Taliban, in which they would renounce terrorism and take steps to reconcile with the Afghan government.
The White House abandoned those efforts when it became clear, after the United States announced its plan to withdraw combat troops, that the Taliban were no longer interested in a bigger deal. Amid fears that Sergeant Bergdahl’s life was in jeopardy — another echo of the Gross case — the American focus narrowed to a straight swap.
Highlights from the Times’s coverage of the historic developments in relations between the United States and Cuba.
But the negotiations for Mr. Gross played out in reverse order. Initially, the State Department demanded that the Cubans release him, refusing to consider any broader deal. Mr. Leahy told Mr. Obama that Mr. Gross would never be freed unless the United States was willing to negotiate over the three agents, who were part of a group originally known as the Cuban Five.
After Mr. Obama was re-elected, he made normalizing relations with Cuba one of his top priorities — one that depended on freeing Mr. Gross. In choosing Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Zúñiga to open a direct channel, the president authorized them to expand the talks to include the Cuban agents, political prisoners and the goal of re-establishing diplomatic ties.
At the White House, only a tight circle of aides was told of the back channel. To preserve their secrecy, they code-named the negotiations Project Ardilla, using the Spanish word for squirrel, after the Secret Squirrel, the swashbuckling, bucktoothed rodent in the vintage Hanna-Barbera cartoon.
Before settling on the package announced this month, the two sides talked about other potential exchanges, including swapping felons. Among those discussed was Joanne Chesimard, a former Black Panther who fled to Cuba after being convicted in 1977 of killing a New Jersey state trooper. But she has asylum in Cuba, and the Cubans had their own list of felons here whose release would be politically contentious.
As the summer wore on, officials said, the administration did what it could to try to improve Mr. Gross’s mental state. Secretary of State John Kerry sent him a handwritten letter after the death of his mother, imploring him not to lose hope. The White House negotiated with the Cubans to allow him more calls and access to email.
But the willingness of White House officials to risk waiting another six months attests to the political pressures they faced. After all, previous presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Jimmy Carter, approved straight spy swaps with Cuba, said Peter Kornbluh, an author of “Back Channel to Cuba,” about the history of secret talks between the two countries.
“What is unprecedented is the U.S. argument that the swap had to have some equivalence,” said Mr. Kornbluh, who is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington. “Negotiations in foreign policy don’t have to be equivalent. They just have to meet the needs to both sides.”
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WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner on Tuesday expressed “full confidence” in Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 3 Republican leader in the House, as he sought to quell a racially charged controversy shaking the party after Mr. Scalise confirmed that he had addressed a white supremacist group a dozen years ago.
Mr. Boehner’s statement of support was his first public comment since the news broke on Monday night, a period filled with calls from some Republican and conservative commentators, as well as Democrats, for Republican leaders to shove Mr. Scalise from the leadership post. The flap roiled Republicans just as they were poised for a celebratory takeover of Congress when the new session opens next week.
“More than a decade ago, Representative Scalise made an error in judgment, and he was right to acknowledge it was wrong and inappropriate,” Mr. Boehner said. “Like many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, I know Steve to be a man of high integrity and good character. He has my full confidence as our Whip, and he will continue to do great and important work for all Americans.”
At nearly the same time, Mr. Scalise released a statement disavowing the group of white supremacists he spoke to in 2002, when he was a state representative. The group, called the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, was founded by David Duke, the nationally known former Ku Klux Klan leader.
“Twelve years ago, I spoke to many different Louisiana groups as a state representative, trying to build support for legislation that focused on cutting wasteful state spending, eliminating government corruption and stopping tax hikes,” Mr. Scalise said. “One of the many groups that I spoke to regarding this critical legislation was a group whose views I wholeheartedly condemn. It was a mistake I regret, and I emphatically oppose the divisive racial and religious views groups like these hold. I am very disappointed that anyone would try to infer otherwise for political gain.”
The furor recalled an episode in 2002, the year Mr. Scalise spoke to the group, when Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi resigned as the Republican Senate leader after expressing regret that then-Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina had not been elected when he ran for president as a segregationist in 1948.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has described the organization, which uses the acronym EURO, as a hate group, while noting that in recent years it has “accomplished little” and served “primarily as a vehicle to publicize Duke’s writing and sell his books.”
Some Republicans joined Democrats in expressing skepticism at Mr. Scalise’s claim that he had been unaware of the group’s racist nature.
“How do you not know? How do you not investigate?” asked Erick Erickson, a conservative pundit and former Louisianian, in opening a column on his widely followed RedState website. He added that Mr. Lott had been forced from the Senate leadership “for something less than this.”
The communications director at the Democratic National Committee, Mo Elleithee, said in a statement on Tuesday: “Seriously? He didn’t know?”
“How abhorrent does a group have to be to decline their invitation?” Mr. Elleithee asked. “These questions are just the tip of the iceberg. Rep. Scalise and all of the Republican leadership need to start giving some real answers soon.”
Republicans had been hoping to begin the next Congress free of distraction and with a focus on what many party members consider an electoral mandate — the Republicans’ largest congressional majority in decades. Party leaders have promised for weeks to show that they can govern without the gridlock that marred much of the 113th Congress. The party is also working to improve its appeal among racial minorities, who have been essential to President Obama’s electoral victories.
Peter Wehner, an official in the George W. Bush administration and now a scholar at the right-of-center Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, wrote on his Twitter account, “Rep Scalise should resign his leadership post. The party of Lincoln shouldn’t have as its #3 a keynoter at a white supremacist convention.”
Mr. Scalise was elected whip in June with heavy support from fellow Southern Republicans, who wanted a red-state lawmaker among their conference’s top leaders. Mr. Boehner is from Ohio, and the House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, is from California, both states that President Obama carried in 2008 and 2012.
For Mr. Boehner, the Scalise controversy came just as he had helped resolve a separate embarrassment involving a House Republican, working behind the scenes this week to pressure Representative Michael G. Grimm of New York to resign after Mr. Grimm pleaded guilty to a federal tax evasion charge.
Democrats attacked Mr. Boehner for not acting against Mr. Scalise. The spokesman for Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, wrote on Twitter that Mr. Boehner’s “silence on Scalise” was “another example of his consistent failure to stand up to extreme GOP elements.”
On Monday night, Mr. Scalise told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, “For anyone to suggest that I was involved with a group like that is insulting and ludicrous.”
He seemed to suggest a staff error, noting that he had had just one aide at the time. “When someone called and asked me to speak, I would go,” he said. “If I knew today what they were about, I wouldn’t go.”
The Democratic Party of Louisiana called Monday night for Mr. Scalise to explain why he had addressed the EURO gathering and to “apologize for helping to legitimize a group that should be denigrated, not wooed, by elected officials.”
“This is a serious stain on Scalise’s record as a public servant,” the party said in a statement.
A transcript of Mr. Scalise’s speech was not available. In a 2002 blog post on <a href="http://Stormfront.org" rel="nofollow">Stormfront.org</a>, an online community of self-proclaimed white nationalists, one person who heard the speech described it as “productive” because Mr. Scalise had “discussed ways to oversee gross mismanagement of tax revenue or ‘slush funds’ that have little or no accountability.”
“Representative Scalise brought into sharp focus the dire circumstances pervasive in many important, underfunded needs of the community at the expense of graft within the House and Urban Development Fund, an apparent giveaway to a selective group based on race,” the conference guest wrote.
Mr. Scalise’s appearance was first reported Sunday by Lamar White Jr., a blogger who runs a website for liberals in Louisiana.
Mr. White also dug up a Stormfront post from 2004 that reminded readers that Mr. Scalise had offered “his support for issues that are of concern to us.” The post went on to say that Mr. Scalise “would be a good alternative” to Mr. Duke in Congress.
Mr. White’s report spread rapidly on political blogs and on Twitter, with colleagues in Louisiana strongly defending Mr. Scalise and calling Mr. White’s motives into question.
“This manufactured blogger story is simply an attempt to score political points by slandering the character of a good man,” Roger F. Villere Jr., chairman of the Republican Party of Louisiana, said in a statement.
In an interview on Monday with The Washington Post, Mr. Duke described Mr. Scalise as a “nice guy” who had been invited to the EURO conference by two Duke associates. Mr. Duke was out of town at the time of the conference, and spoke to attendees by phone and video links.
In 2004, Mr. Scalise and some other Louisiana Republicans were sharply critical of Mr. Duke when he sought to run for Congress as a Republican.
“David Duke is an embarrassment to our district, and his message of hate only serves to divide us,” Mr. Scalise said, according to a February 2004 news account in New Orleans.
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Mayor Bill de Blasio has spent weeks expressing his respect and admiration for the New York Police Department, while calling for unity in these difficult days, but the message doesn’t seem to be sinking in.
When he spoke at a police graduation ceremony at Madison Square Garden on Monday, some in the crowd booed and heckled him. This followed the mass back-turning by scores of officers when the mayor spoke on Saturday at the funeral of Officer Rafael Ramos; the virtual back-turning the day before by an airplane-towed banner (“Our backs have turned to you”), and the original spiteful gesture by officers on the night Mr. de Blasio visited the hospital where Officer Ramos and his partner, Wenjian Liu, lay dead.
Mr. de Blasio isn’t going to say it, but somebody has to: With these acts of passive-aggressive contempt and self-pity, many New York police officers, led by their union, are squandering the department’s credibility, defacing its reputation, shredding its hard-earned respect. They have taken the most grave and solemn of civic moments — a funeral of a fallen colleague — and hijacked it for their own petty look-at-us gesture. In doing so, they also turned their backs on Mr. Ramos’s widow and her two young sons, and others in that grief-struck family.
These are disgraceful acts, which will be compounded if anyone repeats the stunt at Officer Liu’s funeral on Sunday.
The New York Police Department is going through a terrible time, and the assassinations of those officers only underscore the dreadful dangers that rank-and-file cops face every day. And, in truth, there is some thanklessness to being a cop. Officers often feel beleaguered, jerked around by supervisors and politicians, obligated to follow rules and policies that can be misguided, held responsible for their mistakes in ways that the public is not, exposed to frequent ridicule and hostility from the people they are sworn to serve. It has always been that way with cops.
But none of those grievances can justify the snarling sense of victimhood that seems to be motivating the anti-de Blasio campaign — the belief that the department is never wrong, that it never needs redirection or reform, only reverence. This is the view peddled by union officials like Patrick Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association — that cops are an ethically impeccable force with their own priorities and codes of behavior, accountable only to themselves, and whose reflexive defiance in the face of valid criticism is somehow normal.
It’s not normal. Not for a professional class of highly trained civil servants, which New York’s Finest profess to be. The police can rightly expect, even insist upon, the respect of the public. But respect is a finite resource. It cannot be wasted. Sometimes it has to be renewed.
The failures of some cops, the misguided policing tactics that feed a sense of oppression in parts of the city, the offensive provocations of some in the police-reform protest movement, and the horrific killings of two officers, have led the city to a dangerous point.
But there is a way out of this cul-de-sac. It was stated at Officer Ramos’s funeral by an exemplary public servant — and stout de Blasio ally — Commissioner William Bratton.
He put it beautifully: “The police, the people who are angry at the police, the people who support us but want us to be better, even a madman who assassinated two men because all he could see was two uniforms, even though they were so much more. We don’t see each other. If we can learn to see each other, to see that our cops are people like Officer Ramos and Officer Liu, to see that our communities are filled with people just like them, too. If we can learn to see each other, then when we see each other, we’ll heal. We’ll heal as a department. We’ll heal as a city. We’ll heal as a country.”
The mayor will be meeting Tuesday with leaders of the five police unions to lower the temperature and to move the city forward. He has been doing and saying the right things, but he also seems to be taking great pains not to say anything to set off the cops. Surely many officers understand and accept his conciliatory words and realize that the things Mr. de Blasio has done — like hiring Mr. Bratton, increasing financing for the department and modernizing its equipment — are motivated by an honest desire to do right by the Police Department.
The grieving rank-and-file need to recognize this and also see the damage that many of their colleagues, and their union representatives, are doing to trash their department’s reputation.
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LONDON — Walter Bagehot, in his 1867 book, “The English Constitution,” famously described the key to a lasting monarchy as mystery and obfuscation. “Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it,” he wrote. “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.”
These days, however, the task is rather different: controlling the daylight to preserve, or restore, the magic. And if that requires a devious spin doctor, so be it.
But not too much daylight, please.
In a controversial decision, the British Broadcasting Corporation has postponed the scheduled broadcast of a documentary about how the royal family hired a public-relations professional to restore the reputation of Prince Charles after the 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and to help integrate into the royal household his then-lover, Camilla Parker Bowles, whom he later married, and who is now the Duchess of Cornwall.
The first part of a two-part documentary, “Reinventing the Royals,” was supposed to be broadcast on Jan. 4, but the BBC has postponed it for an indefinite period “while a number of issues, including the use of archive footage, are resolved,” the public broadcaster said in a statement.
But according to the RadioTimes, which broke the story, the BBC acted after “an intervention from lawyers known to represent senior members of the royal family, including the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.”
The documentary focuses on Mark Bolland, a public-relations executive hired by Prince Charles in 1996 as an assistant private secretary. Mr. Bolland served as the prince’s deputy private secretary from 1997-2002, then served as his public-relations consultant in 2003.
The documentary is presented by Steve Hewlett and was made without the cooperation of the royal family. It shows how Mr. Bolland took every opportunity to show Prince Charles as a loving father and concerned single parent, while trying to win public acceptance for Mrs. Parker Bowles.
The filmmaker reports that the campaign to integrate Mrs. Parker Bowles into palace life was named “Operation Mrs. P.B.,” and that Charles understood his standing with the British public had been deeply damaged by the death of Diana in a car accident in Paris and revelations of his relationship with Mrs. Parker Bowles.
It also traces the deep suspicion of the news media by Prince William, his eldest son with Diana, to an incident in which he felt he had been “used to further his father’s interests” after news of his first private meeting with his future stepmother was leaked to the British tabloid The Sun, just 10 months after his mother’s death, when he was 15.
William wanted to know how it happened, although it later turned out to have been accidentally leaked by a staffer for Mrs. Parker Bowles, according to Sandy Henney, who was press secretary to Charles when Diana died. In an interview for the documentary, she described the incident as a “defining moment” for the young Prince William.
As a consequence, according to Mr. Hewlett, William became deeply wary of the press. “For William, protecting his privacy and that of his family has perhaps understandably become a virtual obsession,” Mr. Hewlett wrote in an article for RadioTimes. But “in a new media age dominated by the Internet, with all the accompanying expectations of openness and transparency, there are real concerns, even within the royal household, over the sustainability of William’s approach.”
Tom Bradby, a one-time royal correspondent and now ITV’s political editor, said that the princes never lost their disdain for the press. “William and Harry were very angry,” he told Mr. Hewlett. “They thought that the media had hounded their mother to death. I don’t mean they vaguely thought that; they actually thought that’s what had happened.”
Mr. Bolland created resentment among the palace staff, according to the documentary, while Prince William and his brother, Prince Harry, referred to him as “Blackadder,” after a television comedy starring Rowan Atkinson about a devious, scheming, cowardly opportunist close to the royals.
Ms. Henney is forthcoming in the documentary. Years before Diana’s death in a car accident in Paris, Prince Charles “was getting some pretty virulent criticism: bad father, unloving husband,” Ms. Henney said. “I think he was pretty hurt. If you’ve got a middle-aged balding man and a beautiful princess, it’s a no-brainer as to who is going to get the media coverage.”
Relations between the royal family and the BBC, a public broadcast station dependent on licensing fees paid by nearly everyone in Britain with a television, have often been strained, especially during times of royal scandal. Their rift was on display in 2007, when the controller of BBC One resigned after the network showed a misleading trailer at a press launch in which it appeared that Queen Elizabeth II had walked out of a photo shoot after being asked to remove her crown.
In a statement about the delay, the BBC wrote: “The BBC is delaying broadcast of the documentary ‘Reinventing The Royals,’ due to be shown on BBC Two on Jan. 4, until later in the new year while a number of issues including the use of archive footage are resolved.” Permission from the royal family to use such footage is normally granted without fuss.
A spokesman for Clarence House, where Prince Charles and the duchess live, have denied asking that the program be pulled or postponed, though there were reports of detailed talks between the BBC and the royals throughout the year or so it took to make the documentary. “Scheduling of television programs is a matter for the broadcaster,” the spokesman said.
Mr. Bolland, who now has his own public-relations firm, was unavailable for comment.
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MOSCOW — The police in Moscow briefly detained the anticorruption crusader and political opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny on Tuesday as he tried to join an unauthorized, antigovernment rally, just hours after a Moscow court had given him a suspended sentence on criminal fraud charges.
The authorities said later that the police were merely escorting Mr. Navalny back to his home, Interfax reported.
Earlier, in a surprise twist, the court had spared Mr. Navalny jail time by suspending his sentence of three and a half years but ordered his younger brother, Oleg, who was also charged, to serve a prison term of the same length.
The imprisonment of Oleg Navalny, who is generally viewed as a pawn in a larger battle, signaled that the Kremlin was making a thuggish attempt to suppress Aleksei Navalny’s political activities and avoid making a martyr out of him.
After the sentencing, Mr. Navalny tried his best to provoke the authorities, walking from Pushkin Square, down Tverskaya Street toward Manezh Square, and the Kremlin, alternately grim-faced and smiling, trailed by a scrum of journalists.
At one point, he was handed a cellphone to speak with the radio station Echo of Moscow.
“You just asked about house arrest, well house arrest is irrelevant in comparison with what is going on in our country,” he told the radio station. “It’s not about my brother, my family or myself, or any other concrete person. It’s about the disgusting, mean things happening now, happening for years now, because we have just been sitting at home.”
As he walked by the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, he joked that they should take it by storm, as it would be a more comfortable place to spend the night than where he was going. Speaking to Echo of Moscow, he asked Muscovites to join him on Manezh Square, saying, “I hope that I will be one individual who will grow into millions.”
A minute or so later, he was arrested on a sidewalk of Tverskaya Street, as police officers wedged through the crowd of journalists, grabbed him and shoved him into a bus parked nearby on the street. Some in the crowd shout “Shame! Shame!”
The verdict came as critics of the government were hoping that the country’s mounting economic problems would begin to loosen President Vladimir V. Putin’s grip on power.
After it was read, bailiffs immediately placed Oleg Navalny, a former postal worker who was not politically active and had been virtually unknown in public before the trial, in a cell inside the courtroom. He was wearing a Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt.
“Aren’t you ashamed?” Mr. Navalny cried out in dismay at the judge, Yelena Korobchenko.
“Why are you jailing him?” Mr. Navalny shouted. “This is a dirty trick. To punish me more?”
Aleksei Navalny’s house arrest, imposed in February, was expected to end as soon as the suspended sentence is officially in place. Under Russian law, his felony conviction makes him ineligible to seek public office for 10 years after the sentence is completed. His actions will also be shadowed now by fear of harm befalling his brother in prison.
In a recent interview published in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Oleg Navalny, who, like his brother, is married and has two young children, said he understood the risks of his brother’s political activism.
“We absolutely knew that sooner or later this all would touch us,” he said. “It is easy to influence a person through his family.”
The political opposition in Russia has been largely mute in recent months, as Mr. Putin’s popularity has soared following the invasion and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in the spring. Patriotism has also swelled in response to an aggressive government information campaign, presenting events in Ukraine as a coup orchestrated by the United States and the West in a bid to reduce Russia’s sphere of influence.
Some close observers of the Russian political system said that jailing Oleg Navalny effectively turned him into a “hostage,” and was a way of taking revenge against his brother.
“Kremlin liberalism,” Lilia Shevtsova, an expert on Russian domestic politics at the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote in a post on Facebook that oozed sarcasm. “Let’s put him on a long leash. We can always shorten it. And the brother gets a real sentence. This means that we take a family member hostage! And we can make his life in prison unbearable.”
Outside the courtroom, several dozen supporters of Mr. Navalny said they believed that his brother’s sentence was meant to punish him.
“So they have taken him hostage,” said Vera Kashtanova, a 70-year-old retiree huddled in a heavy fur coat against the morning frost.
Ms. Kashtanova said that she had not joined in protests, either during the Soviet era or under Mr. Putin, until this year, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
“I am a Sovok,” she said, using slang that means an old-fashioned Soviet person. “But I am an enlightened Sovok.”
After the sentence was read, a smattering of anti-Navalny demonstrators sauntered toward the subway, taunting the opposition leader’s supporters.
Some of them wore orange-and-black St. George’s ribbons, a symbol of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany that more recently has signified support of the Kremlin’s hard-line policies in Ukraine.
“A thief should sit in prison!” one yelled.
Once again, as with the unexpected pardon last year of another Putin enemy, the former oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the verdict seemed to underscore the all-encompassing power — and capriciousness — of the Russian leader and the system that he appears to command, often by oblique signals.
After nearly a year under house arrest, Mr. Navalny, a lawyer who led months of street protests that followed parliamentary elections tainted by accusations of fraud in December 2011, and who thenran unsuccessfully for mayor of Moscow in 2013, has said that he no longer has hope that Russia’s future can be determined at the ballot box.
“What are we going to go out on the streets for?” he asked in a recent interview with The New York Times. “There are no elections at all anymore. Talking about falsifications is absurd because none of us are allowed to run.”
Far from cowering, Mr. Navalny has publicly and repeatedly accused Mr. Putin and his closest associates in and out of the government of theft and corruption on a vast scale. More recently, he accused them of fomenting war in Ukraine for the sake of securing and expanding power.
He has also made no secret of his own presidential ambitions. And though he has lived for years on the brink of lengthy imprisonment, he has shown no willingness to leave Russia as other prominent critics of Mr. Putin have done in recent years.
Gennadi V. Gudkov, a former member of Parliament, compared the sentencing of the opposition leader’s brother to the policy of detaining relatives used in Chechnya by the Russian security services and a regional leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, against Islamic militants.
“It’s been made clear in today’s case against Navalny,” Mr. Gudkov wrote on Twitter, “Putin supports Kadyrov’s idea of punishing relatives.”
Mr. Navalny’s Twitter account, which has at times been managed by his wife or supporters after a court order prohibited him from using the Internet, featured a message after the ruling saying, “Of all possible sentences, today’s is the most vile.”
The fraud case against Mr. Navalny that was decided on Tuesday is just one of numerous criminal prosecutions that have been brought against him in recent years. All of them are generally regarded as a response by the authorities to his political activism.
In July 2013, Mr. Navalny was convicted of embezzlement after being accused of stealing nearly $500,000 from a state-controlled timber company while working as an unpaid adviser to the governor of the Kirov region east of Moscow. In a dramatic scene, he was sentenced to five years in prison and led from the courtroom in handcuffs, only to be released the next day by a judge who agreed to hear an appeal in the case.
It was while free from prison in that case that Mr. Navalny ran for mayor of Moscow. He drew a surprisingly strong 27.2 percent of the vote despite facing overwhelming obstacles in standing against the Kremlin-backed incumbent, Sergei S. Sobyanin.
At the time, it was widely believed that Mr. Sobyanin supported the idea of allowing Mr. Navalny to run as a way of granting some legitimacy to the elections. Although Mr. Sobyanin still had two years left in his term, he had resigned abruptly to force snap elections that gave him a heavy advantage.
In Kirov, the charges were considered baseless by many legal experts and had been thrown out after a local investigation. The case was resurrected by federal officials in Moscow, and the Kremlin made little effort to mask the political motivation of the prosecution.
Legal experts considered the fraud case unusually thin.
Although Mr. Navalny is known for his sharp tongue and for his deft turns of phrase, no one was amused in the courtroom earlier this month when prosecutors said they would seek a nine-year prison sentence and an additional year as penalty for previous crimes.
In a closing statement during that hearing, Mr. Navalny railed against the judges, prosecutors and other servants of the Putin government, accusing them of knowingly pursuing baseless prosecutions. He expressed particular outrage over the treatment of co-defendants in his cases, including a friend in Kirov, Pyotr Ofitserov, and his brother.
“How many times in his life can a person who has done nothing illegal pronounce his closing words?” Mr. Navalny asked. “In the last year and a half, this is my sixth or 10th closing statement. It’s as if the end of days are coming.”
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The ruble’s dramatic decline threatens to plunge Russia into a full-scale economic crisis. President Vladimir Putin has attempted to minimize the difficulties and deflect blame toward the West, but the problem is serious and no one is to blame but Mr. Putin himself. His efforts to destabilize Ukraine have brought painful sanctions upon Russia, reinforced its dependence on oil and isolated its economy.
Yet Russia’s crisis holds both risk and opportunity. The risk is that an economic collapse might lead the Kremlin to lash out more severely against Ukraine and the West. But there is an opportunity to be seized if the ruble’s fragility increases Russia’s readiness to de-escalate the war in Ukraine in exchange for relief on sanctions and revitalized economic ties with the West.
The roots of the ruble crisis are twofold, brought on by the decline in global oil prices, which sharply cut Russian state revenues and made the national budget untenable, and by the impact of sanctions that the United States and the European Union have imposed in response to the Kremlin’s efforts to undercut Ukrainian independence. While the sanctions have had some economic impact, more importantly, they have made it harder for Russian banks and companies to refinance maturing debt, and have led private citizens to send their funds abroad. All this makes an already risky business climate much worse.
The collapsing economy adds serious risk to an already tense standoff with Russia. Mr. Putin is well aware that his popularity rests on economic, social and political stability. A severe downturn could erode his domestic support. To save himself, he may again resort to the dual levers of nationalism and foreign adventurism to shore up his popularity at home. While this strategy would not be sustainable in the long term, in the near term it would guarantee that the animosity between Russia and the West spirals to dangerous new lows. The most severe consequences would surely be felt by Ukraine, but the Baltic states could also be targeted.
Reducing these risks and seizing the opportunity the crisis presents calls for a comprehensive policy that offers phased sanctions relief but also includes enhanced deterrence and a renewed commitment to Ukraine’s independence. The breakdown of peace talks in Minsk last week only makes the need for a truly comprehensive package more urgent. It would include these basic elements:
• Russia would fully comply with the September Minsk agreement on Eastern Ukraine: After Russia’s invasion in August, an accord was reached promising the disputed Donbass region more autonomy in exchange for a cease-fire and restoration of Ukrainian control of its borders. The cease-fire has been continuously violated, and the Kremlin bears the brunt of the blame. To get sanctions relief, Russia would first have to withdraw all remaining Russian forces from Ukrainian territory and fully support border monitoring by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Europe and the United States would need to operate on a mutual understanding that if Russia reneged on its promise, sanctions would be immediately reimposed. For its part, Kiev would have to redouble its efforts to bring pro-Ukrainian militias operating in the east under control and prepare to implement the elections and aid efforts called for by the agreement.
•NATO would continue to strengthen its deterrent posture in Eastern Europe to hedge against increased risk to its members. There has been reticence in some capitals to implement NATO’s new Readiness Action Plan. That must change. Reinforcement of the alliance’s eastern flank is essential insurance against another breakdown in its relationship with Russia. Washington should commit to a persistent presence of ground forces in the Baltic states and Poland. But for deterrence to work, forward deployments must be more multinational. Small numbers of European forces need to be deployed in Baltic states and Poland and hold regular exercises to reinforce deterrence.
•As part of a broader deal, Ukraine would have to recognize publicly that it is not currently prepared for NATO membership. Russia has longstanding objections to the possibility that Ukraine might join NATO. While it is crucial that Kiev make its own decisions about membership, and NATO must maintain its longstanding open-door policy, the fact is that Ukraine today is still far from meeting the necessary membership requirements. Recognition by Kiev that it will not attain membership in the near term would simply be an acknowledgement of this reality. Nevertheless, Ukraine could still have an enhanced partnership with NATO.
•Russia would have to accept a closer Ukrainian relationship with the European Union — as well as deepen its own. It was Ukraine’s interest in moving closer to the union that sparked the initial crisis. Better and closer ties are in the interests of both countries. Russian concerns with being cut off from access to Ukrainian markets, however, should be taken into account. (Access to the Russian market for Ukraine’s exports is important to the Ukrainians, too.)
•The West would have to make a firmer commitment to supporting internal reforms in Ukraine. Though it has committed funding and advisory support to help strengthen Ukraine’s political, economic and military institutions, a larger, longer-term commitment is needed. Ukraine must do its share by tackling corruption, raising domestic energy prices, reforming its energy sector, and undertaking other structural reforms.
Even as the Minsk talks collapsed, Russia agreed to continue providing Ukraine with coal and electricity, a sign that Moscow may still be seeking a deal. We think this package would offer Russia a brighter economic future along with recognition of Russia’s enduring importance to the West. It would also stabilize Ukraine. But it still may be a hard sell. Reviving the Group of 8, NATO-Russia Council and other channels as part of a comprehensive deal would help. So would high level E.U.-Eurasian Union meetings.
Mr. Putin may still choose to escalate the confrontation in spite of the economic storm ahead. But American and European diplomats must use the crisis to offer him an alternative path.
Hans Binnendijk, a former senior director for defense policy on the National Security Council, is a senior fellow at the RAND Corporation. Christopher S. Chivvis is associate director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center. Olga Oliker is director of the RAND Center for Russia and Eurasia.
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 BBC News |
Russia Has To Slash Military Spending To Balance The Budget
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A Georgian priest is one of nearly 40 people feared missing after a fire on a Greek ferry in the Adriatic Sea.
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