Mr. Putin Resumes His War in Ukraine - NYT Editorial | U.S. Considers Supplying Arms to Ukraine Forces, Officials Say - NYT | "...just as in Soviet times, Russian embassies abroad and Moscow organizations... are busily involved in creating “pseudo-organizations, with pseud-experts, pseudo-lawyers, and pseudo-journalists” who the Russian authorities then use to isolate other points of view while promoting their own." - Moscow Seeking to Make Russian Diaspora a Soviet-Style Political Weapon Against West, Pasternak Says - by Paul Goble | Бойцы батальона «Айдар» блокируют проезжую часть около здания Минобоны в Киеве - Коммерсантъ
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"And perhaps most seriously and again just as in Soviet times, Russian embassies abroad and Moscow organizations supposedly intended to help them are busily involved in creating “pseudo-organizations, with pseud-experts, pseudo-lawyers, and pseudo-journalists” who the Russian authorities then use to isolate other points of view while promoting their own."
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Moscow Seeking to Make Russian Diaspora a Soviet-Style Political Weapon Against West, Pasternak Saysby paul goble (noreply@blogger.com)
Paul Goble
Staunton, February 2 – Russian embassies and other organizations Moscow has set up ostensibly to promote Russian ideas are actually working to transform Russian diasporas into obedient political weapons against the West and are treating them in ways that recall Soviet times, according to the head of the Russian compatriots organization in the Netherlands.
Russian diplomats and officials are doing so, Grigory Pasternak and others in the Russian community abroad say, by imposing a very limited definition of what is Russian. “If you don’t agree with Kremlin policies,” they suggest, it is very difficult to be involved “in the dissemination of Russian culture abroad” (svoboda.org/content/article/26820547.html).
For the last decade, he told Radio Liberty’s Sofya Korniyenko, he and his wife Olga Shterenshis have “been involved in popularizing the Russian language and Russian culture” among the Dutch. But now “it turns out that a representative of the Russian embassy in the Netherlands considers this destructive activity.”
Throughout Europe, they say, Russian diplomats talk about supporting Russian language and culture, but they have little money to do so and aren’t willing to be transparent about where what money they do have is going, allowing embassies to give it to Putin loyalists even if they don’t know Russian rather than to Russian activists.
Such an approach recalls that of Soviet diplomats, and Pasternak says that there are other ways in which Moscow’s work with the diaspora do as well. When he was set to the World Congress of Compatriots in St. Petersburg, he says, the embassy gave him “instructions” about what he was to do and not do while there. Because he ignored them, he was blacklisted.
Moreover, he continues, Russian officials and the Russian media openly lie about the diaspora, talking about “hundreds” of participants in events which attracted only a handful and being careful to report only the words of those who support whatever Moscow is doing rather than provide a survey of all the opinions within the diaspora.
And perhaps most seriously and again just as in Soviet times, Russian embassies abroad and Moscow organizations supposedly intended to help them are busily involved in creating “pseudo-organizations, with pseud-experts, pseudo-lawyers, and pseudo-journalists” who the Russian authorities then use to isolate other points of view while promoting their own.
The situation has deteriorated since the start of the war in Ukraine, Pasternak and Shterenshis say. Various Facebook pages are being set up for “Russians in …” and only those who toe the Kremlin line are able to remain in them for more than a few days. The others are unfriended or leave in disgust, the two say.
Moreover, apparently at the behest of the Russian embassies, strange people are appearing who say they want to work with the diaspora. Often they don’t know Russian, and in one case, the individual sparked suspicions when he gave first one name and then another. Apparently, that person has concluded that he can make a career by being pro-Putin.
Some Russians living in Europe have been taken in, but not all, the two say; and they point to a recent case which shows just how incompetently if fervently Moscow’s agents are pursuing this agenda. Not long ago, the embassy announced that it was opening “a hot line” for any Russian being subjected to discrimination.
What was strange they say for an effort nominally directed at Russians abroad was that the announcement was made in English, hardly the language one would reasonably expect if the problems were as Moscow has presented them.
Read the whole story
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Дебальцево: жизнь под обстрелом by Радио Свобода
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В Донецкой области Украины продолжаются обстрелы сепаратистами населенного пункта Дебальцево. В воскресе...
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From: Радио Свобода
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| Time: 02:09 | More in News & Politics |
CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
No lives were lost in the huge fire that gutted a storage building on the Brooklyn waterfront over the weekend. But the flames put plenty of lives on display as the crumpling warehouse belched up its contents: decades’ worth of charred medical records, court transcripts, lawyers’ letters, sonograms, bank checks and more.
“They’re like treasure maps, but with people’s personal information all over them,” Spencer Bergen, 24, said of the half-charred scraps that he said he had seen strewn around the Williamsburg neighborhood as far inland as Berry Street, several blocks from the warehouse.
New York City sent disaster recovery contractors, equipped with nets, shovels and protective boots, to try to collect the debris. But still, beachcombers sifted freely through the trove of documents, picking their way through remnants of the days when many records were on paper and the city government was one of the few takers for north Brooklyn’s waterfront land.
Compared with the large — and increasingly commonplace — online breaches of personal information at corporations like Home Depot, Target and Sony, the potential damage from stray scraps of paper may seem slight. Still, a glance at a rocky jetty just south of the warehouse revealed a scattering of records stamped “confidential,” a health insurance form with a person’s Social Security number, a urinalysis report complete with a patient’s name and copies of checks featuring bank account numbers.
“If you wanted to steal an identity, I’m sure if you looked at that piece of paper, you’d find a medical record,” said Sherry Hanson, 50, one of the many curious onlookers who clambered down the rocks at the edge of Bushwick Inlet Park to get a closer look at the heaps of paper on Sunday.
Among the government agencies that said they had housed records in the CitiStorage warehouse at 5 North 11th Street were the state court system, and the city’s Administration for Children’s Services and the Health and Hospitals Corporation. Several local hospitals had stored medical records there as well. CitiStorage said the building, with six million cubic feet of storage, also held documents from law and financial services firms.
Reached on Sunday, the hospitals and city agencies sought to play down the possibility that reams of sensitive information had been thrown to the wind. At the same time, however, they said it was too early to know what types of documents had been lost.
The warehouse disgorged so many papers that they clogged the water-intake system of one of the fireboats aiming high-powered jets of water into the smoldering, ice-covered building, trying to smother flames that were still flaring up on Sunday. The current carried more papers to shore, luring people who paged through some documents, photographed others and kept more than a few as souvenirs.
“What if this was all diaries, instead of personal information? Love letters?” mused Loretta Rae, 38, who lives nearby. “If it was diaries,” she joked, “I’d definitely be down there reading it.”
Munirih Quinlan, 29, who works at a hospital, examined slides of what appeared to be an X-ray that had landed on a rock.
“This is crazy,” she said, recalling her training in recognizing Medicare fraud stemming from identity theft. “If you post anything,” she advised others, “make sure it doesn’t have people’s personal information on it.”
The city learned firsthand the dangers of storing important documents in waterfront buildings when storm surges from Hurricane Sandy ravaged two Police Department storage facilities in Red Hook and Greenpoint in October 2012. The department is still struggling to determine the extent of the damage to the Greenpoint building, which contained thousands of pieces of evidence.
Despite plans to move evidence away from the vulnerable Brooklyn waterfront buildings, however, the department has yet to do so, and the blaze over the weekend raised questions about how slowly the city was digitizing or otherwise protecting its records.
What types of records were stored in the CitiStorage warehouse or how many were damaged or dispersed remained a matter of confusion on Sunday evening. The state court system and the Administration for Children’s Services said they had been in the process of removing files from the building, making it unclear what still remained there, while the Health and Hospitals Corporation said it kept vital patient records in electronic form and that its operations would be unaffected.
Some members of the Greater New York Hospital Association — which includes Mount Sinai Health System, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System and NYU Langone Medical Center — kept records at CitiStorage, said Brian Conway, a spokesman for the association, but it was not clear which, if any, were involved.
About the possibility that confidential patient information might have been disclosed on a large scale as the wind scattered unburned records, Mr. Conway said, “There’s no reason to believe that’s a possibility.”
Yet in one indication of the city’s concern, the disaster recovery contractors, in their neon yellow jackets, sealed off the entrance to the rocky jetty with yellow caution tape early Sunday and began to scoop documents out of the water with nets and shovels.
“We’re just here to clean up the debris,” said one of the workers, adding that he did not have permission to explain further.
At a news conference on Sunday afternoon, the fire commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro, said the blaze was expected to continue smoldering for days as the paper inside continued to feed the flames.
The fire, which reached seven alarms, began around 6:20 a.m. on Saturday. But firefighters had also been called there two hours earlier for a smaller fire in the same location, which they found had been contained by the building’s sprinkler system. The firefighters then shut down the sprinklers to prevent further water damage to the paper records, and because sprinkler heads must be replaced after discharging water.
By the time the second emergency call came in, the sprinklers were offline, and the blaze was already large enough to draw scores of firefighters.
“It’s a building full of fuel,” Mr. Nigro said. “Once it got started, it was difficult to extinguish, especially under the extraordinarily rough conditions for the firefighters, with the extreme cold and strong winds.”
He said the department had interviewed three warehouse employees, but investigators had not been able to enter the building and were not close to determining the fire’s cause. Marshals were investigating whether the first fire had rekindled or a second fire started independently, and whether the fire had been deliberately set or sparked accidentally.
In Williamsburg, where luxury high-rises have rapidly replaced the old factories and warehouses and residents fear the 11-acre site where the CitiStorage building sits is next, it was not hard to find people who believed the fire’s cause was obvious.
Less than two blocks downwind from the smoldering waterfront, the cafe MatchaBar, on Wythe Avenue, reopened on Sunday; the acrid, ashy smoke had kept it closed the day before. Among the artists, musicians and writers gathered there was Lisa Markuson, 28, a blue-haired poet, who perched by the window with a Smith Corona typewriter, offering free haikus to customers.
Her ode to the fire:
we’re all pretty sure
that this was no accident
smoke clouds our vision
Read the whole story
· · · · ·
In the early 1990s Bill Browder invested $2,000 in a handful of Polish companies being privatized after the collapse of Communism. Eastern Europe was dipping a toe into the cold bath of free-market capitalism, and Mr. Browder, fresh out of Stanford University’s business school, wanted to jump in, too.
His small investment quadrupled in value within the year and went on to repay him tenfold. “For those who don’t know, the sensation of finding a ‘ten-bagger’ is the financial equivalent of smoking crack cocaine,” he writes in “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.” “Once you’ve done it, you want to repeat it over and over and over as many times as you can.”
Mr. Browder continued to smoke the crack pipe with gusto, shifting his action to Russia and creating a wildly successful investment fund, Hermitage Capital Management. His freewheeling, snappy book describes the meteoric rise, and disastrous fall, of a buccaneer capitalist who crossed the wrong people and paid a steep price.
The highs were very high. Mr. Browder excelled at sniffing out undervalued companies, rolling the dice and reaping fantastic returns. After determining that a little-known oil company called Sidancowas actually worth as much as Lukoil, for example, he bought about $11 million worth of its stock at $4 a share. The gamble was vindicated a year later when British Petroleum bought a block of the company’s stock at a 600 percent premium over that price.
Within two years after Hermitage’s founding in 1996, its assets had swelled from $25 million to more than $1 billion, making Mr. Browder the largest foreign investor in the Russian stock market. In 2000, Hermitage was named the best-performing emerging-markets fund in the world, having generated returns of 1,500 percent to its original investors. Its assets would grow to $4.5 billion by 2005.
The lows, however, were very low. A hefty portion of the book describes Mr. Browder’s frantic efforts to fight off a wolf pack of oligarchs trying to muscle in on Hermitage’s action and strip its assets.
The cut and thrust, and the high stakes, make for a zesty tale. Mr. Browder and his Russian team became adept at amassing scandalous information about their foes and then presenting the findings, tied up in a neat package, to Western journalists who could inflict maximum damage.
Mr. Browder admits to a fatal miscalculation. He assumed that his American citizenship made him untouchable. In fact, he was living on borrowed time. When Vladimir V. Putin was intent on reining in the oligarchs, his interests and Mr. Browder’s coincided. But at a certain point, they did not.
In 2005, deemed a “threat to national security,” Mr. Browder was kicked out of Russia, and his companies were seized. Later the Russian government asked Interpol to issue an all-points bulletin, or red notice, for his arrest on tax evasion charges. Interpol rejected the request, calling it politically motivated. Mr. Browder was then convicted by a Russian court in absentia. “When the Russian government turns on you, it doesn’t do so mildly — it does so with extreme prejudice,” Mr. Browder notes ruefully.
Worse, the Interior Ministry arrested Sergei L. Magnitsky, Hermitage’s tax lawyer. After being held in custody for more than a year, Magnitsky was found dead on a prison floor in Moscow after being beaten and tortured.
Mr. Browder began a relentless campaign to expose and punish Mr. Magnitsky’s persecutors, turning his case into an international cause célèbre. His efforts helped pressure Congress to pass a law in late 2012, commonly known as the Magnitsky Act, that barred 18 Russian officials connected with Magnitsky’s death from entering the United States or using its banking system, and set a precedent for future visa sanctions and asset freezes. Last spring the European Parliament passed its own version of the act.
It’s a Hollywood ending, right down to the standing ovation given by more than 700 European members of Parliament after passing the legislation.
Mr. Browder makes an unlikely hero and even more unlikely capitalist. His grandfather was the head of the American Communist Party and featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1938 as “Comrade Earl Browder.” Felix Browder, Earl’s son, became a mathematics professor at the University of Chicago. Bill Browder’s brother, Thomas, is an eminent particle physicist. “In my family, if you weren’t a prodigy, you had no place on earth,” he writes.
Mr. Browder, by contrast, was a slacker. He goofed off at boarding school and barely made it into the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he spent his freshman year reliving “Animal House.”
In the ultimate act of rebellion, he set his sights on a business career, a decision that straightened him out academically and no doubt would come as a shock to his grandfather. Adding insult to injury, Mr. Browder turned his gaze eastward, toward the former Communist heartland, with plunder on his mind.
“The dominoes were falling: soon all of Eastern Europe would be free,” he writes of the tumultuous weeks after the Berlin Wall came down. “My grandfather had been the biggest Communist in America, and as I watched these events unfold, I decided that I wanted to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe.”
For a while, he was. But as Mr. Magnitzky warned him, Russian stories never have happy endings.
Mr. Browder concludes on a grim note. “I have to assume that there is a very real chance that Putin or members of his regime will have me killed someday,” he writes. For good measure, he adds, “If I’m killed, you will know who did it.”
If this sounds histrionic, there is more than one dead body littering Mr. Browder’s pages. Alexander Litvinenko probably felt safe in London until he drank a cup of radioactive tea. As Mr. Browder discovered on more than one occasion, Russians are not always known for their light touch.
RED NOTICE
A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice
By Bill Browder
Illustrated. 396 pages. Simon & Schuster. $28.
Read the whole story
· · · · · ·
DEBALTSEVE, Ukraine — Ukrainian soldiers rattled along the snowy streets here in armored personnel carriers with the hatches battened down, their helmeted heads safely below plates of steel.
A few drunks staggered along the sidewalks, oblivious to the booms of artillery echoing through town.
Stray dogs scurried about, and in another sign that nobody ventures above ground for anything but pressing business, the carcass of one dog lay uncollected, frozen in the middle of a street.
For more than a week, this unremarkable small town in eastern Ukraine has been almost surrounded by attacking rebels. And because enveloping maneuvers are common in this nine-month war, there is even a phrase for it: “falling into a kettle.”
Debaltseve in the kettle is a glum place. “It’s just a horror living here,” said one woman in a crowd of mothers clutching children and packed bags made of plastic at a bus stop, waiting for a ride out.
After seizing a strategic airport outside Donetsk a week ago, the Russian-backed rebels have turned their sights on this town, valuable for its railroad switching yards, which they will need to revive the economy in areas under their control.
As fighting rages on in places like Debaltseve, the prospects for peace in Ukraine look dim.
A new round of cease-fire talks among Ukraine, Russia, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and separatists broke down Saturday evening, dashing hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough.
Ukraine’s representative, former President Leonid D. Kuchma, said Sunday that disagreement arose over a rebel demand that any new cease-fire line should reflect gains from an offensive that began last month, rather than the line established under a Sept. 5 agreement in Minsk, Belarus.
In Europe, too, hopes for diplomacy are fading. “Russian separatists no longer accept Minsk agreement,” Carl Bildt, the former foreign minister of Sweden, wrote on Twitter. “And behind them is Moscow.”
It is towns like Debaltseve that have seen the worst of the fighting.
Rebels have hemmed in the town on three sides and are trying to close the remaining gap, or the mouth of the kettle — an exposed, 31-mile stretch of highway across the open steppe that is being defended by Ukrainian troops.
The stakes are high for the defense of Debaltseve. If the rebels seize the road, something that seems possible at any moment, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians could be trapped in an area exposed to surrounding artillery. Already, the death toll is steadily rising; on Saturday, artillery killed 12 people here.
The road is both the only means for civilians to evacuate and the only supply route for the army.
“We have closed the kettle,” the main rebel leader, Aleksandr V. Zakharchenko, told Russian television Friday, making clear his intention to cut off and then capture Debaltseve.
“Anybody who leaves this kettle will be in the interlocking field of fire of our artillery,” Mr. Zakharchenko added, referring to the shelling of the road. “From today, the road is under fire.”
The authorities are scrambling to evacuate residents in minibuses, but their numbers are inadequate; each departing vehicle leaves hundreds of women and children behind at the bus stop. When this happens, they trudge back to a dank basement in a train station in which they have been sheltering since the siege began.
After nearly two weeks living in a basement without electricity, Ludmilla L. Ulyanenko, a retired nurse, decided to risk the road out on Saturday morning — only to find that all seats on a bus were taken.
The latest updates to the current visual survey of the continuing dispute, with maps and satellite imagery showing rebel and military movement.
After missing one bus, she stood on the sidewalk, pursing her lips in worry. “This whole situation reminds me of the sinking of the Titanic,” she said, gesturing at the women standing about, some crying. “They also stood around waiting for lifeboats, and there weren’t enough.”
“You don’t happen to know when the next bus will come?” she asked.
By Sunday, the road out had become all but impassable. Artillery hit two buses packed with evacuees, wounding four people, including two children. A car with volunteer aid workers was also struck on the road. In the town, a Grad rocket sprayed a group waiting for buses with shrapnel, wounding eight.
Ukrainians have taken to calling Debaltseve a second battle of Ilovaisk, an event sometimes called the “Ilovaisk kettle,” after the disastrous envelopment of that city last summer by Russian-backed rebels and, Western officials say, by regular Russian Army troops.
Today, critics have attacked the military leadership for stumbling into another near encirclement.
The missteps were as much political as military, Semen Semenchenko, a member of Parliament and paramilitary leader, said in an interview, a day before he suffered a concussion in fighting in Debaltseve.
The Ukrainian Army neglected to reinforce the road because the plan was to trust the cease-fire, he said.
In particular, a combined European, Russian and Ukrainian military monitoring group, jointly led by a Russian general, had been regularly traveling the road, ostensibly diminishing the chances of an attack on it.
As it turned out, when the fighting started in Debaltseve in late January, the Russian general simply stopped making the trip, staying behind at a barracks for peacekeeping officials.
“The general staff had a political strategy” of trying to bolster the cease-fire, not a military strategy to defend the town, Mr. Semenchenko said. Not enough attention was paid to the flanks, he said, leaving the road exposed.
The Ministry of Emergency Situations in Ukraine says it is doing all it can to diminish the risks to civilians. The ministry said 956 people, including 161 children, were evacuated from Thursday to Saturday. The prewar population was about 10,000.
At the bus stop, all attention was focused on the battle for the road and the journey ahead for those waiting for minibuses out. “They shoot the buses,” one woman said, yelling.
Spread out along tiny checkpoints of concrete bunkers along the 31 miles of road, Ukrainian soldiers can do nothing now but brace for assaults — even as the minibuses of evacuees bump slowly past.
“In the mist, you cannot see the enemy,” Mr. Semenchenko said. “You just hear the incoming rockets.”
Read the whole story
· · · · · · · ·
How did Vladimir Putin, the president who promised Russians stability when he first came to power in 2000, become today’s high-stakes gambler, presiding over an economy in crisis and the war in Ukraine? Why do his priorities now center on his political survival, even as the price he is making ordinary Russians pay for it grows out of all proportion?
To understand how Mr. Putin evolved one must look back to the traumas that shook Russia in the 1990s, and how his predecessor dealt with them. When Boris Yeltsin became the country’s first democratically elected president in 1991 he surrounded himself with intellectuals — political and social scientists, market economists and journalists. But the failure to implement his progressive agenda and his near-defeat in the 1996 election brought him up short. Unbridled corruption and mounting economic, political and social instability forced Mr. Yeltsin to recognize that he needed people who — he hoped — would be able to put things right.
In 1997 he appointed a relatively obscure former foreign intelligence officer, Vladimir Putin, as head of the Main Control Directory, which keeps close watch on spending by government officials and records their activities, much as the K.G.B. had done in Soviet days. Another security specialist, Lt. Gen. Nikolai Patrushev (now secretary of Russia’s Security Council), succeeded Mr. Putin in that role in 1998. Gen. Nikolai Bordyuzha (now general secretary of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, an alliance of post-Soviet states) became head of the presidential administration in 1998.
Mr. Yeltsin saw these and other K.G.B. alumni as a bulwark against corruption. But they worked in exactly the opposite way that he intended; instead of defeating corruption, they put it in their service. In August 1999, Mr. Yeltsin chose Mr. Putin, out of a number of possible candidates, as prime minister, and eventually endorsed him as his successor.
As the new century unfolded, Mr. Putin followed a similar path, one that emphasized economic growth and restoring Russian greatness. Too a certain extent, both men were lampooned in the international media, Mr. Yeltsin for public drunkenness, Mr. Putin for shirtless publicity stunts. But there is a key difference between them: Though both sought to present themselves as the embodiment of the Russian state, Mr. Yeltsin realized that this would set a dangerous precedent and stepped down. Mr. Putin, on the other hand, insists that he and the Russian state are one.
At a rally in the spring of 2012, after being elected to his third term as president, Mr. Putin declared that his victory was a defeat for those who are attempting to destroy the Russian state. “The battle for Russia continues,” he declared at another gathering. “The victory will be ours.”
Histrionics aside, the 2012 presidential election had not exactly been mortal combat: Mr. Putin’s rivals were all carefully selected for their personal loyalty to him. And yet he returned to the presidency a changed man, full of messianic fervor and eager to pick a fight.
Perhaps this was because he had spent the previous four years as prime minister to his own protégé, President Dmitri Medvedev. On the surface, it was a cozy arrangement: Mr. Putin retained a key voice in crucial decisions. But even if he was secretly still No.1 in the Kremlin pecking order, he must have felt insecure being officially regarded as No.2. How it must have rankled him when President Obama and Angela Merkel were especially careful to defer to President Medvedev. The German chancellor even hinted during Mr. Medvedev’s visit to Hanover in 2011 that she preferred him to Mr. Putin as a candidate in the approaching presidential race.
That was bad timing. In the Middle East a number of strongmen had been ousted, or were about to be, in the turmoil of the Arab Spring. And Mr. Putin, wary of the “color revolutions” that swept Georgia, Ukraine and other former Soviet states, returned to the presidency determined to bring his fight for political survival to a new level.
A more rational leader would be busy making sure that the economy was growing and that his base of supporters was happy. But for Mr. Putin, the real cause of Russia’s problems was foreign meddling. In his mind, it was the West that had fueled the color revolutions, just as it had stoked the angry protests over rigged parliamentary elections in the winter of 2011-12. Almost immediately, he pushed through a law regulating nongovernment organizations financed from abroad.
Today Russia continues turning inward. For Mr. Putin, competing with the rest of the world means playing by Western rules; if you don’t, the West freezes your assets and hits you with sanctions. He is fighting back by instilling his country with a war mentality. Russia’s plunging economy is presented as the price of pursuing a noble cause: standing up to America, fighting “fascism” in Ukraine and winning recognition for Russia as a global power.
Why my countrymen seem so receptive to this warmongering is an open question. Mr. Putin has certainly succeeded in clouding Russian perceptions and distorting Russian thinking. No one knows how long this strategy will succeed, but of one thing there is no doubt: For many Russians, Mr. Putin has turned himself into a kind of noble cause.
“So long as there is Putin, there will be Russia,” the Kremlin’s deputy chief of staff, Vyacheslav Volodin, declared last fall. “Without Putin there is no Russia.”
Perhaps some day the Russian people will snap out of their lethargy and realize that the state and the person leading it are not one thing.
Maxim Trudolyubov is the opinion page editor of the business newspaper Vedomosti, a Wilson Center fellow in Washington, and the author of a forthcoming book on power and property in Russia.
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WASHINGTON — With Russian-backed separatists pressing their attacks in Ukraine, NATO’s military commander, Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, now supports providing defensive weapons and equipment to Kiev’s beleaguered forces, and an array of administration and military officials appear to be edging toward that position, American officials said Sunday.
President Obama has made no decisions on providing such lethal assistance. But after a series of striking reversals that Ukraine’s forces have suffered in recent weeks, the Obama administration is taking a fresh look at the question of military aid.
Secretary of State John Kerry, who plans to visit Kiev on Thursday, is open to new discussions about providing lethal assistance, as is Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, officials said. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who is leaving his post soon, backs sending defensive weapons to the Ukrainian forces.
In recent months, Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, has resisted proposals to provide lethal assistance, several officials said. But one official who is familiar with her views insisted that Ms. Rice was now prepared to reconsider the issue.
The latest updates to the current visual survey of the continuing dispute, with maps and satellite imagery showing rebel and military movement.
Fearing that the provision of defensive weapons might tempt President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to raise the stakes, the White House has limited American aid to “non-lethal” items, including body armor, night-vision goggles, first aid kits and engineering equipment.
But the failure of economic sanctions to dissuade Russia from sending heavy weapons and military personnel to eastern Ukraine is pushing the issue of defensive weapons back into discussion.
“Although our focus remains on pursuing a solution through diplomatic means, we are always evaluating other options that will help create space for a negotiated solution to the crisis,” said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.
Fueling the broader debate over policy is an independent report to be issued Monday by eight former senior American officials, who urge the United States to send $3 billion in defensive arms and equipment to Ukraine, including anti-armor missiles, reconnaissance drones, armored Humvees and radars that can determine the location of enemy rocket and artillery fire.
Michèle A. Flournoy, a former senior Pentagon official who is a leading candidate to serve as defense secretary if Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected president, joined in preparing the report.Others include James G. Stavridis, a retired admiral who served as the top NATO military commander, and Ivo Daalder, the ambassador to NATO during Mr. Obama’s first term.
“The West needs to bolster deterrence in Ukraine by raising the risks and costs to Russia of any renewed major offensive,” the report says. “That requires providing direct military assistance — in far larger amounts than provided to date and including lethal defensive arms.”
In his State of the Union address last month, Mr. Obama noted that the sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies had hurt the Russian economy.
But American officials acknowledge that Russia has repeatedly violated an agreement, reached in Minsk in September. The agreement called for an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine, the removal of foreign forces and the establishment of monitoring arrangements to ensure that the border between Ukraine and Russia would be respected.
In recent weeks, Russia has shipped a large number of heavy weapons to support the separatists’ offensive in eastern Ukraine, including T-80 and T-72 tanks, multiple-launch rocket systems, artillery and armored personnel carriers, Western officials say.
Some of the weapons are too sophisticated to be used by hastily trained separatists, a Western official said. NATO officials estimate that about 1,000 Russian military and intelligence personnel are supporting the separatist offensive while Ukrainian officials insist that the number is much higher.
Supported by the Russians, the separatists have captured the airport at Donetsk and are pressing to take Debaltseve, a town that sits aside a critical rail junction.
All told, the separatists have captured 500 square kilometers — about 193 square miles — of additional territory in the past four months, NATO says. The assessment of some senior Western officials is that the Kremlin’s goal is to replace the Minsk agreement with an accord that would be more favorable to the Kremlin’s interests and would leave the separatists with a more economically viable enclave.
The administration’s deliberations were described by a range of senior Pentagon, administration and Western officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were talking about internal discussions.
A spokesman for General Breedlove declined to comment on his view on providing defensive weapons, which was disclosed by United States officials privy to confidential discussions.
“General Breedlove has repeatedly stated he supports the pursuit of a diplomatic solution as well as considering practical means of support to the government of Ukraine in its struggle against Russian-backed separatists,” the spokesman, Capt. Gregory L. Hicks of the Navy, said. But a Pentagon official familiar with the views of General Dempsey and Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr., the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said they believed the issue of defensive weapons should be reconsidered.
“A comprehensive approach is warranted, and we agree that defensive equipment and weapons should be part of that discussion.” the Pentagon official said.
Russian casualties remain an unusually delicate political issue for Mr. Putin, who has denied that Russian troops have been ordered to fight in Ukraine.
The report by Ms. Flournoy and the other former officials argues that the United States and its allies should capitalize on this fact to dissuade the Russians and the separatists from expanding their offensive.
“One of the best ways to deter Russia from supporting the rebels in taking more territory and stepping up the conflict is to increase the cost that the Russians or their surrogates would incur,” Ms. Flournoy said in an interview.
The current stock of Ukrainian anti-armor missiles, the report notes, is at least two decades old, and most of them are out of commission. So the report recommends that the United States provide the Ukrainian military with light anti-armor missiles, which might include Javelin antitank missiles.
”Providing the Ukrainians with something that can stop an armored assault and that puts at risk Russian or Russian-backed forces that are in armored vehicles, I think, is the most important aspect of this,” she added.
The Obama administration has provided radars that can locate the source of mortars. But the report urges the United States to also provide radars that can pinpoint the location of longer-range rocket and artillery fire. Enemy rocket and artillery attacks account for 70 percent of the Ukrainian military’s casualties, the report says.
Ukraine, the report notes, also needs reconnaissance drones, especially since the Ukrainian military has stopped all flights over eastern Ukraine because of the separatists’ use of antiaircraft missiles supplied by Russia.
The report also urged the United States to provide military communications equipment that cannot be intercepted by Russian intelligence.
Poland, the Baltic States, Canada and Britain, the report says, might also provide defensive weapons if the United States takes the lead.
The report was issued jointly by the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The other officials who prepared it are Strobe Talbott, who served as deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration; Charles F. Wald, a retired Air Force general who served as deputy commander of the United States European Command; Jan M. Lodal, a former Pentagon official; and two former ambassadors to Ukraine, John Herbst and Steven Pifer.
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The fighting in eastern Ukraine has flared up again, putting an end to any myth about the cease-fire that was supposed to be in force since September.
Though the Russian economy is staggering under the twinned onslaught of low oil prices and sanctions — or, conceivably, as a result of that onslaught — President Vladimir Putin has sharply cranked up his direct support for the rebels in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, while continuing to baldly deny it and to blame all the violence on the United States.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is broke, and without the military means to move against the Russian-backed rebels. Most of the victims are civilians who struggle with hunger and dislocation in the rubble of the combat zones and die in the constant exchanges of shells and rockets.
The eruption of fighting in recent weeks, which was not supposed to happen until spring, has given new force to pleas to the Obama administration to give Ukraine the means to resist Mr. Putin — in money and in arms.
Certainly the United States and Europe should increase their aid to Ukraine and explore ways to expand existing sanctions against Russia. NATO’s commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove, is said to support providing weapons and equipment to Kiev. And Secretary of State John Kerry is said to be open to discussing the idea. But lethal assistance could open a dangerous new chapter in the struggle — a chapter Mr. Putin would quite possibly welcome, as it would “confirm” his propaganda claims of Western aggression.
So far, President Obama has cautiously pledged to help Ukraine in every way “short of military confrontation.” Yet with sanctions and diplomacy making no headway against Russian aggression, it is imperative that the United States and its allies take a new look at what would bring Russia to a serious negotiation.
The first question is, to negotiate what? Along with denying the direct involvement of his troops in eastern Ukraine, Mr. Putin has not made clear what he is trying to achieve. Russian officials have suggested that Moscow has no interest in annexing eastern Ukraine, the way it grabbed Crimea, but rather seeks a Ukrainian federation in which the pro-Russian provinces would have relative autonomy, along with assurances that Ukraine will not move to join NATO.
There is definitely potential for negotiations there. Yet the latest rebel attacks have focused on Mariupol, an important port on the Black Sea, and on expanding the rebels’ control to areas that would give their self-proclaimed “republics” greater military and economic cohesion. And that speaks to long-term rebel occupation.
Tempting as it is to focus on punishing Mr. Putin, the greater objective must be to end the fighting so that Ukraine can finally undertake the arduous task of reforming and reviving its economy. Toward that end, the West must make clear to Mr. Putin that if a federation is his goal, the United States and its allies will actively use their good offices with Kiev to seek a workable arrangement.
But if the evidence continues to accumulate that Mr. Putin and the rebels are carving out a permanent rebel-held enclave in eastern Ukraine, à la Transdniestria, Abkhazia or South Ossetia, he must know that the United States and Europe will be compelled to increase the cost.
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Yesterday’s live coverage of the Ukraine conflict can be found here. An archive of our liveblogs can be found here. For an overview and analysis of this developing story see our latest podcast.
Please help The Interpreter to continue providing this valuable information service by making a donation towards our costs.
For links to individual updates click on the timestamps.
For the latest summary of evidence surrounding the shooting down of flight MH17 see our separate article: Evidence Review: Who Shot Down MH17?
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In the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, three former senior police officials were arrested in connection with the killing of two men in 2006. The two men were shot in their car by special forces. Prosecutors said the operation had been motivated by personal revenge, with false evidence used to make it look like the victims were members of a criminal gang. The father of one of the victims, who had campaigned for the police officers to be prosecuted, was killed by a bomb planted at his son’s grave...
A an alleged member of a criminal ring that is suspected of involvement in at least 40 murders across Russia has been detained in Montenegro.
 Lenta.ru |
Бойцы батальона «Айдар» блокируют проезжую часть около здания Минобоны в Киеве
Коммерсантъ В Киеве бойцы батальона «Айдара» и матери военнослужащих батальона «Киевская Русь» блокируют проезжую часть около здания Минобороны, которое находится на Воздухофлотском проспекте — одной из крупнейших транспортных магистралей Киева. Участники акции принесли ... Бойцы батальона "Айдар" пытаются штурмовать ворота Минобороны УкраиныРИА Новости Бойцы «Айдара» начали штурм Минобороны УкраиныLenta.ru Бойцы батальона «Айдар» начали жечь в Киеве покрышкиКомсомольская правда Московский комсомолец -НТВ.ru -Газета.Ru Все похожие статьи: 74 » |
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Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy has reported almost 25,000 signatures have been gathered for a petition to help Svetlana Davydova, a 36-year-old mother of seven who is accused of treason
Ukraine War Wounded Flood Civilian Hospitalsby webdesk@voanews.com (Al Pessin)
Dozens of injured Ukrainian troops arrive daily at the Central Hospital in the Donetsk Region city of Artemivsk, 40 kilometers from the government-controlled town of Debaltseve, which has been under siege from Russian-backed rebels for the past week. VOA's Al Pessin reports on the sometimes chaotic, always stressful and too often somber scene.
 РИА Новости |
СМИ: США рассматривают возможность поставок оружия Украине
Коммерсантъ США рассматривают возможность поставок Украине оружия, сообщает 2 февраля «РИА Новости» со ссылкой на New York Times. Главком НАТО в Европе, американский генерал Филип Бридлав поддерживает поставки Киеву «вооружений для обороны», и некоторые официальные лица ... СМИ: США рассматривают возможность поставок Украине оружияВзгляд США могут раздумывают о поставках оружия УкраинеПетербургский дневник Все похожие статьи: 4 » |
Michael Sapin, the French finance minister, said Paris was ready to help the new Greek government, but that debt reduction was out of the question.
Last March, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoted as saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine, supposedly in defense of Russian-speakers there, was just like “what Hitler did back in the ’30s” — using ethnic Germans to justify his invasion of neighboring lands. At the time, I thought such a comparison was over the top. I don’t think so anymore. I’d endorse Clinton’s comparison purely for the shock value: It draws attention to the awful things Putin is doing to Ukraine, not to mention his own country, whose credit rating was just reduced to junk status.
Putin’s use of Russian troops wearing uniforms without insignia to invade Ukraine and to covertly buttress Ukrainian rebels bought and paid for by Moscow — all disguised by a web of lies that would have made Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels blush and all for the purpose of destroying Ukraine’s reform movement before it can create a democratic model that might appeal to Russians more than Putin’s kleptocracy — is the ugliest geopolitical mugging happening in the world today.
Ukraine matters — more than the war in Iraq against the Islamic State, aka, ISIS. It is still not clear that most of our allies in the war against ISIS share our values. That conflict has a big tribal and sectarian element. It is unmistakably clear, though, that Ukraine’s reformers in its newly elected government and Parliament — who are struggling to get free of Russia’s orbit and become part of the European Union’s market and democratic community — do share our values. If Putin the Thug gets away with crushing Ukraine’s new democratic experiment and unilaterally redrawing the borders of Europe, every pro-Western country around Russia will be in danger.
“Putin fears a Ukraine that demands to live and wants to live and insists on living on European values — with a robust civil society and freedom of speech and religion (and) with a system of values the Ukrainian people have chosen and laid down their lives for,” Natalie Jaresko, Ukraine’s finance minister, told a Ukraine seminar at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week.
The U.S. and Germany have done a good job organizing the sanctions on Russia. the Obama administration recently decided to deploy some U.S. soldiers to Ukraine in the spring to train the Ukrainian National Guard, but I’d support increasing our military aid to Ukraine’s army now so it can better defend itself from the estimated 9,000 troops Putin has infiltrated into Ukraine.
Ukraine also needs $15 billion in loans and grants in the next year to stabilize its economy, in addition to its bailout from the International Monetary Fund.
Ukrainians had dug themselves into a deep, deep hole with their 20-plus years of industrial levels of corruption from a series of bad governments after Kiev became independent of the Soviet Union. The reason for hope is that the revolution and latest elections in Ukraine have brought in a new generation of reformers who are rapidly transforming ministries and passing tax and transparency regulations. They are actually welcoming hardheaded, good-governance benchmarks as a condition for Western aid. But if they deliver, we must deliver.
Ukraine could also affect the price of oil. The two biggest actors who can shape that price today are Saudi Arabia’s new king, Salman, and Russia’s czar, Putin. If the Saudis decide to cut back production significantly, the price of oil will go up. And if Putin decides to fully invade Ukraine, or worse, one of the Baltic states, and test whether NATO will really fight to defend either, the price of oil will go up. With his economy a shambles, Putin’s government is now almost entirely dependent on oil and gas exports, so he’s really hurting with the oil price collapse. The odds of Putin fully invading Ukraine or the Baltics are low, but do not rule out either.
Triggering a big geopolitical crisis with NATO is an easy way for Putin to shock the oil price back up. Putin’s covert Ukraine interventions up to now have not succeeded in that.
Thomas Friedman is a columnist
for The New York Times.
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Published: Sunday, 2/1/2015 - Updated: 1 minute ago
COMMENTARY
BY MIKE SIGOV
BLADE STAFF WRITER
BLADE STAFF WRITER
Russian President Vladimir Putin killed the chance of peace in Ukraine when he escalated Russia’s armed incursion into east Ukraine late last month.
Unless the United States and the European Union come up with an adequate response, the consequences could be dire.
The escalation started when the European Union was about to discuss the possibility of lifting some of its Russia sanctions and just in time to undermine the plans to hold a summit on efforts to end the fighting.
The timing of the escalation demonstrates that Mr. Putin is not interested in peace.
It also proves that his military campaign in Ukraine is more than just an effort to create a land link between Russia’s mainland and the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed last year.
Mr. Putin is trying to undermine Ukraine’s democratically elected pro-Western government and Ukraine’s effort to join the European Union and NATO. He is also testing the resolve of the United States and its allies to oppose him in his quest for the breakup of the European Union, the demise of NATO, and an ensuing Russian expansion in Europe.
When people in Russia see the bodies of civilians in pools of blood on sidewalks filmed after a recent Russian rocket attack on Mariupol, most of them — those who get their news from state television — believe “commentators” who blame the Ukrainian army and allege that it was armed by the United States and its European allies. Mariupol is a strategic Ukrainian port city on the Sea of Azov near the Black Sea.
The irony is that not only is that allegation untrue but that neither the United States nor any of its European allies have summoned the courage to ship weapons to Ukraine, which has long been imploring them to do so.
Russia also has subjected Ukraine’s neighbors — Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia — to military provocations such as flyovers of nearby airspace by Russia’s military aircraft. In addition, a week ago, the Russian foreign ministry accused Latvia of discrimination against its Russian-speaking population.
Accusations such as that — but against Ukraine — were common before Russia invaded first Crimea, then mainland Ukraine. Latvia may be Mr. Putin’s next target, because it has a considerably more sizable Russian-speaking population than Estonia and Lithuania, the other two of the three Baltic states.
Following the flareup of fighting in Ukraine last month, President Obama ruled out the military option but talked about the need to “ratchet up the pressure on Russia.” The European Union extended by six months the existing sanctions against Russian and pro-Russian separatist officials and announced its plans to expand existing economic sanctions against Russia.
That is not nearly enough because economic sanctions have continuously failed to deter Russia’s aggression. More than 5,100 people have been killed since the fighting started in April.
The Obama Administration should heed the advice of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who told U.S. lawmakers following the Russian escalation in Ukraine last month that Washington and its NATO allies should deploy troops to the Baltic states to deter Russia from taking control of those countries.
But it is even more important to arm the Ukrainians so they can check Mr. Putin’s aggression now — before the United States and its allies have to face off with him in Latvia, Estonia, or Lithuania once he takes over Ukraine. Unlike Ukraine, those three countries are NATO members, so aggression against any of them will be viewed as aggression against all NATO member countries, including the United States.
It is now clear that Mr. Putin is trying either to reassemble the Soviet empire or to simulate such an attempt convincingly enough to persuade his own people who — brainwashed by his propaganda — are cheering for him.
Stopping Mr. Putin in Ukraine is critical if we want to avoid the doomsday scenario of Russian and NATO troops clashing in Europe.
Mike Sigov, a former Russian journalist in Moscow, is a U.S. citizen and a staff writer for The Blade.
Contact Mike Sigov at: sigov@theblade.com, 419-724-6089, or on Twitter @mikesigovblade.
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So what does history tell us about the behaviour of Europe’s biggest country, Russia, which is currently fighting an undeclared war with its neighbour, Ukraine?
I’ll come back to that in a moment but Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, singled out Russia’s military ambitions in a speech on Friday, describing 2014 as “a black year” for European security. He revealed that the alliance recorded more than 400 incursions into foreign airspace by Russian warplanes last year, around four times as many as in 2013. The previous day, British fighters were scrambled to intercept two Russian bombers over the English Channel, an episode that resulted in the Russian ambassador being summoned to the Foreign Office.
Around the time Stoltenberg was giving his assessment of the Russian threat to peace, the reality of the situation in Ukraine was brought home by the shelling of a cultural centre in Donetsk, killing at least six people. In theory, the conflict is between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists who have declared a breakaway republic, but no one seriously believes that Russia isn’t behind the fighting. More than 5,000 people are believed to have been killed since April yet public attention, which suddenly turned to Ukraine after the shooting down of a Malaysian passenger plane in July last year, is focused elsewhere.
Vladimir Putin: Inside the Russian President's Daily Life
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He likes a simple yet sizeable breakfast
Putin’s preferred way to start the day is with cottage cheese, omelette, quails’ eggs and porridge, accompanied by fruit juice and coffee. All his food comes from the farmland estates of the Patriarch Kirill, Russia’s religious leader.
While the terrorist organisation Islamic State (Isis) is responsible for huge numbers of casualties, it has killed far fewer people in Europe than have died in the Ukrainian conflict. It could be argued that the spectacular type of warfare favoured by Isis has actually done the Russian government a favour, deflecting attention with a series of attention-grabbing atrocities. Russia’s tradition of covert warfare is long-established, and some Kremlin officials visibly enjoy the process of repeating denials which are bare-faced lies.
In a repeat of recent history, dead Russian soldiers are once again being returned to their families without any information about where they were killed. The names of more than 260 have been published on a website run by opponents of President Putin, along with a map of eastern Ukraine showing where they died. The Russian government denies involvement but 10 Russian paratroopers were captured in Ukraine in August. The mother of a Russian soldier, whose body was returned with his legs blown off, said he had phoned her to say his unit was being deployed to Donetsk.
When something similar happened during the second Chechen war, the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya interviewed bereaved mothers and wrote about what was going on. She was assassinated in Moscow on President Putin’s birthday in 2006, a month or so before the Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London. At a public inquiry last week, Litvinenko’s death was described as “an act of nuclear terrorism on the streets of a major city”. Ben Emmerson, the QC representing Mr Litvinenko’s widow, said the trail led directly to Putin and called for him to be “unmasked by this inquiry as a common criminal dressed up as a head of state”.
This is a staggering statement. Some commentators are reluctant to accept it, arguing that Putin genuinely feels under threat from Nato; Greece’s inexperienced new government, led by the coalition of left-wing parties known as Syriza, is making friendly overtures towards Russia. No one wants a new cold war but the evidence suggests they’re making a mistake of epic proportions: what European leaders are dealing with here is classic psychopathic behaviour. Putin displays a complete absence of empathy and is painfully thin-skinned; he found being mocked by the punk band Pussy Riot so intolerable that two of the women ended up in penal colonies. Even more alarming is his lack of fear and enjoyment of risk, which means he enjoys baiting people he sees as opponents.
All of this brings me back to the problem with learning from history. The leader-as-psychopath is far from unusual: Saddam Hussein displayed similar characteristics, although a closer parallel in this instance is Stalin. The question is what to do about it, and it would help if people who make excuses for Putin stopped fooling themselves about how dangerous he is. I’ve believed this ever since the assassination of Politkovskaya, whom I knew slightly, and I’ve watched the evidence accumulate: at least 29 journalists have been murdered in direct connection with their work since Putin came to power: opponents have had their assets seized and been sent to harsh prisons in Siberia; neighbouring countries live in fear of cyber-attacks, such as the one on Estonia in 2007, or military invasion.
The Conservative MP Rory Stewart, who chairs the Defence Select Committee, described last week’s incident over the Channel as “a symptom of a much bigger pattern which means we got Russia wrong”. I think it’s more accurate to say that world leaders got Putin wrong, treating him as an authoritarian who would nevertheless keep his behaviour within recognisable boundaries. Remember when George W Bush gave him the affectionate nickname Pootie-Poot? If history teaches us anything, it is that treating unstable psychopaths as if they are normal, reasonable people doesn’t work.
Psychopaths love attention, so allowing Putin to host big sporting events such as the Winter Olympics and the World Cup is a mistake. They like to feel important, so he shouldn’t be invited to attend summits with other world leaders. His behaviour is escalating as economic sanctions start to bite, which is why he is sending military aircraft to test the air defences of other countries. He isn’t going to give up power of his own accord, which means that keeping open back-channels to people around him is vital. Europe didn’t pick this fight, but we should be in no doubt that Russia under Putin is an unpredictable rogue state.
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 The Independent |
President Putin is a dangerous psychopath - reason is not going to work with him
The Independent The names of more than 260 have been published on a website run by opponents of PresidentPutin, along with a map of eastern Ukraine showing where they died. The Russian government denies involvement but 10 Russian paratroopers were captured in ... Putin not interested in peaceToledo Blade Column: Czar Putin?s next movesBend Bulletin all 23 news articles » |
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