Iraq Puts New F-16s Into Action Against Islamic State - Tuesday September 8th, 2015 at 11:03 AM
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Iraq has put F-16 warplanes acquired from the United States into action against the Islamic State group for the first time, the commander of the air force said Sunday.
France paid Moscow a total €949.7 million ($1.1 billion) for canceling the controversial sale of two Mistrals
Most of Turkey’s top priority, indigenous programs are being dragged into further delays as the country faces elections.
French Air Force General Jean-Paul Paloméros, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation discusses NATO's rapid response capability, innovations and strategic communication.
The importance placed by Finland and Sweden on land and amphibious readiness was underlined by the BALTOPS exercises.
Russian-Arab relationships have grown since the Iran nuclear deal; questions are raised about its sustainability
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Amid reports that Russian forces are taking part in Syria’s civil war, the US has sanctioned 5 Russian defense entities
Gen. Jean-Paul Palomeros, NATO supreme allied commander transformation, on the challenge Russia's agression poses to the alliance.
Defense News TV: Russia & NATO
E. European allies are benefiting from Western European know-how and tech to upgrade amphibious vehicle capabilities.
The United States expressed concern to Moscow on Saturday about what it called reports of an imminent and enhanced Russian military buildup in war-torn Syria.
Gulf Arab monarchies sent thousands of heavily armed troops to reinforce loyalists in Yemen in the battle against Iran-backed rebels, media reported Monday.
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ATHENS — Greece is "examining" a request by the United States to deny passage to Russian supply flights to Syria, a Greek foreign ministry source said Monday.
Iraqi Defense Minister Khaled al-Obaidi escaped unharmed as a sniper fired on his convoy Monday near a town where security forces have been battling jihadists, the ministry said.
Turkey's state-controlled missile producer Roketsan has signed a deal with the Polish company WZL1 to make its debut in Poland.
Turkey's critical air bases in the country's south and southeast are becoming a hub in the allied campaign against radical Islamists in Syria and Iraq.
Russian aircraft and ships are on the move again, flying and sailing provocative missions that challenge the security and territorial boundaries of many nations -- none more so than in northern Europe.
September 8, 2015, 11:20 AM (IDT)
An IED laid by the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) blew up a police bus in the eastern Turksih province of Igdir Tuesday, killing at least fourteen police officers.
DEBKAfile: The site of the attack was strategically located on a bus heading for the Dilucu border gate,which connects Turkey to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic. This republic is in dispute between Turkey and Armenia. The PKK is clearly expanding its attacks to hit Turkey’s sensitive corners.
DEBKAfile: The site of the attack was strategically located on a bus heading for the Dilucu border gate,which connects Turkey to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic. This republic is in dispute between Turkey and Armenia. The PKK is clearly expanding its attacks to hit Turkey’s sensitive corners.
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September 8, 2015, 11:20 AM (IDT)
An IED laid by the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) blew up a police bus in the eastern Turksih province of Igdir Tuesday, killing at least ten police officers.
DEBKAfile: The site of the attack was strategically located on a bus heading for the Dilucu border gate,which connects Turkey to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic. This republic is in dispute between Turkey and Armenia. The PKK is clearly expanding its attacks to hit Turkey’s sensitive corners.
DEBKAfile: The site of the attack was strategically located on a bus heading for the Dilucu border gate,which connects Turkey to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic. This republic is in dispute between Turkey and Armenia. The PKK is clearly expanding its attacks to hit Turkey’s sensitive corners.
September 8, 2015, 12:09 PM (IDT)
In retaliation for the PKK attack Monday which killed 16 Turkish soldiers, fifty Turkish warplanes Tuesday struck outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) headquarters in northern Iraq, killing up to 40 Kurds.
September 8, 2015, 1:16 PM (IDT)
Einat Shahin is the first female Israeli ambassador appointed to an Arab capital. Tuesday, she presented her credentials to Jordan’s King Abdullah, along with seven other new envoys. She was escorted to the palace by a convoy and outriders holding Israeli flags. The leading Jordanian A-Doustour newspaper carried a photo of Shahin and the king shaking hands.
Clare Lopez is a former CIA officer, and she is risking her professional career to call out President Barack Obama in the biggest way possible. Lopez is well respected in the intelligence community and worked in the Reagan ...
Before the start of business, Just Security provides a curated summary of up-to-the-minute developments at home and abroad. Here’s today’s news.
IRAQ and SYRIA
Two British members of the Islamic State were killed in a Royal Air Force drone strike in Syria on August 21, Prime Minister David Cameron announced on Monday. Cameron called the strike an “act of self defense.” [BBC] The Guardian’s Ewan MacAskill asks whether the strike signals mission creep on the part of the UK military in Syria, while Simon Jenkins also in The Guardian and our own John Reed in Just Security both raised questions about Cameron’s use of vague language to describe the threat he claimed the men posed.
The Pentagon is planning to significantly revamp its program to train moderate rebels to fight the Islamic State by putting larger numbers of fighters into safer zones, providing better intelligence, and improving the rebels’ combat skills. [New York Times’ Eric Schmitt and Ben Hubbard]
President Bashar al-Assad’s government has killed nearly seven times more people in Syria than the Islamic State has this year, reports indicate. [Washington Post’s Hugh Naylor] Many experts on Syria believe there is no end in sight, particularly given the refugee crisis and recent diplomacy failures. [Reuters’ Tom Perry and Gabriela Baczynska]
Even when families convince individuals not to join the Islamic State, they may not be able to stop stiff prison sentences in the US. After almost joining the Islamic State, 19 year old Asher Amnran Khan decided against it, yet he has still been charged by the FBI with conspiracy and attempt to provide material support and faces the possibility of up to 30 years in prison, reports Adam Goldman. [Washington Post]
The US likely killed five civilians in a March airstrike targeting the Islamic State in Iraq according to an initial report. To date, the US has acknowledged only two civilian deaths as a result of the thousands of airstrikes against the Islamic State. [Daily Beast’s Nancy A. Youssef]
More countries launch airstrikes against the Islamic State. Iraq carried has out 15 attacks against the group within its borders using F-16s acquired from the US. [Agence France-Presse] Meanwhile, President Francois Hollande of France has ordered preparations for airstrikes on the Islamic State in Syria, with reconnaissance flights set to begin on Tuesday. [BBC]
Russia is expanding its military presence in Syria. News emerged over the weekend that in recent weeks, Russia has sent prefabricated housing units for hundreds of people, as well as a portable air traffic control station, seemingly in a show of support for Assad’s regime. [New York Times’ Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt] The Daily Beast’s Michael Weiss reports that Russia’s military buildup may be even more advanced.
Islamic State fighters have seized the Jazal oilfield, the last major oilfield under Syrian government control. [Reuters]
YEMEN
The Saudi-led coalition launched heavy airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, in retaliation for the killing of 60 Gulf soldiers in an attack by Houthi rebels. [Agence France-Presse] Early reports indicate at least 20 people were killed in the bombing. [Reuters’ Mohammed Ghobari]
Qatar has deployed 1,000 soldiers to Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthi rebels, along with more than 200 armored vehicles and 30 Apache helicopters. [Al Jazeera]
AFGHANISTAN
A US airstrike in southern Afghanistan killed at least 11 Afghan policemen in one of the deadliest friendly-fire incidents in the country in recent years. [Wall Street Journal’s Margherita Stancati and Ehsanullah Amiri]
“[I]f history is any indication, there is bad news ahead; turmoil is fertile soil for extremists.” Barbara Elias warns that it may not be as easy to defeat the Taliban, despite Mullah Omar’s death two years ago. While Omar’s death has seemingly fractured the Taliban, that may mean less stability is on the horizon in Afghanistan. [Foreign Affairs]
Many women in Afghanistan who have been incarcerated for “moral crimes” are badly mistreated, according to a profile by National Public Radio’s Rena Silverman. The number of women in prison for moral crimes jumped by 50 percent between October 2011 and May 2013.
IRAN
Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has said that Democrats will not block a final vote on the Iran nuclear deal if Republicans agree to a 60-vote threshold for passage, the same number of votes that would be needed to stop a filibuster. [The Hill’s Jordain Carney]
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said he will oppose the deal. [Politico’s Nahal Toosi and Seung Min Kim] Meanwhile, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), head of the Democratic National Committee, has said she will support the agreement. [Wall Street Journal’s Kate Davidson and Andrew Ackerman]
SURVEILLANCE and PRIVACY
On both encryption and access to data overseas, some US technology companies are increasingly pushing back against government demands, despite the government’s law enforcement concerns. [New York Times’ Matt Apuzzo, David E. Sanger, and Michael S. Schmidt]
Microsoft will be in a Second Circuit courtroom on Wednesday appealing a previous decision upholding a search warrant for data stored overseas. [Wall Street Journal’s Joe Palazzolo] Our own Jennifer Daskal will have more analysis of the case later today on Just Security.
GUANTÁNAMO
The military has stopped honoring security clearances for an attorney representing the only detainee who has agreed to serve as a cooperating witness against the 9/11 defendants. [Guardian‘s Spencer Ackerman]
A fiber-optic cable link between Florida and the naval base at Guantánamo Bay should be completed by February, improving both Internet access at the base and communications with the military court’s headquarters in Virginia. [Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg]
ISRAEL
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said over the weekend that Israel would not accept refugees from Syria and that the country would move forward with plans to construct a fence along its eastern border with Jordan. [New York Times’ Isabel Kershner]
Israel has plans to demolish up to 13,000 Palestinian structures in the West Bank, according to a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. [Guardian’s Kate Shuttleworth]
The missing Intifada. Neri Zilber examines why there has been no third intifada, despite rising tensions in Israel. [Foreign Affairs]
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
A Pakistani drone killed three suspected terrorists on the battlefield, a first time for the country’s military. [Washington Post’s Tim Craig]
Kurdish PKK militants killed 15 Turkish soldiers in an ambush in southeast Turkey on Sunday. In response, Turkey bombed a number of PKK targets. [Reuters’ Orhan Coskun and Ece Toksabay]
New research indicates that most “lone wolf” terrorists broadcast their plans to commit violence, and are usually older, less educated, and more prone to mental illness than members of extremist groups. [Guardian’s Michael Safi]
African Union Forces left the vicininty of Buqda, Somalia, over the weekend, allowing Al-Shabaab to peacefully seize the sizeable town in the center of the country, on Sunday. [Reuters’ Abdi Sheikh and Feisal Omar]
Just as nuclear weapons are changing, so is the technology by which scientists detect their development, points out The Economist.
A group of five Chinese vessels passed within 12 nautical miles of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands after a joint Russian-Chinese military exercise last week underscoring the potential for increased friction between the US and China at sea. [Washington Post’s Missy Ryan and Dan Lamothe]
The Hughes Glomar Explorer is headed for a scrap yard. The ship is perhaps best known to Just Security readers as the namesake of the court case that created the Glomar exception to Freedom of Information Act requests, allowing government agencies, with reason, to neither confirm nor deny the existence of responsive records. [Reuters’ John Miller]
Thirty cadets were injured in West Point’s annual end-of-summer pillow fight as a result of hard objects inserted in some pillow cases. [New York Times’ Dave Philipps]
Read on Just Security »
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TERIBERKA, Russia — The warming Arctic should already have transformed this impoverished fishing village on the coast of the Barents Sea.
The Kremlin spent billions in the last decade in hopes of turning it into a northern hub of its global energy powerhouse, Gazprom. It was once the most ambitious project planned in the Arctic Ocean, but now there is little to show for it aside from a shuttered headquarters and an enormous gravel road carved out of the windblown coastline like a scar.
“There are plans,” said Viktor A. Turchaninov, the village’s mayor, “but the facts — the realities of life — suggest the opposite.”
The dream of an Arctic Klondike, made possible by the rapid warming of once-icebound waters, has been at the core of Russia’s national ambitions and those of the world’s biggest energy companies for more than a decade. But even as Royal Dutch Shell began drilling an exploratory well this summer off the north coast of Alaska, Russia’s experiences here have become a cautionary tale, one that illustrates the challenges facing those imagining that a changing Arctic will produce oil and gas riches.
Tectonic shifts in the global energy economy, fierce opposition from environmentalists who oppose tampering with the ecologically fragile waters, and formidable logistical obstacles have tempered enthusiasm that only a few years ago seemed boundless. After years of planning and delays, Shell’s drilling project in the stormy waters of the Chukchi Sea is now being watched by the industry, officials, residents and critics as a make-or-break test of the viability of production in the Arctic.
“From an economic point of view, I’m not sure going offshore Arctic is very rational,” said Patrick Pouyanné, chief executive and president of Total, the French oil company, which once also planned to drill off Alaska’s northern coast.
Shell has already spent $7 billion and this summer has faced tribulations like those that marred an ill-fated exploration three years ago, including dogged protests, harsh weather and an accident in July that gouged a hole in one of its ships after it struck an uncharted shoal in the Aleutian Islands.
Only seven years ago, Shell and other companies — ConocoPhillips, Statoil of Norway, Repsol of Spain and Eni of Italy — together paid $2.7 billion for leases for the fields off Alaska. The price of oil at the time climbed to nearly $150 a barrel, and the accelerated reduction of ice that once choked the Arctic Ocean seemed to make exploration easier.
Then the market changed. The world today is awash in oil and natural gas, largely because of the shale revolution in the United States and the advent of hydraulic fracturing, which has so increased production that the United States has slashed imports. Saudi Arabia and other states around the Persian Gulf are producing at maximum levels, and if the nuclear agreement with Iran gets final approval and economic sanctions are lifted, Iran’s reserves could soon flood the market. In the last year alone, the price of oil has plummeted to less than $50 a barrel.
Across the Arctic, from Russia to Norway to Canada, offshore projects have already proved disappointing. After drilling eight exploratory wells off Greenland in 2011 and 2012, Cairn Energy, a Scottish company, abandoned them. Chevron shelved exploration in the Canadian waters of the Beaufort Sea last December, followed in June by a consortium including ExxonMobil and BP.
American sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year forced ExxonMobil to withdraw from a joint venture in the Kara Sea with the state-owned oil giant Rosneft, which has had to suspend its drilling plans there as it searches for new partners.
“When we look at Arctic opportunities, they are always the opportunities that are 10 years away,” said Kenneth B. Medlock III, director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University.
The difficulties of getting oil and gas out of the Arctic are daunting. Winters are long and dark, and the Arctic seas, despite reductions in the permanent ice pack, are still clogged with floes and icebergs, while intensifying storms have threatened ships or oil rigs even during the summer. Marshy tundra onshore complicates the construction of pipelines and support facilities. So do coastal erosion and melting permafrost.
There are few roads or airports, or people for that matter, near the areas to be drilled, requiring workers and equipment to be shipped long distances. Despite agreements by the Arctic Council, an international organization that includes the United States, Russia and six other Arctic countries, few resources are available for search and rescue or the cleanup of oil in icy conditions. That, along with strict requirements imposed by the Obama administration, forced Shell to send a flotilla of more than two dozen ships to the Chukchi Sea this summer.
“The entire cost structure up there is three to five times more expensive than onshore lower 48,” said Scott D. Sheffield, chief executive of Pioneer Natural Resources, a Texas-based oil company. Two years ago, his company gave up on a field projected to contain 100 million barrels of oil in the Beaufort Sea — drilled from a man-made island and connected by an eight-mile pipeline to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska — in order to invest more in Texas shale fields.
“One-hundred-million-barrel-type discoveries will not be economical in a $100-a-barrel oil environment, and they certainly won’t be economical today,” Mr. Sheffield said.
Even optimistic projections suggest the Arctic might not prove to be as transformative as once imagined. According to Rystad Energy, a global consultancy based in Norway, production from offshore fields in or near the Arctic could double between 2015 and 2025 to 1.4 million barrels a day, which would still be less than 2 percent of current global production.
“When people say the Arctic is the next frontier and there is great resource potential, of course there is the risk that it is hype,” said Jon Marsh Duesund, a Rystad senior project manager.
High Hopes in Disrepair
Teriberka, a village of 1,000 people on the Barents Sea, is where Gazprom’s offshore ambitions collided with the harsh realities of the Arctic.
It was a thriving fishing village in Soviet times, with fish-processing factories and even a farm for harvesting the pelts of snow foxes, but it fell into decline in the 1970s with the advent of industrial fishing. The population dropped from more than 6,000; wooden piers crumbled; and fishing boats that once brought back cod were scuttled in the bay where the Teriberka River flows into the sea.
Like people in Alaska and other places who look to the changing Arctic for economic development and jobs, the village’s residents welcomed Gazprom’s plans to tap an enormous gas field, called the Shtokman, that was discovered in 1988 about 370 miles offshore.
Under the control of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Gazprom emerged as an energy giant controlled by the state, and for much of the 2000s, the Shtokman was its biggest prize, a project that Russia dangled before eager foreign investors. After reaching deals with Total and Statoil, Gazprom began construction of the road in Teriberka where it hoped to build terminals for processing and shipping the gas in liquefied form — all at a cost estimated to rise to $20 billion.
After years of work, however, Russia’s plans for the project came under pressure from enormous technical challenges, the changing energy market and finally the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
Russia, as the world’s largest producer of natural gas, found itself struggling to compete against alternative supplies to countries in Europe eager to reduce their dependence on Mr. Putin’s government, even as prices dropped significantly.
“Monopolies do not have strategic vision,” said Vladimir Chuprov, an energy expert for Greenpeace Russia who opposes offshore exploration in the Arctic. “The decisions are very political, and the economic background is not a factor.”
Statoil pulled out in 2012, writing off more than $335 million in costs. Total wrote off $350 million last year and, according to Russian news accounts, returned its 25 percent share of the project to Gazprom in June.
The Arctic is at the core of the nationalist ambitions of Mr. Putin, who once said that tapping the region’s resources was as natural as hunting and harvesting berries and mushrooms.
Russia already operates the first offshore production platform above the Arctic Circle, calledPrirazlomnoye, which began pumping the first commercial shipments from the Kara Sea in late 2013 and reached a modest two million barrels last year. The figures, however, are a fraction of the more accessible gas and oil reserves onshore, including the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia 900 miles east. Plans for more offshore projects have stalled, and Russia has shifted its focus onshore, especially following American sanctions that targeted offshore Arctic projects.
The Shtokman field, Mr. Putin has boasted, remains a prospect, but one for the next generation.
“As soon as they speak of the next generation, it means something is wrong,” Mr. Chuprov, of Greenpeace Russia, said. “In this country — in Soviet times, in czarist times — nobody thinks about the next generation.”
Despite Gazprom’s promises to resume drilling — in 2014, then in 2016 or 2019 — residents in Teriberka have become resigned about the boom that never was. The contractors who arrived in droves have departed, and the enormous embankment where Gazprom built a gravel road, encroaching on the village’s cemetery, comes to a dead end at a rocky cliff.
Teriberka is better known now as the location of the Oscar-nominated “Leviathan,” a bleak film that depicts one man’s struggle against a venal bureaucrat who wants to seize his beloved house on the bay.
“They built the road,” Igor Abanosimov said when a neighbor lamented that the project had changed little. Mr. Abanosimov owns a series of floating cottages that he rents out, dreaming, perhaps improbably, of developing a yacht club and other amenities that might attract tourists instead of energy companies. The Arctic, he said, had its own soul.
“Those it wants to accept, it accepts,” he explained. “Those it wants to banish, it banishes.”
Shell’s Many Mishaps
In late August, a ferocious storm whipping through the Chukchi Sea forced Shell to suspend its drilling operations only a month after one of its two floating rigs drove a drill bit into the seafloor. The company resumed operations after the weather cleared. It was just the latest distraction in Shell’s long effort to tap one of the last remaining untouched giant oil reserves.
Three years ago, the company came close to reaching oil, but its plans for two exploratory wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas died after a series of bizarre accidents. One of the two drill ships, the Noble Discoverer, nearly ran aground on a sandy beach in the Aleutians. An Arctic containment dome was crushed during a vital test. And a tow line on the second drill ship, the Kulluk, snapped,setting it adrift on the high seas.
To environmentalists, the accidents bolstered their arguments that exploration in the Arctic is simply too risky. Shell did not give up, though. The company replaced its senior Arctic leadership team and devised another plan to overcome the natural and regulatory hurdles.
And still it has struggled. A private Finnish icebreaker it contracted, the Fennica, struck an uncharted shoal in the Aleutians in July. With no adequate facilities in Alaska, the Fennica had to go to Portland, Ore., for repairs.
When the ship tried to head back north, protesters tried to block the vessel with kayaks and then suspended themselves from a bridge over the Willamette River, obstructing safe passage. A court then threatened Greenpeace with fines of $2,500 an hour if the protesters did not clear the way.
The Obama administration has set strict limits on how Shell can operate. It prohibited the company from simultaneously drilling two wells, as planned. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service ruled that marine wildlife protections required a 15-mile buffer zone between simultaneous drillings, while the company had planned for a nine-mile buffer. Workers on Shell’s ships also have to keep watch and avoid crossing the migratory paths of whales and other marine mammals.
“Most of the natives up here in the north are concerned with the marine mammals,” said James Pakotak, a resident of Barrow, Alaska, where the airport serves as a hub for many of Shell’s workers. The storms that battered Shell’s flotilla also hammered the town. “What if there’s an oil spill? What then?” Mr. Pakotak said.
To be sure, there are those who still believe in the Arctic’s potential. They cite efforts to drill there in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a study by the United States Geological Survey in 2008 that estimated that 13 percent of the world’s untapped oil and 30 percent of its natural gas lay in the Arctic.
The National Petroleum Council, in a report commissioned by the Department of Energy and released this year, said the technology and expertise already existed to extract oil and natural gas safely in icy conditions, replacing declining supplies on Alaska’s North Slope.
Ben van Beurden, Shell’s chief executive, said in a conference call last month that the company’s stake could ultimately be “multiple times” more bountiful than in the vast Gulf of Mexico.
“Alaska is a long-term play,” he said. “That is the way you have to look at it. We can’t be driven by today’s, tomorrow’s, or next year’s, or last year’s oil price.”
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WASHINGTON — In an investigation involving guns and drugs, the Justice Department obtained a court order this summer demanding that Apple turn over, in real time, text messages between suspects using iPhones.
Apple’s response: Its iMessage system was encrypted and the company could not comply.
Government officials had warned for months that this type of standoff was inevitable as technology companies like Apple and Google embraced tougher encryption. The case, coming after several others in which similar requests were rebuffed, prompted some senior Justice Department and F.B.I.officials to advocate taking Apple to court, several current and former law enforcement officials said.
While that prospect has been shelved for now, the Justice Department is engaged in a court dispute with another tech company, Microsoft. The case, which goes before a federal appeals court in New York on Wednesday and is being closely watched by industry officials and civil liberties advocates, began when the company refused to comply with a warrant in December 2013 for emails from a drug trafficking suspect. Microsoft said federal officials would have to get an order from an Irish court, because the emails were stored on servers in Dublin.
The conflicts with Apple and Microsoft reflect heightened corporate resistance, in the post-Edward J. Snowden era, by American technology companies intent on demonstrating that they are trying to protect customer information.
“It’s become all wrapped up in Snowden and privacy issues,” said George J. Terwilliger III, a lawyer who represents technology companies and as a Justice Department official two decades ago faced the challenge of how to wiretap phone networks that were becoming more digital.
President Obama has charged White House Homeland Security and cybersecurity officials, along with those at the Justice Department, the F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies, with proposing solutions — some legislative, some not — to the technology access issue. They are still hashing out their differences, according to law enforcement and administration officials.
Some Justice and F.B.I. officials have been frustrated that the White House has not moved more quickly or been more outspoken in the public relations fight that the tech companies appear to be winning, the law enforcement officials said, speaking only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private conversations.
The White House, after months of study, has yet to articulate a public response to the argument that a victory in the Microsoft case would provide authoritarian governments, particularly the Chinese and Russians, with a way to get access into computer servers located in the United States.
“Clearly, if the U.S. government wins, the door is open for other governments to reach into data centers in the U.S.,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said in a recent interview. Companies and civil liberties groups have been sending in briefs of their own, largely opposing the government’s surveillance powers.
Tensions between American technology leaders and the government over access are hardly new: The Clinton administration was forced to abandon plans to require technology manufacturers to build a small “clipper chip” into their hardware systems to allow the government to unlock encrypted communications.
Still, the nation’s phone companies ultimately supported legislation requiring them to build access points into their digital networks so they could comply with legal wiretap orders. (Tech companies like Apple and Google are not telecommunications firms and not covered by the wiretap law.)
The politics today are far different. Stung by Mr. Snowden’s revelations about how the National Security Agency had secretly breached company networks — often without the companies’ knowledge — Apple, Google and Microsoft are working to reassure customers around the world that they are fighting efforts to give the United States government access to their communications.
The businesses say they are seeing greater demand than ever for built-in encryption — including the new operating system Apple introduced last year for the iPhone, which James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, and other government officials have denounced as endangering efforts to thwart criminals and terrorists.
“It’s important that we do not let these technological innovations undermine our ability to protect the community from significant national security and public safety challenges,” Sally Q. Yates, the deputy attorney general, told Congress this summer.
At issue are two types of encoding. The first is end-to-end encryption, which Apple uses in its iMessage system and FaceTime, the video conversation system. Companies like Open Whisper Systems, the maker of Signal, and WhatsApp have adopted such encryption for stand-alone apps, which are of particular concern to counterterrorism investigators.
With Apple, the encryption and decryption is done by the phones at either end of the conversation; Apple does not keep copies of the message unless one of the users loads it into iCloud, where it is not encrypted. (In the drug and gun investigation this summer, Apple eventually turned over some stored iCloud messages. While they were not the real-time texts the government most wanted, officials said they saw it as a sign of cooperation.)
The second type of encoding involves sophisticated encryption software on Apple and Android phones, which makes it all but impossible for anyone except the user of the phone to open stored content — pictures, contacts, saved text messages and more — without an access code. The F.B.I. and local authorities oppose the technology, saying it put them at risk of “going dark” on communications between terrorists and about criminal activity on city streets. The American military is more divided on the issue, depending on the mission.
The Justice Department wants Apple and other companies that use end-to-end encryption to comply with the same kind of wiretap orders as phone companies. Justice and some former law enforcement officials argue that consumers want investigators to have the ability to get wiretaps in the mobile, digital world if it means solving crimes.
“If you ask about wiretap functionality in the broad privacy context, you get one answer,” Mr. Terwilliger said. “If you ask it in the context of a guy with a loose nuke, or some kind of device, you get a different answer.”
Officials say a court fight with Apple is still an option, though they acknowledge it would be a long shot. Some object that a legal battle would make it harder for the companies to compromise, the law enforcement officials said. They added that Apple and other companies have privately expressed willingness to find common ground.
Apple declined to comment on the case for this article. But company officials have argued publicly that the access the government wants could be exploited by hackers and endanger privacy.
“There’s another attack on our civil liberties that we see heating up every day — it’s the battle over encryption,” Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, told a conference on electronic privacy this year. “We think this is incredibly dangerous.”
Echoing the arguments of industry experts, he added, “If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too.” If criminals or countries “know there’s a key hidden somewhere, they won’t stop until they find it,” he concluded.
The Microsoft case centers on whether the fact that data is stored around the world relieves American firms of turning it over. The government, which won in Federal District Court, has argued in its brief to the appeals court that where the data is stored is irrelevant because the company still has control of email records. The White House declined to comment because the case is in litigation.
“People want to know what law will be applied to their data,” Mr. Smith of Microsoft said. “French want their rights under French law, and Brazilians under Brazilian law. What is the U.S. government going to do when other governments reach into the U.S. data centers, without notifying the U.S. government?”
Chinese firms already have plans to build facilities on American soil that would store electronic communications, so the question may be more than hypothetical. In its brief, Microsoft argues that Congress will ultimately have to weigh in on the issue, since it is as much a political matter as a legal one: “Only Congress has the institutional competence and constitutional authority to balance law enforcement needs against our nation’s sovereignty, the privacy of its citizens and the competitiveness of its industry.”
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Recently, Miley Cyrus told Elle UK, “I’m very open about it — I’m pansexual.”
In June, she’d told Paper Magazine:
“I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn’t involve an animal and everyone is of age. Everything that’s legal, I’m down with. Yo, I’m down with any adult — anyone over the age of 18 who is down to love me.”
There was something about the casual, carefree-ness of the statements that I found both charming and revolutionary. It took a happy-go-lucky sledgehammer to the must-fit-a-box binary that constrains and restricts our understanding of the complexity of human sexuality.
As much progress as has been made in the acceptance of L.G.B.T.-identified people in society, there is still a surprising level of resistance to people who identify as the B in that list of letters (bisexual) — or pansexual or omnisexual or even asexual — and that resistance comes from straight and gay people alike.
I wrote in my memoir, “Fire Shut Up In My Bones,” about identifying as bisexual because “in addition to being attracted to women, I could also be attracted to men.” I also wrote about the tremendous amount of agitation, and even hostility, that people — particularly men — so identified can engender:
“Even the otherwise egalitarian would have no qualms about raising questions and casting doubt. Many could only conceive of bisexuality in the way it existed for most people willing to admit to it: as a transitory identity — a pit stop or a hiding place — and not a permanent one.”
Yet, I don’t feel in any way defective or isolated in my identity. If fact, I feel liberated or and even enlightened by it.
And, more young people like Cyrus appear to be joining in that enlightenment. The market research firm YouGov asked British adults last month to plot themselves on the sexuality scale created by Alfred Kinsey in 1940s, with zero being exclusively heterosexual and 6 being exclusively homosexual.
The survey found that while 89 percent of the respondents overall describe themselves as heterosexual, “The results for 18-24-year-olds are particularly striking, as 43 percent place themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5 and 52 percent place themselves at one end or the other. Of these, only 46 percent say they are completely heterosexual and 6 percent as completely homosexual.”
YouGov then released data from the United States where respondents were asked to do the same self-rating. The American data found that “29 percent of under 30s put themselves somewhere on the category of bisexuality.”
Obviously, these ratings weren’t meant to measure sexual activity, intimate histories or label identification, but they were meant to measure “the possibility of homosexual feelings and experiences.”
YouGov is not the only group that has tried to get a handle on the fluid middle. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Survey of Family Growth presented data from 2006-2008 in a 2011 report that showed that 16 percent of American women and 5 percent of men under 45 refused to say they were attracted to only one sex, instead admitting that they were only mostlyattracted to one sex, were equally attracted to both, or were unsure. In that survey, 21 percent of women 20-24 years old and 7 percent of men in those ages said that they were somewhere in the middle.
And remember, 2008 is forever ago on the rapidly changing issue of L.G.B.T. acceptability. For instance, according to Gallup, only 48 percent of Americans in 2008 found gay and lesbian relations morally acceptable. That number has now jumped to 63 percent, and among those ages 18-34 it is now at 79 percent.
Attraction is simply more nuanced for more people than some of us want to admit, sometimes even to ourselves. That attraction may never manifest as physical intimacy, nor does it have to, but denying that it exists creates a false, naïve and ultimately destructive sense or what is normal and possible.
Furthermore, different people can experience attraction differently. For some, the order of attraction starts with body first. That’s fine. For others though, it starts with the being first, the human being, regardless of the body and its gender. That’s also fine. And yet, the idea that one can have a physiological response to something other than gendered physicality seems to some antithetical to their rigid, superannuated notions of attraction, or even heretical to it.
But it seems more younger people are liberating themselves from this thinking and coming to better understand and appreciate that people must have the freedom to be fluid if indeed they are, and that no one has the right to define or restrict the parameters of another person’s attractions, love or intimacy.
People must be allowed to be themselves, however they define themselves, and they owe the world no explanation of it or excuse for it. They have to be reminded that the only choices they need to make are to choose honesty and safety.
Attraction is attraction, and it doesn’t always wear a label.
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MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry here expressed surprise on Monday over an American warning toRussia against escalating the conflict in Syria, saying that the Kremlin’s Syrian policy — in particular furnishing military aid to help the government confront extremist forces — had been consistent for years.
“We have always supplied equipment to them for their struggle against terrorists,” Maria V. Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said in an interview. “We are supporting them, we were supporting them and we will be supporting them” in that fight.
The sharp exchanges over Russian military aid to the Syrian government appeared to have dampened a brief spirit of cooperation, starting in early August, when Russia, the United States and Saudi Arabia agreed on a renewed effort to reach a political solution to the Syria crisis.
Some analysts see any possible Russian move to strengthen military aid now as a maneuver by President Vladimir V. Putin to embarrass the United States.
“It is basically a chance to play on Obama’s checkerboard,” said Konstantin Von Eggert, an independent political analyst, with Mr. Putin saying, “You want to fight the Islamic State. I am there. I am ready. Ah, sorry, you don’t really want to fight.”
Russia may try to use American criticism of any military aid as proof that the Obama administration is soft on the Islamic State and only wants to topple President Bashar al-Assad, he said, so “it can be presented as an American unwillingness to fight evil.”
Mr. Putin is scheduled to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York this month, for the first time in 10 years. That will give him a high-profile platform to promise to use Russia’s resources in the fight against international terrorism, including at a Sept. 27 meeting on confronting the Islamic State that the Obama administration is organizing.
Mr. Putin said on Friday that Russia believed the solution to the Syria crisis must proceed on dual tracks — both combating the Islamic State and ensuring a political transition. Strengthening the capabilities of the Syrian Air Force to defend Damascus would evidently give Mr. Putin some leverage over any political settlement, too.
In Washington, the State Department announced on Saturday that Secretary of State John Kerry had telephoned his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, to warn against expanding Russian military aid to Syria.
According to American intelligence sources, Russia is bolstering Syria’s air defenses in some key areas and possibly building a camp for Russian military personnel.
Mr. Kerry warned Mr. Lavrov that such aid would further escalate the conflict, cost more lives, push more refugees to flee and risk a confrontation with other forces fighting the Islamic State, according to the State Department.
In Greece on Monday, the Foreign Ministry said it was studying a request from the United States to deny Russia the permission it has sought for overflights to Syria, Reuters reported.
Ms. Zakharova said military aid was consistent with a proposal by Mr. Putin that all the forces battling the Islamic State combine efforts. The specific details of the aid were a matter for the Defense Ministry, she said, not the Foreign Ministry. The Defense Ministry has said it was fulfilling existing contracts.
“Our proposal is to gather all the efforts together — all the international players, all Syria’s neighbors, all members of the opposition coalition, all of those who are involved,” Ms. Zakharova said, asserting that Moscow had already broached the idea with Washington. Since the idea is to share information between all the major players, she said, that would minimize the risk of any unexpected confrontation.
Russian diplomats said they suspected that the real, unstated goal behind the American criticism was that the United States and some other opponents of Mr. Assad want to use the fight against the Islamic State to pursue their original goal of deposing him. Russia opposes that both as a goal and a principle.
Mr. Putin defused a previous American move to attack Syria in 2013 by forging an agreement for the destruction of Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons.
“The problem is that the West cannot show one example of how they would manage the Syria story right after,” Ms. Zakharova said. “What is the West planning to do right after? Do they have a magic wand that will transform Syria from civil war to economic prosperity?”
The United States in particular made similar promises recently in Libya, Iraq and even many years ago in Afghanistan, she said, and they all failed. On Libya, the United States repeatedly painted its leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi as “an evil” who had to be removed.
“Now there is no evil, but there is also no country,” Ms. Zakharova said. “Instead there is a huge playing field for terrorism. And hundreds of thousands of refugees in the European Union. Nobody knows what to do with these crises.”
The main challenge in Syria remains the future of Mr. Assad. Russia is generally dismissive of the argument that Mr. Assad created the current chaos in Syria and fostered the rise of Islamic extremism by having refused to engage with the peaceful opposition when street protests started in 2011.
Much of the opposition in exile insists that he should be barred from a role in any political transition. Russia has said such a position amounts to an unacceptable precondition for talks.
Both Russia and Iran have made a show of rejecting claims that their support for Mr. Assad has softened. The Iranians, whose military aid has been vital to the Damascus government, defended Mr. Assad on Monday for the first time in a while.
“Those who have set a condition about the Syrian president in the past two years should be blamed for the continued war and they should account for the bloodshed,” Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, said at a news conference in Tehran.
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Maxim Zmeyev / ReutersPresident of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (SNC) Khaled Khoja (L) talks to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov before a meeting in Moscow.
Media reports of a Russian military presence in Syria have stirred high-profile accusations that Russia is reinforcing its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad, President Vladimir Putin's long-term ally who has been battling opposition forces in his country since 2011.
The reports, which are sketchy and not substantiated by any solid evidence, were quickly rebuffed by Putin himself, who stated on Friday that it was premature to talk about a military intervention into the conflict in Syria in order to fight the Islamic State terrorist group there, although he admitted that Russia was supplying the Syrian army with military equipment and weapons.
Assad’s regime is embroiled in intense fighting against Western-backed opposition groups and, in the meantime, against the Islamic State. The Kremlin has repeatedly called on the U.S.-led coalition of Western and Gulf states that has called for Assad's ouster to consider the Syrian president an ally in the fight against Islamic State, which it refuses to do.
But while selling equipment under governmental contracts is a common international practice, deploying troops to the area would take the conflict to a different level, which the Russian ruling elite has no intention of doing because it might draw the country into a drawn-out and expensive war, pundits told The Moscow Times.
“After the Soviet operation in Afghanistan, our public opinion has certain prejudices against sending troops to fight for ideals that are foreign to us,” said Nikolai Kozhanov, an international relations expert at the Moscow Carnegie Center think tank.
Troops or No Troops?
Several Western media outlets claimed that Russian military were fighting alongside pro-Assad forces in Syria last week, citing photos posted on social networks of what was reported to be a Russian armored vehicle and Russian airplanes.
The media also attributed their conclusions to a YouTube video containing footage from an unidentified Syrian TV channel in which a soldier can be heard shouting something that resembles two Russian words. In addition, an unidentified activist from a rebel group was cited as telling British newspaper The Times of London that “the Russians have been there a long time.”
On Friday Putin denied the claims.
“To talk about us being ready to do it [carry out a military operation and deploy troops to Syria] is premature. We're supplying enough support by [providing the Syrian army] with military equipment, training troops and arming them,” he was cited as saying by state news agency RIA Novosti.
The next day, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to “voice concern” over the possible Russian military build-up in Syria suggested by media reports. The State Department said that an increased Russian military presence could provoke an escalation of the conflict by creating a risky confrontation with the international coalition that is fighting the Islamic State in Syria.
But Lavrov reiterated Putin’s statement in conversation with Kerry, the foreign minister's spokeswoman said Monday. He also called on the U.S. to collaborate with the Syrian government in order to fight the Islamic State, calling the Syrian government army “the most effective force.”
Not Worth It
Russia's number one interest in Syria is protecting the regime of Assad, whom Putin has supported all along, agreed experts polled by The Moscow Times, and providing state forces with weapons and equipment is aimed at doing just that. The status quo is important, because among other things, Russia operates a naval station in the Syrian city of Tartus, — the country's only military outpost in the Mediterranean — and doesn't want to lose it.
“There's been a shift in the quality of the equipment we are supplying — we have started to sell more and better equipment to the Syrians,” Kozhanov from the Carnegie Center told The Moscow Times. “Apparently Russian officialdom is raising the stakes in the game, but it's unlikely they would change the strategy [and deploy troops],” he said.
Right now there's simply no need to: The situation may be difficult, but Assad is still a long way off defeat, Kozhanov said.
Drawing Russia into a long war would be a serious risk for the Kremlin, if it were to deploy troops to Syria, even with a loyal leader at stake, said Alexei Makarkin, deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow-based think tank.
“We could recall Afghanistan, when the U.S.S.R. entered it in order to replace one ruler with another and then leave. It took them more than nine years [to leave],” he told The Moscow Times in a phone interview.
Right now the goal is to protect Assad with limited involvement, “and to ensure there are prospects for Assad after the [civil] war ends,” Makarkin said.
Mystery Explained?
Since Russia is selling equipment to the Syrians, there are certainly some military personnel present who are responsible for maintaining the equipment and teaching local troops how to use it, Kozhanov said.
The photo circulating in the media that purportedly shows Russian military personnel in Syria was taken from the VKontakte social media account of Ivan Strebkov, who Internet users speculated could be a member of the Russian military. The military men in the photo could be those assigned to work with the equipment, said Yevgeny Buzhinsky, a military expert at the Moscow-based PIR Center think tank.
“Or maybe one of our ships was entering the Tartus port, and the sailors were disembarking onto land,” he told The Moscow Times in a phone interview.
On the photo, four uniformed and armed men are pictured with a military vessel seen behind them. A red star is painted on the vessel, and the photo location is tagged as Tartus, Syria. The photo was posted on Sunday.
Buzhinsky also believes there might be military advisors and experts present in Syria — but that is not the same as having troops there, he said: They help with the equipment Russia sells to Syria, which is completely legitimate.
“Getting involved in a military conflict by sending troops is extremely shortsighted, especially now,” the military expert added.
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Markets | Mon Sep 7, 2015 3:02pm EDT
LONDON | By Lisa Barrington
An oil pumpjack operates near Williston, North Dakota January 23, 2015.
Reuters/Andrew Cullen
LONDON Oil fell more than 3 percent on Monday, hit by weaker Chinese equities and record North Sea crude production data that added to global oversupply concerns.
China's main indexes closed down on Monday as investors sold shares in the aftermath of a four-day market holiday, during which further restrictions on futures trading were announced.
"Oil is only taking its cues from China," SEB chief commodity analyst Bjarne Schieldrop said.
"The price is taking little notice of constructive data like stronger (European) equities, stronger base metals and last Friday's fall in U.S. rig count," he said.
Brent LCOc1 futures contracts for October fell $1.98 to settle at $47.76 a barrel, a 3.73 percent loss. U.S. crude CLc1 fell $1.80 to $44.25 per barrel by 2:48PM EST (1848 GMT), with trading volume of around 75,000 lots less than one-quarter the norm due to the U.S. Labor Day holiday.
Oil has fallen almost 60 percent since June 2014 on a global supply glut, with prices seesawing in recent weeks as concerns about a slowing Chinese economy caused turmoil in global stock markets.
"For commodities, the key demand-side figure to care about is not China’s GDP growing at 7 percent instead of 9 or 10 percent, it is the manufacturing price index, which has been falling for more than 40 months in a row," JBC Energy said.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is producing close to record volumes to squeeze out competition, especially from U.S. shale producers, which have so far weathered the price plunges to keep pumping oil.
Saudi Arabia is set to maintain output at around 10.2 million to 10.3 million barrels per day, near this summer's record high, in the fourth quarter as rising refinery demand offsets lower local use for power, according to industry sources.
"The focus is shifting back to the still-high oversupply," Commerzbank senior oil analyst Carsten Fritsch said.
In the short term, supply will swell further from the North Sea, where crude output tracked by Reuters will rise to its highest in just over two years in October, according to loading schedules, adding to ample Atlantic Basin supplies. [O/LOAD]
Despite this production spike, the year-long decline in oil prices has caused more than 5,000 job losses in Britain's North Sea oil and gas sector since late last year, the country's Oil and Gas Authority said on Monday.
(Additional reporting by Keith Wallis in Singapore; Editing by William Hardy and Cynthia Osterman)
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Signs of an ongoing Russian military buildup in Syria have drawn U.S. concerns and raised questions of whether Moscow plans to enter the conflict. President Vladimir Putin has been coy on the subject, saying Russia is weighing various options, a statement that has fueled suspicions about the Kremlin's intentions.
Observers in Moscow say the Russian maneuvering could be part of a plan to send troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State group in the hope of fixing fractured ties with the West. They warn, however, that Putin would likely find it hard to sell his idea to a skeptical U.S. and risks potentially catastrophic repercussions if he opts for unilateral military action in Syria.
By playing with the possibility of joining the anti-IS coalition, Putin may hope to win a few key concessions. His main goal: the lifting of Western sanctions and the normalization of relations with the United States and the European Union, which have sunk to their lowest point since the Cold War amid the Ukrainian crisis. In addition, the Russian leader may be angling to make the West more receptive to Moscow's involvement in Ukraine, while retaining influence in Syria.
Early this summer, the Kremlin put forward a peace plan for Syria that envisions enlisting Syrian government forces and Iran in the anti-IS coalition. A few rounds of negotiations with the Americans and Saudis have brought no visible results, and now Moscow appears to be testing the water for a next move: beefing up its military presence in Syria.
While Putin said Friday there is no talk "just yet" about Russian troops joining the fight against the Islamic State, he seemed to keep the door open for the possibility, saying "we are looking at various options." The Russian leader is set to attend the United Nations General Assembly later this month, and some analysts say a proposal to deploy troops to Syria could be the focal point of his visit.
Since the Soviet times, Russia has had close political and military ties with Syria, which hosts a Russian navy facility in the Mediterranean port of Tartus intended to service and supply visiting ships. While the Soviet-era facility has just a couple of floating piers along with a few rusting repair shops and depots, it has symbolic importance as the last remaining Russian military outpost outside the former Soviet Union.
Moscow has staunchly backed Syrian President Bashar Assad throughout the nation's 4 ½-year civil war, providing his regime with weapons and keeping military advisers in Syria. Putin said again Friday that Russia is providing the Syrian military with weapons and training.
Rami Abdurrahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said there have been reports since mid-August of Russian troops in the capital's airport and another airport in the coastal city of Latakia.
"We don't know if they are troops or transporters of weapons and ammunition," he said, noting an increase in the flow of Russian weapons arriving in Syria since July.
"The fact that (military cooperation) is not new is one thing, but there is a noticeable increase," said Abdurrahman, who has a large network of activists on the ground in Syria helping him monitor the situation.
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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has expressed "concern" to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that Moscow was moving toward a major military buildup in Syria. The development is widely seen as an effort by the Kremlin to bolster President Bashar al-Assad.
On the latest Power Vertical Briefing, I discuss this developing story with RFE/RL Senior Editor Steve Gutterman.
Also on The Briefing, Steve and I discuss Russia's attempts to pressure Belarus into allowing Moscow to build a new air base in that country.
Enjoy...
Briefing: Putin Plays The Syria Card
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Power Vertical Briefing is a short look ahead to the stories expected to make news in Russia in the coming week. It is hosted by Brian Whitmore, author of The Power Vertical blog, and appears every Monday.
This article first appeared on the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University site.
In 1985, a Soviet leader came to power, leading one of the two superpowers in a bi-polar world, commanding a powerful military and leading a party mandated with changing the world.
Mikhail Gorbachev was also equipped with something far more powerful than the weapons in the Soviet arsenal—forecasts of the USSR’s future inability to compete with the United States in economic, technological and military terms. Gorbachev was convinced that the Soviet war economy and its priorities would constrain and exhaust its national capacity to compete successfully at the end of the 20th century—and that the internal system needed change for the USSR to sustain itself as a competitive, global power.
Gorbachev decisively chose economic reforms and disengagement from strategic confrontation with the West to address Soviet non-competitiveness. Internal political and economic changes to the Soviet system were intended to strengthen the USSR and renew its economic and technological base for sustained global competition in the 21st century.
He disengaged the Soviet Union from external strategic confrontation through conventional and nuclear arms reductions, changed Soviet security and defense policies and reduced arms expenditures. Gorbachev’s choice ended decades of direct military confrontation between the Soviet Union and NATO, and Eastern Europe’s political revolutions ultimately led to the geographic separation of Soviet and NATO military forces.
In 1991, Gorbachev was swept from power by the political and economic forces unleashed by his attempted internal reform of the USSR. 30 years later, another Russian leader driven by similar concerns about future strategic non-competitiveness has set this country on a path to address and reverse its non-competitive position in the world.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia today, however, is on a very different course from Gorbachev. After implementing liberal economic reforms aimed at strengthening Russia’s sovereignty in the early years of his rule, Putin has rejected structural, internal economic and political reforms, fearing that like Gorbachev he too could be swept from power.
Putin’s choice reflects a view that Russia can only address its non-competitiveness by changing the world around Russia, and most critically, by changing the European security system. In Putin’s view, any solution short of changing the European security system—including full integration, separation by erecting new walls, freezing the status quo around Russia, or partnering with other countries to counter-balance the powers in the European system—only means Russia’s inevitable loss of great power status and the loss of his personal power at home.
Consequently, Putin is rearming Russia, remilitarizing Russia’s overall approach to security, changing Russia’s defense concepts, adopting continuous destabilization strategies against neighboring states and returning to old policy formulas for internal and external security—all justified and rationalized by the perceived threat posed by the U.S./European security system around Russia.
His policy requires a changed Europe to enhance Russian strategic competitiveness and requires a changed Europe to avoid political change inside Russia. These two Russian campaigns—one external and one internal—are interfused. Success in one campaign is dependent on success in the other. More importantly, failure in one campaign is perceived as prompting failure in the other.
President Putin’s decision is influenced by Russia’s experiences since the end of the Cold War—internal coup attempts, terrorist attacks, “colored revolutions” around Russia, wars inside and outside of Russia, unfinished reforms and perceptions of Russia’s natural vulnerability to a fate similar to that of the USSR given its one-dimensional economic base and political superstructure.
However, Putin’s policy is driven mostly by concerns about Russia’s inability to compete on almost any level and in almost any sphere with the world’s greatest powers absent fundamental changes to the security, energy, economic and financial systems around Russia.
Russia does have long-standing critical views of the European security architecture. U.S. and NATO Ballistic Missile Defense programs, a variety of NATO and EU policies and actions and U.S. security and defense integration on the continent have been a few of the many points of criticism from Moscow over the years.
Dimitri Medvedev, then the President of Russia, proposed a new European security architecture shortly after the Russian conflict with Georgia in 2008 to change the European security system. While Putin’s policy is consistent with well-documented Russian criticisms of Europe’s security architecture, his actions differ substantially from previous Russian approaches.
Previous Russian approaches could be characterized as attempting to “break into” the European security system to politically divide and overrule. In contrast, Putin’s current approach attempts to “break out” of the European security system, divide Europe and establish new rules. This is a fundamental change of approach that reflects a fundamental change of policy.
Russian political and military experts also have long envied the Chinese security model. In many ways, Putin’s Russia seeks a security system in Europe that resembles the security environment China has in the Pacific.
For the Chinese, there is no real Asian-wide architecture of transpacific security akin to Europe’s transatlantic security that collectively counter-balances national power. China is able to use its economic and military strengths with a wider range of freedom, acting opportunistically, wielding its power to divide and overrule, protect territories and interests and navigate its strengths in a security environment with strategic but isolated pockets of U.S.-Pacific defense integration.
Simultaneously China has integrated economically, gained access to technology, modernized its economic system and maintained continuity in political control over the internal system.
Russian security experts also have admired the fact that China has evolved and grown into a great economic power without the political and economic turmoil Russia suffered in the 1990s—turmoil that has cost Russia time, money, energy and opportunity.
Russia’s leadership wants a Europe without strategic Alliances, without multi-national organizations and without a U.S.-Europe Transatlantic link that can through collective policies and action offset the national strengths Russia would hold over any one European nation. It would be a European security environment that would allow Russia to apply its national strengths to great effect without challenge and competition—enhancing its power abroad and at home.
This is the end-state of Putin’s strategy, and it requires changing the European security system—the rules of the game—to sustain Russia’s capability to compete with Europe and other regional powers poles outside Europe. Conversely, the policy strictly seeks to freeze the political rules of the game inside Russia, and end meaningful political competition at home. Russia’s leaders have concluded that the European system is both vulnerable and unjust.
In the Russian view, the European security system is vulnerable because it is weakened by a diffusion of global power, political devolution, sapped of economic wealth and attacked by forces of disorder in other parts of the world. Putin also has concluded that the current European security system is unjust because it confines and restricts Russia’s ability to exercise her inherent national strengths, inflicting a modern form of multi-dimensional, multi-level strategic encirclement of Russia.
Russia’s leaders claim the European security system is part of a global system whose purpose is to advance a unipolar, U.S.-dominated global order. Moreover, Russia’s leaders assert that preventing Russia from attaining its proper place in a just global order is a prerequisite to sustain the current unjust global order.
Russia’s policy seeks to change first the principles and rules upon which Europe and other countries have prospered and grounded their economic and military security, then replace them with new principles and new rules that would enhance the strengths of an unreformed, Putin-led Russia and compensate for its weaknesses.
As Russia’s campaign against Ukraine has demonstrated, this is a “rule breaker to be rule maker” strategy, and the strategy relies on a variety of internal and external means to achieve its ends. Internally, the strategy feeds nationalism, familiarity and orientation to the disempowered Russian people, offers the prospect for greater profit to the powerful rich and promises purpose, identity and resources to the power ministries (e.g., Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Interior).
Externally, the strategy relies on the use of all elements of power—including military—to discredit, devalue and delegitimize the current European security system. The roots of this strategy have many antecedents in Soviet policy, yet his policy is not that of the Soviet Union. Nor is it a policy that strictly and narrowly follows nationalist aims for redrawing borders to revive a Novorossiya or rebuild the Soviet empire.
His policy is a mixture of the very old, old and new in a completely different global strategic context. Putin needs the Russian people, the country’s powerful rich and the power ministries to support his policy. The Soviet-inspired symbols, messaging and parades, the nationalism associated with a Great Russia, the rearmament, increased defense budgets, the declarations of an unjust peace at the end of the Cold War and the accommodation of the narrow financial interests through new energy contracts with China and others are used to fuel support for his policy at home and attempt to legitimize it abroad.
President Putin has merged these three lines of ideas, ideals and vision for Russia into a single system of thought, policy and action to drive his strategy and build support internally for his agenda. Righting the perceived wrongs inflicted on Russia and rebuilding Russia’s power, prestige and place in the former Soviet space after its perceived humiliation at the end of the Cold War are the public lines of Russian policy.
Away from public view, Putin constructs unchallengeable political control over Russia that is built on the narrow aims of a Kremlin leadership interested in obtaining more wealth and more power. Individually, these public and non-public lines of effort are single elements of Putin’s policy, each with their own appeal to their targeted audience.
However, these three lines of Putin’s policy are mixed together into a single political and strategic military logic for breaking out of the perceived strategic encirclement of the European security system around Russia to establish a stronger, more globally competitive Russia.
Stephen R. Covington serves as International Affairs Advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), Deputy Supreme Allied Commander and Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). The above extract is from his Putin’s Choice for Russia, published by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
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President Vladimir Putin has ordered snap combat-readiness drills in Russia's central military district.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on September 7 that the exercises involve paratroopers and military transport aviation as well as some aircraft from other military districts.
"We have to check the capabilities of paratroopers when they are deployed over large distances and their readiness to make landings on unknown aerodromes," he said.
The minister added that the war games, which run to September 12, are also designed to test the Health and Agriculture ministries' "readiness to carry out their tasks in wartime conditions."
The central military district ranges from the regions around the Volga River to the Ural mountains and Siberia, while also including far northern Russia.
Russia has intensified snap checks of its military might, as the crisis in Ukraine sent relations between the West and Moscow to lows not seen since the Cold War.
Based on reporting by AFP and dpa
PARIS (Reuters) - French President Francois Hollande on Monday proposed a meeting of the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in Paris later this month to push ahead with peace talks after recent ceasefire progress.
"The process has moved forward. There has been progress in the last few weeks. The ceasefire has almost been respected," Hollande told a news conference.
"The foreign ministers will speak in the coming days, and I propose a meeting (of leaders) in Paris before the U.N. General Assembly (on Sept. 28) so that we can evaluate the process and lead it to its end."
Hollande added: "If the process succeeds I will support the lifting of sanctions."
(Reporting by John Irish and Elizabeth Pineau; Editing by James Regan)
In late 2011, he was one of several leaders of a surge of anti-Kremlin protests - and endured the subsequent crackdown, which saw arrests, apartment searches, and several allies sent to prison.
Since the annexation of Crimea in February 2014 and the subsequent eruption of war in eastern Ukraine, Russia’s opposition leaders have endured ever-growing public vilification as ‘fifth columnists” and traitors.
In February this year came a blow that sent the entire anti-Kremlin movement – and much of Russia – into shock: the murder of the veteran opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.
Mr Nemtsov’s murder was a watershed moment for both the opposition and the Kremlin. It signalled that the era of tolerance was over – in the post-Crimea era, dissenters in the most brutal way.
It also deprived the movement of one of its few elected officials. Mr Netmsov held a council seat in Yaroslavl, a provincial medieval town north-east of Moscow.
Six months on, his old allies are regrouping and trying to regain office in the neighbouring region. But it is an uphill struggle.
One of the ancient river towns on which ancient Russia was founded, Kostroma is today a sleepy provincial capital, remarkable mostly for its neoclassical eighteenth century centre, reputedly laid out according to the pattern of Catherine the Great’s fan.
It has been hit by Russia’s economic downturn, though not catastrophically. Factories have closed to be replaced by shopping centres. Two mills producing linen – a traditional Volga export – still stagger along at reduced capacity. Many young people have left to find work in Moscow or Yaroslavl, the bigger, wealthier capital of the neighbouring region.
“It’s always been the definition of the sleepy provinces,” said Olga Dorozhkina, a local activist on the RPR Parnas, Mr Yashin’s party. “You can’t call it a politically active place.”
It is, in short, an unlikely place for an anti-Kremlin insurgency. And it is not where the opposition would have chosen to fight.
The opposition alliance of which Mr Yashin is a member had wanted to field candidates in four regions for the September 13 elections, including Novosibirsk, the booming scientific capital of Siberia.
One by one, however, they were denied registration on one technicality or another.
By mid-August, only Kostroma’s regional election commission had granted the opposition a place on the ballot. It is a decision that Mr Yashin and his campaign manager, Leonid Volkov, believe goes right up to the Kremlin.
“Why were we allowed to run here? It’s simple. In Novosibirsk, 70 per cent of the population live in the regional capital, so we don’t have to go too far to reach most voters. Here, sixty per cent of the population live in the countryside.” said Mr. Volkov, the campaign manager running the Parnas effort.
The population map is not the only difficulty. Novobirisk, with its strong artistic tradition and a reputation has a capital of science, is the kind of environment when Russian opposition politics thrives: big, wealthy, educated and middle class.
Largely rural and far from wealthy Kostroma is quite a different story.
“It is the toughest region for us. The Kremlin are counting on us demonstrably failing here so they can say ‘look, you can’t even get elected. You’re not popular,” he said.
The group need five per cent of the vote to get a deputy into the regional parliament, and the logistical nightmare is real.
Kostroma’s billboards, bus stops, and lampposts are peppered with campaign posters for United Russia, Vladimir Putin’s ruling party, and the parties of the so-called “systemic opposition” – the Communists, hard-nationalist Liberal Democrats, and centre-Left Just Russia, who sit in parliament but seldom, if ever, criticise Kremlin polices.
But the green and white of Parnas is nowhere to be seen – something Mr Volkov blames on the local authority’s firm grip on the local outdoor advertising market. Similarly, the party is largely ignored in television coverage.
“That means there is no room for subtlety in our campaign: first we need to inform people that we exist; and only then can we motivate them to vote for us,” said Mr Volkov. “The first ten days were taken up solely with the first task, so we’ve got a week to reach out and persuade people to vote for us.”
Mr Volkov is targeting not city squares and high streets, but the courtyards around which Russian residential areas are invariably built. The idea is “to go to the people, not to expect them to come to us.”
It is an exhausting schedule. The two lead candidates, Mr Yashin and Vladimir Andreichenko, a former regional governor, host a minimum of five public meetings each per day, relocating every 90 minutes from midday.
And it could easily be demoralising. During a day on the campaign trail with Mr Yashin last week, his best attended meeting attracted 14 voters. They were overwhelmingly elderly.
But if it gets to him, he does a good job of hiding it.
“My name is Ilya Yashin and I want to be your deputy in the regional assembly,” he began at his first meeting, addressing a total of three voters with a spring in his step and an engaging, breezy style.
The message is simple. “There is no one in the assembly who represents your interests. I want to be that person.”
It is old-fashioned, soapbox politics in a country where soap box politics is now a rarity.
And it quickly became apparent that the activists are not just up against impossible logistical challenges, the sullen activists of Patriots of Russia, or the threat of arrest Mr Yashin was detained early in the campaign for using a megaphone.
“It’s difficult to believe any facts anyone repeats,” shrugged Roma, a 27 year old soldier who, with his wife and child, sat through Mr Yashin’s speech in their apartment block courtyard. He was most worried about growing violence in the town. A couple of soldiers from his base had recently been stabbed during an altercation with drunks in a restaurant. “I’ll think about it before I vote.”
But that doesn’t mean his message is not hitting home, but that politicians are regarded with an almost universal disgust.
“Every month prices go up for food, essentials. Wages don’t,” said Natalya, Roma’s 25 year old wife. “Lots of people say they’re going to fight against it. Lots of people say they will fight corruption. Everyone speaks beautifully when they want your vote, and they never do anything afterwards.”
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DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish insurgent targets overnight after the militants staged what appeared to be their deadliest attack since the collapse of a two-year-old ceasefire in July and killed 16 government soldiers.
The military said its aircraft bombed 23 Kurdish insurgent targets in a mountainous area near the Iraqi frontier on Monday. The statement from the army also said that another six soldiers had been wounded, but that none were in critical condition.
The clashes, weeks before polls the ruling AK Party hopes will restore its majority, threaten to sink a peace process President Tayyip Erdogan launched in 2012 in an attempt to end an insurgency that has killed more than 40,000 people.
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels said they had killed 31 members of the armed forces in an attack on a convoy and clashes on Sunday in the mountainous Daglica area of Hakkari province, near the Iraqi border. The army statement said 16 had died making this the highest military death toll in a single attack for years.
The PKK is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and United States.
Erdogan said in an interview late on Sunday on the A Haber TV channel that the fight against the PKK would now become more determined. He said 2,000 PKK militants had been killed since the conflict resumed in July.
Uncertainty arising from the conflict, coinciding with a campaign against Islamic State militants based in Syria, has unnerved investors, with the lira dropping to record lows against the dollar.
The unrest has raised questions over how security can be guaranteed for the Nov. 1 vote. But Erdogan, who has dominated Turkish politics for over a decade and now seeks a parliamentary mandate to extend his executive powers, said the election would go ahead.
The pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), accused by the government of being bound to the PKK, called for a renewed ceasefire and an extraordinary parliamentary meeting. Leader Selahattin Demirtas cut short a European visit, saying there could be no justification for killing.
"We will not surrender to war policies which only deem death proper for the people's poor children and splatter blood on the mothers' dreams of peace," he wrote on Twitter, referring to the Daglica attack and conflict in the southeastern town of Cizre.
Local media reports said a lieutenant colonel in command of the Daglica battalion was among those killed.
"Two of our armored vehicles suffered heavy damage after the detonation of hand-made explosives on the road. As a result of the blast, there were martyrs and wounded among our heroic armed comrades," the military said in a statement.
EMERGENCY MEETING
The military said two F-16 and two F-14 jets struck 13 PKK targets and operations were continuing despite very poor weather after the attack, which occurred as security forces were clearing roadside bombs planted by the PKK.
The security source said that after the militants detonated explosives along the road, a clash broke out between the soldiers and fighters from the PKK.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu chaired an emergency meeting with military and intelligence chiefs and ministers on Sunday night in Ankara following the attack, cutting short a visit to the city of Konya.
"The pain of our security forces who were martyred in the treacherous attack by the separatist terrorist organization sears our hearts," Erdogan said in a statement, adding he believed the Turkish people would unify and take a "decisive stance" against threats to national security.
After he spoke, some 200 people chanting pro-Erdogan slogans attacked the Hurriyet newspaper's offices in Istanbul, accusing it of misquoting him and implying that the president was trying to gain political capital from the Daglica attack.
Protesters with sticks and stones smashed windows, according to the Dogan news agency, part of the same group as Hurriyet, which has attracted criticism from pro-government circles over its coverage of the conflict.
The PKK launched its insurgency in 1984 with the aim of carving out a state in the mainly Kurdish southeast. It later moderated its goal to strengthening Kurdish political rights.
Some Turks fear Kurds in Syria, backed by the United States in their fight against Islamic state, and Kurds in Iraq, as well as the PKK, harbor ambitions of an independent contiguous Kurdish state.
(Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Nick Tattersall, Ralph Boulton and Hugh Lawson)
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