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julia rhodes

5 reasons the West should care about the protests in Ukraine - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...he_protests_in_ukraine_partner

ukraine history politics policy crisis government issues economic culture west protests reasons

shared by julia rhodes on 24 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • 5 reasons the West should care about the protests in Ukraine
  • Seeing how Western governments placed Ukraine’s simmering crisis on the back burner for months, it’s hard not to recall British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 quote about events in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia: “A quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”
  • 1. Civil warUkraine is a country the size of France. Its population is double that of Syria, and more than 10 times the size of Bosnia’s.
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  • The impact on Ukraine’s 45 million people would be tragic. Historic cities like Kyiv, Lviv or Odessa could be left facing the destruction inflicted on Aleppo or Sarajevo. The European Union would have to cope with an unprecedented refugee crisis that would risk undermining traditional democratic parties as far-right groups exploit discontent over such an influx from the east.
  • As casualties mount among civilians and pro-Western forces, pressure would grow for international intervention, perhaps along the lines of NATO’s airstrikes in Bosnia and Kosovo
  • Crimea — a largely Russian-speaking Black Sea region, where the Russian navy maintains a major base — could be a flashpoint.Russian officials have said Moscow would be prepared to fight to regain it if Ukraine shifts westward. Moscow has history here. It has supported breakaway movements to undermine other westward-leading former Soviet nations like Georgia and Moldova.
  • If President Viktor Yanukovych’s ongoing crackdown succeeds in crushing the demonstrators, Ukrainians can expect their country to be sucked back into the Russian orbit. The hoped-for “association agreement” with the European Union setting the country’s limping economy on a Western path would be buried.
  • The EU’s “eastern partnership” plan to build an arc of Western-style democracies along its borders would be left in tatters. In its place would be a new, Cold War-style division of the continent.
  • 3. PartitionA glance at results from the 2010 presidential election that brought Yanukovych to power will show the extent of Ukraine’s divisions. The north and west voted solidly for pro-Western candidate Yulia Tymoshenko, who is now in jail, the south and east supported Yanukovych.
  • 2. Victory for Yanukovych and Putin
  • 4. RadicalizationUkraine’s protesters are not all brave democrats fighting for freedom. Among them are hardline nationalists with xenophobic and anti-semitic leanings.
  • 5. Ukraine resurgentThis week’s violence has seriously damaged hopes that Ukraine can emerge peacefully from the crisis as a democracy that maintains good relations with both Russia and the West.
  • Yet there remains some hope of a solution — if Putin, Yanukovych and the opposition see that the dangers of confrontation outweigh those of compromise; if Russia and the West agree to jointly help rebuild Ukraine’s weakened economy; and if they allow the country to choose its own path which could enable continued economic ties with both.Should that happen, a stable and prosperous Ukraine could still become an important partner for Europe and the United States and a bridge between east and west.
Javier E

Crimea, the Tinderbox - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...crimea-the-tinderbox.html

US russia ukraine crimea history politics crisis foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The Russian military intervention in Ukraine’s autonomous republic of Crimea has brought relations between the United States and Russia to their lowest level in a quarter century. It has transgressed the sovereignty of one of the most populous countries in Europe, violated the terms of a diplomatic agreement to respect Ukraine’s borders, and placed Russia on a war footing with one of the few states in the post-Soviet world that has managed to hold multiple free elections. It is a military operation that is unsanctioned by any international body, wholly open-ended, and blessed only by the Russian Parliament.
  • The Cathedral of St. Vladimir rests on a small hill on Crimea’s southwestern coast. The church is a modern creation, gilded and graceless, but it stands on an auspicious site: the place where, it is thought, Vladimir adopted Christianity in 988 as the state religion of his principality, Rus.
  • To Russians, Vladimir is the first national saint and the truest progenitor of the modern Russian state. To Ukrainians, he is Volodymyr the Great, founder of the Slavic civilization that would eventually flourish farther north, in medieval Kiev.
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  • Just around the headland is Sevastopol, the protected port and naval base where Tolstoy once served on the ramparts. During the Second World War, it was besieged and leveled by German bombers despite a heroic stand by the Soviet Army and partisans
  • An hour’s car ride away is Yalta, where czars vacationed and Chekhov wrote “The Cherry Orchard.”
  • In 1783, when Catherine the Great wrested control from the Tatar khan and the Ottoman Turks, hundreds of thousands of Tatars fled the advancing Russian armies. A century and a half later, in 1944, those who remained behind were scooped up by Stalin and deported to Central Asia
  • Has Crimea also now become a Sudetenland? Or is it just a Grenada? Some Western commentators have already suggested the former, comparing President Vladimir V. Putin’s dispatch of Russian forces to Hitler’s 1938 annexation of German-populated parts of Czechoslovakia.
  • The United States typically interprets its own actions through the lens of its principles. It reads the principles of other countries from their behavior. In most instances that leads to precisely the hypocrisies that Russia, China and other countries find so easy to condemn.
  • This interpretive frame may be hard to understand, but some things are not wrong just because Russians happen to believe them. Russian news crews were covering a real story in Ukraine: the chaotic dismantling of a legally sanctioned government, the quick breakdown of an agreed framework for new elections, and the creeping transformation of political disputes into ethnic ones.
  • he Crimean affair is a grand experiment in Mr. Putin’s strategy of equivalence: countering every criticism of his government’s behavior with a page from the West’s own playbook. If his government has a guiding ideology, it is not the concept of restoring the old Soviet Union. It is rather his commitment to exposing what Russian politicians routinely call the “double standards” of American and European foreign policy and revealing the hidden workings of raison d’état — the hardnosed and pragmatic calculation of interests that average citizens from Moscow to Beijing to New Delhi actually believe drives the policies of all great powers.
  • In a poll carried out in late February by the independent, Moscow-based Levada Center, 43 percent of Russians called the overthrow of Mr. Yanukovych a violent coup and 23 percent labeled the developing situation a civil war. A plurality of respondents saw the entire affair as an orchestrated attempt by the West to draw Ukraine into its geopolitical orbit.
  • First, the European Union, the United States, and Russia must all agree that the principal goal is to prevent greater violence
  • European and American officials must be clear on the reasons why the international community should band together to condemn Russian actions. It is not because of the violation of national sovereignty — a concept imperfectly defended by Americans and Europeans in recent years — but because Mr. Putin’s reserving the right to protect the “Russian-speaking population” of Ukraine is an affront to the basis of international order
  • It is Mr. Putin who has made ethnic nationalism a defining element of foreign policy.
  • The future of Ukraine is now no longer about Kiev’s Independence Square, democracy in Ukraine or European integration. It is about how to preserve a vision of Europe — and, indeed, of the world — where countries give up the idea that people who speak a language we understand are the only ones worth protecting.
Ellie McGinnis

How John Kerry Could End Up Outdoing Hillary Clinton - David Rohde - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...354688

kerry clinton politics policy obama US

shared by Ellie McGinnis on 21 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Kerry’s first foreign-policy speech as secretary, an hour-long defense of diplomacy and foreign aid, was a flop.
  • The nearly universal expectation was that Kerry’s tenure would be overshadowed by his predecessor’s, for a long list of reasons.
  • arriving in Foggy Bottom when the country seemed to be withdrawing from the world. Exhausted by two long wars, Americans were wary of ambitious new foreign engagements—certainly of military ones, but of entangling diplomatic ones, too
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  • Barack Obama’s administration, accelerating a process that had begun in the early 1960s under President Kennedy, was centralizing foreign-policy decision making in the White House’s National Security Council, marginalizing the State Department.
  • Finally, Kerry, a defeated presidential candidate, was devoid of the sexiness that automatically attaches to a figure, like Hillary Clinton, who remains a legitimate presidential prospect
  • The consensus in Washington was that Kerry was a boring if not irrelevant man stepping into what was becoming a boring, irrelevant job.
  • Nearly a year into his tenure, Kerry is the driving force behind a flurry of Mideast diplomacy the scope of which has not been seen in years. In the face of widespread skepticism, he has revived the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; brokered a deal with Russia to remove chemical weapons from Syria; embarked on a new round of nuclear talks with Iran, holding the highest-level face-to-face talks with Iranian diplomats in years; and started hammering out a new post-withdrawal security agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
  • it will be Kerry who is credited with making the State Department relevant again.
  • “He’s front and center on all these issues. That clearly represents a very ambitious first year for any secretary of state.”
  • Kerry has a bad habit of wandering off script. On a trip to Pakistan in August, he created two diplomatic incidents in a single interview. First he said that the Egyptian army was “restoring democracy” when it toppled the country’s democratically elected president.
  • President Obama had “a timeline” for ending U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.
  • he overshot in the opposite direction, promising that any American strike against Syria would be “unbelievably small”—a bit of impressively self-defeating rhetoric that undermined days of administration efforts to argue that a few dozen Tomahawk cruise-missile strikes would be more than what hawkish critics were calling a pointless “pinprick.”
  • a word that comes up frequently in conversations about Kerry is gasbag. He had few close friends in the Senate, where he served for nearly 30 years. A former diplomat says Kerry’s recent foreign-policy successes have made him more insufferable than ever.
  • his gaffes are caused by arrogance and indiscipline. They say that even in a city swollen with egotism and pomposity, Kerry stands out.
  • “Nobody would challenge the notion that he’s been very much a team player and willing to take on really hard assignments from the president and go to the toughest places.”
  • (In one late-night press conference in Moscow last May, he uttered a staggering 95-word sentence.
  • “Even as a junior or senior, he was a pompous blowhard,” says someone who attended Yale with Kerry in the 1960s and asked not to be named.
  • he is not so much arrogant as awkward.
  • Liberal Democrats call his hawkish views on Syria a betrayal of his antiwar past. Republicans say he is a perennial flip-flopper: he fought in the Vietnam War and then protested against it; he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then opposed it; he tried to negotiate with Bashar al‑Assad in 2009, then compared him to Adolf Hitler—and then reopened the door to negotiating with him again.
  • Kerry “just can’t dance.”
  • Washington mandarins dismiss Kerry’s foreign-policy ambitions as grandiose and overweening, especially relative to what America’s diminishing power can achieve after Iraq and Afghanistan
  • old foreign-policy hands say that instead of acknowledging the limits of American power in the post–Arab Spring Middle East, Kerry looks for misguided ways to apply power the country no longer has.
  • Current aides argue that Kerry’s recent successes belie the caricatures of him. “Show me where he hasn’t done this job well,” one demanded when I interviewed him in mid-October.
  • “I would ask John Kerry, ‘How can you ask a man to be the first one to die for a mistake?’ ”
  • Kerry seem “pompous” is that “oftentimes he tries too hard.” According to Manley and others, Kerry had a knack for walking up to fellow members on the Senate floor at precisely the wrong time.
  • His enormous ambition motivates him to aim for major breakthroughs despite daunting odds. And his healthy self-confidence allows him to believe that he can convince anyone of virtually anything.
  • Kerry also has bottomless reserves of patience that allow him to engage for hours in seemingly fruitless negotiations; he persists long past the time others would have given up in exhaustion.
  • The amount of time he’s spent negotiating with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai and Russia’s Sergey Lavrov alone should qualify him for some kind of diplomatic medal of honor.
  • an indifference to his own political standing.
  • Political calculations may have constrained the risks Hillary Clinton was willing to take. Kerry, in contrast, no longer needs to heed political consultants. Nor does he need to worry too much about what his detractors say.
  • “I don’t care at all,” he said. “I could care less about it. You know, David, I ran for president, so I’m not scared of failure.”
  • secretary of state is the job for which Kerry was born and bred
  • “I’m not worried about the politics,” Lowenstein recalls Kerry telling him. “I want to get things done.”
  • Obama, too, no longer has to worry about reelection; concerns about the 2012 election may have limited the president’s own appetite for diplomatic risk taking in the Mideast during his first term.
  • But his enthusiasm for his current job is unquestionable; one aide told me that he will have to be dragged from the office—fingernails scraping against the floor—at the end of his term.
  • As a presidential candidate, he had to downplay his obsession with foreign policy and his fluency in foreign languages, for fear that such things would play badly with voters; as secretary of state, he can freely leverage those qualities.
  • if there is no breakthrough with Iran, or if his efforts to broker peace in Syria fall short, or if the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks founder, history will likely view Kerry as the tragicomic figure his detractors already judge him to be.
  • “After you lose the presidency, you don’t have much else to lose.”
  • Following stints as an assistant district attorney and the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Kerry would, after his election to the Senate in 1984, go on to serve for 28 years on the same committee he had stood before in 1971, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
  • (But for Ohio, where he lost to Bush by 119,000 votes, Kerry would have been president.
  • But Kerry stepped into the role at a singularly weak moment for the position. For one thing, America, weary after a decade of conflict, is turning inward; activist diplomacy is out of favor. For another, State Department employees I interviewed told me that morale is low.
  • the department is too hierarchical, inflexible, and risk-averse—and is in danger of becoming even more so in the aftermath of Benghazi.
  • the intensely controlling Obama administration has centralized foreign-policy decision making in the National Security Council, weakening the State Department.
  • Just a day after Kerry delivered one of the most impassioned speeches of his career, assailing Assad’s use of chemical weapons on civilians as a “crime against conscience” and sending a clear signal that U.S. air strikes on Syria were imminent, the president announced that missile strikes might in fact not be imminent, and that he would be seeking congressional authorization to attack Syria.
  • the president risked causing foreign leaders and negotiators to doubt whether any future warnings or statements issued by Kerry were backed by the White House.
  • Kerry conducted long interviews with every living former secretary of state—Kissinger, George Shultz, Baker, Madeleine Albright, Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Clinton—and set out to model himself after Shultz, who, in six and a half years serving under Ronald Reagan, was seen as a combination of the two prototypes, both a great diplomat and a good manager.
  • “I don’t care about risk, honestly,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, spoiling for a fight. “The riskiest thing to do is to not act. I would far rather try and fail than fail not trying.”
  • When off the record, in relaxed settings, he is refreshingly direct, profane, and insightful, speaking bluntly about the limits of American power and caustically lamenting Washington’s growing paralysis and partisanship
  • He finishes sentences with phrases such as something like that or that’s about it or thanks, man. Toes tapping, head bobbing back and forth, he speaks with fervor and candor. His tenacity is palpable.
  • Recent secretaries of state have had different strengths. Henry Kissinger and James Baker, two secretaries who had close relationships with their presidents (Nixon in Kissinger’s case, George H. W. Bush in Baker’s), were powerful bureaucratic players.
  • But isn’t staking America’s credibility, and his own reputation, on long-odds breakthrough agreements with Tehran or Moscow, or on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a dubious exercise, as Obama’s failed first-term efforts at Mideast peace demonstrated?
  • Colin Powell lost a crucial internal administration battle in failing to halt the Bush White House’s march to war in Iraq—but was adored at the State Department for implementing sweeping administrative reforms.
  • Clinton embraced a new, Google Hangout era of town-hall diplomacy, and she elevated economic development and women’s issues. She was an architect of the administration’s “pivot to Asia,” and she took risks in supporting the Afghanistan troop surge and the intervention in Libya.
  • steered clear of the Middle East, delegating special envoys like Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell to grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, peace talks with the Taliban
  • Clinton was much more prudent and careful than Kerry, whom one former State Department official describes as more of a “high-risk, high-reward”
  • “My view is that she was pretty sheltered,” he told me. “They were not interpersonally pleasant, and they were very protective of her. You can get into a cocoon.”
  • “My assessment was that she made a calculated political choice not to hang her hat on that thankless task,” Kim Ghattas,
  • the former secretary would have taken bolder risks but was reined in by the White House—especially during her first couple of years in office, when hostility from the bitter 2008 primary campaign still lingered between the Obama and Clinton staffs.
  • she actively engaged in Middle East talks, at one point meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for seven hours in New York.
  • Kennan warned Powell about the dangers of traveling too much—of prioritizing activist diplomacy over providing the White House with solid foreign-policy analysis.
  • Powell gave a copy of Kennan’s letter to Kerry. So far, Kerry is not following the advice. As October came to a close, Kerry had already flown more than 213,000 miles and spent more than 100 days—roughly 40 percent of his time—outside the United States. In his first nine months, he’d traveled more miles than Clinton had in her entire first year in office.
  • In 2009, he convinced Afghan President Hamid Karzai to consent to a runoff in his country’s disputed presidential election.
  • 2011, he was dispatched to Pakistan after the killing of Osama bin Laden to persuade local officials to return the tail of an American helicopter that had crashed at the site.
  • cemented Kerry’s bond with Obama was less his diplomatic achievements than his ability to impersonate another tall, wealthy Massachusetts politician with good hair: Kerry served as Mitt Romney’s surrogate during weeks of preparation for the 2012 presidential debates.
  • Kerry channeled Romney so effectively that, aides to both men say, he got under Obama’s skin.
  • Kerry agreed that the U.S. should try to revive Middle East negotiations before the Palestinians again pushed for statehood, at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013.
  • In private meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama pushed for a resumption of negotiations. At a final press conference before returning to Washington, Obama announced that he was handing the pursuit of talks over to Kerry.
  • “What I can guarantee is that Secretary Kerry is going to be spending a good deal of time in discussions with the parties.”
  • He met alone with Abbas for two hours in Amman and then flew to Jerusalem to meet with Netanyahu and three of his aides.
  • Kerry pressed on, returning in April to Jerusalem and Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital in the West Bank. After 24 hours of talks with both sides, Kerry held a press conference at the airport in Tel Aviv.
  • Kerry held three meetings with Netanyahu and Abbas in three days, including one meeting with the Israeli prime minister that lasted six hours, until 3 a.m. On June 29, he canceled a trip to the United Arab Emirates so he could keep talking with Netanyahu and Abbas, raising expectations of a breakthrough. On June 30, he held another press conference at the Tel Aviv airport.
  • “We started out with very wide gaps, and we have narrowed those considerably.”
  • Five months into the job, Kerry was off to an ominous start. His wife was in the hospital. Syria was convulsing. Progress toward Israeli-Palestinian talks was stalled. Egypt was burning. And Republican attack ads were making it appear as though the secretary of state had spent the weekend yachting.
  • Kerry said, according to the aide. “The only thing I’m interested in is a serious negotiation that can lead to a final-status agreement.”
  • “On behalf of President Obama, I am pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement that establishes a basis for resuming direct final-status negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” Kerry said, calmly and deliberately. “This is a significant and welcome step forward.” He declined to take questions.
  • Nine days later, the Israeli cabinet approved the release of the 104 Palestinian prisoners. The next day, Israeli and Palestinian officials arrived in Washington to begin peace talks.
  • The smallness of his circle of aides, which had been seen early on as a detriment to his management of the State Department, now made it easier to keep information contained.
  • Working with consultants from McKinsey, diplomats estimated that $4 billion in long-term private investment would flow to the Palestinians in the wake of an agreement.
  • Palestinian officials appear to have compromised on their demand for a settlement freeze.
  • From the beginning, Kerry had insisted that the Obama administration not allow a halt in Israeli settlement construction to become a public precondition.
  • Kerry also reiterated a core argument: the security that Israel currently enjoys is temporary, if not illusory. Without a two-state solution, Israel will face a European-led campaign of delegitimization, a new intifada, and a Palestinian leader far more radical than Abbas.
  • The crucial concession—the release of the 104 prisoners—came from the Israeli side
  • “It takes time to listen, it takes time to persuade,” Frank Lowenstein told me. “This is where Kerry’s willingness to stay up all night pays off.”
  • The U.S. provided nonlethal aid to the opposition, but White House officials were so fearful of American assistance inadvertently falling into the hands of jihadists that the National Security Council Deputies Committee monitored the distribution of the aid in granular detail. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, were funneling cash and weapons to hard-line militants, including Al Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
  • Russia continued providing Syria with arms and blocking any action by the UN Security Council.
  • When Putin finally received Kerry, after a three-hour delay, Putin reportedly fiddled continuously with his pen and “more resembled a man indulging a long-ago scheduled visit from the cultural attaché of Papua New Guinea than participating in an urgent summit with America’s top diplomat,”
  • At a late-night press conference, a beaming Kerry announced that he and Lavrov would co-host a peace conference in Geneva.
  • “They were great efforts, and again, I reiterate my gratitude to President Putin for a very generous welcome here.”
  • Earlier, in April, after American intelligence officials had confirmed that Assad had carried out several small-scale chemical-weapons attacks, Obama had reluctantly agreed to mount a covert CIA effort to arm and train moderate rebels.
  • if the United States did not “impose consequences” for Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Syrian leader would see it as “a green light for continued CW use.” But the White House did not alter course.
  • Both Obama and Kerry favored a military response—air strikes—according to a senior administration official. As American intelligence agencies accumulated evidence suggesting that Assad was responsible, Kerry offered to make the public case for strikes. White House officials welcomed the idea and vetted his speeches.
  • “My vision is that, if you can make peace, if you can get Israel and Palestine resolved and can get the Iranian threat of a nuclear weapon put to bed appropriately—even if Syria didn’t calm down—if you get those two pieces or one piece of that, you’ve got a hugely changed dynamic in a region that is in turmoil. And if you take just the Palestinian-Israeli situation, you have the potential to make peace with 57 nations—35 Muslim nations and 22 Arab nations. If the issue is resolved, they will recognize Israel.”
jlessner

300,000 March Through Moscow With Portraits of WWII Veterans - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-russia-immortal-regiment.html

march moscow wwii veterans

shared by jlessner on 09 May 15 - No Cached
  • As the head of the vast column reached Red Square, the marchers were joined by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who held a photograph of his late father in his naval uniform.
  • The march of the so-called Immortal Regiment was part of Saturday's commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany.
  • Earlier in the day, 16,500 troops took part in a military parade on Red Square.
katyshannon

Russia launches offensive against Syria - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...ML_SYRIA

crisis russia syria airstrikes offensive

shared by katyshannon on 08 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Russian warships in the Caspian Sea fired cruise missiles Wednesday as Syrian government troops launched a ground offensive in central Syria in the first major combined air-and-ground assault since Moscow began its military campaign in the country last week.
  • missiles flew nearly 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) over Iran and Iraq and struck Raqqa and Aleppo provinces in the north and Idlib province in the northwest, Russian officials said. The Islamic State group has strongholds in Raqqa and Aleppo, while the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front has a strong presence in Idlib.
  • a week after Russia began airstrikes in Syria, its longtime ally, on Sept. 30, and added a new dimension to the complex war that has torn apart the Mideast country since 2011
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  • Syrian official and activists said government troops pushed into areas in the central province of Hama and south of Idlib in the boldest multipronged attack on rebel-held areas, benefiting from the Russian air cover. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
  • Moscow
  • has mainly targeted central and northwestern Syria, strategic regions that are the gateway to Assad's strongholds in Damascus, and along the Mediterranean coast where Russia has a naval base.
  • The Islamic State group is not present in the areas where the ground fighting is underway.
redavistinnell

Putin's Pre-U.N. Charm Offensive: Fake or Breakthrough? - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...sive-fake-or-breakthrough.html

putin fake breakthrough dailybeast

shared by redavistinnell on 22 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Putin’s Pre-U.N. Charm Offensive: Fake or Breakthrough?
  • Moscow think tanks believe the carefully planned and staged remarks were meant to send two important signals to the West before Putin’s meetings at the United Nations General Assembly later this month: First, he is ready to freeze the war in Eastern Ukraine, and secondly, he wants to join the West in the fight against ISIS, the so-called Islamic State, in Syria.
  • The man asked Putin when the leader would go ahead and turn Donbas, as eastern Ukraine is called, into a part of Russia, as happened with Crimea.
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  • Putin answered the man’s question in a long statement, insisting that the only path to regulating the crisis lay in the existing Minsk agreements between Moscow and Kiev.
  • Kashin said that ideally, for Russia, the disputed territory would gradually become a region on the Russian border similar to Transnistria in Moldova, which is under Moscow’s domination but not part of Russia.
Grace Gannon

Sweden's Hunt For A Suspected Russian Sub Heats Up - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-submarine-hunt_n_6011798.html

Russia undersea Sweden submarines Moscow

shared by Grace Gannon on 23 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 23 Oct 14
     
    The Swedish military has made three sightings of foreign undersea activity in its waters. It is suspected to be an intrusion of Russian forces, while the Defense Ministry in Moscow claims to simply have been "fulfilling their tasks in the world's oceans." Russia's intentions are unclear, but Swedish officials continue to be attentive and are prepared to take necessary action.
Javier E

After Boris Nemtsov's Assassination, 'There Are No Longer Any Limits' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-are-no-longer-any-limits.html

assassination russia

shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Putin’s aggressive foreign policy, his increasingly conservative domestic policy, his labeling the opposition a “fifth column” and “national traitors,” his state television whipping up a militant, nationalistic fervor — all of this creates a certain atmosphere. Putin, after all, has a history of playing with fire, only to have the flames get away from him. After years of the Kremlin tacitly supporting ultranationalist, neo-Nazi groups, the same skinheads staged a violent protest at the foot of the Kremlin walls in 2010 while riot police officers stood by and watched helplessly. Today, a rabid nationalism has swallowed up most of the country, and it is no longer clear that Putin can control it. “In this kind of atmosphere, everything is possible,” Pavlovsky told me. “This is a Weimar atmosphere. There are no longer any limits.”
  • Nemtsov’s assassination took that warning to its logical conclusion. Now, “we live in a different political reality,” tweeted Leonid Volkov, a prominent opposition activist. “The fact that they killed him is a message to frighten everyone, the brave and the not brave,” Yashin said. “That this is what happens to people who go against the government of our country.” Anatoly Chubais — who, like Nemtsov, served in the Yeltsin government, and who remains close to Putin — visited the site of the shooting this morning. “If, just a few days ago, people in our city are carrying signs that say ‘Let’s finish off the fifth column,’ and today they kill Nemtsov,” he said in a statement, referring to the Kremlin-sponsored anti-Maidan protest in Moscow last weekend, “what will happen tomorrow?” Or, as Albats put it, “Hunting season is open.”
qkirkpatrick

Will Nemtsov Death Galvanize Opposition? | Opinion | The Moscow Times - 0 views

www.themoscowtimes.com/...517004.html

Russia politics Putin

shared by qkirkpatrick on 08 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Thousands of Russians marched through central Moscow on Sunday to honor slain opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in Russia's largest mass political event since the 2011-12 protest campaign. The size of the somber crowd led some to comment that if Nemtsov's brazen murder in view of the Kremlin was meant to intimidate the political opposition, it had failed.
  • So, could the recent shocking assassination of Boris Nemtsov revive the political opposition in Russia? Two factors suggest that this will not be the case.
  • First, the motives of Nemtsov's killer, as well as who, if anyone, ordered the hit, remain unclear. And even — especially if — the Kremlin was behind the murder, it is highly unlikely that any proof tying President Vladimir Putin to the murder will ever surface.
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  • Second, a nonviolent opposition movement must be in a strong position to take advantage of the backlash that violent repression can engender. To obtain this strength, an opposition movement needs to spend years building effective organizational structures, internal cohesion, bases of public support across social and geographic groups, compelling policies and a vision for tomorrow. In Russia, however, much of this is lacking, and the political opposition appears relatively weak and unorganized.
  • qkirkpatrick on 08 Mar 15
     
    Russians protest after death of political opposition Boris Nemstov. 
Emilio Ergueta

BBC News - Mysteries of the deep - what's been lurking in the Baltic Sea? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-29756959

bbc sea politics history crisis

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 27 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Sweden spent the past week trying, unsuccessfully, to find a foreign submarine thought to be lurking in its waters. But on Friday, having scoured the coast, the Swedish military called off the search. So what's going on in the Baltic?
  • What it means is that they've been searching among the islands and skerries off Stockholm for a submarine that shouldn't be there, bringing back dormant memories of the Cold War. Back in the 1970s and 80s Sweden regularly scoured its territorial waters for Soviet subs, almost always without success.
  • Once a a nuclear-armed whiskey-class submarine ran aground near a Swedish naval base, causing a diplomatic incident that became known inevitably as Whiskey on the Rocks. Fast forward to today, and a time when countries around the Baltic Sea are casting nervous glances towards a newly assertive Russia
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • a coded message in Russian, allegedly intercepted by Swedish intelligence, sent from the archipelago to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea.
  • It could have been mapping or training, it could of course have been spying. Or is it even possible that it set out to be noticed - just to send a message? Here I am. Catch me if you can.
  • f so it would appear to be part of a pattern of Russia trying to probe the defences of some of its near neighbours - both countries like Sweden which aren't in Nato, and countries like Estonia which are. Last month Sweden protested to Moscow after two Russian fighter jets entered its airspace. And across the Baltic in Estonia, an intelligence official working close to the border was abducted by Russian agents and taken to Moscow.
  • The plot thickens.
qkirkpatrick

Russian communists mark 63rd anniversary of Stalin's death - RT In motion - 0 views

www.rt.com/...ussia-anniversary-stalin-death

russian stalin history politics culture communism

shared by qkirkpatrick on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Russia's Communist Party marked the 63rd anniversary of the death of Joseph Stalin in Moscow on Thursday. Hundreds of people holding Stalin portraits and Soviet flags gathered near the memorial to Georgi Zhukov in the center of Moscow. Party members then moved to pay their respects at Stalin’s grave near the Kremlin wall, where they laid flowers and wreaths. Joseph Stalin held the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from April 3, 1922 until the day of his death. He died on March 5, 1953 at his residence in Kuntsevo Dacha.
  • qkirkpatrick on 07 Mar 16
     
    Russian Communists remember Stalin on the 63rd anniversary of his death
katyshannon

Islamic State says 'Schweppes bomb' used to bring down Russian plane | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...te-photo-idUSKCN0T725Q20151119

islamic state bomb down russian plane soda can reuters crisis

shared by katyshannon on 19 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Islamic State's official magazine carried a photo on Wednesday of a Schweppes soft drink can it said was used to make an improvised bomb that brought down a Russian airliner over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula last month, killing all 224 people on board.
  • The photo showed a can of Schweppes Gold soft drink and what appeared to be a detonator and switch on a blue background, three simple components that if genuine are likely to cause concern for airline safety officials worldwide.
  • "The divided Crusaders of the East and West thought themselves safe in their jets as they cowardly bombarded the Muslims of the Caliphate," the English language Dabiq magazine said in reference to Russia and the West. "And so revenge was exacted upon those who felt safe in the cockpits."Western governments have said the Airbus A321 operated by Metrojet was likely brought down by a bomb and Moscow confirmed on Tuesday it had reached the same conclusion, but the Egyptian government said it has still not found evidence of criminal action.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Explosives experts said it was feasible the device shown in the photo could bring down a plane, depending on where it was located and the density of explosives in the soft drink can. The most vulnerable locations include the fuel line, the cockpit or anywhere close to the fuselage skin.
  • Experts added that the photo could also provide a key clue in tracking Islamic State as the detonator pictured was a commercial one, which could be traced back to its manufacturer.
  • State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday the U.S. government was not in a position to confirm "the veracity" of the magazine's claim.
  • activity is likely the reason," he said, referring to the crash.
  • "We do believe that terrorist
  • also published a photo of what it said were passports belonging to dead Russians "obtained by the mujahideen". It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the published photos.The group, which has seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq, said it had exploited a loophole at Sharm al-Sheikh airport, where the plane originated, in order to smuggle a bomb on board.
  • The airport is widely used by budget and charter airlines to fly tourists to the nearby resorts on the Sinai coast.
  • said it had initially planned to bring down a plane belonging to a country participating in the U.S.-led coalition bombing it in Syria and Iraq, but it changed course after Moscow started its own air strikes campaign in Syria.
  • Islamic State's Egyptian branch, Sinai Province, claimed responsibility for the attack the day it happened but Egyptian officials were quick to dismiss talk of a bomb as premature.
jongardner04

Russia and Ukraine suspend direct flights between countries | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rect-flights-between-countries

russia ukraine

shared by jongardner04 on 25 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Direct flights between Ukraine and Russia were grounded on Sunday, as mistrust between the two countries boiled over into a new trade war that could affect hundreds of thousands of people.
  • I never thought it would come to this,” said 30-year-old Alexander Mikhaylin, from Moscow, after walking off the last Russian flight into Kiev’s Boryspil airport late on Saturday night.
  • Moscow also says that at least 70% are Ukrainians trying to visit Russian relatives and that it was Kiev’s main airline that was likely to be financially hurt the most by the air blockade. Travellers must now look into other less convenient, more expensive options including slow overnight train rides and flights via other countries on relatively good terms with both sides.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • People without the required passport must stay cooped up – often for many hours – in the grim waiting areas because they cannot legally leave the airports.
drewmangan1

Syrian President Assad visits Putin in Moscow for talks - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by drewmangan1 on 22 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Embattled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has flown to Moscow for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is now his chief sponsor.
  • But Ru
  • On September 30, the Russian Air Force began pounding Assad's opponents with airstrikes
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...ting-nikki-haley-1212661827918

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley
  • President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. 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  • Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. 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  • ...1 more annotation...
  • North Korea to close down nuclear test site in May
Megan Flanagan

Russia, US move past Cold War to unpredictable confrontation - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

russia war US crisis

shared by Megan Flanagan on 13 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • It's an outright conflict.
  • US-Russia relations have deteriorated sharply amid a barrage of accusations and disagreements
  • "This is a conflict, there should be no doubt,"
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • Washington publicly accused the Kremlin of cyberattacks on election systems and the democracy itself last Friday.
  • US officials suggested Russia be investigated for war crimes in the besieged city of Aleppo.
  • The whole hysteria is aimed at making the American forget about the manipulation of public opinion,"
  • We have not seen a single fact, a single proof,"
  • Hillary Clinton has pointed to the hacks as evidence that Russia favors her GOP opponent,
  • Putin dismissed that charge
  • Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it was a baseless accusation.
  • "It's a much more dangerous and unpredictable situation."
  • openly raised the possible use of nuclear weapons
  • "I think the world has reached a dangerous point,"
  • very real possibility of a building tit-for-tat dynamic
  • Putin wants to limit America's world leadership role, curb what he sees as an American inclination for "regime change," and show that Russia too can use military force to achieve foreign policy goals.
  • ollowed a typical pattern of a slow escalation and a mutual understanding on both sides when it was time to stop. 
  • "you have the impression they are escalating by themselves and going to the extreme."
  • Recent incidents include harassment of US diplomats in Moscow and Russian claims that its foreign service officers are badgered in the US, several occasions
  • quality of relations between us is certainly at the lowest point since the Cold War,
  • aggressive anti-Russia tendencies at the basis of the US policy on Russia."
  • "the unacceptability of interference with democracy in the United States of America,"
  • Gorbachev urged a "return to the main priorities" between Russia and the US.
  • "These are nuclear disarmament, the fight against terrorism, the prevention of an environmental disaster,
  • Russian president is a former KGB agent and that means "by definition he doesn't have a soul."
  • Lavrov called it "ridiculous" to suggest that "Russia is interfering in the United States' domestic matters."
  • but there's clearly concern on some level
  • Putin "really believes the US is responsible" for the December 2011 demonstrations against him
  • Moscow abruptly left a nuclear security pact, citing US aggression, and moved nuclear-capable Iskandar missiles to the edge of NATO territory in Europe
  • 'if we are not getting what we want on one front, we will escalate on other fronts.' "
  • Russians "have signaled in a couple of ways that they are willing" to use nuclear weapons.
  • Russia understands they have another couple of months until January where nothing much is going to happen, and why not take advantage of that
g-dragon

History of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/and-napoleonic-wars-p2-1221702

revolutionary french history napoleonic wars

shared by g-dragon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • French Revolution
  • After the French Revolution transformed France and threatened the old order of Europe, France fought a series of wars against the monarchies of Europe to first protect and spread the revolution, and then to conquer territory. The later years were dominated by Napoleon and France’s enemy was seven coalitions of European states.
  • Austria and Prussia issued the Declaration of Pillnitz - which asked Europe to act to restore the French monarchy – they actually worded the document to prevent war. However, France misinterpreted and decided to launch a defensive and pre-emptive war, declaring one in April 1792.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • A group of European powers opposed to these developments was now working as the First Coalition, the start of seven such groups formed to fight France before the end of 1815. Austria, Prussia, Spain, Britain and the United Provinces (Netherlands)
  • effectively mobilizing the whole of France into the army. A new chapter in warfare had been reached, and army sizes now began to rise greatly.
  • Napoleon was then given a chance to pursue a dream: attack in the Middle East, even on into threatening the British in India
  • Britain and France were briefly at peace but soon argued, the former wielding a superior navy and great wealth.
  • The relationship between Napoleon and Russia began to fall apart, and Napoleon resolved to act quickly to overawe the Russian tsar and bring him to heel. To this end, Napoleon gathered what was probably the largest army ever assembled in Europe, and certainly a force too big to adequately support. Looking for a quick, dominant victory, Napoleon pursued a retreating Russian army deep into Russia, before winning the carnage that was the Battle of Borodino and then taking Moscow.
  • But it was a pyrrhic victory, as Moscow was set alight and Napoleon was forced to retreat through the bitter Russian winter, damaging his army and ruining the French cavalry.
  • With Napoleon on the back foot and obviously vulnerable, a new Sixth Coalition was organized in 1813, and pushed across Europe, advancing where Napoleon was absent, and retreating where he was present.
  • He was sent to the island of Elba in exile.
  • With time to think while exiled in Elba, Napoleon resolved to try again, and in 1815 he returned to Europe. Amassing an army as he marched to Paris, turning those sent against him to his service, Napoleon attempted to rally support by making liberal concessions. He soon found himself faced by another coalition, the Seventh of the French Revolutionary and Napoleon Wars, which included Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia.
  • Napoleon was defeated, retreated, and forced to abdicate once more.
  • The monarchy was restored in France, and the heads of Europe gathered at the Congress of Vienna to redraw the map of Europe.
  • Europe would not be so disrupted again until World War 1 in 1914.
manhefnawi

Battle of Poltava | Summary | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Battle-of-Poltava

Russia Sweden Peter I Charles XII

shared by manhefnawi on 18 May 18 - No Cached
  • Battle of Poltava, (8 July 1709), the decisive victory of Peter I the Great of Russia over Charles XII of Sweden in the Great Northern War
  • In spite of his previous success against the Russians, Charles XII had not been able to challenge Moscow
  • Although he recovered, he was unable to lead his army in person. Command was transferred to Field Marshal Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld and General Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt
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  • the Swedish army had ceased to exist. Charles managed to flee southward to the Ottoman Empire, where he spent five years in exile. Poltava was a major turning point. Russia could now dominate the Polish and Baltic lands without any Swedish opposition, and Peter became the leading ruler in the region
krystalxu

'Russia in the doldrums?': new U.S. sanctions to weigh on recovery | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...eigh-on-recovery-idUSKBN1HG2IT

russia u s recovery

shared by krystalxu on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • MOSCOW (Reuters) - An escalation in U.S. sanctions against Moscow risks derailing a fragile recovery in Russia’s economy, which had just begun to take hold after the Kremlin’s last confrontation with the West in 2014, analysts and investors said on Monday.
anonymous

Is Israel driving a wedge between Russia and Iran? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-44313744

iran Shooting israel culture war

shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Earlier this month the long-running battle between Israel and Iran in Syria reached a dramatic crescendo. What is believed to have been Iranian rocket-fire against Israeli army positions on the occupied Golan Heights (itself a response to earlier Israeli air attacks against an Iranian base in the country) prompted a major Israeli offensive.
  • Now though it is becoming clearer that the attack could change the regional dynamics even further. And developments on the southern Golan Heights could provide additional impetus.
  • The potential battle here could be a new crucible, raising tensions between the three outside actors with the most significant strategic interests in the country - namely Iran, Israel, and Russia.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The relationship between these three countries is unusual to say the least. Iran and Israel are sworn enemies. And Syria is fast becoming the most dangerous front in their bitter rivalry.
  • The surprising factor in the long-standing Israeli air campaign to limit and, if possible, reverse the entrenchment of pro-Iranian forces in Syria is the passivity of Moscow.
  • A weak and fragmented Syria would do little to constrain Israel. While the latter sees Iran and its potential quest for an atomic bomb as an existential threat, Iran itself sees Israel's long-range military power as a considerable threat and an obstacle to its regional ambitions.
  • The Assad regime's growing victories saw a variety of pro-Iranian forces establishing themselves in Syria, from units of the Revolutionary Guard Corps to a variety of militias - a kind of Shia foreign legion, recruited in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
  • Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for all foreign forces to be withdrawn from Syria; a demand echoed just a few days ago by his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who said that only Syrian forces should be deployed in the south of the country.
  • Moscow clearly wants to stabilise the situation in Syria enabling the Assad regime to "declare victory".
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