Russia

Georgia is nervously calling “for an independent investigation into who started the war between Russia and Georgia…after the New York Times and BBC’s Newsnight programme raised serious doubts about Georgia’s claim that its attack on the breakaway Georgian enclave of South Ossetia on August 7/8 was in response to Russian aggression”.

But it was the Amnesty International report comdemning both sides that is really significant, due to Amnesty’s reputation as an impartial and respected source that rarely sides with Russia.

“The rights group said the use of notoriously inaccurate Grad rockets in the Georgian assault on Tskhinvali resulted in “scores of civilian deaths” and violated international law on the conduct of war.

Amnesty also took Moscow to task for failing to stop killings, torture and abuses against civilians perpetrated by Russia’s allies — the South Ossetian militias — in ethnic Georgian enclaves inside the breakaway region”.

Now, in light of this joint culpability (if anything, Georgia’s was active - shelling civilians 0 and Russia’s passive -failing to rein in allies), the question that I asked in August remains:

Why [did] CNN care more about Russian violence in Gori than Georgian violence in Tskhinvali?

Mark Ames has some excellent hunches over at his zine Exiledonline.

This is also a perfect time to remember Barack Obama’s original declaration at the start of the crisis, for which he was roundly ridiculed for being a wimp and even, in McCain’s words, “bizarrely in synch with Moscow”:

“I strongly condemn the outbreak of violence in Georgia, and urge an immediate end to armed conflict,” Obama said in a statement. “Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint”.

At that time, McCain responded with these now embarassing histrionics:

“That’s kind of like saying after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, that Kuwait and Iraq need to show restraint, or like saying in 1968 [when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia] … that the Czechoslovaks should show restraint,” he said.

We can only hope that Americans hawks, of all political stripes, learn some lessons about the wisdom of reflexive, ill-informed bellicosity, and that Obama feels vindicated enough in his moderation to ward off similar attacks at the future US president.

 

The West may have stood by and watched Russia chop off Georgia’s breakaway regions, but it prevented Putin from applying the same treatment to Mikhail Saakashvili’s nether ones.

A transcript of a conversation released today shows that the embattled Georgian president, dubbed by Britain’s Daily Telegraph “the man who lost it all”, came perilously close to living up this label in the most painfully literal of senses.

Nicolas Sarkozy saved the President of Georgia from being hanged “by the balls” — a threat made last summer by Vladimir Putin, according to revelations from Jean-David Levitte, Mr Sarkozy’s chief diplomatic adviser, to the London Times.

Putin is no stranger to toilet-threats, having once memorably declared: “If we catch [the Chechen rebels] in the toilet, we will rub them out in the outhouse.” But this particular exchange is a gem:

“I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr Putin declared.

Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?” — he asked. “Why not?” Mr Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”

Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?” Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: “Ah — you have scored a point there.”

Though Sarkozy would like to be seen as the man who dissuaded Putin from conquering all of Georgia, the ultimate credit for averting major war must go to the radioactive legacy of George Bush.

(In fact, parents of the world would be wise to heed Sarko’s technique: “Eat your greens/clean your room/do your homework or you’ll end up like Bush!”)

For now, Saakashvili’s erm, sack, seems to be safe. However, this afternoon, “more than 10,000 opponents of President Mikheil Saakashvili rallied in Tbilisi on Friday in the first major show of discontent since Georgia’s crushing defeat in an August war with Russia”, reports the Moscow News.

In addition to blaming him for the secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, protesters, some carrying signs saying “Stop Misha, Stop Russia” denounced his crackdowns on civil society and press freedoms.

Saakashvili should not get too comfortable: a coalition of Georgian nationalists avenging his territorial losses and liberals angered by his authoritarianism might just carry out Putin’s wish themselves.

Who says Russia has no soft power?

Well, Robert Amsterdam, for one. He has argued that the Russian invasion of Georgia illustrated its woeful loss of any sort of diplomatic legitimacy.

Outside of polite society, it has been a point beaten to death by such brownshirted bloggers as la Russophobe:  “Russia’s need to rely on physical force obviously shows that even in regard to a tiny country like Georgia (population less than half the city of Moscow), Russia lacks any other way to deal with a crisis”.

Unfortunately, these sentiments have got the upper hand since the Georgian war, but it was not always so. For example, in a 2006 report for the Brookings Institution, Fiona Hill wrote that

It is by no means assured that Russia’s increasing soft power will be used to positive effect. But the prospect is clearly there—and should be encouraging Russia’s current leadership to chart a new regional policy for itself in Eurasia.

Such optimism seemed quaint during the Georgian War, but as the smoke clears, it now seems that Russian soft power might have been strengthened, not weakened, by the war.

According to the BBC, today’s signing of an agreement to resolve the status of another disputed region - Nagorno-Karabakh - by Armenia and Azerbaijan in Moscow, may have been spurned on by Moscow’s ‘hard power’ actions in August:
“Correspondents say Russia’s brief war with Georgia in August has given impetus to international efforts to resolve disputes in the Caucasus, a region where Moscow is seeking greater influence”

But is it too late to change the established narrative?

The BBC reports that “that Georgia may have committed war crimes in its attack on its breakaway region of South Ossetia in August”.

Yet the old line about one-sided Russian aggression persists in strength, and spreads to Eastern Europe.

 

With Russian and American top brass talking again, it looks like the two countries have kissed and made up following the whole Georgia thing.

Or, if you’re US ambassador Beylre, kissed and made out: not only did he recently deny any US intention to punish Russia, but also put a nice gloss on the affair: “There is always an inclination to look at the dark side of things during these periods of strain. I think that sometimes obscures some of the very positive aspects of the joint work that we are doing together in a very positive way”.

Even the New York Times, that pre-eminent peddler of the ‘Evil-Russia-Crushes-Tiny-Democratic-Georgia’ narrative at the time of the conflict, has pulled off a spectacular 180 with a recent article questioning Georgia’s democratic credentials. (ESSENTIAL READING ALERT: Mark Ames wrote a typically thoughtful and spot on think piece on this in The Nation).

So, apart from a friendly / passive aggressive nuclear showdown in Europe and two new countries in the Caucasus, it’s back to normal, right?

Nearly. The most important rejigging has been very subtle. As this article in the NYT points out, on the fence countries like Azerbaijan have begun to move closer to Russia to avoid Georgia’s fate. Moreover, Georgia now maintains a somewhat toxic status, in that neighbouring countries are loath to get too close to it and incur Russian wrath.

So two months on, it seems Georgia is the only loser. America has moved on, Russia has increased its influence, and its neighbours have ostracised it.

This is the price, in the words of an Azeri commentator Rasim Musabayov, of having “a foreign policy that goes against your geography”.

Call me Miss Congeniality, but my brittle European sensibilities were flummoxed by the sheer boorishness of the anti-Russia vitriol in last night’s McCain-Obama match.

Setting aside the painful hypocrisy inherent, in the words of one BBC commenter, in “the irony of two men castigating Russia for unnacceptable petrodollar muscleflexing and interfering in other nations affairs while debating the best tactic for deploying US troops abroad…” the whole thing was very unbecoming.

I understand that this was a foreign policy debate and US-Russian relations have been rocked by the Georgian war; indeed, I was expecting plenty of oblique references to the event, and a healthy dose of sardonic swipes at the resurgent Eastern European power.

Perhaps something along the lines of Putin’s speech in 2006, the last Russian-American low point, in which he compared America to a wolf.

However, that speech, full of “veiled references” and “apparent jibes”, and billed by most Western newspapers as just about the most aggressive, jingoist and nationalistic in human history, now feels SOOOO totally tame!

It seems that comic-book villification has become an essential precondition for American campaigning.

In a sense, ritualistic bluster, the American equivalent of Soviet-speak, is its own political lexicon: vocabulary, rather than content. Using respectful language regarding rival powers is no longer allowed; thus, just as any argument in official Soviet circles had to be advanced in Marxist-Leninist terms, so too now must any US foreign policy argument - no matter how conciliatory and benign - be couched in angry jingoism.

Once upon a time, Kremlinologists had to parse through pages and pages of nearly identical speeches extolling the virtues of Lenin and Marx before they could read between the lines and unearth the sometimes very different meanings that lay beneath.

Who knew that these tactics would have to be applied in America c. 2008?

Depressing, yes; but also necessary, because on the face of it, McCain’s and Obama’s positions on Russia seemed identical: analysts concluded that “both criticized Russia’s invasion of Georgia and said Georgia and Ukraine should be free to join NATO”, and the two agreed on Iran, Russia and the U.S. financial crisis.

After all, it was Obama who was the sole candidate to refer to Russia as a ‘rogue state’.

However, these lexically similar declarations betray significantly divergent policy aims.

Compare and contrast some of the assertions below:

Obama: “Russia is a threat to the peace and stability of the region. Their actions in Georgia were unacceptable”.

McCain: “Russia committed serious aggression against Georgia. And Russia has now become a nation fueled by petro-dollars that is basically a KGB apparatchik-run government. I looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes, and I saw three letters, a “K,” a “G,” and a “B.” And their aggression in Georgia is not acceptable behavior”.

Sound fairly similar, non?

However, the devil is in the follow-ups. Obama later makes a very clear distinction between US support for Eastern Europe, “the Estonians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Poles, the Czechs”, who “are members of NATO”, and Ukraine and Georgia, who are not.

This is something that McCain emphatically does not.

McCain: “I think the Russians ought to understand that we will support — we, the United States — will support the inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine in the natural process, inclusion into NATO”.

Here’s Obama’s take:

Obama: “To countries like Georgia and the Ukraine, I think we have to insist that they are free to join NATO if they meet the requirements, and they should have a membership action plan immediately to start bringing them in”.

While both McCain and Obama support Nato membership for Georgia and Ukraine, Obama includes the key proviso of “if they meet the requirements”; those requirements could include having full territorial control, for example,which Georgia would not currently be able to meet.

And how did they fare meting out threats of a new cold war?
McCain:

I don’t believe we’re going to go back to the Cold War. I am sure that that will not happen. But I do believe that we need to bolster our friends and allies.

Translation: “We don’t want a cold war; just a hardened division of Europe into two sides - us and the Russkie bastards”.

Obama:

Now, we also can’t return to a Cold War posture with respect to Russia. It’s important that we recognize there are going to be some areas of common interest.

Translation: “Despite all my obligatory bullish rhetoric earlier on, I am not interested in a cold war, but rather in an aggressive engagement based on common ground and national interest, including Iran, energy and nuclear non-proliferation”.

I have written much about how McCain has been comprehensively wrong on Russia from the start; no-where more so than in his hot headed and ignorant knee-jerk reaction to the Georgia conflict that singularly failed to address Georgian complicity in the outbreak of the violence.

Yet, he somehow managed to cast Obama’s reasonable and sane call for “restraint from both sides” as “naive”.

The scariest part of it all is that the pundits overwhelmingly applauded McCain’s jingoistic Russia-bashing, and it didn’t all come from the right, either!

While the neoconservative Heritage Foundation’s Nile Gardiner could be expected to wax lyrical about McCain’s  “swagger and aggression”, I was very surprised to see the sentiments echoed by the latte-liberal Guardian’s Michael Tomasky: “McCain probably won the Russia conversation”.

In the end, the BBC sums it up nicely:

“Mr McCain was able to describe meeting Vladimir Putin, “looking into his eyes and seeing three letters, K, G and B” - a reference to the old Soviet intelligence agency for which Mr Putin once worked.

Does it sound corny to foreign ears, with a slight B-movie flavour to it? It probably does”.

So there you have it: superpower presidential elections as B-Movie casting calls.

Be afraid, be very afraid…

–by Vadim Nikitin

Ahhh! That’s better!

NOW FOR THE RUSSIA NEWS ROUNDUP!

1) Not to gloat or anything, but it seems the Brookings Institution has finally started reading FPA Russia Blog. Only a few days after we exposed the absurdity of Anders Aslund’s disingenuous insinuation that Russia’s economic downturn was somehow caused by the Georgia war, their Clifford G Gaddy has pronounced the definitive word on the matter, blasting Aslund out of the water. Good job!

2) Russia is everywhere in the headlines!

The BBC’s Bridget Kendall delves into the “Machiavellian power struggles, dark paranoia of security chiefs and long fingers of corruption” to explore the strange co-leadership of Putin and Medvedev.

3)  Guardian hack Luke Harding asks whether, after Ossetia and Abkhazia, Ukrainian penninsula of Crimea is next. This is very, very unlikely.

4.  Very interesting article in the Washington Post by Philip Pan, about how Putin admonished Ekho Moskvy, one of the last remaining liberal indepenent media outlets, for alleged pro-Georgian bias in the reporting. This has got them all very worried. Hopefully it will not result in their shut down.

5.  Speaking of media bias: is CNN about to be kicked out of Russia?

Exiledonline has an equally disturbing story about how CNN taped a long exclusive interview with Putin, but only aired a few seconds worth of clips. The reason? Putin came across as too reasonable, says author Yasha Levine, and this wouldn’t have gelled with the Putin-as-Bad Guy construct over at Time Warner. And now, he’s apparently so pissed at this ‘censorship’ that he is considering kicking the whole channel out of his country.  Totally un-ironically, too!

 

Having despatched his women vote, has Sarah Palin taken the fight to Obama’s core demographic of pot-smoking hippie homosexual intellectuals?

Compare and contrast Palin’s recent interview with Charlie Gibson, in which she rails against a new cold war with Russia while refusing to rule out a hot one, and Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘America‘, in which he rails against bourgeois hypocrisy while refusing to say the Lord’s prayer:

Sarah Palin, ABC World News Tonight, September 11, 2008:

My mind is made up, there’s going to be trouble…

America it’s them bad Russians

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians

The Russians are power mad. The Russia wants to eat us alive. She wants to take

Our cars from out our garages

Her wants to take our factories

Her wants to corrupt our college girls

Her wants to put us all in slave labour camps

Her wants to emaciate us like skeletons

Her wants Malenkov or Bulganin or somebody to be our boss.

Her wants to dictify us.

Him big bureaucracy running our filling stations

That no good. Ugh.

 

Allen Ginsberg, America:

We’ve got to keep an eye on Russia.

For Russia to have exerted such pressure

in terms of invading

a smaller democratic country, unprovoked

is unacceptable and we have to keep…

we have got to keep our eyes on Russia,

under the leadership there.

I think it was unfortunate.

some steps backwards that Russia has recently taken

away from the race toward a more democratic nation with democratic ideals.

That’s why

we have to keep an eye on Russia.

Russia.

They are our next door neighbors.

They are our next door neighbor.

We will not repeat a Cold War.

We cannot repeat the Cold War.

We are thankful that, under Reagan,

we won the Cold War,

without a shot fired, also.

We will not repeat a Cold War.

—

To use Ginsberg-Palin’s own words, “Are you being sinister, or is this some sort of practical joke? America, this is quite serious… America, is this correct?”

–by Vadim Nikitin

 

…I’d rather
compose
romances for you -
more profit in it
and more charm.

                                                        –V.V Mayakovsky

I am sick of this whole Georgia thing.

I’ve had enough of politics, international relations, diplomatic intrigue!

I hate how news has to be about events.

Who cares about events?

When was the last time an event even happened to you or anyone you know?

I don’t know about you, but nothing ever happens to me. Does that make me a dull boy?  I mean, aren’t all events, with a capital E, imaginary, anyway?

So from now on, I’m just going to put up links to interesting events stories and and as long a description/summation as I can stomach before vomiting over the keyboard.

For example:

1. Starting this week, The Economist is debating the West’s response to renewed Russian assertiveness for two-weeks as part of an ongoing, Oxford-style Online Debate Series. The proposition is, “This house believes the West must be bolder in its response to a newly assertive Russia.”

It involves Dmitry Trenin and Marshall Goldman, a professor I greatly respect for his honest and indignant account of privatisation in his book The Piratisation of Russia. The debate promises to be lively and intriguing!

As of now, 53% to 47% disagree that the west should be bolder! Go fellow travellers!!

2. In today’s Moscow Times, Harvard’s Joseph Nye pens a clear-headed analysis contrasting Chinese soft power during the Olympics with Russia’s hard power in Georgia.

Without jumping to conclusions or offering reflexive condemnation of Russia’s fisticuffs, Nye observes that the most effective foreign policy strategy artfully weaves soft and hard power.

3. A lot has been written about Russia’s stock market plunge. Especially flimsy, not to mention disingenuous, were the shyster-economist Anders Aslund’s attempts to link the recent economic troubles to the war in Georgia.

There are myriad reasons not to respect Aslund; this article adds yet another drop to his overflowing chalice of intellectual dishonesty and increasing irrelevance.

Here is the sensational way his article begins:

Aug. 8 stands out as a fateful day for Russia. It marks Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s greatest strategic blunder. In one blow, he wiped out half a trillion dollars of stock market value, stalled all domestic reforms and isolated Russia from the outside world.

Anders is himself clearly aware of the improbability that a Russian person could ever accomplish that much in a single day before succombing to drink, fatigue or the oppresive weight of the human predicament, because he never re-visits this bizarre claim.

When he finally gets down to a bullet point list of reasons for Russia’s economic ills, the Georgia war doesn’t get a single mention; its inclusion in the lead paragraph was purely for cheap titillation.

Incidentally, the points themselves were mostly sensible and apolitical, and reveal a half-decent, if supply-side, economist groaning from underneath all that reactionary, Russophobic trash-talk.

In a measured and grown up article about the credit crisis, the FT’s Charles Clover and Catherine Belton note Medvedev’s unprecedented injection of $10 bn into the banking system:

“The market hasn’t reacted to Medvedev’s comments. However, [it] should,” said Roland Nash, head of research at Renaissance Capital, the investment bank.

He said the president’s comments may signal fresh investor-friendly policies, but were chiefly a “charm offensive”. He added: “This is the first time in history that the Kremlin has reached out to the investor community. It is fairly unprecedented.”

4.  Some have been making hysterical noises about Russia’s military exercises with Venezuela. Instead, might I suggest listening to the Pentagon itself:

“We exercise all around the globe and have joint exercises with countries all over the world. So do many other nations,” said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

STOP!!! I CAN’T HOLD IT ANYMORE… BAAAAARF!

I’ll leave you with a nice short story:

An Encounter

by Daniil Kharms

On one occasion a man went off to work and on the way he met another man who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was going his way home.

 

And that’s just about all there is to it.

—

–by Vadim Nikitin

 

 

In a refreshing turn of events, Vladimir Putin has reportedly saved the lives of several journalists during a trip to a Siberian conservation area for the endangered Amur tiger (in accordance with the Lomonosov-Lavoisier Law of Conservation of Media, an opposition website owner in secessionist Ingushetia was ordered killed shortly afterwards).

When a tiger escaped from a trap and ran in the direction of the press pack, Putin is said to have shot it with a tranquiliser gun. Then, in a clear signal to Nato and Georgia, the Prime Minister stripped down to his camouflage underwear and proceeded to tear out and eat its still beating heart.

Well, not exactly; but he might as well have done, judging by the British headlines:

“Putin shoots a tiger as Europe grapples with Russian aggression” screams the Guardian, and then asks: “Was it an openly hostile signal of power play to the west? Or just another incarnation of Putin’s oft-demonstrated masculinity?”

“Vladimir Putin ’shoots’ tiger, dismisses EU leaders”, declares the Times, adding that “the Russian Prime Minister – shown in new macho-style pictures apparently tranquilising a tiger – said that any attempts at severing relations would be hampered by the self-interest of European nations”.

In fact, histrionics aside, this has been a big week for Russian diplomacy: President Medvedev spelt out the 5 principles of his new foreign policy vision. The following is the BBC’s Paul Reynolds’s fine summary; his article is also worth reading for its good commentary.

1. International law

“Russia recognises the primacy of the basic principles of international law, which define relations between civilised nations. It is in the framework of these principles, of this concept of international law, that we will develop our relations with other states.”

2. Multi-polar world

“The world should be multi-polar. Unipolarity is unacceptable, domination is impermissible. We cannot accept a world order in which all decisions are taken by one country, even such a serious and authoritative country as the United States of America. This kind of world is unstable and fraught with conflict.”

3. No isolation

“Russia does not want confrontation with any country; Russia has no intention of isolating itself. We will develop, as far as possible, friendly relations both with Europe and with the United State of America, as well as with other countries of the world.”

4. Protect citizens

“Our unquestionable priority is to protect the life and dignity of our citizens, wherever they are. We will also proceed from this in pursuing our foreign policy. We will also protect the interest of our business community abroad. And it should be clear to everyone that if someone makes aggressive forays, he will get a response.”

5. Spheres of influence

“Russia, just like other countries in the world, has regions where it has its privileged interests. In these regions, there are countries with which we have traditionally had friendly cordial relations, historically special relations. We will work very attentively in these regions and develop these friendly relations with these states, with our close neighbours.”

Asked if these “priority regions” were those that bordered on Russia he replied: “Certainly the regions bordering [on Russia], but not only them.”

And he stated: “As regards the future, it depends not just on us. It also depends on our friends, our partners in the international community. They have a choice.”

Of course, these postulates are nothing new. The principles of Multipolarity and the idea of Russia’s Monroe Doctrine in the so-called Near Abroad (the former Soviet republics) were first advanced about a decade ago by Yevgueny Primakov. At the time, around the allied bombing of Yugoslavia, Russia made a lot of bluster regarding Nato encroachment, but couldn’t deliver.  The difference is that now Russia appears for the first time able to put its tanks where its mouth is.