From [TBC] To The Polar Lands - Rolling Russia / "Near Abroad" News Thread

Anyway, good article. I especially like how it loses its composure when speaking with no little implication of 'other totally fascist ideologies'. That first law seems utterly bonkers and creepy as fuck.

a boost to the Russian propaganda machine selling the Ukrainian government as far-right ethno-nationalists.

weird how the latter keep falling into this trap huh

Despite some odd provocations (like being pictured with a Stepan Bandera patch on his military shirt) i don't think Poroshenko could really be classed as a far-right ethno-nationalist and there is a fair proportion of the new Ukrainian political set-up that is reasonably liberal but they're over a barrel at the moment.

On one side, you've got the armed right-wing militias who have propped up the army and expect something in return, on the other you've got a lot of nationalist parliamentarians who have been itching to do things like this for twenty years and are going full steam ahead now that the Russian-leaning population is no longer able to provide a democratic block on it.

It leads to stuff like this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32216738 Dmytro Yarosh, leader of Pravii Sektor, being appointed to a senior military role.

Clearly a terrible idea, clearly divisive at home and abroad but no political will / ability to stop it.

Putin is doing his annual call-in, which apparently had 2.5m questions from the public raised this year. He's currently being dragged by a British dude who has been farming in Russia for 23 years over milk prices.

http://i.imgur.com/PmkTB1i.jpg?1

He has also confirmed the sale of the S-300 air defense system to Iran.

It looks like the Ukrainian journalist Olesya Buzina has been assassinated in Kyiv this morning.

This is either the ninth or the thirteenth suspicious death of people linked to the former government over the last few months, depending on who you ask. A former MP in Yanukovich's party, Oleg Kalashnikov, died of a gunshot yesterday:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/15/ousted-ukraine-president-ally-shot-dead

Many of the deaths have been determined to be suicides by the authorities but fuel conspiracy theories about scores being settled. Suicide obvs not a plausible ruling in the Buzina case.

Anton Gerashenko, a senior official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs updated something along the lines of the following on his Facebook page:

It appears that the shooting of witnesses to the Anti-Maidan continues. Anyone who was involved in organising or financing the Anti-Maidan or any other illegal activities against the Maidan revolution and fears a threat to their life should contact the police so as not to follow Kalashnikov and Buzina

I'd imagine it's meant to suggest an internal squabble between anti-government forces but it's not exactly a good look.

Second journalist murdered in Kyiv in 24 hours. This is nuts.

!?!?

Poroshenko statement:

The Head of State has emphasized the need for prompt and transparent investigation of those murders. “It is evident that these crimes have the same origin. Their nature and political sense are clear. It is a deliberate provocation that plays in favor of our enemies. It is aimed at destabilizing the internal political situation in Ukraine and discrediting the political choice of the Ukrainian people,” the Head of State said.

Petro Poroshenko has also noted that solving these resonant crimes was a matter of honor for the law enforcement bodies. “I demand the law enforcement bodies to find the executors and organizers of these murders in no time. Given the resonance of crimes, law enforcers should regularly inform the society on the results of their investigation,” the Ukrainian President emphasized.

It's practically a word-for-word copy of the Peskov statement on Nemtsov's murder - a "provocation" by enemies to "destabilize the internal political situation of the country".

Nazarbayev re-elected with 97.5% of the vote.

Kazakh leader likely to win new five-year term Nice call BBC!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/LukParad9maj.jpg

Dmytro Firtash, the Ukrainian oligarch with ties to everyone from Yushchenko to Yanukovich to, allegedly, Semion Mogilevich, has been stuck in Austria for over a year pending an extradition request from the US related to bribery charges. It's just been announced the Austrian court has refused on the grounds the charges were politically motivated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSAEhGnRg5Y

Between 5 and 8 police officers were killed in Macedonia over the last 24 hours:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32680904

Kumanovo is mostly Albanian and the fear is that the border region near Serbia might try to go the same way as Kosovo. There are a lot of the same economic and political grievances.

I'm with about a dozen people from Skopje at the moment who traveled by coach through the region just before it all kicked off on Friday night and they're worried all land borders will be closed by the time they need to go back on Monday.

macedonia is a bit of a stretch for the near abroad but low it

yesterday i was thinking of doing a list of top, top atrocity anecdotes i have read from balkan history going from the ottomans torturing macedonian guerillas to death in caves, apis' subaltern mutilating the breast of the dead serbian queen, ustase collecting boxes of eyes in jasenovac, chetniks killing a partisan in sumadija through heart extraction, tito's secret police torturing to death dissidents in goli otok, serb irregulars sexually torturing to death bosniak conscripts.....as much as foreigners have gilded the brutality lily from ibn saqaliba to malaparte, there's a demonstrable recurrence of this sort of thing

/ibn yacub's/

Someone explained to me once that about 50% of the problems in the Balkans were caused by the jugo wind making people crazy. Not sure how convincing that was.

Anyway. It looks like 22 dead in Macedonia with the blame being put on Kosovars. Supposedly the remnants of the KLA.

Google news alert for "chetnik" finally pays off:

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/serbia-rehabilitates-wwii-chetnik-leader-mihailovic

http://qz.com/403307/russia-is-quite-literally-drinking-itself-to-death/

I've been meaning to read The Last Man In Russia for a while but haven't had the energy. Russian demographics are looking a bit better now than they have for a while (or at least, not much worse than a lot of European countries) but the damage done by alcohol during the 90s was immense and it remains a problem. A lot of those excess deaths (and 30% seems pretty high) are likely to be people who started drinking heavily in their thirties and pegged out not long after 50. There was a 60% increase in alcohol consumption between the late eighties and mid nineties, iirc. There are still countries with higher consumption of alcohol per capita (including Ireland) but they don't have huge Muslim populations to bring the average down.

The government has increased the price and is getting much tougher with retailers selling alcohol to minors (i have to take my passport everywhere if i want a drink and i haven't been 18 since Yeltsin) but it's going to take a long, long time to change.

It is a pretty dramatic jump from some of the quite hard drinking former Imperial Russia countries that are 6-7% to the 21-30% of Estonia and Russia. It might be an idea to encourage people to switch from the hard stuff to red wine because I get the feeling putting the price of vodka up will just encourage the unregulated stuff on the black market.

i remember reading a few years ago that about 60,000 a year in russia die from illicitly produced vodka laced with methanol or what have you

Samogon is mostly ok if it's genuinely homemade but illegal industrial stills often add methanol and other stuff. Not just in Russia - some guys were jailed in the Czech Republic today for killing 50 people with methanol vodka last year. There's always a fear that it'll end up in shops so all vodka bottles are now tamper-proof and can't be refilled.

Another fairly common problem is people drinking cheap 99% alcohol "aftershave" or "muscle rub" - both sold in handy 250ml screwtop bottles.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CFJP8hWWoAANvvw.jpg:large

The Duma has decided against a political investigation into the Nemtsov murder, apparently on the basis that it's not within their remit and should be left to the police. It was always highly unlikely / never gonna happen but it removes the only option I can see for openly questioning Kadyrov about his connections. Post-Nemtsov, it definitely looks like government critics are shifting some of the focus away from Putin and on to his problematic fave. The big scandal this week has been the lavish wedding Kadyrov oversaw between a decrepit 57-year-old chief of police and an understandably morose-looking 17-year-old girl.

Interesting piece on Peter Pomerantsev by Mark Ames at Pando:

http://pando.com/2015/05/17/neocons-2-0-the-problem-with-peter-pomerantsev/

Highlights that even some of the critics who are better, smarter and more nuanced than the shrill neocon cheerleaders have some very shady connections writing the cheques.

he doesnt look too bad for 57 though

Yeah, tbf, he has taken care of himself.

There seems to be some confusion over whether he's still also married to his first wife.

Alexei Mozgovoi, construction worker turned leader of the separatist Lugansk Prizrak brigade, has been assassinated along with his press secretary. He was probably the most visible face of the rebellion, post-Strelkov. He had been talking a lot over the last few days about the chances of the ceasefire holding being slim. Could have been offed by either side.

Saakashvili is being strongly tipped as the next governor of Odessa, presumably on the basis that they didn't suffer enough with the massacre.

#Spokesman for Odessa regional Governor's office confirms on Facebook that Saakashvili to be introduced as Governor at 2.30 pm tomorrow.
9:09pm - 29 May 15

Absolutely astonishing.

maybe they convinced it him it was little odessa, brooklyn

All the Hromadske journalists I follow on Twitter are horrified. The competing theories are:

1. Poroshenko needed to remove a key Kolomoisky ally but didn't have any Ukrainian allies of his own who he trusted to take over
2. The central government fears an invasion from Transdniestr and wants someone to organise resistance
3. Poroshenko was sick of having him in Kyiv and wanted to keep him busy
4. It's pure provocation - putting a fervent anti-Russian "reformer" in the biggest Russian-speaking city to stir the pot

None of these is all that convincing but each is more plausible than Poroshenko thinking he's going to clear up the city's notoriously complicated mix of corruption and organised crime. Various EU-leaning journalists and campaigners are claiming that Saakashvili attended a gathering of Georgia's leading Mafia clans in Kyiv last week, which is interesting if true.

http://i.imgur.com/PJINtWN.jpg

^ Kyiv Pride march was attacked by Pravii Sektor today.

Looks like it was a very moderate step forward despite the participants being bussed miles away from the centre of the city, asked not to hold hands and being attacked by neo-Nazis. Klitchko, the Mayor of Kyiv, and the city's police had apparently refused to meet with marchers and refused to guarantee protection until Poroshenko gave a speech yesterday telling them they had to. The police defended the marchers when they came under attack and, as the picture shows, did so at a cost. Compared to what happened in Moscow last week where three people were arrested for trying to hold an unauthorised protest march, it's a limited success.

This may or may not be interesting:

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/series/guardian-moscow-week

The Guardian is having a "Moscow week".

“The difference is huge — in reaction speed, memory, hand tremor — and in how they recover,” Vladimir Nuzhny, of the Health Ministry’s National Narcology Research Centre, said. “On average, 50 per cent of people in Moscow have this Mongoloid gene. So this, we think, is part of the problem.”

As part of the study, the scientists paid 12 volunteer students to drink 350 grams, about a third of a bottle, of vodka in an hour, and then monitored their behaviour.

“That’s a lot by Western standards, but it’s normal for Russia,” Dr Nuzhny told The Times. “At first they thought it was great, because they were being paid to drink, but after a while they realised it was more like work.”

Lumpen is a Russian modelling agency challenging the contemporary conceptions of beauty. Set up by Avdotja Alexandrova at the age of 24, it now has a look book of models from Moscow to Minsk.

Models have frizzy hair, bags under their eyes, and scratches on their faces. Not because they’ve been “dressed-down” to look normal, she says, but because they that’s the way they are.

Nothing says 'padding it out' like having three members of the same underground supper club in your 30 under 30 power list but the articles about migrant workers and the Kapkov development project have been decent.

About half the Polish government has been sacked, including Radek Sikorski, following a long ongoing scandal which started when waiters recorded key politicians bitching about everyone from David Cameron to low-paid workers over dinner:

http://www.politico.eu/article/a-polish-game-of-tapes/

If you believe the statisticians, Poland is probably the best run country in Europe in terms of economic efficiency. The cost of living increases over the last few years have ground people down immensely though.

The events in Moldova over the last few months illustrate the challenges the EU / US face in implementing effective reform in other post-Soviet states like Georgia and Ukraine.

Until 2009, Moldova had effectively kept voting in the Communist party that used to run it when it was a Soviet republic. For much of the last decade, the official GDP per capita was less than $1000. The main source of income was probably remittances from Moldovans working abroad, often illegally - typically in construction or sex work. It was pretty clear a lot of the cash, even the money that was made within Moldova, wasn't filtering through official channels. I remember staying in a 'fully-booked' ex-Soviet hotel that only had about six actual guest - it was almost certainly a front for money laundering.

GDP picked up (I'd guess thanks to the construction boom in neighbouring countries) and dipped again after the stock market crash. The Communists were voted out and replaced with great fanfare in the West by a pro-EU, pro-free-market reformer who, like Yanukovich around the same time, promised to make Moldova more investment-friendly in return for loans. GDP reached its highest ever level (to put it in perspective, that's around $2000 - somewhere between Cameroon and Senegal in the rankings) with higher consumer spending partly driven by access to more credit.

It recently came to light, however, that local oligarch Ilan Shor (who is married to the Russian pop star Jasmine) had been running a massive loan scam through the bank he owned and three others owned by his associates. It's estimated that he stole $1bn - around 12.5% of the country's entire GDP in 2014. He had close links to both governments.

The new PM, who came in demanding that bank chiefs and senior prosecutors be fired or charged for their involvement has quit after three months in the wake of an investigation over whether he forged his school leaving certificate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/world/europe/moldova-bank-theft.html

Igor Dodon, the leader of the Socialists, said the disappearance of so much money showed how the European Union had backed the wrong horse by supporting Moldova’s pro-European forces, which have held power since 2009. “The more money Europe gives, the more money our oligarchs steal,”

All the animals have escaped from Tbilisi Zoo in the flooding!

http://i.imgur.com/TcX2sBb.jpg

There are lions and hippos roaming the streets.

http://www.repstatic.it/content/nazionale/img/2015/06/14/100251697-5b7cdde9-01d9-4e9d-8b49-39ec8bd84150.jpg

Over 200 arrested as police broke up the biggest protest in recent Armenian history with water cannons this morning. There were thousands in the central square in opposition to an increase in electricity prices.

Interesting piece about a Russian informant's difficulties with the FBI:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/26/russian-defectors-spies-dead-end-american-dream?CMP=share_btn_tw

Protests in Armenia are spreading:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/01/armenia-yerevan-electricity-protests-russia

The government agreed to cover the electricity price hike out of state funds but the complaints run much deeper than that. It's not entirely clear what the objectives of the protesters are at this stage, though, other than more transparency.

Three couples have used the protests as a venue for their weddings:

http://i.imgur.com/lgAppCa.jpg

There's apparently some renewed optimism that Ukraine won't default in three weeks, according to Bloomberg. The root seems to be the fact that the Finance Minister, Natalie Jaresko, has scheduled negotiations with creditors for the first time. As far as i can tell, the government has been doing something similar to Syriza and calling for immediate restructuring but only via the press - there have been no discussions with the people they owe the interest payments to. That's probably partly because a fairly large amount of Ukrainian debt is privately held - the country's single largest creditor isn't Germany or the IMF, it's Franklin Templeton investments. One of their fund managers sunk $7bn in to the country a few years ago:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/24db6bec-b1dd-11e4-8396-00144feab7de.html#axzz3eqW634YG

Separately, the parliament has just voted to convert all consumer / mortgage debt to the Dollar rate when the loans were taken out - so if you took out a mortgage in USD when the rate was 5 UAH to the dollar, you'd pay 5UAH now, rather than the current exchange rate of 22 or 23. Jaresko has called it catastrophic as it'll come at a cost of $6bn to domestic banks that have been closing at a rate of one a week over the last year. Poroshenko will probably have to veto it, even though 72 of his own MPs voted in favour. Some have claimed they didn't know what they were voting on or that nobody explained the implications to them.

Good longish pieces on the authenticity / sustainability of Putin's poll ratings:

http://carnegie.ru/eurasiaoutlook/?fa=60849

and the underlying divisions around identity in Ukraine:

http://harpers.org/archive/2015/07/fugue-state/

Interesting piece on Lithuania's absurd attempt to prosecute the Director of Tel Aviv's Holocaust museum for war crimes and the national identity issues driving it:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/07/lithuania_and_nazis_the_country_wants_to_forget_its_collaborationist_past.html