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

Thanks. I'm glad I spent the money then.

https://www.rt.com/news/327907-poroshenko-economist-putin-photoshop/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35581708

"The bill would make it illegal to say that Poland "took part, organised or was co-responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich"

Fair enough as long as long as that doesn't also apply to the numerous Polish led massacres that occurred without any Nazi presence or coercion.

The omens don't look good:

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/1.703568

They are looking at stripping Jan Gross of his Order of Merit for his Jedwabne book to send a message that he is "an enemy of Poland".

Poroshenko has finally lost patience with PM Yatseniuk and the Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and told both to resign, threatening to dissolve the Rada if they don't.

They've both been almost universally loathed for a long time but the trigger is the resignation of Aivaras Abromavicius, who had been brought in from Lithuania as a clean pair of hands to be Minister of Economy and Trade, and the Deputy Prosecutor General Vitaliy Kasko this week. Both had said there is no point trying to work for reform as corruption is too entrenched and senior figures within the government were blocking any attempts at normalising the economy.

In the grand scheme of things Poroshenko is probably also one of those senior figures blocking meaningful reform but depending on who he replaces them with, getting rid of them could be a very positive step.

Yatseniuk has survived a vote of no confidence so remains as PM. 2 members voted in favour of him, 194 voted against, but they didn't get the 226 they required to boot him out. This is partly because the Opposition Bloc (broadly pro-Russian) all abstained. Yatseniuk is wildly anti-Russian but he's so widely disliked that having him there makes everyone else in government look bad by association.

On the subject of Poland's growing right wing

https://twitter.com/gullivercragg/status/700017077323767808

and a useful long read from The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/16/conspiracy-theorists-who-have-taken-over-poland

Many find the Law and Justice phenomenon utterly bemusing. Although still a relatively poor nation by western European standards, by any objective measure Poland’s recent history is one of triumph. It has the most successful and dynamic economy of any former communist country. After centuries of occupation and partition, Poland is now an independent state anchored in western political, economic and security institutions such as the EU and Nato. Poles have never been as prosperous and secure in more than 1,000 years of existence, and they now enjoy individual and collective rights their ancestors could only dream of.

And yet a significant minority of Poles believe that Poland and Polishness remain subject to foreign control and malign internal forces.

This is true to some extent but ignores the huge rise in the cost of living that is driving a lot of the disaffection with mainstream parties.

The madness continues. This is why PiS have been keen to stuff the institute of national remembrance with their own ppl.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-19/rewriting-history-in-warsaw-turns-walesa-legend-into-a-spy-story

Ramzan is stepping down!

http://uatoday.tv/politics/leader-of-chechnya-kadyrov-unexpectedly-says-time-has-come-to-step-down-600103.html

Nobody really knows what is going on with him so it could be anything from Putin pushing him out as a liability (timed with the anniversary of the Nemtsov assassination) or bringing him in closer to take a major role in Moscow. Alternatively, he might just want more time to play in the autumn leaves, cradle ducklings or dress up as a medieval knight.

Yatsenyuk is still clinging on to his role as PM but it's being strongly rumoured he will be gone this week and replaced by either Natalie Jaresko, the Finance Minister (who is American but has been resident in Ukraine for 10+ years) or, amazingly, Leszek Balcerowicz, the former deputy PM of Poland who has no obvious link to Ukraine at all. Balcerowicz was responsible for Poland's 'shock therapy' reforms in the 90s.

U.S. authorities are saying Mikhail Lesin, a very close ally of Putin who died last year, was killed by blunt force injuries.

http://sputniknews.com/world/20160311/1036099700/lesin-died-blunt-force-head-injuries.html

Background: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/the-mysterious-death-of-the-man-behind-putins-media-machine/548764.html

The Lesin business is a good, old-fashioned mystery.

What we know for sure is that he was Putin's closest media advisor and played a key role in bringing his influence to bear on the Russian press. In 2013 he was appointed as head of the media arm of Gazprom but quit a year later following an argument with the head of one of Russia's main liberal news outlets about an editor he wanted fired. He had spent most of the time since at his home in California but was in DC in early November attending an event held by another oligarch, Pyotr Aven. At some point, he was reported to have been found dead in his hotel room. RT, the station he helped found, and the Russian Embassy announced he had died of heart failure after a long illness. Last week the autopsy results appeared to show that he had sustained blunt force trauma, though the cause of death is still open.

There are dozens of conspiracy theories circulating, the main ones being:

Lesin did actually die of a heart attack and the U.S. is just trying to stir things up, or the medical examiners are mistaken
Lesin was murdered by Putin
Lesin was murdered by Kadyrov
Lesin was murdered by the CIA
Lesin was murdered by another oligarch he owed money to
Lesin faked his own death to escape a potential criminal charge in the U.S.
Lesin is in witness protection and will give evidence for the FBI against parties unknown

Adding weight to the idea that he might not be dead, his email account appears to have been accessed weeks after he died and there is a border control record of him 'leaving the U.S.' in mid-December. Apparently, this isn't uncommon, though, and people who bought return tickets are quite regularly listed as having exited the country even if they haven't due to admin errors.

There was a short program about Kharms on R4 the other day. They were reading some ordinary tales of everyday violence and murder from some contemporary Russian tabloid and showing how if you append "And that's just about it" on, they actually would pass as Kharms' own work.

all of putin's enemies to be pushed into a pit

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/19/passenger-jet-crashes-on-landing-in-russian-city-of-rostov-on-don

Gah! I use FlyDubai quite regularly and they are a pretty good airline. Looks like it was a problem with landing rather than anything more sinister.

http://www.factmag.com/2016/03/19/i-ran-the-official-record-store-soviet-azerbaijan

That's great!

Nadiya Savchenko, the most high-profile Ukrainian POW held by Russia, has been found guilty of involvement in the deaths of two journalists.

Background: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35860038

She has taken on the aura of Joan of Arc for Ukrainian nationalists despite some very dodgy connections and plausible involvement in war crimes. The Russian trial (which almost certainly only came about because she was illegally taken over the border) has been a farce, though, and in violation of all sorts of international norms. This could potentially lead to a new round of sanctions.

Karadžić has been found guilty of numerous war crimes. Was found not guilty of genocide in regions but guilty of genocide in Srebrenica specifically.

Kadyrov has decided he rather likes running his own fiefdom and will stay on after all.

https://www.rt.com/politics/337202-putin-backs-kadyrovs-candidacy-in/

It looks like he was just mooting the idea of leaving to get Putin to come out and back him in public.

There has been understandable outrage from pro-reform outlets like Hromadske and the Kyiv Post about Poroshenko not just entrenching corruption but actively fucking with the people dedicated to fighting it. Two former members of his party who were scrutinising the actions of oligarchs he is allied with are being kicked out of the Rada and the office of the Prosecutor General launched a raid on the offices of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau on Friday:

http://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/critical-lawmakers-to-be-expelled-from-parliament-after-exposing-corruption-410735.html

Kyiv Post has traditionally been sympathetic to Poroshenko so when they start floating the "worse than Yanukovich" line, it's not glib propaganda. It's hard to see how the U.S. and EU can fight this without turning off the money tap, which would carry negative repercussions elsewhere - not least the prospect of default.

A large majority of voters in the Dutch referendum on ratifying the EU trade deal with Ukraine have rejected the idea:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35976086

Many commentators in Ukraine are now wondering whether Kiev has done enough to counter the No campaign, whose efforts included the distribution of free waffles in wrappers with slogans urging the Dutch to vote against the agreement.

Obvs can't compete with free waffles. The referendum didn't really have much to do with Ukraine in the grand scheme of things. It was the first opportunity anti-EU voters had to test out a new law requiring a vote to be called on anything that garnered 300k petition signatures. The negative stories coming out of Kyiv about corruption, homophobia, etc probably didn't help but there's a fairly solid chance they would have lost anyway just on the strength of the EU protest vote.

This story about the murder of Yuriy Grabovskiy, a lawyer who defended everyone from neo-Nazis to Russian separatists - essentially unpopular causes who struggled to get anyone to touch their cases with a bargepole - was horrific.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/06/the-mystery-of-the-gay-jewish-defense-lawyer-murdered-in-ukraine.html

The degree of organisation - including taking his mobile phone to Sharm-el-Sheikh after his kidnapping and posting photos from the beach to his Facebook timeline - points a lot of people towards some kind of state actor being involved.

yatsenyuk resigning??

https://twitter.com/thomaswatkins/status/720325821358084096/

Yatsenyuk going is ostensibly a good thing but the critical issue is who comes after him. It looks like Groysman has just about managed to get the support he needs to form a new government but he is the most establishment pick imaginable and it is almost certain that most of the people seen as reformers in the west will either refuse to work with him or be pushed out. Natalie Jaresko is already out.

The Russian airforce buzzes US warships pretty frequently in the Baltic and Black Sea. Russia obviously argues that putting ballistic missile defense enabled warships in the Baltic and Black Seas is a provocation in itself but it is very easy to imagine a fighter crashing in to one while showing off and all hell breaking loose.

Groysman’s Jewishness is not very unusual, even for a mayor and senior politician in Ukraine, where 360,000 Jews live. But his openness about it was not customary in a country where anti-Semitism and decades of Communist repression once made it undesirable for politicians to be seen as too Jewish, said the local rabbi, Shaul Horowitz.

Last year, his reputation as an honest and effective administrator earned Groysman the title of speaker of the Ukrainian parliament before Thursday's vote that made him the first openly Jewish person to hold the country’s second highest post and, at 38, the youngest person to have the job.

Josef Zissels, a leader of the Vaad organization of Ukrainian Jews, pointed to Groysman’s ascent in politics as proof of the absence of serious anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Russia regularly points to the country’s alleged anti-Semitism to justify its conflict with Ukraine, including the annexation of Crimea.

“Clearly, Groysman’s nomination shows the opposite,” Zissels said of the claims.

http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/1.714378

Endeavoring to jump-start his city’s economy, Groysman has made use of his ties in Israel. He has family in the city of Ashdod, which his 69-year-old father, Boris, visits regularly. In 2012, Groysman welcomed Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman to Vinnytsia for the opening of a state-of-the-art medical diagnostic center that Israel built there.

That project demonstrated Groysman’s knack for using his broad network to meet the needs of his constituents and partners, according to one Ukrainian official who spoke to JTA under condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to speak to the media.

kinda amazing to me that the ukraine now has an openly [proud] jewish PM.

Yes, it is a negative appointment overall but that is definitely a positive. Fradkov, who has already been PM of Russia, is sometimes talked up as a successor to Putin but I think he is less openly religious.

The Czech Republic is rebranding as Chechnya Czechia and has put up a website to explain in great detail why this is not stupid:

http://www.go-czechia.com

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36090882

The Hague award of $50bn in compensation to three Yukos shareholders has been overturned. Russia signed but never implemented the charter they were claiming under and argued, correctly imo, that the business was never acquired in a legal manner to begin with.

The US-based Turkish Institute for Progress is putting the efforts of all other genocide deniers to shame atm. There was a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal earlier in the week, followed by skywriting over the Statue of Liberty plugging their website and now they're flying Turkish flags over the Armenian memorial services in LA.

https://mobile.twitter.com/natashavc/status/724335286965014528

I'm sure Obama - as the highest profile genocide denier - won't be losing any sleep over such foul offence against genocide victims on his own patch.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/upload/photos/large/2007_05/2007_05_24/front_2.jpg

This is kind of nuts:

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/78496

A bus was bombed in Yerevan last night, killing two people. This is in the week of the genocide remembrance, with various international figures in town, and obviously shortly after the Nagorno-Karabakh conflagration, so the assumption a lot of people made was that it was Armenia's first terrorist attack in recent memory, with Turkish or Azeri nationalists to blame. It looks like it was just a guy who wanted to blow up his parents and accidentally killed himself on the way there.

The Turkish / Russian divorce seems to be getting even more bitter:

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/78741

Erdogan has called the Black Sea 'almost a Russian lake' and has urged NATO to create a rival 'Black Sea Fleet'.

The big news in Ukraine at the moment is that Poroshenko cancelled his trip to the anti-corruption conference in London at 24 hours notice so he could stay behind and push the Rada into appointing his friend Yury Lutsenko (who has a conviction for embezzlement and no law degree) as Prosecutor General. This hasn't worked yet as they rejected an amendment to the law requiring the Prosecutor General to have the appropriate qualifications but efforts are ongoing.

long interview with pevear/volokhonsky on translating, russian:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6385/the-art-of-translation-no-4-richard-pevear-and-larissa-volokhonsky

https://twitter.com/RussianEmbassy/status/730701444823826432

Nadiya Savchenko, the Ukrainian pilot elevated to Joan of Arc status when she was arrested (or kidnapped) for alleged participation in the murder of Russian journalists and given a transparently unfair trial over the border, has been released today.

She's being swapped with two Russians arrested for alleged participation in separatist activities in Ukraine. This was always more or less inevitable but will be a huge deal in Kyiv - expect processions, etc.

Ukraine claims to have foiled an anti-Muslim / antisemitic terrorist plot targeting Euro 2016 in France.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/06/ukraine-detained-french-citizen-plotting-euro-2016-attacks

A man was caught trying to cross from Ukraine into Poland with 125kg of TNT, 100 detonators, RPGs and various other hardware he'd picked up in Eastern Ukraine. Although his identity hasn't been formally announced, he's apparently a former livestock inseminator / farmhand who went to fight for an extreme-right, pro-Ukrainian militia. If true, and the French seem to be taking a while to confirm the story, it would be the first example of a foreign fighter in a Ukrainian militia planning attacks abroad.

It goes both ways, though, as the recent profile of the pro-Russian militia leader, Igor Strelkov, in the Guardian shows:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/05/russias-valiant-hero-in-ukraine-turns-his-fire-on-vladimir-putin

The big unknown is how influential Russia's own militaristic irregulars will be on domestic politics and how they'll seek to make that influence felt. It has often been said that the biggest threat to the current government is more likely to come from the extreme right or the extreme left than centrist 'liberals' and Ukraine has been a fairly effective way for them to network and gain a profile.

he's apparently a former livestock inseminator / farmhand not to read too much into this but there is a weird kind of synchronicity that someone so intimately involved in the insemination / reproduction of animals should have such intense opinions about human populations, presumably miscegenation, etc.

http://i.imgur.com/WVJGKG0.png

Certainly looks like a deep thinker.

I'm not current on Russia/Mongolia political news posturing right now, but nevertheless: http://siberiantimes.com/ecology/casestudy/features/f232-extreme-warnings-issued-that-lake-baikal-could-drain-dry-like-the-aral-sea/

Newspaper Izvestia this week was blunt in assessing the eco-damage threat to Baikal, a natural reservoir which contains around 20% of the world's unfrozen freshwater.

'Baikal might share the destiny of the Aral Sea,' it stated. 'Construction of three hydro power stations on the Selenga River and its tributaries can cause the unique lake to dry out.'

The 25 million year old lake - a UNESCO world heritage site - is 'on the edge of environmental catastrophe and if certain measures are not taken, it might disappear just like the Aral sea.'

The impact of proposed Mongolian hydro projects could also be to threaten the Buryatian capital city, Ulan-Ude, in the event of an accident to one of three planned dams.

Environmental activist Sergey Shapkhayev warned: 'Potential damage from the third hydro power station which will be located on the Eg River (a Selenga tributary) could cause a huge catastrophe. Hydrological experts believe that this power station is the most dangerous of all.

The Aral, once one of the four largest lakes in the world, has substantially dried up due mainly to Soviet planners diverting rivers to use for irrigation projects. Pictures: Anna Baranova, Satellite images USGS

'This power station will be located in the seismically active part of Mongolia. And any seismic activity can cause all the stored water to wash away part of Mongolia and in half a day it would reach Ulan-Ude' - a city with a population of 415,000. At the same time, speed of water will be compatible to tsunami.'

The warnings come amid new hopes in Russia that ways can be found to persuade Mongolia not to go ahead with the the hydro schemes - see our earlier story here.

Izvestia said that the claims about an Aral-like denuding of Baikal were aired at a closed doors meeting at the Energy Ministry. Crucial to the dams not being built are an offer acceptable to Mongolia of guaranteed cheap energy - from Russia.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/22/poland-to-dig-up-bodies-of-victims-of-2010-smolensk-presidential-jet-crash

A reminder that the Polish Defence Minster (and probably the government itself) seems to believe that EU Council president / former Polish PM Donald Tusk is a Stasi sleeper agent who conspired with the Russian secret service to blow up Lech Kaczynski.

"Turkish sources" have said that all the participants in the Ataturk Airport attack were from the former USSR - Russia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36670576

The suspected mastermind is meant to be Akhmed Chatayev - a Chechen militant who switched to recruiting for ISIS. Russia is predictably pointing out they've had an arrest warrant out for him for over a decade, during which time he was arrested and jailed for a year (!) in Sweden for being found in possession of high explosives and assault rifles, arrested in Ukraine with bomb-making plans and a manual on the destruction of buildings (where the ECHR blocked his deportation to Russia) and granted political asylum in Austria.

Erdogan and Putin seem to have settled some of their differences. Erdogan apologised for the unfortunate incident with the Russian jet and Putin, after six days of making him wait, has accepted and loosened restrictions on trade and travel.

Something going down in Armenia:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-armenia-violence-idUKKCN0ZX06S

Armed men have seized a police station and there is talk of an attempted coup (though this seems a stretch).

There have been protests in Freedom Square and mass arrests.

protests in Freedom Square and mass arrests.

kinda lol but mostly sad

Pavel Sheremet, a top Belarussian journalist, was killed with a car bomb in Kyiv this morning. He was driving the car of the head of Ukrainian Pravda, possibly one of the most important papers looking into political and corporate corruption in the wider region. He was a critic of Putin and Lukashenko and a friend of Boris Nemtsov, so fingers will inevitably be pointed in that direction, but in the current situation there is unfortunately no shortage of people with the means or motive to kill investigative reporters.

Ukrainian Pravda was founded by Georgiy Gongadze, another investigative journalist, who was murdered (it is assumed) on the orders of former Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko and President Leonid Kuchma in 2000.

It's thought the current editor, Olena Pritula, who was Sheremet's partner may have been the target. She wasn't in the car but he borrowed hers to get to work.

trump to baltics: drop dead

As mentioned on the other thread, Estonia (and Poland fwiw) do meet the spending requirements. An argument could be made that Lithuania and Latvia consistently requesting more activity but contributing less money does need to be addressed - though it would also apply to 21 other NATO members iirc. It's a stupid question to ask though - Russia isn't going to invade the EU and the US wouldn't fail to assist if it did. The more interesting policy decisions would be around things like NATO expansion - would Trump continue the US press for Ukraine and Georgia to obtain full member status, etc?

It seems fairly odd for "would probably not invade Russia" to be a key plank of a Democrat argument against Trump given all the other ammunition he has provided them with. Assuming Clinton wants to improve relations in Eastern Europe, running a scare campaign around Trump being soft on Russia is probably not a good way to go about it. It also paints them into a corner if things do kick off in more plausible places like Ossetia and Abhkazia - given a re-run of the 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict, would they support bombing Russian troops, as Cheney apparently did?

I assume it's pitched at Polish and Ukrainian communities in swing states like Pennsylvania though.

having grown up in a heavily polish pennsylvania neighborhood, i would be very surprised if the community finds any of this of much concern

Pavel Sheremet's paper is reporting that the Prosecutor General has opened a criminal case into illegal surveillance of Sheremet and Prytula by the Deputy Head of the Ukrainian police force.

http://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2016/07/25/7115801/

Vadim Troyan, the guy in question, was a leading figure in the Neo-Nazi Azov battalion and his appointment was widely criticised at the time. Sheremet's last major story was an investigation into Azov acting above the law.

The surveillance and the murder aren't necessarily linked but he'll be questioned about both when he returns from holiday.