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

Igor Dodon has won the Moldovan election, as expected:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37970155

Describing it as 'pro-Russia' vs 'pro-Europe/US' is an oversimplification. There's a lot of domestic politics that gets glossed over. This probably didn't help though:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/world/europe/moldova-vlad-plahotniuc.html?_r=0

The Bulgarian presidential election has also gone to someone aiming for a pragmatic balance between Russia and the EU - and capitalising on disenchantment with membership:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bulgaria-election-idUSKBN13801Q?il=0

This is an interesting piece on the arms race between Armenia and Azerbaijan:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-13/kamikaze-drones-russian-missiles-jolt-oldest-ex-soviet-conflict

Azerbaijan's military budget is higher than Armenia's entire state budget. Both sides are buying from Russia - with Azerbaijan also using Israel as a supplier of weaponised drones.

Azerbaijan look the odds on favourites in terms of GDP, military strength, powerful allies etc if it kicked off. But they didn't seem to do so well last time.

Wasn't that before the oil boom?

Alexei Ulyukayev, the Russian Economy Minister, has become the first serving minister to be arrested since Beria:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37983744

It looks like the FSB might have run a sting operation culminating in him being caught asking for $2m to make sure the sale of Bashneft to Rosneft went through.

As the BBC article indicates, it's an odd one to start with - Bashneft and Rosneft are both mostly owned by the government.

Sceptics are split between "nobody is going to try to shake down Igor Sechin" and "$2m seems unrealistically small".

so SV or someone else, can you recommend a good English-language book on Putin and/or his rise to power?

i have seen masha gessen's 'man without a face' praised but have not read

I don't think there will be a good Putin book until after he is dead tbh. I tried a couple of them, including the Gessen one and found it quite sketchy/gossipy and not very compelling.

I keep meaning to go back to Kotkin's Armageddon Averted but I don't think that was in the same class as his Stalin book and don't feel compelled to finish it.

I would steer clear of Gessen, tbh.

From what I have seen of it, and her journalism more generally, Anna Arutunyan's The Putin Mystique might be a good bet in his popularity and leadership style but idk how much it deals with his rise to power.

Alex Navalny has announced he will run against Putin for the presidency in 2018.

His first set of policy announcements includes banning people from Central Asia and the Caucasus from visiting Russia without a visa.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/world/europe/vladimir-putin-russia-fake-news-hacking-cybersecurity.html

CAMBRIDGE, England — His indomitable will steeled by a dozen years in the Soviet gulag, decades of sparring with the K.G.B. and a bout of near fatal heart disease, Vladimir K. Bukovsky, a tireless opponent of Soviet leaders and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, is not a man easily put off his stride.

But he got knocked sideways when British police officers banged on the front door of his home on a sedate suburban street here early one morning while he lay sick in bed and informed him that they had “received information about forbidden images” in his possession.

In April last year, the veteran Soviet dissident, a onetime confidant of Margaret Thatcher, finally found out what was going on: The Crown Prosecution Service announced that he faced five charges of making indecent images of children, five charges of possession of indecent images of children and one charge of possession of a prohibited image.

The case was supposed to go to court in May in Cambridge but, after Mr. Bukovsky, 73, entered a not-guilty plea it was delayed until Dec. 12. This followed a prosecution request for more time to review an independent forensic report on what had been found on Mr. Bukovsky’s computers and how an unidentified third party had probably put it there.

“The whole affair is Kafkaesque,” Mr. Bukovsky said in an interview. “You not only have to prove you are not guilty but that you are innocent.” He insisted that he was the victim of a new and particularly noxious form of an old K.G.B. dirty trick known as kompromat, the fabrication and planting of compromising or illegal material.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/dec/12/soviet-dissident-vladimir-bukovsky-downloaded-thousands-of-child-abuse-images-uk-court-told

In an interview, Bukovsky told detectives he had become interested in child abuse images in the 1990s in the context of a debate on the control and censorship of the internet. “He became curious,” Carter said. Bukovsky then looked for and discovered this material online, the prosecutor said.

“Bukovsky said his initial curiosity turned into a hobby, rather like stamp collecting,” Carter said. The dissident continued to download images between 1999 and 2014, and estimated that he had accumulated a collection of “1,500 movies”. His interest varied year by year. The last downloads took place days before his arrest.

“His computer was looking for material constantly,” Carter told the jury. “Mr Bukovsky said in essence he didn’t see what harm he was doing. He said the children in most of the material looked as if they were enjoying themselves.”

I have an excellent bridge going cheap if anyone at the New York Times is interested.

http://deadline.com/2016/12/game2-winter-rape-murder-russian-reality-series-yevgeny-pyatkovsky-1201871444/

Astonishing activities in the Polish parliament last night.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38347674

The ruling party held the vote on the 2017 budget late at night in a meeting room outside of the main chamber of parliament - the first time that had ever been done. Armed parliament security guards were allegedly asked to keep some opposition MPs and the media out of the hall and the vote was passed on a show of hands. The opposition alleges that people who are not MPs were in the room and were counted as being in favour.

In a separate vote, the number of reporters allowed to cover parliament next year has been severely curtailed.

The attack was a rare instance of an assassination of any Russian envoy. Historians said it might have been the first since Pyotr Voykov, a Soviet ambassador to Poland, was shot to death in Warsaw in 1927.

This is horrific:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/19/russia-irkutsk-surrogate-alcohol-siberia

48 people have died in Irkutsk after drinking a tainted, counterfeit batch of bath tincture. The government introduced a minimum price of 220R for 500ml of vodka (currently about £2.75) and reduced it to 185R last year because so many people were drinking "aftershave" or "bath tincture" instead.

Bath products are still less than half the price so it hasn't really helped much. They're often absolutely sold with the intention of being drunk. I have yet to see a 500ml screw-top bottle of cologne outside of low-end Russian minimarkets.

I have drank some awful blended whiskies in my time, and known some suicidal boozers. But I never met anybody so far gone that they had become inured to the absolute awfulness of casual aftershave drinking.

Grim new chapter in the Petr Pavlensky saga:

https://twitter.com/NataliaAntonova/status/820939051167531008

Interesting stuff being reported about the FSB agents arrested for treason this week. None of it is verified yet but it's plausible.

The theory is that the (arrested) FSB cyber security deputy chief Sergei Mikhailev figured out who was leading the Anonymous-style Russian hacker collective Shaltay Boltay (a journalist called Vladimir Anikeev) and pressured them into targeting particular government figures, culminating in the Surkov email leak. Anikeev was lured back to Russia by the FSB and arrested in October - and is presumed to have ratted out the FSB agents he was working with, including Mikhailev.

There is some background on Shaltay Boltay here:

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2015/02/02/a-man-who-s-seen-society-s-black-underbelly

So that refutes speculation by TPM etc if I'm reading you correctly

If correct, yes. The idea being floated at the moment that the FSB agents were involved in hacking the DNC, etc, wouldn't really square with the allegation that it was the GRU that was leading it anyway.

Over/under odds on a Russian invasion of Belarus?
https://warisboring.com/belarus-prepares-for-hybrid-war-as-europes-last-dictator-knocks-russia-86384fd2a468#.w1swn03dk

This is mostly about a dispute over the price of gas. Russia sells it to Belarus at a heavy discount - which they see as subsidising the Belarussian economy. The decline in the price of gas has hit the revenue Belarus gets for transporting it to Europe, so Belarus increased transport tariffs by 50% - pretty much trying to hardball Russia into cutting the (historically fixed) price of gas Belarus buys for domestic use. They are currently negotiating prices and tariffs in Minsk and the Lukashenko seems to be playing a similar game to Yanukovich in using overtures towards the EU to extract a better deal. I don't think it's anything to be particularly concerned about and the upside is visa free travel to Belarus.

*the Lukashenko camp.

I don't think even Lukashenko refers to himself as "The Lukashenko"

It looks like Navalny has been convicted of embezzlement again so will be barred from running for President. I assume he'll appeal via the ECHR again, though.

Dmitro Firtash is being extradited to the US!

http://news.trust.org/item/20170221133243-grpm3

The first extradition request, on a charge of bribery, was rejected by an Austrian court on the grounds that it was politically motivated, but this has been overturned on appeal.

This could get very interesting. Firtash has alleged ties to politicians all over the world, business people of all shapes and sizes and - allegedly - the capo di tutti capi of the "Russian mafia" Semion Mogilevich.

it kind of was politically motivated, though, right? i mean i have no doubt that he probably did bribe this titanium company or whatever but the timing of the arrest warrant was.. interesting

i met a guy recently who, a few years ago, drove out to broker the sale of a vinyard and it turned out firtash was the buyer. bristling with gun-toting heavies, etc. He found out more about him and decided not to return his calls.

Sure, it was almost certainly done at the request of the Ukrainian government as part of a clan vs clan power struggle. He's likely to be guilty though. It'll be interesting to see how hard the Trump administration wants to push him.

ok what's going on now

Jehovah's Witnesses ban?

loads of ropey oligarchs making discreet Trump donations via limited liability companies?

brave britain making a stand against russian menace by escalating baltic situation it seems

SV will this end in war pls tell us

The last time we were fixing for war in Europe the Jehovah's Witnesses were getting banged up in the German KL system, so maybe Russia planning to ban them for their apolitical peacenik tendencies is a bad omen.

Never say never but there is no realistic prospect of war. There is no incentive for Russia to invade Estonia, no particular separatist sentiment and nothing much for British soldiers to do.

what the hell are we playing at then

NATO being NATO. "Showing commitment " to the Baltic states and giving soldiers something to do.

shouldn't they be peacekeeping and feeding the starving in somalia or something

here, let me have control of the armed forces

It is unusual that the UK is less than half the population of the Russian Federation and our population has grown by about 3 million more than theirs since the cold war era. If we could just knock a decade or so off avg life expectancy the housing/social care problems would be slightly improved - I'm doing my bit for that cause!

This dude has just been shot dead at a hotel in Kyiv:

http://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-voronenkov-maksakova/28313807.html

This is nuts.

"Thank god! They should have shot him for treason long ago," says Voronenkov's mother-in-law

Ice cold.

http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-soviet-nkvd-greatgranddaughter-seeks-painful-truth/28382571.html

I like the karmic balance of that Great Terror story linked on the same page, the overenthusiastic NKVD officer who makes the mistake of trying to implicate Stalin's fave writer in some bogus Cossack intrigue and ends up getting shot for "violating socialist legality".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/gunman-in-ukraine-kills-putin-foe-in-attack-denounced-as-state-terrorism/2017/03/23/72ddd20e-0fc7-11e7-ab07-07d9f521f6b5_story.html

Washington Post interviewed Voronenkov Tuesday night:

“For our personal safety, we can’t let them know where we are,” he said toward the end of the hour-long interview. “It’s a totally amoral system and in its anger it may go to extreme measures. There’s been a demonization of us. It’s hard to say what will happen.

“The system has lost its mind,” he added. “They say we are traitors in Russia. And I say, ‘Who did we betray?’ I gave testimony against the citizen of another country who was president, who fled his country, created a bloodbath, betrayed his country.”

As he left the interview, he added: “It’s hard to imagine we will be forgiven.”

The guy who shot him died a couple of hours ago in hospital. It's rumoured that he's an ex Ukrainian National Guard soldier but that wouldn't tell us anything, if true. Hired killers often have a service background.

Died from what?

He was shot by Voronenkov's bodyguard during the attack.

What happened to the bodyguard?

He is fine, apparently. Was wounded but only lightly.

Seems more or less confirmed that the killer was ex-Ukrainian army now. The Kyiv police chief says they are working under the assumption it was a contract killing.

Separately, this is interesting:

http://www.rferl.org/a/former-ukraine-finance-minister-jaresko-to-manage-puerto-rico-financial-crisis/28387912.html

Natalie Jaresko, the former Ukrainian finance minister has been appointed by the US to overhaul Puerto Rico's budget. Expect lots of privatisation and cuts to services / pensions.

Local media and the nationalist MP Oleh Lyashko are claiming the killer was a member of the far-right / ultranationalist Azov battalion but again that doesn't shed much light on whether there was a nationalist motive, he was a hired gun or, as the eccentric Interior Minister claims, he was a Russian government plant in the Ukrainian militia. Hired gun is substantially more likely than anything else.