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

visionary idealism is a good warning sign, people with ideas are unreliable
america seems to love these chalabi types when it is full of bright ideas and good intentions

Looks like i was overoptimistic in thinking that it should be easy to form a new Ukrainian governing coalition. Getting on for a month later, there's still no agreement, although there's talk of one being in place within the next week or two. There's suggestion that Timoshenko and Lyashko might be invited to join, even though, numerically, there's no need for them to be involved.

There are still substantial disagreements, though. Poroshenko has been talking a lot about ending the war / averting a worse crisis and is getting called out as a coward from sections of the nationalist right. Euromaidan PR, which internationally is often seen as the voice of the revolution - even if the reality is more complex, published an editorial calling for total war earlier in the week and there's a suspicion that that's what Yatseniuk would prefer. Poroshenko wants to buy coal in Hryvnia from Donbass, Yatseniuk is insisting it's bought at a 50% premium in USD from South Africa. There's still no guarantee Russia will send any gas as nobody has actually fronted up any money for it yet.

Poroshenko did take one radical move this week and that was finalising the proposal to remove state support from Donbass, meaning that state employees and pensioners won't get anything from the Kyiv government until the crisis is over. Russia is refusing to bankroll the region so pensioners who were struggling along on $100 a month from the state will now get nothing. It's one potential way of trying to get the people to turn against the DNR but it's a massive, massive risk. Starving your babushki isn't going to win hearts and minds. To some extent it would be fair enough if companies were paying tax to the tinpot warlords but, by and large, industrial revenue is still going to the central government as far as i can tell.

This is a really sweet personal interest story though: http://balkanist.net/lyonya-loves-vika/

http://boingboing.net/2014/11/20/something-big-exploded-in-russ.html

???

That's amazing. The two competing theories are that it was a meteorite strike or the army detonating a stock of old explosives but they've denied the latter. Seems incredible that it was only 200km away from the huge Chelyabinsk impact earlier in the year. Sadly my grasp of physics is pretty much non-existent but i'd be interested to know whether some parts of the world are more vulnerable than others.

Interesting piece on the collapse of the EU / Yanukovich discussions prior to his removal from power:

http://m.spiegel.de/international/europe/a-1004706.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=

i'd be interested to know whether some parts of the world are more vulnerable than others

For small impactors that detonate in the atmosphere, the poles are safer.
For medium impactors (1 per 100k years) that generate tsunamis, inland areas are safer.
For extinction event impactors (1 per ~200+ million years) only some burrowing creatures and deep ocean detritovores are relatively safe, as the raining ejecta heats the entire surface above boiling for a few hours, then the dust from fires freezes the world for a couple years.

x-post: It's obviously smarter to focus on our own mistakes and what we can do better in the future, but... boy does Yanukovich and Putin come off as complete idiots in that telling.

Nobody comes out of it well. Russia was needlessly vindictive in threatening a trade war, the 'naïveté' of the EU was definitely undercut with a level of cynicism in the proposed terms (which doesn't come across fully in that report)', the IMF was typically uninterested in the practical consequences of the harsh measures they were demanding and Yanukovich, as a bumbling con artist, was clearly unqualified to try to pick a way through it. It is hard to know what he could have done that wouldn't have been disastrous for the economy. What's pretty clear though is that there was no ideological turn away from the EU. He'd have probably signed the deal if it was the best one on the table.

Xp, thanks!

The USD / RUB exchange rate is hovering just under 50 (49.99 at one point), which has always been the symbolic indicator of catastrophe. Seems likely to cross the rubicon today. OPEC's decision yesterday not to cut oil output is presumably one of the key factors. There are reports of queues at high-end jewelers across Moscow as people convert cash into diamonds.

The Ukrainian parliament met for for the first time since the election yesterday and the coalition looks settled now. The core is Poroshenko's bloc, Yatseniuk's bloc, Timoshenko's bloc and the far-right Lyashko bloc. Samopomich are playing a very clever game by working with them on some committees but, as far as i can tell, remaining outside of government. I think they're rightly calculating that this is going to be an extremely unpopular government irrespective of what happens so maintaining distance is likely to stand them well in the long term. It also allows them to deny they're part of the 'old politics' of oligarchs and autocrats.

Also, Misha Saakashvili has been charged for his role in covering up a high-profile murder:

http://www.rferl.org/content/georgia-charged-saakashvili-abuse-office/26714046.html

He's supposed to have colluded with the prosecutors to falsify evidence. He also released the killers after about two years in jail for no particular reason.

Elections in Moldova over the weekend.

The pro-Russian Socialist Party seems to have picked up the most votes with the pro-EU Liberal Party and pro-Russian Communist Party (the same party that was running the country in the Soviet era) roughly neck and neck in second and third.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30265985

It's pretty finely balanced as the parties in fourth and fifth place are both pro-EU so even if the Socialists and Communists finish first and second, the other parties could potentially form a coalition. Another pro-Russian party was banned prior to the election for allegedly receiving overseas funding. Transnistria didn't vote.

tbh, although it would be a struggle to convince the rest of the EU to let them in, i'm not sure what else could materially improve the quality of life in Moldova at this stage. GDP per capita is around $2000, compared to $18,000 across the border in Romania. It's the closest thing Europe has to a failed state. After agriculture, i wouldn't be surprised if the most important industries were organised crime and people-trafficking.

I am not sure I'd ever thought about Moldova before but I have this as-yet unrealized fantasy of visiting local tourist sites in Eastern Europe, like chilling on the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea and the like. and thus the Moldova tourism wiki page offers this gem:

Lower Prut Nature Reserve is the synonym of nature's virginity. It is composed of Beleu Lake and a network of ponds that, on the whole, form a unique ecosystem of importance not only national but international.

and this blog entry by someone who seems to be a Moldovan national; she writes

While driving down the highway to the Reserve, I felt like we were part of the contest “worst highway experience in your life”. I highly doubt tourists would be able to handle the excitement and suspense until the Reserve.... [T]he boats that are supposed to offer tourists an unbelievably great experience on the lake are not even equipped with life jackets, let alone a first aid kit.

her blog is awesome btw

Irllol. Prut is 'fart' in Danish, helps a bit.

That blog looks great.

I've been to Moldova but didn't really make it out of Chisinau. The quality of the road between there and Odessa didn't really give me much hope for the rural network.

The Bulgarian Black Sea resorts are meant to be ok but i've heard very good things about the Albanian Adriatic coast. The Belarussian forests and lakes are high on my list of places to go too.

From June:

http://www.voanews.com/content/ukraines-fight-against-corruption-may-be-toughest-struggle-yet/1941943.html

Fighting corruption is not easy, says anti-corruption crusader Alexander Kostrenko, who travels with a retinue of armed guards. He questions Poroshenko’s vow to fight corruption from within.

“Authorities shouldn’t establish anti-corruption committees inside their ministries," he said. "How can state authority organize their own state officials to fight against themselves? It’s ridiculous.”

Kostrenko was reportedly murdered yesterday.

A new ceasefire has apparently been agreed in Lugansk and possibly Donetsk, which is good news.

Kyiv Post, which is heavily government-leaning most of the time, was reporting on Saturday that Misha Saakashvili might be offered the role of Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine, which would have been absolutely astonishing, but it looks like he has turned them down (if it was true). What does seem clear is that various posts have been offered to members of his administration.

The Rouble slipped to an unheard of 54 to the USD yesterday but is back at a still appalling 50 now.

Russia has scrapped the South Stream pipeline and will run a route through Turkey instead.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30283571

Russia says its a defeat for the EU, the EU says its a defeat for Russia, everyone agrees it's bad news for Bulgaria and a massive win for Erdogan.

Russia has been throwing money at stabilising the rouble, without much apparent success. It is back at 54 to the USD.

The interesting news of the day is that Ukraine has made an American hedge fund manager Minister of Finance, a Lithuanian hedge fund manager Minister of Economics and appointed an ex-Saakashviki ally Minister of Health. All three got Ukrainian citizenship this morning and were made Ministers a few hours later. As a break from Ukrainian politics as usual it is a bold move but I'm not sure how well it's going to go down.

Three police officers killed in Grozny at a routine traffic stop. Kadyrov is reporting gun battles have killed at least six militants.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30323751

Yatseniuk announced that there had been an accident at a nuclear power plant in Ukraine yesterday and scheduled an emergency press conference. The press conference clarified it was just an issue with a generator and nbd but we there was half an hour of blind panic before that.

Death toll up to 13 police, 9 militants now.

Russia has requested that France deliver the first of two Mistral helicopter carriers they ordered or provide a refund on the down payment. It is quite brave of Hollande (pictured looking pretty baller in Kazakhstan) to risk having to give Russia $1bn, plus potential compensation, and be landed with a ship customised for Russian specs France might have trouble shifting to anyone else. Moral stances from western EU leaders are usually less costly.

http://i.imgur.com/VZD3HO4.jpg

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

Netrebko unlikely to win many friends back at the Met like this. She's probably the closest thing to a prima donna assoluta around at the moment so I'd be surprised if it severely hurt her career though.

http://rusemb.org.uk/consnews/29

British and Irish citizens now need to have fingerprints taken to get a Russian visa, meaning you have to physically go to the visa office yourself. Not a nuisance for me, as it is on my way to work, but will be a nightmare for most of the people I send there for business. There's one in London, one in Edinburgh and one in the Dublin suburbs, that's it. As they point out though, any Russians coming to the UK need to do the same thing (Moscow, SPB, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk being the only options).

New low for the Rouble today - hitting 90 to the Pound.

If you'd had $1000 worth of Roubles in January, they'd be worth $579 now.

If you'd have $1000 worth of Ukrainian Hryvnia they'd be worth about $500 now.

You can see why there has been so much investment (much of it illegal) in Cyprus, London, etc, especially in property over the years.

wow, good time for a trip to the Hermitage on foreign currency, no?

Yes, absolutely. Moscow has always been horrendously expensive and should now be pretty reasonable. Everywhere else will offer some pretty great bargains.

New low for the Rouble today - hitting 90 to the Pound.

101 to the GBP now.

122! This is ridiculous.

103 to the GBP now. I was tempted to invest in Roubles at 120 yesterday in the belief they'd bounce back to 100 today but i had no idea how to go about that so didn't. There's no logical reason the currency should have devalued more than the Ukrainian Hryvnia. Of course, i wouldn't bet against it going back to 120 by lunchtime.

What the hell is this!?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xai7ttzbx5M

what the hell, indeed!

Makes me wanna invade somethin' ...

Haven't seen it yet but it's his big national press conference today. Should be interesting.

The leaders of Dagestan's insurgency have sworn an oath of loyalty to ISIS. Not entirely sure what the implications would be but they are probably the most consistently troublesome of Russia's various terrorist groups.

Navalny's fraud trial is coming to an end, and working on the reasonable assumption he's going to be convicted, protesters pre-emptively organised a gathering via Facebook. 12,000 signed up before the page was blocked, by Facebook, for all users in Russia. This seems to be the first time they've removed information about peaceful protests without any public justification at the request of the government.

Ukraine's parliament has voted 303 to 8 to end non-aligned status and work towards membership of NATO. This has traditionally been one of the most divisive issues in the country. Around a year ago support for the proposal was in the mid-thirties, percentage-wise, and now it's closer to the mid-40s but it's clearly not an overwhelmingly popular idea and is likely to alienate Russia and ethnic Russian Ukrainians even further.

Looks like Navalny's verdict will be delivered tomorrow rather than on the 15th, possibly in a futile bid to catch protesters on the hop. There's speculation that he'll be convicted and 'magnanimously' pardoned within days but i'm not sure where that's coming from. The original date clashed with the next round of Ukraine / Russia peace talks.

Things have been crazy in Ukraine over the last week. Someone threw a grenade at an MP in Kyiv and two people (one probably a politically-motivated vandal and one a suspected robber) managed to blow themselves up in separate incidents in the South. The latter was initially reported as a suicide bombing but seems to have been an idiot trying to hold up a currency exchange with an explosive vest. Ukraine has always had a certain number of mysterious bombings, even during peace time, but the proliferation of weapons over the last year seems to have made things worse.

The liberal / Maidan-affiliated opposition to the actions of the Ukrainian parliament seems to be growing, with Hromadske - a press agency which is part-funded by the governments of the US and Netherlands and part-funded by George Soros, doing a surprisingly good job of highlighting the deficiencies. The Rada voted at 4:30 this morning local time in favour of an austerity budget which none of its members had seen but which seems to have been a condition for receiving further IMF funding.

Alex Navalny has been found guilty and given a suspended 3.5 year term but his brother Oleg has been jailed for the same duration. He's calling this a 'hostage-taking' and urging street protests.

Reportedly around 3k protesting in central Moscow, including Navalny who is meant to be under house arrest, now. Might be more if it wasn't 18 degrees below zero.

Interesting piece on Khodorkovsky by Julia Ioffe in the New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/12/remote-control-2

Looks like the suicide bombing in Istanbul on Tuesday may have been carried out by a Russian member of a Turkish Marxist-Leninist terrorist organisation. Turkish terrorist cells and their links to the 'deep state' have always been confusing.

http://www.todayszaman.com/latest-news_sultanahmet-bomber-identified-as-russian-citizen_369205.html

If the interpretation in the press is correct, Russia appears to have banned pretty much everyone with what the government deems to be personality disorders from driving. This includes, but is not limited to, gamblers, kleptomaniacs, people who have received treatment for substance abuse, voyeurs, fetishists and, most notably, trans ppl. There might be clarification pending, idk, but I'd be surprised if this wouldn't fall foul of Russia's domestic and international human rights obligations.

11 civilians dead in an apparent separatist shelling of a checkpoint in Eastern Ukraine.

In other horrifying news, ISIS has released what purports to be a video of a ten or eleven year old Kazakh kid 'executing two Russian spies' .

Another bus hit my mortar fire, this time in central Donetsk.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/22/donetsk-bus-stop-shelling-kills-13

*by mortar fire*

Had a surreal moment coming out of the metro to see central Madrid for the first time and emerging straight into a Svoboda / Pravii Sektor demonstration, a minute ago.

The civilian casualties are mounting again with at least thirty dead in Mariupol yesterday. Almost certainly the separatists this time. It doesn't look like either side is actively targeting civilians at the moment but they are both so technically incompetent they can't keep their heavy artillery to the intended targets, which is almost inevitable when you give irregulars hugely powerful weapons and tell them to get on with it.

Old-school spy ring fun!

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/attorney-general-holder-announces-charges-against-russian-spy-ring-new-york-city

Just want to say thanks for this thread, interesting stuff.

Long piece on corruption in Ukraine:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/04/welcome-to-the-most-corrupt-nation-in-europe-ukraine

It focuses on healthcare but could be applied to pretty much everything at every level in the Ukrainian state sector.

There's not much sign that anything has changed since the overthrow of the previous government. Ukrainian papers were leading on stories of billions of Dollars having been stolen after the revolution.

The Merkel / Hollande proposal for a DMZ while talks continue about autonomy / status seems sensible, although whether it will work any better than the original Minsk agreements remains to be seen. Merkel has clearly stated that she doesn't support supplying more weapons to Ukraine and has echoed Poroshenko's original position that there is no military solution to the crisis.

A leaked German intelligence report has suggested the death toll might be closer to 50,000 than 5,000 but its not clear what that is based on.

THe Ukrainian parliament seems to have gone temporarily nuts with new laws this week that authorise the execution of army deserters and corporal punishment for any soldiers found drinking alcohol. They have also banned all Russian films made after 2013 from being distributed in Ukraine - meaning even the likes of Leviathan, which is widely seen as being critical of the Russian state, can't legally be screened. The security services have just arrested a journalist critical of the "Anti-Terror Operation" for treason.

In context, especially given the failure to transition away from corrupt factionalism, George Soros' statement that "Ukraine is now what the EU should aspire to be - a participatory democracy" seems ludicrous - particularly to many of the pro-Maidan liberals he had initially backed. Even Hromadske, the news agency that he partially funds, was critical.