Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 141

Russia Matters: Russia’s Prime Minister Mishustin: A Quiet Technocrat Who Toes the Line and Gets Results

Russia Matters, 5/11/23

Ever since Mikhail Mishustin was hoisted from his job as tax chief to become Russia’s prime minister in 2020, analysts have said he would not be a potential successor to Vladimir Putin after the president’s term ends next year. This take was hard to argue against. As Carnegie’s Tatiana Stanovaya wrote back then: “Mishustin does not have any political experience or popularity with the electorate, and is not part of Putin’s inner circle.”

What Mishustin does have is Article 92 of the Russian constitution, which would make him interim president — and commander-in-chief of a country at war — if something were to abruptly stop Putin from carrying out his duties. Last week, the Kremlin claimed that two drones destroyed over Putin’s Moscow residence had been sent to assassinate him. Though there are still multiple alternative explanations that are at least as compelling, the incident does spark some curiosity about the man who would take over the presidency if Putin dropped out of the picture before his term is up.

Describing the softspoken Mishustin as a “faceless functionary without ambition” seems off the mark. It is true that he lacks both the insider credentials of a more obvious potential successor like Security Council head Nikolai Patrushev and the populist appeal of hawkish firebrands like former president Dmitry Medvedev (whom he replaced as prime minister) and Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. But those who track Russia’s fiscal health have praised Mishustin as a highly competent technocrat, who oversaw a doubling (if not tripling) of budget revenue when he ran the tax service. Granted, that image of competence may be bolstered by the prime minister’s alleged preoccupation with his public persona. In either case, now — as his government helps Russia overcome unprecedented sanctions pressure — it also seems to have translated into a measure of popular appeal: Mishustin’s approval rating, according to the Levada Center, has climbed from around 50% at the start of 2020 to more than 70% as of this April.

Like many other senior Russian officials, Mishustin appears to have been caught off guard by Putin’s decision to mount a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but he has publicly stayed loyal to his boss. At an emergency meeting called by Putin three days before he sent Russian troops over the border, Mishustin suggested Moscow continue dialogue with the West about the two breakaway statelets in eastern Ukraine before deciding whether to recognize them. (They were recognized later that day.) And though the prime minister usually speaks about the war obliquely, without the vitriolic saber-rattling of his predecessor, he has stayed on in his role, not challenging the Kremlin’s messaging, working for Russia’s “technological and economic sovereignty” in the face of pressure from “the collective West.” The details have changed but the ethos is the same as in fall 2020, when an official at a research institute that Mishustin was visiting began his story of progress by recalling a visit some years earlier by “your colleague” Putin, during his time as prime minister; Mishustin corrected him: “Not a colleague, but our leader.”

Below we have started collecting a sampling of Mishustin’s quotes, mostly since his appointment as prime minister, meant to shed light on his views on issues that impact vital or important U.S. interests. (Notes on formatting and sources come after the quotes themselves.)

 I. U.S. and Russian priorities for the bilateral agendaNuclear security and safety:Rosatom is doing a great deal of work to rehabilitate ‘uranium legacy’ sites in Kirghizia [i.e., Kyrgyzstan]. (Interfax, 05.09.23).North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs:No significant developments.Iran and its nuclear program:No significant developments.Leaks of U.S. intelligence assessments:No significant developments.Humanitarian impact of the Ukraine conflict:On the allocation of more than 2.5 billion rubles for a federal workforce retraining project under which Ukrainian refugees would be eligible for a free education: Funds will go toward grants to organizations that train workers needed on the labor market. (Telegram, 03.30.23)Military aspects of the Ukraine conflict and their impacts:Lauding a recent uptick in the production of military equipment: This was achieved thanks to the prompt detection and elimination of a whole series of technological obstacles in production processes both in the organizations of the defense-industrial complex and in those cooperating with them… These are all preliminary results. It is necessary to continue acting in the same vein, there is still a lot to be done. Our industry is gradually coping with current challenges and leveling the situation out. (Telegram, 12.27.22)Now the needs of the Armed Forces in equipment have increased significantly. … It is important to continue the construction of fortifications on the line of deployment of our troops. Most of them are already fully equipped. Also, new strongholds are being built for the border service and the existing strongholds are being equipped. (Government.ru, 03.31.23)The government has approved the charter of the Defenders of the Fatherland State Fund for Supporting Participants in the Special Military Operation, established on the initiative of the president… First of all, this involves comprehensive support for the families of those killed in action and veterans of the special military operation. It also includes assistance for our defenders in obtaining social support measures, essential medications and medical devices, technical rehabilitation systems, vouchers for health centers and home care, as well as education, advanced training and employment opportunities and, of course, psychological counselling. … Caring for our defenders is our common task. (Government.ru, 05.11.23)Punitive measures related to Russia’s war against Ukraine and their impact globally:Unprecedented sanctions were imposed on our country. But their initiators did not achieve their main objective. They failed to undermine our financial stability. (AFP/MT, 09.08.22)The global order is undergoing a serious change. Some Western countries [have] decided that they can use illegitimate economic sanctions, restrictions and political pressure to impose their rule, while ignoring the interests of others. Such attempts are bound to fail. (TASS, 12.05.22)Speaking about sanctions before the State Duma: Let’s be realistic, the outside pressure on Russia is not weakening… But we still expect the adaptation period to end in 2024. Russia will embark on the path of long-term progressive development. … Russian people were the target… but we survived. (AFP/MT, 03.23.23)Promoting integration within the EAEU [Eurasian Economic Union], as well as with partner countries, is another priority. We have continued reinforcing cooperation with friendly countries who share our views and values. Attempts to shut us out of the global economic space through sanctions [have] failed. (Government.ru, 03.23.23)No doubt, the current situation could be called the most difficult in three decades for Russia… Such sanctions were not used even in the darkest times of the Cold War. (Reuters, 04.07.22) Some industries found themselves in a rather difficult situation due to Western partners refusing to carry out planned deliveries. (Government.ru, 05.02.23)Ukraine-related negotiations:No significant developments.Great Power rivalry/new Cold War/NATO-Russia relations:We are faced with the task of ensuring the development of the country’s economy under the restrictions imposed by unfriendly countries. Russia is still part of the global world, so we will continue to expand and strengthen our trade and economic ties with those who are interested in such cooperation. (Government.ru, 03.14.23)Last year saw the start of a deep transformation of the world order. More and more countries have come to realize that a fair world of the future is incompatible with the rules imposed by the collective West. The transition to multipolarity is gathering speed. Russia is at the cutting edge of this process. (Government.ru, 03.23.23)The West continues to do everything possible to limit the Russian economy’s access to global finance — loans and investments — and to restrain the development of Russia not only in the short term, but also in the long term. (Government.ru, 03.28.23)China-Russia: Allied or aligned?Russia will provide the necessary support in terms of enriching the content of trade and economic cooperation and facilitating further consolidation within the SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization]. (TASS, 11.01.22)In the new geopolitical reality, the comprehensive and strategic partnership between Russia and China will fully reveal its great creative potential. (TASS, 12.05.22)Speaking to Chinese President Xi Jinping: It is meaningful that your first foreign visit after having been re-elected is to our country. This testifies to the special nature of Russian-Chinese relations entering a new era. (Government.ru, 03.21.23)Our work is coordinated through … regular meetings of the leaders of the Russian and Chinese governments, which is a unique format that includes five intergovernmental commissions and more than 80 subcommittees and working groups. (TASS, 03.21.23)We value Russia and China’s strong cultural and humanitarian ties. They are founded on our peoples’ historical traditions of friendship and mutual respect. (TASS, 03.21.23)We in Russia are truly interested in the further strengthening of our comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation with China. Our relations are at their highest level in a centuries-long history, and they influence the formation of the global agenda with respect to the logic of a multipolar world order. (TASS, 03.21.23)We believe that the development of trade, economic, scientific and technical cooperation with China is very important. Following the talks between President Vladimir Putin and President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping in Moscow, the two leaders adopted a joint statement on the development of practical cooperation between Russia and China in the medium term. As a follow-up, my colleague, Premier of the State Council of China Li Qiang, and I will soon approve Plan 2030, which will embrace all the main areas of cooperation with our Chinese partners. (Government.ru, 03.23.23)The Russian side rates highly the Sino-Russian relations of a comprehensive strategic partnership and strategic interaction, and it plans to expand friendly ties with the People’s Republic of China, deepen practical cooperation and facilitate the two countries’ joint development. (TASS, 04.04.23)Missile defense:No significant developments.Nuclear arms control:No significant developments.Counterterrorism:No significant developments.Conflict in Syria:No significant developments.Cyber security/AI:Speaking in 2018: But if destiny chooses a different path for me [other than government service], I would work in innovations, with new technologies, in the same field as I have always worked: transformation, related to the digital economy. (Reuters, 01.15.20)On a new technological order, including artificial intelligence, robots, sensors, 3D printing and more: By implementing new technologies, it is possible to ensure the growth of efficiency in all sectors of the economy, from agriculture to the service sector, improve the quality of products, establish more environmentally friendly production, and reduce costs. New forms of creating added value are also emerging. (Telegram, 04.26.23)Energy exports from CIS:For Russia, the Caspian has great significance. Above all, given its strategic location in the center of Eurasia, at a crossroads of transportation and energy arteries, as well as having a large amount of natural reserves and unique bioresources in its waters. (TASS, 10.06.22)Climate change:No significant developments.U.S.-Russian economic ties:No significant developments.U.S.-Russian relations in general:No significant developments. II. Russia’s domestic policiesDomestic politics, economy and energy:[Putin is] not my colleague, but our leader. (RIA, 11.20.20) Of course, the risks have not gone away. So far, the collective West has not managed to push our country out of the global economy, and their attempts have led to ultra-high prices on the world market, and to fears about how to endure the coming winter. However, it is obvious that they will continue to elbow us out of customary sales areas. This should be taken into account when drawing up plans for the future, not forgetting about our own strategic tasks. (TASS, 09.14.22)The [economic] decline, inevitable in this situation, was quite moderate. However, we managed to bring the economy back to a growth trajectory. (Government.ru, 03.23.23)The replacement of the dollar and euro in our foreign trade has allowed us to expand operations with friendly states. (Government.ru, 03.23.23)We need to take all possible measures to ensure stable population growth in Russia. … [A] set of measures was formed to provide additional support to families with children. … But work must be continued to radically overcome the existing demographic trends. (Government.ru, 04.04.23)Everything that can be done in Russia today must be done in Russia. Every kopek of added value produced by the hands of Russians, in this sense, is a contribution to import substitution and the creation of the country’s technological and economic sovereignty. (Interfax, 04.05.23)On simplifying the procedure of obtaining Russian citizenship for scientists and ethnic Russians: Regarding citizenship, we will definitely consider proposals [from a lawmaker making the request]. (TASS, 04.06.23)The government will provide additional support to our pharmaceutical manufacturers. They will be able to receive subsidies from the state for the development and subsequent registration of domestic drugs, analogues of which are now under the influence of foreign patents. (Interfax, 04.10.23)We expect that as the adaptation period ends, we will be able to [establish] “budget rules” as early as 2025, which will help strengthen confidence in economic policy in the long term. (Government.ru, 04.14.23)We will combine in a special register specific projects that contribute to the structural adaptation of the economy, primarily eliminating the low level of localization and critical dependence on suppliers and buyers from unfriendly states. The list of types of production and services is approved by the Government. It includes, among other things, medicines, equipment, unmanned aerial and automotive equipment and software development and testing. (Government.ru, 04.17.23)Defense and aerospace:The volumes of production of the necessary machinery and equipment and other necessary property are systematically increasing. And now we need to actively increase factory capacity. To this end, the Government has made decisions to subsidize investment projects for the modernization of enterprises. (Government.ru, 02.08.23)See also section on “Military aspects of the Ukraine conflict and their impacts” above.Security, law-enforcement and justice:No significant developments.III. Russia’s relations with other countriesRussia’s general foreign policy and relations with “far abroad” countries:Despite such rapid growth of the trade turnover, we [Russia and Iran] have good opportunities to further boost trade and, certainly, scale up mutual investments in such areas as energy, industrial cooperation, transport, agribusiness, innovation, and many other lines. (TASS, 10.06.22)We welcome the Iranian side’s decision to provide comfortable conditions for Russian business. Due to the withdrawal of companies of unfriendly states from Russia, a large number of areas have been freed up in our market that our Iranian partners will be able to occupy. So it is a two-way street and they are welcome in Russia. (TASS, 10.06.22)Ukraine:We have been preparing for many months for a possible reaction to the recognition of the LNR and DNR [separatist “people’s republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine]. I mean, first and foremost, import replacement and analysis of all risks that we might encounter in the event of such a decision. (RG, 02.21.22)Last October, the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions became an integral part of Russia. The president asked us to ensure their integration in the single socioeconomic space of our country. We launched a pension and social security system there with regular payments and benefits. I want to thank all members of parliament for this work. The relevant legislative acts were promptly adopted by the State Duma and approved by the Federation Council. This decision is very important for over 1.5 million people who started receiving pension benefits, and 1 million citizens who received social benefits and monetary compensation. We provided support to the people whose homes were destroyed or damaged, and to those who were injured as a result of hostilities. Last year, we started to restore infrastructure in the new regions to help them return to normal life and activities. (Government.ru, 03.23.23) Russia’s other post-Soviet neighbors:By stepping up cooperation on international markets, we stand for fullest unlocking of the growth potential of the common EAEU market, ensuring the free movement of goods, services, capital and the labor force. … We are already improving our approaches on the basis of international experience. (TASS, 10.21.22)Under the current conditions, the opening of joint high-tech production sites is becoming particularly important. (TASS, 02.03.23)It is necessary to ensure the technological sovereignty of the five nations. It is necessary to make such help available to our enterprises and more actively attract development institutions to it as soon as possible. (TASS, 02.03.23)The Union State [of Russia and Belarus] has a great future in the emerging multipolar international architecture. The deepening of integration will serve the benefit of the peoples of our countries. (Government.ru, 03.27.23)Together we are stronger and capable of handling the most difficult challenges and achieving the goals that we have set in various fields, from ensuring security to improving the welfare of our people. And, of course, resisting external pressure. The deepening of Russian-Belarusian integration is our response to it. This is the mission that our presidents — Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko — have set for us. (TASS, 03.27.23)

This is the fourth in our series of compilations of quotes by Putin’s potential successors; earlier installments covered  Nikolai Patrushev ,   Dmitry Medvedev  and  Vyacheslav Volodin . All sections may be updated in the future. The quotes above are divided into categories similar to those in Russia Matters’  news and analysis digests , reflecting the most pertinent topic areas for U.S.-Russian relations broadly and for drivers of the two countries’ policies toward one another. Bulleted text that is not italicized, bracketed or in parentheses is a direct quote. Quotes linked to English-language sources were taken from the source indicated; quotes linked to Russian-language sources were translated by RM. Entries in each subsection are in chronological order, from oldest to newest.

This item is also part of Russia Matters’ “ Clues from Russian Views ” series, in which we share what newsmakers in/from Russia are saying on Russia-related issues that impact key U.S. national interests so that RM readers can glean clues about their thinking. The opinions expressed in the compiled quotes are solely those of the speaker.

Study: U.S. Terror Wars Contributed to 4.5 Million Estimated Deaths

Photo by NEOSiAM 2021 on Pexels.com

Cost of War Project of Watson Institute, 2023

War’s destruction of economies, public services, infrastructure, and the environment leads to deaths that occur long after bombs drop and grow in scale over time. This report reviews the latest research to examine the causal pathways that have led to an estimated 3.6-3.7 million indirect deaths in post-9/11 war zones, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. The total death toll in these war zones could be at least 4.5-4.6 million and counting, though the precise mortality figure remains unknown. Some people were killed in the fighting, but far more, especially children, have been killed by the reverberating effects of war, such as the spread of disease. 

The report examines the devastating toll of war on human health, whoever the combatant, whatever the compounding factor, in the most violent conflicts in which the U.S. government has been engaged in the name of counterterrorism since September 11, 2001. Rather than teasing apart who, what, or when is to blame, this report shows that the post-9/11 wars are implicated in many kinds of deaths, making clear that the impacts of war’s ongoing violence are so vast and complex that they are unquantifiable.

In laying out how the post-9/11 wars have led to illness and indirect deaths, the report’s goal is to build greater awareness of the fuller human costs of these wars and support calls for the United States and other governments to alleviate the ongoing losses and suffering of millions in current and former warzones. The report highlights many long- term and underacknowledged consequences of war for human health, emphasizing that some groups, particularly women and children, suffer the brunt of these ongoing impacts.

READ FULL PAPER >

Executive Summary (PDF) 

Jeremy Morris: My research found several misconceptions about Russians’ attitude to the Ukraine war. Here’s what people really think

Arbat Street, Moscow; photo by Natylie Baldwin, May 2017

I don’t know who the people are in Jeremy Morris’s network and how representative they are of Russian opinion. I tend to think some of the points in the article are valid and some are not. I do think it’s important to read a variety of perspectives. – Natylie

By Jeremy Morris, OpenDemocracy, 5/9/23

How has Russia changed, more than a year after its invasion of Ukraine? Has it become a fascist state with soldiers in the classroom, and people afraid to express the slightest doubts about the war? Are Russians consenting to be mobilised, to kill and be killed on the front? What do ordinary people really think about Ukrainians, the West and their own government?

At the beginning of last year, I spent time trying to answer the question of how war would change Russia – my hunch was “the same, but worse”. I continue to ask that question, both of myself and the dozens of Russians I work with.

I’m the only foreign anthropologist to have carried out fieldwork in Russia since the war began. I’m also (probably) the only researcher with long-term contacts from all walks of life, who can get reliable responses and avoid many of the biases those studying Russia are unavoidably subject to. Explaining the war means that many contradictory things need to be said. For many Russians, the conflict is traumatising yet normalised at the same time.

As I wrote in openDemocracy shortly after the invasion, when people are presented with potentially traumatising information, their cognitive coping mechanisms include denial and avoidance. As time goes by, they gravitate to more ‘sophisticated’ ways of dealing with the disturbing idea that their country is responsible for mass death and destruction, war crimes and worse.

They consolidate defensively around ideas that justify or explain the invasion, and allow them to continue their lives in as mundane a way as possible – that it’s the West who is the aggressor, or that Ukrainians are dupes of their own “fascist regime”.

These are not really ideas, but feelings that tap into deep-seated historical processes and unfinished questions about the nature of Russia and, before it, the Soviet state. These include misplaced and inaccurate perceptions of the Soviet order’s benign governance of Ukraine and elsewhere, as well as accusations of imperialist sins by the West while denying Russia’s same sins.

Geopolitical and historical resentment about the loss of the Soviet project are felt deeply by many Russians. Like all things that people believe about their own countries, these feelings are amplified in a crisis. But even this is not the main thing.

My job as an ethnographer is to observe and record, hopefully seeing through people’s guile and denial. This applies to perspectives in the West too, where we have just as many biases as those in Russia. As someone who has dedicated his professional life to the study of Russia and the broader context of life after the USSR, more than ever I ask this question: what are your claims to knowledge and what biases do they reveal?

I don’t pretend to analytical wholeness, but I do have confidence in my sources and (in the parlance of social science) their ‘reliability’ and ‘validity’. So much of what we see about the war from both the Ukrainian and Russian perspective is filtered heavily. Often what we see is secondary data that has been manipulated, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Four common misconceptions

Let’s take four broad categories of misconception (intentional in some cases).

Active misconception 1: Russians actively approve of the war and the regime’s conduct. A variation of this is that a majority (or large minority) of Russians are animated by nationalist fervour. Those, like me, who question this – whether we’re critical of survey data, or cautious about using samples of social media posts that express genocidal or other enthusiasm – generally get drowned out.

Reality: If you’d asked Russians before the war whether the Kyiv regime should be replaced in a military coup by Russian forces, those answering ‘yes’ would have been a tiny minority. The idea of a full-scale invasion was unthinkable. Ukraine, Crimea, the Donbas are not salient issues to most Russian people, even now. What matters are jobs, benefits, inflation, corruption, law and order, and other material concerns.

As I have written, survey polling in Russia is an imposition of the norms of the powerful upon the subordinate. It is true that people will readily repeat propaganda tropes about President Zelenskyi being a drug addict, about NATO mercenaries and depleted uranium. But only if you really prompt or push them.

Although people are looking over their shoulders when they speak about the war, they continue, online and off, to openly criticise the conflict, albeit with increasing risks. There are few “hurrah-shouting patriots” to be found. To most people, the regime’s national chauvinism is not an acceptable mobilising ideology.

The evidence for this is clear if researchers are honest about how anti-Ukrainian sentiment, patriotic symbols and ‘wartalk’ are not voluntarily present in everyday life. That’s not to say there isn’t an imperial residue, unpleasantly sticky and hard to wash off – but in this respect, are Russians very different to other post-imperial peoples? It’s unpopular to say so. But while there are some shared feelings between Putin and the Russian people, there is a gulf when it comes to the genuine revanchist and neocolonial intent of the regime.

Active misconception 2: Mobilisation illustrates, at best, passive acceptance by Russians of the war. At worst, it indicates the complete atomisation of society, or the “learned helplessness” (being unable to find a resolution to a difficult situation) of men who really do have the option of resisting, but don’t take it.

Reality: Russia is a big place. For every hapless person mobilised, by consent or not, there are probably three or even four who have more or less actively avoided it. Just as underground groups do what they can to derail trains and graffiti public spaces with anti-war messages, ordinary people have all kinds of visible and invisible tools to dodge the state. (This will not change with the introduction of a digital conscription system – the database will be ineffective and may intensify institutional in-fighting between security services.)

For the vast majority, mobilisation is an occupational hazard that one can take small steps to reduce. Those who go willingly, or even volunteer, are pitied or looked on with disdain as uninformed dupes motivated by greed.

Active misconception 3: Putin’s ‘electorate’ has benefited from the conflict – either because of the money paid to soldiers, or because of other economic changes to do with the war. Another variation is that sanctions have had no effect on Putin’s less-educated supporters.

Reality: Russians are politically as diverse – and fickle – as anyone else. Anyone using terms like ‘electorate’ and ‘loyalty’ is guilty of gross oversimplification.

It’s true that the regime itself thinks in terms of buying people off, and has thrown money at service personnel while trying to index pensions and benefits to the cost of living. However, the reality is that Russia remains a country where inflation exceeds salary rises, and incomes are comparable to struggling middle-income countries such as Colombia and Costa Rica.

Real incomes stagnated after 2010 and, for the majority, increasing costs eroded living standards while access to medical and educational services worsened. The housing market boom is not a sign of health, but a reflection of policymakers as hostages to fortune. There is a surfeit of ‘bad’ jobs (low pay, exploitation, unpredictable management), and most people know they risk losing their lives if they take the only other way out and join the army.

There is no good evidence that the much-quoted figure of 300,000 mobilised new personnel in 2022 was really achieved. Regardless, that number is just 1% of the able-bodied male population. Mobilisation represents Russia’s incoherent and incompetent state in action. ‘Too little, too late, too conditional, too technical, measures ever at counter purposes’ could be the summary of almost every social policy Putin has ever introduced.

Also, there’s no good evidence that Russia at war will stop being an “Empire of Austerity” – as economist Nick Birman-Trickett has called it. Actual services that people use and value are continually cut to the bone and worse. Monies recently allocated to ameliorate the self-inflicted wounds on Russian society sound big, but are not even sticking plasters.

The now-frequent refrains that Putin’s war is intended to reduce demographic decline, or that, conversely, it will precipitate imminent demographic collapse, are not supported by evidence. The argument that the deportation of Ukrainian children into Russia represents “biopolitical imperialism” has to be balanced by the regime’s utter lack of interest in the wellbeing of the vulnerable and their social reproduction in general.

Active misconception 4: People in Russia pay attention to the daily minutiae of the war – such as the ongoing fight for Bakhmut, Prigozhin’s petulant antics, or Ukraine’s recent alleged drone strike on the Kremlin.

Reality: The more unpleasant and potentially real the war becomes to the average Russian, the more they distance themselves cognitively. People feel the unnerving reality of anti-aircraft missiles being installed in Moscow, but even then, they (perhaps rightly) conclude that this is both theatre and intended to protect their betters. It isn’t about them. This is the common refrain: “It’s nothing to do with me.”

Is this cynicism or close to the truth? Can ordinary Russians vote out Putin? Can they protest without risk of torture and 25 years in the worst possible jail conditions? Did they consent to this war? Does their ‘public’ opinion matter, in the unlikely event they are asked it?

Once again, while there are the creeping realities of war, normalisation of the abnormal continues – such as rising prices or the nationalisation of favourite foreign brands. The death of a neighbour’s son at the front or the car-bombing of an ultra-nationalist figure most people have never heard of – these are uncomfortable things, but they can quickly be put out of sight and mind.

Do Russia’s scaled-back celebrations on Victory Day (commemorating the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany) indicate it is no longer possible to ignore the possibility of the war ‘coming home’?

Not really. People will continue to keep their worries, their cares and their remembrances private. People will actively connect and resist, but they will be a minority – just like the minority responding to the call of the motherland to fight and die for an unhinged clique’s vision of Russia resurgent.

The Good, the Bad, and the Befuddling: My Review of Philip Short’s Putin

By Natylie Baldwin, Antiwar.com, 5/19/23

British journalist Philip Short has written a long, in-depth biography of Vladimir Putin. The timing of its publication was rather fortuitous, having been released just a few months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The book is one of the better ones about Putin, though it certainly has its flaws. Before going into the good, the bad, and the befuddling, I will make a few general observations.

In terms of overall personality and traits, Short characterizes Putin as having a very analytical and “keen” mind, with a natural inclination to be introverted and reserved. These traits are consistent with the observations of others whom I’ve spoken with who had experience interacting with Putin in the 1990’s. Furthermore, Putin can be charming and affable when he wants, but he can also be rather Machiavellian.

This is an overall even handed biography that undermines the Marvel comic book evil villain depiction that most of the western media has been pushing, particularly since 2014 and even more since Russiagate. This probably explains why glowing blurbs from the likes of Anne Applebaum aren’t splashed across the jacket along with the rest of the usual gang that can be expected to offer reverence to every book that vilifies Russia and Putin that comes down the pike, no matter how full of slop it is. It probably also explains why Short hasn’t been interviewed nonstop on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. since the Russian invasion even though you’d think the media would be lining up to get insight into Putin by someone who’d just done a deep dive into the man.

Generally, the book paints a portrait of a more complex figure who can be ruthless but also is an intelligent pragmatist who is not much of an ideologue. It also provides a chronology of how Putin started out being very pro-Western and offered valuable assistance to the US but received little in return.

As I and others have pointed out, Putin is an arbiter of several different interests in Russia. Two of those interest groups have been the pro-Western neoliberal technocrats and the military and security services who were always much more hardline and suspicious of the US-led west. Over the years, as Russia got the short end of the stick in its relations with the west, despite its cooperation in many areas, and no consideration of its most basic security interests, the hardliners appeared vindicated in their criticisms of Putin from the right for not being proactive enough in dealing with the US-led west’s machinations. These machinations include NATO expansion up to its borders, active support of the 2014 coup in Ukraine that installed a government that was hostile to Russia, and abrogation of several key nuclear arms treaties, to name a few.

Putin started out being more sympathetic to the pro-Western neoliberal technocrat camp, but has now been forced to side more so with the hardliners. The book acknowledges that the US-led west bears a fair share of responsibility for this. It offers a lot of the historical timeline and documentation – though at some key points it omits or obscures certain critical contextual details, which I will discuss below – but I fear this information will likely continue to fall on willfully deaf ears since it undermines the narrative that has been weaved progressively over time in the west.

The Good: Debunking the Worst Nonsense About Putin and Russia

Short admits that the books by Karen Dawisha and Catherine Belton arguing that Putin is a kleptocrat are poorly substantiated and not to be taken seriously. He explains that Putin isn’t corrupt by Russian standards and he explains what corruption actually means in Russia compared to western countries. This tracks with what program developer Sharon Tennison and diplomat John Evans – both of whom interacted with Putin while he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 1990’s – have said about Putin’s relative honesty. Short also debunks the theory that the Moscow apartment bombings were false flag operations to catapult Putin into popularity and election to the presidency. Many writers and commentators, including both Dawisha and Belton, have pushed this story.

He also explains what NATO expansion looked like from Russia’s perspective, including its history of invasions and the devastation that those invasions wrought that haven’t been forgotten, as well as pointing out that if the US were faced with an equivalent action, it would not be tolerated.

Short acknowledges that Putin was not likely behind the murders of political dissidents such as Anna Politskovaya and Boris Nemstov, but participated in the coverup and protection of those who likely ordered the killings, thereby creating an atmosphere of leniency for such actions. In both cases, it should be noted, the likely culprit was the Chechen leadership. Short does provide some context for why Putin has little choice but to tolerate certain activities by the Chechen leadership that he likely does not like or support. Namely, it is because the current Chechen leadership keeps a lid on any potential extremist behavior that could flare up and result in the kind of deadly terrorism that occurred in the 1990’s.

He does, however, argue that Putin likely ordered the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko. Personally, I think the case for that is less clear-cut than Short does, but that is a good segue into the next section of this review.

The Bad: Still Too Many Western Narratives Taken at Face Value, Obfuscation of Critical Details

While Short dismisses some of the worst lies about Russia and Putin, he still relies heavily on western and pro-western sources. As a result, he takes too much of the western establishment narrative about the poisonings of Alexei Navalny and Sergei Skirpal at face value. I don’t claim to know exactly what happened in either of these cases but I do know that subjecting either of the western narratives on these poisonings to even minimal scrutiny shows them to be far-fetched to put it charitably. Giving the reader a description of the western narrative and then letting the reader know about counter-arguments available would have been helpful in letting the reader use their critical thinking skills to make up their own minds.

I noted some sources that Short used in his book which stood out as very questionable such as Sergei Pugachev who, as I’ve detailed elsewhere, is a self-aggrandizing blowhard.

Chapter 16, titled “Payback,” which dealt with Putin’s pivot toward challenging the west in his third presidential term, was the weakest of the book. While Short gives a decent explanation of why the EU Association Agreement Ukraine was expected to sign in 2013-2014 was problematic, he leaves out important context about the events of Maidan that led up to the annexation of Crimea and eruption of the Donbass rebellion. He doesn’t mention that the agreement mediated by France, Germany and Poland in February 2014 to end the rioting by devolving Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich’s power and bringing early elections was rejected by the ultranationalists who were part of the Maidan protest movement. Short only states that members of Yanukovich’s government “saw the writing on the wall” and police and Berkut units “melted away.”

He doesn’t mention the buses of anti-Maidan protesters from Crimea who were beaten and tortured. He doesn’t mention that the Donbass rebels initially wanted autonomy and the right to speak Russian while remaining Ukrainians and how their desire for independence and unification with Russia evolved as the Kiev government responded to their demands with an anti-terrorist operation rather than a serious negotiation. This reflects either poor research on Short’s part or an intentional desire to omit these important details that would help one to better understand why these events occurred. This is separate from whether one likes or agrees with the events.

Later in the chapter, Short implies that then-Vice President Joe Biden was probably a poor choice by Obama to put in charge of the Ukraine file. I think this is correct, but he claims as part of the reason that Biden had little awareness of the “sensitivities” of Ukraine and Russia issues. It’s true that Biden was not an expert on foreign affairs, but this video from the late 1990’s shows that Biden indeed understood how Russia would view NATO expansion up to their borders. It’s not that difficult of a concept if one looks at a map and has a basic understanding of the events of WWII. Most of the baby boom generation, of which Biden is a member, understood the basic events of WWII, unlike what might be expected by young adults today who are four generations removed. There’s also no reason why Biden couldn’t have called up Jack Matlock or any other competent Russia expert to explain basic history and geography of the region to him or go get some scholarly books to get himself informed about an important area he was supposed to be leading.

In reality, Biden likely wasn’t going to bother putting in any real effort to better inform himself but that speaks to his character. If nothing else, you can rest assured that Biden would understand perfectly well how the US would respond to an equivalent hostile military power on its border. One can’t help but wonder why Short seems to be giving Biden such a pass.

One comment in particular by Short toward the end of the book bothered me. After detailing how the anti-Trump establishment Democrats and their allies in the media tended to push and believe every nefarious allegation about Putin and Russia to the point of absurdity, Short writes:

“The handful of diplomats and scholars who argued otherwise, most of them old Russia hands like Jack Matlock and Stephen Cohen, often went overboard trying to explain Putin’s actions and ended up discrediting themselves.” (p. 603)

I was left scratching my head at this. Matlock and Cohen have/had a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience of Russia. Wouldn’t it be their job to use that expertise to try to explain why Putin – the head of the world’s other nuclear superpower – was doing what he was doing, especially at a time of heightened tensions or even crisis? Isn’t that the whole point of being an expert on Russia? And the fact that a Putin biographer of all people would make such a comment is especially mystifying. Why exactly does Short think he’s writing a biography of Putin if not to explain the man to his audience? Perhaps almost 700 pages is going “overboard” in explaining Putin, eh, Phil? You’re discrediting yourself.

My guess is that Short already knows that even attempting to provide a modestly balanced account of Putin and Russia is going to get him no love from the establishment institutions whose approval one needs at least somewhat to be a writer or analyst who wants to make an actual living. He needs to throw a few bones to the important people who will be close to popping a blood vessel because he’s daring to acknowledge NATO expansion as a contributor to the current mess and that Putin wasn’t actually responsible for the Moscow apartment bombings and likely doesn’t have a trillion dollars stuffed into giant coffee cans in a cave somewhere. In the almost 600-plus pages of the book, I don’t recall Short ever using the term “thug” to describe Putin, which even RFK Jr. and Seymour Hersh feel the obligation to use in reference to the Russian president in recent interviews.

In conclusion, Short’s biography is worth reading if you’re interested in gaining insight into Putin. But it shouldn’t be the only thing you read on that journey. I also recommend the following books which are as good or better:

Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft by Allen C. LynchRichard Sakwa’s series of Putin biographiesThe Strongman by Angus Roxburgh (useful information despite condescending tone of the author)Putin in His Own Words by Daniel SochorPutin’s speeches and interviews available on the Kremlin website

Ana Palacio: A BRICS Revival?

By Ana Palacio, Project Syndicate, 5/12/23

WASHINGTON, DC – There was a time when everyone was talking about a group of fast-growing emerging economies with huge potential. But the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – struggled to transform themselves from a promising asset class into a unified real-world diplomatic and financial player. Is this finally changing?

The story of the BRICS begins with a November 2001 paper by Jim O’Neill, then the head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, called “The World Needs Better Economic BRICs” (the original grouping did not include South Africa). At a time when the world was dealing with the fallout of the dot-com bust and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, O’Neill highlighted the BRICs’ vast potential, noting that their GDP growth was likely to accelerate considerably in the ensuing decades.

At the time, China and India were experiencing rapid economic growth, and Russia, aided by booming commodity prices, was recovering from the post-Soviet meltdown of the 1990s. Growth in the BRICs was outpacing that of the advanced economies so significantly that O’Neill predicted in 2003 that their collective GDP could overtake the then-Group of 6 largest developed economies by 2040.

While the world expected the BRICs to thrive economically, few expected them to form a united grouping. After all, they represent a mix of unsteady democracies and outright autocracies, each with its own distinctive economic structure. And two of them – China and India – have long been locked in a border dispute, with no sign of resolution.

But the BRICS saw their economic alignment as an opportunity to expand their global influence by creating an alternative to West-led international institutions. And, for a while, they seemed to be making progress.

The addition of South Africa – then Africa’s largest economy – in 2010 lent the grouping greater heft. By 2014, the BRICS Development Bank – now the New Development Bank – was formed as an alternative to the World Bank. The next year, the BRICS created the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, in order to support members experiencing short-term balance-of-payments pressures.

Economically, the BRICS continued to thrive, at least in the aggregate. Though China is the only BRICS economy that has sustained solid growth, the group has surpassed the G7 in terms of relative contribution to global GDP (based on purchasing power parity). Moreover, bilateral trade among its members is rising rapidly. But progress toward the BRICS’ broader ambitions seemed to stall.

Recent developments suggest renewed momentum. Lately, members have been talking of “de-dollarizing” trade, with some raising the prospect of a new shared BRICS currency. While calls for de-dollarization are nothing new, some experts believe that a BRICS currency “has the potential to usurp” the US dollar, or at least “shake [its] place on the throne.”

Moreover, the BRICS seem to be making a comeback as a platform for cooperation on a range of issues, including climate change, global governance, and development. In fact, 19 countries, including Argentina, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, have expressed interest in joining the BRICS – bids that will be discussed at the group’s August summit in South Africa.

Though the group’s institutional framework remains underdeveloped, the motivations that led to its creation have not diminished – and are unlikely to any time soon. In fact, the BRICS and their supplicants appear to be both united and driven by one thing: grievance.

Developing economies are angry about the burdensome conditionality that has been imposed on them by Western-dominated institutions. They are sick of what they perceive as double standards on vital policy matters, such as the green transition. They are unwilling to tolerate efforts to “constrain” their economies through conservation demands or limits on technology sharing. Perhaps most important, they regard Western norms and values with suspicion as a fig leaf for Western countries’ self-interested behavior.

The West’s inability – or unwillingness – to reform global governance so that emerging economies like China and India have greater influence has compounded these grievances. Calls for reform have, after all, been growing louder for decades – since around 1999, when the G20 was formed. In the aftermath of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, finance ministers and central-bank governors began holding regular high-level meetings, and non-Western representatives wanted to be heard.

With the West’s pledges to pursue reform having come to nothing, potential alternatives – from development banks to currencies – look increasingly attractive to those who feel left out. The BRICS are attempting to build a new world order, “bric by bric,” and the appeal of their cause among other disgruntled countries is growing.

One must wonder what would happen if countries like Argentina or Saudi Arabia joined this project. Even the “BRICS-Plus” embraced by China could go a long way toward advancing an alternative worldview and institutional system – goals that China is also pursuing with its massive transnational Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

To be sure, the BRICS’ ability to realize its ambitions remains far from certain. None of its members is going to stop putting national interests first, though that is precisely what has long held the BRICS back. Even China’s BRI has been likened to a “new form of imperialism” – hardly the best way to win long-term friends.

But the resurgence of the BRICS is disquieting, not least because the grouping has not demonstrated a capacity for genuine global leadership. Shared grievances about the West – legitimate or not – cannot support a rules-based world order. A coherent narrative for global governance, underpinned by clearly articulated values, is essential. And the BRICS have offered no such thing.

For the West, the BRICS’ growing influence holds an important lesson. If the current international order is to remain relevant, the institutions that comprise it will have to change.

Racket News – Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

By Susan Schmidt, Andrew Lowenthal, Tom Wyatt, Techno Fog, et al., Racket News, 5/10/23

Introduction by Matt Taibbi

On January 17, 1961, outgoing President and former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history. Eisenhower for eight years had been a popular president, whose appeal drew upon a reputation as a person of great personal fortitude, who’d guided the United States to victory in an existential fight for survival in World War II. Nonetheless, as he prepared to vacate the Oval Office for handsome young John F. Kennedy, he warned the country it was now at the mercy of a power even he could not overcome. 

Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new sector, Eisenhower said, was building up around itself a cultural, financial, and political support system accruing enormous power. This “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said, adding:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. 

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. 

This was the direst of warnings, but the address has tended in the popular press to be ignored. After sixty-plus years, most of America – including most of the American left, which traditionally focused the most on this issue – has lost its fear that our arms industry might conquer democracy from within. 

Now, however, we’ve unfortunately found cause to reconsider Eisenhower’s warning.

While the civilian population only in recent years began haggling over “de-platforming” incidents involving figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, government agencies had already long been advancing a new theory of international conflict, in which the informational landscape is more importantly understood as a battlefield than a forum for exchanging ideas. In this view, “spammy” ads, “junk” news, and the sharing of work from “disinformation agents” like Jones aren’t inevitable features of a free Internet, but sorties in a new form of conflict called “hybrid warfare.” 

In 1996, just as the Internet was becoming part of daily life in America, the U.S. Army published “Field Manual 100-6,” which spoke of “an expanding information domain termed the Global Information Environment” that contains “information processes and systems that are beyond the direct influence of the military.” Military commanders needed to understand that “information dominance” in the “GIE” would henceforth be a crucial element for “operating effectively.”

You’ll often see it implied that “information operations” are only practiced by America’s enemies, because only America’s enemies are low enough, and deprived enough of real firepower, to require the use of such tactics, needing as they do to “overcome military limitations.” We rarely hear about America’s own lengthy history with “active measures” and “information operations,” but popular media gives us space to read about the desperate tactics of the Asiatic enemy, perennially described as something like an incurable trans-continental golf cheat.

Indeed, part of the new mania surrounding “hybrid warfare” is the idea that while the American human being is accustomed to living in clear states of “war” or “peace,” the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian citizen is born into a state of constant conflict, where war is always ongoing, whether declared or not. In the face of such adversaries, America’s “open” information landscape is little more than military weakness.

In March of 2017, in a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on hybrid war, chairman Mac Thornberry opened the session with ominous remarks, suggesting that in the wider context of history, an America built on constitutional principles of decentralized power might have been badly designed:

Americans are used to thinking of a binary state of either war or peace. That is the way our organizations, doctrine, and approaches are geared. Other countries, including Russia, China, and Iran, use a wider array of centrally controlled, or at least centrally directed, instruments of national power and influence to achieve their objectives…

Whether it is contributing to foreign political parties, targeted assassinations of opponents, infiltrating non-uniformed personnel such as the little green men, traditional media and social media, influence operations, or cyber-connected activity, all of these tactics and more are used to advance their national interests and most often to damage American national interests… 

The historical records suggest that hybrid warfare in one form or another may well be the norm for human conflict, rather than the exception.

Around that same time, i.e. shortly after the election of Donald Trump, it was becoming gospel among the future leaders of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” that interference by “malign foreign threat actors” and the vicissitudes of Western domestic politics must be linked. Everything, from John Podesta’s emails to Trump’s Rust Belt primary victories to Brexit, were to be understood first and foremost as hybrid war events.

This is why the Trump-Russia scandal in the United States will likely be remembered as a crucial moment in 21st-century history, even though the investigation superficially ended a non-story, fake news in itself. What the Mueller investigation didn’t accomplish in ousting Trump from office, it did accomplish in birthing a vast new public-private bureaucracy devoted to stopping “mis-, dis-, and malinformation,” while smoothing public acquiescence to the emergence of a spate of new government agencies with “information warfare” missions. 

The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.

Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy. 

They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like “toxicity monitoring,” replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a “nose for news” with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like “newsworthy claim extraction,” and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the “redirect method,” which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward “constructive alternative messages.”

Binding all this is a commitment to a new homogeneous politics, which the complex of public and private agencies listed below seeks to capture in something like a Unified Field Theory of neoliberal narrative, which can be perpetually tweaked and amplified online via algorithm and machine learning. This is what some of the organizations on this list mean when they talk about coming up with a “shared vocabulary” of information disorder, or “credibility,” or “media literacy.”

Anti-disinformation groups talk endlessly about building “resilience” to disinformation (which in practice means making sure the public hears approved narratives so often that anything else seems frightening or repellent), and audiences are trained to question not only the need for checks and balances, but competition. Competition is increasingly frowned upon not just in the “marketplace of ideas” (an idea itself more and more often described as outdated), but in the traditional capitalist sense. In the Twitter Files we repeatedly find documents like this unsigned “Sphere of Influence” review circulated by the Carnegie Endowment that wonders aloud if tech companies really need to be competing to “get it right”:

In place of competition, the groups we’ve been tracking favor the concept of the “shared endeavor” (one British group has even started a “Shared Endeavour” program), in which key “stakeholders” hash out their disagreements in private, but present a unified front.

Who are the leaders of these messaging campaigns? If you care to ask, the groups below are a good place to start. 

“The Top 50 List” is intended as a resource for reporters and researchers beginning their journey toward learning the scale and ambition of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Written like a magazine feature, it tries to answer a few basic questions about funding, organization type, history, and especially, methodology. Many anti-disinformation groups adhere to the same formulaic approach to research, often using the same “hate-mapping,” guilt-by-association-type analysis to identify wrong-thinkers and suppressive persons. There is even a tendency to use what one Twitter Files source described as the same “hairball” graphs.

Where they compete, often, is in the area of gibberish verbiage describing their respective analytical methods. My favorite came from the Public Good Projects, which in a display of predictive skills reminiscent of the “unsinkable Titanic” described itself as the “Buzzfeed of public health.” 

Together, these groups are fast achieving what Eisenhower feared: the elimination of “balance” between the democratic need for liberalizing laws and institutions, and the vigilance required for military preparation. Democratic society requires the nourishment of free debate, disagreement, and intellectual tension, but the groups below seek instead that “shared vocabulary” to deploy on the hybrid battlefield. They propose to serve as the guardians of that “vocabulary,” which sounds very like the scenario Ike outlined in 1961, in which “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific and technological elite.”

Without further ado, an introduction to the main players in this “CIC”:

Continue reading here.

Alexander Rubinstein: Ukrainian media asks ‘who should be next’ after car bombing of Russian writer

Photo: Dariya Dugina, victim of Ukrainian terrorist attack in 2022

By Alexander Rubinstein, The Grayzone, 5/9/23

A Ukrainian media group partnered with BBC, Der Spiegel and other Western outlets polled readers on which Russian intellectual should be assassinated following a car bomb attack on writer Zakhar Prilepin. The Biden administration has greenlit Kiev’s campaign of terror.

Hours after Russian writer and activist Zakhar Prilepin was nearly killed in a targeted car bomb, a popular Ukrainian news agency submitted a poll that asked its readers, “Who do you think should be next in the Russian pantheon of scum propagandists?”

It’s open season on Russian intellectuals supportive of the government’s war effort, according to Ukrainian news agency UNIAN. Following a car bomb intended to kill Russian novelist Zakhar Prilepin in the Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia, the outlet polled its audience on Telegram, providing a list of names of prominent Russians that could be assassinated.

Excluding the two reported assassination attempts on Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prilepin is the third high-profile Russian to be targeted for assassination by Ukrainian agents. His maiming follows the car bombing that killed Dariya Dugina, which was intended for her father, the Russian nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, and the bombing of a public event featuring Vladlen Tatarsky, who ran a popular Telegram channel. The Telegram post by UNIAN explicitly references Dugin, Tatarsky, and Prilepin.

Among the list of potential targets were the operators of other Telegram channels, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan (crudely referred to in the post as “beaver eater”), Russian TV news hosts Dmitry Kiselyov and Sergey Mardan, and others. Some 50,000 Telegram users have voted in the poll at the time of this article’s publication.

According to UNIAN’s About page, the outlet “partners in information dissemination and exchange” with American outlets Reuters and Bloomberg while its clients include prominent foreign outlets like the BBC and Der Spiegel.

UNIAN is owned by the 1+1 Media Group belonging to Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, a long time backer of Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky and the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. The conglomerate is also the parent company of TSN, the TV News program that recently put out a bounty for drone terror attacks on Red Square during Moscow’s annual May 9 celebration of the defeat of Nazism.

The assassination attempt against Russian novelist Zakhar Prilepin coincided with raids inside Ukraine that swept up 11 war commentators including Gonzalo Lira, an American citizen. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence

agency announced on May 4 that they had arrested “another network of enemy internet agitators.”

American journalists with ties to US intelligence have sought to justify the targeting of online influencers. Christo Grozev, the lead Russia investigator at the US government-funded outlet Bellingcat, justified the bombing of a public event at a cafe in St. Petersburg on the grounds that the target was a “propagandist.”

Similarly, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, an American journalist and former Democratic Party operative who enlisted in Ukraine’s armed forces, filmed a phantasmagorical defense of the arrest of American Gonzalo Lira by Ukrainian intelligence agents on the same grounds. While the SBU had only publicly released images of Lira with his face blurred, Ashton-Cirllo was somehow able to produce uncensored versions.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has provided a green light for Ukraine’s campaign of terror inside Russia. Following the second assassination attempt on Russian President Vladimir Putin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked about the US view on attacks inside Russian territory. “These are decisions for Ukraine to make about how it’s going to defend itself,” Blinken responded.

Among the trove of top secret documents leaked by National Guardsman Jack Teixeira and now likely slowly decomposing in file cabinets at top American newsrooms, is a document detailing the US’s dismal projections for a Ukrainian counteroffensive. As its hopes for recapturing the whole of its pre-2014 territory dim, Ukraine is resorting to a campaign of targeted assassinations against its most vocal critics in Russia, and disappearing those who remain within its realm.

Poll: 67% of Ukrainians are against any compromises with Russia; 82% say Putin new Hitler

Kyiv Post, 5/8/23

A survey published by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation on May 8 shows that over 67% of Ukrainians say the war with Russia can end only after the Ukrainian victory.

They say that no compromises with Russia are acceptable, the poll shows. 22% of respondents say that some compromises are possible.

Over 5% of those asked say that any compromises are acceptable as long as they end the war.

According to the same poll, 82% of Ukrainians say that there’s no difference between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler, leader of Nazi Germany. 11% of respondents say they “probably agree” with this statement.

Ukrainians also see Poland (68%), the U.S. (67%), and the U.K. (45%) as the most supportive, while Polish President Andrzej Duda, U.S. President Joe Biden, and former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson as Ukraine’s most important backers.

The two most popular people in Ukraine are President Volodymyr Zelensky and Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi.

Additionally, 40% of Ukrainians think the Moscow-controlled Ukrainian Orthodox Church helped Russia in its war against Ukraine. 26% say they “probably agree” with this statement.

Fred Weir: Russia’s top mercenary leader turns on Kremlin. What’s behind rift?

By Fred Weir (in Russia), Christian Science Monitor, 5/16/23

Russia’s most successful military leader in the Ukraine war so far is not a soldier at all.

Yevgeny Prigozhin is a former convict and Kremlin-connected entrepreneur whose private army, the Wagner Group, has borne the brunt of the long, grinding, and incredibly costly battle that has raged since last summer amid the ruins of Bakhmut, once a quiet Donbas mining town.

And over the past 10 days, he has publicly threatened to pull his forces out of Bakhmut, appearing in a video with a field of dead Wagner troops he claimed were victims of Defense Ministry negligence. A week ago he accused Russian troops of “fleeing” the battlefield near Bakhmut, leaving his men exposed. “Soldiers should not die because of the absolute stupidity of their leadership,” he said.

This extraordinary spectacle has led to speculation about a rift in Moscow’s upper echelons of power, an imminent collapse of Russian lines around Bakhmut, or perhaps even a political challenge to the Kremlin by Mr. Prigozhin and the right-wing nationalist hawks who revere him.

Russian experts say there is indeed a struggle for influence and resources between Mr. Prigozhin and the Russian military bureaucracy, which clearly hates the private contractor. But they say he is not so much challenging the powers that be in Moscow, as he is jockeying for his own post-war position in what is anything but a monolithic Putin-era Russian establishment.

“Prigozhin is trying to act like a politician, and Putin may not be ready to tolerate too much independence,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center who continues living and working in Moscow. “But this is a strong authoritarian state which is ready to use all sorts of people to achieve goals that look very strange for the 21st century. For Putin, right now, it’s extremely important to fight and win this war. He needs men who can get things done, and that’s why he tolerates Prigozhin.”

A construct of Mr. Putin’s system?

Mr. Prigozhin, who served a decade in prison for robbery and fraud in the 1980s, began with small-scale businesses in post-Soviet St. Petersburg, mainly in the food catering field. After Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia’s wealthy elites had a choice between accepting political obedience or leaving the country, and Mr. Prigozhin, by then a successful grocer and restaurateur, chose the former.

Mr. Prigozhin became close enough to the Kremlin that he earned the sobriquet “Putin’s chef.” He grew wealthy on official catering contracts and began to branch out. Among other things, he started the Internet Research Agency, a cyber-trolling outfit that became notorious in the United States for allegedly interfering in the 2016 elections.

Although Mr. Prigozhin publicly denied it until last September, he’s best known for founding the Wagner Group, a private military contractor he says was modeled on U.S. examples like Blackwater, in 2014. The group was reportedly named for the call sign of its first commander, Dmitry Utkin, and its goal was to assist Ukrainian separatists in the Donbas without leaving official Russian fingerprints. The Wagners extended operations to Syria and several countries in Africa, where they were able to support Russian foreign policy goals in various ways, yet enable Moscow to maintain official deniability. Estimates of the size of the Wagner forces vary, but they generally seem to be somewhere in the tens of thousands of troops.

Andrei Soldatov, a specialist in Russian secret services who is now with the Center for European Policy Analysis, argues in a recent piece for Foreign Affairs that, far from being a wild card or a threat to Russia’s power structure, Mr. Prigozhin’s entry into private military operations was probably sponsored by Russian military intelligence, the GRU, and is very much in line with the traditional Kremlin style of creating different forces to pursue various goals and to play against each other.

“The GRU was instrumental in the emergence of the Wagner group, and the agency established a special department to supervise it,” says Mr. Soldatov. “Lately it looks as though Prigozhin is desperate to preserve the reputation of Wagner as the only force that’s capable of going on the offensive,” hence his strange public antics. “But this doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s a loose cannon” or a threat to the Kremlin, he adds.

Many argue that Mr. Prigozhin and his private army are ultimately a construct of the system created by Mr. Putin and that he serves at the pleasure of the Kremlin.

“The Wagners are an outsourcing model, who are able to do things that the state might not be able to openly carry out, such as recruiting prisoners straight out of jail and sending them into battle,” says Mr. Kolesnikov, the Carnegie expert. But “Yevgeny Prigozhin is simply a state hireling.”

“He wants to build his brand”

After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the Wagner role grew immensely. Already involved in the Donbas conflict for several years, the group honed its skills at assaulting heavily defended Ukrainian positions, especially around Bakhmut. Mr. Prigozhin made the rounds of Russian prisons last September, offering freedom for any convict who would volunteer and serve six months on the Ukrainian front. It’s not known how many signed up, but Mr. Prigozhin recently noted that about 5,000 men have completed that service and returned to normal life.

Unlike the Defense Ministry, he has also been fairly honest about the casualties his men have suffered in the grueling attritional fighting around Bakhmut, putting losses at about 90 soldiers per day – which, he insisted, was far less than Ukrainian casualties. The ministry may also envy his relative success as the leader of the only Russian force that has consistently moved forward, however slowly and painfully, over the past several months.

In fact, Mr. Prigozhin has been in a constant squabble with the Russian military brass. He has cited them for allegedly failing to supply his Wagner stormtroopers with enough ammunition to blast through the rows of high-rise buildings in western Bakhmut, where Ukrainian troops still hold on. He has also accused the regular Russian troops who are meant to be securing the Wagners’ flanks of poor performance.

Not being a professional soldier – or even part of the chain of command – enables Mr. Prigozhin to take his complaints directly to the public via social media and sympathetic Russian journalists. Though he gets very little coverage in mainstream Russian media, everyone knows his name, and polls suggest that Wagner forces are more popular than the official Russian army. Hence, Mr. Prigozhin’s social media appeals get enormous traction.

Major public opinion agencies, like mainstream Russian media, have conspicuously avoided polling the public about Mr. Prigozhin and the Wagners. But one less formal survey carried out by the “Myusli Lavrov” Telegram channel found that 80% of its respondents would sooner sign a contract with Wagner than with the official Russian army. And at least one Russian military unit has posted a video appeal asking to be transferred to the Wagners.

“Prigozhin is something like a Russian version of Elon Musk, and his relationship with the Defense Ministry is like that of a huge, successful corporation struggling with government bureaucracy,” says Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser. “Private corporations can be very effective, though perhaps it’s dangerous to give them too much power. But Prigozhin has been moving forward, street by street, in Bakhmut because he’s an effective leader, he has an excellent team whom he pays very well, he’s innovative. He rewards success and punishes failure. …

“The Russian army’s problems are mainly the burden of bureaucracy. Communications on the battlefield take hours for them, whereas the Wagners do it in minutes,” he says.

Mr. Markov argues that Western analysts are mistaken to view Mr. Prigozhin as a potential political challenger to the Kremlin.

“Prigozhin’s popularity may be a threat to the military bureaucracy, but not to Putin,” he says. “Prigozhin doesn’t want to be president. He wants to build his brand, to become the most powerful private army in the world. He wants to have projects in many countries and become very rich. Right now, he needs to win in Bakhmut.”

FAIR: Ukraine’s ‘Press Freedom’ Score Increases Despite Martial Law, Banned Media

Photo by Nati on Pexels.com

By Bryce Greene, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), 5/9/23

France-based press watchdog Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières, or RSF) recently released its scores and rankings for international press freedom. In 2022, RSF gave Ukraine a score of 55.76 out of 100, placing it 106th out of 180 countries surveyed. In the most recent report, issued after over a year of war, Ukraine shot to 79th out of 180, with a new score of 61.19. This despite wartime measures that banned opposition parties, consolidated media under state control, and saw journalists’ speech chilled by unprecedented intimidation.

Wartime measures in any country often result in a loss of press freedom. To say that such restrictions are typical, however, does not mean that they are therefore not really happening. For RSF to change the standards it applies to Ukraine, as it apparently has, because the country has been invaded is to endorse the idea that freedom of the press ought to be limited in times of danger—an odd position, to say the least, for a group dedicated to protecting the rights of journalists to take.

Deteriorating democracy

By ordinary standards, the position of the press in Ukraine has not improved in the past year, but dramatically worsened. In an exhaustive article, Branko Marcetic (Jacobin, 2/25/23) thoroughly outlined how democratic institutions have deteriorated in Ukraine as a result of the war. Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian political scientist at the University of Ottawa, told Marcetic:

“[President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy used the Russian invasion and the war as a pretext to eliminate most of the political opposition and potential rivals for power, and to consolidate his largely undemocratic rule.”

This continues a trend since before the war. In 2021, Zelenskyy had banned the most popular news website in the country, then banned media outlets affiliated with one of the most popular parties in the country. In a case that elicited international condemnation, Vasyl Muravitsky was forced to flee to Finland after being accused of “treason” and allegedly disseminating “anti-Ukrainian” materials. His prosecution began before the war, but has continued in absentia during the invasion.

The trial is happening against a backdrop of wider political repression. Among other wartime measures, Zelenskyy suspended, then banned, 11 opposition parties due to their alleged links with Russia. One of these parties had even held 10% of the seats in the Ukrainian parliament before the move. Journalists and anyone else with a political opinion are well aware of the consequences of speaking out, and the pressures have only intensified.

One Ukrainian scholar told Marcetic:

“All Ukrainian journalists and bloggers who did not want to promote Zelenskyy’s version of “truth” had to either shut up (voluntarily or under duress) or, if possible, emigrate.”

Consolidated TV

International Federation of Journalists president Dominique Pradalié Media (1/17/23): “Freedom and pluralism are in danger in Ukraine under the new media law.”

In July, Zelenskyy consolidated television organizations into a single, government-controlled channel. In a widely criticized move, Zelenskyy signed a law that expanded the ability of the state regulator, controlled by Zelenskyy and his party, to issue fines, revoke licenses and prevent publication for media organizations.

The top Ukrainian journalists’ unions opposed the law. The head of one union warned that

“government officials will declare those who disagree with their vision to be enemies of the country or foreign agents. This perspective of state and political regulation of the media is in total contradiction with the desire of Ukrainian civil society for European integration.”

The International Federation of Journalists called on the European Commission and Council of Europe to review the measure. The Committee to Protect Journalists repeatedly called on the Ukrainian government to drop the bill, warning that it “imperils press freedom in the country by tightening government control over information.”

Unlike other international journalism-centered NGOs, Reporters Without Borders offered praise for the bill. In a blog post titled “RSF Hails Ukraine’s Adoption of New Media Law, Despite War with Russia” (1/11/23), it wrote that the law was “generally welcomed by Ukrainian journalists.” This praise was based on minor provisions that were required for Ukrainian admission to the European Union, as it “harmonize[d] Ukrainian legislation with European law.”

This was acknowledged as a positive move by the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU), one of the unions opposed to the bill. But as NUJU made clear, journalists objected to the enormous control given to the state media regulators, not these less important provisions.

RSF acknowledged these measures, but euphemistically described them as “co-regulatory mechanisms that facilitate a dialogue between the media regulator and the media”; it wrote that the provisions “expand[ed] the media regulator’s powers,” but offered only muted criticism, suggesting that “to guarantee the regulator’s full independence…the process for its appointing members needs to be changed.” While it noted that this could be done by “amend[ing] the constitution,” it tellingly acknowledged that these changes were “impossible as long as martial law…is still in effect.”

Banning media—with improvement

RSF’s obfuscation and whitewashing of the law carried into its 2023 Press Freedom Index report for Ukraine, which merely says of the law, “A new media law that was adopted in late 2022 after years of preparation is designed to bring Ukraine in line with European media legislation.”

In the report, RSF acknowledged some repression:

“Media regarded as pro-Kremlin were banned by presidential decree, and access to Russian social media was restricted. This has intensified since the start of Russia’s invasion. Media carrying Russian propaganda have been blocked.”

RSF even acknowledged that “the application of martial law sometimes results in reporting restrictions for journalists.” To RSF, however, this increase in censorship does not overshadow the improvements in Ukraine’s media environment, as embodied by the EU-compliant regulations, so it gave the country a higher score than last year.

Looking at previous years of RSF index reports, the language hasn’t changed much since the 2021 index, which reads:

“Ukraine has a diversified media landscape…. Much more is needed to loosen the oligarchs’ tight grip on the media, encourage editorial independence and combat impunity for crimes of violence against journalists.”

In the 2022 report, this changed to “Ukraine’s media landscape is diverse, but remains largely in the grip of oligarchs who own all of the national TV channels.” The report criticized the Russian invasion for replacing the media in occupied areas with Kremlin propaganda. There was no criticism of the government’s consolidation of control, or the deteriorating political situation.

‘Front line of resistance’

The latest RSF report downgraded Russia’s already low standing, from 155th to 164th place (38.82 to 34.77). Its report on Russia began, appropriately, by noting what the Russian government had done to the press:

“Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, almost all independent media have been banned, blocked and/or declared “foreign agents” or “undesirable organizations.”

The report on Ukraine, by contrast, began by talking about Russia:

The war launched by Russia on 24 February 2022 threatens the survival of the Ukrainian media. In this “information war,” Ukraine stands at the front line of resistance against the expansion of the Kremlin’s propaganda system.

This framing allows RSF to present the banning of “media regarded as pro-Kremlin” as an act of “resistance” rather than repression.

Rising score ‘a joke’

Political scientist Gerald Sussman called Ukraine’s rising score “a joke,” especially when the “US ranking dropped to No. 45 (from 42).” (RSF cited states’ efforts to restrict reporters’ access to public spaces, among other issues.) Sussman has extensively studied the role of seemingly independent international NGOs in pushing US-centric, market-oriented values around the world. He connected RSF’s Press Freedom score to other “Freedom” indexes, like Freedom House’s “democracy score,” which often judges “democracy” according to market standards. “Groups with the name ‘freedom’ in their title are almost always conservative,” Sussman stated in a statement to FAIR.

Freedom House has yet to release its 2023 democracy scores, though its 2022 report criticized Ukraine for pre-war repression, citing “imposition of sanctions on several domestic journalists and outlets on national security grounds, leading to three TV channels being taken off the air.” As we noted, RSF had no such critique.

Reporters Without Borders is a prestigious international institution, respected by many in the world of media and human rights. Unfortunately, like many in the media, it appears to have taken on the role of cheerleader for Ukraine in the proxy war, abandoning the pretense of being an objective monitor.

In Ukraine, the past year has been devastating for a country already struggling with media repression. RSF’s denial of reality does nothing to actually help Ukraine, but downplaying these problems will only further imperil press freedoms.