Russia & Former USSR Archives - Page 11 of 15

July 31, 2014

Moscow fights back after sanctions | Reuters

From By Polina Devitt and Gabriela Baczynska at Reuters:

The first European economic victims of the trade war were Polish apple growers, who sell more than half their exports to Russia. Moscow is by far the biggest importer of EU fruit and vegetables, buying more than 2 billion euros’ worth a year.Russia said the ban, covering most Polish fruit and vegetables, was for sanitary reasons and it would look into expanding it to the rest of the EU.

Please buy Polish apples.

July 29, 2014

Cold War Strategies Are Back in Russia’s Playbook | The Moscow Times

From Alexander Golts, deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal:

Russia is becoming a lonely pariah without alliances or military might, other than its nuclear weapons. And without any other easy means of achieving its objectives, I am afraid that the Kremlin will constantly try to prove it is just crazy enough to use its nuclear weapons. In short, Russia is turning into a second North Korea, only much, much larger, and far more dangerous.

July 28, 2014

Let the Past Collapse on Time! by Vladimir Sorokin | The New York Review of Books

From Vladimir Sorokin:

Yeltsin, who was tired after climbing to the top of the pyramid, left the structure completely undisturbed, but brought an heir along with him: Putin, who immediately informed the population that he viewed the collapse of the USSR as a geopolitical catastrophe. He also quoted the conservative Alexander III, who believed that Russia had only two allies: the army and the navy. The machine of the Russian state moved backward, into the past, becoming more and more Soviet every year.

In my view, this fifteen-year journey back to the USSR under the leadership of a former KGB lieutenant colonel has shown the world the vicious nature and archaic underpinnings of the Russian state’s “vertical power” structure, more than any “great and terrible” Putin….A country such as this cannot have a predictable, stable future….

Unpredictability has always been Russia’s calling card, but since the Ukrainian events, it has grown to unprecedented levels: no one knows what will happen to our country in a month, in a week, or the day after tomorrow. I think that even Putin doesn’t know; he is now hostage to his own strategy of playing “bad guy” to the West…..If you compare the post-Soviet bear to the Soviet one, the only thing they have in common is the imperial roar. However, the post-Soviet bear is teeming with corrupt parasites that infected it during the 1990s, and have multiplied exponentially in the last decade. They are consuming the bear from within. Some might mistake their fevered movement under the bear’s hide for the working of powerful muscles. But in truth, it’s an illusion.

Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell.

July 27, 2014

Calm before the storm as Europe poised to join economic war against Russia – Telegraph Blogs

From Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

Vladimir Putin

Russia is battening down the hatches. The central bank was forced to raise interest rates this morning to 8pc to defend the rouble and stem capital flight, $75bn so far this year and clearly picking up again.

The strange calm on the Russian markets is starting to break as investors mull the awful possibility that Europe will impose sanctions after all, shutting Russian banks out of global finance.

…Lars Christensen from Danske Bank said the inflexion point will come if the EU does in fact impose “Tier III” measures aimed at crippling the Russian banking system, as now seems likely. “That is when the lights will turn off for the Russian market. We will see capital flight of a whole different nature,” he said.

The world is entering a dangerous phase. Having escalated the conflict in Eastern Ukraine into a proxy war, the Kremlin seems unwilling or unable to back down despite rising US and EU sanctions. This is not another Afghanistan. The stakes are far higher. The 100th anniversary of the outbreak of WWI reminds us that Eastern Europe is a tinder box for major global conflicts. While a ‘hot war’ is unlikely — both sides have too much to lose — Eastern Ukraine could well ignite another cold war. Peace proves elusive.

Peace is an armistice in a war that is continuously going on.

~ Thucydides ( c. 460 – c. 395 BC), History of the Peloponnesian War

July 26, 2014

It started with a Super Bowl ring, now Putin is taking whole countries

Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, says Vladimir Putin stole his prize Super Bowl ring in 2005:

“I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring.’ I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

Kraft revealed that he hadn’t intended to part with his prize from the Patriots’ win over the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XXXIX. He claims that a call from the White House kept him from attempting to recover it. The official overcame Kraft’s objections, repeatedly saying:

It would really be in the best interest of US-Soviet relations if you meant to give the ring as a present.

This may have been a mistake by the Bush administration, considering that Vladimir Putin has graduated to seizing parts of Georgia, the Crimea and now has his eyes on Eastern Ukraine. As Winston Churchill would have said:

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.

July 18, 2014

Flight MH17: The smoking gun

The following tweet and video purportedly show a BUK surface-to-air missile system being moved by UKR rebels from the area near the MH17 crash site — with two empty missile tubes.

Video of UKR rebels moving BUK system away from area where plane was downed; it only has 2 of 4 missiles left http://t.co/1RnjKwtkEG

— grasswire (@grasswire) July 18, 2014

Hat tip to The Interpreter

July 18, 2014

MH17 is the third plane this week shot down over Ukraine under mysterious circumstances – Vox

From Max Fisher:

…at first, people were wondering if rebels even had the capability to shoot down a high-flying commercial airliner like MH17. But there was another incident just on Monday, July 14, that did not get very much attention at the time. That day, over eastern Ukraine, an Antonov AN-26 Ukrainian military transport plane was hit by a missile while flying over eastern Ukraine — at 21,000 feet altitude. That’s far beyond the range of a shoulder-fired system like the MANPADS.

July 17, 2014

Malaysia Airlines MH17 crash: Deleted posts suggest Ukraine rebels downed jet in error

From The Straits Times:

…a message on the official Twitter account of the Donetsk People’s Republic had announced hours earlier that insurgents had seized a series of Russian-made Buk systems capable of soaring to that height.

“@dnrpress: self-propelled Buk surface-to-air missile systems have been seized by the DNR from Ukrainian surface-to-air missile regiment A1402,” said the post.

That tweet was later deleted as well.

July 17, 2014

What We Know So Far About the Passenger Jet Shot Down in Ukraine

From Elias Groll & Reid Standish:

Update: 1:10 p.m.Prior to the Malaysian Airlines jet’s shoot down, pro-Russian separatist leader Igor Strelkov posted on the Russian social networking site, VKontakte, claiming responsibility for shooting down a Ukrainian AN-26 transport plane. However, after news emerged of the downed Malaysian Airlines plane, Strelkov’s page appears to have been scrubbed of the post.Strelkov’s page claimed responsibility for taking down a Ukrainian jet and posted and accompanying video that shows smoke rising from what is now believed to be the crash site of the passenger jet. Below is a screengrab of Strelkov’s VKonkakte page that includes the post claiming responsibility for the downed transport plane. That post now appears to have been removed. Donetsk separatist boss Strelkov, Kremlin’s proxy in war, says he ordered shootdown thinking plane was Ukrainian pic.twitter.com/uaWKVlsA7q — Strobe Talbott @strobetalbott July 17, 2014 After reports emerged that a passenger jet had been shot down, Strelkov said that his forces were not responsible and that they lacked the capability to shoot down a plane flying at that altitude. The plane was reportedly flying at an altitude of about 33,000 feet.Meanwhile, additional images are emerging of the crash site, including the horrifying image below that was carried by Russian television:

July 3, 2014

Enough to make Gazputin grin

Chinese stocks drift lower
Crude oil rising
Other commodities weak

China’s Shanghai Composite Index continues to drift lower on the long-term, monthly chart.

Shanghai Composite Index

Apart from crude oil, commodity prices have fared little better. But crude plays such a dominant role in most commodity indices that they appear more buoyant. Dow Jones-UBS Commodity Index rallied to 140 before retracing for another test of primary support. Oscillation of 13-week Twiggs Momentum around zero, however, does not suggest a significant trend.

Dow Jones UBS Commodities Index

Crude oil is doing a lot better, heading for another test of $110/barrel on the back of supply threats from geo-political tensions. The ascending triangle is very large, but breakout would suggest a long-term target of the 2008 high at $145*.

Brent Crude and Nymex Crude

* Target calculation: 110 + ( 110 – 75 ) = 145

…Enough to make even Gazputin grin.