NATO deserves attention both in terms of its current activities in Afghanistan and because of the current debates revolving around NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia. NATO’s quest for a new identity since the end of the Cold War has rightly resulted in much debate about the utility of the Alliance in a world with contemporary threats that can no longer be defined by East and West. Several articles published recently at the Atlantic Community provide an excellent framework for anchoring discussions around NATO.

Andre Kelleners, a member of the Atlantic Community, argues that rather than sidelining Russia, NATO membership states should consult with Russia to determine a common understanding of NATO’s role. It makes sense, he contends, for Partnership-for-Peace countries to eventually join the alliance as full members, but only together with and at the same time as Russia. It is in all parties’ best interest for NATO and Russia to share the same vision.

Andreas Umland of the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, continued the debate about when and how to offer a Membership Action Plan (MAP) to Ukraine. He highlighted the February 2008 statistics which revealed that a staggering 53% of Ukraine’s population were against NATO membership and only 21% in favor. He blames NATO rather than Germany for this statistic, saying that NATO “has done too little too late in terms of explaining to Ukrainians what NATO is about. Instead, Ukraine's political and public discourse remains corrupted by Soviet legacies.”

Timo Noetzel and Benjamin Schreer of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin focus the discussion around NATO on the difficulties which NATO is currently facing in Afghanistan and argue that the chances are high that the Alliance will fail. NATO, they contend, is both politically and militarily ill-prepared to execute the required counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan. An Afghan disaster might not be a death sentence for the Alliance, but would certainly have major repercussions.

Kester Kenn Klomegah | Moscow | April 26

IPS - New efforts have been launched to curb human trafficking across Russia and the ex-Soviet republics. The Moscow office of the International Organisation of Migration is implementing a programme 'Prevention of Human Trafficking' jointly financed by the European Commission, the U.S. State Department and the Swiss government, adapting features of counter-trafficking legislation in the European Union to bridge gaps in Russian law.

According to United Nations estimates, 20 million migrants pass through the region every year. "Russia serves as a main transit country from Asia to the European Union, and it (Russia) has a significant amount of internal trafficking from smaller towns and villages to regional city centres, both for labour and sexual exploitation," said Lauren McCarthy of the University of Wisconsin. Many people look to leave poorer countries like Moldova, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The wish to migrate is then exploited by traffickers.

Trafficking for forced labour (other than forced prostitution) is the main form of trafficking in the region, in particular central Asia. Law enforcement responses, however, tend to focus on sex trafficking which often involves young women trafficked to western Europe, the Middle East and Russia.

Dennis Overbye | Honolulu, Hawaii | March 29

NYT - Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

Might this be the solution, one we've all been eagerly awaiting, to the dilemma of power facing Vladimir Putin? Sources indicate that Putin and Lukashenko (Belarussian president) will soon announce a more formal union? Might it be a union that would require a complete constitutional overhaul? Perhaps, if, of course, that is what Volodya wants. Of course, historically, when the US adopted a new state it didn't require a whole 'nuther constitution. Same with the European Union for that matter. The petitioning state, of course, must adopt the acquis d'communautaire but it's not like Javier Solana, or whoever is president at the time, gets a new lease on political life--and power. But we are talking about Russia, home of the eternally cynical and pessimistic. I mean the last good thing to happen to Russia was . . .

Anyway, at the very least, it fans the flames of rumor concerning Putin's real succession plans.

Speaking of said plans, Friday night I was at a party (I know, it's scandalous that I was actually out and enjoying life! Who knew?) with a whole bunch of Belarussians, Professors of Russian here in Austin and Russian students--my buddy is a grad-student in Slavic studies. The conversation about yaiishkii notwithstanding (if you don't know what yaiishkii are, don't ask!), the other more newsworthy but less, erm, interesting discussion centered on just what Putin plans to do. My thoughts were firmly in the 'he'll be prime minister' vein appointing a figurehead now that he has a parliamentary supermajority in place, but others really thought he might step down and appoint a protege. (The Belarussians in attendance were firmly in this camp. Lukashenko anyone?) Never mind that no one could, of course, identify a single prominent Russian with the necessary gravitas by name. Alas, that would be too precise, I suppose, in an environment overflowing with beer and margaritas--no vodka, we are in Texas.

But this news? It's interesting, no? More speculation for the rumor mill.

Moscow | Moscow | Oct 2

dpa - Gazprom Tuesday said it would limit deliveries of gas to Ukraine, if Kiev does not pay accounts for fuel delivered to the end of October, the firm's official spokesman Sergey Kupryanov told the Russian news agency, Interfax.

Kupryanov said that the Russian gas monopolist had carried out its contractual commitments, but Ukraine had 'systematically defaulted on its terms of the contract.'

'Ukraine's debt amounts to more than 1.3 billion dollars,' he was quoted by Interfax as saying.

'Gazprom repeatedly raised the question of prompt repayment to Ukraine, but there is no action on the part of the government,' said Kupryanov, according to the Interfax report.

Russia's ambassador to Ukraine Viktor Chernomudrin said on Tuesday that the price of Russian gas to Ukraine would depend on the structure of the country's new cabinet, following elections, the website Lenta.ru reported.

I’ve been pondering this question for awhile. Is it just me or is the world abandoning rationality? People in the public sphere seem to be talking gibberish, but no one cares, or maybe they don’t notice. Up is down and black is white. I found out I am not alone in wondering about my sanity. The author William Rivers Pitt has written in truthout this article titled “I May Have Gone Insane.” At last, someone else has noticed and is fighting with the daily struggle of compartmentalizing thoughts we had pre-Bush from those we must entertain now.

Pitt has been driven to accept the “… premise that the Bush administration has literally been trying to shatter elemental reality on planet Earth...” His litany of evidence includes of course the constant refrain from the administration that the Iraq War is about freedom and is not a civil war; we are in fact winning. But he goes on to cite the Vice President’s assertion that he lives in some netherworld between two branches of government; the administration’s efforts to suspend habeas corpus and describe it as buttressing our freedoms; the similar claims made about executive secrecy and intensive surveillance of citizens.

Ukraine | September 17

BBC - The authorities in Ukraine have approved a giant steel cover for the radioactive site of the world's worst nuclear disaster - Chernobyl.

Ukraine has hired a French firm to build the structure to replace the crumbling concrete casing put over the reactor after the 1986 accident.

The casing project is expected to cost $1.4bn (£700m).

It will take five years to complete and the authorities say they will then be able to start dismantling the reactor.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko hailed the project:

"Today is probably the first time that we can openly look into the eyes of the national and international community and say that a solution to the problem that has long been called the Chernobyl problem was formally found," he said.

Sept 15

Reuters - U.S. officials will inspect the Qabala anti-missile radar station in Azerbaijan on Sept. 18 as Russia steps up efforts to persuade Washington to form a joint security programme in the ex-Soviet country.

Russia has proposed the idea as an alternative to U.S. plans to install a missile defence system in eastern Europe. A top army official said on Saturday the Qabala station would offer better protection against potential attack from the Middle East.

"Our chief goal is to prevent the deployment of a third anti-missile defence region in eastern Europe, in Poland and the Czech Republic," Major-General Alexander Yakushin, first deputy head of Russia's Space Forces, told a news conference.

"Our main goal (at Qabala) is to adequately respond to those threats that actually exist from a southern direction, and not some future hypothetical threats in 2025."

Minsk, Belarus | Sept 14

AP - Belarus's Supreme Court convicted four army officers of treason and spying for Poland, sentencing them Friday to 7 to 10 years in prison. They could have received the death penalty.

Prosecutors have said the officers transported documents across the border into Poland inside the kind of fire extinguisher that motorists in Belarus are required to keep in their cars.

When the arrests were announced in July, the deputy chief of the Belarussian KGB said that Polish intelligence was eager to obtain information on Russian antimissile defense systems in Belarus, especially long-range S-300 air defense missiles.

The four stood silently in handcuffs as the Supreme Court's military branch read out the verdict.

Belarussian law stipulates that treason is punishable by death; the court did not explain why they instead received prison sentences.

Alex Nicholson | Moscow | August 1

AP - Russia's state-controlled gas monopoly said Wednesday that it will reduce natural gas supplies to Belarus by 45 percent as of Friday after Minsk failed to pay in full for previous gas shipments.

Gazprom tried to allay fears that the decision could reduce gas shipments to Europe through a key transit pipelines that handles about 20 percent of Russia's gas exports.

``Gazprom will take all possible measures for the transportation of Russian gas through the territory of Belarus in full accordance with current obligations before European customers,'' a statement said.

The announcement came after Russia's former Soviet neighbor missed a July 23 deadline for payment of part of an outstanding gas bill. Alexander Ananenkov, Gazprom's acting chief executive, was due to make an announcement about Belarus later Wednesday at Gazprom's Moscow headquarters.

. . . the US Army could ever get away with an ad campaign like this?



Via Danger Room.

. . . this Kosovo plan down the Russian's throat we can expect difficulties in several places, namely: Abkhazia, Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transdneistria. Count on it.

Luke Harding | Moscow | June 6

The Guardian - A mass grave holding the remains of thousands of Jews executed by the Nazis during the second world war has been discovered in southern Ukraine by workers digging pipelines.

The workers stumbled upon the remains by chance last month in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near the Black Sea port of Odessa, Jewish leaders said yesterday.

The discovery provides further chilling evidence of the scale of Nazi brutality in Ukraine, which was occupied by both German and Romanian forces in 1941.

"The workmen were laying gas pipes near the centre of the village. They discovered hair, children's toys, skulls and pieces of clothing," Mr Shvartsman(spokesman for the regional Jewish community) told the Guardian last night.

Cliff Schecter notes that Putin has escalated:

In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to target Europe with missiles, including potentially nuclear weapons, in a dramatic escalation of his Cold War-style showdown with the United States.

Mr. Putin, in an interview at his summer residence outside Moscow, said he considers U.S. plans to build an eastern European anti-missile site to shoot down Iranian missiles a provocation aimed at Russia.

The US has been baiting the bear for a long time now. The only thing that's remarkable is that Putin was this patient. The missile defense systems are a clear provocation and clearly aimed at Russia. America has been interfering far, far too much in Russia's sphere of influence, and this is one of the consequences. America doesn't have any good will in Russia. None. Zero. Nadda. The "shock therapy" and the "color revolutions", NATO "expansion", and all the other bullshit that's been pulled in countries right on their border made sure of that.

Nota bene: For critical background on our relationship with Russia the last few years listen to this podcast interview of Ian and I with Anatol Lieven. ~spk

If we were to start destabilizing a moderately small country here in the Western Hemisphere tomorrow, one very important but not necessarily vital to our national security, would anyone in Washington care? Would anyone in the chanceries of Europe really care? No, and rightfully so. We don't go ape-shit when France topples some tin-pot dictator in Francophonie.

So why is it when Russia does the same thing the US foreign policy elite starts chewing their collective finger nails, fearing the rise of the Russian bear?

(And don't get me started about Turkmenistan, ok?)

Really, in all seriousness, Georgia is a nice place. They've got some great food, but in the grand scheme of world affairs do they really matter all that much to our security?

Registan writes:

Yet another U.S. oil bribe conviction over energy rights in Kazakhstan. Oil company Baker-Hughes apparently paid $4 million in bribes to develop the massive Karachaganak natural gas field in western Kazakhstan. It is (really) small potatoes compared to the reported $78 million James Giffen paid out to Kazakh officials on behalf of several oil companies in the early 2000’s, but that doesn’t matter. Corruption retards economic development.

Yet, the moral outrage here shouldn’t really stem from the bribery, which is, let’s be honest, SOP in much of the developing world. It is really how our courts, which handle these convictions, expect American companies to operate overseas when they can’t grease the gears. It’s not a moral judgment (bribery and corruption are clearly bad things, and if they can be eliminated, they should), but a business one—American companies will not be able to compete if they can’t play on the same playing field. For the time being, that playing field is unspeakably corrupt, driven by bribery and extortion.

Nikola Krastev | NEW YORK | April 30

RFE/RL - The Texas-based oil-services company Baker Hughes pled guilty on April 26 in a U.S. federal court to violating U.S. antibribery provisions, and agreed to pay a fine of $44 million.

One-quarter of the fine covers Baker Hughes' activities developing the huge Karachaganak natural-gas field in northern Kazakhstan.

In the criminal complaint, the Houston federal court alleged that officials of a Baker Hughes subsidiary in Kazakhstan paid $4.1 million in bribes from 2001-03 to an intermediary, who in turn transferred money to a high-level executive of KazakhOil, the state oil company at the time.

[...]

Similarities To 'Kazakhgate'

Baker Hughes' settlement resembles the so-called "Kazakhgate" case, another bribery case in the United States involving Kazakh officials, which continues to move at a snail's pace in the federal courts of New York.

The Kazakhgate complaint alleges that U.S. businessman James Giffen funneled tens of millions of dollars in the 1990s to Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev and former Prime Minister Nurlan Balgimbaev in exchange for lucrative licenses for Western oil-companies.

Yuliya Timoshenko | May/June Issue

Foreign Affairs - Russia's imperial ambitions did not end with the fall of the Soviet Union. The Kremlin has returned to expansionism, trying to recapture great-power status at the expense of its neighbors, warns one of Ukraine's most prominent politicians. The United States and Europe must counter with a strong response -- one that keeps Russia in check without sparking a new Cold War.

Clifford Coonan | Mongolia | April 23

The Independent - A self-taught yak herdsman from Mongolia who forced the closure of polluting mines on the Onggi river is today awarded the world's biggest environmental prize.

The Mongolian yak herder Tsetsegee Munkhbayar loves the Onggi river, which provides his people with water and fish. It broke his heart to watch mining companies transform the waterway of his homeland in the steppes into a poisoned mess as they poured toxic slurry from the mines straight into the river.

Mr Munkhbayar, 40, decided that if he did not act to save his beloved Onggi river nobody would and so he decided to do something about it. Almost singlehandedly, and at considerable personal risk, he took on the mining companies, and it worked. This was the very first time that anyone had stood up for environmental rights in Mongolia, a country which is still opening up after decades of communist rule by the Soviet Union.

Four out of 10 Mongolians are nomadic herdsman and the big debate in the country these days is whether mining is the way of the future or if livestock-rearing, the traditional way the Mongols sustained themselves, is the way forward.

. . . policy you only have to ask yourself one question: is Georgia (the Republic, not the state) worth the life of even one US soldier?

If your answer is yes, well, then you and Dick Cheney have a lot to talk about.

If your answer is no, then you can do no better than to read this long piece by long-time Russia watcher and commentator Anatol Lieven.

Why should you talk to Dick Cheney? Read this:

We should remember that as late as the summer of 1989, a Soviet leader who envisioned Russia as it now exists would have been received with incredulous joy by the West as representing a future beyond our most optimistic dreams. And at that time a Western policymaker who advocated such megalomaniacal, horribly dangerous projects as drawing Ukraine and Georgia into an anti-Russian military alliance, and taking responsibility for their security, would have been regarded as completely insane.

More after the jump.

Luke Harding | Moscow | March 23

The Guardian - Russia's next parliament is likely to be entirely without any genuine opposition after a court in Moscow today banned a leading liberal party from standing in elections.

Russia's supreme court announced that it had liquidated the small Republican party, claiming that it had "violated electoral law". The party is one of very few left in Russia that criticises the country's president, Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Ryzhkov, the leader of the party, said the ban was part of a Kremlin-inspired campaign to crack down on dissent.

"This is part of the Kremlin's policy of suppressing the opposition. It's being done to prevent opposition parties from taking part in elections," he told the Guardian. "This is the fate any opposition party in Russia."

Mr Ryzhkov - one of a handful of independent MPs in the Duma and a leading critic of Mr Putin - said his party would appeal in Russia and to the European court of human rights.

March 19

MosNews - A methane explosion killed 78 miners in a Siberian coal mine on Monday, Russia’s NTV television reported in the evening news program.

The NTV also quoted regional governor Aman Tuleyev as saying that a British citizen was among the missing after the explosion. On the day of the explosion, new equipment was being launched at the mine and all management, including a representative of a British company that supplied the equipment, went into the mine.

“The main task now is to find as many people as possible,” Kemerovo governor Aman Tuleyev said in footage broadcast by the Rossiya television station.

The death toll could climb steeply with more than 40 miners still underground about 10 hours after the blast. Rescue work was being hampered by thick smoke and roof collapses in horizontal shafts that stretched for up to 5 km.

Galina Stolyarova | Moscow/St. Petersburg | March 12

TOL - The count of Russian journalists who die mysteriously keeps rising, but investigators never find the killers.

Each week, Rimma Maximova makes a phone call to the prosecutor’s office in St. Petersburg. And each week she hears the same thing. Staff tell her they have no more information about her son Maxim’s disappearance.

Maxim Maximov was her only child. He became a talented, methodical, and respected investigative journalist. At the time he went missing, aged 41, he was a special correspondent for the St. Petersburg weekly magazine Gorod. Before that he’d been a leading reporter for the Agency for Journalistic Investigations.

But one day in June 2004, Maximov left his apartment apparently planning to be out for only an hour or two. He never returned. No trace of him has ever been found, and no one has been arrested for abducting or killing him.

He is one of more than a dozen journalists believed to have been murdered in Russia because of their work since 2000, the year President Vladimir Putin came to power.

Vladimir Isachenkov | March 6

The Independent - A military correspondent for Russia's top business daily died after falling out of a window and some media alleged yesterday that he might have been killed for his critical reporting.

Ivan Safronov, the military affairs writer for Kommersant, died Friday after falling from a fifth-story window in the stairwell of his apartment building in Moscow, according to officials; his body was found by neighbors shortly after the fall.

With prosecutors investigating the death, Kommersant and some other media suggested foul play.

"The suicide theory has become dominant in the investigation, but all those who knew Ivan Safronov categorically reject it," Kommersant wrote in an article.

Simon Saradzhyan | Moscow | Febraury 9

Moscow Times - When Turkmen voters go to the polls Sunday, they are expected to install acting President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov as the successor to the late leader Saparmurat Niyazov.

Turkmen political watchers say that if Berdymukhammedov is elected, he will keep the gas-rich country on the course set by his authoritarian predecessor, who paid lip service to neutrality while effectively anchoring his country to Russia through gas exports.

"This will be a smooth transition," said Turkmen historian Skhokhrat Kadyrov, adding that the death of Niyazov last December had been anticipated for some time.