"Volzhsky orgsintez" was returned to the state
August 25, 11:20
"Volzhsky orgsintez" was returned to the state
On August 24, the Arbitration Court of the Volgograd Region satisfied the claim of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, which demanded the return to the treasury of property previously owned by the state in the form of 100% of the shares of Volzhsky Orgsintez JSC.
The lawsuit was filed against the current sole owner of the Volzhsky Orgsintez plant, Alexander Sobolevsky. The Prosecutor General's Office demanded that 2,344,925 shares of the enterprise be withdrawn and returned to the state, since the plant is of strategic importance for the economy and the military-industrial complex of Russia.
The reason is gross violations committed during the privatization of the plant.
“The Russian Federation, as the owner of a state-owned enterprise, did not privatize it, did not transfer the authority to own, use and dispose of this property of the Volgograd Region. Despite the above,The State Property Fund of the Volgograd Region in the period from September 1993 to 1996 illegally distributed property belonging to the Russian Federation in the form of securities, transferring them in favor of third parties, including residents of foreign states, ”the statement of claim says .
Immediately after accepting the claim for consideration on July 25, at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office, the court ruled on the application of interim measures - the property of the enterprise was seized, and the owner and management were forbidden to perform certain actions.
According to some information, earlier the owner of the enterprise could have plans to eliminate the production of aniline, which is strategically important for the military-industrial complex of Russia - this compound is used to make explosives.
In addition to aniline, Volzhsky Orgsintez also produces civilian products, such as methionine, an additive for animal feed, as well as flotation reagents, carbon disulfide, and gasoline additives.
The plant is located in Volzhsky, Volgograd Region, is one of the ten largest taxpayers in the region and is one of the most powerful enterprises in the country's chemical complex. Its team is about 1500 people.
At the same time, claims were made against the current and former owners of Volzhsky Orgsintez more than once, including those related to the redistribution of property and non-payment of large amounts of taxes and fines. It was also discussed that Western, in particular, German companies could participate in the chain of ownership.
Suddenly, the market did not decide again.
And how many more of the same, illegally transferred enterprises were illegally transferred to outsiders, including foreign persons in the "holy 90s."
About Ilyin and "Putin's fascism"
No. 8/84.VIII.2023
They say that Ilyin's philosophy is proof of fascisization.
And what, Ilyin went to the people? A bunch of ideological followers? Yes, even officials do not read Ilyin for career reasons. Not like the people. I'll tell you a secret: even the Institute of Philosophy laughs at Putin's attempts to find "Russian ideology" in Ilyin. And they get paid for it. There is an attempt with unsuitable means, but there is no fascism as such. Fascism is terrible not because of the existence of an ideology, or ideologues, or some kind of sects (and the Putin-Surkov club of Ilyin lovers is nothing more than a miserable sect), but by how massively it embraces the population. And the population did not embrace these ideas. Even more - the population refracts all this turbidity through the prism of the national shame of the 90s and considers Putin's policy to be the reincarnation of the Soviet Union. Putin's attempts to instill in the Russians a "national ideology" from above actually failed. Even if Ilyin will be studied in schools (twice ha!), then do you seriously expect from the "children of the Unified State Examination" some kind of serious study of anything? The school is in a rather miserable state, and no matter what you study, the result will be about the same deplorable. And even more so when it comes to confused and delusional concepts (did you read Ilyin yourself? Half of it was written clearly under hallucinogens). At best, for career reasons, they will learn to mimic Ilyin who read, the more they actually read something and the more they somehow comprehend. So Putin's jumping with a volume of a Hitler-lover never says that someone will fulfill the ideas described in this volume. Actually, even Putin's speechwriters read Ilyin very superficially, and therefore they drag quotes that contradict each other.
What, in practice, is it possible to implement something from Ilyin's ideas? No. And how to implement? There is no mass force, except for the state apparatus, behind Putin. United Russia is a pariah of unprincipled careerists much more than ideological fighters for anything. There is one idea - to grab from the Russian state personally into your pocket. They can’t even portray anything sensible for money, let alone carry out something consistently. Youth movements? These are even more grants from the Russian state, almost everything is an imitation there. They gather crowds of young people not with ideas, but with completely commercial offers to receive 1-2-3 thousand rubles and roll up on a ball to Moscow on Red Square for a walk, take pictures. No matter how much I spoke with ordinary and non-ordinary MGERs, they don’t even really know why they are and for what reason they are standing. They just don't explain. Mr. Goebbels would definitely not have allowed such a disgrace, but the Surkovs-Volodins - yes, easily. Well, Putin will wave a volume of a Hitler-loving philosopher, so what? In fact, there are no ideas. What “ordinary quilted jackets” are fighting for is a rather complex complex of eclecticism, in which there are ideas laid down by Soviet ethics, and layering of market pragmatism, and national traumas of the 90s, and much more, and to say that this is all entirely and completely for Putin, it is also impossible, because there, rather, is a form of utopian socialism, sharply negatively opposed to Putin's oligarchy.
That is, the fascist state of Putin's Russia can at best cosplay . For it was not even possible to form an intelligent fascist party.
At the same time, in Ukraine, fascism is EXCELLENTLY ORGANIZED STATELY and has a broad mass base in the form of a bunch of frankly Nazi public organizations, almost every one of which is backed by one or another nationalist battalion and which organized PRACTICAL MASS TERROR with death squads and extrajudicial killings, in contrast to pitiful attempts Putin on the repression of some especially zealous liberals. If you were sitting in / in Ukraine and would write something in favor of Russia or simply against it, then the guys from Azov or some Zaporizhzhya Sich would already be pounding at your door. And they might not have been brought to the place of detention.
I paid a visit to fraternal Belarus. Dropped by for just a few days.
Quite an interesting experience is to visit the places of the 2020 coup attempt, which were frequent guests of my online hot August 2020. The bullet then, as they say, whistled at the temple of Belarus, but passed by. Thanks to Lukashenka's resilience and Russian help, the Old Man survived and the country still maintains peace and stability. An alternative can be observed in Ukraine.
I haven't been to Belarus for 32 years. The only visit was in 1991, when I went to the Chess Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR, which was held in Brest in March 1991.
From that trip, purely positive impressions remained - the republic was remembered as very neat and green, he himself played well at the tournament (although he could have done better), for the first time he watched Star Wars in the Brest cinema. And finally, he visited the Brest Fortress itself, which is so firmly imprinted in memory and memorable, even 32 years after the visit.
The main impression of Minsk after 32 years is a very neat and green city with almost Moscow monumental architecture in the center. It's a pity there was no time to visit the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, that's for another time. Many skyscrapers and glass buildings have appeared since then.
I was on a couple of broadcasts on Belarusian TV - they will come out next week - there will be about the war in Ukraine, PMC Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin and about the transformation of the world order.
The consequences of the state coup attempt in the center of Minsk were not noticed. As if there was nothing. The bosses are now either in jail or have fled abroad. Fans of bchb are now clearly perceived as the direct heirs of the Belarusian collaborators of the Second World War. For especially stupid people, this was all demonstrated in Ukraine. In bookstores you can find anti-bchb-literature, where they go through the actual - fugitives, collaborators and other riff-raff.
The people are calm and unhurried. The country lives a peaceful life, although threats at its borders are growing. There is great interest in the events at the front in Ukraine, as well as in the general course of the new Cold War. I also met Belarusian colleagues on the Telega. Lukashenko did not see any visible cult of personality, as various demos sometimes try to assure him. He himself was surprised that he had not seen a single portrait of Lukashenka anywhere in a public place. Although a significant part of the surrounding reality there was formed precisely by his works.
The prices are acceptable. Cheaper than in Moscow. Although Bishkek will certainly be cheaper. The food is delicious. Well, where without dranniks.
The only thing is that in the hotel where I lived in Minsk, there were serious problems with Wi-Fi, it regularly fell off + mobile Internet was constantly streaming (hence the appearance in fits and starts). Perhaps there are jammers in the center. Got a little internet detox.
In general, I did not regret that I went. I hope that over time there will be an opportunity to come here for a longer time, visit the museum of the Great Patriotic War, go to Khatyn and the Brest Fortress.
New Russia-baiting provocations from Latvia
August 31, 2023
In past articles going back to 2014 when I visited Riga for its celebrations as Cultural Capital of Europe, I spoke out against Latvia’s defiance of the human rights provisions of the EU’s acquis making it the Apartheid State of the European Continent. The issue centered on the stripping of Latvian citizenship of most of its Russian speakers when Latvia became a sovereign state in 1991.
The principle invoked in the citizenship law was to exclude all those who had not been Latvians before the outbreak of WWII. It was directed against the large numbers of Russian speakers who settled in Latvia after the war when the Latvian SSR attracted workers to its burgeoning industrial plants and port facilities, as well as many military families posted to naval installations there.
Over the course of decades, the Russian speakers were integrated into Latvian society and when the USSR was at the point of break-up, many stood by their ethnic Latvian co-citizens in the struggle for independence from Moscow, including in armed struggle. This much was openly admitted to me in 2014 in a conversation I had with the deputy mayor of Riga in charge of the Cultural Capital events, who said that the citizenship decisions of 1991 were a mistake, but a mistake that could not now be corrected since it would be seen as a concession to Putin.
The effect of the citizenship laws dating from the independence of Latvia meant, in practice, that more than 300,000 Russian speakers who were officially registered as Latvians in their Soviet passports now became stateless. The stateless numbered about 15% of the overall population, and a considerably higher percentage of the capital, Riga. The intent was clearly to force an ethnic cleansing.
As non-citizens, the Russian speakers were subjected to harsh economic and social restrictions. Their rights to own property were circumscribed. Their access to certain professions such as banking was barred. A ceiling was put in place on their ability to rise into positions of responsibility in business. This Apartheid situation was understood by members of the European Union committee who studied Latvia’s candidacy for admission to the Union in 2004, but in the political horse-trading that made possible the invitation of 10 new Member States in that year, the flagrant violation of the acquis by Latvia was overlooked.
The ethnic cleansing measures of the Latvian lawmakers did not produce the results intended. The vast majority of Latvia’s Russian speakers did not leave the country. The logical destination for emigration, the Russian Federation, was during the 1990s in the midst of economic, social and political disintegration and had no resources to allocate to facilitate inbound Latvians. Even Russia’s own returning soldiers and officers from East Germany were given no proper lodgings or financial support. And so Latvia’s stateless Russian speakers stayed put. And year after year, in the new millennium the authorities piled on new discriminatory legislation to make their situation more intolerable. New language laws progressively restricted and then banned the use of Russian in the schools and institutions of higher learning. Various organizations of the stateless demonstrated against these changes but to no avail.
That is the background for what I am about to describe: the forced expulsion from Latvia of some of the Russian speakers by the Latvian authorities that begins tomorrow, 1 September.
So far, the absolute numbers of those about to be expelled are only 5,000 – 6,000 because the latest measure is directed against residence card holders who also hold passports of the Russian Federation and who have not passed exams proving their mastery of the Latvian language. As a secondary condition to be spared deportation, the targeted group is obliged to submit in writing their condemnation of the policies of the Russian Federation with respect to the war in Ukraine. Under the terms of the relevant Latvian legislation, letters will go out tomorrow ordering the recipients to leave the country within three months.
As a practical matter, Russian authorities say that the expulsions are directed primarily at pensioners who have spent decades as citizens, then as officially documented residents of Latvia.
It is fair to say that this latest turning of the screws against the Russian speaking population in Latvia portends further Russophobic outrages in the country.
I bring the issue to your attention, because your voice of protest is solicited. An appeal to various international organizations charged with protecting human rights awaits further signatories. The appeal is directed to the High Commissioner of the United Nations for Human Rights F. Türk, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe D. Mijatović and the High Commissioner of the OSCE for national minorities, K. Abdrakhmanov. Anyone interested in joining this appeal should send me a message via the Contact function of this site and I will put them in touch with the Appeal’s organizers.
For those who still don't get it and do not want to see the reality of SMO. This is Torfyanovka border crossing facility at Russian-Finnish border.
We crossed it twice--once on the way to St. Petersburg from Helsinki, once--other way around. There are busses between St. Petersburg and Helsinki. Nice, comfortable (with the toilet) busses. Every single vehicle stops both on Finnish and Russian check points, people disembark and go through customs and passport control. In Russia it is run, naturally, by Border Guards of FSB RF. Checks are thorough. And here is this illustration: once we all disembarked on Russian side (for entry) we, as American citizens, have been singled out (the only people from G-7 on the bus) and pushed ahead of everybody in the line. It was expected and FSB spoke to us for about 20 minutes while everyone was getting checked. After that and thorough check of our phones we have been let go.
And here is illustration: the only other non-Russian citizen persons who have been pushed even ahead of us have been a young mother and her son of about 10 years. Both had Ukrainian passports. Well, guess what--after 15-20 minutes of questioning they have been led inside service facilities and, as a result, they have been taken from the bus. Why, you may ask. Well, the explanation is filthy simple--under this "brotherly people" BS premise Russia, together with millions of genuinely displaced people allowed into the country a huge number of Ukies who hate Russian guts and continue their both passive and active "resistance"--a euphemism for sabotage and terrorism--against Russia. FSB has its hands full with detecting and eliminating a huge number of sleeper cells run by SBU and GUR under control of MI6, CIA and others on Russian territory and this involves, and you have guessed it by now, a large number of mid to short range drone operators who constantly try, and sometimes succeed, to attack Russia's infrastructure.
Many people still cannot wrap their brains around the fact that Russia's European part ALONE--the territory where 80% of Russians live and work--is almost 4 million square kilometers or 1.5+ million square miles. To give a proper comparison--it is almost the area of a whole European Union. So, make your own conclusion what it means to control such a territory (including newly added administrative subjects of 404)--even the best ISR means (and Russia DOES have best ISR means) do not guarantee detecting a group of saboteurs who can move into the launch area with hidden prepositioned or simply carried 10-12 drones and launch them at any target. Even modified 45 minutes endurance commercial drone with about 0.5 kilo of explosives attached to it gives you a range of about 40-50 kilometers. Let's recall middle school geometry: A=3.14 x 50^2 = 3.14 x 2,500= 7,853 square kilometers one must search and detect.
If we re talking about drones with the range of 100 kilometers it gives you, consequently, the area of 31,400 square kilometers to control and search and here we are talking about equivalent of the territory of... Belgium. So, good luck opening the Theory of Search, together with the Theory of Probability, Statistics and the math and physics of modern ISR means and there you go--you may finally understand that technology alone is NOT enough, especially in the country covered with forests. One MUST have a superb human intel on the ground and the network of informants. In case of Russia we are talking about thousands upon thousands possible and highly probable Ukie saboteurs who are... drum roll--Russian citizens. Russia IS NOT going to do American Japanese "thingy" of 1940s.
And now that you know these very simple facts you may appreciate the issue of Operational Sweeps, Probability Density Maps, sensor fusion and human intel, among many other things, which may help to understand the scale and the scope Russia's military-intel community faces in mitigating 404 (NATO's, really) threats. THERE WILL BE leakers, the sabotage will continue such as attacks on Pskov or Moscow, or Rostov-on-Don et al, and some will get lucky--it is inevitable in case of the scale of the events unfolding in a front of our eyes. It is simple as that. And that is why this Ukrainian woman and her son have been taken off the bus and have been led for thorough check. We learned later that after the checks have been completed she and her (now identified and confirmed) son have been put on the next bus to Russia.
The situation in Moldova for August 22-29
August 29, 2023
Rybar
Foreign policy
Export of Ukrainian agricultural products
Moldovan Prime Minister Dorin Recean met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev . One of the main topics of the talks was the discussion of "the development of Ukrainian food transit through Moldova" and the creation of an appropriate infrastructure for it.
Earlier, Romania announced its readiness to ensure transit through its ports of more than 60% of the total volume of Ukrainian grain exports, doubling it.
Moldova is a link in this supply chain, which is hurting local farmers who are on the verge of mass bankruptcy due to a collapse in prices. In addition, Moldovan farmers do not have the opportunity to fully transport and store their products due to congestion in the transport network.
Maia Sandu wants to solve this problem with urgent Western investments in the country's railway and port infrastructure.
Political forum in Athens
President Maia Sandu was invited to Athens for a forum of Southeast European and Western Balkan officials hosted by Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis .
Main topic of discussion is the expansion of logistics for exports from Ukraine, which includes Moldova as a transit territory.
Sandu held a meeting with Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis, where they discussed Greek investments in the Moldovan economy, as well as cooperation between countries in the energy sector: the contract of the Moldovan company Energocom with the Greek operator DEPA for the supply of natural gas was mentioned. The parties also agreed to open a direct flight between Athens and Chisinau.
In Greece, Sandu also met with President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky : in the public part of the meeting, the prospects for joint European integration of the countries were discussed.
Integration with Romania
The United States Agency for International Development ( USAID ) handed over to the state operator of electricity transmission systems Moldelectrica a batch of drones worth $1 million
The 10 drones are said to be needed to test the operation of high-voltage overhead power lines, for which they will collect detailed aerial photographs over wide areas.
In fact, USAID, cooperating with the Moldovan state operator for more than a decade, has been actively promoting the unification of the electric power system of Moldova with Romania.
Scandal with Goran Bregovic
The famous Serbian musician Goran Bregovic was not allowed into Moldova to participate in the Gustar festival because of his pro-Russian views.
The Serbian Foreign Ministry asked for clarification from the Moldovan authorities: Belgrade called such actions unfriendly. However, the Border Police of Moldova stated at all that Bregovic was banned from entering the country as early as 2022.
Interior setting
Regions and the crisis of central government
In Gagauzia, the central authorities were accused of systematic infringement of the rights of autonomy. The deputies of the People's Assembly (PNG) called the interference in the field of education of the autonomy unlawful: new amendments to the Code of Education of Moldova now regulate the procedures for appointing the head of the education department of Gagauzia.
In addition, the phrase “Republic of Gagauzia” uttered by Dmitry Konstantinov , Chairman of the People’s Assembly of the Gagauz autonomy, caused a resonance in the Moldovan information field. a resonance in the Moldovan information field .
Later, the politician noted that he did not support the secession of Gagauzia, but did not exclude the desire of the inhabitants of the autonomy and some deputies to get out of the power of Chisinau. At the same time, the NA Speaker called the Moldovans simply “neighbors”, with whom the Gagauz “cooperate well”.
In response, the mayor of Balti, the largest city in the north of the country, Nikolai Grigorishin, demanded the status of autonomy for the municipality, like Gagauzia.
Grigorishin at the rally expressed general dissatisfaction with the government's ban on patent trading, which deprives many citizens of sources to survive in conditions of extreme poverty. The mayor of Beltsov recalled that this law does not work in Gagauzia, since the autonomy has the right to ignore it.
Economy Minister Dmitry Alaiba believes that Balti residents are protesting "at the instigation of the opposition."
The situation in civil aviation
The local civil aviation authority officially revoked Air Moldova 's flight certificate.
The airline extended the pause on flights due to the financial collapse. In April, Air Moldova employees even sent a petition to President Maia Sandu demanding that the national air carrier not collapse.
President's office accuses opposition politician Ilan Shor of bankruptcy of Air Moldova , who is named as the main beneficiary of the company's privatization in 2018.
However, the head of the Power of Farmers Association and ex-deputy Alexandru Slusari recalled that during the several years of its rule, PAS did not comply with the recommendations of the commission of inquiry to cancel the Air Moldova privatization deal.
Another once largest state-owned air carrier from Balti is also in a deplorable state - Moldaeroservice , is also in a deplorable state . Employees have said they have not been paid for more than two and a half years, and the company is in bankruptcy proceedings.
The demonstrative indifference of the Sandu team to the fate of Moldovan civil aviation is similar to its deliberate destruction, the niche of which will be occupied by Western companies.
In parallel with these events, Minister of Economy Dmitry Alaiba said that representatives of the German company Eurowings will visit Moldova next week . The authorities are also negotiating with foreign carriers to open flights to China and the United States.
It is also known about the negotiations on the return to Moldova of the Hungarian company Wizz Air , on the planes of which periodically flies .
Farmer protests
The head of the Association "Strength of Farmers" Alexander Slusar once again outraged by the lack of systematic government support for Moldovan farmers.
Slusari claims that the Moldovan authorities asked the EU 1.2 billion leiAt the same time, the government does not introduce a temporary moratorium on bankruptcy for farmers.
In addition, Slusari criticized the government for the lack of promotion of domestic products. According to him, at the height of the season, only foreign products can be found on store shelves, which can be seen as "economic sabotage against a domestic manufacturer."
Socio-economic crisis
The resonance in society was caused by the words of the head of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, Veronika Dragalin , that if the situation in Moldova worsens, she can always leave for the United States.
Dragalin admitted that she has an American passport and has a career in the United States, and her salary in Moldova does not correspond to her "standard of living and needs."
Inflation in Moldova swallowed up wage increases in 2022, with real wages down 9.6%, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Military escalation
Military training
A platoon of the Moldovan army is taking part in the Agile Spirit 2023 military exercise , which takes place from August 19 to September 2 in Georgia under the auspices of NATO . The goal of the exercises is called “improving interoperability at the tactical level” between the Georgian army, the United States, as well as NATO members and partners.
Military cooperation with Germany
State Secretary of the Ministry of Defense of Moldova Valery Mizha held a meeting with the German military attache in Bucharest Matthias Pfeiffer on the occasion of the end of his mandate. The Moldovan side thanked the Germans for their contribution to the modernization of the army. Sebastian Erbe appointed as new German military attaché in Bucharest .
In addition, representatives of the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation visited the Ministry of Defense of Moldova to discuss "reforming the defense sector" .
The attitude of the authorities and the population towards NATO
The local media discussed another opinion poll about the attitude of citizens to the prospects of joining NATO: more than 60% of respondents are against joining the alliance, and only 28% would support such an idea.
The study was conducted by the NGO Institute for European Policy and Reform (IPRE), which receives Western grants and cooperates with EU structures.
Viorel Cibotaru, head of the Moldovan mission to NATO and the country's ambassador to Belgium , said that the negative attitude of the population towards the alliance is the result of a "hybrid war waged by the Russian Federation."
According to the diplomat, the Moldovan authorities need to launch an ideological campaign to change the attitude towards NATO among citizens. However, the ruling PAS party is already fulfilling this order and stubbornly criticizes the provision of the Constitution, which establishes neutrality.
How "grant-eaters" harm Russia: the case of Valery Garbuzov
September 5, 2023
Rybar
The story with the director of the Institute for the USA and Canada , Valery Garbuzov , seems to have ended with his dismissal. We still need to get confirmation with what wording he was fired. But the speed with which the decision was made suggests that the community of "grant-eaters" is extremely concerned about what happened and is trying to hush up the situation, which has already entered the public field.
The situation with Garbuzov is indicative of the fact that one of the leading scientific institutions for informational counteraction to our strategic adversary in the face of the globalist elites associated with the UK and the USA has degraded to the level of a mediocre employee at a distance. While in Langley they open champagne on this occasion and drill holes for orders, we will try to explain why this happened and what to do about it.
Future for the leadership of the Institute
The first question that quite rightly arises concerns the extent of Garbuzov's responsibility for such acts. Given the position held, we can talk about treason. But so far in the Russian legal field, this is considered a minor prank, and dismissal is the most severe punishment. Garbuzov quite calmly distributes interviews in which he assesses the likelihood of continuing to work at the Institute of the USA and Canada in a different position, and declares that he is not going to leave Russia. This is possible only because, under Russian law, he is not in danger. Even despite the fact that active hostilities are now underway, and he openly supports the position of the enemy .
The second question concerns the replacement of Garbuzov. Sergey Kislitsyn, Head of the Center for the Study of Strategic Planning at the IMEMO RAS, has now been appointed to his place as acting director. This is a person from the same system. Today, the IMEMO RAS plays the role of a coordinating center between specialized institutions, such as the Institute of the USA and Canada, the Institute of Latin America and others. The appointment of a young leader immersed in the problems of the institute is, on the one hand, justified, since it will help to avoid the collapse of management. But on the other hand, the new leader still needs to prove himself through real actions, which, we believe, should seriously differ from the malicious activity of his predecessor.
In the meantime, Garbuzov actively continues to fight for his place. In an interview, he focuses on the fact that, according to the existing regulations, the institute can work with the VRIO for an unlimited time. He also mentions that elections will need to be held to appoint a new director. And he adds that he does not know whether the new director will leave him at work and in what position. All this strongly resembles the transfer of the Institute "for overexposure" to a young colleague until "the dust settles." And then it will be possible to return, through the "elections". And, in our opinion, such a possibility really exists.
How was a mediocre employee able to lead the domestic analogue of RAND and began to promote the narratives of the enemy?
To answer this question, you need to understand how the distribution of grants works. This is a global mechanism that has grown out of the military system for the distribution of complex scientific tasks. A grant is a task, after completing which, the contractor often does not even know for what purposes his developments will be used. This ensures secrecy and makes it possible to attract huge scientific resources to solve military-applied problems without fear of compromising the final result. Options for "assemblies" of tasks are known only to "architects".
To identify the most talented researchers, targeted funding is allocated - grants. Since most scientific research is open, employees with a large number of scientific publications are more likely to receive a grant. For the institutions they work for, this is also beneficial, since the number of publications raises the rating of the institution . This allows you to either raise tuition fees or attract larger grants already within the entire educational institution. At first glance, everything is quite logical and transparent.
But in Russian realities there is a nuance
For Russian research institutes during perestroika, grants remained almost the only source of livelihood. Funding for educational and scientific programs was stopped by the then government of the Russian Federation under the guidance of foreign curators in the first place. The axiom: education - R & D - innovation - production - trade expansion - military dominance, has been known since the days of the East India Company. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the first blow was dealt to education and science. And it is not surprising that there was no adequate response, because there was no one to respond. Effective managers have different tasks and work format.
Against this background, the unexpected career growth of Garbuzov becomes clear. When he got an internship under the State Department program, he did not even need to be recruited in the classical sense of the word. It was enough to explain that if he promoted the right, from the point of view of American curators, his narratives will personally be published in foreign scientific publications, which will distinguish him from the rest of the research institute staff. This will allow him to take a leadership position and attract grants to the institute. And then it will be possible to act as a distributor of grants among young employees, if they also “think in the right direction.” Bonuses will be participation in various scientific conferences, seminars, round tables. For someone without serious talent, it was an opportunity to travel, receive generous travel allowances in hard currency, royalties for publications, and take on leadership positions. And all this is just for the "correct" coverage of the situation.
The context in which domestic research institutes existed
Here it is appropriate to explain a little the context of that period. In the absence of state funding, the situation in the 90s for most research institutes developed in two directions: the search for foreign grants and the "rental business" . Scientific work on grants was carried out naturally in the interests of Western curators, and the rental business led to the formation of horizontal ties with representatives of trade and organized crime, which often ended in raider seizures of premises.
Against this rather bleak background, the research institutes, which could provide a sufficient volume of publications in foreign publications, were in good standing in the Ministry of Education and the Russian Academy of Sciences, and they subsequently began to allocate significant funds from the budget.
But in many cases the moment has already been lost. The scientific management of the institutes is already accustomed to the fact that they receive tasks only within the framework of grants. In the absence of clear tasks and control from the Russian Academy of Sciences or the Ministry of Education, even with funding, research institutes continued to work according to the already familiar scenario within the framework of grants. Horizontal connections also did not disappear, and continued to work. And part of the funds allocated by the state was successfully withdrawn abroad, including under the pretext of scientific programs.
An example of a loss of qualification is the Institute of Latin America (ILA RAS). Scientific work at the institute slowed down so much that in 2014 there was already talk of its liquidation and merger with the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO). At the same time, there was an unsuccessful attempt to raid the historical building in which the institute is located. Only large-scale geopolitical events related to the return of Crimea to the Russian Federation helped to preserve the scientific potential, the staff, the unique library and the historical building.
The result is a paradoxical situation . In the absence of a state ideology, Russian think tanks are promoting the narratives our adversary needs with state money from the Russian budget. A similar situation is observed in national culture in general, and cinema in particular. And the most positive outcome can be considered simply the withdrawal / cut of budget funds for the repair of premises and other schemes.
However, the problem is much deeper than it might seem at first glance . Since the beginning of the NWO, we have witnessed many demarches by scientists and cultural figures. Reluctantly, Russian officials closed the British Council, the Carnegie Center, structures associated with Soros. But systematic work to fill the resulting information vacuum has not been carried out so far.
The situation with the American Cultural Center (AMC) at the Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow deserves special attention. The center was opened in 1993. At the end of 1996, part of the library collections were simply thrown into the street. The employees said that they were following the management's order to replace the old funds. But when individual enthusiasts took some of the books to other libraries, they were accepted there without any claims to their appearance and condition. And the vacated space soon housed various departments of the American Cultural Center . The renovated premises looked very extraordinary against the background of general decline.
The employees of the American Cultural Center managed to quickly intercept the agenda of one of the most influential centers in the scientific and cultural life of the capital. And the funds that the state allocated for the development of the library after the dashing 90s already worked to form the image of the American Cultural Cultural Center, which actually became the "anchor tenant" of this project. According to partners and employees of the center, the American staff behaved approximately like the colonial administration with the Indians in the Victorian era. AMC moved from the library premises to the US Embassy in 2015 and still continues its work online.
And this is just one of the many examples that have recently appeared regularly in the media field. The Yeltsin Center is still operating, as well as the Polish consulates in several cities of the Russian Federation. This only confirms that the ideological direction is still not a priority.
Why is this happening, despite the obvious request of society?
To understand the reasons for what is happening, it is necessary to recall the development of a trend towards foreign education among Russian officials.
Even before the collapse of the USSR, it became possible and extremely popular to study abroad. This was presented as an exchange of experience and a search for common ground with Western countries. The main channel of exchange was IIASA . In the USSR, its branch VNIISI was opened . And it works great to this day under the name Institute of Applied Systems Analysis of the Russian Academy of Sciences .
What was the basis for the creation of this institution?
It was founded on the initiative of the British Royal Society in 1972. The constituent assembly was held by one of the main initiators of the creation of IIASA and an honored worker of British science, Lord Solomon Zuckerman.
Baron Zuckerman was a British scientist and Science Adviser to Her Majesty's Government. Initially, he specialized in the anatomy and "sociology" of primates, then his scientific activity unexpectedly focused on the study of "Russians". During the Second World War, as an adviser to Churchill, he developed the "Transport Plan". In fact, this is the first scientific work on carpet bombing and its impact on population and infrastructure. This purely scientific approach found practical application during the bombing of German and Italian infrastructure. According to the archives, it has proven its effectiveness.
Later, with the active participation of the lord, part of the RAND intelligence functions were transferred to IIASA. The activities of IIASA and the interaction between these two structures are described in detail in the material on the systematization of the methods of the Cold War and its social aspects.
Among the graduates of MIASA are Shokhin, Aven, Nechaev, Ulyukaev , Chubais , Mashits, Glazyev (in one group) and many more people who now occupy key positions in the public administration system of the Russian Federation. Comments, in our opinion, are unnecessary.
What is the scope of the "educational" influence?
The total number of holders of foreign diplomas among Russian officials is estimated according to various sources at 96-98 thousand people. Of course, not all of them studied under the MIASA programs, but the educational methods in the Anglo-Saxon circuit are quite stable and conservative, which allows us to speak at least about a general approach.
Of the total number of Russian officials - this is about 7% - a fairly acceptable figure. But this is only at first glance. When we reviewed the activities of BlackRock, we found out that for the actual monopoly control of the market, it is enough to own 5-7-8% of the shares. Because the free float is rarely more than 15-20% of the shares. Our adversary thinks in similar categories in relation to the state administration system of the Russian Federation. It is enough to control a small part of public officials to have a serious impact on the entire system of public administration.
If we look at their position on the CBO, we see a clear bias towards the liberal agenda. The reasons are banal - money, assets and children are in the western contour of influence.
Therefore, the statements of some figures of culture and art, the issuance of rental certificates for frankly anti-Russian films cause a wide response in society, but almost zero reaction at the official level. After all, if a rental certificate is not issued, then some characters may not shake hands at the Cannes or Venice film festival. In the paradigm of such officials, this greatly outweighs the interests of the state, which they must represent and protect.
Is it possible to get rid of all " agents of influence " at the same time?
If we compare this with the situation on the stock market, then such actions will significantly reduce the capitalization of the company. In the same way, for the system of public administration and the economy of the Russian Federation, this may mean an unacceptable level of costs. Recall that, regardless of their competence, these people occupy key positions and many processes are closed to them, which are not easy to promptly redirect through other channels. The system can only be reformatted slowly and carefully, under the supervision of competent specialists from the special services.
The quality of foreign education
With all the obvious pluses and benefits (now we are not talking about MIASA), Western education is very narrowly focused and caste. There is a gradation of universities, whose graduates can apply for certain positions depending on the status of the educational institution. If a person is very talented, he will still always work for a graduate of a more prestigious university, even if he formally occupies a leadership position. It is precisely with this that the desire of the Western elite is connected to introduce their heirs into a closed club for the elite.
The education that 96 thousand Russian "users" received , as you might guess, is not elite in the vast majority. And in the Western system of values they are perceived as servants or, at best, as regional managers . It is with this that the hatred of expats for Russia is connected. They try their best to look and act like their masters, but cannot become their own due to their background and education. This causes them a flurry of negativity in relation to Russia and everything Russian.
What is the ideological direction in Russia now?
We have already asked ourselves the question: why are enthusiasts on the Telegram platform dealing with the problems of information counteraction to the enemy in the second year of the war? Over the past period, only the Rybar team managed to create a relatively full-fledged think-tank, capable of solving not only analytical, but also applied problems, thanks to the help of subscribers, the enthusiasm of volunteers and their own “stubbornness”. Now it's up to the scientific institutes.
At a time when the budgets of the "Western partners" for soft power are growing, and the operations of the CIPSO are becoming more complex and large-scale, the issues of information confrontation are becoming very relevant. The public demand for alternative coverage of the critical situation for the country, without exaggeration, is huge. But so far, things have not gone beyond the creation of commissions, working groups and similar associations, which, at best, solve local problems in the apparatus struggle.
To achieve tangible results in the information war, as in any other, a systematic approach, total coverage and continuous impact on the enemy are required. I would very much like to hope that there are people at the top who not only understand this, but are also ready to create new think tanks, including on the basis of existing scientific capacities.
Countermeasures
In addition to strengthening control over figures like Garbuzov by the secret services and introducing criminal liability for such actions, which is absolutely justified in this situation, it is necessary to create conditions for the emergence of a fundamentally different type of leaders. Financing should be provided to talented professionals who are ready to solve practical problems, and not draw indicators.
The main harm from "grant eaters" is that they demonstrate to young scientists the futility of their activities. Working under the "sensitive guidance" of such characters causes nothing but apathy. As a result, part of the specialists, for whose training considerable state funds have been spent, simply leave the profession, some are forced to look for employment opportunities abroad. In both cases, our resources do not work for the development of the country.
It is the lack of conditions for development, the lack of opportunities to find an adequate job in their specialty, that pushes young scientists and engineers to “search for adventures” abroad. And statements that they will face the harsh reality there and return look very unproductive. Practice shows that this is not the case . Some do return, but many remain there, agreeing with many restrictions and problems, because here all social elevators are securely blocked by such as Valery Garbuzov. And to create conditions for the development of really talented guys, it is not enough to create another commission, committee or working group. A systemic state development program is needed, based on the existing potential of research institutes, but without the "ballast" with which Western partners have loaded it.
The situation in Moldova for August 29 - September 5
September 5, 2023
Rybar
Foreign policy
gas issue
Moldovan President Maia Sandu said that international auditors did not reveal the debts of Moldovagaz to Gazprom.
The audit was conducted by the British company Forensic Risk Alliance & Co and the Norwegian Wikborg Rein Advokatfirma AS, which received 800 thousand euros from the country's Reserve Fund for their work .
In 2021, the parties entered into a new gas contract, the condition of which was the audit of Moldovagaz's debt to Gazprom. The Russian side estimated the debt at $709 million, and at the end of 2022, the Accounts Chamber of Moldova counted $591 million.
However, the Sandu administration decided to entrust the audit to a kind of independent party , which, contrary to the logic and financial documents of the Moldovan company, came to the conclusion that there was no debt. It took the “independent” auditors a year to do this: the audit contract with the British and Norwegians was signed in August 2022. At the same time, the timing of its announcement was constantly postponed.
Anti-Russian rhetoric
Maia Sandu gave an interview to the American channel CNN , in which she accused the Russian Federation of trying to interfere in the upcoming local elections. The president believes that any protests by citizens against the policies of her administration or the election of pro-Russian candidates are "paid for with dirty money . "
However, the opposite opinion is heard in Moldova: former Minister of Justice Fadei Nagachevsky criticized the ruling PAS party for publicly using the ambassadors of EU and US countries for election purposes, which directly violates the law.
The process of leaving the CIS
The Moldovan government denounced four more Agreements within the framework of the CIS: on ensuring the mutual protection of interstate secrets (1993); on cooperation in the field of training specialists in radioecology, radiation safety, radiobiology and related sciences (2000); on the distribution of documents on interstate standardization (2018); on the basic principles of cooperation in the field of the peaceful use of atomic energy (1992).
Export of Ukrainian grain
The Western edition of Reuters published an article citing an unnamed source in the US State Department that the Americans are actively working with Moldova and Romania to increase the export of Ukrainian grain through the Danube.
Earlier, Romania announced its intention to double the transit of Ukrainian grain, but in Moldova, local farmers suffer because of this supply chain. The main beneficiary of the destruction of national agricultural sectors is the American company BlackRock , which is buying up Ukrainian lands.
Romanianization and European integration
Romanian President Klaus Iohannis said that at the summit of the Three Seas Initiative (TSI) , which will be held on September 6 in Bucharest, Moldova and Ukraine are expected to be assigned the status of associate participants. Greece will become a new full member.
TSI is the political platform of the EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe. According to Iohannis, the Initiative takes on a new meaning in the new geopolitical realities.
The summit is planned to be attended by Maia Sandu , who has gone on another tour of European countries to support Moldova's accession to the EU.
Sandu met with Slovenian President Natasha Pirc Musar and also took part in the Strategic Forum in Bled, where she held talks with Western leaders on reforms and European integration.
After that, the president went to the Netherlands , where, in particular, she appealed to representatives of the local diaspora with calls to return back to Moldova to accelerate European integration.
Interior setting
Socio-economic crisis
Maia Sandu admitted that the outflow of the population is one of the main problems in Moldova. After the collapse of the USSR, about 1 million people left Moldova, with the current population of 2.6 million. Young people are leaving the country en masse, and Sandu believes that the main reason is the “establishment of regimes” after 1991, “aspiring to authoritarianism.”
The country's population has already fallen to its 1956 level, and the government's consistent steps to destroy the economy, transfer national assets to foreigners and promote the LGBT agenda only exacerbate the situation.
Over the past ten years, the number of schoolchildren in Moldova has decreased by 11%. In the coming years, the number of first-graders is also expected to decrease due to negative demographic trends.
Education Minister Dan Perchun acknowledged that the country is experiencing an acute shortage of school teachers. At the same time, the leader of the education trade union, Genadie Donos, does not rule out that teachers may soon go to protests demanding higher salaries.
The National Bureau of Statistics reports that in Moldova the unemployment rate and the number of unofficially employed increased by 3.9% over the year.
Crisis in agriculture and protests of farmers
In Moldova, unrest continues among farmers who are on the verge of mass bankruptcy and are dissatisfied with the lack of assistance from the government.
The Power of Farmers Association announced on September 6 a protest in front of the Ministry of Agriculture due to the extreme complexity of the procedure for submitting documents for the payment of subsidies: farmers believe that the authorities intend to sabotage the process.
However, the Minister of Agriculture, Vladimir Bolya , said that subsidies will not improve the situation of farmers "until the system approach in agriculture changes . "
At the same time, former Prime Minister Vasily Tarlev accused the authorities of irresponsibility due to foreign agricultural products on the shelves and the lack of support for local producers: the country began to import vegetables, fruits and wheat grown by Moldovan farmers.
Creation of the Anti-Corruption Court
The Council of the Union of Lawyers of Moldova criticized the project to create an Anti-Corruption Court: lawyers are sure that the government's initiative will not succeed.
The Union of Lawyers is confident that the government is not improving the criminal process itself to investigate corruption, so the new body will face the same problems as other judicial instances. Moreover, according to experts, the Anti-Corruption Court will have to justify its importance in the eyes of the public, which can lead to biased and demonstrative trials.
Veronica Dragalin , who has been living in the United States since childhood, and her family are prominent representatives of the American diaspora of Moldovans, was appointed to the position of head of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office .
Military escalation and Transnistria
Western analytics
Foreign Policy published an article criticizing the insufficient actions of the US and the EU to “protect” Moldova, Georgia and Belarus from Russian influence.
However, Moldova was called an encouraging case : Western analysts highly appreciate the anti-Russian course of Maia Sandu. At the same time , Pridnestrovie is called the main obstacle to the ambitions of official Chisinau to join NATO , but the destruction of Russian-Moldovan cooperation in the energy sector is considered a good start .
Militarization of Moldova
The American Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces in Europe, General Christopher Cavoli, attended a meeting of the Moldovan government on the day of the National Army.
At the meeting, they discussed the deepening of cooperation between the Moldovan army and the United States. Prime Minister Dorin Recean called the Americans "strategic partners", and Cavoli assured of his support for the modernization of the Moldovan army and the renewal of equipment.
On the day of the National Army , Maia Sandu said that now her team is "working to catch up in the defense sector."
The situation in Transnistria
The head of the PMR, Vadim Krasnoselsky , said that the region is counting on Russian gas through alternative routes if its transit through Ukraine is stopped.
Krasnoselsky also once again criticized the new "law on separatism" in Moldova, calling it "short-sighted" and provoking an escalation of the conflict. So far, the law has not yet been applied, but the PMR is sure that formally all citizens of the republic can be prosecuted under it.
PRIGOZHIN’S THREE STRIKES – KHODORKOVSKY BUSINESS, BEREZOVSKY POLITICS, THE LAST AFRICA TRIP
By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
On March 5, in Bangui, Central African Republic (CAR), there was a fire-bombing of a French–owned brewery which destroyed 50,000 bottles of beer. On August 23, a private jet of the Wagner Group was bombed in the air north of Moscow, and the Wagner leaders, Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, were killed, along with five of their associates and three flight crew.
The connection between the two incidents is that Prigozhin’s methods of doing business in Africa cost him his life in Russia. The African business, not the mutiny at Rostov on June 23-24, is the fatal link.
It was the last straw. This is not a case of a soldier who lived by the sword and died by the sword. It’s the gangster who thought he was the capo dei capi, boss of bosses; and was brought down to earth because he wasn’t. To ignore the warnings that he had reached his multi-billion dollar operating limit, that he should stop muscling in on the competition, retire and keep his money — these are well-known rules of American business, not to say mafia rules. But Prigozhin followed Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky in thinking Russian business is different. They thought there was no limit to their power to get what they wanted.
There are two competing Russian press compilations of what exactly happened on August 23, and what the evidence reveals of who arranged the killing and how the operation was carried out. These are Konstantin Malofeyev’s Tsargrad on the national patriotic side, and Meduza, the anti-Putin opposition publication now based in Riga.
The Anglo-American accounts in the mainstream press and the alt-media blogs, including Andrew Napolitano’s group of US military and CIA retirees, Douglas Macgregor, Tony Shaffer, Larry Johnson and Scott Ritter, do not come close to the Russian interpretation of the case.
The lengthy Tsargrad report can be read at this link. It is blocked to readers in some countries.
“When he and the commanders were summoned to the Kremlin to meet with Putin [immediately after the June 23-24 mutiny], the president yelled at the whole lot of them for three hours. Straight up yelled. But then he didn’t touch them! Maybe Zhenya [Prigozhin] decided that Putin got it out of his system: ‘He didn’t kill us right away, so he won’t ever kill us’? He considered himself indestructible. He decided that he was immortal.” Source: https://meduza.io
In Tsargrad’s reconstruction of the flight of Prigozhin’s aircraft and of the doppelganger or decoy aircraft which flew ahead by 40 minutes, and then returned to Moscow 35 minutes after the crash, the cause was one or two bombs detonated on board Prigozhin’s flight. The destruction occurred so suddenly that the pilots had no warning and no time to signal air traffic control. The subsequent recovery and decoding of the aircraft black boxes, and the civilian and military radar track records appear to have confirmed this also, although there have been no official releases of this information, and no unofficial leaks.
A report by FlightAware suggests that although the two flights appear to have followed the same flight path, tracking their precise locations is impossible “likely due to … interference (or) jamming in the area.” Reuters reports that position locations were calculated from signals sent to multiple receivers in the area.
The Tsargrad report indicates that because Prigozhin’s aircraft had been in a maintenance facility for several days before the flight, the assassination devices may have been secreted in the airframe well before the flight. Alternatively, they may have been taken on board at the last minute. Their location is now known to the authorities from the pattern of explosive damage and chemical traces in the recovered parts of the aircraft. There has been no official disclosure or leaks on what the forensic analyses have begun to reveal.
The refusal of the Russian authorities to allow any disclosure of forensic evidence, or of the black box, radio, and radar records of the flight has stimulated the Russian press into reporting conspiracy theories claiming Prigozhin is still alive; a rump of the Wagner group is also prompting this story. The Wagner media outlets are withholding what they know of Prigozhin’s meetings in Africa before he returned to Russia on August 22; and his telephone calls, messaging and internet communications, and meeting records over the following 24 hours in Moscow.
Sightings of Prigozhin lookalikes have been reported in Tyumen, and in Saudi Arabia and Mali. There are Moscow reports that Prigozhin was trying to sell his aircraft, and that potential buyers inspected it earlier in the day of the fateful flight. The CCTV footage showing Prigozhin at Vnukovo airport, then boarding the plane, is being tightly held, and no one claiming to have watched it has leaked to the press or social media.
In the Tsargrad report, the sources include former Russian civil aviation, military and intelligence veterans. They concur the assassination was the settling of “old scores”. They differ on whether these were domestic in origin, or Ukrainian, British or other foreign sources. They also agree that President Vladimir Putin did not order the killing and probably did not know in advance.
“Putin forgave him; there are other enemies who did not”, Lieutenant General Leonid Reshetnikov (right), a veteran of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), told Tsargrad: “No special service of our country will ever go into an operation that leaves a ‘hint’ of the involvement of its leadership. Of course, [if there was the operational order], another place would have been found — Africa is a big place and the circumstances more opportune there; for example, the crocodiles don’t have enough high-quality meat to eat. And so, there might be a terrorist attack with a subtext pointing away from those most likely to have done it.”
A Moscow source believes that before the event Putin did not act and did not know. After the event he did not disapprove.
“Prigozhin was a mobster for hire who thought he was the Godfather. So his modus operandi included many things – killing, extortion, and bribes, yes — in the pursuit of personal and business advantage. But trying to make state policy and take over state or other oligarch assets, no. But that’s what Prigozhin had been doing for months in his attacks on Defense Minister [Sergei] Shoigu, and the General Staff. I think there were enough provocations from Prigozhin, even before the mutiny. But maybe there was a fresh trigger when he began to become a thorn in Africa. So, yes, this is a typical 1990s gangster settlement more than a political one. And more. With what he said and did, apparently on impulse and unpredictably, Prigozhin made himself into a walking time-bomb. And as it turns out, that’s what happened on the aircraft. It’s obvious that since the mutiny in June, the Defense Ministry has had two months to neutralize Wagner, resettle the men, recover their arms, scatter the troublemakers.”
“Putin would have ordered the Defense Ministry to sort out the whole business and leave no loose ends. But that’s not an order to liquidate Prigozhin. He could have walked away if he had accepted the breakup of his military operations, the reassignment of his Defense Ministry contracts, the end of his African commando. In addition, he could have held on to his real estate and other civilian businesses if in running those too, he hadn’t threatened other oligarchs. In retrospect, from June on, no oligarch would have done business with this guy. He didn’t have the Kremlin’s sanction to continue in business. So his assets became takeover targets for raiders against him. That’s what was happening. There were a lot of old scores to settle, and rich pickings if he didn’t go quietly. And, more fool, he wouldn’t.”
Another Moscow source, recalling the most famous official assassination in English history, when the king was threatened personally and politically by the head of the church, says: “This isn’t King Henry saying aloud in front of his knights about Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ so the knights go off and kill him.” Putin didn’t say, do it; he didn’t say, don’t do it. What followed was a gangster settlement. That’s to say the outcome, but not to say the method or the motivation was approved, except in retrospect.”
“I knew Prigozhin for a very long time, since the early ’90s,” Putin said on August 24. “He was a man of complicated fate, and he made serious mistakes in his life. He achieved the results he needed, both for himself, and, when I asked him, for the common cause, as in these last months. He was a talented person, a talented businessman, he worked not only in our country, and achieved results, but also abroad, particularly in Africa. He was involved there with oil, gas, precious metals and stones. As far as I know, it was only yesterday that he got back from Africa. He met some officials here.”
Source: https://www.youtube.com/
It is likely that when Putin referred to Prigozhin’s meetings with “officials here”, African officials were included. It is unclear what Russian officials Prigozhin met after his return to Moscow.
Putin was speaking more plainly than has been understood by Russians or foreigners. “Businessman”, talented or not, is not a term of respect among Russian voters – Putin knew that. Prigozhin had made “serious mistakes” out of business calculation for himself; the Rostov mutiny and march to Tver included. So long as he acted, as he had been requested, for the state, his business tactics were tolerated in oil, gas, gold and diamonds. But they were not acceptable if he operated against the “common cause”. Putin made a point of hinting “as far as I know” that this is what had happened when Prigozhin had met officials in Africa before the fatal flight on August 23.
This is not payback or revenge for the June events. This is a fresh violation in Africa by Prigozhin. What happened?
For the time being, those who know, including the officials in CAR and Mali who let Russian officials know what Prigozhin had told them, are silent. In the CAR five months have elapsed since a squad of Wagner saboteurs struck the Castel brewery in Bangui in what the French government and media are describing as a Russian attack on their commercial interests in the country.
Independent sources say that Prigozhin’s rival brewery is located about 20 kilometres from the Castel plant. They add that CAR is too small a market to support this second brewery, and that satellite images and other monitoring indicate that the Wagner site has been using the brewery as camouflage for another form of trade, possibly drugs. This also implies powerful local CAR partners. Whatever has been happening in Bangui, there appears to have been no negative consequences for Prigozhin and Wagner by the time the CAR President, Faustin-Archange Touadera, arrived in St. Petersburg for the Russia-Africa summit conference on July 26.
There is no local record at all of Prigozhin’s visit to the CAR a fortnight later, or to Mali in the northwest. Russian press reporting is silent on Prigozhin’s movements during his last Africa trip.
In his videoclips and photographs from the Africa trip, Prigozhin doesn’t say where he is, who he was meeting with, or what he was discussing. Sources, including those reported by Meduza and hinted at on Telegram platforms linked to Wagner, suggest that Prigozhin was trying to protect his African military operations from takeover by Russian state-linked groups, and to save the businesses associated with them. The African leaders with whom he met have made clear that whatever private business deals they and Prigozhin have run in the past, they will rely on the Russian state in future to assure the flow of arms, troop training, and security arrangements on which they depend.
Sources speculate that in the CAR and Mali Prigozhin repeated his verbal attacks on the Russian Defense Ministry, and attempted to bribe or threaten the Africans; and that they then reported to Russian officials what he was doing. If this is what the African trip record reveals, it would have been understood in Moscow that Prigozhin was attempting a repeat of the Rostov mutiny – this time outside the country and against the state strategy for Africa. The “common cause”, as Putin called it.
In parallel, Russian oligarch operations in west Africa, such as Oleg Deripaska’s bauxite and alumina business in Guinea, Alexei Mordashov’s Nord Gold mines in Burkina Faso, LUKoil in Ivory Coast, and Alrosa’s diamond mines in Angola, the Russian state agencies and the oligarchs have been working hand in hand. For example, Deripaska relies on personal and state support from Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov; for their “common cause” they don’t fight each other in Africa.
By Russian operating standards in Africa over the past decade, Prigozhin was not less corrupt; slightly more criminal; significantly less successful except in the military security business; and much more indiscreet. Only in the Russian diamond, gold and platinum projects in Zimbabwe has the gap between publicly announced ambition and the financial bottom-line been greater; read more here.
Left: July 27, 2023, St Petersburg: Yevgeny Prigozhin, right, with Freddy Mapouka, chief of protocol for the Central African Republic’s president, at a St Petersburg hotel owned by Prigozhin. The picture was posted by Dmitry Syty, a Russian cultural attaché in Bangui. Syty, who has been sanctioned by the US, UK and EU for being a Wagner frontman in CAR, posted the image on his Facebook account with the message: “Mr. Ambassador [Mapouka] shared with me the first photos of the Russia-Africa Summit. We see familiar faces [Prigozhin]”. Right: Prigozhin’s public posting, apparently from Mali in August, a week before his fatal flight from Moscow. On the soundtrack, Prigozhin says he is “making Russia even greater on all continents, and Africa even more free." In a second videoclip released by a Wagner Group Telegram account on August 31, Prigozhin says he is in Africa in “the second half of August”, and “for people who like to discuss wiping me out, or my private life, how much I earn, or whatever else, everything’s okay. “
An attempt by the Financial Times of London to use Anglo-American market gossip and intelligence feed to exaggerate the value of Prigozhin’s African assets first appeared under the byline of a reporter called Miles Johnson last February. Johnson’s story headline of $250 million was a misrepresentation.
The report claimed that Prigozhin’s and the Wagner Group’s revenue-generating businesses in Africa and Syria were in “oil, gas, diamond and gold extraction.” The maximum revenue figures cited by the reporter were an oil company’s revenues of $134 million in Syria in 2020, just $400,000 in 2021; $2.6 million from gold-mining in the Sudan in 2021; and $6 million from exports of Russian “ industrial equipment to Sudan and Central African Republic” in 2021. The newspaper had no data for CAR or Mali.
These sums do not add up to the headline; they fall far short of this lead in Johnson’s story: “The sanctioned Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin generated revenues of more than a quarter of a billion dollars from his global natural resources empire in the four years before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, according to corporate records.”
An earlier FT report made no estimate at all of Wagner’s African business cashflows or mineral assets. The US Treasury’s sanctions announcements naming Prigozhin and Wagner fronts in the CAR, failed to substantiate any estimate of their asset value or cashflow.
Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), diagrammed by the Financial Times.
The US Treasury theory is that “the Wagner Group funds its brutal operations in part by exploiting natural resources in countries like the Central African Republic and Mali. The United States will continue to target the Wagner Group’s revenue streams to degrade its expansion and violence in Africa, Ukraine, and anywhere else.”
In fact, what has been happening is that Prigozhin funded his soldiers’ bills from his domestic Russian cashflows, and was helping himself to the African mining and other concessions, including drug smuggling which the US Treasury and the Financial Times have failed to report. French, British and Russian sources are more informative on the point.
By the due diligence standards of the mining markets and the prospectuses of western mining companies in the CAR, Mali, and the Sudan, the Wagner assets themselves have been marginal. On the other hand, businesses like the Africa ti L’or-brand beer in the CAR – “friendly country investment in the CAR is win/win cooperation” — are more profitable if they are combined with contraband in partnership with local political and military figures. In that line of business, Prigozhin was imitating the earlier CIA model in Southeast Asia and Central America, and the Anglo-Irish mercenary Mike Hoare in the Congo.
Even Vox, an anti-Russian outlet financed by US propaganda foundations, has dismissed the US sanctions against the Wagner businesses in Africa as “imitation activity”, and the businesses themselves as low in cash value. “‘Considering the fact that this sector is well-corrupted and there are a number of local beneficiaries (local criminal groups, corrupted officials and politicians, etc.), the amount of money that the Wagner group could hypothetically gain from the sector does not exceed much the operational costs of the Russian mercenaries there,’ Luzin told Vox.”
MAP OF WAGNER GROUP ACTIVITIES IN AFRICA
There are many maps purporting to show Wagner Group “boots on the ground” in African states over the past ten years. This US Congressional Research Service publication dates from August 2023. French government media have published maps claiming much more extensive operations.
Under the headline, “Wagner’s lucrative African operations”, the FT reported last week “a longtime Prigozhin acquaintance” as acknowledging: “‘We’re talking about tens of millions a year maximum,’ the person said of the expected profits.” For the Anglo-American intelligence services tracking of Prigozhin’s family and its assets, click to read.
Following the military coup in Niger on July 26, US and British think tanks and propaganda platforms have been supplying the media with claims that the coup signals “a shift in alliances toward Russia. The appearance of Russian flags waved by some coup supporters suggests a repeat of the Mali and Burkina Faso scenarios.” The hint is that Prigozhin and Wagner have been working behind the scenes in Niger.
According to the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, “the August 23 death of Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin adds a new layer of uncertainty to Russia’s ability to take advantage of the crisis in Niger—which once again puts France in a difficult position.”
“‘Niger is a line in the sand for stopping this trend,’ said Jendayi Frazer, a former top U.S. envoy for African affairs who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. ‘And if it can’t be stopped in Niger, then I think that there’s real trouble for the rest of West Africa.’”
Menas, the London consultancy on Africa, reports: “It is too early to say whether the new rulers will follow Mali and Burkina Faso in turning towards Russia. If they do it will bring the same horrors of human rights abuses to Niger as has occurred in the neighbouring countries…Should the West — notably the US, France, the EU and a number of individual countries such as Belgium and Germany — reduce or cut their considerable financial support for Niger, its economy would be left in tatters. Its massive financial dependency on the West might deter Niger’s new rulers from straying too far towards Russia. A final concern for the West, or at least Europe, is migration. Russia’s primary motive, should it gain a foothold in Niger, is to destabilise the West. It could eventually result in an additional 100,000 migrants a year cross the Sahel to the Mediterranean coast.”
Marc Eichinger dismisses the Anglo-American speculation as commercial rivalry and political propaganda. Eichinger is the leading independent French expert on Niger and a veteran of investigations of French corporate and state corruption in Niger; follow his African investigations here, and the French state role (2022).
Left: the French state’s chief of African corruption and money laundering into French presidential election campaigns, Anne Lauvergeon, opening the Niger’s false uranium project at Imouraren; Centre and right, Marc Eichinger’s books on the corrupt dealings of Lauvergeon’s Areva uranium mining group, and its successor, Orano. On Orano’s fabrication of the €1.1 billion Imouraren uranium mineral deposit, read this.
It is also clear that Wagner’s business interests in Africa were far smaller than his political ambitions; they have been marginal in the countries where they are located, and they have been ignored by the Russian oligarchs with much more significant interests in western and southern Africa. They were not employing Wagner or Prigozhin before the Rostov mutiny in June; whether they suspected Prigozhin of interloping on their territory is not known.
The internal politics of each of these African states, the role of their military, economic and commercial structures, the operations of the US, British, French, Belgians and Israelis, and the new role of the Chinese are so different, one from another, that generalisations in the western press of a Russian attempt to trigger a domino series of regime changes are propaganda.
South Africa has been the Kremlin’s strategic priority in Africa since the Soviet era. Since the collapse of the apartheid regime in 1994, Russian attempts to break into the nuclear reactor, mining, and offshore gas businesses of South Africa, several Russian oligarchs have played key roles, especially Roman Abramovich, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, and Vladimir Potanin. They appeared to be successful during the presidency of Jacob Zuma, 2009-2018; they have ultimately failed at the business level, though not at the political level of the current president, Cyril Ramaphosa.
Prigozhin and Wagner, however, have been of no consequence in South Africa except as a bogeyman for the anti-Russian South African media, which oppose the role South Africa is playing in BRICS with the Kremlin. These white community media support the commercial and strategic roles which the US, British and French aim to continue playing in Africa.
NOTE: The opinion polling published by the independent Levada Centre of Moscow on July 7 suggests the majority of Russians will disregard the later news of Prigozhin’s death, whoever turns out to be responsible for it. The June mutiny and its immediate aftermath Russian voters have interpreted as “a conflict between a toad and a viper”, with no lasting damage for Putin, Shoigu, or the General Staff. “The rebellion had a very limited impact on the ratings of the authorities. This is confirmed by all available research. The ratings of Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Sergei Lavrov and the government as a whole have not changed. Only that of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, the target of Prigozhin’s criticism, suffered. Putin, from the point of view of the majority, did exactly what he was supposed to – he gave an address, showed his awareness of the situation, showed firmness, supported the military and condemned the rebels. The president did not win over his opponents, but it was enough for his supporters: ‘he did his part’. Ordinary Russians had no issues with Vladimir Putin.” If the official investigation of the aircraft bombing turns out to be uninformative and inconclusive, this is likely to have no negative political impact on Russian voters. So uninformative and inconclusive it is likely to be.
Russian Foreign Ministry about the "grain deal"
September 6, 15:06
The Russian Foreign Ministry issued an extensive clarification of Russia's official position on the "grain deal". So to speak, following the visit of "friend Rejep" to Russia.
In short, Russia will not return to the "grain deal" until all its conditions are met. Since the West is not going to fulfill any of Russia's conditions, the prospects for a "grain deal" are zero. Turkey and the UN do not have the necessary leverage to influence the position of the West, so their proposals cannot restart the "grain deal".
Russian Foreign Ministry about the "grain deal
Against the backdrop of increased attention being paid to the “Black Sea Initiative” for the export of Ukrainian food (stopped on July 17), concluded in Istanbul on July 22, 2022 in one “package” with the Russia-UN Memorandum on the normalization of domestic agricultural exports (valid until 2025) (these agreements are called the “grain deal”), we believe it justified to reiterate the Russian position in detail.
After the “Black Sea Initiative” was curtailed, which, as you know, did not justify the declared humanitarian purpose (out of 32.8 million tons of cargo, less than 3% were sent to countries in need) and was used by Ukrainians to carry out attacks against Russian facilities, no disaster occurred. Contrary to the alarmist statements of Westerners and the UN Secretariat about rising food prices and worsening threats of hunger, the cost of grain on world markets is steadily declining (in August, the reduction was about 4-5%, and from the peak values of March 2022, the decline was already 25-40% ).
In general, there is no global physical shortage of food - there are problems with its distribution, but not with production. In other words, because of the cessation of the sea export of Ukrainian grain, no one died of starvation and the food crisis did not happen, as predicted in Western capitals and the UN. Which is not surprising, because it is difficult to feed humanity with 32.8 million tons of predominantly fodder corn and feed grain.
Strongly exaggerated, at the suggestion of the same Westerners and UN members, and the role of Ukraine as a world granary. The share of this country in the total export of wheat was already small (5%), and now it is objectively decreasing even more, taking into account, among other things, the reduction in acreage due to radiation and chemical contamination of the soil as a result of the use of depleted uranium ammunition supplied by the West. At the same time, Ukrainians have other (besides the Black Sea) opportunities to export their goods - by land and river routes to the EU, along the so-called "corridors of solidarity".
It is no secret that such transportation is more expensive, and Europeans are in no hurry to actually show their declared solidarity with Kiev: in May, the European Commission banned the import of Ukrainian wheat, corn, rapeseed and sunflower into Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria (only transit is allowed) . On September 15, when the next moratorium expires, Brussels will have a great opportunity to reconsider its own decision and lift the ban on the import of Ukrainian grains, which risk completely flooding the markets of Eastern European countries. There will also be an opportunity to send grain from Ukraine to needy countries in Africa and Latin America free of charge, since Washington and some European capitals are so worried about this. For some reason I just don't believe it.
Under these conditions, as the Russian side has repeatedly and in detail noted, if the Westerners and Kiev really need the Black Sea corridor, then it is time to take concrete steps to lift illegal unilateral sanctions against domestic entities engaged in the production and export of agricultural products and fertilizers. We are talking about the normalization of the activities of banks and companies, the establishment of transport logistics and insurance, the resumption of the supply of spare parts. The solution of these “systemic” tasks is provided not only by the Russia-UN Memorandum, but would also fully comply with the high-flown declarations of the Americans and Europeans that their sanctions do not prevent access of Russian fertilizers and grains to world markets.
However, instead of real exemptions from sanctions, Russia only receives a new batch of promises from the UN Secretariat. This time, the UN Secretary General and his experts put forward four supposedly "breakthrough" proposals - SWIFT for the "subsidiary" of Rosselkhozbank; creation of an insurance platform; unblocking foreign assets of Russian fertilizer companies and establishing access for our ships to European ports. In exchange, the Russian side is required to give guarantees for the immediate and full restoration of the "Black Sea Initiative".
However, in reality, the current proposals, like the previous ideas of the UN, do not contain any new elements and cannot become the basis for achieving qualitative progress in the normalization of our agricultural exports.
As has been repeatedly pointed out, including in public comments, there are no working alternatives to reconnecting the specialized Rosselkhozbank to SWIFT - neither with the options of branches and subsidiaries, nor through a marginal channel with JP Morgan, which, by the way, was closed after the collapse " Black Sea Initiative. And a few days before the Russian-Turkish summit in Sochi, Rosselkhozbank received a notification from Commerzbank in Frankfurt about the closure of a correspondent account in euros.
We have been promised the creation of a special insurance platform for Russian agricultural products since August 2022, but for unknown reasons this has not been done so far.
The same applies to the access of Russian ships and cargo to foreign ports - the UN was unable to deal with the sanctions obstacles arising in connection with this (in the form of declaring the entire territory of Russia a zone of military risks, as well as introducing Russian specialized transport and insurance structures and the companies themselves on the sanctions list).
In order to unlock their foreign assets, fertilizer companies are even directly invited to recognize their sub-sanctioned status, in order to then ask for concessions “at their own peril and risk”.
It is obvious that all these palliative measures and workarounds are intended only to create the appearance of work, but do not lead to a real solution to the problem - the removal of sanctions restrictions on the specialized Russian economic operators. For the same reason - a direct sanctions ban on the import of spare parts to Russia as "dual-use" goods - the UN does not even mention the corresponding "systemic" task.
The UN Secretary General continues to remain silent on the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline, despite his special visit to Kyiv on March 8 and a separate proposal on April 26. After the Ukrainians blew up on June 5 in the territory under their control a pipeline that annually provided raw materials for fertilizers sufficient to produce food for 45 million people, the UN Secretariat prefers not to recall this core element of both Istanbul agreements at all.
The question of the further plans of the UN to ensure the implementation of the Russia-UN Memorandum remains open, since A. Guterres assured that there are no intentions to withdraw from the agreement. However, at present, the relevant activities have actually been suspended: the overseeing agreement of UNCTAD Secretary General R. Greenspan since July of this year. there is an invitation to come to Moscow for the next round of consultations, but at present even regular progress reports have been stopped. However, the UN representatives are still in the Joint Coordinating Center in Istanbul without a mandate due to the termination of the Black Sea Initiative.
In this regard, Russia reiterates its principled position, which was clearly voiced by President Vladimir Putin on September 4, that we will be ready to consider the possibility of reviving the Black Sea Initiative, but only after the requirements for lifting the sanctions status from Russian companies engaged in the field of agricultural products and fertilizers. It is obvious that while the prospects for appropriate steps on the part of Western countries are not visible, and in Kiev they even declare that they will continue to seek tougher sanctions against Russia, not caring in the least about the needs of the countries of the Global South in grain and fertilizers, as well as about food security generally.
For its part, Russia will continue to export domestic food and fertilizers, which will help stabilize world prices and improve their overall availability. We also continue our efforts to donate our products to those in need.
In particular, Russian fertilizers have already been sent to Malawi (20,000 tons) and Kenya (34,000 tons). In the coming period, it is planned to send such fertilizers to Zimbabwe (23,000 tons), Nigeria (34,000 tons) and Sri Lanka (55,000 tons). In addition, free deliveries of 200,000 tons of Russian wheat to Somalia, the Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali and Eritrea are planned before the end of the year.
The joint project of Russia, Turkey and Qatar to supply 1 million tons of grain from Russia for processing in Turkey with subsequent free transportation to the poorest countries is also extremely in demand. Moreover, we are talking about the same amount of food that was sent to those in need within the framework of the "Black Sea Initiative" for the year.
Pro-American magazines called the deceased leader a tyrant
September 7, 11:29
More about the changes in the new history books. This time about the USSR and post-Soviet Russia.
As you know, from the new school year, Russian high school students will study the history of our country using new unified textbooks. The textbooks have completely revised paragraphs on the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and added a section on the special operation in Ukraine.
For comparison, thematic excerpts from the textbooks of 2010, 2021 and 2023 recommended by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation are given:
1. History of Russia, XX - beginning of the XXI century, grade 11. A. A. Levandovsky, Yu. A. Shchetinov, S. V. Mironenko, 2010.
2. History of Russia, early XX - early XXI century, grade 10. A. V. Shubin, M. Yu. Myagkov, Yu. A. Nikiforov, 2021.
3. History of Russia, 1945 - the beginning of the XXI century, grade 11. V. R. Medinsky, A. V. Torkunov, 2023.
On the death of Stalin
It was (1): “On March 5, 1953, IV Stalin died. Towards the end of his life, this man reached the zenith of power, building on the blood and selfless enthusiasm of tens of millions of people the second most powerful world power.
It became (3): “With the death of I. Stalin on March 5, 1953, an entire era in the life of the country ended. The death of the long-term leader of the state caused confusion, fear, and sincere grief among the majority of Soviet people. The reaction in the world was mixed. Along with regret and the usual expressions of grief in such cases by ordinary people who sympathized with the Soviet Union and its leader, many pro-American newspapers and magazines called the deceased leader a tyrant, a dictator. However, the role of Stalin in the victory over Germany and the liberation of the world from the Nazi threat was most often recalled.
On the transfer of Crimea
It was (2): “In 1954 Crimea was transferred from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. The broadcast was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia. At the same time, the opinion of local residents was not asked. In those years, it was believed that it was not so important in which republic of the USSR this or that territory was located. But the consequences of these decisions were long-term.”
In the history textbook of 2010, the topic of the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR was not raised.
It became (3): “In 1954, on the personal initiative of N. Khrushchev and without observing the norms of Soviet legislation, Crimea was transferred from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. Nobody asked the opinions of the Crimeans, the vast majority of whom were ethnic Russians... As a result, Crimea was cut off from Russia for many years. Historical justice was restored only in 2014.”
About Gagarin's flight
It was (1): “The world's first satellite (1957) and the first spacecraft with a man on board - Yu. A. Gagarin (1961) are launched into near-Earth orbit. However, in general, the industry continued to move along the usual routine path.
It became (3): “The first flight into space in the history of mankind became a triumph of the Soviet Union. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was enthusiastically received in many countries of the world. The authority of the USSR stepped to the cosmic height.
On the quality of life in the era of stagnation
It was (1): “No more than 4% of national income was spent on health care (in developed countries - about 12%). From 1970 to 1985, the average life expectancy decreased by two years, and according to this most important indicator, the USSR fell back to 35th place in the world, and to 50th in terms of infant mortality.
It became (3): “The USSR has achieved great success in the development of science, education, health care. This ensured a positive dynamics of population growth, an increase in life expectancy. In terms of the level of education, the USSR occupied leading positions in the world.
About the fuel and energy complex of the era of stagnation
It was (1): “The authorities saw the main way to avoid an economic collapse in forcing supplies of energy carriers to the Western market, especially since their prices increased by almost twenty times in the 1970s alone. For 1960–1985 the share of fuel and raw material exports to the USSR rose from 16.2% to 54.4%, while the share of machinery and sophisticated equipment fell from 20.7% to 12.5%. The foreign trade of the USSR acquired a clearly expressed "colonial" character. But the treasury was fabulously enriched by hundreds of billions of petrodollars.”
It became (3): “Exploration and development of raw material deposits, construction of main pipelines, distribution and processing systems and production facilities became one of the most ambitious projects, to which all sectors of the economy of the USSR were connected. The successful development of oil and gas fields in the USSR coincided in time with the most acute energy crisis in the West.
About Brezhnev
It was (1): “In the person of L. And Brezhnev and his entourage, the Soviet nomenklatura - state, economic, military and the most influential party - found an obedient conductor of their collective will. The new leadership of the country conscientiously and, as a rule, without unnecessary initiative, put into practice the fundamental principles that were being formed in this narrow and all-powerful stratum of Soviet society.
It became (3): “He proved himself to be a wise and successful leader… The main feature of the political development of the USSR in the period under review was the stabilization of the power system. The leading role in the leadership was established for L. Brezhnev, who, when making decisions, was largely guided by the collective opinion of the party apparatus.
About glasnost
It was (1): “A course towards glasnost was proclaimed, i.e., towards a mitigation of censorship over the media controlled from above, the elimination of “special depositories” in libraries, the publication of previously banned books, etc. However, it soon became clear that the party apparatus , which has long lost its flexibility and adaptability, is not able to keep the flow of free speech in line with the officially confirmed "socialist choice"".
It became (3): “In conditions when all censorship restrictions were removed, and the state actually withdrew from the control of the media, an avalanche of destructive and hostile information fell upon the citizens of the USSR. It was touted as "freedom of speech."
About the war in Afghanistan
It was (1): “In order to hold its positions in Afghanistan, Moscow in 1979 decided to introduce there a “limited contingent of Soviet troops” (about 200 thousand people). The USSR was drawn into a bloody war that unfolded in a small Asian country with a patriarchal-tribal way of life.
It became (3): “On December 25, 1979, at the request of the government of Afghanistan, a limited contingent of Soviet troops was introduced into the country. His goal was to support the Afghan army in the fight against the Islamists, whose bases, with the help of the United States and NATO, were deployed in neighboring Pakistan. The West used the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan for propaganda attacks on the USSR.
On the collapse of the USSR
It was (1): “The first all-Union referendum in Soviet history, held in March 1991, gave M. S. Gorbachev and his associates hope that the “voice of the people” would be heard by republican politicians: out of 185.6 million full-fledged citizens, 148 voted .6 million, 76.4% of whom were in favor of "preserving the USSR as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics."
It became (3): “On March 17, 1991, an All-Union referendum was held, at which more than 76% of the citizens of the USSR spoke in favor of preserving the union ... In Ukraine, a question was added to the ballot of the All-Union referendum, the manipulative nature of which was then not yet obvious to everyone: Do you agree that Ukraine should be part of the Union of Soviet Sovereign States on the basis of the Declaration on the State Sovereignty of Ukraine?" If 70.2% voted for the preservation of the USSR, then 80.2% voted for the second question. Most ordinary people, answering “yes” to both questions, could not see the double bottom, since it was impossible for anyone to imagine the preservation of the USSR without Ukraine.”
About the putsch of 1991
It was (2): “The capture of the White House could have been carried out only at the cost of great loss of life. The members of the GKChP did not dare to shed blood. They didn't know what to do. The troops ceased to obey them. But on August 21, there were still clashes between armored vehicles and demonstrators, during which three people were killed.”
It became (3): “The members of the State Emergency Committee were inactive: under the circumstances, it was impossible to avoid the use of force to turn the situation in their favor. However, they did not dare to do so. The strange coup, in which all the lawful leaders of the state allegedly acted as putschists, ended just as strangely.
About voucher privatization
It was (1): “Its first stage was carried out on the basis of vouchers (nominal privatization checks) issued free of charge to all citizens of Russia. They could be invested in shares of privatized objects. 40 million shareholders appeared in the country, but mostly nominal, because most of the shares through the free sale of vouchers were concentrated in the hands of the former managers of state property.
It became (3): “The government decided to give each citizen a privatization check (it was called a voucher in the Western manner) with a face value of 10 thousand rubles, which could be exchanged for shares. Mass privatization began in August 1992. The authors of the reform claimed that the value of the voucher corresponded to the price of a Volga car, but this was a hoax. By the end of the year, its real price corresponded only to the price of a few kilograms of sausage.”
About the presidential elections of 1996
It was (1): “The main pre-election struggle unfolded between B. N. Yeltsin and the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation G. A. Zyuganov. The president defended the fidelity of the strategic course of reforms, promising to deploy them "face to the people" to a greater extent than before. His opponent, on the contrary, sharply criticized the reforms and their results... The majority of voters chose to continue the reforms. Despite all the difficulties, the citizens of Russia did not want to return to the past.”
It became (3): “Yeltsin's authority was extremely low. During the election campaign, the president's supporters relied on advanced information technology and an aggressive media campaign. Day and night, television and a number of the most influential print publications convinced voters that in the event of Yeltsin's defeat, the Communists would return to power, and did not spare colors for depicting the horrors and upheavals that would come in this case. Yeltsin was also supported by the seven largest oligarchic financial groups in Russia (“seven bankers”), which provided funding for his election campaign.”
Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on the Development of Civil Society, Issues of Public and Religious Associations Olga Zanko appealed to the Prosecutor General's Office with a request to check the activities and literature of the writer Viktor Suvorov in connection with critical statements and distortion of facts related to the Great Patriotic War.
"Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on the Development of Civil Society Olga Zanko appealed to the Prosecutor General's Office with a request to check the activities and literature of the writer Viktor Suvorov (real name Vladimir Rezun). The parliamentarian sent a corresponding deputy request addressed to the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Igor Krasnov today," the press service said. Deputy Zanko RIA Novosti.
She clarified that the writer's books contain critical statements about the Soviet people, the feat of the Soviet troops, and also distort the facts regarding the history of the beginning and causes of the Great Patriotic War.
“From the appeals of citizens, I learned that his books are still in Russian state libraries. And what is more terrible, they are in children's libraries. I checked, indeed, this is so - I found them in the Youth Reading Room of the Russian National Library. About this person everything has been clear for a long time. He betrayed his Motherland during the Soviet era, sold out to Great Britain, gave interviews in which he said that he basically did not give references to documents for writing his books, deliberately distorted the facts about the beginning and causes of the Great Patriotic War. It is very important to protect the younger generation from books such authors, especially in history," Zanko's press service quoted Zanko as saying.
She said that in addition to appealing to the Prosecutor General's Office, the parliamentarian sent a letter to the Director General of the Russian National Library, Vladimir Gronsky, with a request to remove Suvorov's literature from the Youth Reading Room.
Viktor Suvorov is the pseudonym of Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun, a writer, historian and military analyst, author of books, including the bestsellers Icebreaker and Aquarium.
The court overturned the results of the privatization of the Metafrax plant
September 11, 9:22
It is impossible to review the results of privatization, but if you really want to, then you can.
The court recovered 94.2% of the shares of Metafrax Chemicals in favor of the state
The court overturned the results of the privatization of a methanol production plant in the Perm region, control over which was gained by Dmitry Rybolovlev’s companies in the 1990s. Now he has nothing to do with the enterprise, said his representative.
The Arbitration Court of the Perm Territory on Friday, September 8, satisfied the claim of the Prosecutor General's Office to declare illegal the results of the privatization of one of the largest producers of formalin and methanol in Russia - the Metafrax Chemicals company.
“To reclaim in favor of the Russian Federation state property in the form of ordinary shares of Metafrax Chemicals JSC <...> in the amount of 281,672,929 shares from someone else’s illegal possession of Metaholding JSC, 802,299 shares from someone else’s illegal possession of Metafrax Trading LLC, - Interfax quotes the court decision. These shareholdings correspond to 94.2% of the enterprise. The court ruling has already entered into force.
According to the SPARK system, the shareholders of Metafrax Chemicals are Metaholding (95.88%) and the general director of the plant Vladimir Daut (0.5%), as well as Metafrax Trading (0.27%) and Victor Mayer (0. 01%). The revenue of Metafrax Group, which includes Metafrax Chemicals, according to IFRS in 2022 amounted to 78.2 billion rubles, net profit - 12.7 billion rubles. (minus 20% by 2021). In June, the company launched a complex for the production of urea, ammonia and melamine with a total capacity of 1 million tons.
The court also ordered Registrar Intraco to write off the shares of Metafrax Chemicals from the personal accounts of the defendants and credit them to the personal account of the Federal Property Management Agency. Metafrax Chemicals “strictly adheres to the need to comply with the court decision and is ready to cooperate with authorized government bodies and regional authorities,” says a statement from the company’s board of directors, which was received by RBC. The plant continues its current production and economic activities: it does not allow production stops and ensures timely shipments of products, fulfills obligations to contractors, creditors and employees, they added.
At the same time, the board of directors of Metafrax Chemicals emphasizes that the lawyers of the plant’s shareholders do not consider the court’s decision to be justified and plan to file an appeal. Previously, representatives of the company petitioned for the court to obtain from the archive materials relevant to the consideration of the case and to postpone the process, but this request was rejected. RBC sent a request to a representative of the Federal Property Management Agency.
And if you start checking the results of the loans-for-shares auctions of the 90s... How many interesting things that we didn’t have time to fall apart and destroy can be found in return the use of the state...
A monument to Dzerzhinsky was unveiled at the SVR headquarters
September 11, 14:01
While a monument to Dzerzhinsky is still not erected on Lubyanka, the SVR decided to celebrate the birthday of Iron Felix by installing a copy of the legendary monument at its headquarters in Yasenevo.
Like the FSB, the SVR is also linked in its origins to the work of Dzerzhinsky after 1917.
The opening of the monument to Dzerzhinsky was attended by the head of the SVR Naryshkin and other heads of foreign intelligence, who paid tribute to the founding father.
Naryshkin also noted that the monument to Dzerzhinsky looks in the direction of Poland and the Baltic states.
PS. The monument to Dzerzhinsky should return to Lubyanka.
They Confabulate...
This is the only thing they can do.
Russia—after suffering Western oil embargos and price caps on its oil and oil products, has shipped its first crude oil cargo to Brazil in its quest to find more outlets for its fossil fuels. The Aframax tanker Stratos Aurora is now less than 500 miles off the shore of Brazil, according to Bloomberg ship tracking data, carrying 650,000 barrels of Varandey crude oil from the Murmansk port. Russian oil hasn’t been shipped to Brazil since 2016, but sanctions on Russian crude oil, as well as the price cap, have made it difficult for the country to find outlets.
I just returned from Russia and nowhere did I find any signs of "suffering". On the contrary, Russians overwhelmingly praise sanctions. It is also difficult to explain to average Western "academic" or journo that Russia is absolutely free in her decisions on oil output and goes about it as she wishes. If London and Washington want to send ships to "enforce" the price cap--they are welcome, let them see what happens. We all know that nothing could be done and price cap failed the first day it was introduced. Now, Russia and SA extended their output cut and here we are today.
Meanwhile, Daniel Larison reacts to Walter Russel Mead's wet fantasies of "wearing Russia down". It has to be reiterated again that Mead is not an academic but shyster from what WSJ calls geopolitics, but let Larison speak:
Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead thinks that the right way to wear down Russia in a war of attrition is by attacking Russian interests in far-flung, peripheral areas around the world. Mead claims that “we operate in a target-rich environment” for bringing the “cost of war home to the Kremlin,” and he lays out a series of policies that are either unworkable, counterproductive or useless. Among other things, he calls for the U.S. to “roll up” the Wagner Group in the Sahel, work with Turkey and others to “make Mr. Putin’s presence in Syria ruinously expensive,” bring pressure to bear on Russian forces in Moldova, and “target Mr. Putin’s Latin American allies.”
Even assuming that it was practical and wise for the U.S. to do any of these things, it is hard to see how they would significantly impair Russia’s war effort or aid Ukraine in a war of attrition.If the U.S. managed to make things difficult enough for Russian forces and mercenaries in other parts of the world that it was no longer worth it for Moscow to keep them there, that would just lead to additional resources and manpower being redirected to fighting in Ukraine. It isn’t clear why Mead believes that the U.S. and “its allies in Europe and the Gulf” have the capabilities to eliminate Russian influence in the Sahel. French influence is in retreat in many countries, U.S. partners keep losing control in military coups, and so-called “allies” from the Gulf are not reliably on the same side as the U.S. in political and military crises across Africa. The problem wasn’t that the U.S. and its allies were “standing passively by” but that they were actively pursuing militarized policies that have repeatedly blown up in their faces. Russia has managed to exploit some of the resulting upheaval to its advantage.
Well, I have the answer why creatures like Mead, and even many in the outlet Larison published piece in--Responsible Statecraft--believe this. The answer is simple--99% "degrees" from US universities in history, political science, journalism, economics and other subjects like that are fraud and disqualify overwhelming majority of their bearers from any serious discussion on the subject matter, such as REAL strategy, warfare, resources management and the military history of the XX century. Mead is just a propagandist who has no tool kit to grasp those things, as for Russia Study field--I repeat myself ad nauseam. There is NO such field in the US anymore.
I guess, the unpleasant truth of the US losing economic race to China and military one to Russia will take some time to get internalized, possibly by new US political elites, but even if to assume that, as many report (in Russian), Blinken was in Kiev trying to force Ze to the negotiating table with Russia, one has to keep in mind that Russia has no reasons whatsoever to negotiate anything with Kiev. Election cycle in the US is of no concern to Russia who has written Washington off no matter who comes to power. As for Mead--I have a suggestion, instead of "teaching" Clausewitz and Strategy, he may take basic classes on WWII history, not the BS he teaches, and how real economy works. I do not expect him succeeding studying modern warfare--too complex and requires graduate STEM degree (and clearance), but he may try. Hey, at 60 I learned some basic chords on piano and even know how to play The House of the Rising Sun. But, in all seriousness, most of US "geopolitical" and "strategy" academy should be fired and given jobs as greeters at the Walmart's entrances.
Elections in Russia’s 4 new (formerly Ukrainian) regions this past weekend: sham or exercise in democracy?
September 11, 2023
Requests for interviews that I receive from one or another international broadcaster often prompt me to research and prepare statements on current events that I might otherwise not respond to, though they are genuinely important and worth exploring, worth explaining to myself and others in a methodical way.
Such was the case this morning when WION, India’s English language global broadcaster offered me air time to discuss the results of the elections that took place over the weekend 8-10 September in the four oblasts (regions) which Russia absorbed in the time since it launched its Special Military Operation in Ukraine in February 2022: Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhe.
Their lead question was: the world is denouncing these elections as a sham; what do you think?
In fact, my cursory examination of the online editions of leading newspapers in the USA, the UK, France and Belgium shows that till now none has said a word about the Russian elections. Perhaps they are waiting for the press release that they will eventually get from the U.S. State Department to guide their reportage, and, for the moment, State is fully engaged following Joe Biden’s travels in Southeast Asia.
In any case, the question will surely arise in Western media and I am satisfied that what I said in the WION interview is a fair answer given the still incomplete processing of election results in Russia. I felt especially comfortable dealing with this issue thanks to my experience as an international election observer to the 2019 federal elections for president in the Crimea. Crimeans then, like the four above mentioned oblasts absorbed into Russia from Ukraine since 2022, were experiencing their first voting as “subjects” of the Russian Federation.
As I note in the interview, when compared with the results of voting in Crimea in 2019, the results in the four oblasts this past weekend look credible and explicable.
Back in 2019 voter participation in Crimea was very high, perhaps 90% Having visited voting centers in various towns across Crimea and watched the orderly lines forming before the centers and their efficient processing inside using machine-readable ballots. I was satisfied that the official figures matched reality.
Per preliminary data, voter participation in the four new regions over the weekend varies between 65% and 80%. There are easy to understand reasons for lower turnout including, in some parts of the oblasts, Ukrainian missile and drone attacks on voting centers or more generally on residential areas which would persuade risk-averse people to stay at home, possibly in their basements. No such security threats existed in Crimea in 2019. Then there is also the reality that if any part of these oblasts should revert to Ukrainian control, the voter records would immediately be used for persecution up to and including executions by the Ukrainian authorities. This is the sort of calamity that happened to residents of Bucha when it fell to Ukrainian forces. Nonetheless, the actual turnout in the four regions was fully sufficient to declare the elections as officially valid.
So who won in the 4 new regions? Everywhere the ruling United Russia Party won, carrying 75-80% of votes counted. This is somewhat lower than the party’s sweep of votes in Crimea in 2019, but that was an election for the president and Vladimir Putin enjoyed popularity well above that of the party backing him. These elections were for local city councils and parliamentary assemblies, as well as for Duma deputies.
As I said, in 2019 I was part of an international group of election observers that spread out across the Crimea. This year there were also international observers who came to Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhie and Kherson oblasts. I take my hat off to them, because they were quite brave to risk possibly falling victim to Ukrainian attacks. Among the observers, there were nationals from the USA, The Netherlands, Spain, Serbia, Cameroon, France and Argentina in a total contingent of experts numbering 33. As one might expect, they gave the elections a clean bill of health as fair and transparent at a press conference in Moscow presided by elections chairwoman Pamfilova when the polls had closed.
*****
What was the message that Russia was trying to send to the world by holding these elections?
This was the second question posed by my interviewer from WION.
In fact, Russia has very little interest in what the outside world may think of these elections. The presence of foreign election observers was just a box to be checked as a certification issue. These elections were held to satisfy the needs and expectations of Russians in Russia. Notwithstanding all the attempts of US-led media to cast Russia as an autocracy and enemy of democracy, that is nothing more than propaganda used to justify Western aggression targeting Russian interests, including hybrid warfare and confiscation of assets.
The voting in Kherson, Zaporozhie, Donetsk and Kherson puts in place popularly elected city counselors and other local officials. It gives them legitimacy that the Moscow appointed officials who were operating till now could not enjoy.
This is not to say that the elections had no drawbacks. The most obvious of these is that the territories of the original four oblasts are still not completely held by Russia. That is to say, depending on your standpoint, these oblasts are partly occupied by Ukrainian forces, where, of course, no voting took place. The second problem is that the oblasts have lost a large part of the population living there before the war. Large numbers of the local population fled to Russia, a substantial part went West and they are now refugees in the EU. All of these former residents did not vote for obvious reasons. By the way, the same problem will present itself if any peace treaty to end this war requires that referenda be held at a future date to ratify the union with Russia or to reverse it.
*****
Let us assume that the voting in these four oblasts does begin to get coverage in Western media in coming days. It is less likely much attention will be given to the voting in the rest of the Russian Federation, which was a far more vast and diverse process. Indeed, there are 85 regions or ‘subjects’ in the Federation where voting took place. Many of the races were local, for mayors, city councils and the like, plus the federal deputies to the State Duma.
Not every governorship in Russia is elected; many are appointed by the president. However, in 21 regions, the governor’s position was put to the ballot. According to latest reported results, all 21 incumbents were voted back into office: 19 United Russia governors and 2 Communist Party governors. In the Duma elections, the overall picture in most of Russia was 70% to 80% for the United Russia Party, 10-20% for the Communists, and the balance for other Duma parties: the Liberal Democrats (LDPR), Just Russia and New People, a centrist party that formed since the last elections. In some regions, especially in Siberia and the Far East, the mix was somewhat different, in keeping with local traditions and ‘favorite son’ candidates from the Communists or Liberal Democrats.
The overall conclusion from these national parliamentary elections is that they point to an overwhelming victory for Vladimir Putin if he is in the race for president in 2024.
Finally, one further observation on the elections across Russia: there was very heavy use of electronic absentee ballots via the internet. In Moscow, where this procedure was most advanced, 2.5 million out of a total of 3 million votes cast were such absentee ballots. This is a new practice in Russia. It will be interesting to see what complaints there may eventually be over voting irregularities. In the USA, in particular, the political elites should pay close attention to what the Russians are doing in their democracy considering all the scandals surrounding absentee paper ballots in the 2020 elections.
When the WION link becomes available, it will be posted here.
Evidently, Ural Airlines...
... practice crash-landings of A320s all the time, and they are becoming really good at it. But jokes aside.
An Airbus A320 en route from Sochi to Omsk declared a mid-flight emergency on Tuesday morning and was redirected to an alternate airfield, but failed to reach it, Russian media reported, citing emergency services. The aircraft was forced to perform a crash-landing in a field not far from Novosibirsk airport, sources told the RIA and TASS news agencies. The incident was reportedly caused by a hydraulics malfunction. There were up to 170 aboard the distressed flight, and according to preliminary reports none of the passengers or crew suffered any serious injuries. Authorities said the aircraft remained in one piece, there was no fire on board, and everyone safely evacuated it using emergency slides.
And again, whatever the reason, A320 performed brilliantly, whatever the cause of malfunction, not to speak of a crew, of course. I wonder if Captain Yusupov crash-landed it brilliantly again.
Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded Friday the pilots of an Ural Airlines plane the highest civilian honor: "Hero of the Russian Federation" for their "courage and heroism" in performing official duties in extreme conditions. Putin also awarded crew members with the "Order of Courage" award for their "courage and dedication" shown in the performance of duties in extreme conditions. The honors came after Captain Damir Yusupov safely landed an Airbus jet Thursday with full fuel tanks in a cornfield after it hit a flock of birds seconds after takeoff from an airport in southeast Moscow. Yusupov made the decision after the jet lost power to both engines. That decision saved the lives of all 226 passengers and seven crew on board, including two pilots. The Ural Airlines Airbus-A321 aircraft headed from Zhukovsky International Airport in Moscow to Simferopol in Crimea, belly-flopped without chassis in a field near the Ramenskoye settlement about one kilometer (0.6 miles) from the airport.
Yet another miracle from Ural Airlines, its pilots and crew and indomitable A320 series, which simply refuse to kill passengers. Will know about the cause of crash-landing soon enough, the most important part--everyone seem to be OK. Preliminary cause--failure of hydraulic system. Hm.
Here it is. This time it was not corn but wheat field.
In a London courtroom last week, lawyers for the British government and the presiding judge, Lord Anthony Hughes (lead image, centre), revealed they will resist the efforts of the Dawn Sturgess family to obtain a multi-million pound settlement in compensation for what they claim, and the government says, was her death five years ago from Novichok poisoning by Russian state agents.
Secrecy is the key, not only to the big money claim, but to the government’s aim to defeat it and at the same time preserve the official story that the Kremlin ordered and carried out the chemical warfare attack in England in 2018.
Lord Hughes is defending the government’s effort to keep secret enough of the evidence in the case to block Adam Straw KC (lead image, left) and Michael Mansfield KC (right), the Sturgess family lawyers, from demonstrating that the British security services should have known in advance – and did know enough — to have protected Sturgess from the Russian cause of her death. Their argument has been that for this negligence a very large sum of money should be paid to Sturgess’s heirs, to Rowley, and to the lawyers.
The judge, the government, and the lawyers have agreed, however, there is one secret they must all keep. Sergei Skripal, the original target and survivor of the Novichok attack allegations in the official narrative, must never be allowed to testify publicly to what he knows.
To cover this up, Straw, Mansfield, and a lawyer representing the British press lied in court last week, claiming they want “open justice” from the secret services and the police. According to Jude Bunting KC representing the media, “open justice is about avoiding ill-informed speculation about proceedings and, insofar as material is in the public domain because of assertion, or even because of state-sponsored [Russian] misinformation, that is all the more reason for disclosing that material in open rather than in closed.”
Hughes claimed to be seeking the same openness. “One of the difficulties of this inquiry and this case…is that everybody popularly supposes that they know the answer. They may or may not be right, but the purpose of the inquiry is to find out.” Hughes was pretending.
Dawn Sturgess died of heart failure on June 30, 2018, in the apartment of her partner, Charles Rowley, at the Wiltshire county town of Amesbury. She was kept alive at Salisbury District Hospital until July 8 while police searched the apartment for illegal drugs and interviewed local drug dealers who were at the apartment with Sturgess and Rowley the evening before. On July 11, the police reportedly discovered a perfume bottle on the kitchen table; two days later its contents were publicly revealed to contain Russian-made Novichok.
For the full story, read the book published in March 2020, and since then the archive of investigations of the medical evidence fabrication.
THE AMAZING PIG IN THE RUSSIAN POKE — RUSSIA AIMS AT TOPPING WORLD PORK MARKET
By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
If you want to understand who is winning the American war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield, and also in the world’s commodity trade markets, you can start by calculating the life expectancy of a NATO-trained Ukrainian soldier on the front line, or of a NATO staff officer in a command bunker he thought was secret. Then you can check the life expectancy of a Russian pig.
The losses of the former are Russia’s tactical gains; they aren’t yet victory in the war.
But it’s the latter, the Russian pig who, upon turning into pork, is breaking through the enemy’s defences towards strategic victory of Russian economic power to capture a world market. This means defeat – unrecoverable loss of market share – for the hostile states led by the once powerful pork exporters, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Canada, and the US. As the most recent European Union pig and pork slaughter data show, the war is pushing up the energy and feed costs of pig farming, and drastically cutting European exports of pork to the Asian consumer market, the biggest in the world. Also now, the Chinese government is on the point of deciding who to favour if Beijing allows a limited lifting of the African Swine Fever (ASF) ban — the Russian pig or European and American pigs.
Behind the Ukraine front, the test of who is winning the war against Russia is also who puts their money and their meat where their mouth is. In Russia, meat consumption is rising per capita to a level never recorded before in Russian history. At the same time, the country has become the world’s fifth largest pork producer.
“Practically speaking,” says Yury Kovalev, “we no longer have imports, but not because this is closed, but because over the past fifteen years an entire industry has been created, production has grown every year, and we have almost completely abandoned import dependence.” Kovalev is general director of Russia’s National Union of Pig Breeders.
“For us, export is now the main direction for growth. Back in 2019-2020, Russia reached about 200,000 tonnes of exports, which is about 5% of our total production. In 2023, the export of pig products can reach 220,000 to 230,000 tonnes. The main strategic challenge of the Russian pig industry in the next ten years is to enter the top-5 of world pork exporters. To [achieve that] it is necessary to double exports to at least 350,000 to 400,000 tonnes; that’s up to 10% of domestic production.”
On current projections, Russia’s pork exporters expect that by the end of 2025 – one year beyond the battlefield defeat of the Ukro-NATO forces – the profitability of Russia’s pig exporting companies will depend on rising export demand, especially in China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand. This, the exporters say, will require accelerated growth in grain output to feed the pigs, which in turn depends on low to stable fertilizer, fuel, other energy and grain prices.
These are Russia’s strategic advantages in the present war. They are killing the profit margins and competitive advantages of the US-NATO side, and forcing the allied states to trade between themselves. This is the thin end of the NATO sausage.
By 2018 Russia was able to achieve full self-sufficiency in pork. This came after twenty years in which pork imports began by gobbling half of the Russian consumption market. US exporters understood that while the loss of the Russian export market was bad enough, war sanctions would benefit Russian pork exports and damage the US pork rival in the rest of the world.
“Awhile back, Russia was a major buyer of proteins in the world market. We still remember when prices for chicken leg quarters in the US, or the price of beef in Brazil, would be greatly affected by events in Russia. That is no longer the case,” a US consultancy reported to the agro-industry market last year. “High feed and energy costs are negative for US livestock producers, and they will negatively impact their ability to bring more product to market. Ultimately this is bad news for US meat protein consumers.”
By the end of March of this year, Rosstat, the state statistical agency, reported the number of pigs on the farms of all agricultural producers across Russia had increased by 5.7% compared to the figures at the end of March last year to reach 28.3 million head.
In 2018, when self-sufficiency in pork was first reached, the volume of Russian consumption was 3.74 million tonnes. In 2022, the consumption figure was up to 4.37 million tonnes. At the same time, production of pork was rising faster than consumer demand. In 2022 production was 5.28 million tonnes in live weight; it is projected by the pig breeders’ union to hit 6.03 million tonnes in 2025.
The domestic production is accelerating into market surplus, so the wholesale prices of live pigs and slaughtered meat have been declining. The average price for 2019 was 9% lower than for 2018; in 2020 prices dropped another 5%. The price decline is continuing. It was down 6% in 2022, and down another 7.5% in the first quarter of this year.
This trend, combined with the dropping rouble rate of exchange, has boosted the competitiveness of Russian pork in global trade. Until the war began, the Ukraine was a major market for Russian pork exporters, trailing behind Vietnam and Hong Kong, but ahead of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Replacing the Ukraine with other countries of the CIS and southeast Asia has already been achieved, according to the June 2023 trade reports.
About the "returnees".
colonelcassad
September 12, 16:09
About the "returnees".
Regarding questions regarding returnees. In my subjective opinion it should be like this:
1. Public repentance (text/video/interview) for their statements and public break with emigration hostile to Russia. Let’s look at the experience of Belarus after 2020, where some “fugitives” were allowed to return after public repentance and a break with the BCHB.
2. Active repentance must be expressed - in trips to the Northern Military District zone and in providing material assistance from personal funds to the army, the wounded, the disabled and residents of new regions of Russia, which makes it impossible to sit on two chairs, as this entails “Peacemaker” sanctions and everything else. And it makes returning to Russia irreversible. Everything is simple here - choose, friend, you are with us or with them. You cannot sit on two chairs.
If a person is ready to take the path of public and active repentance for his mistakes, in these cases the issue of returning such emigrants can be considered on the principle of returning fugitive White Guards to the USSR after repentance and entering the service of Soviet power. Just statements like “that I realized everything,” “I didn’t understand,” “I was scared” are not enough. We must prove in word and deed a change in views. Returning to Russia after what has been done should not be a right, but a privilege.
A relapse of “frightened patriotism” should in the future become an aggravating circumstance when assessing the activities of such persons in our legal system.
All this should not apply to those who directly financially and organizationally helped the enemy - these are clients of the Criminal Code, where all their actions are clearly described, as are the legal consequences. Media fame cannot serve as a basis for evading the law by saying “I realized everything.”
Monument to Dzerzhinsky in Barnaul
September 12, 7:34
A trailer for yesterday's birthday of Comrade Dzerzhinsky.
Yesterday, in addition to the large monument to Felix Edmundovich at the headquarters of the Foreign Intelligence Service, another smaller monument was opened - in one of the schools in Barnaul. The younger generation from an early age should honor one of the knights of the revolution and the creator of the Cheka. Yesterday, the anti-Soviet people were burning up after celebrating the birthday of Iron Felix. There will be more glow only when the monument returns to Lubyanka.
The Reported Russian-North Korean Military Deal Is All About Geostrategic Balancing
ANDREW KORYBKO
SEP 12, 2023
Russia and North Korea’s complementary balancing acts at the global and national levels vis-a-vis China coupled with China’s reluctance to burn all bridges with the West as it begins building alternative global institutions are the real driving forces behind the first two’s reported military deal.
Many observers believe that Russia and North Korea have decided to strengthen their military ties due to shared threats from the West. Reports claim that they’re exploring a swap whereby Russia would share hypersonic, nuclear, satellite, and submarine technology with North Korea in exchange for Soviet-era ammunition and artillery. The first part of this deal would balance the emerging US-South Korean-Japanese triangle while the second would keep Russia’s special operation going into next year.
There’s likely a lot of truth to this assessment since it makes sense for them to help each other against their shared opponents in the New Cold War, but there’s more to it than just that. For starters, the preceding report about their impending swap doesn’t account for Russia’s growing edge in its “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with NATO that’s responsible for defeating Kiev’s counteroffensive. Even without North Korea’s Soviet-era supplies, Russia is still impressively holding its own against all of NATO.
This proves that Russia’s military-industrial complex (MIC) already meets its needs in the present and beyond, thus raising the question of why Russia would countenance a military deal with North Korea in the first place, let alone such a seemingly lopsided one. A cogent explanation is that Russia’s MIC might struggle in that scenario to meet its military-technical obligations to third parties, ergo the need to purchase lower-quality supplies so that production facilities can prioritize higher-quality exports.
Even if that’s the case, then it doesn’t answer the question of why Russia would be willing to share such potentially game-changing military technology with North Korea for these supplies instead of simply paying for them with hard currency, nor why it either can’t or won’t try to get them from China. Likewise, one might also wonder why North Korea can’t receive the aforesaid military technology from China and would have to request it from Russia as part of their reported swap.
The answer to those three questions concerns China’s reluctance to burn all bridges with the West as well as Russia and North Korea’s shared interests in preemptively averting potentially disproportionate dependence on the People’s Republic. Beginning with the first balancing act, while President Xi arguably envisages China leading the creation of alternative global institutions as strongly suggested by his decision to skip last weekend’s G20 Summit in Delhi, he’d prefer for this to be a smooth process.
Any abrupt bifurcation/”decoupling” would destabilize the global economy and therefore sabotage his country’s export-driven growth, but the US might force this scenario in response to China’s large-scale arming of Russia and/or transfer of game-changing military technology to North Korea. For that reason, President Xi likely wouldn’t agree to either of those two deals except if they were urgently required to prevent their defeat by the West, but neither is facing that threat so China won’t risk the consequences.
As for the second part of this balancing act, even if President Xi offered to meet Russia’s and North Korea’s military needs, those two would still probably prefer to rely on one another for them instead of China in order to not become disproportionately dependent on the People’s Republic. Both regard that country as one of the top strategic partners anywhere in the world, but each would feel uncomfortable if they entered into relationship where Beijing plays too big of a role in ensuring their national security.
From Russia’s perspective, it’s a matter of principle to never become disproportionately dependent on any given partner since such ties could curtail the Kremlin’s foreign policy sovereignty even if its counterpart doesn’t have any nefarious intent. In the Chinese context, relations of that nature might make some policymakers less interested in maintaining their country’s balancing act between China and India, thus leading to them subconsciously favoring Beijing and pushing Delhi closer to Washington.
Should that happen, then the global systemic transition to multipolarity would revert back towards bipolarity (or rather bi-multipolarity) as Russia turbocharges China’s superpower trajectory in parallel with India helping the US retain its declining hegemony. The result would be that only those two superpowers would enjoy genuine sovereignty while everyone else’s would be greatly limited by the natural dynamics of their competition. Russia obviously wants to avoid this scenario at all costs.
Unlike Russia’s global interests, North Korea’s are purely national, but they’re still complementary to Moscow’s. Pyongyang had been disproportionately dependent on Beijing since the end of the Old Cold War after the USSR collapsed, but China later leveraged this relationship to expand ties with the West by approving UNSC sanctions against North Korea. Russia did the same for identical reasons, but North Korea wasn’t dependent on Russia so Pyongyang didn’t hold a grudge against Moscow like it did Beijing.
It was this growing distrust of China that inspired Kim Jong Un to seriously explore Trump’s ultimately unsuccessful de-nuclearization proposal in order to rebalance his country’s relations with the People’s Republic. The same motivation was why Myanmar agreed to a rapprochement with the US under Obama that also ultimately failed. Both countries felt that their disproportionate dependence on China was disadvantageous and accordingly sought to rectify it by rebalancing ties with the US.
Since the American dimension of their balancing acts didn’t bear any fruit and is no longer viable, each is now looking towards Russia to play that same role in helping them relieve their disproportionate dependence on China. Russian-Myanmarese relations were explained here while Russian-North Korean ones will now be elaborated on a bit more. From Pyongyang’s perspective, even if Beijing gave it game-changing military technology, this could always be cut off one day if China reached a deal with the US.
In fact, China probably wouldn’t consider giving North Korea such technology anyhow since that could make it more difficult for Beijing to ever leverage its influence over Pyongyang again in pursuit of such a deal with Washington, thus limiting China’s own foreign policy sovereignty. The likelihood of Russia reaching a major deal with the US anytime soon is close to nil after all that’s unfolded over the past 18 months, so North Korea believes that Russia will be a much more reliable long-term military partner.
Russia and North Korea’s complementary balancing acts at the global and national levels vis-a-vis China coupled with China’s reluctance to burn all bridges with the West as it begins building alternative global institutions are the real driving forces behind the first two’s reported military deal. This grand strategic insight enables one to better understand the true state of relations between these countries and therefore helps objective observers produce more accurate analyses about them going forward.
Update on the just completed visit of Korean leader Kim Jong Un to Russia
September 13, 2023
To all appearances, Kim Jong Un’s visit to Russia ended today, less than 24 hours after it began. I say this based on the live reporting of Sixty Minutes co-host Yevgeny Popov a couple of hours ago. Popov was standing from just outside the building on the Vostochny space complex in the Amur region of the Russian Far East, where the Korean delegation had been meeting and feasting. With him we watched how Putin saw off the Korean leader to a limousine taking him to the nearby train station for the return trip to Pyongyang.
Short and sweet. Russian news carried video images of the exchange of toasts by the heads of state during a festive banquet that preceded the departure. We were told that all-in-all the two sides met for two hours of talks with all key officials present and for an additional hour of tête-à-tête talks between Kim and Putin.
What could they possibly achieve in this brief get-together, you may ask? However, that would be to miss the point highlighted by Russian commentators on state television, namely that over the past year the number of staff at the Russian embassy in Pyongyang more than doubled and was filled with experts who surely were preparing all the agreements which were officially signed during the visit.
Why was the meeting held in the Vostochny space launch complex, or cosmodrome? Firstly, because such a visit was a mirror image of what Russian Defense Minister Shoigu was shown in Korea during his visit there this spring – the Koreans’ latest achievements in missile technology.
The Russians are immensely proud of the Vostochny site which has been replacing their main launch site at Baikonur from Soviet days. Baikonur is in Kazakhstan. Vostochny is on Russian land. At Vostochny they can show off their state of the art military and civilian space technologies. This addresses the known Korean pursuit of assistance in launching military spy satellites, where so far they have failed on their own. More broadly, it underlines the fact that cooperation in the “military technical” sphere is the driving force of Russian-Korean partnership.
The term “military technical” entered the vocabulary of Russia observers at the start of the Special Military Operation when it was used by Defense Minister Shoigu to describe what the Russians would be deploying to vanquish the Ukrainians and their Western backers. At the time, nearly all Western pundits were scratching their heads over the term.
Now we know better. “Military-technical” puts the accent on military hardware as opposed to warm bodies in uniform, and Shoigu was confident that the latest Russian equipment now in serial production would prove its worth against anything that the West supplied to Kiev. Watching the videos of German Leopard tanks, British Challenger II tanks and American Bradley armored personnel carriers burning to ash after being struck by Russian artillery and the killer drone known as “Lancet,” we understand today that he was right.
*****
“Old friends are better than new clothes.” This bit of folk wisdom was part of Vladimir Putin’s toast at the festive banquet. But are the Russian-Korean relations something more than friendship?
There was no qualification of the relations as “strategic partnership” or “alliance” or even “higher than alliance,” such as has been used to describe Russian-Chinese relations by the principals of both countries. Here, with the Koreans, it was just “friends.”
What exactly did these friends agree upon? It is unlikely we will know for some time. Defense Minister Shoigu went before cameras earlier today but he spoke only about further destruction of Ukrainian military equipment and personnel. Not a word about the Koreans.
From the commentary of panelists on Sixty Minutes yesterday and today, we can assume that officially Russia will insist it is honoring its signature on the UN sanctions against North Korea whatever it does in the days ahead. Russian shipments of agricultural commodities and hydrocarbons to North Korea in the coming weeks will be described as “humanitarian aid,” which is not subject to sanctions. However, the message goes out on these talk shows that Russia is considering revoking its signature on the sanctions and going flat out to cooperate with the North Koreans in every domain.
In the meantime, the Russians are watching with pleasure how Jake Sullivan and his bosses in the American national security team are squirming as they try to invent new sanctions to impose on Pongyang.
As another Russian talk show reminds us “Time Will Tell.”
“Don’t step on a rake twice!”: admonition of Vladimir Putin to Russian businessmen
Uncategorized September 12, 2023
“Don’t step on a rake twice!”: admonition of Vladimir Putin to Russian businessmen in his address to the Plenary Session of the Eastern Economic Forum, Vladivostok
Vladimir Putin’s work schedule these days prior to, during and after the Eastern Economic Forum being held in Vladivostok 11-13 September stretches far into the night and resumes before the sun rises. The “after” part relates to the meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which will likely begin late tonight or tomorrow. I will deal with this issue in the concluding section of this essay.
Notwithstanding the strain, Putin was in excellent form when I watched him deliver his address to the Plenary Session of the Forum this morning, Brussels time. His sense of humor never left him. Indeed, to the great amusement of the audience, he several times repeated his admonition to the Russian business community, both oligarchs and managers of state enterprises, not to “step on the fork twice,” by which he meant not to keep the hard currency proceeds of their export sales abroad but to repatriate them.
Though there has been talk in Russian financial circles of compelling Russian exporters to send their funds home, as was done on an emergency basis in the first phase of the SMO, there is now no such compulsory requirement, in line with the free market ideas that still form a part of Russian political life, however much the country is criticized as ‘statist’ by Western observers.
As we know, $350 billion of the Russian state’s own hard currency reserves were frozen by the United States and its European allies in the days following the start of the Special Military Operation in February 2022. Private companies and wealthy Russians also suffered confiscations of their assets held in the West. Putin acknowledged that the Russian state recovered the equivalent of its frozen assets in the course of 2022 from the sale of even reduced quantities of gas and oil thanks to the price explosion on world markets. However, we may assume that individual Russians and companies were less fortunate.
In urging Russian businesses to repatriate their export earnings and invest them in the much safer Russian economy, Putin provided his audience with sound reasons to follow his advice. His entire speech was devoted to the comprehensive development program in the Russian Far East now being implemented that opens many different opportunities for private investment. For business there is the assurance that they will be supported by massive government investment in infrastructure and by extension to them of preferential tax and credit regimes. The scope of the program encompasses road, rail and port infrastructure, as well as urban renewal, construction of new neighborhoods which integrate schools, kindergartens, and medical facilities so as to provide attractive living conditions to those who will arrive in the region to fill the high paying jobs being created.
Doctors and teachers residing in the Far East now have the right to state-subsidized housing mortgages for up to 6 million rubles (currently 60,000 euros) at 2% interest over 20 years. This will now be raised to a 9 million ruble ceiling for acquisition or construction of housing exceeding 60 square meters. Moreover, these preferences will now be extended to workers in the defense industries.
In parallel, there are separate projects directed at providing the Far East and the Far North of Russia with gas supplies by pipeline and LNG, so as to be able to satisfy the energy needs of manufacturing and extractive industries that till now were frustrated by logistical and energy restraints. In this connection, one must note that Putin’s first mission after he landed in Vladivostok was to go out and visit the Zvezda shipyards, Russia’s largest, and to witness the commissioning of two ultra-modern “ice category” vessels, one for carrying Liquefied Natural Gas and other for carrying petroleum. “Ice category” means they are capable of sailing the Northern Sea Route without assistance from accompanying ice breakers. This type of technology is held by very few countries. Until recently Russia was purchasing nearly all of its tankers from South Korea. Those days are gone.
Taking in at one glance what Vladimir Putin outlined to the audience of the Plenary Session, it is clear that this is the most significant investment program in the Russian Far East since the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the 1890s under Emperor Nicholas II. The next big investment milestone in the Far East was in the 1970s during the construction of a parallel rail line to the Trans Siberian, the Baikal Amur Mainline. However, those investments did not have the kind of comprehensive development approach that we see in what Putin just unveiled.
When asked by the moderator whether this development program was researched and launched because of the sanctions imposed by the West, Putin replied that the program was first sketched in detail ten years ago, back in 2013 when it was clear how the balance of economics and political influence was shifting to the Asia Pacific. The plans had been slowly progressing since. What happened in the course of 2022 was the decision to go full speed ahead and implement right now what had been planned earlier.
Now a word about that moderator in the Plenary Session, Managing Director of the RBC TV channel, Ilya Doronov. That he was selected conforms to the changes made at such high level events ever since relations with the West collapsed. Previously, at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum and at the Vladivostok event, well known journalists from MSNBC, from CNN and similar mainstream media regularly took the podium and led the Q&A with Putin. Whether they were just pretty women or well-dressed males, these journalists were as pumped up with their own self-importance as they were ill-informed about Russia. They read off the hostile questions they were given by their home offices, again and again. In the person of Doronov, we have a top level Russian journalist who knows Kremlin insiders and leaders of the business community on a first name basis and who could formulate questions that were really worth pursuing with the President.
In particular, let us consider Doronov’s question with respect to the defense of the ruble through the rise in the Central Bank lending rate to 12.5%: won’t this reduce credit available to expand business, he asked, and so work against the growth plans?
Putin explained that the decision to raise the lending rate was motivated firstly to fight inflation, which already has risen to 5.2% on an annualized basis. The defense of the ruble was a secondary consideration. In brief, the government is facing problems which are manageable but require close attention and fine-tuned solutions. The plans for development of the Far East will not suffer, he said, because the government will extend credit on preferential terms to priority projects.
One is left to conclude that the Russian government wishes to slow down consumer credit, since that is the part of the economy that has been overheating. Moreover, it is the resumption this year of imports for the consumer trade that has been driving the balance of payments from high positive numbers in 2022 to negative numbers today, and this, too, bears on the exchange rate.
After hearing Putin’s explanation of the current management of the economy, which is based on a set of theories to make sense of the world and is widely debated in the State Duma and media, as well as within the cabinet, we may conclude that Mr. Putin is a fully ‘rational actor’ in the sense defined by Professor John Mearsheimer in his latest book How States Think.
*****
A WhatsApp message to me early this morning from WION, the Indian English-language global broadcaster, prompted me to pay special attention to the visit to Russia of the North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, which I was asked to comment upon. I put on my thinking cap and came up with a couple of observations that should guide our appreciation of what Kim may accomplish and why the West should be worried.
First, not much has been said in major media about the timing of Kim’s visit. He is arriving in Vladivostok on the second day of the three-day Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. He will not be taking part in that event, to be sure, but all of the Russian government and business leaders with whom his delegation should meet to discuss a comprehensive deepening of relations are on the spot in Vladivostok. The very wording with which Press Secretary Peskov described arrangements for the visit is a tip-off: he said that Putin and Kim will have one-on-one talks “if necessary.” This summit event is thus very different from the Trump-Kim meetings of several years ago which were focused on a very few issues and were held with no one but translators present. Moreover, though the talks may be behind closed doors, the Russian-North Korean negotiations are not surreptitious; they are going on under the noses of global media.
The second question given me by the program host from WION was what does this meeting mean for the West given that the accent is likely to be on arms sales.
Allow me to quote a relevant interpretation of the meeting’s sense by today’s online New York Times:
“North Korea could provide Russia with much-needed ammunition. In return North Korea is seeking food aid and some advanced technology.”
The widespread assumption that Russia needs North Korean ammunition for its ongoing war in Ukraine is just plain wrong. The other type of military supply which Russia is said to seek in North Korea is medium range ballistic missiles, which some analysts say are among the best and least vulnerable to air defenses in the world. There, too, I say that the Russian interest is not to deploy such missiles in the Ukraine campaign.
Instead, I believe the Russians are seeking the aforementioned military materiel from North Korea to add to their weapons inventory in preparation for a direct war with NATO if that comes. In such eventuality this materiel can be of crucial importance. In the meantime, conclusion of agreements for supply from North Korea allows the Russians to be more liberal in their deployment of their own top-of-the-line hardware as they shift in coming weeks from defense to offensive operations on the ground in Ukraine. By way of example, I note that Russian use of their Iskander hypersonic missiles in Ukraine thus far has been very sparing. But most recent news suggests that Russia is placing large numbers of Iskander in the field for use when it goes on the offensive. These missiles cannot be produced in great numbers quickly. Therefore, it will be very handy for Russia to have a back-up in the form of Korean medium range missiles.
There are, in fact, a good number of areas of common interest which the sides can discuss if they so wish. Among them, I would mention the long frozen project to build pipelines for gas transmission across Korea to China.
We may learn about the fields of agreement following the Kim-Putin meetings. And then again, perhaps the sides will wish to keep the West guessing.
BEN ARIS: RUSSIANS RALLY ROUND WAR-TIME PUTIN, PROPENSITY TO HOLD PROTESTS HAS FALLEN
SEPTEMBER 12, 2023 LEAVE A COMMENT
By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 8/31/23
In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval rating was 82%, according to the last available Levada centre poll.
Despite the speculation that the Russians might rise up and rebel following the start of the war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity remains higher than ever according to Levada.
Putin’s popularity had been hovering in the mid- to high-60s for much of the pandemic years, falling to a one-time low of 53 points in April 2020 when the first lockdowns were introduced before recovering to 66 in August that year.
However, following the invasion of Ukraine his popularity leaped over 10 points to 83 in March 2022 and has remained at between 81 and 83 points throughout the duration of the war, with the exception of September to November when it fell to 77-79 following Ukraine’s successful Kharkiv counter-offensive.
Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has also enjoyed a bump in popularity, with his approval rating rising from the mid-50s pre-war to 69-71% since the start of this year. His approval was slightly down to 69% in July.
Mishustin’s government has also been lifted from around 50% approval pre-war to 67% in July and has consistently polled at 67-69% all year.
Russia’s regional governors are even more popular, as they have in the last ten years become more effective and have concerned themselves with dealing with the immediate needs of their constituents. Region governors received consistent ratings of between the high-50s to low-60s pre-war that rose to 69% following the start of the war and have stayed at 69-74 in since. In July their approval fell slightly to a still high 72%.
The Duma remains the most unpopular institution in Russia but even that has had a boost from the nationalist rhetoric and heavy-handed propaganda. Pre-war the majority of Russian disapproved of the Duma with a roughly 40%/50% approve/disapprove split.
However, that ratio flipped in March 2022 to a 59/36 approval/disapproval as the majority of Russians approved of the Duma and its actions. Since then the overall majority of Russians still approve of the Duma with the rate varying at 54-59, and the split was 57/35 approve/disapprove in July, the last data available, with the remainder expressing no view.
The surge in nationalism is also visible in Levada’s “which direction is the country going in?” poll. Pre-war around 50% of respondents thought the country was going in the “right” direction, with roughly 44% believing it was going in the “wrong” direction and the remainder having no opinion.
However, following the start of the war the number of respondents saying Russia was going in the “right” direction jumped to 69% in March 2022 and wrong fell to 22%.
Since then respondents have very consistently polled at 67-68% for the right direction, with a few aberrations, such as the months of the Kharkiv offensive disaster for Russia.
Those that think Russia is going in the wrong direction are consistently down 20 percentage points at around 22% compared to the pre-war period, while the “don’t know” category has remained the same, circa 10% for both pre-war and post-start of the war periods.
As for the propensity to protest with political demands, this has roughly halved between the pre- and post-start of the war periods. This metric is a little more volatile than the political approval results, but the propensity to protest with political demands has oscillated around 27-30% for most of the last five years, but it fell sharply in the first poll after the start of the war in May 2022 to 16% and was 17% in July.
Interestingly, the accompanying question of “could there be political protests and would you participate if there were?” has fallen even further. Pre-war the poll found somewhere between 19% and 29% said yes to this second question, but in May 2022 that fell to only 6%, its lowest level in years. Since then it has recovered to 15% in July, which is on par with many of the polls in the pre-war period.
The political protest questions suggest that immediately after the war started respondents were afraid to take to the streets because of the anticipated Kremlin crackdown. However, after the initial shock of the invasion wore off a small minority of around 15% remain opposed to the Putin regime and war has not added significantly to their numbers. The same people don’t like Putin now as didn’t like him before the war.
The propensity to protest with economic demands show almost identical patterns. Pre-war those that thought protests were possible numbered 25-30% with 21-29% saying they would participate if protests happened.
In the May 2022 poll that fell to 17% that thought protests could happen and 14% saying they would participate if they did. In July the same 17% said protests could happen but the number willing to participate has fallen to 10%.
.WHAT PRESIDENT PUTIN REALLY SAID ABOUT ANATOLY CHUBAIS, WHY, AND WHY NOW
By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
It must be the sea air at Vladivostok that causes temporary clumsiness and misspeaking on the part of President Vladimir Putin (lead image, left) during the carefully orchestrated question-and-answer session of the annual Far Eastern Economic Forum.
At the forum in September 2018, asked about British government and media reports of two Russian military intelligence soldiers using Novichok to attack Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Putin said he knew their names and denied they were GRU agents. “Of course, they are civilians,” he said in Vladivostok.
Again in Vladivostok on Tuesday this week, asked about Anatoly Chubais (right), the former Kremlin chief of staff and privatisation chief during the Yeltsin administration who has moved to Israel, Putin referred to him as “Moshe Israelevich”. Putin added: “the fact [is] that Anatoly Borisovich is hiding there [Israel] for some reason… I was shown some kind of photo from the Internet, where he is no longer Anatoly Borisovich Chubais, but some kind of Moshe Israelevich, lives there somewhere… Why he’s doing this, I don’t understand why he ran away.”
The US government propaganda agency and the Russian opposition have called Putin anti-Semitic for referring to Israel and calling Chubais “Moshe Israelevich”.
They were ignoring the context and Putin’s complimentary remarks about other Russian runaways to Israel, before he got to Chubais.
So was Putin misspeaking, or was he launching his presidential re-election campaign by trying to reassure two opposing blocs of Russians – the majority of voters who have long regarded Chubais as one of the most hated politicians in the country; and the Russian oligarchs for whom the current investigation of Chubais for billion-dollar theft of state funds is a harbinger of their own fate?
On September 12, 2018, Putin led the plenary session of the Vladivostok forum with state guests, the presidents of China, Japan, South Korea, and Mongolia. The moderator of the session was the journalist Sergei Brilyov, who worked at the time for the state television channel Rossiya.
Left to Shinzo Abe, Xi Jinping, and Lee Nak-yeon. The Mongolian president, Khaltmaagiin Battulga, is on Putin’s immediate left but in the photograph is screened by the South Korean president. Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/
The Kremlin verbatim text reports this exchange of five years ago:
“Sergei Brilyov: In the past three to four days, at least two theories have been advanced as to what happened to those two young men, photographed in the United Kingdom in connection with the Skripal case. Either they deliberately poked their faces towards the camera in order to be photographed, or they are completely unprofessional to have their images captured by all the cameras. Perhaps you have a third theory?
“Vladimir Putin: Actually, we have, of course, taken a look at these people. We already know who they are, and we have located them. I hope they will show up and tell everyone about themselves. This would be better for everyone. I assure you that there is nothing special or criminal here. We will see shortly.
“Sergei Brilyov: Are they civilians?
“Vladimir Putin: Of course, they are civilians.
“Sergei Brilyov: All right, we will wait.
“Vladimir Putin: I would like to address them, so they can hear us today. Let them come to a media outlet and tell everything.”
The British media had named Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov as GRU agents whose presence in London, then Salisbury at the time of the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Putin’s claim they were civilians was untrue. On the next day, the two men – GRU Colonel Alexander Mishkin and Colonel Anatoly Chepiga – appeared on national television to give their account of their trip to Salisbury in March of that year.
Source: US state propaganda agency Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Read the true story, starting here.
This week in Vladivostok, at the same forum, the state guests were the Vice Premier of China’s State Council, Zhang Guoqing, and Vice President of the Lao Republic, Pany Yathotou. Only the Laotian appeared on the platform during Putin’s speech. The moderator was journalist, Ilya Doronov, managing director of the RBC television channel.
Left to right: Ilya Doronov, President Putin, and Pany Yathotou. Source: http://en.kremlin.ru
The Kremlin website has published the video and transcript of yesterday’s session, including the official English translation.
Doronov introduced his line of questioning by saying he wanted discuss “relations between the state and the business community, including those who are returning here…. I interviewed Andrei Belousov [First Deputy Prime Minister] ahead of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum [June 14-17, 2023], and I asked him how the state and the business community should interact. He said that they should collaborate as partners, with the state being a senior partner, while the business community is a junior partner.”
Putin replied: “Did he say this?
“Ilya Doronov: Yes, this is what he said.
“Vladimir Putin: He is talking like a former State Planning Committee official. We should be equal partners.
“Ilya Doronov: Nevertheless, you have already said that they should be equal partners. In principle, do you get the impression that the state’s presence in the economy and in business is becoming excessive?
“Vladimir Putin: We are hearing this, and they are talking about this all the time. Yes, we have major companies, especially in the energy sector; however, private companies are developing rapidly, and we support them, including here in the Far East.”
Doronov went on to ask Putin about Central Bank restrictions on business cashflows, loan interest rates, and rouble exchange and capital export controls proposed by some government officials. Putin replied: “What are they doing? They are just trying to scare people by proposing that they cooperate on peaceful terms and undertake specific actions or else, they say, we will impose restrictions and force you to repatriate your revenue, etc. However, no one will make any sudden moves in this regard.”
Doronov then asked Putin about Alexei Kudrin who left the Accounting Chamber in November 2022, and has not been replaced. “Ilya Doronov: I have a question about the Accounts Chamber – it has been without a head since November last year. What is the reason? Alexei Kudrin was so good that they cannot find a replacement? If so, why did they let him go to Yandex in the first place?
“Vladimir Putin: First of all, Russia has no slave system – if he wanted to go on to work in business, we cannot force him to stay. Even though he was indeed the best fit for the job; he had been a good Minister of Finance, too.”
Kudrin is the longest-running candidate for regime change in the Kremlin who is not in jail, or outside the country – click to open the archive here.
Doronov then asked Putin about Arkady Volozh, the controlling shareholder of Yandex who has moved to Israel where last month he attacked the Russian war policy. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is barbaric, and I am categorically against it,” Volozh said in a statement. “I am horrified about the fate of people in Ukraine – many of them my personal friends and relatives – whose houses are being bombed every day.” Volozh and Kudrin are collaborating in the restructuring of Yandex and they have met often in Israel; Volozh employs Kudrin. Read more on the Yandex transactions here and the Volozh archive.
Putin did not mention the still secret terms of the reorganisation he has agreed for the Yandex assets and the payoffs to Volozh and Kudrin. But the president was emphatically positive toward Volozh personally.
“Ilya Doronov: I mentioned Yandex for a reason. Recently, Arkady Volozh created his own official website, where he says – I will quote it verbatim – that he is ‘a Kazakhstan-born, Israeli tech entrepreneur’ who ‘co-founded NASDAQ-listed Yandex N.V., one of the largest internet companies in Europe.’ I will remind you that Volozh was born in 1964, when Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union, but there is no mention of the Soviet Union on his biography page. We have other businesspeople who publicly express their opinion, including their view on the special military operation. Where would you say is the line that should not be crossed? A line that even those who have contributed as much value to the nation as Yandex, should not cross?
“Vladimir Putin: Look, it is not for me to draw this line. It should be in the minds and should remain on the conscience of those people who make certain statements. I would like to emphasise that in most cases people make such statements because they want to preserve their business, to preserve their assets, especially if they have moved and decided to bind their lives to another country. He lives in Israel, and I can imagine that, to live a good and prosperous life there and have good relations with authorities, he has to make certain statements. He had been silent for a long time before he decided to make a statement. God grant him health and may he live well there. Frankly speaking, we are not particularly bothered by what he said. But in general, if a person grew up on this soil, got an education and became successful, he should have some respect for the country that gave him everything. I am not referring to Volozh – he is a gifted person who created a really good company and handpicked a team – I am not referring to him, but in general. Yes, one can imagine that a person does not agree with what the current authorities are doing. Do they have the right to express their views? By all means. But there are quite a few fine points here.
“We can side with our geopolitical adversaries and play along with them, thus damaging our country’s interests, or we can act otherwise. There are many nuances here. People decide for themselves who they are. Do they have a sense of national identity? Or do they prefer to mimic and feel like someone else, not a Russian person born in the Soviet Union? A person makes their own choices. Rest assured that ordinary citizens of Russia, our people, understand everything perfectly well and there is no way to mislead anyone. If someone has chosen a new destiny, let them try to make themselves known there, to prove themselves and to achieve results. Because whoever they may be, whatever results they have achieved, they have achieved them here, and it is not guaranteed that they will achieve the same in some other place. This is their choice.”
Volozh (left) meeting Putin at Yandex’s Moscow headquarters on September 21, 2018; Volozh returned from Israel for the occasion. Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/
Then Doronov asked Putin about Chubais.
“Igor Doronov: About the new destiny, after another question: in July, an article by an independent expert from Glasgow was published in the Russian magazine ‘Economic Issues’. Glasgow is Scotland.
“Vladimir Putin: I’m aware of that.
“Igor Doronov: I’m speaking for the audience. I have no doubt that you are aware. The article is called ‘Non-payments in the Russian economy of the 90s. An unforeseen institution.’ Do you know who the author is? Anatoly Chubais. He is actually represented in this article as an independent British scientist.”
“I have a question: Do you trust British scientists at all?
“Vladimir Putin: You know, I trust scientists regardless of their nationality. If they are serious people, serious researchers, I don’t just trust them, I admire their work, their life, the results of their work, because a real scientist is immersed in the topic he is engaged in, these people put their whole lives on the cause to which they devoted it, they don’t even regret their lives. There are countless examples both in our country and abroad. If they are fooling around, of course, they are not scientists, then they are quasi-scientists, they entertain the public. Also not bad, let them fool around. Although you can go to the circus, there is something to see in the circus.
“The fact that Anatoly Borisovich is hiding there for some reason… I was shown some kind of photo from the Internet, where he is no longer Anatoly Borisovich Chubais, but some kind of Moshe Israelevich, lives there somewhere… Why he’s doing this, I don’t understand why he ran away. You see, it may also be due to the fact that complex processes are going on in this structure of nanotechnology, which he headed for many years, and there is a big hole, a huge financial hole, really. I’m not even going to call the numbers now, big numbers. But there, thank God, there are no criminal cases or prosecutions. Maybe this is due to the fact that he fears that eventually all this will lead to the emergence of some criminal cases, which is why he switched, in Israel even switched to an illegal position. What the hell does he need, I honestly don’t understand.
“Igor Doronov: The opinion of a man who worked in Dresden [reference to Putin’s KGB posting, 1985-90], right?
“Vladimir Putin: Well, some nonsense. Still writes… A smart person, I haven’t read this article, maybe he wrote something useful. However, apparently, such activity at the head of a large company that was created for the development of nanotechnology – at least from an economic point of view, from a financial point of view – it seems that he clearly failed.
“Igor Doronov: The question, oddly enough, is about privatisation and deprivation [confiscation]. There is now an idea of a new privatisation in Russia, but the topic that is now very much worrying business and is being discussed here, on the sidelines of the WEF [World Economic Forum, Davos], and in Moscow they are talking about it is deprivation [confiscation], when the state, as it were, can be said, takes assets in its favour. And there are already several such cases. Businessmen say that we do not understand: have any rules changed or how do we look to the future in this situation? The topic is quite acute. How would you comment on it?
“Vladimir Putin: No, there is no deprivation [confiscation] planned, there will be no deprivation, I can tell you that for sure. The fact that the prosecutor’s office is actively working in certain areas, for individual companies – law enforcement agencies have the right to assess what is happening in the economy in specific cases, but this is not related to any decisions about deprivation. This will not happen, and [Prosecutor General] Igor Viktorovich [Krasnov] knows my position. Igor Viktorovich?”
The US and Israeli media headlined Putin as making an anti-Semitic crack. This is how the US government propaganda agency reported the remarks. “President Vladimir Putin suggested that Anatoly Chubais, a former top government official who fled after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, may have left due to financial irregularities at the state-run corporation he oversaw. Putin’s comments, made on September 12 at an economic forum in Vladivostok, were the first he’s made about Chubais since he abruptly resigned last March and fled Russia… Asked by the event moderator about reports that Chubais was living in Israel, Putin replied, using what appeared to be an anti-Semitic remark.”
The Russian state news agency Tass reported part of Putin’s remarks about Chubais but left out the “Moshe Israelevich” comment. RT included it but headlined its report with the prosecutors’ investigation of Chubais’s self-enrichment at Rusnano.
RT, the state news agency, reported the Chubais reference and included the “Moshe Israelevich”.
Meduza, the Russian regime change platform based in Latvia, reported Chubais as responding to Putin by announcing: “I would not like to comment on anything that has been said.” Chubais said this to Tass, according to the Tass Telegram report on Tuesday afternoon.
RT, Tass, Meduza, and the Moscow business newspapers all omitted to report that Putin had declared there will be no prosecution of Chubais for the Rusnano thefts.
No Russian or western commentator or reporter has yet interpreted Putin’s remarks in the context of the renationalisation of the methanol producer Metrafax; this occurred in August after officials won a Perm court order reversing the privatisation of the company because of initial violations of the prevailing law. This is despite Putin’s explicit warning to Prosecutor-General Igor Krasnov – renationalisation “will not happen”.
The president had not spoken as plainly when he and Krasnov met at the Kremlin last January. Then Krasnov told Putin: “We have continued to protect property interests of the state, primarily where third parties tried to benefit, based on their premeditated and selfish interests. Thus, more than 16,000 claims concerning state and municipal property have been filed with courts.
Moreover, we also continue to return state control over strategic enterprises that are important for our country’s security and defence, the control over which was illegally seized by third parties, including in favour of foreign agencies, the state control of which has been illegally lost.”
Putin appeared to be endorsing Krasnov’s line, replying: “I can see that recently, you have toughened control over securing the economic interests of the state, including in view of national projects and significant funds that the state allocates for the priority areas of the country’s economic development… Another priority is overseeing investigation and questioning, an important aspect related to the interests of the state and citizens. Of course, it is a complex issue and a special mission for the prosecution service. I am certain that you will continue working on this…. I hope that the prosecution agencies and all staff will remain tenacious and productive in the short-term and, of course, mid-term perspective. Thank you. Now, let’s address some issues more closely.” .
Left: Putin meeting Krasnov at the Kremlin on January 31, 2023. Right, Alexander Shokhin, head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, in Vladivostok this week.
The Kremlin communiqué is silent on the discussion which followed. Krasnov then moved in Perm court against the private shareholders of Metrafax. In Vladivostok on Tuesday morning, Putin implied that he didn’t approve.
Putin was also responding to a public call at the forum by Alexander Shokhin, the chief oligarch lobbyist in Moscow, for the president to stop the state prosecutors from renationalising companies whose foreign owners have left the country, or whose Russian owners took them over illegally. Shokhin told RBC that “cases of nationalisation of private assets are worrying the business community. No one knows who may be next in line… business could change several owners from the moment of privatisation and the final owner could be in a worse position. Therefore, decisions should be made based on what kind of asset it is, in what condition it is, how much has been invested in it. Stability in the current conditions is more important than secondary grounds in order to take assets from the current owners.”
In Vladivostok also, Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch who stole his Russian Aluminium (Rusal) assets from Mikhail Chernoy according to the evidence filed in the British courts, warned Putin not to risk his re-election campaign by high-profile takeovers of private shareholdings, like the Metrafax case. “I must frankly say that, of course, attempts are being made. But it will depend on all of us. There will be some one-time cases, or else there will already become a trend. We understand what happened: there was a global disruption, then we were faced with our institutional choice, which added difficult challenges, there was a small stage of stabilisation. Now there is an adjustment — we are trying to find a model that will allow us to develop for the next 10-15 years.”
Deripaska (right) went on to issue his election warning to Putin. “It is too early to say that the government and business have reached some, let’s say, mutually understood level. It’s natural. We just need to understand that the government is also solving problems related to the crisis. It is in a slightly different paradigm. You just need to give them time. Now they have a better situation, respectively, they have more time. They started analysing all the other processes. The election campaign will begin, and, of course, there will be a new dialogue between the government and society, government and business, between business and society. I hope and believe in this, because it would be a profound mistake to abandon the achievements that were so hard to come by: the market economy, the institution of law, competitiveness, private property, they allowed us to go from decline to growth so quickly. But I think that more than one dialogue will be needed, and the authorities stressed today [Putin’s speech] that they are ready for this dialogue.”
A well-informed Moscow source, who supports the president and the war, reacted: “Putin is distancing himself, pretending he has never cared much for [Chubais]. Scripted or otherwise he is trying to ingratiate himself with the patriotic vote. It’s low-cost politically. It’s a stunt.”
In Vladivostok, the Russian Far East Rises
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on SEPTEMBER 14, 2023
Pepe Escobar
In Vladivostok this week, the Russian Far East was inaugurated. Russia, China, India, and the Global South were there to contribute to this trade, investment, infrastructure, transportation, and institutional renaissance.
Russian President Vladimir Putin opened and closed his quite detailed address to the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok with a resounding message: “The Far East is Russia’s strategic priority for the entire 21st century.”
And that’s exactly the feeling one would have prior to the address, interacting with business executives mingling across the stunning forum grounds at the Far Eastern Federal University (opened only 11 years ago), with the backdrop of the more than four kilometer-long suspension bridge to Russky Island across the Eastern Bosphorus strait.
The development possibilities of what is in effect Russian Asia, and one of the key nodes of Asia-Pacific, are literally mind-boggling. Data from the Ministry for the Development of the Russian Far East and the Arctic – confirmed by several of the most eye-catching panels during the Forum – list a whopping 2,800 investment projects underway, 646 of which are already up and running, complete with the creation of several international Advanced Special Economic Zones (ASEZ) and the expansion of the Free Port of Vladivostok, home to several hundred small and midsize enterprises (SMEs).
All that goes way beyond Russia’s “pivot to the East” which was announced by Putin in 2012, two years before the Maidan events in Kiev. For the rest of the planet, not to mention the collective west, it is impossible to understand the Russian Far East magic without being on the spot – starting with Vladivostok, the charming, unofficial capital of the Far East, with its gorgeous hills, striking architecture, verdant islands, sandy bays and of course the terminal of the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway.
What Global South visitors did experience – the collective west was virtually absent from the Forum – was a work in progress in sustainable development: a sovereign state setting the tone in terms of integrating large swathes of its territory to the new, emerging, polycentric geoeconomic era. Delegations from ASEAN (Laos, Myanmar, Philippines) and the Arab world, not to mention India and China, totally understood the picture.
Welcome to the “de-westernization movement”
In his speech, Putin stressed how the rate of investment in the Far East is three times the Russian region average; how the Far East is only 35 percent explored, with unlimited potential for natural resource industries; how the Power of Siberia and Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok gas pipelines will be connected; and how by 2030, liquified natural gas (LNG) production in the Russian Arctic will triple.
In a broader context, Putin made clear that “the global economy has changed and continues to change; the west, with its own hands, is destroying the system of trade and finance that it itself created.” It is no wonder then that Russia’s trade turnover with Asia-Pacific grew by 13.7 percent in 2022, and by another 18.3 percent in just the first half of 2023.
Cue to Presidential Business Rights Commissioner Boris Titov showing how this reorientation away from the “static” west is inevitable. Although western economies are well-developed, they are already “too heavily invested and sluggish,” says Titov:
“In the East, on the other hand, everything is booming, moving forward rapidly, developing rapidly. And this applies not only to China, India, and Indonesia, but also to many other countries. They are the center of development today, not Europe, our main consumers of energy are there, finally.”
It is quite impossible to do justice to the enormous scope and absorbing discussions featured in the major panels in Vladivostok. Here is just a taste of the key themes.
A Valdai session focused on the accumulated positive effects of Russia’s “pivot to the East,” with the Far East positioned as the natural hub for swinging the entire Russian economy to Asian geoeconomics.
Yet there are problems, of course, as stressed by Wang Wen from the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University. Vladivostok’s population is only 600,000. the Chinese would say that for such a city, infrastructure is poor, “so it needs more infrastructure as fast as it can. Vladivostok could become the next Hong Kong. The way is to set up SEZs like in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Pudong.” Not hard, as “the non-western world very much welcomes Russia.”
Wang Wen could not but highlight the breakthrough represented by the Huawei Mate 60 Pro: “Sanctions are not such a bad thing. They only strengthen the “de-westernization movement,” as it is informally referred to in China.
China by mid-2022 slipped into was defined by Wang as “silent mode” in terms of investment for fear of US secondary sanctions. But now that’s changing, and frontier regions once again are regarded as key to trade ties. In the Free Port of Vladivostok, China is the number one investor with its $11 billion commitment.
Fesco is the largest maritime transportation company in Russia – and reaches China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. They are actively engaged in the connection of Southeast Asia to the Northern Sea Route, in cooperation with Russian Railways. The key is to set up a network of logistic hubs. Fesco executives describe it as “titanic shift in logistics.”
Russian Railways in itself is a fascinating case. It operates, among others, the Trans-Baikal, which happens to be the world’s busiest rail line, connecting Russia from the Urals to the Far East. Chita, smack on the Trans-Siberian – a top manufacturing center 900 km east of Irkutsk – is considered the capital of Russian Railways.
And then there’s the Arctic. The Arctic is home to 80 percent of Russia’s gas, 20 percent of its oil, 30 percent of its territory, 15 percent of GDP, but consists of only 2.5 million people. The development of the Northern Sea Route requires top-notch high-tech, such as a constantly evolving feet of icebreakers.
Liquid and stable as vodka
All that transpired in Vladivostok connects directly to the much-ballyhooed visit by North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. The timing was a beauty; after all the Primorsky Krai region in the Far East is an immediate neighbor to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
Putin emphasized that Russia and the DPRK are developing several joint projects in transportation, communications, logistics, and naval sectors. So much more than military and space matters amicably discussed by Putin and Kim, the heart of the matter is geoeconomics: a trilateral Russia-China-DPRK cooperation, with the distinct outcome of increased container traffic transiting through the DPRK and the tantalizing possibility of DPRK rail reaching Vladivostok and then connecting deeper into Eurasia via the Trans-Siberian line.
And if that was not ground-breaking enough, much was discussed in several round tables about the International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC). The Russia-Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran corridor will be finalized in 2027 – and that will be a key branch of the INTSC.
In parallel, New Delhi and Moscow are itching to start the Eastern Maritime Corridor (EMC) as soon as possible – that’s the official denomination of the Vladivostok-Chennai route. Sarbananda Sonowal, the Indian minister of ports, shipping and waterways, promoted an Indo-Russian workshop on the EMC in Chennai from October 30 to discuss “the smooth and swift operationalization” of the corridor.
I had the honor of being part of one of the crucial panels, Greater Eurasia: Drivers for the Formation of an Alternative International Monetary and Financial System.
A key conclusion is that the stage is set for a common Eurasia payment system – part of the Eurasian Economic Union’s (EAEU) draft declaration for 2030-2045 – against the backdrop of Hybrid War and “toxic currencies” (83 per cent of EAEU transactions already bypass them).
Yet the debate remains fierce when it comes to a basket of national currencies, a basket of goods, payment and settlement structures, the use of blockchain, a new pricing system, or setting up a single stock exchange. Is it all possible, technically? Yes, but that would take 30 or 40 years to take shape, as the panel stressed.
As it stands, a single example of challenges ahead is enough. The idea of coming up with a basket of currencies for an alternative payment system did not gather steam at the BRICS summit because of India’s position.
Aleksandr Babakov, deputy chairman of the Duma, evoked the discussions between the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and Iran on trade financing in national currencies, including a road map to look for best ways in legislation to help attract investment. That’s also being discussed with private companies. The model is the success of the China-Russia trade turnover.
Andrey Klepach, chief economist at VEB, quipped that the best currency is “liquid and stable. Like vodka.” So we’re not there yet. Two-thirds of trade are still carried in dollars and euros; the Chinese yuan accounts for only three percent. India refuses to use the yuan. And there’s a huge Russia-India imbalance: as much as 40 billion rupees are sitting in Russian exporters accounts with nowhere to go. A priority is to improve trust in the ruble: it should be accepted by both India and China. And a digital ruble is becoming a necessity.
Wang Wen concurred, saying there’s not enough ambition. India should export more to Russia and Russia should invest more in India.
In parallel, as pointed out by Sohail Khan, the deputy secretary-general of the SCO, India now controls no less than 40 percent of the global digital payment market. It had a share of zero only seven years ago. That accounts for the success of its unified payment system (UPI).
A BRICS-EAEU panel expressed the hope that a joint summit of these two key multilateral organizations will happen next year. Once again, it’s all about trans-Eurasian transportation corridors – as two-thirds of world turnover will soon follow the eastern track connecting Russia to Asia.
On BRICS-EAEU-SCO, top Russian companies are already integrated into BRICS business, from Russian Railways and Rostec to big banks. A big problem remains how to explain the EAEU to India – even as the EAEU structure is deemed to be a success. And watch this space: a free trade agreement with Iran will be clinched soon.
At the last panel in Vladivostok, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova – the contemporary counterpart of Hermes, the messenger of the Gods – pointed out how the G20 and BRICS summits set the stage for Putin’s speech at the Eastern Economic Forum.
That required “fantastic strategic patience.” Russia, after all, “never supported isolation” and “always advocated partnership.” The frantic activity in Vladivostok has just demonstrated how the “pivot to Asia” is all about enhanced connectivity and partnership in a new polycentric era.
Russian Grain Diplomacy: Winning Hearts, Minds, and Markets
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on SEPTEMBER 13, 2023
Mohamad Hasan Sweidan
The Ukraine conflict and the Black Sea grain deal have highlighted the ‘geopolitics of wheat’ and helped Russia gain leverage over Europe while expanding its influence in Africa and the Global South.
In the complex fabric of international relations, the interaction between geopolitics and trade – particularly of vital commodities – often occupies a key position. Nowhere is this more evident today than in the grain trade agreement between Russia and Ukraine, known as the Black Sea Grain Initiative.
Nestled within the fertile plains of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Ukraine stand as formidable players in the global cereal production arena, particularly in the domain of wheat cultivation. Their collaborative efforts significantly contribute to stabilizing global food prices and securing the food supply for numerous countries.
But the historical, political, and regional intricacies inherent to these two states have often cast shadows over their global economic interdependence, a situation further exacerbated by the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Major players in the global grain market
On 22 July, 2022, a landmark agreement was brokered with the mediation of Turkiye and the UN, in which Russia and Ukraine would facilitate grain exports from both countries to global markets.
Central to this agreement was the establishment of a secure maritime route in the Black Sea – traversing the Bosphorus Strait in northwestern Turkiye – that would ensure the safe transit of grain shipments to and from Ukrainian ports.
Moreover, the accord envisioned the creation of a joint coordination center comprised of representatives from the three states who would be tasked with monitoring and inspecting ships to prevent the transportation of weapons.
Map of Black Sea Grain Initiative Shipping Route
The global significance of this agreement cannot be overstated, given the pivotal roles that Russia and Ukraine occupy as the world’s foremost cereal exporters. According to the World Food Program, Ukrainian cereals sustained the diets of approximately 400 million people globally in 2021.
Yet due to the ongoing proxy conflict in Ukraine, the number of individuals experiencing acute hunger is projected to surge by 47 million, representing a 17 percent increase, with the majority of those affected residing in sub-Saharan Africa.
Russia and Ukraine collectively account for a substantial share of the global grain market, with Russia being the leading wheat exporter (20 percent of global exports) and Ukraine following closely behind as the fifth-largest (10 percent of global exports).
Additionally, the two neighbors jointly contribute 25 percent of the world’s barley exports and 15 percent of maize exports. In 2021, Russia recorded wheat exports valued at $8.92 billion, with major destinations including Egypt ($2.44 billion), Turkiye ($1.79 billion), Nigeria ($493 million), Azerbaijan ($339 million), and Saudi Arabia ($316 million).
During the same year, Ukraine’s wheat exports totaled $5.87 billion, with key destinations being Egypt ($851 million), Indonesia ($640 million), Pakistan ($594 million), Nigeria ($490 million) and Ethiopia ($440 million).
However, the outbreak of war has severely impacted Ukrainian wheat exports, causing them to plummet from 21 million tons in the 2019-20 season to 16.8 million tons in 2022-2023, with a further decline to 10.5 million tons anticipated in the next year.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) predicts that Ukraine’s wheat production will dwindle to 17.5 million tons, marking the lowest level since 2012-2013.
Despite western efforts to stifle Russia’s economy, Moscow has emerged as the primary beneficiary of this decline, effectively filling the void left by reduced Ukrainian exports. Russian wheat exports soared to a record-breaking 45.0 million tons in the 2022/2023 season, reflecting a remarkable 36 percent increase from the previous year and surpassing the previous record set in the 2017-2018 season by 3.5 million tons.
Thanks to competitive prices and abundant supplies, the USDA anticipates that Russia will account for over 20 percent of the global wheat trade in the 2022-2023 season, with Russian wheat stocks projected to reach their highest levels in nearly three decades.
Data from the Russian state statistics service Rosstat reveals that grain stocks until May 2023 were 61.5 percent higher than the previous year, while wheat stocks increased by 69.4 percent. Russian wheat exports are poised to set a new record at 47.5 million tons in the 2023-2024 season, surpassing exports from the EU (38.5 million tons), Canada (26.5 million tons), Australia (25 million tons), and Argentina (11 million tons).
Disparities within the Black Sea Grain Initiative
According to EU data, nearly 33 million tons of cereals and other foodstuffs were exported through the Black Sea Grain Initiative. UN data further reveals that these cereals and food were shipped to 45 countries spanning three continents, with 46 percent going to Asia, 40 percent to Western Europe, 12 percent to Africa, and 1 percent to Eastern Europe.
The primary exports include maize (51 percent), wheat (27 percent), sunflower flour (6 percent), sunflower oil (5 percent), barley (4 percent), rapeseed (3 percent), and others (4 percent).
But to Moscow’s consternation – and contrary to its expectations – UN figures indicate that 90 percent of maize and 60 percent of wheat exported through the initiative found their way to high- and upper-middle-income countries, while only 10 percent of maize and 40 percent of wheat went to low- and middle-income countries.
These figures very clearly underscore the deal’s importance to Europeans. While initially aimed at meeting the food needs of poorer nations, it has instead overwhelmingly served the interests of western countries. Low-income states benefited from only 9 percent of total wheat exports and zero maize exports through this agreement.
This explains the west’s keen efforts to re-engage with the agreement after Russia’s July withdrawal from the deal, in which Moscow made clear that the west’s failure to fulfill its Russian grain export commitments scuttled the agreement’s renewal.
More grain for the Global South
This situation is not unfamiliar to Europeans. The stark contrast between western rhetoric and actions has become increasingly evident, contributing significantly to the competition between the Global South and major powers.
While the EU vocally advocated for a grain agreement to “avert a worsening food crisis” in impoverished countries – but hoarded the grain for its own use – Russia exported 11.5 million tons of cereals to Africa in 2022 and nearly 10 million tons in the first half of 2023.
During the recent Russia-Africa summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, the Central African Republic, and Eritrea would each receive between 25,000 and 50,000 tons of grain, with Moscow also covering the shipping costs.
Impact of Russia’s grain diplomacy
Russian grain diplomacy has become a valuable card for Moscow to influence opinion in the African continent, which it has been able to further capitalize on after the shocking self-interest Europeans displayed during the last grain deal.
Russia’s conditions for rejoining the grain agreement have sparked a complex diplomatic situation with significant implications. Moscow’s demands include the reconnection of its state agricultural bank to the international bank messaging system SWIFT, a more equitable distribution of grain to poorer countries, especially in Africa, and the rollback of sanctions affecting export processes and logistics.
The UN proposed a compromise that would connect a ‘subsidiary’ of Russia’s State Agricultural Bank to SWIFT, but Moscow insisted that the connection must be a direct one.
For Russia, the grain deal represents leverage over Europe, given the potential impact of rising food prices on European countries already grappling with a self-inflicted energy crisis. With Moscow’s withdrawal from the agreement, global grain prices surged, affecting wheat, rice, vegetable oil, and sunflower oil.
As a mediator in this ongoing conflict, Turkiye also has a vested interest in the deal’s restoration. Success in persuading Russia to return to the agreement would bolster Ankara’s diplomatic standing, particularly in its relations with the west.
Moreover, ‘food politics’ are not restricted to the Russia-west conflict: Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia have imposed bans on the transportation of Ukrainian cereal products through their territories to protect their own farmers from cheap Ukrainian imports. While the bans are set to expire this month, these countries intend to extend them, further underscoring the need to resume the grain agreement.
Europe’s options appear limited, as the deal not only contributes to food security but also significantly impacts the west’s image in the Global South. Russia is keenly aware of this and actively works to publicize the destinations of Ukrainian grain while positioning itself as a guarantor of food security in numerous African countries, including Egypt.
Russian grain diplomacy has thus become a strategic tool for Moscow to project itself as a benefactor to Global South countries and to promote multipolarity that seeks less dependence on the west. With revenues and resources both in Russian hands, this is not a scenario in which Europe and the US can emerge unscathed.
Moldova will purchase Russian gas from a Greek company with a loan from the EBRD
September 13, 2023
Rybar
The Greek state-owned company DEPA Commercial won the tender for the supply of 100 million cubic meters of gas to the Moldovan Energocom in the first quarter of 2024.
The cost of the purchased gas is not indicated, but the next EBRD loan for these needs amounted to 100 million euros.
At the same time, DEPA Commercial has a contract with Gazprom for gas supplies until 2026: the Russian company supplies about 2 billion cubic meters per year to Greece through the Turkish Stream.
Greece also receives gas via the Trans-Adriatic Gas Pipeline from Azerbaijan, but according to Greek authorities, it provides only 20% of the country's gas needs.
All these data give grounds to assert that Moldova intends to continue repurchasing Russian gas from intermediaries.
Earlier, the chairman of the board of Moldovagaz, Vadim Cheban , said that Russian gas was supplied to the country, purchased at exorbitant prices through European companies.
It was the soaring gas tariffs that provoked the socio-economic crisis and citizen protests in the fall and winter of 2022.
After the most difficult winter season for the citizens of Moldova, the government reported to Western supervisors that the country had allegedly gotten rid of dependence on Russian gas supplies for the first time in 30 years.
Last week, the Moldovan authorities also announced that they do not intend to pay the historic debt to Gazprom, which is stipulated in the 2021 contract. The government announced that the Moldovan people should not pay for non-existent obligations.
True, in return, Moldovans will have to pay off much more serious debts: the EBRD is the largest creditor of the current government and the bank clearly does not intend to engage in the real “development” of Moldova, whose assets are no longer controlled by the authorities .
For example, the EBRD bought the Danube port of Giurgiulesti for only 1,000 euros , and now Ukrainian agricultural products are exported through it, while Moldovan agricultural enterprises are literally dying out.
Parallel worlds: what counts as news in the West; what counts as news in Russia
Yesterday I received the following message from a friend in the United States.
Quote
This from a good military observer from US
The UA mounted a concerted offensive against Crimea and Sevastopol by cruise, anti ship missiles and water drones. In each case Reaper, Global Hawk drones and in one instance a manned French ISR platform.
UA used 5 Su-24 bombers to launch cruise and anti-ship missiles on Sept. 13. We seem to be pushing the Russians into dramatic offensive action.
It looked like a significant UA strike, at least in resources used. Plus we’re launching the largest military exercise in Russia doorstep in several months. Full on stupid. I think DC may be pushing the Russians too far. Putin has exercised great restraint to this point, but his advisors, generals and public want him to deliver a crushing blow. Now, if the Germans provide Taurus Missiles, he may finally pull the trigger and settle the matter on the battlefield.
Are they saying this on TV, etc.?
Unquote
Indeed, Western media are filled with stories written in Kiev on how they have fired missiles at Russian military installations on Crimea these past days and used surface drones to attack Black Sea vessels of the Russian navy.
I responded as follows:
Quote
The Sixty Minutes show, all 5 hours of it in the daily afternoon and evening editions, has been filled with two topics: 1) the Western reactions to the visit of Kim to Russia (terror in the hearts of the Western infidels) and 2) Russia’s devastating blows against the attacking Ukrainians across the front Coverage of the Ukrainian missile attacks has been minimal. We also see that the Russians are FINALLY devoting serious resources to destroying the Ukrainian fortified areas just outside the city of Donetsk, which is where the daily shelling of the city has come from. This leads me to take seriously the accusations that the Kremlin has allowed this to go on for the purpose of consolidating Russian public opinion.
Unquote
Put another way, each side has selected from the day’s developments material that will distract viewers from what it would rather they not hear, while highlighting developments that show its own activities to best advantage.
That said, there is one topic in the news that both Western major media and Russian major media can enjoy setting out and explaining to their audiences: the scandals of judicial persecution being pressed by Democrats and Republicans in the United States against the likely candidate from the other party in the 2024 presidential race.
In remarks to the Plenary Session of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok last week, Vladimir Putin spoke directly about this issue, saying it demonstrated the rottenness of American political life and sweeps away all possible claims of the United States to give lessons to others about democracy. Meanwhile, day after day both the Vesti news programs of Russian state television and the Sixty Minutes weekday programs to which I allude above give prime time to photo montages of Hunter Biden and Joe while discussing the charges of corruption and pay-offs to both father and son from Chinese and Ukrainian officials during Biden’s service as Vice President. Though the Kremlin has no particular liking for Donald Trump and Putin reminds his people that sanctions against the country rose vertiginously during the Trump years, the legal proceedings against the former president are presented as further proof that America is a failed democracy.
For its part, American mainstream is also wallowing in the breaking news over the first time ever indictment of the son of a sitting president for federal crimes. I watched a half hour of last night’s CNN reporting that weighed the likelihood of the investigation into the Bidens moving on from the son’s lying over his drug addiction when purchasing firearms to the substantive issues that lie behind the charges of tax evasion.
The Russian media have been speculating for some weeks on whether the judicial persecution of the candidates will cross what ‘red lines’ still exist in America as a First World country and progress to assassination of Trump, say. They have been speculating on whether their own favorite American journalist Tucker Carlson can survive his revelations about the gay life of Barack Obama.
If there is anything in contemporary American political life that amuses Russians, it is the prevailing gerontocracy in Washington. Having had their fill of old and feeble leaders during the last years of Leonid Brezhnev and the during the short reins of his immediate successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, the Russians are delighted to have a relative youngster in the person of Vladimir Putin, even if he is 70, and to poke fun at the foibles on stage in full view of the cameras of the demented American president.
Parallel worlds: what counts as news in the West; what counts as news in Russia
Yesterday I received the following message from a friend in the United States.
Quote
This from a good military observer from US
The UA mounted a concerted offensive against Crimea and Sevastopol by cruise, anti ship missiles and water drones. In each case Reaper, Global Hawk drones and in one instance a manned French ISR platform.
UA used 5 Su-24 bombers to launch cruise and anti-ship missiles on Sept. 13. We seem to be pushing the Russians into dramatic offensive action.
It looked like a significant UA strike, at least in resources used. Plus we’re launching the largest military exercise in Russia doorstep in several months. Full on stupid. I think DC may be pushing the Russians too far. Putin has exercised great restraint to this point, but his advisors, generals and public want him to deliver a crushing blow. Now, if the Germans provide Taurus Missiles, he may finally pull the trigger and settle the matter on the battlefield.
Are they saying this on TV, etc.?
Unquote
Indeed, Western media are filled with stories written in Kiev on how they have fired missiles at Russian military installations on Crimea these past days and used surface drones to attack Black Sea vessels of the Russian navy.
I responded as follows:
Quote
The Sixty Minutes show, all 5 hours of it in the daily afternoon and evening editions, has been filled with two topics: 1) the Western reactions to the visit of Kim to Russia (terror in the hearts of the Western infidels) and 2) Russia’s devastating blows against the attacking Ukrainians across the front Coverage of the Ukrainian missile attacks has been minimal. We also see that the Russians are FINALLY devoting serious resources to destroying the Ukrainian fortified areas just outside the city of Donetsk, which is where the daily shelling of the city has come from. This leads me to take seriously the accusations that the Kremlin has allowed this to go on for the purpose of consolidating Russian public opinion.
Unquote
Put another way, each side has selected from the day’s developments material that will distract viewers from what it would rather they not hear, while highlighting developments that show its own activities to best advantage.
That said, there is one topic in the news that both Western major media and Russian major media can enjoy setting out and explaining to their audiences: the scandals of judicial persecution being pressed by Democrats and Republicans in the United States against the likely candidate from the other party in the 2024 presidential race.
In remarks to the Plenary Session of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok last week, Vladimir Putin spoke directly about this issue, saying it demonstrated the rottenness of American political life and sweeps away all possible claims of the United States to give lessons to others about democracy. Meanwhile, day after day both the Vesti news programs of Russian state television and the Sixty Minutes weekday programs to which I allude above give prime time to photo montages of Hunter Biden and Joe while discussing the charges of corruption and pay-offs to both father and son from Chinese and Ukrainian officials during Biden’s service as Vice President. Though the Kremlin has no particular liking for Donald Trump and Putin reminds his people that sanctions against the country rose vertiginously during the Trump years, the legal proceedings against the former president are presented as further proof that America is a failed democracy.
For its part, American mainstream is also wallowing in the breaking news over the first time ever indictment of the son of a sitting president for federal crimes. I watched a half hour of last night’s CNN reporting that weighed the likelihood of the investigation into the Bidens moving on from the son’s lying over his drug addiction when purchasing firearms to the substantive issues that lie behind the charges of tax evasion.
The Russian media have been speculating for some weeks on whether the judicial persecution of the candidates will cross what ‘red lines’ still exist in America as a First World country and progress to assassination of Trump, say. They have been speculating on whether their own favorite American journalist Tucker Carlson can survive his revelations about the gay life of Barack Obama.
If there is anything in contemporary American political life that amuses Russians, it is the prevailing gerontocracy in Washington. Having had their fill of old and feeble leaders during the last years of Leonid Brezhnev and the during the short reins of his immediate successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, the Russians are delighted to have a relative youngster in the person of Vladimir Putin, even if he is 70, and to poke fun at the foibles on stage in full view of the cameras of the demented American president.
Russians need to get past this homophobia, as do a lot of Americans. We got bigger fish to fry. Tucker's just keeping his career alive with sensationalism. Does that matter more than how many people Obama had 'droned'?
There is this continuity from Soviet days: second rate propaganda. The US has always done it best, how do you think we got to this place?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
