1. society
2. unrest and war

NCSEJ WEEKLY NEWS BRIEF
Washington, D.C. February 19, 2015
1. Moldova's Parliament Appoints New Pro-EU Prime Minister; Lukashenka Says Belarus Ready For
Dialogue With NATO; Tbilisi Condemns Russia-South Ossetia Border Deal; Putin Says Russian
Intelligence Shows U.S. Is Already Arming Ukraine; Navalny Says Police Forced Him To Moscow
Court; Mayor Of Capital Of Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region Charged With Abuse Of Office;
Nuland In Azerbaijan At Start Of Caucasus Tour
Briefs, February 16 – February 20, 2015
2. Lithuanian fascists march beneath swastikas near execution site of 10,000 Jews
JTA, February 17, 2015
3. Specter of Anti-Semitism Hangs Over Ukraine
By Matthew Kupfer
Moscow Times, February 18, 2015
4. Fighting rages in east Ukraine despite bid to revive truce
By Gleb Garanich and Anton Zverev
Reuters, February 19, 2015
5. Ukraine Announces a Growing List of Casualties From Debaltseve Retreat
By David Herszenhorn and Andrew Kramer
New York Times, February 19, 2015
6. Making the Most of Minsk
By Adrian Karaynycky
New York Times, February 19, 2015
7. How to arm Ukraine without starting World War Three
By Steven Pifer
Reuters, February 18, 2015
8. Pseudo-peace
Economist, February 16, 2015
9. A year after revolution, Ukraine struggles with old hang-ups
By Richard Balmforth
Reuters, February 18, 2015
10. Cabinet’s new budget slammed for wasteful energy policy, inaccurate exchange rate
By Anastasia Forina
Kyiv Post, February 19, 2015
11. Putin Visits Budapest Amid Protests, Says Gazprom Ready To Ship Gas To Hungary
RFE/RL, February 17, 2015
12. The American Education of Vladimir Putin
By Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy
The Atlantic, February 16, 2015
#1a
Moldova's Parliament Appoints New Pro-EU Prime Minister
RFE/RL, February 18, 2015
Moldova’s parliament has approved a new pro-EU prime minister, 38-year-old businessman Chiril Gaburici,
despite concerns of possible backlash from Russia.
Gaburici has vowed to make European integration a top priority for his government and ensure Moldova can
qualify to apply for EU membership by 2018.
Moldova has been governed for five years by a pro-Europe coalition.
The pro-Europe bloc won again in parliamentary elections in November, when Moldovans went to the polls
aware that the separatist war in eastern Ukraine was triggered by Kyiv pursuing similar policies in the face of
Moscow’s opposition.
Russia has threatened that Moldova’s drive for closer ties to the EU could cause it to lose control of the
breakaway pro-Russian region of Transdniester and lead to higher prices for Russian natural gas.
Moscow has already put pressure on Moldova’s economy by banning imports of Moldovan wine, vegetables,
and meat.
#1b
Lukashenka Says Belarus Ready For Dialogue With NATO
RFE/RL, February 19, 2015
Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka says his country is ready for a "constructive dialogue" with
NATO.
Speaking to top Belarusian military officials in Minsk on February 19, Lukashenka said: "As a sovereign state
we are open, in particular, to constructive dialogue with NATO on parity and transparency principles."
He added that "we have a lot of common issues [with NATO]; joint work on which fully meets Belarus’s
interests."
Lukashenka -- who has ruled for 21 years and been called the last dictator of Europe -- said the fighting in
Ukraine has shown that Belarus must have an army capable of protecting "its national interests."
"If need be, we have to be able to defend the independence and sovereignty of our country," he said.
Lukashenka added that additional finances will be allocated for the ongoing systemic renovation of arms in
Belarusian armed forces which is scheduled to be accomplished by 2020.
#1c
Tbilisi Condemns Russia-South Ossetia Border Deal
RFE/RL, February 19, 2015
Georgia has condemned a "state border" agreement signed by Moscow and the Georgian breakaway South
Ossetia region.
In a statement issued on February 18, hours after the accord was inked in Moscow, the Georgian Foreign
Ministry called the signing of the document "yet another action directed against the sovereignty and territorial
integrity of Georgia."
The statement also said Russia "vainly attempts to conceal the de facto annexation" of South Ossetia and
another Georgian breakaway region, Abkhazia.
In November, Moscow signed an "alliance and strategic partnership" treaty with Abkhazia’s separatist
government.
Moscow has said it plans to sign a similar treaty with South Ossetia.
Russia recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations after fighting a five-day war with
Georgia in 2008.
#1d
Putin Says Russian Intelligence Shows U.S. Is Already Arming Ukraine
Moscow Times, February 18, 2015
Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed the U.S. is supplying Kiev with lethal weapons, telling reporters
that the conflict in Ukraine will not be resolved through military escalation.
"According to our intelligence, [U.S.] weapons are already being delivered," Putin was shown on state
television Channel One as telling a press conference on Tuesday, when asked if a shipment of lethal hardware
from Washington to Kiev would fan the flames of war in eastern Ukraine.
Putin, speaking in Bucharest during a presidential visit to Hungary, added that arms deliveries would only
contribute to the loss of lives in the war-torn region.
"I am deeply convinced that whoever and whatever weapons are delivered to the conflict zone, the [outcome]
will always be bad ... the number of victims could increase," he said in comments widely published by Russian
media.
Kiev and Western nations, in turn, have for months accused Moscow of arming pro-Russian separatists in
eastern Ukraine - a charge the Kremlin has repeatedly denied.
In December the U.S. Congress passed legislation authorizing the sending of arms to Kiev. But while U.S.
President Barack Obama signed the measure into law, he has been hesitant to use the option, amid
widespread warnings arming Kiev would be seen as a declaration of war.
#1e
Navalny Says Police Forced Him To Moscow Court
RFE/RL, February 19, 2015
Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny says police have forcibly taken him to a Moscow court.
Navalny wrote on Twitter on February 19 that police came to his Anticorruption Foundation headquarters in
Moscow and forced him to go to the Presnya district court in the Russian capital.
Navalny's press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, said the court will look into a case against Navalny linked to his
advertising campaign in the Moscow subway on February 15.
Navalny and an associate, Nikolai Lyaskin, were detained by police for several hours on February 15 for
advertising an opposition protest in Moscow scheduled for March 1.
Navalny said earlier he will lead 100,000 people in the protest.
Navalny, an anticorruption blogger and leader of antigovernment protests in 2011-12, is currently serving two
suspended sentences on theft convictions.
He denies wrongdoing and says the cases against him are politically motivated revenge for his opposition
activities.
#1f
Mayor Of Capital Of Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region Charged With Abuse Of Office
RFE/RL, February 19, 2015
The mayor of Birobidzhan, the capital of Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region, has been detained on
corruption charges.
Russia's Investigative Committee says Andrei Parkhomenko was detained on February 19 and charged with
abuse of office.
Investigators say the case is linked to the privatization of a cinema theater building in Birobidzhan.
The Jewish Autonomous Region is located in Russia's Far East. It borders China and the Russian regions of
Khabarovsk Krai and Amur.
The autonomous region was established in 1934 during the rule of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
#1g
Nuland In Azerbaijan At Start Of Caucasus Tour
RFE/RL, February 17, 2015
The U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland has arrived in
Azerbaijan on the first leg of her South Caucasus tour.
Nuland told journalists in Baku on February 17 that her talks with President Ilham Aliyev focused on bilateral
ties and the situation around the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nuland added that she would talk about the release of Azerbaijani civilians held in Nagorno-Karabakh during
her meetings with Armenian officials in Yerevan on February 18.
In the Armenian capital, Nuland will also discuss strengthening U.S.-Armenian ties and advancing a settlement
of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Before visiting Yerevan, Nuland will travel on February 17 to Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, where she is expected to
discuss Georgia's path toward European integration and the country’s efforts to defend its territorial integrity
and sovereignty.
#2
Lithuanian fascists march beneath swastikas near execution site of 10,000 Jews
JTA, February 17, 2015
Approximately 500 ultra nationalists, some bearing Nazi swastikas, marched through a Lithuanian city that
during the Holocaust saw the region’s most effective massacre of Jews.
Monday’s march through Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest city 60 miles from the capital of Vilnius, was the
eighth annual event organized by the Lithuanian Nationalist Youth Union on Feb. 16 – one of their Baltic state’s
two independence days.
As the marchers assembled at a local park, they were confronted by 20-odd protesters from the local Jewish
community and anti-fascist groups who shadowed the marchers in a silent counter-demonstration.
“This march is particularly offensive because it is taking place where locals and Nazis murdered more than
10,000 Jews in one day,” said Dovid Katz, a U.S.-born Jewish scholar of Yiddish who settled in Vilnius 16
years ago and has led protests against the veneration of Nazis in the Baltic States.
Katz, editor of the website DefendingHistory.com, was referring to the Kaunas massacre in October 1941, in
which more Jews were killed in a single day than any other killing spree against Jews in the Baltic region.
During the march, locals chanted “out with Katz” and made obscene gestures at him and at Efraim Zuroff, a
hunter of Nazis and the Israel director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Three activists from the nationalist youth movement posed for pictures next to Zuroff while holding signs that
accused Israel of being a racist state and showed a picture of Africans refugees on the march.
Tomas Skorupsis, an organizer of the march from the youth movement, said the event was not anti-Semitic.
Repeating a popular view in far-right circles in the Baltic nations, he added: “There are many Lithuanians who
find it hard to forgive Jews who, during Communism, killed nationalist freedom fighters. But I think we should
leave it in the past and look ahead.”
Many in the Baltic nations – where Jewish communities hundreds of thousands strong were wiped out by the
Nazis and their local helpers – regard local fascists as heroes because they fought Communist occupation,
which is often equated with the Nazi one.
“This comparison is not only false, it also serves to whitewash the stain in these countries’ histories instead of
confronting it, as other European nations have done,” Zuroff said.
#3
Specter of Anti-Semitism Hangs Over Ukraine
By Matthew Kupfer
Moscow Times, February 18, 2015
As the conflict in eastern Ukraine continues to escalate, one doesn't have to look far to find proof that the
Ukraine crisis is a mass of contradictions. It's been that way from the beginning. The separatist forces of the
Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics have long claimed to be at war with a fascist regime in Kiev, yet they
count among their ranks volunteers pulled from the Russian far right, people often much closer to fascists than
anyone in the Ukrainian government.
Meanwhile, on the Ukrainian side, strident Ukrainian nationalists once known for anti-Semitism and bigotry
have teamed up with Jews, Russian-speaking Ukrainians and individuals of other ethnicities in defense of their
country. And, although the Kiev government itself is in no way fascist, it does have a far-right detachment, the
Azov Battalion, fighting in the Donbass. In short, marriages of convenience abound on both sides.
Meanwhile, ideology can be very flexible. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the recent comments by
Alexander Zakharchenko, the head of the Donetsk People's Republic.
On Feb. 2, while announcing a mass mobilization in the de facto republics, Zakharchenko disparagingly called
the current regime in Kiev Jewish. More specifically, he referred to the supposedly Jewish Ukrainian leaders as
"miserable representatives of a very large, great nation." He described this situation as farcical — Jews who
"have never held a sword in their hands" commanding Cossack warriors — and suggested that Ukraine's
historic heroes would turn over in their graves if they caught wind of this.
The Donetsk leader was clearly attempting to tap into Ukraine's latent anti-Semitism, a prejudice that
historically has been endemic to the Eastern European region. At the same time, ever mindful of maintaining
his republic's "anti-fascist" credentials, he couched his comment in politically correct language. Jews are, he
said, a "great nation." The implication was that he does not disapprove of all Jews — just the miserable ones.
This is, on the whole, a very perplexing, bizarre quote. Can the government in Kiev simultaneously be fascist,
neo-Nazi, and Jewish? And when an anti-Semite must couch his anti-Semitism in half-hearted, but
complimentary platitudes about the "great" Jewish nation, is that a victory or a failure for political correctness?
Unfortunately, this incident reveals yet again how the Ukraine crisis has often rendered Jews the object of
others' narratives, and not the subject of their own. The separatists and their Russian supporters are the most
guilty of this.
Yet efforts to counter these claims have at times hardly been better. In April 2014, several masked men waving
Russian flags and claiming to represent the separatists gathered near a Donetsk synagogue to hand out fliers
ordering local Jews to register with the separatist authorities or face deportation.
Given the intensity of "fascism" accusations during that early period of the conflict, it is possible that the
masked men were pro-Kiev provocateurs who hoped to discredit the separatists by associating them with
Nazism. Yet, their actions did more to victimize Jewish citizens than discredit the rebels.
Even positive efforts have, at times, seemed forced. There was a cheesy photo op of a nationalist Right Sector
member painting over anti-Semitic graffiti with the help of a rabbi. And a recent photo tweet by Ukrainian
President Petro Poroshenko, which showed the president talking with two elderly Ukrainians, contained the
caption, "Grandchildren of those who defended Ukraine 70 years ago fight today for their native land against
an aggressor."
The sentence was heart-warming, but historically questionable. Did these elderly Ukrainians fight in the ranks
of the Red Army to defend their country from Hitler, or were they among the Ukrainian nationalists who
collaborated with the Nazis in hopes of breaking free from the Soviet yoke? The photo selection seemed aimed
at skirting over the issue: A bearded rabbi stood peering out from behind Poroshenko and an elderly woman,
perhaps absolving the tweet of any historical baggage by his very presence.
As a Jew, it is difficult to feel positively about any of this, even the well-intentioned pro-Kiev photo ops. No one
wants his or her ethnicity or religion to become a political football.
But the predicament of Jews in Ukraine and Russia is hardly doom and gloom. Anti-Semitism remains a
regional problem, but it is no longer almost an official policy, as it often seemed in the Soviet Union. And both
the Russian and Ukrainian leadership openly reject anti-Semitism.
Furthermore, in Ukraine, the Euromaidan revolution and the struggle against Russian aggression in the
Donbass have bridged major gaps that once divided Ukrainian society. Today, Ukrainian Christians, Jews and
Tatar Muslims find themselves on the same side of the conflict. And the Ukrainian government also includes
several Jewish figures, including parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Groysman, who holds the third most
powerful position in the government.
Kiev's willingness to overlook the Azov Battalion's far-right ideology is still a concern, but there is also reason
to believe that, with time, marriages of convenience between different political, ethnic and religious groups will
lead to a more unified, tolerant Ukraine. In short, as a direct result of the conflict, the word "Ukrainian" may in
the future denote a truly civic national identity.
As fighting rages in the Donbass, it may seem preemptive to think about a time after the conflict, but it is still
important. Moving forward, the Ukrainian government should not lose its momentum. It must seize the
opportunity to better incorporate all of the country's diverse ethnic, religious and social groups into Ukrainian
society.
Ukraine's interethnic history is extremely complicated, with many dark chapters. A resolution of past tensions
will require an open, respectful discourse between all groups involved.
That means creating a climate in which individuals can come to understand each other's histories, cultures and
grievances. To achieve this, Kiev should partner with cultural organizations, civil society and academics
engaged in the study of Ukraine's history and diversity. But the process will take time and effort.
In the meantime, however, we can all support this process by calling comments like Zakharchenko's what they
are: anti-Semitism.
Matthew Kupfer is a writer and graduate student at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and
Eurasian Studies.
#4
Fighting rages in east Ukraine despite bid to revive truce
By Gleb Garanich and Anton Zverev
Reuters, February 19, 2015
Fighting raged in eastern Ukraine on Thursday despite European efforts to resurrect a stillborn ceasefire, a day
after pro-Russian separatists spurned the truce by forcing thousands of government troops out of a strategic
town.
Western nations are refusing to give up on a peace deal brokered by France and Germany last week even
though the rebels disavowed it to seize the important railway hub of Debaltseve.
Shelling continued near that town on Thursday, and local officials in government-held territory said rebels had
also fired mortar bombs at another town further south. Kiev fears they are massing for an assault near the
major port of Mariupol.
Thousands of weary and demoralised soldiers withdrew from Debaltseve on Wednesday in one of the worst
defeats suffered by Kiev during 10 months of fighting in which more than 5,000 people have been killed.
European and U.S. officials have expressed hope that the ceasefire will hold now that the rebels, fighting for
territory Russian President Vladimir Putin has called "New Russia", have achieved their immediate goal of
taking Debaltseve.
But Reuters correspondents outside the rebel-held town of Vuhlehirsk said artillery shells were still falling on
nearby Debaltseve, though with less intensity than earlier this week.
Reporters in the main rebel stronghold of Donetsk said there was also shelling in the area.
The Kiev government's biggest fear is of a rebel assault on Mariupol, a port of 500,000 people and by far the
biggest government-held city in the two rebellious eastern provinces.
"Right now there are mortar attacks on Shyrokine," a military spokesman said, referring to a village about 30
km (20 miles) east of Mariupol, along the coast of the Sea of Azov.
"There is no attempt to seize our positions up to now. The rebels are bringing up reserves," the spokesman
said.
FOUR LEADERS TALK
Wednesday's withdrawal was a humiliating defeat for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who faces an
economic crisis as well as the war. Images of captured Ukrainian soldiers were beamed across Russia.
The Ukrainian Defence Ministry said 13 servicemen were killed and 157 wounded during the withdrawal and a
further 82 were still missing. Ninety-three were taken prisoner.
"There are no words to describe it. Along the entire way we were blanketed with shots, wherever there were
trees they fired at us from machine guns and grenade launchers. They used everything," Vadim, a soldier from
Ukraine's 30th brigade, told Reuters in Artemivsk, a government-held town north of Debaltseve where the
soldiers assembled after they withdrew.
Some blamed commanders for leaving them trapped in the besieged town after it became impossible to
resupply it.
"It felt like we'd been abandoned or betrayed," said a soldier from Ukraine's 55th brigade.
Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said more than half a tonne of "deadly metal, in the shape of
rocket shells, mortar, anti-tank rockets and other hardware, came down on the head of every soldier on
average every day" from the start of the ceasefire on Sunday until the withdrawal.
The rebels have maintained that the ceasefire did not apply to Debaltseve, suggesting they may begin to
observe it now that they have captured the town. They have announced that they are pulling back heavy guns
as required under the truce.
The leaders of Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia agreed in a telephone call to make a new attempt to
enforce the ceasefire and ensure other terms of the peace deal are implemented.
But deep mistrust means Western leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who led the drive that
resulted in the peace deal signed in the Belarussian capital Minsk last week, see only a glimmer of hope of
ending the fighting.
The White House said it was "deeply troubled" by reports of fighting and NATO's top military commander, U.S.
Air Force General Philip Breedlove, said he did not think the truce had ever even begun.
"It is a ceasefire in name only," Breedlove said during a visit to Kosovo.
Western countries say Russia is behind the rebel advance, having deployed thousands of troops with
advanced weaponry into eastern Ukraine to fight on the separatists' behalf, though Moscow denies this.
British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said Putin posed a "real and present danger" to Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania and NATO was getting ready to repel any aggression.
Moscow said the comments went beyond "diplomatic ethics".
Valdis Dombrovskis, vice president of the European Commission, said "Russia is looking to redraw Europe's
21st century borders by force".
Moscow dismissed a call by Ukraine for United Nations peacekeepers to come to east Ukraine. Russia said
the Minsk agreements should be the basis for peace, not peacekeepers. As a permanent member of the
Security Council, it could block any move to send peacekeepers.
Russia has in the past proposed sending its own peacekeepers but the OSCE security watchdog, which has
observers in east Ukraine, ruled out a Russian role in any force, describing Moscow as an "aggressor".
#5
Ukraine Announces a Growing List of Casualties From Debaltseve Retreat
By David Herszenhorn and Andrew Kramer
New York Times, February 19, 2015
The Ukrainian military on Thursday said that the casualties in Debaltseve were substantially worse than initially
announced, with at least 13 soldiers killed, 157 wounded, more than 90 captured and at least 82 missing.
Witnesses said the number of dead would likely grow considerably higher.
Late Wednesday, the office of President Petro O. Poroshenko had said that at least six soldiers had been killed
and 100 wounded in the hurried retreat from Debaltseve, a strategically important junction in eastern Ukraine,
now firmly in the hands of pro-Russian rebels. The town fell after several days of intense fighting that continued
after a cease-fire was to have taken effect at midnight Saturday.
In a statement defending his decision to order the withdrawal, Mr. Poroshenko said that 2,475 soldiers were
safely pulled out, along with 200 military vehicles. Late Wednesday, Mr. Poroshenko urged the deployment of
a United Nations peacekeeping force — an idea swiftly rejected by Russia.
With the accord they brokered last week to end the conflict seemingly in tatters, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine,
Germany and France spoke by telephone on Thursday in an effort to find a way to impose an elusive truce.
None of the provisions of the peace accord, forged during an overnight negotiating session in Minsk, Belarus,
have yet been carried out in line with the terms and timetable.
There has been no halt in fighting, with reports of battles not just in Debaltseve but throughout the eastern
regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. A deadline on Tuesday for beginning the withdrawal of heavy weaponry
came and went, with artillery still booming.
In the city of Artemivsk, where Ukrainian soldiers gathered after their retreat from Debaltseve, the harrowing
human toll from the recent days of fighting was on vivid display.
Many soldiers were in a demoralized and drunken state. Shellshocked soldiers from the battle in Debaltseve
wandered the streets through the day Wednesday, before beginning to drink heavily.
By Wednesday evening, gunshots were ringing out on the central square. One man stood, swaying, on the
sidewalk mumbling to himself. Soldiers who had escaped from Debaltseve after weeks of shelling were
commandeering taxi cabs without payment. It was not clear that all of them had been given places to sleep,
and one group stood silently, shivering on a street outside the Hotel Ukraine.
And at Biblios, an upscale restaurant in Artemivsk, soldiers staggered about in the dining room, ordering
brandy for which they had no money to pay, and then firing shots into the ceiling as other guests quietly fled
the premises.
At a news conference in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe’s special monitoring mission in Ukraine, read a long list of violations of the
cease-fire agreement throughout eastern Ukraine, most of them involving artillery fire.
Among the violations he cited were numerous instances of mortar shelling east of the coastal city of Mariupol.
Mr. Bociurkiw complained that monitors had been unable to reach Debaltseve because they were denied
access by the separatist forces controlling the town, and that monitors believed there were many civilians
trapped there “in dire conditions.”
“The cease-fire has to be unconditional, there’s no exceptions,” he said. “As far as the special monitoring
mission is concerned, we expect unfettered and safe and secure access.”
He added that the combatants should not pick and choose only those provisions of the cease-fire accord they
wish to fulfill. “The Minsk documents are not a shopping list,” he said. “It’s one integrated whole.”
Mr. Bociurkiw also read from a statement by the chief of the monitoring mission, Ertugrul Apakan, a Turkish
diplomat, who said he was “profoundly disturbed” by the events at Debaltseve, especially civilian casualties,
adding, that he “condemned any attempts to create new facts on the ground and so to change the basis on
which the latest package of Minsk measures were agreed on.”
On the telephone call on Thursday, Mr. Poroshenko’s office said that he had told his counterparts — Angela
Merkel of Germany, François Hollande of France and Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — “Do not pretend that what
happened in Debaltseve corresponds to the Minsk arrangements.”
His comments, however, only highlighted how Mr. Poroshenko and Mr. Putin have continued to view the
conflict through vastly different lenses and often with completely contradictory assessments of the facts on the
ground.
Although hours were spent in Minsk discussing the situation in Debaltseve, no agreement had been reached
on what to do about the continuing siege of the town, which lies on a main highway between the cities of
Luhansk and Donetsk, regional capitals and main separatist strongholds.
Separatist leaders had said that they did not regard the cease-fire as applying to Debaltseve, and Mr. Putin in
his public comments appeared to accept that view, suggesting during a visit to Budapest on Tuesday that
Ukraine should accept its defeat at the hands of former miners and tractor drivers. Mr. Putin has consistently
denied that Russian military forces have participated in battles in Ukraine.
The Kremlin, in a brief statement after Thursday’s call, offered a positive assessment of recent days.
“It was noted that the measures approved by the contact group in Minsk helped allow a reduction in the
intensity of fighting in Donbass and reduced the number of civilian casualties,” it said, referring to the region of
eastern Ukraine where the conflict has been concentrated.
The Kremlin said the leaders had agreed that the foreign ministers of the four countries would begin
consultations “in the nearest future” about carrying out the terms of the cease-fire — a further indication of
Russia’s view that the peace accord was still on track. “The leaders emphasized the need to secure a
sustainable cease-fire,” the Kremlin added.
Ukraine, in its statement, said there was agreement that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, which is supposed to monitor the truce, should be given full support. It also said that some verification
had begun, including in the area of the Donetsk airport, and in the towns of Horlivka, Pervomaisk and
Shyrokyne.
Mr. Poroshenko also demanded the release of all prisoners, including Ukrainian soldiers captured in the area
of Debaltseve. The Minsk accord had called for the release of prisoners held on each side, on a principle of “all
for all.” The prisoner exchange was supposed to take place within two weeks after the pullback of heavy
weapons.
For weeks after a failed truce agreement in September, the four leaders had issued positive statements even
as fighting continued and the number of casualties increased, as if they might be able to impose the truce by
force of will.
It was not immediately clear if the battle for Debaltseve, with the number of dead and injured still not tallied,
was a final tussle over where to draw the cease-fire line, or a clear sign that the war would persist despite the
Minsk agreement.
Highlighting its control over Debaltseve, Russia said on Thursday that it was sending a convoy of humanitarian
aid to the town.
#6
Making the Most of Minsk
By Adrian Karaynycky
New York Times, February 19, 2015
With a major battle around the rail hub of Debaltseve ending with the withdrawal of Ukrainian government
forces, it looks like the tenuous truce in eastern Ukraine may hold. After violence that has left more than 5,600
dead and displaced about 1.6 million people, world leaders hope the cease-fire can be sustained and Ukraine
can start to rebuild — even though the Minsk agreement, concluded last week after talks between Russia,
Ukraine, France and Germany, is regarded skeptically by many, including some of its European Union
architects.
Ukraine’s leaders, however, point to one crucial gain: The Minsk agreement treats the Donbass, the eastern
region that includes the Donetsk and Luhansk areas declared “people’s republics” by separatist rebels, as an
integral part of Ukraine. Officials note that the declaration recognizing their country’s territorial integrity even
appears on the Kremlin’s website. Moreover, they say, the agreement makes no reference to the Donetsk and
Luhansk republics and speaks of the rebel regions as subjects of Ukrainian law.
The Ukrainian leaders’ guarded optimism may, however, be misplaced. This is not mainly because Russia’s
president, Vladimir V. Putin, has shown himself, time and again, to be a deceitful interlocutor, nor because he
already has routinely violated Russia’s treaty obligations to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
In this instance, Mr. Putin may be earnest. Russia has been hit hard by Western sanctions, and the growing
sentiment for arming Ukraine within the American leadership has raised the prospect of an even higher price
for direct intervention. Moreover, unlike other Russia-engineered breakaway statelets like South Ossetia and
Abkhazia, in Georgia, and Transnistria, in Moldova, the Donbass has suffered severe protracted war, a ruined
infrastructure, economic devastation and social dislocation, making Russia’s support for the enclave costly.
Russia has strong reasons to declare a formal respect for the territorial integrity of Ukraine minus Crimea,
because as a participant in Ukraine’s political institutions, a largely autonomous Donbass may impede the
country’s integration into the West.
In a Jan. 27 article in the newspaper Izvestia, Sergei A. Markov, the director of Moscow’s Institute of Political
Studies and a reliable guide to the Kremlin’s thinking, called for “a new politics in Ukraine.” Russia, he wrote,
“should not be pressing for the autonomy of the Donbass, but for full democracy for all of Ukraine,” in which
“state authority in Ukraine should be returned to the entire Ukrainian people.” He laid out a strategy that
challenges the legitimacy of Ukraine’s leadership and demands new parliamentary and presidential elections.
A closer look at the Minsk agreement suggests that it contains mechanisms helpful for Russia to resume its
pursuit of the bigger quarry: Ukraine itself. First, the accord places immense economic burdens on Ukraine,
which is to resume pension payments to the inhabitants of the Russia-backed region. Kiev also takes on the
burden of rebuilding the war-ravaged region.
Second, the agreement establishes the right of the Donbass breakaway areas to establish their own people’s
militias. Third, the agreement speaks of the withdrawal of foreign fighters, illegal formations and their weapons,
but what would prevent these munitions from emerging in the hands of the new militias?
Currently, the separatist eastern enclaves — with a post-conflict population of about three million — are like a
modern-day Sparta, armed with prodigious amounts of artillery and more than 500 Russian tanks, many of
them far superior to those of Ukraine. That number is greater than the tank arsenals of Germany, Britain or
France — and may grow before the Russia-Ukraine border is sealed at the end of 2015, which is the target
under the agreement.
Fourth, the agreement creates a powerful fifth column inside Ukraine as the Donbass will have the right to be
represented in Ukraine’s legislature. Already, rebel leaders are demanding that Ukraine’s parliament return to
the country’s non-bloc status, which is code for renouncing NATO membership aspirations. Pro-Russia voices
will be given a platform in the Ukrainian legislature, the Verkhovna Rada, and will participate in the national
debate.
This will enable the Kremlin to use the Donbass to resurrect Russian “soft power” in the context of Ukraine’s
post-conflict economic crisis. And if deadly clashes, an impasse over constitutional changes or misread
intentions undermine the Minsk deal, Mr. Putin seems to believe that adversity and mounting casualties will
eventually lead to a collapse of support for Ukraine’s current leaders. He is poised to take political advantage
of any reshuffling of the deck.
In short, Mr. Putin’s Minsk gambit is to create a frozen conflict, but unlike those in Georgia or Moldova. Instead
of backing proxy statelets, the strategy is to embed the conflict and his fifth column within the Ukrainian state,
allowing him to pursue his aims while seeking to lift the costly Western sanctions.
Unappetizing as it may be, this possible return to soft-power struggle, coordinated with the Donbass leaders he
helped install, is still a vast improvement over deadly conflict. The West and Ukraine’s leaders should embrace
Mr. Putin’s challenge and respond appropriately.
That means maintaining tough economic sanctions while pressing for the withdrawal of the massive Russian
military arsenal in eastern Ukraine. If, as the Minsk agreement may allow, a powerful Russian-sponsored
military force in eastern Ukraine will soon be granted legitimacy under Ukrainian law, then removing the bulk of
weapons will prove difficult. In this case, the West must quietly rebuild and modernize Ukraine’s military
capability. This will involve providing direct lethal defensive military aid and training, if necessary by clandestine
means. The West must also insist on Ukraine’s right to modernize its military.
The United States and Europe should assist Ukraine’s economic recovery with aid that encourages reform.
And the West should organize a donors’ conference to restore the Donbass — and press Russia to bear some
of the costs.
It is also up to the European Union and the United States to ensure that any constitutional changes mandated
by the Minsk agreement do not block Ukraine’s possible integration into the European Union. At the same time,
Ukraine could grant the Donbass decentralized authority that would permit it to enjoy free-trade status with
Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union.
This new Minsk agreement is deeply flawed. It may well break down into a new spiral of deadly warfare, but it
is all we have to avert further death and destruction. The West has no choice but to respond intelligently and
assertively to Mr. Putin’s new strategy.
Adrian Karatnycky is a senior fellow, and co-director of the Ukraine in Europe program, at the Atlantic Council.
#7
How to arm Ukraine without starting World War Three
By Steven Pifer
Reuters, February 18, 2015
The Feb. 12 Minsk II Ukrainian ceasefire agreement brokered by German Chancellor Angela Merkel is a fragile
arrangement. Most analysts hold modest expectations. The past few days are proving them right.
Separatist and Russian forces have continued their attack on Ukrainian forces at Debaltseve, despite the
ceasefire that supposedly took effect on Saturday. Separatist leaders assert the ceasefire does not apply
there, while Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman claims that Moscow is not part of the conflict or the
agreement.
President Barack Obama and other Western leaders continue to hope that the ceasefire will take hold. But if
Minsk II unravels, as did the first Minsk ceasefire of last September, pressure will likely grow on the White
House to provide greater military assistance - including defensive arms - to Ukraine.
I joined with seven other former U.S. officials two weeks ago to advocate that Washington needed to provide
significant military assistance to Ukraine. Our report, Preserving Ukraine's Independence; Resisting Russian
Aggression: What the United States and NATO Must Do, explained that most of this assistance would be
nonlethal, such as radars to pinpoint the origin of enemy rocket and artillery fire. But with one major exception:
light anti-armor weapons to help the Ukrainians confront the tanks and other armored vehicles that Moscow
has poured into eastern Ukraine.
Such military assistance would fulfill Washington's commitment to Ukraine under the 1994 Budapest
Memorandum on Security Assurances - a key part of the arrangement under which Ukraine agreed to give up
the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal. The specific goal would be to increase the Ukrainian army's ability to
defend against Russian attack and, by raising the costs of aggression, dissuade Moscow from further fighting.
The point now is to encourage the Kremlin to seriously seek a negotiated political settlement.
Over the past two weeks, Secretary of State John Kerry has reportedly told members of Congress that he
supports arming Ukraine, something that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter endorsed during his recent Senate
confirmation hearing. Obama, however, has thus far taken a cautious approach.
This is not a "slam-dunk" decision. It's a 60 percent-40 percent or even 55 percent-45 percent call. But inaction
presents more risks than assisting Ukraine's military.
First is the real possibility that the fighting and bloodshed will go on. Though the Russian army has reportedly
suffered hundreds of casualties, something the Kremlin has taken great pains to hide from the Russian people,
it fights on. Moscow apparently considers the cost of this conflict sustainable.
Second, to the extent that Moscow concludes that the hybrid warfare it has carried out in Ukraine is a
successful tactic, it may well be tempted to apply it elsewhere. The Kremlin claims a right to defend ethnic
Russians and Russian speakers wherever they live and whatever their citizenship. What happens if Moscow
were to try hybrid warfare in Estonia or Latvia, in "defense" of the ethnic Russian populations there? Those
countries are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that the United States has an obligation to
defend.
Critics of providing defensive arms have offered a number of reasons why Washington should not do it. Let's
consider their main arguments.
Some assert that arming Ukraine would launch an inexorable slide culminating in U.S.-Russia war - even a
nuclear conflict. Why? Providing anti-armor weapons does not automatically mean providing F-16s or the 82nd
Airborne. Our report did not recommend U.S. troops, and the Ukrainians did not ask for them. Kiev also did
not ask for offensive weapons. The Ukrainian army is hardly likely to march on Russia led by man-portable
antitank missiles.
Washington can calibrate and control the level of military assistance. The limits should be made clear with Kiev
in private, but the U.S. government can assuredly build in the necessary firebreaks on American involvement.
Critics also worry that, if the United States provides defensive arms to Ukraine, Russia would escalate. They
argue that Russia cares more about Ukraine than does the West. Which is true. But those critics usually omit a
key factor in the equation: Ukraine.
It is not just an object in a Russia-West tug of war. Ukraine gets a say and appears to care every bit as much and more - about its own future.
Critics assume, moreover, that escalation would be an easy call for the Kremlin. It might not be that simple.
Escalation would almost certainly require more overt involvement by regular Russian army units in a way that
would be difficult for Moscow to hide or deny.
That raises problems for the Kremlin and Putin. Opinion polls show that most Russians do not want their army
fighting in Ukraine. The more they see of the conflict, and the more casualties that result, the more likely that
their support for Putin's war would erode.
The Russian president does not appear to care much about dead Russian soldiers. But he does care a great
deal about their impact on his public standing.
More overt Russian army involvement also would be more visible to the outside world. That would only bolster
support in Europe and elsewhere for maintaining sanctions and adding more biting measures that would
further damage the Russian economy.
Other critics claim that providing Ukraine defensive arms would end the cooperation that has developed
between the United States and Europe. They can offer no evidence to support this, however. Merkel does not
favor supplying arms, but she had ample opportunity during her Feb. 9 Washington visit to warn that doing so
would disrupt transatlantic unity. She did not.
Some NATO allies, moreover, would likely provide arms to Ukraine if Washington did so. They include Poland,
the Baltic states, Canada and perhaps Britain. British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond last week ruled out
arms "for the time being." But he also suggested that Britain would not sit by as the Ukrainian army collapsed.
Providing military assistance and defensive arms to Ukraine is not risk free. But if Minsk II falls apart and the
fighting grows, that would engender major risks as well - not only to Ukraine, but to other Russian neighbors if
Moscow sees hybrid warfare as a winning tactic.
The provision of military assistance is not intended as a stand-alone policy. It is a piece of an overall strategy
that consists of Western financial support to sustain Ukraine (provided that Kiev can pursue serious economic
reforms) and economic sanctions on Russia designed to effect a change in Moscow's policy toward Ukraine.
By taking from Russia the military option, or the inexpensive military option, arming Ukraine aims, like
sanctions, to get the Kremlin to seriously seek a political settlement.
Holding open the prospect of a political settlement that can address Russian and Ukrainian interests is the last
key piece of the strategy. A settlement, however, needs a willing Russian partner prepared to accept a
reasonable outcome. Putin tried to play the statesman in Minsk. As Minsk II appears to unravel, his good faith
comes increasingly into question.
Obama should now consider providing Ukraine more military assistance and defensive arms, with the goal of
turning Moscow back to the real effort at finding peace. Though that action carries risks, inaction presents a
more hazardous course.
Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, 19982000.
#8
Pseudo-peace
Economist, February 16, 2015
Hopes for the latest peace plan in Ukraine were never high. Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine's president, began
playing down expectations immediately after signing the deal, saying it would be "difficult" to realise. Before a
bank of television cameras at midnight on Sunday, he issued the order for his troops to cease fire. The first
casualties came just twenty minutes later, when rebel rockets struck a village west of Luhansk, bringing a roof
down on two elderly residents. By morning, Ukrainian and separatist leaders were trading accusations of fresh
attacks. Ukrainian officials claimed there were more than 60 violations in the first day, a sharp drop from the
pitched battles of the previous week, but an inauspicious start. "The pseudo-peace is advancing at full speed,"
commented Yuri Kasyanov, a prominent Ukrainian activist.
Most of the shelling is centered around Debaltseve, the beleaguered transport hub, where pro-Russian rebels
refuse to observe the ceasefire. "The Minsk agreement doesn't say a word about Debaltseve," says Alexander
Zakharchenko, the Donetsk separatist leader. Rebel troops made a final push to take the city during the two
and a half days between the signing of the Minsk deal and the start of the ceasefire, an interregnum insisted
upon by Russia and the separatists. American officials allege that the Russian military took part in the
offensive, deploying artillery and rocket systems to the area. Now, rebel forces claim to have encircled the city
and the thousands of Ukrainian troops stationed there. Mr Zakharchenko says he will not allow them to
escape.
International observers sought to portray the day as a success, despite the tensions around Debaltseve. The
chief of the monitoring mission from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said the
ceasefire was holding "with some exceptions" after the first 12 hours. French President Francois Hollande
called observation of the ceasefire "generally satisfactory". Similar statements rang out following last
September's deal, when the fighting slowed without ever fully stopping. Those exceptions soon became the
new normal, and boiled over into full-fledged combat again last month. Few on the ground expect anything
different from this latest truce.
Even if the ceasefire endures, it is a far cry from a lasting peace. Vladimir Putin's paramount goal remains
control over Ukraine's political future. Accordingly, on Monday morning the separatists began demanding
additional measures not agreed to in Minsk, including a guarantee that Ukraine will not move toward NATO.
The text that did come out of Minsk is fraught with vague formulations that threaten to gum up enforcement.
Dmytro Kuleba, a senior official with Ukraine's foreign ministry, says the marathon Minsk negotiations will be
"recalled as a cakewalk compared to further implementation efforts". The next step of the plan envisions both
sides withdrawing heavy weaponry to create a buffer zone of some 100km. The thorniest issues - control over
the border with Russia and the political status of the Donbas region - have been left for last.
If the long-sought peace fails again, Mr Poroshenko promises to introduce martial law, and to respond swiftly.
"If they hit us in one cheek, we will not turn the other," he says. Midway through Sunday, Ukraine's interior
minister announced that new armored vehicles were being sent to reinforce soldiers on the front. The
possibility of American arms deliveries still tantalizes some Ukrainians who expect the war to continue. One
nationalist Ukrainian parliamentarian summed up his priorities for the coming phase: "Keep calm and wait for
American weapons."
#9
A year after revolution, Ukraine struggles with old hang-ups
By Richard Balmforth
Reuters, February 18, 2015
The former power company executive yanked up his trouser leg to show the electronic bracelet round his ankle
that would alert police if he tried to make a run for it from Kiev.
"And all this when I am not guilty of anything and there has been no crime," said Volodymyr Zinevich.
Zinevich, 45, once director of Ukraine's state energy firm Ukrinterenergo, is suspected of embezzlement from a
botched deal to buy South African coal last year. The imports were to make up for a shortfall in supplies
caused by the war in eastern Ukraine.
A contract he signed for importing 1 million tonnes of coal to keep power plants operating was ended in
November after three deliveries, when questions arose about the quality of the coal.
Prosecutors say Zinevich imported coal which was unsuitable for use. Questions were also raised over the
price at which it was sold to end-users.
Nobody else has been named in the affair. Zinevich, whose company was given the tender by the government
to find a foreign source of coal, denies wrongdoing and says he is a casualty of high-level political intrigue.
Is he involved in a scheme of the sort that has made Ukraine a no-go area for foreign investors for years?
Or is he, as he says, victim of competing political interests behind the scenes despite the Maidan revolution a
year ago and commitments by the new pro-Western leadership to end shady dealings and corruption?
Whatever the truth, cases like that of Zinevich with undercurrents of arbitrary justice and political scheming
raise awkward questions about the state of Ukraine which the "EuroMaidan revolution", a year on, has still not
found a lasting answer to.
Ukraine will mark the first anniversary of the ousting of the pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovich next
weekend, honouring the memory of the 100 or so civilians killed in protests against him.
He fled to Russia on Feb. 21 after the shootings which climaxed months of protests against his policy swerve
away from European integration and against the sleaze and corruption that marked his four years in power.
CRITICAL MISSION
President Petro Poroshenko and the other pro-Western leaders who emerged have pledged to build a more
just society and root out the corruption that threatens Ukraine perhaps as much as the bitter war raging in the
east with pro-Russian separatists.
That mission is even more critical now with Western governments saying they will not pour money into a
dysfunctional state.
In one brutal European Union appraisal, British Foreign Minister Philip Hammond described Ukraine's
economy as a "sink of corruption".
As the anniversary approaches, the mood among many Ukrainians is disillusionment and resentment that noone yet has been put on trial for the killings, something widely seen as a cover-up highlighting the malaise of a
sick society.
"For a year nothing has happened. No-one has appeared in court. No-one is in jail. There's the impression that
no-one wants to get to the truth," Igor Kulchytsky, whose 65-year-old father, Volodymyr, was one of those shot
dead on Kiev's Independence Square, told Reuters.
SHADOW ECONOMY
In truth, rooting out corruption is not easy in a country where much of the public service functions with a flow of
illicit payments that guarantee work is carried out or, often, to ensure that no steps are taken.
According to an estimate by Kiev's small foreign investment community, the shadow economy may account for
as much as 60 percent of the economy as a whole.
Corporate malpractice is prevalent among state companies too, the prime minister says. The state gas
company Naftogaz, for instance, has been specifically targeted by the International Monetary Fund as in need
of a total re-make.
"They teem with (illegal) money," Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said of state companies.
But there has been no consensus yet, despite months of talk, in finding someone to head a newly created
"anti-corruption" body to be the arrow-head of the attack.
Needing to act to stem growing popular resentment, Poroshenko axed his prosecutor-general, Vitaly Yarema,
whose office is blamed for failing to find those guilty of the Maidan shootings and for lack of action against the
Ukrainian assets of Yanukovich and his circle.
Zinevich believes Yarema's office was behind his case too. He suggests it was pressured into victimising him
because the new leadership needed a showcase to demonstrate it was robustly attacking corruption.
A spokeswoman for the prosecutor general's office said: "Vitaly Yarema is not commenting on this case."
The contract Zinevich signed was for delivery of 1 million tonnes of South African coal -- half of which was
delivered before the investigation started against him.
Investigators say the coal he imported did not meet national standards. Yarema said Zinevich had caused
damage to the state to the tune of $25 million.
"I think prosecutor Yarema needed a loud scandal that would draw people's attention, so they could say: 'Look
at what we are doing to fight corruption'," Zinevich told Reuters in an interview.
Zinevich, who is under house arrest, denies there was any loss to the state and says he made no illegal profit
from the aborted deal.
"The coal was imported and it was burned ... How can you talk about a loss when it's the price of the contract?
There's no crime. It's absurd."
#10
Cabinet’s new budget slammed for wasteful energy policy, inaccurate exchange rate
By Anastasia Forina
Kyiv Post, February 19, 2015
To secure the latest $17.5 billion four-year loan from the International Monetary Fund, Ukraine has to revise its
state budget. Lawmakers are expected to consider the changes drafted by the Cabinet of Ministers next week,
but critics are already saying the currency rate predictions are unrealistic and have slammed the energy policy
as wasteful.
Energy subsidies
The government wants to allocate Hr 12.5 billion on top of Hr 12 billion already dedicated to subsidizing
residents who won't be able to afford the new gas and heating tariffs required by the IMF. For example, the
monthly tariff for gas, which now varies from Hr 1,000 to Hr 4,000 ($37 - $148) per 1,000 cubic meters
depending on annual consumption, will be raised by 280 percent, Valeria Gontareva, the National Bank of
Ukraine governor, said on Feb.18.
With Ukraine's average salary in 2015 estimated to be Hr 3,990 ($148) per month, paying gas bills along with
other utilities will be unaffordable for most Ukrainians and could lead to social unrest. Current subsidies will not
be able to cover those needs, but further subsidies will exacerbate devaluation, experts warn. “There is a
realistic option - return to the 2014 memorandum with the IMF, which implied a gradual increase in tariffs,"
Dmytro Marunych, head of the Energy Strategies Institute, says.
The revenue generated from the new tariffs should cover part of national gas producer Naftogaz's deficit.
Annually, it sucks 7-9 percent worth of of gross domestic product out of the budget. Some of that loss is due to
embezzlement during gas sales, but much of the problem is due to the disparity between a high gas market
price and low gas tariffs paid by the population. “Why do we have to subsidize an ineffective Naftogaz at the
expense of ordinary people," Viktor Kryvenko, deputy head of parliament's committee on budget, says. “We
need economically feasible tariffs which will allow for development of domestic gas extraction."
Currency rate
The revised budget is based on an exchange rate of Hr 21.7 to the dollar. But after the National Bank switched
to a flexible monetary policy, that rate has already dropped to Hr 27 per dollar. Assuming that the IMF money
cannot be used to stabilize the rate, it's not clear how the National Bank will be able to reverse the current
slide, rendering the budget hopelessly inaccurate. “I don't understand where this figure came from," Kryvenko
says.
Serhiy Yahnych, director of the business investment department at UkrSibbank says that the current hryvnia
depreciation is “largely exaggerated" due to a rapidly shrinking current account deficit. External aid and the
restructuring of external debt are likely to balance financial outflows, according to him. “Provided Ukraine
delivers improvements to the business climate, we think that hryvnia would fluctuate in a broad range of
between 20 and 25 per dollar," Yahnych says.
Despite the criticism, ministers hope their budget changes will get approval. “We hope that parliamentary
coalition will support the bill we suggested, which will open the way for the loan," Natalie Jaresko, finance
minister said, when presenting amendments on Feb.16. “If the parliament does not approve these changes, it
will deprive us of this vital financial support."
#11
Putin Visits Budapest Amid Protests, Says Gazprom Ready To Ship Gas To Hungary
RFE/RL, February 17, 2015
Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a visit to Budapest on February 17 that the state firm Gazprom is
ready to ship natural gas to Hungary after an existing agreement expires in 2015.
Putin made the remarks during his first bilateral trip to a European Union country since ceremonies last June
marking the 70th anniversary of the Allied D-Day invasion in World War II.
Thousands of Hungarians protested Putin's visit, calling on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to stop what
they called the "Putinization" of Hungary.
But after talks with Putin in Budapest on February 17, Orban said "Hungary needs Russia" for "energy
sources" and to export "Hungarian-made products."
Orban is seeking to negotiate a flexible long-term natural gas supply agreement with Russia beyond Hungary's
current agreement, which expires later this year.
Orban, who gained prominence in the late 1980s with a strong anti-Soviet stance as a communist student
leader, is now considered one of Putin's closest European allies.
Orban's pro-Russian stance has added to his image problem in the West, after he said last summer that he
envisaged Hungary as an "illiberal democracy" modeled on states like Russia and Turkey, even as he cracked
down on some civil rights groups.
Orban wants to negotiate a flexible long-term natural gas supply agreement with Russia because the country's
current agreement with Russia is due to expire in 2015.
Putin adviser Yury Ushakov said the two will discuss Russian gas supplies to Hungary.
Putin was expected to try to pressure Orban to stall further European sanctions against Russia over its
annexation of Crimea and support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
In December, Russia scrapped the $40 billion South Stream pipeline project, which was designed to supply
gas to southern Europe without crossing Ukraine, citing EU objections.
Hungary had firmly backed the South Stream project.
During a visit to Moscow last year, Orban signed a 10 billion-euro ($12 billion) loan deal with Russia to expand
Hungary's only nuclear plant, located in Paks, some 130 kilometers south of Budapest.
Putin's trip to Hungary comes amid the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine between government troops and
Russia-backed separatists.
Hungary supported the European Union sanctions on Russia, but has been vocal about their negative impact.
#12
The American Education of Vladimir Putin
By Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy
The Atlantic, February 16, 2015
"The problem you Americans have in dealing with us is that you think you understand us, but you don't. You
look at the Chinese and you think: 'They're not like us.' You look at us Russians, and you think, 'They're like
us.' But you're wrong. We are not like you."
Over the past few years, top-ranking Russians have repeatedly delivered versions of the admonition above to
American interlocutors. We've been told that it comes originally from Vladimir Putin. That makes sense. Putin
is a former intelligence officer. And what the warning expresses, with typically Putin-esque bluntness and
political incorrectness, is a maxim shared by U.S. intelligence officers: Beware of seeing false mirror images.
Do not assume your adversary will think and act the same way you would in similar circumstances. You will
likely misread him if you do.
Despite a new ceasefire, Russia and the West remain at risk of uncontrolled escalation over Ukraine, and in
such situations little can be more dangerous than misreading your adversary. So Putin is right: Washington
shouldn't "mirror-image" him, and U.S. leaders shouldn't assume that he will interpret events and words as
they might. But one neglected question is that of how Putin interprets the United States. Has he followed his
own advice-or does he assume Americans, including President Obama, will act and react as he would? Does
he even care about how Americans think, what their motives and values are, how their system works? What
does Vladimir Putin actually know about the U.S. and about Americans?
As it turns out, very little.
Because of his KGB history, Vladimir Putin is typically accused in U.S. media of harboring an anti-American,
Cold War view of the United States, and of blaming the United States for bringing down the Soviet Union. But
there is little evidence of any anti-American views in the early phases of Putin's public life. As deputy mayor of
St. Petersburg in the 1990s, he did not accuse the United States of destroying the Soviet Union. Instead he
publicly laid blame for the collapse of the U.S.S.R. on the miscalculations of Soviet leaders and their
mishandling of reforms in the 1980s. His more negative views of the United States, and its perceived threat to
Russia, seem to have hardened later in the 2000s, over the course of his interactions and relationships with
two American presidents: George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
There is no reliable record of Putin's interactions with Americans or his thoughts on the United States during
key phases of his life: his youth in Leningrad, his KGB service, his period in the St. Petersburg mayor's office,
and his pre-presidential years in Moscow. When Putin went to Leningrad State University in the early 1970s,
only a small number of American exchange students were there. But Putin did not study English, and he would
have had limited opportunity to socialize with the American students outside the university. During his early
KGB service in Leningrad in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the United States was filtered through the world of
counterespionage and global developments of the time; Americans seemed dangerous and unpredictable.
The early 1980s were years of heightened Cold War confrontation. After a period of détente, the United States
had again become a clear and present danger for the Soviet Union. Based on their analysis of U.S. defense
budgets, global U.S. military exercises, American and NATO air probes near sensitive Soviet borders,
statements by top White House and Pentagon officials, and increased operations by the CIA in Afghanistan
and elsewhere, the Kremlin leadership was thoroughly convinced that the United States posed a real military
threat.
March 1983 brought a full-scale war scare, just after U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced the proposed
development of a missile-defense system to shield the United States from a Soviet nuclear strike. Soviet leader
Yuri Andropov lashed out against those plans and raised the specter of a nuclear holocaust. On March 8,
1983, Reagan made his famous "Evil Empire" speech about the dangers posed to the United States and its
way of life by the Soviet Union. In September 1983, the situation deteriorated further when Soviet warplanes
intercepted and shot down a civilian South Korean Airlines plane, KAL 007, in the mistaken belief that it was a
U.S. spy plane.
In the Soviet Union, top leaders terrified themselves and their population with memories of World War II, and
specifically of Adolf Hitler's surprise 1941 attack on the U.S.S.R. As Benjamin Fischer, an analyst and scholar
at the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence, noted: "For decades after the war, Soviet leaders seemed
obsessed with the lessons of 1941, which were as much visceral as intellectual in Soviet thinking about war
and peace." Andropov and his colleagues put the KGB on full alert in the early 1980s in response to the
lessons they had learned from the Soviet intelligence failures of World War II. It was around that time that Putin
entered the KGB Red Banner Institute in Moscow, where Soviet paranoia about the United States and fears of
a nuclear war undoubtedly framed the tone and content of his instruction.
Putin was posted in Dresden, East Germany, by the time Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan began a
process that would put the tensions and war scares of the early 1980s behind them. He was too low in the
KGB rankings to have much interaction with any top-level espionage targets, which would have included
Americans. Until he came back from Dresden in 1990 and began working for the mayor of St. Petersburg,
Vladimir Putin may have never met an American in any personal context.
By contrast, his position as St. Petersburg's deputy mayor in charge of external relations offered Putin many
opportunities to interact with Americans, in a very different atmosphere from that of the 1980s. After 1991, the
Soviet Union was gone, and Putin and the rest of the mayor's team were trying to figure out how to run the city
and make its economy competitive again. American and other Western politicians, as part of a U.S. effort to
forge a new relationship with the Russian Federation, openly courted Putin's boss Anatoly Sobchak, the first
democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg. Putin seemed to respond well to the overtures.
U.S. businesses that moved into St. Petersburg had to deal directly with Deputy Mayor Putin who, according to
John Evans, the U.S. consul general in St. Petersburg at the time, was always helpful in resolving contract
disputes between U.S. and Russian businesses. Within the city's U.S. and Western business community, Putin
was seen as "pro-business." He gave no impression whatsoever of any anti-American or anti-Western views.
The St. Petersburg connection also gave Putin an important entry point into the United States. In 1992,
Sobchak co-chaired a bilateral commission on St. Petersburg with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It
is not clear how much direct contact Putin and Kissinger had at that time. But Kissinger would become an
important interlocutor for Putin when he became president later on. Putin has admitted that the source of his
initial interest in Kissinger was the former secretary of state's early career in World War II military intelligence.
As a renowned scholar with an academic career and numerous books to his name, Kissinger could provide a
sounding board for ideas about geopolitics. He could interpret the United States and the West for Putin. And he
could explain Vladimir Putin to other influential Americans. But beyond Kissinger, Putin has had few
representative Americans to rely on for insights into how the U.S. political system works and how Americans
and their leaders think.
The two key presidential aides in charge of overseeing critical aspects of relations between Moscow and
Washington for most of the 2000s-Sergei Prikhodko and his deputy, Alexander Manzhosin-spoke English, but
to our knowledge neither had any experience of living or working in the United States. Otherwise, Putin's "go-to
guys" for the United States within the Russian government and the Kremlin have been Sergei Lavrov, Russia's
foreign minister and former representative to the UN in New York, who speaks fluent English, and Yury
Ushakov, a personal presidential advisor and former Russian ambassador to the United States. Putin's lack of
fluency in English has limited his own ability to have direct contacts except through interpreters or others who
can act as connectors and conduits. Nor has he shown any particular curiosity about America beyond its
leaders and their actions.
By 1994, the U.S.S.R.'s military alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organization, had collapsed along with the rest of
the Soviet bloc, but NATO was still going strong, and Eastern European countries were knocking on its door
seeking new security arrangements. Five years later, the issue of NATO and NATO enlargement came to play
a significant role in Putin's professional life and his ascent to the presidency.
Putin was head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the post-Soviet successor to the KGB, when the
alliance went to war in response to Yugoslav military atrocities against ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo,
which was still part of Yugoslavia. The intervention took place a mere two weeks after NATO had admitted
Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The United States did not secure the usual authority from the
United Nations to intervene. NATO warplanes bombed Belgrade, and NATO forces, with American troops in
the lead, then moved into Kosovo to secure the territory and roll back the Yugoslav military. As Putin put it in a
speech 15 years later: "It was hard to believe, even seeing it with my own eyes, that at the end of the 20th
century, one of Europe's capitals, Belgrade, was under missile attack for several weeks, and then came the
real [military] intervention."
NATO's Kosovo campaign was a turning point for Moscow and for Putin personally. Russian officials
interpreted the intervention as a means of expanding NATO's influence in the Balkans, not as an effort to deal
with a humanitarian crisis. They began to revise their previous conclusions about the prospects for cooperating
with NATO as well as with the United States as the leader of the alliance. As Putin noted in a March 2014
speech, the experience left him with a rather harsh view of Americans, who, he said, "prefer in their practical
politics to be guided not by international law, but by the law of force." The Americans had, as they would on
numerous occasions, "taken decisions behind our backs, presented us with accomplished facts."
In August 1999, Putin was appointed prime minister, and his immediate concern was Chechnya, where
separatist violence was spilling over the border and into the rest of Russia. The considerable high-level
Western attention to, and criticism of, the second outbreak of war in the republic stoked Russian fears of NATO
or U.S. intervention in the conflict. In the United States, for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national
security advisor in the Carter administration, and retired general Alexander Haig, a former secretary of state in
the Reagan administration who had also served in top positions in the U.S. military and in NATO, helped to set
up an advocacy group to demand a diplomatic solution to the war and policies to protect civilians caught in the
conflict. Given the Soviet leadership's neuralgia about officials like Brzezinski and Haig in the 1970s and
1980s, this group was viewed with alarm in Moscow. Russian political figures saw the risk of the Americans
and NATO intervening in Chechnya to protect civilians, just as they had intervened in Kosovo.
Putin's response was to write an op-ed in The New York Times in November 1999, in an early foray into
international PR. He explained that Moscow had launched its military campaign in Chechnya to respond to acts
of terrorism. He praised the United States for its own strikes against terrorists, noting that "when a society's
core interests are besieged by violent elements, responsible leaders must respond" and calling for the
"understanding of our friends abroad." The general message was conciliatory. Putin clearly hoped that the
constructive atmosphere that had framed his interactions with Americans in St. Petersburg could be restored in
some way.
After September 11, he appeared convinced that Washington would come to see things from Moscow's
perspective and would recognize linkages between al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and terrorists in Chechnya. In a
press conference in Brussels on October 2, 2001, Putin asserted that terrorists took advantage of "Western
institutions and Western conceptions of human rights and the protection of the civilian population ... not in
order to defend Western values and Western institutions, but rather ... in a struggle against them. Their final
goal is annihilation." All states would have to clamp down politically at home, as well as improve military
postures abroad, to deal with this problem. Based on Russia's experience in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Putin
offered the United States concrete assistance in rooting out al-Qaeda.
If Putin and the Kremlin hoped to create an international anti-terrorist coalition with Washington modeled on the
U.S.-Soviet World War II alliance against Germany-one that would give Russia an equal say with the United
States-that hope went unfulfilled. As Georgetown professor and former U.S. government official Angela Stent
has pointed out: "When countries form partnerships forged out of exigencies such as the 9/11 attacks, the shelf
life for these alliances is usually short because they have a specific and limited focus." The U.S.-Soviet antiNazi alliance itself, she wrote, "began to fray as the victors disagreed about what would happen after Germany
surrendered, and the Cold War began."
In the aftermath of 9/11, Putin was mystified by the actions of his U.S. counterparts. In the absence of
countervailing information, Putin initially saw American failure to respond to his warnings about the common
threat of terrorism as a sign of dangerous incompetence. In a series of speeches just after September 11,
Putin said he "was astonished" at the Clinton administration's lack of reaction to his warnings of a terrorist plot
brewing in Afghanistan. "I feel that I personally am to blame for what happened," he lamented. "Yes, I spoke a
great deal about that threat. ... Apparently, I didn't say enough. I didn't find the words that could rouse people
[in the U.S.] to the required system of defense."
The 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq convinced Putin that the United States was up to no good and looking for
pretexts to intervene against hostile regimes to enhance its geopolitical position. Putin and his intelligence
officials knew that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was bluffing about his possession of chemical and other
weapons of mass destruction (WMD). After the invasion of Iraq, and the U.S. failure to find any WMD, a
comment attributed to Putin was passed around European diplomatic circles: "Pity about the WMD. I would
have found some." In other words, the U.S. intelligence services and government were beyond incompetent-if
you're going to use a pretext, do your homework; make sure it's a good one.
The opinion Putin and his security team seem to have formed over this period-that the United States was not
just incompetent but dangerous, and intent on inflicting harm on Russia-was strikingly at odds with the
conclusion in the United States that the collapse of Soviet communism meant the disappearance of the military
threat from Moscow. As in the 1980s, U.S. officials had a hard time believing that Russia could genuinely see
the United States as a threat. As a result, Washington made decisions that were consistently misinterpreted in
Moscow-including a second major NATO enlargement in 2004.
The color revolutions in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004 further darkened Putin's view of U.S. activities.
For Moscow, Georgia was a tiny failed state, but Ukraine was a smaller version of Russia. In Putin's view the
Orange Revolution demonstrations in Ukraine in 2004, and their scale, could only have been orchestrated from
the outside. This was especially the case when the color revolutions became conceptually tied to the Bush
administration's "Freedom Agenda" and its efforts to support the development of civil society and the conduct
of free elections in Afghanistan and Iraq-two countries that the United States had invaded and occupied.
The color revolutions, Putin argued in his March 2014 speech, were not spontaneous. The West inflicted them
on a whole array of countries and people. The West, Putin argued, tried to impose a set of "standards, which
were in no way suitable for either the way of life, or the traditions, or the cultures of these peoples. As a result,
instead of democracy and freedom-there was chaos and the outbreak of violence, a series of revolutions. The
'Arab Spring' was replaced by the 'Arab Winter.'"
Russia's 2008 war with Georgia marked the end of Putin's relationship with George W. Bush and his
administration. The Obama administration came into office shortly afterward, intent on a "reset" that seemed to
address Putin's main stated desire for Russia to be approached by the United States with pragmatism on
issues of mutual interest and importance. But once again, Putin and the Kremlin took their policy cues from
U.S. actions rather than words.
U.S. offers of modernization partnerships to boost bilateral trade and help secure Russia's accession to the
World Trade Organization were combined with bilateral presidential commissions for human rights and civilsociety development. The repeal of Cold War-era restrictions on U.S. trade with Russia was accompanied by
the introduction of a new raft of sanctions in the form of the Sergei Magnitsky Act, which targeted a list of
Russian officials who had been complicit in the death of a crusading Russian lawyer. Disagreements with the
United States and NATO over interventions in the civil wars that erupted in Libya and then Syria in the wake of
the Arab Spring uprisings marred U.S. and Russian cooperation on negotiating with Iran over the future of its
nuclear program. Putin was especially angered by the violent death of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi at
the hands of rebels who found him hiding in a drainage pipe during an attempt to flee Tripoli following NATO's
intervention in Libya. In Putin's interpretation, the 2011-2012 Russian political protests were just part of this
one long sequence of events, with the hand of the West barely concealed.
On September 11, 2013, on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Putin returned to a public format that
he had not used since 1999. He again wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, directed at the American public
and calling for U.S. caution as it contemplated a military strike on Syria. The tone was anything but conciliatory.
The prose was bold, not cautious. Putin observed: "It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in
foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America's long-term interest? I doubt
it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on
brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan 'you're either with us or against us.'"
With this op-ed, Putin effectively declared that his American education was complete.
By 2013, as the crisis in Ukraine began to unfold, Putin's view of America had become dark indeed. As he
concluded in his March 2014 speech: "Russia strived to engage in dialogue with our colleagues in the West.
We constantly propose cooperation on every critical question, want to strengthen the level of trust, want our
relations to be equal, open, and honest. But we have not seen reciprocal steps." Limited by a lack of direct
contacts with the United States, and driven by his perception of the threat it posed, Putin believed that he had
been rebuffed or deceived at every turn by the West.
This post has been adapted from a new, expanded edition of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.
FIONA HILL is the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution.
CLIFFORD G. GADDY is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.