Russia in the 21st Century [Superthread]

[MarkOttawa]

Bear sharpens claws:

Planes, tanks and ships, oh my!: Russian military gets a sweeping, massive upgrade

The Russian military received a sweeping array of new weapons last year, including 41 intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the wide-ranging military modernization will continue this year, the defence minister said Wednesday [Feb. 22].

Minister Sergei Shoigu told lawmakers the air force will receive 170 new aircraft, the army will receive 905 tanks and other armoured vehicles while the navy will receive 17 new ships this year.

Amid tensions with the West, the Kremlin has continued to spend big on new weapons despite Russia’s economic downturn.

Also this year, three regiments of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces will receive new intercontinental ballistic missiles, Shoigu said. Each regiment has up to 10 launchers.

The rising number of new weapons has raised demands for new personnel. Shoigu said the military currently needs 1,300 more pilots and will recruit them by 2018...

The weapons modernization effort has seen the 1-million Russian military narrow the technological gap in some areas where Russia had fallen behind the West, such as long-range conventional weapons, communications and drone technologies.

Shoigu said the military now has 2,000 drones compared to just 180 in 2011. He also noted that Russia has now deployed new long-range early warning radars to survey the airspace along the entire length of its borders.

The minister said the military will complete the formation of three new divisions in the nation’s west and southwest, and also deploy a new division on the Pacific Islands, which have been claimed by Japan...
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/planes-tanks-and-ships-oh-my-russian-military-gets-a-sweeping-massive-upgrade

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MilEME09]

3 Divisions in southern and western command? and another for the far east? almost 1000 AFV's, anyone else feel like this sounds like a build up to something?

 

[The Bread Guy]

3 Divisions in southern and western command? and another for the far east? almost 1000 AFV's, anyone else feel like this sounds like a build up to something?

Like the old Soviet days, it's aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall defensive against the NATO juggernaut that just won't stop imperializing ...

(image source)

 

[a_majoor]

While alarming in of itself, there are a few factors which still need to be taken into account:

1. Russia's GDP is about the same size as Italy's. Pouring all these resources into arms means a far smaller slice of pie is left for other things.
2. This overspending on the military is reflected in the generally dismal state of other Russian economic endeavours. For example, Italy has a small military force, but also produces coffee makers, cars and other things Russia does not (well, to be fair, Canada does not produce locally designed cars or coffee makers either).
3. The small and very specialized industrial base means it is difficult for Russia to truly innovate. Note that the PAK-FA was designed and built decades after the F-22, is deficient in its electronics (according to the Indians, who want in on the program) and still does not have engines of sufficient power to perform at F-22 levels.
4. Russia has a very limited force projection ability
5. China is on Russia's other border.

 

[The Bread Guy]

... 4. Russia has a very limited force projection ability ...

If you believe some commentators, they don't seem to need huge doses of just-military power projection over long periods to coerce convince other states to do what it wants.

 

[Old Sweat]

Remember what happened the last time they got in a military spending contest.

 

[a_majoor]

From "The American Interest", how President Trump may turn out to be Russia's nightmare:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/02/24/trump-isnt-sounding-like-a-russian-mole/

Trump Isn’t Sounding Like a Russian Mole
Walter Russell Mead

Trump’s core global strategy is intended to destroy any illusions in Moscow that Russia is a peer competitor of Washington’s.

With his latest effusive remarks to Reuters on the importance of expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal, President Donald Trump has sent the press into a panic once again.

What the press has largely ignored about Trump’s latest pronouncement is an obvious truth that undermines its own narrative: someone who was safely in Vladimir Putin’s pocket wouldn’t run around saying things like this. While liberal America may have forgotten recent history, Russia certainly hasn’t: provoking a nuclear arms race with an outclassed, economically weak Soviet Union was Ronald Reagan’s winning strategy in the 1980s. Tech and wealth are two key American advantages over Russia now as they were over the Soviet Union then; Trump’s message here is that he intends to follow in Reagan’s footsteps to use these strengths to advance American power, with the inevitable result of marginalizing one of Russia’s primary sources of power and prestige. Putin’s ramshackle Russia is no more capable of matching an American nuclear buildup than Brezhnev’s sclerotic Soviet Union could keep up with the United States—and Putin knows it.

Whether it will work is an entirely different question, but there can be little doubt that Trump’s core global strategy will destroy any illusions in Moscow, or anywhere else, that Russia is a peer competitor of the United States. A Trump administration is going to be four years of hell for Russia: a massive American doubling down on shale production along with a major military buildup. Trump is, in other words, a nightmare for Putin and a much, much bigger threat to Putin’s goals than President Obama ever was or wanted to be.

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
•Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
•Blocking oil and gas pipelines
•Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
•Cutting U.S. military spending
•Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran

That Trump is planning to do precisely the opposite of these things may or may not be good policy for the United States, but anybody who thinks this is a Russia appeasement policy has been drinking way too much joy juice.

Obama actually did all of these things, and none of the liberal media now up in arms about Trump ever called Obama a Russian puppet; instead, they preferred to see a brave, farsighted and courageous statesman. Trump does none of these things and has embarked on a course that will inexorably weaken Russia’s position in the world, and the media, suddenly flushing eight years of Russia dovishness down the memory hole, now sounds the warning that Trump’s Russia policy is treasonously soft.

This foolishness is best understood as an unreasoning panic attack. The liberal media hate Trump more than they have hated any American politician in a generation, and they do not understand his supporters or the sources of his appeal. They are frantically picking up every available stick to beat him, in the hopes that something, somehow, will Miloize him.

So blind does hatred make them that they cannot understand how their own behavior is driving American public opinion in directions that bode ill for liberals in the future. In the first place, suppose Donald Trump does not in fact turn out to be the second coming of Benedict Arnold. Suppose instead, as is much more likely, that he turns out to be a very hawkish president, one who quite possibly will make George W. Bush look like Jimmy Carter. The media and Democratic Party leaders will have staked huge amounts of credibility on a position that turns out to be laughably untrue. Six months or a year from now, they will have to flip from calling Trump an anti-American traitor and Russian plant to calling him a dangerous, fascistic ultranationalist whose relentless hawkishness is bringing us closer to World War Three. Already there are some days when they mount both attacks at the same time: the hawkish traitor whose Nazi style America First ideology leads him to lick Putin’s boots. The media wants to cast Trump as both Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler; but you can’t give the Sudetenland to yourself.

The talking heads and the top pundits won’t admit it, and may not even see it—as our media is extremely good at hiding from facts that make it feel uncomfortable—but not many people will be convinced by this line of attack. Hawk or traitor: you can only pick one.

Meanwhile, the current media and Democratic drumbeat of fierce, hyper-patriotic anti-Russian fervor is legitimating exactly the kind of nationalist assertiveness and chauvinism that, in normal times, liberals try to tamp down. The liberal media, in the desperate hope of landing some blows on President Trump, is helping to create a national climate of alarmed and defensive patriotism that leads to exactly the kind of public opinion climate that is catnip to Republicans and poison to liberal Democrats.

Of course it’s possible that all the rumors and gossip about Trump and Putin are true, and that Putin holds powerful blackmail material on Trump, or alternatively that they share a dark and anti-democratic dream that they will jointly try to impose on the world. But if those things are true, we won’t find out because some nameless source has whispered something incriminating to one of Ben Rhodes’ 27 year-old journalistic naifs; it will be because Trump begins to shift American foreign policy in ways that benefit Russia.

What would those telltale signs of treason look like?

Trump might for example acquiesce in a greater Russian presence and say in the Middle East. He might limit U.S. fracking, helping to prop up Putin’s oil price. He might seek to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles in ways that give Russia badly needed economic relief from an arms burden that daily pressures the country more, and that accepts a permanent parity between the US and Russian nuclear arsenals, leaving America perpetually hostage to a nuclear balance of terror with a much weaker Russia. He might slash military spending and procurement; rather than steadily building the gap between Russian and American military capabilities, he might slow down and allow the Russians and others to dream of catching up.

In other words, if President Trump really is a Putin pawn, his foreign policy will start looking much more like Barack Obama’s. Will the New York Times and the Washington Post really have the brass to call Trump a traitor for pursuing a mix of policies which came right out of Obama’s playbook?

This would be a foolish enough positioning to cause even the press, or at least some of it, to blush. The Gray Lady has her limits. What is happening instead is the identification of the largely ineffective and symbolic sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine and illegal annexation of Crimea as the gold standard of anti-Russia policy. If Trump so much as hints at bargaining away these largely decorative sanctions, we are likely to see a media firestorm of historic scale. It will not be grounded in reality; Obama’s chosen anti-Russia policy mix was as weak and hesitating as such policy can be. The sanctions were a way of pretending to ourselves that we had a Ukraine policy more than offering an actual path to forcing Russia to disgorge its gains. Trump’s policies of fracking and big military build up are more anti-Russian without sanctions than Obama ever thought was practical or wise.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t some honest and important questions about Trump and Russia. Looking into President Trump’s business ties and possible conflicts of interest is legitimate journalism. And there is little doubt that some of the Russian and other ex-Soviet figures which whom President Trump did business in the past are not the kind of people one would want a future president associating with.

But Trump’s actual foreign policy hardly suggests a president in thrall to the Kremlin, and excessive dovishness is unlikely to be the besetting sin of the Trump administration. The more the media locks itself into the narrative of Trump the appeaser, the harder its job will become when the real difficulties of the Trump presidency begin to take shape.

America needs an intellectually solvent and emotionally stable press to give this president the skeptical and searching scrutiny that he needs. What we are getting instead is something much worse for the health of the republic: a blind instinctive rage that lashes out without wounding, that injures its own credibility more than its target, that discredits the press at just the moment where its contributions are most needed.

 

[a_majoor]

Setting the conditions for a new "Cold War"? The only real issue in this article is the definitive blaming of Russia for the election hacks, I would suggest the DNC hacks were far more plausibly done by disgruntled "Bernie Bros" angry at how the nomination process was manipulated against Senator Sanders and his very motivated supporters:

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/brace-yourself-new-cold-war

Dispatches
Michael J. Totten
Brace Yourself for a New Cold War
8 March 2017

American-Russian relations are about to take a sharp turn for the worse.

President Donald Trump, like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton before him, hoped to “reset” Washington’s dismal relationship with Moscow, but that was always the longest of long shots. Vladimir Putin’s ideology and perceived national interests require the West as an enemy, and no matter how many times Trump tweets that he respects Putin’s “strength” and says it would be “a good thing” if we could get along with Russia and unite against ISIS, neither the Kremlin nor permanent Washington will allow it.

To be sure, Russians initially swooned when Trump beat Clinton in the election last November.

“It turns out that the United Russia [Vladimir Putin’s party] has won the elections in the United States!” Omsk governor Viktor Nazaro said. “Tonight we can use the slogan with Mr. Trump; Yes We Did,” said Boris Chernyshev, a member of the Russian parliament’s ultranationalist faction. “I want to ride around Moscow with an American flag in the window, if I can find a flag,” said Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of Putin propaganda channel RT (Russia Today). Alexander Dugin, former professor and fascistic Putinism philosopher, gushed that Trump’s inauguration was “incredibly beautiful—one of the best moments of my life.”

According to international public opinion surveys, Russia is the only country in the entire world where more people rooted for Trump than for Clinton. (He “beat” her in Russia by 21 points.)

He’s one of us, the Russians thought, sort of. A rising leader of the ragtag nationalist anti-globalist movements. Trump’s antipathy toward the European Union, NATO, and the bipartisan political class in the United States imperfectly mirrors their own attitudes and prejudices.

Russian dolls adorned with Trump’s face are available in stores all over Moscow and beyond. Putin even told the state-run media to provide non-stop friendly coverage to the new administration in Washington for a while. According to the Russian news agency Interfax, Russian media mentioned Trump more often in January than it mentioned Putin.

That’s over now. The media swooning has cooled. The Russian ruler has again eclipsed Trump. It’s not hard to understand why.

Having even a potentially innocuous meeting with Russian officials has rapidly turned into a new third rail in American politics. National Security Advisor Mike Flynn lost his job for lying about discussing sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had to recuse himself for saying under oath at a Senate hearing that he had no contacts with Russian officials even though he too had met with Kislyak in his office. Congress is investigating Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee last year, and even Republican members of Congress are wondering aloud if the Trump campaign had anything to do with it.

There is virtually no chance after all this that the Trump administration will be able to get away with lifting sanctions against Russia or anything else that looks chummy or even blandly cooperative without triggering a spectacular backlash that includes members of his own party and possibly even his cabinet.

Don’t think for a moment that Russians haven’t noticed this either. Of course they’ve noticed, and they have every reason to be anxious about it. Before long, anti-Russian sentiment in the United States could eclipse anti-Americanism is Russia. The only reason that hasn’t happened already is because so many Americans hoped for so long against hope that Russia shorn of totalitarian communism would eventually return “home” to the West like the prodigal son.

Russia, though, hasn’t been fully European since the Mongol invasion of Rus in the year 1240. Its forcible incorporation into the Golden Horde Empire endured for more than 200 years. Sure, Russia’s capital is on the European continent, but Russians see themselves as Eurasian. (North Korea and China, don’t forget, border Russia.)

Putin crafted the Eurasian Economic Union—which includes Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia—as an authoritarian crony state-capitalist competitor to the liberal democratic West that he detests. There isn’t a damn thing anybody in Washington can say or do to convince him to dump that project and align himself as a junior partner with the European Union and NATO, not when he’s the undisputed one-man boss of an entire continent-spanning alternative.

Understand something here. Both the European Union and Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union sent out feelers to Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia for possible future membership. Rather than joining Putin’s Union like Belarus and the others, all three signed association agreements with the European Union. And all three have been dismembered and occupied in part by the Russians, indefinitely preventing them from joining the Western alliance. Neither the European Union nor NATO will even consider accepting a member state that has a disputed territorial conflict with Moscow.

If Russian and American national interests are so at odds then, why on earth did the Kremlin bother interfering in our election in order to get Donald Trump elected? I don’t believe that it did, at least not if you put it that way.

Think about it. Almost everybody thought Trump would lose, including the president himself. His win last November surprised everybody. Vladimir Putin is a smart man, but he can’t see the future better than anyone else. Like the rest of us, he assumed Hillary Clinton would win.

So when his cyberagents hacked the Democratic National Committee and released what it found to WikiLeaks, Putin was attacking the presumed incoming president of the United States. He didn’t go after Clinton per se. Rather, he pre-emptively struck against the next White House. He would have done the same thing if Joe Biden or Tim Kaine or any other Democrat were at the top of the ticket. And he would have done the same thing to the Republican Party if, say, Marco Rubio were the GOP nominee and the presumed winner of the general election.

The fact that Trump actually won was a surprise and a bonus.

Trump said last September that he loves WikiLeaks, forgetting everything he ever knew about the rogue outfit. (Someone should ask him what he thinks of WikiLeaks dumping a trove of classified material onto the Internet supposedly revealing how the CIA spies on people all over the world through their smart phones.) Its founder Julian Assange is emphatically not a Republican operative. WikiLeaks has spent its entire existence waging geopolitical warfare against the United States, mostly on behalf of itself, but partly on behalf of the Russians and everyone else in the world who wants to pull down the American “empire.” Like the Russians, Assange trained his fire on Clinton not because he likes the Republicans but because the Democratic Party includes roughly half the elected officials in the United States and presumably would have included the next president of the United States.

Assange and Putin hoped to kneecap the incoming president before she could even get started.

Their hostility toward the United States in general isn’t obvious to everyone in this country. Putin’s approval rating actually increased during the last year among Trump’s most die-hard supporters. The rest of us, though—and the rest of us still includes most Republicans—are reacting against Russian malfeasance more strongly than we have at any time since the Berlin Wall fell.

That reaction is blowing up in the Trump administration’s face, but the president can turn it around by taking an unambiguously hawkish stance against Russia. Putin, meanwhile, can’t do anything to recover his reputation in the United States.

Trump has already started to reverse himself and isn’t as rhetorically kind to Putin as he was even recently. “Even in the way he talks you can now hear notes of Obama,” said Russian Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. “And you can hear in his address [to Congress]: the military budget will be increased by over $50 billion.”

During last year’s campaign, Trump openly considered recognizing Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula, joining just a handful of rogue states like North Korea and Venezuela. A couple of weeks ago, though, he backtracked and tweeted, “Crimea was TAKEN by Russia during the Obama Administration. Was Obama too soft on Russia?”

Many of the president’s pro-Putin aides and staff—Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Mike Flynn to a lesser extent—are out now while many of his current cabinet members—in particular United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and Defense Secretary James Mattis—are as staunchly hawkish on Russia as John McCain and Mitt Romney. Trump hasn’t stuck a sock in their mouths and probably never will. “There's a decreasing number of areas where we can engage cooperatively,” Mattis said recently, “and an increasing number of areas where we're going to have to confront Russia.”

There are other reasons Putin and his claque are unhappy. “With Trump in the White House,” Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes write in Foreign Policy magazine, “Putin has lost his monopoly over geopolitical unpredictability. The Kremlin’s ability to shock the world by taking the initiative and trashing ordinary international rules and customs has allowed Russia to play an oversized international role and to punch above its weight. Putin now has to share the capacity to keep the world off balance with a new American president vastly more powerful than himself. More world leaders are watching anxiously to discover what Trump will do next than are worrying about what Putin will do next.”

So after all this, the Kremlin has ordered Russia’s state-run media to stop writing about Trump as if he’s some kind of hero.

There’s a lot more going on, though, than a cooling of the Trump euphoria in Moscow. The Russians have plenty of reasons to fear the emergence, if not sooner then at least later, of a sustained bipartisan American hostility to Russia and Putin, with Donald Trump himself as its champion, that dwarfs anything the world has seen since Ronald Reagan engaged with détente with the Soviet Union’s last premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Kremlin reportedly fears that Trump will be removed from office—either by Congress or a military coup and possibly even assassinated—and that a venomous anti-Russian consensus will unite Americans, finally bringing about at least a partial end to our debilitating political polarization that Russia has been crowing about for a year now. They are most likely wrong about the first part of that equation. An American president hasn’t been assassinated for more than a half-century, no American president has ever been forcibly removed from power against his will internally, and the very idea of a military coup is absurd. The Russians are probably right, though, about the second part. A venomous anti-Russian consensus in America is already rising.

Whatever else happens, at some point Vladimir Putin will inevitably infuriate Trump. The American president is notoriously thin-skinned and couldn’t even get through a phone call with Australia’s friendly Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull without losing his cool. Even leaving all that aside, Trump may soon realize that the most effective way to retire the ongoing controversy surrounding his staff’s real and alleged dodgy ties to Russia is to fulminate against Putin the way he does against Barack Obama and Rosie O'Donnell.

Donald Trump hasn’t even been president for two months yet. His bizarre pro-Russian bumbling could easily turn out to be a mere blip at the start of his presidency. And if a galvanizing anti-Russian consensus does end up emerging, it’s likely to be much more intense than it would have been had Vladimir Putin left us alone.

 

[The Bread Guy]

...  I would suggest the DNC hacks were far more plausibly done by disgruntled "Bernie Bros" angry at how the nomination process was manipulated against Senator Sanders and his very motivated supporters ...

Based on what evidence?  Heck, if we're going all :Tin-Foil-Hat:, why not blame the CIA for the hack?

... apparently the CIA has the ability to mimic Russian hackers. In other words, the CIA has the ability to hack anybody they want and make it look like the Russians are doing it or make it look like the ChiComs are doing it or make it look like the Israelis are doing it ...

More from those fake-newsers @ the Washington Post here.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Those ungrateful Latvians, asking to see a Russian military facility, then saying, "uh, no thanks" when the Russians say, "sure, drop on by ..." ...

Russian ministry of Defense (Mindef) denounced today that Latvia denied the visit to military facilities that this country had previously requested to be closely monitored, describing them as a threat for its security.

Latvia asked in 2016 for a visit to the Russian air force brigade in the city of Ostrov and the landing troops of Pskov, but now this country refuses to do it, said a statement issued by Mindef.

Russia considers that the refusal of Latvia responds to an action of solidarity with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Mindef also referred to the statements made by NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg, who said that at least ten times Russia was invited by this organization to join the exercises in the region.

The Mindef statement said that according to a document signed in Vienna 2011 on the principle of openness by the two parties, Russia was only invited once to witness the exercise Anaconda-2016.

Mindef said that following the documents of Vienna, Russia sent its monitors to the exercises, but they only received negative answers to their requests from the Government of Poland, where the exercise took place ...

Could the Latvians be trying to avoid one of these situations?

 

[The Bread Guy]

Not likely to cause RUS to fall, but interesting nonetheless ...

• "Hundreds arrested in protests against Russian government's corruption"
• "Are Russian protests about corruption, Vladimir Putin the start of something?"
• "Russian Opposition Leader Arrested as Police Clear Anti-Corruption Protest"
• "Russian protest leader Alexei Navalny gets 15 days in jail"
• "Russia's mass protests were a win for Navalny. How will the Kremlin respond?"

 

[The Bread Guy]

Ya don't say?

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday compared a recent wave of street demonstrations in the country to the first stirrings of the Arab Spring, warning that his government would deal harshly with unsanctioned protests.

“This tool was used at the beginning of the so-called ‘Arab Spring,’” Mr. Putin said, referring to anticorruption protests held Sunday in Moscow and many other cities, Russian news agencies reported. “We know very well what this led to, what bloody events this led to.”

Thousands of Russians took to the streets Sunday in protests that were spurred by lawyer and anticorruption activist Alexei Navalny. In Moscow, riot police faced down marchers at an unsanctioned rally along one of the central boulevards of the capital, arresting hundreds ...

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

Yep! Leave it to a dictator to figure out how other dictators have fallen ... and thinking (deluding oneself?) that he knows how to deal with it.  ;D

 

[a_majoor]

More on the pressures that Putin is facing:

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/article/asia/beginning-end-putinism-1091

The Beginning of the End of Putinism?
APRIL 4, 2017 | ROB DANNENBERG

On Sunday, March 26, widespread protests broke out in more than 80 cities in the Russian Federation, apparently in response to the government's inability or unwillingness to deal with the problem of endemic corruption.

Estimates of the numbers of protesters vary, with the opposition claiming that more than 30,000 participated in Moscow alone. The government estimated fewer than 8,000 protesters. With the announced number of protesters arrested at over 1,500, it is likely the number of participants was larger than government figures suggest, though definitely smaller than the massive protests in 2011 and 2012. 

Striking nonetheless was the breadth of the protests -- in cities from St. Petersburg in the west to Vladivostok in the east -- and the relative youth of the participants.  These weren't disgruntled pensioners complaining about transfer payments.  Many of the protesters appeared to be young enough to have known only post-Soviet leadership in Russia.  They seemed worried about the direction their country is taking under Putin's leadership. Perhaps significantly, the protests took place on the 17th anniversary of Putin's first election to the presidency. Putin warned of hooliganism and point to the chaos that stemmed from "colored revolutions" and the Arab Spring.

Putin may have cause for concern.  The recent protests, complaining about corruption, are materially different in substance than the 2011 and 2012 protests that focused on election fraud, although the issues are related.  The latest round of protests has taken place in a worse economic and political environment.

Moreover, the luster of the nationalism aroused by Putin's geopolitical adventures in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere may have begun to fade as the conflicts in those regions continue and as their economic cost rises. Russia's increased negative image in the world, and in the West in particular, may be taking its toll on the Russian polity as the effects of the corruption exposed in the Panama Papers and by the impressive investigative activity of opposition leader Alexei Navalny starts to have an impact. This is in addition to the impact of the massive Russian sports cheating scandal exposed by the WADA investigations.

Western sanctions have been meaningful but not for the purpose for which they were implemented, i.e., to reverse the annexation of Crimea. The sanctions may have helped foster the economic conditions which might over time bring about political change in Russia. Real incomes in Russia have been steadily falling for several years despite relatively stable energy prices.  The number of Russians living below the poverty line has increased by 15 percent in the past two years.  The number of billionaires and millionaires has increased, and evidence of their extravagant lifestyles has become increasingly available on the internet.

The geopolitical environment may be turning against Putin as well. Despite the annexation of Crimea and the Russian-sponsored insurrections in the Don Basin and the establishment of two more "frozen conflict" states in the model of Transdniestria and Abkhazia, the bulk of the Ukraine has survived and has embarked on a path toward a closer economic, political, and ultimately military relationship with the West.  This is precisely what Moscow was trying to avoid. Russia can’t preserve Putinism by creating a ring of "Lugansk People's Republics," meaning, small, weak, pro-Russian, self-proclaimed city-states on its borders.

Moscow has complained repeatedly and loudly about having been betrayed by the West over the eastward expansion of NATO, but Russia’s annexation of Crimea has resulted in meaningful NATO military deployments in the Baltic States, Poland, and elsewhere.  The 2014 annexation has likely served as the impetus for increased military spending by NATO members and the expansion of the alliance to include Montenegro (where a failed coup attempt was likely engineered by Russian military intelligence).  The U.S. has deployed ballistic missile defense systems to Poland and Romania. Although the rationale for those deployments is defense against Iran, the Russians understand those same systems could be used in defense against Russian missiles. 

Even Russia's pervasive use of cyber tools to influence the recent U.S. presidential election has backfired. If you accept the premise that the Russians conspired to bring about a Trump victory, the victory is a pyrrhic one, because the U.S. political environment brought about by Russia's cyber meddling has likely made it very difficult if not impossible for President Trump to effect any meaningful improvement in U.S.-Russian relations and to give Putin the sanctions relief he so clearly desires. Compounding Putin's problems in the long run, Trump has proposed a significant increase in U.S. defense spending and is embarking on a program of modernization of the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal. At the same time, Trump is encouraging/insisting that U.S. allies increase their defense spending and participation in mutual security. We may be witnessing the beginning of a new arms race that Russia has no more chance of winning than did the Soviet Union.

The Russian argument against the eastward expansion of NATO is based on the belief that NATO is a strategic military threat to Russia. But what Putin and Russia's leadership really fear is the expansion of Western values and economic prosperity to Russia's borders.  The pluralistic and democratic values of the West and the efficiency and prosperity of Western economic systems represent direct and existential threats to Putinism.

Putin is desperately engaged in an all-out effort to stem the tide of history.  This is a contest he cannot hope to win. Recent protests may be the beginning of a rejectionist movement by Russia's youth against the corruption and dishonesty of the system Putin and his Siloviki cronies have established and from which they have massively profited.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Yep! Leave it to a dictator to figure out how other dictators have fallen ... and thinking (deluding oneself?) that he knows how to deal with it.  ;D

More on the pressures that Putin is facing:

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/article/asia/beginning-end-putinism-1091

He may be under pressure, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he parlayed this into a way to get a firmer grip.  I could be wrong, but it wouldn't be out of character.  In fact, some ideas here ...

...  1) Blame the West
    Why? Because that’s what the Russian government-controlled, conspiratorial media always does. In fact, Pravda almost immediately published this interview with the heading, “CIA Involved in St. Petersburg Terror Act?” The source was an individual with the background of “government and business consultant.”

    2)  Double-Down on Alliances with Shiite Wing of Radical Islam
    Russia is a long-standing ally of the Shiite wing of radical Islam represented by the Iranian and Syrian regimes and their Hezbollah terrorist proxy. The civil war in Syria has tightened this alliance, making Russia a direct ally on the battlefield.If ISIS or any other jihadist group based in Syria is behind the bombing, Russia’s resolve to keep Assad in power and expand the regime’s territorial holdings will only stiffen. The bombing makes it less likely Russia will pressure Assad and his inner circle out of power (even if a pro-Russian regime remains), as that’ll give the appearance that Russia caved in to the jihadists.Expect Putin to tempt the West into a laxer policy towards Iran and Hezbollah, claiming that their anti-American hostility is a byproduct of U.S. aggression that will disappear when the U.S. changes its tune and abides by Russia’s strategy for the region.

    3)  Use It as a Pretext for Action Against a Neighbor*
    Putin has a dual strategy conquering neighboring territory under the guise of protecting and unifying Russian minorities while depicting Russia as the best hope of the civilized world as America declines.Putin has been setting the stage to once again seize Georgian territory ever since he had Russian forces rip away Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008. Russia has been slowly taking more land, eliciting a condemnation from the European Union and a complaint from Georgia about “creeping annexation.”In March 2015, Vasil Rukhadze of the Jamestown Foundation warned that Russia “might be preparing for a final assault on Georgia.”Russia consistently accuses the pro-U.S. government of Georgia of responsibility for Islamist terrorist attacks on its soil. The Russian foreign minister said in January 2016 that ISIS has a training base in the Pankisi Gorge region of Georgia.

    The region is indeed a hotspot for ISIS recruitment, but the accusation that ISIS has a training base implies Georgian acquiescence.

    There are other neighbors that could be in Russia’s sights, but Georgia is most likely to be blamed for the bombing of the subway.

    4)  Retaliate with Syrian Kurds
    Russia has been arming Syrian Kurdish forces that have a Marxist orientation and are accused of being part of the PKK terrorist group. Increased assistance and coordinated action with them is a likely form of retaliation.The Turkish government, which views PKK as a terrorist threat of the highest order, is furious about this but eager to grow its military ties with Russia.

    5)  Increased Support to the Taliban in Afghanistan
    Senior U.S. military leaders say that Russia is backing the Taliban in Afghanistan. Iran is likewise helping the Taliban fight ISIS in Afghanistan.Increased support to the Taliban is an option for retaliating against ISIS (if ISIS is deemed responsible for orchestrating or inspiring the bombing) and also serves other interests.  The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan believes Russia wants to undermine the U.S. and NATO mission in Afghanistan.  Russia has also sided politically with the Taliban in opposing long-term agreements for U.S. and NATO involvement and demanding the departure of foreign forces from the country.

    6)  Suppress Massive Protests
    Putin has been facing the biggest protests in five years with demonstrators fueled over frustration over corruption. The U.S. State Department condemned the arrests of hundreds of protestors, including a major opposition leader.Putin warned the protestors that they risked making Russia follow in the footsteps of the Arab Spring, referring to mass violence and chaos. He obviously wants to use national security as a justification for shutting down the opposition ...

* - Maybe a titch less likely, give the alleged Kyrgyz perp, but the perp could always have gotten help from someone, right?

 

[The Bread Guy]

:rofl:

The State Duma’s committee on information policies, information technologies and communication will hold a special meeting in cooperation with experts to look into whether the offices of the Voice of America and Radio Liberty radio stations operating in Russia, as well as the US television network CNN are in compliance with Russian legislation and if their broadcasts were tantamount to meddling in Russian elections, the committee’s chairman Leonid Levin, of the A Just Russia party, said on Thursday.

The first deputy chairman of the committee on CIS affairs, Eurasian integration and relations with compatriots, Konstantin Zatulin, of the United Russia party, came out with an idea of such a probe last March. He explained it would be a proportionate response to US Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s demand for investigating Russian television broadcaster RT. Shaheen suspects this multi-lingual television channel addressing a world audience is in breach of US legislation on the registration of foreign agents.

"After consultations with legislators and with the brain-father of the proposal, Konstantin Zatulin, the committee made a decision to hold an enlarged meeting to be attended by analysts and experts to decide if the Voice of America, Radio Liberty and the CNN observed Russia’s election legislation or were responsible for influencing election processes in the country," the committee’s press-service quotes Levin as saying.

He said that such questions begin to be put to the US public when Russian mass media, such as the RT television channel and agency Sputnik, are accused of influencing US presidential elections and truying to undermine trust towards the voting procedure.

In the words of someone way more clever than me, "Ah, yes. Remember back when the hackers from Voice of America leaked a bunch of Putin's emails and sent spambots to support the opposition?"

 

[Kirkhill]

Great fan of Putin that I am - I'm not laughing.

Putin continues doing what he knows - the same job he was trained for as a kid in the KGB: winning friends and influencing people.  That task is as old as the COMINTERN and SMERSH and for those that don't remember the 80's google Helen Caldicott and "If you love this planet".

Meanwhile

http://www.ned.org/

How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate-the Church Committee of the Senate, the Pike Committee of the House and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.

Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name-the National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.

It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations and of cynicism. Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the "nongovernmental"-part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.

Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.

The Endowment has four principal initial recipients of funds: the International Republican Institute; the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs; an affiliate of the AFL-CIO (such as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity); and an affiliate of the Chamber of Commerce (such as the Center for International Private Enterprise). These institutions then disburse funds to other institutions in the US and all over the world, which then often disburse funds to yet other organizations.

In a multitude of ways, NED meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries by supplying funds, technical know-how, training, educational materials, computers, fax machines, copiers, automobiles and so on, to selected political groups, civic organizations, labor unions, dissident movements, student groups, book publishers, newspapers, other media, etc. NED programs generally impart the basic philosophy that working people and other citizens are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining, minimal government intervention in the economy and opposition to socialism in any shape or form. A freemarket economy is equated with democracy, reform and growth, and the merits of foreign investment are emphasized.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/TrojanHorse_RS.html

confirmed by this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy#Criticisms

And then there is this

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/03/15/gop-senators-ask-tillerson-to-probe-us-funding-soros-groups-abroad.html

and this

https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/

and this

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/george-soros-democratic-convention-226267

Where does government end and private society begin?

Meanwhile this

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/19/george-soros-calls-donald-trump-a-would-be-dictator-who-is-going-to-fail.html

Now, if I were Putin, I might be having difficulty distinguishing amongst the US, the Democrats, the Clintons, the Rockefellers and Soros - all of whom are offering advice to his citizens on how to vote him out of office by applying Alinsky's rules.

But I'm guessing that I should have stocked up on tinfoil as obviously my brain has been fried...

Even paranoids have enemies.

As I am re-reading this I am reminded of an aphorism of empire: military follows missionaries following merchants.  The military isn't necessary until the do-gooders show up.  The State Department is full of "Shining City on a Hill" acolytes.

 

[The Bread Guy]

... Now, if I were Putin, I might be having difficulty distinguishing amongst the US, the Democrats, the Clintons, the Rockefellers and Soros - all of whom are offering advice to his citizens on how to vote him out of office by applying Alinsky's rules ...

Methinks the Republicans may also have been behind any ... "democratic nudging" that may have happened, too ...

 

[Kirkhill]

Methinks the Republicans may also have been behind any ... "democratic nudging" that may have happened, too ...

I think that point was not lost on those that decided on "none of the above" on November 8th.  The US version of Preston Manning's "same old story".

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

History proves that European wars have killed more people than every other war put together.

That should be our main peacekeeping focus.... through providing a credible deterrent to Russian aggression.

History hasn't proven that at all actually.... as per the list above.

There's no actual proof of a Russian threat, so there's no apparent value in "deterring" them. Russia, like Britain and France, is a former power that is being passed over. Us "deterring" in Latvia is akin to the Simpson's episode where they stand up the Bear Patrol