|
Post by Admin on Nov 16, 2014 22:40:42 GMT
A tired Vladimir Putin has left Brisbane’s G20 praising the summit’s “constructive atmosphere” and saying the reported fallout between him and leaders of Western countries were exaggerated by the media. Putin was the first world leader to leave Australia, his jet taking off shortly after 2pm local time. The Russian president told reporters from his own country he was the first to go because he had to get back to Moscow to work, and he needed “four or five hours sleep”. But Putin remained defiant over Russian interests in Ukraine, saying Kiev’s economic blockade of the separatist east was “a big mistake”, though “not fatal”. “I don’t understand why Kiev authorities are cutting off those territories with their own hands. Well one can understand – to save money. But it’s not the time or the case to save money on,” he said. Western leaders have queued up at G20 to condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine, in particular supporting and arming separatist rebels, and for Russia’s perceived complicity in the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. In his closing remarks, the Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, told reporters he had had “a very candid and robust discussion” with Putin at Apec in Beijing, and that he suspected several leaders had had similar talks with the Russian leader at the G20. “I have some differences with the Russian government, obviously,” Abbott said. “I don’t agree, in fact I utterly deplore, what’s happening in eastern Ukraine. I demand Russia fully cooperates with the criminal investigation into the downing of MH17.” The conflict in eastern Ukraine has killed more than 4000 people this year. The UK prime minister, David Cameron, said he did not believe a new Cold War front was emerging, but that he was “robust” in his comments to the Russian leader, while the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, said he told Putin bluntly to “get out of Ukraine”. But Putin said there was a “good chance of resolution” of the Ukrainian conflict, and played down concerns military activity was escalating in the region. He said discussion of Ukraine at the G20 was frank and informative.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Nov 18, 2014 22:37:35 GMT
Speaking with Hubert Seipel of the German channel ARD ahead of the G20 summit, Putin warned of catastrophic consequences for Ukraine if the Kiev government continues to nurture radical nationalism and Russophobia, including in the ranks of its military and National Guard units that are still being sent as reinforcements to the country’s troubled east. “Frankly speaking, we are very concerned about any possible ethnic cleansings and Ukraine ending up as a neo-Nazi state. What are we supposed to think if people are bearing swastikas on their sleeves? Or what about the SS emblems that we see on the helmets of some military units now fighting in eastern Ukraine? If it is a civilized state, where are the authorities looking? At least they could get rid of this uniform, they could make the nationalists remove these emblems,” Putin said. “Indeed, self-defense fighters, for example, were supposed to leave some of the towns they had surrounded, are yet they haven’t left. Do you know why not? I will tell you plainly, this is no secret: because the people fighting against the Ukrainian army say, 'These are our villages, we come from there. Our families and our loved ones live there. If we leave, nationalist battalions will come and kill everyone. We will not leave, you can kill us yourselves.'” “That is why we have fears that it may all end up this way. If it happens it would be a catastrophe for Ukraine and Ukrainian people,” Putin stressed. The Russian leader dismissed the idea that only Russia has the key to solve the Ukraine crisis, saying that it sounds as if someone is trying to pass responsibility for the conflict to Moscow. “You know, when someone tells us that we have some special opportunities to solve this or that crisis it always troubles and alarms me...I always begin to suspect that there is an intention to pass on the responsibility to us and to make us pay for something. We do not want that. Ukraine is an independent, free and sovereign state,” Putin said. “There is just one thing that I always pay attention to. We are told again and again: pro-Russian separatists must do this and this, you must influence them in this way, you must act in that way. I have always asked them: 'What have you done to influence your clients in Kiev? What have you done? Or do you only support Russophobic sentiments?'” Putin said. He stressed that supporting Russophobia in Ukraine could result in “real catastrophe” and urged to seek a joint solution to the crisis in order to “bring the positions of the parties closer together.” Russia will not let Kiev simply send armed forces to eastern Ukraine and “annihilate” its opponents there, Putin stressed, answering a question of a German journalist. “The issue is that we can’t have a one-sided view of the problem. Today there is fighting in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian central authorities have sent the armed forces there and they even use ballistic missiles. Does anybody speak about it? Not a single word. And what does it mean? What does it tell us? This points to the fact, that you want the Ukrainian central authorities to annihilate everyone there, all of their political foes and opponents. Is that what you want? We certainly don’t. And we won't let it happen.” Putin stressed that the Minsk treaties securing the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine only became possible because Russia managed to convince anti-government fighters to sit down at the negotiation table with Kiev representatives. “The Minsk agreements arose only because Russia became actively involved in this effort; we worked with the Donbass militias, that is the fighters from southeast Ukraine, and we convinced them that they should settle for certain agreements. If we had not done that, it would simply not have happened,” the president said. There are still problems with the implementation of these agreements, Putin added, saying that both sides are unwilling to follow some of the points. Both Kiev and the self-defense forces have failed to leave some of the towns they were supposed to leave. When confronted about this fact, however, the militia told Moscow that they are not leaving due to fear of genocide or the killing of their families, as many fighters come from the same areas being occupied.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Dec 2, 2014 22:48:18 GMT
The Russian government has acknowledged that the country will fall into recession next year, battered by the combination of Western sanctions and a plunge in the price of its oil exports. The news caused the stock market to drop and pushed the ruble to a fresh record low against the dollar. The economic development ministry on Tuesday revised its GDP forecast for 2015 from growth of 1.2 per cent to a drop of 0.8 per cent. Russian households are expected to take hit, with disposable income seen declining by 2.8 per cent against the previously expected 0.4 per cent growth. Russia’s economic outlook is at the mercy of the global market for oil, a key export that finances the bulk of the state budget. Sanctions over Moscow’s role in eastern Ukraine are making things worse, hurting Russian banks and investment sentiment in particular. The national currency, the ruble, has dropped by more than 40 per cent this year as the economic troubles mounted. That in turn risks spawning more problems, such as a spike in inflation that would pinch consumers. While Russia’s troubles could do some economic damage to Europe, they are unlikely to have much impact on the U.S. economy, the world’s largest. Russia is the 28th-biggest market for the United States, absorbing $11.1 billion worth of U.S. goods last year. “Russia-U.S. trade is hardly large,” said Eric Lascelles, chief economist at RBC Global Asset Management. “I don’t think we should be worried” about the impact of a Russian recession on U.S. exports. In fact, the U.S. is benefiting from the lower oil prices that are driving Russian toward recession, and the money being pulled out of Russia is being pumped into U.S. and European financial markets, helping to keep interest rates low, Lascelles said. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, agreed, saying: “I don’t think there’s any direct economic impact” on the United States. However, he noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin could respond to the economic troubles by trying to divert the Russian public’s attention with even more belligerent policies toward Ukraine and the West, raising tensions and perhaps rattling financial markets. The release of the forecast on Tuesday afternoon weighed on the Russian stock market and the ruble, which fell 5.4 per cent lower against the dollar, to a new all-time low of 53.97 per dollar.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Feb 2, 2015 22:44:31 GMT
With Russian-backed separatists pressing their attacks in Ukraine, NATO’s military commander, Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, now supports providing defensive weapons and equipment to Kiev’s beleaguered forces, and an array of administration and military officials appear to be edging toward that position, American officials said Sunday. President Obama has made no decisions on providing such lethal assistance. But after a series of striking reversals that Ukraine’s forces have suffered in recent weeks, the Obama administration is taking a fresh look at the question of military aid. Secretary of State John Kerry, who plans to visit Kiev on Thursday, is open to new discussions about providing lethal assistance, as is Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, officials said. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who is leaving his post soon, backs sending defensive weapons to the Ukrainian forces. Fearing that the provision of defensive weapons might tempt President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to raise the stakes, the White House has limited American aid to “non-lethal” items, including body armor, night-vision goggles, first aid kits and engineering equipment. But the failure of economic sanctions to dissuade Russia from sending heavy weapons and military personnel to eastern Ukraine is pushing the issue of defensive weapons back into discussion. “Although our focus remains on pursuing a solution through diplomatic means, we are always evaluating other options that will help create space for a negotiated solution to the crisis,” said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council. Fueling the broader debate over policy is an independent report to be issued Monday by eight former senior American officials, who urge the United States to send $3 billion in defensive arms and equipment to Ukraine, including anti-armor missiles, reconnaissance drones, armored Humvees and radars that can determine the location of enemy rocket and artillery fire. In recent weeks, Russia has shipped a large number of heavy weapons to support the separatists’ offensive in eastern Ukraine, including T-80 and T-72 tanks, multiple-launch rocket systems, artillery and armored personnel carriers, Western officials say. Some of the weapons are too sophisticated to be used by hastily trained separatists, a Western official said. NATO officials estimate that about 1,000 Russian military and intelligence personnel are supporting the separatist offensive while Ukrainian officials insist that the number is much higher. Supported by the Russians, the separatists have captured the airport at Donetsk and are pressing to take Debaltseve, a town that sits aside a critical rail junction. All told, the separatists have captured 500 square kilometers — about 193 square miles — of additional territory in the past four months, NATO says. The assessment of some senior Western officials is that the Kremlin’s goal is to replace the Minsk agreement with an accord that would be more favorable to the Kremlin’s interests and would leave the separatists with a more economically viable enclave. The administration’s deliberations were described by a range of senior Pentagon, administration and Western officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were talking about internal discussions.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Feb 4, 2015 22:51:48 GMT
When Serbia’s dictator Slobodan Milosevic embarked on carving out a Greater Serbia from a collapsing Yugoslavia in 1991 by supporting proxy separatists, the West imposed an arms embargo on all the Yugoslav republics, arguing that fewer weapons would mean less fighting. But the impact proved the exact opposite. While Belgrade and Serbian separatists already possessed every variety of heavy weaponry inherited from the Yugoslav army, the newly emerging states of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were denied an effective means to defend themselves. The consequences were dire, as Milosevic’s proxies murdered and expelled tens of thousands of civilians in a policy camouflaged as “ethnic cleansing.” The Bosniak Muslims suffered the full force of this brutal assault on their territories and people. In effect, the arms embargo on Yugoslavia escalated and prolonged the armed conflict, precipitated attempted genocide, and eventually pulled NATO into the crisis through air strikes and a subsequent peacekeeping operation. The anti-civilian war and Alliance intervention culminated in the November 1995 Dayton accords, which established a divided Bosnian state that remains dysfunctional and unreformable to this day. All these negative developments were a direct consequence of state vulnerability, military weakness, and Western miscalculation at the outset of the Yugoslav conflicts. The failure of the West to aid Bosnia militarily also served to radicalize some elements of the Muslim population and introduced foreign mujaheddin units into the war because the government in Sarajevo was desperate for any assistance it could muster. Some of these fighters stayed on to proselytize among Bosnia’s moderate Muslims and were suspected of generating anti-Western jihadism. In Ukraine, a lack of weaponry to resist Russia’s violent assault and the escalating slaughter of thousands of civilians will also embitter sectors of society and raise opportunities for nationalist radicalization. Contrary to conventional official wisdom in the U.S. administration, arming Ukraine will not automatically lead to an escalation of the war. On the contrary, it is the inability of the Ukrainian government to fully resist the Kremlin-sponsored rebellion that will embolden further land grabs by Moscow and its local proxies. This will increase civilian casualties, already estimated in the thousands, force tens of thousands more to flee their homes, destroy more of the country’s infrastructure, further damage an already precarious economy, and undermine the reformist pro-Western government that Washington and Brussels have fully endorsed. The basis of statehood, reform, and economic development is national security and social stability. Without effective self-defense against foreign-generated secessionism and outright invasion a country cannot build and consolidate its democratic institutions, pursue deep structural reforms, modernize its economy, or attract desperately needed foreign investment. The case of Yugoslavia needs to be carefully studied by our policy makers so that the same mistakes are not repeated in contemporary Ukraine. There is also a larger strategic consequence of disabling Kyiv from fully defending its national independence. It sends two troublesome messages to the wider region. First, other vulnerable states along Russia’s borders will wonder whether they will also be left alone to face an aggressive Moscow if their sovereignty and territory is violated. And second, it signals to Putin that the West lacks unity and willpower and the Kremlin can reach for other potential prizes such as the Baltic states without fear of punishing military consequences. For the past year, Ukrainian forces have demonstrated their determination to defend their country against superior Russian firepower. What they lack is the means to pursue a concerted defense of Ukrainian territory that would become a deterrent to further military aggression. With rebels pursuing new offensives in eastern Ukraine and Russia pouring in more troops and weapons across the porous eastern border, the time is ripe for arming Kyiv with more effective and lethal defensive weapons. The list is readily available and includes anti-tank rocketry, sophisticated radars, secure communications equipment, and other items that would help deter and deny further territorial gains for Moscow. A program of Western training for Ukraine’s military will also enable better coordination and tactical expertize in confronting Moscow’s invasion. There is another important element in this military equation that the White House seems to be neglecting. While Ukrainian casualties can be borne by a determined nation that is resisting Moscow’s offensives, climbing losses among rebels, many of whom are Russian citizens, and among Russia’s military forces will challenge Kremlin denials of direct involvement in the Donbas. The war in Ukraine will become increasingly unpopular among Russia’s population, which is already facing a collapse in living standards because of Moscow’s economic incompetence. A bloody nose for Russia’s Milosevic in Ukraine may actually embolden the Russian people to call for an end to Putin’s imperial restoration project. Surely, our administration would welcome that?
|
|