RUSSIA & UKRAINE – Johnson’s Russia List table of contents :: JRL 2016-137 :: Thursday, 21 July 2016

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Johnson’s Russia List :: JRL 2016-#137
Thursday, 21 July 2016
A project sponsored through the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs
The contents do not necessarily represent the views of IERES or the George Washington University.
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1. Russia Direct: Pavel Koshkin, Russia’s search for a new national identity in the 21st century. Book Review: A recent book by Carnegie Moscow Center’s Dmitri Trenin, “Russia and the World in the 21st Century,” sheds light on the Kremlin’s foreign policy and its impact on how Russian society views national identity.
2. New York Times: Sports Court Upholds Ban on Russian Track and Field Athletes.
3. TASS: Kremlin slams blanket ban of Russian field and track athletes from Rio Olympics.
4. Russia Beyond the Headlines/Sports.ru: If Russia is banned from the Olympics, justice will have been done. While much of the Russian media is attempting to deflect attention from the systematic corruption exposed by the doping scandal by blaming politics, Pavel Kopachev and Alexei Avdokhin, journalists for the sports.ru news website, believe that regardless of anything else Russian sports must be thoroughly cleaned up, from the top to the very bottom.
5. TASS: Expert suspicious of McLaren’s report on doping in Russian sport.
6. Orientalreview.org: Andrey Fomin, The Olympics as a tool of the new Cold War.
7. Kremlin.ru: Meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Talent and Success Foundation.
8. TASS: Basic provisions of controversial anti-terror package come into force in Russia.
9. Bloomberg: Putin Debt Binge Indulged While Russia Looks Good Next to Europe.
10. Bloomberg: Goldman Sees Russian Oil Output Topping Soviet Record by 2018.
11. Vedomosti: Pundit analyses Russia’s military planning goals. (Ruslan Pukhov)
12. Russia Direct: Re-thinking confrontation between NATO and Russia. DEBATE: Both NATO and Russia continue to send strong signals that they have no intention of backing down in Europe. So what needs to happen for a de-escalation to occur? (Robert Legvold and Paul Saunders)
13. Rethinking Russia: Nikolay Pakhomov, NATO’s Virtual Reality.
14. Russia Beyond the Headlines: Russian intelligence saved Erdogan from overthrow – media reports. Reports that Russian intelligence warned the Turkish president about the military coup, allowing him to escape and retain power, appeared in various Russian media outlets in the evening of July 20. However, it is unclear to what extent the reports are true: Erdogan himself said that he learned about the coup from his brother-in-law.
15. Moscow Times: Fyodor Lukyanov, People With Big Ambitions: What the Turkish Coup Means for Russia.
16. The Nation: Stephen Cohen, The Friends and Foes of Détente With Russia. Events from Turkey, Washington, Moscow, and Syria to Cleveland affect the Obama-Putin attempted rapprochement.
17. Wall Street Journal editorial: The GOP’s Putin Confusion. The party platform drops language on lethal aid for Ukraine.
18. New York Times: Andrew Rosenthal, Is Trump Obsessed With Putin and Russia?
19. Russia Direct: Sergey Markedonov, A new way of thinking about terrorism in the North Caucasus and beyond. To prevent terrorism, it is necessary to win the hearts and minds of those who are most vulnerable to radical ideology.
20. Counterpunch.org: Andre Vltchek, Tough Russian Anti-Capitalist Literature.
21. BBC Monitoring: Russian press probes reasons for journalist’s murder in Kiev.
22. http://theduran.com: Alex Christoforou, Another Journalist Murdered in Ukraine. Body Count Hits 14 And Rising.
23. TASS: Journalist’s death prompts Ukrainian officials to look for ‘Russian trace’ – experts.
24. Russia Insider: Alexei Pankin, We Will Soon See Russia Accused of the Murder of Journalist Pavel Sheremet in Kiev.
25. Fort Russ: The last article of Ukrainian journalist blown up today: Failed Turkish coup stirs coup fears in Ukraine.
26. Paul Goble: Ukraine has Almost Exhausted ‘Anti-Russian Model’ of Behavior, Kyiv Analyst Suggests.
27. Consortiumnews.com: Robert Parry, ‘Fraud’ Alleged in NYT’s MH-17 Report.
28. Washington Post editorial: Russia’s ugly treatment of Americans.
29. RFE/RL: Mark Galeotti and Anna Arutunyan, Commentary: Hybrid Business — The Risks In The Kremlin’s Weaponization Of The Economy.