(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – October 28, 2014) President Vladimir Putin’s rating has fallen for the first time this year, with a substantial drop in the number of those who say they are ready to re-elect him, a poll by the Levada Center showed Tuesday. While a poll in August showed 57 percent of respondents would vote for Putin if […]
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(Interfax – October 28, 2014) Russians are prone to describe the Western democratic model as unviable under the Russian conditions but exhibit an interest in the life and work in Western countries, sociologists told Interfax. Fifty-five percent of 1,630 respondents polled by the Levada Center in 134 populated localities in 46 regions in September said Russia needed a special type […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Glenn Kates – October 27, 2014) Ukrainians have voted in a new parliament for the first time since the Euromaidan protests ousted President Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russian government earlier this year. Here are some takeaways from the October 26 vote: The West-Russia divide is no longer relevant in parliament Since the collapse of the Soviet […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Daryna Krasnolutska – October 27, 2014) Vladimir Putin may have more ammunition to extend his influence over the Ukraine’s war-torn east after the country’s parliamentary election. A surge in support for pro-European parties leaves the area, the bedrock of ousted leader Viktor Yanukovych’s popularity, with less of a say in the nation’s future. Parties backing President […]
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MOSCOW, October 28 (RIA Novosti), Daria Chernyshova – Ukraine’s snap parliamentary elections were a referendum on whether to support the Minsk agreements and give autonomy to Donbas or not and are expected to make the country easier to govern, experts told RIA Novosti on Tuesday. “This election was a referendum on the dominant political issue of the day, which is […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – October 28, 2014) Russia will recognize elections to be held by rebels in Ukraine’s Donbass region on November 2, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told newspaper Izvestiya in an interview. The move will likely worsen Russia’s already strained relations with the West, which has demanded that Russia withdraw support for the rebels and assist […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – October 28, 2014) With 80% of votes counted, People’s Front party headed by Ukraine’s prime minster, Arseny Yatsenyuk, has held its hair-breadth lead over President Petro Poroshenko’s eponymous party. People’s Front is on 21.94% of the vote, while Petro Poroshenko Bloc is on 21.6%, according to the Ukrainian Central Election Commission. But with half […]
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KYIV. Oct 28 (Interfax) – Ukraine’s central election commission announced after processing 90.02% of valid protocols that the People’s Front had won 22.16% and Petro Poroshenko Bloc 21.77% of the votes in Sunday’s parliamentary polls. The Samopomich association garnered 10.96% of the votes, Opposition Bloc 9.35%, Radical Party 7.46% and Batkivshchina 5.7% according to figures displayed at the Central Election […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – October 28, 2014) The price of a barrel of Texan light dropped lower than $80 for the first time in two years, but Russia’s economy minister has retained its forecast for the next three years of the oil price remaining within the corridor of $90-$110, according to Interfax. “It is not possible to say with certainty […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, October 28, 2014) Sixty percent of the population of the Russian Federation is either poor now or has had experience with living in poverty in the past, a figure that is no longer falling as it was a decade ago and one that means Russians may be more capable of coping with […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Alexey Eremenko – October 28, 2014) Moscow will not join the U.S. effort to thwart the Islamic State terrorist group until Russian-American relations improve, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this weekend. The big question, however, is whether Russia is in fact in a position to offer any substantial aid to the anti-jihad campaign – […]
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Subject: Re: 2014-#220-Johnson’s Russia List (Adomanis on Applebaum) Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 From: Martin Dewhirst <martin.dewhirst@googlemail.com> Anne Applebaum (whom I read but do not know personally) does not need a low-profile person like myself to spring to her defense, but I would guess that she is too busy, and would consider it beneath her dignity, to respond to ill-informed comments on her […]
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[“Taking Measure Of The Ukrainian Mind-Set” – RFE/RL – rferl.org – October 25, 2014] Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty interviewed Kiev-based sociologist Iryna Bekeshkyna about unfolding conditions in Ukraine, back on the eve of recent national legislative elections: How have Ukrainian attitudes toward the EU, Russia, and NATO changed? Is it possible to conduct opinion polls in the Donbas? And why is […]
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[“Russia in grim go-it-alone mood as sanctions bite” – BBC – Bridget Kendall – BBC – Sochi, October 27, 2014] BBC News covers Russia’s Valdai Club meeting at Sochi and the impact of Ukraine-related Western sanctions on Russia. Russia’s efforts to reduce … reliance on trade with the West overshadowed a high-profile meeting between … Putin and foreign correspondents …. * * * A series of […]
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[“In eastern Ukraine, most voters dream only of peace” – Reuters – Thomas Grove – Oct. 26, 2014] Reuters covers hopes in eastern Ukraine for an end to conflict, amidst recent national legislative elections, even as separatist-dominated areas failed to participate. Voters in eastern Ukraine had one thing on their mind as they voted in Sunday’s parliamentary election: an end […]
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[“In Ukraine’s East, Low Voter Turnout in Election Signals Kiev’s Challenges; Wary of Poroshenko’s Government, Few Voters Head to Polls in Eastern Town Controlled by Kiev” – Wall Street Journal – James Marson – October 27, 2014] The Wall Street Journal covers unfolding circumstances in Ukraine’s east, including issues over participation in recent legislative elections: * * * The lack of […]
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[“Ukraine leader wins pro-West mandate but wary of Russia” – Reuters – Richard Balmforth and Timothy Heritage – KIEV, Oct 27, 2014] Reuters covers Ukrainian legislative elections that favored West-leaning Ukrainian Presidenti Petro Poroshenko: Pro-Western parties will dominate Ukraine’s parliament after an election handed President Petro Poroshenko a mandate to end a separatist conflict and steer the country further out […]
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[“Alleged Russian intelligence agent caught outside Kyiv claiming to be FSB general (PHOTOS)” – Kyiv Post – October 24, 2014] The Kiev Post covers reports that Ukraine captured a Russian operative connected with Ukrainian separatists, posing as a journalist: Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU) says on Oct. 23 it apprehended a high-level Russian intelligence agent and a commissioned military officer […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Ben Aris in Moscow – October 24, 2014) This weekend’s crucial parliamentary elections in Ukraine could mark the end of two decades of failure and the launch of the country’s attempt to catch-up with the rest of the region. The trouble is that Ukraine is already off to a really bad start. There has […]
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(RIA Novosti – Moscow, October 26, 2014) The first president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, thinks that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Valdai [Valday] speech was one of the strongest of his period in power. On Friday [24 October] the head of state gave a speech to participants in the Valdai discussion club in Sochi, in which he criticized the West’s […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Graham Slack in Kyiv – October 27, 2014) Ukrainians have elected a pro-European parliament in snap elections on October 26, according to preliminary results. The results show pro-European parties headed by President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk respectively are neck-and-neck for first place, with 20% of votes counted. Both men said they […]
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MOSCOW, October 27 (RIA Novosti) – The Ukrainian parliamentary elections went ahead according to Ukrainian law, which raises hope that the country could return to normal, the head of Russia’s Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights Mikhail Fedotov said Monday. “As far as it can be judged from media reports, the elections were held normally. This raises hope […]
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MOSCOW, October 27 (RIA Novosti) – Moscow considers the parliamentary elections in Ukraine as complete and is ready to recognize their results, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday. “It seems that these elections are complete, though not throughout the entire territory of Ukraine. I believe we will recognize these elections because it’s important for us that a power in […]
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… 12. Wall Street Journal: In Ukraine’s East, Low Voter Turnout in Election Signals Kiev’s Challenges. Wary of Poroshenko’s Government, Few Voters Head to Polls in Eastern Town Controlled by Kiev.
13. Reuters: In eastern Ukraine, most voters dream only of peace.
14. Kyiv Post: Peace elusive for voters in Sloviansk district. …
… 16. Christian Science Monitor: Fred Weir, In gloomy Ukraine, an unexpected gleam for one company. …
17. Moscow Times: Russian Intellectuals Ask State-Run TV to Admit Falsehoods in Ukraine Reports.
18. Reuters: Russia still has troops in Ukraine, NATO says. …
MOSCOW. Oct 24 (Interfax) – If current prices for oil persist in 2015, Russian GDP, retail trade, real incomes and investment will all decline, Ulyukayev said at a business breakfast hosted by Rossiiskaya Gazeta.” “If the current price of oil persists, then as soon as this year there will be practically no growth in real individual incomes and retail trade. […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Delphine d’Amora – October 24, 2014) Russia must create a contingency budget to counter the threat that Western sanctions, economic stagnation and low oil prices will dash the country’s hopes of restoring growth in the near term, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said Friday. “A budget cannot constantly have expenses that were drafted in a different […]
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(RIA Novosti – Moscow, October 23, 2014) Russians have become more worried about the state of their country’s financial system after the introduction of Western sanctions, but at the same time the economic situation has not yet compelled Russians to massively change their spending behaviour, according to research conducted in October by Russia’s National Agency for Financial Studies [NAFI]. “Over […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Chris Weafer – October 24, 2014) Chris Weafer is Senior Partner at Macro-Advisory, which offers bespoke Russia-CIS consulting. Many of the headlines about Russia in recent months have quite rightly focused on the geopolitical risks and the sanctions impact on the economy. To that has recently been added the surprisingly abrupt fall in the […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – October 24, 2014) Russia has ranked 17th on HSBC Bank’s annual list of the of the world’s best countries for expats, beating other destinations like Japan, France and the United Kingdom. Expats in 34 countries were asked in the HSBC Expat poll published Wednesday to judge their experiences on living abroad in three main categories […]
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DONETSK, October 23 (RIA Novosti) – TheDonetsk militias will free from the Ukrainian government forces the outskirts of the village of Yelenovka in Donetsk’s Volnovakha region by the end of November, Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DPR) Prime Minister Aleksander Zakharchenko said Thursday. “This is our land, our city. It’s not likely we will enter there in the near future, but I […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Anna Dolgov – October 24, 2014) A congress of Russian intellectuals has appealed to the head of state-run Channel One television to acknowledge “falsifications” in its reporting on Ukraine, holding the network accountable for the deaths of young Russians who were moved to go and fight there. The congress told Channel One chief Konstantin Ernst […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Matthew Bodner – October 24, 2014) While top Russian officials and pro-Kremlin politicians continue to paint NATO as an existential threat to Russia and even an instigator of the Ukraine crisis, Moscow has been working to strengthen the legitimacy of its own security organization: the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). But while this bundling of […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Volodymyr Verbyany – October 23, 2014) Andriy Teteruk had just returned from fighting as a volunteer battalion leader in eastern Ukraine when he received an invitation from Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to run for parliament on his People’s Front ballot. “I also got proposals from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party,” Teteruk, 41, […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Graham Stack in Kyiv – October 24, 2014) Ukraine is to go to the polls on October 26 in early elections likely to give forces supporting President Petro Poroshenko a strong majority in the parliament, paving the way for sweeping constitutional reform. “This should be a constitutional majority,” said Poroshenko, out campaigning in the […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Matthew Bodner – October 22, 2014) As Sweden’s navy goes on its sixth day of hunting a suspected Russian submarine, Swedish defense officials announced on Tuesday that they intend to force the mystery vessel, if found, to surface “with armed force, if necessary,” the English-language Swedish newspaper The Local reported. The announcement that Sweden is […]
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[check back for updates, including more links; links also posted to facebook and twitter] Johnson’s Russia List JRL 2014-#220 :: Wednesday 22 October 2014 E-Mail: davidjohnson@starpower.net A project of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs: www.ieres.org JRL homepage: russialist.org JRL on Facebook: facebook.com/russialist JRL on Twitter: twitter.com/JohnsonRussiaLi Support JRL: russialist.org/funding.php Ukraine 1. The National Interest: Nicolai Petro, Why the Putin Peace Plan […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Stepan Kravchenko – October 21, 2014) Tamara Nekrasova never really hated Ukrainians, not even when a shell fired from Ukrainian territory struck her house just a short walk from the Russia-Ukraine border, sending her to the hospital and killing a neighbor. It wasn’t until later, after months of relentless anti-Ukraine reports on Russian television, that anger […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – October 22, 2014) The Emergency Situations Ministry has announced an unscheduled inspection of the offices of Ekho Mosvky two days after a journalist at the opposition-friendly radio station said it had been threatened with “problems” for running an interview with opposition leader Alexei Navalny. News website Slon.ru cited the station’s deputy editor, Tatyana Felgenhauer, as […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Galiya Ibragimova, RBTH – October 21, 2014) Since Russia’s Justice Ministry received the right to declare organizations “foreign agents” without their consent, the number of NGOs on the list has grown substantially In the two years since the passage of Russia’s controversial law on NGOs in July 2012, human rights and research organizations […]
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(Moscow Times – moscowtimes.com – Allison Quinn – October 22, 2014) Nearly a quarter of Russians believe that the United States poses a bigger terrorist threat to their country than radical Islamists, a survey published Tuesday showed. Twenty-two percent of respondents to the poll by the state-run All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), titled “Terrorist Threats Against Russia: New Sources,” […]
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(Eurasia Daily Monitor: Volume 11, Issue 185 – Vladimir Socor – Jamestown Foundation – jamestown.org – October 20, 2014) Western powers lost control and, to some extent, lost comprehension of the situation in Ukraine during the Euromaidan mass protest movement and its aftermath. They then trailed behind the events throughout Russia’s war against Ukraine to date. The European Commission’s lame-duck status […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Alexander Iskandaryan, special to RBTH – October 20, 2014) Alexander Iskandaryan is a political scientist and director of the Caucasus Institute in Yerevan, Armenia. The leadership in Minsk seems to be taking advantage of the crisis in Ukraine to improve its image Relations between the West and Belarus have taken a curious and […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – October 21, 2014) When Russian President Vladimir Putin cut off European Union imports of agricultural products earlier this year, one of the rationales was to give a boost to the badly underdeveloped domestic sector – and it seems to working. September’s retail and investment numbers were down but agricultural production soared by 16.8% year-on-year […]
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Subject: Book announcement Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 From: GORDON HAHN <gordon-hahn@sbcglobal.net> My most recent book – The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond – has been published by McFarland Publishers. It is available for purchase from the publisher and Amazon. The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond Gordon M. […]
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CHERKESSK. Oct 21 (Interfax) – The sanctions imposed by Western countries against Russia have united Russians, said State Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin. Speaking at a meeting with members of the Karachay-Cherkessia People’s Assembly on Tuesday, he said that Western partners have been putting pressure on Russia, in particular, by introducing a number of sanctions, including personal ones, which “runs counter […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – October 21, 2014) When Russian President Vladimir Putin cut off European Union imports of agricultural products earlier this year, one of the rationales was to give a boost to the badly underdeveloped domestic sector – and it seems to working. September’s retail and investment numbers were down but agricultural production soared by 16.8% year-on-year […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – October 21, 2014) Russia and Ukraine are meeting on October 21 to hammer out a new agreement over Ukraine’s debts to Russia and future pricing for Russian gas, as winter approaches and Ukraine desperately needs Russian supplies to be restarted. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian opposite number Petro Poroshenko reached a provisional […]
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(RIA Novosti – Alexander Mercouris – LONDON, October 21, 2014) Alexander Mercouris is a London-based lawyer The ASEM summit in Milan cruelly exposed the illusions EU leaders hold about the Ukrainian conflict, and not for the first time Ever since the February coup in Ukraine, the EU’s leaders have held to two assumptions: First, that the crisis in Ukraine is […]
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STOCKHOLM, October 21 (RIA Novosti) – The Swedish Armed Forces admitted Monday evening that they have failed to maintain transparency and issued false information about the whereabouts of the alleged foreign submarine in the Stockholm archipelago. “The Armed Forces are conducting an intelligence operation in the Stockholm archipelago. . . We are supposed to do this with maximum transparency while […]
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