(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Anna Dolgov – November 13, 2014) The government is revising a program that allows graduates to study abroad at the state’s expense and could limit it to nations and universities that are deemed friendly to Russia, the education minister said, amid worsening relations with the West. “We are now carefully reviewing the list of universities […]
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(Stratfor.com – November 11, 2014) Summary In recent weeks, rumors that Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev will be replaced have been circulating among Russian media and pundits who watch Moscow. Stratfor has been monitoring the Russian government’s coherence and the strength of its leader, President Vladimir Putin, as the country faces a series of crises involving its faltering economy and tensions […]
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(RFE/RL News Analysis – rferl.org – Robert Coalson – November 11, 2014) Fighting in eastern Ukraine — and particularly around the city of Donetsk — has flared up again, more intensely than at any point since the shaky cease-fire was agreed in Minsk on September 5. Journalists and other observers on November 7 reported seeing dozens of military vehicles, including […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, November 13, 2014) Vladimir Putin is proposing the kind of grand bargain to Barack Obama that Hitler proposed to Neville Chamberlain and then to Joseph Stalin, in which the West would accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea in exchange for Moscow’s cooperation on Iran, according to Andrey Illarionov. Chamberlain rejected that bargain but […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Ivan Nechepurenko – November 12, 2014) In what appears to have been an expertly crafted demonstration of Eastern diplomacy, Chinese President Xi Jinping walked into the 2014 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit on Monday flanked by Presidents Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama. Obama and Putin maintained equally icy demeanors, while Xi – the host of this […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Julia Reed in Moscow – November 12, 2014) Crimes? What crimes? In 1997, the then prime minister of Sweden, Goran Persson, heard on the radio the results of a survey that Swedish youth knew next to nothing about the Holocaust. Outraged by the finding, he got the support of parliament to create a national […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Bryan MacDonald, special to RBTH – November 12, 2014) Bryan MacDonald is an Irish journalist who focusses on Russia and international geopolitics. Are Western and Gulf oil interests ganging up to break Russia? Is the country hopelessly addicted to black gold? Bryan McDonald find the truth is a bit more prosaic. The last […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Allison Quinn – November 13, 2014) Most Russians believe that the country’s state-run news agencies have provided objective coverage of the events unfolding during the Ukraine conflict, a poll by the Levada Center revealed Wednesday. Fifty-nine percent of respondents to the poll, conducted between Oct. 24 and 27, said they disagreed with the notion often […]
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MOSCOW. Nov 13 (Interfax) – The Russian Foreign Ministry has denied the information on Russian military presence in southeastern Ukraine and movements of Russian troops over the Russian-Ukrainian border. “I am telling you totally frankly and officially that there are no military movements across the [Russian-Ukrainian] border, let alone a Russian military presence in southeastern Ukraine,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – bne/IntelliNews – November 13, 2014) The shaky month and half ceasefire in Ukraine seems to be breaking down amid a mounting daily death toll over the past week and reports of Russian “little green men” and soldiers crossing the border into the disputed eastern provinces. Nato reported that columns of Russian tanks, artillery and […]
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ST. PETERSBURG. Nov 13 (Interfax) – The Ukrainian authorities are adamant to integrate with the European Union at any cost and do not wish to think about possible consequences, according to former Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Serhiy Arbuzov. “Western regions have always adhered to European integration because they are attracted to EU member countries culturally and economically. It is a […]
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MOSCOW. Nov 13 (Interfax) – Russian GDP increased by 0.7% year-on-year in Q3 2014, the Federal Statistics Service’s (Rosstat) preliminary estimate published on Thursday said. Rosstat’s data coincided with the calculations of the Economic Development Ministry, which estimated GDP growth in Q3 at 0.7%. Rosstat has not published estimates for GDP growth in January-September. However, based on data for Q1 […]
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… 47. The Interpreter: Executive Summary. The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money.
48. Paul Goble: Window on Eurasia: A Russian Maidan Could Take Place Outside of Moscow.
49. The New York Review of Books: Timothy Snyder, Putin’s New Nostalgia. …
… 23. Interfax: Moscow says Silk Road route may go via Russia.
24. Reuters: Russia, China ink framework deal on second major gas supply deal.
25. New York Times: As Russia Draws Closer to China, U.S. Faces a New Challenge. …
(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, November 11, 2014) The Russian political system is so hyper-centralized and Russian political culture is so Moscow-centric that almost all discussions about radical change in that country focus on the capital city and its residents rather than on the rest of what remains the largest country on earth. But there have been […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Christopher A. Stroop, special to RBTH – November 6, 2014) Christopher A. Stroop (Stanford University, Ph.D.) is a senior lecturer at RANEPA and editor of its English-language journal, State, Religion and Church: srch.ranepa.ru. When Christopher A. Stroop began teaching at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow, he […]
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Subject: RE: DJ: RIA Novosti is dead. Valdai Discussion Club? Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 From: Alexei Ilyichev <a.ilyichev@valdaiclub.com> Dear Mr. Johnson, Valdai Discussion Club is now absolutely independent non-profit organization with no connection to RIA Novosti and its successor Sputnik. So please don’t worry about its fate. Best regards, Alexei Ilyichev Editor www.valdaiclub.com The non-profit Foundation for Development and […]
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MOSCOW. Nov 11 (Interfax) – The decision of the news television station CNN International to end broadcasts in Russia will “deplete” the information picture, head of the Russian presidential Human Rights Council Mikhail Fedotov told Interfax. “This is certainly bad news. The fact that CNN will stop broadcasting in Russia will deplete our information picture very seriously. We would like […]
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(Interfax – November 11, 2014) Russian laws are not stop the CNN television network from broadcasting on cable and satellite channels in Russia, the country’s Communications and Mass Media Ministry said in a press release. “Following the CNN television channel’s announcement that it will soon end broadcasts in Russia, the Communications and Mass Media Ministry of the Russian Federation explains […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – November 11, 2014) Cable news channel CNN will end its broadcasts in Russia starting on Jan.1, after the country passed a law restricting foreign ownership of media outlets. Time Warner, which owns CNN, said it had notified its Russian cable distributors VimpelCom and Akado that it would stop broadcasting in the country by Dec. 31, […]
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UK’s media regulator Ofcom is trying to influence the channel’s editorial policy by wrongly accusing RT of biased coverage of the Ukrainian military conflict, RT Editor-in Chief Margarita Simonyan believes. MOSCOW, November 11 (RIA Novosti) – In accusing RT TV-channel of biased coverage of the Ukrainian conflict, British media regulator Ofcom is trying to influence the channel’s editorial policy, RT […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Anna Dolgov – November 11, 2014) Britain’s media regulator has threatened to bring sanctions against Russia’s state-run broadcaster RT after ruling that it breached U.K. codes on impartiality in several of its newscasts on Ukraine. In particular, the Ofcom regulator highlighted four RT reports that aired in the run-up to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in […]
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MOSCOW, November 11 (RIA Novosti) – NATO is set to continue its military pressure on Russia and has held numerous exercises on Russia’s border, a senior Russian Defense Ministry official said Tuesday. “It is evident that our colleagues from NATO are set to continue military pressure on Russia, which… is unlikely to make Europe safer,” Sergei Koshelyev, the head of […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Gleb Fedorov, RBTH – November 5, 2014) RBTH has surveyed the best Russian language teachers abroad about how they teach their students the language. They compare nouns to cats, infinitives to flour and even take their students to the bathhouse to drink mead – all in order for the Russian language not to […]
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(RIA Novosti – Vienna, November 10, 2014) There is no information on the movement of the armed forces of Ukraine in the conflict zone in the east of the country not only in the openly published but also in the full reports of the OSCE monitoring mission, to which Russia has drawn the organization’s attention specially, Andrey Kelin, Russia’s permanent […]
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Subject: Churchill and War with USSR Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 From: Jake Kipp <jacobkipp@cs.com> In May 1945 before he knew about the atomic bomb, Churchill asked the British General Staff under Field Marshal Alan Brooke to do a study of a possible war between attacking British, US, German, and Polish forces against the USSR with a start date of […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Alexander Panin – November 11, 2014) Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum on Monday, President Vladimir Putin vowed that Russia would develop all forms of trade with China, not just hydrocarbon exports. But the second-largest natural gas deal this year signed the previous day with Russia’s Gazprom suggests China is more interested in Russia’s […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – November 11, 2014) Russia’s oil industry runs the risk of repeating the death spiral of the Soviet oil industry, should prices stay below $90, according to research by brokerage Renaissance Capital. If the oil price were to stay well below $90 for long, Russia’s mostly state-owned oil industry could enter self-destruction mode, as it […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Leonid Bershidsky – November 7, 2014) Russia’s present is too unbalanced to discuss, and President Vladimir Putin prefers to rehash the past. That increases the temptation to talk about the distant future, to fathom where the country’s current trajectory is leading. Some smart commentators in Moscow have also given in to this temptation, and their scenarios […]
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(Institute of Modern Russia – imrussia.org) On October 30, the National Endowment for Democracy held a round table discussion entitled “Is Democracy Possible in Russia?” According to participants, in light of current political developments, it appears unlikely that Russia will become a democracy anytime soon. Participants in the National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) October 30th round table included Lilia Shevtsova, senior […]
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(Eurasia Daily Monitor: Volume 11, Issue 199 – Mairbek Vatchagaev – Jamestown Foundation – jamestown.org – November 7, 2014) Reading the Ukrainian media earlier this year gave one the impression that Ukraine was fighting not Russia, but Chechnya (vesti.ru, May 28). Few doubted that Chechens were fighting on the Russian side in eastern Ukraine, but their numbers were greatly exaggerated. […]
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(mccain.senate.gov – November 7, 2014) Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) today released the following statement following reports that Russia has violated its ceasefire agreement and again supplied pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine with military equipment and arms: “No one should be surprised by reports today that large columns of Russian tanks, artillery, and military personnel have moved back […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, November 9, 2014) Some Moscow commentators have compared Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Valdai Club meeting in to Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri, but the Kremlin leader’s remarks in fact are far closer to those delivered by Adolf Hitler to Neville Chamberlain at Berchtesgaden in 1938, according to […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – November 8, 2014) The Pentagon’s spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby, says he has “no independent operational reporting” to confirm Kyiv’s claim that Russia sent an armored column into eastern Ukraine on November 6. Kirby said the Pentagon can confirm “a continued presence ” of unhelpful Russian battalion tactical groups “right across the border” in Russian territory […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, November 8, 2014) What Russians now have in the Russian Federation is a Soviet system without communism and its administrative arrangements, and what they dream of is “a Soviet empire without communists,” an entity not equivalent to the tsarist empire as some think but one that reflects their memories of the USSR. […]
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BEIJING. Nov 10 (Interfax) – Some sections of the Silk Road route pass through Russia, according to Russian Direct Investment Fund head Kirill Dmitriyev. “The route is being chosen, and Russia should hold a very active position in this respect. The Russian president said earlier today that we had plenty of infrastructural capacity for building a part of that route […]
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KIEV, November 9 (RIA Novosti) – Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko has stated on his Facebook page Sunday, he will not allow the division of the country on linguistic grounds, though he still intends to keep the Ukrainian language as the only state language. “After what we all have gone through and are going through this year, no one will ever […]
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From: Igor Rotar <igorotar@gmail.com> Date: Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 12:37 PM Subject: from a Russian journalist Igor Rotar My name is Igor Rotar.I am a veteran journalist and researcher who recently received a green card in the USA and currently lives in San Diego. I am the author of three books about the ethnic conflicts in the Soviet Union, […]
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Johnson’s Russia List JRL 2014-#233 :: Sunday 9 November 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 me JRL on Twitter: twitter.com/JohnsonRussiaLi Support JRL: russialist.org/funding.php 1. Paul Goble: Window on Eurasia: Putin’s Valdai Speech Echoes Not Churchill’s at Fulton but Hitler’s at Berchtesgaden, Illarionov Says. 2. The Guardian […]
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[check back for updates, including more links; links also posted to facebook and twitter] Johnson’s Russia List JRL 2014-#232 :: Friday 7 November 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 me JRL on Twitter: twitter.com/JohnsonRussiaLi Support JRL: russialist.org/funding.php Ukraine 1. Reuters: Ukraine’s ‘kamikaze’ PM relishes hawkish reputation. (Arseny Yatseniuk) 2. RIA […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Henry Meyer – November 7, 2014) Russian troops marched in Red Square to commemorate a World War II parade held under the noses of German invaders in 1941 two days after President Vladimir Putin defended a 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler. Six thousand soldiers and cadets accompanied by World War II-era warplanes and other weaponry today […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Anna Dolgov – November 7, 2014) A state-controlled media holding has fired an Ekho Moskvy radio journalist, citing ethical norms, and threatened to dismiss the radio station’s long-standing chief editor who has led it as one of the final strongholds of media freedom in the country. The dismissal of Alexander Plyuschev followed a Twitter post […]
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MOSCOW, November 7 (RIA Novosti) – Moscow supports the Geneva format of settling the political crisis in Ukraine with the participation of Russia, Ukraine, the United States and the European Union, but says Kiev should be prepared for the meeting as well as not to waste time, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said Friday. “We take this approach seriously […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Kateryna Choursina, Daryna Krasnolutska – November 7, 2014) Ukraine’s military said its forces killed as many as 200 rebels in fighting in Donetsk as dozens of tanks and other military vehicles crossed the border into Ukraine from Russia. “Insurgents who were shelling Ukrainian troop positions at Donetsk Airport yesterday were killed by government troop artillery strikes,” […]
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MOSCOW, November 7 (RIA Novosti) – Allegations voiced by Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird and a number of representatives from the United States and NATO about Russian troops supposedly moving toward the country’s border with Ukraine have no grounds and are based on rumors, a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman said Friday. “These announcements were made citing some ‘reports’ without any […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – November 7, 2014) Russia has launched ‘Operation Domino’ against Ukraine, says Ukraine’s security service, SBU. Kyiv says the Kremlin is flooding Ukraine’s Donbass with guerilla fighters and their military trainers, intending to use the rebel-held region as a bridgehead for further expansion across Ukrainian territory. According to SBU spokesperson Mariyan Lubkivsky, speaking on a […]
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KYIV. Nov 7 (Interfax) – The Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) says the number of armed opponents of Kyiv is insufficient for mounting a major offensive against the Ukrainian army positions. “We cannot speak about an offensive so far because the forces remaining on the Ukrainian territory are definitely insufficient for a major advance,” NSDC Information Analysis Center […]
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Subject: EVENT / “The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture, and Money” Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2014 From: Institute of Modern Russia <info@imrussia.org> Upcoming Event IMR Report on Kremlin Information War To Be Launched in Washington, D.C. On November 13, editor-in-chief of The Interpreter, Michael Weiss, and journalist Peter Pomerantsev will present their report titled “The Menace […]
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MOSCOW, November 7 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s official stance on the recent elections in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics (DRP, LPR) in eastern Ukraine expressed by the country’s Foreign Ministry as “respecting” them does not mean Moscow “recognizes” them, Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov said Friday. “Russia’s official position on the results of the elections is expressed compactly, […]
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(Business New Europe – November 7, 2014) Oil prices fell below $80 for the first time in four years on November 5 after Saudi Arabia and other Opec members refused to cut production. But economists say despite the large movements in the oil price, the de facto freely floating ruble will mitigate much of the economic pain to Russia. “The […]
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