Billboard for the referendum called to strengthen a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption in Slovakia in February. It says: WE ARE DECIDING ABOUT CHILDREN'S FUTURES. LET'S PROTECT THEIR RIGHT TO A MOTHER AND FATHER. Credit: Pavol Stracansky/IPS

By Pavol Stracansky
BRATISLAVA, Mar 15 2015 (IPS)

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) groups in Central and Eastern Europe, which still faced mixed prospects as they fight for rights and acceptance, are now taking some heart from the “failure” of a referendum in Slovakia, a member of the European Union.

Last month, a referendum called to strengthen a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption in Slovakia was declared invalid after only just over 20 percent of voters turned out.

The controversial plebiscite was heavily criticised by international rights groups, which said it pandered to homophobic discrimination and was allowing human rights issues affecting a minority group to be decided by a popular majority vote.

The campaigning ahead of the vote had often been bitter and vitriolic, including public homophobic statements by clergy, and a controversial negative commercial about gay adoption, which Slovak TV stations refused to broadcast and eventually only appeared on internet.The reasons behind the relative societal intolerance towards LGBT groups in Central and Eastern Europe vary from entrenched conservative attitudes rooted in countries’ isolation under communism, to local political aims and the influence of the Catholic Church.

The commercial showed a child in an orphanage being told that his new parents were coming to collect him and, after two men appear at the door, asking: “Where’s Mum?”

Activists here say that the referendum’s outcome was a sign that, despite this campaigning, Slovaks know that LGBT people pose “no threat” to society and has positively furthered discussion about allowing registered partnerships in the country.

Martin Macko, head of the Bratislava-based LGBT rights group Inakost, told IPS: “The referendum showed that people consider the family important, but that they do not see same-sex families as a threat to traditional families. The long-term perspective regarding discussions on registered partnerships in Slovakia is positive.”

Importantly, the result has also been welcomed in other parts of Central and Eastern Europe where many LGBT groups still face intolerance and discrimination.

Evelyne Paradis, Executive Director of international LGBT rights group ILGA-Europe told IPS: “LGBT activists across Europe have welcomed the outcome of the Slovak vote … hopefully the referendum will lead to a constructive discussion about equality in Slovakia. At the same time, we know that there is a broad diversity of views in the region which means that much work remains to be done before full equality is realised.”

Compared with Western Europe, attitudes in many countries in Central and Eastern Europe to LGBT people and issues are often much more conservative and in some states actively hostile.

The Czech Republic, whose larger cities have relatively open and vibrant gay communities, is the only country in the region which allows for registered partnerships of same-sex couples.

In other countries, such as Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and Poland, marriage is defined constitutionally as only between a man and a woman. In January this year, Macedonia’s parliament voted to adopt a similar clause in its constitution.

Adoption by same sex couples is banned in all states in the region while other important legislation relating to LGBT issues is also absent. In Bulgaria, for instance, inadequate legislation means that homophobic crimes are investigated and prosecuted as ‘hooliganism’. This, activists claim, creates a climate of fear for LGBT people.

Poor records on minority rights in general in places like, for instance, Ukraine, mean that while the state may ostensibly be committed to LGBT rights, such communities are in reality extremely vulnerable.

In Russia, legislation actively represses same-sex relationships, with federal laws criminalising promotion of any non-heterosexual lifestyle, while Lithuania has legal provisions banning the promotion of homosexuality.

Deeply negative attitudes towards homosexuals are widespread in some societies. A 2013 survey in Ukraine showed that two-thirds of people thought homosexuality was a perversion, while a study in the same year in Lithuania showed that 61 percent of LGBT people said they had suffered discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Isolated verbal and physical attacks and passive intolerance among more conservative groups are common across the region. But in some countries, specifically Russia, anyone even suspected of being non-heterosexual faces open, organised and sometimes lethally violent persecution.

Natalia Tsymbalova, an LGBT rights activist from St Petersburg, was forced to flee Russia in September last year after receiving death threats. Now claiming asylum in Spain, she was one of at least 12 LGBT activists who left Russia last year.

Speaking from Madrid, she told IPS about the continuing repression of LGBT people in her home country.

She said that although state propaganda campaigns had “switched to ‘Ukrainian fascists’ and the West” being portrayed as the public’s greatest enemy instead of LGBT people since the annexation of Crimea and the start of the Ukraine conflict, “state homophobia has not disappeared”.

“It has just faded into the background,” she added, “no longer making top headlines in the news, but it is still there and it has never left. The number of hate crimes is not falling, and they are being investigated as badly as before.”

The reasons behind the relative societal intolerance towards LGBT groups in Central and Eastern Europe vary from entrenched conservative attitudes rooted in countries’ isolation under communism, to local political aims and the influence of the Catholic Church.

In Slovakia, a strongly Catholic country where the Church’s influence can be extremely strong in many communities, supporters of the referendum welcomed Pope Francis’ personal endorsement of their cause.

It has been speculated that the conservative Alliance for Family movement, which initiated the referendum, is funded by Slovakia’s Catholic Church and that the Church was the driving force behind moves to bring about the vote.

In Lithuania, another strongly Catholic country, Church officials have supported laws restricting LGBT rights and have openly called homosexuality a perversion.

However, some rights activists also say that politicians in countries struggling economically or looking to entrench their own power can often use minorities, including LGBT people, as easy political targets to gain voter support.

ILGA’s Paradis told IPS: “Unfortunately many political leaders use the LGBT community as scapegoats … from activists we often hear that they do this to hide ‘real problems’ in countries, such as youth unemployment, access to education and healthcare. They promote ‘traditional family values’ as the way to rescue society. Sadly, in doing this, political leaders build a climate of intolerance and hatred.”

Saying that Russian politicians are now using homophobia to push wider agendas, Tsymbalova told IPS: “Homophobia plays an important role in the anti-Western rhetoric of President [Vladimir] Putin and his fellows. It is one of the main points of the conservative values that they try to promote and the public still has negative attitudes toward LGBT communities.”

The outcome of the Slovak referendum has left activists there more optimistic about the future for LGBT people in their country.

They are now pushing for discussions with the government about introducing registered partnerships and they hope that LGBT communities in other countries in the region will be heartened by the result or that, at least, people hoping to organise similar referendums will reconsider what they are doing.

Macko of Inakost told IPS: “Religious groups in some Balkan and Baltic countries are considering organising similar referendums and we really hope this will discourage them.”

Paradis told IPS that while the Slovak referendum had already been welcomed by many of its member groups in Central and Eastern Europe, progress on LGBT issues in many countries, including registered partnerships, was unlikely to be swift. “There indeed is more discussion in the region on granting rights to same sex partnerships, but what we see is a very mixed picture.”

However, the outlook for LGBT people in some places remains grim. Tsymbalova told IPS that many LGBT people in her home country have given up hope of any positive changes in the foreseeable future.

“In our community, there is almost no one who believes that the situation for LGBT people in Russia will seriously change for the better any time soon. Under the existing regime, which promotes and exploits homophobia, these changes will not happen and there is almost no hope of a regime change, so expectations are gloomy.”

She added: “Many LGBT activists have either left Russia, like me, or are going to. [As] for same-sex registered partnerships, it would take several decades to be accepted in Russia and I don’t believe I will see this in my lifetime. It is completely out of the question for the next 20 or 30 years.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Helge Luras
OSLO, Sep 18 2014 (IPS)

New military measures to deter what NATO perceives to be a direct threat from Russia were adopted at the alliance’s Heads of State meeting in Wales (Sep. 4-5). A few days earlier, President Barack Obama made promises in Estonia that the three tiny Baltic NATO member states would “never stand alone”. 

Since early 2014, Russia has done practically all that Western leaders have warned President Vladimir Putin in advance not to do. Crimea was occupied and annexed. Pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine were encouraged and given practical support. Later, Russian personnel and equipment came more and more openly into conflict with Ukrainian forces.

Helge Luras

But the West’s warnings to Russia did not stop there. Already several months ago, establishment figures and the media began to associate events in Ukraine directly with the situation in the Baltics and in Poland. NATO has responded to the Russian offensive against Ukraine, a non-NATO country, by shifting military resources towards the areas of NATO that it claims, but only by conjecture, are threatened by Russia.

But did anyone at the NATO summit warn that the alliance might create a self-fulfilling prophecy? Did anyone have the foresight to consider how tensions between Russian speakers and Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians might increase as a result of the hyperbole of the Russian threat? One should not assume hostile intentions in today’s ethnically-charged world without good reason.

That some Western minds consider themselves, and by extension NATO, to be an idealistic force for peace, human rights and democracy, is beyond dispute. But the reality is that NATO countries – that is, the West – represent the world’s most powerful military force, both conventional and nuclear.

Up to now, NATO has not challenged another nuclear armed entity and therefore has survived its own political-military escalation tendency. But in the case of Russia, the erroneous Western perception of self could cause a catastrophic and total war.

Since the Cold War, the West has swallowed up a large area formerly under the influence, if not outright control, of Soviet Russia. The hegemonic mind saw this as just natural and of no business to an anachronism like Russia.“The problem is that Russian and NATO leaders are not drunken poets pathetically fighting with untrained fists at a literary reception. They may act so, but are in fact front men of substantive and institutional systems that can wipe out all human civilisation in a short time”

The future of humanity when expansion started in the 1990s was a Western future: liberal, democratic and free-market. Spheres of influence were the hallmark of others, exemplified by “reactionary” and authoritarian forces like Russia under Putin. Western influence is in another category – it is natural if not God-given.

In Russia, there is a clear and evolving bias in news reporting which the West characterises as “propaganda”. In the West, there is less need to instruct the media directly, there is a reverse bias due to cultural indoctrination. Evidently the West is a keeper of the right values. There is no cause and effect. Evil just pops up. All things Russian are bad, deceitful, not to be trusted. But in Russia this feeds an undeniable paranoia in the psyche.

The West has retained one “acceptable” bogeyman in the atmosphere of religious tolerance that creates such cognitive dissonance as it struggles to come to grips with core tenets of original (radical) Islam. The Western “liberal mind” has at least one cultural object left to legitimately hate: Russian political culture and the strong man it produces.

The problem is that Russian and NATO leaders are not drunken poets pathetically fighting with untrained fists at a literary reception. They may act so, but are in fact front men of substantive and institutional systems that can wipe out all human civilisation in a short time.

Western leaders undoubtedly perceive that their power is waning. No more state-building in faraway countries for us. The end of omnipotence, indeed of paradigm, is obviously traumatic and difficult to consider with a cool mind. But the diminution of Western political power occurs with no corresponding weakness in pure military muscle.

This leaves the temptation of a “Mad Man Doctrine”. If you can convince your opponent that you are willing to react disproportionately to what is at stake for you, he will fear you beyond the otherwise sensible. Everyone treats a mad man with caution.

In Ukraine, there is more at stake for Russia than for the West. Therefore Russia, as it has also shown, will not give up or allow itself or its allies to lose. In the Baltic countries, there is also more at stake for Russia than for the United States and for most other NATO countries as well.

For, in the post-Cold War, Russia has no ideology beyond nationalism. Its most ambitious claims, even if unopposed, would come to a halt at the geographical outer limits of the ethnic Russian nation.

This is not to say that Russian nationalism could not become a factor of instability beyond Ukraine. Trouble is latent. The partly Russian-populated Baltic countries are now in NATO, and NATO is an institutionalised form of the Mad Man Doctrine. The danger of miscalculating the reaction for NATO as well as for Russia is therefore significant.

Little suggests that the West understand how risky the games in progress really are. NATO and Russia are nuclear powers. Sensible leaders on both sides understood as much during the Cold War. Nuclear powers must not go to war with each other. If at all, the conflicts must remain by proxy. Such insights must be rediscovered today.

NATO should concentrate on finding a way to downplay the conflict with Russia, compromise on Ukraine, and not follow what the United States seem intent on doing; escalating, increasing defence spending across the bloc, sending more troops to the Baltic countries. Appeasement, if the starting point is dumb-headed NATO-expansionism, can be a virtue as well as a vice.

Military means are already at play in the conflict between NATO and Russia. Some call for even more. Before pushing Russia further in the direction they claim not to want – ethnic expansionism – politicians in the West must remember that nuclear arms are the last weapons in the arsenal of both.

Luckily, Putin seems quite sane, with superior rationality to many of his Western counterparts. The irresponsible comparison between Putin and Hitler is therefore wrong in many respects, but not least because Hitler never had the bomb. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

LGBT flag map of Georgia. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

By Pavol Stracansky
TBILISI, Sep 8 2014 (IPS)

Georgia’s LGBT community is sceptical that recently-introduced anti-discrimination legislation hailed by some rights groups as a bold step forward for the former Soviet state will improve their lives any time soon.

The law, which came into effect in May this year, is ostensibly designed to provide protection for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in a country where homophobia is deep-rooted at all levels of society and LGBT groups face daily discrimination.

But activists in Georgia say that introduction of the legislation has actually hardened attitudes against the LGBT community and that there are serious concerns over how effectively it can be applied.“Since the law was passed, things are actually worse now for LGBT people. When they make a complaint about something, people just say, ‘what more do you want? You’ve got your rights now in law’. It’s really obnoxious” – Irakli Vacharadze, head of Identoba, the Tbilisi-based rights organisation

Irakli Vacharadze, head of Identoba, the Tbilisi-based rights organisation, told IPS: “Since the law was passed, things are actually worse now for LGBT people. When they make a complaint about something, people just say, ‘what more do you want? You’ve got your rights now in law’. It’s really obnoxious.

“There are also questions over how it is going to be applied and at the moment, at least, it is definitely not effective.”

With a deeply religious society – 84 percent of the population identifies itself as Orthodox Christian – attitudes in Georgia to anything other than traditional heterosexual relationships are deeply negative among much of the population.

LGBT people say that they are often refused service by businesses and hospitals, bullied in school, and harassed by the police. Meanwhile, the Orthodox Church, which has a hugely influential role in society, has denounced LGBT equality and described support for LGBT rights as the “propaganda of sin”.

A 2013 survey by Identoba revealed how entrenched anti-LGBT sentiment is in society – 88 percent of respondents said homosexuality could “never be justified”.

A peaceful gay rights march marking International Day Against Homophobia last year ended in violence as protestors from a rival church-led counter-demonstration attacked and beat LGBT demonstrators.

But the country’s pursuit of closer ties with the European Union forced political parties, which had previously been at best apathetic towards the LGBT community, to address the issue.

As a condition of being granted coveted visa-free travel to EU countries, the government was told it had to implement anti-discrimination laws, including legislation specifically on gender expression and sexual orientation.

And although fiercely opposed by the Church, they were passed with the general support of all political parties.

However, LGBT people in Georgia remain far from convinced that, in its present form, it will help them. Although welcomed as a step forward, rights groups have criticised the fact that a devoted enforcement body was not approved and instead cases will go to the Ombudsman for Human Rights.

They say that the Ombudsman’s office lacks capacity and that effectively dealing with complaints will be compromised. They have called for the passage of additional measures to ensure enforcement of the law.

The Ombudsman’s office has yet to set up a department to deal with anti-discrimination complaints brought under the new legislation and one will not be functional before January.

Meanwhile, faith, or rather lack of it, in the country’s justice system is also likely to limit its effectiveness.

Viorel Ursu, Regional Manager of the Eurasia Programme at the Open Society Foundation, told IPS: “People do not trust the judiciary in general in Georgia. They feel that even when they bring legal action, there is no guarantee that justice will be served. And although there are laws designed to protect against discrimination of LGBT people, they will still face discrimination anyway.”

Activists are under no illusions about what the laws will bring the LGBT community. When asked whether he expected things to get better for LGBT people in Georgia in the near future, Vacharadze said: “Definitely not. There’s no chance.”

But the introduction of the legislation has already had at least one potentially positive effect. LGBT people say a profound ignorance of their gender expression and sexual orientation and their lifestyles contributes to the widespread antipathy towards them in Georgian society, but passage of the laws has at least promoted vitally-needed public discussion of the LGBT community.

Vacharadze told IPS: “The law alone will not change society’s attitudes towards LGBT people, it won’t get rid of homophobia. It won’t do anything to deal with the ignorance about LGBT issues and the community.

“The way to deal with it is to get information about LGBT out to the public and get them informed. One thing about the passage of this legislation was that it did actually create a debate about LGBT people in Georgia and got information about them out into the public and got people discussing it.”

The laws also have a wider significance in that they stand in stark contrast to the repression of LGBT communities in other former Soviet states, most notably Russia which is increasing its persecution of homosexuals through repressive legislation.

Just this week, the senior political figure in recently-annexed Crimea typified the Russian political stance to non-heterosexuals when he attacked LGBT people at a government meeting.

Sergei Aksyonov, leader of the new Russian region, said that if LGBT people held any meetings “police and self-defence forces will react immediately and in three minutes will explain to them what kind of sexual orientation they should stick to.”

He also said that “Crimean children should be brought up with a ‘positive attitude to family and traditional values’,” and that Crimea had “no need” for gays and lesbians.

Some observers say that the passing of the laws in Georgia, at a time when neighbours and other former Soviet states are attacking LGBT people, is proof that the country is set on moving closer to Europe and putting as much political distance between it and Russia, which has annexed some of its territory in recent years.

Indeed, as political parties debated the anti-discrimination laws, Davit Usupashvili, the parliamentary speaker, described the bill as a choice between Russia and the European Union.

Campaigners say that the government’s desire to cultivate closer and closer ties to the EU means that the legislation will, in time, become effective.

Ursu told IPS: “In the next year or so, the Georgian government should look to strengthen the law and try to prove that it is functioning simply because it remains under the scrutiny of the EU.

“The law not only had to be adopted but it also needed to be shown to be working effectively. It is in the government’s interest to ensure that it can be applied effectively.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Nadezdha Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina (fourth and fifth from the right) with activists from the Andrei Rylkov Foundation for Health and Social Justice in Moscow marking the United Nations International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking with calls for reform of Russia's hard-line drug policies. Credit: Andrei Rylkov Foundation

By Pavol Stracansky
MOSCOW, Jun 26 2014 (IPS)

A protest in Moscow Thursday marking the U.N. International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking has highlighted the ‘torture’ drug users are put through in the Russian criminal justice system.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, members of the Pussy Riot Group who were controversially jailed for performing in a Moscow cathedral in 2012, spoke in the Russian capital to highlight the plight of drug users in Russia.

Joining protestors in more than 80 cities around the world demanding drug policy reforms, they attacked what they said was their country’s “cruel and inhuman” treatment of drug users.

Describing a litany of rights abuses against drug users, including torture and beatings by police and prison warders, they said Russian authorities viewed imprisonment as a “cure for drug dependency”.“Similar to xenophobia and homophobia, narcophobia has become a protective cloak for the authorities .... Creating an image of the enemy, the subhuman, the zombie, and reinforcing that image in the public consciousness justifies the inhuman treatment of drug dependent people in our country” – Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, members of the Pussy Riot punk rock group

“People who use drugs are outcasts – they are despised, hated, accused of all problems, and criminalised. Similar to xenophobia and homophobia, narcophobia has become a protective cloak for the authorities…. Creating an image of the enemy, the subhuman, the zombie, and reinforcing that image in the public consciousness justifies the inhuman treatment of drug dependent people in our country,” they said.

“Russia’s drug policy is built on torture. Humiliation and violation of human dignity – thisis what drug dependent people face everywhere, from hospitals to prisons and other state facilities,” they added.

Russia takes a hard-line approach to drug use, implementing repressive drugs legislation, including lengthy jail terms for possession of even tiny amounts of hard drugs.

Drug users say they are also targeted by police: official figures show that one in six of the Russian prison population is a drug user and, according to other surveys, just under 30 percent of drug users have been arrested at some point since they started using drugs.

They say they also regularly have confessions extracted from them or are coerced into helping officers as they go into withdrawal in detention – a charge police deny.

There is a complete lack of relevant medical services for drug users in temporary holding facilities and pre-trial detention centres and even painkillers are rarely given to addicts going into withdrawal.

Drug users in prison face particular hardship. Conditions for all prisoners are poor with hygiene often bad, cells massively overcrowded and brutality and disease rife. But drug users are especially vulnerable.

Anya Sarang, head of the Moscow-based Andrei Rylkov Foundation for Health and Social Justice, which works to raise awareness of drug problems, told IPS: “Russian prison is torture in itself with prisoners not given basic medical infection control, nutrition etc., and general human rights violations. But drug users are more vulnerable than other prisoners.

“For instance many are HIV positive, but not only are there problems getting their medicine or starting them on treatment because they are not given necessary immune system checks in some cases, but their diet is poor and there is always the risk of infections, such as tuberculosis.”

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major problem in Russian prisons, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other bodies. Studies have shown that a person with HIV is 25 times more likely to contract TB in a Russian prison than outside one.

But the risk of potentially deadly infections is only one problem facing drug users in prisons. As in many jails across the world, drugs are smuggled in and traded between inmates, giving users, some of whom may never have tried hard drugs, access to substances like heroin and experience of dangerous drug-taking methods.

Campaigners say that this is further evidence of how the criminalisation of drug use only perpetuates and worsens drug problems.

Michel Kazatchkine, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, told IPS: “We know from studies that contact with the criminal justice system is associated with increased injection drug use and other similar behaviour, among other problems. Putting drug users in prisons …. is making things worse not just in prisons but also for communities when they are released from prison.”

Activists point to how opioid substituition therapy (OST) for people in custody or prison has been successfully implemented in some Western states.

But the practice is completely banned in Russia, despite being widely implemented in many countries around the world, recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO), and having been proved to be successful in helping halt the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Russia has one of the world’s fastest growing HIV/AIDS epidemics – there were 78,000 new HIV cases registered last year, up from 69,000 in 2012 and 62,000 in 2011 – which the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) and other bodies say has been historically driven by injection drug use.

Drug use in the country is growing equally rapidly. According to figures from the country’s Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN) there were an estimated 8.5 million drug addicts in 2013 – up from 2.5 million since 2010. The service says up to 100,000 people die each year in Russia from drug abuse. It is also the world’s largest heroin consumer.

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina said only a reform of drug policy including decriminalisation would improve the situation in prisons.

But Russian authorities show no sign of lifting the OST ban nor improving the very limited harm reduction services which exist in the country and FSKN officials have made a number of public statements in recent months reaffirming their commitment to hard-line drugs policies.

Kazatchine told IPS: “I don’t see any sign of Russia’s approach to drugs softening. What I am seeing is a toughening of the way Russian society looks at marginalised groups, such as drug users, men who have sex with men, LGBT people, etc. The climate has toughened and Russia is de facto criminalising drug use and recession.”

This, critics say, has left Russian drug users in a terrible position in society. Sergey Votyagov Executive Director of the Eurasian HRM Reduction Network (EHRN), told IPS that they were “one of the most stigmatised and under-served populations” in the country.

Meanwhile, the devastation wrought by Russia’s drugs policies has been seen clearly in its newest territory. Just days before Thursday’s protest in Moscow, campaigners in Ukraine had raised the alarm over the fate of drug users in Crimea following its recent annexation.

OST is available in Ukraine and had been provided to 800 people in Crimea. But as part of Russia, Moscow ordered OST programmes there shut down at the start of May.

A mission by the Council of Europe to Crimea which ended last month reported that at least 20 people had died following the cessation of the programmes and at least 50 more had migrated to the Ukrainian mainland, while a few had gone to Russia for detoxification and rehabilitation treatment.

Those who remained spoke of having to deal with intimidation by new authorities and, in some cases, losing their jobs because of either worsening health or their status as former OST patients being made public.

Some who have fled the peninsula described the fear and desperation among drug users still there.

Speaking at an event organised by the International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine in Kiev earlier this month, one woman, Oksana, who left the day after her OST treatment had stopped, said:  “I might have died if I had stayed in Crimea.

“I am disabled, I have had a stroke and I know very well how it feels to be left without therapy and help. Those who could not leave Crimea are in terrible conditions. Some of them are already dead, others have chosen suicide.”

There is little hope that things in Crimea will change any time in the foreseeable future. Earlier this month, Sergei Donich, deputy prime minister in the Crimean government, told local media that OST was ineffective and was being pushed by pharmaceutical firms who stood to gain from it.

Kazatchine described the situation on the peninsula as a “tragedy”, adding that it was unlikely there would not be more deaths among drug users.

He told IPS: “Evidence shows that OST reduces mortality, it prevents overdoses among drug users. I think it is inevitable that [with no more OST] more drug users will die.”

As the Palestinian unity government announced June 2 receives a cautious welcome from many world leaders, Russia’s support for the new body is providing the Kremlin with an opportune platform to pursue its foreign policy ambitions and strengthen its domestic ideology.

Russia is one of the four members of the Middle East Quartet – along with the European Union, the United States and the United Nations – working on the Israeli-Palestine peace process and has pledged its, albeit cautious, support for the new body.

But with seven years of internal conflict having been brought to an end with the formation of the unity government, Russia is now likely to be looking to emphasise its role as peace broker in the Middle East to gain influence not just in the region, but in other areas torn by internal conflict, experts say.“Russia could use this unity government as a platform to push its position on a number of issues in the region.” – Dr. Theodore Karasik, Director of Research and Consultancy at the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis

Dr. Theodore Karasik, Director of Research and Consultancy at the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis (INEGMA), told IPS: “Russia could use this unity government as a platform to push its position on a number of issues in the region.”

“The Kremlin and the Russian Defence Ministry are beginning to make large inroads into the region, capitalising on perceived Western mistakes to win over countries on issues that are up in the air.”

For more than a decade, Russian foreign policy has ostensibly been against intervention of foreign powers in the affairs of other sovereign nations and it has increasingly viewed the Middle East as a good example to prove its point, highlighting the chaos and violence following direct U.S.-Western military action or support in various states.

And it has positioned itself as a peacemaker, trying to avert the same Western mistakes in Syria by pushing for a solution to the country’s internal conflict that does not involve U.S. military action.

This has given it an enhanced, if far from dominant, role in a region where it is already a major arms supplier to a number of regimes and has important relationships with key states such as Israel and Iran, among others.

Its support for, and role as part of the Middle East Quartet, in bringing about a unity government in an explosive part of a highly troubled region, will cement its position there, say Russian analysts.

It will also help to solidify support from others for its view that U.S.-led solutions for the region, and by extension other troubled parts of the world, are fatally flawed.

“Russia is looking for a position in the Middle East, utilising the perception of U.S. and Atlanticists’ mistakes that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the region,” said Karasik.

“The idea of a Palestinian government is not just about a two-state system but about an Arab initiative to solve problems between internal factions, Hamas and Fatah, and bringing calm and peace in a wider area that goes beyond just Gaza.”

“Moscow is then aligned with Arab states supporting this and can say that it is working on this as a mediator and bringing peace just as it was right at the time when U.S. President Barack Obama was about to bomb Syria,” Karasik added.

Indeed, defence analysts say that many countries in the region already view U.S. policy on Ukraine as misguided and are likely to side with Russia in opposition to the Western sanctions that have been imposed on it in the wake of its annexation of Crimea.

Russia’s emphasis on stability in the region is also tied to the Kremlin’s domestic agenda. The spate of colour revolutions in neighbouring and geographically close states in the last decade, as well as the recent Arab spring uprisings, have left Russia’s political elite aghast.

Fears of something similar happening in Russia, which intensified deeply following the revolution in Ukraine earlier this year, have been behind a severe crackdown on civil liberties and basic rights in Russia, rights watchdogs have said.

By acting as a peacemaker parading the benefits of stability in countries in the Middle East – and therefore the rejection of Western military-intervention led approaches to resolving other nations’ internal conflicts – and garnering support for that view from other states, the Kremlin is also reinforcing tacit support for its own approach at ensuring order at home.

“It sees itself as looking to prevent chaos from ripping up countries from within, something which ties in with its domestic agenda,” said Karasik.

The Kremlin propaganda machine has repeatedly pushed the idea that the West has been behind foreign revolutions, fomenting and then orchestrating them.

Throughout the Maidan protests in November last year, it painted a picture of the demonstrations being led by Western-backed and funded fascist groups bent on destruction and chaos and ultimately ushering in an illegitimate government doing the bidding of the West and posing a direct threat to Russia.

And it can now point to the conflict in the east of Ukraine as another example of the resultant chaos when the West interferes in other sovereign states.

However, those same problems in Ukraine may mean that Russia will have to forego any ambitions it might have in expanding its influence in the Middle East, say some experts.

Sergei Demidenko, a Middle East specialist at the Institute for Strategic Analysis in Moscow, told IPS: “The Kremlin will not go overboard in its support for the Palestinian unity government, but at the same time it would not be the case that it will not support it.”

“Palestine and the Middle East are not important for Russia in terms of foreign policy because its focus is all on Ukraine and the post-Soviet space at the moment. It will say that it wants to see stability in the [Middle East] region and Palestine, and that may well be true, but it will say that because it needs to say something.”

“Russia’s influence in the Middle East is not as great as some may think and the concern now is on Ukraine, not Palestine.”

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Apr 29 2014 (Columnist Service)

For weeks now, the mainstream media have been unanimously engaged in denouncing Vladimir Putin’s action in Crimea first and Ukraine now. The latest cover of The Economist depicts a bear swallowing Ukraine, with the title “Insatiable”.

Media unanimity is always troubling, because it means that some knee-jerk reflex is involved. Could it be possible that we are just following the inertia of 40 years of Cold War?

This inertia has not really gone away. Just say or write “communist President Raul Castro,” and nobody will blink. But use the same logic and call President Barack Obama a capitalist, and see how it is received.

Roberto Savio. Credit: IPS

Here in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi was able for 20 years to rally his voters against the threat of “communists”, as he called members of the left-wing Democratic Party, now in power with a devout Catholic at its head, Matteo Renzi.

There are at least four points of analysis that are conspicuously missing in the chorus.

The first is that there is never any allusion to the responsibilities of the West in this affair. Let us recall that Mikhail Gorbachev agreed with George H. W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand to let the reunification of Germany go ahead, as long as the West refrained from invading Russia’s zone of influence.

Of course, once Gorbachev was out of the way, the game opened up again. Boris Yeltsin’s total docility towards the United States is well known.

What is much less well-known is that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made a 3.5 billion dollar loan to support the ruble. The loan went to the Bank of America, which distributed the money to various Russian accounts.

None of it ever reached the Central Bank of Russia, going instead to the oligarchs so that they could buy up Russia’s public companies – and never a word of protest from the IMF. Then along came the unknown Putin, put in power by the departing Yeltsin on the understanding that he would cover up Yeltsin’s cronyism.

Here goes a brief summary of how the West gradually encircled Russia:

After Yeltsin, Putin supported Washington’s then imminent invasion of Afghanistan in a way that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War. He agreed that U.S. planes could fly through Russian air space, and that the U.S. could use military bases in former Soviet republics in Central Asia, and he ordered his military to share their experience in Afghanistan.

Then in November 2001, Putin visited George W. Bush at his Texas ranch, in a flourish of hype along the lines of “Putin is a new leader who is working for world peace…by working closely with the U.S.”

A few weeks later, Bush announced that the U.S. was withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, so that it could build a system in Eastern Europe to protect the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) from Iran – a move that was seen as directed against Russia in reality, to Putin’s dismay.

This was followed by Bush’s 2002 invitation to seven nations from the extinct Soviet Union (including Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia) to join NATO (which they did in 2004).

Then in 2003 came the invasion of Iraq, without the consent of the United Nations and over the objections of France, Germany and Russia, turning Putin into an open critic of the U.S.’s claim that it was promoting democracy and upholding international law.

In November of the same year, the Rose Revolution brought Mikheil Saakashvili, a pro-Western president, to power in Georgia. Four months later, street protests in Ukraine turned into the Orange Revolution, carrying another pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko, to power.

In 2006, the White House asked for permission to land Bush’s plane in Moscow to refuel, but made it clear that Bush had no time to greet Putin. In 2008 came Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia, with the support of the U.S., much against Russia’s will.

Then Bush asked NATO to grant membership to Ukraine and Georgia, a slap in Moscow’s face. So it should have been no surprise when, in 2008, Putin intervened militarily after Georgia tried to regain control of the breakaway pro-Russian region of South Ossetia, taking it under Russian control along with another breakaway region, Abkhazia. Yet we all remember how the media talked about an unreasonable action.

Obama tried to repair the damage done to international relations under Bush. He asked for a “reset” of relations with Russia.

And at the beginning, everything went well. Russia agreed to the use of its space for getting military supplies to Afghanistan. In April 2010, Russia and the U.S. signed a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), reducing their nuclear arsenals. And Russia supported strong U.N. sanctions against Iran, and cancelled the sale of its S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Tehran.

But then, in 2011, it became clear that the U.S. was expressing its views about Russia’s parliamentary elections. The Western media were against Putin, who accused the U.S. of injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into opposition groups. The then U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, called this an exaggeration: he said that only tens of millions of dollars had been provided to civil society organisations.

Putin was elected again in 2012, already obsessed with the Western threat to his power, and in 2013 he gave asylum to National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Obama cancelled a planned summit meeting – the first time a U.S. summit with the Kremlin had been cancelled in 50 years.

And while all this was going on, the Arab Spring broke out. Russia authorised military action in Libya, but only to provide humanitarian aid. In fact, this was used to back a change of regime, and Russia felt that it had been duped, and protested to no avail.

Then came Syria, and the West tried to obtain Russian support again for a change of regime, and became upset when Putin refused.

And finally, now, there has been the intervention in Ukraine to get the country into the European Union and away from an economic bloc that Russia was trying to create, with Belarus. So, Ukraine should be seen in a specific context….

The second point is that no political action, short of a war, can really reduce Russia to a local power. It has the largest mass land of any country, it is at the borders of the European Union, and it extends to the Far East. It is both Europe and Asia.

It is in rivalry with China in Asia, has territorial conflicts with Japan, and faces the U.S. across the Bering Strait. It is a prominent producer of oil and a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, and it has a nuclear arsenal.

Any effort to encircle or weaken it, now that ideological confrontations are gone, can only be seen as part of an old imperial policy. Russia is not a threat as the Soviet Union was.

Russia’s GDP is 15 percent that of the European Union’s – a bloc of close to 500 million people that accounts for 16 percent of the world’s exports. China has 1.3 billion people and nine percent of world trade.

Russia has 145 million people (its population is shrinking by close to one million people every year) and 2.5 percent of world exports. It has few industries, also because Putin is not interested in the modernisation of the country, which would inevitably increase the size of the educated professional class, which is already against him.

The third point, therefore, is that we should take the Ukraine affair with a pinch of salt. It is a very fragile state, where corruption controls politics, and it has structural economic problems. Its western part is more rural, while the eastern part is more industrialised.

The workers there know that entering the European Union would mean the phasing out of many factories. In the western part, during the Second World War, many sided with the Nazi forces, and today there is a strong nationalist movement, close to fascism. Ukraine is a very messy and costly affair.

It is clear that to intervene just to challenge Putin, and offer money (which is basically what the European Union did), seems very shallow thinking. Are we really ready to change the criteria of the European Union, accept a country which is totally out of sync with these criteria, and take on an enormous burden, just to appear to have won against a strongman?

Which brings us to the fourth and final point: Putin is an ex-KGB officer, who feels that Russia was treated unfairly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that the West is trying to unseat him. All his efforts for reaching an entente with the West have been continuously betrayed, with successive enlargements of NATO, a network of military bases surrounding Russia, clear Western support for all of his opponents, and mediocre trade treatment.

He knows that his feelings about Russian decline are shared by a large majority of his citizens. But he is also an arrogant autocrat, to say the least, who is doing nothing to foster economic modernisation because, by keeping trade and production in his hands, he can maintain control. For him, Ukraine was politically unacceptable.

Another autocrat, Viktor Yanukovych, president of Ukraine from February 2010 to February this year and very much in Putin’s style, was deposed by massive street protests sponsored and supported by the West. Any possible contagion should have been stopped in its tracks. So Putin is playing the role of saviour of Russian citizens, which allows him to intervene wherever there are Russian minorities.

The question is: if Putin goes away, will we have a democratic, participatory, clean, non-corrupt Russia? Those who know Russia well do not think so. History is full of examples which show that removing autocrats does not, by itself, bring democracy.

So, the policy is to continue to surround Putin in the name of democracy. But are we sure that this is not playing his game, by becoming the defender of the Russian people?

They also have the inertia of the Cold War, and they look to the West not exactly as an ally. Today, Putin is the only binding force in Russia. If he goes, most probably there would be a long period of chaos.

This is clearly not in the interest of Russia’s citizens…and it is always dangerous to play a game of power without looking to the stability of Europe as such. Of course, this is not the thinking of the strategists in the West who would love to eliminate any other power!

As Naomi Klein writes, the only winners in this affair are the energy companies. They are engaged in a campaign for the world to become independent from Russian oil and gas.

So, let us speed up production of oil in the U.S., regardless of what happens to the environment. And let Europeans stop using Russian gas; we will export it to them. The problem is that there are no structures to do that, and it will take several years to build them.

But just when everybody was debating how to bring climate change under control, and reduce the use of fossil energy, an overall important strategy is pushing this issue into the background. Sri Lankan journalist Tarzie Vittachi once said: “Everything is about something else”…and there are not many examples of oil and democracy going hand-in-hand.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Vladimir Putin and Nursultan Nazarbayev shaking hands at a Kremlin meeting in December 2013. Credit: Kremlin Presidential Press and Information Office - CC BY 3.0

By Joanna Lillis
ASTANA, Apr 7 2014 (EurasiaNet)

The Crimea crisis is putting pressure on Kazakhstan’s long-standing, multi-vectored foreign policy, which has sought to balance the competing interests of Russia, China and the United States in Central Asia.

In forcefully backing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, many in Kazakhstan worry that President Nursultan Nazarbayev could be setting himself up for separatist woes of his own.“Kazakhstan’s position is dictated not so much by creed as by fear… Events in Crimea are a possible scenario for Kazakhstan too.” -- Aidos Sarym

At the Nuclear Security Summit on Mar. 25 in The Hague, Nazarbayev jumped off the diplomatic fence to offer strong support for Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, the architect of the Crimean land-grab.

Nazarbayev essentially blamed Ukraine’s new leaders for precipitating the crisis, saying that “an unconstitutional coup d’etat” had occurred in Kiev. He also noted there had been “discrimination against minority rights” in Ukraine, thus providing diplomatic cover for Russia’s position that it intervened to protect Russians in Crimea.

Outraged officials in Kiev called Nazarbayev’s remarks “unacceptable;” A Kazakhstani Foreign Ministry representative quickly retorted that the Ukrainian reaction was “dictated largely by emotions, and not common sense.”

The occasion marked Kiev’s second protest within a week: on Mar. 20 it complained about Astana’s recognition of the Mar. 16 Crimean referendum, which Russia proceeded to use as justification of its annexation of the peninsula.

On Mar. 27, Kazakhstan abstained in a vote against a U.N. resolution declaring the plebiscite invalid.

The crisis is placing considerable strain on Nazarbayev’s “multi-vector” approach, which is premised on the maintenance of good relations with all powers.

The policy, along with an abundance of natural resources, has raised Kazakhstan’s international profile during the post-Soviet era. Nazarbayev’s recent statements, however, are leading Kazakhstan into a “political and diplomatic blind alley,” cautioned opposition leader Amirzhan Kosanov.

“Kazakhstan has basically lost its independence in assessing events taking place in the world and, wittingly or unwittingly, is becoming hostage to the foreign policy pursued by the Kremlin,” Kosanov told EurasiaNet.org.

Kosanov is far from the only one worried. Kazakhstan’s pro-Russian stance is causing widespread consternation at home, where critics fret that Putin’s doctrine of intervening to protect Russian speakers in Crimea could eventually be applied to Kazakhstan – albeit in circumstances currently unimaginable, since Astana and Moscow are close allies and Russian speakers’ rights are guaranteed.

Northern Kazakhstan is home to a sizable Russian minority.

The similarities between Kazakhstan and Ukraine are blinding: both are post-Soviet states sharing long borders with Russia, with large ethnic Russian minorities (22 percent of the population in Kazakhstan’s case).

“Kazakhstan’s position is dictated not so much by creed as by fear… Events in Crimea are a possible scenario for Kazakhstan too,” Almaty-based analyst Aidos Sarym told EurasiaNet.org.

Hyperbolic headlines splashed across Kazakhstan’s press illustrate the apprehensions.

“Is Kazakhstan Threatened With Occupation Tomorrow?” thundered the Assandi Times. “Is Kazakhstan Being Dragged Into Someone Else’s War?” wondered Adam Bol magazine.

“Supporting the precedent of the actual annexation of Crimea from sovereign Ukraine, Akorda [the presidential administration] is itself encouraging possible separatist sentiments within the country,” said Kosanov.

Dosym Satpayev, director of the Almaty-based Risks Assessment Group think tank, suggested that Nazarbayev’s backing of Russia over Ukraine may represent what he sees as the lesser of two evils: for the 73-year-old president, in power for over two decades, his fear of domestic dissent seems to be overwhelming any concern that “separatist sentiments could be possible in Kazakhstan itself.”

“That means fears of revolutions and coups turned out to be higher for Kazakhstan’s leadership than fear of the threat of separatism,” he told EurasiaNet.org.

Unfazed by Nazarbayev’s pro-Kremlin stance, Western leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and French President Francois Hollande lined up to meet him in The Hague.

This suggests that Kazakhstan still retains lots of diplomatic wiggle room to get back squarely on a multi-vector track. As well as eyeing Kazakhstan’s oil and gas reserves, Western leaders may be hoping the veteran Kazakhstani leader can exert a behind-the-scenes, calming influence on the irascible Putin.

In a nod to Western sentiment and Kiev’s sensibilities, Astana has mixed pro-Russian pronouncements with statements on the need to uphold Ukraine’s sovereignty, performing what Sarym calls a “verbal balancing act.”

The nuclear summit also offered Nazarbayev a PR opportunity to note the contrasts between Kazakhstan and Ukraine, says Satpayev, and laud “Kazakhstan’s domestic political and inter-ethnic stability.”

Nazarbayev has consistently made clear that, multi-vector policy notwithstanding, he considers Russia to be Kazakhstan’s main geostrategic ally. Beyond the politics of such a position lie glaring economic realities.

Russia is Kazakhstan’s largest trading partner, last year accounting for 36 percent of imports worth 17.6 billion dollars and seven percent of exports worth 5.8 billion dollars.

The trade balance may be in Russia’s favour, but – crucially for Kazakhstan – while most trading partners buy oil, Russia is a major consumer of non-oil exports.

Kazakhstan is also tied into economic cooperation with Russia through their membership of the Customs Union, a trilateral free trade zone with Belarus which is due to sign an agreement in May to expand into the Eurasian Economic Union from 2015.

For Putin, Ukraine’s tilt westward has infused his Eurasian Union vision with even greater political significance. Nazarbayev is a strong backer of Eurasian integration (he first proposed the idea of a Eurasian Union in 1994) – but he nowadays views the political element of integration with suspicion.

In The Hague he took pains to stress that Kazakhstan has a “purely pragmatic economic interest” in the union, which, as he pointed out, allows his landlocked country tariff-free access to the Black Sea through Russia.

Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that, in addition to political and economic factors, there is a “mental factor” contributing Kazakhstan’s support for Russia, suggests Sarym: many in the Astana political elite (including Nazarbayev) have held top posts since the Soviet era, and in their worldview, “Moscow is the center of the world and the Kremlin is a cultural mecca.”

Editor’s note:  Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Crowds waving Crimean and Russian flags in Simferopol in Crimea after the referendum. Credit: Alexey Yakushechkin/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Apr 5 2014 (IPS)

Last month’s annexation by Russia of Crimea and the West’s reaction have placed emerging regional powers, which have generally supported Moscow’s position on key geopolitical developments, in a difficult position, according to U.S. analysts.

Moscow’s move, which followed its de facto military takeover of the peninsula and a snap referendum on joining Russia of the mainly Russian-speaking population there, has also underlined differences within the so-called BRICS bloc, which includes Brazil, India, China, and South Africa, as well as Russia.“They don’t want to be pulled into a fight between the big dogs." -- Rajan Menon

Rather than vote with Moscow, the four non-Russian BRICS members all abstained on last week’s vote at the U.N. General Assembly, which affirmed the world body’s commitment to recognise Crimea as part of Ukraine and declared the snap referendum, which took place in mid-March, invalid.

China abstained on a similar resolution in the U.N. Security Council on the eve of the referendum. Russia cast the lone veto.

“I think the Chinese decision to abstain, rather than back Russia, was a very significant decision,” said Bruce Jones, who directs the Brookings Institution’s International Order and Strategy project.

“The Chinese and the Russians have long paired up in their willingness to back each other in vetoes, and, for an issue as important as this, with the Russians putting as much emphasis on this as they did, for the Chinese to abstain was a really significant signal that they were not willing to simply close their eyes to Moscow’s action,” he told IPS.

“Overall this is an event that will sow discord within the BRICS’ grouping and will make the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, and others think more carefully about their support for and partnership with Russia,” according to Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Moscow’s annexation, which has been countered by a series of still-escalating economic and diplomatic sanctions imposed by U.S.-led Western nations, has provoked considerable division among both the non-Russian BRICS, as well as other members of the Non-Aligned Nations.

While only 11 countries – all of them either closely allied to Russia or reflexively anti-U.S. in foreign policy orientation – voted against the resolution, 58 countries, including the four BRICS members, as well as other politically significant countries such as Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, Kenya, Pakistan, Uganda, and Vietnam, abstained.

One hundred countries voted in favour, including all European Union (EU) members, Turkey, Nigeria, Indonesia, and most of Latin America and the Gulf Arab states.

Two dozen countries didn’t show up, including several important countries with strong interests in alienating neither Russia nor the West, including several Central Asian nations with large Russian-speaking minorities.

Israel, which habitually aligns itself with Washington, and Iran, which normally opposes it but is now engaged in critical negotiations with the West over its nuclear programme, were both no-shows.

While Western leaders appear resigned to the irreversibility of Russian control of Crimea, they are hoping that what they see as the steadily rising economic and political costs incurred by Moscow – including capital flight and NATO commitments to move military assets further east toward the Russian border — will dissuade President Vladimir Putin from further adventurism either against Ukraine or in Russian-speaking areas of Romania and Moldova. Whether that works remains to be seen.

But the precedent-creating nature of Russia’s takeover – its use of military force (albeit without bloodshed), the violation of territorial integrity of a nation with internationally recognised borders, and its justification that Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population faced persecution and discrimination from what Moscow considers a regime that had illegally seized power against an elected president – has clearly troubled many nations, especially those with significant disaffected minorities.

“What is most threatening is that most states in the world are not homogenous,” said Rajan Menon, who teaches international relations at City University of New York (CUNY).

“India is a highly diverse nation, as is China and, in a way, South Africa, too. So the idea of holding a referendum to become separate states is naturally very troubling to them.”

“I think the other BRICS were all in their way quite uncomfortable with Russia’s moves in Crimea, but they’re also quite uncomfortable with the West using sanctions because they’re all quite vulnerable to that political weapon,” noted Jones, author of a just released book on the global order, ‘Still Ours to Lead: America, Rising Powers, and the Tension Between Rivalry and Restraint’.

The latter was demonstrated in the approval by the BRICS foreign ministers March 24 of a statement in which they rejected the reported suggestion by the foreign minister of Australia, which will host the next G20 summit in Brisbane in November, that Russia should be suspended or expelled form the group.

“The escalation of hostile language, sanctions and counter-sanctions, and force does not contribute to a sustainable and peaceful solution, according to international law, including the principles and purposes of the United Nations Charter,” the statement said.

While some commentators interpreted the statement as backing Moscow, Jones noted that the foreign ministers rejected language in support of the annexation that had been sought by Russia.

“That goes to the core issue of the BRICS,” he said. “They’re strategically divided at the same time that they are unified in wanting to resist the West’s using its economic leverage to pressure them.”

Moreover, he added, the idea that Russia is leading anti-Western bloc – a theme raised by more right-wing voices here since the Crimea invasion – is “nonsense.”

Indeed, Kupchan, author of a 2012 book on world order, ‘No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn’, told IPS he thinks the Western powers have gained in the international arena as a result of the Crimea crisis.

“Even though emerging powers are reluctant to align themselves clear with the West on this front, I think that they are for the most part on board with the Western response,” he said. “And the fact that so few countries have recognised Russia’s annexation of Crimes speak for itself.”

According to Menon, the BRICS want above all “a world with multiple centres of power,” a point that applies in particular to the less powerful BRICS members, namely India, Brazil, and South Africa, as well as other emerging powers.

“They don’t want to be pulled into a fight between the big dogs,” he told IPS. “They want maximum flexibility, a kind of strategic ambiguity, if you will.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Russian President Vladimir Putin awaits leaders arriving for the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg on Sep. 5, 2013. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 1 2014 (IPS)

When Western powers, led by the United States, decided to throw Russia out of the Group of 8 (G8) industrial nations, it was aimed at punishing and “isolating” President Vladimir Putin for his intervention in Ukraine and “annexation” of Crimea.

“What’s next? Expel Russia from the United Nations and the G20?” an Asian diplomat jokingly asked one of his colleagues at the U.N. delegate’s lounge last week, hinting at what could only be construed as a Western political fantasy.The procedure the G7 followed to transform itself to G8 in 1998 (with the inclusion of Russia) was as opaque as the process that led to Moscow’s virtual expulsion.

The G8 move was pretty tame because it was a decision taken by seven Western industrial nations: the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Japan, along with the European Union.

But Russia is also a member of the G20, a coalition of both developed and developing countries, as well as the economic powerhouse called BRICS (comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).

Australia has reportedly warned that Russia may be excluded from the next G20 summit meeting in Brisbane in November. But that is more easily said than done.

On the sidelines of last week’s Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague, the foreign ministers of BRICS warned Australia against any such action.

In a statement released during the summit, the foreign ministers of BRICS said “the custodianship of the G20 belongs to all member states equally and no one member state can unilaterally determine its nature and character.”

The G20 members include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States and the European Union (EU).

At a General Assembly vote last Friday, on a resolution implicitly critical of Russia on the upheaval in Ukraine, Russia’s four BRICS partners abstained, joining 54 others.

The final vote was 100 for the resolution, 11 against, but with 58 abstentions in an Assembly with 193 votes.

Chakravarthi Raghavan, editor-emeritus of the Geneva-based South-North Development Monitor, told IPS, “The G7/G8 and the G20 are at best self-appointed informal gatherings, without any legitimacy, mere costly annual exercises, where occasionally side-event meetings are of some help.”

He pointed out that the G7/G8 originally came into being in the wake of the oil crisis to tackle economic issues and promote a dialogue of the G5/G7 with the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to promote agreements and avoid confrontations.

Soon, it became clear the G7 process was not effective, and the initial aim of informal but frank and spontaneous exchange of views among the leaders failed.

“Their own bureaucracies and ministries in governments did not want this process to move forward,” said Raghavan, a veteran journalist and a former editor-in-chief of Press Trust of India (PTI) who has covered the United Nations, both in Geneva and New York, for several decades.

But instead of abandoning the annual meetings, he said, the G7 continued to meet, with the original economic focus lost, and with costly preparations and meetings of “sherpas”, where the gatherings themselves became too formalised, and where the outcome had been already decided or agreed to at the lowest common measure of accord.

He also pointed out that the G7/G8 increasingly began pronouncing themselves on all kinds of subjects – with none of the leaders able to ensure the decisions were carried out in their own countries.

Vijay Prashad, author of “The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South”, told IPS the procedure the G7 followed to transform itself to G8 in 1998 (with the inclusion of Russia) was as opaque as the process that led to Moscow’s virtual expulsion.

The Group of Seven (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and USA) came together in 1974 to consolidate their response to the major thrust from the Third World Project: an assault of the oil weapon of 1973 that consolidated in the U.N. General Assembly resolution 3201 in May 1974 for a New International Economic Order (NIEO).

The G7 was formed, as former U.S. President Gerald Ford put it, “to ensure that the current world economic situation is not seen as a crisis in the democratic or capitalist system,” Prashad said.

“It had to be seen as a momentary shock, not a systematic challenge,” he added.

The collapse of the Third World Project, the rise of a new International Monetary Fund (IMF)-driven neo-liberal dispensation and the demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) moved the G7 to welcome battered Russia into its arms, said Prashad, who is the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.

Membership in the G7 came with the promise that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) would not move one step closer to Russia than the German border, he added.

Raghavan told IPS the annual G20 meeting pronounces itself on a range of political, economic and other arenas — but with less and less effect — whether (as they have done several times) for concluding Doha trade negotiations or other areas.

Some of their views on global financial stability – addressed to the Bank of International Settlements – have factually been very diluted in actual decisions and norms because of the lobbying of the big financial groups, both in New York and London, said Raghavan, author of the just released “Third World in the Third Millennium”.

Prashad said when the credit crisis startled the West in 2007, the G8 hastened to China and India, asking for funds.

If the money came – as it did – the G8 would wind up its operations and the G20 (with Brazil, China, India and South Africa as members) would take over as the effective executive managers of planetary affairs – which it did not, he added.

The G20 had been formed during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 to ward off any nationalistic reactions to that crash.

“As the Western stock markets rallied by 2011, the promise was forgotten,” he said.

The G8 continued – much to the chagrin of the BRICS bloc, which had assumed it would now share power.

They agree the West’s move east is dangerous, and it is unlikely they will allow for the expulsion of Russia from the G20 – itself of limited consequence, he noted.

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain , Apr 1 2014 (IPS)

History, not only law, matters: like how Crimea and Abkhazia-South Ossetia – basically Russian-Orthodox – became Ukrainian and Georgian, respectively.

Two Soviet dictators, Nikita Khrushchev and Joseph Stalin, transferred Crimea to Ukraine and Abkhazia-South Ossetia to Georgia by dictate. The local people were not asked – just as Hawaiians were not consulted when the U.S. annexed their kingdom in 1898.

Johan Galtung

The first referendum in Crimea, held Mar. 16, resulted in an overwhelming No to Ukraine and Yes to the Russian Federation.

Khrushchev’s 1954 transfer of Crimea was within the Soviet Union, and under Red Army control. But when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Red Army became the Russian army, the conditions changed.

Former U.S. president George W. Bush wanted Ukraine and Georgia to become NATO members, moving the Russian minorities two steps away from Russia. Nothing similar applies to the other Russian minorities in the former Soviet republics. They are people living on somebody else’s land, not people living on their own land.

What happened to Crimea was a correction of what had become a basic mistake. However, Russia moving into eastern Ukraine could be – as the West says – invasion-occupation-annexation.

But that would be highly unlikely, unless civil war broke out between Ukraine West and East, and the Russian minority in the East – Donetsk – was in danger. Russia would not stand by, just as NATO would not if something similar happened close to the Polish border in Lvov.

This simply must not happen, but the possibility is growing.

President Vladimir Putin has the formula: a Ukrainian federation. Look at the maps, for instance the votes for Yulia Tymoshenko in the West and North and for Viktor Yanukovych in East and South Ukraine in the 2010 elections.

Elections decided by longitude-latitude mean two countries, and yet there is also just one.

The solution: a federation with high levels of autonomy for both parts. Educated guess: it will happen.

This is where Putin made his basic mistake: he moved too fast. He is more intelligent -better informed, more able to manage many factors mentally at the same time – than Western leaders. Others are slower; they need more time.

A referendum is the right of any people regardless of what the law says, a serious act under freedom of expression – whether in Crimea (illegal), Scotland (legal), Catalonia in Spain (illegal). What then happens is a very different matter. If people vote for a divorce, then so be it. But make it clean. Putin has made it dirty so far – but the situation can be
remedied.

Putin should have called a conference right after the referendum, before any annexation, making it clear that he would respect the call for Crimea’s entry into the Russian Federation, but would take the concerns of everyone touched directly by the outcome seriously.

The Tatars are Muslims, not Orthodox. Not unlike the Serbs in Kosovo, who are Orthodox, not Muslim like the Albanian majority. Respect them, offer them the dignity of autonomy within Crimea, try to amend the horrors perpetrated against them in the past, be open to reconciliation.

The Ukrainians in Crimea, soldiers or civilians: If firmly rooted, invite them to stay; if garrisoned soldiers, invite them to leave peacefully before any annexation makes it look like surrender.

The Russian-speaking in Ukraine (16 percent): Leave the door open for a Crimean-style process with referendum and annexation if they so wish – but make it clear that the West of Ukraine would have the same right.

Providing a neutral buffer might be better for all. How could the European Union-Russia-NATO-Shanghai Cooperation Organisation cooperate to make that a reality?

Let them benefit jointly from the offers to make them lean one way or the other, towards the EU or towards Russia. Could the West do one, and the East the other?

The how, when, where and by whom to be discussed at the conference.

Kievan-Rus: Yes, there are Russian origins in the Ukrainian capital. This does not give Russia a legitimate claim to Kiev, just as origin does not give Israel legitimate claim to Palestinian land even if the West accepts it, origin does not give Serbia legitimate claim to all of Kosovo, and origin does not give Damascus-Baghdad legitimate claims in Southern Spain.

European borders have shifted a great deal; there are many origins to claim.

Sanctions against selected individuals: Make it clear that Russia has not and will not kill anybody if not attacked, and that sanctions may also one day be applied to individuals who launch aggressive, not defensive wars, such as the one in Afghanistan; admit that the Russian invasion there was also a mistake.

Kosova/o. The Albanians based on an overwhelming majority took Kosovo out of Serbia, but they did not have the right to take the Serbian minority with them – a good reason for not recognising Kosova. The solution is a federation with high autonomy for Serbs.

Now Putin has to show his willingness to do that for the Tatars and then recognise Kosovo – asking them to use Yugo-space as he will use the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
(END/IPS)

Excerpt:

The observation that the Chinese characters for the word “crisis” combine the characters for “danger” and “opportunity” has become a staple of Washington foreign policy discourse for years.

So it’s no surprise that the ongoing crisis in Ukraine – and Russia’s de facto absorption of Crimea – provides lots of “opportunities” for various interests to push their favourite causes.The notion of a new Cold War appeared to offer all kinds of opportunities for those interests nostalgic for the financial and bureaucratic benefits which it wrought.

Of course, that begins with Republicans who have used the crisis – and President Barack Obama’s failure to anticipate, prevent or reverse it – as an opportunity to pound away at his alleged naivete, weakness and spinelessness, a theme which the party’s still-dominant neo-conservative faction has been hyping since even before his 2009 inauguration.

“(T)his is the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy in which nobody believes in America’s strength anymore,” declared Sen. John McCain, Obama’s Republican rival back in 2008, before an audience of some 14,000 activists of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) earlier this month.

At the same time, the neo-conservative editorial board at the Wall Street Journal has kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism, comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter, rendered seemingly helpless in 1979 by the hostage seizure in Iran, the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign-affairs columnist, Bret Stephens, suggested that Obama slap tough sanctions on President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and business elite (steps the White House began taking last week) to force the Russian leader to back down.

“Only a president as inept as Barack Obama could fail to seize the opportunity to win, or even wage, the new Cold War all over again,” according to Stephens.

Indeed, the notion of a new Cold War appeared to offer all kinds of opportunities for those interests nostalgic for the financial and bureaucratic benefits which it wrought.

While arms manufacturers have opted to remain in the background – lest their enthusiasm for a return to the golden age of sky-high defence budgets appear too obvious, even vulgar – their representatives in Congress and sympathetic think tanks have not been so constrained.

Thus, Amb. Eric Edelman (ret.), who served as Pentagon undersecretary for policy under George W. Bush, called last week for “a large increase in the defence budget, much like the one Jimmy Carter obtained after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“A jolt to the budget …would signal an end to the relative decline in U.S. military power over the post four years that, in [Defence] Secretary [Chuck] Hagel’s words, has meant that ‘we are entering an era where American dominance on the seas, in the skies, and in space can no longer be taken for granted,’” he wrote in The Weekly Standard last week.

Edelman is currently a director of the neo-conservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the successor organisation to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a letterhead organisation that championed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“That would send a powerful and unwelcome message to those in both Moscow and Beijing who are betting on the end of the unipolar world,” he added.

Writing for the same publication, Thomas Donnelly, a PNAC alumnus based at the American Enterprise Institute, argued that defence increases must include a reversal of the Obama administration’s decision to cut the active-duty from the current 522,000 troops to around 445,000, the smallest number since the eve of Washington’s entry into World War II.

He even decried other hawks, including McCain and neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who have ruled out putting “boots on the ground” to counter Russian moves, or for that matter advances by the Syrian army against rebel forces as well.

“Ukraine is still, for the present, a no-man’s-land, neither West nor East. But Ukraine is hardly the only no-man’s-land. The entire Middle East is fast become an especially gruesome. The South China Sea is likewise up for grabs. …Preserving the peace on the Eurasian landmass demands land forces,” he wrote.

In addition to restoring cuts to the army, another long-time and highly lucrative favourite of the military-industrial complex – missile defence – is being promoted as the answer to Russian moves.

“Beyond sanctions and aid to Ukraine, the most important thing we could be doing right now, with respect to Russia, is installing anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, a likely 2016 presidential aspirant, told the Washington Post last week shortly after Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney made much the same pitch, deploring Obama’s decision in 2009 to scrap a plan to install missile defences in Poland the Czech Republic as part of a “reset” in relations with Moscow.

Echoing FPI, which, much like its PNAC predecessor used to do, published an entire agenda Friday of actions to counter Moscow signed by dozens of mainly neo-conservative foreign policy analysts, Cheney called for a “joint military exercises with our NATO friends close to the Russian border,” as well as a step-up in military equipment training for Ukraine’s armed forces.

But the military-industrial complex is not the only interest that is jumping on the Crimea crisis to push for major new initiatives from which it stands to benefit financially.

Bemoaning the degree to which Ukraine, other Central European countries, as well as much of western Europe depends on Russian oil and gas, U.S. energy companies and their advocates in Congress and on the op-ed pages are pressing the administration hard to permit them to more freely export their products, especially liquefied natural gas (LNG), for which the U.S. has very few export terminals, around the world.

“Even if, in the short term, most of our LNG exports go to Asia rather than to Europe, expediting and expanding those exports would increase global supply, push down global prices, and signal to Putin that Washington is determined to squeeze his gas revenues and break his energy stranglehold on Eastern Europe,” wrote Texas Sen. John Cornyn Monday in the National Review Online.

That argument was echoed by the Washington Post, which in the past has expressed concerns about the impact on climate change of encouraging fossil fuel consumption.

But, faced with Russian actions, the Post said ramping up U.S. exports now would send an important message. “The more suppliers there are…,” it wrote Sunday, “the less control predatory regimes such as Mr. Putin’s will have over the market.”

While the administration declined to comment on Monday’s announcement by the Department of Energy that it had authorised LNG exports from a terminal in Oregon, the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s lobby group, welcomed the move.

“The economic and strategic benefits of natural gas exports have sparked a bipartisan chorus for action,” said API’s president, Jack Gerard. “Today’s approval is a welcome step toward greater energy security, and our industry stands ready to help the administration strengthen America’s position in the global energy market and provide greater security to our allies around the world,” he said.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

A pro-Russian protestor screams at Ukrainian riot police outside the regional administration building in downtown Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Credit: Zack Baddorf/IPS.

By Zack Baddorf
DONETSK, Ukraine, Mar 23 2014 (IPS)

In Donetsk’s Lenin Square, Yuroslav Korotenko keeps a constant vigil inside a tent erected just a few feet away from a massive statue of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.

“We stay here and save this monument and this place, because people in the West come [to] this place with war,” Korotenko told IPS. “People from Donetsk think about peace with Russian Federation and don’t want war in our town.”“People don’t accept the new government that is now in Kiev."

Korotenko describes himself as a protector of the square, where thousands of pro-Russian protestors have held daily demonstrations in support of a referendum to join Russia and in opposition to the government formed in Ukraine after former president Viktor Yanukovych absconded to Russia.

“People don’t accept the new government that is now in Kiev,” said Alex Yoktov, a Donetsk native who attends the rallies. “It’s like one oligarch switched to another oligarch in the government.”

Yoktov said the Euromaidan movement in the capital Kiev used violence and “extremists to get to power.” The Euromaidan protests in Kiev were held over the past several months to demand closer integration with the EU.

“I fear that Nazis like Svoboda [a Ukrainian political party] and stuff, and such parties will be the main power of the country,” he told IPS. “So they can do whatever they want. It will be almost the same situation … in Germany when fascists come to power.”

Home to about two million people, Donetsk is a major economic, industrial and scientific hub in the east located about 80 kilometres from Russia.

In early March, the city council of Donetsk called for a referendum on the future of the region to “protect the citizens from possible violent actions on the behalf of radicalised nationalistic forces.”

The council noted that it considers Russia a strategic partner.

Yoktov said he feels closer to Russia than Europe. “It’s like native relations. We are the same people as in Russia. They’re our brothers.” Many people in the region, including Yoktov, have relatives in Russia.

Nadiia Zima, a 24-year-old teacher in Donetsk, disputes Yoktov’s claim. She has protested on the streets of Donetsk in support of Euromaidan, and wasn’t paid.

Zima is convinced there will be a referendum in Donetsk, since Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the eastern part of Ukraine is historically Russian. “Any referendum is to my mind just an imperial desire of the Russian president,” Zima told IPS.

Zima worries about her country’s future. “I fear that war can start,” she told IPS. “The thing that I am afraid of more is that our Donetsk region is going to be the next after Crimea.”

Vitalik, standing guard at a Ukrainian police checkpoint about 20 kilometers outside Donetsk with about eight Ukrainians fears war, too. He didn’t want to give his last name because he fears being targeted by Ukrainian security forces.

The self-organised, unarmed volunteers huddle together near an orange and black St George flag that symbolises Russian military valour.

“We’re stopping buses that are moving around this country to check that there are no guns, weapons and stuff like that and some strange people,” Vitalik told IPS. “We are protecting Donetsk.”

The 30-year-old construction worker said he’s especially concerned about the new 60,000-strong Ukrainian National Guard, which would include members of the Right Sector paramilitary group who fought in the Euromaidan protests in Kiev.

“It’s not like we don’t trust the Ukrainian military. We don’t trust the heads of the Ukrainian military,” he said.

More than 700 kilometres away in Kiev, Vitalik Coida is also a volunteer guard, protecting the entrance of the Euromaidan protest area in central Kiev. He is a member of the Svoboda party, considered by many pro-Russians as one of the main “extremist” groups.

Cojda watches out for “provocateurs” who bring weapons and bombs. “But we patrol, we stop them, anyone who looks suspicious. All of these are people sent by Putin because you can hear their Russian accent,” he told IPS.

Cojda arrived at Euromaidan on Nov. 26, shortly after the protests began. He said his 19-year-old friend died in his arms after being shot during a battle with the Berkut, the elite riot police of Ukraine. “It was very difficult to look into his mother’s eyes because it was me that invited him to come here…to protect the country from bandits.”

The Svoboda party, he said, is “really fighting for truth and for freedom.” He said he would remain at Euromaidan until Russian troops leave Ukraine.

The mistrust of the Euromaidan activists is the result of an “information war” led by Russia and Ukrainian elites, according to Donetsk Euromaidan activist Aleksandr Beznis.

“The people do not know the truth,” Beznis told IPS. “There are no extremists from my country from Maidan.” He said Ukraine’s biggest problem is now Russia.

Beznis came from Donetsk to Kiev this week to get weapons training.

“We like Russia, too, but we don’t want any war here,” Beznis said. “As we don’t want to be involved, we need to support our safety and democracy in Ukraine. We must protect our democracy and we must train for our power.”

His biggest fear is civil war. “I hope that it will not happen. I really hope. I try not to think about it,” he said.

Vitalik, the pro-Russian checkpoint guard just outside of Donetsk, says much the same. “Nobody wants a war, everyone wants to stay in peace.”

Some argue that the conflicts in Syria, the Congo and Libya are part of a more general slide into a Hobbesian, or failed state, the kind of world in which the weak perish and the strong survive. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By James A. Russell
WASHINGTON, Mar 21 2014 (IPS)

Russia’s storming of the Ukrainian naval base in Crimea just as Iran and world powers wrapped up another round of negotiations in Vienna earlier this week represent seemingly contradictory bookends to a world that some believe is spinning out of control.

It’s hard not to argue that the world seems a bit trigger-happy these days.The chaos in places like Syria, the Congo, Libya, and Afghanistan has actually been the norm of international politics over much of the last century - not the exception.

Vladimir Putin’s Russian mafia thugs armed with weapons bought with oil money calmly annex the Crimea. Chinese warships ominously circle obscure shoals in the Western Pacific as Japan and other countries look on nervously. Israel and Hezbollah appear eager to settle scores and start another war in Lebanon. Syria and Libya continue their descent into a medieval-like state of nature as the world looks on not quite knowing what to do.

Noted U.S. foreign policy experts like Senator John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Condoleezza Rice have greeted these developments with howls of protest and with a call to arms to reassert the United States’ global leadership to tame the anarchic (and anti-U.S.) world.

They appear to believe that we should somehow use force or the threat of force as an instrument to restore order. Never mind that these commentators have exercised uniformly bad judgment on nearly all the major foreign policy issues of the last decade.

The protests of these commentators notwithstanding, however, it is worth discussing what all these events really mean; whether they are somehow linked and perhaps suggest a structural shift in international politics towards a more warlike system.

For the United States, these developments come as the Obama administration sensibly tries to take the country’s military off a permanent war-footing and slow the growth in the defence budget — a budget that will still see the United States spend more on its military than most of the rest of the world combined.

The first issue is whether the events in Crimea are emblematic of a global system in which developed states may reconsider the basic calculus that going to war with each other doesn’t pay.

Vladimir Putin may have correctly calculated that the West doesn’t care enough about Crimea to militarily stop Russia, but would the same calculus apply if he tried to seize Moldova, Poland, or some part of Eastern Europe?

Similarly, would the Central Committee in Beijing risk a wider war in the Pacific over the bits of rocks in the South China Sea that are claimed by various countries?

While we can’t know the answer to these questions, the political leadership of both Russia and China clearly would face significant political, economic, and military costs in choosing to exercise force in a dispute in which the world’s developed states could not or would not back down.

These considerations remain a powerful deterrent to a resumption of war between the developed states, events in Crimea notwithstanding – although miscalculations by foolhardy leaders like Putin are always a possibility.

The second kind of inter-state dispute are those between countries/actors that have deep-seated, historic disputes.

Clearly, the most dangerous of these situations is the relationship between India and Pakistan — two nuclear-armed states that have been exchanging fire directly  and indirectly for much of the last half century.

Similarly, the situation in the Middle East stemming from Israel’s still unfinished wars of independence remains a constant source of regional instability.

Maybe one day, Israel and its neighbours will finally decide on a set of agreeable borders, but until they do we can all expect them to resort to occasional violence until the issue is settled.

Try as we might, there’s not much the international community can do about these enduring disputes until the parties themselves seek peaceful solutions that address their grievances.

The third kind of war is like those in Syria, the Congo, and Libya that some argue is part of a more general slide into a Hobbesian, or failed state, kind of world in which the weak perish and the strong survive.

Here again, however, we have to wonder what if anything is new with these wars. As much as we might not like it, internal political evolution in developing states usually entails violence until winners in the contests for political authority emerge.

The West’s own evolution in Europe took hundreds of years of bloodshed until established political systems took shape that settled disputes peacefully.

The chaos in places like Syria, the Congo, Libya, and Afghanistan has actually been the norm of international politics over much of the last century – not the exception.

This returns us to the other bookend cited at the outset of this piece — the reconvened negotiations in Vienna between Iran and the international community.

These meetings point to perhaps the most significant change in the international system over the last century in which global institutions have emerged as mechanisms to control state behaviour through an incentive structure that discourages war and encourages generally accepted behavioural norms.

These institutions, such as the United Nations, and its supporting regulatory structures like the International Atomic Energy Agency, have helped establish new behavioural norms that impose serious costs on states that do not observe the rules.

While we cannot be certain why Iran seeks a negotiated solution with the international community over its nuclear programme, it is clear that the international community has imposed significant economic costs on Iran over the last eight years of sanctions.

That same set of global institutions and regulatory regimes supported by the United States will almost certainly enact sanctions that will impose significant costs on Russia as a result of its illegal seizure of the Crimea.

Those costs will build up over time, just as they have for Iran and other states like North Korea that find themselves outside of the general global political and economic system.

Russia will discover the same lesson learned by Iran – it’s an expensive and arguably unsustainable proposition to be the object of international obloquy.

For those arguing for a more militarised U.S. response to these disparate events, it’s worth returning to George F. Kennan’s basic argument for a patient, defensive global posture.

Kennan argued that inherent U.S. and Western strength would see it through the Cold War and triumph over its weaker foes in Moscow.

As Kennan correctly noted: we were strong, they were weaker. Time was on our side, not theirs.

The same holds true today. Putin’s Russia is a paper tiger that is awash in oil money but with huge structural problems.

Russia’s corrupt, mafia-like dictatorship will weaken over time as it is excluded from the system of global political and economic interaction.

The world’s networked political and economic institutions only reinforce the strength of the West and those other members of the international community that choose to play by the accepted rules for peaceful global interaction.

In places like Syria, we need to recognise that these wars are part of the durable disorder of global politics that cannot necessarily be managed by us or anyone else despite the awful plight of the poor innocent civilians and children – who always bear the ultimate costs of these tragic conflicts.

We need to calm down and recognise that the international system is not becoming unglued; it is simply exhibiting immutable characteristics that have been with us for much of recorded history.

We should, however, be more confident of the ability of the system (with U.S. leadership) to police itself and avoid rash decisions that will only make these situations worse.

James A. Russell is an Associate Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, where he is teaching courses on Middle East security affairs, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and national security strategy.

Independence Square in Kiev on Feb. 24, 2014. Credit: Natalia Kravchuk/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 20 2014 (IPS)

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, conscious of the stark ineffectiveness of the Security Council over the upheaval in Ukraine, is engaged in a round of shuttle diplomacy with Russian and Ukrainian leaders to help resolve the crisis in that region.

“The secretary-general is desperately trying to create a U.N. role in the spreading dispute,” said one Third World diplomat."Imagine the response from Washington if Russia or China or some other sizable world power had worked hard to build a military and/or political alliance near U.S. borders." -- Norman Solomon

“It’s a good try – but in a lost cause,” he said, pointing out that Ban is up against a tough-talking Russian President Vladimir Putin who has already rejected a political compromise held out by U.S. President Barack Obama.

Norman Solomon, founding director of the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy, told IPS it is proper that “Ban Ki-moon should try to mediate the conflict, but it’s too bad his itinerary on this trip won’t also take him to Washington.”

Placing recent events in context, the U.S. and Russian governments are both blameworthy, he said.

“And if one takes seriously the unfortunate but very real dynamics that impel large nations to be concerned about spheres of influence – particularly in the vicinity of their borders – the U.N. secretary-general should be willing to confront President Obama as well as President Putin,” said Solomon, author of ‘War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.’

He said one of the ways that Ban could move toward defusing this crisis would involve urging a rollback of the expansion of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), along with an ironclad pledge from NATO to never seek membership from Ukraine.

“A secretary-general less subservient to the U.S. government might be willing to give it a try,” he said.

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, told IPS, “I don’t know what the U.N. secretary-general did while that coup was planned and carried out, but his actions certainly come too late now.”

It would be interesting if he stated the coup in Ukraine was just that, and condemned the West for its interference, he added.

“For U.S. officials and press to claim somehow that the coup which occurred in Ukraine, engineered by the West, complied with law, while the referendum in Crimea did not, is utter hypocrisy,” said Ratner, president of the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights.

“But the facts are hard to find in the mainstream media,” he added.

John Quigley, professor emeritus of international law at Ohio State University, told IPS it would advance the cause of peace and stability if the secretary-general supports the right of self-determination of the people of Crimea and if he distances himself from the statements of Western leaders who have denounced the referendum vote in Crimea and who view the incorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federation as an unlawful annexation.

“The principles of the U.N. Charter require such a stance on his part,” said Quigley, author of ‘The Ruses for War: American Intervention since World War II.’

Asked about his meeting with Putin, the secretary-general told reporters in Moscow Thursday: “I am not in a position to disclose all what the president said. What I can tell you is that I expressed my very serious, grave concerns about the current situation where tension is going [up].”

Political emotions have been hardened between important countries, particularly Russia, as a permanent member of the Security Council, and the European Union and the United States. They should really resolve this issue peacefully, Ban added.

Solomon told IPS the last three U.S. presidents, including Obama, have betrayed the promise of a peaceful, cooperative Europe by relentlessly promoting NATO expansion toward Russia’s borders.

“Imagine the response from Washington if Russia or China or some other sizable world power had worked hard to build a military and/or political alliance near U.S. borders. The cries of outrage from the USA would be matched by strenuous and muscular forms of intervention,” said Solomon.

Yet top officials of the U.S. government continue to act as though Russian leaders have no legitimate security interests in what goes on in Ukraine, he pointed out.

Solomon said the arrogance of nationalistic and geopolitical power matches up from the White House to the Kremlin and back again, with dangerous escalation of words and deeds.

“The culpability of the Kremlin is obvious, while the culpability of the White House may seem foggy,” he said.

Ratner told IPS, “I think it’s important to take on the dominant narrative in the Western press that somehow the overthrow of the government in the Ukraine was good, that Putin is the imperialist and that Russia is unlawfully taking over the Crimea.”

For a long time, he pointed out, the West attempted to undermine Ukraine, make it part of Europe and pull it away from Russia.

And it has tried this with other Republics that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, said Ratner.

“In Ukraine, as we know, the West tried to get the government to sign an agreement making the West the exclusive trading partner and pulling it into Western military alliances,” he said.

“As we know from the leaked phone call between U.S. officials, the United States., as Professor Stephen Cohen wrote in the Nation, was plotting to midwife a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government by ousting or neutralizing its democratically elected president – that is, a coup.

“So now we have had the coup – a successful effort by the West to continue to weaken and isolate Russia,” he noted.

Quigley told IPS the secretary-general is calling for a solution based on principles of the U.N. Charter. And self-determination is one of those principles.

The people of Crimea have been consistently in favour of separation from Ukraine since the time of the break-up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The unfortunate focus on sanctions by the major Western powers has meant that pressing human rights issues are being ignored, said Quigley.

The secretary-general plans to meet with members of the U.N. human rights monitoring mission in Kiev on Friday. This is most helpful, he added.

Ban could also focus on human rights in Crimea, in particular the concerns of the two major minorities there – Ukrainians and Tatars – who oppose in the main the affiliation of Crimea with Russia.

The secretary-general should have raised this issue with the Russian Federation so that it might provide some assurances the rights of these minorities will be respected, he added.

Muscovites at the entrance to Red Square. Experts say the impact of any strong Western sanctions would be felt by ordinary Russians. Credit: Pavol Stracansky/IPS.

By Pavol Stracansky
MOSCOW, Mar 20 2014 (IPS)

As the West imposes what have been called the most comprehensive sanctions on Russia since the end of the Cold War, many ordinary Russians say they have no fear of any economic measures the United States or the European Union may take against their country.

Since the Russian invasion of the Crimean peninsula at the end of last month, Western leaders have been threatening Moscow with economic sanctions.

The threat of sanctions sent stocks on Russian exchanges tumbling and added to what has been a massive capital flight – when investors pull money out of a country’s economy – since the start of the year.There is resolute confidence among many ordinary Russians that Russia is more than strong enough to withstand any economic assault.

Economists say that the already ailing Russian economy could be severely affected if harsh, targeted sanctions were implemented.

The referendum in Crimea at the weekend – condemned by much of the international community as illegitimate and illegal and which has resulted in the region being set to become part of Russia within possibly months – has now brought the first round of those sanctions.

So far, the EU sanctions will see EU-wide assets of 21 Russian and Crimean individuals identified as linked to unrest in Crimea frozen while those same people face a travel ban. The U.S. sanctions are similar but apply to 11 people.

And although widely seen as limited in scope, further measures have been pledged by the U.S. and the EU if Russia does not move to de-escalate the crisis.

While the Russian government and other politicians have responded by preparing a series of counter measures, there is resolute confidence among many ordinary Russians that Russia is more than strong enough, economically and politically, to withstand any economic assault the West launches at it. The street mood seems defiant, even if economists warn of consequences in the face of strong sanctions.

This confidence is being bolstered by reports in the Russian media, much of which is controlled by the Kremlin.

Since the invasion of Crimea, local media has portrayed the West as colluding with an illegal and reprobate Ukrainian government bent on oppressing the majority ethnic Russian population in Crimea.

It has also played on the widespread belief among Russians that Crimea is naturally a part of Russia – it was made part of Ukraine in 1954 by then Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev. Russian media has now posited Russia as a liberator securing the safety of its citizens in a land unfairly taken from it.

It has also emphasised the country’s military might. On Sunday the head of the state broadcasting network Russia Today, Dmitri Kiselev, spoke on his news show of how Russia remained the only country in the world capable of reducing the U.S. to “radioactive ash”.

Such talk has created a renewed sense of Russian power among many. In a survey by the independent Levada polling agency released this week, two thirds of Russians see Russia as a global superpower – up 16 percent since 2011.

Crucially, newspapers have carried reports saying that the sanctions will only push Russia closer to China and other Asian states and strengthen economic ties with them, replacing any lost trade with the West.

Maria Yemelianenko, 29, a supermarket worker in Moscow, seemed to sum up the general mood among Russians towards Western sanctions. She told IPS: “Russia is a huge country and sanctions could not affect us like they have with other countries in the past. We have a lot of our own resources.

“I am sure President Putin knows what he is doing, and the people of Russia will not go hungry.”

But while many Russian politicians have dismissed the potential effects of sanctions, not everyone is convinced there will not be some repercussions for the Russian economy.

Alexei Kudrin, a member of the Presidium of the Russian president’s Economic Council, was quoted by the Yandex.ru news website as saying that economic growth could be affected negatively and that both foreign and domestic investment could be hurt.

Dmitry Seleznev, 52, an economist at a large agricultural production company in St Petersburg, told IPS that the Russian economy would feel the effects of sanctions.

He said: “Investment growth will fall, the economy may lose its chance to come out of its current stagnation and exports could fall.”

Some economic fallout from the Crimean crisis has already been seen. Russian stocks have been losing heavily since the start of the year, but the falls deepened in the run-up to the referendum at the weekend.

Global investment houses issued warnings last week that foreign investors were pulling their money out of the country at a record rate because of Russia’s involvement in Crimea and that as of the end of last week, financial outflows from Russia had reached 45 billion dollars since the start of 2014 – a 60 percent rise from the first quarter of 2013.

Gross domestic product (GDP) growth forecasts have also been slashed and some stock market analysts have spoken of long-term damage being done to Russia’s ability to attract investment because of negative perceptions of Russia among foreign investors.

Other experts believe though that while the current sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the EU are limited, further sanctions would indeed have the potential to make life ‘difficult’ for ordinary Russians.

Ian Bond, Director of Foreign Policy at the Centre for European Reform think-tank in London, told IPS: “The EU may be forced into a position where it has to apply broader sanctions, for example, to shut Russian banks out of European financial markets. And the U.S. can make life really difficult by denying Russia access to the U.S. system for dollar transactions.

“That sanction has had a major impact on the Iranian economy, for example, and would be noticed by ordinary Russians.”

He added that at that point support for President Putin, which is currently high among the general Russian population, could begin to wane.

He said: “Whether Putin’s popularity would be affected depends on how effective his propaganda operation is. So far it seems to be working well – his popularity in Russia seems to have risen since the takeover of Crimea, and a lot of people seem to be swallowing the fairytale that the new Ukrainian government is full of fascists and anti-Semites.”

One asset manager running a Russian equity fund who spoke to IPS, but asked not to be named, said that Russia’s economy would be in trouble if people’s worst fears were realised and the current situation escalated into armed conflict.

“The country would then be facing huge economic problems,” he said.

This is one thing which Russians do not want though. Despite their support for Crimea’s return to Russia and positive view of Moscow’s role in effecting that change, recent polls have shown a majority are against any Russian involvement in a military conflict in Ukraine.

“The referendum in Crimea went peacefully and people will probably eventually understand it was the will of the people there,” said Sergei Mishkhin, a 20-year-old student in Moscow.” I want Russia to have friendly relations with all countries. We are just hoping for peace.”

A Russian armoured personnel carrier in Simferopol, the provincial capital of Crimea. Credit: Zack Baddorf/IPS.

By Zack Baddorf
SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine , Mar 19 2014 (IPS)

Crimean officials have reported that roughly 97 percent of Crimeans voted for independence from Ukraine on Sunday, with a turnout of about 80 percent. Yet the security situation in Crimea has led many to question how free the vote really was.

“Leaving the question of the referendum’s legality aside, the situation on the ground is hardly conducive to free expression of one’s will,” Dr. Anna Neistat, Human Rights Watch associate director who is now in Crimea, told IPS.“In the lead-up to the referendum the authorities spared no effort to control information and silence critics." -- Dr. Anna Neistat, Human Rights Watch associate director

“With unmarked armoured personnel carriers without licence plates in the streets, surrounded by fully armed men, and subjected to incessant pro-Russian propaganda, Crimeans [felt] that the choice has already been made for them,” she said.

Russian armed personnel carriers were parked on street corners throughout the Crimean capital Simferopol. The Russians have since surrounded and taken ground inside Ukrainian military bases throughout the peninsula.

Paramilitary groups of Cossacks, a Slavic people, brought from Russia roamed the streets on the day of the vote and leading up to it. Joined by members of local “self-defence” groups wearing distinctive red armbands, they attacked foreign and local journalists.

Slovak photojournalist Jan Husar was the victim of such an attack.

On Mar. 12, just a few days before the vote, Husar was taking photos at Simferopol airport of local militants barring flights coming from Kiev and Istanbul. They only let planes flying in from Moscow land.

Outside the airport terminal, he took a picture of a car passing by. “In the car were some guys,” he told IPS. “They jumped out. One had a handgun.” Husar speculates they may have been the Russian secret service.

They demanded to see his papers. A group of Cossacks started surrounding Husar. The two unidentified men from the car left after Husar deleted the picture of their vehicle but the Cossacks stayed.

They started to push him towards a nearby forest. Only after the intervention of a local resident did they let Husar go, but they kept his camera memory cards.

“In the lead-up to the referendum the authorities spared no effort to control information and silence critics,” Neistat told IPS. The units attacking journalists “acted completely outside of the law, with no clear chain of command and no accountability.”

“So imagine if you were a guy who was a [political] leader who wanted to speak out,” Husar said. “You could get in a really, really dangerous situation.”

Some activists in Crimea experienced just that. Viktor Neganov, leader of the Euromaidan movement in the Crimean city Sevastopol, led about 100 Ukrainians in his hometown to call for an end to corruption. At one protest, a pro-Russian crowd confronted the activists. They attacked Neganov, knocking him down.

“They started to punch me, I tried to protect myself but there were too many people – 10 or 20 from different sides,” Neganov told IPS.

Neganov said the protests were infiltrated and orchestrated by Russian spies and military officers pretending to be ordinary citizens. After facing threats later, he slipped away from Crimea.

Despite the crackdown, many voters also told IPS they had little concern about Russian troops occupying their homeland.

“I’m supporting the Russian troops. If there weren’t Russian troops, there would be something like what happened at Maidan in Kiev,” said Vladimir Ifirich, who said he voted for Crimea to join Russia.

The Maidan in Kiev has been the centre of pro-democracy protests over the past several months. Those protests have come to be known as the Euromaidan movement since the movement was started in opposition to former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to not sign a European Union trade deal.

Voter Gunadi Blinsky, a 60-year-old emergency service worker in Simferopol, also doesn’t mind the Russian military presence.

“Actually we don’t experience any inconvenience with Russian troops here,” he told IPS. “The other day, we were at the theatre, today we’re going to a concert. So no problem at all.”

Construction plant worker Natasha Mamayeva echoed an indifference to the Russian occupation. “Everything is calm,” she said. “So far the Russian troops have done no harm to local people.”

On Tuesday, Russian troops stormed a Ukrainian military base in Crimea, killing a Ukrainian soldier and wounding another in the process of taking control. In the Crimean port city Yalta, Russian troops were reported to have kidnapped a Ukrainian military foreign intelligence service chief.

At a polling station in Simferopol with Soviet-style music being blasted out, local election official Ivana Lubov-Dutrianko told IPS that the vote was free and fair.

“Everything is quiet here,” she said. “Please tell the truth: Nobody forced anyone to vote. Everyone is free to vote how they want.”

But in Bakhchisarai town, just a half hour’s drive south of Simferopol, many boycotted the vote. It’s the heartland of the Turkic ethnic group, the Tatars, who make up about 12 percent of the Crimean population. The entire Tatar population was forcibly deported from Crimea in 1944 by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

“If the diplomatic efforts fail, obviously some Tatars will join the insurgency and run a guerrilla war,” according to Imiril Mirov, the Bakhchisarai district government chief.

But there is no sign of any Tatar resistance movement. “We have no armed units, no self-defence, nothing at all,” Mirov told IPS. The primary goal is to avoid bloodshed, he said.

Crowds waving Crimean and Russian flags in Simferopol in Crimea after the referendum. Credit: Alexey Yakushechkin/IPS.

By Pavol Stracansky
KIEV, Mar 18 2014 (IPS)

As Crimea prepares to become part of Russia following a referendum which much of the international community says has no legitimacy, families on the peninsula are being forced apart by the political upheaval while others are considering leaving the region.

Results of the referendum held Sunday suggest that an overwhelming majority of Crimeans want to become part of Russia, with official results showing that 97 percent of voters backed joining Russia following a turnout of just over 82 percent. Crimea has been a southern republic of Ukraine.

But while many people in cities like Sevastopol, and in Simferopol which is the regional capital, celebrated well into the night after the results were announced, the decision is already taking a toll on many local families.There is a noticeable political divide between younger and older people.

Valery Dorozhkhin, 39, a professor at Simferopol University, told IPS: “There are conflicts in families here. In some you have grandparents whose family roots were in Russia who very strongly support Russia. Then you have their grandchildren who feel Ukrainian and will have voted against joining Russia in the referendum.”

Large parts of southern and eastern Ukraine have historically had close cultural ties to Russia. But these have always been especially strong in Crimea.

Crimea was annexed by the Russian empire in the late 18^th century. But Russians did not form a majority in the region until after World War II.

This came about largely after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin deported the entire population of Tatars – around 200,000 people – en masse to labour camps in central Asia in 1944 on false charges that they had collaborated with Nazis. Nearly half of those deported died of starvation or disease within a year. Russians were moved into Crimea to replace those expelled.

In 1954, then Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev decided to make Crimea a part of Ukraine. Today, 60 percent of the Crimean population is ethnic Russian and even more speak Russian as their first language.

As part of the Soviet Union, any potential ethnic tensions were largely negligible, but since Ukraine’s independence in 1991 there have been calls from separatist groups among the Russian community in Crimea for secession, with waxing and waning support.

The political upheavals across Ukraine in recent months exacerbated those ethnic tensions and the recent run-up to the elections has been marked by, many rights activists and independent observers say, violence and repression against non-Russian communities and those supporting the new Ukrainian government in Kiev.

But there is not just an ideological dividing line between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. There is also a noticeable political divide between younger and older people.

Of the thousands who turned out in rallies in support of Crimea remaining part of Ukraine ahead of the referendum, many of them, although certainly not exclusively, were from the younger generation.

Many younger people who have never known Crimea as anything other than a part of Ukraine have found themselves confused and in some cases fearful of what life under a different regime will be like.

“It is especially hard for younger people in Crimea at the moment. They see themselves as Ukrainians, they feel Ukrainian,” Dorozhkhin told IPS.

This concern about what will come next has already led to some people considering leaving Crimea. There have been reports of individual families deciding to leave the region, while others are concerned about their work.

Some Ukrainians living in Crimea have said they have lost their jobs for perceived support to authorities in Kiev.

Vladimir Vasylenko, a 37-year-old NGO worker in Sevastopol, sums up the mood of those who are concerned about what the future holds for them.

Speaking to IPS, he is worried and almost tearful, as he explains how he is afraid that Russian authorities’ generally negative attitude to the third sector could put his work in jeopardy. But he says he is also worried because he has no idea what life in general will be like under Russian rule.

“I wonder whether I should leave or not. I sometimes think that yes, I will, but I have older members of my family, my mother and grandmother, who will not leave, who do not want to go. I have to think of them too. I just don’t know what to do. The worst thing is that no one knows what is going to come next.”

Tensions remain in Crimea despite the support shown for a return to Russia in the referendum. The Tatar population, which makes up 13 percent of the Crimean population, boycotted the referendum. There is a growing fear in communities of Tatars, many of whom distrust Russia because of what happened to their grandparents and ancestors under Stalin.

They say that since the Russian occupation, their communities have grown fearful of attacks by armed pro-Russian “self-defence” groups, which they say roam the streets at night.

Some say that they have woken up to find white crosses daubed on their front doors and out of fear of attack they have set up their own self-defence squads controlling areas with Tatar populations, while others guard mosques.

But those who backed integration into Russia now see a bright future ahead for Crimea.

Aleksandr Pavluk, a 54-year-old resident of Simferopol who works in one of Crimea’s key industries, tourism, told IPS: “Everything here is fine after the referendum. We’re all very happy and people are looking forward to being part of Russia.

“We are also hoping to have a good summer tourist season when we expect to see lots of holidaymakers from both Russia and from Ukraine.”

Protests against the Russian invasion of Crimea at the Maidan in Kiev. Credit: Justin Hyatt/IPS.

By Justin Hyatt
KIEV, Mar 15 2014 (IPS)

Amidst rising tensions within Ukraine, between its government and Russia, and even more between Russia and the West, many are now beginning to fear the beginning of a new Cold War. Talk of sanctions is finding new supporters, and there are proposals to freeze plans for a G8 summit scheduled in Russia later this year.

At the end of February pro-Russian gunmen seized key buildings in the Crimean capital Simferopol, and on Mar. 6 the Crimean parliament asked to join Russia. It set a referendum on this question for Mar. 16.

Crimea is a southern region of Ukraine with a large Russian-speaking population, and significantly under Russian cultural and political influence. Russian or pro-Russian forces are now said to control most of Ukraine’s southern peninsula.“We are one nation. Not divided, just diverse."

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the need for a presence in the Crimea in order to protect the Russian-speaking population there. On the other hand Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has pledged that Ukraine will not give a “single centimetre” of land to Russia.

Tensions have escalated on the peninsula. While only warning shots have been fired so far, pro-Ukrainian protestors as well as journalists have been physically and verbally assaulted. Election observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) who attempted to enter Crimea in the last few days were chased away.

Questions of language and identity have assumed enormous proportions as Ukraine plunges deeper into turmoil.

“Language and religion were not dividing factors for Ukrainians until politicians started artificially creating such confrontations,” Liliya Levandovska, researcher at the Central European University in Budapest in Hungary told IPS.

The party of former Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia following lethal clashes in Kiev, would make references to the suffering of the Russian-speaking population, said Levandovska. “But these were myths, and now Putin is broadcasting these myths to the world.”

Many eastern Ukrainians are scared they will be obliged to use only Ukrainian language, Tamara Zlobina, an analyst earlier with the Institute for Strategic Studies in Kiev told IPS. “They are fed disinformation by Putin’s propaganda.”

Many easterners, she said, are frustrated by poverty and helplessness, but may end up venting their anger towards pro-Ukrainian activists, instead of the regime.

“There are conflicts and discussions going on everyday on the streets,” said Zlobina. “The east has its own Maidan now. There are pro-Ukrainian activist groups, pro-Russian activist groups, and then there are masses who are confused. The situation is unclear.”

But Zlobina sees the tide turning. She believes that false media propaganda is backfiring and that it has only “provoked a lot of eastern Ukrainians to join the Euromaidan movement and fight for their right to have dignity and a decent future.” The Euromaidan movement is named after Ukrainian protests in Kiev demanding better rights and greater integration with the EU.

Levandovska says people who came from the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine to visit the Maidan returned with a decidedly different picture from what they had gleaned from the media.

The Crimean Tatars are an ethnic Turkic group who were deported by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to central Asia in 1944. They currently make up 12 percent of the Crimean population.

Highly vociferous in their non-alignment with Moscow, they recently staged a public protest in Simferopol in support of a united Ukraine, outnumbering a pro-Russian protest held at the same time. “Vladimir Putin realised then that a media assault was not enough, that separation would have to come by force,” Levandovska told IPS.

Activists reported that pro-Russian powers shut down all Ukrainian TV channels in Sevastopol, such as ICTV, Novyi and TRK Ukraina.

Billboards in Crimea are depicting a choice between a “Nazi” Ukraine, or joining the Russian federation. The Tatars plan to boycott the referendum.

On Mar. 8, on International Women’s Day, a special gathering took place on the Maidan in Kiev. Banners held by women bore slogans such as “Equality, Solidarity, Sisterhood” and “Women of Maidan to Women of Crimea.” Natalia Sherimbetova, a language instructor from Kiev, said that women from Crimea would not get to hear about the event because Ukrainian TV channels are no longer accessible there.

In another show of solidarity with the Russian-speaking population of western and southern Ukraine, a language-swap day was organised in Lviv, Donetsk and Kiev where Ukrainian speakers spoke Russian for a day and vice-versa. “It was powerful. Even in the most Western of Ukrainian cities, Lviv, many people made a point to speak Russian,” Sherimbetova told IPS.

It’s difficult to gauge just how many people participated in the language swap, but Sherimbetova insists that the essence is in the symbolic gesture of this action, and that Ukrainians, especially in the West, were trying to send a message to their Russian-speaking brethren.

“We are one nation. Not divided, just diverse,” said Levandovska. “It is just a matter of time, until the people in the east will stop believing false propaganda. We all want long-term peace and prosperity for Ukraine.”

A banner used by pro-Russian supporters during rallies in Simferopol in Crimea. It reads: ‘Crimea, Against Nazism’. Credit: Alexey Yakushechkin/IPS.

By Pavol Stracansky
KIEV, Mar 14 2014 (IPS)

Crimea is facing a violent wave of human rights abuses, activists warn, with kidnappings of journalists and rights campaigners, harassment of non-Russian minorities and reports of growing persecution of anyone thought to be sympathising with the pro-European Kiev government.

They say the autonomous region, now in de facto control of Russian troops, is spiralling into violence and repression ahead of a planned referendum on its future this Sunday.“Come Sunday the Russians will take control and its army will probably change the entire functioning of Crimea. We can only see more protests and more violence.” -- Marina Tsapok, spokeswoman for the Association of Monitors of Human Rights in Ukraine

Marina Tsapok, spokeswoman for the Association of Monitors of Human Rights in Ukraine, told IPS: “People have been kidnapped and are missing. The situation is getting worse, it is completely illegal and we are expecting even more violence, both before the referendum and after it.”

Human rights groups have feared a crackdown on potential opponents of Crimean secession ever since it was announced that the autonomous region would hold a referendum on its future.

The region’s authorities have made it clear they want Crimea to become part of Russia. Pro-Russian support among the local population – 60 percent of which is ethnic Russian – is strong.

Russian propaganda against the new Ukrainian government – which it has painted as an illegally-formed body led by fascists and neo-Nazis bent on destroying the country – has helped foment not just pro-independence sentiment, but also driven mounting antipathy towards supporters of a unified Ukraine in Crimea.

At rallies last weekend, pro-Ukrainian supporters were savagely beaten and whipped by pro-Russian militiamen. In one incident more than 100 men aggressively forced a group of women to end their peaceful protest against Russian military intervention in front of the Ukrainian Naval headquarters in Crimea’s capital, Simferopol. Many such incidents have gone unnoticed or unpunished by police, fuelling fears that pro-Russian groups are now able to violate human rights with impunity.

There have also been reports in the media of Ukrainians in Crimea afraid to leave their homes for fear they will be attacked by pro-Russian groups.

Pro-Ukrainian locals are not the only ones facing harassment though. Activists and journalists attempting to monitor the situation are being targeted.

The Euromaidan information service, which is chronicling and reporting on alleged rights abuses, says there have been a growing number of kidnaps in recent days. The name Euromaidan derives from pro-EU protests in central Kiev over the last several months.

Tsapok also told IPS that on Wednesday this week five people had been reported missing, believed kidnapped. Four were rights activists and another was a former military officer. This came just hours after five people, including journalists and activists, were found alive following abductions.

Others say they have faced death threats for trying to take photos of troops and masked gunmen outside military and civilian buildings.

Meanwhile, the region’s largest ethnic minority – the Tatars – are also under threat.

The Tatars, Turkic Muslims who lived in the region for centuries, were forcibly repatriated from Crimea in 1944. More than 200,000 were sent to labour camps in central Asia when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin accused them of collaborating with the Nazis. Almost 40,000 of them died during the journeys.

Russians were moved in in their place and Tatars only began returning to the region as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate.

They now account for roughly 14 percent of the Crimean population and, because of their history, many remain distrustful of Russia.

Since the Russian occupation, many say their communities have grown fearful of attacks by armed pro-Russian self-defence groups which they say roam the streets at night. They say that they have woken up to find white crosses daubed on their front doors.

Out of fear of attack they have set up their own self-defence squads controlling areas with Tatar populations while others guard mosques.

Heather McGill, a researcher for Amnesty International, told IPS: “These reports of the markings on the doors of Tatar people, of people’s passports being rounded up and taken away for use in the referendum, as well as the kidnappings and other human rights abuses that we are seeing show how bad things are. And, from what we can see, they are only getting worse.”

With the referendum widely expected to back Crimea joining Russia, the Kremlin will be in firm control of the peninsula. This raises questions over whether the new Crimean authorities will adopt Moscow’s current approach to human rights which has been widely condemned by the international community.

McGill told IPS: “It is very hard to see how things will be [concerning human rights] in Crimea if the vote comes out in support of joining Russia. But I would wager it will be worse than things are currently.”

Meanwhile, in Kiev, where the new Ukrainian government continues to work with Western leaders to find a solution to the Crimea crisis, rights activists fear the worse for their partner groups in Crimea as well as the future prospects for civil liberties and basic rights on the peninsula.

Tsapok told IPS: “Come Sunday the Russians will take control and its army will probably change the entire functioning of Crimea. We can only see more protests and more violence.”

But she also appealed for human rights activists and independent media everywhere to ensure that rights violations in Crimea continue to be reported and monitored.

Last week, international rights monitors were stopped from entering Crimea at gunpoint. A team from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe was turned back by members of local “self-defence” units controlling roads into the region.

Tsapok said: “Crimea today affects everyone. Today’s front line is between legality and lawlessness, between news and propaganda, between civilisation and medieval savagery.

“I say to all friends, please spread information about the situation in the Crimea, about beatings of journalists, kidnapping of civil society activists, the ‘referendum’ at gunpoint. People should not remain indifferent – or tomorrow all these bad things could happen to someone else.”

As the fate of Ukraine hangs in the balance, U.S. politicians from both parties have been scrambling to take advantage of the crisis.

Republicans in Congress have slammed President Barack Obama for his “trembling inaction.” Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has revived the hawkish approach of her pre-secretary of state years by comparing Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s actions to Hitler’s.The partisan divisions in the United States are dwarfed by the depth of animosity between those in Ukraine who favour the policies of Moscow and those who side with the new government in Kiev.

With the mid-term elections coming up this fall and the presidential elections beckoning two years hence, the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine has become the latest issue to roil partisan politics in the United States. In this case, however, the divergent rhetoric conceals a broad consensus on how Washington should deal with the crisis.

The situation on the ground in Ukraine, meanwhile, continues to be largely non-violent. But tensions remain at a high pitch.

After protesters in Kiev sent President Viktor Yanukovych in exile to Russia and took power in late February, a pro-Russian backlash gathered force in areas of the country with a large Russian-speaking minority.

The resistance has been most acute on the Crimean peninsula, a semi-autonomous region that is the only part of Ukraine where Russian speakers are in the majority. The region also hosts Russia’s Black Sea fleet, in a leasing arrangement good until 2042.

Russian troops have spread throughout Crimea, effectively neutralizing Ukrainian forces. After armed men stormed the Crimean parliament last weekend, lawmakers hastily chose a new Crimean prime minister, Sergei Aksynov, who leans toward Moscow.

He has called for a referendum on Crimea’s fate on Mar. 16 when voters will choose between Russia and Ukraine. The result is not a foregone conclusion, given the sizable number of Ukrainians and Tatars who live in Crimea.

Secretary of State John Kerry has attempted to negotiate a way out of the impasse, but his meetings this week in Paris and Rome with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, have not yielded a compromise.

Both the United States and the European Union are working quickly to assemble aid packages for the new leadership in Kiev, which presides over a rapidly tanking economy.

These diplomatic efforts have not prevented critics of the Obama administration from seizing the opportunity to repeat complaints that the president is not sufficiently strong.

Congressional opponents urged a military response to the crisis in Libya in 2011, which helped to force the president’s hand and initiate intervention.

Similar criticisms of administration weakness in the face of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war last August led the administration to ask Congress for authorisation to use military force, a plan made moot by a Russian-brokered plan for the Assad government to give up its arsenal.

The same critics have been quick to recycle their earlier judgments. Obama’s opponent in the 2008 presidential elections, John McCain (R-AZ), echoed comments he made during the Libya and Syria crises when he appeared before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual meeting in Washington on Monday.

The situation in Ukraine, he said “is the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy in which nobody believes in America’s strength anymore.”

His colleague in the House, freshman Congressman Cotton, accused the Obama administration of “trembling inaction.” The Republicans are eager to pick up seats in the mid-term elections and possibly retake control of the Senate.

For her part, Hillary Clinton is looking further ahead to the 2016 elections. During her 2008 presidential bid, she derided Obama for his lack of experience in foreign policy and called his willingness to talk with America’s adversaries “naïve.”

Obama went on to win the election and appointed Clinton his secretary of state. In her new position, she implemented the foreign policy she had previously criticised, particularly in her negotiations with the leadership in Myanmar.

Despite her misgivings about Vladimir Putin – during the 2008 elections she famously said that he lacked a soul – she led the team responsible for pushing the “reset” button on U.S.-Russian relations.

Although her reservations about Putin are not new, her comments comparing Russian actions in Crimea to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 certainly establish distance between her and the administration she once served.

Clinton has not come out and said that President Obama is weak, but her invocation of the Nazi seizure of the Sudetenland suggests that appeasement might be just around the corner.

Yet the administration and its critics do not offer substantially different recommendations for dealing with Ukraine.

The Obama administration has sent fighter jets to the region, but only to monitor the air space. No one is talking military options. The only different of opinion is over the relative mix of economic sanctions and diplomatic sticks.

The partisan divisions in the United States are, of course, dwarfed by the depth of animosity between those in Ukraine who favour the policies of Moscow and those who side with the new government in Kiev.

But despite demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, stand-offs between Russian and Ukrainian troops in Crimea, and the seizure and re-seizure of public buildings by competing factions in eastern Ukraine, so far there’s been no more violence than what might occur in an average European soccer match.

Even though politicians in the United States are failing to model bipartisan behaviour, there is still a chance that the different sides in Ukraine can find a compromise that keeps the country together and also protects the rights of minorities.

Much depends on Russian intentions and Ukrainian reactions, but also on the ability of policymakers in Washington to keep their own political ambitions in check.

A post on the Russia-Ukraine border. Demarcation of the border is often flimsy. Credit: Susan Astray/CC2.0.

By Pavol Stracansky
MOSCOW, Mar 6 2014 (IPS)

Elena Smolenskaya doesn’t hesitate a second when asked what she thinks about the Russian military intervention in Crimea. The 23-year-old Moscow student is convinced that President Vladimir Putin had no choice but to order troops into the country.

“The military action was right to protect Russian people in Crimea. This is why the majority of Russian people support what President Putin is doing. He is protecting Russian interests,” she told IPS.“The adoption of more restrictive laws is a possibility against the current backdrop of anti-Western hysteria in state-sponsored and loyalist media.”

Elena’s view is far from uncommon – especially in areas outside the country’s major cities where support for Putin has always been highest – and appears to be growing every day.

Before the Ukrainian revolution polls in Russia had shown that the majority of Russians were against intervention in their western neighbour’s affairs, but the mood appears to have shifted in the last few weeks.

While there were demonstrations in Moscow against the occupation at the weekend – swiftly suppressed with the arrest of hundreds – there were much larger counter protests in support of it. In Russia’s second city, St Petersburg, more than 15,000 turned up at a rally supporting the military operation in Crimea.

Local analysts say that many Russians see the new government in Kiev as strongly anti-Russian and made up of dangerous neo-fascists. This image was reinforced when soon after Moscow-friendly former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled the country, its new leaders proposed a law banning Russian as an official language.

In a survey by the independent Russian Levada polling group at the end of February, 43 percent of respondents described the Ukrainian protests and subsequent revolution as a violent coup, and almost a quarter categorised it as a civil war. A poll by the same organisation showed that a third thought that the overthrow of the Yanukovych regime was led by Ukrainian nationalists supported by Western secret service agents.

Clashes in Eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian locals and supporters of the Kiev government after the revolution reinforced these views.

As attention turned to Crimea, which was part of Russia until 1954 when then Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev made it part of Ukraine republic within the Soviet Union, many agreed with Kremlin claims that military intervention was a necessity to protect the almost 60 percent of Crimea’s population that is ethnic Russian, and help protect a people and culture which many in Russia see as their own.

Vasily Gomelsky, a 56-year-old clerk in Moscow, told IPS: “President Putin is right and I completely support him. He just wanted to protect the Orthodox [Christian] civilisation that has been there for hundreds of years. We were all afraid of what might happen if neo-fascists [in Kiev] take over there.”

Russian media, much of which is formally or informally state-controlled, has widely pushed the same view.

The Komsomolskaya Pravda national daily carried an interview with a 20-year-old Russian activist present at the pro-EU Euromaidan demonstrations in Kiev earlier who claimed that there were “German and American mercenaries” among the protestors leading younger members of the Ukrainian radical far right Pravy Sektor movement.

Criticism of the occupation in any media has been scarce. Where it has occurred it has, in some cases, been swiftly dealt with by the authorities.

Prof. Andrei Zubov of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations – which was founded by and remains institutionally a part of the Russian Foreign Ministry – wrote an article in the Vedemosti national daily condemning the intervention and likening President Putin to Hitler.

In another interview he said that the Russian president had “clearly lost his mind.”

He was sacked early this week. He said he believed the Foreign Ministry had forced his bosses to get rid of him.

Some critics say the professor’s dismissal typifies the approach to dissent of an administration which has been widely condemned by activists and the international community for its crackdown on rights since Putin began his latest presidential term in 2012.

The adoption of controversial legislation on gay propaganda, a crackdown on third sector organisations, repression of political opponents and systematic harassment of activists, among others, have all been cited as examples of Russian authorities’ disregard for rights.

Others warn that new-found support in the wake of the conflict will allow President Putin to pursue even more rigorous curbs on basic freedoms.

“Overall, Putin’s foreign policy commands support. The Crimean conflict will allow him to consolidate the country and the majority of the population will, in the end, support him. It will also allow him to put an additional squeeze on dissent,” Nikolai Sokov, a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation (VCDNP), told IPS.

Just last week an anti-terrorist bill giving security forces sweeping powers in cases of suspected terrorism was approved by Russian parliament in a first reading.

The bill included, among other things, heavily-criticised controls of internet use. But it was approved without problems and one MP was reported as saying that critics need only go to Kiev to see why the bill was so desperately needed.

“The bills were actually introduced several weeks ago but the Ukraine conflict ensured they would be adopted,” said Sokov.

Also, the Russian State Agency for Financial Monitoring said Wednesday that it had launched an investigation after uncovering that Ukrainian ultra-nationalists were being funded by the same donor organisations as some Russian NGOs.

Controversial legislation forces NGOs in Russia which receive finance from abroad to be registered as ‘foreign agents’, and are subject to regular checks by local authorities.

Tanya Lokshina, Russia programme director at Human Rights Watch, told IPS: “The news of the investigation is very threatening for all NGOs which receive foreign funding.”

She added: “The adoption of more restrictive laws is a possibility against the current backdrop of anti-Western hysteria in state-sponsored and loyalist media.”

Meanwhile, support for President Putin among ordinary Russians appears firm with many saying it is he, rather than the West, who is looking to avoid escalating the current crisis into a war.

“Some people did fear that [occupying Crimea] could lead to war, but as we have seen, President Putin has acted sensibly with regard to this. He is looking out for Russian interests, not looking for confrontation,” Smolenskaya told IPS.

Russian troops control the streets in the Crimean city Simferopol. Credit: Alexey Yakushechkin/IPS.

By Pavol Stracansky
KIEV, Mar 4 2014 (IPS)

Crimea could remain under Russian control indefinitely as the current crisis – described by some politicians as Europe’s gravest since the end of the Cold War – threatens to turn into a “frozen conflict”, experts say.

The Ukrainian peninsula is now under de facto Russian military control with Ukrainian military bases surrounded, and control of infrastructure and strategic buildings across the region in the hands of Russian commanders.Many in Crimea regard themselves as Russian, and since the break-up of the Soviet Union local secession movements have had varied levels of support.

And despite increasingly harsh rhetoric and threats of the strongest possible diplomatic action from U.S. and European leaders, many experts believe that there is little the West can do to loosen Moscow’s grip on the region.

Ian Bond, Director of Foreign Policy at the Centre for European Reform (CER) think tank in London, told IPS: “Unfortunately, things have got to the point where it looks that the best case scenario for the development of the present situation is that Russian troops end up staying in Crimea, the situation there will remain as it is now, and this becomes a ‘frozen conflict’.”

Crimea, today an autonomous republic in Ukraine, has long had close cultural ties with Russia. It is home to the majority of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians, many of whom came there during the forced repatriation of more than 200,000 Tartars – Turkic Muslims who lived in the region for centuries – in 1944.

They were sent to labour camps in Central Asia and replaced by Russians on the orders of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin who was angry at alleged collaboration between local Tartars and the Nazis during World War II. Tartars today make up a significant minority of Crimea’s population.

The Crimea was also part of Russia until 1954 when then Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev made it a part of Ukraine republic within the Soviet Union.

Russia has maintained a physical presence on the peninsula in the form of its massive naval base in the Black Sea port of Sevastopol, which it holds under a lease agreement with Kiev and which gives Russian troops the right to move around parts of Crimea.

Many in Crimea regard themselves as Russian, and since the break-up of the Soviet Union local secession movements have had varied levels of support.

The Euromaidan protests in Kiev, a series of protests through winter to demand closer integration with the EU, failed to gain support on the peninsula. As the revolution came to an end, calls for independence in Crimea grew louder, as did those for help from Moscow as clashes broke out among pro-Russian and pro-Kiev groups in some parts of eastern Ukraine.

The calls were answered by Moscow with the Kremlin claiming its troops were needed to protect Russian citizens. The troops, although not universally feted by locals, have not faced any aggression.

Locals in Crimea who spoke to IPS said that there was a wary peace in many towns and cities in the region and that the situation was far less tense than the media had been reporting.

Alexandr Yakushechkin, 45, from Simferopol, said: “Things here are actually quiet and peaceful. There are Russian soldiers only in front of two main administration buildings in Simferopol but nowhere else.”

He added that he did not expect Russian soldiers to stay in Crimea past a March 30 referendum on the country’s future status.

But others are already planning for the long-term presence of Russian soldiers and what that could mean for the economy in a region which relies heavily on tourism.

Gala Amarando, who works in the local tourist industry in Simferopol, told IPS: “People in Crimea live for the tourist season and they know things this summer may be complicated. They are already thinking of having to slash prices and ways to attract holidaymakers.”

With Moscow showing no signs of backing down on its intervention and moving more and more soldiers into the peninsula every day, some experts believe Russian troops could become a permanent presence, citing the 2008 invasion of the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia.

Georgia had tried to bring the region to heel with force but Moscow sent in troops amid claims that the people of South Ossetia were in danger. Georgia lost one-fifth of its territory in the ensuing battle and while the West imposed sanctions and Russia signed a ceasefire agreement saying it would withdraw troops, it never honoured it fully, and troops remained.

This raises questions over the effectiveness of any potential Western sanctions against Russia this time around.

The CER’s Bond told IPS: “What Russia learnt from the 2008 conflict in Georgia is that there were sanctions for a while and then they were forgotten fairly soon, and Barack Obama came into office and started to try and reset relations between Washington and Moscow.

“What Vladimir Putin may be thinking now is that if no blood is shed, the consequences may not be that bad, and the next U.S. president may try and reset relations with Moscow again. Perhaps Putin is thinking it is worth the risk.”

Some believe that targeted sanctions – particularly against the massive wealth of Russia’s ruling elite held abroad – may have some effect in making the Kremlin at least consider its position, others argue that Crimea will be used by Putin as collateral until he gets what he wants – a government that will have the support of all Ukrainian regions and honour previous deal he had made with Kiev.

Nikolai Sokov, a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation (VCDNP), told IPS: “The only thing that can change his mind [about holding Crimea] is an effective government in Kiev that can hold the country together and stick to earlier agreements.”

However, there is a fear that Putin may, having successfully gained control of Crimea, try to intervene in other parts of East Ukraine where pro-Russian sentiment is also strong – with terrible consequences.

Support for Russia and its military is seen as far less clear cut in regions in East Ukraine outside Crimea, and armed conflict between Russian troops and either the Ukrainian army or paramilitary pro-western groups would be almost certain.

Bond told IPS: “While the best case scenario is a ‘frozen conflict’, the worst case scenario is that Putin intervenes in other parts of Ukraine. Then it would get really bad. The consequences of this, not just for Ukraine but the wider world as well, really do not even bear thinking about.”