Tag: Ukraine

Reporting from Ukraine, Frum finds little evidence of them:

Since February 22, there have been six notable anti-Semitic incidents in Ukraine: four involving the defacement or desecration of synagogues and cemeteries, and two involving outright violence. These incidents have alarmed Jewish communities worldwide. In Ukraine, however, they are regarded with unanimous skepticism, if not outright disbelief.

All my conversations on these subjects were off-the-record. The incidents are ongoing police matters, and older Ukrainians have developed a hard-learned caution about being identified in the media. However, I spoke to more than a dozen people who occupied a variety of leadership roles within the Ukrainian Jewish community. And not a single person took seriously the idea that these anti-Jewish incidents had been carried out by “neo-Nazis.”

Jamie Dettmer is more worried about Ukraine’s pervasive corruption problem:

Ukrainians had high hopes for the Orange Revolution a decade ago only to see them dashed as the politicians and their backers and allies in the business elite clawed back power and unleashed ten years of squalid political manipulation that culminated in the Yanukovych kleptocracy.

According to Ukrainian officials more than $20 billion of gold reserves may have been embezzled and $37 billion in loan money disappeared.  In the past three years more than $70 billion was moved to offshore accounts from Ukraine’s financial system.

Many in the political class are still wedded to those old ways, judging by the bribes they have been offering investigators from a new anti-corruption agency set up by the interim government on the insistence of the Maidan revolutionaries.

Previous Dish on fascist fears in Ukraine here and here.

Pavel Felgenhauer claims that Putin must move fast if he’s going to grab Eastern and Southern Ukraine:

If Putin decides to send in his troops, he has a narrow window in which to act. The winter of 2014 in Russia and Ukraine was relatively mild with little snow, while the spring is early and warm. The soil is drying rapidly, meaning that it will soon be possible to move heavy vehicles off of highways and into fields in southern areas of Ukraine close to the Black and Azov Seas. A key date is April 1, which marks the beginning of the Russia’s spring conscript call-up, when some 130,000 troops drafted a year earlier will have to be mustered out as replacements arrive. This would leave the Russian airborne troops, marines, and army brigades with many conscripts that have served half a year or not at all, drastically reducing battle readiness. The better-trained one-year conscripts can be kept in the ranks for a couple of months but no longer. Otherwise they’ll start demanding to be sent home, and morale will slip. As a result, Russia’s conventional military will regain reasonable battle-readiness only around August or September 2014, giving the Ukrainians ample time to get their act together.

But Masha Gessen, who sees the annexation of Crimea as payback for the West’s intervention in Kosovo, believes that Putin is playing a very long game:

Once Putin held power in Russia, he never planned to cede it, so he had all the time in the world. Two of Putin’s key character traits are vengefulness and opportunism. He relishes his grudges and finds motivation in them: He has enjoyed holding the bombing of Yugoslavia against the United States all these years—and knowing he would strike back some day. He is anything but a strategic planner, so this knowledge was abstract until it wasn’t, when the opportunity to grab Crimea presented itself. Revenge has been sweet, but when other opportunities present themselves—and this will happen more often now, at least from Putin’s point of view—he will deploy Russian military force or the threat of Russian military force in other neighboring countries. He will take his revenge not only cold but plentifully.

Kim R. Holmes argues that one of “the most important lessons of the Cold War is that drawing lines in the sand actually works”:

We often think of how the containment strategy held the Soviet Union in check, but the real tests of strength actually occurred before that strategy was fully in place. Truman “lost” Poland (mainly because he never had it in the first place), but he drew the line with Turkey and Greece. Both countries ended up as NATO allies, not members of the Warsaw Pact. We should be drawing similarly clear lines in the sand today, particularly with respect to the Baltic members of NATO, making it absolutely clear that the United States will honor its NATO Article Five commitment to defend those countries.

The challenge for U.S. policy is not to let Russia’s fait accompli in Crimea signal a complete abandonment of Ukraine. It’s one thing to say we will not go to war to defend Ukraine’s independence, and another one altogether to consign Ukraine forever to Russia’s sphere of influence. Not everything in foreign policy comes down to threatening war. Most Ukrainians want to be part of the West, as the Poles did some 70 years ago, and this matters more in the long run than the strength of Russia’s armored brigades.

https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/448423006843703296

Ioffe calls the G8’s transformation into the G7 “a clarifying moment”:

Russia insists that it is a European country, and insists on maintaining its membership in various Western clubs and treaties, but when it is accused of violating post-War European norms—guess which government faces the most suits in the European Court of Human Rights?—howls about Russia’s uniqueness and European chauvinism and double standards.

It’s been tough balancing act to maintain, one that Russians call “sitting with one ass in two chairs.” Today, the West and Japan provided a clarifying moment by pulling one chair away, ending the agony. And it’s about time. Russia, in insisting on its mystical duality, has been, increasingly, a thorn in the organization’s side—as well as its own.

Larison expects the move to accomplish little:

Since Putin now seems interested in appealing to a more nationalist audience at home, I doubt very much that keeping it out of G-8 meetings will “sting” at all. After all, being “banished” from the company of Western governments is what many of Putin’s supporters at home desire. … The other members of the G-8 are obviously free to exclude Russia from their meetings, but it is silly to think that this punishes Russia in any meaningful way. The more that Western governments try to ostracize Russian leaders, the easier it will be for them to ignore Western complaints and demands, which defeats the purpose of the ostracism.

Allahpundit suspects that Russia wouldn’t have to do much to get back in the club:

Given the EU’s palpable reluctance to alienate Russia’s energy sector — the price of natural gas just went up in Kiev, don’tcha know — and the continent’s wider terror at a new round of Russian military adventurism, how little would Putin have to do for the G-7 to pronounce him rehabilitated and to re-admit Russia to the group? They’re desperate to keep things on a “diplomatic track”; if Putin turned around tomorrow and said he’d pull Russian troops off the Ukrainian border and return to that track in exchange for western recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, would the G-7 go for that? If instead Putin made a move on eastern Ukraine and then, having occupied it, renounced further claims on the country, would that be enough to turn the G-7 back into a G-8? My sense is that there’s virtually no limit to the slack the west will cut him in return for putting his guns down, so long as he doesn’t make a move on a NATO country.

Oliver Bullough is concerned that America is helping Putin consolidate power:

Since coming to power, Putin has made it his goal to restore the Kremlin’s power: by crushing Chechnya, by cancelling elections, by controlling the media and by squashing over-mighty oligarchs who felt they could challenge him. A natural next step is to enhance his control over the remaining oligarchs’ money by forcing them to repatriate it. John Christensen, executive director of the Tax Justice Network, which campaigns to open up the shoal of tax havens that are all that remains of the British Empire, says that bringing the money home would both increase Russia’s tax take and improve the Russian economy by forcing businessmen to invest productively rather than in London property or U.S. basketball teams.

Jamile Trindle also evaluates the impact of the sanctions:

“The real potential damage to Russia’s economic future is self inflicted,” said Chris Weafer of Moscow-based consultancy Macro-Advisory, in a recent research note.

“The real damage from a prolonged conflict in Ukraine,” Weafer said, “may be to radically slow the inflow of much needed investment capital.” Weafer recently cut his forecast for the Russian economy in 2014 from 1.9 percent to 1 percent growth.

Investors’ cooling interest in Russia could make it more expensive for Russia to borrow money in international markets. Rating firms Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings both downgraded Russia’s outlook from stable to negative, after the U.S. rolled out new sanctions Thursday. The Russian Finance Ministry has said it might delay plans to sell $7 billion in Russian sovereign bonds this year. Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov acknowledged Friday that Russia’s borrowing costs are going up.

Packer’s take on the Ukraine crisis:

A successful election in a stable Ukraine is half the battle against Putin’s aggression. The other half is deterrence. It would be naïve to take Putin at his word that Russia has no designs on territory outside Crimea. He needs an atmosphere of continuous crisis and grievance to maintain support at home, to distract his own public from the corruption, stagnation, and repression that are his real record as a leader. Deterrence can be designed to expose Russia’s weakness: non-lethal military aid to Kiev, escalation of sanctions against Putin’s cronies, and the ultimate threat of financially targeting Russia’s energy sector. But no strategy will work if the U.S. and the European Union don’t act together, and America can no longer simply expect Europe to follow its lead. That was a different era.

Lastly, Larison continues to ask why we are sanctioning Russia:

[W]hat is the purpose of the punishment beyond proving that it can be done? If a punitive approach makes Russia more antagonistic and intransigent, as it seems likely to do, how is that a desirable outcome? Another illusion that needs to be dispelled is the belief that punitive measures achieve anything other than increasing tensions and making conflicts in the future more likely.

Motyl insists the new government in Kiev isn’t fascist:

Both Svoboda and Right Sector are on the right. They are decidedly not liberals—and some of them may be fascists—but they are far more like the Tea Party or right-wing Republicans than like fascists or neo-Nazis. I for one wouldn’t want them to be setting the tone for Ukrainian policy. But neither would I want the Tea Party to be in charge of Washington. No less important, their role in the Kyiv government is at best tertiary (they would probably win no more than 5 percent of the vote in a national election), and policy is set not by them but by the broad coalition of unquestioned liberal democrats.

He recommends focusing on “the activity of Putin and his fascist state.” Cathy Young also worries about Russian fascists:

[I]n Russia, nationalists in the upper echelons of power include such prominent figures as former NATO envoy and current Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who first entered the political scene as a leader of the nationalist bloc Rodina (Motherland). In 2005, Rodina was banned from Moscow City Council elections for running a blatantly racist campaign ad: the clip showed three Azerbaijani migrants littering and insulting a Russian woman and Rogozin stepping in to tell them off, and ended with a slogan promising to “clean up the trash.” While Rogozin is no fan of America, he has some peculiar American fans: in 2011, a glowing tribute that concluded with, “Let’s hope that Rogozin rises to power in Russia—and for the rise of a ‘Rogozin’ in America and elsewhere throughout the West,” appeared on the “white identity” website, Occidental Observer.

Rodina co-founder and Rogozin’s erstwhile rival for its leadership, Sergei Glazyev, most recently served as Putin’s man in charge of developing the Customs Union—the alliance with Kazakhstan and Belarus that was also to include Ukraine. Like Rogozin, Glazyev has attracted the sympathetic attention of far-right kooks in the Unites States—in this case, Lyndon LaRouche: in 1999, LaRouche Books published an English translation of Glazyev’s book, Genocide: Russia and the New World Order, with a foreword by LaRouche himself.

Previous Dish on fascist fears in Ukraine here.

by Patrick Appel

Ioffe sizes up the sanctions announced yesterday:

These sanctions will not just ban travel to the U.S. or freeze assets (most of which these guys keep in Europe and in various tax shelters around the world), but will effectively bar them from participation in the world financial system. That is going to sting and it’s going to hurt, and it’s going to hurt in the exact right places. Sources inside the administration say that Europe’s list of sanctions, which is forthcoming, overlaps very significantly with the American one. The administration is also discussing whether to distribute the sanctions to family members, given that these men officially may own very little themselves, but have stashed their wealth in shell companies, and wives and children who function as shell companies. But just having a last name that’s on the U.S. Treasury sanctions list may be hurt enough. And, as the White House has emphasized repeatedly, this is only the beginning.

But there are people who are not on the list who are already cringing at the anticipation of the blow: Russian liberals. They were largely horrified by their country’s invasion of Ukraine and are happy to see Putin’s cronies punished by the West, but they know that the Kremlin, unable to lash out at Washington, will take its fury out on them.

Bershidsky doubts Europe’s sanctions will be as harsh as America’s:

Most of the Putin cronies on the list have known assets in Europe and Caribbean offshore areas. They will suffer serious damage only if the European Union puts them on its list of sanctioned individuals — which is doubtful because of the U.K.’s desire to avoid damage to London banks and the city’s reputation as an international financial center. The U.S. sanctions are also designed to cause minimum economic damage: They don’t touch Russia’s major government-owned companies, such as Gazprom or Rosneft, headed by long-time Putin associate Igor Sechin. Keeping them out of the U.S. would be a heavy blow.

The sanctions’ intent is easily readable to Putin. Even if he is not as close to the men on the list as their history and the government contract breakdown suggest, he will know Obama wanted to strike at those who are, to the best of his knowledge, his best friends, possibly even the keepers of his personal fortune.

Charlemagne also looks at Europe’s response:

In the bureaucratic jargon of Brussels, the annexation of Crimea merits only “Stage 2” sanctions: visa bans, asset freezes and political wrist-slapping. The latter includes suspending G8 meetings, halting formal bilateral summits and stopping negotiations on Russia’s membership of the OECD, a rich-world think-tank, and the International Energy Agency. Stage 3 sanctions, comprising unspecified “far-reaching consequences for relations on a broad range of economic areas”, would be triggered by further Russian actions “to destabilise the situation in Ukraine”.

Larison asks about the purpose of America’s sanctions:

One thing that the administration should have also learned by now is that it gets little or no credit from its critics for its hawkish measures, and most of its critics will continue to condemn its response as “weak” no matter what it does. It won’t matter to those critics how much the U.S. tries to punish Russia, because it will never be seen as good enough. Meanwhile, punitive measures can inflict damage on Russia, but there is no good reason to believe that sanctions will ever cause it to change its behavior in the way that Washington wants. Punitive measures have to be aimed at forcing Russia to give up Crimea, and if they’re not then they don’t serve much of a purpose other than riling Moscow and provoking retaliation. Since that goal seems entirely fanciful, what are these punitive measures supposed to be achieving?

Anne Applebaum calls the new sanctions “only a signal”:

by Patrick Appel

Daniel Berman eyes Estonia:

Putin needs three things in a target at this point. First it needs to be of less strategic value than the Crimea so that the arguments for fighting for it are even less. Second it needs to be politically vital, preferably as part of both NATO and the EU so that if the West chooses not to fight for it both organizations will be shattered. Thirdly, Russia’s moral case must be so impeccable that in the game of political chess that will precede the Western defeat, Russia at all times maintains at least a moral deadlock if not a moral ascendancy. In effect, he needs an Eastern European Verdun.

Estonia meets all of these criteria.

It is poor and geographically isolated. Furthermore, more than a third of its population is Russian, a legacy of Soviet rule, and that minority, unlike that in the Crimea, has legitimate cause for complaint. … Estonia is a member of both the EU and NATO. If Russia is able to stir up chaos in the form of riots and unrest within a member of both organizations it will discredit them totally. It makes no sense for Europe to risk destruction to defend Estonia, less than it did over the Ukraine, but the EU and NATO are based on the lie that an attack on one is an attack on all. Putin’s goal is to exploit this as a lie; Estonia is Verdun, a strategically worthless target that political factors forced the French army to defend to the death. In this case its Putin’s goal to draw NATO and the EU into a battle not of armies, but of political capital, and to destroy that capital in the open fields of the Baltic shore.

Andrew Connelly instead selects Moldova as possibly the “next Crimea”:

In November 2013, the country signed an association agreement with the European Union—the same treaty that led to Yanukovych’s downfall in Ukraine. Moldova is considered poor even in comparison to neighboring Romania and Bulgaria, and with the average Moldovan currently taking home around $200 per month, access to EU markets could be a huge boon. Moldova is home to the largest wine cellars in the world and exports around 3 million bottles to Russia each year, though after Chisnau’s flirtations with the EU last year, Moscow jealously banned their import. Gas is exclusively imported from Russia and hence vulnerable to politically motivated disruptions.

by Patrick Appel

https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/446684476807340032

https://twitter.com/Max_Fisher/status/446669982127366144

Today Obama announced new sanctions:

President Obama took new steps Thursday to intensify the economic isolation of Russia following its “illegal” annexation of Crimea, which could have a “significant impact on the Russian economy,” the president said. Speaking from the White House on Thursday, Obama said the U.S. will move “to impose sanctions not just on individuals but on key sectors of the Russian economy.” Senior White House officials say the sanctions will apply to 20 senior members of the Russian government and other “cronies.” They will also apply to St. Petersburg-based Rossiya Bank, which will be “frozen out of the dollar,” making it difficult for the institution to operate internationally.

The sanctions will target Russia’s financial services, energy, mining, and engineering sectors, officials said Thursday.

Miriam Elder thinks the sanctions have teeth:

The first round of sanctions announced by Obama on Monday was symbolic but ultimately toothless, targeting people with big mystiques but little power in today’s Kremlin … These sanctions are different. They hit as close to Putin without targeting the man himself. There are a couple notable absences from the list — Alexei Miller, the CEO of Gazprom, and, more importantly, Igor Sechin, the CEO of the state oil company Rosneft and one of Putin’s hardline advisors. But by reaching to his favorite oligarchs, the U.S. has hit Putin where it hurts. There’s a reason most outside Russia have never heard of these people — in Russia those with the real power stay in the shadows.

Drum expects “we’ll quickly get a pro forma response about how weak and vacillating this is from Bill Kristol, John McCain, and Charles Krauthammer.” Prior to the sanctions announcement, Fred Kaplan put America’s spat with Russia in perspective:

What’s going on now is not Cold War II.

The Cold War split the entire world in two factions. Scads of civil wars, regional wars, and wars of national liberation were, in some sense, “proxy wars” in the titanic struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. China was used as a lever for playing one side off the other—and China played off both. Nothing like that is going on now. Nothing like it could possibly go on now. Neither side has the leverage to do it. Russia has no global reach whatsoever. Russia has no support for its actions in Ukraine; China has evinced no interest in it.

Right now, then, this is at most a regional conflict, not a global one, and the best thing that Obama can do—in both his threats and his inducements—is to keep it that way. Certain Republicans on Capitol Hill could help. Senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who used to know better, could lay off their absurd yelping about Obama’s “weakness” and “feckless leadership.” For one thing, it’s not true; at least when it comes to this crisis, they’ve recommended very few steps that Obama hasn’t already taken. If they’re really worried about Putin’s perceptions of America, instead of merely clamoring to make political points with GOP extremists, they should stand by the president and make sure Putin understands that, on this issue, there are no domestic fissures for him to exploit.

Russia also sanctioned US officials today:

The Russian response has been received as less potent than the new U.S. sanctions. The United States announced a round of sanctions targeting officials and oligarchs with close ties to Putin as well as Bank Rossiya — individuals and entities that many Russia watchers never expected to be hit with sanctions.