Results tagged “politics”

Remember those halcyon days - like last Thursday - back when lots of people thought that the United States and Russia were on the brink of diplomatic breakthrough? The Obama administration appeared perfectly willing to ditch the Polish and Czech missile proposal for a joint system located in Russia, while the Russians opened up their territory for more supply shipments to the conflict in Afghanistan, and some analysts were even speculating that Russia was giving up its quest for superpower status in favor of pragmatic agreements and cooperation.

Well it seems like that's all gone now, and or at least Obama's advisers were informed that there would be no significant deal reached on a START-1 replacement during this visit. Whatever happened, the talk just turned very sour in the final hours before the president's arrival to Moscow. This is probably old news for most readers, but here are the quotes which have set the tone for a disappointing summit coming up this next week. From the Financial Times:

In a television interview before his meetings with Mr Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, Mr Obama said: "It's important that even as we move forward with President Med­ved­ev, Putin understands that the old cold-war app­roach to US-Russian relations is outdated, that it's time to move forward in a different direction.

"I think Medvedev understands that; I think Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new."

I just couldn't resist the alliteration temptation. What we're looking at here is the broader directions that should result from next week's Obama-Medvedev powwow.

Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski offers a three-pronged strategy in the Financial Times for President Obama when he travels to Moscow next week. In the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, Robert Legvold offers a template for improving US-Russia relations in general. Since this is a blog, and not a newspaper or brick-sized bi-monthly periodical, I'm going to re-engineer the formats of these two articles into what should be an easy reference in the future for those not willing to plow through a 6,000-word appeal to the Obama Administration to redesign relations with Russia NOW. First, Brzezinski:

Polls show that Russia is one of the nations whose citizens are least interested in Barack Obama, and pessimistic that his leadership will head toward positive changes in international relations.  That means that if Obama were hoping to survive on the charm offensive, pitching an over-the-heads speech along the lines of the Cairo approach to the Muslim world, he will be disappointed, argues Paul Starobin on CNN.

Obama cannot call for democracy in Islamic societies while altogether ignoring its retreat in Russia. More generally, Americans, and American presidents, like to steer clear of the vocabulary of realpolitik, a language redolent of the Old Europe against which America decisively rebelled centuries ago.

The likelihood, then, is for stalemate in the contest between Obama's campaign for the hearts of the Russians and their demand to be free of American meddling in their old imperial stomping grounds.

The Russian people are probably not going to come away with a pronounced negative view of Obama -- he is acutely sensitive to cultural protocol wherever he goes and has yet to make a wrong step. But as for his global charm offensive -- this is where it comes to a halt.

Stephen Blank has an interesting new article on Forbes in which he assesses the economic damage being caused by Russia's inability to effectively reduce legal nihilism and corruption, both of which are dragging on the country's attempt to recover from the crisis.  Sticking out like a sore thumb is of course the second trial of Mikhail Khdorkovsky, which will be in full session during the first state visit of President Barack Obama.  Blank describes the Khodorkovsky trial as a "palpable judicial farce," and if President Dmitry Medvedev is unable to take action to solve the situation it will "confirm the widespread belief that he is merely a tool of his predecessor, a placeholder until Putin resumes the presidency."

When he was a candidate to lead Russia, Dmitry Medvedev denounced the country's "legal nihilism." Now, as president, he has often spoken in favor of judicial independence. Yet one year after his inauguration, with President Obama set to pay a state visit on Monday, Russia remains engulfed by a tidal wave of corruption, hamstrung by a politicized justice system that is chasing away the enduring foreign investment and economic stability that Russia so desperately needs.

We believe that David Ignatius's article in the Washington Post is very well worth reading today, as he discusses some of the dominant themes that came up during a recent conference sponsored by the Russian Institute entitled "What Does Russia Think?"  (oddly, I unknowingly gave yesterday's video interview a similar title).  The result is a presentation of a bouquet of modern myths about Russia - such as Putin's authoritarianism being mistaken with economic success (instead of coincidence with high oil prices), the strongman legend, the distrust and antagonism toward the outside world, and the other "heaps of memes" (as Michael Idov would describe them) that contribute to our common understanding of Russian politics.  Ignatius is aware of these shortcuts of logic and rationalism, so the argument he presents over the Grand Inquisitor paradox takes the longitudinal view that the problems Russia is experiencing are the same from 100 years ago.  Interesting stuff.

"Putin is the leader. There is no disagreement about that. Putin came to power and life improved," argued a member of the Russian Duma. He described Putin's political intuition in the way that 19th-century Russians spoke about the czar: "Putin knows what the society needs better than the society does."

In relation to the video posted below, Paul LeGendre of Human Rights First has an opinion piece up over on Huffington Post:

In a week, President Obama will travel to Moscow to meet with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The agenda items of the summit in Moscow are of course numerous and complex, but it would be a mistake to let human rights concerns get lost in the mix. High among those concerns is the troubling rise in hate crimes in Russia, the government's inadequate response to this trend, and increased harassment - including at times murder - of human rights defenders. These and other outstanding human rights issues could make Russia a far less reliable partner in addressing economic, security, and other issues.

Click here to sign a letter to the U.S. president asking him to discuss these issues with Medvedev.

Glad to see we are not the only ones asking that President Barack Obama raise the issue of human rights during his visit to Russia. The following video, focused on the growing problem of hate crimes in Russia, was produced as part of a campaign by the NGO Human Rights First, which last year invited the youth movement activist Oleg Kozlovsky for an award.

TODAY: Re-set still top of the headlines; military disarmament a benefit or a loss for Russia?; Caucasus talks see no resolution; Russian academy invitation to denounce 'falsifiers'; legendary Soviet singer dies

The Moscow Times reports on Barack Obama's comments on his first trip to Russia, four years ago: 'Thinking of the Russians more as partners does mean being more thoughtful, respectful and consistent about what we say and what we do'.  ITAR-TASS reports that the Presidents have had a telephone conversation in advance of their meeting.  In the Washington Post there is an analysis of the riddles that abound in Russia political identity; with Putin's anti-Americanism and authoritarianism, will Obama strike more of a chord with fellow trained lawyer Medvedev?   A senior Russian senator has said that a breakthrough on US-Russian relations is very much a possibility.  The Other Russia reprints a letter from three US senators urging Obama to be firm on defending democratic values.   The Washington Post reports that most Russians are unaware of the US President's upcoming trip, let alone the phenomenon of 'Obamamania'.

I am still digging up good clips from my last interview with Paul Goble.  Here he reacts to the argument from Anatol Lieven's National Interest article which argued that Piontkovsky, Shevtsova, and other Russian liberals serve as "an asset to Putin in terms of boosting public hostility to Russian liberalism that if they hadn't already existed, Putin might have been tempted to invent them."  See more reactions here and here.

A friend of mine sharply rebuked me the other day for not writing enough on my blog.  While I can assure you all I haven't exactly been napping in the recliner, I will do my best to start picking up the slack while still juggling my legal workload (which lately consists several sharp knives, a hot potato, a bowling ball, and a nuclear warhead - let's hope I don't drop anything).  To begin with, why not revisit one of my favorite subjects:  the murky machinations of Gazprom-related business in Hungary, where the goulash state corporatism and Russia's most cheerful barracks live on despite the ravages of the economic crisis.  Although much of this story is background for the initiated, there is some wild news about Emfesz uncovered by Roman Kupchinsky that merits discussion.

The last few times I have checked in on this story, we've seen the Austrian company OMV backstab the Hungarians (with Russian help) in an attempt to take over MOL, South Stream vs. Nabucco continued to roil Hungarian politics (while Russo-skeptic Viktor Orban's party Fidesz made big advances in the EP elections), and lastly the tricksters behind the much maligned RosUkrEnergo trading company dissolved this shadowy group only to replace it with another proxy, known as RosGas.

George Friedman of Stratfor gives some interesting and less interesting opinions on the Obama-Medvedev summit coming up next week.  Friedman believes the the "sphere of influence" question will be the central issue of the meeting, while he doesn't expect any major breakthroughs, just more cosmetic agreements.  Beware of high flying assumptions and weighty clichés (like Obama showing that he is "tough as Putin"!).

This is all news to me, but in an article in Foreign Policy, Peter Savodnik argues that Russia has given up on its quest to build itself back into a superpower, and is instead settling for the push for "a new international system" and other institutions and coalitions of multilateralism.  The rub of it is that Russia can't afford to keep up the confrontation status quo with Washington in the midst of an economic crisis.  If Russia wants to get more involved in rule-based international institutions, that can only be a good thing, if they are willing to follow the rules.

The basic answer is that Moscow, after years of trying unsuccessfully to reclaim its superpower status, has concluded that a new system is needed. Of course, a greatly weakened Russia is in no position to coauthor, with the United States, a new geopolitics. But it can initiate a conversation meant to transcend the asymmetries and tensions of the past two decades -- tensions that were manageable until recently but no longer appear so.

I see that Anders Aslund from the Peterson Institute née IIE is defending Latvia's currency peg again, this time in the Moscow Times. Given the dearth of such defenders among the conventional economics wisdom crowd, and considering Russia's kabuki-like rhetoric over its own currency policy, I thought this something worth drawing attention to. Not only that, but I dare say currency peg cheerleaders are a dying breed. This is not to say that pegs are uncommon, but simply that nowadays no country is ultimately considered to be fully developed until it can float its own currency in the international foreign exchange market, somewhat like sitting for an exam without a crib sheet to consult (Hong Kong is an obvious exception, but also not technically a country).

Now, I could get all petty-nitpicky-snipey with Aslund's defense and quibble that rejecting a comparison to Russia c. 1998 and ignoring a comparison to Argentina c. 2001 while choosing to compare Latvia with Denmark and Barbados - all while contending that Latvia is a special case - is a non-sequitur, self-serving, disingenuous and lazy all wrapped up in one. Or, I could get all econo-geeky and point out that substituting the triple-whammy of wage cuts, tighter government spending and deflation for a currency devaluation is tantamount to trading six for half a dozen when faced with an asset-liability mismatch as deeply embedded as Latvia's.

But that's not what I want to do here, in part because plenty of others have already taken enough of a swat at it from an economic standpoint (and indeed, those predicting a devaluation are many: Business Monitor International, Paul Krugman, Edward Hugh, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Marxist theoretician Boris Kagarlitsky, and, with an Op-Ed that frankly reads as though it was penned by one of his underpaid student assistants, Nouriel Roubini). No, what I would rather do is propose the Latvia currency situation as an example of politics trumping economics.

In attempting to get somewhat closer to understanding what on earth could possibly be going on inside the head of Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, Europe's last dictator, RFE/RL interviews two analysts, Uladzimir Padhol and Leonid Radzikhovsky, and produces a very interesting discussion. 

RFE/RL: Lukashenka seems to enjoy acting as though he is bringing his interviewers in on a big secret -- real or imagined. "Did you know that it was thanks to me that there was no blockade of Abkhazia under [former Georgian President Eduard] Shevardnadze?" "Did you know that Russian [Finance] Minister Aleksei Kudrin's dire forecast about the Belarusian economy was meant to create panic?" Is this a tactic, or a philosophy?

Padhol: This is not only a philosophy but a self-preservation instinct as a politician. Being a supra-authoritarian dictator, he is constantly making mistakes in the course of governing. For instance, trade with Russia resulted in the construction of over 100 new dairy plants. And what's to be done with them now?

He constantly has to conceal the fact that he's the one who's the source of these mistakes. And he's constantly inventing these conspiracy theories to create a picture of the world in which he is always the infallible one, the one who made the best decisions. This secrecy thing allows him to constantly perform his "I am the best" shtick. Why's he waging such a battle with the independent media? Because they immediately expose him: "There you said one thing, here you say another."

TODAY: Politkovskaya suspects to be retried; NATO claims to be no rival to Russia; Medvedev says START negotiations still ongoing; extent of alcohol abuse deaths sends shockwaves; Duma speaker superhero

Russia has announced that the three men who were acquitted of being accomplices in the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya will be retried.  Her son Ilya says that the decision to retry will only delay the process of finding the real murderers.  The Guardian reports that Politkovskaya's children have demanded 'a genuine investigation', and say, 'we are convinced that the murder wasn't properly investigated'.  Russia is in conflict with the rest of the G8 powers on the elections in Iran.  'No one is willing to condemn the election process, because it's an exercise in democracy', Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said, and isolating Iran serves no purpose, whilst other powers are less lenient.

One need not look further than today's edition of the Times of London to find the degeneration of dialogue between Georgia and Russia. I will let the quotes speak for themselves...

In an article headlined, "Vladimir Putin wants to see Mikheil Saakashvili hanged 'by the balls'", we have the following:

President Medvedev has set out the Kremlin's policy just as graphically, calling Mr Saakashvili a "political corpse" who "no longer exists in our eyes". He told Western analysts that his Georgian counterpart was "mentally unstable".

Same day, another article with the headline, "Mikheil Saakashvili says Russia started war to gain energy supplies":

"This is Georgian territory and this is bulls**t that we started war in our territory! We didn't attack Russia. We didn't go there and bomb Moscow," Mr Saakashvili told The Times. "If there are idiots who say we started the war, they are wrong."

"They want to do Checkpoint Charlie in my own country, exactly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall."

And then Saakashvili again over here:

"I do not know what is playing out in Vladimir Putin's [the Russian Prime Minister's] head. I think everybody but him wants peace."

Pardon me, but I just can't help thinking about a certain exchange between two other adversaries of years past: