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famous-people · 1 year

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Petr Aven

Petr Aven was born on March 16, 1955, in Moscow. His father, Oleg Ivanovich, was a specialist in computer technology and a lecturer at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow State University named after Mikhail Lomonosov. His mother worked as a teacher at an institute. In 1972, Petr graduated from a specialized mathematics school, where he studied alongside Yegor Gaidar. Five years later, he received a degree from the Economics Faculty of Moscow State University named after Mikhail Lomonosov.

From 1989 to 1991, Aven served as an advisor to the Soviet Union's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During the same period, he worked as a contracted leading research fellow in Austria at the Vienna International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. In the fall of 1991, Aven became a part of the "reform government" led by Yegor Gaidar, serving as the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Economic Relations and the First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR.

In January 1992, he became the head of the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations of Russia. From July 8, 1992, Aven served as the deputy chairman of the Currency and Economic Commission of the Government of the Russian Federation. He resigned from this position on December 22, 1992.

From December 25, 1992, to February 28, 1993, Petr Olegovich Aven served as an advisor to Boris Berezovsky, the President of Logovaz Joint Stock Company. In March 1993, he created and became the head of "Finances of Petr Aven," a company that focused on handling Russia's liquid debt obligations. Specifically, it provided consultancy services to buyers of Russian debt, covering all aspects of transaction preparation except for the pricing.

Petr Olegovich was elected as a deputy to the State Duma of the Russian Federation on December 12, 1993, on the "Choice of Russia" list. However, on January 4, 1994, he declined the mandate because the Central Election Commission declared the election of deputies to the Parliament invalid for those who did not submit written commitments to cease activities incompatible with the status of a deputy.

In 1994, Aven met Mikhail Friedman, the Chairman of Alfa-Bank's Board of Directors. It was then that the position of president was specially introduced in Alfa-Bank for Aven. Petr Aven knew his business: he quickly expanded Alfa-Bank's client base and brought it into a fundamentally new, influential orbit. By transferring 50% of Finances of Petr Aven (FinPA) shares to Friedman, Aven became the owner of 10% of Alfa-Bank shares in return. Soon, analysts began to talk about the bank as reliable and far-sighted. Petr Aven is also the Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of Alfa-Bank. Since November 1998, he has been a member of the Board of Directors of Open Joint-Stock Company "Alfa-Bank."

In 2008, the Petr Aven Charitable Foundation "Generation" was established in Latvia. Its priority areas include support for children's healthcare, projects in the field of "cultural exchange" between Russia and Latvia, as well as scholarships and grants in the field of science. The founders of the foundation are Petr and Elena Aven. The entrepreneur actively supports art and theater in Russia and is the largest collector of Russian art from the early 20th century.

In 2016, according to Forbes magazine, Petr Aven ranked 19th on the list of the 200 richest businessmen in Russia, with a personal fortune of $4.6 billion.

On September 26, 2018, Petr Olegovich Aven was elected Chairman of the Board of Directors of Alfa-Bank. Since 2022, he has been under sanctions imposed by Western countries.

Awards of Petr Aven:

Order of Honour

Order of the Three Stars, 3rd Degree, Latvia

Order of Friendship - for significant contributions to the socio-economic development of the Russian Federation, achievements in labor, active public involvement, and many years of diligent work.

Family:

Grandfather - Janis Aven, Latvian marksman, repressed.

Father - Oleg Ivanovich Aven, professor, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, specialist in computer engineering.

Widower.

Wife - Elena Vladimirovna (1958 - August 25, 2015).

Two children: Daria and Denis.

Reputation is more important than short-term benefits.

©Petr Aven

#bisnes #oligarchy

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liber-legis · 3 years

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From “Godfather of the Kremlin” by Paul Klebnikov

The Death of a Nation

The result of Gaidar’s hasty liberalization of prices meant that more than 100 million people who had achieved some kind of basic material prosperity under the Soviets were plunged into poverty. Schoolteachers, doctors, physicists, lab technicians, engineers, army officers, steelworkers, coalminers, carpenters, accountants, telephone receptionists, farmers—all had been wiped out. The crash liberalization of trade, meanwhile, allowed Russia’s natural-resource wealth to be looted by insiders. The Russian state was deprived of its biggest revenue source; consequently it had no money for pensions, worker’s salaries, law enforcement, the military, hospitals, education, and culture. Gaidar’s shock therapy set in motion a relentless decline—economic, social, demographic—that would last until the end of the Yeltsin era.

While the rest of the developed world continued to grow, the Russian economy was shrinking. In the Gorbachev era, the Soviet Union had been the world’s third largest economy (after the United States and Japan). Naturally, the Russian economy alone would be significantly smaller than that of the former Soviet Union. But the real decline occurred after the Soviet Union broke up. From the beginning of Gaidar’s shock therapy, Russia’s gross domestic product shrank by approximately 50 percent in just four years. Eventually, Russia would sink below the level of China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico. ON a per capita basis, Russia would become poorer than Peru. Decades of technological achievement were lost. Renowned scientific institutions fell apart. The Russian cultural establishment disintegrated. And the country’s assets were sold off.

Anyone who traveled to Russia in the early Yeltsin years was treated to the spectacle of ordinary Russian citizens trying to get by. Outside the ramshackle, hollow concrete structures that were the Soviet Union’s supermarkets, new private bazaars formed, which included not just brawn babushkas selling vegetables, but also little huts offering bad quality imported goods: CD’s of disco music, fake Nikes, Marlboros, cans of Vietnamese pork. These bazaars sprawled out in the mud and the garbage at subway stations, along the big avenues, in populated areas.

On Stoleshnikov Lane, near the legendary Moscow Art Theater, around the corner from the Bolshoi Theatre, elderly men and women gathered daily and formed two parallel lines along what de fact had become a pedestrian street. Anyone who ran the gauntlet of these pensioners, neatly dressed in their tattered clothing, was besieged by silent pleas to buy a teakettle, a pair of knitted stockings, three wineglasses, a secondhand sweater, a used pair of leather shoes. Meanwhile, beautiful antique volumes began piling up in the bookstores, selling for ridiculously low prices—Moscow’s intellectuals were selling their libraries. In the flea markets outside the city, you could buy the highest Soviet battle decorations, the equivalent of the Victoria Cross or the Congressional Medal of Honor: the old veterans of World War II were selling their medals to buy a few scraps for the dinner table.

With Russia in a slump far worse than the Great Depression, people tapped an old survival instinct. Amid rumors of crop failure and impending food shortages, millions of city dwellers traveled to the countryside to plant cabbages and potatoes in their garden plots. The arable land just outside Moscow was swarming with people digging and planting. It was back to medieval agriculture. Chubais and Gaidar were proud of the fact that mass starvation had been avoided. But it was avoided not because prices had been liberalized, but because the Russian people had returned to the countryside. It was with a shovel and sack of seed potatoes that Russians escaped starvation in 1992 and 1993.

Any doubts about the first years of the Yeltsin Era’s being a disaster were dispelled by the demographic statistics. These numbers, even in their most general form, suggested a catastrophe without precedent in modern history—the only parallel was with countries destroyed by war, genocide, or famine.

Between 1990 and 1994, male mortality rates rose 53 percent, female mortality rates 27 percent. Male life expectancy plunged from an already low level of sixty-four years in 1990 to fifty-eight in 1994; men in Egypt, Indonesia, or Paraguay could now expect longer lives than men in Russia. In the same brief period, female life expectancy fell from seventy-four to seventy-one. The world had seldom seen such a decline in peacetime.

Each month thousands of Russians were dying prematurely. Such a drop in life expectancy, labeled “excess deaths”, has always been the standard algorithm in demographer’s calculations of the death toll of disasters—whether Stalin’s collectivization in the 1930’s, Pol Pot’s rule in Cambodia in the 1970’s, or the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980’s. American demographer Nicholas Eberstadt estimated the number of “excess deaths” in Russia between 1992 and 1998 was as high as three million. By contrast, Eberstadt observed, Russia’s losses in World War I were 1.7 million deaths.

Many premature deaths occurred among the elderly—the babushkas, church ladies, and old men—people who had seen their life savings disappear in the great inflation of 1992, who had seen their pension checks turn worthless, who did not have families to support them, and who simply could not scrape together enough money for a nutritious diet or medicine. The stress of finding themselves in the ferocious unknown world that emerged after Communism was also a major (though unquantifiable) factor in killing off the elderly. It was a frightening experience for them—coming in the twilight of their lives, when they were weak and slow—the feeling of seeing the world turn upside down, the streets become unfamiliar, all the comforting supports of life swept away. Many hung on for a while, wandering around town; the men became drunks sprawled in the icy gutter; the women became bone-thin ladies begging it the entrance of churches; then they died. The younger generation had turned its back on its elders and allowed them to perish.

A more visible factor in the rise in mortality was the disintegration of Russia’s public health system. Hospitals were suddenly unsanitary, underfunded, underequipped, bereft of medicine. Suddenly Russia was suffering outbreaks of diseases associated with the most impoverished regions of the Third World: diphtheria, typhus, cholera, and typhoid.

Tuberculosis, the great killer of the Industrial Revolution, was largely wiped out in the twentieth century with the advent of antibiotics and better public hygiene. But in the 1990’s, Russia found itself with hundreds of thousands of active TB cases and even more dormant cases. The most worrying aspect of this phenomenon was the appearance of drug-resistant TB—a highly infectious strain of the bacterium resistant to any known antibiotic. The breeding ground of this scourge was the prison system—active TB afflicted up to 10 percent of Russia’s huge prison population. Under conditions of overcrowded cells and minimal medical treatment, the disease spread rapidly and was transmitted further into the general population. Each year some 300,000 people (mostly young men) entered the prison system, while a slightly smaller number of convicts were released upon the completion of their term. According to two researchers studying Russia’s problem, Dr. Alexander Goldfarb of New York’s Public Health Research Institute and Mercedes Becerra of the Harvard Medical School, Russia’s prisons released 30,000 cases of active TB into society, and 300,000 carriers of the dormant bacterium every year. If nothing was done to address the problem, Goldfarb declared, the number of TB cases would continue to double every year, reaching 16 million by 2005 (11 percent of the population).

If the living conditions were appalling for the one million young men in Russia’s prisons, they were hardly any better for the 1.5 million in the armed forces. Every year, 2,000 to 3,000 young conscripts perished—either by suicide, murder, accident, or hazing incidents. (The precise number of these kinds of deaths was not released by the army.)

The Yeltsin era witnessed an explosion of sexually transmitted diseases. Between 1990 and 1996, new syphilis cases identified every year skyrocketed from 7,900 to 388,200. AIDS was virtually unknown in Russia in the years before Communism fell. Since then, fed by burgeoning intravenous drug use and rampant, unprotected sex, AIDS spread with geometric rapidity through the Russian population. The government had no idea of the precise number of people afflicted, but based on the growth of visible AIDS cases, Dr. Vadim Pokrovsky, the nation’s leading epidemiologist, estimated that Russia would have 10 million people infected by 2005 (almost all between 15 and 29).

A significant portion of the increase in mortality rates in Russia was due to lifestyle choices: an unhealthy diet, heavy smoking, and perhaps the highest rate of alcohol consumption in the world. Drug addiction took an increasing toll. Initially, post-Communist Russia had served only as a transshipment point for opium and heroin form Southeast Asia or Central Asia to the West. Soon the drugs began to appear in Russia itself. By 1997, Russia’s domestic market had ballooned into one of the largest narcotics markets in the world. According to official estimates, Russia had 2 million to 5 million drug addicts (3 percent of the population). These were mostly young men and women.

For the older generation, the poison of choice was alcohol. It was impossible to tell just how much alcohol was consumed in Russia, since so much of the vodka was produced in bootleg distilleries. One 1993 survey found that more than 80 percent of Russian men were drinkers and that their average consumption was more than half a liter of alcohol per day. In 1996, more than 35,000 Russians died of alcohol poisoning, compared to several hundred such deaths the same year in the United States.

Heavy drinking and crime contributed to a spectacular rise in violent and accidental deaths—the single fastest-growing “cause of death” category. Between 1992 and 1997, 229,000 Russians committed suicide. 159,000 died of poisoning while consuming cheap vodka, 67,000 drowned (usually the result of drunkenness), and 169,000 were murdered.

While Russians were dying in increasing numbers, fewer children were being born. In the late 1990’s, there were 3 million state-funded abortions each year—nearly three times the number of live births. Abortions had long been used by Soviet women as the primary method of birth control. The average Russian woman had three or four abortions: many women had ten or more. As a result of these multiple abortions, as well as drug addiction, one third of Russian adults were estimated to be infertile by the late 1990’s.

The rapid decline in births, combined with an even faster growth in mortality rates, produced a relentless decline in Russia’s population. In 1992, the Russian population was 148.3 million. By 1999, the population had fallen by 2.7 million people. If it had not been for the immigrants coming into Russia from the even more desperate situation in the Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, the Russian population would have shrunk by nearly 6 million between 1992 and 1999. These figures did not include the millions of Russians (mostly the healthier, more enterprising members of the younger generation) who had emigrated to Europe or North America unofficially.

The most pitiful victims of Russia’s social and economic decline were the children. In 1992, 1.6 million children were born in Russia; that same year, 67,286 children (4 percent of all births) were abandoned by there parents. By 1997, the breakdown in parenting had grown to catastrophic levels. That year, 1.3 million children were born, but 113,000 children (equivalent to 9 percent of all newborns) were abandoned. Russia had no real program of adoption or foster care, so most of these children ended up on the street. According to some Western aid agencies, there were more than 1 million abandoned children wandering around Russia’s cities by the end of the 1990’s. The rest ended up in the vast orphanage network. Here they were left in dark, overcrowded wards, haunted by malnutrition, insufficient medical care, and routine abuse by the staff and older orphans. At least 30,000 Russian orphans were confined to psychoneurological internaty for “incurable children”; an easily reversible speech defect such as a cleft palate was enough to get a child classified as “imbecile’ and locked up in an institution where he or she would be essentially left to die. It didn’t need to be this way—95 percent of Russia’s orphans still had a living parent.

When I first went to Togliatti to interview the directors of Avotaz, I decided to take the train to Moscow. The journey would last twenty-four hours, but I usually liked traveling by train in Russia—rumbling through the countryside in those 1930’s -era railcars was one of the best ways to meet people.

In the carriage of my Togliatti train was a mother with an ailing seven-year old child. It was hot. The boy was stripped to his underwear. He was covered with sores—he had a very wiry, blistered little body. His mother was evidently taking him home after an unsuccessful attempt to get him treated for some skin disease. The boy was in agony. He kept wanting to scratch himself. He was crying. His mother applied plasters to the worst of the sores. “Mama...Mama...it hurts,” he called out.

The boy’s suffering continued throughout the night, his cries echoing through the darkened railroad carriage. The next morning the passengers seemed more silent and subdued than usual; there was a palpable sense of people trying to harden themselves against the child’s suffering. The boy finally fell asleep in midmorning. I saw the mother sitting in the corridor alone, gazing blankly at the passing Russian landscape.

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theculturedmarxist · 3 years

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The president of the Council of Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, made an extraordinary statement over the weekend. “Just days ago much of the world was focused on the unwanted prospect of regime change in Ukraine,” he tweeted. “Now the conversation has shifted to include the possibility of desired regime change in Russia.” Senior Brookings Institute fellow Benjamin Wittes was even more explicit:

For anyone expecting me to be outraged about this — I am, after all, almost daily denounced as a Putin-lover and apologist, so surely I must want the Great Leader to stay in power forever — I have to disappoint. If Vladimir Putin were captured tomorrow and fired into space, I wouldn’t bat an eye.

I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there.

Once, Putin’s KGB past, far from being seen as a negative, was viewed with relief by the American diplomatic community, which had been exhausted by the organizational incompetence of our vodka-soaked first partner, Boris Yeltsin. Putin by contrast was “a man we can do business with,” a “liberal, humane, and decent European” of “alert, controlled poise” and “well-briefed acuity,” who was open to anything, even Russia joining NATO. “I don’t see why not,” Putin said. “I would not rule out such a possibility.”

The New York Times Magazine, noting that the KGB of the seventies that Putin joined was no longer really a murder factory but just another “thinking corporation,” even compared him once to Russia’s first true Western-looking leader:

In him, Russia has found a humane version of Peter the Great, a ruler who will open the country to the influence of a world at once gentler and more dynamic than Russia has ever been.

I’ve been bitter in commentary about Putin in recent years because I never forgot the way the West smoothed his rise, and pretends now that it didn’t. It’s infuriating also that many of us who were critical of him from the start are denounced now as Putin apologists, I think in part because we have inconvenient memories about who said what at the start of his story. The effort to wipe that history clean is reaching a fever pitch this week. Before they finish the job, it seemed worth getting it all down.

In late 1996, Vladimir Putin was at a career crossroads. His boss, Anatoly Sobchak, the first democratically elected Mayor of St. Petersburg, had just lost an election and with Putin’s help, was gearing up to flee the country to avoid corruption charges.

Should Putin, too, flee abroad, perhaps to Germany, where he’d enjoyed a posting in his KGB days? He had his own reputation issues, having been inveigled in scandal in his time as Sobchak’s adviser and Deputy Mayor. In 1992, while head of a Petersburg Committee to attract foreign investment, he’d been given over $120 million in export quotas for timber, oil, and rare earth metals by the federal government, to trade for desperately needed food. The deal was approved by Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and then-trade Minister (and future Alfa Bank heavy) Pyotr Aven. The raw materials were not bartered but pawned off to “various commercial structures,” as the newspaper Smena put it, and the city got back just two tankers of cooking oil.

The Federal Accounting Chamber ended up writing a letter recommending that Mr. Putin not be considered for promotions. But the little man from the northern capital was destined for a higher calling.

#russia #putin #vladimir putin #ukraine conflict #history

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russianreader · 6 years

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Squandering Its Way to Superpowerdom

“Squandering”: Did the US Secretary of State Grasp the Russian Approach to Budget Spending? The Kremlin Accused the State Department of Tactlessness and Unprofessionalism, Yet Pompeo’s Remarks Were on the Mark Yevgeny Karasyuk Republic December 13, 2018

Venezuelan Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino gives his thumb up as he sits on the cockpit of a Russian Tupolev Tu-160 strategic long-range heavy…

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newstfionline · 4 years

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Sunday, January 17, 2021

‘Spend as much as you can,’ IMF head urges governments worldwide (Reuters) Policymakers worldwide should embrace more spending to help revive their stuttering economies, the head of the International Monetary Fund said on Friday at Russia’s annual Gaidar economic forum. Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva did not give any specific economic forecasts, but made clear her desire for governments to up their spending and that a synchronised approach internationally was best for growth. “In terms of policies for right now, very unusual for the IMF, starting in March I would go out and I would say: ‘please spend’. Spend as much as you can and then spend a little bit more,” Georgieva said. “I continue to advocate for monetary policy accommodation and fiscal policies that protect the economy from collapse at a time when we are on purpose restricting both production and consumption,” she said.

States Brace for Armed Protests in Wake of U.S. Capitol Attack (NYT) Bracing for the potential of violent protests in the days leading up to the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20, state officials are calling up National Guard troops, erecting imposing fencing and shutting down Capitol grounds in response to the F.B.I.’s warning that armed protesters could target the capital cities across the country. A survey by The New York Times of all 50 states found at least 10 that are activating National Guard troops in their capital cities. The moves by state officials point to the growing fear over continuing violence around the country in the aftermath of the mob attack last week on the U.S. Capitol in which assailants supporting President Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election forced their way inside the building.

Mexico hits another record for COVID-19 cases (AP) Mexico posted a record spike in coronavirus cases on Friday, with 21,366 newly confirmed infections, about double the daily rate of increase just a week ago. The country also recorded 1,106 more deaths. It was unclear if the spike was due to the presence of the U.K. virus variant, of which only one case has so far been confirmed in a visiting British citizen. The country has now seen almost 1.61 million total infections and has registered over 139,000 deaths so far in the pandemic.

Maduro ally presses for dialogue with Biden (AP) A close ally of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said Friday he’s hopeful the Biden administration will roll back a “cruel” sanctions policy and instead give room for diplomacy that could lead to the reopening of the U.S. Embassy and the release of several jailed American citizens. Jorge Rodríguez’s comments came in his first interview since taking the helm of Venezuela’s National Assembly over strong protests from the U.S., European Union and domestic opponents. Rodriguez, extending an olive branch to the incoming U.S. president, said the ruling socialist party is eager for a new start after four years of endless attacks by the Trump administration that he believes not only exacerbated suffering among Venezuelans and failed to unseat Maduro but also punished U.S. investors who historically have been important in the OPEC nation. It’s unclear if the Biden administration will accept the overture or continue with the hardline policy of regime change it inherits. In the meantime, there’s no end in sight to an economic crisis that has sent millions fleeing and those left behind lacking basic goods, including gasoline, in a country sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves.

UK shuts travel corridors and requires negative Covid tests to enter (The Guardian) Boris Johnson has announced a dramatic tightening of the UK’s borders, with all international arrivals to be forced to quarantine as well as demonstrate they have had a negative Covid test. After months of criticism of the government’s lax border policies, which Labour claimed were “costing lives”, the prime minister said he was tightening the rules to prevent new variants of the virus reaching the UK and safeguard the vaccination programme. He also underlined the desperate situation facing England’s hospitals, urging the public to think twice before going out at the weekend. “There are now more than 37,000 Covid patients in hospital across the UK and, in spite of all the efforts of our doctors and nurses and our medical staff, we are now seeing cancer treatments sadly postponed, ambulances queueing, and intensive care units spilling over into adjacent wards,” he said.

Now, really? Italy political chaos sparks dismay (Reuters) Italy faces political turmoil. That after former prime minister Matteo Renzi pulled his small party out of the ruling coalition, stripping it of a majority. Now it’s unclear what will happen, but it’s hardly the best timing. The country is mired in its worst recession since World War II. It’s also battling the second-highest death toll in Europe in the ongoing health crisis. Small businesses in Rome said leaders should be focused on helping them, not squabbling over power.

Undeterred by the pandemic, Hindu pilgrims gather in India (NYT) As India prepares to begin an ambitious coronavirus vaccination program this weekend, more than 700,000 Hindu pilgrims gathered to take a dip in the Ganges River on Thursday, the start of the Kumbh Mela, one of the largest religious gatherings in the world. The faithful who traveled to Haridwar, the holy town at the foothills of the Himalayas that is the site of this year’s pilgrimage, said a dip in the freezing waters will cleanse them of their sins and provide blessings that extend through several generations. The authorities said that about 1,000 people had been fined for not wearing masks or maintaining social distance, but Sanjay Gunjyal, a police official monitoring the crowd, acknowledged the difficulty of trying to enforce the rules. “In a limited space, crowd management and maintaining social distancing is extremely difficult,” he said. “Their belief system was paramount and not the fear to catch Covid,” said Manoj Singh Negi, a spokesman for the police department monitoring the event. “That they got to touch the holy waters was the overriding sentiment.”

Damaged roads, lack of gear hinder Indonesia quake rescue (AP) Damaged roads and bridges, power blackouts and lack of heavy equipment on Saturday hampered rescuers after a strong earthquake left at least 46 people dead and hundreds injured on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island. Operations were focused on about eight locations in the hardest-hit city of Mamuju, where people were still believed trapped following early Friday’s magnitude 6.2 quake, said Saidar Rahmanjaya, who heads the local search and rescue agency. Cargo planes carrying food, tents, blankets and other supplies from Jakarta landed late Friday for distribution in temporary shelters. Still, thousands of people spent the night in the open fearing aftershocks and a possible tsunami.

Russia to Exit Open Skies Treaty, Escalating Military Rivalry With U.S. (NYT) Russia said on Friday that it was pulling out of a decades-old treaty that allowed countries to make military reconnaissance flights over each other’s territory. The decision by President Vladimir V. Putin to leave the accord, the Open Skies Treaty, matches an action taken by President Trump in May. The treaty, which dates to 1992, is of limited use to the United States, which has a network of spy satellites. But it has been important to European allies as a way of keeping track of Russian troop movements along their borders. When Mr. Trump announced the American withdrawal, which was completed late last year, he predicted Mr. Putin was “going to come back and want to make a deal.” He did not. And Russia’s move signaled that the country did not intend to make it easy for the administration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to reverse Mr. Trump’s rejection of a series of arms-control and military monitoring treaties.

In Uganda, Museveni steamrolls to a sixth term (Washington Post) Longtime Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni won a sixth term as president with about 60 percent of the vote, according to election results Saturday, in an election that highlighted the many tactics used for decades to steamroll Museveni's opponents. While voting Thursday was largely peaceful and orderly, the campaign period displayed the architecture of Museveni’s 35-year grip on power: relentless and violent crackdowns, widespread arrests, and attempts to bar journalists and independent observers. His ability to keep deploying them, election after election, also has been indirectly bolstered by the billion-plus dollars his government receives annually in Western aid money, primarily from the United States and U.S.-backed lending institutions. The State Department’s assistant secretary for African affairs, Tibor Nagy, tweeted Friday that Uganda’s election was “fundamentally flawed” and that the United States was assessing options to respond. But, to many critics of Museveni, such statements are undercut by the U.S. aid money — totaling $936 million in 2019 — that just keeps coming. “The international donors, and particularly the United States, are the biggest enablers of Museveni’s authoritarianism,” said Godber Tumushabe, a Ugandan lawyer and activist. “They underwrite all of Uganda’s public services — health, infrastructure, etcetera — which allows Museveni to spend massively on a security apparatus and a network of patronage.”

#headlines #news

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azspot · 7 years

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It is mid-afternoon and leaden rain falls over the city. After traversing a labyrinth of scruffy stairways, ill-lit corridors and backyards, Andrey and I are seated in a space rather like a classroom. This place brings together organisations, lawyers and experts in judicial reform, human rights and other representatives of civil society from one of the most unruly parts of the country from the state’s point of view: Saint Petersburg. At times the meeting takes on a somewhat melancholic air. This impression becomes more acute when one realises the age of some of those present: men and women who were young in the turbulent 90s and who now pass verdict on that period. ‘We weren’t ready for that wave of democracy’, some argue. This is a point I have heard uttered by the Ukrainian-born, Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich.

Back then, under Yeltsin, Russia began to dismantle the USSR from within while simultaneously experimenting with democracy and applying drastic measures to transition to a market economy under the guidance of reformists such as Gennady Burbulis and Yegor Gaidar. Convinced that there was no alternative, figures who had been raised on Marx now embraced shock therapy capitalism with the same Messianic fervour. In October 1991 Yeltsin told the Duma that this was ‘Russia’s way to democracy and not empire’. Following the shortages under Gorbachev’s perestroika, the social impact was dramatic as poverty and inequality increased. But the deep empire – its security structures and power clans – survived the collapse and adapted to the new times. At the meeting, a tall man with long white hair and a denim jacket says that ‘our rulers continued the old ways of keeping power amongst themselves…’, and adds, with a sarcastic smile, ‘until the KGB took control’. This the KGB to which the current governor of Saint Petersburg, Georgy Poltavchenko, and the president himself belonged.

Several of these NGOs are threatened by the Foreign Agents Law, passed after the protests against the government, in 2011 and 2012. It states that organisations that receive donations or assistance from outside Russia and participate in ‘political activities’ must be specifically registered as such. Such measures, along with the criminalisation of slander, are designed to stigmatise human rights organisations above all others, funded, as they often are, by the EU, some of its member states and western foundations. They have to choose between an isolated outcast status with the attendant financial problems, adopting an ‘apolitical’ stance, dissolving, or becoming semi-clandestine. Meanwhile, little by little and just as it did in the past, the regime is creating a replica of itself within civil society by supporting sympathetic organisations.

This authoritarianism flourishes amid political apathy, influenced by decades of totalitarianism. Many people are reluctant to display ‘political feelings’, we are told at the Ombudsman’s Office. Doing so in public is increasingly troublesome and can cost a person dear. According to this institution, certain kinds of demonstration, like small protests against the war on Ukraine, are prohibited on a systematic basis, with organisers risking fines and other sanctions. Some are more equal than others, it seems, because these restrictions are rarely applied to movements close to the regime. This, I am told, is true of the National Liberation Movement, a Russian nationalist organization, which organises pickets and counter-protests which have the tendency to turn violent against events held by groups such as Memorial, an organisation devoted to investigating the USSR’s past and which has been declared a ‘foreign agent’. In present-day Russia, there is an asphyxiating atmosphere surrounding any expressions of ‘unpatriotic’ dissent in the public realm and on social media. During my stay, at the urging of political forces that emphasise ‘traditional family values’, the Duma passed, and the president signed into law, a partial decriminalisation of domestic violence, with the effect that only those cases that lead to a woman being hospitalised will have criminal consequences. This is probably another law heading for the Strasbourg court of human rights, which recently found Russian legislation on ‘sexual propaganda’ to be discriminatory against homosexuals. But the niceties of the Council of Europe count for little for this Kremlin, which has suspended its payments to the organisation. The writer Peter Pomerantsev said to me that if Stalin was three-quarters repression and one-quarter propaganda, then Putin is the opposite, apart from the occasional reminder that it is better to tread carefully. That proportion, I replied and some of my Russian friends seem to agree, could vary.

#russia

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divulgacion-alternativa · 5 years

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Benjamin Fulford Publication Links - January 20, 2020:

“On January 16th, President [Herman] Gref of Federal Central Bank Sberbank got so drunk with grief that he was taken to the Odintsovo Hospital suffering from acute alcohol poisoning. That is why he suddenly cancelled his speech at the Gaidar Forum.” https://en.gaidarforum.ru/

On January 18th, Gref told Tass News, “We should brace for the collapse of the existing world order. It will be very painful.” https://tass.com/top-officials/1043741

One other thing they reported to us was that Yevgeny Zinichev, “the head of the Ministry of Emergencies, will become the head of the FSB, but this will also not be for long.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Zinichev

British royal family sources confirm this and say that Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako have been invited to the UK this spring where, among other things, they will discuss the creation of a world future planning agency. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-royals-japan/japanese-emperor-to-make-state-visit-to-united-kingdom-idUSKBN1ZD0LK

Representatives of the P3 Freemasons, the British Commonwealth, and Asian secret societies are planning to meet in London, possibly in February, to discuss the creation of this agency. They will also discuss preparations for human colonization of space, P3 sources say. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/01/space-force-trump/604951/

“The Summit will be hosted by the Prime Minister and will bring together businesses, governments and international institutions to showcase and promote the breadth and quality of investment opportunities across Africa. The Summit will strengthen the UK’s partnership with African nations to build a secure and prosperous future for all our citizens. It will mobilize new and substantial investment to create jobs and boost mutual prosperity.” https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/uk-africa-investment-summit-2020/about

The Chinese are also now taking the lead on environmental protection, the sources say. Recent news items backing this up include Chinese plans to ban single-use plastic and a ten-year fishing moratorium on the Yangtze. https://in.reuters.com/article/china-environment-plastic-idINKBN1ZI0MR?utm_source=reddit.com

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/02/c_138672069.htm

The fact that the plane was remotely hijacked and flown towards an Iranian military base—a clear war crime—is now being reported by mainstream news outlets. https://ahtribune.com/world/north-africa-south-west-asia/iran/3818-who-targeted-ukraine-airlines-flight-752.html

Also, in a sign of a real break in the Anglo world, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is blaming the U.S. for downing the Ukrainian airliner. This is happening as UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace says his country is ending its military alliance with the Trump regime. https://nypost.com/2020/01/14/canadian-pm-justin-trudeau-blames-downing-of-ukraine-jet-on-us-escalation/

https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-abandoning-trump-iran-us-withdraw-leadership-world-qassem-soleiman2020-1?utm_source=reddit.com&r=U.S.&IR=T&utm_source=reddit.com

A clear sign of how rogue the U.S. regime has become was when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, “The destruction of Soleimani is an example of a new U.S. strategy aimed at deterring its opponents. This applies equally to Iran, China, and Russia.” Someone should point out to Pompeo that assassination is a two-way street. https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/17/lunatic-pompeo-threatens-putin-with-drone-assassination/

The Trump regime is also doing things like threatening Europe and pulling out of NATO military exercises. https://www.debka.com/us-forces-withdraw-from-nato-march-drill-in-norway-due-to-mid-east-tension/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/16/iran-says-it-is-enriching-more-uranium-than-before-nuclear-deal

Finally, we are hearing increasingly credible information about battles taking place in deep underground bases from multiple sources. First take a look at the seismographs from an Indian underground nuclear test versus those from a natural earthquake. https://www.flickr.com/photos/confederateyankee/265119334/

Multiple sources tell us they have found children in cages and other horrors in some of these bases that are now being taken over or destroyed by the white hats. Japanese sources tell us that 14,000 Japanese children were being sold each year to the Khazarian mafia. FBI statistics show that 40,000 children go missing each year in the U.S. Many of them are now being rescued from cages in underground bases, Pentagon sources say. The 38-minute video at the link below provides good background information on this no longer very secret war. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=F0NEd9gEHFs&feature=emb_title

------------------------End of the Links----------------------

Weekly Geo-Political News and Analysis by Benjamin Fulford

*****ONLY TEXT*****

January 20 - 2020 - Source: www.benjaminfulford.net

Benjamin Fulford | January 13 - 2020 | TEXT ONLY | https://youtu.be/LGs2TPvSAaI

Benjamin Fulford | January 6 - 2020 | TEXT ONLY | https://youtu.be/8JIAi7ccK9U

Interview with Cobra and Benjamin Fulford | Age of Aquarius Activation | Financial System: https://youtu.be/_luQ-M49Pvc

Benjamin Fulford | December 23 - 2019 https://youtu.be/0_i2Yw3eyzs

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#benjaminfulford #benfulford #fulfordnews #divulgacionalternativa

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salvabit-blog · 6 years

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روسيا من غير المرجح أن تستثمر في البيتكوين خلال الـ 30 عامًا القادمة

في الآونة الأخيرة ، أشار تقرير إلى أن روسيا تنوي استثمار مليارات الدولارات في بيتكوين للتخفيف من آثار العقوبات الأمريكية. أشار التقرير إلى خبير اقتصادي روسي كبير ومحاضر في مؤسسة اقتصادية وطنية. ومع ذلك ، يقول مسؤول حكومي روسي إن هذا أمر بعيد الاحتمال. وكشف المسؤول ، الذي يعمل مع قسم تنظيم التشفير ، عن التحديات الكبيرة التي تعوق تبني التشفير في البلاد. واحد من هؤلاء هو عدم وضوح التنظيم. الحكومة الروسية لم تتخذ بعد موقفا بشأن استخدام التشفير ، والغموض يضر الصناعة. ومع ذلك ، في ما هو إشارة مشجعة إلى هذه الصناعة ، ويعتقد رئيس الوزراء الروسي أن cryptos لها مستقبل. في خطابه الذي ألقاه في أكبر حدث تجاري في روسيا ، اعترف دميتري ميدفيديف بتقلّب cryptos ، لكنه يعتقد أنها سترتد. المعادلة الروسية تلقى عالم التشفير نبأ أن روسيا كانت تنظر إلى بيتكوين بأمل كبير وحماس كبير. روسيا لديها الكثير من التأثير في الاقتصاد العالمي. كما قام الرئيس الروسي ، فلاديمير بوتين ، في الآونة الأخيرة بشراكة وثيقة مع نظيره الصيني. مجتمعة ، يمكن للبلدين جعل Bitcoin معيار عالمي مقبول. ومع ذلك ، قد يكون هذا مجرد التمني. وفقا لإلينا سيدورينكو ، فإن روسيا لا تزال على الأقل ثلاثة عقود من التحول إلى بيتكوين. Sidorenko هو رئيس مجموعة العمل المشتركة بين الإدارات التي تم تكليفها بإدارة صناعة التشفير في روسيا. تحدثت إلى Forklog ، وسائل الإعلام التشفير الكرتونية الروسية ، أوضحت : بموجب هذا البيان لا يوجد شيء من الحس السليم ، ناهيك عن الأفكار التي سيتم النظر فيها في الدوائر الحكومية. إن الاتحاد الروسي ، مثل أي بلد آخر في العالم ، ببساطة غير جاهز اليوم للجمع بين نظامه المالي التقليدي بطريقة أو بأخرى. ولكي نقول أنه في روسيا يمكن تنفيذ هذه الفكرة في الثلاثين سنة القادمة على الأقل من غير المحتمل أن يكون ممكنا. ويقال أن سيدورنكو أشار إلى التأكيدات السابقة بأن روسيا تشتري بيتكوين على أنه أمر سخيف. وأشارت إلى عدم وجود تشريع على البيتكوين باعتباره أكبر عائق. حتى لو أ��ادت روسيا أن تضع أصولها في العملات المعدلة الآن ، فإنها ببساطة لا تستطيع فعل ذلك ، بسبب حقيقة أنه ليس لدينا أي آليات تسمح لنا بإدخال نظام ، حيث سيتم تخزين هذه الأصول ، أي السلطات ستكون مسؤولة عن ذلك ، والذي سيكون مسؤولا عن الانتهاكات والأشياء. مثل هذا النموذج في ظل التشريعات الجنائية والمالية والمدنية الحالية ، بشكل عام ، لا يصلح لا يزال هناك أمل وفقا ل Sidorenko ، تعتبر cryptos مخاطر عالية في جميع أنحاء العالم. مع وضعه في الاعتبار ، فإن دمج التشفير مع النظام المالي الحالي " لا يناسب أي شخص. ' الطريقة الوحيدة لتنفيذ العملات الرقمية في روسيا ستكون من خلال إنشاء "عملة تقليدية مشتركة بين الدول". وهذا من شأنه أن يوفر نظامًا موحدًا ومقبولًا عالميًا للمدفوعات بين مختلف البلدان. يعتقد رئيس الوزراء الروسي ديمتري ميدفيديف أنه لا يزال من السابق لأوانه إلغاء الكريبتوس. وفي كلمته التي ألقاها في منتدى غيدار العاشر ، أشار إلى التشفير كحقل تحتاج روسيا إلى مراقبةه. وقال ميدفيديف ، وهو رئيس مجلس الوزراء: لكن هذا ، بالطبع ، ليس سبباً لدفنهم. هنا ... هناك جوانب خفيفة وجوانب غامقة ، كما هو الحال في أي ظاهرة اجتماعية ، في أي معهد اقتصادي. ويجب أن نراقب عن كثب ما يحدث لهمRecently, a report indicated that Russia intended to invest billions of dollars in Bitcoin to cushion itself against the effects of U.S sanctions. , the report cited a senior Russian economist and a lecturer at a national economics institution. However, a Russian government official says that this is very unlikely. The official, who works with the crypto regulation department, revealed the great challenges that hinder crypto adoption in the country. One of these is lack of regulatory clarity. The Russian government is yet to take a stand on the use of cryptos and the ambiguity is hurting the industry. However, in what is an encouraging nod to the industry, the Russia Prime Minister believes that cryptos have a future. In his address in Russia’s biggest business event, Dmitry Medvedev acknowledged cryptos’ volatility, but he believes they’ll bounce back. The Russian Equation The crypto world had received the news that Russia was looking at Bitcoin with great hope and enthusiasm. Russia has a lot of influence in the global economy. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin has also in recent times struck a close partnership with his Chinese counterpart. Combined, the two nations can make Bitcoin an accepted global standard. However, this might just be wishful thinking. According to Elina Sidorenko, Russia is at least three decades away from turning to Bitcoin. Sidorenko is the chairperson of the interdepartmental working group that has been tasked with managing the crypto industry in Russia. Speaking to Forklog, a Russian crypto media outlet, she explained: Under this statement there is not a bit of common sense, much less ideas that would be considered in government circles. The Russian Federation, like any other country in the world, is simply not ready today to somehow combine its traditional financial system with cryptocurrencies. And to say that in Russia this idea can be implemented in the next at least 30 years is unlikely to be possible. Sidorenko reportedly referred to earlier assertions of Russia buying Bitcoin as absurd. She cited lack of legislation on Bitcoin as the biggest impediment. Even if Russia wants to place its cryptocurrency assets now, it simply cannot do this, due to the fact that we do not have any mechanisms that would allow us to introduce a system, where these assets would be stored, which authorities would be responsible for it, which would be responsible for abuses and stuff. Such a model under the current criminal, financial and civil legislation, in general, does not fit There’s Still Hope According to Sidorenko, cryptos are considered high risk the world over. With his in mind, integrating cryptos with the current financial system would ‘not suit anyone.‘ The only way to implement digital currencies in Russia would be through the creation of an ‘interstate cryptocurrency.’ This would provide a unified and globally accepted system of payments between different countries. Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian Prime Minister, believes that it’s still too early to call off cryptos. In hisaddress at the 10th Gaidar Forum, he cited cryptos as a field that Russia will need to keep an eye on. Medvedev, who is the head of the cabinet, stated: But this, of course, is not a reason to bury them. Here … there are both light sides and dark sides, as in any social phenomenon, in any economic institute. And we should just watch closely what happens to them Read the full article

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coin-river-blog · 6 years

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Economy & Regulation

Last year’s falling prices are not a good enough reason to “bury” cryptocurrencies, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said during a high-level economic conference. He believes Russia should carefully follow the developments around digital coins.

Also read: Clickbait Media Uses Bitcoin and Russia to Pump Headlines Again

Russia Should Watch Carefully

Medvedev thinks the Russian Federation should watch the situation with cryptocurrencies, whose rates “showed extreme volatility” in an extremely bearish 2018. The value of some digital assets fell five-fold, the head of the Russian government noted during his appearance at the annual Gaidar economic forum. Quoted by Tass, he further elaborated:

This, of course, is not a reason to bury them. As with any social phenomenon, any economic institute, there are both bright sides and dark sides.

That’s why the Chairman of the Russian Council of Ministers says Russia should simply carefully follow what’s happening with cryptocurrencies.

Digital financial assets, a term applied to cryptocurrencies in official Russian documents, remain unregulated in the country. However, Medvedev’s comments come just weeks before the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, is expected to review on second reading a package of draft laws aimed at establishing order in the crypto industry.

Dmitry Medvedev, Prime Minister of Russia

Three bills were voted on first reading in the Duma in last May – “On Digital Financial Assets,” “On Attracting Investments Using Investment Platforms,” and “On Digital Rights.” Their final adoption was postponed multiple times but is now among the priorities for the spring session of the house. The drafts are part of a long list of bills designed to regulate different aspects of the digital economy.

‘Why Regulate What We Don’t Understand’

The Gaidar forum is an international event which is held at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Ranepa). Each year, it brings together economists, scientists, officials, political figures, and businessmen from around the world to discuss current trends in the socio-economic and political development of Russia. The country’s business environment and investment climate as well as the prospects for its integration in the global economy are some of the major topics of the conference.

Herman Gref, CEO of Sberbank

Russia does not need excessive regulation in the digital economy sector, said Sberbank CEO Herman Gref who was among this year’s participants in the forum. During a session devoted to digitalization, he pointed to the EU as bad example, noting that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) directive has stopped progress in the fields of data technologies and artificial intelligence in Europe.

Gref, who was Russia’s minister of economic development and trade between 2000 and 2007, also noted there’s no full understanding in the country about what should be regulated in the digital sphere. Quoted by Russian media, he emphasized:

There is no need to hurry with regulation. It is not necessary to regulate what we still don’t fully see and understand.

Тhe prominent Russian banker warned that overregulation could hurt the development of new technologies in his country. Gref also said he favors the approach adopted by China and the United States where, in his words, no tight regulation has been applied yet.

During his speech, Gref called on the Russian government to refrain from introducing state monopolies in the development of new technologies and digital ecosystems. “Non-competitive models lead to non-competitiveness of any business model,” concluded the chief executive of the largest Russian bank, which is a state-owned company.

What are your expectations about future Russian policy toward cryptocurrencies? Tell us in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

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we-arnold-lockshin-blog · 5 years

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Дмитрий Саймс — Агент ЦРУ

Dictatorship USA – Run By A Plundering and Murderous Ruling Class

Дмитрий Саймс — Ставленник Спецслужб США

Факты, которые подконтрольные ЦРУ СМ»И» в России скрывают...

Дмитрий Саймс — Агент ЦРУ и Враг России

Дмитрий Саймс “был неофициальным советником по вопросам внешней политики экс-президента США Ричарда Никсона (1913—1994) в последние годы его жизни.

Является председателем и главным исполнительным директором Центра национальных интересов (Вашингтон, США; ранее — Никсоновский центр) со дня его основания 20 января 1994 года Ричардом Никсоном, а также издателем и генеральным директором американского журнала «The National Interest» («Национальный интерес»).

Принимает участие в качестве эксперта в российских политических телевизионных передачах и печатных изданиях.

С 3 сентября 2018 года вместе с Вячеславом Никоновым ведёт общественно-политическое ток-шоу «Большая игра» на «Первом канале» российского телевидения". (Саймс, Дмитрий - Википедия)

«Dimitri K. Simes (Russian: Дмитрий Саймс; born October 29, 1947) Dimitri K. Simes is President and CEO of The Center for the National Interest and Publisher of its foreign policy bi-monthly magazine, The National Interest. Mr. Simes was selected to lead the Center in 1994 by former President Richard Nixon, to whom he served as an informal foreign policy advisor and with whom he traveled regularly to Russia and other former Soviet states as well as Western and Central Europe.

«Mr. Simes served as Chairman of the Center for Russian and Eurasian Programs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Simes was a Senior Research Fellow and subsequently the Director of Soviet Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

«Mr. Simes was born in Moscow in 1947, and both of his parents were prominent lawyers for dissidents in the Soviet Union and were expelled from the Soviet bar and forced to leave the country. Dimitri Simes graduated with an M.A. in history from Moscow State University. From 1967 to 1972, he was a research associate at the Institute of World Economy and International Affairs (a foreign policy think tank in the Soviet Union at that time) prior to emigrating to the U.S. in 1973.

«Simes has served as a consultant to the National Intelligence Council.» (“Dimitri Simes”, Wikipedia)

Дмитрий Саймс — Действующее лицо ведомств спецслужб США...

The Center for the National Interest...

“George Beebe is Director for Intelligence and National Security at the Center for the National Interest. He spent more than two decades in government service as an intelligence analyst, diplomat, and policy advisor, including service as director of CIA’s Russia analysis” (Center for the National Interest).

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...

“In 1993, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace opened an affiliate in Moscow that advised Russian President Boris Eltsin in the process of privatization of the ex-Soviet economy through people like Yegor Gaidar, which earned it the nickname of «Trojan Horse» of the CIA... In 1997, Jessica T. Matthews (former director of Global Affairs at the National Security Council), was elected president of the Endowment...” (“The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace”, Voltaire.net, Aug. 25, 2004).

Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)...

“CSIS was known for its hard-line Cold Warriors, and it is certain that many of the fellows or staff were former intelligence officials. Several of them made no secret about it. When president Carter installed Admiral Stansfield Turner as CIA director, many of the operatives who had been involved in the murky side of the CIA moved to CSIS. When Reagan reappointed Casey as director of the CIA in 1980s many of the CSIS fellow migrated back to the CIA or other intelligence agencies.” (“The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)”, Wikispooks)

National Intelligence Council...

“The National Intelligence Council supports the Director of National Intelligence in his role as head of the Intelligence Community (IC) and is the IC’s center for long-term strategic analysis.” ( Office of the Director of National Intelligence)

“Директор Национальной разведки (англ. Director of National Intelligence, DNI) — должностное лицо исполнительной ветви федерального правительства США, назначаемое президентом США с согласия Сената США. Директор Национальной разведки подотчётен президенту США и:

исполняет обязанности главы разведывательного сообщества США;

исполняет обязанности советника президента США, советника Совета Национальной безопасности, советника Совета Внутренней Безопасности по вопросам разведки, имеющим отношение к национальной;

руководит исполнением Программы Разведывательного сообщества.» (“ Директор Национальной разведки”, Википедия)

////////////////////////////////////////

Перед нами - коварный и опасный мошенник, расист, лжец и фашист Дональд Трамп, порочный Конгресс, нацистские ФБР - ЦРУ, кровавые милитаристы США и НАТО >>> а также и лживые, вредоносные американские СМ»И».

Киевские власти — агенты американского империализма... Именно то, чего хотят Трамр/ США и в Венесуэле!

А также в Иране. А также в Cирии. Затем и в России!

/////////////////////////////////////////////

Правительство США жестоко нарушало мои права человека при проведении кампании террора, которая заставила меня покинуть свою родину и получить политическое убежище в СССР. См. книгу «Безмолвный террор — История политических гонений на семью в США» - "Silent Terror: One family's history of political persecution in the United States» - http://arnoldlockshin.wordpress.com

Правительство США еще нарушает мои права, за 15 лет отказывается от выплаты причитающейся мне пенсии по старости. По грязным политическим причинам властители США воруют пенсию!! (см. «ФБР преследует американца в России», АиФ 10.09.2001)

ФСБ - Федеральная служба «безопасности» России - вслед за позорным, предавшим страну предшественником КГБ, мерзко выполняет приказы секретного, кровавого хозяина (boss) - американского ЦРУ (CIA). Среди таких «задач» - мне запретить выступать в СМИ и не пропускать отправленных мне комментариев.

Кроме того, ЦРУ - ФСБ забанили все мои посты, комментарии в Вконтакте, в Макспарке, в Facebook (“a dangerous account — your post goes against our Community Standards so only you can see it”), в Twitter (“Your account is suspended and is not permitted to perform this action”), в Medium.com, Одноклассники (почти всё) ... и удаляют ещё много других моих постов.

И ещё ЦРУ — ФСБ часто блокируют мою электронную почту (свою и/или отправленную мне) или заносят её в черный список («your host [74.6.133.40] is blacklisted») - делая невозможным для адресатов ознакомиться с обрашение.

Всё это только верхушка айсберга... ЦРУ — ФСБ всё ещё упорно преследуют меня и неотнократно старались «тихо» убивать меня.

Арнольд Локшин, политэмигрант из США

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cryptswahili · 6 years

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Crypto Cards Are Legal in Russia, According to the Finance Ministry

Using cryptocurrency debit cards to pay for goods and services does not contradict Russian law, Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseev was quoted as saying by local media. He believes these transactions are legal as the seller receives the money in Russian rubles.

Also read: No Reason to ‘Bury’ Cryptocurrencies, Russian PM Medvedev Says

Buying Coffee With Crypto Card Is Not Against the Law

Alexei Moiseev

The Russian Ministry of Finance receives a lot of queries about digital coins and their uses, Moiseev admitted during the Gaidar economic forum, an annual event that brings together politicians, academics and businessmen to discuss the challenges and opportunities for the country. He gave an example with a person who was prosecuted for paying his bill in a café with a payment card connected to a cryptocurrency account.

The ministry gave his opinion that the transaction was completely legal, as the cryptocurrency was initially converted to dollars and then to rubles. The café eventually got the money in Russian fiat currency which is in full compliance with the Russian law, the official explained during the conference.

“You can pay with these cards legally. What shouldn’t be done is to maintain a foreign account without notifying the tax service and reporting regularly the movement of funds. You’ll be responsible for that under the Code of Administrative Offenses,” explained Ivan Tikhonov, founder of the crypto news outlet Bitsmedia.

A number of crypto debit cards are currently available in North America and Europa. They are usually integrated with cryptocurrency wallets and payment platforms that allow instant conversion to fiat money and both online and in-store purchases as with any other bank card.

Cryptocurrency Not a Pyramid Anymore

During the forum, Alexei Moiseev also said that the crypto industry has changed in a positive direction. Cryptocurrencies don’t have the signs of financial pyramids anymore, he noted. The deputy finance minister added that the anonymity of digital assets and blockchain transactions is an illusion. He was quoted by News.ru as saying.

The financial pyramid element was something I used to talk about before, for which I was repeatedly ostracized. But I think that now there are no signs of it, in my view.

Cryptocurrencies, or digital financial assets as they are described by Russian institutions, remain unregulated in the country. The Russian parliament is expected to adopt at least three laws pertaining to the crypto sector this spring. The term “cryptocurrency” is not in the draft texts of the regulatory framework but a ban is not mentioned either. Russian lawmakers recently broadened the definition of “digital financial assets” to cover cryptocurrencies and tokens. The update came after pressure from industry organizations and was supported by the Finance Ministry.

“Money surrogates” are illegal in Russia, where the ruble is the only legal tender. That applies not only to decentralized digital coins but also to other fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar. However, dollar bank cards are accepted for payments as the amount is always converted to rubles during the transaction.

Crypto Viewed as Potential Global Currency

The Russian government is likely interested in cryptocurrencies as an alternative to the greenback. The recent claims by an economist from the state-controlled Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Ranepa) that Moscow will soon invest heavily in bitcoin have been refuted by officials. Nevertheless, Ranepa’s Rector Vladimir Mau shared his opinion that digital currencies have a future and “huge development perspectives.”

Quoted by Tass, Mau said cryptos could become one of the elements of a new global currency system. “10 years ago, at the beginning of the current structural crisis, we talked a lot about post-crisis currency configurations: the yuan, SDR, strengthening the role of regional reserve currencies. Later, cryptocurrencies appeared and they must be part of this discussion,” emphasized the head of the presidential academy which is hosting the Gaidar forum. The academic added that the dollar is losing trust because of the internal political situation in the U.S.

What do you think about the future of cryptocurrency payments? Are you using a crypto debit card? Share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.

The post Crypto Cards Are Legal in Russia, According to the Finance Ministry appeared first on Bitcoin News.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

#cryptocurrency

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eurasiafactbook · 7 years

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History of the Soviet Union

1917–1927

The original ideology of the state was primarily based on the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In its essence, Marx's theory stated that economic and political systems went through an inevitable evolution in form, by which the current capitalist system would be replaced by a Socialist state before achieving international cooperation and peace in a "Workers' Paradise," creating a system directed by, what Marx called, "Pure Communism."

Displeased by the relatively few changes made by the Tsar after the Russian Revolution of 1905, Russia became a hotbed of anarchism, socialism and other radical political systems. The dominant socialist party, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), subscribed to Marxist ideology. Starting in 1903 a series of splits in the party between two main leaders was escalating: the Bolsheviks (meaning "majority") led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Mensheviks (meaning minority) led by Julius Martov. Up until 1912, both groups continued to stay united under the name "RSDLP," but significant differences between Lenin and Martov thought split the party for its final time. Not only did these groups fight with each other, but also had common enemies, notably, those trying to bring the Tsar back to power. Following the February Revolution, the Mensheviks gained control of Russia and established a provisional government, but this lasted only a few months until the Bolsheviks took power in the October Revolution, also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution.

Under the control of the party, all politics and attitudes that were not strictly RCP (Russian Communist Party) were suppressed, under the premise that the RCP represented the proletariat and all activities contrary to the party's beliefs were "counterrevolutionary" or "anti-socialist." During the years of 1917 to 1923, the Soviet Union achieved peace with the Central Powers, their enemies in World War I, but also fought the Russian Civil War against the White Army and foreign armies from United States, United Kingdom, and France, among others. This resulted in large territorial changes, albeit temporarily for some of these. Eventually crushing all opponents, the RCP spread Soviet style rule quickly and established itself through all of Russia. Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the RCP, became Lenin's successor and continued as leader of the Soviet Union into the 1950s.

1927–1953

The history of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953 covers the period of the Second World War and of victory against Germany while the USSR remained under the firm control of Joseph Stalin. Stalin sought to destroy his political rivals while transforming Soviet society with aggressive economic planning, in particular a sweeping collectivization of agriculture and a rapid development of heavy industry. Stalin's power within the party and the state was established and eventually evolved into Stalin's cult of personality. Soviet secret-police and the mass-mobilization Communist party were Stalin's major tools in molding the Soviet society. Stalin's brutal methods in achieving his goals, which included party purges, political repression of the general population, and forced collectivization, led to millions of deaths: in Gulaglabor camps, during the man-made famine, and during forced resettlements of population.

World War II, known as "the Great Patriotic War" in the Soviet Union, devastated much of the USSR with about one out of every three World War II deaths representing a citizen of the Soviet Union. After World War II the Soviet Union's armies occupied Eastern Europe, where Socialist governments took power. By 1949 the Cold War had started between the Western Bloc and the Eastern (Soviet) Bloc, with the Warsaw Pact pitched against NATO in Europe. After 1945 Stalin did not directly engage in any wars. Stalin continued his absolute rule until his death in 1953.

1953–1964

In the USSR, the eleven-year period from the death of Joseph Stalin (1953) to the political ouster of Nikita Khrushchev (1964), the national politics were dominated by the Cold War; the ideological U.S.–USSR struggle for the planetary domination of their respective socio–economic systems, and the defense of hegemonic spheres of influence. Nonetheless, since the mid-1950s, despite the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) having disowned Stalinism, the political culture of Stalinism—an omnipotent General Secretary, anti-Trotskyism, a five-year planned economy (post-New Economic Policy), and repudiation of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact secret protocols—remained the character of Soviet society until the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the CPSU in 1985.

Nikita Khrushchev And Mao Zedong, 1958. Source: Getty Images

1964–1982

The history of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, referred to as the Brezhnev Era, covers the period of Leonid Brezhnev's rule of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This period began with high economic growth and soaring prosperity, but ended with a much weaker Soviet Union facing social, political, and economic stagnation. The average annual income stagnated, because needed economic reforms were never fully carried out.

Nikita Khrushchev was ousted as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), as well as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, on 14 October 1964 due to his failed reforms and disregard for Party and Government institutions. Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin replaced him as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Anastas Mikoyan, and later Nikolai Podgorny, became Chairmen of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Together with Andrei Kirilenko as organizational secretary, and Mikhail Suslov as chief ideologue, they made up a reinvigorated collective leadership, which contrasted in form with the autocracy that characterized Khrushchev's rule.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German President Erich Honecker kiss on the occasion of GDR's. Source: Getty Images.

The collective leadership first set out to stabilize the Soviet Union and calm Soviet society, a task which they were able to accomplish. In addition, they attempted to speed up economic growth, which had slowed considerably during Khrushchev's last years in power. In 1965 Kosygin initiated several reforms to decentralize the Soviet economy. After initial success in creating economic growth, hard-liners within the Party halted the reforms, fearing that they would weaken the Party's prestige and power. No other radical economic reforms were carried out during the Brezhnev era, and economic growth began to stagnate in the early-to-mid-1970s. By Brezhnev's death in 1982, Soviet economic growth had, according to several historians, nearly come to a standstill.

The stabilization policy brought about after Khrushchev's removal established a ruling gerontocracy, and political corruption became a normal phenomenon. Brezhnev, however, never initiated any large-scale anti-corruption campaigns. Due to the large military buildup of the 1960s the Soviet Union was able to consolidate itself as a superpower during Brezhnev's rule. The era ended with Brezhnev's death on 10 November 1982.

While all modernized economies were rapidly moving to computerization after 1965, the USSR fell further and further behind. Moscow's decision to copy the IBM/360 of 1965 proved a decisive mistake for it locked scientists into a system they were unable to improve so that it gradually became antiquated. They had enormous difficulties in manufacturing the necessary chips reliably and in quantity, in programming workable and efficient programs, in coordinating entirely separate operations, and in providing support to computer users.

One of the greatest strengths of Soviet economy was its vast supplies of oil and gas; world oil prices quadrupled during the 1973-74 oil crisis, and rose again in 1979-1981, making the energy sector the chief driver of the Soviet economy, and was used to cover multiple weaknesses. At one point, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin told the head of oil and gas production, "things are bad with bread. Give me 3 million tons [of oil] over the plan." Former prime minister Yegor Gaidar, an economist looking back three decades, in 2007 wrote:

The hard currency from oil exports stopped the growing food supply crisis, increased the import of equipment and consumer goods, ensured a financial base for the arms race and the achievement of nuclear parity with the United States, and permitted the realization of such risky foreign-policy actions as the war in Afghanistan.

1982–1991

The history of the Soviet Union from 1982 through 1991, spans the period from Leonid Brezhnev's death and funeral until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Due to the years of Soviet military buildup at the expense of domestic development, economic growth stagnated. Failed attempts at reform, a standstill economy, and the success of the United States against the Soviet Union's forces in the war in Afghanistan led to a general feeling of discontent, especially in the Baltic republics and Eastern Europe.

Greater political and social freedoms, instituted by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, created an atmosphere of open criticism of the Soviet government. The dramatic drop of the price of oil in 1985 and 1986 profoundly influenced actions of the Soviet leadership.

Nikolai Tikhonov, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, was succeeded by Nikolai Ryzhkov, and Vasili Kuznetsov, the acting Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, was succeeded by Andrei Gromyko, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Several Soviet Socialist Republics began resisting central control, and increasing democratization led to a weakening of the central government. The USSR's trade gap progressively emptied the coffers of the union, leading to eventual bankruptcy. The Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991 when Boris Yeltsin seized power in the aftermath of a failed coup that had attempted to topple reform-minded Gorbachev.

Mikhail Gorbachev with Ronald Reagan and George Bush in New York City during his visit to the USA in 1987. Source: Getty Images.

Source: wikipedia.org.

#Soviet Union #history

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russianreader · 6 years

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Squandering Its Way to Superpowerdom

Venezuelan Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino gives his thumb up as he sits on the cockpit of a Russian Tupolev Tu-160 strategic long-range heavy…

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uniteordie-usa · 7 years

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How NATO-linked Think Tanks Control EU Refugee Policy | New Eastern Outlook

http://uniteordiemedia.com/how-nato-linked-think-tanks-control-eu-refugee-policy-new-eastern-outlook/ https://uniteordiemedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/the-wall-The-EU-600x464.jpg How NATO-linked Think Tanks Control EU Refugee Policy | New Eastern Outlook A flood of uncontrolled war refugees from Syria, Libya, Tunisia and other Islamic countries destabilized by Washington’s ‘Arab Spring’ Color Revolutions, has created the greatest social dislocation across the EU from Germany to Sweden to Croatia since the end of World War II. By now it has...

A flood of uncontrolled war refugees from Syria, Libya, Tunisia and other Islamic countries destabilized by Washington’s ‘Arab Spring’ Color Revolutions, has created the greatest social dislocation across the EU from Germany to Sweden to Croatia since the end of World War II. By now it has become clear to most that something quite sinister is afoot, something which threatens to destroy the social fabric of the very core of European civilization. What few realize is that the entire drama is being orchestrated, not by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, or by faceless EU bureaucrats of the Brussels EU Commission. It is being orchestrated by a cabal of NATO-linked think tanks.

Last October 8, 2015 amid the great stream of hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding into Germany from Syria, Tunisia, Libya and other lands, a newly self-confident German Chancellor Angela Merkel proclaimed on a popular German TV program, “I have a plan.” She took the occasion to take a sharp dig at coalition partner, Bavarian CSU head, Horst Seehofer, a stauch critic of Merkel’s open arms refugee position since spring 2015 that saw more than one million refugees enter Germany last year alone.

Since that point, with iron-hard resolve, the German Chancellor has defended the criminal Erdogan regime in Turkey, an essential partner in her “plan.”

Most of the world has looked on with astonishment as she ignored principles of free speech and decided to prosecute publicly a well-known German TV comedian, Jan Böhmermann, for his satirical remarks about the Turkish President. They were astonished as the symbol of European democracy, the German Chancellor, chose to ignore Erdogan’s imprisonment of opposition journalists ands his shutting of Turk opposition media as he proceeded with plans to establish a de facto dictatorship rule within Turkey. They were puzzled as Berlin’s government chose to ignore overwhelming proof that Erdogan and his family were materially aiding and abetting ISIS terrorists within Syria who were in fact creating the war refugee crisis. They were astonished to see her push through an EU committment to give Erdogan’s regime billions of euros to supposedly deal with the refugee flow from Turkish refugee camps across the border into EU neighbor land, Greece and beyond.

The Merkel Plan

All of those seemingly inexplicable actions from the once-pragmatic German leader appear to go back to her embrace of a 14-page document prepared by a network of pro-NATO think-tanks, brazenly titled “The Merkel Plan.”

What the newly-self-confident German Chancellor did not tell her hostess, Anne Will, or her viewers was that “her” plan was given to her just four days earlier, on October 4, in a document already titled The Merkel Plan, by a newly-created and obviously well-financed international think-tank called the European Stability Initiative or ESI. The ESI website showed that it had offices in Berlin, Brussels and in Istanbul, Turkey

Suspiciously, the authors of the ESI plan titled their plan as if it had come from the German Chancellor’s office and not from them. More suspicious is the contents of The Merkel Plan of ESI. In addition to already taking more than one million refugees in 2015, Germany should “agree to grant asylum to 500,000 Syrian refugees registered in Turkey over the coming 12 months.” In addition, “Germany should accept claims from Turkey…and provide safe transport to successful applicants…already registered with the Turkish authorities…” And finally, “Germany should agree to help Turkey obtain visa-free travel in

2016.”

That so-called Merkel Plan was a product of US and NATO-linked think tanks and of governments of NATO member countries or prospective members. The maxim “follow the money trail” is instructive in this case to see who really runs the EU today.

The ESI

The ESI came out of NATO-led efforts to transform South East Europe following the US-instigated war in Yugoslavia during the 1990’s that resulted in the Balkanization of the country and establishment of a major USA and NATO airbase, Camp Bond Steel in Kosovo.

Current ESI Chairman directly responsible for the final Merkel Plan document is Istanbul-based Austrian sociologist, Gerald Knaus. Knaus is also a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), and an Open Society Fellow.

Founded in London in 2007, the ECFR is an imitation of the influential New York Council on Foreign Relations, the think-tank created by the Rockefeller and JP Morgan bankers during the 1919 Versailles peace talks to coordinate an Anglo-American global foreign policy. Significantly, the creator and moneybags for the ECFR is American multi-billionaire and Color Revolution funder, George Soros. In virtually every US State Department-backed Color Revolution since the collapse of the Soviet Union, including in Serbia in 2000, in Ukraine, in Georgia, in China, in Brazil and in Russia, George Soros and offshoots of his Open Society Foundations have been in the shadows financing “democracy” NGOs and activists to install pro-Washington and pro-NATO regimes.

The select members, called Council Members or associates, of the London-based ECFR include ECFR co-chairman Joschka Fischer, former German Green Party Foreign Minister who arm-twisted his party into backing Bill Clinton’s illegal 1999 bombing of Serbia without UN Security Council backing.

Other members of the Council of Soros’ European Council on Foreign Relations think tank include former NATO Secretary General, Xavier Solana. It includes disgraced plaigarist and former German Defense Minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg; Annette Heuser, Executive Director Bertelsmann Stiftung in Washington DC; Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman, Munich Security Conference; Cem Özdemir, chairman, Bündnis90/Die Grünen; Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, German Liberal Party (FDP) MP; Michael Stürmer, Chief Correspondent, Die Welt; Andre Wilkens, Director of Mercator Foundation; pederasty defender, Daniel Cohn-Bendit of the European Parliament. Cohn-Bendit, known as “Danny the Red” during the May, 1968 French student riots, was a member of the the autonomist group Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle) in Rüsselsheim, Germany along with his close ally, now ECFR chairman, Joschka Fischer. The two went on to found the “realo” wing of the German Greens.

The Open Society Foundations is the network of tax-exempt “democracy-promoting” foundations created by George Soros on the collapse of the Soviet Union to promote “free market” pro-IMF market liberalization of former communist economies that opened the doors for the systematic plundering of invaluable mining and energy assets of those countries. Soros was a major financier of the liberal economic team of Boris Yeltsin including Harvard “Shock Therapy” economist, Jeffrey Sachs, and Yeltsin liberal adviser, Yegor Gaidar.

Already it becomes clear that the “Merkel Plan” is the Soros Plan in fact. But there is more if we wish to understand the darker agenda behind the plan.

The ESI Funders

The European Stability Initiative think-tank of Soros-tied Gerald Knaus is financed by an impressive list of donors. Their website lists them.

The list includes, in addition to Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Soros-tied German Stiftung Mercator, and the Robert Bosch Stiftung. ESI funders also include European Commission. Then, curiously enough the funder list for The Merkel Plan includes an organization with the Orwellian name, The United States Institute of Peace.

Some research reveals that the United States Institute of Peace has anything but a peace-loving background. The United States Institute of Peace is chaired by Stephen Hadley, former US National Security Council adviser during the neo-conservative war-waging Bush-Cheney administration. Its Board of Directors includes Ashton B. Carter, current Obama Administration neo-conservative hawkish Secretary of Defense; Secretary of State John Kerry; Major General Frederick M. Padilla, President of the US National Defense University. These are some very seasoned architects of the US Pentagon Full Spectrum Dominance strategy for world military domination.

The “Merkel Plan” authors at the European Stability Initative, in addition to the largesse of George Soros’ foundations, list as “core�� funder, the German Marshall Fund of the United States. As I describe in my book, The Think Tanks, the German Marshall Fund is anything but German. With its seat in Washington, as I noted in the book, “It’s an American think tank with its headquarters in Washington, D.C. In point of fact, its agenda is the deconstruction of postwar Germany and more broadly of the sovereign states of the EU to fit them better into the Wall Street globalization agenda.”

The German Marshall Fund of Washington has been involved in the post-1990 USA agenda of regime change around the world in league with the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy, Soros Foundations, and the CIA front called USAID. As I describe it in the think tanks book, “The major focus of the German Marshall Fund according to its 2013 Annual Report was to support the US State Department agenda for so-called democracy-building operations in former communist countries in eastern and south-eastern Europe, from the Balkans to the Black Sea. Significantly their work included Ukraine. In most instances, they worked together with the USAID, widely identified as a CIA front with ties to the State Department, and the Stewart Mott Foundation which gives funds to the US Government-funded National Endowment for Democracy.”

Notably, the same Stewart Mott Foundation is also a funder of the ESI-authored Merkel Plan, as is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

This all should give pause for reflection as to who and for what goals the Merkel-Erdogan deal for dealing with the EU refugee crisis is intended. Does the Rockefeller-Bush-Clinton faction in the United States intend to use it as a major social engineering experiment to create chaos and social conflict across the EU at the same time their NGOs such as the NED, Freedom House and the Soros Foundations are stirring things up in Syria and Libya and across the Islamic world? Is Germany, as former US presidential adviser and Rockefeller crony, Zbigniew Brzezinski called her, a “vassal” of US power in the post-1990 world? To date the evidence is pretty strong that that’s the case. The role of US and NATO-linked think tanks is central to get an understanding of how the Federal Republic of Germany and the European Union are actually controlled from behind the Atlantic curtain.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” https://journal-neo.org/2016/04/27/how-nato-linked-think-tanks-control-eu-refugee-policy/

Read More: journal-neo.org/2016/04/27/how-nato-linked-think-tanks-control-eu-refugee-policy/

#Angela Merkel #EU bureaucrats #European Stability Initiative #Libya #pro-NATO #Refugees #Soros’ European Council on Foreign Relations #Syria #think-tanks #Tunisia

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djgblogger-blog · 7 years

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Imagining Russia post-Putin

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Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks to the students on July 21, 2017. Alexei Nikolsky/via AP

On July 21, Vladimir Putin was asked at an audience with schoolchildren what he will do when he retires. He replied, “I haven’t decided yet if I will leave the presidency.”

While everyone is obsessed with following the twists and turns of the ties between Putin and President Trump, it is important to bear in mind that the relationship between the two countries will long outlast these two men.

Putin will run again in the March 2018 presidential election, and he is sure to win. His approval rating is above 80 percent, and the opposition has been co-opted, preempted or repressed. Putin’s term would end in 2024, at which point he will be 72 years old.

As a scholar of the Soviet Union back in the 1980s, I saw how the failure to develop an effective mechanism to rotate political leaders contributed to that system’s stagnation and ultimate collapse. Could a similar situation soon unfold?

Follow the leader

Given the problems facing Russia, it is understandable why Putin might not feel comfortable handing over the reins of power to a successor next year. With the global oil price stuck at US$50 a barrel, the Russian economy is barely growing, and Russia remains subject to Western sanctions imposed after its annexation of Crimea in 2014. But by 2024, “Project Successor” will surely be back on the agenda of the Russian elite.

The Russian Constitution requires Putin to step down after two consecutive terms. Putin solved that problem in 2008 by moving sideways, becoming prime minister while his protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, took over as president. Putin decided to return to the presidency in 2012, presumably because he felt Medvedev was not doing a good enough job.

Now, analysts are divided over whether the political regime Putin has created will survive beyond his tenure. Many believe that power is so deeply embedded in Putin’s web of informal ties that it is impossible to imagine another individual stepping into his shoes. There is so much at stake – so many illegally acquired fortunes that need state protection – that the day after he steps down, the Kremlin could erupt into faction fighting of the sort that ravaged Russia in the 1990s, and which plagues Ukraine to this day.

However, it is important to remember that Putin is not a dictator who wields unchallenged authority. Nor is he the head of a disciplined ruling party, such as the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar shows, he is a broker, balancing the interests of rival clans – business oligarchs, regional bosses, the heads of the security forces (siloviki) and the technocrats who run the government ministries. These were the men who brought Putin into power, and without whose cooperation nothing in Russia gets done.

Certain rules of the game have emerged. The oligarchs stay out of politics, and in return are mostly protected from the seizure of their assets by the state.

Over the years, Putin has also skillfully won more autonomy for himself, but he is still aware of the limits of his power. Russian analysts speak of the number of individuals around Putin who hold power as the “collective Putin,” or the “Politburo 2.0,” a reference to the ruling Cabinet of the Communist era that represented diverse bureaucratic interests.

But in order to secure his place in Russian history – something that clearly concerns him – Putin faces the challenge of installing a reliable successor. This person will have to guarantee Putin’s personal security and wealth and that of his inner circle. This is apparently what Putin promised his predecessor Boris Yeltsin and his family when he was selected as Yeltin’s successor. Putin will probably try out the person as prime minister before nominating him as president. Indeed, this was the path Putin himself took back in 1999.

Putin’s system does not, however, have any mechanism in place for picking a successor: a major structural flaw. In the 17 years that Putin has been in power, China has smoothly cycled through three leaders. In the oil-rich former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, Gaidar Aliev groomed his son Ilham, who took over the presidency upon his father’s death in 2003. But Putin has no son, only daughters, traditionally not seen as successors to power. Presidents Karimov in Uzbekistan and Niyazov in Turkmenistan, who ruled for decades, also did not have sons to whom they could hand over power.

Nevertheless, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have both experienced fairly smooth leadership transitions in recent years. When Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov died in 2016 he was replaced by the man who had served as his prime minister since 2003. In Turkmenistan in 2006, Saparmurad Niyazov was succeeded upon his death by his former dentist, then serving as deputy prime minister.

Admittedly, those countries are smaller and more homogeneous than Russia, and their leaders wielded far more personal power than Putin. But it is evidence for the argument that the authoritarian regimes that emerged from collapse of the Soviet Union may be more stable than they appear to outsiders, even though they have not developed the institutions of a liberal democracy.

Next president of Russia?

Dmitry Medvedev, the current prime minister, is unlikely to return to the presidency. He is not a popular figure, and was the target of a recent documentary by opposition leader Aleksei Navalny which detailed his personal wealth, including owning a vineyard in Tuscany. Since its release on YouTube in March 2007, it has been viewed more than 23 million times, and Medvedev’s approval rating swung negative, losing 15 points in one month.

There are three men who stand out as more plausible successors to Putin, trusted by the elite and with the potential to be sold to the public as an effective leader.

Sergei Shoigu, currently defense minister, is the second-most popular politician in Russia after Putin (26 percent trust versus Putin’s 55 percent), but he has no experience in business or foreign affairs, having spent most of his career in the civil emergencies ministry.

Sergei Sobyanin, Moscow’s mayor, was formerly the head of the oil-rich Khanty-Mansi province.

Yurii Trutnev, a former regional governor and natural resources minister, currently serves as deputy prime minister, is intelligent and a proven manager.

Shoigu and Sobyanin are both from a mixed ethnic background. Shoigu comes from Tuva on the Mongolian border, and Sobyanin is part Mansi, a people of the Arctic north. This could be a problem, since many Russians harbor negative stereotypes about ethnic minorities and may be reluctant to see one as president of Russia.

Despite the grave problems facing Russia, Putin has undoubtedly brought a degree of stability to Russia, especially when compared to the chaos of the 1990s. In the 17 years since he took office in 2000, living standards have more than doubled, the problem of Islamist terrorism and Chechen secession has been contained, and Russia has reemerged as an influential player on the international stage. In my view, Putin – and Russia – would be best served by his stepping aside sooner rather than later, establishing a precedent for a peaceful transition of power as part of his legacy.

In July 2017 Peter Rutland was a visiting senior fellow at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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