By Natylie Baldwin, OpedNews, 12/29/21

The U.S. likes to promote itself as a bastion of liberal democracy on the world stage. But if recent comments by Russian deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov are any indication, it seems that the way in which the U.S. has advocated for liberal democracy and human rights in Russia has led to mistrust of American motives and has arguably done more harm than good for those Russians it is claiming to want to help.

On November 29^th, Ryabkov stated at a meeting of Russia’s upper chamber of parliament that the US has been funding a long-term project of destabilizing Russia and impeding its development:

“Using non-profit international organizations among other tools, Washington is spending considerable funds to destabilize the situation in Russia… under the pretext of helping strengthen democratic institutions and civil society… Notably, it is done under the guise of environmental protection, anti-corruption efforts, ensuring gender equality and ethnic and cultural diversity… [O]ver time, American propaganda and disinformation is becoming more sophisticated, imitating independent media, investigative journalism and grass-roots initiatives.”

Russian officials did not always view the liberal democracy touted by the U.S. in such a negative light, however. Vladimir Putin stated his desire for Russia to be accepted as part of the U.S.-led west during his earlier terms as president and even implemented some domestic policies consistent with this goal. For example, he strengthened the rule of law by implementing the rights of habeas corpus and trial by jury, and increasing rights to exculpatory evidence. Reforms to the criminal code led to the doubling of acquittal rates in bench trials (only heard by a judge) and the tripling of acquittal rates in jury trials, contributing to a 40 percent drop in the overall incarceration rate and a 95 percent drop in the juvenile incarceration rate since 2001.

Furthermore, according to activists I spoke with in 2015, Putin encouraged the emergence of civil society with the first Civic Forum in 2001 – something they said never would have happened under his predecessor. Though admittedly, Putin advocated for a partnership with government, leading to concerns early on among some activists of a desire to co-opt the movement.

Given that he had multiple crises to contend with in those early years, it’s unrealistic to think Putin would have spent his political capital on challenging certain deeply-held conservative cultural norms. But clearly there has been a turn away from even the modest embrace of liberalism he displayed previously as U.S.-led projects to purportedly promote democracy and human rights in Russia have often had the opposite of the intended effect.

Gay Rights

In 2013, U.S. government officials publicly chided Russia at the outset of the Winter Olympics in Sochi for its purported policy of homophobia as reflected in a law prohibiting the propagation of material that encourages homosexuality to minors. Since then, U.S. officials and media pundits have criticized Russia repeatedly for its intolerance toward gays but have little to say about allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which have far more draconian policies toward homosexuals.

According to the Levada Center, the percentage of Russians who support same-sex relationships actually decreased between 2013 and 2021. If the U.S. thinks it has been helping gay Russians by vociferously condemning the country’s policies on the world stage, it would appear to be wrong.

Women’s Issues: Misrepresenting the Complexity of Domestic Violence in Russia

In September of this year, in the lead-up to the Russian parliamentary elections, the New York Times published a feature article on Alyona Popova, a domestic-violence activist, journalist and lawyer who was running for a seat in the Duma on the outskirts of Moscow.

As is often the case, the article took an issue that affects the lives of many Russians and rather than give it the nuanced and in-depth treatment it deserved, it devolved into a platform for depicting Vladimir Putin and his government as backwards, stating: “Ms. Popova implores women to turn against Vladimir Putin’s ruling party, United Russia, which has rolled back protections for women over the last several years. Leading up to this weekend’s election, she has presented the issue in urgent terms, and a proposal to make all acts of domestic violence subject to criminal penalties tops her campaign platform.”

The article then goes on to essentially give the impression that Russians, even women, generally don’t care enough about this issue. It then underpins this impression by mentioning the 2017 law that reclassified first offenses of domestic violence as administrative rather than criminal. But the article never discusses the fact that most Russians polled at the time agreed with this approach and their reason for doing so.

The most common reason Russians stated for supporting the reclassification involved a desire to raise deterrence by increasing reports from victims to police. Russians believe that police will be more incentivized to respond to calls if there is money to be collected.

According to Russian journalist Victoria Ryabikova, awareness of and attitudes towards domestic violence have been evolving in recent years: “In 2017, 59% of Russians supported the idea of reclassifying domestic violence as an administrative, not criminal offense, and 19% considered it acceptable in some cases to strike one’s spouse or child, according to a survey by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM). But by the end of 2019, the situation had changed: 90% of Russians considered any physical violence unacceptable, and a further 50% stated that assault and battery in the home were unforgivable.”

As it turns out, the majority of Russians are not Neanderthals who want to see domestic violence victims go unprotected. If the New York Times would have dug a bit deeper and actually had journalists reporting on Russia who had a contextual understanding of the country and its culture, its readers might have been better informed on the nature of this issue.

By misrepresenting a social issue in Russia via poor reporting to further a tired and overly simplistic narrative, the U.S. and one of its major institutions did little to help Russian women or to improve Americans’ understanding of their experience.

Anti-corruption: The Three Faces of Alexey

Then there is Alexey Navalny, the most famous Russian dissident viewed by many in the west as a political prisoner. His career has mostly consisted of him trying to figure out who he is in his attempts to fight the Kremlin: a right-wing nationalist, a liberal democrat, and more recently an anti-corruption activist. He has had backing by the United States, including a Yale fellowship and U.S. government funding for Democratic Alternative, an organization he co-founded with Maria Gaidar (daughter of ’90s Shock Therapy architect Yegor Gaidar) in 2005.

Despite this concrete support and his near canonization in the U.S.-led western media as well as the fact that Russians do consider corruption to be a significant problem, Navalny has low trust and approval ratings within Russia.

U.S. Meddling and Moralizing Backfires

The Russian government has taken more extreme actions against Navalny and other western-backed activists, including the domestic violence NGOs Anna Center and Nasiliu, in recent years. It seems that, at least to some extent, the Putin government perceives the US-led west to be targeting Russia with a destabilization campaign and is taking measures it views as defensive against activists and NGO’s supported by the U.S. This also ironically allows the Russian government to cynically use these measures to quash debate or dissent on issues as it chooses.

The U.S., for its part, must admit that either it also uses these issues cynically and cares nothing for Russians affected by them or it has supported a strategy that has backfired.

National Security Archive, 11/24/21

Washington, D.C., November 24, 2021 – The biggest train wreck on the track to NATO expansion in the 1990s – Boris Yeltsin’s “cold peace” blow up at Bill Clinton in Budapest in December 1994 – was the result of “combustible” domestic politics in both the U.S. and Russia, and contradictions in the Clinton attempt to have his cake both ways, expanding NATO and partnering with Russia at the same time, according to newly declassified U.S. documents published today by the National Security Archive.

The Yeltsin eruption on December 5, 1994, made the top of the front page of the New York Times the next day, with the Russian president’s accusation (in front of Clinton and other heads of state gathered for a summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, CSCE) that the “domineering” U.S. was “trying to split [the] continent again” through NATO expansion. The angry tone of Yeltsin’s speech echoed years later in his successor Vladimir Putin’s famous 2007 speech at the Munich security conference, though by then the list of Russian grievances went well beyond NATO expansion to such unilateral U.S. actions as withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the invasion of Iraq.

The new documents, the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the National Security Archive, include a series of revelatory “Bill-Boris” letters in the summer and fall of 1994, and the previously secret memcon of the presidents’ one-on-one at the Washington summit in September 1994. Clinton kept assuring Yeltsin any NATO enlargement would be slow, with no surprises, building a Europe that was inclusive not exclusive, and in “partnership” with Russia. In a phone call on July 5, 1994, Clinton told Yeltsin “I would like us to focus on the Partnership for Peace program” not NATO. At the same time, however, “policy entrepreneurs” in Washington were revving up the bureaucratic process for more rapid NATO enlargement than expected either by Moscow or the Pentagon,[1] which was committed to the Partnership for Peace as the main venue for security integration of Europe, not least because it could include Russia and Ukraine.[2]

The new documents include insightful cables from U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Thomas Pickering, explaining Yeltsin’s new hard line at Budapest as the result of multiple factors. Not least, Pickering pointed to “strong domestic opposition across the [Russian] political spectrum to early NATO expansion,” criticism of Yeltsin and his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, as too “compliant to the West,” and the growing conviction in Moscow that U.S. domestic politics – the pro-expansion Republicans’ sweep of the Congressional mid-term elections in November 1994 – would tilt U.S. policy away from taking Russia’s concerns into account.

Pickering was perhaps too diplomatic because there was plenty of blame to go around on the U.S. side. Clinton wrote in his memoir, “Budapest was embarrassing, a rare moment when people on both sides dropped the ball….”[3] Actually, the drops were almost all in Washington. White House schedulers led by chief of staff Leon Panetta tried to prevent Clinton from even going to Budapest by constraining his window there to eight hours, which meant no time for a one-on-one with Yeltsin. Clinton himself thought he was doing Yeltsin a big favor by even coming and expected good press from the substantial reduction in nuclear arsenals that would result from the signing of the Budapest memorandum on security assurances for Ukraine (violated by Russia in 2014). National Security Adviser Tony Lake gave Clinton a prepared text that “was all yin and no yang – sure to please the Central Europeans and enthusiasts for enlargement, but equally sure to drive the Russians nuts….” The author of that phrase, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, wasn’t even in Budapest, paying attention to the Haiti crisis instead (“never again” he later wrote, would he miss a Yeltsin meeting).[4]

The new documents include a previously secret National Security Council memo from Senior Director for Russia Nicholas Burns to Talbott, so sensitive that Burns had it delivered by courier, describing Clinton’s reaction to Budapest as “really pissed off” and reporting “the President did not want to be used any more as a prop by Yeltsin.” At the same time, Burns stressed, “we need to separate our understandable anger on the tone of the debate with [sic] Russia’s substantive concerns which we must take seriously.” Similarly, the Pickering cables recommended using Vice President Al Gore’s previously scheduled December trip to Moscow for meetings with Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin to also meet with Yeltsin, calm down the discussion, and get back on a “workable track.”

Mending fences would include Gore’s description to Yeltsin of the parallel NATO and U.S.-Russia tracks as spaceships docking simultaneously and very carefully,[5] and Gore and then Clinton assuring the Russians (but not in writing, as Kozyrev kept asking for) that no NATO action on new members would happen before the 1995 Duma elections or the 1996 presidential elections in Russia.

The final assurance was Clinton’s agreement (despite Russia’s brutal Chechen war and multiple domestic pressures) to come to Moscow in May 1995 for the 50th anniversary celebrations of the victory over Hitler. In Moscow, Yeltsin berated Clinton about NATO expansion, seeing “nothing but humiliation” for Russia: “For me to agree to the borders of NATO expanding towards those of Russia – that would constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian people.” But Yeltsin also saw Clinton would do whatever he could to ensure Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, and that mattered the most to him. Only after that Moscow summit would Yeltsin order Kozyrev to sign Russia up for the Partnership for Peace.

The new documents only reached the public domain as the result of a Freedom of Information lawsuit by the National Security Archive against the State Department, seeking the retired files of Strobe Talbott. Thanks to excellent representation by noted FOIA attorney David Sobel, State set up a schedule of regular releases to the Archive over the past three years. The full corpus of thousands of pages covering the entire 1990s will appear next year in the award-winning series published by ProQuest, the Digital National Security Archive, which won Choice Magazine’s designation as an “Outstanding Academic Title 2018.” The Archive also benefited from State’s assignment of veteran reviewer Geoffrey Chapman to the task of assessing the Talbott documents for declassification. Chapman ranks among the most thorough, expert, and professional declassifiers in the U.S. government.

Text and documents available here.

By Gilbert Doctorow, Antiwar.com, 12/22/21

In the past couple of days, my peers in the community of Russia analysts have addressed the question of “what if” – what is it that Russia can and may do if the negotiations with the United States over its draft Treaties on security in Europe fail within the very short time period the Russians have set, apparently one month. Parenthetically, I am amused that spokesmen for the U.S. State Department say that they may enter into talks with the Russians some time in January. It seems they did not catch the short timeline the Russians have set or mistakenly believe it was a bluff.

The best of the analyses by my fellow analysts was posted yesterday by former Canadian diplomat Patrick Armstrong. I recommend this read to everyone, because it is in its own way reassuring, setting out possible Russian options that are far removed from pressing the button and blowing us all, and themselves, to bits.

However, I did not see in his piece, nor do I find in the writings of other independent analysts, not to mention on the pages of our mainstream newspapers, any explanation of what exactly Vladimir Putin meant when he said initially and repeated yesterday before the Collegium of the Russian Ministry of Defense, an audience of a hundred or more generals, that should the talks with the US fail, Russia will immediately implement “military-technical” retaliatory measures.

The term “military-technical” has been picked up and sold for the purchase price by nearly all our media. No explanation is given, because very likely no one really understands the term.

So I will have a go at it here and now, after a eureka moment came to me earlier this morning. The term is as elusive as the translation of “адекватный,” which most everyone (or every translation software) wrongly translates as “adequate” when it normally means “appropriate” or “suitable.”

The “technical” in the expression is coming from техника, which is the common Russian way of saying “equipment”. Military “tekhnika” means motorized howitzers, personnel carriers, fighter jets, etc. Tekhnika also has common civilian use: the outfitting of a factory is “tekhnika” as in “техническое оснащение.”

So, what Putin is saying is that the Russians will respond by deploying military hardware. Now what hardware would that be? Given that so much of the draft treaties deal with short range missiles that the US is deploying in Europe and hopes to deploy in Ukraine, it is entirely logical that the Russian response to failure in negotiations will not be to invade Ukraine, it will not be to cut gas supplies to Europe, but it will be to deploy its nuclear capable short range missiles in Belarus and in Kaliningrad.

But that is not all…

Read full article here.

By Ben Armbuster, Responsible Statecraft, 12/20/21

As tensions mount in Eastern Europe amid questions about whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will order an invasion of Ukraine, a new poll has found that Americans don’t have much of an appetite to go to war to defend the former Soviet Republic, with a vast majority saying U.S. leaders should focus their attention on domestic issues.

According to a survey conducted by YouGov in conjunction with the Charles Koch Institute that was released on Friday, a plurality of Americans (48 percent) said they either strongly or somewhat oppose “going to war with Russia to protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity” should Russia invade. Just 27 percent favored such a move while 24 percent said they didn’t know…

Read full article here.

By Natylie Baldwin, Antiwar.com, 12/21/21

Considering that this is a memoir of a woman whose claim to fame is being a Russia expert and a celebrated biographer of Putin, I was expecting substantive discussion of contemporary Russia to be a significant part of the book. That was not the case, however, as her real experience with Russia seems to have occurred from the late 1980’s through the early 2000’s. This experience is weaved into her general biography but it doesn’t provide the necessary insight to understand the current state of affairs in the country or the problems that have come to a head recently between Russia and the west.

Hill did not start out as a privileged insider but came from a hardscrabble working class background in Northeast England, which makes her down-to-earth and relatable. She describes how the neoliberal and deindustrialization policies of the 1970’s and 1980’s personally affected her family and many others in the UK and how she observed similarities in certain regions of the U.S. after she moved there. She draws parallels on the dynamics behind this and the economic collapse Russia went through in the 90’s – a theme I have also explored. She is to be lauded for bringing the details of this topic to the professional educated class that will most likely be reading her book. Where she tends to go off the rails is what she says – and doesn’t say – about Putin era Russia.

From what I can ascertain from her telling, she spent significant time on the ground in Russia off and on from 1987 through the early 2000’s. She goes into the most detail about her travels to Russia as an exchange student during the Gorbachev era and then again while pursuing her PhD during the 1990’s. During the former, she describes Moscow as bleak and run-down with crumbling infrastructure and food shortages but an impressive public transportation system. During the latter, she describes the effects of the Shock Therapy program that transitioned Russia to a free market economy. She also goes into the travails of being a woman during this period of economic collapse and chaos where many Russian women turned to prostitution servicing relatively well-heeled western men. She relates an anecdote in which an elevator man at the Moscow hotel where she was bringing a delegation of Japanese businessmen to visit her academic sponsor assumed she was a call girl and was aggressively intent on getting a cut until the reality of the situation was explained to him – by a man, of course.

However, it doesn’t seem that she has spent any real time in Russia for most of the Putin era, with the exception of attendance at a couple of Valdai conferences. This leads me to believe that she is relying on information from the usual dubious sources in the political and media establishment about what contemporary Russia is like. This is evident from the few remarks she makes in passing.

First, she uses the term autocratic when referring to Putin’s Russia, which is inaccurate. Autocracy is absolute rule by one person. Anyone who has any depth of understanding of Putin era Russia knows that Putin does not rule absolutely. Similarly she uses the term populist in a somewhat pejorative sense to compare Putin to Donald Trump and Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage: “They were charismatic leaders who dealt in pithy slogans that offered promises, not programs.” This is a gross oversimplification of Putin’s politics over the past two decades and implies that Putin has had a lack of political substance in his approach to addressing the numerous crises he inherited when taking over Russia. Putin is a pragmatist who had to learn on the job. There are still many problems to tackle but the command of many details of different areas of governance he has developed over time as demonstrated during lengthy Q&A sessions, speeches and press appearances, along with the concrete improvements he oversaw in poverty reduction, infrastructure investment, lowering crime and rebuilding a dilapidated military reveals this observation by Hill to be quite laughable….

Read full review here.