Russia Matters, 10/15/24

1. “There is talk behind closed doors” in Western capitals of a deal in which “Moscow retains de facto control over… one-fifth of Ukraine it has occupied—though Russia’s sovereignty is not recognized—while the rest of the country is allowed to join NATO or given equivalent security guarantees,” according to FT editors. “Under that umbrella, it could rebuild and integrate with the EU, akin to West Germany in the Cold War,” they write. Some of these discussions are echoed in Kyiv, according to Der Spiegel. “For the first time since the Russian invasion in February 2022, the Ukrainian capital is seriously discussing scenarios in which the country foregoes the complete reconquest of its occupied territories, almost 20% of Ukrainian territory, for the time being,” this German outlet reports. According to Robert Kagan of Brookings, however, a stable peaceful resolution of the conflict is unlikely because Putin will assume that the West will keep arming Ukraine even if a deal is reached. “Unless something dramatic changes, this is a war that, like most wars, will be won or lost on the battlefield… Americans need to decide soon whether they are prepared to let Ukraine lose,” Kagan writes in WP.
2. Requests for more weapons and security guarantees by the West, which Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to refer to when briefing the Rada leadership on his victory plan on Oct. 16, have so far received a tepid response by the Biden administration, according to WSJ. In their comments on the plan, U.S. officials have pointed out that it repackages some of Ukraine’s earlier requests for arms and noted that members of NATO are divided about whether to offer Ukraine a formal invitation to join, WSJ reported. Ukrainians are increasingly exhausted by the war, and polls show an incremental increase in the number of Ukrainians prepared for negotiations, according to this U.S. newspaper.
3. The fall of Pokrovsk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region would leave the Ukrainian military without a key logistics hub for operations in eastern Ukraine, and it could serve as Russia’s gateway to conquering the rest of that region, according to Keith Johnson of FP. Moreover, “Pokrovsk’s fall could have an even more insidious impact on Ukraine’s ability to keep fighting: The city is the source of most of the coal used for the country’s steel and iron industry” which is the second-largest sector of the Ukrainian economy, according to Johnson. Without Pokrovsk’s mine, “the country’s remaining steel industry will be crippled,” according to The Economist.
4. “Russian forces proved more flexible and effective in the conduct of defensive operations in 2023 through a combination of maneuver and positional defense,” according to Michael Kofman of CEIP. Despite these adaptations, however, the Russian army’s assaults on Ukraine’s prepared defenses led to grinding battles. “The net effect was incremental Russian gains at high cost, as Russian forces proved unable to attain operationally significant breakthroughs when possessing quantitative advantages in manpower, materiel and munition,” according to Kofman. However, “[w]hat was true in 2023 may not hold for 2024, and beyond,” this leading expert on the Russian military finds in his CEIP piece, “Assessing Russian Military Adaptation in 2023.” Looking beyond 2023, Kofman finds Ukraine’s fall 2024 incursion into Russia’s Kursk region to be a success on the tactical level, but not “that successful” on the operational level “because if the primary goal was to shift significant Russian forces from their advances” in eastern Ukraine, “this did not take place,” Kofman told NYMag.
5. Since the first Western restrictions on Russian oil exports were introduced in 2022, Moscow has assembled a fleet of more than 400 tankers that are currently moving some 4 million barrels of oil a day beyond the reach of sanctions, according to FT’s investigation. Presently nearly 70% of the Kremlin’s oil is being transported on these shadow tankers, according to a separate investigation conducted by the Kyiv School of Economics Institute and reported by NYT. Russia has invested about $10 billion in developing its fleet of such shadow tankers. Commenting on the FT investigation, Harvard professor and RM principal investigator Graham Allison wrote on his X account: “For those who still imagine that Western sanctions are strangling Russia’s economy, the FT’s Big Read… masterfully illuminates how Russia is out-playing the US at the cat and mouse game of economic sanctions.”*
6. Without dedicated reintegration programs in Western countries for fighters returning from Ukraine, the risk of radicalization and violence appears “rather high,” according to Jean-François Ratelle of the University of Ottawa in his PONARS commentary. Western governments may think that most such fighters will not pose a security threat, but that view seems “short-sighted… because it… puts the focus on ideology rather than the broader context of the war and postwar experience,” Ratelle warns.

By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 10/4/24

Uriel Araujo, PhD, anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts

Finland and Estonia, two NATO countries, have recently signed an agreement about Baltic Sea security. Moreover, and more importantly, they have announced their intention to blockade the Gulf of Finland by closing it to Russian shipping. The Russian Foreign Ministry reacted by stating that Russia would regard any such action as a violation of maritime law. Establishing their boundaries (pertaining to the Gulf of Finland’s contiguous zones) would be within their sovereign rights, of course. However, restricting maritime shipping the way they intend to do cannot be described as anything else than a violation of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – with potential serious consequences.

The Gulf of Finland extends to Saint Petersburg in Russia to the east. Its southern coast contains a network of ports plus the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant. The port of Primorsk at the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland is important for oil products, for example – there are several others. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the gulf for Russia. For one thing the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline began in Finnish waters.

With that said, as  Pavel Klachkov (Russian political scientist and a Financial University director) remarks, NATO’s military presence is increasing in the Baltic region, which is such a strategic area for Russia as well. In April, for instance, NATO joint military exercises commenced in Lithuania. Finland’s accession to the Alliance, he argues,  gave “new momentum to the northern direction, where conditions are being created for a potential conflict between NATO and Russia.” The Atlantic Alliance has also begun setting up a headquarters in Mikkeli, a Finnish city, which lies very close to the Russian border.

 He adds: “Since Finland joined the North Atlantic Alliance, it has quickly integrated into its operational structure and actively participates in exercises. These maneuvers are not merely a show of force — they are a rehearsal for possible military conflict scenarios with Russia. NATO’s active operations in the Kola Peninsula and the Gulf of Finland, both in close proximity to Russia’s borders, are particularly notable.”

Moreover, NATO exercises have been rehearsing the blockade of key routes for Russia – both the Suwalki Gap and the Gulf of Finland are crucial for supplying Russia’s northwestern regions. This is the larger context behind the recent Finnish-Estonian announcement.

After the 2022 NATO Summit in Madrid, Biden famously said that Russian President Vladimir Putin was looking for the “Finlandization of Europe”, but would instead get the “NATOization” of that continent. With the accession of Sweden and Finland, the Atlantic Alliance’s territorial reach has extended as far out as the Russian eastward Arctic flank, thereby making Russia the only non-NATO country in the Arctic. Many Western journalists and commentators would be quick to dismiss the aforementioned Russian political scientist’s analysis about NATO enlargement as “Russian propaganda”. However, going back in time a bit, in December 2019, Mark Cancian (a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies) wrote that “it’s time to stop NATO expansion. He commented back then on the American support for North Macedonia’s membership in the NATO alliance, and wrote that “a larger NATO embroils the United States in obscure regional disputes, commits it to defend exposed countries, and unnecessarily antagonizes the Russians.” Voices like that of Cancian or – to name a more famous Western political scientist – that of John Mearsheimer have largely been ignored by American policy-makers. This is unfortunate.

In November 2020 I wrote that, under Joe Biden’s presidency, Washington would pursue the policy of countering and encircling Russia, bringing changes not only in US relations to Ukraine and Eastern Europe, but to the entirety of Europe. At the time, tensions were rising in most – if not all – countries neighboring Russia. For one thing, in September 2020 NATO troops took part in provocative military exercises in Estonia near the Russian border.

Earlier that same year Washington sent no less than 20,000 troops to Europe to take part in the NATO exercise “Defender Europe 20”, It involved 18 countries across 10 European nations, including Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Georgia (all of which share a border with the Russian Federation). It was described as the “largest military exercises on the continent since before the end of the Cold War.” From 2020 onwards things intensified considerably – with vast consequences for the continent and the whole world.

Considering all of this, it is really quite impossible to disregard Russian concerns and complaints about NATO expansion (or about Ukraine’s relations with the Alliance, for that mere) as nonsense or mere rhetoric. From a Russian perspective, those are of course valid concerns pertaining to its national security and vital interests. The Atlantic Alliance appetite for growth since at least 1999, with its breach of the 1990 promise, has in fact been one of the main causes of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine since 2014. One could arguably reason that Moscow’s main goals (culminating in the 2022 campaign) have been basically a response to that.

Ukraine is of course a focal point for tensions due to many reasons, historically. NATO-Russian tensions however extend way beyond the Ukrainian question. There is indeed a lot of room for escalating such frictions in the Northern flank of the Alliance. And the US-led West seems to be bent on doing precisely that – which once again makes the world a less secure place.

Source: InfoBrics

YouTube link here.

Let’s hope that YouTube channels like Dialogue Works and the Duran, among others, do not get deleted by YouTube. In recent weeks, Glenn Diesen, Mark Sleboda and Rachel Blevins have all had their channels permanently taken down, citing a vague accusation of hate speech as the excuse. – Natylie

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 10/14/24

The Ukrainian government is considering options to end the war with Russia that would involve ceding territory, Der Spiegel reported on Sunday, citing a Ukrainian official.

The report said it was the first time since Russia’s invasion in February 2022 that the Ukrainian leadership has considered a deal that wouldn’t involve it getting back all of the territory Russian forces have captured since February 2022.

Under a peace deal that was on the table in March and April 2022, Russia would have withdrawn its forces back to pre-invasion lines. But that deal was discouraged by the US and other NATO countries, who urged the Ukrainians to fight.

Over the past two years, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pushing a “peace formula” that calls for a full Russian withdrawal from Ukraine before peace talks can even happen, which is a non-starter for negotiations with Moscow.

“We believed that victory had to mean the unconditional surrender of Putin’s Russia,” the Ukrainian source told Der Spiegel. The official acknowledged that was not a realistic view, saying, “A deal must also be beneficial for Russia.”

The report comes as Russian forces continue to make gains in eastern Ukraine, which have become more rapid in recent months. Ukrainian forces still hold a small chunk of Russia’s Kursk Oblast, but Russian troops are slowly pushing them back.

The Ukrainian official said that Kyiv believes the US will slowly wind down its support for Ukraine whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November. Trump is running on ending the war while Harris is vowing to continue supporting Kyiv.

“Whether it’s Trump or Harris, the Americans will slowly but surely withdraw,” the official said. “The prognosis is poor.”

The Bell, 10/7/24

‘Reputation whitewashing’ scandal rocks Russian opposition

Yet another scandal is tearing the Russian opposition apart. This time, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), set up by the late Alexei Navalny, is under fire. Maxim Katz, a former municipal deputy turned popular YouTuber, released an investigation that accuses the foundation of close ties with fugitive Russian bankers and alleged that the organization is receiving funds from people who are accused of fraud.

• Katz’s video is dedicated to Alexander Zheleznyak and Sergei Leontiev, the former co-founders of Probusinessbank. In the 2010s, the bank ranked 51st in Russia in terms of its assets, but it was stripped of its license by the Central Bank in 2015 and later filed for bankruptcy. When checking the bank’s financial situation, the regulator found large-scale operations to withdraw assets and losses caused by the bank’s management, estimated to run into hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2017, Zheleznyak and Leontiev, who fled Russia as soon as Probusinessbank hit trouble, were arrested in absentia. 
• In his investigation, Katz leaned heavily on the long-established facts of the Probusinessbank case, adding in some previously unpublished documents. Katz got these from a group of former depositors, led by Nerses Grigoryan, who are trying to sue to recover their money. The main allegation is that Zheleznyak and Leontiev stole billions  from depositors in Probusinessbank and then fled Russia. Once in the West, they reinvented themselves as entrepreneurs persecuted because of their criticisms of Putin’s regime.
• Zheleznyak and Leontiev repeatedly claimed that their troubles with the authorities began after 2012 following an attempt to launch a bank card from which 1% of purchases would be transferred to Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation — at the bank’s expense rather than the cardholder’s. There were talks about releasing the card, but it never saw the light of day. Zheleznyak and Leontiev allegedly had to abandon the idea amid pressure from the government and the Central Bank. Katz disputes this account, saying that there were no visible sanctions from the authorities at the time. Later, Probusinessbank was entrusted with rehabilitating a bank that ran into problems and Zheleznyak was even presented with a state award and worked on the State Duma’s expert council on security and combating corruption.
• Zheleznyak and Leontiev have played a noticeable role in the Anti-Corruption Foundation from abroad in recent years. Katz alleges they have used it to try to whitewash their reputations. Zheleznyak was the founder of the group’s legal entity in the United States and signs important documents on its behalf each month, while Leontiev makes a monthly donation of $20,000. 
• After the investigation was released, the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s leading figures did not comment on the substance of the allegations and called for their followers to wait for a more “detailed response” to follow. Chair Maria Pevchikh complained that “we will have to do this to the detriment of our real work.” Leonid Volkov, one of its directors who was last year embroiled in a scandal over issuing a letter in support of sanctioned Russian oligarchs, dismissed all claims of “whitewashing.”
• Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former oil magnate turned opposition figure who is also embroiled in a row with the Anti-Corruption Foundation over separate allegations, said that he was shocked at the reaction from the group and its failure to give a detailed response. “When an outrageous situation becomes public it raises the question of the need for greater transparency in the funding of opposition forces and the compliance of their activities with Western legal standards,” he said.

Why the world should care:

After the war in Ukraine and especially after the death of Alexei Navalny, there were great hopes for unity among the opposition in exile. This latest scandal shows yet again that this is unlikely to happen — at least in the foreseeable future. For now, it seems that key figures and groups are more interested in fighting their own turf wars than joining a collective struggle against the Putin regime.