By Branko Marcetic, Current Affairs, 9/7/22

When a major political figure dies, it’s always significant what’s singled out for forgetting. That’s the case with former president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, who’s been lionized in the Western press since his death last week, lauded for his efforts to democratize and bring new freedoms to the former USSR, and whose legacy has now been reduced to tatters by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

World leaders praised him. U.S. president Joe Biden feted Gorbachev as “a man of remarkable vision.” UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer said he was “one of the great figures of the 20th century.” The president of the European commision said he was someone whose legacy is “one we will not forget.” Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul called him “a figure who made the world better” and urged us to “learn from his legacy.” “Putin seems to view himself as the anti-Gorbachev,” writes David Remnick of the New Yorker, expressing his hope that “around the world,” Gorbachev’s belief in “democracy, the rule of law, and the peaceful and orderly transfer of power” would “prevail.” Putin’s pointed refusal to attend Gorbachev’s funeral became something of a mini-scandal in the West since his death.

This is largely in line with how the Western press has treated Gorbachev over the last ten years especially, when the former Soviet minister had offered mounting criticism of Putin’s authoritarianism at home. There’s no shortage of coverage of Gorbachev slamming the Russian president, warning of the return of Stalinism and totalitarianism, or his criticisms of dubious Russian elections, points the former Soviet president has made again and again over the years.

But there’s another, overlooked element of Gorbachev’s legacy, one that’s as absent from today’s eulogies as it was ignored by officials when he was alive. That’s Gorbachev’s harsh criticism of U.S. foreign policy after the end of the Cold War, particularly toward Russia, along with his frequent warnings that the decision-making in Washington was destabilizing the world, and his urgent demands that the United States and Russia engage in robust diplomacy. It’s not hard to see why this has been erased: many of Gorbachev’s points are today dismissed in the West purely as Putin apologism and pro-war excuse-making.

“They Declared Victory”

The man exalted as the “anti-Putin” has often assailed U.S. hubris in foreign policy after the Cold War. In one of his final interviews before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gorbachev criticized the “triumphant mood in the West, especially in the United States” after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

“They grew arrogant and self-confident. They declared victory in the Cold War,” Gorbachev complained.

This wasn’t an outburst from an elderly statesman in the twilight of his life, but an echo of criticisms he’d been leveling for years. All the way back in 1998, Gorbachev, writing in Time magazine, lightly admonished Bill Clinton’s talk of making the 21st century “the next American century,” asking how such “rhetoric rings in the rest of the world.” A disappointed Gorbachev noted that when the Soviet Union collapsed, “the West could not resist declaring victory in the Cold War, and the U.S. saw an opportunity to extend its influence to the former Soviet bloc.” He cautioned that the U.S. tendency to see itself as having “a right to decide for others, to impose American institutions and to promote the American way of life” was not a style of leadership conducive to “world peace and stability.”

But as the years wore on, the tone of these criticisms became more stern. “Americans have a severe disease—worse than AIDS. It’s called the winner’s complex,” he said in 2006, before attacking then Vice President Dick Cheney and then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as “hawks protecting the interests of the military—shallow people.”

“The American media trumpeted … about the victory in the Cold War, that socialism is down,” he complained three years later. “This disease of extreme self-confidence led to it—the [belief] that things would always go on this way. And it did last long … I think that now everyone is learning a hard lesson.” Two years later, he again complained about the “euphoria” and “winner’s complex” that emerged in the “American political elite” after the end of the Cold War.

“The United States could not resist the temptation to announce its ‘victory’ in the Cold War. … The ‘sole remaining superpower’ staked a claim to monopoly leadership in world affairs. That, and the equating of the breakup of the Soviet Union with the end of the Cold War, which in reality had ended two years before, has had far-reaching consequences.”

“They were rubbing their hands, saying, ‘How nice! We had been trying to do something about the Soviet Union for decades, and it ate itself up!’” he said in 2016, complaining that the West failed to embrace the possibilities for cooperation he believed his reforms had opened up.

The “Mistake” of NATO Expansion

Gorbachev often criticized this mentality with particular reference to the U.S.-led policy of NATO expansion, widely criticized at the time as unnecessary and destabilizing, and which officials and commentators today deny has played any role in either the ongoing war in Ukraine, or deteriorating U.S.-Russia relations more generally.

Gorbachev criticized expansion in the harshest terms from the very start. “I believe it’s a mistake. It’s a bad mistake,” he said in a 1997 speech he made in Washington, as the plan was set into motion. “And I’m not persuaded by the assurances that we hear that Russia has nothing to worry about.”

Gorbachev warned—presciently, as it turned out—that the move would spark backlash in Russia, hardening the hardliners and empowering political conservatives. “I feel that if the same kind of games continue to be played, if one country plays some card against the other country, then all of those problems, all of those issues that we have been mentioning today, will be very difficult to resolve,” he said.

Despite receiving a standing ovation in the U.S. Capital, Gorbachev was ignored. Twenty-four years later, his opinion had only hardened.

“The ‘winners’ decided to build a new empire,” he said in 2021. “Hence the idea of NATO expansion.”

“The Americans promised that NATO wouldn’t move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted,” he told the Telegraph in 2008.

In the same interview, Gorbachev complained that “we had 10 years after the Cold War to build a new world order and yet we squandered them,” because “the United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently.” The conservative newspaper noted that Gorbachev’s statement “mirrors the most belligerently anti-Western speeches of Vladimir Putin,” and that he “sounded like the ageing hardliners he struggled against in the Kremlin during the 1980s” for railing against the military-industrial complex.

“Whereas American interests extend thousands of miles, and to many continents, let’s accept that Russia has natural interests in the former Soviet states. Let’s have a dialogue about this,” he had said four years earlier. He elaborated on the importance of taking Russia’s interests into account years later in a 2016 interview: “The relations between us are so important and concern everyone else, so we must take the interests of others into account.”

This critique extended right up to the escalating crisis over Ukraine. In the very same 2009 interview in which Gorbachev gave the harshest criticisms of Putin he had offered up to that point, he echoed Putin and his officials’ long-held objections to Ukraine’s potential membership, questioning the wisdom of the idea. By 2016, seven years later, he was more strident.

“NATO has begun preparations for escalating from the Cold War into a hot one,” he warned, in the context of deteriorating diplomatic relations and intensifying military exercises in Europe by Russia and NATO members, the United States in particular. “All the rhetoric in Warsaw just yells of a desire almost to declare war on Russia. They only talk about defense, but actually they are preparing for offensive operations.”

Today, these words—which suggest that even though Moscow bears primary responsibility for the war it chose to launch, we need to understand the role Western foreign policy choices played in triggering such an appalling decision—are anathema in a political climate where everyone from the Pope to Noam Chomsky is attacked as being a war supporter or even a fascist sympathizer for so much as noting the existence of Western provocations.

That same year, in 2016, Gorbachev suggested that a neutral Ukraine was a solution to the worsening crisis, stating that “a democratic and unaligned Ukraine is in the interests of the Ukrainian people,” and that this be codified in the country’s constitution. Instead, three years later, it was Ukraine’s future entry into NATO that was enshrined in the document.

For Gorbachev, this was no doubt a particularly sore point. Both documents and the recollections of the players involved have firmly established that he was assured by U.S. and NATO officials that the alliance wouldn’t move east if a reunified Germany became a member, a promise he failed to get in writing. It wouldn’t be surprising if Gorbachev held a special bitterness over the fact that he’d been misled.

But he also made clear the issue was about something bigger. As a committed multilateralist, Gorbachev viewed NATO’s expansion—along with its transformation from a defensive alliance to a vehicle for proactive military force—as a blow to a budding world order where problems would be resolved via international law, diplomacy, and institutions like the United Nations.

“The United States and its allies instead decided to expand NATO eastward, bringing that military alliance closer to Russia’s borders while claiming for it the role of a pan-European or even a global policeman,” he said in 2011. “This usurped the functions of the United Nations and thus weakened it.”

“International organizations, particularly the United Nations, crippled by the unilateralism of the United States and NATO, are still faltering, unable to fulfill their task of conflict settlement,” he concluded. 

Even before the turn of the century, he had made this point, quoting John F. Kennedy’s vision of a peace that wasn’t defined by “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” but was a “product of many nations.” This meant prioritizing working through the UN rather than through NATO, he had said.

Unilateralism “Unworthy of a Great Power”

These critiques of U.S. foreign policy weren’t limited to NATO expansion. Echoing numerous experts and even Putin himself, Gorbachev was scathing about a host of instances of Washington unilateralism that dented relations between the two countries, starting with NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.

“The United States is conducting itself irresponsibly on the world stage,” he charged that year, in an early criticism of what he called Washington’s “superiority and victory complex.”

Gorbachev called the Bill Clinton administration’s decision to resolve the Kosovo crisis through a unilateral bombing campaign “uncivilized” and “unworthy of a great power.”

“The argument that you intervened in Yugoslavia ‘because you could’ only encouraged nuclear-threshold countries to do everything possible to arm themselves with nuclear weapons,” he warned.

The same year, he told Larry King that NATO’s air strikes, done without UN authorization, were a “mistake.”

“I believe that instead this will boomerang and they will certainly rue this and the view of the people, not just the Yugoslav people, but the people throughout the world, is very negative,” he said. Meanwhile, he urged the Russian government to “not lose our heads,” and “stick to the position that it is for a political settlement.” (The later deployment of Russian troops to the conflict nearly triggered war between the two nuclear powers).

The NATO bombing was arguably the most pivotal early episode in the decline of U.S.-Russian relations, even more so than the alliance’s first eastward expansion. The pro-Western president Boris Yeltsin announced he was “deeply angered,” cut Moscow’s ties to NATO, and recalled his chief military representative to the alliance, while a Russian man shot up the U.S. embassy in Moscow with a submachine gun. Decades later, Putin himself pointed to the bombing as the starting point of deteriorating relations, as well as to justify his illegal annexation of Crimea.

Gorbachev continued to inveigh against Washington foreign policy as the years went by.

“While America’s role is acknowledged throughout the world, her claim to hegemony, not to say domination, is not similarly recognized,” he wrote in 2000 in an open letter to the newly elected George W. Bush. He accused the United States of continuing “to operate along an ideological track identical to the one it followed during the Cold War — but now without a cold war,” pointing to “the expansion of NATO eastward, the handling of the Yugoslav crisis, the military theory and practice of U.S. rearmament,” and said that responsibility for worsening relations “must be shared between Russian and American leadership.” In one particularly prescient passage, he wrote that:

“For 10 years, U.S. foreign policy has been formulated as if it were the policy of a victor in war, the Cold War. But at the highest reaches of U.S. policy-making no one has grasped the fact that this could not be the basis for formulating post-Cold War policy. In fact, there has been no ’pacification.’ On the contrary, there has been a heightening of inequalities, tension and hostility, with most of the last directed toward the United States. Instead of seeing an increase in U.S. security, the end of the Cold War has seen a decline. It is not hard to imagine that, should the United States persist in its policies, the international situation will continue to deteriorate.”

Calling for finding “mutually acceptable” solutions as U.S.-Russia relations seemed to warm a year later, Gorbachev chided those in the United States who wished to deploy a missile defense system and enlarge NATO over Russian objections. “The subtext is: if, to achieve these goals, we must sometimes talk nice to the Russians, let’s do so,” he wrote. “The same pundits and politicians are equally blunt about consultations with American allies and partners: we can talk, but in the end we shall do what’s good for us.” (Gorbachev’s words eerily anticipated Clinton’s deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott’s later explanation for the U.S. push to expand NATO: “We do what we can in our own interest.”).

“One would have to be very naïve to think that such a strategy would not be resisted,” Gorbachev warned.

Ten years later, Gorbachev charged that “as long as the West insisted on its purported victory in the Cold War, it meant that no change was needed in the old Cold War thinking … such as using military force and political and economic pressure to impose one model on everyone.” Pointing to the 1999 NATO bombing, the Iraq War, and U.S. military threats against Iran, he lamented that, especially in the United States, “policy-making and political thinking are still militarized,” and that this mindset had made the UN and Security Council “expendable or at best an impediment.”

A few years later, he laid out his hypothetical advice to Putin—who had by then returned to the Russian presidency for a third term over Gorbachev’s public objections—for managing U.S.-Russia relations:

“I learned that you can listen to the Americans, but you cannot trust them. When they get an idea to do something, they’ll turn the world onto a different axis to get it done.”

The Road to Another Versailles

Gorbachev’s condemnations of U.S. foreign policy were often paired with warnings about humiliating or ignoring Russia, and the deleterious effect it would have both on public opinion and political sentiment within the country, as well as global stability more generally.

“I think we have a unique chance to create a new quality of relations with the West,” he said in 2004, at the tail end of Putin’s early attempts to ally Russia with the United States, viewed within Russsia as one more unreciprocated bit of outreach by another pro-Western president. “But we don’t want to be beggars. We don’t want to be treated by the EU or by the United States like we are down; that is something we will not accept.”

Seven years later, Gorbachev would bemoan that that despite “numerous declarations of cooperation and even strategic partnership,” post-Soviet Russia “is still being treated as an outsider,” and had not been “given a voice in resolving key problems, and obstacles were put in the way of its integration into the European and global economy.” Shortly after, in 2014, Gorbachev again cited this treatment to explain the emergence of a New Cold War. The West had “tried to turn us into some kind of backwater, a province,” and tried to “push us out of politics” instead of treating Russia like an equal partner.

“Our nation could not let that pass,” he said. “It’s not just about pride. It’s about a situation where people speak to you however they want, impose limitations, and so on. It’s America calling the shots in everything!”

By 2008, the U.S.-Russia relationship had again reached a nadir, owing to a confluence of factors. On the Russian side, there was Putin’s increasing authoritarianism at home and his meddling in Ukrainian politics, and his anger at U.S. criticism of both. On the U.S. side, there were a series of foreign policy decisions Moscow had stressed were contrary to its foreign policy interests, including Bush’s controversial announcement that he would pursue neighboring Ukraine and Georgia’s membership into NATO.

“Russia has long been told to simply accept the facts,” Gorbachev protested in a New York Times editorial in 2008, four months after Bush’s declaration. “Here’s the independence of Kosovo for you. Here’s the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, and the American decision to place missile defenses in neighboring countries. Here’s the unending expansion of NATO. All of these moves have been set against the backdrop of sweet talk about partnership. Why would anyone put up with such a charade?”

Pointing to talk about rethinking the U.S. approach to Russia, Gorbachev urged officials to rethink one thing in particular: “the habit of talking to Russia in a condescending way, without regard for its positions and interests.”

“The politicians in America sometimes act in a way that seems disrespectful toward our country and our people,” he cautioned a month later. “The Russians are people who value their dignity. You better not mess with that.”

In Gorbachev’s warnings, we can see the shadows of the road not traveled after World War One. After that conflict, the Allies embarked on a short-sighted attempt to contain a future resurgent Germany, treating the nation as a defeated power, imposing on it a harsh reparations regime, and generally implementing measures felt by Germans to be a national humiliation—all of it feeding into a dangerous upsurge of German nationalism that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and, ultimately, a second World War.

Gorbachev himself had explicitly brought up this comparison in 1997, warning the West not to impose the kind of peace that the Allies had on Germany after World War One.

“You may not humiliate a nation, a people, and think that it will have no consequences,” he said.

Dialogue At All Costs

But arguably Gorbachev’s most important words—just as ignored and unspeakable in today’s political climate—were his warnings about nuclear war and his urgent calls for peace. Despite his brutal assessment of U.S. foreign policy, Gorbachev simultaneously spent the past thirty years urging cooperative U.S.-Russia relations, and calling for dialogue between the two governments without delay, in spite of their deep mutual mistrust and what he viewed as serious oversteps by U.S. administrations.

Writing for the Times in 2001, Gorbachev celebrated what seemed to be warming relations between the two powers under Putin and Bush, who had recently convened a summit in Ljubljana. He praised the two leaders for “understand[ing] the importance of the relationship” between their nations and defying “the hawks in Washington and Moscow who would like to put Russian-American relations on the foreign policy back burner.”

“Something else was said at the summit: Russia and the United States are not enemies,” he wrote. “Continuing to emphasize this truth is of crucial importance.”

This was a theme Gorbachev would stress again and again over the coming decades: that, as he put it in 2004, dialogue between the two nuclear powers must “not be broken off whatever the challenges and complications we have to face.” Even as U.S.-Russia relations deteriorated and ultimately fell apart, Gorbachev continued to insist, to the leadership of both countries, that the two could still “develop a serious agenda” for cooperation, that they should rebuild trust through dialogue and the lifting of sanctions, and hold a summit “with a broad agenda, without preliminary conditions.” He urged the same approach from Europe, calling for the same kind of summit between Russia and the EU, and for European powers to “defrost relations” with Russia.

“We shouldn’t be afraid that someone would ‘lose face,’ or that someone would obtain a propaganda victory,” he wrote. “This should all belong to the past. We should think of the future.”

Gorbachev’s calls for dialogue continued despite—or rather, because of—the ever-escalating crisis over Ukraine, and the steadily worsening U.S.-Russian relationship that came with it. A longtime proponent of arms control who called again and again for nuclear weapons to be abolished, Gorbachev cautioned that the ratcheting tensions had put the world on a “dangerous threshold.”

“This is extremely dangerous, with tensions as high as they are now,” he wrote back in 2014, when tensions were nowhere near where they sit today. “We may not live through these days: someone could lose their nerve.”

Gorbachev’s calls to “return to the path we charted together when we ended the Cold War” were based not on idealism, but on experience. As Soviet president, he had, after all, forged a close working relationship with Ronald Reagan, a virulent anti-communist who had repeatedly branded his country an “evil empire,” and whose language was so extreme it sparked alarm even among European allies. It was at a nadir in U.S.-Soviet relations—after, among other things, Moscow had shot down a Korean airliner in 1983, killing a U.S. congressman and sixty-two other Americans—that Gorbachev and Reagan began their successful pursuit of diplomacy, ultimately signing a landmark arms control agreement and paving the way for ending hostilities.

As Gorbachev repeatedly stressed over the years, it was the very process of dialogue and negotiations, pursued in spite of the serious difficulties and mistrust in the U.S.-Soviet relationship, that helped reduce tensions and lay the foundation for peace. “The dialogue that president Reagan and I started was difficult,” Gorbachev later wrote. But,

“in the final outcome, our insistence on dialogue proved fully justified. … While addressing these vital tasks, we changed the nature of relations between our two countries, moving step by step to build trust and to test it by concrete deeds. And in the process, we—and our views—were changing too.”

Gorbachev credits this painstaking diplomatic work for Reagan’s 1988 recanting of his “evil empire” label, and to his and George H. W. Bush’s joint declaration a year later that the Cold War was over.

Forgetting At Our Own Peril

There’s so much more one could mention that’s been wiped clean from today’s tributes to Gorbachev, from his criticism of U.S.-led globalization and Washington’s decades-long blockade of Cuba, to his insistence that environmental degradation and growing inequality and poverty were the true security challenges of our time. But as the United States and Russia stand on the brink of outright war, it’s his tireless advocacy for U.S.-Russian cooperation—an appeal he made equally to the hawks in both countries—and his decades of warnings about the consequences of short-sighted Washington foreign policy choices that are most urgent today.

Liberal commentators in the West have justifiably made much of Putin’s rollback of Gorbachev’s democratizing reforms at home, and the erasure of his legacy that it represents. But there’s next to no introspection about how that same liberal establishment has itself undermined the other major part of Gorbachev’s legacy: his work to normalize relations between the United States and Russia, his calls for restraint and strategic empathy in Western foreign policy, and his insistence on dialogue and diplomacy. There’s little of Gorbachev’s spirit among the leading liberal voices of today, who by and large mock diplomacy as appeasement or surrender, dismiss criticism of Western foreign policy choices like NATO expansion as irrelevant propaganda or even war-justification, and speak of inflicting defeat or even regime-change on Russia.

More importantly, it should be a wake-up call that Gorbachev—a man lauded this past week as the antithesis of Putin, and valorized for his liberalism, his wisdom, and his foresight—shared many of the same complaints about U.S. foreign policy that have been cited not just by Moscow’s current leadership, but by a host of foreign policy thinkers who are today targeted in the crudest McCarthyite terms.

Contrary to the Telegraph’s 2008 assessment, Gorbachev didn’t turn into a hard-liner or into Putin as he aged—in fact, his criticism of the Russian president only became harsher over time. The record shows that Gorbachev consistently made the same warnings and complaints, often prescient ones, from as far back as the 1990s, as he reacted with dismay to what he regarded as arrogant and foolish foreign policy decisions that ran counter to the spirit of U.S.-Russian cooperation he thought he’d forged in the Soviet era.

It should all cause serious rethinking of the belief that simply replacing Putin, even with a liberal alternative, will solve current U.S.-Russia tensions, or allow the past decades’ direction of U.S. foreign policy in that part of the world to carry on unimpeded. And it should trigger serious self-reflection in the West: that maybe Putin, as bad as he is, is not the only thing that has to change for the sake of peace and stability.

I shouldn’t have to say this but just because I post an article on this site doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with everything in it. This site is not about satisfying anyone’s confirmation bias. In the case of this article, it is important to be aware of what Ukrainians think about what is going in their country. – Natylie

By Janina Dill, Carl Muller-Crepon, Mamie Howlett, The Conversation, 9/12/22

Kyiv’s counteroffensive in the north-east of Ukraine appeared to take everyone by surprise, not least Russia’s war planners who had been moving troops south to meet an offensive in the Kherson region which Ukraine had been trumpeting about for several weeks. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is claiming that his military has won back 700 square miles of territory, including key Russian supply bases Kupiansk and Izium.

Ukraine’s military success must have equally surprised politicians and pundits around the world who have, over the last six months, urged Ukraine to offer concessions in order to secure a peace settlement with Russia. Giving up territory in the east or pledging to remain neutral would save Ukrainian lives and reduce the risk of a Russian nuclear strike, they argue. But this has raised the question as to what sort of settlement would be acceptable to Ukrainians and whether they would support ceding territory or sovereignty to end the violence.

Ukraine has a just cause for war – self-defence. Russian opinions excepted, this is something most of the rest of the world agrees on. But even a war with a just cause may not be worth fighting. Moral philosophers and lawyers caution that a war of self-defence must still be proportionate – the projected costs should not exceed the benefits.

Calls on Ukraine to negotiate or surrender often echo this argument. Ukraine can’t expect to defeat its large neighbour in the long run, so it should give up self-defence now to limit the costs of the war. But should resistance to aggression really be constrained by such cost-benefit calculations?

You could just as easily think about self-defence in absolute terms. Some outcomes are unacceptable – regardless of how costly it is to resist. The many reports of war crimes in Russian-occupied territory could well motivate Ukrainians to want to fight to the end to resist Russian control.

What is victory worth?

To find out how Ukrainians think about self-defence, in late July 2022 we surveyed a representative sample of 1,160 Ukrainians in all regions not contested by Russia. We asked our respondents about what concessions they might accept, offering various scenarios.

Some of these included upfront territorial concessions, while others didn’t. What’s more, the scenarios featured strategies with different projected costs and benefits after three more months of fighting. They varied regarding projected military and civilian deaths, the risk of a nuclear strike and the likely political outcomes.

We found that Ukrainians strongly prefer strategies that preserve Ukraine’s political autonomy and restore its territory, including Crimea and the Donbas region. This is the case even if making concessions would reduce projected civilian and military deaths, or the risk of a nuclear strike over the next three months.

Of the people we surveyed, 79% opposed all options that would lead to a Russian-controlled government in Kyiv. Importantly, the minority of people who accepted a Russian-controlled government did so because they prioritised restoring Ukraine’s territory in the choice they faced.

Russian control of the government in Kyiv or of territories in the east would put the lives of many Ukrainians at risk, as it is well documented that Russia has committed widespread human rights violations in temporarily occupied territories.

One way to interpret our findings is that Ukrainians reject Russian political control or territorial concessions because they prefer the immediate costs of self-defence – civilian and military fatalities and nuclear risk – over the long-term costs of Russian control. But our findings suggest that not giving in to Russia is about more than the important aim of saving Ukrainian lives overall.

How many extra deaths or increased nuclear risk after three months would lead to a similar rejection by respondents as a Russian-controlled government? The answer we found after extrapolating our statistical analysis is it would take about 12 million additional civilian deaths or more military fatalities than the country has inhabitants (44 million) – or the certain prospect of a nuclear attack – for Ukrainians to react as strongly as they reject a Russian-controlled government.

Clearly, this is unrealistic – no realistic strategy for self-defence could have such costs after three months. So these calculations reveal that Ukrainians take an absolute stance: they categorically reject Russian control and territorial concessions – regardless of the costs.

Why does it matter what Ukrainians think?

We conducted this study because the voices of ordinary Ukrainians have been absent from the intense international debate about whether – and how – Ukraine should defend itself. We worked closely with the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology to gather reliable data while ensuring the safety of interviewers and respondents.

It’s difficult to conduct surveys in a war zone, but we have at least three urgent reasons to care about what Ukrainians think. First, the costs of self-defence, but also the costs of potential concessions, are primarily borne by ordinary Ukrainians. They deserve a say in which of many difficult paths their country takes.

Second, we cannot properly judge what is at stake in Ukraine’s defensive war without understanding how strongly Ukrainians oppose Russian control and how highly they value territorial integrity. A cost-benefit calculation from afar is unsound.

Third, it is dangerous for the international community to pressure Zelensky and his government to pursue a strategy that contradicts what Ukrainians want. Trying to go against the wishes of the people could destabilise the government and would ultimately be unsuccessful.

Put simply, it is neglectful, unsound and unwise to judge Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia – and make political demands based on such judgments – without understanding how Ukrainians think about the costs and benefits of self-defence. Back in April, the philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky urged Kyiv to settle, even if it meant territorial concessions, famously asserting that Ukraine and its western allies should “pay attention to the reality of the world”.

As Ukrainian troops bravely advance east, we have a fuller picture of this reality. Ukrainians categorically reject Russian control and territorial concessions – regardless of the immediate costs of resistance.

By MK Bhadrakumar, Indian Punchline, 9/14/22

MK Bhadrakumar is a retired Indian diplomat.

A recurring feature of the Cold War was that the United States almost always placed great store on the optics of a Soviet-American affair while Moscow chose to concentrate on the end result. The Cuban Missile Crisis is the best known example where the denouement was about the publicized abandonment of the planned Soviet deployment of missiles in Cuba and a US public declaration and agreement not to invade Cuba again. But it later came to be known that there was also an unpublicised part, namely, the dismantling of all of the Jupiter ballistic missiles that had been deployed to Turkey. 

The behavioral pattern remains the same in Ukraine. Per the western narrative, Russia is staring at the abyss of defeat amidst the “rout” in Kharkov Region. Interestingly, though, at the responsible levels in the Beltway, there is a noticeable reticence about beating the drums presumably because of their awareness that the Ukrainian forces simply re-entered the Balakleysko-Izyum direction to occupy areas that the Russians had planned to vacate.

Moscow is once again leaving the optics almost entirely to the American journalists while Moscow concentrates on the end result, which has had three dimensions: one, complete the ongoing evacuation from the Balakleysko-Izyum direction without loss of lives; two, exploit the Ukrainian troop movements to target the forces that came out into the open from well-fortified positions in the Kharkov Region; and, three, concentrate on the campaign in Donetsk.

The last part is becoming very sensitive for Moscow, as a significant section of Russian “war correspondents” carried sensational reports that it is apocalypse now. Even senior politicians such as Gennady Zyuganov, General Secretary of the Communist Party, and a powerful voice in the State Duma, feels agitated.

Zyuganov said at the first plenary meeting of the Russian State Duma’s fall session on Tuesday that the “special operation” has grown into a full-fledged war and the situation on the front has “changed drastically” in the past couple of months. 

A fragment of the speech posted in the Communist Party’s website also quoted Zyuganov as saying that “every war requires a response. First and foremost, it requires maximum mobilization of forces and resources. It demands social cohesion and clear prioritisation.”

Although intended as constructive criticism, Zyuganov’s advice will almost certainly be passed over by the Kremlin. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov has responded with alacrity, saying,“At this moment — no, it (full or partial mobilization) is not on the agenda.”

President Putin’s support base remains as strong as ever. The recent Russian regional and local elections partly turned into a “referendum” on the Ukraine situation. And the fact that the ruling party received one of the best results in its history by winning about 80 percent of the mandates in regional and local parliaments shows a resounding vote of confidence in Putin’s leadership.

That said, the “angry patriots” pose a headache. That is why the latest situation around Bakhmut in Donetsk assumes particular significance. Bakhmut is undoubtedly the lynchpin of the entire fortification that Kiev erected in Donbass in the past 8 years. It is a strategic communication junction with roads in many directions — Lysychansk, Horlivka, Kostiantynivka, and Kramatorsk — and control of the city is vital for establishing full supremacy over Donetsk Region.

The Russian troops and allied militia groups have been trying since August 3 to break into the Ukrainian defenses in the Bakhmut-Soledar direction but with patchy success. Now comes reports that the Russians have entered Bakhmut city and taken control of the industrial zone in the northeastern parts.

Some reports say the Russian military contractors known as the Wagner Group have been deployed in Bakhmut. These are highly trained ex-military personnel.

The stakes are exceedingly high. For Kiev, the entire logistics of the operations in Donetsk can unravel if it loses control of Bakhmut. As for the Russians, the breakthrough in the Bakhmut-Soledar direction will clear the main hurdle for the crucial offensive towards the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk axis to the west, the last conglomeration of Ukrainian forces in Donetsk. Bakhmut is only 50 kms from Slavyansk-Kramatorsk.

Speaking about the Ukrainian “counteroffensive” last weekend to National Public Radio, General Mark Milley, US chairman, Chiefs of Staff, had made some interesting points: 

-Ukraine has amassed a good amount of combat power. How do they use that will now be the determining factor. Things will clarify “in the coming days and weeks.”

-Ukrainian military so far fought extraordinarily well in defence. Defense has always been the stronger form of war.

-Ukraine is now moving into offensive operations where it is critical to integrate fire power into their manoeuvre in order to achieve superiority.

-Therefore, “it remains to be seen” what is happening in the next few weeks. “It is a very, very difficult task that the Ukrainians are undertaking” – combining their offence with manoeuver.

The Ukrainian offensive in Kharkov was planned as a flank attack to encircle and destroy the Russian groupings in the area of ​​Balakleya, Kupyansk and Izyum. But the Russian command anticipated such an attempt, as its frontline had thinned out lately. The Ukrainian forces outnumbered the Russians by almost 4-5 times.

Interestingly, in anticipation of a Ukrainian offensive, civilians who agreed to leave the region for Russia were evacuated from the threatened settlements in military convoys. Using mobile defense tactics under the cover of specially organized units, Russians finally succeeded in withdrawing their forces.

In effect, the Ukrainian/US/NATO plan to manoeuvre a flank attack and encircle the Russian troops was thwarted with minimal losses. On the other hand, Ukrainians also admit that Russians inflicted significant losses of manpower on their opponents (who included a big chunk of fighters from NATO countries.)  

But the Russian military also made mistakes. Thus, their forward positions were not mined—inexplicably enough; frontline intelligence gathering was deficient; and, the residual Russian troops (drawn down to one-third of full strength) were not even equipped with anti-tank weapons.

The single biggest outcome of the past week’s happenings is that the conflict has assumed the nature of a full-fledged war. Zyuganov was not off the mark when he said in his Russian state Duma speech: “The military-political operation… has escalated into a full-fledged war, which has been declared against us by the Americans, NATO members, and a unified Europe.

“A war is fundamentally different from a special operation. A special operation is something you announce – and something you can choose to put an end to. A war is something you can’t stop even if you want to. You have to fight to the end. War has two possible outcomes: victory or defeat.”

Putin has a big decision to make now. For, while the good part for the Russian military may be that the frontline has been straightened and large Russian reserves are being transferred to the battlefields, de facto, a state of war exists now between Russia and NATO.

The recent phone calls to Putin in quick succession by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, after an interlude of months, signals that an exigency may have arisen to re-engage the Kremlin leader.

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 9/14/22

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday welcomed a proposal drawn up by senior Ukrainian officials and a former NATO chief that outlined a plan for security guarantees Kyiv would seek from Western countries.

The proposal emphasizes Ukraine’s desire to become a NATO member and says that until Kyiv joins the Western military alliance, it needs security guarantees from other countries.

The document says that the “strongest security guarantee for Ukraine lies in its capability to defend itself.” It says building up a sufficient defensive force requires “a multi-decade effort of sustained investment in Ukraine’s defense industrial base, scalable weapons transfers and intelligence support from allies, intensive training missions and joint exercises under the European Union and NATO flags.”

The security guarantees Ukraine seeks from other countries is a commitment for them to support Ukraine’s ability to create this force to deter future attacks through military aid, funding of reconstruction, training, intelligence sharing, and joint exercises.

According to the document, the countries Ukraine wants security guarantees from include but are not limited to “the US, UK, Canada, Poland, Italy, Germany, France, Australia, Turkey, and Nordic, Baltic, and Central European countries.”

As part of this arrangement, Ukraine seeks a “massive training and joint maneuver program of Ukrainian forces and partners on Ukrainian territory with international trainers and advisors.”

Zelensky on Wednesday welcomed the plan, which was drawn up with the help of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former NATO secretary-general. Zelensky said that the report “should become the basis of the future security compact.”

Russia condemned the document as the threat of NATO expansion into Ukraine was one of its main motivations for launching the invasion. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova pointed out that many of the proposals are already being implemented as Ukraine is receiving billions in aid from Western countries.

“Weapons have been supplied to Ukraine non-stop,” Zakharova said, according to the Russian news agency TASS. “The financial assistance being channeled to Ukraine in all of its forms, be it money transfers, or loans and so on, is unprecedented in recent history.”

President of Russia Vladimir Putin:  Friends, Mr Min Aung Hlaing, Mr Pashinyan, Mr Oyun-Erdene, Mr Li Zhanshu, ladies and gentlemen,

I am delighted to greet all participants and guests of the Eastern Economic Forum. Russia and Vladivostok are again hosting a forum of business leaders, experts, politicians, public figures and members of government from dozens of countries across the world.

Video addresses have been sent to us by Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of Malaysia Ismail Sabri Yaakob and Prime Minister of Vietnam Pham Minh Chinh. I am delighted that they have made time to take part in this plenary session.

As per tradition, the programme of the Eastern Economic Forum includes discussions on the projects and initiatives that are extremely important for the development of the regions in Russia’s Far East and for strengthening Russia’s cooperation and production ties with Asia Pacific countries, both our old, traditional partners and countries that are only developing dialogue with Russia in a broad range of areas and business projects.

Of course, this meeting in Vladivostok is a good opportunity to once again review the situation in the global economy and to exchange views on its main trends and risks.

Last year, the Eastern Economic Forum was held after a long pause caused by the coronavirus pandemic. At that time, the majority of experts agreed that global business activity was beginning to recover and that it would normalise soon after the lifting of the coronavirus restrictions, However, the pandemic has given way to new challenges, global ones that are threatening the world as a whole. I am referring to the Western sanctions frenzy and the open and aggressive attempts to force the Western mode of behaviour on other countries, to extinguish their sovereignty and to bend them to its will. In fact, there is nothing unusual in that: this policy has been pursued by the “collective West” for decades.

The waning dominance of the United States in the global economy and politics, as well as the stubborn unwillingness or even inability of the Western elites to see, let alone recognise objective facts, acted as a catalyst for these processes.

I have already mentioned that the entire system of international relations has recently undergone irreversible, or should I say, tectonic, shifts. Emerging states and regions around the world, primarily, of course, in the Asia-Pacific region, now play a substantially bigger role. Asia-Pacific countries emerged as new centres of economic and technological growth, attracting human resources, capital and manufacturing.

Despite all that, the Western countries are seeking to preserve yesterday’s world order that benefits them and force everyone to live according to the infamous “rules”, which they concocted themselves. They are also the ones who regularly violate these rules, changing them to suit their agenda depending on how things are going at any given moment. At the same time, other countries have not been forthcoming when it comes to subjecting themselves to this dictate and arbitrary rule, forcing the Western elites, to put it bluntly, to lose grip and take short-sighted, irrational decisions on global security, politics, as well as economics. All these decisions run counter to the interests of countries and their people, including, by the way, the people in those Western countries. The gap separating the Western elites from their own citizens is widening.

Europe is about to throw its achievements in building up its manufacturing capability, the quality of life of its people and socioeconomic stability into the sanctions furnace, depleting its potential, as directed by Washington for the sake of the infamous Euro-Atlantic unity. In fact, this amounts to sacrifices in the name of preserving the dominance of the United States in global affairs.

Back in spring, many foreign corporations rushed to announce their withdrawal from Russia, believing that our country will suffer more than others. Today, we see one manufacturing site after another shutting down in Europe itself. One of the key reasons, of course, lies in the severed business ties with Russia.

The competitive ability of European companies is in decline, for the EU officials themselves are essentially cutting them off from affordable commodities and energy, as well as trade markets. It will come as no surprise if eventually the niches currently occupied by European businesses, both on the continent and on the global market in general, will be taken over by their American patrons who know no boundaries or hesitation when it comes to pursuing their interests and achieving their goals.

More than that, in an attempt to obstruct the course of history, Western countries have undermined the pillars of the global economic system, built over centuries. It is in front of our eyes that the dollar, euro and pound sterling have lost trust as currencies suitable for performing transactions, storing reserves and denominating assets. We are taking steps to shed this dependence on unreliable and compromised foreign currencies. By the way, even allies of the United States are gradually reducing their dollar assets, as we can see from statistics. Step by step, the volume of transactions and savings in dollars is diminishing.

I want to note here that yesterday, Gazprom and its Chinese partners decided to switch to 50/50 transactions in rubles and yuan with respect to gas payments.

I want to add that with their short-sighted actions, Western officials have triggered a global inflation. In many developed economies, the inflation rate has reached a record-high level that had not been seen in many years.

Everybody is aware of this but I will reiterate: as of late July, inflation in the United States reached 8.5 percent. Russia has just over 14 percent (I will speak about this further) but it is declining, unlike in Western economies. The inflation there is on the rise, and in our country it is declining. I believe that as of the end of the year, we will have around 12 percent and, as many of our experts think, in the first quarter or by the second quarter of 2023, we will most likely reach the target inflation rate. Some say it will be 5–6 percent. Others say it will go down to 4 percent. We will see. In any case, the trend is positive. Meanwhile, what is happening with our neighbours? The inflation in Germany has reached 7.9 percent, in Belgium 9.9 percent, in the Netherlands 12 percent, Latvia 20.8 percent, Lithuania 21.1 percent and Estonia 25.2 percent. And it is still on the rise.

Rising prices in the global markets can be a real tragedy for most of the poorest countries, which are facing shortages of food, energy, and other vital goods. I will cite a few figures that underline the danger: while in 2019, according to the UN, 135 million people in the world were facing acute food insecurity, their number has soared by 2.5 times to 345 million by now – this is just horrible. Moreover, the poorest states have completely lost access to the most essential foods as developed countries are buying up the entire supply, causing a sharp increase in prices.

Let me give you an example. Most of the ships – you all know very well how high passions have been running, how much has been said about the need to facilitate the export of Ukrainian grain at all costs, to support the poorest countries. And we certainly had no other choice but to respond, despite all the complicated developments taking place around Ukraine. We did everything to ensure that Ukrainian grain was exported, and we certainly assumed – I met with the leaders of the African Union, with the leaders of African states and I promised them that we would make every effort to uphold their interests and would facilitate the export of Ukrainian grain.

Russia did it together with Turkiye. We did it. And I would like to report the result to you, colleagues: if we exclude Turkiye as an intermediary, all the grain exported from Ukraine, almost in its entirety, went to the European Union, not to the developing and poorest countries. Only two ships delivered grain under the UN World Food Programme – the very programme that is supposed to help countries that need help the most – only two ships out of 87 – I emphasise – transported 60,000 tonnes out of 2 million tonnes of food. That’s just 3 percent, and it went to the developing countries.

What I am saying is, many European countries today continue to act as colonisers, exactly as they have been doing in previous decades and centuries. Developing countries have simply been cheated yet again and continue to be cheated.

It is obvious that with this approach, the scale of food problems in the world will only increase. Unfortunately, to our great regret, this could lead to an unprecedented humanitarian disaster, and perhaps, exporters need to think about limiting their exports of grain and other food to this destination. I will certainly consult with President of Turkiye, Mr Erdogan, because together with him we were the ones who developed a mechanism for the export of Ukrainian grain, primarily, I repeat, to help the poorest countries. But what happened in practice?

I would like to stress once again that this situation has been caused by the reckless steps taken by the United States, the UK and the European Union, which are obsessed with illusory political ideas. As for the wellbeing of their own citizens, let alone people outside the so-called golden billion, they have been pushing it to the backburner. This will inevitably lead Western countries into a deadlock, an economic and social crisis, and will have unpredictable consequences for the whole world.

Colleagues,

Russia is coping well with the economic, financial and technological aggression of the West. I am talking about a real aggression; there is no other word for it. Russia’s currency and financial market has stabilised, inflation is going down, as I have already mentioned, and the unemployment rate is at an all-time historical low of less than 4 percent. The assessments and forecasts of our economic performance, including by businesspeople, are more optimistic now than in early spring.

I would like to say that our economic situation has stabilised overall, but we also see a number of problems in some sectors, regions and individual enterprises, especially those that relied on supplies from Europe or supplied their products there.

It is important to continue working with businesses to take prompt decisions and launch effective targeted support mechanisms. I would like to ask the Government Commission to Increase the Sustainability of the Russian Economy under the Sanctions to keep track of the situation. It is true that we are doing this almost on a daily basis. Nevertheless, despite the evidence of stabilisation I have mentioned, we are also aware of the risks and so we must keep an eye on them.

Russia is a sovereign state. We will always protect our national interests while pursuing an independent policy, and we also appreciate this quality among our partners, who have demonstrated their reliability and responsible attitude in the course of our trade, investment and other types of cooperation over many years. I am referring, as you are aware, to our colleagues from the Asia Pacific countries.

An absolute majority of Asia Pacific countries reject the destructive logic of sanctions. Their business relations are focused on mutual advantage, cooperation and the joint use of our economic capabilities to the benefit of our countries’ citizens. This adds up to a huge competitive advantage of the regional countries and a guarantee of their dynamic long-term development, which has been growing faster than the world’s average for a long time.

You are aware of this, but I would like to remind everyone that over the past 10 years Asian countries’ GDP has been increasing by approximately 5 percent every year, while the figure is 3 percent in the world, 2 percent in the US and 1.2 percent in the EU. But it is even more important that this trend persists. What will this ultimately lead to? As a result, the share of Asian economies in global GDP will grow from 37.1 percent in 2015 to 45 percent in 2027, and I am sure that this trend will persist.

It is important for Russia that the economy of the Russian Far East grows together with Asia Pacific economies, that this region provide modern living conditions, boost people’s incomes and well-being, and that it create high-quality jobs and cost-effective production facilities.

We have already tested unique national tax, administrative and customs privileges in the Far East. They help implement landmark projects, even by global standards, in such fields as natural gas conversion and the shipbuilding sector, bioengineering technologies and clean energy.

In the past seven years, industrial production volumes in the Far East have increased by about 25 percent. This exceeds nationwide levels by one third. I want to stress this: growth rates of industrial production in the Far East greatly exceed similar nationwide growth rates.

We will continue to promote the priority development of the Far Eastern regions by using new advanced state support measures and by creating the best and highly competitive business environment. For example, we intend to continue adjusting the mechanism of priority development areas for modern and joint projects with other countries, to create the best possible business climate for attracting the most advanced technologies to Russia and for manufacturing high value-added goods in the Far East.

Events of this year confirm the special significance of such a factor as accessible and affordable raw materials without which it is impossible to organise any production process or to set up co-production chains. Russia is just about the only country that is completely self-sufficient in terms of natural resources, and the Far East plays a substantial role here. This region is a highly important supplier of crude oil and natural gas, coal, metals, timber and marine biological resources to the domestic market and our foreign partners.

We are staking on the prudent and rational development of Russia’s natural riches under the most stringent environmental standards. First of all, we will refine all extracted raw materials domestically as much as possible. We will also use these raw materials to strengthen the sovereignty of this country, to ensure industrial security, to raise incomes and to develop the regions.

We have already protected the resource extraction industry from unfriendly actions. From now on, only companies with Russian jurisdiction have the right to develop natural resources in Russia.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment together with the Ministry of Industry and Trade and leading business associations has determined the national economy’s demand for strategic raw materials. This information will become the foundation of the revised Strategy for the Development of Russia’s Mineral Resources Base with an extended planning horizon up to 2050.

At the same time, special focus should be placed on geological exploration and processing of rare raw materials (such as titanium, manganese, lithium, and niobium), which are used in metallurgy, medical and chemical industries, microelectronics, aircraft manufacturing and other industries, as well as in new energy storage and transmission technologies.

I would like to separately ask the Government to have a look at the bioresources harvesting sphere, where we have a mechanism of investment quotas. Here, it is important to achieve balanced growth and full utilisation of production capacities, as well as to ensure the harmonious development of the regions’ infrastructure.

I would like to stress that the funds the state receives from the utilisation of water bioresources must above all be allocated for developing the infrastructure of rural areas, employment support, and increasing incomes of local residents. I ask the Government to take specific measures on this. We have discussed this many times.

Next, over the past years Russia has implemented big plans for the development of transport infrastructure, railways and roads, seaports and pipelines. These timely decisions have made it possible for businesses to quickly rebuild logistics in today’s conditions, and redirect cargo flows to those countries that are ready and willing to trade with Russia and prefer civilised and predictable business relations.

It is noteworthy that despite the attempts of external pressure, the total cargo of Russian seaports has only slightly decreased over the seven months of this year; it has remained at the same level as a year earlier, which is about 482 million tonnes of cargo. Last year there were 483 million, so the figure is practically the same.

At the same time, Far Eastern ports are seeing a real logistics boom. The volume of cargo transhipment and container handling is such that specialists are working 24/7 to handle the workload. In a word, no matter how much someone might like to isolate Russia, it is impossible to do it, as we have always said so. It is enough just to look at the map.

We will use natural competitive advantages to build up our further transport capabilities, expand the road and railway network, build new access roads to sea terminals and expand their capacity.

I mentioned earlier that our focus is on building the eastward infrastructure and developing the North-South international corridor and ports of the Azov-Black Sea basin which we will keep working on. They will open up more opportunities for Russian companies to enter the markets of Iran, India, the Middle East and Africa and, of course, for reciprocal deliveries from these countries.

The total volume of freight and cargo transportation along these routes and arteries will be able to grow by about 60 percent by 2030. We are absolutely realistic about our predictions, and this is how it will be. To achieve these numbers, the Government has drafted specific “roadmaps” in the three areas I outlined earlier, which will enable us to make this work consistent, consolidate and coordinate our efforts in terms of deadlines and capacity to break up the bottlenecks and upgrade border checkpoints and related infrastructure.

In addition to our plans to expand transport corridors, it is important to put in place new rolling stock and railway traction vehicles, to provide Russian shipyards with orders for modern high-quality tankers, dry cargo ships and container vessels, including ice-class ships, for the further expansion of the Northern Sea Route as a potent transport corridor of national and global importance with, I want to stress this, year-round navigation. The state-of-the-art icebreakers that we are designing and building make it possible for us to do this already now.

This year, a container vessel made its first run between Murmansk and Kamchatka along the Northern Sea Route to reaffirm the reliability and safety of shipping operations in the Arctic zone.

Notably, the point is not just about authorising the passage of ships in the Arctic or simply connecting two destinations. What we need to do is make sure that ships are properly serviced and cargo is properly handled at each port along the route, and the traffic schedule is sustainable, predictable and reliable. Then, every Northern Sea Route waypoint and region will benefit from the logistics corridor. That is what we should be striving for.

The Government has approved a development plan for the Northern Sea Route until 2035 with plans to allocate 1.8 trillion rubles from various sources to implement it. As forecasted, the cargo traffic along this corridor will go from the current 35 million tonnes per year to the targeted 220 million tonnes per year.

The availability of freight vehicles is certainly a key factor in the transportation of goods to and from the Russian Far East. This means we need to offer economically justified and competitive freight rates. I am asking the Government to study all these issues carefully.

Aviation is a special issue for the Far East. Here, the availability of flights from the European part of Russia to the Far East is not the only issue, but connectivity between the Far Eastern regions themselves also matters – air services should cover as many destinations, cities and regions of the Far East as possible.

That is why we have established a single Far Eastern airline. It offers almost 390 destinations, some of them subsidised by the state. In the next three years, this airline’s traffic should increase, and the number of destinations will exceed 530. And as we could see after those flights were opened, these destinations are in great demand.

To implement these plans, we need to expand the company’s fleet, to make sure it has modern aircraft, including small aircraft. A decision has been made in this regard, and I ask the Government to strictly implement it.

I would like to note that in general, Russian air carriers will soon be thoroughly re-equipped. Our airlines, including Aeroflot, have placed the largest order package in modern history, for about 500 Russian-made mainline aircraft. By the way, as far as I know, the United Aircraft Corporation and Aeroflot have signed a respective agreement on the sidelines of this Eastern Economic Forum, and the figures in there are quite impressive – over a trillion, I think.

This high demand should become a powerful incentive for aircraft factories and design bureaux, for many related industries, including electronics and aircraft components, and, of course, for the schools training professional personnel including engineers and skilled blue-collar workers in the aviation industry.

I would like to add that a decision has been made on another sensitive issue for the Far East. I am referring to the development of air medical services and increasing the availability of medical care for people living in remote areas. Starting next year, we will more than double federal funding for these purposes, which means that the number of flights will also increase, and there will be faster and better provision of healthcare in the region.

Friends, colleagues,

All our decisions involving the economy and social sphere, all the mechanisms that we are implementing in the Far East have the same important purpose – to make this region a truly attractive place for living, studying, working, for starting families, to ensure that more children are born.

Several important initiatives in this regard have been included in the package of measures that the Government is now considering. One of them is to create an up-to-date environment for living, to improve the local cities and towns.

Let me remind you that at the last forum, we set a task to develop master plans for the development of the largest Far Eastern cities. These include all administrative centres of the regions, and cities with a population of over 50,000 people, as well as Tynda and Severobaikalsk, the key stations on the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway.

We had in mind an integrated approach to the development of communities, where plans for the modernisation of infrastructure, social facilities, and creation of public spaces and so on would be combined competently and conveniently, and economic and industrial projects would rely on thoroughly calculated business models.

In all cities, the initial task was to make strategic development plans. Master plans are already being actively developed on the basis of those strategic plans in 17 cities and metropolitan areas. One of them has to do with the development of the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky urban area, and the day before yesterday, we discussed this issue with our colleagues on the spot. Once again, I ask the Government to provide maximum assistance in implementing this and other master plans in order to have them unconditionally implemented.

Here, among other things, it is important to use tools such as the Far Eastern concession, the government’s infrastructure loans and infrastructure bonds. It is necessary to determine target limits for the Far East in these programmes. The funds should be used for urban development and improvement, and of course, for infrastructure, including the upgrade of existing networks and connections to utilities.

I would like to add that at the recent St Petersburg Economic Forum, I instructed the Government to allocate an additional 10 billion rubles annually for improvement projects in Russian cities. I think it would be right to channel half of this financing, that is, 5 billion a year, towards upgrading Far Eastern cities and towns with populations below 250,000.

Separate resources should also be allocated under all our main infrastructure development programmes for projects to modernise Far Eastern cities. I have already given such an instruction, and I ask you to ensure its implementation as quickly as possible. Target limits should be stipulated in the federal budget for the next three years.

Something else I would like to stress – we need to increase the volume of housing construction in the Far East, while also widely applying the most advanced ‘green’ and energy-efficient construction technologies.

This year, the Far Eastern Quarters programme was launched. Under this programme, developers will be able to take advantage of priority development areas, including tax and infrastructure benefits, which will reduce the cost of flats and the price of finished housing. This will increase the availability of housing for people. The plan is to build about 2.5 million square metres of housing by 2030 using this cost-reduction mechanism. I ask the regional authorities and the Ministry for the Development of the Russian Far East to hold the first tenders by the end of the year, to select developers and start designing and developing the residential buildings.

Next, the Far Eastern residents are entitled to special, preferential mortgage terms. As many as 48,000 families have already purchased new housing using mortgages with a rate of 2 percent. This year, we have expanded the Far Eastern mortgage programme so that doctors and teachers, regardless of their age, can apply for it along with young Far Easterners.

Let me remind you that the programme is planned until 2024. But given the demand and efficacy – and this programme is working effectively – I propose extending it until at least 2030. I hope that the Far Eastern residents will also appreciate this.

(Applause.)

A separate decision concerns the support of young professionals who come to the Far East or graduate from local educational institutions, get a job and consider local accommodation. As many as 10,000 rental apartments will be built for them. The rental rate will be significantly below the market level due to subsidies from the regional and federal budgets. The Government has already envisaged such a measure. I ask you to work out all the details in order to start building rental housing for young professionals without delay. And I would like to specifically point out that the location of this housing should be included in the development master plans for Far Eastern cities, which means all the necessary infrastructure should be available – in short, such accommodation should be convenient and enjoy demand.

I would like to note that the Far Eastern regions, like many other regions of the Russian Federation, are experiencing a shortage of workers today. We will also take several important steps to intensify personnel training in key competencies. Over 900 modern workshops will be opened in Far Eastern colleges by 2030, and in the near future, until the end of 2025, we will launch 29 production and educational clusters. In addition, businesses will receive compensation for employing young workers.

Another important area is improving the quality of higher education in the Russian Far East. The goal is to attract qualified instructors, upgrade facilities and equipment in higher education institutions, and provide grants to stimulate academic research and prospective developments in the crucial areas of the technological agenda.

There are network programmes for Far Eastern universities that connect education institutions in the region with the country’s leading universities such as St Petersburg State Marine Technical University, Moscow Aviation Institute and others. We will undoubtedly support this area of cooperation.

Finally, branches of the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts (GITIS), the National State Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) and the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute will open in 2025 in the Russian Far East to train cultural and art workers. I would like to ask the Government to provide all necessary assistance.

I would like to note that the Far Eastern regions offer their own professional development initiatives. For example, the Agency for Strategic Initiatives in the Sakhalin Region supports a pilot project called Earning Money Together. Participants in the project will be able to undergo free additional training, receive career guidance and get help with starting a business. Based on the outcome of these pilot projects we will think about scaling up.

I also want to mention a training programme for a new generation of managers in the Far East. The programme focuses on cultivating a local pool of talent, and on integrating study programmes and internships in public offices and development institutions. This programme is already running and I suggest that the heads of all regions in the Far Eastern Federal District get involved.

Colleagues, I want to conclude my remarks by stressing once again that the modern global economy and the entire system of international relations is going through challenges. However, I believe that the logic of cooperation, aligning the potentials and mutual benefits that our countries and our friends in the region adhere to, will prevail no matter what. By reasonably taking advantage of the competitive sides and strengths of the Asia-Pacific countries, by creating constructive partnerships we will open new colossal opportunities for our peoples. We are ready to work together for the sake of a successful future. And we are grateful to our partners for participating in this work.

Thank you.

Link to video and transcript, including Q&A here.