Although it’s been very slow to emerge, there is increasing concern expressed in Russia about the environment, from pollution related to industry and unregulated landfills to climate change. The Russian government has finally been forced to recognize the problem – at least in terms of rhetoric, with 2017 having been officially declared “The Year of the Environment in Russia.”

This past September, Russia – the fourth biggest emitter of carbon in the world – finally ratified the Paris Climate Accord. However, Russia could remain within its commitments to the accord by increasing its current emissions because of the major drop that came after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There has been talk for several years that Putin even supports the formation of a Green Party, though some wonder if it would just be another small rather ineffectual party with a green “flavor.”

Over the past year, Russia has experienced major storms, floods and wildfires on an unprecedented scale – of which the aftermath prompted a personal visit by Putin in which he scolded the poor emergency response by local officials. But there is much more damage happening that hasn’t received such a dramatic treatment by the media. A recent article from Asia Times reports:

The Kremlin has now been forced to acknowledge that Russia is being hit hardest by climate change. According to state agency Rosgydromet, global warming is taking place 2.5 times faster in Russia than on average in the rest of the world, because of its geographical position.

Some effects of climate change became evident this summer, when surging wildfires devastated millions of hectares of Siberian taiga and floods ravaged the Irkutsk region.

But these are minor developments compared to a far, far greater peril.

If temperatures continue rising, there will be catastrophic consequences for Russia’s permanently frozen landmass – a vast geographic region which makes up 60% of the country’s territory.

Melting of permafrost poses threats to “the structural stability and functional capacities” of key infrastructure, as pointed out in a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

According to separate estimates by the Russian Academy of Science, at current rates, the area covered by permafrost will shrink by a staggering 25% by 2080. That shrinkage threatens $250 billion worth of physical infrastructure, including energy pipelines, transportation networks and residences.

Additional reporting by Moscow correspondent Fred Weir for CSM revealed more concerns:

Arctic ice, receding at a record pace, revealed five new islands in the Russian far north this year that had been hidden under the ice sheets for all of recorded human history.

Russian scientists aboard a research ship near the northern coast of Siberia last week were amazed to discover a massive eruption of methane bubbles from the ocean floor. The huge clouds of the super-greenhouse gas suggest that the underlying permafrost is melting faster than anyone could have anticipated.

This all begs the question of whether any short-term benefits that Russia might gain from more comfortable temperatures in populated areas or the opening up of formerly unreachable resources might be seriously outweighed by the longer-term liabilities.

According to polls administered by the Russian government, over half of Russians think environmental problems are worsening and two-thirds don’t think the government is doing enough about it. More importantly, a recent Russian poll to ascertain the attitude of youths (aged 10 – 18, living in 52 Russian regions) toward several issues, showed that almost half were concerned about the environment and 90 percent thought that updated laws were needed to better protect the environment.

With this context in mind, I will share comments that Putin made at the recent Valdai conference with respect to climate change in response to a question about Russia’s ratification of the Paris accord and how to resolve the conflict between protection of the environment and economic imperatives:

Vladimir Putin: As for the uniformity of approaches and evaluations, we will probably never reach this. Indeed, experts in various fields who somehow try to answer the question about the causes of climate change do not give unambiguous answers to the causes of climate change.

There are different opinions, I have heard them. Some say there is some global change in space that affects the Earth, so from time to time huge changes like this take place on our planet. I sailed along the Lena River in our country and saw high banks with deposits containing the remains of obviously ancient tropical mammals, which lived in tropical seas. I am talking about the Lena River, its stretch north of the Arctic Circle. It means back then the climate there was like this. Well, were there any anthropogenic emissions at the time? Of course, not. You see, there is no answer.

Just the same, my position is that if the human race is responsible for climate change, even in the slightest degree, and this climate change has grave implications, and if we can do something to, at least, slow down this process and avoid its negative consequences, we must spare no effort. This is our position. Despite all disagreements, we will support the international efforts to combat climate change.

Indeed, we have practically ratified the Paris Agreement and are committed to implementing it. You said we hesitated or argued about it. There will always be room for doubt or disputes. But look at the obligations that we undertook and those undertaken by our partners. We are committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 70 or 75 percent by 2050.

By the way, the European Union has undertaken to cut the same type of gas emissions by 60 percent. We have approved a national environmental programme. It sets forth in detail what we must do and how we must do it complete with the deadlines. We have approved 12 federal programmes under the national project to work to change the situation regarding the environment. Gas emissions in 12 of the largest metropolises in our country, where they affect people’s lives and have a negative impact on the environment, must be reduced by 20 percent.

We have adopted a programme to deal with waste dumps – not only with primitive rubbish dumps but with hazardous waste as well. We have adopted a programme to extend protected nature areas by five million square kilometres. We have a whole set of measures that we are not just intending to carry out but we have already started to implement and they have already been made law in our country. So, we are determined to move, together with our partners, along this path that is laid down in the Paris Agreement.

As for the hydrocarbons, I think it was yesterday that I said the structure of the Russian energy sector is one of the world’s greenest. The nuclear power and hydropower industries in our country account for a third of the energy sector and gas accounts for 50 percent of the remaining two-thirds.

We have one of the greenest energy sectors in the world plus the capacity of our forests to absorb [waste carbon dioxide]. So, we understand the threats that everyone, including us, are exposed to. The warming rate in Russia exceeds that in the rest of the world by 2.5 percent. We are aware of this.

And one more thing: there are forests ablaze in one part of our country while close to it there is flooding and there is also drought and so on. We are well aware of this and we will do, jointly with the whole world, with the humankind, whatever it takes to preserve nature and the environment.

The OSCE reported over the weekend that both the Kiev forces and the Donbas rebels have successfully completed the withdrawal of troops and weaponry from the line of contact at Zolote, near the LPR.

On 1 November, the SMM received a letter from the armed formations in non-government-controlled areas of Luhansk region, notifying that they had completed the withdrawal of forces and hardware in the agreed disengagement area near Zolote.

On 2 November, the SMM received two Notes Verbales from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, notifying that the Ukrainian Armed Forces had completed the withdrawal of forces and hardware in the agreed disengagement area near Zolote.

Withdrawal of forces near the DPR in Petrovskoye are scheduled to begin today.

As analyst Tom Luongo has written, with the last approval permit having finally been granted by Denmark for Nordstream 2 to proceed, if significant progress can be made toward resolving the Donbas war, then a detente between Russia and Europe is likely to follow. This would mean a relaxation or even rescinding of the sanctions.

I agree with this assessment and believe that Washington is likely to find itself isolated within the next couple of years if it persists with its anti-Russia hysteria. If Jeremy Corbyn were to become Prime Minister of Britain, there is also a chance for decreased hostility from the UK, which will leave only Poland and the Baltic states as out-of-tune players in the “we can’t get beyond our animus toward Russia” band.

In an interview last week with a Russian TV news channel, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated that, while Russian-Chinese relations are the best they’ve ever been, neither country is contemplating the establishment of a formal military alliance.

It appears that the Russian government is prepared for Washington to not renew the New START Treaty, which expires in February of 2021. Since there is no active diplomatic work being done on behalf of a possible extension, it would be difficult to get the necessary logistics done in order to extend the treaty before the deadline. Antiwar.com reports:

An expected replacement treaty would be what everyone was hoping for, but with no work active on it, there is no real chance of getting everything done, and indeed no sign that things will even start, with the US showing little interest in arms limitation talks.

Though Russian Foreign Ministry office’s Vladimir Leontyev says it might be possible to rush through a blanket extension of New START under existing terms, even that would take at least six months to implement, and is made even more complicated by President Trump wanting China to also be limited by any new deal.

In a recent interview conducted jointly by Al Arabiya, Sky News, and RT Arabic, Putin answered a question about how Russia will respond to NATO’s continual march toward Russia’s borders. Watch the 3 minute exchange below.

After Ukrainian president Zelensky confronted armed ultra-nationalist members of the notorious Azov battalion in the Donbas earlier this week for their obstruction of what was supposed to be a mutual withdrawal of forces from the contact line weeks ago, it has been confirmed by the OSCE that both sides have started the disengagement process near the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR):

KYIV, 30 October 2019 – The Chief Monitor of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine, Yaşar Halit Çevik, welcomed the beginning, yesterday, of the disengagement of forces and hardware from the Zolote disengagement area. 

Additional SMM patrols in the Zolote area, assisted by static cameras and unmanned aerial vehicles, on 29 October observed the launch of flares by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the armed formations, signaling both sides’ readiness to disengage, and subsequently Ukrainian Armed Forces personnel and members of the armed formations exiting the disengagement area, together with their weapons.

This was the next step of the Steinmeier Formula agreed to weeks ago by both sides as overseen by the Trilateral Group (Russia, Ukraine, and OSCE). If the withdrawal is completed successfully, the groundwork will have been laid for a meeting of the Normandy Four (Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France) to negotiate implementation of the Minsk 2.0 Agreement of 2015. AP reports:

The heavy weapons disengagement in eastern Ukraine, which was delayed for weeks, is seen as the final hurdle before the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany can get together to discuss a peace settlement for the conflict that has claimed more than 13,000 lives since 2014.

Vladislav Surkov, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, told the Tass news agency that the pullback was “good news” and said the much-anticipated summit could take place if a weapons pullback in another location [in the DPR] goes ahead as well.

Representatives of Russia, Ukraine and the rebels met in the Belarusian capital Minsk on Tuesday to talk about further steps. OSCE representative Martin Sajdik, who mediated the so-called Contact Group talks, said after the meeting that the disengagement in another area near the village of Petrovske was discussed.

With respect to those talks in Minsk on Tuesday, the Russian news agency TASS reported that the representative of the LPR said the Kiev side had expressed a more cooperative tone:

“We can note that at least the tone of [Ukraine’s] envoy to the talks Leonid Kuchma was different today. He was much more understanding and practically talked openly about how Ukraine is interested in holding a summit in the Normandy format,” Miroshnik said.

He added that Kiev has high hopes for the Normandy summit. “Ukraine wants to discuss there, most likely, key issues of the special status and its inclusion in the constitution, as well as several other issues of Donbass settlement. That’s why Ukraine partially fulfilled the prerequisite in the form of the Steinmeier formula,” he noted.

Whether this actually translates into a meeting of the minds that yields a workable agreement that can be bring peace and stabilization to Eastern Ukraine remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, there was cautious optimism in Russia for this step forward as expressed in the news segment by Vesti News below. According to this report, the regular Ukrainian military had to trick the ultra-nationalist obstructionists near the contact line in order to proceed with the withdrawal:

Iran, which is now a member of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, has announced that it will be conducting business with Russia using each country’s SWIFT-free alternative banking system. RT provided the following details:

Instead of SWIFT, a system that facilitates cross-border payments between 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries worldwide, the two countries will use their own domestically developed financial messaging systems – Iran’s SEPAM and Russia’s SPFS.

“Using this system for trade and business exchanges between EAEU [Eurasian Economic Union] member states can help develop and expand trade exchanges between the member states as well,” [Iran’s central bank governor] Abdolnaser Hemmati said, as cited by Mehr News Agency on Tuesday.

Tehran is set to officially join the Russia-led free-trade zone, the EAEU, next month [October]. The document on Iran’s participation was ratified in June by the nation’s parliament (Majlis) and President Hassan Rouhani has already ordered that the free trade zone agreement be implemented.

In further reporting this week from RT, Russia, China and India will be setting up a cross-border alternative to SWIFT to facilitate business among the three BRICS countries:

Members of the BRICS trade bloc Russia, India, and China have decided to connect their financial messaging systems to bypass the SWIFT international money transfer network.

Russia’s financial messaging system SPFS will be linked with the Chinese cross-border interbank payment system CIPS. While India does not have a domestic financial messaging system yet, it plans to combine the Central Bank of Russia’s platform with a domestic service that is in development.

The new system is expected to work as a “gateway” model when messages on payments are transcoded in accordance with a certain financial system.

As Washington continues its pattern of weaponizing its economic power via sanctions and threats to cut countries it doesn’t like off from the SWIFT banking transfer system, there will continue to be push-back that eventually diminishes Washington’s influence.

The World Bank has just announced its annual Ease of Doing Business rankings. Russia is now ranked 28th, having moved up almost 100 spots in 7 years.

Most of you are familiar with the scandal involving former VP Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, taking a seat on a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma. Hunter had no experience in the fossil fuel sector or in Ukraine. But then fate smiled on Hunter at the rate of $50,000 a month when pop was assigned to oversee the administration of Ukraine by the Obama administration after the 2014 coup that was engineered to install an anti-Russian government.

Some of you may have also heard of the Atlantic Council – the politically powerful Washington think tank that pushes a Russophobic and pro-NATO line. Many establishment politicians have supported and received support from this bastion of militarist pseudo-intellectualism.

But most people don’t realize that the Atlantic Council has intimate ties with Burisma. As investigative journalist Max Blumenthal recently reported:

But behind the curtain, the Atlantic Council has initiated a lucrative relationship with a corruption-tainted Ukrainian gas company, the Burisma Group, that is worth as much as $250,000 a year. The partnership has paid for lavish conferences in Monaco and helped bring Burisma’s oligarchic founder out of the cold. 

This alliance has remained stable even as official Washington goes to war over allegations by President Donald Trump and his allies that former Vice President Joseph Biden fired a Ukrainian prosecutor to defend his son’s handsomely compensated position on Burisma’s board. 

As Biden parries Trump’s accusations, some of the former vice president’s most ardent defenders are emerging from the halls of the Atlantic Council, which featured Biden as a star speaker at its awards ceremonies over the years. These advocates include Michael Carpenter, Biden’s longtime foreign policy advisor and specialist on Ukraine, who has taken to the national media to support his embattled boss. 

Even as Burisma’s trail of influence-buying finds its way into front page headlines, the Atlantic Council’s partnership with the company is scarcely mentioned. Homing in on the partisan theater of “Ukrainegate” and tuning out the wider landscape of corruption, the Beltway press routinely runs quotes from Atlantic Council experts on the scandal without acknowledging their employer’s relationship with Hunter Biden’s former employer. 

Read the full article here.

Independent journalist Yasha Levine was in Kiev late last year and saw an exhibit in connection with World War II. At first glance, Levine thought some of the symbols looked dubious. When he got close enough to read the actual inscription, he saw that the monument – just a short distance away from Maidan Square – was glorifying members of the OUN/UPA who had collaborated with the Nazis during the war and took part in massacres of thousands of Jews and Poles. These war criminals were being heralded as heroes on behalf of Ukrainian independence.

From a distance, the exhibit looked unremarkable — one of those harmless national heritage displays you can find in any European historic city center. But as I got within reading distance, I saw that there was nothing harmless about it. The exhibit wasn’t just showcasing historical Ukrainian symbols, it was celebrating and promoting one of the bloodiest fascist movements in Eastern Europe: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its paramilitary offshoot, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN/UPA) — groups that had played a central role in the genocide of over a million Ukrainian Jews during World War II.

These groups were notorious for their savagery. Their goal was to create a racially pure, fascist state that was free from Poles, Jews, and Russians. To achieve their aims, their leaders pledged allegiance to Adolf Hitler and received training from Nazi Germany. Many of their members had volunteered for the Ukrainian Waffen-SS division, joined Nazi auxiliary police battalions, and helped the Nazis administer occupied Ukraine. Aside from killing Jews, the OUN/UPA organized the slaughter entire Polish villages. Survivors of their atrocities told gut-wrenching tales. They cut babies from wombs, smashed children against walls in front of their mothers, hacked people to death with scythes, flayed their victims, and burned entire villages alive….

….Naturally, all this dark and bloody history was left out of the exhibit. Instead it spun a superficial revisionist tale, presenting Nazi collaborators and mass murderers as heroes and liberators. A big component of the whole thing was a series of agitprop woodcuts that glorified the struggle of OUN/UPA soldiers against both the Nazis and the Reds and pushed the fiction that these groups were not bent on genocide but were involved in liberating all the peoples of the Soviet Union from totalitarian oppression. They were multicultural! Tolerant!

I stood looking at the exhibit in shock.

This was more than just whitewashing. This was straight up Nazi collabo glorification and Holocaust revisionism — an extreme reinterpretation of Ukrainian history that has long been pushed by the country’s fascist movements and the influential Ukrainian nationalist diaspora in the United States and Canada.

But even more disturbing was who was included on the list of official sponsors of the exhibit: Radio Liberty.

For those who may not recall from the Cold War days, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (now consolidated and known as RFE/RL) were U.S. government funded media targeting the Soviet/Russian population. Levine continues:

As leaned in for a closer look, I saw that it was produced by the Ukrainian government. Specifically: the Institute of National Memory, a state-funded organization closely linked to country’s top spy agency, the Security Service of Ukraine. What’s more: it had the backing of the United States. An info panel running along the bottom of one of the large displays proudly listed Radio Liberty — the U.S. government’s Ukrainian-language propaganda outlet — as a “media partner.”

Holocaust revisionism? Glorification of mass murderers and Nazi collaborators? Right out in the open in the center of Kiev? And endorsed by our very own government? What the hell was going on?

It’s not like the fascist and genocidal history of the OUN/UPA is open to interpretation. In the last decade, a huge body of amazing historical research has come out on the topic. Groups like the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Simon Wiesenthal Center both consider the OUN/UPA to be being major players in the genocide of Jews in Ukraine and have consistently criticized Ukraine’s attempts to erase and deny this history.

So why is a major federal agency funded by Congress helping push this revisionist Nazi bile on the Ukrainian people?

Read the full article here.

Professor Paul Robinson has just written a book about the influence of Conservative philosophy in Russian culture and politics. That book is the inspiration for this episode of CrossTalk featuring Robinson, along with Russian journalist Dmitry Babich and analyst Alexander Mercouris. They discuss how conservative philosophers in Russia are more rich and complex than they have typically been depicted by western pundits who often don’t have any meaningful understanding of the subject.

Russian conservatism is in many ways different than American conservatism which has a strong libertarian influence in which rejection of state involvement is central. This is generally not the case with Russia, which has a tradition of a strong state. Russian conservative thinkers, ranging from Dostoevsky to Vladimir Solovyov and Ivan Ilyin, provided deep explorations of the concepts of freedom, social morality and the challenges of modernity.

After long and difficult talks on Tuesday in Sochi, Putin and Turkish president Erdogan reached an agreement (memorandum of understanding) with respect to the situation in northeast Syria that will require the Kurds to retreat approximately 20 miles back from the Turkish-Syrian border. Both leaders spoke at a press conference after the negotiations. According to the Kremlin website, Putin reiterated support for Turkey protecting its legitimate national security interests near its border, but that ultimately all countries had to respect Syria’s sovereignty as well as the rights of Kurds:

We share Turkey’s concerns about the growing threat of terrorism and ethnic and religious disputes in that region. We believe these disputes and separatist sentiments have been fueled artificially from the outside.

…. Syria must be liberated from illegal foreign military presence. We believe that the only way to achieve strong and long-lasting stability in Syria is to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country. This is our principled position, and we have discussed it with the President of Turkey.

It is important that our Turkish partners share this approach. The Turks and the Syrians will have to protect peace on the border together, which would be impossible without mutually respectful cooperation between the two countries.

In addition to this, a broad dialogue between the Syrian government and the Kurds living in northeastern Syria must be launched. It is clear that all the rights and interests of the Kurds as an integral part of the multi-ethnic Syrian nation can only be fully considered and fulfilled via such an inclusive dialogue.

Putin also said that the return of Syrian refugees must be facilitated and stressed the importance that no actions by any party undermine the work of the constitutional committee which is set to begin its work at the end of the month:

We consider it necessary to continue helping Syrian refugees to return home, which will substantially alleviate the socioeconomic burden shouldered by the countries that agreed to take in Syrians. First and foremost this applies to the Republic of Turkey.

We urge the international community, primarily relevant UN agencies, to be more active in rendering humanitarian aid to all Syrians going home, without any discrimination, politicisation and preconditions….

…. Of course, during our talks with the President of Turkey, we discussed further steps to promote the peaceful political process in Syria, which the Syrians will conduct within the Constitutional Committee in cooperation with the United Nations.

The guarantors of the Astana format have meticulously worked on it for many years.

We believe the situation on the ground must not prevent the long-awaited launch of the committee in Geneva next week – October 29–30.

As reported by Russian news agency, Tass, Erdogan stated that Turkey and Russia would embark on joint patrols of the buffer zone Turkey has carved out with its recent military incursion into the northeast of Syria:

SOCHI, October 22. /TASS/. Turkey and Russia will carry out joint patrolling in northern Syria, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday on the outcomes of the talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi.

“Within 150 hours, [Kurdish formations] the People’s Protection Units must leave the 30-kilometer zone. The countdown will begin tomorrow at 12:00 [local time, same as Moscow time — TASS]. After the 150 hours run out, Turkey and Russia will begin joint patrolling of the area to the east and to the west of the Peace Spring operation zone,” Erdogan said.

According to him, joint patrolling will be carried out on the Syrian territories 10 kilometers away from the Turkish border.

Meduza reported the following specific terms of the agreement, noting that “Erdogan’s claims were reduced to a stretch of land just 60 miles wide that contains only the two Kurdish cities Turkish armed forces managed to seize since the start of the operation against the Kurds.” :

• Turkish troops will indefinitely retain control over the territory they managed to capture after October 9 (the agreement calls this “maintaining the status quo”).
• Syrian border guards and Russian military police will occupy the rest of the border region, which will be off limits to Turkish troops, though Turkey will get the right to participate in joint patrols alongside Russian forces up to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from the border.
• The Kurdish armed formations that Erdogan considers to be terrorist groups must leave the entire border region within a week. The agreement says nothing about what happens next to these groups, but both Russia and Turkey committed to “fighting terrorist in all forms.”
• The document doesn’t mention Kurdish autonomy, but it says all questions about Syria’s political structure will be determined later by a constitutional committee convened by Russia, Turkey, and Iran.
• The agreement also doesn’t mention the resettlement of Turkey’s Syrian refugees in Kurdish territory, except for vague language about both parties making efforts to ensure that refugees return to Syria “safely and voluntarily.”

Other bilateral issues were discussed at the 6-hour-long conference between the two leaders, including defense cooperation involving the S-400 and continued trade in bilateral currencies. Again, according to Tass:

“The works on S-400 [missile systems] continues, Turkey is receiving supply procurements. Currently, bilateral defense industry cooperation will resolutely continue,” Erdogan stressed.

The Turkish president also announced that Ankara and Moscow “agreed to expand trading in national currencies.”

Putin later conferred with Syrian president Assad by telephone to inform him of the outcome of the meeting with Erdogan. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov briefed the media on the call and stated that beginning today, Syrian border guards will conduct joint patrols with the Russians near the Turkish-Syrian border for about a week before the Turks begin their joint patrols with the Russians in the smaller stretch over which they recently gained control :

According to Peskov, the Russian leader stressed that the main goal is to recover Syrian territorial integrity and to continue political regulation efforts, including the work related to the Syrian Constitutional Committee.

Assad supports the decisions taken on the outcomes of the talks, the Kremlin spokesman added. “President al-Assad thanked Vladimir Putin, expressed his full support for the results of the work and stated that he is ready to send Syrian border guards to the [Syrian-Turkish] border along with the Russian military police,” he said…

….Starting midday October 23, the Russian military police and Syrian border guards will arrive at the Syrian-Turkish border to monitor the withdrawal of Kurdish military formations to the depth of 30 km from the border. In 150 hours, Russia and Turkey will begin the joint patrolling of the area.

Just prior to the Putin-Erdogan meeting, it was reported that U.S. diplomats told the political leader of SDF – who was in Washington D.C. for urgent talks that became contentious- that they would “not allow” the Kurds to make a deal with Assad or the Russians. But since the Kurds are no longer getting protection from the U.S., it appears they will likely not be abiding by any dictums issued by Washington.