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Showing posts with label RUSSIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RUSSIA. Show all posts
September 25, 2022
The mysterious death of a Russian oligarch
August 31, 2022
Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Reformist Soviet Leader,
Adopting principles of glasnost and perestroika, he weighed the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and set a new course, presiding over the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.
Follow for reactions to the news of Mikhail Gorbachev’s passing.
Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. He was 91.
His death was announced on Tuesday by Russia’s state news agencies, citing the city’s central clinical hospital. The reports said he had died after an unspecified “long and grave illness.”
Few leaders in the 20th century, indeed in any century, have had such a profound effect on their time. In little more than six tumultuous years, Mr. Gorbachev lifted the Iron Curtain, decisively altering the political climate of the world.
At home he promised and delivered greater openness as he set out to restructure his country’s society and faltering economy. It was not his intention to liquidate the Soviet empire, but within five years of coming to power he had presided over the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He ended the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan and, in an extraordinary five months in 1989, stood by as the Communist system imploded from the Baltics to the Balkans in countries already weakened by widespread corruption and moribund economies.
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For this he was hounded from office by hard-line Communist plotters and disappointed liberals alike, the first group fearing that he would destroy the old system and the other worried that he would not.
It was abroad that he was hailed as heroic. To George F. Kennan, the distinguished American diplomat and Sovietologist, Mr. Gorbachev was “a miracle,” a man who saw the world as it was, unblinkered by Soviet ideology.
But to many inside Russia, the upheaval Mr. Gorbachev had wrought was a disaster. President Vladimir V. Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” For Mr. Putin — and his fellow K.G.B. veterans who now form the inner circle of power in Russia — the end of the U.S.S.R. was a moment of shame and defeat that the invasion of Ukraine this year was meant to help undo.
“The paralysis of power and will is the first step toward complete degradation and oblivion,” Mr. Putin said on Feb. 24, when he announced the start of the invasion, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mr. Gorbachev made no public statement of his own about the war in Ukraine, though his foundation on Feb. 26 called for a “speedy cessation of hostilities.” A friend of his, the radio journalist Aleksei A. Venediktov, said in a July interview that Mr. Gorbachev was “upset” about the war, viewing it as having undermined “his life’s work.”
When he came to power, Mr. Gorbachev was a loyal son of the Communist Party, but one who had come to see things with new eyes. “We cannot live this way any longer,” he told Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who would become his trusted foreign minister, in 1984. Within five years he had overturned much that the party held inviolable.
A man of openness, vision and great vitality, he looked at the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and saw official corruption, a labor force lacking motivation and discipline, factories that produced shoddy goods, and a distribution system that guaranteed consumers little but empty shelves — empty of just about everything but vodka.
The Soviet Union had become a major world power weighed down by a weak economy. As East-West détente permitted light into its closed society, the growing class of technological, scientific and cultural elites could no longer fail to measure their country against the West and find it wanting.
The problems were clear; the solutions, less so. Mr. Gorbachev had to feel his way toward his promised restructuring of the Soviet political and economic systems. He was caught between tremendous opposing forces: On one hand, the habits ingrained by 70 years of cradle-to-grave subsistence under Communism; on the other, the imperatives of moving quickly to change the old ways and to demonstrate that whatever dislocation resulted was temporary and worth the effort.
It was a task he was forced to hand over to others when he was removed from office, a consequence of his own ambivalence and a failed coup against him by hard-liners whom he himself had elevated to his inner circle.
The openness Mr. Gorbachev sought — what came to be known as glasnost — and his policy of perestroika, aimed at restructuring the very underpinnings of society, became a double-edged sword. In setting out to fill in the “blank spots” of Soviet history, as he put it, with frank discussion of the country’s errors, he freed his impatient allies to criticize him and the threatened Communist bureaucracy to attack him.
Still, Mr. Gorbachev’s first five years in power were marked by significant, even extraordinary, accomplishments:
■ He presided over an arms agreement with the United States that eliminated for the first time an entire class of nuclear weapons, and began the withdrawal of most Soviet tactical nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe.
■ He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, a tacit admission that the invasion in 1979 and the nine-year occupation had been a failure.
■ While he equivocated at first, he eventually exposed the nuclear power-plant disaster at Chernobyl to public scrutiny, a display of candor unheard-of in the Soviet Union.
■ He sanctioned multiparty elections in Soviet cities, a democratic reform that in many places drove stunned Communist leaders out of office.
■ He oversaw an attack on corruption in the upper reaches of the Communist Party, a purge that removed hundreds of bureaucrats from their posts.
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■ He permitted the release of the confined dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, the physicist who had been instrumental in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb.
■ He lifted restrictions on the media, allowing previously censored books to be published and previously banned movies to be shown.
■ In a stark departure from the Soviet history of official atheism, he established formal diplomatic contacts with the Vatican and helped promulgate a freedom-of-conscience law guaranteeing the right of the people to “satisfy their spiritual needs.”
Mr. Gorbachev’s perestroika was graphically demonstrated when, in a stunning chapter of history, Eastern Europe’s Communist regimes fell, one after another.
In a few euphoric months in 1989, the political architecture of Europe was transformed by popular demand for democracy. Seven countries that had been locked behind the Iron Curtain for more than four decades once again tasted independence. Some historians have ranked 1989 alongside 1789, the beginning of the French Revolution, and 1848, a year of political upheaval throughout Europe, in importance.Image
There is little question that Mr. Gorbachev was the catalyst of that change. Whatever was to happen within the Soviet Union, Mr. Gorbachev would be remembered as the man who restored Europe to what it was before World War II, a continent of independent national states.
Until he arrived, the Soviet Union had embraced what the West called the Brezhnev doctrine, under which the Kremlin arrogated to itself the right to interfere in the affairs of faltering Communist regimes of the Warsaw Pact.
Brezhnev invoked that right in 1968, when he dispatched Soviet forces to destroy the liberalization movement in Czechoslovakia that became known as the Prague Spring, and Khrushchev did so in 1956, when his army crushed a revolt in Hungary.
Mr. Gorbachev laid that policy to rest. If a regime was failing, he said, it — and it alone — would have to forge a genuine social compact with its people.
But if Mr. Gorbachev was lionized abroad as having helped change the world — he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 — he was vilified at home as having failed to live up to the promise of economic change. It became widely said that in a free vote, Mr. Gorbachev could be elected president anywhere but the Soviet Union.
After five years of Mr. Gorbachev, store shelves remained empty while the union disintegrated. Mr. Shevardnadze, who had been his right hand in bringing a peaceful end to Soviet control in Eastern Europe, resigned in late 1990, warning that dictatorship was coming and that reactionaries in the Communist Party were about to cripple reform.
Peter Reddaway, an author and scholar of Russian history, said at the time: “We see the best side of Gorbachev. The Soviets see the other side, and hold him to blame.”
February 25, 2022
Russia moves to take Kyiv
- Russian troops have entered the Ukrainian capital Kyiv from the north, advancing to the city’s Obolon district. Despite rumors he had fled, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky released a video from the city’s government district, saying, “We are here. We are in Kyiv. We are defending Ukraine.” [Axios / Dave Lawler and Zachary Basu]
- Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has advocated that the Ukrainian military stage a coup and negotiate with him. “Take power into your own hands,” he said to the soldiers, explaining, “It looks like it will be easier for us to come to an agreement with you than with this gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis who lodged themselves in Kyiv and took the entire Ukrainian people hostage.” [NYT / Anton Troianovski]
- Putin also floated the idea of engaging in talks with Ukraine hosted in Minsk, Belarus. Those negotiations would be predicated on Ukraine “demilitarizing” and agreeing to a nonaligned status, giving up its European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization ambitions. [Reuters]
- Meanwhile, Putin has shored up support from a few strongmen. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad approved of Putin’s invasion, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said his country was with Putin, and Belarus has provided military assistance; but other leaders, like Jair Bolsonaro, who have supported Putin in the past, have remained silent after the invasion. [Washington Post / Terrence McCoy and Chico Harlan]
- Meanwhile, European leaders, as well as those in Britain and the US, have issued a new round of sanctions against Russia, including against Putin. The EU, Britain, and the US have agreed as of Friday to freeze the foreign assets of Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. [AP / Raf Casert and Aamer Madhani]
- And thousands of Russians throughout the country have risked arrest or worse protesting Putin’s invasion, in cities including Moscow and St. Petersburg. More than 1,800 had been arrested as of Thursday night, and several high-profile Russians risked their livelihoods by speaking out against the war. [Guardian / Andrew Roth]
February 24, 2022
Putin, warning against interference, says that Russia is a ‘powerful nuclear state.’
2/24/22
President Vladimir V. Putin has ordered Russian troops into Ukraine but made clear his target goes beyond his neighbor to America’s “empire of lies,” and he threatened “consequences you have never faced in your history” for “anyone who tries to interfere with us.”
In a rambling speech early Thursday, full of festering historical grievances and accusations of a relentless Western plot against his country, Mr. Putin reminded the world that Russia “remains one of the most powerful nuclear states” with “a certain advantage in several cutting edge weapons.”
In effect, Mr. Putin’s speech, intended to justify the invasion, seemed to come close to threatening nuclear war.
In the context of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, Mr. Putin said, “there should be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.”
President Biden, who said Mr. Putin “had chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering,” has said that no American troops will be sent to Ukraine. Its European allies have taken the same position.
“We have made it clear that we don’t have any plans and intention of deploying NATO troops to Ukraine,” Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance’s secretary-general, said on Thursday.
Still, history has demonstrated that European wars involving a major global power can spiral out of control.
For Mr. Putin, the invasion of a country bigger than France with a population of 44 million represents a high-risk gamble, beyond any of his past military adventures. It is easy to begin wars, much harder to stop them. The West’s economic sanctions, already coming into force, will be severe, and long-term Ukrainian guerrilla resistance to any Russian presence appears certain.
Still, after his short war in Georgia in 2008, his annexation of Crimea in 2014, his orchestration in 2014 of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine that created two breakaway regions and his military intervention in Syria in 2015, Mr. Putin has clearly concluded that Russia’s readiness to use its armed forces to advance its strategic aims will go unanswered by the United States or its European allies.
“Russia wants insecurity in Europe because force is its trump card,” Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador, said. “They never wanted a new security order, whatever the European illusions. Putin decided some time ago that confrontation with the West was his best option.”
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April 23, 2021
Russia To Pull Troops From Ukraine Border, Defusing Crisis
Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images
Russia says it will begin a phased reduction of troops from its border with neighboring Ukraine – apparently ending a deployment that had alarmed Kyiv and Western observers concerned about a possible repeat of Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, speaking on Thursday after overseeing drills in Crimea involving more than 10,000 troops, appeared to suggest that the ominous troop buildup on the border was more or less a routine training exercise.
He ordered ground troops to return to bases in Vladikavkaz and Novosibirsk and airborne units to Pskov, Ivanovo and the Krasnodar region, beginning Friday and finishing by May 1. Russian naval forces in the Black Sea were also part of the military exercise.
"I believe that the goals of the snap inspection have been fully achieved," the Interfax news agency quoted Shoigu as saying. "The troops demonstrated the ability to reliably defend the country."
"In this regard, I have decided to complete the Southern and Western military district reviews," he added.
Sergei Malgavko/Sergei Malgavko/TASS
Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and is supplying an armed insurgency in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, which borders Russia.
Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, welcomed the de-escalation by Russia but said Kyiv would remain vigilant.
"The reduction of troops on our border proportionally reduces tension," Zelenskiy wrote on Twitter. "Ukraine is always vigilant, yet welcomes any steps to decrease the military presence & deescalate the situation in Donbass."
Shoigu ordered military chiefs to "analyze the snap inspections in all levels of management and draw up a plan to eliminate shortcomings," according to Interfax. He also said that despite the troop reduction, Russia would keep a close tab on planned NATO exercises.
Most of Ukraine was absorbed into the Russian Empire in the late-18th century and Ukraine was a founding republic of the former Soviet Union. It finally gained independence from Moscow with the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Although not currently a NATO member, Ukraine has long expressed a desire to join the Western alliance – a move Russia says would be a "huge strategic mistake."
Earlier this month, Zelenskiy said Ukraine was hoping to hasten progress toward NATO membership and announced that it would take part in joint military exercises known as "Exercise Cossack Mace" with NATO forces later this year.
The Kremlin had rebuffed U.S. and European concern over the buildup, saying it will defend its national interests the way it sees fit. On Wednesday, Putin — who has ignored calls by Ukraine for talks to defuse the situation — warned NATO to stay clear of Russia's "red lines."
Russia ordering troops back to base after their deployment to the border is an important and timely move, a NATO official told Reuters.
"Any steps towards de-escalation by Russia would be important and well overdue," the unnamed NATO official said.
"NATO remains vigilant and we will continue to closely monitor Russia's unjustified military build-up in and around Ukraine," the official said.
The tensions in Eastern Europe come at a particularly fraught time for relations between Washington and Moscow, with the U.S. ramping up sanctions against Russia in retaliation for a major cyberattack, the Kremlin's alleged interference in U.S. elections and reports that the Kremlin offered the Afghan Taliban bounty payments to kill American troops stationed there. Putin's government has denied all the allegations.
Washington has also expressed concern over the health of Russia's main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, who is in the third week of a prison hunger strike. He is reportedly in precarious health.
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