In this just published Sputnik interview, I am pleased to share the podium with Fred Weir of the Christian Science Monitor. Fred has been one of the most level-headed journalists in mainstream media.

The subject of the interviews was Vladimir Putin’s annual press conference on Thursday.  My own remarks to Sputnik are in line with what I wrote on my website the same day.  Now I can add the observation that major media like The Financial Times chose to report what they wanted, not what they heard and saw. By that I mean they sensationalized Putin’s response to a question from Sky News about the Ukraine crisis, and made it look as if that was the breaking news of the event, when all he did was reiterate what he had been saying the preceding week. The only “new” element Putin introduced was confirmation that Russian presence on the border was to counter an anticipated Ukrainian assault on Donbas. And that would have been knowable to any viewer of Russian state television reporting these past several weeks when it was stressed that half of all the Ukrainian armed forces were now concentrated just to the West of Donbas.

As I noted, the way Western reporters were ignored from the dais while the microphone was given almost exclusively to representatives from the regions and the President’s concluding phrase to Sky, that the United States has responded positively and talks are being scheduled for January, all of this was to play down the present wrangling with Washington and not do or say anything to put at risk the coming talks.

However, I post this link to Sputnik not for the sake of my contribution but to direct attention to the remarks of Fred Weir as regards change being afoot on the US side thanks to Russian firmness and the ongoing reevaluation of Russian military capability. Fred’s reference to the talks his colleagues had with generals in NATO headquarters bears special notice.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

https://sputniknews.com/20211223/russia-is-back-moscow-wont-back-down-ending-era-of-nato-expansion-is-possible-observers-say-1091758619.html

These days ‘cyber warfare’ is all the rage among those doing military threat analysis in geopolitics. Mutually Assured Destruction by launch of ICBMs is passé, vulnerable to ABM systems, although Russia insists its latest variable range hypersonic missiles Avangard, Tsirkon and Kinzhal evade interception and will get the job done.  The West does not yet possess hypersonic missiles, whereas it is going full blast on cyber, so that is the talk of the town here.

All of the foregoing ignores a much older martial art that also gets the job done without harming a soul. I have in mind psychological warfare, in military slang “Psy Ops.”  In what follows below, I argue that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been applying precisely that art on us these past several weeks and months, with some notable successes already scored and likely more to come in his ongoing pursuit of a US-NATO capitulation, meaning the roll-back of physical threats to Russian national security from the forward positions at Russia’s doorstep presently obtaining.

* * * *

Over the past month, every few days I have been publishing commentary on the unfolding crisis around Ukraine as Russia massed at the Ukrainian border what was variously reported in our media as between 75,000 and 150,000 troops.  Some of these articles have elicited words of praise from readers of my website or of other sites reposting me including www.antiwar.com and LinkedIn.

Accordingly I open with a mea culpa, acknowledging that over this month my interpretation has zig-zagged, with my expressing at one moment confidence that Russia had no interest or intention to invade Ukraine and at another moment allowing for the possibility.  However, I think it is better to have done flip-flops than to have stayed with one consistent story all this time, given that my flip-flops were prompted by the changing information flow coming in.

We have all been in a state of confusion over the Kremlin’s intentions.  By “we all” I also include Russia’s own think tank experts, going as high as Fyodor Lukyanov, who is widely interviewed on Russian state television as well as by Western media and is assumed to be in the know.  He did not have a clue, as I remarked reading his latest analytical article in The Moscow Times.

Vladimir Putin has kept his game plan very close to his chest and has successfully confused us all, especially over the past three weeks in the various public meetings and forums in which he and his team participated.

The declaration of a crisis situation came from the American side in mid-November, which sent diplomats, including the Secretary of State Blinken, scurrying to confer with allies in Europe, to share with them military intelligence about the numbers and structure of the Russian forces near Ukraine and to try to reach consensus over draconian economic and other sanctions that all would apply against Russia should an actual invasion take place.  One notable general gathering for this purpose brought together all NATO member states in Riga on 30 November – 1 December. Afterwards, the United States intimated that all ducks were lined up.  The Europeans tended to remain silent.

Then finally came the Biden-Putin video conference of 7 December, which seemed to be a white knuckle event at the end of which very little was given out to the media by either US or Russian sides. We only heard that working teams would be formed to discuss Russian complaints. But nothing changed at the Ukrainian border.

On 15 December, there was the video-conference between Putin and Xi Jinping , highlighting the closeness of Russian-Chinese bilateral relations in a number of areas including defense, and implying by its timing that if the US moved incautiously against Russia following the expected invasion of Ukraine, it might face a second front in the Pacific. After that came a bombshell, the release on 17 December of Russia’s draft treaties with the USA and NATO to wholly revise the security architecture in Europe to Russia’s benefit. And then there was the speech by Putin to the Collegium of the Russian Defense Ministry on the 21st in which he said that if the talks with the Americans over these draft treaties did not go well, if it appeared that the other side was just buying time, then Russia would immediately implement what he called ‘military-technical’ retaliatory measures. Our media tended to believe this meant an invasion of Ukraine, or worse. Why they were wrong, I have explained in an essay I published two days ago in which I deciphered the term “military-technical.”  I will revert to this further on.

I emphasize that during this whole period the Russians did nothing to reduce their military presence at the Ukrainian border, while denying that they had any intention of moving into Ukraine, saying it was their right to post their soldiers anywhere inside their own territory and that the Americans were just making self-serving propaganda to reinforce control over their European allies.

During this entire period, Western commentators in mainstream media, and even in alternative news outlets, were drawn into the idea of an impending Russian invasion. Everyone speculated on what forces the Russians would deploy, their numbers and equipment, on how long the Russians would need to take Kiev. At the other end, they speculated on what sanctions the Americans and their allies would impose: cutoff from SWIFT, refusal of Western banks to convert rubles, scrapping the Nord Stream pipeline and much more was in the list that Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland released to journalists.  The pundits opined on how damaging these sanctions would be to the Russian economy and to popular support for the Russian leadership.

As I now see it, most everyone was taken in by what has been a masterly Psy Ops move by Russia.

It has already brought them a great achievement: the United States, France, Britain have all now declared publicly that they will not send a single soldier to defend Ukraine if Russia attacks. From this it is not a far step to accept the Russians’ first demand, that the USA and NATO abandon the offer made to Ukraine in 2008 to admit the country to NATO at one date or another in the future.  That would effectively end the dogma underpinning the entire U.S. foreign policy: denial of the right of any other state than itself to have national interests and spheres of influence. It would remove the principal objections to Russian demands today for the roll-back of NATO forces along all the “front line states” in Eastern Europe.

The Psy Ops has achieved other positive results for Russia which I will get to in a minute. But first I am obliged to explain what was the point of massing their soldiers at the Ukrainian border in the first place if not to stage an invasion or to frighten and confuse the Americans over the likelihood of such an invasion.

The word “invasion” with boots on the ground has monopolized Western analysis of Russian intentions with respect to Ukraine. Our commentators uniformly point to a precedent: the “invasion” of Crimea in March 2014 that led to occupation and ultimately to annexation. But the analogy is totally false. Our Western media have either forgotten the details of how Crimea was lost by Ukraine or care little for the facts and are just engaging in naked propaganda.

In 2014, the Russians indeed defeated the Ukrainian forces in Crimea. But there was no movement of troops across a border, no pitched battles to conquer ground.  What happened was something far more sophisticated and difficult to execute. At the time, our journalists called it ‘hybrid warfare.’  That was just a newly minted term for psychological warfare, or Psy Ops.

No Russian troops crossed the border, because under the existing Russian-Ukrainian state treaty governing the lease of the Russian naval base in Sevastopol the Russians had the right to station 17,000 military men on the peninsula, a number which was incidentally roughly equal to the number of Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea.  True, very likely there was a rotation of Russian troops, substituting special forces for the regulars in the barracks ahead of the eventual Russian move.   

In any case, when Crimean residents refused to accept the new, illegitimate government in Kiev following the U.S- directed coup d’état by radical Ukrainian nationalists in February 2014, the Russians made their move with what they had on the spot. They cut all means of communication between the local Ukrainian units and their command in Kiev, then they instructed the confused and despairing Ukrainians to surrender and either go back home to the mainland or change sides and take an oath of allegiance to Russia. I am told that as many as 75% of the Ukrainian forces chose to stay. Hardly a shot was fired and perhaps one Ukrainian soldier died.

This operation by the Russians was a perfect execution of the Clausewitz rules of war: overwhelm the enemy so that they surrender without slaughter.  The naval forces of Ukraine also abandoned ship and cleared out without a fight.  The net result was the immediate capitulation of Kiev and Russian take-over of Crimea.

                                                     ****

So, did the Russians bring their 75,000 or 150,000 troops to the Ukrainian border two months ago just to exact concessions from the United States by threatening war with Ukraine and expulsion of the U.S. backed regime in Kiev?  Surely that has been a nice advance dividend from their operation, but it was not the driver.

Until Vladimir Putin spoke yesterday at his annual press conference, we did not have a clear statement from the Kremlin on why so many of its troops were massed within striking distance of Donbass. Now Putin said directly that they anticipated a Ukrainian assault on the ‘separatist’ Russian-backed provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk. The aggressive intent of the Kiev had been encouraged by the delivery over the past two years of $2.5 billion in military equipment and trainers to Ukraine from the United States, which was supporting the radical forces within the Ukrainian defense establishment. Russian media have for weeks reported that half of the total Ukrainian army had been mobilized and sent to the western border of Donbas, ready to strike. He added that it would be intolerable for the Russians to abandon Donbas civilians to the anticipated onslaught, so that if it began the Russians would have to enter Ukraine to turn it back. In effect, the Russians were at the eastern border not to stage an invasion but to make an invasion unnecessary by stopping the Ukrainian forces at the western border in their tracks.

Let us be very plain:  the Russian commitment to support the Donbas has a number of justifications.  That Kiev would intend upon occupation to engage in ethnic cleansing, to drive out to Russia a large part of the population is beyond doubt.  Russia would bear a moral obligation to protect civilians against possible genocidal intentions of the extreme Ukrainian nationalists, akin to the ‘right to protect’ principle invoked by NATO when it entered the civil war in Libya to overthrow General Qaddafi.  Still more, there would be an obligation to its own citizens residing in Donbas. As we know some 600,000 Ukrainians in Donbas accepted Russian Federation passports when they were made available by Moscow over the past couple of years.

* * * *

We will see in January to what extent the Americans and Russians can reach agreement on redrawing the security architecture in Europe so as to satisfy the Kremlin’s concerns.  If they fail, then Putin will not invade Ukraine, he will not stop gas shipments to Europe, but he will implement the ‘military-technical’ means of retaliation mentioned last week.  This means, as I observed in my essay published a couple of days ago, that the Russians will likely begin the next phase of Psy Ops. They will install nuclear capable missiles in Belarus and in Kaliningrad which will threaten NATO capitals in Europe; they will position their various submarine and surface vessel launched cruise missiles just outside U.S. territorial waters, threatening the political and defense installations of the U.S. with a 5 minute time to target. In this way they will subject their adversaries to the same threats as they face coming from NATO.   And there is every reason to believe these measures, in which not a soul perishes, will bring the U.S. and Europe around to common sense, equitable solutions.

In the meantime, aside from the U.S. public disavowal of sending troops to the aid of Ukraine, the Russian Psy Ops have begun to crack the stubbornness of Cold Warriors among the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

Yesterday an analytical article on the situation in Ukraine and Russian demands was published by The Washington Post that would have been unimaginable a month ago. It would not be out of place if posted on www.antiwar.com  I heartily recommend it to my readers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/12/23/ukraine-taiwan-red-lines/

If other leading newspapers and electronic media follow this lead as the United States modifies its security doctrine in Europe to satisfy some key demands of the Russians, then I, Ray McGovern, Patrick Armstrong and other “dissident’ observers of the West’s relations with the Kremlin may find ourselves in the midst of “mainstream” as the tide comes in and lifts all boats.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

Given the fast pace of breaking news in Russia-US-EU relations over the past three weeks, it was high time to tamp down speculation about possible imminent outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine and to let us all enjoy what is left of the holiday season within the limits permitted by the ongoing Covid pandemic. Vladimir Putin obliged by staging an intentionally dull and low key annual press conference. The press conference lasted over four hours but at the end I only had two pages of notes.

There were 500 + journalists present in the Manezh, which was chosen for the first time because it is more capacious than the venue across town traditionally used for the purpose. Maximum consideration was given to sanitary measures. All journalists had passed three PCR tests to be admitted, all were masked and seating ensured social distancing. The microphone sponge cover was removed after each journalist spoke and handed over as a souvenir.  Vladimir Putin sat alone on a dais behind a draped white table perhaps 10 meters long. His press secretary Dmitry Peskov was also at the table but half a room away.

At the outset, Peskov informed us that most of the accredited 500 journalists in the hall were coming from the Russian regions and they would be favored.  Indeed, though Western media were also accredited only three among them, for the BBC and Sky News and an Italian media outlet, were given the microphone to pose questions. The avoidance of international topics was no accident, as Putin’s answer to the lady from Sky News made clear.

She asked him whether Russia was ready to provide assurances it would not invade Ukraine. Putin then went through his prepared speech on the history of the Ukraine conflict from the Feb 2014 coup onwards up to the latest Kiev-planned assault on Donbass that the Russian troop concentration prevented. He went over the sad story of Western broken promises with respect to moving NATO to the East. And he concluded that these issues are now the subject for discussion with the US to be held in Geneva in January. He said that the Americans seemed to be treating the process seriously.  Full stop.  He said nothing that might upset the understandings now reached with Biden over the pending talks.

The BBC journalist used his moment in the limelight to present a question, or rather a programmatic statement given him by the editor of the anti-Putin, pro-free press newspaper and Nobel Peace Prize winner of 2021 Dmitry Muratov, criticizing Russia’s foreign agent law as stifling the non-governmental organizations and press.  Here again, Putin was perfectly prepared to knock down Muratov’s arguments, pointing out how much more humane Russia’s law on the matter is than the foreign agent law in the USA upon which it was modeled. That 1930s law is still in force and imposes liability for criminal prosecution on those in its sights even after they desist, whereas the Russian law allows journalists to practice their trade even as foreign agents.

As a demonstration of the freedom to operate that the Russian law grants, Peskov remarked at the outset that several representatives of such publications were accredited and seated in the hall.  Later in the conference, the microphone was handed to political activist, 2018 presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak, who was most likely present on behalf of Dozhd, the opposition television station that is in fact registered as a foreign agent.

As for the rest of the conference it was all about domestic Russian issues including the pandemic, the current bubbly economy (annual GDP growth of 4.6% and 2 or 3% rise in inflation adjusted real incomes) and the dismal impact of Covid on mortality and life expectancy, which has declined from 75 to 71 this year as a result.

Before closing this overview of the press conference, I direct attention to one question from a journalist puzzled by the latest news on Russian gas deliveries to Europe that had a big impact on gas prices in Europe these past two days. The news was that Gazprom has most recently not booked capacity on the Yamal pipeline, which is a key conduit of its gas exports to Europe, and that in fact the gas flows have now been reversed, flowing from German eastwards.

In response, Vladimir Putin gave us a brief master class on how the gas trade really functions. He explained that Gazprom did not reserve space in the pipeline because it has received no new orders from its Western customers and has fulfilled existing obligations including supplying Germany with 10% more gas this year than last. Instead, the Poles have booked the reverse flow.  Why?  Possibly for speculative reasons, because that gas was purchased from Russia at a long term contractual price that is 3 – 4 times cheaper than current spot prices in Europe, so that if it was resold now the seller could realize a profit of a billion dollars.  Possibly they did so in order to send the gas down to Ukraine.    It is quite stunning that our journalists – finance people either did not know that or kept it to themselves while blaming Europe’s gas shortage and soaring prices on Russia.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that is not all.  Deploying in Europe would only partially serve the Russians’ purpose. It will touch off a furious reaction in NATO, meaning a lot of hot air, but it will also precondition the Europeans to accept meekly the eventual capitulation of the United States that they would otherwise denounce as appeasement.

As I have said previously, Putin’s entire approach is that Russia is in an arm wrestling match with one country only, the USA. He knows that the USA does not really care if Russia and the EU blow one another up: that would only enforce their global hegemony.  So the iron clad logic is that the Russians would also station their hypersonic cruise missiles just off the US shores as Putin threatened three years ago, when he spoke about Russia’s cutting edge, next generation strategic weapons that had then and today still have no equals in the world.  That is the pistol to the head that will force US negotiators to break out into a cold sweat and do what has to be done to end the madness of their NATO expansion to the East and plans to turn Ukraine into a forward missile attack post against Russia. And the Europeans will just shut up.

Moral of the story as we head into the festive season: the end of the world is not nigh,

©Gilbert Doctorow

The opening remarks Sunday night by Dmitry Kiselyov on Vesti Nedeli, the widely watched weekly round-up of news from Russian state television, minced no words: “Russia has made a proposal to the United States which it cannot refuse. The moment of truth has arrived.”  He was referring, of course, to the draft treaties on mutually assured security presented to the United States and NATO through diplomatic channels and simultaneously posted on the website of the RF Ministry of Foreign Affairs last Friday.

These proposals, demanding in effect a roll-back of NATO to the status quo before its expansion eastward in 1997, was immediately understood by the Russian public to be an ultimatum and evoked various reactions. The move was clearly not deemed to be an open and shut case, as Mr. Kiselyov would have us believe.

In what follows, I offer a translation of commentary posted on three Russian websites during December 18-19. Two of the websites are middle of the road, fairly neutral platforms. One, Ekho Moskvy, is the boldest anti-Putin news website in the country with an audience cutting across the social strata.

                                                                                 ****

https://news.rambler.ru/politics    18 December 2021

“A political scientist has related how the USA will respond to Russia’s ultimatum,” by Yuvelina Bernst

The proposals of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to achieve strategic stability will most likely not be accepted by the USA and NATO and can lead to unforeseeable consequences, right up to a war. That is the opinion voiced by political scientist Yevgeny Satanovsky in his Telegram channel “Armagedonnych.”

The first reaction, in his words, is predictable: ‘something may be discussed, but as a whole it is unacceptable.’ Otherwise, the United States ‘will have to curtail all work on strangling Russia militarily, leaving for this purpose only agitation, propaganda, recruitment, espionage, and, at the worst, sabotage ..’

He explained that U.S. President Joe Biden and the Democrats would not be forgiven by his predecessor Donald Trump and the Republicans for a retreat from the present positions in Europe after Afghanistan.

At the same time, in case of a head to head clash between Washington and Moscow, taking into account new technologies, ‘there will be no shortage of spilled blood,’ noted the political scientist.

‘It’s a hell of a curious situation. It can end up in anything,’ the expert concluded.

[note:  Satanovsky is an expert in military affairs based in Moscow and appeared often in the top-level Russian political talk shows on Russian state television during the military campaign in Syria]

                                                                     ****

https://aif.ru/politics/world/ultimatum_mida_kakaya_sudba_zhdet_dogovor_o_garantiyah_bezopasnosti

“Ultimatum of the RF Ministry of Foreign Affairs. What fate awaits the Treaty on Security Guaranties?”

by Sergei Osipov, staff writer, Argumenty i Fakty.

[AiF is the largest daily social and political newspaper of Russia, with circulation of over 1.5 million]

On 17 December there appeared on the website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs a draft Treaty between the RF and the USA on security guaranties. Russian diplomacy banged its fist on the negotiating table and demanded that the world listen to it. Now the main thing is to make sure that the table holds.

Proposal or Ultimatum?

In essence, the Russian project is a polite form of an ultimatum. Not, of course, like the one that Austria-Hungary presented to Serbia on the eve of World War I, but still. Russia, for example, is offering America not to accept the former Soviet republics into NATO. There is no mention in the text of the document of those already admitted. However, Moscow wants to cut off the road to NATO membership for Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and – what the hell – Belarus.

There are two more points, which unilaterally concern only the United States. The Russian Foreign Ministry intends to forbid them to place their bases in the already mentioned former Soviet republics. There is nothing in the text about our bases in Armenia or Tajikistan. Apparently, we are not a priori forbidden to do so.

The cherry on the cake is hidden at the end of the draft treaty. The U.S. military is ordered to return all U.S. nuclear weapons to its national territory. Recall that in Europe, U.S. nuclear bombs are stockpiled in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey. Since pilots in all of these countries are routinely trained to use these weapons, the training programs are also proposed to be shut down.

This raises a logical question: Would NATO countries send Russia off along with her ultimatum? And what should she do if they send her far away and rudely?

“They will definitely send us on our way,” says military expert Alexei Leonkov. “The problem is that there are no appropriate people among the leaders of Europe and the U.S. who are capable of calculating the consequences of their actions. There are no veterans of combat operations in Korea or Vietnam who have felt war firsthand. After 1991, a new generation of Western officials grew up in the West, accustomed to seeing a weak Russia beside them. For a long time, while our country was not in the best shape, we were not taken seriously. But we have gained in strength and pumped up our muscles. The time has come to remind the West of this.”

Let us remember: it was not Russia that initiated the tearing up of many international and bilateral disarmament agreements. On the contrary, our country has always called for preserving the treaty potential that has kept the world from descending into the abyss of war for decades. But in these proposals, the West saw only our weakness and an excuse to increase pressure. This logic is flawed and dangerous.

The Russians are known to be slow in harnessing their horses, but fast in the saddle. We have something to show off to the US and NATO to guarantee our security. What can the West threaten us with? I think that first of all they are threatening us with intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles. It is no coincidence that this type of weapon is mentioned more than once in the draft treaty. Let me remind you that these are ground-based ballistic missiles and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. The treaty between the USSR and the United States on their destruction was broken under President Trump, so everyone’s hands are free. The Raytheon Corporation began work on the RSMDs even before the U.S. withdrawal from the treaty. So far there is no hypersonic warhead for its “flying cigars,” but soon there will be one. However, if the US places its intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles in Europe, Russia will not lag behind. Not so long ago the chief of the Strategic Missile Forces hinted that we also have successful developments in this direction.

In addition, the West should not forget that Russia now has the most modern Armed Forces in the world. We are the only country that has updated its nuclear arsenal. In the Army alone, the share of new equipment exceeds 70%. So now, after Russian proposals to the United States were published, the joke has become relevant again: whoever has not heard Lavrov, will listen to Shoigu.

The last Russian warning?

Several of the proposals of the RF Ministry of Foreign Affairs on creation of a new architecture of international security are so radical that the question arises: were they written for this Earth?  For example, the following “wishful thinking”: “The parties shall refrain from the deployment of their armed forces and armaments… in areas where such deployment would be perceived by the other party as a threat to their national security.”  Since, as we know, “Russia’s borders do not end anywhere,” and US globalism has become a byword in general, how to fulfill this good wish?

Or here: “The parties shall refrain from flights of heavy bombers equipped for nuclear or non-nuclear weapons and from the presence of surface combat ships of all classes…. in areas, respectively, outside national airspace and outside national territorial waters from which they can engage targets in the territory of the other side. In other words, the American fleet will not go to the Black Sea, but the Russian fleet will go to the Mediterranean Sea? At the same time, no restrictions are imposed on strategic submarines with ballistic missiles.

In general, as Alexander Blok wrote in his poem “The Scythians,” “for the last time the barbarian lyre is summoned to a bright brotherly feast. It would, of course, be nice if our “Western partners” would come to hear our lyre. But I have a suspicion that they will not buy tickets to this concert.

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https://echo.msk.ru/blog/leonid_gozman/2954466-echo/

“Thirteen theses on the Russian ultimatum” by Leonid Gozman, political scientist

1. This is not just an ultimatum. This is a demand for full and unconditional capitulation.
2. Russia does not have the political, economic or military resources to ensure that such an ultimatum works. Nothing except the possibility of destroying the planet so that, to use the expression of the Supreme Commander of the RF Military Forces V.V. Putin, “they croak and we go to heaven.”
3. The authors of the ultimatum understand how blithely it will be taken. Such an important document has been communicated not by the official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova – her words are likened to the escapades of Zhirinovsky -, and not even by Lavrov, who to a large degree turned into one more propagandist, and by the no less discredited deputies of the minister. This is a call to pay serious attention to the text itself.
4. They are demanding that the NATO countries violate their Charter and their obligations set down in international treaties.
5. Russia is not offering any steps from its side. The West must acknowledge that we are always and in all matters were and remain right, and they must acknowledge defeat.
6. In all of this pre-war hysteria there is nothing even resembling a casus belli – no one has killed the Archduke and no one from the West is threatening us.  No one is making territorial claims against us. No one from outside is even trying to intervene in what is going on here domestically. This is all happening in an empty space!
7. The talk about a NATO threat is not substantiated by a single fact. The former republics of the Baltics became members of NATO – at their borders everything is calm.
8. There are, of course, external threats to Russia – Afghanistan, Iran, perhaps China. But instead of preparing ourselves to repel them, the leadership of Russia is threatening war on those who could be our allies.
9. Russia’s leadership wants to speak only with the USA and not with anyone else. It seems they believe their own fairytales about how Europe is no more than a group of US vassals.
10. The ultimatum does not say what will happen if it is rejected. Will our troops march on Kiev, Vilnius and Warsaw?  Will we bomb Washington? Or just Voronezh?
11. The Russian leadership surely consists of people who understand that this ultimatum cannot be accepted. This means they have some kind of plan which varies in a range from nuclear war to the complete closure of the country and its being turned into a big military (concentration) camp. It is just not clear how they will resolve the question of the property and families of high officials of the RF in the West.
12. However the foreign policy situation will take shape after the refusal by the West to accept this ultimatum, inside the country repression will be strengthened – both with respect to opponents of the regime, including those who are outside the borders, and with respect to the broad circle of Russian citizens who are not overjoyed by the activity of the authorities.
13. The main conclusion:  they have lost their minds

[sampling of comments posted by readers:

Jfr – Mr. Gozman, your level is that of some granny in an old folks’ home. It is just such nonsense, doesn’t hold together and is filled with hatred for everything around.

ugas – All correct. Just one point – before you lose your mind you must have one.

unafk – “They have lost their minds!” This is the FIRST thesis. Everything else is not so important!

venq – Well, I don’t know. After Gorbachev ‘let go’ Eastern Europe, NATO quietly expanded to the east. Instead of a finger, they bit off both arms, not having agreed with us a single piece of paper about their expansion. We, imho, are now just trying to bring this NATO pass-through into paper form.]

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The foregoing shows the confusion in professional media and public over the government’s intentions by way of the ultimatum to Washington and Brussels.  It bears mention that even a political analyst as close to power, as much interviewed on state television as Fyodor Lukyanov shows, in an article he published yesterday in The Moscow Times, that he is clueless about the government’s game plan. It is all being played very close to the chest by Vladimir Putin and his immediate entourage.

That there is a game plan, a chess strategy anticipating many different possible moves by both sides to the confrontation is beyond doubt. Perhaps on Thursday when Vladimir Putin holds his annual televised “Direct Line” conversation with the Russian public we will learn more. Normally this long Q&A focuses on domestic policy questions, but we may anticipate that this year the accent will be on foreign policy in general and on the ultimatum in particular.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

The release a couple of days ago on the RF Ministry of Foreign Affairs website of its draft treaties to totally revise the European security architecture¹ has been picked up by our leading mainstream media. The New York Times lost no time posting an article by its most experienced journalists covering Russia, Andrew Kramer and Steven Erlanger: “Russia Lays Out Demands for a Sweeping New Security Deal With NATO.” For its part, The Financial Times brought together its key experts Max Seddon in Moscow, Henry Foy in Brussels and Aime Williams in Washington to concoct “Russia publishes ‘red line’ security demands for Nato and US.”

Both flagships of the English language print media correctly identified the main new feature of the Russian initiative, encapsulated by the word ‘demands.” However, they did not explore the “what if” question, how and why these ‘demands’ are being presented de facto if not by name as an ‘ultimatum,’ as I consider them to be.

The newspaper articles themselves are weak tea.  They summarize the points set out in the Russian draft treaties. But they are incapable of providing an interpretation of what the Russian initiative means for the immediate future of us all.

Normally they would be hand fed such analysis by the U.S. State Department and Pentagon. However, this time Washington has declined to comment, saying it is now studying the Russian treaties and will have its answer in a week or so.  In the meantime, America’s reliable lap dog Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General, saw no need for reflection and flatly rejected the Russian demands as unacceptable. The ‘front line’ NATO member states in the Baltics also reflexively vetoed any talks with the Russians on these matters.

However, even the FT and NYT understand what Mr. Stoltenberg’s opinion or Estonia’s opinion is worth and held back on giving their own thumbs up or down. They both analyze the draft treaties primarily in connection with the current massing of Russian troops at the border of Ukraine. They assume that if the Russians receive no satisfaction on their demands they will use this to justify an invasion.  We are told that in such an eventuality a new Cold War will set in on the Old Continent, as if that will be the end of all the fuss.

In part, the problem with these media is that their journalist and editorial teams are tone deaf as regards things Russian. They are insensitive to nuance and incapable of seeing what is new here in content and still more in the presentation of the Russian texts. In part, the weakness is attributable to the common problem of journalists: their time horizon goes back to what happened last week. They lack perspective.

In what I present below, I will attempt to address these shortcomings. I will not invoke historical time, which would possibly take us back seventy years to the start of the first Cold War or even thirty years to the end of that Cold War, but will restrict my commentary to the time surrounding the last such Russian call for treaties to regulate the security environment on the European continent, 2008 – 2009 under then President Dmitry Medvedev. That is within the time horizon of political science.

I will pay particular attention to the tone of this Russian démarche and will try to explain why the Russians have drawn their ‘red lines’ in the sand precisely now.  All of this will lead to a conclusion that it is not only President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev who should be concerned about the condition of local bomb shelters, but also all of us in Brussels, Warsaw, Bucharest, etc on this side of the Atlantic, and in Washington, D.C., New York and other major centers on the American continent. We are staring down what might be called Cuban Missile Crisis Redux.

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We commentators each have our own starting dates for the narratives we offer to the reading public. In my case, I choose to begin with President Putin’s speech to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007. That speech in itself was very unusual, as Putin explained from his first moments at the lectern:

“This conference’s structure allows me to avoid excessive politeness and the need to speak in roundabout, pleasant but empty diplomatic terms. This conference’s format will allow me to say what I really think about international security problems. And if my comments seem unduly polemical, pointed or inexact to our colleagues, then I would ask you not to get angry with me. After all, this is only a conference.  And I hope that after the first two or three minutes of my speech [the Conference host] will not turn on the red light over there.”

This led him to deliver the following bold assertion:

“I am convinced that we have reached that decisive moment when we must seriously think about the architecture of global security. And we must proceed by searching for a reasonable balance between the interests of all participants in the international dialogue.”

In a word, the concerns and the proposed process of solution through renewal of the architecture of security that we see today in Russia’s latest draft treaties go straight back to 2007 when Vladimir Putin came out publicly on the subject in what might be described as the lion’s den of the world security establishment.

With Senator John McCain and other champions of American global hegemony staring at him in disbelief from the front rows, in that speech Vladimir Putin set out in detail Russia’s rejection of the U.S. led unipolar world as a source of international tensions, recourse to military solutions, an arms race and nuclear proliferation.  U.S. hegemony was undemocratic and unworkable, he said.

The speech was also notable for Putin’s mention of the shabby treatment his country had received at American hands following the break-up of the USSR in the 1990s straight through into the new millennium. The key issue was expansion of NATO to the East, taking in former Warsaw Pact countries and, finally, former USSR republics, the Baltic States.

I quote:

“It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfill the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all. I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”

Putin’s 2007 speech was cast in the manner of complaint. It came from a country that was still only partially recovered from the economic devastation it suffered in the 1990s during a badly managed transition from the Soviet command economy to a market economy. More to the point, his was a country with greatly diminished military capability compared to the Soviet super power from which it emerged independent.  To a certain degree, the disbelief amidst the American and allied contingent in Munich arose from the very audacity of still puny Russia to challenge the powers that be.

In the weeks and months following Putin’s Munich speech, the United States recovered from its shock at his public denunciation and swiftly moved into counter-attack, launching an Information War on Russia that is with us today. From the closing days of the Bush Administration, through the entire Obama Administration save when the New START arms control agreement was being negotiated and signed within the brief period called “the reset,” the United States used every means fair and foul to discredit Russia before the global community in the hope of isolating the country and relegating it to pariah status. Trade sanctions against Russia were first imposed by the United States in 2012 under the Magnitsky Act.  The United States greatly expanded its sanctions policy on Russia following the  annexation of the Crimea in March 2014. Thanks to the MH17 air catastrophe of that summer, a ‘false flag’ event of the first magnitude, all of Europe was brought on board. The sanctions policy was renewed yet again by the EU just this past Friday.

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Looking back at 2008, when Vladimir Putin passed the presidency to his stand-in, Dmitry Medvedev, we see that revising Europe’s security architecture was one of the key policy objectives of the Medvedev presidency. He spoke about it in a speech he delivered in Berlin in June 2008.  Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel was among the first to cold-shoulder the proposal, saying that Europe’s security arrangements had already taken concrete form.

 In November 2009 he finally published on his website a draft treaty on European security. At the same time, Foreign Minister Lavrov officially submitted the document to the Ministerial Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) then meeting in Athens. 

My book of essays entitled Stepping Out of Line, published in 2013, has a couple of chapters devoted to Medvedev’s initiative, which I concluded was hampered by a poor concept further weakened by poor execution.²

The draft agreement was first of all a non-aggression pact among and between all interested states in the Atlantic-Eurasian space. It would establish a framework of deliberative meetings in which all Member States would hear cases of threats of use of force or actual use of force against any Member State. However, non-aggression was merely window dressing, describing something which everyone could understand and say ‘amen’ to.  The second stated objective was to ensure the collective security of its members under the principle that no state or group of states could promote its security at the expense of other Member States.

What was missing from the draft treaty on European security was precisely the definition of what constituted enhancing one’s security at the expense of another. To Europeans the treaty could only serve the purpose of Russian grandstanding, establishing a major new forum for it to air any grievances it might have over NATO expansion, the missile defense system and other U.S. sponsored measures enhancing Western security at the direct expense of Russian state security.

The emptiness of the draft treaty was a failure of Medvedev and his immediate assistants who drew it up. In February 2010, at the regular Munich Security Conference, Sergei Lavrov made a valiant effort to save the Medvedev initiative by proposing that the existing OSCE be reengineered as the vehicle for ensuring collective security. Russia was saying that NATO must give up its predominance in Europe and cede place to a reinvigorated OSCE.  Very little of Lavrov’s speech was reported in Western media.

 The fact that it was quietly buried by all the receiving parties may be attributed to the very weak position of Russia itself at the time. The victorious Russian campaign against Georgia in 2008 was seen by defense professionals in the West very differently from what the general public understood. For professionals, the Russian military showed it had not made much progress from the poorly equipped and led forces that the USSR deployed in Afghanistan or that the Russian Federation deployed in Chechnya in the 1990s. The fact is that Medvedev’s posture was that of a supplicant, dealing from a weak hand. Do note, however, that the Russian concerns were precisely the same as those evoked by the Kremlin today as it promotes its new draft treaties.

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Until the past few days, we heard no more of Russian draft treaties to alter the security architecture of Europe. Instead over the intervening years there have been repeated instances of Russian public complaints over U.S. and NATO activities that it considers menacing. One such loud complaint came in January 2016 with release of a documentary film entitled World Order.³ This was a devastating critique of U.S. global hegemony justified in the name of ‘democracy promotion’ and ‘human rights’ ever since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992.

Following on the points made in Vladimir Putin’s Munich speech of 2007, World Order illustrates through graphic footage and the testimony of independent world authorities the tragic consequences, the spread of chaos and misery, resulting from U.S.-engineered ‘regime change’ and ‘color revolutions,’ of which the violent overthrow of the Yanukovich regime in Ukraine in February 2014 was only the latest example.

The title of the film followed on Putin’s address to the 70^th anniversary gathering of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015 which had as its central message that world order rests on international law, which in turn has as its foundation the UN Charter.  By flouting the Charter and waging war without the sanction of the UN Security Council, starting with the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999 and continuing with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 up to its illegal bombings in Syria, the United States and its NATO allies had shaken the foundations of international law.

The foreign interviewees in World Order comprised an impressive and diverse selection of leaders  in various domains, including American film director Oliver Stone; Thomas Graham, former National Security Council director for Russia under George W. Bush; former IMF Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn; former Pakistan President Perwez Musharraf; former French Foreign Minister Dominique Villepin; former Israeli President Shimon Peres; Wikileaks founder Julian Assange; and deputy leader of the Die Linke party in the German Bundestag, Sahra Wagenknecht.

Strauss-Kahn, Musharraf and others charged that the U.S. plots against and destroys foreign leaders who dare to oppose America’s total control over global flows of money, goods and people. Wagenknecht addressed the question of Germany’s subservience to American Diktats and its de facto circumscribed sovereignty. The statements supported Putin’s long-standing argument, reiterated in the film, that the Western European allies of the U.S. are nothing more than vassals.

The clear message of the film was that U.S. led ‘democracy promotion’ and its spread of ‘universal values’ will not be tolerated and that Russia has set down certain red lines, such as against NATO expansion into Ukraine or Georgia, over which it will fight to the death using all its resources.

However, strong and pointed as this documentary film was in setting out the views of the Kremlin on the global and European security, it was just a complaint, nothing more.  I mention it in detail above to demonstrate the continuity of Russian concerns that this week have come to a head with the release of the draft treaties for consideration of NATO and the USA.

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What is new today in the Russian démarche over European security?  Both content and presentation are new.

In contrast to Dmitry Medvedev’s treaties of 2008-2009, the latest Russian draft texts are all content that is methodically and exhaustively set out. They refer directly to the activities of the United States and NATO over the past several years that Russia considers most threatening to its security and thus most objectionable.

It is clear that the master treaty is with the United States and that the treaty with NATO is a subsidiary treaty. This reflects the insistent view from the Kremlin that the NATO verbiage of its being a consensus driven alliance is rubbish and that the reality is American domination and direction of NATO.  This view sweeps aside any objection from any of the NATO Member States, as for example the immediate objections that came from the Baltic States and Poland, that their agreement to the proposed changes is needed, not to mention the need to consult with other interested parties, namely Ukraine. The Kremlin clearly intends to isolate Washington in the negotiating process for these treaties, before pussy footing with the other NATO members.

In the spirit of the Ten Commandments, almost all of the content is in negatives, in prohibitions.

With respect to the proposed treaty with the United States, we find the following:

“[The Parties] shall not implement security measures adopted by each Party individually or in the framework of an international organization, military alliance or coalition that could undermine core security interests of the other Party.

“The Parties shall not use the territories of other Sates with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.

“The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

“The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.

“The Parties shall refrain from flying heavy bombers equipped for nuclear or non-nuclear armaments or deploying surface warships of any type, including in the framework of international organizations, military alliances or coalitions, in the areas outside national airspace and national territorial waters respectively, from where they can attack targets in the territory of the other Party.

“The Parties shall undertake not to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party.

“The Parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and return such weapons already deployed outside their national territories at the time of the entry into force of the Treaty to their national territories. The Parties shall eliminate all existing infrastructure for deployment of nuclear weapons outside their national territories.”

As regards the draft treaty with NATO, I call particular attention to the following provisions:

“The Parties shall exercise restraint in military planning and conducting exercises to reduce risks of eventual dangerous situations in accordance with their obligations under international law, including those set out in intergovernmental agreements on the prevention of incidents at sea outside territorial waters and in the airspace above, as well as in intergovernmental agreements on the prevention of dangerous military activities.

“In order to address issues and settle problems, the Parties shall use the mechanisms of urgent bilateral or multilateral consultations, including the NATO-Russia Council.

“The Parties reaffirm that they do not consider each other as adversaries.

“The Parties shall maintain dialogue and interaction on improving mechanisms to prevent incidents on and over the high seas (primarily in the Baltics and the Black Sea region).

“The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997. ….

“The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.

“All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.

“The Parties that are member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization shall not conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine as well as other States in Eastern Europe, in the South Caucasus and in Central Asia.”

The draft treaties do not create a new security architecture so much as they dismantle existing architecture added since the mid-1990s by the United States and its allies through NATO expansion to the east, military exercises close to Russian borders and air space, “temporary” stationing of personnel and equipment in forward positions approaching Russian borders.

If accepted in their present form, these treaties would represent a total capitulation by the United States over everything four successive administrations have tried to achieve to contain Russia and put it in a small cage at the periphery of Europe.

The demands are so stunning in scope that we must ask why Russia is taking the seemingly enormous risk of advancing them, and doing so publicly.  Moreover, why now?

I have two explanations to advance: the first is the unshakable confidence that Vladimir Putin and his colleagues have in their present tactical advantage over the United States in the European theater of operations and strategic advantage over the United States on American home territory if push comes to shove.

Three years ago Putin used his annual State of the Union address to show off the newest weapons systems that Russia had successfully tested and was now putting into serial production, most particularly the hypersonic missiles that can evade all known ABM systems. He said then that for the first time in its modern history Russia had moved ahead of the United States in developing and deploying strategic weapons systems.  While the States might develop the same with time, the Russians would move still further ahead.

Moreover, Putin claimed that whereas in its past the United States had considered the oceans to be its natural defense against military conquest from abroad, the latest Russian missiles, small enough to be carried in containers on merchant ships, on frigates or on submarines turned the adjacent oceans into the country’s weak point. The Russians could station their weapons just outside the 200 mile economic zone and still reach key military targets on U.S. territory within several minutes. That is to say that Russia could now do what Khrushchev was denied the right to do in 1962 by stationing Soviet missiles in Cuba.

During his roll-out speech, Putin hoped that the United States and its Western partners would take notice, would do the arithmetic and alter their threatening behavior.  Instead, Western media tended to treat the Russian weaponry as a bluff, or as an electoral ploy to appeal to his voters in the then ongoing presidential campaign, or as something beyond the Russians’ ability to produce in sufficient quantities and with speed to pose a threat before the USA possessed the same.

One year ago, the Russian president again called attention to the deployment of the new weapons systems and urged the United States to react appropriately.  Of course, once again Washington did nothing. Instead the US administration continued to raise the threat level of China and to dismiss Russia as nothing more than spoilers running a country on its way down.

Finally, we may conclude that Vladimir Vladimirovich and his team have decided to act, and to act now on the strength of the strategic superiority they believe they enjoy.  Given the very cautious way that Putin has always conducted government affairs over the past twenty years, anyone who thinks the Kremlin is bluffing or miscalculating had better think again.

Now there is also a second, supportive factor to explain the Russians’ decision to publicize what is essentially an ultimatum to the USA.  That factor is China.   It is not for nothing that Putin and Xi had a widely publicized video conference call this week during which the Chinese President gave his full backing to Russian demands for resolution of the security crisis in Europe and said explicitly that the Chinese –Russian relationship is higher than an alliance. 

Now what could be higher than an alliance?  Surely this hints at a mutual defense pact, meaning that each side will come to the aid of the other as needed if threatened or attacked.

We may assume that there is something in writing between the Russians and the Chinese to give Putin the confidence that he has China at his back as he ventures into diplomatic and possibly military confrontation with the United States and its NATO allies.

And yet, what would the value of such a scrap of paper be?  Where would you seek redress if the Chinese failed to deliver and NATO marched to Moscow?  No, the value of the video conference with Xi lies elsewhere.  Like their amassing 100,000 troops at the Ukrainian border, the Russians are using the Chinese backing to scare the hell out of Washington, which might well assume that the Chinese will coordinate their own military actions against Taiwan, against the U.S. naval forces in the South China Sea and beyond to present the United States with an unwinnable two-front war while serving their own, Chinese, interests.

Should the political situation in Washington prevent such lucid thinking, I believe that the Russians will fall back on their own quite independent ability to put a pistol to the head of the American establishment, through the stationing of its missile forces just offshore, which has not yet been done.

How this plays out will depend on the nature of the U.S. response to Russia’s next move, which might, in the circumstances of Washington stonewalling, be that invasion of Ukraine that has been so much talked about in the past few weeks. It would be foolhardy at this point to sketch all possible scenarios.  But we are surely at the moment when the ‘the worm turns.’

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In conclusion, I call the reader’s attention to one further detail on presentation:  who has been the messenger on the Kremlin’s behalf.

For the past several years, people around Vladimir Putin have joked with respect to foreign powers, “if they cannot deal with Lavrov [RF Minister of Foreign Affairs], then they will have to deal with Shoigu [RF Minister of Defense].” Judging  by the last two weeks, I would insert another personality into this equation:  Sergei Alekseevich Ryabkov, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Ryabkov has been around for a good long time, but till now we did not hear much from him.  He graduated from the prestigious MGIMO, the higher school that traditionally educated fast-track candidates of the Soviet-Russian diplomatic corps. He served several years at the Russian embassy in the Washington and is fluent in English. In the new millennium he has had responsibilities relating to non-proliferation and managing relations with Europe.  His present title is Deputy Minister.

As relations with the United States and the EU have heated up in recent weeks over the build-up of Russian forces at the border with Ukraine, Ryabkov has been speaking to the press and has done so in an undiplomatic, in-your-face fashion.  When one reporter asked him a week ago about how some of Russia’s “partners in the West” would react to something, he snapped back: “We have no partners in the West, only enemies. I stopped using the word ‘partner’ some time ago.” 

The Kremlin’s showcasing of the bulldog Ryabkov is part of the change in tone, the new assertiveness of Putin and his team to which I refer above. 

And lest anyone miss the point, another hardline Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Kiselyov, director of all news reporting on Russian state television opened his weekly news wrap-up program ‘Vesti Nedeli’ tonight with the remark: “Russia has made an offer to the United States which it cannot turn down. The moment of truth [момент истины] has arrived.”

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

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­­­­­¹https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790818/?lang=en

²”Medvedev’s Draft Treaty on European Security: Dead on Arrival” and “Russia’s Draft Treaty on European Security: Sergei Lavrov to the Rescue”

³”https://consortiumnews.com/2016/01/02/hearing-the-russian-perspective/

This past week Russian media devoted a great deal of attention to the thirtieth anniversary of the dissolution of the USSR under the terms of the Belovezha Accords signed by the presidents of the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus on 8 December 1991.

A new documentary film entitled “Thirty Years without the Union” prepared under the direction of Kremlin insider, journalist Naili Oskar-zade was released by state television’s Channel One seven days ago.  Then last night, another full-length documentary film entitled “Russia, Its Most Recent History” (Россия, Новейшая История”) was also prepared within Channel One and was aired on the news channel Rossiya 24. Contributors to the production included a number of top journalists – directors who have worked closely with Putin in the past on other documentaries, in particular, about Crimea’s “coming home” in 2014.  .  It is now available on youtube.

Both documentaries have in common an oral history aspect. They combine not only archival footage going back to the 1990s but also present new interviews with surviving participants in the events of that period, including heads of state like Kazakhstan’s now retired president Nazarbayev, as well as senior Russian military and statesmen.

 In what follows, I will draw on my impressions from this second film and put them in the broader context of the current informational atmosphere in Russia which is marked by greater frankness about the errors committed in the past by Presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin and by a more accusatory tone about the role of the United States and its Western allies in the destruction of the Russian economy and subversion of its political unity during the 1990s.  We are reminded of the poorly conceived and implemented economic reforms under Gorbachev that left store shelves bare. But that was only the first step on the country’s descent into hell. The newly applied fine touches in the documentary film to the broad canvas of the impoverishment and destitution of the Russian people that we have known for years show that even rear admirals and Vladimir Vladimirovich himself were compelled to sit behind the wheel as gypsy taxi drivers to keep their heads above water financially at the start of the transition to the market economy, while the country’s top scientific talent queued before the American embassy to get migration visas and a new future outside Russia, taking with them much of the cutting edge proprietary research they had done at government expense.

The film “Russia, Its Most Recent History” fine tunes the long-existing attacks on former Soviet President Gorbachev for unforgivable naiveté in his dealings with the United States and its Western allies as the Cold War wound down. The Red Army was withdrawn from East Germany and from the Warsaw Pact countries, but Gorbachev did not consider reserving at least one base in each of these countries to ensure Russian security interests were respected, nor did he demand appropriate financial compensation for the withdrawal to provide housing and necessities to the troops arriving back in Russia. We are told that all of this was achievable had Gorbachev done his job properly, defended Russia’s legitimate interests and not been content to bask in the warm reception he enjoyed in Western capitals and media. Nor did Gorbachev do anything to secure the civil rights of the large Russian minority populations of the Baltic States as they entered upon withdrawal from the Union when the West would surely have agreed.  

This sober and accurate critique of decision-making by the widely discredited Gorbachev is now matched by equally devastating criticism of Yeltsin for negotiating terms of the break-up of the USSR by which Russia did not use its leverage with the other Union republics. We are told that Yeltsin was drunk during much of the Belovezha meeting. If only he had kept a cool head, he could have demanded of Ukrainian president Kravchuk the cession of Crimea back to the Russian Federation. But his only interest was to achieve the dissolution as quickly as possible, and so to take over state power from Gorbachev, who would face a fait accompli and have to leave office.

 The film suggests that it was Yeltsin’s lust for power that drove the dissolution, which was not necessary for implementation of the political and economic reforms that he stood for. That judgment is surely a step too far in this revisionist account.  The interview with Nazarbayev sets out the grievances of the leaders of the Central Asian republics that they were excluded from Belovezha, that it was the three Slavic republics who alone decided the fate of the Union.  Of course, that was the case: it was common knowledge that the Central Asian republics would be the strongest foes of any democratization and market reform of the Union and so their signatures on the dissolution papers were not sought.

The exposé and open denunciation of Yeltsin from the Kremlin itself is new in Russian public space. We must remember that loyalty to the man who installed him as president at the close of 1999 has long been an inviolable postulate of the Putin administration. It was left to others, like the film director and television host Nikita Mikhalkov to show the treachery of the Fifth Column liberals who were brought into government in the 1990s and protected by Boris Nikolaevich.

The film “Russia, Its Most Recent History” is Putin-centric.  It features a lot of footage of Putin out and about, speaking to the people when he was head of the FSB, conferring with the military during the Chechen wars.  It also draws on the latest interviews with Putin to put past and present in focus. This most recent Putin is assertive and very confident of Russia’s ability to stand up to all challenges from the West based on its leading position in weapons systems and the patriotic pride of troops and people. It is not from nowhere that the Kremlin was quoted today as warning NATO that “there will be consequences” if it ignores Russia’s demands and continues its eastward expansion, and that these consequences will weaken Western security.

The film jumps back and forth in time during the 1990s to make its basic points about how under Yeltsin Russia’s sovereignty was compromised, how with the intervention of Western sponsored NGOs the collapse of the Russian Federation itself was being fomented.  I do not deny that these elements all were present in that decade, but the decade itself was not uniform in the various parameters of economic performance and pauperization of the population, on one hand, or loss of an independent foreign policy on the other hand.  There were turning points that we must not ignore.

For the economy, the free fall collapse of GDP, unpaid salaries and pensions, total destitution and runaway inflation lasted until 1995-1996, when a certain stabilization took effect. In fact during the 1990s the middle classes rose and fell several times, when bank failures and state default wiped out savings, but the decade ended on a high note set during the brief but effective premiership of Yevgeny Primakov. Similarly, Russian foreign policy rose from the total disarray and submission to Washington under Andrei Kozyrev, to resumption of the pursuit of national interests under the same Primakov two years previous when he replaced Kozyrev as foreign minister in 1996. Russia and the West parted ways during the NATO assault on Yugoslavia and there was no looking back.  All of these distinctions are ignored in the latest Russian documentaries that have a propagandistic rather than historical interest guiding them, even if they make valid points about Russia’s exploitation by cunning Western statesmen in the 1990s.

Finally, in closing I draw attention to a couple of recent noteworthy public positions taken by President Putin with respect to the Fifth Column operating in the country, even if was not named as such.  First there was the remarkable public exchange this past week with film maker Alexander Sokurov during the on-line session of the Human Rights Council. Sokurov had been arguing in favor of letting go those republics of the Russian Federation which want out.  Putin at length denounced such positions as ignorant, founded on a misreading of the popular will in such places as Dagestan and Chechnya, and having as a practical consequence to turn the Russian Federation into Yugoslavia during its descent into civil war. It is worth noting that Sokurov has long been promoted among the liberal intelligentsia of Petersburg by Hermitage Museum director Mikhail Piotrovsky. It will be interesting to see whether the public belittlement of Sokurov will move his patron and friend any closer to the exit door.

In the past week Vladimir Putin also leveled an oblique criticism at Russia’s liberal protesters against the Foreign Agent registration law. Their cause has been openly led by this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, Dmitry Muratov, editor in chief of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Muratov was in Oslo delivering his acceptance speech and so was getting a lot of attention in Moscow.

Putin chose to make the point that the country must be vigilant against those receiving funds from abroad who are wittingly or otherwise serving foreign interests to the detriment of Russia.  In this spirit, he remarked that in the 1990s the government was filled with foreigners working for the CIA, and he made reference to one egregious case: two Americans who were close assistants of Anatoly Chubais in his work at the head of the privatization program. Said Putin, they were on the CIA payroll and were later found by U.S. authorities to have violated their contract and enriched themselves during their stay in Russia, causing damages of $34 million to the U.S. government. Putin went on to say that their time in Russia was so personally profitable that they could pay an enormous fine without difficulty.

The telling of this story is quite extraordinary considering President Putin’s attachment to the word “аккуратно” – cautious, prudent – to describe the proper conduct of state affairs. The allegations about Chubais’s assistants being on the CIA payroll were first made by Vladimir Vladimirovich in 2013.  They were unfounded then and are unfounded today.  This is not to say that the USAID contractors involved, Harvard economist Andrei Schleifer and legal expert Jonathan Hay, were not guilty of violating the conflict of interests terms of the overarching USAID contract with the university. After all, Schleifer did pay $2 million in fines to settle his case with the U.S. Government, while Harvard itself paid $32 million to end prosecution. I mention this case in passing in my recently published Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s to make the point that our Western notions of corrupt Russia get only half the story right:   alongside my narrative about Russian scoundrels whom I met and dealt with on my employers’ behalf, there were so many deeply corrupt Americans, Swiss and others who came to Russia in the 1990s and with whom I met socially in Moscow. Read the book!

Back in 2013 when Putin first mentioned the Schleifer case without naming him, and now again, knowledgeable commentators say they have no reason to believe that the CIA was in any way involved. And I say that circumstantial evidence rules conclusively against any CIA involvement: had that been the case, the charges against Schleifer, Hay and Harvard would have been quietly dropped, just as finally happened in the U.S. prosecution of businessman James Giffen, in his “Kazakhgate” trial over bribes to Nazarbayev in 2010 when the CIA refused to divulge its relationship with him.  James Giffen also figures in my Memoirs from the 1990s as a buccaneer and for a time exceptionally powerful figure in East-West trade.

With this cavil, I cede the point that Russia in the 1990s was overrun by CIA employees and other foreign agents. On the back cover of my Memoirs, Volume II, you will find my remark that in 1998 I quit as acting director of the Moscow office of a leading American NGO because I was persuaded that staff in the Washington headquarters were getting second paychecks from the Agency.  Inside the book I explain that the office had become a nest for CIA personnel: there were simply too many strange “visitors” passing through on their way to the Caucasus and other peripheral Russian territories where trouble was brewing.  That particular NGO was the long time administrator of US-Soviet academic exchanges. During my brief tenure as office director it was also responsible for a number of USAID funded assistance programs. On close inspection as an insider, I concluded that many of these programs in support of civil society or a free press seemed inappropriate for sponsorship by outsiders, least of all by the U.S. Government given the decades long adversarial if not hostile relations with Russia.

In general, the recent attention to the 1990s in Russian media breaks a long period of relative silence. The 1990s were for the vast majority of Russians a very painful experience which they would rather forget.  That obviously is changing.  In February I will be interviewed on local radio in St Petersburg by the host of a weekly broadcast entitled “The History Club.”  He tells me that there is growing interest now in the ‘90s.  We shall see. ©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

It is now the morning after the widely anticipated video conference tête-à-tête between U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and it is time to put our Kremlinology skills to work. By that I mean to say there is very little today in the public domain to provide clear answers to what may have been achieved, or to put it more brashly, who won the match of wills. We must rely on small hints that we can tweak out from mainstream media, which has, of course, been hand fed by Washington.

First, reading The New York Times and the Financial Times today we see that the bluster coming from Washington in the run-up to the contest has been deflated and something closer to the reality of U.S. leverage over Russia or lack of it is coming through.  I will not go beyond these two leading newspapers of the USA and the United Kingdom, because a brief perusal of Continental papers like Le Soir in Belgium, Le Figaro in France and the Frankfurter Allgemeine in Germany shows that coverage of the Biden-Putin summit is negligible. That relative disinterest in and of itself also counts as deflating the inflammatory Biden Administration bluster which came before.

As regards my two mainstream flagships, I note the subtle change in numbers.  A couple of weeks ago, I read that the Russians had 250,000 troops moved south to the Ukrainian border region. A week ago, it appeared there were 150,000 but many more could be brought in.  Today I read that the Russians have 70,000 troops standing by in the region adjoining the border with Ukraine.

Yesterday we read that the US had agreed with its European allies on a set of crippling economic sanctions to impose on Russia if it invaded Ukraine.  Today’s NYT tells us that a Russian invasion “could end Russia’s hopes of completing the Nord Stream II pipeline to Europe.”  But that has been at the top of the U.S. agenda for the last five years or more, and it is still placed in the conditional tense.  The message is even more diluted in the FT this morning: “The U.S. is putting pressure on Germany to block Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline as part of a package of sanctions that would be implemented in the event of Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.”

There is hardly mention of the cut-off from SWIFT and halt to convertibility of the ruble into pounds, euros and dollars which had been in the threat list given to the press by Russia-hater in residence at the State Department, Victoria Nuland.  Is it any wonder, then, that the Russian stock market this morning did not react at all to US threats of kicking Russia out of the world financial system and was in positive territory at the open.

From the brief highlights of the meeting released to the media by the Kremlin, we learn that both presidents expressed satisfaction with the meetings of their delegations over cyber security which followed from their face to face summit in Geneva in June.  We also are told that some small progress was made addressing the reduction of the respective diplomatic presence in both countries to crippling levels: as a first step, the Americans are granting the Russians access to the diplomatic properties that were seized at the end of the Obama presidency and start of the Trump presidency in violation of international law. In the context of a virtual meeting set up in great haste for the ostensible purpose of bullying Russia into abandoning its alleged plans to invade Ukraine in the coming two months, these little signs of “business back to normal” put in question the depth of the crisis being addressed.

Finally, I note that today Biden has reversed course on his coziness with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  Before the video summit, Zelensky had been led to believe that he would hear from the American president immediately afterwards.  Now, in what is clearly a humiliating put-down, Zelensky has been told to await a call from Biden on Thursday, that is after the American President has conferred with his West European allies.

However tentative all the above remarks may be, it is a safe guess that there will now be a war between Russia and Ukraine only if Kiev launches a military assault on the Russian backed rebel provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk.  It is now crystal clear that no Western military aid will come to save the necks of the Ukrainians when the Russians move in, as they will definitely do to save their Donbas brethren, many of whom are Russian Federation passport holders.  And assuming that Zelensky has any sense of self-preservation and desire to enjoy the millions he has surely amassed during  his brief time in office,  he would likely be on the first private jet out to Israel or wherever, should his generals march on Donbas under instructions from the Right Sector and neo-Nazi radicals who have never been properly stripped of power.

That being said, the avoidance of war tomorrow does not mean the problem of U.S.-Ukraine-Russian relations has been solved in any way.  Vladimir Putin is not one to kick the can down the road. It will be solved on his watch before 2024. But having shouted “wolf” once, as it did in the days leading up to this summit, Washington will be ever less able to rally Europe to its side in the future over the supposed Russian menace.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

Today the “international community” is waiting impatiently for the start of the Biden-Putin video conference which is scheduled to begin at 18.00 Moscow time, 10.00 AM Washington time. While the proceedings will be closed to the public, the opening salutations will be aired and much will be made by our pundits of the body language of the two leaders. Every minute that the two men spend together will be weighed by our television and press analysts for what that says about the substance of the talks. Then there will be the press conferences of the two presidents immediately after the video conference, providing still more of a feast for the journalists and commentators.

In the event we are awaiting, all attention will be directed to one man, Vladimir Putin, to see if he flinches before the threats of dire economic sanctions that Biden has prepared with the clear backing of Congressional hawks and with alleged backing of the European allies should the Russians do what Washington says they are planning, namely invade Ukraine.. The sanctions list that has been released to the public includes cut-off from the international settlements body SWIFT and halting the convertibility of the ruble into dollars, euros or pounds. Such measures would be unprecedented in the post-Cold War period and, if the Russians had not long rehearsed their own devastating response for the West, would normally constitute a casus belli.

 In short, Biden and his associates are surely congratulating themselves on the way they have set the mousetrap for Putin, who will be damned if he does invade Ukraine and damned if he doesn’t when the Kiev forces retake the Donbass. Should Putin choose not to invade, for whatever reason, with or without a Ukrainian march on Donbass, then Biden can claim that his standing up to the Autocrat worked, and he will  potentially raise his domestic standing with the American electorate as defender of the U.S.-led world order. This, by the way, is one scenario which I failed to identify in my earlier writings on the U.S –Russian confrontation over Ukraine.  How well a zero sum scenario will actually play with the Republicans and Democratic hawks remains to be seen.

Vladimir Putin will come to the conference in a self-confident mood.  His blitz trip down to India yesterday and talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi fully validated Russian foreign policy at the global level. Their meeting ended in re-confirmation of the special strategic relationship that India and Russia have enjoyed now for decades, which has survived the pressures arising from the fast development of an informal but deep Russian alliance with China, India’s greatest adversary of the moment. Indeed, Modi is proceeding with implementation of the S-400 contract with Russia in the face of threatened sanctions from ….the USA, which has been actively courting India from the time of the Trump administration.

Moreover, notwithstanding Putin’s general caution in exercising the country’s military might, no one should doubt for a moment his choice when faced with what the Russian leadership and political classes perceive as an existential threat from U.S. and NATO forces in Ukraine. Kiev’s retaking Donbass with U.S. help would amount to such a threat.

And we should keep in mind that the kind of sanctions now being mentioned by the Americans have been discussed for several years. Together with China, Russia has prepared work-around solutions to manage its affairs whatever sanctions are thrown up by Washington.

Of course, there is the real question of whether the cut-off from SWIFT and scuttling of ruble convertibility in their currencies is truly enforceable on the European allies, whatever Biden may have wanted to hear from them in the run-up to today’s video conference.

If, as a direct consequence, the Russians cannot be paid for their gas deliveries to Europe, which amount to 40% of total European imports, 30% of actual consumption today ,then they will have contractual basis for stopping those deliveries.  It is inconceivable that even the American vassals who run Europe can withstand the rebellion of business and general public domestically when the lights go out just to please Mr. Biden and play America’s political games. Now, of all times, as winter is setting in and gas reserves on European territory are low!

Reporting in the Financial Times and other major media on the response of NATO allies to the salesman’s work of Mr. Blinken and the Pentagon generals over the past couple of weeks has avoided these fundamental questions. We hear only that the Europeans, including Germany, were finally persuaded by American intelligence that the Russians are preparing for an invasion of Ukraine.  We have not heard how these countries will likely respond to such an invasion if it takes place. Will they not investigate under what conditions it takes place, that is to say, who actually starts the war, Ukraine by overrunning  Donbass or Russia by unprovoked aggression. Under a similar scenario in Georgia in 2008, Europe did its own investigation on the ground to assess responsibility, led by then French President Nicolas Sarkozy. He came back with the conviction that the Georgians were to blame and no sanctions on Russia followed.

Finally, no survey of the dynamics of a European follow-through on the sanctions threat can avoid dealing with the question of how the new German government will respond.  The three party coalition formed by SPD leader Olaf Scholz was assembled over the heads of the German electorate, like the other undemocratic  coalitions that rule much of Continental Europe today. Formulation of policies, programs and distribution of ministerial portfolios among the three parties was the result of horse-trading between them. The result is quite fragile if put to the test, and imposition of draconian sanctions on Russia would be just such a test.  It is inconceivable that the business friendly Free Democrats will support Scholz if one of his first acts in power would be to destroy the German economy by depriving industry of gas supplies and leaving the general population to spend their pending lockdown freezing in unheated  homes.

So, who is left for Mr. Biden to catch in his mousetrap?  One person only:  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Will he be sufficiently stupid to spring the trap on himself, possibly fatally, by risking a war with Russia that everyone knows he cannot win if Mr. Putin does not hold back. Even this B Grade actor cannot be that dumb.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

In my recent online lecture to the Prince George Golitsyn Memorial Library in St Petersburg presenting my newly published book Russia in the Turbulent 1990s, I remarked that one of my main conclusions from living in Russia at that time of economic collapse and generalized misery for the population was that the Performing Arts remained at top international levels despite it all and even underwent a renaissance.  I noted that High Culture was clearly a defining element of modern day Russia, and went on to say that today, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic calamity this remains true: the cultural life in Russia’s capitals is far richer than in any European state or than in North America.  This very point was hammered home two days ago when I received an email from the Mariinsky Theater setting out its program of events on its three stages of downtown Petersburg over the coming six weeks of the holiday season.

Having spent a couple of weeks in Petersburg at the end of October – start of November, and having attended evenings of ballet at the Mariinsky and at another theater hosting the Diaghilev Festival of dance, I know full well that these establishments were securing the welfare of visitors, perfomers and staff by requiring QR codes from all ticket holders and requiring the wearing of masks at all times once inside.

 I also know that  the current Wave 4 of Covid-19 has hit Russia hard, in particular, its most densely populated cities, St Petersburg and Moscow.  If we compare infection rates per 100,000 population, hospitalizations, ICU units occupied and the like, the situation in Petersburg over the past several weeks to present has been roughly similar to what we have been experiencing in Brussels.  The big difference has been in “outcomes”: mortality is substantially higher in Russia due to the still low rate of vaccination.  Only in the past few days, under very great pressure of media and imposition of what is effectively a lockdown on unvaccinated seniors, has there been a rush to vaccination centers. As of today, the rate of vaccination in Petersburg among adults approaches 55%, roughly comparable to that in Brussels, if way below the levels in Flanders and Wallonia.

Meanwhile, the way institutions of Culture are being shabbily treated in Belgium speaks of cowardice of our elected officials and pandering to prejudices of the N-VA leadership, if I may be allowed to point fingers.  The decisions reached on Friday at the latest session of the Consultative Committee of the federal government meeting with the leaders of the Kingdom’s three Regions, were a disgrace as they pertain to the cultural establishment.  Theaters were placed under a strict limit of two hundred ticket holders even given the requirement of masks and Covid Safety Passes, meaning proof of full vaccination or recovery from the virus. Such limits can only aggravate the already dire financial situation of these houses after 18 months of negligible revenue.

To their credit, the Directors of the Royal Theater La Monnaie, of the Bozar complex which includes concert halls, of the National Theater of Wallonia-Brussels and of the Royal Flemish Theater have issued an Open Letter to the public flatly rejecting the illogic of the latest government restrictions. I refer the reader to the opera house website to read the details of the measures these establishments have put in place to assure public safety and prevent spread of infections in keeping with the recommendations of Science: https://www.lamonnaie.be/fr/mmm-online/2234-les-maisons-de-la-culture-plaident-pour-une-vision-a-long-terme.  Moreover, you do not have to be a genius to follow their argument that imposition of a limit of 200 persons means half of the normal occupancy for one hall while it means one-sixth of occupancy for another hall; in other words, the one size fits all approach of this Government is patent nonsense.

I say “bravo” to Peter de Caluwe at Monnaie and to his colleagues for their brave stand.  May they prevail over the policy of malicious disregard for the Performing Arts being pressed on the federal government by the Minister President of one region only, Flanders.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021