Russia agrees to provide coal and electricity for the Ukraine

Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told TASS news that Russia has a new deal with the Ukraine to provide coal and electricity for the Ukraine. The conflict in the east has cut off coal supplies for plants in the rest of the Ukraine.

Peskov claimed that Putin had agreed to the deal as a goodwill gesture and said: "Putin made a decision to start these supplies due to the critical situation with energy supplies and despite a lack of prepayment." The agreement will see Russia supply the Ukraine with half a million tonnes of coal each month according to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak. If further agreement is reached it will provide another half million. At present, Ukraine has only 1.5 million tonnes of coal in reserve whereas normally winter stocks reach 4 to 5 million tonnes. 

While normally Ukraine is self-sufficient in providing its electricity, fighting in the coal producing regions of the east has cut off coal supplies to the thermal generating stations. These provide almost 40 percent of Ukraine's electrical power. Kozak also said that he hoped the agreement would resolve problems involving Ukrainian supply of energy to the Crimea. Ukraine blocked all air and bus travel to the Crimea on Friday. The Crimean customs service said that automobile traffic was also stopped at two of three crossings but had resumed by the afternoon. A Ukrainian security official said the measures were temporary. A spokesperson for Ukrainian security Col. Andriy Lysenko claimed that the suspension resulted because "there is a high likelihood of sabotage groups entering under the guise of local people." There were three recent fatal explosions in the south including one in Odessa and another in Kherson just 60 miles north of Crimea. The disruption of transport is certain to anger residents on both sides of the border as this is the busy holiday season. 

On a more positive note, eastern rebels freed another four prisoners including three soldiers after the initial swap of 146 for 222 people held by the Ukraine government. The latest release was in Luhansk

Anti-Putin Protests in Moscow

Russians by the thousand joined hands to form a ring in the centre of Moscow. They were protesting Putin's probable return as president after next week's election.

Protesters wore white ribbons that symbolize opposition to Putin. These are the largest demonstrations since Putin's rise to power over a decade ago.

The protesters demand greater democracy and openness in the Russian system. They want corruption cleared up as well and the end of one man rule.

Nikolai Chekalin a scientist said:"I don't know that there will be any result (from the protest) but I've come to show the government that there are many of us and that there are many people together,"I would like transparency, an honest court and conditions for business to develop."

Protesters shouted "Russia without Putin"and many cars honked their horns in support. Protests began after allegations of fraud in the December elections. Putin is depending more on rural and working class support as his popularity with the young and upper middle class declines. However it seems that he still has enough support to win the presidency again. For more see this article.

Putin and Iran

This is from Yglesias' website. I don't know where Yglesias has been lately but the justification for attacking Iran may not have anything to do with Iran building nuclear weapons but with Iran helping insurgents in Iraq through the revolutionary guards. Every day you will see more accusatory articles in a steady drumbeat to convince the US public that Iran is behind much of the insurgency--when in fact the Saudis probably provide just as much help but to Sunni insurgents.

Putin and Iran
16 Oct 2007 12:22 pm

Vladimir Putin's warnings against military action against Iran deserve to be taken very seriously. Since we're not contemplating actually conquering Iran and trying to occupy its territory, people need to understand that the post-strike diplomatic environment is going to be much more important to the future of the Iranian nuclear program than is any damage that bombing Iran with our on-the-table options might or might not do. If Russia decides to just send some scientists with schematics and materiel over to Iran and show them how to build a nuclear bomb, then -- bam -- nuclear bomb.

Conversely, at the moment not only is Iran under some diplomatic pressure to stop short of weaponizing, many countries around the world are taking direct measures to prevent the Iranians from just easily going and buying the stuff they need. Insofar as an unprovoked American military attack convinces other countries that the real dangerous lunatics live in DC rather than Teheran, countries around the world could cut back on their vigilance and make it much easier for an Iranian nuclear program to succeed.

The point is that when people talking about the Iranians being such-and-such time period away, or some bombing effort taking them back x number of years, they're talking as if progress toward a nuclear weapon proceeds at a constant pace. In practice, one of the factors that determines how quickly you can proceed is the international context. Right now, things are pretty tricky for Iranian nuclear scientists. Military action that doesn't reflect a firm, UN-backed consensus grounded in some reasonable interpretation of international law (military action that does reflect such a consensus seems very, very unlikely but in principle it could happen) could dramatically alter that.

Berezovsky plots another Russian "revolution"

What he really wants is another counter-revolution. When he and the robber Barons were taking control of Soviet public assets for their own aggrandisement he was quite happy with the counter revolution. Now he has fallen out with Putin who has thrown the odd tycoon in jail, Berezovsky wants the good times back.
When an individual suggests that he will use force to overthrow a government surely that is a form of terrorism these days. Only if a country does it is it liberation or self-defence and even then it must be the right country such as the US.

'I am plotting a new Russian revolution'


London exile Berezovsky says force necessary to bring down President Putin



Ian Cobain, Matthew Taylor and Luke Harding in Moscow
Friday April 13, 2007
The Guardian


Boris Berezovsky pictured in his London office. Photograph: Chris Young/PA



The Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky has told the Guardian he is plotting the violent overthrow of President Putin from his base in Britain after forging close contacts with members of Russia's ruling elite.
In comments which appear calculated to enrage the Kremlin, and which will further inflame relations between London and Moscow, the multimillionaire claimed he was already bankrolling people close to the president who are conspiring to mount a palace coup.


"We need to use force to change this regime," he said. "It isn't possible to change this regime through democratic means. There can be no change without force, pressure." Asked if he was effectively fomenting a revolution, he said: "You are absolutely correct."
Although Mr Berezovsky, with an estimated fortune of £850m, may have the means to finance such a plot, and although he enjoyed enormous political influence in Russia before being forced into exile, he said he could not provide details to back up his claims because the information was too sensitive.

Last night the Kremlin denounced Mr Berezovsky's comments as a criminal offence which it believed should undermine his refugee status in the UK.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's chief spokesman, said: "In accordance with our legislation [his remarks are] being treated as a crime. It will cause some questions from the British authorities to Mr Berezovsky. We want to believe that official London will never grant asylum to someone who wants to use force to change the regime in Russia."

It will not be the first time the British government has faced accusations from the Kremlin that it is providing a safe haven for Mr Berezovsky. When he told a Moscow radio station last year that he wanted to see Mr Putin overthrown by force, Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, told the Commons that "advocating the violent overthrow of a sovereign state is unacceptable" and warned the tycoon he could be stripped of his refugee status.

Russian authorities subsequently sent an extradition request to London. That failed, however, when a district judge ruled Mr Berezovsky could not be extradited as long as he has asylum status.

In an interview with the Guardian, however, Mr Berezovsky goes much further than before, claiming to be in close contact with members of Russia's political elite who, he says, share his view that Mr Putin is damaging Russia by rolling back democratic reforms, smothering opposition, centralising power and flouting the country's constitution.

"There is no chance of regime change through democratic elections," he says. "If one part of the political elite disagrees with another part of the political elite - that is the only way in Russia to change the regime. I try to move that."

While declining to describe these contacts - and alleging that they would be murdered if they were identified - he maintained that he was offering his "experience and ideology" to members of the country's political elite, as well as "my understanding of how it could be done". He added: "There are also practical steps which I am doing now, and mostly it is financial."

Mr Berezovsky said he was unconcerned by any threat to strip him of his refugee status. "Straw wasn't in a position to take that decision. A judge in court said it wasn't in the jurisdiction of Straw."

He added that there was even less chance of such a decision being taken following the polonium-210 poisoning last November of his former employee, Alexander Litvinenko. "Today the reality is different because of the Litvinenko case."

Mr Berezovsky, 61, a former mathematician, turned to business during the Yeltsin years and made his fortune by capturing state assets at knockdown prices during Russia's rush towards privatisation.

Although he played a key role in ensuring Mr Putin's victory in the 2000 presidential elections, the two men fell out as the newly elected leader successfully wrested control of Russia back from the so-called oligarchy, the small group of tycoons who had come to dominate the country's economy.

A few months after the election Mr Berezovsky fled Russia, and applied successfully for asylum in the UK after Mr Litvinenko, an officer with the KGB's successor, the FSB, came forward to say he had been ordered to murder the tycoon.

Mr Berezovsky changed his name to Platon Elenin, Platon being the name of a character in a Russian film based loosely upon his life. He was subsequently given a British passport in this name.

As well as claiming to be financing and encouraging coup plotters in Moscow, Mr Berezovsky said he had dedicated much of the last six years to "trying to destroy the positive image of Putin" that many in the west held, portraying him whenever possible as a dangerously anti-democratic figure. He said he had also opposed the Russian president through Kommersant, the influential Russian newspaper which he controlled until last year.

Last month Mr Berezovsky was questioned by two detectives from the Russian prosecutor general's office who were in London to investigate the death of Mr Litvinenko. He has denied claims that he refused to answer many of their questions.

Last night the Kremlin said Russian authorities might want to question him again in the light of his interview with the Guardian. "I now believe our prosecutor general's office has got lots of questions for Mr Berezovsky," said Mr Peskov. He added: "His words are very interesting. This is a very sensitive issue."

The Foreign Office said it had nothing to add to Mr Straw's comments of last year.

The Cold War Starts Again?

Sometimes I think that the BBC is FOX news the other side of the pond. It is hardly surprising that Putin has begun to react to US and NATO aggressive policy that has surrounded Russia by bases in former satellite countries and also allowed them to join NATO. Imagine if Russia had bases with missiles etc. in Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and St. Pierre and Miquelon! It is OK for NATO to put missiles near Russian borders but not OK for Russia to provide Iran air defences against an attack by the US or US plus allies.


Putin's speech: Back to cold war?
By Rob Watson
BBC defence and security correspondent, Munich



Mr Putin said the US "has overstepped its borders"
The Munich security conference was born in the 1960s - the height of the Cold War. Forty years on, there been talk of a new chill.

Given the tone and content of Russian President Vladimir Putin's address to the gathered defence ministers, parliamentarians and pundits, it is not, perhaps, hard to see why.

Warming quickly to his task after only the briefest of greetings, President Putin accused the US of establishing, or trying to establish, a "uni-polar" world.

"What is a uni-polar world? No matter how we beautify this term, it means one single centre of power, one single centre of force and one single master," he said.

'Formula for disaster'

President Putin continued in a similar vein for some time.

In today's multi-polar world, there is no place for needless confrontation

US Senator John McCain

"The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres - economic, political and humanitarian, and has imposed itself on other states," he said.

It was a formula that, he said, had led to disaster: "Local and regional wars did not get fewer, the number of people who died did not get less but increased. We see no kind of restraint - a hyper-inflated use of force."

The US has gone "from one conflict to another without achieving a fully-fledged solution to any of them", Mr Putin said.

With the new US Defence Secretary Robert Gates and several US congressmen sitting in the audience, he called for the reconsideration of the whole existing architecture of global security.

'Disappointing' speech

But he did not win over his audience.

Several delegates did not like his rather brusque brushing off of questions about Russia's own commitment to democracy and his defence of Moscow's decision to sell an air-defence system to Iran.

Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer described President Putin's speech as "disappointing and not helpful". And there was similar reaction from the president of Estonia and others.

But it was left to US Republican senator and presidential hopeful John McCain to lead the retort.

Today's world, he said sternly, was not uni-polar, adding that it was an autocratic Russia that needed to change its behaviour.

"Moscow must understand that it cannot enjoy a genuine partnership with the West so long as its actions at home and abroad conflict so fundamentally with the core values of Euro-Atlantic democracies," he said.

"In today's multi-polar world, there is no place for needless confrontation, and I would hope that Russian leaders understand this truth," Senator McCain said.

Spotlight on Moscow

Afterwards in the corridors there were dark mutterings by some about a new Cold War.

Others were less gloomy, dismissing President Putin's performance as one of Russia's periodic bouts of letting off steam at its diminished world status.

But it has made an impression.

For the last few years, as one observer suggested, it was the former US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who was the man everybody loved to hate at this conference.

President Putin's performance has single-handedly switched the spotlight from the US to Russia.

Putin lashes out at West

The Litvinenko affair seems to have died down. Many of the western media reports seem to portray Putin as behind the killing. Litvinenko's criticism of Putin is emphasized and not his connections with Berezovsky, Chechen rebels, and smuggling activities.
It is not surprising that Putin is concerned about the Missile Defence systems being put in place in former Soviet Satellites. Not surprisingly this has sparked an arms and technology race to defeat the system.


Putin lashes out at West :: latest

President Vladimir Putin said today that Russia faces unfair criticism and needless military threats from the West, lashing out in an annual news conference at US plans for missile defence sites in former Soviet satellite states and at suspicions that Moscow is wielding its energy wealth for political purposes.

Putin held forth on a broad range of issues at the more than three-and-a-half-hour marathon, but he left two key questions unanswered: whom he wants to succeed him and who he believes is behind the shocking slayings of Kremlin critics that have damaged his reputation and will cloud his legacy after he steps down.

Putin presented a wide overview of Russia seven years after he was handed its helm: economically robust but plagued by an income divide, uneasy about the intentions of the US in Europe and insistent on its reliability as a major energy supplier.

Russia’s relations with the West are a perennial topic at the news conference, which gives foreign journalists a rare chance to directly ask Putin questions, and gives Putin a chance to portray Russia, as he often does, as a country under attack from ill-wishers abroad.

He spoke harshly against the possible deployment of elements of an American missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, scoffing at US claims that they would be aimed at intercepting possible missile attacks from Iran and saying Russia would take unspecified retaliatory measures.

“We consider such claims unfounded, and, naturally, that directly concerns us and will cause a relevant reaction,” he said, suggesting Russia will continue to develop weapons that would iron out what Russian military officials have said would be a strategic imbalance.

He said that while missile defence systems under development will only be capable of tackling ballistic missiles, Russia is developing new weapons that will be capable of changing the altitude and direction of their flights on their way to targets.

“Missile defence systems are helpless against that,” Putin said.

In the wake of energy price disputes with Belarus that interrupted Russian oil supplies to Europe this winter and deepened Western concerns about Russia’s reliability as an energy supplier, Putin rejected suggestions that the country is using energy as a political weapon.

“The thesis is being thrust on us all the time that Russia is using its old and new economic efforts to attain foreign policy goals. It is not so,” Putin said, adding that journalists who advanced such ideas were “ill-wishers”.

Also seeking to harm Russia, he said, are “oligarchs who have fled” Russia to avoid prosecution and live in Western Europe or the Middle East, clear references to bitter Kremlin critics including Boris Berezovsky in Britain and Leonid Nevzlin in Israel.

Putin, however, stopped short of suggesting, as Russian prosecutors, pro-Kremlin lawmakers and state-run media have done, that Berezovsky or Nevzlin could have been behind the fatal poisoning of former security agent Alexander Litvinenko.




He stressed that only investigators and courts could determine who was behind the killings last year of Litvinenko and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and suggested he did not subscribe to theories linking the slayings.

“I don’t very much believe in the conspiracy theory and, honestly speaking, it doesn’t bother me very much,” Putin said.

The Kremlin has denied Litvinenko’s deathbed accusation that Putin was behind his slaying, and Putin reiterated his assertion that Russian authorities would have no reason to kill him, portraying him as a small fry who had no access to secrets during his service.

The cool words toward the West were peppered amid questions that focussed mainly on domestic matters.

Always one of Russia’s main media events, this year’s news conference set new records for its length, three hours and 32 minutes, six minutes longer than last year, and the number of journalists accredited: 1,232.

Not all of them got to ask questions, but Putin fielded an array of queries on issues spanning the spectrum from Iran’s nuclear programme to water levels in a Russian reservoir to what he does to brighten up a bad mood (he talks to his dog, Connie, who “gives good advice”, or reads Omar Khayyam poems from a book his wife, Lyudmila, gave him: “I recommend it.”).

Those personal details, along with touches like a flirtatious exchange with a young reporter from Murmansk and a joke about Soviet-era drinking habits, are part of his annual effort to portray himself a regular guy on top of being a competent, caring president in control of a resurgent country with a growing economy and global clout.

Putin hailed Russia’s economic growth but added that maintaining the pace and bridging the yawning gap between rich and poor will be a key task for his successor and for the government after his term is up.

Despite being pestered repeatedly, he refused to say who that might be.

With the end of Putin’s second term approaching and the March 2008 election drawing closer, the Kremlin is widely believed to be grooming two Putin proteges as possible successors: First Deputy Prime Minster Dmitry Medvedev and Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov.

Open support from the highly popular Putin for one man would virtually ensure his election.

“There will not be a successor. There will be candidates for the presidency,” Putin said, adding that the government must ensure a democratic campaign.

“I reserve the right to express my preference,” he said, but added that he would not do so until closer to the vote.

He repeated his indication that he opposes changing the constitution to let him stay in power after 2008, responding to a question about his plans by saying: “Why are you shoving me out ahead of time? I’ll leave on my own.”