Russia: Other Points of View

ISLAM, ISLAMISM AND POLITICS IN EURASIA REPORT No. 17, June 7, 2010

by Gordon Hahn

Monterey Institute for International Studies

CONTENTS

• CE MILITARY AMIR AND INGUSHETIA VILAIYAT AMIR ‘MAGAS’ CAPTURED
• CAUCASUS EMIRATE (CE) TERRORISM, MAY 2010
• THREE SUICIDE BOMBINGS INTERDICTED IN MAY 2010
• WAS DAGESTAN VILAIYAT’S QADI THE KIZLYAR SUICIDE BOMBER?
• THE MUFTI YEVTEEV CONTROVERSY
• RADICALIZATION AMONG BASHKIR YOUTH REPORTED
• AUCASUS EMIRATE’S ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE AND LEADERSHIP, AS OF MAY 2010 (PART 3 – INGUSHETIA AND DAGESTAN)
• ANNOUNCEMENT: NEW NON-PROLIFERATION/TERRORISM STUDIES MASTER OF ARTS DEGREE AND TERRORISM STUDIES CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS

To access the full report, click Download KAVKAZJIHAD_MonTREP_IIPER_17_June2010

RUSSIAN FEDERATION WEEKLY SITREP

by Patrick Armstrong

The “third turn”. If we look back over the last couple of decades, we see that the Western image of post communist Russia has gone through two major turns. In the 90s Russia was a sort of younger brother whom we would mould and usher into the light of democracy. That didn’t work out very well: that’s when Russians began to associate the word “democracy” with theft and poverty. Then Russia became “resurgent” and “assertive”, or, in other words, it stopped declining away. The obsession with containing and thwarting Russia made Russians come to associate “democracy” with geopolitics. I think that a third turn is underway and, for that, I would thank Saakashvili in part. NATO expansion is now somewhat of an embarrassment (as is “democratic” Georgia); the “coloured revolutions” are being revealed as grounded in fantasy; Russia has not collapsed (and how many predictions were there of the inevitable coming failure of the “Putin system”?). Added to which, when, year after year, you’ve cried wolf that Russia is about to take over a neighbour and it doesn’t happen, your credibility turns to credulity. We are beginning a third (and I think much more realistic) phase of seeing Russia as an ordinary power with which one does ordinary business – sometimes rancorous, but business based on facts. The anti-Russia diehards have not gone away, but they are losing their audience. I give a lot of the credit for this change to Paris (and I do think that a key event was Kouchner’s visit to the Ossetian refugees; that experience inoculated Paris against swallowing Tbilisi’s story whole). Berlin has also played an important realistic role as, of course, has Obama’s “reset”. More recently, the Russian reaction to Kaczynski’s death seems to be ending the instinctive Polish opposition to all things Russian. Thus we see the gradual draining away of the core axiom that “Putin wants a new Russian Empire” and the corollary ideological perspective that everything Moscow does is really about that: Russian gas pipelines are really threats; Medvedev’s proposals on security and financial systems are really designed to “split the Western alliance” and the other manifestations of seeing what you believe rather than believing what you see. Here are a few straws in the wind from the past week. (For former examples of Westerners seeing only what they wanted to see in Russia, I recommend Malia’s Russia Under Western Eyes which starts with Voltaire’s imaginary ideally-governed Russia or Foglesong’s The American Mission and the 'Evil Empire' which details a century of American obsessions about a Russia seen as a disappointingly stubborn and backwards twin brother.)

CISCO COMMITS $1B IN MEETING WITH RUSSIAN LEADER

REPRINTS

by Brooke Donald

Associated Press

Cisco Systems Inc. said Wednesday it will invest $1 billion to help foster high-tech innovation in Russia.

Cisco CEO John Chambers made the commitment at a meeting at the company's San Jose headquarters with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who was visiting the computer networking equipment manufacturer as part of a tour of Silicon Valley.

Medvedev has said he wants to bring more high-tech innovation to Russia's oil-dependent economy and create the country's own Silicon Valley outside Moscow.

"We're very honored to commit to your dream," Chambers said as the men signed a memorandum of understanding, with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other guests looking on.

Cisco said it plans to establish a physical presence in the country's new technology center and set up a second global headquarters for its emerging technologies group in Skolkovo. The $1 billion investment will be spread out over 10 years.

RUSSIA'S POLICY 'THAW' AND AN OBAMA TRIUMPH

COMMENTARY

By Gordon M. Hahn

Russian officials are making statements to the effect that Moscow considers any sale of its S-300 air defense systems to Iran to be banned by the new UN sanctions against that country for its nuclear weapons program.  An unidentified Kremlin source traveling with Russian president Dmitrii Medvedev told RIA-Novosti on Friday that the sale of the S-300s do fall under the new sanctions.  Russia’s Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation (FSMTC) also announced: “An analysis of the provisions of the UN Security Council Resolution 1929 adopted on June 9, 2010, conducted by the FSMTC experts, shows that the restrictive measures contained in the document apply to the delivery of S-300 air defense systems to Iran as well.”  State Duma Foerign Affairs Committee Chairman Konstantin Kosachev, who is close to the Kremlin and a member of the ruling United Russia party, reiterated this view.  Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov simply cautioned that it was up to the president to make the final decision to be reflected in a presidential decree. (“UN sanctions mean Russia cannot sell S-300 missiles to Iran – officials,” RIA Novosti, 11 June 2010).

MAINSTREAM MEDIA BACKTRACKING ON TULIP AND COLORED REVOLUTIONS

COMMENTARY

By Gordon Hahn

Recent articles in The Washington Post (WP) and Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reveal a brusque aboutface underway in the mainstream media in assessing the so-called ‘color revolutions’ in the 2000s.  In response to Kyrgyzstan’s narcomafia-sparked interethnic violence, they have responded with a somewhat different take on the Kyrgyz ‘tulip revolution’ after for years touting it as a pro-democracy revolution from below and a rejection of Russia and its authoritarian model in a regional ‘great game’ between the light of Western democracy and the darkness of Russian autocracy and imperialism.  The new take has much in common with my own on Russia: Other Points of View (ROPV) that these ‘revolutions’ had more in common with ‘revolutions from above’ or better intra-elite palace coups supported in a secondary and limited role of elements in society, one narrowly proscribed by elite clans pulling the strings.  These revolutions’ rejection of Russia, in the cases where this was a factor at all, for example, as in Georgia and Ukraine, was driven by a desire to garner Western, in particular U.S. economic assistance and thus a willingness to permit U.S. involvement in the ‘revolution.’  The new cold war or great game, in my view, was driven as much or more by American hubris and cold war attitudes as Russian resentment, gruffness, and overreactions.

IN KYRGYZ CRISIS, OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

REPRINTS

By David Ignatius

Washington Post

June 16, 2010

Watching the deteriorating security situation in Kyrgyzstan, we have a Cold War reflex to forecast a new flash point between the United States and Russia. In reality, it's the opposite -- this remote and feeble Central Asian country is offering a new opportunity for Moscow and Washington to work as partners. 

"We are not in any way framing this as a zero-sum game," a senior Obama administration official explained Tuesday. "On the contrary, we are very closely coordinating our actions with Moscow." 

The death toll this week rose into the hundreds, but violence appeared to decline on Tuesday and the Kyrgyz defense minister said the government would withdraw its request for an international peacekeeping force. But U.S. officials said that it was hard to predict how soon stability would return. The Kyrgyz government had initially sought Russian intervention, but Moscow had signaled that it wouldn't send troops alone. 

RUSSIAN FEDERATION WEEKLY SITREP

By Patrick Armstrong

Russia Inc. The Finance Ministry announced that the budget deficit in 2009 was 2.3 trillion Rubles (US$78 billion – about 25% less than anticipated); GDP declined nearly 8%; the Reserve Fund holds about US$60 billion and the National Welfare Fund about US$95 billion. The IMF has raised its estimate for Russia’s GDP growth in 2010 to 4.25% from 4% and estimates that inflation will be 6%. Rumours of Russia’s economic death have been exaggerated: indeed these numbers look rather better than the IMF’s estimates for either the Euro Area or the USA. Medvedev’s calls for Russia to be treated as a major player in the world financial system don’t look so implausible today.

RUSSIAN FEDERATION WEEKLY SITREP

by Patrick Armstrong

People power. While the Russian government enjoys a high and constant level of support, that support is, to a degree, rather passive: the population knows that the ruling party will stay in power but appears to be content that it do so. However, things are stirring: I do not refer to the “opposition” so beloved of the Kommentariat but to blue buckets. It is a grass-roots movement, sustained by the new media, and mobilised against the flouting of the law by big wheels. There will, no doubt, be attempts to paint this as an anti-government phenomenon but there is no reason why it need be: Medvedev has often railed against “legal nihilism” and the “bucketeers” are aiming at the same target. It is, I believe, the first example of a spontaneous, nation-wide, bottom-up expression of the popular will in post-Communist Russia: neither something the government started nor an artificial stunt like Other Russia.  It could become a challenge to the government should the government ignore or attempt to suppress it. Medvedev would be advised to show the movement some support: the wise leader knows when to follow.

UNITED RUSSIA?

REPRINTS

by Paul J. Saunders

www.nationalinterest.org 

Obama administration officials have focused intently on working with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, both in the nuclear talks that led to the new START agreement and now in discussions of United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iran. And they have dismissed the idea that concentrating on Medvedev—at the expense of working with the more influential Prime Minister Vladimir Putin—could put U.S. goals at risk, claiming that “there was not daylight” between the two in the arms control negotiations and that Medvedev and Putin were “in perfect lockstep every step of the way.” Today’s meetings between Putin and the leaders of Iran and Turkey at a regional security forum in Istanbul should raise questions about basing American policy on this assumption.

Putin met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the margins of the “Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia” conference, an 18-nation gathering originally launched by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Ahmadinejad also used the opportunity to praise Turkish leaders for their strong statements in Turkey’s ongoing confrontation with Israel over nine deaths during Israel’s commando attack on a Turkish-sponsored flotilla seeking to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

ISLAM, ISLAMISM AND POLITICS IN EURASIA REPORT No. 15, June 7, 2010

by Gordon Hahn

Monterey Institute of International Studies

CONTENTS

• THE CE OVKBK’S NEW AMIR AND KABARDINO-BALKARIYA’S EARLY SPRING WAVE OF TERRORISM
• THE SOCHI OLYMPIC GAMES AND THE CAUCASUS EMIRATE
• CE’S ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE AND LEADERSHIP, AS OF MAY 2010 (PART 2 – NOKCHICHO VELAIYAT/CHECHNYA)
• STRATFOR ACKNOWLDEGES CE’S IMPORTANCE AND GLOBAL JIHADI TIES
• ANNOUNCEMENT: NEW NON-PROLIFERATION/TERRORISM STUDIES MASTER OF ARTS DEGREE AND TERRORISM STUDIES CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS

To access the full report, click Download KAVKAZJIHAD_MonTREP_IIPER_16_1June2010