Almost without exception, everywhere along Russia’s border, people have suffered centuries of invasion and genocide.
1861: 1 Million Circassians reduced to 80k.
1920-1933: up to 25% of Ukrainians exterminated
1940: 22,000 Polish prisons executed.
1990s: 2-5% of Chechnya’s population slaughtered.
2009: Georgia invaded after anti-corruption reforms.
And somehow, I have idiot friends convinced that any resentment of Russia is a CIA funded conspiracy.
Traditional Russian tactics: if you have a huge problem, create a bigger one – it shall keep people busy:
Trigger warning for people who suffered under communism.
Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband for treason in 1953, was honored Monday by the City Council on what would have been her 100th birthday. . .
The proclamations also said she was “wrongfully” executed for helping her husband, Julius, pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.
“A lot of hysteria was created around anti-communism and how we had to defend our country, and these two people were traitors and we rushed to judgment and they were executed,” said Councilman Daniel Dromm (D-Queens).
http://nypost.com/2015/09/29/city-council-honors-woman-executed-for-treason-in-1953/
OMG, she also makes the best vareneky in the world — even when I don’t get home until 23:30. I’m in love all over again.
Since last winter, Ukrainians have accused Russians of using mobile crematoriums to hide their casualties, but in May, it became apparent that the American authorities also believed the accusation.
Russia is so desperate to hide its military involvement in Ukraine that it has brought in mobile crematoriums to destroy the bodies of its war dead, say U.S. lawmakers who traveled to the war-torn country this spring.
The U.S. and NATO have long maintained that thousands of Russian troops are fighting alongside separatists inside eastern Ukraine, and that the Russian government is obscuring not only the presence but also the deaths of its soldiers there. In March, NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow told a conference, “Russian leaders are less and less able to conceal the fact that Russian soldiers are fighting — and dying — in large numbers in eastern Ukraine.”
Hence the extreme measures to get rid of the evidence. “The Russians are trying to hide their casualties by taking mobile crematoriums with them,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry told me. “They are trying to hide not only from the world but from the Russian people their involvement.”
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-26/putin-burns-his-dead-to-hide-ukraine-aggression
Russia and Estonia in border crossing spy exchange
Lessons:
1) In Russia, there is no shame in lying. Lying successfully is a sign of strength.
2) Russian leadership fear the effect the internet may have on their domestic population. Part of their strategy is to pollute it and make it repulsive. (This is the opinion of the Russian investigative journalist who worked in the Troll house.)
3) Russians prefer to function under a fog of confusion and misinformation. They think it makes their enemies hesitate, and it gives their vertically structured institutions an advantage over western institutions with have more autonomy and delegated responsibility.
Last Sept. 11, this “news” broke on Twitter : “A powerful explosion heard miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, La., #ColumbianChemicals.” Another tweet linked to a screenshot purporting to show the story featured on CNN. Another pointed to a YouTube video of ISIS claiming responsibility.
It took two hours for Columbian Chemicals to catch up and put out the truth: There was no explosion and the “news” was fabricated. “Personally, I think it’s just a real sad, sick sense of humor,” the head of the local Office of Homeland Security explained. “It was someone who just liked scaring the daylights out of people.”
That someone turns out to have been Vladimir Putin, or one of his cronies.
Last week technology writer Adrian Chen unraveled the elaborate hoax in the New York Times magazine. He discovered how a secretive group in St. Petersburg, Russia, deployed dozens of online “trolls” who propagated the lie, briefly terrorizing the small Louisiana community on the 9/11 anniversary. Mr. Chen identified the group as the Internet Research Agency, reportedly run by a Putin business associate.
Preparation for the hoax took months. Dozens of Twitter accounts using false American-sounding names posted hundreds of tweets. Some targeted local newspaper and broadcast journalists, alerting them to the “news.” Trolls created sites designed to look like real Louisiana TV stations and newspapers and posted fake eyewitness reports and photos. They created a Wikipedia entry describing the Columbian Chemicals disaster. Mr. Chen discovered that many of the same accounts also spread phony tales of an Ebola outbreak and a police shooting of an unarmed black woman, both in Atlanta.
Independent Russian news media estimate the Internet Research Agency employs 400 trolls. A former staffer, Ludmila Savchuk, told Mr. Chen that over two 12-hour shifts she was expected to produce propaganda amounting to five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and at least 150 comments on posts created by co-workers, often criticizing the American or Ukrainian government. Russian trolls sometimes pose as American liberals or conservatives on U.S. news sites, giving a false impression of public opinion.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-trolls-the-u-s-internet-1433715770
Also: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=0
* Russia claims that NATO has spent years trying to marginalise it internationally.
Since the early 1990s the Alliance has consistently worked to build a cooperative relationship with
Russia on areas of mutual interest, and striven towards a strategic partnership.
Before the fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, NATO began reaching out, offering
dialogue in place of confrontation, as the London NATO Summit of July 1990 made clear
(declaration here). In the following years, the Alliance promoted dialogue and cooperation by
creating new fora, the Partnership for Peace (PfP) and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council
(EAPC), open to the whole of Europe, including Russia (PfP founding documents here and here).
As a sign of Russia’s unique role in Euro-Atlantic security, in 1997 NATO and Russia signed
the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security, creating the NATO-Russia
Permanent Joint Council. . . . Far from marginalising Russia, NATO has treated it as a privileged partner.
* Russian officials say that NATO should have been disbanded at the end of the Cold War, and that
the accession of new Allies from Central and Eastern Europe undermines Russia’s security.
NATO was not disbanded after the Cold War because its members wanted to retain the bond that
had guaranteed security and stability in the transatlantic area, as the London Declaration makes
clear: “We need to keep standing together, to extend the long peace we have enjoyed these past four
decades”. Upholding the values that have always guided it, NATO became more than a powerful
military Alliance: it became a political forum for dialogue and cooperation. . . .
* Russian claims that NATO promised not to enlarge
Russian officials claim that US and German officials promised in 1990 that NATO would not expand into Eastern and Central Europe, build military infrastructure near Russia’s borders or permanently deploy troops there.
No such pledge was made, and no evidence to back up Russia’s claims has ever been produced. Should such a promise have been made by NATO as such, it would have to have been as a formal, written decision by all NATO Allies. Furthermore, the consideration of enlarging NATO came years after German reunification. This issue was not yet on the agenda when Russia claims these promises were made.
Allegations about NATO pledging not to build infrastructure close to Russia are equally inaccurate.
. . . .
http://www.nato.int/nato_static/assets/pdf/pdf_2014/20140411_140411-factsheet_russia_en.pdf
It’s true. There is a little bit of this.
Ukraine struggles to survive as an independent nation against external and internal forces – Russia, the powerful neighbor next door, and Russian sympathizers throughout eastern Ukraine. “Russian-backed aggression, relentless propaganda and meddling in Ukraine’s domestic politics have pushed many Ukrainians to adopt a deeply polarized worldview, in which constructive criticism, dissenting views, and even observable facts are rejected out of hand if they are seen as harmful to Ukraine,” argue Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and Mykhailo Minakov, associate professor/docent in philosophy and religious studies at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The writers identify this as a new form of exceptionalism.
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/new-ukrainian-exceptionalism
There are many stories like this one:
Officer of the Russian 17th Motorized Rifle Brigade Awarded Order of Courage for the Donbas War
Truth is negotiable in Russia. Only power matters.
Those who attended the conference cam from:
Spain: Catalan Solidarity for Independence
Ireland: Irish Republican Socialist Party and Sinn Féin
US: Independent and Sovereign Nation State of Hawaii and the African People’s Socialist Party
Puerto Rico: National Sovereign State of Borinken
Italy: European Communitarianist Party
Western Sahara region: Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Polisario Front
The removal of the memorial to General Ivan Chernyakhovsky began on September 17 in the northern town of Pieniezno, where the general died of wounds in 1945.
Local authorities argue he symbolizes the foisting of communism on Poland.
For Russia, Chernyakhovsky is a national hero.
Russia’s embassy in Warsaw on September 18 issued a statement saying that Russia had “warned the Polish side many times” that removing such monuments “may not remain without the most serious consequences.”
http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-warns-poland-chernyakovsky-monument/27255953.html
Abducted Estonian official Eston Kohver has been exchanged for Aleksei Dressen, a former Estonian Internal Security Service (ISS) employee imprisoned in Estonia for espionage for Russia.
Calls to Kyiv police have quadrupled since the new, reformed police started working.
