Russia in the 21st Century [Superthread]

[Kirkhill]

Vlad has placed his Iskanders in three locations of interest.

Kaliningrad, Krasnodar (in the Kuban adjacent to Ukraine and "Caucasus Emirate") and outside Orenburg facing Kazakhstan and at the pass around the south end of the Urals that connects Siberia to European Russia

Kaliningrad’s Drift toward Europe Shows What Happens to Russians Cut Off from Russia, Nationalist Commentator Says

Paul Goble May 15, 2014
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Staunton, May 15 – Separatist and pro-German sentiment among ethnic Russians in Kaliningrad reflects not only German revanchist efforts but the threat of “the alienation of young from the Russian world” if they are “cut off” for a lengthy period from Russia and if Moscow acts as if “’there are no problems’” with such people, according to a Russian nationalist writer.

In an essay on Stoletie.ru entitled “Crimea has Returned but Will Kaliningrad Leave?” Vladimir Shulgin argues that “the events in Ukraine obviously showed what will happen with a people who for a long time are intentionally separated from their true Russian name, spirituality and customs.”

The Russian nationalist’s words underscore something that Moscow is loath to admit and that helps to explain some of the hysteria behind the Kremlin’s words and actions: Russian identity is far less strong than Russians would like the world to believe, and Russians in the non-Russian countries are different from and even antagonistic to Russians in the Russian Federation.

Shulgin begins his article by asking directly “Why has our Baltic Shore suddenly been seized by an obsession with all things Koenigsberg?” Why are people in what he describes as “a typical Russian region, where [the members of that ethnic community form an enormous majority of the population saying and doing such pro-German things?

“What,” in short he asks, “does all this mean?”

In part, Shulgin says, it reflects the actions of German writers and bloggers who promote the idea of the restoration of a German Koenigsberg and who are able to win over marginal elements who carry German flags and march around. But this “separatist” movementreally “exist only in their imagination.”

German commentators call any manifestation in Kaliningrad an indication of the appearance of “die Deutsch-Russen” (German-Russians) and encourage Germans in Germany to support them. Indeed, the message to the latter may be more important than the former: Germans need to be Germans and not Europeans or Atlanticists.

But if the Koenigsberg movement is not as strong as some German writers suggest, it does exist and has a basis for doing so, Shulgin writes. And there is the chance that the movement’s activists may succeed in organizing a referendum in support of some if not all of their goals.

That is because the Russian community of Kaliningrad is largely cut off from Moscow and has begun to articulate narrow regionalist goals: autonomy from the central government, the right of return of Germans who were forced out, and the renaming of cities, towns and streets to reflect their original German titles.

Another reason they may succeed, the Russian commentator says, is that in the face of German propaganda and the lack of well-articulated national sensibilities among the Russians in Kaliningrad, “local politicians in essence do not interfere with the separatist mobilization of public opinion.”

Shulgin’s article does not mean that he believes Kaliningrad is going to become independent as “the fourth Baltic state” as some have predicted or transfer from Russian to German sovereignty, but it clearly does mean that he and others in Moscow fear that Russian identity there is weaker than they would like it to be and that measures must be taken.

http://www.interpretermag.com/kaliningrads-drift-toward-europe-shows-what-happens-to-russians-cut-off-from-russia-nationalist-commentator-says/

‘Siberian Federalization’ Idea Spreads to Kaliningrad and Kuban

Paul Goble August 13, 2014
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Staunton, August 13 – Despite Moscow’s apparently successful efforts to block a march in Novosibirsk this Sunday, the Russian authorities have failed to prevent the ideas behind it from spreading not only to other Siberian cities like Yekaterinburg but also and more seriously to Kaliningrad and Kuban.

Feliks Rivkin, an activist in Yekaterinburg, says that he will be leading a demonstration in his city for the same thing the Novosibirsk activists want: to force Moscow to live up to the Russian constitution and give Russian regions their federal rights. Even if the authorities refuse, he adds, his group plans to go ahead anyway.

Meanwhile, in Kaliningrad, local activists are picking up on the same ideas. One Moscow commentator, Vladimir Titov, argues that Kaliningraders don’t have all the bases for launching an independence movement, but he suggests that “the single place in Russia where at present regionalism as a political direction has real prospects” is precisely there.

Kaliningrad’s non-contiguous location, its closeness to European Union countries, and the fact that 25 percent of its residents have Shengen visas and 60 percent have foreign passports all have the effect of making ever more Kaliningraders look toward Europe rather than toward Russia proper.

Well-off Kaliningraders are buying property in the EU, they are sending their children to study in Lithuania, Poland and Germany, and “young Kaliningraders already find it difficult to name the main Russian cities, including in such lists Klaipeda, Riga, Poznan, Rostok and Lubeck.

“This isn’t surprising,” Titov says. “Warsaw and Yurmala for these young people are closer and more familiar than Kaluga or Khabarovsk.” And their elders also reflect this sense of place: They speak about conditions “among them, in Russia” in much the same way they would talk about any other foreign country.

Increasingly too, he continues, Kaliningraders refer to their land not as Kaliningrad oblast but as the Amber kray and to their capital as Koenigsberg or more familiarly Koenig. That doesn’t please the authorities or “professional patriots” but it is the way things are. None of this means they want independence, but they seek real federalization and see this as their time.

Making concessions to Kaliningrad’s special situation seems entirely reasonable, Titov says, but “then a question arises: “If Kaliningrad can, why can’t Siberia? And just who is to say that it can’t?”

But interest in federalization is not limited to Siberia and Kaliningrad. There are regionalist movements in Karelia, Ingermanland, Novgorod and elsewhere, and they have now been joined by a new one: in Kuban. Activists there have announced plans to hold a march for the federalization of Kuban on August 17 to demand a separate republic be established for them.

Regional officials in Krasnodar have already refused to give them permission, but organizers say that they will go ahead anyway, citing their Constitutional right to freedom of assembly in order to demand their Constitutional rights for federalism.

From Moscow’s perspective, this is all very disturbing. Not only does it suggest that the center is losing control over the situation in at least some regions, but it raises the spectre of regional separatism of the kind that spread through the Russian Federation in the early 1990s and that Vladimir Putin has worked hard to suppress.

Moreover, it raises questions about the dangers Moscow has brought on itself by its promotion of “federalism for export” in the case of Ukraine, especially since what Moscow has been seeking there is not devolution of powers from Kyiv but in fact separatism and a change of state borders.

In a commentary on Politcom.ru, Konstantin Yemelyanov notes that the organizers of these actions “undoubtedly are trying to use the Kremlin’s weapon against it: not long ago, for example, the theme of the federalization of Ukraine was the public basis of Russian policy toward a neighboring country, and the Russian foreign ministry highlighted all the benefits” of such arrangements.

“A political provocation which formally does not contradict Russian law but hits the weak places of Russian public policy is becoming one of the types of political participation and self-expression for the opposition.” Given the memories of those now in power about 1991, that is a truly frightening “spectre.”

http://www.interpretermag.com/siberian-federalization-idea-spreads-to-kaliningrad-and-kuban/


So Vlad has got an independent Ukraine actively leaving his orbit, an independent Kazakhstan threatening to leave his orbit, active separatists in Siberia, Kaliningrad-Koenigsberg, on the north slopes of the Caucasus (Caucasus Emirate) and most importantly in the Kuban - from where he is mounting battlegroup incursions into Ukraine.  He also has a number of other places with restive populations - including Tatarstan - and now he has just bought himself more problems by annexing Crimea with its indigenous Tatars.

Which brings us to this:

Crimea Vote Galvanizes Separatists in Russia
By Yekaterina KravtsovaMar. 14 2014 00:00 Last edited 21:10

David Mdzinarishvili / Reuters
Ukrainian soldiers talking to armed men in Perevalnoye on Thursday.
For separatist groups in Dagestan, Tatarstan and other regions of Russia, the Kremlin's support of a referendum on independence in Ukraine's Crimea peninsula would seem to provide an opportunity for their own movements, which have long been repressed by Russian authorities.

The Kremlin, evidently, does not agree. President Vladimir Putin has long been a vocal opponent of regional separatist movements in Russia, having risen to power by waging a bloody war against rebels in Chechnya, and last year he signed into law a bill that stipulates prison time for those who make separatist appeals.

Ruling party lawmakers hold a similar position, arguing that the situation in Crimea is fundamentally different from that in the North Caucasus and in multiethnic republics of Russia that have active separatist movements.

But some observers believe that in the long term, the Kremlin will not be able to restrain the activity of separatist movements across Russia if it supports measures like the Crimea referendum.

"Russia must never support any referendums [on independence]," opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny wrote Wednesday on his popular LiveJournal blog. "The economy will become weak and we will not be able to give wagons of money to [Chechen leader Ramzan] Kadyrov anymore. This will happen sooner or later."

"No one doubts that he will immediately organize a referendum on independence. There are no Russians there anymore, the result is clear," Navalny warned.

Chechnya and Dagestan are seen as the main centers of separatism in Russia, but there are also separatist movements in regions including Tatarstan, Tuva, Bashkortostan, Sakha, and even regions where the majority of the population is Russian, such as exclave Kaliningrad and the Primorsky region in the Far East.

In recent years, the Kremlin has initiated a policy of settling Russians from former Soviet republics in these regions, giving them Russian citizenship immediately and a place to live. Less than a decade ago, an ethnic Russian moving from a former Soviet country was required to live for five years in Russia to qualify for citizenship.

At the same time, Russia adheres to a tough policy of suppressing separatist movements. In Chechnya, Putin installed Kadyrov, the son of a former rebel who is now fiercely loyal to the Kremlin, and annually allocates millions of dollars to the republic partly in exchange for Kadyrov's efforts to quash separatist violence there.

Russia conducted two wars against Chechen separatists following the Soviet collapse. In 1991, Chechnya was declared an independent state by a leader of one of its nationalist movements, Dzhokhar Dudayev, who later became its president. It remained de facto independent until Russian troops invaded in 1994.

Troops were withdrawn in 1996 after thousands of casualties on each side, and a decision about Chechnya's status was postponed until 2001. The second war, which officially was a counter-terrorist operation, was held from 1999 until 2009, with combat operations lasting until 2001. According to official statistics, up to 160,000 people died during the two wars.

Putin typically reacts aggressively to any calls for self-determination in regions of Russia, even when such appeals appear to represent no real threat.

In October, when university professor Sergei Medvedev said he believed the Arctic should be under international control in order to prevent damage to the environment, Putin called him a "fool" and said his position was "anti-national and unpatriotic."

And late last year, Putin signed into law a measure that stipulates prison time for those who call for independence from the Kremlin. The authorities said the law would prevent the rise of possible separatist tendencies and actions that may lead to Russian regions becoming parts of other countries.

Given Putin's position on the issue, groups in Russia seeking independence for their regions see the Kremlin's support of Crimea splitting from Ukraine as highly hypocritical.

"[We] condemn Russia's ongoing double-standard policy in international and home affairs," separatist group the All-Tatar Civic Center said in a statement posted online earlier this month. "It supports any pro-Moscow national movements in former Soviet republics with all [possible] means … while on its own territory conducts a policy of brutal Christianization and Russification of enslaved peoples, with those who oppose such policy being unjustly prosecuted."

In 1992, Tatarstan held a referendum on independence and 61 percent voted for Tatarstan to be an independent country, but Russia refused to acknowledge the results of the vote.

Kremlin-loyal lawmakers and observers argued that Russia's support of the Crimea referendum was not hypocritical due to crucial differences between the Ukrainian region and Russian republics.

Robert Shlegel, a State Duma deputy from the ruling United Russia party, said the referendum in Crimea would be different from separatist initiatives in Russia because Ukraine was "in a state of anarchy."

"Moreover, Crimea is not a Russian region right now, so separatism movements in Russian regions will not take it as a sign that they can also have a referendum on independence," he said by phone. "That is why in this particular political situation holding a referendum in Crimea is a logical decision."

Another United Russia deputy, Dagestan native Gadzhimet Sarafaliyev, said he believed the Crimea referendum was legal because the peninsula was historically Russian and it was a mistake to have given it to Ukraine in the first place.

"We are talking about helping Crimea here," he said by phone. "We do not have any geopolitical interests — Crimea has always been Russian and it must be Russian again."

He said he was not concerned that the referendum might trigger an escalation of separatist movements in the turbulent Dagestan republic. "How can we talk about an escalation of something that does not exist? Dagestan is the most adapted to Russian society of all regions — there has never been any talk about it becoming a separate country."

The majority of Dagestan's population is ethnically non-Russian, with some 26 different nationalities living there, and an Islamic separatist movement is active in the republic, although the movement's adherents typically call for the creation of an independent state that would include territories from other North Caucasus republics.

Meanwhile, Russia's state-controlled media compares the Crimean referendum with upcoming referendums in Britain's Scotland and Spain's Catalonia and refers to Western support of Kosovo's separation from Serbia in 2008.

Alexei Makarkin, a deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow-based think tank, said that Russia has a clear division into "us and them," allowing everything for "us" and nothing for "them."

Makarkin's point was demonstrated by Safaraliyev, who insisted that Turkey must have only cultural and humanitarian cooperation with Tatars in Crimea and must not interfere in Ukraine's affairs, since it was a NATO member.

According to pro-Kremlin pundit Alexei Mukhin, who heads the Center for Political Information think tank, the Kremlin decided to support the Crimea referendum because it realized it would not inspire separatist sentiments in Russia, since all separatist movements in Russia are under the tight control of regional authorities.

But he argued that the Kremlin's support of the referendum was no more than a bluff in order to "bring to life Ukraine's political system that is stuck in mess and mayhem."

"When the Federation Council approved the president's decision to send troops to Ukraine, everyone thought war had already begun, which was not true. The same thing holds here — support of the referendum does not mean that the Crimea is already a part of Russia," Mukhin said, adding that Russia would act within the confines of international law in any case.

But Makarkin said he believed there is no logic in the Kremlin's move and that in the long term it could motivate independence movements in certain Russian regions.

"Now separatist movements fear the central authorities, who can easily destroy them, but many of them will definitely think, 'Why can't we have such a referendum?'" he said. "The Kremlin has no other answer besides, 'You cannot because it is prohibited.'"

Makarkin said that the process of fanning separatist sentiments was closely tied with the country's economic situation. "When the economy is weak, separatist movements get an additional argument for their activity," he said.

All those interviewed by The Moscow Times agreed that Russia would need to allocate significant funds to Crimea if it became part of Russia, making Russia's policy similar to that in Chechnya.

"The difference is that even though Chechnya was in an extremely disastrous state after two wars, Russia allocated money there at a time when there was economic growth in the county," Makarkin said.

"But now it would be difficult for the Kremlin both to give money to Crimea and to keep all its social promises, especially if sanctions against Russia come into effect."

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/crimea-vote-galvanizes-separatists-in-russia/496142.html

 

[CougarKing]

for Russia the only down side is that China will, possibly, become its main customer - consider Canada and the USA and oil for an example of what's wrong with that relationship.

ERC,

Didn't you say at another thread that while the EU may tolerate Russia shutting off the gas, China will not?

Source: Yahoo Finance

And the oil pipeline goes ahead:

Russia breaks ground on new gas pipeline to China

Russia launched construction Monday of a 770 billion ruble ($20.8 bn) gas pipeline that will help bring gas from the far east of the country to China.

"We are today starting the biggest construction project in the world," President Vladimir Putin said at the ceremonial joining of the first sections of the 3,968-kilometre (2,466-mile) Siberian Strength pipeline outside the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk.

China's Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, who was also in attendance at the ceremony, said he hoped the pipeline would be completed within four years.

"China already plans in the first half of next year to start building the Chinese section of the pipeline and we should make an effort to complete construction and begin exploitation of the pipeline in 2018," he said.

In May the two countries signed a 30-year deal which will eventually see Russia supplying China with 38 billion cubic metres of gas per year, an agreement worth some $400 billion.

The pipeline, which will have a total capacity of 61 billion cubic metres per year, will also link the gas fields in Yakustsk and Irkustsk to cities across the Russian far east.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[Edward Campbell]

In this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that newspaper, The Economist warns Western leaders that a "longer and broader confrontation with Russia ... lies ahead:"

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21615582-sad-reality-vladimir-putin-winning-ukraine-west-must-steel-itself

Ukraine, Russia and the West
The long game
The sad reality is that Vladimir Putin is winning in Ukraine. The West must steel itself for a lengthy struggle

Sep 6th 2014 | From the print edition

IN HIS undeclared, unprovoked, grisly war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin enjoys several telling advantages. Unlike the bickering Western leaders who have failed to deter him, he is answerable only to himself. He has no real allies, and, because he silences his critics as ruthlessly as he violates his neighbours’ sovereignty, few domestic constraints. Nor, plainly, is he constrained by shame: witness his staggering lies over Russia’s role in the fighting, and his decision, even after flight MH17 was shot down by his proxies, to send in more tanks and troops.

Above all, Mr Putin cares more about the outcome than the West does. His geopolitical paranoia, his obsession with the territory lost at the end of the cold war, and the personal prestige he has staked on victory make it essential. And he has a modern army he is willing to use. Because of these imbalances Mr Putin is winning, at least by his own warped calculus. Yet in doing so he has forfeited another edge that he held until too recently, namely the willingness of some Western dupes to see him as a reasonable interlocutor, even a partner. Even the most purblind now know him for what he is: less a statesman than a brigand, not a partner but a foe.

That overdue clarity should guide the West in the ongoing struggle for Ukraine. And it should prepare its leaders for the longer and broader confrontation with Russia that lies ahead, which may stretch all round its borders.

The fog of hybrid war
Hopes of a ceasefire in Ukraine this week were undermined by Mr Putin’s ludicrous insistence that Russia is not a belligerent. But as things stand, any truce will be on his terms. Since regular Russian forces helped the ragtag separatists to turn back Ukraine’s army in devastating style (see article), Ukrainian generals are less concerned with defeating the rebels than resisting a full-scale Russian invasion; Mr Putin’s thuggish boast that he could “take Kiev in two weeks” is dreadfully plausible. Most likely his plan remains a federal Ukraine, with an eastern region controlled by Moscow, or, failing that, a simmering, low-intensity conflict. Either arrangement would wreck Ukraine’s dream of integrating with the European Union and NATO.

Even the whiff of peace will encourage some Europeans to argue that Mr Putin need not be punished further—just as there were some who used his denials of involvement as a pretext to equivocate. That would be an inexcusable mistake. As Angela Merkel says, Russia cannot simply be allowed to invade its neighbours and shift Europe’s borders with impunity. The measures under discussion in Washington and Brussels should be much tougher than previous sanctions, including the limp reaction to the annexation of Crimea. Every member of Russian’s craven parliament, security services and government should face visa bans and asset freezes. The offshore assets of top Russian kleptocrats should be identified and seized. Russia’s energy and defence sectors must be squeezed and its sovereign bonds should be shunned: Western lenders should not finance Mr Putin’s warmongering.

One aim of all this should be to bolster Ukraine’s hand in the negotiations that, sooner or later, it will probably have to enter. (More generous financial aid, to save its free-falling economy and help pay its energy bills, is needed too.) The other aim is to put pressure on Mr Putin. The propaganda pumped out by Kremlin-run television has maintained Russians’ support both for the war and for him; but as the rouble falls, capital flees Moscow and the body bags of Russian soldiers covertly return, his political problems will mount. And even if Western punishment fails to modify his behaviour in the short term, the underlying goal should be to tame him (and perhaps his successors) in the future, for Ukraine is plainly not the end.

Kiev and beyond
Mr Putin’s first choice was to suborn Ukraine without invading it, but by demonstrating his willingness to use force, he has sown fear—and, for Mr Putin, fear is the basic currency of politics. A puny, divided response has emasculated the West, which he thinks is bent on weakening and encircling Russia. For him, Russia’s post-Soviet history has been a catalogue of American-inflicted humiliation, which it is his mission to reverse. He wants his neighbours to be weak more than he wants Russians to be prosperous; he prefers vassals to allies.

This world view—a noxious compound of KGB cynicism and increasingly messianic Russian nationalism—propelled him into Ukraine. The idea that his adventurism will end in the Donbas is as naive as the theory that he would be satisfied when his troops wrenched Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia in 2008. This week Mr Putin rattled his sabre at Kazakhstan, still ruled by the elderly Nursultan Nazarbayev: any succession squabble would be an opportunity. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, small, ex-Soviet countries, have Russian-speaking minorities of the kind Mr Putin has undertaken to “protect”. These Baltic states joined NATO in 2004. But what if a Russian-financed separatist movement sprang up, a Baltic government claimed this amounted to an invasion and its NATO allies refused to help? The alliance’s bedrock—its commitment to mutual self-defence—would be shattered.

Mr Putin’s revanchism must therefore be stopped in Ukraine. This week, en route to a NATO summit in Wales, Mr Obama visited Estonia to assure his Baltic allies of America’s backing. A brigade of American soldiers would be more reassuring still. NATO is set to approve a nimbler reaction force, with kit pre-positioned in Poland. But it is past time for the alliance to junk the undertaking it gave Russia not to base troops in the Baltics: that was made in an era of goodwill, which Mr Putin has trampled. The Europeans must do more to wean themselves from Russian gas, by diversifying supplies and introducing new rules and infrastructure to trade energy across the continent. Mr Putin is not a good commercial partner.

Eventually these measures may together force Mr Putin to rethink his recklessness, or encourage the Russian people and elite to think differently about him. There will be a price for the West too, of course. But as poor, benighted Ukraine shows, the price of inaction has always been higher.

It appears, to me anyway, that The Economist is right:

    1. Putin/Russia has 'won' in Ukraine; and

    2. Putin/Russia is far, far more like Stalin/USSR than like Gorbachev/USSR, we cannot, as Mrs Thatcher so famously put it, "do business together" with Putin/Russia.

My prescription, which will cause some (even considerable) economic pain to many Western, including Canadian, companies, is: isolation and containment, and containment must be accompanied by a real, credible threat of rollback, as it was in the 1950s and '60s. (Stalin knew that Truman and Eisenhower were ready and able to fight to stop and "roll back" Russian aggression, Malenkov, Bulganin and Kruschev all worried that Kennedy and even Lyndon Johnson would do the same ... Russian certainty about American certainty began to wane in the mid to late 1960s when it became increasingly apparent that the US was not ready to prosecute a "long, long war."*) Isolation[ involves kicking Putin/Russia out of e.g. the G20 and the OECD: "no truck or trade with the Ruskies," if I may update a 1911 (Canadian) campaign slogan.


_____
*

 

[The Bread Guy]

Meanwhile, on the Baltic borders ....

An Estonian intelligence officer has been kidnapped at gunpoint and taken into Russia, according to local Estonian reports.

Estonian intelligence confirmed that the incident occurred at the Luhamaa border checkpoint while the officer was investigating an incident of cross border crime, according to The Baltic Times.

"Unidentified persons coming from Russia took the freedom of an officer of Estonian Scurity police officer on the territory of Estonia," Estonia's state prosecutor's office announced. "The officer was taken to Russia using physical force and at gunpoint."

In retaliation, Estonia's Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian Ambassador to Estonia, Juri Merzljakov, in relation to the incident ....

The Russian version:

An officer of the Estonian security police was detained on Friday on the territory of Russia’s north-western Pskov region while he was conducting an undercover operation, the public relations center of the Federal Security Service told ITAR-TASS.

“A citizen of Estonia, Eston Kohver, who is an officer of the Estonian security police bureau, was detained on the territory of the Russian Federation,” the press center said. “He had a Taurus handgun, an amount of €5,000 in cash, equipment for covert audio recording, and materials indicative of an intelligence mission."

 

[McG]

Russia is now accused of launching a small operation into Estonia.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nato-faces-1st-test-as-estonia-accuses-russia-of-abduction-1.2757254

 

[The Bread Guy]

Meanwhile, if you're a Lithuanian who opted out of serving in the Soviet Army after The Wall came down, watch out ....

Russia has reopened 25-year-old cases that may lead to criminal charges against young people who refused to serve in the Soviet army in 1990-1991, shows a request for legal assistance received by the Lithuanian Prosecutor General's Office.

"We have received such request for legal assistance. As the activities, which Russia lists among criminal deeds, is not criminalized in Lithuania, the request for legal assistance will not be processed," Vilma Mažonė of the Prosecutor General's Office told BNS.

The Prosecutor General's Office refused to reveal further details of the case.

Russia may bring criminal charges against the citizens of Lithuania who left the Soviet army or refused to serve there after Lithuania declared independence on 11 March 1990.

Some of the young men were abducted and transported to Soviet army units by force, some were sent to jail, a few died during persecution by Soviet army officers, while others returned to the Soviet military units in fears for their own or their family's safety, some escaped the Soviet army by hiding.

According to data provided by the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defence, 1,562 young people refused forced service in the Soviet army after 11 March 1990. Of them, 67 were taken to Soviet military units by force, 20 were sentenced to jail terms, three faced criminal charges and three died.

Another 1,465 were forced to go into hiding, change their place of residence and leave families to avoid forced service or repressions by the Soviet army or the Soviet authorities ....

Stay classy, Soviet Union Russia ....

 

[vonGarvin]

Just in case you were wondering, it's back on...

 

[The Bread Guy]

Just in case you were wondering, it's back on...

Back, by (un)popular demand, War, Cold, C1-A1, for the use of ....

 

[Good2Golf]

...wouldn't it be: War, Cold, C1-A2? 

 

[The Bread Guy]

...wouldn't it be: War, Cold, C1-A2? 

Good point.

 

[CougarKing]

The ongoing crisis in Ukraine actually brings a sense of deja vu to Estonians about their own history:

Military.com

Estonian Commander Says Russia Wants a Europe Without America

Sep 15, 2014 | by Matthew Cox
Estonia may be one of NATO's smallest members, but its air force commander had the strongest words for Russian aggression in Ukraine at a gathering of allied military leaders.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's "war against Ukraine did not really come as a surprised to us," Col. Jaak Tarien, commander of the Estonian Air Force, told an audience at the U.S. Air Force Association's 2014 Air and Space Conference.

Speaking with a group of NATO military leaders, Tarien reminded how Soviet Russia launched a similar operation in Estonia in 1924.

"Soviet Russia sent infiltrators to our young republic. They tried to rally local people to demonstrate against our government," he said.
The Estonian people did not want to go along.

(...EDITED)

 

[cupper]

Oh the games people play.

Looking more and more like we're going back to the Cold War.

Laissez les bonne temps rouler! ;D

Yep, seems the Russians are into the spirit of throwback Thursday.

Canadian fighter jets intercept Russian bombers in Arctic

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadian-fighter-jets-intercept-russian-bombers-in-arctic-1.2772440

Fighter jets intercepted two Russian bombers flying on the perimeter of Canada’s Arctic airspace in the early morning hours Thursday, NORAD revealed to CBC News.

Two CF-18s met the Tupolev Tu-95 long-range bombers, commonly referred to as "Russian Bears," at around 1:30 a.m. PT as they flew a course in “the western reaches” of Canada’s Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the Beaufort Sea, said Maj. Beth Smith, spokeswoman for North American Aerospace Defence Command.

The ADIZ extends approximately 320 kilometres from Canada’s coastlines, a distance far beyond the 22 kilometres, or 12 nautical miles, from the coast that define a nation’s sovereign airspace. Smith made it clear that the Russian bombers never entered Canada’s sovereign airspace.

The encounter comes one day after Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko delivered a speech in Parliament thanking Canada for its ongoing support as his country’s forces battle with pro-Russian separatist rebels.

“This is disturbing. We’ve heard stories like in the past, of Russian bombers challenging Canadian airspace,” said James Bezan, parliamentary secretary to the Minister of National Defence and a Conservative MP from Manitoba.

“This plays into the narrative of a Putin regime that’s more aggressive not just in Crimea, not just in Ukraine, but indeed testing their neighbour in their entire region," he said.

About six hours before the CF-18s intercepted the Russian bombers, American F-22 fighter jets were scrambled from a base in Alaska to meet a group of Russian aircraft, including two refuelling tankers, two MiG-31 fighters and two long-range bombers.

After the U.S. jets made contact, the group headed west back towards Russian airspace.

“We’re seeing increased aggressive actions being taken by the Russian Federation,” Bezan said during an interview on CBC’s Power & Politics.

Despite the ongoing tensions between Western allies and Russia, it is not the first time Canadian and U.S. aircraft have intercepted Russian bombers seemingly flying towards toward sovereign airspace.

According to Smith, NORAD has dispatched fighter jets to make contact with Russian long-range bombers “in excess of 50 times” in the last five years.

Canadian jets intercepted the same type of long-range bombers off the coast of Newfoundland in 2010. After that incident, Peter MacKay, then minister of defence, told CBC News that Canadian military aircraft intercept between 12 and 18 Russian bombers annually.

 

[cupper]

Putin is really trying to restart the Cold War apparently. Or he's just bat poop crazy.

Russia Plans Break From Global Web as U.S. Rift Deepens

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-19/russia-seeks-to-safeguard-itself-from-u-s-internet-regulation.html

Russia plans next week to discuss contingency measures to cut the country off from the global Internet in what the Kremlin called a necessary step to shield the nation from the U.S.-controlled worldwide Web.

Russia’s state security council will examine ways to ensure domestic users can be redirected to servers inside the country rather than relying on the U.S.-managed Internet domain-names system, the Moscow-based Coordination Center for .RU domain said by e-mail today.

“We need to defend ourselves from the U.S. and Europe,” President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said by phone today. “This is not about isolating ourselves, it’s about getting ready for possible cut-offs as countries that regulate the Web may act unpredictably.”

Russia, on the brink of recession after U.S. and European Union sanctions provoked by the worst geopolitical rift since the Cold War over Ukraine, has been tightening control of the Internet this year. Putin, a former KGB colonel who’s centralized power since he became president in 2000, has called the Internet a creation of U.S. spy agencies.

“The Kremlin has already crushed all real opposition and taken over control of nearly all media that tried to remain independent,” Gennady Gudkov, a former opposition lawmaker, said on his blog. “Criticism of the authorities is now an almost exclusive preserve of the Internet.”

Autonomous Access

Russia may urge its telecommunication operators to adjust their equipment to enable access to the Russian Internet autonomously in case of war or mass protests, the daily newspaper Vedomosti reported today.

The press offices of Yandex NV, Mail.ru Group Ltd, OAO Mobile TeleSystems, OAO MegaFon and VimpelCom Ltd (VIP) declined to comment. Yandex declined 1.3 percent and MegaFon 0.6 percent in Moscow as of 5:10 p.m. in Moscow. VimpelCom lost 0.8 percent in New York.

The entire global system of Internet domain names and IP addresses is managed by the Los Angeles-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

Putting a block on the worldwide Internet doesn’t present technical challenges and is only a matter of political will, said Anton Nosik, a well-known blogger in Russia.

“It’s clear that moving Russia onto a North Korean model of Internet management will have far-reaching consequences for the economy,” he said on his blog. “But the overall trend of the government seeking to restrict the exchange of information and access to the Web is clear.”

Internet Crackdown

Russia last month banned anonymous access to the Internet in public spaces and expanded the regulation of media to the blogosphere, requiring those with at least 3,000 daily readers to register their real names and contact information. In February the authorities had passed a law allowing them to close webpages without a court decision if material is deemed “extremist.”

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who used to criticize Putin and reveal corruption among his inner circle, was the first victim of that law when his blog on LiveJournal.com was shut in March. Recent legislation requires Internet companies to store Russian users’ information on servers in the country, similar to Chinese regulations.

Google Inc. Chairman Eric Schmidt said last year, as the changes were being proposed, that Russia was “on the path” toward China’s model of Internet censorship.

“Russia is isolating itself and securing itself from the West,” said Masha Lipman, an independent Moscow-based political analyst. “Putin throughout almost all of his 15 years of rule has made control over societal forces a priority. It’s only natural that his concern is even higher now with the Western sanctions and a deteriorating economy.”

 

[Kirkhill]

Or perhaps he is just trying to convince folks he is bat poop crazy because only a crazy person would actually press the button and launch a nuclear missile.  And the only high card he has in his hand is the nuclear one.

Well maybe not the only one - but I think he is running out of other good ones.

Locking Russia off from the world and turning it into North Korea may be his preferred tactic now.

 

[George Wallace]

Perhaps it is only his belief that Russia must keep its military industrial complex active in order to build up a healthy economy......or maybe he is just batshyte crazy..... :dunno:

 

[Journeyman]

  Pabst Brewing to be sold to Russian company
Bruce Horovitz, USA TODAY September 19, 2014

    Why bother?  :dunno:

 

[CougarKing]

"Crazy? nawww. you don't say"  ;D Ras-PUTIN is being his normal, foreign asset-nationalizing self.

Yahoo Finance/Business Insider

Russia Is Considering A Crazy New Law That Would Allow The State To Seize Foreign Assets
Business Insider
By Tomas Hirst – 4 hours ago

on Aug. 27. In another dark twist to the West's standoff with Russia over the crisis in Ukraine, a pro-Kremlin deputy has submitted a draft law that would allow the government to seize foreign assets in the country in response to Western economic sanctions.

The law, submitted after Italian authorities seized €30m worth of shares and bank accounts belonging to the Russian businessman Arkady Rotenberg, would also allow for oligarchs to get compensation from the state in the case of an "unjust judicial act of a foreign court." The full (Russian language) text of the draft law can be found here.

Given Russia's parlous economic position — GDP grew only 0.8% this year — the concept of using state funds to bail out multimillionaire businessmen may be received poorly in the country. Already opposition leaders are rounding on the government with Boris Nemtsov, co-chair of the RPR-PARNAS political party and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, writing on Facebook:

What is [the benefit of] a strongman's friendship? It's when you have 4 villas, apartments and a hotel seized in Italy and your accomplice in the Kremlin immediately introduces a bill for damages from the Russian budget.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[Colin Parkinson]

    Why bother?  :dunno:

Thankfully they only brew pisswater and not real beer

 

[Edward Campbell]

Part 1 of 3

Here, according to a report which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from The New York Times, is how Putin and his inner circle survive sanctions:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/world/europe/it-pays-to-be-putins-friend-.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=LedeSumLargeMedia&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Private Bank Fuels Fortunes of Putin’s Inner Circle

By STEVEN LEE MYERS, JO BECKER and JIM YARDLEY

SEPT. 27, 2014

Weeks after President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in March, an obscure regulatory board in Moscow known as the Market Council convened inside an office tower not far from the Kremlin to discuss the country’s wholesale electricity market. It is a colossal business, worth 2 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product, and a rich source of fees for the bank that had long held the exclusive right to service it.

With no advance notice or public debate, though, the board voted that day in April to shift that business to Bank Rossiya, a smaller institution that lacked the ability to immediately absorb the work. For Bank Rossiya, it was a tidy coup set to yield an estimated $100 million or more in annual commissions, yet it was hardly the only new business coming in. State corporations, local governments and even the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea were suddenly shifting their accounts to the bank, too.

In a matter of days, Bank Rossiya had received an enormous windfall, nearly all from different branches of the Russian state, which was delivering a pointed message. In late March, the United States had made Bank Rossiya a primary target of sanctions, effectively ostracizing it from the global financial system. Now the Kremlin was pushing back, steering lucrative accounts its way to reduce the pain.

The reason the Kremlin rushed to prop up Bank Rossiya is the same reason that the United States, and later its European allies, placed it on the sanctions list: its privileged status as what the Obama administration calls the “personal bank” of the Putin inner circle. Built and run by some of the president’s closest friends and colleagues from his early days in St. Petersburg, Bank Rossiya is emblematic of the way Putin’s brand of crony capitalism has turned loyalists into billionaires whose influence over strategic sectors of the economy has in turn helped him maintain his iron-fisted grip on power.

Now the sanctions are testing the resilience of his economic and political system. Even as President Barack Obama argues that the measures aimed at Putin’s inner circle are pinching Russia’s economy and squeezing the tycoons who dominate it, many of them have mocked the sanctions as a mere nuisance, the economic equivalent of a shaving cut, while the Kremlin has moved rapidly to insulate them.

Woven deeply into the Putin system is Bank Rossiya. Founded as the tiniest of banks in the twilight of the Soviet era, Bank Rossiya, through staggering, stealthy expansion backed by the largesse of the state, now has nearly $11 billion in assets. It controls a vast financial empire with tentacles across the economy, including a large stake in the country’s most powerful private media conglomerate, a key instrument of the Kremlin’s power to shape public opinion. How well the bank survives in a time of sanctions may ultimately be a barometer of whether economic pressure is enough to make Putin stand down at a time when neighboring countries, especially in the Baltics, are increasingly anxious about a newly aggressive Russia.

Putin came to power vowing to eliminate “as a class” the oligarchs who had amassed fortunes - and, to the new president’s mind, a dangerous quotient of political sway - under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in the post-Communist chaos of the 1990s. Instead, a new class of tycoons have emerged, men of humble Soviet origins who owe their vast wealth to Putin, and offer unquestioning political fealty to him in return.

“These guys emerged from scratch and became billionaires under Putin,” Sergei Aleksashenko, a former deputy finance minister and central banker, said in a recent interview.

If the modern Russian state is Kremlin Inc., Putin is its CEO, rewarding his friends with control of state-owned companies and doling out lucrative government contracts in deals that provoke accusations of corruption but have the veneer of legality under the Putin system.

“He has given and he has taken away,” said Mikhail M. Kasyanov, who served as prime minister during Putin’s first term. “They depend on him, and he depends on them.”

This inner circle coalesced around Putin as he began his unobtrusive rise, from a middling career as a KGB intelligence officer to a midlevel functionary in the office of St. Petersburg’s mayor.

One of these loyalists is Bank Rossiya’s chairman and largest shareholder, Yuri V. Kovalchuk, a physicist by training, sometimes called the Rupert Murdoch of Russia for his role as architect of the bank’s media interests. Other Bank Rossiya shareholders include several of the country’s wealthiest men, the son of Putin’s cousin and even an old St. Petersburg friend of his, a cellist who was formerly first chair at the fabled Mariinsky Theatre.

The Kremlin has long denied giving Putin’s friends preferential treatment. But in acquiring many of its holdings, the privately held Bank Rossiya benefited from Kremlin directives that allowed it to purchase prized state-owned assets at what critics have called cut-rate prices. Meanwhile the true extent of its holdings is obscured by shadowy corporate shell structures that nest like matryoshka dolls, one inside the next.

Records show that the ownership of one powerful TV advertising company linked to Bank Rossiya, for example, is buried in offshore companies in Panama, in the British Virgin Islands and even at a simple concrete house on Karpathou Street in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, whose owner had no idea of the company registered there.

In the early days of the conflict over Ukraine, several European leaders expressed deep ambivalence about alienating a Russia that under Putin’s rule has become immeasurably wealthier than it ever was under the Soviet system. Russia has been a sought-after partner in the globalized economy, a source of cheap natural gas for Europe, where wealthy Russians have also purchased billions of dollars in real estate in places like the Cote d’Azur and the Belgravia district of London.

But that resistance has to some extent eroded, especially since the downing of a commercial airliner over eastern Ukraine in July that killed 298 people. This month, despite an edgy truce between pro-Russian separatists and government forces in Ukraine, the West announced a new round of sanctions aimed not just at Putin’s powerful cronies but at the Russian economy more broadly.

Some argue, however, that this punitive strategy fundamentally misunderstands the way the Putin system works.

Gennady N. Timchenko, an oil trader and Bank Rossiya investor whose own holding company is also under sanctions, admitted in a recent interview with the Russian government’s news agency, Tass, to a measure of annoyance. He was unhappy that his Learjet had been grounded because of sanctions, and that he could not vacation in France with his family and dog, Romi, which happens to be the offspring of Putin’s beloved black Labrador, Koni.

And yet, he said, he would never presume to question the Russian president’s policies in Ukraine, whatever the cost to companies like his.

“That would be impossible,” he said, going on to refer to Putin formally by his first name and patronymic. “Vladimir Vladimirovich acts in the interest of Russia in any situation, period. No compromises. It would not even enter our minds to discuss that.”

End of Part 1 of 3

 

[Edward Campbell]

Part 2 of 3

‘A Bouquet of Friends’

In the Kolomna district of St. Petersburg, near the shipyards, is a 19th-century palace that belonged to Grand Duke Aleksei Aleksandrovich, a son of Czar Aleksandr II. Lately its elegant halls - this one in Baroque style, this one English, this one Chinese - have been repurposed as the House of Music, a training academy for classical musicians.

The academy’s artistic director, Sergei P. Roldugin, has his own singular back story. He is an accomplished cellist and musical director. He is certainly not a businessman, he explained at the palace the other day.

“I don’t have millions,” he said.

And yet, on paper at least, he has a fortune that could be worth $350 million. That is because, years ago, he said, he acquired shares in a small bank run by men close to his old friend Putin.

He had met Putin in the 1970s, and is godfather to his eldest daughter, Maria. He opened the House of Music with Putin’s patronage. Last year, he recalled, the president asked him for a favor: Would he organize a private concert?

So Roldugin traveled to the president’s official residence west of Moscow, Novo-Ogaryovo, with three young musicians: a violinist, a pianist and a clarinetist. They played Mozart, Weber and Tchaikovsky - so well, he said, that Putin invited them to play again the next night for the same small group of friends who had gathered there.

They were “of course, very famous people,” Roldugin said, without revealing any names.

“Quite all,” he said, “are under sanctions.”

The concerts are a glimpse into the small, remarkably cohesive group of men who came together around Putin as the old order was crumbling and a new, post-Soviet Russia was taking form.

When the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, began to allow the first experiments in private enterprise in the 1980s, St. Petersburg was still Leningrad, an impoverished shadow of the czarist capital it had been.

An early adapter was Kovalchuk, a physicist at the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute, who founded an enterprise to turn its scientific work into commercially viable products. Another was Timchenko, a former Soviet trade official, who formed a cooperative to export products from an oil refinery on the Baltic Sea.

What brought Putin into their orbit was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. After five years as a KGB officer in East Germany, Putin was part of a wave of embittered military and intelligence officers who withdrew from the Soviet satellites and returned with few prospects to a changing homeland.

Still with the KGB, Putin came into contact with one of his former law professors: Anatoly A. Sobchak, a reformer who had just become chairman of the Leningrad legislature (and would later become mayor of the renamed St. Petersburg). He asked Putin to become an adviser, to smooth relations with the still-powerful security services. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, Putin joined Sobchak full time, overseeing a new committee on foreign economic relations.

The committee worked closely with Russia’s emerging entrepreneurs, regulating imports and exports and distributing city contracts. Some of the deals became controversial, notably one during the hungry winter of 1991-92, of a deal to barter oil, metal and other products for food. Virtually none of the food ever materialized, and a City Council committee unsuccessfully sought to have Putin fired for incompetence.

For all that, Putin was considered an efficient, unprepossessing administrator, helping businessmen cut through the bureaucracy. His fluency in German was useful with the many Germans seeking a foothold in the city. Among them was Matthias Warnig, formerly of the East German secret police, the Stasi, who opened one of the city’s first foreign banks, Dresdner.

Putin was, in short, both collecting new friends and laying the foundation for what would evolve into the system of personalized, state-sponsored capitalism now at the heart of his power.

“It was a favorable environment for such a bouquet of friends to appear,” explained Mikhail I. Amosov, who served on the City Council at the time.

In many cases, contracts and property were distributed through insider deals, often without open or transparent bidding.

“Everything was decided through personal connections,” Amosov said. “We didn’t like it.”

One enterprise that received an infusion of municipal aid was Bank Rossiya.

The bank had been founded in 1990 at the initiative of the city’s branch of the Communist Party, with party funds as capital. It was also believed to handle the banking needs of the KGB. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was all but bust.

Kovalchuk stepped in. In December 1991, he and a group of friends secured a small loan from a local shoe manufacturer and bought the foundering bank. The investors included three other alumni of the Ioffe Technical Institute - the physicists Victor Y. Myachin and Andrei A. Fursenko, and Vladimir I. Yakunin, the institute’s former head of international relations.

The reconstituted Bank Rossiya quickly became a favored city institution. At the mayor’s instruction, according to news reports, the city opened several large accounts there, fattening the bank’s coffers and setting it on its way.

Business connections became deeply personal connections.

In 1996, Putin joined seven businessmen, most of them Bank Rossiya shareholders, in forming a cooperative of summer homes, or dachas, called Ozero, or “lake,” in the northeast of St. Petersburg. The group has come to have an outsize influence on Russia’s political and economic life. The cooperative included the homes of Putin, Yakunin, Kovalchuk, Fursenko and his brother Sergei, Myachin, and Nikolai T. Shamalov, who headed the St. Petersburg office of the German manufacturer Siemens and would also acquire a major stake in Bank Rossiya. Vladimir A. Smirnov, a St. Petersburg businessman with an exclusive contract to supply the city’s gasoline retailers, served as Ozero’s director.

Timchenko, the oil trader, entered the Bank Rossiya circle as an investor; according to the bank, his stake is owned by a company he controls. Warnig, the German banker, would later join Bank Rossiya’s board. (When Putin’s wife was badly injured in a car accident, Warnig’s bank arranged to pay for her medical care in Germany.)

And there was Roldugin, the cellist.

“The issue was that I needed to have some money,” he said, adding, “There was no money for art anywhere.”

His investment, he said, involved “a lot of manipulations” and required him to take out a loan. Today the bank lists him as owner of 3.2 percent of its shares.

Putin’s stint in St. Petersburg ended in 1996, when his boss lost his bid for re-election. Soon Putin had a new boss, Yeltsin. And after Yeltsin unexpectedly elevated him to prime minister and then acting president on New Year’s Eve in 1999, the fortunes of many of his friends - and their little bank - began to be transformed.

‘Bank Rossiya, That’s It’

He had arrived in Moscow as a midlevel apparatchik in ill-fitting suits, had ascended to power as a thoroughly unexpected president and won his first presidential election in 2000 on the crest of war to suppress separatists in Chechnya. By 2004, Putin had become the paramount figure in Russia, winning a second term with 72 percent of the vote, in a race tainted by allegations of strong-arm tactics and vote rigging. Yet Putin probably would have won a fair election easily, too. The Russian economy, buoyed by high oil prices, was booming, creating huge fortunes and also lifting the middle class. The long era of post-Soviet gloom seemed done.

Not many people yet understood that in the middle of Russia’s prosperity, the men in the tight circle close to Putin were becoming fabulously wealthy, and increasingly powerful, in what critics now consider a case study in legalized kleptocracy.

Bank Rossiya, which reported less than $1 million in profits the year before Putin became president, had grown steadily, but figures like Kovalchuk and Timchenko remained in the shadows.

“I didn’t even know such names - Timchenko, Kovalchuk,” said Kasyanov, whom Putin dismissed as prime minister shortly before the elections.

During the 2004 campaign, one of Putin’s quixotic challengers, Ivan P. Rybkin, did raise the issue of corruption, accusing Kovalchuk and Timchenko of acting as the president’s “cashiers.” But few people were listening. (Rybkin disappeared soon after making his accusation, re-emerging several days later, saying he had been kidnapped and drugged in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev.)

In sanctioning Bank Rossiya, the Obama administration would resurface the “cashier” allegation, though it offered no evidence that Putin has personally profited from the bank. Kovalchuk, who through a spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment, in the past has attributed his bank’s success not to any special treatment but to sound investment and business decisions.

Either way, Bank Rossiya’s holdings would increase tenfold during Putin’s second term. Critical to this remarkable growth was the bank’s ability to snap up assets, at knockdown prices, that had previously belonged to the state-owned energy company Gazprom.

Those deals were documented in a series of reports published at the end of Putin’s second term by Boris Y. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, Vladimir V. Milov, a former deputy energy minister, and others.

“The total value of the assets exfiltrated from Gazprom,” they estimated, was $60 billion.

An early deal involved one of the country’s biggest insurers, Sogaz. Bank Rossiya bought a controlling stake in Sogaz by acquiring shares that had been held by Gazprom. The bank paid around $100 million, according to Nemtsov and Milov, who later valued Sogaz at $2 billion.

“Putin said, ‘Bank Rossiya, that’s it,’” Milov later told the Russian edition of Forbes.

Sogaz became the insurer of choice for major state companies like Russian Railways, headed by Yakunin, and the growing oil giant, Rosneft, by then led by Igor I. Sechin, who had been Putin’s deputy in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office. Sogaz also bought 75 percent of a company called Leader that managed Gazprom’s $6 billion pension fund, Gazfond. The purchase price was $30 million, less than Leader’s profits that year alone, according to Nemtsov and Milov.

It seemed to be a quintessential insider deal: The year before, Yuri Shamalov, son of the Bank Rossiya shareholder and Ozero member, had been appointed chairman of Gazfond.

“Shamalov Jr., as head of Gazfond, sold shares in the company managing Russia’s largest private pension fund at a fantastically low price to the bank owned by his father,” Nemtsov asserted.

At the same time, Kovalchuk, the bank’s chairman, began assembling a media empire that now controls some of Russia’s largest television and radio stations and newspapers.

Bank Rossiya had already assumed management of the assets of Gazprombank, one of Russia’s largest. Now, Gazprombank purchased Gazprom Media Group, which owns five TV and several radio stations. The price: $166 million.

Two years later, Dmitri A. Medvedev, a Putin protégé and first deputy prime minister, put Gazprom Media’s value at $7.5 billion, or 45 times the purchase price.

Not content merely to manage media assets, Bank Rossiya began buying up media companies of its own.

In 2005, a subsidiary of Bank Rossiya bought a stake in Channel 5, a local television network owned by the St. Petersburg government. The price was $25 million. There was no competition. Channel 5’s value swelled in 2006, when regulators let it acquire frequencies in 30 regions across Russia.

Soon after, Putin designated it a national broadcaster, able to reach 91 cities and 53 million people. Today, it is the country’s fifth-largest broadcaster.

A year later, a Bank Rossiya subsidiary bought a controlling stake in Ren TV, today the country’s eighth-largest broadcaster.

Once known for investigating government corruption and airing opposition views that were never allowed on state television, Ren TV over time became noticeably less critical.

In August, amid the fervor over Ukraine, it canceled what was widely viewed as one of the last reasonably independent national political talk shows, “Nedelya,” or “The Week.”

“The first goal was political control of the media,” said Roman Pivovarov, a leading analyst of the Russian media landscape. “But that was achieved relatively early on. So this was as much about money. The picture today is clear, in that the big media belongs to the small circle of people who control not only the politics but the economics of Russia.”

By 2008, Putin’s second term was ending and the Bank Rossiya media empire provided a supportive voice when, rather than recede from politics, he decided to serve as prime minister. Medvedev was elected president, while Putin largely retained control over the levers of government.

Two years later, Kovalchuk scored his biggest prize - a 25 percent stake in Channel 1, a state-controlled network with the largest audience in Russia. The stake cost only $150 million, “an amazingly low price,” according to the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. The next year, Channel 1 reported profits of nearly $100 million.

Then, in 2012, Putin announced he would seek a third term as president. Democracy activists were deeply alarmed but powerless. No one doubted he would win, though the economy had slowed and Putin’s men were targets of rising criticism, no longer hidden.

End of Part 2