Obama-led US would protect eastern Europe.
VALENTINA POP, October 5, 2008 for the   EUOBSERVER from BRUSSELS.
 http://euobserver.com/9/26863/?rk=1

If elected president of the US, senator Barack Obama would not trade eastern European security for Russian help on Iran, his senior foreign policy advisor, Gregory B. Craig, told EUobserver in an interview. Any notion that the US tried to sabotage the Lisbon treaty is “silly,” he added.

Barack Obama will be a more “pro-European” president if elected, his advisor says. Mr Obama would be a “much more pro-European president” than his Republican predecessor if elected on 4 November, said Mr Craig – a lawyer who led former president Bill Clinton’s defence against impeachment and also worked as foreign policy advisor to former secretary of state Madeleine Albright.

The US and Europe will have to co-operate with Russia in areas where they have “common objectives and common ground,” especially on non-proliferation – reduction of the global nuclear arsenal, security of nuclear materials and challenges such as North Korea and Iran – senator Obama’s foreign policy man explained.

“[But] that doesn’t mean that you trade away our security commitments to the new members of NATO, that’s not even thinkable. I always remember the notion that the expansion of NATO was not a threat to Russia, that this was a decision not by NATO to move east, but a decision by the new democracies from the former Soviet space to integrate with the West.”

“The notion that you choose to co-operate with Russia vis-a-vis Iran at the expense of central and eastern Europe, I just don’t accept that. That’s not viable and it won’t happen that way,” Mr Craig said.

Russia’s aggressive stance toward neighbours who want to be part of NATO and the EU is a historical throwback, he added. “I think the notion that Russia has a veto over what they decide inside of Ukraine or Georgia is very 19th to 20th century. In a 21st century world, with global impacts, global trends, Russia suffered enormously economically as a result of its intervention in Georgia.”

The Obama advisor underlined that new members of NATO are protected by a “solemn security commitment,” while NATO aspirant states can look to the United Nations charter that “requires nation states to respect the sovereignty of other nation states.”

“Although a country like Ukraine is not a member of NATO, Russia does not have under international law the right to violate the sovereignty of Ukraine. Even if there is no security obligation, the people of Europe and US will be supportive of the freedom and independence of the Ukrainian people to make their own decisions, to choose democracy and affiliate themselves with Western institutions if they want to.”

Mr Craig said that senator Obama would also stick to plans to build parts of the US global missile shield in Poland and the Czech republic, despite fierce Russian criticism. The new Democratic president would “not turn his back on that agreement” as it is a “solemn commitment” signed by Washington, Prague and Warsaw.

“The timing, pace and scope of the implementation of that agreement is going to be a matter left to the discretion of the president of the United States,” he added, however.

US military facilities in Romania and Bulgaria – also disliked by Moscow – are not up for discussion either, Mr Craig said. “Democracies from the former Soviet space have every right to make their own decisions,” he explained, calling the notion of a Russian veto a “relic of the Soviet past.”

Obama good for EU-US ties:

The Obama camp believes America-bashing is decreasing in the EU in a trend that would be accelerated by a Democratic victory in November.

The European Parliament president’s recent request for an investigation into alleged CIA funding of the irish No-campaign against the Lisbon treaty is a freak event resulting from the parliament’s own upcoming elections in 2009, Mr Craig said.

“Every election has its silly season … this speculation or rumour that the CIA would support the No vote in Ireland is preposterous.”

“It seems to me that the European Union has some problems with its public relations, not just in Ireland, but also elsewhere where the [EU] constitution has been defeated. That should not, in my view, deter the Europeans from continuing on the course of consolidating its institutions, the rule of law, economic trading agreements and greater co-operation. This has been the policy of many, many US presidents and it will be the policy of president Obama to support that.”

Asked why senator Obama didn’t stop in Brussels during his European tour in July – which included Berlin, Paris and London – his advisor said it was just a question of “limited time.”

“We couldn’t include every capital that we wanted to visit. We regretted not being able to go to Brussels for many reasons – because it’s the European Union, it’s NATO, it’s a capital in itself of importance. And there is no doubt that at some point early in his administration, if elected, senator Obama would visit Brussels.”

No “League of Democracies”

Senator Obama also disagrees with Republican candidate John McCain’s idea of creating “League of Democracies”, a new global institution excluding Russia and China designed to escape the perceived deadlock of the United Nations Security Council, Mr Craig said.

“We would not want to exclude governments and nations from where their participation is required to solve problems. Creating another organisation that draws a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is not productive in solving the great challenges that face the world’s democracies today,” he explained.

“As flawed as it is, [the UN] is still the place people go to solve their problems. Not only about war and peace, but also about poverty and development, disease and the future of the planet. Creating yet another institution called the League of Democracies won’t get us where we want to go,” Mr Craig said.

EU states agree to invite Belarus minister {as an outsider to their foreign ministers’ meeting.}
PHILIPPA RUNNER, EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS, October 3, 2008.

EU states have agreed to invite Belarus foreign minister Sergei Martynov to a prestigious meeting in Brussels, as the French EU presidency struggles to counter Russian diplomacy on the union’s eastern fringe.

The Belarusian minister is to take part in a “troika” with EU foreign relations chief Javier Solana, external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner and French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner on 13 October, on the margins of a wider EU foreign ministers’ meeting on the same day.

Senior EU diplomats made the decision in Brussels on Friday (3 October), with Mr Kouchner’s office set to rubber-stamp the move before a formal invitation goes out. A previous suggestion to bring Mr Martynov to Paris in September was judged premature at the time.

The formal invitation may be made before Monday, when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin plans to visit Minsk, in order to show Belarus that the EU is taking seriously its latest offer of a rapprochement with the West.

“We wouldn’t like to leave Belarus in the arms of Russia,” a French diplomat told EUobserver. “We want to see what we could do in order not to give up [EU] sanctions totally, the sticks, but to give some carrots at the same time.”

France is “considering” the risk that Mr Putin will use the threat of gas price hikes against Belarus in 2009 to pressure the country into recognising Georgia rebel enclaves South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, she added.

The Martynov-troika meeting would signal a breakthrough in EU-Belarus relations. In 1997, the EU froze contacts with Belarus officials above the deputy-minister level, and between 2004 and 2006 imposed a visa ban on 41 officials, including President Alexander Lukashenko.

Belarussian parliamentary elections last Sunday were judged undemocratic by the EU and the OSCE. But Belarus has released political prisoners and allowed small anti-Lukashenko protests, as it seeks Western support in a bid to resist becoming a Russian client state.

***
Unturning the screw:

The EU is also considering relaxing its legal sanctions package on top of the one-off Martynov gesture.

The latest options discussed internally include a temporary suspension of the visa ban for some of the names on the list. The suspension could include President Lukashenko himself, but not people such as Viktor Sheyman, a former security chief implicated in the disappearance of three anti-government activists in 1999.

The EU is also debating ending the 1997 ban on high-level contacts and chopping the costs of EU visas from €60 (one third the average monthly wage in Belarus) to €35 per visit.

The visa move could help build pro-EU sentiment among ordinary Belarusians and advertise the benefits of political reform. “We want people to come to Vilnius and see how things look in a democracy, how much we have prospered,” a Lithuanian official said.

Any sanctions decision will wait until the 13 October EU foreign ministers’ meeting however, in case the unpredictable President Lukashenko makes a u-turn after the Putin visit next week.

Dutch obstacle:

The large majority of EU states in favour of softening sanctions will also have to persuade Dutch foreign minister Maxim Verhagen of the merit of such a move.

“We are not convinced there has been any major improvement [in the political climate in Belarus]. He [Mr Verhagen] doesn’t see any grounds for a substantial change,” a Dutch diplomat said.

“We’re talking about human rights here and we have to take things seriously,” he added. “This has all the makings of being a substantial discussion point in the GAERC [the EU foreign ministers gathering].”

Even though the bill grew from 3 pages to 110 pages, the Conservative Republicans wanted no part of it.

The bill was defeated 228 – 205 with 140 Democrats voting for it and 95 opposing.   You can say thus that the Democrats stuck their neck out and were afraid to be seen as those that derailed the President and brought on a calamity – and a clear calamity is in the making indeed. Money runs away from the stock market and into US treasuries that give now next to no returns at all. So, investors look for a safe haven and really do not care about not making gains. The best deal is now a 3 months treasury bill – and some may even think of bars of gold in the attic. The European Central Banks have stopped selling gold.

So, McCain came to Washington to help the President but his party failed him. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat Leader of the House of Representatives, in introducing the Bill, said the truth – it was the nearly eight years of Bush that destroyed the Clinton savings and caused the present situation – this made the Republicans so furious that they decided to bite their own hands and vote NO! That is what the Republicans want us to think now – as we said – they built a trap for the Democrats – A You Die if you-do-or if -you-don’t. The election for President is not the issue now – it is the election of the House members.

Those folks did not want to be accused of having agreed to the bailout and will now fight the Democrats on very skewed levels.

McCain has problems, and Palin is irrelevant to the process.

The President of the Ukraine got the lesson of his life – not everyday you can see a superpower in its nakedness.

———-

A vindicated Europe celebrates ‘civilised’ capitalism.
By Bertrand Benoit in Berlin and John Thornhill in Paris, The Financial Times,   September 29 2008.

As Peer Steinbrück pondered recent events on Wall Street, Germany’s hard-nosed finance minister could not help indulging in a bit of futurology. “When we look back 10 years from now,” he told journalists on Thursday, “we will see 2008 as a fundamental rupture.” The US, he said, would lose its role as a “finance superpower”.

Yet while US commentators may have interpreted such remarks as heralding a statist renaissance in Europe, there are few signs yet that the old continent is turning its back on the free market.

Yes, there is anger in Berlin and Paris at Washington’s refusal – up until after the outbreak of the subprime crisis – to heed European calls for more regulated markets. The proposals Berlin had made during its presidency of the Group of Eight industrial nations last year “elicited mockery at best or were seen as a typical example of Germans’ penchant for over-regulation”, Mr Steinbrück said.

Crisis management alone would not rebuild the lost confidence, he added. “We must civilise financial markets, and not just through moral appeals against excess and speculation.”

***

In a speech in Toulon on Thursday, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, said the world would have to learn the lessons of the financial crisis and rethink the values and practices of globalisation. This would mean shifting the emphasis from speculation to entrepreneurship and restoring a proper balance between the market and the state.

“The market economy is a regulated market, a market that is at the service of development, at the service of society, at the service of all. It is not the law of the jungle,” he said, predicting the end of laisser faire capitalism.

***

Officials in Berlin point to calls by Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, to curb excessive bonuses as evidence that a new consensus is emerging in Europe that could bridge the old divide between Britain and the continent.

No doubt the Europeans will now find new vigour in defending those areas that remain untouched by liberalisation. Mr Steinbrück said the country’s three-pillar banking system, with state, co-operative and commercial banks, had proven more robust than its two-tier US counterpart.

The crisis also presents Europe with an opportunity to push for more international co-operation, as it has done before in areas ranging from international security to climate change. Mr Sarkozy has supported the expansion of the G8 to include big emerging economies such as China and India, as well as calling for reform of the International Monetary Fund. “We cannot continue to manage the economy of the 21st century with the instruments of the 20th century economy,” he said.

Yet it would be wrong to read such statements as precursors of a general retreat of liberalism on the continent. In his speech, Mr Sarkozy defended the essence of capitalism that had permitted the “extraordinary surge of western civilisation over the past seven centuries”. He also said it would be a “historic error” to return to the collectivism of the past that had been responsible for so many disasters. In Germany, the world’s largest exporter of goods, politicians are all too conscious of how much their country has benefited from trade liberalisation.

Meanwhile, the last thing Ms Merkel and Mr Steinbrück want is for the radical Left party, a coalition of defectors from the Social Democratic party and former East German Communists, to turn the crisis into ammunition for next year’s general election. In June, Ms Merkel told the FT she was worried that attempts to discredit free-market liberalism would play into the left’s hands.

As Mr Steinbrück put it before German legislators: “Neither calls for more state nor naive beliefs in market forces will help us in our task of shaping the economy in a way that will allow all to benefit from stable, crisis-free growth.”

Chinese company wants to buy Brussels Airlines and its Airport.
VALENTINA POP, September 5, 2008.

Chinese airline Hainan may challenge a bid by Lufthansa to buy Brussels Airlines, with the Asian firm already in talks to snap up Belgium’s Charleroi airport.

German carrier Lufthansa remains the favourite bidder for Brussels Airlines, but some shareholders in the Belgian company believe the offer is too low and are looking at other partners, such as British Airways and Hainan, Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported on Friday (5 September).

Late last week, Lufthansa said it was in “constructive negotiations” to acquire a 45 percent stake in Brussels Airlines for €65 million, expecting to close the deal within the next few weeks. The remaining stake was then to be taken over after two years.

But shareholders in Brussels Airlines believe the carrier is worth at least €200 million. Brussels Airlines is the heir to the bankrupt Sabena, with a 30 percent share having been taken over in 2006 by Richard Branson’s Virgin Express.

Hainan’s interest in Brussels Airlines is fortified by its bid for Charleroi airport, a low-cost hub 46 km south of the Belgian capital.

Hainan is among the three companies shortlisted to buy up the currently publicly owned Charleroi airport, with the Chinese company saying it is one of their priorities and promising further developments of the low cost terminal, La Libre Belgique reported on Tuesday.

The move has sparked internal competition between Charleroi and the main Brussels airport, Zaventem, out of which Hainan operates a number of flights. Unidentified sources close to the deal told the Belgian newspaper that the managers of Zaventem had launched a “sabotage and denigration campaign” of Charleroi airport, in order to distract the Chinese.

La Libre Belgique also reported that the Flemish region and the Brussels Airport Company (BAC) who manages Zaventem gave Hainan Airlines financial advantages worth €1.5 million.

The newspaper draws a comparison with the aid offered by the Charleroi airport and the Walloon region to the Irish carrier Ryanair, aid deemed illegal by the European Commission in 2004.

After having read the newspaper report, the Walloon minister for transportation, Andre Antoine, said: “Nobody is stupid. The aim of the manoeuvre is to attract the Chinese to Zaventem, not Charleroi.”

Zaventem is Brussel’s main international airport.

In return, BAC said it didn’t understand the minister’s reaction and didn’t see any problems with the €1.5 million contract it signed two years ago with the Chinese company, in order to promote the Flemish region in Shanghai and Beijing. The contract does not involve directly neither BAC, nor Hainan Airlines, a press spokesman for BAC said.

La Libre Belgique reported that the contract involved some €400,000 being payed to Hainan for “marketing support” and €200,000 for language training for the pilots of the company. Only €900,000 were allocated to promoting the region in China, the newspaper says.

———————-

[Comment / Opinion on EUobserver] After Georgia: is Ukraine next?
ANDREW WILSON, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, September 5, 2008.

EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - The war in Georgia began by exposing the security vacuum in the surrounding region. Now it has claimed its first collateral victim, after the fall of the Ukrainian government on 2 September.

The crisis has been brewing over the summer recess, but came to a head in late August after President Yushchenko’s administration accused Prime Minister Tymoshenko of trading her relative silence over Georgia for Russian support in a campaign to supplant him as president.

Ukraine president Viktor Yushchenko – the 2004 Orange Revolution feels a long time ago (Photo: timoshenko.com.ua)

When parliament reassembled, Tymoshenko joined forces with the east Ukrainian-based Party of Regions, ramming through a law to reduce presidential power, and apparently repositioning herself as a more pro-Russian candidate in the presidential race.

Parliament was also unable to agree any of several diametrically opposed resolutions on Georgia, ranging from outright condemnation of Russia to recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The crisis comes in between the emergency EU summit on Russia-Georgia in Brussels on 1 September and the regular EU-Ukraine summit on 9 September in Evian, France.

The EU therefore has an ideal opportunity to push back against Russia’s attempts to dominate the European neighbourhood by starting with Ukraine, which is also the linchpin for the whole region.

***

War of words:

Many Ukrainians now hear domestic echoes of the lead-up to war in Georgia. Ukraine has its own potentially separatist region in Crimea, and the country’s Russian minority numbers some 8.3 million (the largest minority in Europe).

Half of Ukraine’s population of just over 46 million are Russian-speaking in various degrees. Although the Ukrainian constitution bans dual citizenship, the government has launched an inquiry into alleged covert Russian passport-holding in the Crimean city of Sevastopol.

Some Ukrainians note that Russia justified its invasion of Georgia, as the Nazis once justified their dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, as being necessary to “protect” a minority to whom they had just given citizenship.

Russia has begun a war of words over Ukraine’s alleged supply of arms to Georgia. And the conflict itself has shown that the Russian Black Sea Fleet, based in Sevastopol, can operate with impunity, whether Ukraine likes it or not.

Based on its analysis of Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” as a foreign-backed “NGO coup,” Russia has also been quietly building its own network of Russia-friendly NGOs in Ukraine since 2004.

Ukrainians also talk of an otkat ekonomiya (“kickback economy”), in which Russian money percolates throughout the Ukrainian elite.

***

A strategy for Ukraine:

What should the EU therefore offer in Evian? The European Neighborhood Policy is a worthy enough technical process, but it does not address pressing political concerns about maintaining and securing Ukraine’s independence.

Many member states will worry about leaping straight to the contentious issue of ultimate membership for Ukraine, but the EU already recognizes Ukraine’s theoretical right to join once it has met the Copenhagen criteria; and it cannot be beyond EU leaders’ verbal dexterity to play up the prospect.

What Ukraine would value and needs most is a real sense that it is being treated distinctly in its own right. The key words are “association” and “partnership,” in whatever order or combination.

The EU has greater scope for short-term measures, which should be designed to deliver a multi-dimensional solidarity strategy for Ukraine.

The EU’s foreign ministers should invite their Ukrainian counterpart to give a briefing on Ukraine-Russia relations at their next meeting.

Ukraine should be offered a road map for visa-free travel, as well as ensuring that member states deliver on current visa facilitation measures. The new EU-Ukraine agreement should include a beefed-up solidarity clause, building on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, whereby the EU would consult and assist Ukraine in case of challenges to its territorial integrity and sovereignty. And the EU should back Ukraine if it insists that the Russian Black Sea Fleet leaves on schedule in 2017.

The EU should also launch a comprehensive study of all aspects of Europe’s reliance on Russian energy supplies, including transit, energy security and conservation, supply diversification, and the impact of “bypass” pipelines like Nordstream and South Stream.

It should consider linking the opening of the Nordstream pipeline, which would allow Russia to cut off gas to Poland and Ukraine while maintaining deliveries to Germany, to the opening of the proposed “White Stream” pipeline to bring gas from Azerbaijan directly to Ukraine via Georgia, bypassing Russia.

The EU could even play a part in keeping the 2012 European Championship football finals on track. The decision to appoint Ukraine and Poland as co-hosts was a powerful symbol of European unity across the current EU border (Poland is a member, Ukraine is not).

UEFA is unhappy with Ukraine’s progress in building the necessary infrastructure, but Ukraine should be given time to get its act together.

Where appropriate, the EU should extend these measures to Moldova, which is now calling Ukraine a “strategic shelter,” most probably after the elections in March 2009.

Ukraine faces a crucial presidential election in 2009 or 2010. After getting its fingers badly burned at the last election in 2004, Russia is clearly tempted to intervene again. The “Russian factor” will strongly influence the campaign.

Greater Western engagement is needed to ensure that the “Europe factor” is equally prominent.

The EU Must Reengage in the Moldova’s Transnistria (Trans-Dniester ) Problem To Avoid a Russian-Ossetian Type of Intrusion. What is at Stake here Is the Clear Return to a Reasserting Russia That Has Throws a Shadow Reading   Cold War II. Front-line Countries are the GUAM Countries: Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova. The Latter Is The Only One That Does Not Border Russia – But Is In Danger of Becoming Another Belarus.

——–

[Comment] The EU should re-engage with Moldova’s ‘frozen conflict.’
Nicu Popescu, August 30, 2008, The EUoserver.

EUOBSERVER / COMMENT – Recently, the EU has learned that a war over an obscure place such as South Ossetia can shatter the arrangements of post-Cold War Europe. The armed conflict between Russia and Georgia has reverberated even more shockingly across the post-Soviet space. Without stronger engagement with its neighbours, the EU might end up with a bi-polar Europe, not a “ring of friends” in its neighbourhood.

In addition to Abkhazia and South Ossetia [in Georgia], Transnistria is a third “frozen conflict” zone supported politically, economically and militarily by the Russian Federation and used to exert influence on Moldova. The war in Georgia is beginning to have an impact in Moldova. The danger is not that of another war, but of unsustainable peace and the transformation of Moldova into a second Belarus.

***

At just 100 kilometers from the EU border, Transnistria is the closest unsolved secessionist conflict to the European Union. This conflict undermines Moldovan statehood, threatens Romania and Ukraine’s security and complicates EU-Russia relations. In the last years the EU has significantly stepped up its engagement in Moldova. The EU offered Moldova a visa-facilitation agreement and trade liberalization as well as making Moldova the second biggest recipient of EU assistance in the European neighbourhood (after Palestine). The EU also appointed an EU Special Representative, introduced a travel ban against Transnistrian leaders, and launched an 120 people-strong EU Border Assistance Mission to reduce the smuggling on which Transnistria thrived. The EU efforts are partly effective, but they need time, which might be in short supply.

***

On the wings of a military victory in Georgia, Russia’s president Dmitri Medvedev convoked his Moldovan counterpart, Vladimir Voronin, to a summit in Sochi. Russia offered Moldova a settlement in Transnistria on Russian terms, or to face gradual recognition of Transnistrian independence. Russia wants a return to the “Kozak Memorandum” – a 2003 deal on Transnistria that the EU and Moldova refused for fear of entrenching Russian military presence in Moldova. Russia also wants Moldova to interrupt virtually all its cooperation with NATO, condemn Georgia, possibly end the presence of the EU Border Assistance Mission in the region and accept a dysfunctional federalisation agreement.

The Moldovan government has been ready to accept some Russian conditions, but not a Russian military presence in the reunified Moldova. It also wants Russian peacekeepers to be replaced with international civilian monitors, but has little EU support on that. On this really tough issue Moldova is left pretty much on its own with Russia.

***

The EU has an enormous, but untapped potential in Moldova. This country is on the EU’s fringe, but 1,000 km away from Russia. Moldova wants to join the EU. The EU accounts for over half of Moldovan external trade, while Russia has roughly 15 percent. Still, many EU member states have been too hesitant to support stronger EU involvement in Moldova.

The EU’s biggest failure is to push for the transformation of the Russia-dominated and biased peacekeeping operation in Moldova. The EU discussed this twice. In 2003, the idea was refused by Russia. But in 2006 a few EU member states killed the scheme for fear of irritating Russia. This approach now has to be revisited in the light of the Georgian crisis.

***

There are four things the EU should do to send a symbolically powerful signal of engagement. The first, is for EU High Representative Javier Solana to visit Moldova, a country he has not been to since 2001. In the aftermath of the war in Georgia, European heads of state and foreign ministers have visited Georgia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan to show solidarity, but not Moldova (except for the Romanian president).

The second, is for EU member states to urgently agree on a mandate to launch negotiations on a new enhanced EU-Moldova agreement, a process that is already underway with Ukraine and even Russia. The negotiations themselves on this agreement could start after the Moldovan elections in March 2009. Despite some problems with democracy, Moldova along with Ukraine still remains one of the most pluralistic post-Soviet states.

Thirdly, the EU should agree internally that the current peacekeeping format in Transnistria is biased and should launch an initiative to internationalize the force, while offering a comprehensive EU civilian presence upon Moldovan invitation.

Fourth, the EU should offer to discuss a road-map for a visa-free regime between the EU and Moldova. This would be the strongest signal for both Moldova and Transnistria that they have a future in a Europeanised and reunified country. And it would also be a good demonstration of the EU’s ability to prevent future instability and conflict in its neighbourhood through soft, not hard, power.

Nicu Popescu is research fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, London office

Miliband rallies ‘coalition against Russian aggression’ {starts with talks in the Ukraine.}
PA, Wednesday, 27 August 2008, The Independent.
 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/…

Related Articles:
Ukraine condemns Russian move on Georgian regions.
Russian relations with West reach new low.
EU condemns Russia move on Georgia regions.
***

David Miliband will make a keynote speech in Ukraine today strongly condemning Russia’s decision to formally recognise two breakaway regions of Georgia.

The Foreign Secretary said he was visiting Kiev in a bid to assemble the “widest possible coalition against Russian aggression”.

Russia’s president Dmitri Medvedev was yesterday accused of “inflaming” the crisis by insisting that South Ossetia and Abkhazia should be independent.

Mr Medvedev told a news agency: “We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a new Cold War.

“But we don’t want it and in this situation everything depends on the position of our partners.”

He said the West would have to “understand the reason behind” the decision to recognise the regions if it wanted to preserve good relations with Russia.

***

Mr Miliband said Russia’s recognition of the two regions was “unjustifiable and unacceptable” and further inflamed an already tense situation in the region.

“It will also not work,” he said in a statement yesterday. “It is contrary to the principles of the peace agreement, which Russia recently agreed, and to recent Russian statements.

“It takes no account of the views of the hundreds of thousands of Georgians and others who have been forced to abandon their homes in the two territories.”

The Foreign Secretary was backed by Western leaders including US President George Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Mr Bush condemned Mr Medvedev’s decision as “irresponsible” and called the move “inconsistent” with UN Security Council resolutions and the French-brokered ceasefire plan.

“Russia’s action only exacerbates tensions and complicates diplomatic negotiations,” Mr Bush said.

Ms Merkel condemned Russia’s decision as “absolutely not acceptable,” but said Europe must still keep channels of communication open with Moscow.

French Foreign Ministry spokesman Eric Chevallier said the Russian decision was “regrettable, and we reaffirm our attachment to Georgia’s territorial integrity”.

France, which currently holds the EU presidency, has called an emergency meeting of EU leaders on Monday to review the relationship between Russia and Europe.

***

Mr Medvedev has warned that he was considering halting co-operation with Nato altogether, amid the fallout from the one-sided military confrontation between Russia and Georgia earlier this month.

Yesterday Russia cancelled a visit by Nato’s secretary-general, and it has complained that the alliance is bolstering its military presence in the Black Sea.

And in a move that is likely to increase tensions even further, Mr Medvedev later warned that his country may respond to a US missile shield in Europe through military means.

Mr Medvedev said the deployment of an anti-missile system close to Russian borders “will, of course, create additional tensions”.

He said: “We will have to react somehow, to react, of course, in a military way.”

EU – save Ukraine from Russia, The European Foreign Policy Council (ECFR) NGO says.

Philippa Runner, from Brussels for the EUobserver, August 25, 2008.

The European Union should formally recognise Ukraine’s right to join the EU and offer it a “solidarity clause” to help prevent Russia from undermining Kiev’s pro-democratic government in the wake of the Georgia conflict, a European foreign affairs think-tank has said.

“The next focal point for security tensions – although not for war – might be Ukraine,” the European Foreign Policy Council (ECFR) warned in a flash report on Monday (25 August), urging Brussels to make a strong show of friendship with Ukraine at an EU foreign ministers’ meeting on 5 September and the EU-Ukraine summit on 9 September.

Russian cruiser – the Black Sea fleet has been stationed in Crimea since 1783.

In the “mid-term,” the ECFR advised the EU to make a political declaration endorsing Ukraine’s EU perspective, draft a road-map for a visa-free travel deal, and help Ukraine to ready itself for NATO membership and the ejection of Russia’s Black Sea fleet from its old home in Crimea.

 www.SustainabiliTank.info thinks this is a very raw idea – not even half backed. We have seen Sevastopol and neighboring towns and waters. They are filled with old and newer Russian warships and the people in the towns are mainly Russian. Talking of the people – also in the Eastern part of Ukraine most people are Russian transplants, they speak Russian and feel they want to be part of Russia. We said this many times – to save Ukraine from Russia, the solution is an amicable divorce – so the best the EU could do is to advise the Ukraine to go for their own good to a marriage/divorce councillor and promise them the EU membership if they agree to severance from some of the heavily Russian territories. Surely, the EU can say to the Russian Prime-Minister that moving in with force will be dealt with in economic terms, but we all know that if ,and when, these statements are put to test, the EU will not go to war because of the Ukraine. Further, in the Ukraine case there is not even an argument like we had for Ossetia, where we said that if one opts for independence – this should lead to an Ossetia State that includes both – South and North Ossetia. There is no similar condition in the case of The Ukraine.}
A new bilateral EU-Ukraine treaty – currently under negotiation – should also legally oblige the EU to “consult and assist Ukraine in case of challenges to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine.”

The ECFR study sees Russia’s assault on Georgia as part of a wider plan to rebuild the old Soviet sphere of influence, noting that some pro-Kremlin analysts such as Sergei Markov recently floated the idea of a Russia-led “East European Union,” which would mimic EU integration and include countries such as Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Turkey.

“What matters here is Russia’s drive to become the centre (and the sheriff) of a pole of influence in a multi-polar world and a bipolar Europe,” the ECFR said.

***

Tensions flare:

Russia-Ukraine tensions flared in recent weeks after Moscow accused Kiev of supplying arms to Georgia, and Kiev tried to limit Russia’s use of its Crimea-stationed warships against Georgia.

Inside Ukraine, pro-western President Viktor Yushchenko’s senior aide, Andriy Kyslynskiy, last week accused Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko of striking a secret deal with the Kremlin in return for Russia’s support when she runs in the next Ukrainian presidential elections in 2010.

Mr Kyslynskiy also said political “interference” by pro-Kremlin elements in the Ukrainian establishment has reached levels unseen since the run-up to the 2004 Orange Revolution, adding that Russian intelligence is funding and steering Crimean separatist groups.

Some 60 percent of the 2 million people who live in Crimea are ethnically Russian, hundreds of thousands of whom secretly hold Russian passports, the ECFR says.

Crimea was historically Russian and has been home to the Black Sea fleet since 1783. It became part of Ukraine when Ukraine won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, with the Russian fleet set to leave by 2017 under a bilateral deal.

In the wider Ukraine, about 25 percent of the 50 million-strong population are Russophone, most of whom live in the east of the country and many of whom oppose Ukraine’s integration with NATO and the EU.

***

Warning shots already fired:

On 22 August, some 2,500 people held an anti-Georgia rally in the eastern Ukrainian town of Donetsk. The same day, 50 people in Simferopol in Crimea called for the peninsula to rejoin Russia, with the crowd nonetheless gaining coverage in Russian state media.

In late July, anti-NATO protestors in Crimea threw stones at Ukrainian police, who fired warning shots in the air. A second group used small boats to try and block NATO warships leave the port of Odessa to take part in a naval drill.

“[Russia] is likely to play on deep rifts within Ukraine on the ‘Russia question’ to try and influence the country’s future,” the ECFR said. “[The EU] must demonstrate that an escalation of tensions in the post-Soviet space will be met with more, not less, engagement in the Eastern neighbourhood.”

——————–

Georgian rebels in Abkhazia seek greater EU recognition.
LEIGH PHILLIPS, 25.08.2008, EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS.

Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, on the Black Sea – is a once a popular holiday spot for Russian elite.

The Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia is keen to get EU recognition as an independent country, after the Russian parliament passed a resolution urging the Russian president to endorse Georgian rebels’ ambitions of statehood.

“We are not interested in only Russia recognising us,” Abkhaz deputy foreign minister, Maxim Gunjia, told EUobserver on Monday (25 August), adding that he expects Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to shortly back the pro-independence vote by Russian MPs.

“We want the European Union and all states to recognise our independence. This is a very positive moment for the EU – it could follow Russia’s example and also recognise Abkhazia. It is the only way to preserve stability and peace in the region.”

“We recognise that full recognition is a very big demand of Abkhazia for the EU at the moment,” Mr Gunja added, indicating that Abkhazia would also be interested in other ways of increasing its presence on the international stage.

“The EU could instead give a voice to Abkhazia in various European forums and institutions,” he said. “Only Georgia is invited to such forums while discussing the Caucasus, which is why the information the EU is receiving is biased, and why the conflict became possible.”

***

The lower house and the upper house of the Russian parliament on Monday both unanimously voted through a resolution urging Mr Medvedev to recognise Abkhazia and a second Georgian rebel territory, South Ossetia, as independent states.

The resolution has a largely symbolic value so far, as the legal decision resides solely with the Russian president, with some western experts doubting the Kremlin will follow through.

“The game is completely open, but it would be much more reasonable for Medvedev not to do so. If he doesn’t, he holds onto a very powerful bargaining chip with regards to the EU and US, and Georgia itself,” conflict prevention think-tank, the International Crisis Group (ICG), analyst, Alain Deletroz, said.

“If he wants to turn a military victory into a diplomatic victory, he will not recognise [the rebel enclaves], because it will then become extremely difficult for the EU to keep an open dialogue with Moscow,” Mr Deletroz explained. “What Russia wanted was a division within NATO. If they go too far, they will only achieve the opposite – a unification within the alliance.”

***

The China angle:

“Even for the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation [the China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan security alliance], recognition would create problems. For the same reasons that China was not happy with the West’s recognition of Kosovo, Beijing would also not be happy with Russian recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia,” the ICG expert added, pointing to China’s discomfort over its own separatist problems, such as Taiwan.

The European Commission was reluctant to issue any reaction to the Russian parliamentary vote ahead of next week’s extraordinary summit on EU-Russia relations, but the EU has repeatedly said it supports Georgia’s “territorial integrity.”

“The debate is ongoing in Russia, and we will not react as long as the debate is ongoing,” European Commission spokesperson, Ton Van Lierop, told reporters in Brussels.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia broke away from Tbilisi in civil wars in the 1990s, setting up de facto states with their own mini-parliaments and paramilitary forces within Georgia’s internationally-recognised borders during a tense, 15-year long ceasefire that erupted into open conflict on 7 August.

Tbilisi has accused Russia of giving the rebels financial and political backing, as well as arms, in order to keep NATO and EU-aspirant Georgia divided. It also accuses the separatist and Russian forces of “ethnic cleansing” in pushing out the last remaining ethnic Georgians from the two territories during the recent war.

———————-

UNDP Releases Information on a UN Angle:

Please see - http://www.innercitypress.com/undp1georg…

It seems that Inner City Press came up with information, acknowledged by UNDP, that together with the George Soros Open Society International, and the Swedish Government, there was a very modest supplemental funding of Georgian officials, including the President, to make it possible for them to run a rather non-corrupt government in the National interest of Georgia, and perhaps also in the interest of the oil buyers of the West.

Above link leads to an article that starts:

UN’s Engagement with Saakashvili Included $1500 a Month, Soros and Sweden Also Paid.

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, August 25 — Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was paid $1500 a month by the UN Development Program earlier this decade, on top of his official presidential salary, UNDP has told Inner City Press. UNDP says the goals of these payments, in which the Swedish government and financier George Soros joined, were to allow the Georgian “government to recruit the staff it needed and also to help remove incentives for corruption.”

  While receiving these $1500 monthly payment, Saakashvili committed to increase tax collection in Georgia. Deals were signed with , among others, British Petroleum, for the Baku – Tbilisi – Ceyhan oil pipeline. UNDP, and presumably its two co-funders, applauded this development.

——-

This last article mentions also the old UNDP problem with having helped with injecting hard currency to North Korea that, as the claim goes, has helped them finance the acquisition of nuclear know-how. So, UNDP is a tool for covert actions and not just a victim of side effects in what they consider to be development work? In the tape attached to the article, Matthew Russell Lee points out at the unevenness of the way, North Korea, Sudan, and Zimbabwe were dealt with, and surfaces the idea that the treatment is in relation to the interest of internal politics in the US. So back to our posting, how will the UN be used in the case of the Ukraine – which is rather more of an EU then a US problem?

[Comment] Winning the peace in Georgia
NICU POPESCU AND ANDREW WILSON, The authors are research fellows at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Brussels, August 20, 2008, as an EUOBSERVER COMMENT:

The European Union’s frenetic diplomacy around Georgia’s war with Russia is in stark contrast with its reluctance to engage just a few months ago. After years of blockage, delays and hesitation the EU will have to act. The question is how to get it right this time.

After the launch of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2003, the EU made all the right noises about its potential contribution to conflict resolution in the South Caucasus. It appointed an EU Special Representative (in 2002), launched a rule of law mission to Tbilisi in 2004, deployed a 12-person EU border support team and significantly increased its financial contribution to the rehabilitation of the conflict zones in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

But – “Many in the EU have developed Georgia fatigue”

Since 2006 the EU has been the biggest international donor to the conflict regions (not counting Russia’s non-transparent assistance). The EU has financed civil society, the reconstruction of schools, hospitals, electricity generation and water sewage systems in the conflict zones.

But the EU has performed less well on the political issues. In a constantly degenerating security environment of increasing tension between Russia and Georgia, the long-term focus of the European neighbourhood policy has been increasingly out of touch with the pressing realities on the ground.

The EU has found it hard to muster the political will to even ask Russia some tough questions about its role in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, let alone push the transformation of the negotiation formats and the peacekeeping operations in the region. The OSCE’s five military observers in Tskhinvali were regularly reporting persistent breaches of the security regime in South Ossetia and excessive militarisation of the region, but such reports have rarely been taken off their shelves in the OSCE headquarters in Vienna. The EU never had the political will to discuss the topic with Russia other than pro-forma.

In 2005 Russia terminated a 150-person strong OSCE Border Monitoring Mission on the Russian-Georgian border, and Georgia invited the EU to take over. The EU response was to send three persons (later extended to 12) to help Georgia reform its border management system. In January 2007 the EU sent a fact-finding mission to the conflict region that suggested a number of small steps for EU engagement in the conflict zones.

These included relatively uncontroversial proposals such as offering greater support and financing for civil society and youth support in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and greater support for institution-building in Georgia’s customs service; the opening of European Information Centres in Abkhazia and South Ossetia; the appointment of two EU police officers to work with the secessionist authorities; and the possibility for two EU border experts to develop a dialogue on border-control issues in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

However minimalist, even such measures have had to be dragged through EU decision-making mechanisms, blocked and delayed by a minority (sometimes only one) of Russia-friendly member states. As the EU was debating sending two more persons on the ground, Russia was introducing hundreds of armed “peacekeepers” into Abkhazia.

Learning from the Balkan wars:

Worse, in response to frequent visits by Georgian ministers to Brussels demanding a greater EU role in conflict settlement, many in the EU have developed a “Georgia fatigue.” Georgia itself developed a sense of disappointment with Brussels: the EU’s offers of deep free trade and visa facilitation were not very attractive, and the EU’s reluctance to engage encouraged unilateral action.

It is now time for the EU to relearn one of the central lessons of the Balkan wars: that the best way to keep the peace is to get involved, rather than standing on the sidelines.

The EU now needs to rescue what it can from a terrible situation. It has already become Russia’s main negotiator for the post-conflict arrangements. Now is the time to reform the dysfunctional peace support arrangements that enabled the conflict, i.e. the supposedly “trilateral” Georgian-Russian-North-Ossetian joint peacekeeping force supervised by a Joint Constitutional Commission where Georgia was de facto completely outnumbered by South Ossetia, North Ossetia and Russia. The EU now has three options.

The first is to offer greater support to the OSCE and the UN in South Ossetia and Abkhazia by providing additional monitors.

Second, the EU could send armed peacekeepers. But either of these options would mean double dependence on Russia, requiring approval in the UN Security Council, and Russian cooperation on the ground. EU peacekeeping from a position of weakness might end up conferring greater legitimacy on Russian forces on the ground, while contributing little to any political settlement (like the UN peacekeepers in Cyprus).

The third, and the most desirable, option for the EU is to deploy a comprehensive EU Reconstruction Mission covering humanitarian, reconstruction and political aspects. Its functions would include monitoring the security situation and the peacekeeping operation, but also dealing with return of internally displaced persons, conflict-mediation, confidence-building measures, as well as disarmament, demobilization, and the reintegration of former combatants. Such a mission would come in response to Georgia’s invitation, and would not need UN approval.

The EU should also set up a Contact Group that would meet every six months at ministerial level, with monthly meetings for their Political Directors, to oversee the progress of the peace plan and discuss issues that may impede implementation.

The EU has taken the lead in finding an immediate ceasefire solution. But without longer-term engagement in the South Caucasus violent solutions to territorial problems might remain the default solution for years, if not decades to come.

—————————

Pentagon, White House at odds over aid to Georgia.

By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers, posted on Tuesday, August 19, 2008
WASHINGTON — The Bush White House and the Pentagon are at odds over whether to station a Navy ship in the Black Sea to demonstrate U.S. support for the embattled Georgian military and government, two defense officials told McClatchy Tuesday.

The White House thinks that deploying a vessel such as the hospital ship USNS Comfort would showcase the Bush administration’s support for Georgia and signal U.S. concern that Russia has sparked a humanitarian crisis in Georgia.

The Pentagon officials, who both spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss internal policy deliberations, said the move is unnecessary. Last week, the U.S. military sent a 12-member assessment team to determine how much humanitarian aid Georgians need.

Air Force and Navy aircraft are sending supplies daily and military officials don’t think Georgia requires much additional assistance.

The Comfort, which is based in Baltimore, could be ready to leave as early as Friday but would take five weeks to arrive, and the two military officials said they believe that air support is sufficient.

“That is all they need right now,” one senior defense official said.

Moreover, to send the Comfort, a destroyer or any other major naval vessel, the Bush administration would need to obtain permission from Turkey under the Montreux Convention, an international treaty that regulates naval passage in the Black Sea. So far, Turkey, which controls the Bosporus and the Dardanelles that link the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, has refused, the Pentagon officials told McClatchy.

The White House is frustrated, the officials said, but the Pentagon is unperturbed.

Last week, McClatchy reported that President Bush publicly declared that U.S. “naval forces” would assist Georgia before his administration had consulted Turkey or the Pentagon has planned a naval operation.

Throughout the Georgia conflict, Pentagon officials have resisted using U.S. weapons, troops or ships to send political messages to Russia. The Marine Corps would like to withdraw 17 Marines who were in Georgia to train Georgian troops for duty in Iraq, but the White House has insisted that the trainers remain in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, to head off any chance that the administration would be seen to be abandoning an ally.

Earlier this year, Turkey, a member of the NATO alliance, approved a U.S. military plan to send the destroyer USS McFaul and the USS Dallas, a submarine, to the Black Sea for a training exercise. The military is stocking those ships with humanitarian aid in case defense officials decide to proceed with the training exercise, naval officials said. For now, however, the two ships remain docked in Greece.

The McClutchen papers, August 20, 2008

This weekend, as expected, the TV was plastered with the Russians in Georgia and the Beijing Olympics.

President Bush and Secretary Condaleezza Rice said that Russia will not get away with this like it happened in Hungary.

On CNN, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the man with the Kosovo and Bosnia experience, said this was not Kosovo. The Russians were ready to stage this action already two years ago. It happened now because there was a Russian provocation and there has been indeed a real ethnic cleansing going on in Ossetia and in Abkhazia that caused many thousands of refugees pouring continuously into Georgia. The US says the number is 150,000 displaced people.

Holbrooke looks back into history and thinks of Budapest of 19956, Prag of 1966, Afghanistan of 1968 – so this is the invasion of Georgia that was executed in similar methodology.

Dmitry Simes, President of the Washington DC Nixon Center, and Rose Gottemoeller, Director of Carnegie, Moscow, agree to the above and say that the fact that this happened again at the time of the Olympics, just shows the Putin self confidence and that Putin does not worry that this will harm Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014. That area is in fact just across the border from were fighting was going on now.

Governor Bill Richardson stressed that this is not time for high US talk, simply, “we have no leverage on Russia,” so we have to engage them and not isolate them. He knows the area, problems, has been there – all as part of his UN Ambassadorship.

Georgia was incorporated into Russia in 1801 and stayed under Russian rule for 190 years. They re-emerged as an independent state only in 1991. The Ossentians always considered themselves different from the Georgians – and also not similar to the Russians. The same goes for Abkhazia and Azaria as per Rick Stengel, editor of Time Magazine, who was this Sunday’s coordinator of the GPS program that is usually brought out by Fareed Zakaria.

So, can one ostracize Russia from world business? Will this bring about a renewal of the Cold War?

He does not think that Russia has become a revisionist State and that it is fighting for a larger Russia. His idea is that the area is specially complicated – something like the Balkans, and that there were many reasons to what went on.

———

***

Cold Friends, Wrapped in Mink and Medals.

By BILL KELLER
Published in The New York Times August 16, 2008

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.

Related
Map
Russia Marches, Neighbors Check Their Cards (The New York Times, August 17, 2008)
Specter of Arrest Deters Demonstrators in China (The New York Tines, August 14, 2008)

Chrystia Freeland’s Article: The New Age of Authoritarianism  www.ft.com August 12, 2008)

So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.

If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

The Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. From the dazzling locksteps of that opening ceremony, to the kowtowing international V.I.P.’s, to the carefully policed absence of protest, this was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess.

Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international norms of behavior went unredeemed. The New York Times’s Andrew Jacobs followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had filed the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee.

The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was not the ease or audacity but the swagger of it. This was not just about a couple of obscure border enclaves, nor even, really, about Georgia. This was existential payback.

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning.

It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.

Mr. Putin is, in this sense of grievance, a man of his people, as visitors to the New York Times Web site can see in the sampling of breast-beating commentary from Russian bloggers. It is safe to assume that Mr. Putin’s already stratospheric popularity at home has grown to Phelpsian proportions, not least among the long-suffering military.

In China, 1989 was the year that a spark of liberal aspiration flickered on Tiananmen Square, and was decisively extinguished. That was another beginning, or at least a renewal: of Chinese resolve. In May of that year, in the midst of the Tiananmen euphoria, Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited Beijing, and two visions of a new communism stared each other in the face.

The protesters on the Chinese pavilion held banners welcoming Mr. Gorbachev as a champion of the greater freedom they sought. Meanwhile, the visiting Russian delegation marveled at the abundance in Chinese stores, the bounty of a policy that chose economic liberalization without political dissent.

The Chinese and Russians scorned each other’s neo-Communist models, but in some ways they have evolved toward one another. Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. (The Chinese “street” felt no more sympathy for restive Tibetans than the Russian blogosphere felt for Georgia.) And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way.

President Bush was mocked from both sides for his seeming impotence. Neoconservatives were appalled by photos of President Bush sharing a laugh with Mr. Putin in Beijing while Russian armor gathered at the Georgian border. For a president who has made the export of democracy his signature doctrine, that looked to the stand-tough crowd like a “Pet Goat” moment.

Others argued that this was a crisis Mr. Bush tacitly encouraged by talking up Georgia’s rambunctious president as a friend and NATO candidate. By midweek, possibly goaded by the wailing of neoconservatives and the aggressively anti-Putin rhetoric of Senator John McCain, Mr. Bush had abruptly amped up his opprobrium and dispatched an American airlift of humanitarian aid. And by the weekend there was a cold war chill in the air.

But Mr. Bush’s predicament is not just his. The question of how to deal with these reinvigorated autocracies bedevils the Europeans and will surely rank high among the legacy issues that confound Mr. Bush’s successor.

This time it is not — or not yet — the threat of nuclear apocalypse that limits the West’s options toward our emboldened Eastern rivals. The Chinese, in fact, are acting as if they have gotten past the saber-rattling stage of emerging-power status; they lavish diplomacy on Taiwan and Japan, and deploy the might of capital instead. The Russians may be in a more adolescent, table-pounding stage of development, but Mr. Putin, too, prefers to work the economic levers, bullying with petroleum.

The United States, meanwhile, is mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, estranged from much of the world, and bled by serial economic crises.

History, it seems, is back, and not so obviously on our side.

Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, covered the last years of the Soviet Union for the newspaper.

***

——————

The New Age of Authoritarianism.
By Chrystia Freeland
Published: August 12 2008 in The Financial Times.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, democracy was on the march and we declared the End of History. Nearly two decades later, a neo-imperialist Russia is at war with Georgia, Communist China is proudly hosting the Olympics, and we find that, instead, we have entered the Age of Authoritarianism.

It is worth recalling how different we thought the future would be in the immediate, happy aftermath of the end of the cold war. Remember Francis Fukuyama’s ringing assertion: “The triumph of the west, of the western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism.”

Even in the heady days of 1989, that declaration of universal – and possibly eternal – ideological victory seemed a little hubristic to Professor Fukuyama’s many critics. Yet his essay made such an impact because it captured the scale, and the enormous benefits, of the change sweeping through the world. Not only was the stifling Soviet – which was really the Russian – suzerainty over central and eastern Europe and central Asia coming to an end but, even more importantly, the very idea of a one-party state, ruthlessly presiding over a centrally planned economy, seemed to be discredited, if not forever, then surely for our lifetimes.

That collapse brought freedom and prosperity to millions of people who had lived under Soviet rule. Moreover, the implosion of Soviet communism inspired hundreds of millions of others around the world to embrace freer markets and demand more responsive governments. The great global economic boom of the past 20 years, which has brought more people out of poverty more quickly than at any other time in human history, would not have been possible had the Soviet way of ordering the world not been discredited first.

Yet today, in much of the world, the spread of freedom is being checked by an authoritarian revanche. That shift has been most obvious in the petro-states, where oil is casting its usual curse. From Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, the black-gold bonanza has given authoritarian regimes the currency to buy off or to repress their subjects. In Russia, oil has fuelled an economic boom that prime minister Vladimir Putin, and some of his foreign admirers, mistakenly attribute to his careful demolition of the chaotic democracy of the 1990s.

For Russians, that argument is strengthened by the fact that the rising economic power of the moment – China – is unashamedly sticking to its faith in one-party rule. The end of the cold war made it tempting to believe that as countries opened up their markets, and became richer in the process, they would inevitably open up their societies, too. George W. Bush, US president, reiterated that hopeful thesis on his Asia tour last week, insisting: “Young people who grow up with the freedom to trade goods will ultimately demand the freedom to trade ideas.”

But the Chinese mandarins and the Russian siloviki are taking a different view – and acting on it. As China scholar David Shambaugh recounts in his new book, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation , the CCP studied the collapse of Soviet communism with great care. And rather than seeing it as proof of the inevitable, global triumph of western liberalism, the Chinese comrades treated the Russian example as a textbook case of what a ruling Communist party ought not to do.

In this version of history, sinologist Andrew Nathan tells me, 1989 is also a turning point, but not because that was when communism’s most notorious wall came down. Instead, the key event of that year was the bloody suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square: “As a propaganda position they have put it out that we had a crackdown in 1989 and we saved the party and we saved the country,” he says. “We didn’t have a failure of will like the Russians. Without that, we wouldn’t have been a great, modern power.” That’s a point of view Mr Putin has embraced, too, describing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy and his own reconstruction of a neo-authoritarian state as the only way to restore Russian “greatness”.

The west has been remarkably sanguine about this resurgence of authoritarianism, and one reason is that, this time, the comrades have money. Even as the Kremlin repeatedly confiscates the assets not just of its own businesspeople but of foreign ones, too, investment bankers, and plain old investors, are flocking to a Moscow flush with petro-roubles. The same is true of the Gulf states. China, on a path to become the world’s largest economy, is the most attractive of all.

But the Age of Authoritarianism is bad news for all of us, not just the human rights campaigners that businesspeople and practitioners of realpolitik love to dismiss. Like all overly rigid objects, authoritarian regimes conceal a tremendous fragility in their apparent strength – and their leaders know it. It is this realisation that has driven Mr Putin’s systematic destruction of all forms of civil society – an eminently pragmatic measure, although it has mystified some outside observers, who wonder why so popular a leader needs to be so heavy-handed. China’s chiefs have figured this out, too, hence their anxiety about everything from the Muslim Uighurs to the internet to the former Soviet Union’s “colour revolutions”.

Of course, another way to ensure popular support for your authoritarian regime is by playing up nationalist sentiment. We are more tolerant of our home-grown bullies if we think we need them to fight our enemies abroad – as even democratic America has demonstrated in recent years. Mr Putin has understood this all along, launching a brutal attack on Chechnya even before his coronation as president in 2000.

Russia’s expert taunting of the hotheads in Georgia, followed by immediate and massive retaliation the moment Tbilisi took the bait, is the latest evidence that, for the Kremlin, neo-imperialism is an essential bulwark of neo-authoritarianism. Bringing down the walls really did make the world safer. Now that so many leaders are building them back up again, figuring out how to contain the 21st century’s monied authoritarians is our most pressing foreign policy dilemma.

 chrystia.freeland at ft.com

The Russian-Georgian War: Implications for the Middle East – Ariel Cohen (Institute for Contemporary Affairs-Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)

Moscow formulated far-reaching goals when it carefully prepared – over a period of at least two and a half years – for a land invasion of Georgia. These goals included: expelling Georgian troops and effectively terminating Georgian sovereignty in South Ossetia and Abkhazia; bringing down President Mikheil Saakashvili and installing a more pro-Russian leadership in Tbilisi; and preventing Georgia from joining NATO.
Russia’s long-term strategic goals include increasing its control of the Caucasus, especially over strategic energy pipelines. If a pro-Russian regime is established in Georgia, it will bring the strategic Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Erzurum (Turkey) gas pipeline under Moscow’s control.
In recent years, Moscow granted the majority of Abkhazs and South Ossetians Russian citizenship. Use of Russian citizenship to create a “protected” population residing in a neighboring state to undermine its sovereignty is a slippery slope which is now leading to a redrawing of the former Soviet borders.
Russian continental power is on the rise. Israel should understand it and not provoke Moscow unnecessarily, while defending its own national security interests staunchly. Small states need to treat nuclear armed great powers with respect.
U.S. intelligence-gathering and analysis on the Russian threat to Georgia failed. So did U.S. military assistance to Georgia, worth around $2 billion over the last 15 years. This is something to remember when looking at recent American intelligence assessments of the Iranian nuclear threat or the unsuccessful training of Palestinian Authority security forces against Hamas.

The writer is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Security at The Heritage Foundation.

Jerusalem Issue Briefs -   The Russian-Georgian War: Implications for the Middle East
by   Ariel Cohen,   Published August 2008.

Vol. 8, No. 6       15 August 2008

 The Russian-Georgian War: Implications for the Middle East – by Ariel Cohen.

Moscow formulated far-reaching goals when it carefully prepared – over a period of at least two and a half years – for a land invasion of Georgia. These goals included: expelling Georgian troops and effectively terminating Georgian sovereignty in South Ossetia and Abkhazia; bringing down President Mikheil Saakashvili and installing a more pro-Russian leadership in Tbilisi; and preventing Georgia from joining NATO.
Russia’s long-term strategic goals include increasing its control of the Caucasus, especially over strategic energy pipelines. If a pro-Russian regime is established in Georgia, it will bring the strategic Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Erzurum (Turkey) gas pipeline under Moscow’s control.
In recent years, Moscow granted the majority of Abkhazs and South Ossetians Russian citizenship. Use of Russian citizenship to create a “protected” population residing in a neighboring state to undermine its sovereignty is a slippery slope which is now leading to a redrawing of the former Soviet borders.
Russian continental power is on the rise. Israel should understand it and not provoke Moscow unnecessarily, while defending its own national security interests staunchly. Small states need to treat nuclear armed great powers with respect.
U.S. intelligence-gathering and analysis on the Russian threat to Georgia failed. So did U.S. military assistance to Georgia, worth around $2 billion over the last 15 years. This is something to remember when looking at recent American intelligence assessments of the Iranian nuclear threat or the unsuccessful training of Palestinian Authority security forces against Hamas.
The long-term outcomes of the current Russian-Georgian war will be felt far and wide, from Afghanistan to Iran, and from the Caspian to the Mediterranean. The war is a mid-sized earthquake which indicates that the geopolitical tectonic plates are shifting, and nations in the Middle East, including Israel, need to take notice.

Russia’s Goals:

Moscow formulated far-reaching goals when it carefully prepared – over a period of at least two and a half years – for a land invasion of Georgia, as this author warned.1 These goals included:

Expelling Georgian troops and effectively terminating Georgian sovereignty in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia is preparing the ground for independence and eventual annexation of these separatist territories. Thus, these goals seem to be on track to be successfully achieved.
“Regime change” – bringing down President Mikheil Saakashvili and installing a more pro-Russian leadership in Tbilisi. Russia seems to have given up on the immediate toppling of Saakashvili, and is likely counting on the Georgian people to do the job once the dust settles. Russia, for its part, will pursue a criminal case against him for genocide and war crimes in South Ossetia, trying to turn him into another Slobodan Milosevic/Radovan Karadzic. This is part of psychological operations against the Georgian leader, of which more later.
Preventing Georgia from joining NATO and sending a strong message to Ukraine that its insistence on NATO membership may lead to war and/or its dismemberment. Russia succeeded in attacking a state that has been regarded as a potential candidate for NATO membership since April 2008. The Russian assault undoubtedly erodes the NATO umbrella in the international community, even though Georgia is not yet formally a member, especially if it emerges that Moscow can use force against its neighbors with impunity. While it remains to be seen whether Georgia ultimately is fully accepted into NATO, some voices in Europe, especially in Germany, will see in the war a vindication of their opposition to such membership. Georgia’s chances will decrease further if the next U.S. president is noncommittal on the conflict. Ukraine is standing tall in solidarity with Georgia for the time being, and has taken a strong step to limit the movements of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, but has little domestic support for NATO membership.
Russia’s long-term strategic goals include:

Increasing its control of the Caucasus, especially over strategic energy pipelines.2 If a pro-Russian regime is established in Georgia, it will bring the strategic Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Erzurum (Turkey) gas pipeline under Moscow’s control. Israel receives some of its oil from Ceyhan, and has a stake in the smooth flow of oil from the Caspian.
Russian control over Georgia would outflank Azerbaijan, denying the U.S. any basing and intelligence options there in case of a confrontation with Iran. This kind of control would also undermine any options for pro-Western orientations in Azerbaijan and Armenia, along with any chance of resolving their conflict based on diplomacy and Western-style cooperation.

Recreating a nineteenth-century-style sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union and beyond, if necessary by use of force. Here, the intended addressees included all former Soviet republics, including the Baltic States. The message may have backfired as the presidents of Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania came to Tbilisi and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Saakashvili. However, without Western European and U.S. support, “New Europe” alone cannot stand up to Moscow.

Russian Proxies Inside Georgia:

Russian relations with Georgia were the worst among the post-Soviet states. In addition to fanning the flames of separatism in South Ossetia since 1990, Russia militarily supported separatists in Abkhazia (1992-1993), which is also a part of Georgian territory, to undermine Georgia’s independence and assert its control over the strategically important South Caucasus.3

Despite claims about oppressed minority status, the separatist South Ossetian leadership is mostly ethnic Russians, many of whom served in the KGB, the Soviet secret police; the Russian military; or in the Soviet communist party. Abkhazia and South Ossetia have become Russia’s wholly-owned subsidiaries, their population largely militarized and subsisting on smuggling operations.

This use of small, ethnically-based proxies is similar to Iran’s use of Hizbullah and Hamas to continuously attack Israel. Tbilisi tried for years to deal with these militias by offering a negotiated solution, including full autonomy within Georgia.

In recent years, Moscow granted the majority of Abkhazs and South Ossetians Russian citizenship and moved to establish close economic and bureaucratic ties with the two separatist republics, effectively enacting a creeping annexation of both territories. Use of Russian citizenship to create a “protected” population residing in a neighboring state to undermine its sovereignty is a slippery slope which is now leading to a redrawing of the former Soviet borders.

On August 7, after yet another Russian-backed South Ossetian military provocation, Saakashvili attacked South Ossetian targets with artillery and armor. Yet, Tbilisi was stunned by the ferocity of the Russian response. It shouldn’t have been, nor should Americans be surprised. The writing was on the wall, but Washington failed to read it, despite repeated warning from allied intelligence services and a massive presence of diplomats and military trainers on the ground. The results for Georgia are much more disastrous than for Israel in summer 2006.

“Kill the Chicken to Scare the Monkey:”

Aggression against Georgia also sends a strong signal to Ukraine and to Europe. Russia is playing a chess game of offense and intimidation. Former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin spoke last spring about Russia “dismembering” Ukraine, another NATO candidate, and detaching the Crimea, a peninsula which was transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, when both were integral parts of the Soviet Union.

Today, up to 50 percent of Ukrainian citizens speak Russian as their first language and ethnic Russians comprise around one-fifth of Ukraine’s population. With encouragement from Moscow, these people may be induced to follow South Ossetia and Abkhazia to Mother Russia’s bosom. Yet, Ukraine’s pro-Western leaders, such as President Victor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, have expressed a desire to join NATO, while the pro-Moscow Ukrainian Party of Regions effectively opposes membership. NATO opponents in Ukraine are greatly encouraged by Russia’s action against Georgia.

In the near future, Russia is likely to beef up the Black Sea Fleet, which has bases in Tartus and Latakia in Syria, and used to have an anchorage in Libya. For over two hundred years the navy has been the principal tool of Russian power projection in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

Beyond this, Russia is demonstrating that it can sabotage American and EU declarations about integrating the Commonwealth of Independent States members into Western structures such as NATO.

By attempting to accomplish regime change in Georgia, Moscow is also trying to gain control of the energy and transportation corridor which connects Central Asia and Azerbaijan with the Black Sea and ocean routes overseas – for oil, gas and other commodities. Back in 1999, Western companies reached an agreement with Central Asian states to create the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. So far, this has allowed Azerbaijan to bypass Russia completely and transport its oil from the Caspian Sea basin straight through Georgia and Turkey, without crossing Russian territory. The growing output of the newly independent Central Asian states has been increasingly competing with Russian oil. By 2018, the Caspian basin, including Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, is supposed to export up to 4 million barrels of oil a day, as well as a significant amount of natural gas. Russia would clearly like to restore its hegemony over hydrocarbon export routes that would considerably diminish sovereignty and diplomatic freedom of maneuver in these new independent states.

A Russian S-300 Anti-Aircraft Shield for Iran?

Russia’s Georgian adventure also emboldens Iran by securing its northern tier through denial of bases, airfields, electronic facilities and other cooperation in Georgia and Azerbaijan to the U.S. and possibly Israel. At the same time, in March 2009, Russia is likely to deploy modern S-300 long-range anti-aircraft missiles in Iran. By June 2009 they will become fully operational, as Iranian teams finish training provided by their Russian instructors, according to a high-level Russian source who requested anonymity.4

The deployment of the anti-aircraft shield next spring, if it occurs, effectively limits the window in which Israel or the United States could conduct an effective aerial campaign aimed at destroying, delaying or crippling the Iranian nuclear program.

The Islamic Republic will use the long-range anti-aircraft system, in addition to the point-defense TOR M-1 short-range Russian-made system, to protect its nuclear infrastructure, including suspected nuclear weapons facilities, from a potential U.S. or Israeli preventive strike.

The S-300 system, which has a radius of over 90 miles and effective altitudes of about 90,000 feet, is capable of tracking up to 100 targets simultaneously. It is considered one of the best in the world and is amazingly versatile. It is capable of shooting down aircraft, cruise missiles, and ballistic missile warheads.5 The S-300 complements the Tor-M1 air defense missile system, also supplied by Russia. In 2007 Russia delivered 29 Tor-M1s to Iran worth $700 million.

Israel has been very effective in electronic warfare (EW) against Soviet- and Russian-built technologies, including anti-aircraft batteries. In 1982, Israeli Air Force F-16s smashed the Syrian anti-aircraft missiles in the Beka’a Valley and within Syria, allowing Israel full air superiority over Syria and Lebanon. As a result, Syria lost over 80 planes, one-third of its air force, in two days, while Israel lost one obsolete ground support A-4 Skyhawk to ground fire.

In 1981, Israeli F-15s and F-16s flew undetected over Jordan and Saudi Arabia on their mission to destroy Saddam Hussein‘s Osirak reactor. More recently, the Israeli Air Force surprised the Syrians when they destroyed an alleged nuclear facility in the northeast of the country in September 2007, apparently flying undetected to and from the mission.

However, a mission over Iran, if and when decided upon, is very different than operations over neighboring Syria. First, if Israel waits until March 2009, there may be a president in the White House who emphasizes diplomacy over military operations. Even if the George W. Bush Administration allows Israel over-flight of Iraqi air space and aerial refueling, a future administration might not, opting for an “aggressive diplomacy” approach instead – especially with an emboldened and truculent Russia as a geopolitical counter-balance.

Second, Israel, military experts say, does not have long-range bomber capacity, such as the Cold War-era U.S. B-1 heavy supersonic bomber, or the B-2 stealth bomber. Israel, a Russian source estimated, can hit 20 targets simultaneously, while the Iranian nuclear program may have as many as 100. Many of the Iranian targets are fortified, and will require bunker busters.

Operational challenges abound. Israel’s EW planes, needed to suppress anti-aircraft batteries, are slow and unarmed, and could become a target for Iranian anti-aircraft missiles or even fighter sorties. But the most important question analysts are asking is whether the current Israeli leadership has the knowledge and the gumption to pull it off. After all, the results of the 2006 mini-war against Hizbullah were disastrous for Israel, and the Israel Defense Forces have exposed numerous flaws in its preparedness, supply chain, and command, control, communications and intelligence.

The Need to Defang Tehran:

Nevertheless, the need to preemptively defang Tehran may prove decisive in view of Tehran’s hatred and intransigence.

As noted by Professor Stephen Blank of the U.S. Army War College:

When one is dealing with a national leadership which is motivated by ethnic and religious hatred, one needs to remember that such a leadership becomes obsessed and loses its ability to calculate things. They may risk war rather than seek accommodation. This was not only the case with Nazi Germany, but also with the antebellum American South of the 1840s and 1850s, where racial hatred of the slave owners cause them to lose sight of what was at stake.

Blank goes on to conclude that the Iranian leadership believes that Russia and China will provide them with protection, of which the S-300 is an important component, and that the sanctions are not effective.

Under the circumstances, an Israel-only preventive bombing campaign – without the United States – might be too risky to pull off. If the United States sits this crisis out, Israel could possibly settle for deterring Iran by taking its cities and main oil facilities hostage.

This was known during the Cold War as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), brought to you courtesy of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad. Going MAD would make the Middle East even more fragile than it already is, and would make the life of its inhabitants ever more difficult and tragic.

Clearly, with the renewal of East-West tensions as a result of Russia’s moves against Georgia, it will be much more difficult to obtain Moscow’s agreement to enhance sanctions and international pressures on Iran. The struggle to diplomatically halt its nuclear program will become far more difficult.

Lessons from the War:

Lessons for the Middle East and Israel from the Russian-Georgian War abound, and apply both to military operations, cyber-warfare, and strategic information operations. The most important of these are:

Watch Out for the Bear – and Other Beasts! Russian continental power is on the rise. Israel should understand it and not provoke Moscow unnecessarily, while defending its own national security interests staunchly. Small states need to treat nuclear armed great powers with respect. Provoking a militarily strong adversary, such as Iran, is worthwhile only if you are confident of victory, and even then there may be bitter surprises. Just ask Saakashvili.
Strategic Self-Reliance. U.S. expressions of support of the kind provided to Georgia – short of an explicit mutual defense pact – may or may not result in military assistance if/when Israel is under attack, especially when the attacker has an effective deterrent, such as nuclear arms deliverable against U.S. targets. In the future, such an attacker could be Iran or an Arab country armed with atomic weapons. Israel can and should rely on its own deterrent – a massive survivable second-strike capability.
Intelligence Failure. U.S. intelligence-gathering and analysis on the Russian threat to Georgia failed. So did U.S. military assistance to Georgia, worth around $2 billion over the last 15 years. This is something to remember when looking at recent American intelligence assessments of the Iranian nuclear threat or the unsuccessful training of Palestinian Authority security forces against Hamas. Both are deeply flawed. There is no substitute for high-quality human intelligence.
Air Power Is Not Sufficient. Russia used air, armor, the Black Sea Fleet, special forces, and allied militias. Clausewitzian lessons still apply: the use of overwhelming force in the war’s center of gravity by implementing a combined air-land-sea operation may be twentieth century, but it does work.6 Israel should have been taught this lesson after the last war with Hizbullah.
Surprise and Speed of Operations Still Matter – as they have for the four thousand years of the recorded history of warfare. To be successful, wars have to have limited and achievable goals. Russia achieved most of its goals between Friday and Monday, while the world, including President George W. Bush, was busy watching the Olympics and parliaments were on vacation.
Do Not Cringe – within reason – from taking military casualties and inflicting overwhelming military and civilian casualties at a level unacceptable to the enemy. Georgia lost some 100-200 soldiers and effectively capitulated. A tougher enemy, like the Japanese or the Germans, or even Hizbullah, could well suffer a proportionally higher rate of casualties and keep on fighting.
Information and Psychological Warfare Is Paramount. So is cyber-security. It looks like the Russians conducted repeated denial of service attacks against Georgia (and in 2007 against Estonia), shutting down key websites. Russia was ready with accusations and footage of alleged Georgian atrocities in South Ossetia, shifting the information operation playing field from “aggressor-victim” to “saving Ossetian civilians from barbaric Georgians.” These operations also matter domestically, to shore up support and boost morale at home.

Conclusion:

The Russian-Georgian war indicates that the balance of power in western Eurasia has shifted, and that U.S. power may be deteriorating in the face of its lengthy and open-ended commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Global War on Terror, which are leading to a global overstretch.

While the Middle East, and especially the Persian Gulf, will remain a top priority in U.S. foreign policy regardless of who wins the White House, Israel is heading towards a strategic environment in which Russia may play a more important role, especially in its southern tier, from the Black Sea to Afghanistan and western China. Twenty-first century geopolitics is presenting significant survival challenges to the Jewish state and the region.

Notes:

1. Ariel Cohen, “Springtime Is for War?” The Heritage Foundation press commentary, originally published by TechCentralStation (TCSDaily), March 31, 2006, http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary…, August 13, 2008.

2. Melik Kaylan, “Welcome Back to the Great Game: Failing to Stand Up to Russia Would Jeopardize Every International Gain Since the Cold War,” Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2008.

3. Simon Sebag Montfiore, “Another Battle in the 1,000-Year Russia-Georgia Grudge Match,” The Times of London, August 12, 2008.

4. Personal interview with the author, Washington, D.C., August 2008.

5. Dave Majumdar, “Israel’s Red Line: The S-300 Missile System,” Aviation.com, http://www.aviation.com/technology/08080…, August 13, 2008.

6. Martin Sieff, “Defense Focus: Underestimating Russia. Russian Army Shocks West in Georgia Ops,” United Press International 20080812-002422-8913, August 12, 2008.

*         *         *

Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Security at The Heritage Foundation. He is a member of the Board of Advisers of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

JCPA, Beit Milken, 13 Tel Hai St., Jerusalem 92107, Israel, Tel: 972-2-5619281 Fax: 972-2-5619112,  jcpa at netvision.net.il

nbsp;JPost.com – Aug 14, 2008 22:38 | Updated Aug 15, 2008.

Egypt: Rafah closed until Schalit freed; By KHALED ABU TOAMEH for Jerusalem Post.

The Egyptian government has informed Hamas that it will not reopen the Rafah border crossing until the movement releases kidnapped IDF soldier St.-Sgt. Gilad Schalit, a Hamas official in the Gaza Strip said Thursday.

Photo of Egyptian riot police officers line up during a demonstration by Hamas supporters at Rafah crossing. (AP)

The Hamas official described the Egyptian condition as “completely unacceptable” and claimed that the Egyptians had promised to reopen the border crossing within four weeks after the cease-fire agreement that was reached nearly two months ago between Israel and Hamas. “They said the border would be opened if Hamas abided by the cease-fire and stopped the rocket attacks on Israel,” the Hamas official told The Jerusalem Post by phone.

According to the Hamas official, the Egyptians are “afraid” to open the Rafah terminal for fear of being “reprimanded” by Israel, the Americans and the Palestinian Authority.

“They are all afraid that the reopening of the border would strengthen Hamas and weaken the Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah,” he added. “[PA President] Mahmoud Abbas is also exerting heavy pressure on Egypt not to reopen Rafah. He doesn’t want Hamas to be in control of the Palestinian side of the terminal. He [Abbas] wants his men to return to the terminal, as was the case before June 2007.”
A senior Egyptian government official told Hamas leaders earlier this week that even if Cairo agreed to reopen the Rafah border, it would do so only under the terms of the 2005 US-brokered agreement that gave Abbas’s security forces exclusive control over the terminal, the Hamas official said.

“We’re not completely opposed to the deployment of some of Abbas’s loyalists at the border, but we insist that such a move be done in coordination with the legitimate Hamas government,” he explained.

The Hamas official quoted the Egyptian representative as saying that as far as Egypt was concerned, Israel still bore full responsibility for the situation inside the Gaza Strip.

“The Egyptian position is that the reopening of the Rafah border crossing would exempt Israel from fulfilling its duties toward the residents of the Gaza Strip,” he said. “The Egyptians also told us that if we wanted to import fuel, gas and food, we should do so only through Israel because they insist that the Rafah terminal be used only for the passage of civilians.”

Asked if Hamas were holding secret talks with Israel over a prisoner exchange, the Hamas official would neither confirm nor deny rumors of such negotiations.

Over the past few weeks, several Hamas officials have been critical of the role Egypt has been playing in the negotiations over the release of Schalit. Some have even suggested replacing the Egyptians with mediators from Qatar or Germany.

The Hamas officials claim the Egyptians are “biased” in favor of Israel and are putting pressure on the movement to soften its position over the case of Schalit.

Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar told reporters in Gaza Thursday that his movement’s strategy was not to burn all bridges with Egypt.

He also said that as far as Hamas was concerned, Egypt remained the main party authorized to act as a mediator in the talks with Israel.The Egyptian government has informed Hamas that it will not reopen the Rafah border crossing until the movement releases kidnapped IDF soldier St.-Sgt. Gilad Schalit, a Hamas official in the Gaza Strip said Thursday.

————–

The Russian giant returns.

By Shlomo Avineri – The writer is professor emeritus at Hebrew University and former director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (Ha’aretz)

The war in Georgia provoked sharp, contrasting reactions around the world, from support for the small democratic country fighting for its survival (with a critical nod about what looks like incitement against Russia by President Mikhail Saaskashvili) to shock at the aggressive brutality of the Russian offensive. This war, above all, is a symbol of Russia’s return to the playing field of the Great Powers. As is customary for Russia, whether czarist or Soviet, its policy is authoritarian to its own citizens and belligerent to the rest of the world.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika created a dual illusion in the West, first, that Russia was on the high road to democracy, and, second, that the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the severance of the East European countries from Communism had left Russia a weak country.

The first illusion led to dreams of Russian democracy, the second was responsible for disdain for Russia as a player in the international arena. Both proved mistaken.

It turns out that unlike Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and other countries in which there really was a relatively easy transition to democracy and a market economy, that was not the case internally in Russia. In those countries there was a tradition of a civic society, volunteer organizations and autonomy of church and academic institutions. With the disappearance of Communist repression, it was possible to anchor the transition to democracy in these traditions and institutions.

All that was lacking in Russia: Its pre-Communist tradition was hierarchical and authoritarian, lacking a civic society, without representative or elected frameworks. In the absence of all these, the disintegration of the Communist regime led to the anarchy and chaos of the Boris Yeltsin period. This was reflected not only in a weak and insufficiently clear president, but also in the country’s disintegration. Districts and regions divorced themselves from the central government, and Soviet economic assets were stolen by those close to the government and by corrupt oligarchs.

The rise of Vladimir Putin symbolized an end to this anarchy, but an end to the dream of democracy as well.

Putin must be credited with the rehabilitation of the Russian state, the subordination of local bullies to the rule of Moscow and the restoration of some assets, mainly in the field of energy, to central control. It wasn’t done by persuasion, but with brutality and aggressiveness: The free press was reined in, the opposition parties were pushed aside, although not eliminated, the parliament was neutralized and moguls with political ambitions were expelled from the country or arrested.

Although Russia as a country was rescued, a duplicate of the authoritarian czarist regime emerged. The brutal repression of the Chechnyan rebellion broadcast a clear warning. Even the way in which Putin bypassed the constitution to gain two terms as president is testimony to his determination and his ability to maneuver. It is no coincidence that a picture of Peter the Great hangs in his office.

All this had external repercussions as well. During Yeltsin’s time the West became accustomed to seeing Russia as a giant cut down to size. The European Union and NATO expanded eastward without hindrance. But this proved a passing weakness. The entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated the limits of U.S. power, while soaring oil prices gave Russia a tremendous economic advantage, as well as European dependence on Russian gas. Thus Putin began to restore Russia to the status of a great power that cannot be ignored.

There were many signs: the unwillingness to help the U.S. to curb Iran’s nuclear program, to prove to America it is not omniscient; power games in the supplying of energy to Ukraine and the Czech Republic, which are looking Westward; and all accompanied by belligerent rhetoric, which is adding to Putin’s popularity among a population that has felt humiliated since the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The West had no strategic response to this development, and the differences of opinion between the U.S. and Europe on the issue of Iraq only made things more difficult.

The Russian demonstration of force in Georgia will obligate the West to develop a new overall policy toward Moscow. It will be quite a difficult challenge for the next U.S. President. No longer will there be an asymmetrical conflict and a delusional search for Osama bin Laden in the back of beyond, but a return to traditional great power confrontations. This is not a return to the Cold War, since Putin’s Russia is not the bearer of a universal ideology like the Soviet Union; however we can reasonably assume that it will attempt to establish its own regional hegemony.

After Georgia, will Moscow try to teach Ukraine a similar lesson? Time will tell. But the era of ignoring Russia has come to an end. The question now centers on the West’s ability to formulate a suitable response to this challenge.

———–

And What about the Middle East? – and here is the rub – let us say that we will sit and see. Furter, we are sure that the Arabs have also decided to sit and see; some may have insights already – who knows?

Georgia and the Ukraine made moves to get closer to the West – they applied to become members of NATO. Georgia also worked with Western Europe in order to help the EU with access to Azerbaijan and Central Asia petroleum and gas. Russia clearly did not regard this bypassing of its traditional authority over what it considers as its brood. At the UN they still are bunched as former CIS and other Eastern bloc friends. Georgia had to be punished and Ukraine had to be thought that its future may be of the same sort.

Now, did the Georgians think that the US will be more then a paper tiger? Lots of promise, social help – but militarily? Then – it really is not direct US interests, but rather EU interests. So, why would Russia not say to itself that showing the EU that the US is a paper tiger – nu – that is something that can also help loosen further the EU-US ties.

Will the US react by telling the Russians that their economy does not justify their being members of the G8? That would be a reasonable game-play, but who will pick this up in the US Presidential contests?

Aha! so here we go. Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and saw honesty. Perhaps he was right of sorts and Putin has now provided a pay-back. Russia’s moves strengthen McCain in his competition with Obama.

Was this move intended to help the Republican’s in the Presidential competition, and a sign of an oil-hungry party in charge, that barks but does not bite, rather then a new force that would make the world less dependent on oil – and oil these days is indeed the only thing going for the present version of a degraded Russia. The future is bleak for Russia in a world that will be dominated by China and India with the billion-plus people, and their booming internal economies that by now whistle at Russia as there is very little except brute nuclear power that this country has to offer them. Oil – yes – but the oil to China and India will arrive by ship rather then by pipe – and if it is a pipe – that pipe will come from Central Asia and not Russia.

Do we think that National borders are holly? No! But then South Ossetia belongs together with North Ossetia to one Free Ossetia State – and that is clearly not what Russia wants. They did not let go of Chechnia either. So the question here is whose ox is being gored – and the ox will suffer just the same under this or another regime. The South Ossetians of Georgia had at least a chance at a new and better life. By playing the Russian cards they blew it and that is why the civilized world is on Georgia’s side. If this sort of game digs deep into the Ukraine, our best advise to the Ukraine government is to take the Czech example of friendly divorce, and let go of those eastern territories that want some more Russian punishment. Ukraine will then soon find out that they are better thereof – and the Russian Ukrainians will just be set back and have to start their lives anew.

GEORGIA: Where the Cold War Never Ended.
Analysis by Zoltán Dujisin

PRAGUE, Aug 11 (IPS) – As war breaks out in Georgia, the geopolitical struggle between the U.S. and Russia becomes more violent and closer to Russia’s border than ever.

The conflict started after Georgian troops tried to take control of the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia, which had been de facto independent and protected by Russian peacekeeping forces since 1992.

Russia has responded by launching an extensive military operation in South Ossetia, repelling Georgian forces from regional capital Tskhinvali, 100 km northwest of the Georgian capital Tbilisi, and advancing into Georgian territory.

Mikheil Saakashvili, President of the 4.6 million Caucasus country, claims the Russian “invasion” was premeditated.

Abkhazia, another breakaway region in Western Georgia that proclaimed independence in the same year, has also become entangled in the conflict by taking Russia’s side.

Sporadic clashes between Georgian and separatist soldiers were not rare, but hostilities never reached the current extent.

The Georgian move apparently took Western leaders, who had warned against attempting a military solution, by surprise.

Ivan Sukhov, a journalist specialised in the region told Radio Free Europe on Friday that Saakashvili had taken “a position that is awkward for the West, since Georgia has consistently positioned itself as a principled opponent of military action. Even if the Georgian actions were provoked by the South Ossetians, this is a serious political mistake.”

Georgia seemed determined to expose Russia’s involvement in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and present the conflict as one between Western democracy and Eastern authoritarianism, possibly hoping to obtain a more decisive Western intervention in the conflict.

The attempt to revive cold war rhetoric was palpable in Saakashvili’s parallels of Georgia’s situation with the 1956 Hungarian and 1968 Czechoslovak interventions by the Soviet Union.

One possible goal of the Georgian leadership’s military intervention was to internationalise the conflict so as to change the format of the present Russian-dominated peacekeeping mission, and facilitate the regions’ peaceful or forcible reintegration.

Many have seen in Georgia’s rash decision the first consequence of Kosovo’s unilateral independence from Serbia last February.

The move has encouraged the separatist claims of the South Ossetian and Abkhaz leaderships, and Georgia’s renewed determination to fully regain its territorial sovereignty.

The leaders of the separatist regions trust that after Kosovo’s independence, the consent of the sovereign state is no longer necessary if a greater power can guarantee its security.

Moreover they have deployed similar arguments to those applied in Kosovo: a past of ethnic-driven war which left thousands of civilians dead and countless displaced on both sides.

Unhappy with the U.S.-promoted Kosovo independence, Moscow had promised an adequate response to the latest violation in international law, and its first step came with the institutionalisation of ties with Georgia’s two breakaway regions in March.

Unlike the West in Kosovo, Russia can claim the conflict in its southern regions directly affects its own security, and above all, that of a population of which 80 percent hold Russian passports.

Russian claims of arbitrary killings of up to 1,600 civilians by Georgian forces have not been independently verified, although a few Western journalists have started to take interest in testimonies by Ossetian refugees allegedly witness to human rights abuses by Georgian troops.

If the claims were to be at least partially verified and Russia was to show self-restraint and restore order, its ambition of a role as a legitimate world power and a regional pacifier could gain credibility.

Besides Kosovo, Russia was irritated by Washington’s enthusiastic promotion of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) membership for two of Russia’s neighbours, Ukraine and Georgia, as well as U.S. plans to build a missile defence system in Eastern Europe which it claims will alter the balance of forces in Europe.

Georgia’s NATO bid was presented by the U.S. and Georgia’s former communist Eastern European allies as a chance to expand the area of freedom and democracy and to limit the expansion of Moscow’s authoritarian tendencies in Russia’s near abroad.

Many elites in the post-communist countries tend to believe that Russia is inherently inclined towards authoritarianism and expansionism and that the Soviet Union was just another expression of this impulse.

But the Western European member states, aware that Georgia’s commitment to liberal democracy was dubious and territorial tensions on the rise, decided to postpone the discussion on Georgia’s membership of NATO.

Many have noted an increase in Saakashvili’s authoritarian tendencies over the last year, with the arrest of opposition activists and the abuse of state resources by merely citing the “Russian threat”.

The U.S. has also been openly providing military support and training to the Georgian army while often encouraging Georgia to see itself as a crusader for democracy in the midst of authoritarianism. But as a member of NATO, a young and nationalistic state like Georgia could have drawn the entire alliance into a direct military confrontation with Russia.

Different points of view were posted by Open Democracy.net :
 http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/geo…

 http://www.opendemocracy.net/russia/arti…

 http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/sou…

EU-Russia relations in jeopardy as bombs hit Tbilisi.

By Phillipa Runner for EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS, August 11, 2008   – The suspension of EU-Russia negotiations on a new bilateral pact, freezing talks on visa-free travel for Russian citizens and holding back EU humanitarian aid to Chechnya until Russia ends aggression in Georgia could be among ideas debated by EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Wednesday (13 August).

Once fighting dies down, the EU may also offer to send policemen – but not soldiers – to help keep the peace in Georgia’s breakaway regions and speed up free trade and visa facilitation deals with Georgia and Ukraine, “to show that those countries are not part of a ‘grey zone’ for Russia to expand [into],” a senior EU diplomat told EUobserver.

The EU launched talks in July on a new pact to replace its old Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with Russia and pays around €18 million a year in aid to help rebuild war-torn Chechnya. But Russia’s incursion into Georgia last week threw EU-Russia relations into turmoil, in the gravest European security crisis since the 1999 Kosovo war.

In the early hours of Monday morning (11 August), Russian jets struck two targets within earshot of Tbilisi city centre and Russian tanks advanced toward Gori, 65 kilometres from the Georgian capital. The moves came despite a unilateral Georgian ceasefire on Sunday, with Moscow saying Georgian forces have violated the ceasefire announcement.

“According to our sources, Russia is going to launch a last attack on Georgia with the aim of regime change,” the EU diplomatic contact said. “I’m afraid the Russians may storm Tbilisi soon. I hope the ministers [still] have something to discuss next week.”

The French EU presidency has called the emergency EU foreign ministers session for 10:00 local time on Wednesday to respond to the situation, with EU ambassadors to meet in Brussels on Tuesday afternoon to prepare the agenda. No extraordinary meeting of EU leaders is foreseen for now, despite a call by Poland to hold an emergency summit.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy will travel “in the coming days” to Moscow to meet Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.

Meanwhile, French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner and Finnish foreign minister Alexander Stubb arrived in Georgia on Sunday night. The plane touched down at Tbilisi International Airport just a few hours after the airport was struck by Russian bombers.

“We must find the means for an immediate ceasefire, accepted by both sides,” Mr Kouchner told AFP following talks with Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili. “We must move quickly, this is not a diplomatic exercise, it’s an exercise of survival.”

“We are now in the business of crisis management, we are now in the business to broker peace. We are not in the business of seeking who has done what, when, where and how,” Mr Stubb said.

Bitter resentment:

Russia says its actions are designed to protect Russian passport holders and peacekeepers in the Georgian breakaway republic of South Ossetia, in line with existing treaties. It has accused Georgia of “genocide” in shelling the South Ossetian town of Tskhinvali last week, during what it called Mr Saakashvili’s “suicidal” bid to defeat the rebels.

But Georgia says the Russian-backed separatists provoked its attack on Tskhinvali, which Russia used as a pretext to attack the small NATO and EU-aspirant state. It says the Russian push is designed to reassert power in Russia’s old sphere of influence and to cut off an emerging oil and gas corridor between Europe and the Caspian Sea.

The UN refugee centre estimates that 10,000 to 20,000 people have become internally displaced in Georgia, but news reports on the ground indicate the figure could be tens of thousands more. Casualty estimates range from a few hundred soldiers and civilians, to over 2,000 mostly civilian deaths, with at least two reporters killed.

EU and US leaders conducted intensive telephone diplomacy over the weekend, with the US president and the NATO secretary general both criticising Russia’s “disproportionate” use of force. US practical help has so far been limited to helping airlift home 2,000 Georgian soldiers from Iraq, while the EU has earmarked €1 million for humanitarian aid.

“Over the past few years I lived in a democratic country, and I was happy. Now America and the European Union spit on us,” a Georgian soldier told an IHT reporter on Sunday, as Georgian troops retreated from the South Ossetian front line.

—————————-

The GUAM are Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova. www.sustainabiliTank.info even has an Asian GUAM button for Georgia and Azerbaijan – two States in the Caucasus region that are of high importance to the EU as transit area for oil and gas lines originating in Azerbaijan and in the Central Asian States. Georgia has applied for acceptance to NATO and has developed friendly relations also with the US. A confrontation in Georgia is not unthinkable for the NATO members, even though the Balkan-alike Caucasus area is much more difficult to defend by the Atlantic alliance then the original post-Yugoslavia real Balkans. Nevertheless, bypassing the UN Security Council with biting resolutions that can hurt the Russian economy is in the cards. The Wall Street Journal today points out the fall in the Russian stock market and the impact Putin’s decisions have on potential future investments in Russia. Further, with a rising China, Russia would be unrealistic in its evaluation of its position in the world and the WSJ starts seeing the possibility that Medvedev, the nominal President, might indeed distance himself from Putin, the nominal President. These are interesting days that sprang out in the shadow of the Olympics.

nbsp;www.israel21c.org

Israeli company squeezes fuel from old tires.
By Karin Kloosterman July 24, 2008

As soon as the summer is over and the fall begins, people in the northern United States start winterizing their vehicles. With more than 250 million cars on the road, and winter tires needed for many, it’s frightening to imagine where all those old tires go.

Most people do not realize that old tires are a health, safety and environmental hazard. Disease-carrying mosquitoes nest in them, and if they catch fire, they can burn for weeks, releasing toxic fumes into the air, and chemicals into our groundwater.

An Israeli company based in the Ukraine, has found a safe and environmentally friendly way to dispose of old tires: the pollution-free process consumes no energy and produces attractive byproducts, such as gas for your car.

Using an electromagnetic field and depriving the system of oxygen, Coral Group applies its “soft pyrolysis” method to break down old tires into basic components. Pyrolysis is a process that decomposes organic materials in the total absence of oxygen. And in Coral’s method, attractive end products are created. They include kerosene (jet fuel), benzene (automobile fuel), diesel, oil and black carbon.

“This is a truly wonderful solution,” says Roman Berezin, director of the Middle East Bureau in Netanya, Israel who notes that the operational plant in the Ukraine emits no pollution in the process. “There is no smokestack,” he says.

“We are an energy production company that sits between recycling and creating energy,” says Berezin, noting this is especially relevant today, where the cost of oil is skyrocketing. Although massive amounts of fuel are not generated in the process, Coral’s solution becomes economically viable once oil hits $23 a barrel. Today, crude oil is already selling at $130 a barrel.

According to feasibility studies done by the company, a facility that recycles 10,000 tons of old tires a month can generate $8.5 million worth of byproducts after 2 years.

The company is looking to open tire recycling factories around the world, and owns most of the intellectual property associated with the process and the equipment used. A typical processing plant would include a cutting station to chop up the tires, a pyrolysis chamber, and stations that separate the resulting gases, oils and solids. The fully automated system is computer-controlled.

Coral Group is Israeli-owned with R&D and an operating plant in the Ukraine. The company was founded in 2003 and holds about 32 innovative projects in various stages of development, with a number ready for commercialization. Other projects include a high-efficiency drinking water purifier, the Electus and an improved airfoil boat. The company employs 250 people.

The company is now looking to start building a plant in Israel that can recycle 9,000 tons worth of used tires every month. It hopes to continue expansion — maybe not in time for winter, but hopefully in the US too.

Japan – Emissions deal reached with Ukraine.
Bloomberg, Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Japan has agreed to buy greenhouse-gas emission allowances from Ukraine to reach a target set under the Kyoto Protocol. Details of the contract, including volumes and prices, will be determined through negotiations, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said in a statement late Monday. Japan is now holding talks with the Czech Republic and Poland to make similar contracts, it said.

Ukraine is likely to release less greenhouse gas than permitted by the Kyoto accord. Under the terms of the treaty, it can sell the difference to polluters who exceed their ceiling. Japan has increased the amount it will spend on buying allowances for the year ending next March to ¥31 billion ($292 million), compared with ¥18.4 billion in the past two years, according to METI.

The contract with Ukraine follows a similar agreement Japan signed in November.

Japan has pledged to cut emissions of gases blamed for global warming by 6 percent from the 1990 level by the end of 2012. Emissions rose 6.2 percent in the year that ended in March 2007 from the 1990 level.

Ukraine’s total emissions of greenhouse gases in the five years through 2012 are forecast to be 2 billion tons fewer than its ceiling, according to the statement.

Pushed overseas?
Nippon Steel Corp. said it may be forced to increase production overseas should it be disadvantaged under new international climate change rules now being discussed.

Japan’s biggest steelmaker may have “no choice but to shift to Brazil and other countries to expand output,” Nippon Steel Executive Vice President Hideaki Sekizawa said after China, India and 14 other nations at last week’s Group of Eight summit in Toyako, Hokkaido, considered long-term emission cuts.

The summit was held amid efforts to unite industrialized and developing nations on a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol on global warming after it runs out in 2012.

—–

The term “hot air” was framed at Kyoto by those realizing that the collapse of old inefficient industries will lead to drastic reductions in the GHG emissions from former Eastern Bloc countries.

At Kyoto, in 1997, environmentalists contended that this sort of shrinking in GHG emissions should not be part of CDM or any form of Kyoto Mechanisms. The Principle of Additionality was established in order to eliminate this sort of deals.

Ukraine’s vice prime minister has encouraged both Poland and the Czech Republic to ratify the Lisbon treaty.

Speaking to TheParliament.com on Thursday, Hryhoriy Nemyria said those things.

“We encourage those countries to exercise their duty and responsibility to continue to ratify the Lisbon treaty. I especially have in mind the presidents of Poland and the Czech Republic.”

Nemyria, who has responsibility for European affairs, also said that he didn’t think the Irish vote against the Lisbon treaty was a vote against enlargement, but stressed that the ‘reflection time’ given to Ireland after the no vote should not take away from Ukraine’s progress towards EU integration.

“We support those MEPs who think that Irish reflection time should not be deducted from Ukrainian integration – There were a number of doomsday scenarios on previous enlargements and every time the EU was creative enough to find a way out and to continue.”

Ukraine is currently in talks with the EU on a new “enhanced” agreement to take over from a 2005 pact under the EU’s neighbourhood policy. A major part of the new agreement will be a free trade area, which goes side by side with requirements on economic and sectoral cooperation.

A thorny issue for Ukraine is whether or not they will be granted a “membership perspective” in the new agreement. The official line is that no watered down versions of membership will do, so while welcoming the recent Polish-Swedish idea for an ‘eastern partnership’ Nemyria says that it should not be used as a substitute for the real thing.

He says Ukraine will stay firm on this position in the upcoming summit with the EU in September. “Evian is going to be a very important and successful summit. We have to underline a very important position that any organisational devices should not be confused with substantive solutions.”

And commenting on the start of talks on a new EU-Russia agreement, he said, “We can’t but support this process because a European solution works in Ukraine and shall work in Russia.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko visits Brussels today, June 19, 2008 for talks with European commission chiefs, Javier Solana ( the EU’s High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the designated   EU’s Minister for Foreign Affairs), Günter Verheugen (Vice-President of the European Commission, responsible for enterprise and industry), and Andris Piebalgs (Commissioner for Energy at the European Commission). So, it seems quite obvious that the reason for her visit to Brusells is Energy for Europe. We assume that it is the Russian gas pipelines.

‘Eastern Partnership’ could lead to enlargement, Poland says.

27.05.2008 – 09:15 CET | By Renata Goldirova, Euobserver from Brussels.
Poland and Sweden have officially tabled proposals for an “Eastern Partnership” between the EU and its neighbours Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine – with Poland presenting the deal as a path toward EU membership.

“It’s time to look to the east to see what we can do to strengthen democracy,” Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt said on Monday (26 May), after presenting the project to the rest of the EU club with his Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski.

According to Mr Sikorski, the eastern partnership initiative is tailored to “practically” and “ideologically” strengthen the union’s existing neighbourhood policy towards countries that could eventually become EU members, but are held back by “enlargement fatigue” within the bloc.

The minister drew a clear line to distinguish the EU membership prospects of those countries affected by the Polish-Swedish proposal and those involved in the “Mediterranean Union” – a similar, French-sponsored project for countries lying south of the EU.

“To the south, we have neighbours of Europe. To the east, we have European neighbours…they all have the right one day to apply [for EU membership],” Mr Sikorski said, urging the eastern countries to follow the example of the Visagrad Group set up in 1991 by Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic as part of their EU integration efforts.

“We all know the EU has enlargement fatigue. We have to use this time to prepare as much as possible so that when the fatigue passes, membership becomes something natural,” the Polish minister said.

The initiative has seen some criticism from countries such as Bulgaria and Romania who do not want to see the union’s “Black Sea Synergy” – a co-operation scheme for Black Sea rim states – undermined. But the Czech Republic, which will sit at the EU’s helm in 2009, has thrown its weight behind the Polish-Swedish plan.

“It goes in the same direction that we want. And we see that the next year, we need to balance. This year, it is a Mediterranean year. So, the next year would be the eastern year,” the country’s deputy prime minister, Alexandr Vondra, told journalists.

EU-hopeful Ukraine has, for its part, made it clear it is not willing to settle for anything less than EU membership.

“We believe that the initiative of the Eastern partnership should envisage a clear EU membership perspective to those European neighbours of the EU who can demonstrate the seriousness of their European ambitions through concrete actions and tangible achievements,” said a statement issued by Ukraine’s foreign ministry on Monday.