Eastern Europe/Ukraine [Feb 6th 2015]

[sanjaykumar]

Germans of today should just HOPE that ppl don't have a long memory, and should probably not encourage that book a lot.


The Europeans remember, they will never forget.

[Philip]

lluminating.Pres. Vlad reminds me of an old ad for a fag that we oldies used to see in the cinemas in our time.It showed men engaged in various walks of life acting decisively and finally taking a long cool draw on a fag,blowing out smoke.The catchphrase was: "For men of action,satisfaction.SCISSORS always satisfies!"

Vladimir Putin describes secret meeting when Russia decided to seize Crimea
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/m ... ize-crimea

Russian President Vladimir Putin has described in a forthcoming documentary how he ordered the annexation of Crimea. Photograph: Mikhail Klimentyev/AP

Agence France-Presse
Monday 9 March 2015 04.35 GMT
President Vladimir Putin has revealed the moment he says he gave the secret order for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and described how Russian troops were ready to fight to rescue Ukraine’s deposed, pro-Moscow president.

In a trailer shown Sunday for an upcoming documentary on state-run Rossiya-1 television called “Homeward bound”, Putin openly discusses Moscow’s controversial grabbing of Crimea a year ago.

Putin recounts an all-night meeting with security services chiefs to discuss how to extricate deposed president Viktor Yanukovych, who had fled a pro-Western street revolt in the Ukrainian capital Kiev.

“We ended at about seven in the morning,” Putin says. “When we were parting, I said to my colleagues: we must start working on returning Crimea to Russia.”

Four days after that February 2014 meeting, unidentified soldiers took over the local parliament in Crimea and deputies hurriedly voted in a new government. The Ukrainian province was then formally annexed by Moscow on 18 March, triggering international condemnation.

The military operation was initially kept secret and despite the increasingly obvious actions of unmarked Russian forces on the ground, Moscow insisted that only locals were involved in the upheaval. Later, the Kremlin conceded that it had been behind the power grab.

In the trailer for the documentary, Putin also claims that Russia’s military was ready to fight its way into the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk to get Yanukovych, a heavily corrupted but loyal figure who favoured keeping Ukraine in Russia’s sphere of influence.

“He would have been killed,” Putin said. “We got ready to get him right out of Donetsk by land, by sea or by air,” he said. “Heavy machineguns were mounted there to avoid talking too much.”

Yanukovych later resurfaced in the southern Russian city of Rostov and has not been back to Ukraine.

More than 6,000 people have since been killed in fighting between Ukraine’s government forces and heavily armed separatist militias based in Donetsk and backed - according to Western governments - by Russia, although Moscow denies this.

Rossiya-1 did not say when the full documentary would be aired.

The Yanquis always want others to do their dirty work for them,'cept when they think it will be a cakewalk and opportunity with their Brit. gundog for some "sport". The French and Germans well know how their greatest mil. leaders,"ze Emperor" and "der Fuhrer" both bit the dust when they invaded and took on Russia.Now Uncle Sam wants them to do so again this time as a combined force! NATO sabre rattling in E.Europe will only provoke and enrage the Russian "Bear". The French and Germans are resisting,but the Brit. bullfrog...oops!.....sorry, bulldog CaMoron by name wants to be remembered by history as a successful military adventurer,looking at Thatcher and the Falklands for inspiration,forgetting the debacle of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War!

[Austin]

Viktor Yanukovych disappearance from Kiev is quite a mystery ........He mentioned that some loyal bodyguard made sure he reached E Ukraine else he would have been dead.

[Virendra]

The Yanquis always want others to do their dirty work for them,'cept when they think it will be a cakewalk and opportunity with their Brit. gundog for some "sport". The French and Germans well know how their greatest mil. leaders,"ze Emperor" and "der Fuhrer" both bit the dust when they invaded and took on Russia.Now Uncle Sam wants them to do so again this time as a combined force! NATO sabre rattling in E.Europe will only provoke and enrage the Russian "Bear". The French and Germans are resisting,but the Brit. bullfrog...oops!.....sorry, bulldog CaMoron by name wants to be remembered by history as a successful military adventurer,looking at Thatcher and the Falklands for inspiration,forgetting the debacle of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War!

Brits are jumping the highest because they've got nothing to loose. They're already atrophied lietenants of US from the once glorious past. They are becoming two things very swiftly - a) white Pakistan and b) hired staff of US.

[vijaykarthik]

Ukraine reports that most rebel artillery and heavy weapons have been moved from most hotly contested areas.

Now, what next?

What will NewLund do now? General-ly rum Time to Breed (and) love

[Shreeman]

This is time for rearming. A lot of goods will flow just like georgia. ukraine will turn a lot more like sakashvilli's georgia, except this time the same fool thinks he has got the western backing for a full on fight with russia.

Low level fighting will remain. trenches will remain occupied. this is why the rail bridges between dnr/lnr are leaving their physical form. Gas/oil will stop flowing via ukraine too.

What happens in the summer is anyone's guess.

[rsingh]

Not at all, but I am not supporting this author's whining as one either. OTOH, rape has indeed been used as a weapon to terrorize and dominate and enslave populations since the first Homo Sapiens Pakus discovered it.

30 million people were killed in WW2. Many millions of those starved to death - by the Germans. Many others were tortured to death. Babies were bayoneted in mothers' arms b4 the mothers were tortured, raped and murdered by the Germans and their "Al-Lies". People lived in bomb shelters or basements or behind rocks or out in the open through winters because of fear. They survived by eating human flesh - or drinking urine. They watched as their friends, loved ones, wasted away and died - or were blown to bits or burned to death or died screaming.

The German venture into Russia was apparently to get resources: mainly humans to use as slaves.

A few Germans who survived don't deserve a whole lot of special sympathy for their sufferings during that time. They survived, which is more than can be said of those others.

Germans of today should just HOPE that ppl don't have a long memory, and should probably not encourage that book a lot.

BTW, the thing I did say is that the US/western writers have NOT glossed over the realities of western occupation of Germany. Of course they claimed that the Germans desperately preferred American occupation (rapists?) over Russian occupation (rapists?). I wouldn't know if there was a whole lot to choose between the two, but that is the claim: a lot of suicides as the Red Army came through, not as many (though there were many) under the western occupation.

There was a scene in one of the books I've read, where a German woman complains to a Red Army combat officer. He looks at her and tells her:

My mother starved to death in Leningrad. Take your complains elsewhere

Others are quoted as saying:

Our soldiers in this wave are combat troops. We are too exhausted and traumatized to bother with any civilians. But the next wave coming after us: they are pigs. Enjoy life while you can.

I can't remember the name of the book - it featured an American captain whose first name was Sean - who led a company into a German town near the end of the war. One of the first things the character did was to bring in the Mayor and tell him to supply some number X of women to fill a brothel, because the alternative would be that too many of their women would be raped in the streets. As civilized as that. So there was no coverup, if one read between the lines on what was happening all over Germany.



In the end the guy is said to fall in love with one of the German women ('Ernestine', who had actually had several ribs broken, c/o the attentions from the first wave of the Red Army to come through Berlin. But then he returns to the US and she sticks her head in a gas oven. So, I believe, does her sister, who seemed to be well-fed and happy due to her employment as a prostitute.
As far as 'policy' there was, I believe, a common acceptance that the German notion of racial superiority had to be crushed. The Russians were pretty open about it. I don't think the Western generals, or men in the field, felt a whole lot differently. How disciplined they were, to suppress their feeling about, it is a different question. Many felt that the whole of Germany should have been vaporized and cleansed, like Hiroshima except on a much grander scale.

The question to ask is what really happened in, say, France or Holland or Italy or Egypt or Belgium or Spain, where there was no reason for the liberation forces and civilians to hate each other . I know that much of France and Belgium were reduced to rubble - a lot of it by "friendly fire". This is mentioned in passing, about the D-Day landings and immediate aftermath.

These were the realities of the war and early occupation period.

You have quite good grasp of ww2 (from Russian prospective). very rare from an educated indian because we tend to educate ourself via western litrature. Russian war films and documentories were my hobby.These films were backed by ministry of defence.......so had access to real hardware. Nazis were played by GDR actors. You do not get asli mal then that. Salam

[UlanBatori]

I think one of the books I have read is Cornelius Ryan: The Last Battle. Can't read Russian, sorry. But I have also read about the 900 Days of Leningrad. Battle for Kharkov. Put these things together and one gets a very different picture from watching CNN and NDTV.

For contemporary literature see this.

[RSoami]

^^
And I thought your post was very anti-german and biased.

[UlanBatori]

Biased? Of course. But not against Germans in particular. I am Equal-Opportunity Biased. :LOL

See this statement from the second part of the Wikipedia link I posted above:

As in the case of the American occupation of France after the D-Day invasion, many of the American rapes in Germany in 1945 were gang rapes committed by armed soldiers at gunpoint.[53]

Must have been written by Commie Pinko Liberal O-Bahmer-supporter . The wimmens in Liberated France were supposed to be the ones that the Allies were Liberating, hain? The ones lining the streets throwing Le Roses and blowing kisses? Surely not the enemy?

[Philip]

It's now abundantly clear.All the anti-Russian/Putin rhetoric was to scaremonger western populations and halt NATO defence cuts. With several EU nations engaged in cutting their wasteful defence budgets when there is no threat from Russia after the end of the Cold War and retreat is the order of the day from Uncle Sam in the disastrous expeditions worldwide,the uniformed tribes of NATO have had to reinvent the "bogeyman",this time Putin,after Ghaddaffi,Saddam,Kim,etc.,to justify their existence.

By expanding NATO's borders to Russia in the east and sabre-rattling against Russia,conducting mil-execises on its borders,what has happened is the opposite. Russia has rearmed with clear focus under Putin to meet a possible NATO threat,as is being seen conducted in the UKR and previously in the Balkans and Eastern European nations,through orchestrated "revolutions",directed by covert forces. There is now going to be less in the kitty for economic development and the falling EU will only fall further.The EU/NATO will now be even more beholden to Uncle Sam.

[vijaykarthik]

Russia called off something related to arms with the NATO lately. Something to do with an arms pact forum. Wanted to read but it was FT and I have hit the max no of articles already. Paywalled.

[Singha]

A brothel, Blue and Gray Corral, was set up near the village of St. Renan in September 1944 by Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, commander of the infantry division that landed at Omaha Beach, partly to counter a wave of rape accusations against G.I.’s. (It was shut down after a mere five hours.) [9]

The Free French Forces high command sent a letter of complaint to the Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force General Dwight D. Eisenhower.[10] He gave his commanders orders to take action against all allegations of murder, rape, assault, robbery and other crimes.[10] In August 1945, Pierre Voisin, mayor of Le Havre urged Colonel Thomas Weed, U.S. commander in the region, to set up brothels outside Le Havre.[5] However, U.S. commanders refused.[5]

130 of the 153 troops disciplined for rape by the army were African Americans.[11] With the help of the French authorities U.S. officers allegedly scapegoated African American soldiers, proclaiming rape to be black crime.[12] Military courts sentenced African American soldiers to more severe punishment than white American soldiers.[13] U.S. forces executed 29 soldiers as conducting rapes, including 25 African Americans.[14]

[vinod]

Military analysis of what Russia really wants reveals nuclear dangers

While it is immensely difficult to place oneself in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s position and to see the world as he and Russia undoubtedly see it, there are things that we do know.

The first is that Russia has always seen itself as encircled and threatened, a condition exacerbated by the West since the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A simple exercise with a globe can help to demonstrate this. Rotate it until Moscow is in the center and then scan the points of the compass. To the north, over the pole, is the United States; to the east, China; to the south, Islam, and to the west, Europe, the European Union and NATO.

Second, over the past 20 years, Russia has shrunk, physically and conceptually. The Soviet Union was, in all but one way, a force to be reckoned with. It was able to hold the world hostage and force it to focus, above all, on the maintenance of an uneasy but mostly stable peace. The Soviet Union’s Achilles’ heel was its economy; NATO’s Cold War victory was essentially an economic one. The West defeated the Soviet Union by fielding more, and better, military technology with fewer, but infinitely better-trained personnel, funded by economies that worked.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, it shed a number of its republics, which functioned, in part, as buffers between mother Russia and the encircling threat. They also provided vital access to the sea. A sympathetic observer might note that Russia’s only guaranteed ports are on its north coast, all of which have, in recent human history, been accessible only in the Arctic summer months. Even now with the ice receding, the Northern Sea Route is a far from reliable route into either the Pacific or Atlantic and therefore strategically unsatisfactory. In the Baltic, St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad serve well, though Russia must be concerned for the long-term stability of Kaliningrad because the city has a long German history as Koenigsberg. This stability should also concern Europe: arguably, as long as Kaliningrad is secure, the threat to the other Baltic ports and countries is reduced. To the east, Vladivostok serves the Pacific but, in extended living memory, has been directly threatened (and occupied) multiple times, by the Japanese and Americans in the early 20th century and throughout the Cold War by the United States.


This brings us to the south and the Black Sea and the Russian ports on the Crimean peninsula. The southern access to the Mediterranean has always been problematic because of the Dardanelles, which has forced Russia to find staging posts in the Mediterranean from which to sortie. Throughout the Cold War, the Russian fleet could be found in anchorages all around the eastern Mediterranean, which helps to explain Russia’s interest in the Syrian port of Tartus. The port is now unavailable as a result of a civil war made infinitely more complicated by a West that had not taken the time to weigh the true factors and factions, which always included Russia (the leadership of which may, actually, have been right all along in siding with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad).

When Ukraine became independent of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Crimean peninsula became a significant strategic problem and, almost certainly, the subject of contingency planning: The naval ports and other military bases had to be accessible. The matter of which way Ukraine faces is not simply, for Russia, a matter of either lost trade or a lost buffer state, both of which are important, but also of lost oceanic access.

If this is the case, the West needs to think, with great clarity and caution, about what is actually happening in Ukraine to understand the nature of Putin’s problem. The need for assured oceanic access at each point of the compass may be so deeply engrained in the Russian psyche as to significantly affect his decision-making and risk appetite.

So what? A Russia that prefers to believe that it is surrounded by enemies is one thing. A Russia denied what it believes to be its birthright – unfettered oceanic access and secure land borders – is another. The West has learned to live, uncomfortably, with the first, just as one learns to accommodate a paranoid neighbour. But it has also learned the consequence of unnecessary needling, which invariably ends in tears. Sometimes it is necessary, for the greater good, to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The wrong thing, in this case, is to persuade Ukraine to cede the peninsula, and a land corridor, to Russia. Access to EU markets is a possible compensation but not, at any price, membership in NATO. Buffer states are a tragic necessity in an uncertain world – and as important for NATO as for Russia.

Why would the West, and especially Ukraine, do this? Because Russia is on its knees, for three reasons. The first, and most immediate, is the price of oil, which is far below what Putin requires to make the country function. Second is that Russia’s political system looks unlikely to survive in the long term. Only a North Korean or a young Saudi would see Russia as a political paradise. One suspects that many Russians, if they had the economic wherewithal, would choose to live in a liberal democracy, for all its faults. The third, and most telling, reason is that the population is in long-term, possibly accelerating decline, with a birthrate way below replacement levels and falling life expectancy in the ethnic Russian population. Current predictions put Russia’s population, in 2050, at 118 million, a loss of 16 percent to 19 percent in 50 years.

At the moment, it would appear that Putin has the upper hand because he is able to take a longer view than any of his fellow leaders, almost all of whom are time-limited, or time expired, and most of whom are, at best, tacticians, not strategists. The evidence seems to indicate that the West could regain the upper hand by opting to play a very long game: Russia, as currently constituted, is itself time-limited. Yet the personalization of politics and leadership in the West has increasingly led to tactical behavior driven by short personal horizons — as short as 60 days in the case of the British Prime Minister David Cameron, who is facing a serious reelection challenge. Maybe proper statesmanship requires strong and enduring institutions, rather than individuals, capable of thinking beyond an opponent’s horizon?

The alternative approach is to learn to deal with the nuisance and uncertainty of continued ambiguity. Airspace incursions make for good photographs and alarmist tabloid headlines but are mostly an expensive inconvenience. Submarine incursions, such as those off Scotland’s coast, designed to test Britain’s resolve to protect the submarines carrying Britain’s nuclear deterrent may be of a different order. During the Cold War, there were well- established protocols for close encounters, which by and large worked well. But they required well-practiced and well-equipped military services that, through their actions, acquired a familiarity with their opponents and an understanding not just of their capabilities and limitations but also their methods.

What does this mean for the NATO Baltic States, which are seen as being as vulnerable as Ukraine? First, St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad provide access to the Baltic Sea, so there is no pressure on Russia to find another port. Why would Putin test NATO’s resolve through an action against one of the Baltic States? Protecting the Russian minorities was a convenient lie used in Ukraine to cover the real reason for intervening — to secure the naval and military bases in Crimea.

And what of the barely veiled threats of lowered thresholds before involving nuclear weapons? Most Cold War veterans were at least passingly familiar with Herman Kahn and his ladder of escalation. He described advancement on the ladder toward war as a series of deliberate choices, the results of which determined the direction of travel. We practiced at every level, from decision-making in Whitehall to the delivery of the weapons and then the whole grim business of operating in an environment partly demolished by biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. I think we came to appreciate that the conduct of nuclear deterrence was a deeply skilled and intelligent business; it demanded very high levels of familiarity. The current risk seems obvious: an oversupply of unpractised tacticians in power in Western capitals, and an absence of strategists.

Finally, then, what should the West do in Ukraine? To fuel a proxy war by supplying materiel and trainers would be foolish, naïve and wilfully escalatory. Surely the better approach is to use proper, powerful economic sticks and carrots to bring Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table, with the United Nations in place to keep the peace.

At the beginning of the year, the United Kingdom commemorated the 50th anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill, a man widely seen as the greatest Englishman in all history. He would have seen the strategic need to treat with the new tsar, whether we like him or not.

It is much better to have Putin if not actually inside the Western tent then at least not outside it pulling out the guy ropes and causing chaos. Russia ultimately has a far greater problem with militant Islam than the West, it understands Iran and Syria better than the West and has to deal with China in quite a different way. For all concerned, better a messy peace than a nasty descent into a wider and wholly avoidable conflict, be it long and ambiguous or short and horrific.



The piece appears here courtesy of Project for Study of the 21st Century. You can find more information about the group, as well as other commentaries at http://www.projects21.com.

[vijaykarthik]

^interesting article.

[UlanBatori]

Another nation of rapists for Annette Beck-Sickinger to avoid

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — The radical left-led (Oh! U Mean Not Nazi? ) Greek government insisted Tuesday that the debt-ridden country has never been fully compensated by Germany for its brutal World War II Nazi occupation, linking the issue with Greece's fraught bailout negotiations.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said a 1960 reparation deal with Germany did not cover key Greek demands, including payments for wrecked infrastructure, war crimes and the return of a forced loan exacted from occupied Greece.

Germany has repeatedly rejected previous approaches from Athens on further reparations, saying the question was settled by existing agreements.

Relations between the two countries have soured considerably since Greece's acute financial crisis broke out in late 2009. Germany is a major contributor to the international rescue loans that have kept Greece afloat since 2010, and has been a keen proponent of the resented budget and income cuts demanded in exchange to rebuild the country's shattered finances.

Tsipras told parliament that Greece will honor its obligations to bailout creditors, including Germany, but won't "abandon its irrevocable demands" for World War II reparations.

His six-week-old government is trying to ease the terms of its rescue loan program.

"We are not giving lessons in morality, but we will not accept lessons in morality either," Tsipras said during a debate on reviving a special parliamentary committee on demanding German war reparations.

Oh, wait! The rapists here were German, weren't they?

[RSoami]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/m ... ees-russia
US to send Ukraine small drones and armoured Humvees.

The US will also send 30 heavily armored Humvees and 200 other regular Humvees, as well as radios, counter-mortar radars and other equipment.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/ ... IQ20150311#
Russia may ease Ukraine's gas terms, but Kiev must settle its bills

http://rt.com/business/239749-imf-ukraine-aid-package/
IMF approves $17.5bn bailout package for Ukraine

[Shreeman]

Woe is me. Or is it not me yet?

http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... e-analysts

[vijaykarthik]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/ ... me=topNews

Interesting move from the US asking the Vietnamese not to allow access, the Ruskies, to Cam Ranh Bay

[panduranghari]

Woe is me. Or is it not me yet?

http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... e-analysts

The take away point is - QE worked in Eurozone. It did not work in US.

Dollar rises as its considered as a currency to hold when its uncertainty. The dollar will, eventually, rise so high that its scarcity overseas will force many deals to be re written or reneged. And when that happens, people will wonder why they are holding these dollars when the deals made are not giving them the bang for the buck(the main reason why they are harding dollars). Eventually these oversea dollars will start flooding back into the US. The consequence is the increased dollar liquidity within the USa. Weimar Germany of 1923 or Zimbabwe of 2002 will look like a childs play.

[Philip]

Frontline Ukraine: 'How Europe failed to slay the demons of war' In an extract from his new book, historian Richard Sakwa argues that the current conflict has its roots in the exclusion of Russia from genuine partnerships since the end of the cold war

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/m ... wa-extract

Richard Sakwa is professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent

Tuesday 10 March 2015 10.14 GMT

In 2014, history returned to Europe with a vengeance. The crisis over Ukraine brought back not only the spectre but the reality of war, on the 100th anniversary of a conflict that had been spoken of as the war to end all war. The great powers lined up, amid a barrage of propaganda and informational warfare, while many of the smaller powers made their contribution to the festival of irresponsibility.

Related:
More on this topicFrontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands by Richard Sakwa review – an unrivalled account

This was also the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the second world war, which wreaked so much harm on central and eastern Europe. The fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years earlier and the subsequent end of the cold war had been attended by expectations of a Europe “whole and free”.

These hopes were crushed in 2014, and Europe is now set for a new era of division and confrontation. The Ukrainian crisis was the immediate cause, but this only reflected deeper contradictions in the pattern of post-communist development since 1989. In other words, the European and Ukrainian crises came together to devastating effect.

The “Ukrainian crisis” refers to profound tensions in the the country’s nation and state-building processes since it achieved independence in late 1991, which now threaten the unity of the state itself.

These are no longer described in classical ideological terms, but, in the Roman manner, through the use of colours. The Orange tendency thinks in terms of a Ukraine that can finally fulfil its destiny as a nation state, officially monolingual, culturally autonomous from other Slavic nations and aligned with “Europe” and the Atlantic security community. This is a type of “monism”, because of its emphasis on the singularity of the Ukrainian experience.

By contrast, Blue has come to symbolise a rather more plural understanding of the challenges facing Ukraine, recognising that the country’s various regions have different historical and cultural experiences, and that the modern state needs to acknowledge this diversity in a more capacious constitutional settlement. For the Blues, Ukraine is more of a “state nation”, an assemblage of different traditions, but above all one where Russian is recognised as a second state language and economic, social and even security links with Russia are maintained. Of course, the Blue I am talking about is an abstraction, not the blue of former president Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

The Blues, no less than the Orangists, have been committed to the idea of a free and united Ukraine, but favour a more comprehensive vision of what it means to be Ukrainian. We also have to include the Gold tendency, the powerful oligarchs who have dominated the country since the 1990s, accompanied by widespread corruption and the decay of public institutions.

Since independence, there has been no visionary leader to meld these colours to forge a Ukrainian version of the rainbow nation.


Facebook Twitter Pinterest The EU flag waves on Independence Square in Kiev during anti-government protests. Photograph: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images The “Ukraine crisis” also refers to the way that internal tensions have become internationalised to provoke the worst crisis in Europe since the end of the cold war. Some have even compared its gravity with the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. The world at various points stood close to a new conflagration, provoked by desperately overheated rhetoric on all sides.

The asymmetrical end of the cold war effectively shut Russia out from the European alliance system. The failure to establish a genuinely inclusive and equal security system on the continent imbued European international politics with powerful stress points, which in 2014 produced the international earthquake that we now call the Ukraine crisis.

There had been plenty of warning signs, with Boris Yeltsin, the Russian Federation’s first leader, in December 1994 already talking in terms of a “cold peace”. When he came to power in 2000, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin devoted himself to overcoming the asymmetries.

In Greater Europe there would be no need to choose between Brussels, Washington or Moscow
The major non-state institution at the heart of the architecture of post-communist Europe, the European Union (EU), exacerbated the tensions rather than resolving them. The EU represents the core of what could be called “Wider Europe” – a Brussels-centric vision that extends into the heartlands of what had once been an alternative great-power system centred on Moscow. The increasing merger of Wider Europe with the Atlantic security system only made things worse.

Russia and some European leaders proposed not so much an alternative but a complementary vision to the monism of Wider Europe, known as “Greater Europe”: a way of bringing together all corners of the continent to create what Mikhail Gorbachev in the final period of the Soviet Union had called the “Common European Home”. This is a multipolar and pluralistic concept of Europe, allied with but not the same as the Atlantic community.

In Greater Europe there would be no need to choose between Brussels, Washington or Moscow. In the absence of the tensions generated by the post-cold war “unsettlement”, the peace promised at the end of the cold war would finally arrive. Instead, the double “Ukrainian” and “Ukraine” crises combined with catastrophic consequences.

For me, this is both personal and political. The cold war division of Europe is the reason I was born and grew up in Britain and not in Poland, but, even before that, war and preparations for war had scarred my family. In the inter-war years my father, an agronomist by profession but like so many of his generation also a reservist in the Polish army, marched up and down between Grodno and Lwów (as it was then called).

He told of the 25kg he had to carry in his backpack, with all sorts of equipment and survival tools. The area at the time was part of the Second Polish Republic, and for generations had been settled by Poles. These were the kresy, the borderlands of Europe grinding up against the ever-rising power of the Russian empire. With the partition of Poland in the 18th century, Grodno and what is now the western part of Belarus was ceded to Russia, while Lemberg (the German name for Lwów) and the surrounding province of Galicia became part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

On gaining independence in 1918, and with Russia and the nascent Ukrainian state in the throes of revolution and civil war, the various armies repeatedly marched back and forth across the region. In the end the Polish state occupied an enormous territory to the east of the Curzon Line.


Facebook Twitter Pinterest Demonstrators wave an orange party flag after disputed presidential elections in 2004. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP These were the lands occupied by Joseph Stalin, following the division of the area according to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939. Poland was invaded on 1 September and against the overwhelming might of Adolf Hitler’s armies the Polish forces fell back, only for the Soviet Union to invade on 17 September.

My father’s unit soon came up against the Soviet forces, and when greeted initially by the Poles as coming to support them against the Germans, they were asked to disarm. My father escaped to Hungary, but many of his reservist comrades were captured, and eventually murdered in Katyn and other killing sites.

My father subsequently joined the Polish second corps under General Anders, and with the British eighth army fought at El Alamein, Benghazi, Tobruk and then all the way up Italy, spending six months at Monte Cassino. At the end of the war Poland was liberated, but it was not free. Unable to return to their homeland, the family was granted refuge in Britain. In the meantime, the Soviet borders were extended to the west, and Lwów became Lvov.

These were territories that had never been part of the Russian empire, and when Ukraine gained independence in 1991 they became the source of the distinctive Orange vision of Ukrainian statehood. Today Lvov has become Lviv, while its representation of what it means to be Ukrainian is contested by other regions and communities, notably the Blues, each of which has endured an equally arduous path to become part of the modern Ukrainian state.

As for the political, being a product of an ideologically and geographically divided Europe, I shared the anticipation at the end of the cold war in 1989–91 that a new and united Europe could finally be built. For a generation the EU helped transcend the logic of conflict in the western part of the continent by binding the traditional antagonists, France and Germany, into a new political community, one that expanded from the founding six that signed the Treaty of Rome in March 1957 to the 28 member states of today.

The Council of Europe, established in 1949, broadened its activities into the post-communist region, and now encompasses 47 nations and 820 million citizens, as its website proudly proclaims. The European Convention of Human Rights and its additional protocols established a powerful normative framework for the continent, policed by the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg. Russia in the 1990s actively engaged with the EU, signing a Partnership and Cooperation agreement in 1994, although it only took effect on 30 October 1997 following the first Chechen war, and the next year Russia joined the Council of Europe.

However, another dynamic was at work, namely the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato). Also established in 1949 to bring together the victorious western allies, now ranged against the Soviet Union in what had become the cold war.

Nato was not disbanded when the Soviet Union disintegrated and the cold war came to an end. This was the source of the unbalanced end to the cold war, with the eastern part dissolving its alliance system while Nato in the 1990s began a march to the east.


Facebook Twitter Pinterest An East German border guard looks through a hole in the Berlin Wall on 19 November 1989. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features This raised increasing alarm in Russia, and, while notionally granting additional security to its new members, it meant that security in the continent had become divisible. Worse, there was an increasing perception that EU enlargement was almost the automatic precursor to Nato expansion.

The failure to create a genuinely inclusive and symmetrical post-communist order generated what some call a new cold war
There was a compelling geopolitical logic embedded in EU enlargement. For example, although many member states had reservations about the readiness of Bulgaria and Romania to join, there was a fear that they could drift off and become western versions of Ukraine. The project of European economic integration, and its associated peace project, effectively merged with the Euro-Atlantic security partnership, a fateful elision that undermined the rationale of both and which in the end provoked the Ukraine crisis.

The failure to create a genuinely inclusive and symmetrical post-communist political and security order generated what some took to calling a “new cold war”, or, more precisely, a “cold peace”, which stimulated new resentments and the potential for new conflicts.

It became increasingly clear that the demons of war in Europe had not been slain. Instead, the Ukraine crisis demonstrates just how fragile international order has become, and how much Europe has to do to achieve the vision that was so loudly proclaimed, when the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, of a continent united from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

The Ukraine crisis forces us to rethink European international relations. If Europe is not once again to be divided, there need to be new ideas about what an inclusive and equitable political and security order encompassing the whole continent would look like. In other words, the idea of Greater Europe needs to be endowed with substance and institutional form.

Unfortunately, it appears that the opposite will happen: old ideas will be revived, the practices of the cold war will, zombie-like, come back to life, and once again there will be a fatal dividing line across Europe that will mar the lives of the generation to come. This is far from inevitable, but to avoid it will require a shift in the mode of political intercourse from exprobration to diplomacy, and from denunciation to dialogue.

Related:
More on this topicThe demonisation of Russia risks paving the way for war | Seumas Milne

Thus the personal and the political combine, and this book is much an exploration of failed opportunities as it is an account of how we created yet another crisis in European international politics on the anniversaries of the start of two world wars and a moment of hope in 1989. My father’s generation suffered war, destruction and displacement, and yet the European civil war that dominated the 20th century still inflames the political imagination of the 21st.

Ha!Ha!Ha! Dog in the manger Yanquis.The Vites are getting Kilo subs from Russia apart from other mil eqpt at very reasonable cost,why on earth shiould they refuse any request to the Russians for the use of CRBay? Remember that it was oince hinted that we could use it if we wanted it. The Viets would also enjoy a fat fee for the same. Hoiw the wheel has changed.The base was once used by the USN which knows how important it is. With the RuN at CRB and the IN alsoo training the Viet navy for Kilo subs,it would be another way of restraining the PLAN from bullying the littoral states in the Indo-China Sea.

Choco soldier melts.IMF bails him and the UKR out.
http://rt.com/business/239749-imf-ukraine-aid-package/
IMF approves $17.5bn bailout package for UkrainePublished time: March 11, 2015

[RSoami]

http://www.voanews.com/content/in-easte ... 77067.html
In E. Ukraine, Civilian Deaths Push Men to Join Rebels


VoA is going t get a call from some high official in Washington soon.

[ramana]

How will Ukraine pay $17.5 B back? Looks like they will be under IMF debt for ever.

[DavidD]

How will Ukraine pay $17.5 B back? Looks like they will be under IMF debt for ever.

Kind of the point, no?

[Chinmayanand]

How will Ukraine pay $17.5 B back? Looks like they will be under IMF debt for ever.

Ukraine will just pay like Pakistan does . BTW, payments are a thing of the future .The bigger question is when will the next tranche come from . Looks like the Ukrainian establishment is gaming the US just like TSPA.

[panduranghari]

How will Ukraine pay $17.5 B back? Looks like they will be under IMF debt for ever.

That used to be a question long time back when US used WB and IMF to wage economic wars. The question today is not so much 'how' Ukraine will pay back, but 'who' will pay ukraine so Ukraine pays back the loan. While Russia with its relatively huge economy is finding meeting external dollar obligations difficult, the IMF loan to Ukraine is to show Russians that Ukraine will have enough dollars to wage a war at extremis. In essence they will survive even if Russia switches gas off. They will still have a standing army (mercenary army) who will fight against Russia as long as they are paid in greenbacks.

[Shreeman]

"Castro is sick" == cancer.
"chavez is sick" == dead.
"putin is sick" == soon?

[Prem]

Nuclear Treaty with Russia May Be Breaking Down
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/nuclear-t ... 00168.html

A high-level Russian official on Wednesday asserted again that the Kremlin has the right to move nuclear weapons into the disputed Crimean peninsula, which Russian troops invaded last year — and suggested that a key nuclear arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia is in danger of breaking down.On the question of sending nuclear weapons into Crimea, Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted Mikhail Ulyanov as saying, “I don't know if there are nuclear weapons there now. I don't know about any plans, but in principle Russia can do it.” It’s a position that other Russian officials have articulated in the past. Ulyanov’s boss, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, made similar comments in December.More surprising was Ulyanov’s warning about the status of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Force Treaty, signed by the U.S. and the Soviet Union in 1987. The deal was designed to eliminate the two countries’ stocks of nuclear and ballistic missiles with ranges of between 300 and 3,400 miles. The escalating rhetoric over nuclear weapons comes as tensions continue to rise in Europe. On Tuesday, Russia formally withdrew from a different treaty limiting conventional armed forces in Europe. Over the weekend, the president of the European Commission called for a Pan-European Army specifically to serve as a counterweight against Russia’s aggression.The U.S. has repeatedly called on Russia to admit to violations of the nuclear treaty. The Kremlin, not surprisingly, has declined to do so.
The government-owned news agency ITAR-TASS reported on comments made by Ulyanov Wednesday morning. “Some actions by our U.S. colleagues cause great surprise,” he reportedly said. “In their scheme of things we are expected to say voluntarily what we have violated and to confess violations. This kind of approach does not look serious to us.”Ulyanov charged that the U.S. is undermining global stability and making progress toward nuclear disarmament more difficult, TASS reported. Ulyanov reportedly said the presence of U.S. anti-ballistic missiles in Europe and “development of high-precision strategic non-nuclear weapons” are damaging the prospects for continued cooperation on nuclear arms issues."The discussion with the United States on this subject will go on. Its outcome is anyone’s guess,” he added before concluding with the backhanded assurance that “at this point it would be wrong to say that the treaty is falling apart.”U.S. officials have already accused Russia of repeatedly violating the nuclear treaty by developing new weapons of the kind it specifically banned. Last month, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said, that in the face of continued violations, “U.S. responses must make clear to Russia that if it does not return to compliance, our responses will make them less secure than they are today.”

[vijaykarthik]

Has Putin died or has he been replaced? A fair bit of shocking news tricking in. All bets are off if that guy isn't around.

[vijaykarthik]

http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=747 ... 40867345fa

[RSoami]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31855700
Yanukovych ally Peklushenko in new Ukraine mystery death

All of Yanukovich`s allies are being murdered systematically in the `rule of law` ideal imposed by the great benevolent EU.

[Philip]

Ramana,the UKR has earlier agreed to GM crops to be introduced in full measure. This was one of the key reasons for the IMF to bail it out.See earlier posts.One major reason for the change of guard ousting Yanukovych.This is because the EU do not want GM crops on their soil! So the breadbasket of E.Europe,the UKR is to be the land where controversial GM crops are to be grown,feeding the world surreptitiously,esp. the "turd world" ,where foodstuffs which have GM crops,or animal products which were fed with GM crops,do not have warnings on their labels.

[Philip]

http://rt.com/news/240309-hungary-russia-nuclear-deal/

​EU moves to block €12bn Russia-Hungary nuclear deal - reports
Published time: March 13, 2015

Employees work in the operation center of the Paks nuclear power plant reactor unit number four in Paks, 120 km (75 miles) east of Budapest (Reuters/Laszlo Balogh)
The European Union is opposing a multibillion deal under which Hungary is to buy nuclear fuel rods from Russia for its old Paks nuclear power plant. Some media claim the deal has been blocked, though Budapest denies the reports.

Russian nuclear engineers are to build two new reactors with combined capacity of 1,200 megawatts at Hungary’s only nuclear power plant, which currently has four reactors. The deal signed last year involves a €10-billion loan that Moscow offered to Budapest on condition that the money would pay for the equipment.

The new reactors would have to be loaded with Russian-made fuel rods, which is a matter of safety for the new reactors. However EU’s nuclear fuel purchasing agency Euratom is opposing the exclusive deal. The Financial Times reported Thursday that the European Commission last week backed Euroatom’s decision to block the deal.

The blockage was not immediately confirmed by European or Russian officials. Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs rejected the FT report and said Budapest would demand that the newspaper publish a retraction.

Hungary is among EU members opposing Brussels’ drive to break ties with Russia over the ongoing Ukrainian crisis. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is a vocal opponent of EU sanctions against Moscow, which have led to a trade war between Russia and Europe.

Read more
‘Strategic rift’: Hungary PM criticizes EU partners trying to isolate Moscow

He also criticized the EU for derailing the South Stream pipeline project, which would route Russian natural gas to Europe through Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, providing extra energy security to Eastern Europe.

Orbán maintains his maverick position towards EU anti-Russian policies, which he views as harmful for Europe and imposed under pressure from Washington. Critics accuse him of authoritarian trends, with hawkish US Senator John McCain going as far as calling him a “neo-fascist dictator.”

Amid the criticism both at home and abroad, the PM’s Fidesz party won last year’s general election with a landslide victory, receiving almost 45 percent of votes.

[member_24540]

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/11/n ... ropaganda/

Nuland’s Mastery of Ukraine Propaganda
March 11, 2015

Exclusive: In House testimony, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland blamed Russia and ethnic-Russian rebels for last summer’s shoot-down of MH-17 over Ukraine, but the U.S. government has not substantiated that charge. So, did Nuland mislead Congress or just play a propaganda game, asks Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

An early skill learned by Official Washington’s neoconservatives, when they were cutting their teeth inside the U.S. government in the 1980s, was how to frame their arguments in the most propagandistic way, so anyone who dared to disagree with any aspect of the presentation seemed unpatriotic or crazy.

During my years at The Associated Press and Newsweek, I dealt with a number of now prominent neocons who were just starting out and mastering these techniques at the knee of top CIA psychological warfare specialist Walter Raymond Jr., who had been transferred to President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff where Raymond oversaw inter-agency task forces that pushed Reagan’s hard-line agenda in Central America and elsewhere. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Victory of ‘Perception Management.’”]

One of those quick learners was Robert Kagan, who was then a protégé of Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams. Kagan got his first big chance when he became director of the State Department’s public diplomacy office for Latin America, a key outlet for Raymond’s propaganda schemes.

Though always personable in his dealings with me, Kagan grew frustrated when I wouldn’t swallow the propaganda that I was being fed. At one point, Kagan warned me that I might have to be “controversialized,” i.e. targeted for public attack by Reagan’s right-wing media allies and anti-journalism attack groups, like Accuracy in Media, a process that did indeed occur.

Years later, Kagan emerged as one of America’s top neocons, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, which opened in 1998 to advocate for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, ultimately gaining the backing of a large swath of the U.S. national security establishment in support of that bloody endeavor.

Despite the Iraq disaster, Kagan continued to rise in influence, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a columnist at the Washington Post, and someone whose published criticism so alarmed President Barack Obama last year that he invited Kagan to a White House lunch. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama’s True Foreign Policy Weakness.”]

Kagan’s Wife’s Coup

But Kagan is perhaps best known these days as the husband of neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, one of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former advisers and a key architect of last year’s coup in Ukraine, a “regime change” that toppled an elected president and touched off a civil war, which now has become a proxy fight involving nuclear-armed United States and Russia.

In an interview last year with the New York Times, Nuland indicated that she shared her husband’s criticism of President Obama for his hesitancy to use American power more assertively. Referring to Kagan’s public attacks on Obama’s more restrained “realist” foreign policy, Nuland said, “suffice to say … that nothing goes out of the house that I don’t think is worthy of his talents. Let’s put it that way.”

But Nuland also seems to have mastered her husband’s skill with propaganda, presenting an extreme version of the situation in Ukraine, such that no one would dare quibble with the details. In prepared testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, Nuland even slipped in an accusation blaming Russia for the July 17 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 though the U.S. government has not presented any proof.

Nuland testified, “In eastern Ukraine, Russia and its separatist puppets unleashed unspeakable violence and pillage; MH-17 was shot down.”

Now, it’s true that if one parses Nuland’s testimony, she’s not exactly saying the Russians or the ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine shot down the plane. There is a semi-colon between the “unspeakable violence and pillage” and the passive verb structure “MH-17 was shot down.” But anyone seeing her testimony would have understood that the Russians and their “puppets” shot down the plane, killing all 298 people onboard.

When I submitted a formal query to the State Department asking if Nuland’s testimony meant that the U.S. government had developed new evidence that the rebels shot down the plane and that the Russians shared complicity, I received no answer.

Perhaps significantly or perhaps not, Nuland presented similarly phrased testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday but made no reference to MH-17. So, I submitted a new inquiry asking whether the omission reflected second thoughts by Nuland about making the claim before the House. Again, I have not received a reply.

However, both of Nuland’s appearances place all the blame for the chaos in Ukraine on Russia, including the 6,000 or more deaths. Nuland offered not a single word of self-criticism about how she contributed to these violent events by encouraging last year’s coup, nor did she express the slightest concern about the actions of the coup regime in Kiev, including its dispatch of neo-Nazi militias to carry out “anti-terrorist” and “death squad” operations against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Nuclear War and Clashing Ukraine Narratives.”]

Russia’s Fault

Everything was Russia’s fault – or as Nuland phrased it: “This manufactured conflict — controlled by the Kremlin; fueled by Russian tanks and heavy weapons; financed at Russian taxpayers’ expense — has cost the lives of more than 6,000 Ukrainians, but also of hundreds of young Russians sent to fight and die there by the Kremlin, in a war their government denies.”

Nuland was doing her husband proud. As every good propagandist knows, you don’t present events with any gray areas; your side is always perfect and the other side is the epitome of evil. And, today, Nuland faces almost no risk that some mainstream journalist will dare contradict this black-and-white storyline; they simply parrot it.

Besides heaping all the blame on the Russians, Nuland cited – in her Senate testimony – some of the new “reforms” that the Kiev authorities have just implemented as they build a “free-market state.” She said, “They made tough choices to reduce and cap pension benefits, increase work requirements and phase in a higher retirement age; … they passed laws cutting wasteful gas subsidies.”

In other words, many of the “free-market reforms” are aimed at making the hard lives of average Ukrainians even harder – by cutting pensions, removing work protections, forcing people to work into their old age and making them pay more for heat during the winter.

Nuland also hailed some of the regime’s stated commitments to fighting corruption. But Kiev seems to have simply installed a new cast of bureaucrats looking to enrich themselves. For instance, Ukraine’s Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko is an expatriate American who – before becoming an instant Ukrainian citizen last December – ran a U.S. taxpayer-financed investment fund for Ukraine that was drained of money as she engaged in lucrative insider deals, which she has fought to keep secret. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s Finance Minister’s American ‘Values.’”]

Yet, none of these concerns were mentioned in Nuland’s propagandistic testimony to the House and Senate – not that any of the committee members or the mainstream press corps seemed to care that they were being spun and even misled. The hearings were mostly opportunities for members of Congress to engage in chest-beating as they demanded that President Obama send U.S. arms to Ukraine for a hot war with Russia.

Regarding the MH-17 disaster, one reason that I was inquisitive about Nuland’s insinuation in her House testimony that the Russians and the ethnic Russian rebels were responsible was that some U.S. intelligence analysts have reached a contrary conclusion, according to a source briefed on their findings. According to that information, the analysts found no proof that the Russians had delivered a BUK anti-aircraft system to the rebels and concluded that the attack was apparently carried out by a rogue element of the Ukrainian military.

After I published that account last summer, the Obama administration went silent about the MH-17 shoot-down, letting stand some initial speculation that had blamed the Russians and the rebels. In the nearly eight months since the tragedy, the U.S. government has failed to make public any intelligence information on the crash. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Danger of an MH-17 ‘Cold Case.’”]

So, Nuland may have been a bit duplicitous when she phrased her testimony so that anyone hearing it would jump to the conclusion that the Russians and the rebels were to blame. It’s true she didn’t exactly say so but she surely knew what impression she was leaving.

In that, Nuland appears to have taken a page from the playbook of her husband’s old mentor, Elliott Abrams, who provided misleading testimony to Congress on the Iran-Contra Affair in the 1980s – and even though he was convicted of that offense, Abrams was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush and thus was able to return to government last decade to oversee the selling of the Iraq War.

[Tuvaluan]

"Castro is sick" == cancer.
"chavez is sick" == dead.
"putin is sick" == soon?

Usually seems to me like constructing deniability to support a future black op aimed to kill the person in question.

[Singha]

the only person who loves hearing the voice of john mccain weighing in on every issue under the sun....is john mccain.

[habal]

Kick Who Out? SWIFT Gives Russia a Seat on the Board
There are 25 available board seats, and each seat is allocated for a three-year term to a specific country

On Monday afternoon, not only did SWIFT NOT kick Russia out… but they announced that they were actually giving a BOARD SEAT to Russia.

This is basically the exact opposite of what the US government was pushing for.

Awkward…

But this story is even bigger than that.

Because at the same time that the US government isn’t getting its way with SWIFT, the Chinese are busy putting together their own version of it called CIPS.

CIPS stands for the China International Payment System; it’s intended to be a direct competitor to SWIFT, and a brand new way for global banks to communicate and transact with one another in a way that does NOT depend on the United States.

http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/03/13/4484

additional news items

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-0 ... nch-soon-s

China Completes SWIFT Alternative, May Launch As Soon As September
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSK ... 9?irpc=932

China's international payment system, known simply enough as China International Payment System (CIPS), which serves to process cross-border yuan transactions is ready, and may be launched as early as September or October.

According to Reuters, the launch of the will remove one of the biggest hurdles to internationalizing the yuan and should greatly increase global usage of the Chinese currency by cutting transaction costs and processing times.

It will also put the yuan on a more even footing with other major global currencies like the U.S. dollar, as CIPS is expected to use the same messaging format as other international payment systems, making transactions smoother.

CIPS, which would be a worldwide payments superhighway for the yuan, will replace a patchwork of existing networks that make processing renminbi payments a more cumbersome process.

China-IMF talks underway to endorse yuan as global reserve currency
March 12, 2015, 12:12 pm

A senior Chinese central bank official said Thursday that the country is “actively communicating” with the IMF on the possibility of including the yuan, or RMB, in the basket of the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).

Including the yuan in the SDR system would allow the IMF to recognize the ascent of the world’s second-biggest economy while aiding China’s attempts to diminish the dollar’s dominance in global trade and finance.

“We hope the IMF can fully take into account the progress of RMB internationalization, to include RMB into the basket underlining the SDR in foreseeable, near future,” said Yi Gang, vice governor of the People’s Bank of China.

However, China will be patient until conditions are ripe, Yi said at a press conference on the sidelines of the ongoing annual parliamentary session.

In late 2015, the IMF will conduct its next twice-a-decade review of the basket of currencies its members can count toward their official reserves.

SDRs are international foreign exchange reserve assets. Allocated to nations by the IMF, an SDR represents a claim to foreign currencies for which it may be exchanged in times of need.

Although denominated in US dollars, the nominal value of an SDR is derived from a basket of currencies, with, specifically, a fixed amount of Japanese yen, US dollars, British pounds and euros, without RMB.

China would need to satisfy the Washington-based lender’s economic benchmarks and get the support of most of the other 187 member countries.

To become a currency included in the SDR basket, the trade volume of goods and services behind that currency will be evaluated, the Chinese Central Bank official explained on Thursday, stressing that RMB has no problem in this regard. But he said views are divided on whether the RMB is a freely usable currency.

“No matter whether and when the RMB will be included in the SDR basket, China will push on with its financial sector reform and opening-up,” Yi said.

The yuan became the world’s No. 2 currency for trade finance globally in 2013, and overtook the Canadian and Australian dollars to enter the top five world payment currencies in 2014, according to global transaction services organization SWIFT.

China said the yuan has also been used as a reserve currency in some countries and regions.

http://thebricspost.com/china-imf-talks ... QOo5xAy2vp

UK snubs US to join China-led Asian bank
March 13, 2015, 5:25 am

Overlooking US censure, the UK has announced its decision to join China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, becoming the first “major western country” to apply for membership.
“I am delighted to announce today that the UK will be the first major Western country to become a prospective founder member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which has already received significant support in the region,” said UK Finance Minister George Osborne on Thursday.

http://thebricspost.com/uk-snubs-us-to- ... QOqbhAy2vq

[Deans]

Since the West has gone ape over the death of Nemtsov (Putin's critic), its interesting to see what's happening to
Chocolate's opponents in the last 2 months.

January 26th: Mykola Serhiyenko, former first deputy chief of Ukrainian railways, committed suicide, shot himself with a rifle
January 29th: Oleksiy Kolesnyk, former Kharkiv regional government head. Hanged himself.
February 25th: Sergey Walter, Party of Regions mayor of Melitopol. Hanged himself
February 26th: Oleksandr Bordyuh, chief police deputy of Melitopol. Hanged himself
February 28th: Mykhaylo Chechetov, deputy chairman of Party of Regions. Jumped from his apartment window
March 10th: Stanislav Melnik, Party of Regions deputy. Shot himself.
March 12th: Oleksandr Peklushenko, former Party of Regions governor of Zaporizhia. Shot himself.

[Shreeman]

The putin has gone missing rhetoric matches the Kim not seen, Castro not seen, is chavez dead nonsense is now front page. They really have reduced putin to hitler in the western media.

[Philip]

New IMF loan to Ukraine will go down the drain’
Published time: March 11, 2015
http://rt.com/op-edge/239705-ukraine-imf-financial-aid/