The State of Affairs in Russia

[Tonitrus]

At least the names of the government officials involved seem more legit/higher level. 

[Martinus]

Of course, it is little wonder that the government is doing that, since nothing distracts voters in a double election year (we are electing the President in May and the Parliament in autumn) like fears of a military conflict.

[grumbler]

At least the names of the government officials involved seem more legit/higher level. 

Nonsense.  If Marty didn't inspect and approve this training, it never happened.  Just ask him.

[Martinus]

Battle.net Blocked in Crimea
Our roundup starts off with some serious news--Battle.net is now blocked in Crimea.

The Moscow Times has reported that Crimean gamers are locked out of all Battle.net games, with the notice "In accordance with current trade regulations relating to the region of Crimea, we are legally required to suspend access to your Battle.net account."

As PC Gamer notes, many well-known companies have imposed similar restrictions as part of Executive Order 13685, which prohibits "the exportation, reexportation, sale, or supply, directly or indirectly, from the United States, or by a United States person, wherever located, of any goods, services, or technology to the Crimea region of Ukraine."

[Liep]

WAR CRIME!

[jimmy olsen]

I just got an unprompted teaching offer from a Russian ESL company I applied to years ago. The pay offered would have been fine when the Rouble was trading at less than 30 to the dollar, but not when it's over 50.  I guess that's why they're spamming everyone who has ever applied.

[jimmy olsen]

Who exactly is living in a bad imperialist state these days?

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/russians-cold-war-116736.html?ml=m_b1_1#.VSdqwqocQc8

The United States has a short-term and a long-term problem in Russia. The shorter-term and easier problem is the hostile attitude of Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin cronies toward Washington. The longer-term and much tougher challenge is the enmity of the Russian people themselves. It may astonish my friends in the West, but the attitude of Russians today towards the United States and Americans is worse than it was for most of the Cold War, when Americans were viewed as "good guys" living in a bad, imperialist state. Now, many Russians view not only U.S. leaders but U.S. citizens as "bad guys."

And the trend-lines keep going in one direction: down. According to surveys conducted recently by the Levada Center, an independent Russian polling organization, the number of Russian residents who have a positive attitude towards the United States has dropped by almost three quarters in the last year, while the percentage of those with a negative attitude exceeds 80 percent. The share of Russians who describe relations with the U.S. as "hostile" surged from 4 percent in January 2014 to 42 percent in January 2015. Partly this is because as Russian democracy deteriorates, the Russian public seems ready to fall for even the most ridiculous notions floated by state-affiliated media outlets, such as claims that Americans adopt Russian orphans specifically to abuse them and sell their organs.

Yet anti-American propaganda is not alone to blame. It is important to understand that U.S. actions also played a role in escalating anti-Americanism in Russia. The biggest culprit has been NATO expansion, which many in Russia believe targets their country, aiming to surround and isolate it. The bombing of Belgrade also contributed, more because of the overt disregard for Russia's opinion than because of the military action itself. The Iraq War, the intervention in Libya, and many other moves can be added to the same list.

Another reason for the deteriorating attitude towards the United States has been the fact that Russia's cultural and historical identity has been ignored, despite the usual assurances of respect for Russian culture. For more than three centuries–starting with the reign of Peter the Great and particularly after the victory over Napoleon–Russia has seen itself as a great power. The sense of having a special mission has been with Russians even longer. Many in Russia are unwilling to accept a secondary role on the world stage. Neither the substance nor the style of U.S. actions has taken this into account in recent years.

Russia's cultural and historical identity explains the resounding popular support in the country for Putin's decision to annex Crimea. The approval rating for the move has consistently remained around 90 percent. Initially, only 1 percent of the population was categorically opposed and now, a year later, this number is at 2.6 percent. This has nothing to do with the supposed aggressive nature of Russians, nor with a desire to rebuild a lost empire. The annexation of Crimea–conducted without a single shot fired and without any casualties–was carried out under the rallying cries of helping Russians and restoring justice (a rationale that Russian citizens unfortunately believed), and it revived the victorious identity, the national pride, and the belief in Russia's power and moral authority that had been lost with the collapse of the U.S.S.R.

Of course this does not absolve Russia of responsibility for its actions of the past year. Feeling offended in no way excuses aggression. And Russian society is not monolithic. The majority does support Putin's policy on Ukraine, but there is a vocal minority – primarily educated city-dwellers–who speak out sharply against it, seeking peace with Ukraine rather than its subjugation, and cooperation with the United States rather than confrontation. Tens of thousands of people attended anti-war marches in Moscow. It is not correct to equate current-day Russia with its president. However, this is what House Resolution 758, passed by the U.S. Congress on December 4, 2014, does when–in condemning the actions of the Russian Federation—it makes no mention of the people of Russia, who are as interested in ending the war as the people of Ukraine.

The only long-term solution to this problem of rampant anti-Americanism in Russia is for Americans to better understand the broader Russian mindset. This is a nation that feels historically unlucky, subjected to a vengeful West that poured salt in its wounds after the Cold War by further cutting into its great-power status. It is also a nation that, frankly, is not especially fond of democracy. That's the main reason for Putin's enduring popularity.

At the same time there is hardly a monolith of opinion behind Putin and the Kremlin, and the Russian leader's current policy is far from being in the interests of everyone in Russia. Russian businessmen suffer from corruption, scientists and academics—from the country's isolation, members of the high-tech community—and from unraveling connections with the world's most technologically advanced countries. Russian writers and artists suffer from ideological pressure. The annexation of Crimea took a heavy financial toll on the entire population. The war in the Donbass region, if it continues, will bring further human losses, primarily among the less educated and less affluent segments of the population.

Intoxication with the victory in Crimea will pass sooner or later, and then the U.S. government will need to seek a balance of interests not with Putin, but with the large number of groups that make up the Russian public, as well as with a new government of Russia that will represent the interests of the public. Only then can normal, constructive relations between Russia and the United States be restored.

The latest measures taken by the United States with regard to Russia affect (not always in expected ways) not only Putin's policies, but also the sentiments of Russians towards the United States. From this viewpoint, the personal sanctions targeting "Putin's friends" will not undermine and may even improve the image of the United States in the long term. Many of these individuals are perceived as corrupt, and are believed to have amassed their huge fortunes in disreputable ways. Personal sanctions also bring tension to the atmosphere around Putin, which was likely the objective of this policy's authors.

The expansion of sanctions, however, will only further bring down the living standards of millions of Russians. This will not force the Russian government to change its policy on Ukraine, but it will worsen attitudes towards the United States.

Deliveries of U.S. weapons to Ukraine will unquestionably result in at least a temporary increase in anti-American sentiments in Russia. At the same time, these weapons could prevent new offensives by Russia-supported separatists in Ukraine. The one price that the Kremlin is not willing to pay for continuing its course in Ukraine is large-scale casualties affecting the entire country, which could – in combination with the economic crisis – lead to domestic unrest. In fact, human casualties are also the one price that Russian society is unwilling to pay. If it becomes clear that a local parity in armaments makes such casualties inevitable, there might be no more offensives, which would protect the lives of both Ukrainians and Russians. U.S. weapons could serve as the same kind of deterrents that the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers were for several decades. Of course, the most dangerous period will be the time between the announcement of deliveries and the actual arrival of weapons to the frontlines.

Thinking long-term, there are two other initiatives the United States should take. First, it should provide moral support to the people and organizations in Russia that fight for freedom and democracy in their country. Their moral and political resistance prevents, or at least slows, the descent of the country into archaic barbarity. They have been left in a one-on-one confrontation with the government in their country, but they should not feel all alone in the world. Support of Soviet dissidents had a major significance in its time and was duly appreciated by many in the U.S.S.R.

Second, the United States should expand, rather than cut back, exchange and direct assistance programs in science, culture and particularly education, no matter how difficult this is to do when the Russian government is doing all it can to impede or shut down such programs. Young people who learn about life in the U.S. through well-organized educational exchange programs or internships will never fall victim to primitive anti-Western stereotypes. Those who return to Russia to work will try to foster principles of freedom and openness in their own country, principles that are currently alien to much of the Russian population. Russia needs this for effective development, while the United States and the rest of the world need Russia to become an ally and not an enemy.

[Martinus]

Russians completely buy the Kremlin propaganda, hook and sinker.

Our firm has an office in Kiev and a lot of Russians from the Donetsk area work there - apparently they are all completely supportive of Putin, so this cannot be blamed on media censorship in Russia; these people simply prefer to believe in their own version of events.

[alfred russel]

I just got an unprompted teaching offer from a Russian ESL company I applied to years ago. The pay offered would have been fine when the Rouble was trading at less than 30 to the dollar, but not when it's over 50.  I guess that's why they're spamming everyone who has ever applied.

This may be your opportunity for professional challenge you said you were missing in your current job. While the pay may not be good in USD, local prices are in rubles.

[Valmy]

Russians completely buy the Kremlin propaganda, hook and sinker.

Our firm has an office in Kiev and a lot of Russians from the Donetsk area work there - apparently they are all completely supportive of Putin, so this cannot be blamed on media censorship in Russia; these people simply prefer to believe in their own version of events.

In one of my group interviews I met a guy who had worked ten years in Azerbaijan for some Russian oil outfit and he said he had to return to the US because it got so bad. The Russians made no effort to hide their hatred for him all the time and he kept being forced to denounce the US, which of course he did but it made no difference. Charming.

[Martinus]

I just got an unprompted teaching offer from a Russian ESL company I applied to years ago. The pay offered would have been fine when the Rouble was trading at less than 30 to the dollar, but not when it's over 50.  I guess that's why they're spamming everyone who has ever applied.

This may be your opportunity for professional challenge you said you were missing in your current job. While the pay may not be good in USD, local prices are in rubles.

But inflation is also high.

[Valmy]

But inflation is also high.

Dorsey is just trying to get Tim exiled to Russia or something.

My other professional Russian story is I got messaged by a Russian Engineer saying he got a job offer from a Texas firm but he hears in Russia that Texans shoot all foreigners. So he wanted to know if that was true. I was like

[Eddie Teach]

Did you tell him you only shoot the ones stealing jobs from Texans?

[Ed Anger]

Yes

[Syt]

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/04/13/how-vladimir-putins-skewed-view-of-world-war-two-threatens-his-neighbors-and-the-west/?utm_source=Facebook

How Vladimir Putin's skewed view of World War Two threatens his neighbors and the West

Russian President Vladimir Putin stands smiling between George W. Bush and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as the U.S. president reaches out to shake hands with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. It was a photo-op that couldn't be missed: the military parade in Moscow on May 9, 2005, marking the 60th anniversary of the Nazis' capitulation. Despite widespread outrage over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, everybody could agree that the end of World War Two was worth celebrating together. Even Viktor Yushchenko, the first Ukrainian president who openly defied the Kremlin, came.

This May 9, Putin will be lucky if a couple of European presidents show up for the 70th anniversary. The annexation of Crimea and Russia's support for militants in eastern Ukraine have made Kremlin invitations toxic. Few Western leaders will want to be seen at a Victory Day parade featuring 15,000 soldiers and 200 military vehicles, including the BUK anti-aircraft missile system believed to have shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine last summer.

Just five years ago, U.S. and other Allied troops marched in the Victory Day parade to commemorate the coalition that defeated Nazi Germany. Now Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is blaming "the Americans and the European Union's aggressive core" for sabotaging the Kremlin's party plans. The foreign dignitary likely to attract the most attention this year is North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who is expected to make his first official trip abroad to attend the Moscow parade.

A string of historic 70th anniversaries began in June of last year, when France remembered the Allies' D-Day landing in Normandy. German Chancellor Angela Merkel ably used the occasion to arrange Putin's first meeting with the freshly inaugurated Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko. But as the Kremlin ramped up its involvement in eastern Ukraine, Putin became an increasingly unwanted guest at international gatherings.

In January, the Red Army's liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was remembered. The Polish government didn't send out formal invitations to the commemoration, thereby letting Putin know he wasn't welcome at a ceremony attended by dozens of world leaders. A couple of weeks later, the 70th anniversary of the Yalta Conference came and went. That summit — hosted by Stalin in the Crimean resort — extended the Kremlin's influence over much of Eastern Europe and helped set the stage for the Cold War. The next big awkward anniversary is April 25, 1945, when advancing Soviet and U.S. troops met on the Elbe River south of Berlin, sealing Adolf Hitler's fate.

World War Two was supposed to be history by now. Germany, once Europe's chief villain, had long atoned for its sins, building a model democracy, making peace with its neighbors, and becoming an anchor of the continent's unity. 2015 was meant to be a year of remembrance and celebration of how far Europeans had come in seven decades. Instead, it has degenerated into a clash that says more about the present than the past, especially in Eastern Europe.

For most countries that emerged from the Soviet empire 25 years ago, independence from Moscow exposed messy, overlooked histories. The small nations of east central Europe had been pushed and pulled by the Nazi and Communist juggernauts surrounding them. From the Baltics to the Balkans, it was a story of collaboration and betrayal, resistance and subjugation. One and the same army could be viewed as liberator, conqueror and occupier. Loyalties were split, quartered and ground to pieces.

Complexity or inconvenient facts had no place in official Soviet historiography, where the Red Army was celebrated as the undisputed victor in the war against fascism. The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that carved up Poland and ceded the Baltic nations to the Soviet Union was forgotten; the Holocaust downplayed; and the role of the Western Allies diminished. World War Two was remembered as the "Great Patriotic War" and didn't start until the Nazis' genocidal invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. There was no mention that Hitler and Stalin were allies before the attack. The Pacific war was a sideshow that the Soviet Union didn't enter until Japan's defeat was imminent.

When Putin came to power in 2000, Russians were still reeling from a decade of nihilism that had followed the collapse of Communism. For a country that was beginning to pick itself up, the "Great Victory" against the Nazis presented itself as the ideal surrogate for a national idea to pull together Russia. Practically every family had suffered in the war, and the whole country knew the iconography from Soviet television and film. Putin couldn't buy Russia a new identity for all the petrodollars in the world, but he could make Victory Day the de facto national holiday, celebrated with ever more gargantuan military parades.

For Putin, the Soviet version of World War Two is a cornerstone of Russian prestige. In March, Putin called his ministers to a meeting in the Kremlin to check on preparations for this year's holiday.

"Today we unfortunately see not only attempts to misrepresent and distort events of the war, but cynical, open lies and the brazen defamation of a whole generation who gave up everything for the victory," Putin said. "Their goal is clear: to undermine the power and moral authority of modern Russia and deprive it of the status of a victorious nation."

Putin was reacting to ridiculous — and transparently political — statements by Eastern European leaders that hardly warranted a response. In January, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk recalled the "Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany" on German TV, and Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna suggested in an interview that an ethnic Ukrainian unit of the Red Army had actually liberated Auschwitz.

Lavrov denounced his counterpart's comments as "sacrilegious." The word choice is revealing, as Russia's World War Two cult has taken on quasi-religious qualities. Leading up to the 65th anniversary of the war's end, the Kremlin even convened a special commission to combat the "falsification of history," evidently with unsatisfactory results.

The problem isn't an attempt to deny the sacrifice of tens of millions of Soviet civilians and Red Army soldiers. At issue is the dual nature of a liberation that turned into conquest as Stalin steamrolled across and then subjugated Eastern Europe.

In the Kremlin's cartoonish portrayal of history, the people who fought fascists were not Communists or democrats but simply "anti-fascists." In Russia, the term "fascist" has been stripped of ideology and is synonymous with "anybody we don't like." Given Putin's authoritarianism and his appeal among far-right parties in Europe, the Kremlin's concern about fascism is artifice. Putin is an opportunist, not an ideologue.

Yet remembering the Great Victory is more than an instrument to consolidate Russians: it has also become a way to prepare people for war.

The Kremlin cast the Ukraine conflict in Soviet tropes from the start, branding the pro-European interim government as "fascist" and spreading hysteria among Russian speakers about the coming wrath of the Banderovtsy — followers of the World War Two-era Ukrainian nationalist leader, Stepan Bandera. The fear-mongering fell on fertile ground, as Ukraine had witnessed some of the fiercest fighting and worst massacres of the war. Pro-Russian militants in Crimea and eastern Ukraine convinced themselves they were reliving an epic struggle against fascism. Their symbol became the orange-and-black striped St. George's ribbon, a sign of remembrance of the Red Army's victory over Nazism.

For Putin, the main lesson of World War Two is that enemies are tirelessly plotting to encircle and enslave Russia. If 75 years ago it was the Third Reich, today it's the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. At the same time, President Barack Obama's decision to ignore his parade has infuriated Putin. In March the pro-Kremlin tabloid LifeNews started a Twitter campaign, #VictoryDayForObama, "to remind the president of one of the most important days of the 20th century."

Germany has championed good relations with Russia as a way of making up for World War Two and can't be as dismissive as the United States. German leftists proposed inviting Putin to Berlin to mark this year's anniversary. Merkel settled on a more diplomatic solution: skipping the military parade on May 9 yet paying her respects at the Kremlin's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier a day later.

Twenty years ago, Bill Clinton faced a similar dilemma. The U.S. president ended up traveling to Moscow for the 50th anniversary of the war's end, but he stayed away from the main military parade as a way of showing his disapproval of Russia's war in Chechnya.