NCSEJ WEEKLY NEWS BRIEF Washington, D.C. May 27, 2016

Romania to organize an International summit in 2017 against anti-Semitism Actmedia, May 26, 2016 http://actmedia.eu/daily/romania-to-organize-an-international-summit-in-2017-against-anti- semitism/63937

Romania will organize at the beginning of 2017 an international summit dedicated to the joint action against the anti-Semitic and extremist manifestations, President Klaus Iohannis announced on Wednesday.

"We shall launch soon the initiative of organizing in Bucharest, at the beginning of 2017, an international summit dedicated to the joint action against the anti-Semitic manifestations, as well as against any form of extremist manifestations," said Iohannis at the ceremony of decoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Honorary Chairman Yehuda Bauer.

The head of state congratulated Bauer, who throughout his career proved to be an unmistakable landmark in the research of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and the movement of the Jewish resistance during the persecution.

The decoration ceremony was attended by Justice Minister Raluca Pruna, alongside several ambassadors, presidential advisors and representatives of the IHRA and of the associations for the Holocaust victims.

The president signed in February the decoration decree of professor Yehuda Bauer with the National Order for Merit in rank of Grand Officer, "in sign of high appreciation and gratitude for the personal significant contribution to the research of the Holocaust phenomenon, whose goal is to keep alive this tragedy the humankind should not know anymore, as well as for the fruitful, prodigious collaboration he has with our country."

The decoration was proposed by Foreign Affairs Minister Lazar Comanescu.

Kremlin: Savchenko's Release Won't Help Warm EU-Russia Ties RFE/RL, May 26, 2016 http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-ukraine-eu-savchenko-release-wont-help-ties/27758807.html

Russia says the release of Ukrainian military pilot Nadia Savchenko after nearly two years in captivity is unlikely to help improve Moscow's relations with the European Union.

Savchenko returned home on May 25 after being exchanged for two Russians held by Ukraine.

"The return of our guys to Moscow and the pardoning of Savchenko and her return to Kyiv can hardly be considered as something that is able to significantly change the current atmosphere, which of course we would like to see as more constructive," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on May 26.

Savchenko's handover, which had been demanded by the West, comes a few weeks before the EU decides whether to extend sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine.

The EU sanctions, which were adopted in 2014 in response to Russia's occupation and illegal annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and Moscow's military support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, are due to expire at the end of July.

Putin Talks Syria, Ukraine With Normandy Format Leaders Moscow Times, May 24, 2016 http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/putin-talks-syria-ukraine-with-normandy-format- leaders/570075.html

President Vladimir Putin has held phone talks with the leaders of Ukraine, France and Germany to discuss the situation in Syria and in Ukraine's Donbass region, the Kremlin said in a statement Tuesday.

Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko discussed the peaceful settlement of the situation in south-east Ukraine as well as possible steps to tackle the socioeconomic and humanitarian problems in the region.

All leaders stressed the importance of complying with Minsk agreements and of enhancing the effectiveness of the OSCE's special monitoring mission in the region “by giving it additional powers,” the RBC newspaper reported.

“Vladimir Putin called for an immediate end to attacks by the Ukrainian armed groups on Donbass' residential areas. He emphasized that a key part of any settlement should be direct dialogue between Kiev and Donetsk and Luhansk,” the statement said.

Members of the so-called Normandy Format — the group of senior diplomats from the four countries actively working to resolve the situation in eastern Ukraine — have also received a set of proposals from the self- proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic (LNR) and Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), RBC reported. The suggestions touch upon “local elections, special status, amnesty and decentralization,” and “should be carefully considered,” the Kremlin statement said.

In addition to the situation in Ukraine, the leaders discussed some aspects of the situation in Syria.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko urged Russia to release “all the Ukrainian hostages, including Nadiya Savchenko, Gennady Afanasyev and Yury Soloshenko,” the RBC news website reported, citing a statement on the Ukrainian president's website.

Poroshenko used the talks to call for Russia to withdraw its troops from the area, calling current shelling near the city of Avdeevka, “a real obstacle to progress in the peaceful settlement,” the statement said.

Kremlin Says Russia 'In Favour' of Returning Donbass to Ukraine Moscow Times, May 26, 2016 http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/kremlin-says-russia-in-favour-of-returning-donbass-to- ukraine/570568.html

The Kremlin is ready to support the return of Ukraine’s troubled eastern regions to Kiev government control, according to President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the RIA Novosti news agency reported on Thursday.

In a move some have interpreted as an invitation to dialogue, and others as bluff, Peskov said on Thursday that Moscow fully supported Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s pledge to re-establish control over the war-torn regions. Such support was, however, conditional on changes being “dictated by humanitarian concerns.”

A day earlier, the head of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic Alexander Zakharchenko declared that the separatist statelet would only agree to Kiev control once “Ukraine becomes a state again.” For this to happen, “there would need to be change of government.”

The new government would also be required to condemn the “2014 putsch,” the separatist leader added, referring to the popular revolution that toppled former President Viktor Yanukovych.

It is unlikely that Moscow is ready to abandon separatists in eastern Ukraine that it has supported since the beginning of the conflict.

Peskov’s comments, moreover, come at a time of an uptick in fighting, with Kiev reporting “record” losses for over a year. According to Ukrainian military command, seven Ukrainian soldiers were killed on May 23 alone.

Resistance to sanctions against Russia increased in E.U. – Steinmeier Ukraine Today, May 26, 2016 http://uatoday.tv/politics/no-unity-in-europe-on-sanctions-against-russia-steinmeier-661522.html

European Union is going to have a hard time negotiating to prolong the sanctions against Russia. Some E.U. members are not satisfied with the economic restrictions imposed on Moscow over the conflict in Ukraine. And compared to the last year, this time it will be harder to reach a consensus.

This is according to German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

"The resistance to the sanctions is growing in the E.U. Germany is doing all it can to ensure that Europe has a united front on this issue", Steinmeier said in an interview with the Baltic News Service (BNS).

Steinmeier also reminded, the sanctions were inextricably connected to the implementation of the Minsk agreements. While the Minister didn't point at any particular country, Italy and Hungary had been the most skeptical regarding the sanctions.

At the same time the German official claimed, Europe needed to continue dialogue with Russia to work on global issues. Among the problems Steinmeier mentioned crises in Syria and Libya.

European Union imposed economic sanction against Russia in July 2014 and reinforced them in September. In 2015 the E.U. linked the restrictions to the complete implementation of the Minsk agreements.

Sweden, With Eye On Russia, Agrees To Give NATO Greater Access RFE/RL, May 26, 2016 http://www.rferl.org/content/sweden-with-eye-on-russia-agrees-to-give-nato-greater- access/27758216.html

Sweden's parliament has voted 291 to 21 to give NATO more access to the neutral Nordic country for training exercises and in the event of a war.

Sweden is outside of NATO, but has moved closer to the alliance recently because of heightened tensions with Russia, cooperating with NATO states like Denmark, Norway, and Iceland and participating in operations in Afghanistan.

"This deal will not change our relationship with NATO nor our security policy. We will remain nonaligned," Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist said. "There will be no NATO troops on Swedish soil without an invitation."

Sweden's closeness to NATO has already angered Moscow. In April, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the daily Dagens Nyheter that Russia would take unspecified action if Sweden joined NATO.

But Russia's annexation of Crimea and backing of separatists in Ukraine have heightened fears in the Baltic region.

Sweden has accused Russian warplanes of carrying out simulated bombing runs near its border and it has warned of Russian spies in the country.

Sweden's center-left government has said it will not join NATO. However, opposition parties favor membership and polls show many Swedes agree.

Savchenko's Return Heralds New Turmoil in Ukraine By Vladimir Isachenkov AP, May 26, 2016 http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/savchenkos-return-heralds-turmoil-ukraine-39399465

After being freed from a Russian jail, Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko stands to emerge as a wild new force in Ukraine's already volatile politics.

Savchenko's adamant defiance of Russian authorities and the Russian justice system has made her a national icon, a widely revered symbol of courage and perseverance for a nation reeling from an economic meltdown and a devastating war in the east against Russian-back separatists. The 35-year-old's blunt candor and passionate ways pose a tough challenge to Ukraine's political clans, who have been locked in fierce power battles that go back decades.

The prospects of more political infighting raises new threats to the stability of Ukraine — and would be welcome news for the Kremlin, which is eager to see its neighbor plunge deeper into turmoil.

Savchenko's return home was a personal triumph for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who rallied international leaders to press Russia for her release. But even though he may have hoped her return boosts his sagging popularity, Savchenko's entry into politics is likely to challenge him greatly.

Many Ukrainians hold Poroshenko responsible for a moribund economy, a dramatic fall in living standards and his failure to stem rampant official corruption. Some hard-line nationalists, including members of volunteer battalions who fought in the east, see the president as too weak in defending Ukraine's national interests.

They have vowed to block any legislation that would give broader powers to the separatist eastern regions in line with the February 2015 Minsk peace agreement brokered by France and Germany. Some nationalist forces have seen that deal as betrayal of Ukraine's interests.

Poroshenko has defended the Minsk agreement and accused Russia of failing to honor it as sporadic clashes in the east continued despite the truce.

Savchenko, an ardent nationalist captured by separatists in June 2014 while she acted as an artillery spotter for a volunteer battalion in eastern Ukraine, will likely take an unflinching stance on the war in the east and oppose any compromise with Russia-backed rebels.

She also is likely to become a voice for masses angry with endemic corruption, which has run amok despite official promises to eradicate it, eroding trust in the government and sapping the hopes raised by the 2014 ouster of Ukraine's former, Moscow-friendly leader.

Even before Savchenko's return, Ukraine's ruling coalition was embroiled in bitter political infighting. Following months of jockeying, Poroshenko managed to replace Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk with his loyalist, Volodymyr Groysman. Still the battle left the parties led by Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk in a fragile coalition, united mostly in their desire to avoid an early election.

Savchenko is already a member of parliament, voted in while she was languishing in a Russian jail. She has not yet talked about her political plans — but her return could consolidate those unhappy with the status quo and increase pressures for an early election.

Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian prime minister whose party got Savchenko into parliament in 2014 when her Russian ordeal just began, hopes now to emerge as the main winner.

Tymoshenko, who spent 2 ½ years in a Ukrainian prison in 2011-2014 as the former pro-Moscow president sought to eliminate her as a political rival, expected a triumphant return to the political scene after his downfall. Instead, she saw her popularity dwindle as many saw her as a relic of the old political system.

Since then, Tymoshenko managed to rebuild her popularity, riding the growing wave of anger with the anemic economy and official corruption.

"Tymoshenko is pushing for new elections, and Savchenko's voice may help a lot," said Vadim Karasyov, an independent Kiev-based political analyst.

Still, Tymoshenko will likely find it hard to control the unruly military pilot.

Savchenko, who is fully aware of her nationwide popularity, is unlikely to take a back seat. The tensions between the two were immediately visible Wednesday during a greeting ceremony at Kiev's airport, when Savchenko dodged Tymoshenko's attempts to kiss her and refused to take flowers from her.

"Savchenko's uncompromising stance and her unpredictability would be a problem for both herself and for those who would try to use her," said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of Penta think-tank in Kiev.

"Savchenko's charisma can unite the right and the ultra-right forces, which believe that the ideals of revolution must be defended," he said. "That scenario may trigger street protests and new parliamentary elections."

As Ukraine seems ready to sink deeper into turmoil, one man is watching with glee: Russia's President Vladimir Putin, whose relentless pressure on Ukraine has been one factor crippling his southern neighbor.

As parts of the Minsk peace agreement remain deeply divisive in Ukraine, the Russian leader could highlight Ukraine's failure to meet its end of the deal and push for lifting Western sanctions against Russia. The Kremlin could also point to Ukraine's political infighting to support its contention that the nation is dominated by nationalists who are eager to resort to violence and shun compromise.

Ukraine’s Parliament Is Getting a Facelift, but Will It Make a Difference? By Brian Mefford Atlantic Council, May 23, 2016 http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/ukraine-s-parliament-is-getting-a-facelift-but-will-it- make-a-difference

The newly elected Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada, Andriy Parubiy, wasted no time in announcing a series of internal reforms for the Ukrainian parliament, which has long been the most hated institution of public life. In the latest International Republican Institute (IRI) poll, 88 percent of Ukrainians viewed the institution unfavorably. Contributing factors to this negative view include parliamentary immunity, parliamentarians’ habit of voting for other members, and an overall perception of massive graft and corruption.

In an effort to clean up the institution’s image, Parubiy announced three reforms. First, he advocated increasing the number of plenary meetings from two sessions to three sessions per month. Plenary sessions are the equivalent of voting meetings and typically occur on four consecutive days. With an average of just eight days per month usually allotted to plenaries, it is no wonder that little legislation—and even fewer reforms—get passed.

Parubiy also proposed the creation of a “council of committees,” which would be held following regular committee meetings. This council of committees would propose the agenda for the next plenary week of parliament—that is, what items will be voted on.

Second, Parubiy signed an order to withhold the salaries of MPs who are absent from parliament’s plenary meetings. Since being a member of parliament provides immunity from all prosecution, it tends to attract individuals who are often too busy managing their financial affairs to show up. Therefore, Parubiy proposes to dock their salaries pro rata for missed plenary sessions. The names of those absent members would then be published for public consumption in Holos Ukrainiy (Voice of Ukraine), the official medium for government information. Given that MPs’ salaries are a mere $660 per month (17,000 hryvnas, plus rent, transportation, and staff salaries), their official salaries are not what they are living on. The order is symbolic in nature, but a step in the right direction.

More specifically, Parubiy is aiming to tackle the so-called “piano voters”: MPs who vote for other members in the same way that a pianist touches many keys on the piano at once. This will potentially expose multiple voting by MPs who seek to falsify the official vote counts on pieces of legislation. Parubiy proposes to ban those MPs who vote multiple times or are excessively absent from participating in foreign delegations; another option is to ban them from the session hall for several sittings. Given existing parliamentary immunity, that is the extent of punishment available at this time, but at least it draws attention to the problem.

Third, Parubiy has called on committees to render decisions on legislation beyond a simple passage or rejection. For example, the Budget Committee should not only pass legislation by vote, but should also offer its analysis of the legislation’s effect on tax revenues. This is common practice in the United States and other Western democracies, but has been absent so far in Ukraine.

Parubiy’s proposed parliamentary reforms coincide with fifty-two reform recommendations made by a technical mission of the European Parliament that was led by Irish politician Pat Cox. The reforms were developed to improve the efficiency and transparency of parliamentary operations in Ukraine. However, not everyone is happy with the proposed EU recommendations and Parubiy’s proposals. Fatherland MP Serhiy Vlasenko said, “Let’s perhaps postpone the issue of so-called reform of parliament for a little while. . . . and try to observe the current Parliamentary Rules of Procedure and see what areas we need to reform and which we do not need to reform.”

In addition to proposing these reforms, Parubiy expressed his hope that parliament will pass judicial reform before the current session ends in July. The legislation has already passed on the first reading with a majority, but due to constitutional changes contained within the bill, it requires a two-thirds vote on the second reading to take effect. Parliament also must pass a major decentralization bill in the second reading, although supporters are at least thirty-five votes short at this time.

Time will tell if Parubiy’s proposed reforms improve the performance of parliament. Nonetheless, he is making moves in the right direction, and his efforts deserve the West’s support.

Minsk is not working, but Kiev should stay with it By Steven Pifer Kyiv Post, May 21, 2016 http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2016/05/21-minsk-arrangements-ukraine-pifer

The Minsk arrangements that were supposed to resolve the conflict in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine have not been implemented. Ukrainians and others increasingly question whether it is time to abandon the Minsk process. The Ukrainian government, however, should not do so, as it would dangerously undermine Kyiv’s position.

Negotiators met twice in Minsk—in September 2014 and February 2015—to broker a settlement to the Russian-inspired separatist fighting in the Donbas. The second time, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande joined Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin to mediate.

Minsk is not working. The first three provisions of the Minsk II agreement called for an “immediate and full ceasefire” by midnight on February 15, 2015, the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the line of contact within fourteen days of the February 11 conclusion of the Minsk II agreement, and free access for Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitors to provide “effective monitoring and verification” of the ceasefire and heavy weapons withdrawal.

Today, more than fifteen months after Minsk II was signed, Ukrainian soldiers continue to die as a result of hostile fire. Separatists marked VE Day on May 9 in Donetsk by parading tanks and artillery whose presence flouted the heavy weapons withdrawal requirement. OSCE monitors routinely are denied access to areas in occupied Donbas.

Absent implementation of the basic security provisions of Minsk II, the failure to bring into force the political and economic elements comes as no surprise.

Ukrainians see the Minsk arrangements as flawed and, in any case, unattainable. Moscow has shown little interest in their implementation, by all appearances instead preferring a frozen—or not-so-frozen—conflict. Voices inside and outside of Ukraine increasingly say the Minsk process should be discarded.

That view is entirely understandable. It is also wrong. Before throwing out Minsk, Ukrainians need to ask what alternative path might lead to a settlement. They should also understand what they might lose by moving precipitously.

Some suggest a return to the Geneva format of negotiations, which met briefly in early 2014. That would bring the United States and European Union to the table. But why would Russia agree to that format instead of Minsk? Would the European Union provide a more effective voice than Germany and France? Would the presence of the United States ensure a more favorable outcome for Kyiv?

The Ukrainian government should have answers to these questions before casting aside Minsk in favor of Geneva. Similar questions should be asked before pursuing any alternative negotiating format.

Some in Kyiv seem frustrated with the role of Merkel, who has clearly led the German-French tandem. While the Germans have at times leaned on Kyiv, Merkel sees an important principle at stake: Moscow is using armed force to support a conflict on the territory of a sovereign state, on top of its illegal seizure and annexation of Crimea, in violation of the cardinal rule of the European security order going back to the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. The German chancellor has proven steadfast in maintaining European Union unity regarding sanctions on Russia, and she has made clear that full implementation of Minsk II is necessary for the sanctions relief that Moscow desires.

Merkel has invested time, effort, political weight and prestige in Minsk II. If Ukraine were to decide to walk away, how would Kyiv keep Germany involved? Having seen one process fail, Merkel would have no incentive to engage in a new negotiating effort, particularly given everything else on her agenda now.

The Germans would leave the mediation role to someone else. Who? There is no reason to expect that the Obama administration, in its last eight months in office, would pick it up. Whoever takes the presidential oath in January, he or she will need time to get organized and may not have Ukraine at the top of the in box in the Oval Office.

Moreover, if Kyiv abandons Minsk, it would destroy the basis for European unity on sanctions. Merkel has maintained the European Union’s support for sanctions—despite softness on the part of member states such as Hungary and Italy—by linking them to Minsk II. Ending Minsk II would end that link. That would lead to the collapse of European sanctions, eliminating a significant element of Western pressure on Moscow.

Discarding the Minsk arrangements raises a host of difficult questions. It does not appear that those questions have good answers, in the sense of answers that would make a settlement of the Donbas conflict more likely and ensure continued Western support for Ukraine. A Ukrainian decision to abandon Minsk would make a settlement less likely and weaken Western unity.

The Minsk arrangements are flawed and most probably will not work. At some point, it may well be time to end Minsk. But Kyiv should want that conclusion to be reached in Berlin and Paris because they recognize Moscow’s intransigence, not because Ukraine itself killed the process.

Mikheil Saakashvili: 'Ukraine's government has no vision for reform' Guardian, May 25 2016 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/25/mikheil-saakashvili-ukraine-government-has-no-vision- for-reform-odessa

When Mikheil Saakashvili was appointed governor of the Ukrainian region of Odessa a year ago, the former Georgian president constantly mentioned Vladimir Putin. Reforms in post-revolution Ukraine, and attempts to reform Russophone Odessa, were all part of a grand plan to stick two fingers up to the Kremlin, and prove to both Ukrainians and Russians that post-Soviet life could be transformed to remove corrupt elites and promote democratic values.

A year later, and Saakashvili still talks about Putin, during a late-night interview at his residence on the outskirts of Odessa. But as well as the Russian president, the man who crushed his Georgian army during a brief 2008 war, Saakashvili also has increasingly tough words for the man who appointed him to his new role in Odessa: the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko.

For Saakashvili, the crunch time has now approached to determine whether Poroshenko is part of the problem, or part of the solution. Last month, he held a press conference in which he blasted the president for not fulfilling a single promise made since he took office after the 2014 revolution.

“For a long time, Poroshenko has been very flexible,” Saakashvili told the Guardian, speaking in his rapid, lightly accented English, learned while studying in the US. “If you were a reformer he spoke reform language. If you were someone old-fashioned, he said OK, we can find a way to deal with you. Now he’s brought in a government which has not got any vision of reforms at all.”

Poroshenko, a chocolate tycoon turned reform politician, has faced increasing criticism in Ukraine in recent months. The Panama Papers leaks suggested his companies had set up offshore holdings even as his army was fighting a decisive battle with Russian troops in 2014. Increasingly, Ukrainians see his government as beholden to the old system of oligarchic backroom deals, and not serious about changing the fabric of Ukrainian politics and society. Many accuse him of betraying the ideals of the Maidan revolution, in which more than 100 protesters died.

Poroshenko’s new government was approved last month after weeks of political wrangling and the ignominious decline of the former prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who had single-digit approval ratings and was physically carried out of the parliament chamber by an irate MP after narrowly surviving a no-confidence vote in February.

A number of key reformers have left the government, and there has been cynicism over whether the new prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman, is a politician able to push through necessary reforms. Western diplomats, while increasingly frustrated at the slow pace of reform, were keen for a compromise government to be found to avoid snap elections and a renewed period of political instability.

Saakashvili, however, referred to the new government as “a bunch of mediocre people”. Almost every day there appear to be new depressing developments: reform-minded officials walking away from the government, progressive appointments blocked or stalled.

The controversial outsider

A charming seaside town of high culture and low business practices, Odessa has long been famous for its dodgy deals and sprawling mafia structures – the archetypal corrupt Ukrainian city. As an energetic outsider, Saakashvili was seen as the perfect person to take on the huge challenge of reforming it.

The garrulous Georgian has always been a controversial figure – revered by some for the reforms he pushed through as president of Georgia and despised by others, especially in Moscow. Saakashvili took Ukrainian citizenship to take up the Odessa post, and has been stripped of his Georgian citizenship. He is wanted on various charges in Georgia, but dismisses the cases as retribution by his political enemies.

Saakashvili led the Rose revolution in Georgia in late 2003, and until 2013 remained president of a country where he was able to use the huge power of his role to cut corners. Many say he eventually developed dictatorial tendencies.

In Ukraine, his powers as the appointed governor of one region give him much less of a blank slate to work with, though his background as a former president, and high approval ratings for his public outbursts about corruption, have given him the ability to speak to Poroshenko in the sort of lecturing tone that bureaucrats usually reserve for their underlings rather than their superiors. In the past year he has functioned as a kind of political Catherine wheel – burning brightly and with great intensity, but always appearing on the edge of spinning out of control. He typically combines poised confidence with something of the manic; in his interview with the Guardian he spoke firmly and with great persuasion, but wore a blue T-shirt that appeared to have a significant amount of water spilled on it.

However, in a country where hopes of a new type of governance have begun to evaporate as oligarchic influence over politics and business returns, Saakashvili’s very emotional and public outbursts are popular. They are now beginning to focus on the president himself.

“He knew the risks,” said Saakashvili, when asked if such strident criticism of his boss was turning him into something of a headache for Poroshenko. He has a reputation as a hothead, something of which Ukrainians were reminded in December, during an extraordinary cabinet meeting in which Saakashvili shouted that the interior minister, Arsen Avakov, was corrupt and should be jailed. Avakov threw a glass of water in Saakashvili’s face and called him a “bonkers populist”.

Outsized ambition

In Odessa, critics say he has picked his targets selectively, not going after businessmen who contribute to a fund set up to boost the town budget, while very publicly dressing down others. His erratic working practices – televised tirades, impromptu press conferences and midnight meetings – have both their fans and their detractors.

The Odessa businessman Andrey Stavnitser, a Saakashvili supporter, said there had been a real change in the city’s business climate. People are scared to take bribes now, but he is worried this is based on a fear of Saakashvili’s impulsive outbursts rather than institutional reform. “The old officials are like problem gamblers,” he said. “They are walking past the casino and they really want to go in, their hands are beginning to shake, but they don’t. But just a bit longer and they will end up back inside as before.”

Others in Odessa said that while the political tone had changed since the former president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in the Maidan revolution, and the public space for free media and open debate was now much broader, the problem of corruption had not gone away.

“Yanukovych’s people thought they would be around for years to come, so they would come and tell you they want half the company,” said Vadim Cherny, an Odessa businessman who has survived a number of assassination attempts, including having two cars blown up, in the past decade. “These new guys view themselves as transitory, so they try to steal as much money as possible from you in cash. They haven’t got rid of corruption; they have just changed its form.”

One of Saakashvili’s biggest priorities has been to reform the customs service at Odessa port. He believes there is an easy way to get rid of corruption in state bodies: fire everyone. In Georgia, he famously disbanded the entire institute of the traffic police, who have a reputation for being corrupt across the former Soviet Union.

He wants to take the same approach to Odessa’s port. “We need to fire them all. We have 130 new people. They are young, new and trained, and the old ones are hopeless,” he said. A number of businessmen noted that bribes at the port really had stopped in recent months, mainly because people were scared of becoming the next victim of one of Saakashvili’s public anti-corruption tirades.

But due to a much-maligned quirk of Ukrainian law in which goods can pass customs at any point in the country rather than at the point of entry, many companies have simply decided to bypass Odessa and pass customs in other places where the old schemes still work.

Critics say Saakashvili’s recent foray into the national arena is born of his outsized ambition, and a desire one day to become prime minister of the country. Instead of focusing on improving Odessa, they say, he has taken to criticising the government, and taking an “anti-corruption roadshow” around the country. He is expected to set up a political party of his own, though the lack of early elections has stymied this for now. He insists, however, that his focus on national politics is a necessary extension of his work in Odessa.

“You cannot create something beautiful in this ugly environment; an oasis in the desert,” said Saakashvili. “I hope Poroshenko understands the importance that you can’t do it halfway. Half-made reforms mean they get discredited; you get the thing we always have in the post-Soviet space where people think reforms are impossible, so then nothing gets done.”

Are Lithuanian Jews’ descendants, Litvaks, asking too much — citizenship? By Linas Jegelevicius Baltic Times, May 19, 2016 http://www.baltictimes.com/are_lithuanian_jews____descendants__litvaks__asking_too_much_____cit izenship_/

Things could perhaps be straightened out with the snap of a finger if Litvaks, Jews of Lithuanian origin, complained to the Israeli government about the difficulties they bump into along the road to Lithuanian citizenship. But Faina Kukliansky, the chairperson of the Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania, just won’t resort to it yet. “I won’t do it, as the problem we are dealing with is an issue of the state of Lithuania. Lithuania is in the shoes to resolve it itself,” she told The Baltic Times.

Justices follow 2013 Constitutional Court ruling

“The practice of courts adjudicating citizenship cases has notoriously become very against Jews,” Kukliansky, a lawyer by occupation, said before adding, “But the justices are just enacting the Lithuanian Constitutional Court’s tougher prerequisites for citizenship.” The ambiguous court practice has been formed following the ruling in a citizenship case by the Constitutional Court back in 2013.

It stipulates that citizenship can be restored only to persons who left Lithuania before the restoration of independence in 1990 for political reasons, resistance to occupation regimes, or persecution by the regime. The provision also applies to their descendants. About 1,000 Jews living in South Africa have taken advantage of this legal provision. However, the process of restoring citizenship rights was suspended to some people due to the ruling, which basically says that Jews were not persecuted in independent Lithuania during the interwar years.

“Such thinking is unjust. My mother Paulina Tatarskyte would stand at foreign embassies at the request of the family from the end of 1937. The Americans would issue just slightly over 200 visas per year and the English Embassy would give 120 visas for Jews seeking (to) escape the snares of death. The Jews were in imminent danger before the World War Two,” Lithuanian parliamentarian Emanuelis Zingeris, Jewish by ethnicity, testified before a parliamentary committee hearing amid the outcry.

The Constitutional Court also took a restrictive position against many of the applicants, Jews, because of the increasing numbers of citizenship requests.

“So now the justices … are simply transposing the 2013 ruling into new rulings in such cases. It would not happen if the Lithuanian authorities knew the Jewish history,” Kukliansky underlined. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, celebrated on May 5 in Paneriai, a suburb of Vilnius, she lashed out at

Lithuania’s migration officials for their increasing refusal to grant citizenship to Litvaks. In the solemn ceremony, the participants carried Lithuanian and Israeli flags as they marched from the Paneriai railway station to the Paneriai Memorial, where a memorial ceremony was held.

The march followed the route that the Vilnius Ghetto prisoners were forced to take to the Paneriai forest, where they were massacred.

In a phone interview, Kukliansky brought up Sugihara, an interwar Japanese diplomat in Lithuania, who risked his life to issue visas to Jews until 1940. His action reportedly saved 6,000 Jews from incarceration in Nazi camps. Kukliansky repeated that she “could not believe” that “some Lithuanian officials” deem that Jews were not persecuted during 1933 and 1940.

“Some of the Lithuanian officials really need to be taught a lesson of history and be reminded that Hitler came to power in 1933. What happened next in Germany and the rest of Europe, where the Nazi troops descended, does need a reminder. It is shameful to hear Lithuanian officials asking Litvaks in the Migration Department to explain what danger they or their offspring felt then,” the Litvak leader said.

The Nazis, often assisted by their Lithuanian collaborators, massacred about 90 per cent of the Lithuanian pre- war Jewish population of 200,000 during World War Two. Some 70,000 of them were killed in Paneriai.

About 8,000 Lithuanian Jews were rescued and about the same number of Jews survived by fleeing to the Soviet Union.

Kukliansky told The Baltic Times that she is to make rounds to “certain institutions of Lithuanian power” within the coming weeks and bring the situation to high-ranking officials’ attention. “As well as to the law, because now the Law on Citizenship can be tractated in different ways, depending who reads it,” she pointed out.

Politically, she says, the state of Lithuania is making “a huge mistake” by turning down many Litvaks’ citizenship requests.

According to her, the number of Jews awaiting court rulings on citizenship requests is around “a thousand.”

“And the geography (of applicants) encompasses Palestine, South Africa, and some other countries. I reckon Lithuania should be proud that there appear well-educated, well-to-do Jews, who want to become part of the Lithuanian Jewish Community and Lithuanian,” Kukliansky said.

She expressed hope that Lithuania will show consideration for the Jewish community amid the growing dissatisfaction.

When the latest population census was conducted in 2011, some 3,000 Jews lived in Lithuania.

Speaking to The Baltic Times, Rokas Tracevskis, a historian and journalist, called the refusals to grant Lithuanian citizenship to Litvaks “a pity.”

“From my observations, since the summer of 2015, the Migration Department at the Lithuanian Interior Ministry rejects almost all the requests to restore Lithuanian citizenship submitted by descendants of persons, who used to be Lithuanian citizens in the 1920s and 1930s. The Migration Department points … to the new practice of Lithuanian courts, which now allows restoration of citizenship only for descendants of those who left Lithuania due to the terror of foreign invaders,” the historian said.

In his words, it means that only those who left Lithuania in the period from 1940 to 1990 — from the time of the first Soviet invasion until the reestablishment of Lithuania’s independence — have a good chance of restoring their Lithuanian citizenship.

He agrees that the position of Lithuanian courts is the consequence of the ruling of 2013, due to the Constitutional Court fearing a massive restoration of citizenship.

“I would suggest to Lithuanian judges and bureaucrats to be as liberal as possible in this case. It should be more humanism and less Soviet-style bureaucratic attitude: if something can be allowed in this case, it should be allowed. Some one thousand persons, mostly Litvaks (the name for Jews of the heartland of the former Lithuanian Grand Duchy) from the Republic of South Africa and Israel, got Lithuanian citizenship before the change of court practice in Lithuania. There were 200 rejections since the summer of 2015,” Tracevskis underlined.

He insists “around 10 people” whose requests were turned down appealed to Lithuanian courts and their cases now are pending.

“I mentioned in one of my recently re-published books, “The Real History of Lithuania in the 20th Century,” that some 90 per cent of Jews in South Africa are of Litvak origin. Actually, between 1924 and 1925, 70 per cent of the central and eastern European immigrants to South Africa were Jews from Lithuania,” he pointed out.

Do Jews want too much?

Some 20 years ago, when Tracevskis worked in the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, he had an opportunity to communicate with a descendant of those Jewish-origin immigrants from Lithuania.

“He was a South Africa-based honorary consul of Lithuania: I got an impression that emotional ties with Lithuania among people of that community are very strong and positive. They would be good Lithuanian citizens,” the journalist and historian is convinced.

However, an official within the Lithuanian government told The Baltic Times on the condition of anonymity that local Jewish community “wants to get all it can.”

“It has always been that way. Jews are and will always remain very demanding, as they still feel underappreciated and ignored. They cannot just constantly speak about the tragic history, but, as very smart people, they should also turn (an) ear to the arguments that the Court has laid out in the 2013 ruling,” the official said.

Lithuanian King Mindaugas’ legacy

Richard Schofield, the director of Vilnius-based International Centre for Litvak Photography, told The Baltic Times he has heard of cases when Lithuanian Litvaks would be subjected to an excruciating scrutiny and wait while citizenship documentation was being processed.

“As far I’m concerned, I think this way: if you were born on Lithuanian soil then you’re Lithuanian and therefore qualify for Lithuanian citizenship. I seem to remember that one of Lithuanian King Mindaugas’ great legacies was inviting foreign merchants and others to come and live in Lithuania. This is generally considered to be one of the defining moments in the birth and subsequent greatness of Medieval Lithuania. Maybe if Lithuania wants to be great again it should follow Mindaugas’ example,” Schofield said.

Approached by The Baltic Times, Bella Shirin, a descendant of an interwar Lithuanian Jewish family, told the author of the article that, for a couple of years, she was unable to submit the required citizenship papers because of the lack of the evidence that her parents had held Lithuanian citizenship before the Soviet occupation in 1940.

“As all the papers burnt during the war, I had to rely on the Kaunas and Vilnius state archives, which contain tons of archives. The archive workers were very helpful and friendly helping me, as well as the migration officials in Vilnius and Kaunas. I was lucky to receive citizenship after four months since the application submission. The citizenship is the biggest honour and commitment to me, prompting me to work for the sake of the Lithuanian society and enhance the Lithuanian and Israeli cooperation,” Shirin said.

Litvaks’ citizenship problems reached Parliament

Amid the outburst of dissatisfaction, the Lithuanian Parliament’s (Seimas) European Affairs Committee decided last Wednesday, May 11, to set up a working group to draft amendments to the Law on Citizenship. If enacted, they would clear the way for citizenship of Litvaks who do not qualify for it now.

According to the Migration Department, 10 Litvaks were refused citizenship in 2014 and 76 in 2015. Ninety- seven received negative decisions in the first quarter of this year. The numbers of those who were given citizenship are 209 in 2012, 273 in 2013, 528 in 2014, and 602 in 2015.

Replying to The Baltic Times’ query, Evelina Gudzinskaite, the acting director of the Migration, called Litvaks’ complaints “unfounded.”

“I’d like to underline that Litvaks, for the most part, are unhappy about the Department’s refusal to grant them Lithuanian citizenship, allowing at the same time to retain them Israeli citizenship, too, or that from any other country,” Gudzinskaite underscored. She added: “All Litvaks who departed from Lithuania after the inception of World War Two or later can, in fact, have dual citizenship.” The acting Migration Department director pointed out that not only Jews, but many others of other nationalities are denied dual citizenship as well.

A synagogue is born in a little Polish town, but no Jews are left By Julie Masis PRI, May 25, 2016 http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-05-25/synagogue-born-little-polish-town-no-jews-are-left

A small town in Poland is building a wooden synagogue — more than 70 years after the Nazis burned all the country's wooden Jewish temples to the ground.

Thing is, there aren’t any Jews left in the town of Bilgoraj. Even the retired businessman who came up with the idea, 62-year-old Tadeusz Kuźmiński, isn’t Jewish.

But he had a vision, and a dose of historical nostalgia.

“One day he woke up in the night and he got the idea of rebuilding a wooden town in Bilgoraj — with a synagogue in the center of the market,” said Kinga Staroniewska, the coordinator of the Bilgoraj XXI Foundation that’s carrying out the project. She spoke on behalf of Kuźmiński, head of the foundation, because he does not speak English.

A replica of a pre-World War II icon, the temple is the latest monument being erected in Poland at a time when it's witnessing a small Jewish revival.

Using prewar photos and measurements, the temple is based on the 18th century Wolpa Synagogue, Staroniewska said. That architectural masterwork stood in what used to be Poland and now is western Belarus. It was known as the most beautiful synagogue in Eastern Europe before the Germans destroyed it.

The replica is not meant for religious practice, however. The foundation coordinator explained that the purpose is to give people a chance to visit a historical house of worship.

“[Kuźmiński] is retired and he wants to do something more than just sitting in a chair,” Staroniewska said. “The main reason is to leave something for the next generations, to show how Bilgoraj looked before World War II, when Jews, Muslims, Russians and Poles were all mixed together and liked each other.”

That last sentiment may sound a bit romanticized. There was some relative coexistence among those cultures before the war. There were also moments through history of sheer brutality.

Poland’s Jewish population dates back centuries and is believed to have once been the largest in the world. Little Bilgoraj used to have a thriving community.

Before World War II, about 5,000 Jews lived in Bilgoraj — more than 60 percent of the population — but only the 500 families that fled to the Soviet Union before the Nazi occupation survived. They did not return to Bilgoraj after the war. The Nazis killed all the Jews who remained, and destroyed the Jewish school, the Jewish hospital and the synagogue. They used the stones from the Jewish cemeteries to pave the streets, Staroniewska said.

Prior to the war, there were about 200 wooden synagogues in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Latvia, some dating back to the 17th century, according to Ewa Małkowska-Bieniek, an art historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The interior of the structures were richly decorated with paintings that often depicted perhaps unexpected items, like zodiac signs, elephants, lions and unicorns. Only about five modest wooden synagogues in Lithuania survived the war.

Attempting to further reflect Bilgoraj's multicultural history, Kuźmiński is also planning to build a mosque near the synagogue, in honor of the Tatar Muslims who used to live in his town.

About 2,000 of Poland's residents identify as having Tatar roots, according to the 2011 census.

Bilgoraj’s Tatar community wasn’t killed off by the Nazis, said Staroniewska, but many members converted to Catholicism. The town's mosque was destroyed in the 19th century and the foundation plans to rebuild it based on a painting that survived.

Imitation temples and mosques aren’t the only things popping up. Kuźmiński also built wooden homes like the ones people lived in before the war. They look quite different from the Soviet-era apartment blocks that currently dot the town, Staroniewska said.

One of the wooden houses is a replica of the home of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the late Polish Jewish author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. About 100 years ago, Singer lived in Bilgoraj when he was a teenager in the home of his grandfather, who was a rabbi. Also based on a prewar photograph, the house opened to the public on April 23 as what Staroniewska described as the first museum dedicated to Singer in the world.

The Bilgoraj XXI Foundation is now raising money to paint murals on the reconstructed synagogue’s ceiling. Staroniewska estimates that will cost about half a million dollars and take several years.

Prayer houses with nobody praying in them? That might sound strange, but some people in Poland say Kuźmiński’s project is a good one.

“This is our history and it has to be remembered whether there are Jews in Bilgoraj or not,” wrote Warsaw resident Marcin Kotas in a Facebook message. “Without keeping the past in memory, we won’t be able to make the future free of past horrors. History likes to repeat itself unless you work to change it.”

Mike Mandel, a religious Jew who lives in Krakow, Poland, agreed.

“I think it’s a great idea because he felt some connection to it,” he said about the Polish businessman’s project. “I guess because he feels something is missing in the town.”

Why an Orthodox Jew Is Fighting the Construction of a Holocaust Memorial in Ukraine Haaretz, May 24, 2016 http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/.premium-1.720919

LVIV, Ukraine – Three construction workers, their faces covered in white dust from stonework, meticulously toil away on what later this year will become the first city-sponsored Jewish memorial in Ukraine’s history. On a worn plaque tucked away in a corner, a Star of David sits next to a text that identifies the ruins here as the remnants of the Golden Rose, Ukraine’s oldest synagogue. Between the fenced windows on the wall opposite the plaque, someone has hastily graffitied a black swastika.

Yet there is something more unsettling than the juxtaposition of a Jewish symbol and a Nazi emblem: The main opponent to the memorial project is Meylakh Sheykhet, a long-time fighter for the protection of Jewish sites in Lviv and western Ukraine.

As an Orthodox Jew, Sheykhet finds it offensive to do anything less than rebuild the Golden Rose, which the Nazis burnt to the ground, as a functioning place of worship. And he makes it known in theatrical ways.

“Get out of here, that isn’t yours!” he shouted to the open-mouthed construction crew on a recent visit to the site, kicking wooden boards and ripping up string lines. “You’re doing what the fascists and Soviets did!”

Despite his objections, the project and others like it are well underway. After years of silence, Ukraine has begun to officially recognize its Jewish past. In a land where almost one million Jews were murdered during World War II, synagogues, cemeteries and other Jewish landmarks destroyed by the Nazis have been left derelict for decades. But the situation has started to change as of late.

In addition to the Golden Rose memorial, the government is now funding a new commemorative complex in Babi Yar, a ravine in Kiev where German death squads shot more than 30,000 Jews in 1941. And across the country, dozens of private initiatives aim to restore or preserve Jewish heritage sites.

In Lviv, an international selection committee came up with plans in 2010 for a memorial next to the Golden Rose and at two other Jewish historical sites. “The goal of this project is to bring this edifice into urban presence, to expose it, to open it, to bring the tourists,” says Sergey Kravtsov, a Jewish architect and urban planner who wrote a history of the Golden Rose and was on the selection committee. “To show that once, Jewish history was also a part of this city.”

Nationalist movements, which enjoy popularity in Lviv, have long praised figures like the controversial Stepan Bandera, who fought for an independent Ukraine during World War II but whose forces have been accused of massacring Jews and Poles. Far less emphasis has been placed on figures like Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, or the celebrated Yiddish-language author Sholem Aleichem, who both lived in Lviv.

“The multicultural history got forgotten because its components, the Poles and the Jews, were expelled or killed,” says journalist and researcher Ruth Ellen Gruber, who was also a judge on the international selection committee. “People don’t have a connection with this history today. But projects like this one are an attempt to bring it back.”

The hard-line opposition of Sheykhet and his organization, the United States-based Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union, goes against the general consensus on the initiative, which has been widely supported by local officials and other Jewish groups.

Growing up in Soviet Lviv, Sheykhet says maintaining his faith under communism required bravery and a strong will. Atheism was state doctrine, and so he remembers his family was constantly watching over their shoulders for the KGB. “We were always afraid,” he says. “We were afraid of everything.”

His father was the leader of underground religious services, which had to convene in a different location every day. In his one-room apartment, he hid prayer books behind stacks of Soviet-approved literature.

After the USSR collapsed and Ukraine gained independence in 1991, Sheykhet devoted his energy to the preservation of western Ukraine’s decaying Jewish sites, facing indifference and finding little external support. Over the years, however, his relentless efforts have been lauded. Near his office desk, a letter signed by John McCain is proudly tacked on a wall. In it, the Republican U.S. Senator congratulates Sheykhet for his important religious and cultural work.

A breaking point

But the Golden Rose initiative was a breaking point. Despite the municipality’s intention to promote the memorial as its flagship project, those involved in the building say Sheykhet began expressing concerns about the city’s plans after he was not included in the selection committee.

“At the very beginning of this initiative, it was a conversation across the table,” says Sofia Dyak, the director of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, an institution that has monitored the Golden Rose project. “But after the competition, a split happened. Meetings became more tense.”

Sheykhet has since filed lawsuits to hold up the memorial’s construction in the courts.

For long, it seemed he was alone in his struggle to preserve Jewish history. Now, as a movement to protect the sites seems to be gaining momentum, Sheykhet is fighting as fervidly as ever for more to be done, though at times even against his newest allies.

While neighboring Poland has led an active policy of commemoration for the past two decades, Ukraine’s efforts to remember its Jewish past are still in their early stages.

“I like to compare Lviv to Krakow,” says Gruber. “Twenty-five years ago, the Jewish quarter in Krakow was a derelict slum. Little by little, because of tourism, things started to happen: Cafés popped out, synagogues were restored, museums opened. Lviv has the same potential. There is enough tangible material to deal with.”

Whereas Jews comprised a third of Lviv’s population before the Holocaust, today there are around 2,000 left in the city. The Golden Rose memorial was meant to be an effort that recognizes those Jews’ contribution to the city’s unique character.

“It’s such a nice project that was meant to unite,” says Liliya Onyshchenko, the head of the Lviv Department of Historic Environment. “But unfortunately we haven’t yet been able to reach understanding with Mr. Meylakh.”

The Orthodox leader worries that the memorial will become nothing more than a tourist trap in the same vein as an Ashkenazi-inspired restaurant, standing right next to the construction site, where servers dress up as stereotyped Jews and try to convince diners to haggle over the final bill.

Many have criticized Sheykhet’s vision as unrealistic; in the midst of a crippling economic crisis, critics think it’s currently infeasible to rebuild the synagogue. Onyshchenko says that when the city consulted with local Jewish groups, they wanted something built quickly on the site. “What we’re doing doesn’t mean that it can’t be rebuilt at anytime in the future if there are funds for it,” she says. “Right now, nobody visits those ruins.”

The Golden Rose is located right in the heart of Lviv’s historical center, just down the street from a popular bunker-themed bar dedicated to Bandera and his forces. Sheykhet holds Shabbat dinners in the crumbling former entrance way of the synagogue. Just a few octogenarian coreligionists gather under the eroded arched ceilings, sitting largely in silence over their plates of buckwheat and fish.

None of them is originally from Lviv, but they’ve forged close links with Sheykhet over the years. After dinner and sparse conversation in Russian, Ukrainian and some English, the Birkat Hamazon (grace after meals) was recited in Hebrew and guests shuffled out into the starlit spring night. Wishing everyone a peaceful Shabbat, Sheykhet gave a dejected smile and a shrug of his shoulders, promising a larger and livelier gathering on a different occasion.

Taking War Seriously: Russia-NATO Showdown No Longer Just Fiction By James Sherr Moscow Times, May 25, 2016 http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/opinion/article/taking-war-seriously-russia-nato- showdown-no-longer-just-fiction/570258.html

NATO’s former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, General Sir Richard Shirreff’s new book, “2017: War With Russia,” is a work of fiction. But its subject — a clash between NATO and Russia as early as next year — is not completely fanciful.

When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014, it also attacked the Helsinki-based security order of Europe. In place of this system, President Vladimir Putin is calling for a revived Yalta system, based on spheres of influence and respect. He also has invoked the borders of historic Russia and proclaimed a right to “defend” Russian “compatriots” abroad.

And if treaties and agreements are not sacrosanct to the Kremlin, why should NATO borders be sacrosanct? It is only reasonable that NATO’s Baltic allies ask this question and that others, beginning with Turkey, do so as well.

Their concerns are heightened by military developments as significant as today’s political ones. Since the war with Georgia in 2008, Russia has made a steady, cumulative investment in the capacity to wage local and regional war throughout the interior and on the periphery of the former U.S.S.R. This means full-spectrum, non- linear war, from non-attributable attacks by “polite little men” to first use of nuclear weapons. It also means information war, from disinformation to cyber attacks, and a coordinated effort to mobilize the state.

What is the purpose of the investment? The short answer is to wage proactive defense against geopolitical and civilizational encirclement by the West. That states on Russia’s periphery might welcome Western encroachment is grist to the mill of those in Russia who assess threats and respond to them. Inside the Kremlin’s febrile world, an unbroken chain of malign intent connects NATO and EU enlargement, humanitarian interventions, colored revolutions and regime changes, culminating with Russia itself. To ask in these circumstances whether Russia’s policy is offensive or defensive is to play with words.

Today the Baltic states are threatened politically. The aim of Russian policy is to persuade them that, inside or outside the EU and NATO, they lie in a grey zone and should behave accordingly. To this end, military-force groups with a capacity to seize Riga and Tallinn in 60 hours are an asset, even if it would be folly to employ them in practice. Until NATO takes steps to rectify the military balance, Russia will use fear as a weapon to undermine the political balance.

But what is the risk that the Baltics will be attacked militarily? Since NATO cannot know, it must not allow a dangerous imbalance of forces to arise. Unfortunately, it already has arisen. From 1991 to 2008, the West believed there would be no military threats in Europe, and national armed forces were restructured accordingly. The impact of the Georgian war on these orthodoxies was minimal. But Crimea’s annexation has launched an intellectual revolution. Those at its cutting edge are realists who know that vulnerabilities cannot be repaired by summit declarations and band-aids.

They also know that Russia’s weaknesses are as telling as its strengths. Today, Russia has an enhanced version of the army that Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s predecessor, Anatoly Serdyukov, aspired to build. The irony is that he was the first Russian defense minister to remove NATO as the baseline of Russian defense sufficiency.

The core of today’s military capability lies in 30-40 maneuver units, nuclear and dual-use strike systems and multi-layered air defense. That is a formidable capability for limited conflict, but it is not the capability Russia’s General Staff would design for full-scale war against NATO. Russia’s ambitious longer-term plans confirm as much. But these plans are running into the usual Russian buffers — human, industrial and institutional — and not all of them can be planned out of existence, least of all in a damaged and deteriorating economy.

Therefore, the challenge for NATO is no different than it used to be in West Berlin: to persuade Russia that any war means full-scale war. To this end, it is not necessary to deny Russia a victory in the Baltic states. It is necessary to deny it a quick victory. This is a doable task, but that does not mean it will be done. There also is no certainty that Putin’s Chekist testing and probing of weakness will not provoke a tougher response than he can safely manage.

James Sherr is Associate Fellow, Chatham House

Ekho Moskvy Chief Alleges Censorship In Cancellation Of Putin Critic's Show RFE/RL, May 25, 2016 http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-ekho-moskvy-albats-cancelation-censorship/27757576.html

The editor in chief of Ekho Moskvy radio, one of Russia's most prominent independent-minded media outlets, says a popular talk show hosted by a searing Kremlin critic has been pulled off the air due to censorship by the station's management.

The comments by Aleksei Venediktov come amid mounting concerns that the authorities are stepping up efforts to curtail hard-hitting investigative reporting and dissenting voices anywhere in the Russian media.

He announced on May 25 that a politically themed talk show hosted by Yevgenia Albats, a prominent journalist who is also editor of a weekly magazine that has investigated President Vladimir Putin's friends and family, had been taken off the air.

"I can confirm that the Yevgenia Albats' program has not been on Ekho Moskvy since May 1 due to the absence of a contract between the host and the general director."

Venediktov later said in a series of Tweets and interviews with Russian websites that Albats had refused to sign a contract with the station's general manager due to restrictions that included preapproval of all the questions she would be able to ask.

"I am furious," he told the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets.

Ekho Moskvy's broadcasts and web reports are widely followed in Moscow and a handful of other large cities. Under Venediktov, who is well-connected among Russia's ruling elite, the station has largely managed to maintain its independence, despite being owned by state-run energy giant Gazprom.

In an interview later in the day with Open Russia, an opposition website founded by once-jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Venediktov criticized the station manager.

"Under Ekho Moskvy's charter, it is the editor in chief exclusively who is responsible for editorial policy. All restrictions and additions to the rights and obligations of the journalists are my business, not that of the general director," he said.

Venediktov, who is a towering figure among Russia's journalism circles, did not immediately respond to a message from RFE/RL seeking further comment.

It wasn't immediately clear what prompted the conflict between Albats, a veteran journalist who is fiercely critical of Putin, and the station's general manager, Yekaterina Pavlova. Albats' magazine, The New Times, has published several investigations into corruption among government officials and the personal lives of Putin's daughters.

Albats, meanwhile, told Open Russia that the contract limited what questions she could ask, and suggested that Venediktov was not doing enough to support her position.

"I think that he has enough authority at Ekho Moskvy so that a contract could be signed that doesn't violate Russian laws on mass media, that don't violate the authority of the editor-in-chief, that don't end up contradicting the Constitution of the Russian Federation, which forbids censorship," she told the site.

Pavlova, who did not appear to make any public statement, could not be immediately reached for comment.

In a story on its own website, Ekho Moskvy said this was at least the second time in recent years that Pavlova has pressured one of its on-air journalists.

Russian media outlets have been repeatedly squeezed since Vladimir Putin first assumed the presidency in 2000.

Early in his first term, Putin oversaw the shuttering of leading independent national television channel NTV, which was taken over by Gazprom. Legislation passed by the State Duma in 2014 restricted foreign ownership of media outlets, affecting some of the country's most respected publications.

Other independent outlets have also come under pressure. The RBC media group, which has published investigative stories that linked Putin's daughter to a government-backed development project, saw its top editors resign en masse earlier this month after disputes with the company's management.

The resignations were widely seen as the result of pressure from the authorities, who had conducted a series of tax and other investigations into the company, which was bought in 2010 by billionaire businessman Mikhail Prokhorov.

Why Russian Primaries are Little More Than a PR Stunt Moscow Times, May 23, 2016 http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/business-as-usual-for-the-kremlin-in-united-russia- primaries/570052.html

Merry-go-round voting is a specific Russian voting practice. It works like this: the voter goes to the voting booth with a ballot already marked in favor of a specific parliamentary candidate. At the booth he gets an empty ballot, puts the already-marked ballot into the ballot box and exits, giving his unused empty ballot to a supervisor. The supervisor marks it, gives to the next voter, and he goes for his turn to “vote.” And so on.

This trick has been used in Russia's parliamentary elections for years. On May 22, it was seen during the first national primaries held by the ruling United Russia party. The Kremlin adopted primaries a few years ago, but this was the first time that not only party members but anybody with the right to vote could take part.

The Russian parliamentary system is under the strict control of the Kremlin. The United Russia party is regarded as the Kremlin’s direct extension in the State Duma, providing President Vladimir Putin with a parliamentary majority.

In December 2011, massive vote rigging took place in Moscow and other cities which provided United Russia with a majority in the Duma despite a lackluster performance. This consequently led to Bolotnaya Ploshchad protests and popular unrest.

Since then, changes have been adopted to avoid direct rigging and consequent protests. National primaries for United Russia were declared to be one of them.

The initial idea of primaries was to make the candidates of the ruling party compete with each other for the final place in the ballot.

However, experts believe that this did not produce the desired results.

“It worked as a PR story for the Kremlin,” says political analyst Alexander Kynev. “Primaries de facto helped United Russia and the Kremlin to start their campaign before anyone else did. Other declared goals have not been achieved.”

A total of 9.5 percent of the population attended the primaries, according to United Russia officials. But attendance was highly dispersed, with some districts in Chechnya — known for its highly autocratic rule — showing more than 80 percent, and Moscow less than 1 percent.

There were reports of compulsory attendance for both state employees and private sector workers.

Leaders in the Russian regions often see the general election as an opportunity to send their lobbyists to Moscow as parliamentarians, so they try to control which candidates will run. That was the case this time, too, says political analyst Abbas Gallyamov. Candidates considered undesirable to the local leadership fell under huge pressure and withdrew from the race.

The substance of primaries was in fact purely imitative in most of the regions, according to Kynev, candidates were appealing for public support but already knew they would make it to the ballots.

“People again got the confirmation that nothing has changed in Russian politics: a boss calls for them and forces them to go vote and they watch the conflicting television reports afterwards,” Gallyamov says.

There were a few regions, though, where real competition took place, Kynev says, and it was there, unsurprisingly, that the most violations were detected.

There is no formal rule behind the concept of primaries, political analyst Mikhail Vinogradov points out, and the final decisions on who will be included in the ballots and will get a real chance to get into the Duma, will be made later at a United Russia convention.

United Russia’s ratings have been fluctuating at around 45-47 percent during recent months. No independent opposition party is able to get through the 5 percent barrier which is needed to get into the Duma, according to recent polls.

In previous elections, like in 2011, the Kremlin managers would stop at nothing to secure a majority in the Duma for United Russia, including direct rigging and fraud. Now, there is no need for that, as the system has been changed and half of the parliament members will be elected directly, rather than through party lists.

Most of them will join the United Russia faction or pro-Kremlin coalition, should it be formed. Analysts forecast there will be a handful of independent voices in the next parliament at best.

Azerbaijan's Other Political Prisoners RFE/RL, May 25, 2016 http://www.rferl.org/content/azerbaijan-other-political-prisoners/27757458.html

The release of RFE/RL journalist Khadija Ismayilova from an Azerbaijani prison has drawn applause from Western officials and international rights groups. But it also highlighted the plight of numerous other activists and journalists widely considered political prisoners who remain behind bars in the oil-rich former Soviet republic.

"This is a positive signal that can be replicated in other cases," Giacomo Fassina, a spokesman for European Parliament President Martin Schulz, told RFE/RL following Ismayilova's release on May 25.

Dozens of journalists, opposition activists, and other critics of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev remain behind bars in cases they and their supporters call retribution for their political activities. The U.S.-based group Freedom House says there are still more than 80 political prisoners in Azerbaijan.

Their arrests and prosecutions have come amid a broad clampdown on dissent in Azerbaijan over the past three years that has been condemned by Western governments and prominent rights watchdog groups.

At least five journalists considered victims of politically motivated prosecutions remain jailed on a range of charges, including alleged hooliganism and drug-related offenses, according to media-freedom groups and Western officials.

The office of Dunja Mijatovic, representative on freedom of the media for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), urged Baku in a May 25 statement to "release all remaining members of the media and bloggers still in prison today in Azerbaijan, including Seymur Hazi, Nijat [Nicat] Aliyev, Abdul Abilov, Rashad Ramazanov and Araz Guliyev."

Numerous political activists remain imprisoned as well, including several from the opposition Popular Front Party and the civic youth movement N!DA.

EU foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini's office said Ismayilova's release "marks a further step in progress toward Azerbaijan's compliance with its international commitments," and called for "the release and rehabilitation of all those currently imprisoned or under restriction of movement in Azerbaijan on political grounds."

Aliyev has demonstrated a willingness to heed calls for the release of those seen as political prisoners -- a label Baku has vehemently rejected.

Prior to the decision by Azerbaijan's Supreme Court to reduce Ismayilova's punishment to a suspended sentence, he issued a snap presidential pardon of 14 of these prisoners, including members of the N!DA civic youth group and human rights activist Rasul Cafarov.

But other N!DA activists remain in custody, including Bayram Mammadov, who earlier this month was charged with drug possession and placed in pretrial detention. Fellow N!DA member Giyasaddin Ibrahim, who was detained together with Mammadov, faces similar charges.

They were purportedly involved in writing graffiti on a statue of former President Heidar Aliyev in Baku ahead of Flower Day on May 10, which celebrates the late leader. Other N!DA members have previously been charged with drug possession.

The numerous Popular Party activists who remain jailed include the party's deputy chairman, Fuad Qahramanli, who was arrested in Baku in December. His lawyer said he was charged with publicly calling for the overthrow of the government and inciting ethnic, religious, and social hatred.

Other prominent critical voices currently imprisoned include Ilqar Mammadov, the leader of the Republican Alternative (REAL) movement who remains in jail despite a ruling by the European Court for Human Rights that his arrest was politically motivated.

Ismayilova's release came just three days before Azerbaijan celebrates its annual Republic Day with a mass amnesty, proposed by the country's first lady, that anticipates the release of some 3,500 prisoners convicted of minor crimes.

It remains unclear, however, whether those who are considered political prisoners might be freed, given the criminal nature of the offenses they have been charged with or convicted of.

The prisoners and their supporters say the criminal charges are trumped-up.

Russian Monument To Stalin's Victims Highlights Fate Of Executioner By Robert Coalson RFE/RL, May 26, 2016 http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-saransk-monument-nkvd-vand-stalin-great-terror/27759128.html

In the summer of 2004, a group of activists near the city of Saransk made a gruesome discovery: Some 500- 700 corpses buried in shallow mass graves in a forest.

They were the bodies of victims of Josef Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s. According to local historians, the victims were Orthodox priests, Muslim clerics, local teachers, collective farmers, and workers. Their names are unknown because the archives of the Soviet and Russian secret police remain closed.

"We brought our information about the grave to the government, to academic circles, and to civil society," activist Nikolai Kurchinkin told the Saransk edition of the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta. "But there was only silence."

The activists hoped that the bodies would be exhumed and buried properly in the city cemetery. They hoped that a monument would be placed on the spot where the victims were dragged out into the forest and shot in the back of the head.

On May 23, however, a monument was unveiled on the site, one of the few monuments in Russia devoted to "the victims of political repressions during the 1930s." But after a single line noting that fact, the monument's text then dedicates 12 lines to honoring one particular victim of Stalin's Terror: Valter Vand, the former head of the local branch of the NKVD, as the secret police tasked with carrying out executions and many other forms of political repression at the time were known.

The unveiling was organized by the Interior Ministry of the Republic of Mordovia. The speakers at the ceremony included the deputy head of Mordovia's Interior Ministry and Vand's granddaughter, Nina Freiman. The ceremony was timed to mark the 78th anniversary of Vand's own execution, probably somewhere near that very spot.

"This monument is not only for the victims of political repressions," Freiman said, "it is a monument to their families as well, who in an instant became 'enemies of the people,' outcasts. This monument is for them, who shared the fate of their relatives, who did not betray them, who struggled for their good name until the end of their days."

Stalin 'Really Lives On'

It is well known that many communists were among Stalin's victims. Among such "victims," one must count Vand's boss, Nikolai Yezhov. Yezhov, who slavishly presided over the worst years of the Terror as head of the NKVD, was himself arrested, tortured, and executed in 1940. One of the crimes he was allegedly killed for was ordering the purge of about 14,000 NKVD officers and other security officials.

One of whom was Valter Vand. Vand didn't stand out much among the NKVD officers of his time. He was born in Germany and served as a German officer in World War I. He was taken prisoner in Russia and decided to remain in the country following the Bolshevik coup in 1917. He began his career in the Soviet repression machine in 1920, becoming the head of the Mordovia secret police in 1932.

Interestingly, according to the blog of Russian writer Boris Akunin, Vand only became a Soviet citizen in 1932 after he was already heading the Mordovia police.

"He was so thoroughly suffused with Russian patriotism and love for this expansive country," said Mordovia Deputy Interior Minister Tolkunov at the unveiling, "that he chose to dedicate his life to serving the good of Soviet Russia. Despite the fact that his fate turned out tragically -- [Vand was arrested in June 1937 and] was shot on May 23, 1938 -- he remained true to his principles and convictions until the very end."

Soviet Russia seemed to be enduring an epidemic of "tragic fates" at the time. The local party boss reported to Yezhov shortly after Vand's arrest that "his successor, comrade Veizager, in three months has done dozens of times as much chekist work as comrade Vand did in many years."

But it wasn't enough. Sigizmund Veizager was arrested on November 21, 1937, and executed on May 9, 1938 -- two weeks before Vand met the same fate.

Vand was rehabilitated in 1957, and Veizager in 1994. Both of them, very likely, are in the unmarked graves with their victims.

Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich commented in October 2015 on the shadow of Stalin.

"Deformed people have emerged from socialism because a prison camp deforms both the torturer and the victim," she said. "What has remained is the deformed intelligentsia who do not know where good and evil are."

"This is something I only realized while I was working on Second-Hand Time," she continued, in a reference to her recent book, which examines the post-Soviet mentality two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. "I did not think that so much of Stalin's legacy has remained in our countries. It turns out that he is more alive than all the living. He really lives on -- he continues to be a kind of landmark. The rulers want this."

Russia: A Nation of Sore Losers By Maxim Trudolyubov New York Times, May 26, 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/opinion/russia-a-nation-of-sore-losers.html?_r=0

Everyone loves to win. But in Russia, obsessing about victories past or present, military or artistic, is a national pastime.

At least, that’s the impression you get if you listen to Russia’s politicians and its state-run news media. That Russia’s leadership in arts, sports and fighting terrorism is not sufficiently recognized by the rest of the world is a daily staple, a very public kind of acute status anxiety.

Celebrating triumphs is preferable, of course. Russians do not like losing. In fact, their leaders make a show of being very sore losers indeed.

Take the Eurovision song contest. Despite being extremely kitsch, the event is taken seriously in Central and Eastern Europe — for reasons that often have little to do with music.

In the finale of the most recent contest, a Ukrainian singer took first prize. The result, which was decided by televoting, seemed as politicized as the winning song: a tragic ballad about the fate of the Crimean Tatars deported under Stalin. Given Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea, it is not a stretch to assume that European audiences were sending Russia a message, rather than choosing a winner purely on artistic merit.

When the Russian singer, who had been favored to win, came in third, Russian politicians cried foul. One member of Parliament, Yelena Drapeko, blamed “an information war” against Russia for the result. Some angry citizens proposed that Russia boycott the next competition, which is to be held in Ukraine.

On this occasion, perhaps, the Russian fury over what was seen as yet another unfair result of yet another unfair competition may have had some basis. But the average Russian learns every day that his country is treated unfairly and has been robbed of its triumphs, whether on battlefields or in sporting arenas. Envious rivals from the West and their agents, who surround and penetrate Russia, are said to be constantly working to deny the country the recognition it deserves. Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter

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“Russia’s enemies want a weak, sick state,” said President Vladimir V. Putin at a rally in 2007. “They need a disorganized and disoriented society.” He has blamed the West for seeking to undermine Russia ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This paranoid theme has become a recurrent strand in Mr. Putin’s presidential rhetoric. Even victory in World War I “was stolen from the country by those who sowed dissension within Russia,” he said in 2014, at a commemorative event. (He was referring to the Bolsheviks, but his argument was the same — “national betrayal” by Russia’s enemies.)

The problem is that when winning is everything, the ends justify the means. So now, when Russia wins, the rest of the world is suspicious. A doping scandal that originally involved Russian track and field athletes now threatens to tarnish Russia’s much-vaunted victories in the 2014 Winter Olympics, held in the southern city of Sochi. More than a dozen Russian Olympians from the Beijing Games of 2008 also now risk losing their medals thanks to a retrospective doping probe.

Alerted by a Russian whistle-blower, the World Anti-Doping Agency established a commission that last year uncovered an extensive state-sponsored program of administering performance-enhancing drugs to top Russian athletes. The All-Russia Athletic Federation has been suspended from competition since last November. According to the new allegations, which have been made by the former head of Russia’s antidoping laboratory, state security agents were involved in a complex scheme to falsify Sochi athletes’ test samples and prevent detection of the Russian team’s systemic doping.

“All this simply looks like slander by a turncoat,” said the presidential spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov, giving the usual knee-jerk response. But realizing that the Russian team faced possible exclusion from this year’s Games in Rio, the Kremlin changed tack.

“We are very sorry that athletes who tried to deceive us, and the world, were not caught sooner,” wrote Russia’s sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, in a British newspaper. Officials have apparently decided to sacrifice some athletes in order to save the federation in time for the summer Olympics. Quite frankly, I am scared to imagine what Mr. Putin might do if Russia is barred from Rio.

Turning victories into a national religion may once have seemed a good idea. One cannot turn a country around in just a few years, but inspirational, feel-good narratives do help people find purpose during hard times.

I went to school in the old Soviet Union, and it was as I went to university that Russia’s transition to a post- Soviet state occurred. The process was not pretty. We did feel perhaps that our country was diminished, but we worked hard and never felt humiliated.

Of course, there were some who did feel degraded, party officials or former K.G.B. agents probably among them, but at first they were not a dominating force. Since the turn of the century, however, that has changed. Those who were upset about their loss of status have used these years of rule to convert people to their creed.

Celebrations of Victory Day, marking the Soviet Union’s triumph in World War II, were always a big family event when I was little — my two grandfathers, then still alive, were both war veterans. During the past decade or so, though, the holiday has mutated into more than a day of remembrance. As a purported nation-building exercise, it has evolved into a full-fledged cult.

Today’s Russia still does not feel like a humiliated society exactly, but it does feel like a bitter and disillusioned one. Every country, Russia included, needs uplifting narratives, but there is a psychological trap in turning recognition into a cult. If attaining success at all costs becomes acceptable, then any failure leads to recrimination and blame.

Worst of all, this cult is self-defeating, depriving us of the very recognition we crave: Even when Russia wins — especially when Russia wins — the world doesn’t believe in it.

Maxim Trudolyubov, an editor at large for the business newspaper Vedomosti, writes The Russia File blog for the Kennan Institute and is a fellow at the Bosch Academy in Berlin.