Putin's mini army: Lawmaker proposes giving Russian women president's sperm to create new 'military and political elite'

A lawmaker wants to hand out Vladimir Putin's sperm to Russian women en masse in a bid to create a new generation of 'military and political elite'.

Yelena Borisovna Mizoulina, the Chairwoman of Parliamentary Commission on women's affairs, children and family, told colleagues that giving the president's sperm to would-be mothers would improve patriotism in Russia.

Ms Mizoulina, who has a PhD in law, made the bizarre proposal during a round table discussion on fertility in Russia.




Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2824454/Putin-s-mini-army-Lawmaker-proposes-giving-Russian-women-president-s-sperm-create-new-military-political-elite.html#ixzz3ITmKJrcj


^ Are preorders accepted yet or it sells only on stock exchange?

How the Invasion of Ukraine Is Shaking Up the Global Crime Scene

 As Putin's "​little green men" were taking Crimea back in March, I was speaking with both cops and gangsters in Moscow who saw this as a great business opportunity—a chance for Russian gangs to move into new turf, make new alliances, and open up new trafficking routes.

They were thinking far too small. Already it has become clear that the conflict in Ukraine is having an impact on not just the regional but the global underworld. As one Interpol analyst told me, "What's happening in Ukraine now matters to criminals from Bogotá to Beijing."

Crime, especially organized crime, has been at the heart of the events in Ukraine from the start. Many of the burly and well-armed "self-defense volunteers" who came out on the streets alongside the not-officially-Russian troops turned out to be local gangsters, and the governing elite there have close, long-term relations with organized crime. Likewise, in eastern Ukraine, criminals have been sworn in as members of local militias and even risen to senior ranks, while the police, long known for their corruption, are fighting alongside them.

Now Ukraine is beginning to shape crime around the rest of the planet.

While it was only to be expected that Crimea and eastern Ukraine might be integrated even more closely into the Russian organized crime networks, it looks as though Ukraine's gangsters are perversely stepping up their cooperation with their Russian counterparts even while Kiev fights a Moscow-backed insurgency.

Just as the Kremlin was setting up its new administration in newly annexed Crimea, so, too, were the big Moscow-based crime networks sending their  smotryashchye—the term means a local overseer, but now also means, in effect, an ambassador—there to connect with local gangs. In part, they're interested in the opportunities for fraud and embezzlement of the massive inflow​ of federal development funds perhaps $4.5 billion thi​s year alone—and the newly-announced casino complexes to be built near the resort city of Yalta. They're also looking to the Black Sea smuggling routes and the opportunity to make the Crimean port of Sevastopol the next big smuggling hub.

These days, the Ukrainian port of Odessa is the  ​smugglers' haven of choice on the Black Sea. There's Afghan heroin coming through Russia and heading into Western Europe through Romania and Bulgaria, stolen cars coming north from Turkey, unlicensed Kalashnikovs heading into the Mediterranean, Moldovan women being trafficked into the Middle East, and a whole range of criminal commodities head out of Odessa Maritime Trade Port, along with its satellite facilities of Illichivsk and southern ports. Routes head both ways, though, and increasingly there is an inward flow of global illicit goods: Latin American cocaine (either for retransfer by sea or else to be trucked into Russia or Central Europe), women trafficked from Africa, even guns heading to the war zone.

The criminal authorities of Odessa, who have more than a nodding relationship with elements of the "upperworld" authorities, have done well on the back of this trade, charging a "tax" in return for letting their ports become nodes in the global criminal economy. But all of a sudden, they face potential competition in the form of Sevastopol. The Crimean port may currently be under embargo, but it has powerful potential advantages. The main criminal business through Odessa is on behalf, directly or indirectly, of the Russian networks; if they chose to switch their business, then perhaps two thirds of the city's smuggling would be lost. The Russian Black Sea Fleet is based in Sevastopol, and military supply convoys—which are exempt from regular police and customs checks—are a cheap and secure way to transport illicit goods. Finally, the links between the gangsters and local political leaders are at least as close in Crimea as in Odessa. So, if the criminals of Sevastopol can establish reliable shipping routes and are willing to match or undercut Odessa's rates, we could see a major realignment of regional smuggling.

 Why does it matter if the ships dock at Sevastopol rather than Odessa? Because if the former can offer lower transit costs and new routes, then not only does it mean the Crimeans can take over existing smuggling business, it also makes new ventures economically viable. For example, already, counterfeit cigarettes are being smuggled to northern Turkey, having been brought into Crimea on military supply ships. Perhaps most alarming are unconfirmed suggestions I have heard from Ukrainian intelligence services—admittedly hardly objective observers—that some oil illegally sold through Turkey by Islamic State militants in Syria might have been moved to Sevastopol's private Avlita docks for re-export.

The Ukraine conflict is also leading to increased organized crime in the rest of Ukraine proper. Protection racketeering, drug sales, even "raiding" (stealing property by presenting fake documents, backed by a bribed judge, thereby allegedly proving that the real owner signed away his rights or has unpaid debts) are all on the rise. To a large extent, this reflects a police force still in chaos (those who backed the old regime face charges and dismissal) and looming economic chaos. It is also a reflection of the country's endemic corruption: The international non-governmental organization Transparency International rank​s Ukraine 144 out of 177 countries in its Corruption Perception Index, and although the national parliament confirmed a new anti-corruption ​l​aw in October, it will take years to make a difference.

And this isn't just a Ukrainian problem. Preliminary reports from European police and customs bodies also suggest increased smuggling into Europe, and not just of Ukrainian commodities. Latin American cocaine, Afghan heroin, and even cars stolen in Scandinavia are being re-exported through Ukraine into Greece and the Balkans. According to my sources in Moscow, there is also an eastward route bringing illicit goods into Russia. In September, for example, the police broke a gunrunning​ ring that was spread across six regions of Russia and was caught in possession of 136 weapons, including a mortar and machine guns.

Most of this business again depends on the Russian crime networks. As a result, even ethnic Ukrainian criminals are now trying to forge closer strategic alliances with the Russians, even while their two countries are virtually at war. The Muscovites I spoke to on both sides of the law and order threshold pointed to such western Ukrainian nationalist strongholds as Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk as places where, suddenly, Russian gangster business is welcome. Of course, even as their gangsters are collaborating, Kiev and Moscow are scarcely talking—and any lingering police cooperation has essentially collapsed.

Where organized crime flourishes, so too do the shadowy financial businesses that launder their cash. Ukraine's financial sector is notoriously under-regulated and cozy with dubious customers, from the kleptocrats of the old elite (Prime Minister Yatsenyuk has claim​e​d that $37 billion disappeared from the state's coffers during former President Yanukovych's four-year reign) to organized criminals. Still, relatively little international money has traditionally flowed into and through Ukraine's banks, not least because other jurisdictions such as Cyprus, Latvia, and Israel offer equal opportunities with greater efficiency.

However, these other laundries are beginning to become less appealing, not least as countries clean up their acts under international pressure. So just at the time when the world's criminals are looking for new places to clean their ill-gotten gains, Ukraine's are both desperate for business—the country's economy is tanking,  having shrunk by 5 perc​net over the past year—and increasingly connected to the Russians, the global illegal service providers par excellence. Already, I understand that a US intelligence analysis has suggested that they will be used not only covertly to allow Crimea's embargoed businesses and gangs to move their money in and out, but also to offer up their laundering services to the world. And the world seems to be interested: According to a US Drug Enforcement Administration analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity, in September, a sizeable payment for Nigerian methamphetamine bound for Malaysia actually passed through Ukrainian banks.

As the varangians—slang for gangs from Moscow and European Russia—become increasingly strongly entrenched there, working with an array of local criminals, they bind Ukraine all the more tightly with the global underworld. Ukraine has all the resources and facilities of a modern, industrial nation, like ports and banks, but not the capacity to secure and control them. This kind of potential black hole is a priceless asset for the world's gangsters.

Of course, there is one last way the Ukrainian conflict could have a wider criminal impact. If Kiev is finally able to defeat the rebellion in the east, then what do the gangsters who fought for the rebellion do? Some of the most powerful might be able to cut deals with the government or find refuge in Russia, but Moscow shows no signs of wanting to incorporate hundreds of disgruntled and impoverished gun-happy thugs. If what happened after the 1990s civil wars in the Balkans is a guide—and many analysts think it will be—then they will seek to head into Europe and North America. There, they are most likely to turn to criminal activities that draw on their skills and experiences. One French prosecutor I spoke to called them "the next Albanians," referring to the violent and dangerous gangs, especially from Kosovo, that flowed into Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Europe in particular might find itself hard-pressed to respond. The Ukrainian authorities may well be willing to help, but they probably lack the ability to provide much usable intelligence. Meanwhile, the Russians, who probably have the best sense of who the fighters actually are, seem increasingly unlikely to provide any assistance. Jörg Ziercke, head of Germany's BKA, its equivalent of the FBI, recently complained that assistance from Moscow in dealing with Russian organized crime was drying up.

Forget tit-for-tat embargoes. One of the most effective responses to Western sanctions at the Kremlin's disposal may be to encourage the criminalization of Ukraine, and do nothing to help Europe and North America cope with the fallout.

http://www.vice.com/read/how-the-invasion-of-ukraine-is-shaking-up-the-global-crime-scene-1106

New symbol for Russian Rubble

Russian hybrid warfare: what are effects-based network operations and how to counteract them



Confirmation that the command operates a network of paid pro-Kremlin commenters appeared on May 31, 2014. Anonymous International exposed the activities of the Russian Internet Research Agency, which feeds itself from Russia’s state budget. The goal of this organization is to create, through comments on the internet, the illusion of support for the Kremlin regime.

Interestingly, the owner of the agency, Eugene Prigozhin, is the founder of the holding company Concord, known as ‘Putin’s chef.’ The company’s direct management includes Maria Kuprashevich, who is known for having taken a job in the liberal media to commit espionage.

It was revealed that there is a staff team who are working with strict accountability to the curators. These staff writers are paid for writing pro-government comments on the internet.

The average salary of such a ‘commenter’ writing ‘politically correct’ posts is from thirty to forty thousand rubles (approx. 1,000 USD). Propaganda warfare is conducted on two fronts, on both the Russian and international internet. Each department has its ‘experts’, on which total spending for the last month amounted to 33 million rubles (1 million USD).

To confirm these facts, it is enough to compare scanned passports discovered through hacking email accounts with real people on social networks. A list of hacked correspondence, as well as some names and details on people, can be found in this publication (in Russian). Many more confirmations were published.

As highlighted by Stephen Komarnyckyj, an analysis of Russian propaganda content suggests that Russia: :

    Disseminates conspiracy theories tinged with anti-Semitism to erode public trust in Western governments, and also to use support for Israel to inflame anti-Western sentiments. The core of the conspiracy theory is a narrative which suggests the USA is controlled by Zionists who in turn organised 09/11;
    Influences politicians, often marginal figures, by granting them air time to gain support for Russia’s hostile actions towards other countries. However, this simultaneously boosts the image of extremist politicians promoting anti-Western views and political disengagement;
    Promotes a narrative for the war in Syria favorable to the Assad regime. In turn, Assad, in exchange for the support of Oboronservis and Russian specialists, blocks the establishment of a pipeline from the Qatar gas deposits to the EU;
    Incentivizes journalists who spread misinformation according to a centrally produced agenda. There are journalists who are directly employed by Russia Today and receive a script, and others who work as freelancers but produce material which conforms to the channel’s agenda;
    Forms a climate of  opinion in the West to allow an invasion of Ukraine to take place and boost tolerance for subsequent genocide/ethnic cleansing by stigmatising Ukrainian national identity.



The tools used to implement such mechanisms are derived from the concept of effect-based operations. Effects-based operations (EBO) concept was developed by Dr. Edward A. Smith. His book “Effects-Based Operations: Applying Network Centric Warfare in Peace, Crisis, and War published” was published by US DoD Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) in 2003. Effects-Based Operations (EBO) is a United States military concept that emerged during the Persian Gulf War for the planning and conduct of operations combining military and non-military methods to achieve a particular effect. In 2008, US Joint Forces Command stopped using the term “effects-based”, but the concept remains valid in the US Air Force.

“Effects-based operations (EBO) are coordinated sets of actions directed at shaping the behavior of friends, foes, and neutrals in peace, crisis, and war. The concept of effects-based operations focuses “coordinated sets of actions” on objectives defined in terms of human behavior in multiple dimensions and on multiple levels, and measures their success in terms of the behavior produced.”

“Effects can occur simultaneously on the tactical, operational, military-strategic, and geo-strategic levels of military operations, in domestic and international political arenas, and in the economic arena as well. Effects cannot be isolated. All effects, at each level and in each arena, are interrelated and are cumulative over time. And lastly, effects are both physical and psychological in nature. Effects-based operations can be described as operations in the cognitive domain because that is where human beings react to stimuli, come to an understanding of a situation, and decide on a response.”

As we can see in essence not much difference with the concept of 6 priorities discussed in Russia since 1995. It does not mean that Russia was early in understanding of some concepts. Effects-based operations are not new. Good generals, admirals, and statesmen have focused on using military forces to shape the behavior of friends and foes for centuries.

New warfare concepts related to information age developments reflected in the new approaches. Direct approach of attrition based warfare  changed with asymmetric warfare approaches.



Attrition warfare is a military strategy in which a belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel. The war will usually be won by the side with greater such resources. Attrition warfare is the key element of conventional warfare.  Conventional warfare is a form of warfare conducted by using conventional weapons and battlefield tactics between two or more states in open confrontation. The forces on each side are well-defined, and fight using weapons that primarily target the opponent’s military. It is normally fought using conventional weapons, and not with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

In modern world where national states can not use obviously conventional war against opponent or where the networks appeared and developed the concept of asymmetric warfare which is element of non-conventional warfare comes in foreground.

Asymmetric warfare is war between belligerents whose relative military power differs significantly, or whose strategy or tactics differ significantly. Asymmetric warfare can describe a conflict in which the resources of two belligerents differ in essence and in the struggle, interact and attempt to exploit each other’s characteristic weaknesses. Such struggles often involve strategies and tactics of unconventional warfare. Unconventional warfare (abbreviated UW) is the opposite of conventional warfare. Where conventional warfare is used to reduce the opponent’s military capability, unconventional warfare is an attempt to achieve military victory through acquiescence, capitulation, or clandestine support for one side of an existing conflict.

On the surface, unconventional warfare contrasts with conventional warfare in that forces or objectives are covert or not well-defined, tactics and weapons intensify environments of subversion or intimidation, and the general or long-term goals are coercive or subversive to a political body.

The impact of means upon the outcome tends to vary arithmetically, while that of will varies geometrically. The more determined the foe, the less means he will require in order to succeed in the contest. The more constrained the task is, the greater the probability is of success with the means available. However, obviously if the means fall to zero, no amount of determination will suffice to make up the difference.



The general objective of unconventional warfare is to instill a belief that peace and security are not possible without compromise or concession. Specific objectives include inducement of war-weariness, curtailment of civilian standards of living and civil liberties associated with greater security demands, economic hardship linked to the costs of war; hopelessness to defend against assaults, fear, depression, and disintegration of morale. Two original definition are claiming: “The intent of U.S. Unconventional Warfare efforts is to exploit a hostile power’s political, military, economic, and psychological vulnerabilities by developing and sustaining resistance forces to accomplish U.S. strategic objectives.” or according to John F. Kennedy: “There is another type of warfare—new in its intensity, ancient in its origin—war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It preys on unrest.

The ultimate goal of this type of warfare is to motivate an enemy to stop attacking or resisting even if it has the ability to continue. Failing this, a secondary objective can be to debilitate the enemy before a conventional attack.

Attrition warfare was based on symmetry of Means and Will



If a symmetric contest may be said to pit one adversary with great means and great will against another that also has both great means and great will, then an asymmetric contest might be expected to involve different combinations. The possibilities can be outlined in terms of a simple quadratic diagram.



Key in understanding of hybrid warfare concept is conflict is between one power that has great means and limited will and another that has limited means but great will. The result is likely to be far from being either certain or swift.



The success lies in attacking your opponent’s weaknesses and not his strengths and by extension, that warfare revolves about the creation and exploitation of asymmetries. There are really two different symmetries that might be exploited. One side has an advantage in means. Logically, we would expect that side to exploit its advantage by attacking and destroying the other’s more limited physical means, e.g. by pressing an essentially attrition-based approach. The other side has an advantage in will. Therefore, we would expect that side to exploit its advantage by attacking its opponent’s will to continue the struggle, e.g. an essentially effects-based approach focused on shaping the opponent’s behavior.

The impact of means upon the outcome tends to vary arithmetically, while that of will varies geometrically. The more determined the foe, the less means he will require in order to succeed in the contest. The more constrained the task is, the greater the probability is of success with the means  available.



Does this mean that asymmetric forms of conflict have replaced the old attrition-based warfare driven by a symmetry of means and will?  Actually no. This is mistake to think so. Asymmetric forms of conflict could serve to prelude of old attrition-based war after the goal of behavior shaping resulting from successful effect-based operations is achived. That is why for Western leaders it is naïve to believe that asymmetric conflict Russia with West can not grow to conventional conflict once the will as a key component of resistance has been suppressed. That is why the first and ultimate goal of Russia at this stage is the will of Western countries to resist. For this purpose the information and network operations is the key Russian strategy. That means that far more is behind Russian RT and informational operations.

There are many analytical reports of Russian think tanks on organization of network and informational operations. Many case studies and practical tools how to do efficiently information and network operations have been developed. In hybrid war news agencies, blogosphere and social networks are military tools (“actors” and “sensors’) in battlefield. The sooner the West understands this issue the better.



Pilosophic, theoretic and strategical approaches for informational and netwars have been formed among other authors by Alexander Dugin, the ideologist of the creation of a Eurasian empire that would oppose the “Atlantist interests”. Dugin, who is known for his fascist views, expounds his theory of warfare in his work – “Netwars – the threat of new generation”.  Special portals have been established in order to  exchange information and experience in informational and netwars (it contains also closed restricted part) exist. For example: Portal of netwar, Eurasia netwar subportal.

Another example,  just one of many, can be used to illustrate  the detailed and planned preparation of Russia for the conduct of network operations in social networks. Nikolay Starikov is an active proponent of information and netwars. He created schools for Russian “patriotic” bloggers and created a substantial volume of  content for propaganda purposes and for the  purpose of  attacking “anti-Russian” views. He created the so-called Internet militia with blog for the  exchange of  information and experience. His latest books are used for brainwashing of “patriotic bloggers” including extracts  from such works as “Ukraine, chaos and revolution – weapon of Dollar” and “Russia, Crimea, History”. An example of the resources developed by Nikolay Starikov can be found here: Nikolay Starikov blog; Nikolay Starikov Internet Militia: Nikolay Starikov traning for Russian “patriotic” bloggers (2011) - Video in Russian.

This is only one example. There are many similar organizations and authors working for Russian think tanks in this sphere.

What actions are possible to oppose Russia both symmetrically and asymmetrically and counteracting Russian information and network aggression?

First of all a shared vision of both West and Ukraine. This vision shall be based on understanding that Russia have been waging a war against not only Ukraine, but also the West using a wide array  of means and tools. One of the most important elements is to strengthen and protect the will of the West and Ukraine  (key target for effects-based operations) to stop Russia. Russia, by targeting the West’s will, will be able with lower resources to efficiently target the West,  and first of all the  EU until it reaches the  point of compliance with Russia.

Ukraine is the first country to face this type of total hybrid war and has developed conclusions regarding how to fight a well-prepared enemy using new warfare tools and among them informational and network warfare. An understanding of the military priority is growing rapidly  in Ukraine, but regarding the  information and network priorities there is still a lack of understanding and action. In order to withstand this hybrid war  efficiently Ukraine needs help from the West including non-governmental organizations.

Another point of concern is that volunteer efforts in the area of information and network activities could decrease as as the economic factor started to prevail and some volunteers are returning to business or to self-employment. Ukraine as a state provides no visible support and investments to NGOs and similar organization in the informational sector of Ukraine both for internal audience and for Western audience. The help from Western foundations and NGOs are not visible too as major point of application of projects and grants are conventional journalistic and mass media and not blogs and social networks.

If NGOs and groups supporting Ukraine and Ukrainian NGOs and groups will not coordinate their activities, not efficiently cooperate and will not get sufficient resources then they unfortunately will lose and remain at the best a nice intellectual passive discussion clubs. The question is just when it happens if not to change current approaches. One of the myth of network and information operations in peace time or hybrid wars  that they apply only to a peer competitor (in this case Russia). This myth seems to be in minds of the Ukrainian defense ministry and government: if Russia spends so huge resources and funds on network and informational warfare that Ukraine is simply helpless and can do nothing. This is a very dangerous delusion. They forgot about being smarter and more efficient networking, coordination and efficient investments and fundraising. However even if we manage to be smart and possess huge will without investments, fundraising and resources (means) the information war against Russia could be lost Obviously if the means in asymmetric warfare equation (means*will2 ) fall to zero, no amount of determination will suffice to make up the difference.

The actions within mass-media and conventional journalistic domain have been discussed widely, but Internet informational resources were left  without attention. What shall an organization or set of organizations do  to efficiently counteract Russian information aggression against the West and Ukraine. The action shall be symmetrical compared to what is Russia is doing otherwise information and network war will be lost.

The actions described below proposed by “A strategy for damaging Russia’s propaganda machine” by Stephen Komarnyckyj,were intended as a starting point for discussion. The main principles on which they are based are:

    mapping Russia’s propaganda resources- we need to develop a conceptual framework to do so which breaks the resources into categories such as
    a) directly financed media agencies
    b) directly paid agents of influence
    c) Soviet legacy political parties who are still Russian centric in orientation
    a shift away from uncoordinated initiatives towards pooling resources and coordinating actions;
    a move away from reacting to the material produced by the propaganda apparatus to a focus on coordinated action to destroy the apparatus itself;
    a focus on undermining Putin’s virtual world and its hired creators by exposing its – and their – dishonesty;
    an emphasis on non-violent action. The strategy must adhere to best practice in terms of being anti-discriminatory. It is likely that the traditional ploy of depicting Ukrainians as Nazis will be utilised against any organised campaign. It is also possible that attempts will be made to discredit the campaign by planting agents who will make provocative, inflammatory statements. Indeed, Ukrainian politics has been affected by a number of right wing parties who may have been sponsored by Russia.

The document was only an initial outline of a strategy. The key messages are:

     a planned campaign focusing on the structure of Putin’s propaganda apparatus and involving a coordinated effort will be more effect than sporadic, uncoordinated campaigns;
    such a campaign could permanently and decisively ruin Russia’s propaganda apparatus;
    the campaign must be part of a programme to decolonise the West’s perception of Ukraine;
    the campaign must adhere to the principles of transparency, equality, and diversity both as a matter of principle and because this will neutralise several means by which Russia might attempt to discredit the attack on its propaganda apparatus.

In development of this initiative Euromiadan Press following discussions and exchange of opinions defined preliminary set of action to efficiently counteract Russian information aggression against West and Ukraine

    Build up and maintenance of Internet informational resource for:

    coordinating of activities in social networks in Ukraine and abroad to present truthful information on Ukraine;
    presenting truthful information on Ukraine by translations
    exposing Russian propaganda directed against Ukraine
    exposing the links of Western organizations, foundations, agencies, NGOs, journalists, politicians with Russia (shall be based only based on proved information obtained through investigational journalism)
    referral of information to Western journalists involved in presenting information on Ukraine
    contacting Western think tanks with presentation of information on Ukraine
    closing the gaps in analytics about Ukraine (cultural, historical, day-to-day life, news e.t.c. )
    exposing Russian doctrines and strategies which were not covered by Western NGOs, agencies, consultancies, think tanks and Western mass media
    presenting position of Ukrainian government in informal way through social networks on topics related to counteraction of Russia
    presenting the views and information which government can not express directly due to diplomatic restrictions by the way of assumptions and analytics
    Placing the information in order to study public reaction (“feeler”) to possible scenarios and actions
    Networking
    a planned campaign focusing on the structure of Putin’s propaganda apparatus and involving a coordinated effort

    Build up and maintenance of Internet informational resource for (separately from news and informational project)

Informational war against Russia

    Psychological war against Russia
    Positive commenting in Western mass media and in social networks of selected topics and points (“Ukrainian trolls”)
    presenting the views and information which government can not express directly due to diplomatic restrictions (in contrast to points in topic 1 – more radical views)
    Placing the information in order to study public reaction (“feeler”) to possible scenarios and actions (in contrast to points in topic 1 – more radical views)
    Disinformation for creating uncertainties for Russia to plan efficient actions against Ukraine
    a planned campaign focusing on the structure of Putin’s propaganda apparatus and involving a coordinated effort

    Academic activity

    Study and presentation of Russian doctrines, strategies and motivations which were not adequately covered by Western NGOs, think tanks, agencies, consultancies and Western mass media
    Study and presentation of new strategies and tactics employed by Russia in hybrid war against Ukraine (could be used by Russia further to destabilize the situation in Europe)
    Cooperation with Western think tanks with purpose for them to better understand current Russian ideology and motivations
    Research of current situation and moods in occupied territories
    Psychological studies of refugees from occupied territories, Ukrainian servicemen participants of war against Russia and Russian – backed terrorist with the aim to develop optimal rehabilitation approaches

    Investigational journalism:

    Exposing Russian politicians, Ukrainian politicians working against Ukraine
    Exposing the links of Western journalists and politicians with Russia (shall be based only based on proved information)
    Exposing Russian involvement in activities against Ukraine
    Exposing war crimes committed during hybrid war against Ukraine
    Exposing Western lobbyists of Russia

    Educational support, training

    For Ukrainian NGOs, think tanks and activists:

o Efficient work through social networks, internet resources

o Trainings on software (wordpress, php, seo etc.)

o Sharing experience on particulars of hybrid war warfare

    For Western NGOs, think tanks and experts:

o Russian ideology, doctrines and strategies and their applications

o Ukrainian culture and history

o Sharing experience on particulars of hybrid war warfare

    Build up and maintenance of Internet popular educations resource explaining complicated topics in simple and entertaining format targeted for wide public and busy people (examples: http://www.vox.com/) for younger audience even comics could be used. Humor could be used (perhaps  on a separate site) as an emotional means  for exposing Russian propaganda (information connected with positive relaxing emotions is effective in engraining perceptions while avoiding critical evaluation).

In order to make these actions a reality Ukraine needs the  help of Western non-governmental organizations and foundations to provide a coordinated network activities which will facilitate the destruction of Russia’s propaganda machine.

Written by Dr. Vitalii Usenko, MD, MBA, expert in international business management and communications and by Dmytro Usenko, student at Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Special thanks to Steve Komarnyckyi and Edmond Huet for their review advice and comments which were very valuable during preparation of this article

http://euromaidanpress.com/2014/11/05/russian-hybrid-warfare-what-are-effect-based-network-operations-and-how-to-counteract-them/

Russian hybrid warfare: what are effects-based network operations and how to counteract them



Article by: Vitalii Usenko and Dmytro Usenko

The strategy of a hybrid or irregular war followed by real war was developed in the USSR.  The same scenario was used by USSR during the ‘liberation’ of Poland, Bessarabia, Bukovyna, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the attempt to ‘liberate’ Finland in 1939-1940.  This liberation is now being justified as a Soviet attempt to secure its borders against Hitler, which is the same justification Russia uses now, 75 years later:  “to secure its borders against NATO”.

Since its formation in 1922 following communist doctrine the USSR has made accusations against every country in the world with the deliberate intention of concealing its own role as the instigator.



Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the USSR established the Comintern to be, in the definition of its own name, the world communist party, and gave it the objective of setting up a world Soviet socialist republic.  The declaration that accompanied the formation of the USSR in 1922 included four republics;  the plan was to increase this number until the whole world formed part of it.  The declaration behind the formation of the USSR is an official document with the principal objective of this vast state being the destruction and subjugation of all other states in the world.  Europe was the first target.  This ideology was inherited by second leader of USSR, Joseph Stalin, who needed crises, wars, destruction and hunger in Europe.  The worse for Europe the better.  It would create opportunities for Stalin and provide justification for him to send the Red Army into Europe as its liberator.

In 1939, the Soviet Union started actively pursuing the reconquest of the provinces of Tsarist Russia lost during the chaos of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War, after the agreement with Nazi Germany in August 1939.  The same rhetoric is used by Putin to back up his claim that in returning Crimea to Russia he is correcting not just a historical injustice, but an outrage.

nsc Russian hybrid warfare: what are effects based network operations and how to counteract them

History is being repeated and it seems that a similar strategy to the one described in US NSDC (National Security Council) Report 68 “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security” (April 14, 1950), a Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive of January 31, 1950 should be reconsidered in respect of Russia.  The President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense undertook a reexamination of US objectives in peace and war and the effect of these objectives on US strategic plans, in the light of nuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union.  The challenge which faced the USA and the West at that time involved preempting the destruction of not only the US but the civilization itself.

“The fundamental design of those who control the Soviet Union and the international communist movement is to retain and solidify their absolute power, first in the Soviet Union and second in the areas under the Soviet sphere of influence. The means employed by the Kremlin in pursuit of this policy were limited only by considerations of expediency. Doctrine is not a limiting factor; rather it dictates the employment of violence, subversion, and deceit, and rejects moral considerations.  The only apparent restraints on resort to war are, therefore, calculations of practicality”, stated the report.



Russia has not changed its mentality much from its predecessor USSR with its communist ideology.  The mistakes and misconceptions of the West were explored in the article “A need to contain Russia” by Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post on March 29, 2014:  “Openly or subconsciously, since 1991, Western leaders have acted on the assumption that Russia is a flawed Western country.  Perhaps during the Soviet years it had become different, even deformed.  But sooner or later, the land of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the home of classical ballet, would join what Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, so movingly called “our common European home. For the first time, many are beginning to understand that the narrative is wrong: Russia is not a flawed Western power. Russia is an anti-Western power with a different, darker vision of global politics”, concluded Anne Applebaum.

In the 1990s, many people thought Russian progress toward that home simply required new policies:  with the right economic reforms, Russians would sooner or later become like West.  As it turned out Russia is not a flawed Western power. Russia is an anti-Western power with a different, darker vision of global politics.



Eedward lucas 2 Russian hybrid warfare: what are effects based network operations and how to counteract them

Edward Lucas, UK journalist in ‘The Economist’ author of the books “New Cold War” and Deception: “Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West”, has similar point of view. He argues that Russia is a revisionist power:

    It has the means to pursue its objectives;
    It is winning ; and
    Greater dangers lie ahead.

He recommended that the United Kingdom (but it applies to US and NATO countries) and its allies:

    Give up any hope of a return to business as usual;
    Boost the defense of the Baltic states and Poland;
    Expose Russian corruption in the West;
    Impose sweeping visa sanctions on the Russian elite;
    Help Ukraine; and
    Reboot the Atlantic Alliance.

Edward Lucas supposes that Putin is tempted to destroy NATO via Baltics: “Putin has seen the West weakness in Ukraine, and he wants to exploit that. I fear very much that he will try something in the Baltic states because he can see that if he destroys NATO’s credibility in the Baltic states, then he destroys NATO, and this is a very tempting target for him.”

Let us have a brief look at the Eurasian ideology and Russian Doctrine and then go the application of these doctrines to current hybrid warfare and network operations. There is practically no difference with its precursor’s Communist ideology, which promoted a continuous program of expansion and world domination.  The terminology is slightly different, but the final goal of world domination in the communist doctrine and the Russian doctrine is virtually identical.  It was too early to assume that Russia changed and could potentially become part of the West.



The Russian Doctrine and Eurasian ideology are unofficial documents, they have not been approved by the Russian Parliament.  Elements of the doctrines are present in political programs or in theories of the “Russian National Idea.”  It seems that the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church perceive both Russian Doctrine and Eurasian ideology as an essential worldview, the spiritual foundation for the entire Russian nation.

The doctrine’s major goal is to carve out Russian civilization as a separate world phenomenon and to lay out the Russian Global Project.  There isn’t much difference with the communist ideology where communism was considered to be a separate world phenomenon,  in essence a Red Global Project.

The Russian Doctrine is a collection of different scenarios, each of which not only describes one variant of the future and warns against possible threats, but at the same time lays out strategies outlining the vision of the desired Russia, the Russia that should be.  It is a voluminous document, which is why we will only  highlight some points relevant to the current situation.



In the introduction to the Russian Doctrine, we find quotes from different speeches by Vladimir Putin:  “The Russian Federation is doomed in today’s world.”  “The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

The Russian Doctrine sees the “final and irreversible overcoming of the US and Western hegemony by ousting them from the geopolitical arena” as Russia’s only chance for survival in the 21st century. “Only those countries will be successful in the first 20 years of the 21st century which are hard, severe, persistent, and consistent.”

“The Russian empire has revived several times. Based on the values of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), even after the long-lived Tatar-Mongol yoke, the renewed mighty empire-successor of Kyivan Rus of King Sviatoslav has arisen in Eastern Europe.”  Moscow is described as the Third Rome, the sole successor of Rome.

The Russian Doctrine presupposes that the crisis of Western civilization will inevitably lead to an urgent search for a new world leader.  The international potential of Russian civilization is again on the agenda of history.

The Russian Doctrine defines three major principles of foreign policy:

     Concentration: The return and re-unification of all territories of historical Russia, first of all Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, followed by reunification with the rest of the Russian world
    Fight ‘terror-globalism:’  Russia shall declare openly that Russia does not recognize the civilizing missions of the USA and the West;
    ‘Big Clench,’ ‘Alternative globalization’:  Strategic cooperation with China, India, and Iran, resulting in a military union between Russia, China, India, North Korea, and Syria.
    Possible further extension to other Arab countries and countries from other regions, such as Africa and South America.

Alternative globalization, ousting the US and the West from the geopolitical arena, will start from ‘the near abroad,’ from countries like Ukraine.  The initial territories initially would include Ukraine’s Tavria region (Crimea, Mykolaiv Oblast, and Kherson Oblast) and the Donbas (Donetsk Oblast). Please note that the Russian Doctrine was published in 2005, not in 2014.



The Soviet Union started actively pursuing the reconquest of the provinces of Tsarist Russia lost during the chaos of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War in 1939, after the agreement with Nazi Germany in August 1939.  The same rhetoric is used by Putin to back up his claim that in returning Crimea to Russia he is correcting not just a historical injustice, but an outrage.

We will return again to US NSDC (National Security Council) Report 68 “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security” (April 14, 1950). The document’s summary of Soviet priorities is equally applicable to Putin’s Russia:

“The fundamental design of those who control the Soviet Union and the international communist movement is to retain and solidify their absolute power, first in the Soviet Union and second in the areas under the Soviet sphere of influence”.  “The means employed by the Kremlin in pursuit of this policy were limited only by considerations of expediency. Doctrine is not a limiting factor; rather it dictates the employment of violence, subversion, and deceit, and rejects moral considerations.  The only apparent restraints on resort to war are, therefore, calculations of practicality”, stated the report.

Ukraine is learning not only how to fight an undeclared hybrid was against Russia; some ‘humanitarian’ aspects of this hybrid war were not left without attention either.

Many questions exist why the worldview and history (more precisely, the distortion of historical events and wrong interpretations of history) are so important for Putin’s Russia as integral part of information and network operations.  The issue is that Russian extremists consider worldview and history as warfare tools in this hybrid war as well.

Russian extremist theories of world dominance see the warfare from a perspective which could be unusual for Western audiences.  Russians have a far broader conception of warfare than you might expect.  They see 6 major priorities in warfare (the more potent is to create an irreversible result and the more sustainable, but slower in time are at the top, the less potent to create sustainable result but faster are at the bottom).  This concept is known as the Social Security Concept of the all-Russian political party “Truth and Unity Course”.  Hearings of this concept in the Russian Paliament (State Duma) took place on November 28, 1995 (text of the hearings can be found here).  It was at the time when the West considered that democratic developments in Russia were irreversible and that Russia would be an allied country with Western democratic values.



     Methodological priority:  World view and methodology – changing the worldview and methodology of the individual as a means of warfare method (how a person sees the world) is the most potent from the sustainability point of view.  That is why the Russian Orthodox Church and the creation of the “Russian World” as an all-encompassing worldview is of utmost priority for Russia in order to achieve its long-term goals.
     Chronological priority, the warfare of history – to distort history and chronology in order to justify claims on new territories both for external and internal users as well as to brainwash external and internal victims with propaganda for them to regard Russian claims as legitimate.
     Priority based on facts and their interpretations:  ideology, technology, methodology.  The examples:  Russian Doctrine, ideology of Russia as Third Rome, Alexandr Dugin’s ideology and his Eurasianism, Panslavism based on distorted historical interpretations (see above – 2nd chronololgical priority).
     Economics priority:  eсonomics and finance warfare (example – trade wars against Ukraine, use of the unjustified gas price as an instrument of war against Europe and Ukraine, Russian banking and finance system as warfare tool against Ukraine, currency speculations and throw-in of counterfeit local currency in order to destabilize Ukrainian currency and the Ukrainian monetary system, strategy to buy sovereign debt of victim country and then to request immediate debt re-payment etc.)
     Ecological priority, “Genetics” warfare (alcohol, tobacco, environmental pollution e.t.c.) – to promote in the victim country a tolerance to abuse of alcohol, narcotics, to support environmental pollution,  deliberately destroying the infrastructure and industrial capacities of the victim county e.t.c.  In line with this priority Russia is making efforts to destroy the infrastructure of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblast.  The terrorists mined the Stirol chemical plant, threatening to cause an environmental catastrophe in the Donetsk Oblast.
     Military priority:  conventional warfare.  Military warfare was used by Russia in a new form of an undeclared hybrid war with a wide application of newly created Special Operation Forces (SSO) in combination with use of local residents brainwashed by the ‘higher’ priorities of warfare described above.

As we can see that information and network operation strategies are key and cover 5 priority of 6 (Methodological priority, Chronological priority, Priority based on facts, Economics priority, Ecological priority) and only one priority is a conventional military priority.

Galeotti MoscowsSpyGame short 300x187 Russian hybrid warfare: what are effects based network operations and how to counteract them

Until recently not much attention was paid in US and EU to Russian doctrines and strategies, but fortunately situation is changing. Mark Galeotti in his article “Moscow’s Spy Game. Why Russia Is Winning the Intelligence War in Ukraine”, published in Foreign Affairs concludes: “Russia has long been preparing for the kind of conflict underway in Ukraine—one that combines espionage with firepower, economic pressure, information warfare, and political maneuvering. The Russian intelligence services use all these tools effortlessly—a skill that they inherited from their Soviet predecessors and further refined for today’s world, in which influence is as much about economic leverage and the ability to spin the story as about actual facts on the ground. It is telling that even the head of the Russian army, General Valery Gerasimov, admitted last year that “nonmilitary means” have become indispensable to Russia and sometimes even exceed traditional firepower in importance.”

In fact conventional warfare, the military priority was not the topic of this article. However one of the recent novelties in terms of Russia’s concept of war was the creation of full scale Special Operations Forces in Russia.

The Special Operations Forces of the Russian Federation (SOF or SSO in Russian) is a highly mobile group of trained and equipped forces of the Russian Ministry of Defense designed for specific tasks abroad and domestically.  The Russian SOF is new unit in Russian army.

Valery Gerasimov, Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia announced the creation of the Special Operation Forces on March 6, 2013.  Speaking to foreign military attachés, he said, “We created the command of the forces which is engaged in routine work and conducts planned activities within the framework of the preparation of the Armed Forces”.

The Special Operations Forces are troops designated to achieve Russian political and economic goals in any geographical part of the world which is of interest to the Russian Federation.  These troops are fighting in peacetime.

The Russian SOF, besides such acute operations, usually solve the most incredible and ‘delicate’ tasks.  They come into action when diplomatic methods are no longer useful.  They can distract the energy and attention of ‘certain’ countries from external problems, creating problems inside these countries, shake the political system of these countries, destabilizing the political situation within these countries, including the use of third parties and local residents of the victim country.  Special operations forces are designed to create, train and supervise foreign guerrilla movements, eliminate unwanted leaders on foreign territory without any UN sanctions.



The first drill of the Russian Special Operation Forces (SOF) units was conducted on a mountain range in the Kabardino-Balkaria region in April 2013.  During the drill, an airlift of SOF units by military transport and army aviation occured, landing groups and cargo to the special assignment area.  As described by the Russian military journalist Aleksandr Sladkov (video + article in Russian) during this drill, the SOF demonstrated variants of their possible actions in nieghboring countries.  Drills were an imitation of the redeployment of SOF units to the territory of a neighboring country.  As Censor.net[block]28[/block], the same Russian military journalist, Aleksandr Sladkov, was seen fighting with terrorists against the Ukrainian army (perhaps learning more about Russian SOF fighting in Ukraine)

The first baptism of these forces tool place in Ukraine during the seziure of the Crimean Parliament on February 27, 2014 (video with the Crimean report of unit No. 090900, February 22-28, 2014) and then in the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts.

Besides USSR experience and practical concepts Russia has watched closely the development of military doctrines in the West in the late  1990s to early 2000s, especially after 9/11. Some concepts are in further development or reconsideration now: Effect-Based Operations, Network-Centric Warfare, Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences, Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age, Network-Enabled Operations, Effects-Based Information Operations.

Western approaches on effects-based operations and network-centric warfare were in active development in mid-1990s . One of them is “Five Rings for Strategic Warfare concept” of John A.Warden,. III, published in his work “The Enemy as a System” in 1995.

Clayton K S Chun in his overview mentioned that “Colonel John Warden believed that nation-states operate like biological organisms composed of discrete systems. In a perfect world these systems function in harmony and the organisms survive and flourish. However, certain systems controlled other systems and were thus significant, while other elements might appear to be vital, they were actually not important for sustaining the organism. Warden believed that like a biological organism a nation could be stunned. Military action could produce strategic paralysis. Strategic paralysis in Warden’s terms would make an enemy incapable of taking any physical action to conduct operations”

“Every state and every military organization will have a unique set of centers of gravity or vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, our five-ring model gives us a good starting point. It tells us what detailed questions to ask, and it suggests a priority for the questions and for operations from the most vital at the middle to the least vital at the outside. These centers of gravity, which are also rings of vulnerability, are absolutely critical to the functioning of a state.”



Leadership was at the center of Warden’s ring model. In his biological system analogy, leadership equated to the brain of a living organism. Leadership targets can include executive, legislative, judicial, and other functions. Campaign planners could target physical governmental facilities

Organic essentials: sources of energy, food, and financial resources to maintain its existence

Society’s infrastructure includes among other things road and rail networks, airports, power grids and factories.

The fourth ring is the population. Attacking the population does not focus solely on bombing civilians, but could also include using psychological warfare or other activities to reduce a populace’s morale.

The last ring comprises fielded military forces. Fielded military forces represent the “fighting mechanism” that protects the state from attack.

All these rings could be targeted and approach could be both inside-out as the case with information and network operations and outside-in as in case of conventional wars.

Russians have modified this model in accordance with their needs of information and network warfare. They modelled nation-state as six rings each of which could be targeted  by different means. This model was published in a book by Valeriy Korovin “The third World Network War”



National state is made-up in accordance with following model. Leader of the state, political elites around the leader, an expert community forming political meanings and interpretations, undertaking mass conversion of  these meanings and interpretations and bringing them to the masses (Russian terminology) – society and population. The outer ring isthe  armed forces.

We can see from current developments that Russia tries to wage a so called “inside-out” war which starts from attempts to influence first of all EU leaders, then the EU expert community followed by mass media with adding social networks and Internet blogs as new forms of communications. The tools used for this are effect-based operations.

The reflection of the application of this model we can clearly see now. “A strategy for damaging Russia’s propaganda machine” by Stephen Komarnyckyj, published in Euromaidan Press, showed  the mechanisms which Putin has deployed for his attack:

    Agents of influence including politicians, businessmen, corporations with a stake in Russia’s localization program, energy sector etc.;
    Networks of journalists who may be sectarian Communists (such as Seumas Milne), or social conservatives attracted by Putin’s superficially Christian agenda (such as Peter Hitchens);
    Sectarian left wing sites (such as Counterpunch and Global Research) which exploit a linguistic disconnect to create a sanitised Russia and a conversely stigmatised Ukraine;
    Political proxies (such as Stop the War and numerous politicians);
    PR Agencies and consultancies;
    The Troll army of paid internet commentators, all working to a script.

be continued

Russia Moving Missiles, Rockets Toward Eastern Ukraine



Russia is sending additional military forces toward the border with eastern Ukraine, including units equipped with ballistic missiles, as part of Moscow’s ongoing destabilization effort in support of pro-Russian rebels.

U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports said one Russian military unit equipped with short-range ballistic missiles was detected this week near eastern Ukraine, where Russia has launched a destabilization program following its military annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in March.

The military movements coincided with the an unusual number of flights last week by Russian strategic nuclear bombers and aircraft along Europe’s northern coasts in a what NATO’s military commander called strategic “messaging” toward the West.

“My opinion is that they’re messaging us,” Gen. Phillip Breedlove, the commander, told reporters at the Pentagon this week. “They’re messaging us that they are a great power and that they have the ability to exert these kinds of influences in our thinking.”

The bomber flights included three days of paired Tu-95 bomber flights that were to have circumnavigated Europe from the north but instead were halted near Portugal.

U.S. officials said Russia deployed several Il-78 refueling tankers in Egypt that were to resupply the bombers during flights over the Mediterranean, but those flights were scrapped for unknown reasons.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg expressed concerns about Russian military moves in Ukraine during remarks to reporters Tuesday in Brussels.

“Recently we are also seeing Russian troops moving closer to the border with Ukraine, and Russia continues to support the separatists by training them, by providing equipment, and supporting them also by having special forces, Russian special forces, inside the eastern parts of Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said.

Other officials said both intelligence and social media reports in recent days revealed an increase in Russian deployments.

The missile systems being deployed were described as conventionally armed, short-range ballistic missiles, multiple launch rocket systems, and BM-21 Grad multiple rocker launchers.

Additionally, Russian military forces are moving towed artillery pieces closer to the border.

One official said the display of military power is part of Moscow’s effort to reinforce “separatists” seeking to carve out a pro-Russian enclave in Eastern Ukraine.

The Russian “Spetsnaz” or special forces commandos are already inside the country, but the ground forces as of Wednesday appeared to be staging at the border.

Russian military forces in Ukraine number around 300 commandos. “These are not fighting formations. These are formations and specialists that are in there doing training and equipping of the separatist forces,” Breedlove said.

The buildup is either part of a plan for military escalation, or a coordinated pressure tactic by Moscow to force Ukraine to make concessions to the rebels, officials said.

Rebel groups in the region have made repeated threats to take control of the key southeastern Ukrainian port of Mariupol and other territory unless the Ukrainian government agrees to make changes in the current separation line.

“The build up may just be a pressure tactic to force such concessions, or it may presage further escalation,” one official said.

Rebels in eastern Ukraine recently held elections that Ukraine and NATO dismissed as illegal. New charges were raised in Kiev Wednesday about violations of a peace agreement reached in Belarus in September.

Breedlove said Monday there was no “huge change” in Russian deployments. Currently about seven battalion task groups are stationed near the border with Ukraine.

“Some of those formations have moved closer to the border,” he said. “We believe that was probably to bring some pressure on and make sure that the elections went according to the separatist plans; we’ll look now to see if they pull back from the border into their previous border locations.”

“We have now realistically entered the phase of a ‘frozen conflict,’” Yury Yakimenko, a political analyst at Ukraine’s Razumkov political research center told Reuters. The term frozen conflict has been applied to other former Soviet Republics where separatists are being backed by Russian forces.

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is part of a program by Russian President Vladimir Putin to gain control or hegemony over former Soviet bloc states described as the “near abroad.”

Putin is seeking to restore Russian power with territorial seizures, along with a large-scale nuclear and conventional forces buildup.

Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen M. Lainez said Russian forces and equipment remain on Ukraine’s border and on Ukrainian territory in violation of international law. “We again call on Russian authorities and the separatists they back to abide by their commitments under the Sept. 5 ceasefire agreement and the Sept. 19 implementing agreement,” she said.

Breedlove said the Russians in the past have conducted small-scale bomber flights.

“And what you saw this past week was a larger, more complex formation of aircraft carrying out a little deeper and, I would say, a little bit more provocative flight path,” he said. “And so it is a concern.”

The flights are destabilizing and “problematic,” Breedlove said.

Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, also voiced concerns about the Russian bomber flights.

“When it comes to the increased Russian military activity, both in the air but also along the borders of Ukraine, I think that what we see is, especially when it comes to increased air activity of Russian planes, is that they are showing strength, and what we are doing is what we are supposed to do: we are intercepting the Russian planes, whether it is in the Atlantic Sea or the Baltic Sea or in the Black Sea,” he said.

Breedlove said he has discussed with U.S. military chiefs the idea of moving additional troops and supplies closer to Russia as a result of “increased pressure that we feel in Eastern Europe now and because of the assurance measures that we are taking in the Baltics, in Poland, in Romania.”

“I believe there is a requirement for rotational forces in the future until we see the current situation begin to normalize,” he said.

Breedlove said the halt in the conflict in Ukraine has been “pretty much a cease-fire in name only.”

“There continue to be sporadic engagements in and around the cease-fire zone,” he said. “And the second thing that I would say that has changed is we have seen a general trend towards a hardening of this line of demarcation and much more softening of the actual Ukraine-Russia border.”

Russia’s border with Ukraine in the east is open and completely porous. As a result, Russian military equipment is flowing back and forth the border

“Russia continues to resupply the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine,” Breedlove said.

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/russia-moving-missiles-rockets-toward-eastern-ukraine/

Terrorists get military supplies (allegedly weapons) from Russia

A pro-Russian terrorist posted on 5 November on his personal page in Russian social network "Vkontakte” pictures of unloading boxes from a Russian train in Donetsk.

The sign "ОАО ВГК” on the wagons shows that carriages belong to The Federal Freight - railway business established in Russia by Russian Railways.

The boxes might contain weapons supplied by Russia.

Reported by EMPR

Link to the terrorists' page: http://vk.com/id166742746













https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1496947117236746&type=3&l=e373c06aef

OSCE: 7 out of 10 Russian ‘aid’ trucks were carrying fuel - And the other three were carrying ammunition.

Seven of the 10 Russian trucks that crossed into Ukraine on Tuesday supposedly carrying aid to civilians in the Donbas conflict zone were in fact fuel tankers, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitors have said.



The OSCE said in a monitoring report that the Russian convoy consisted of seven fuel tankers, one truck, one other means of transport and one accompanying car. The truck bore the inscription "Humanitarian Assistance from the Russian Federation."

This was the fifth such “aid convoy” to cross into Ukraine from Russia since August, with a sixth reported to have crossed into Ukraine later. None of the convoys have been approved by the government in Kyiv.

The OSCE said it was able to inspect the convoy, opening the truck, but Ukrainian customs officers were not allowed to approach the vehicles, and were only able to examine them visually from behind a fence and take photographs

The OSCE’s report said the convoy crossed into Ukraine at 0750 Moscow time, and returned from Ukraine to Russia at 1320.

The report may fuel suspicions in Kyiv that the Russian aid convoys are being used by Russia to deliver fuel and ammunition to anti-government russian thugs in the Donbas conflict zone. Military blogger Dmytro Tymchuk said on Wednesday that militant attacks on Ukrainian forces had intensified after the latest visits by Russia’s aid convoys, which he said had resupplied the militants and Russian mercenaries in the Donbas.

UNIAN: http://www.unian.info/society/1005466-osce-7-out-of-10-russian-aid-trucks-were-carrying-fuel.html

Russia test-fires intercontinental missile from submerged submarine in Barents Sea

Test comes after Russia informed the United States on Tuesday that it will boycott the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit.


A Russian Tula submarine. / Photo by RIANbot / Wikimedia

 By Timothy Heritage, George Jahn and Deb Riechmann   
Published 15:21 05.11.14

REUTERS AND AP - Russia test-fired a Sineva intercontinental missile from a submerged submarine in the Barents Sea on Wednesday as part of a check on the reliability of the navy's strategic forces, the Defense Ministry said.

The liquid-fueled missile, which can carry nuclear warheads, was fired from the Tula submarine to the Kura Test Range in the far eastern region of Kamchatka, RIA news agency quoted the ministry as saying. It gave no other details.

The Sineva, which has a range of about 12,000 km (7,500 miles), entered service in 2007 and is part of efforts to prevent the weakening of Russia's nuclear deterrent.

President Vladimir Putin has underlined the importance of the nuclear deterrent during the standoff with the West over the crisis in Ukraine, and Russia has held several military exercises during the crisis that have alarmed Western powers.

Russia informed the United States on Tuesday that it will boycott the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit, diplomats told The Associated Press on Tuesday, potentially stripping the meeting of one of its key participants and hurting efforts initiated by President Barack Obama to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism.

Officials already had told the AP on Monday that Moscow was absent from last week's initial summit planning session in Washington but had left it unclear whether Russia planned to attend the summit itself.

http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/1.624803?v=A32FDD7AFE5A728F0C727C1DA0D9A7B2

Free fall      



Участники рынка, опрошенные РБК, утверждают, что это фактически означает уход ЦБ с валютного рынка и переход к плавающему курсу рубля. «Средний биржевой объем торгов в день составляет $7-10 млрд, поэтому $350 млн в день от ЦБ – это совсем немного», – говорит руководитель трейдинга на валютном рынке ФГ БКС Александр Мюльбергер.

http://top.rbc.ru/finances/05/11/2014/545a0a12cbb20fd22f8c995b#xtor=AL-[internal_traffic]--[rbc.ru]-[main_body]-[main_item]



Ruble tumbles as Russia limits currency controls http://www.cnbc.com/id/102155462#.

Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America

The adventures of Russian agents like The Ghost of Marius the Giraffe, Gay Turtle, and Ass — exposed for the first time.




Russia’s campaign to shape international opinion around its invasion of Ukraine has extended to recruiting and training a new cadre of online trolls that have been deployed to spread the Kremlin’s message on the comments section of top American websites.

Plans attached to emails leaked by a mysterious Russian hacker collective show IT managers reporting on a new ideological front against the West in the comments sections of Fox News, Huffington Post, The Blaze, Politico, and WorldNetDaily.

The bizarre hive of social media activity appears to be part of a two-pronged Kremlin campaign to claim control over the internet, launching a million-dollar army of trolls to mold American public opinion as it cracks down on internet freedom at home.

“Foreign media are currently actively forming a negative image of the Russian Federation in the eyes of the global community,” one of the project’s team members, Svetlana Boiko, wrote in a strategy document. “Additionally, the discussions formed by comments to those articles are also negative in tone.

“Like any brand formed by popular opinion, Russia has its supporters (‘brand advocates’) and its opponents. The main problem is that in the foreign internet community, the ratio of supporters and opponents of Russia is about 20/80 respectively.”

The documents show instructions provided to the commenters that detail the workload expected of them. On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.

They are to post messages along themes called “American Dream” and “I Love Russia.” The archetypes for the accounts are called Handkerchief, Gay Turtle, The Ghost of Marius the Giraffe, Left Breast, Black Breast, and Ass, for reasons that are not immediately clear.

According to the documents, which are attached to several hundred emails sent to the project’s leader, Igor Osadchy, the effort was launched in April and is led by a firm called the Internet Research Agency. It’s based in a Saint Petersburg suburb, and the documents say it employs hundreds of people across Russia who promote Putin in comments on Russian blogs.

Osadchy told BuzzFeed he had never worked for the Internet Research Agency and that the extensive documents — including apparent budgeting for his $35,000 salary — were an “unsuccessful provocation.” He declined to comment on the content of the leaks. The Kremlin declined to comment. The Internet Research Agency has not commented on the leak.

Definitively proving the authenticity of the documents and their authors’ ties to the Kremlin is, by the nature of the subject, not easy. The project’s cost, scale, and awkward implementation have led many observers in Russia to doubt, however, that it could have come about in any other way.

“What, you think crazy Russians all learned English en masse and went off to comment on articles?” said Leonid Bershidsky, a media executive and Bloomberg View columnist. “If it looks like Kremlin shit, smells like Kremlin shit, and tastes like Kremlin shit too — then it’s Kremlin shit.”

Despite efforts to hire English teachers for the trolls, most of the comments are written in barely coherent English. “I think the whole world is realizing what will be with Ukraine, and only U.S. keep on fuck around because of their great plans are doomed to failure,” reads one post from an unnamed forum, used as an example in the leaked documents.

The trolls appear to have taken pains to learn the sites’ different commenting systems. A report on initial efforts to post comments discusses the types of profanity and abuse that are allowed on some sites, but not others. “Direct offense of Americans as a race are not published (‘Your nation is a nation of complete idiots’),” the author wrote of fringe conspiracy site WorldNetDaily, “nor are vulgar reactions to the political work of Barack Obama (‘Obama did shit his pants while talking about foreign affairs, how you can feel yourself psychologically comfortable with pants full of shit?’).” Another suggested creating “up to 100” fake accounts on the Huffington Post to master the site’s complicated commenting system.

WorldNetDaily told BuzzFeed it had no ability to monitor whether it had been besieged by an army of Russian trolls in recent weeks. The other outlets did not respond to BuzzFeed’s queries.

Some of the leaked documents also detail what appear to be extensive efforts led by hundreds of freelance bloggers to comment on Russian-language sites. The bloggers hail from cities throughout Russia; their managers give them ratings based on the efficiency and “authenticity,” as well as the number of domains they post from. Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s only independent investigative newspaper, infiltrated its “troll farm” of commenters on Russian blogs last September.

Russia’s “troll army” is just one part of a massive propaganda campaign the Kremlin has unleashed since the Ukrainian crisis exploded in February. Russian state TV endlessly asserts that Kiev’s interim government is under the thumb of “fascists” and “neo-Nazis” intent on oppressing Russian-speaking Ukrainians and exerts a mesmerizing hold on many in the country’s southeast, where the channels are popular. Ukraine has responded by banning all Russian state channels, barring entry to most Russian journalists, and treats some of the more obviously pro-rebel Russian reporters as enemy combatants.

The trolling project’s finances are appropriately lavish for its considerable scale. A budget for April 2014, its first month, lists costs for 25 employees and expenses that together total over $75,000. The Internet Research Agency itself, founded last summer, now employs over 600 people and, if spending levels from December 2013 to April continue, is set to budget for over $10 million in 2014, according to the documents. Half of its budget is earmarked to be paid in cash.

Two Russian media reports partly based on other selections from the documents attest that the campaign is directly orchestrated by the Kremlin. Business newspaper Vedomosti, citing sources close to Putin’s presidential administration, said last week that the campaign was directly orchestrated by the government and included expatriate Russian bloggers in Germany, India, and Thailand. Novaya Gazeta claimed this week that the campaign is run by Evgeny Prigozhin, a restaurateur who catered Putin’s re-inauguration in 2012. Prigozhin has reportedly orchestrated several other elaborate Kremlin-funded campaigns against opposition members and the independent media. Emails from the hacked trove show an accountant for the Internet Research Agency approving numerous payments with an accountant from Prigozhin’s catering holding, Concord.

Several people who follow the Russian internet closely told BuzzFeed the Internet Research Energy is only one of several firms believed to be employing pro-Kremlin comment trolls. That has long been suspected based on the comments under articles about Russia on many other sites, such as Kremlin propaganda network RT’s wildly successful YouTube channel. The editor of The Guardian’s opinion page recently claimed that the site was the victim of an “orchestrated campaign.”

Russian-language social networks are awash with accounts that lack the signs of real users, such as pictures, regular posting, or personal statements. These “dead souls,” as Vasily Gatov, a prominent Russian media analyst who blogs at Postjournalist, calls them, often surface to attack opposition figures or journalists who write articles critical of Putin’s government.

The puerility of many of the comments recalls the pioneering trolling of now-defunct Kremlin youth group Nashi, whose leaders extensively discussed commenting on Russian opposition websites in emails leaked by hackers in 2012. Analysts say Timur Prokopenko, former head of rival pro-Putin youth group Young Guard, now runs internet projects in the presidential administration.

“These docs are written in the same style and keep the same quality level,” said Alexei Sidorenko, a Poland-based Russian developer and net freedom activist. “They’re sketchy, incomplete, done really fast, have tables, copy-pastes — it’s the standard of a regular student’s work from Russian university.”

The group that hacked the emails, which were shared with BuzzFeed last week and later uploaded online, is a new collective that calls itself the Anonymous International, apparently unrelated to the global Anonymous hacker movement. In the last few months, the group has shot to notoriety after posting internal Kremlin files such as plans for the Crimean independence referendum, the list of pro-Kremlin journalists whom Putin gave awards for their Crimea coverage, and the personal email of eastern Ukrainian rebel commander Igor Strelkov. None of the group’s leaks have been proven false.


Russia Today editor Margarita Simonyan was among the journalists whom Putin gave awards for their favorable coverage of the Crimean crisis. Via kashin.guru

In email correspondence with BuzzFeed, a representative of the group claimed they were “not hackers in the classical sense.”

“We are trying to change reality. Reality has indeed begun to change as a result of the appearance of our information in public,” wrote the representative, whose email account is named Shaltai Boltai, which is the Russian for tragic nursery rhyme hero Humpty Dumpty.

The leak from the Internet Research Agency is the first time specific comments under news articles can be directly traced to a Russian campaign.

Katarina Aistova, a 21-year-old former hotel receptionist, posted these comments on a WorldNetDaily article.






Kremlin supporters’ increased activity online over the Ukraine crisis suggests Russia wants to encourage dissent in America at the same time as stifling it at home. The online offensive comes on the heels of a series of official laws and signals clearly suggesting Russia wants to tighten the screws on its vibrant independent web. In the last 30 days alone, Putin claimed the internet was and always had been a “CIA project” and then signed a law that imposes such cumbersome restrictions on blogs and social media as to make free speech impossible.

“There’s no paradox here. It’s two sides of the same coin,” Igor Ashmanov, a Russian internet entrepreneur known for his pro-government views, told BuzzFeed. “The Kremlin is weeding out the informational field and sowing it with cultured plants. You can see what will happen if they don’t clear it out from the gruesome example of Ukraine.”

Gatov, who is the former head of Russia’s state newswire’s media analytics laboratory, told BuzzFeed the documents were part of long-term Kremlin plans to swamp the internet with comments. “Armies of bots were ready to participate in media wars, and the question was only how to think their work through,” he said. “Someone sold the thought that Western media, which specifically have to align their interests with their audience, won’t be able to ignore saturated pro-Russian campaigns and will have to change the tone of their Russia coverage to placate their angry readers.”

Pro-Russian accounts have been increasingly visible on social networks since Ukraine’s political crisis hit fever pitch in late February. One campaign, “Polite People,” promoted the invasion of Crimea with pictures of Russian troops posing alongside girls, the elderly, and cats. Russia’s famously internet-shy Foreign Ministry began to viciously mock the State Department’s digital diplomacy efforts. “Joking’s over,” its Facebook page read on April 1.

Other accounts make clear attempts to influence Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the country’s restive southeast. Western officials believe many of the Twitter accounts are operated by Russian secret services. One was removed after calling for and celebrating violent attacks on a bank owned by a virulently anti-Putin Ukrainian oligarch.

“This is similar to media dynamics we observed in the Syrian civil war,” said Matt Kodama, an analyst at the web intelligence firm Recorded Future. “Russian news channels broke stories that seemed tailored-made to reinforce pro-Assad narratives, and then Syrian social media authors pushed them.”

Other documents discuss the issues the Russian commenters run into when arguing with the regular audience on the American news sites, particularly the conservative ones. “Upon examining the tone of the comments on major articles on The Blaze that directly or indirectly cover Russia, we can take note of its negative direction,” the author wrote. “It is notable that the audience of the Blaze responds to the article ‘Hear Alan Grayson Actually Defend Russia’s Invasion of Crimea as a Good Thing,’ which generally gives a positive assessment of Russian actions in Ukraine, extremely negatively.”

But praise can be as problematic as scorn. “While studying America’s main media, comments that were pro-Russian in content were noticed,” the author wrote. “After detailed study of the discussions they contained, it becomes obvious: the audience interprets those comments extremely negatively. Moreover, users of internet resources assume that the comments in questions were either written for ideological reasons, or paid for.”

The documents align with the Kremlin’s new attention to the internet. Putin, who swiftly monopolized control over television after coming to power in 1999 and marginalized dissent to a few low-circulation newspapers, largely left the “Runet” alone during his first two terms in power, allowing it to flourish as a parallel world free of censorship and skewed toward the educated urban middle class. Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s protégé who was president from 2008–12, made a show of embracing social media, but it never sat well with officials and Putin supporters. The gulf between Medvedev’s transparency drive and Russia’s Byzantine bureaucracy’s reluctance to change only highlighted his impotence, earning him the nickname “Microblogger” for his small stature.


While president, Dmitry Medvedev visited Twitter’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. Dmitry Astakhov / AFP / Getty Images



“In the best case they looked funny, in the worst, their actions exposed their real motives,” said Katya Romanovskaya, co-author of KermlinRussia, a popular parody account mocking Medvedev’s clumsy efforts. “Twitter is an environment where you can instantly connect with your audience, answer direct questions, and give explanations — which Russian officials are completely incapable of. It goes against their bureaucratic and corrupt nature.”

The current internet crackdown comes after protests by middle-class Muscovites against Putin’s return to the presidency in early 2012, which were largely organized on Facebook and Twitter. All but a few officials have since abandoned the medium and many did so en masse last fall, raising suspicions they did so on Kremlin orders.

“Putin was never very fond of the internet even in the early 2000s,” said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who specializes in security services and cyber issues. “When he was forced to think about the internet during the protests, he became very suspicious, especially about social networks. He thinks there’s a plot, a Western conspiracy against him. He believes there is a very dangerous thing for him and he needs to put this thing under control.”

Last month, the deputy head of the Kremlin’s telecommunications watchdog said Twitter was a U.S. government tool and threatened to block it “in a few minutes” if the service did not block sites on Moscow’s request. Though the official received a reprimand (as well as a tongue-lashing on Facebook from Medvedev), the statement was widely seen as a trial balloon for expanding censorship. Twitter complied with a Russian request for the first time the following Monday and took down a Ukrainian nationalist account.

A new law that comes into effect in August also forces bloggers with more than 3,000 followers to register with the government. The move entails significant and cumbersome restrictions for bloggers, who previously wrote free of Russia’s complicated media law bureaucracy, while denying them anonymity and opening them up to political pressure.

“The internet has become the main threat — a sphere that isn’t controlled by the Kremlin,” said Pavel Chikov, a member of Russia’s presidential human rights council. “That’s why they’re going after it. Its very existence as we know it is being undermined by these measures.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/documents-show-how-russias-troll-army-hit-america

Crime And Crimea: Criminals As Allies And Agents


Members of a local "self-defense" unit man a checkpoint on the highway between Simferopol and Sevastopol in Crimea in March.

By Mark Galeotti

November 03, 2014

Mikhail Volkov is a cop in Moscow (up to a point) and Viktor Skvortsov is a criminal (of sorts), but even back in May they were both using the same words to describe Crimea: a business opportunity.

Viktor no longer really runs with the Muscovite underworld, but he still trades on his old associations with the now-global Solntsevo network from the freebooter 1990s, which are good enough to get him invited to the occasional mobster-"biznisman" birthday party or funeral. From time to time, his old contacts either need a favor or ask one of him, and his ill-defined "import-export business" appears to find itself the conduit for dubious commodities that may or may not be what is on the customs manifest.

Mikhail -- and for obvious reasons neither of these are their real names -- is not so much on the other side of the fence so much as another on-and-off entrepreneur of legality. He's a police detective whose case load often involves organized crime and who has managed to find ways of balancing securing enough convictions to rise slowly but steadily up the chain of command, while at the same time turning a blind eye with sufficient frequency to acquire the kind of money that buys a top-of-the-range BMW, a luxurious dacha outside Moscow, and -- until they were banned for police officers -- regular trips abroad. Either way, he navigates the underworld with at least as much aplomb at Viktor and with seemingly as many friends there, too.

They were united in separately enthusing about the boundless illicit economic opportunities to be found in annexed Crimea. As up to $4.5 billion of federal funds flow in, thanks to the Kremlin's determination to make a Potemkin peninsula into a symbol of the value of becoming part of the Russian Federation, there was ample scope for kickbacks, sweetheart deals, and simple "attrition" of construction materials.

Meanwhile, Simferopol could begin to challenge the Ukrainian port of Odesa as a smuggling hub. Until this year, Odesa handled the lion's share of not just Ukrainian but also Russian smuggling over (and very occasionally under) the Black Sea. With around a third of all Afghan heroin now being trafficked along the "Northern Route" through Russia, this was an increasingly lucrative place to do business, and the criminal elites of Odesa were getting rich on their cut. Whether or not Simferopol could ever emerge as a credible rival, especially in light of Western sanctions, is in a way irrelevant: the very possibility that it might has forced Odesa's godfathers to lower the "tax" they levy on criminal traffic through the port, an example of black-market economics at its most basic.

Embezzlement, corruption, and smuggling in and through Crimea will be a big business. Already, preliminary Interior Ministry figures for the first three months of Russian control show that smuggling, economic crime, and violent offenses rose by between 5 and 9 percent.

However, when it comes to Russia, the biggest illegal business tends to be government, and this is no exception. After all, what the Crimean annexation has demonstrated in especially stark form is the connection between crime and the Russian state that is not essentially parasitic and competitive (as it is when criminals embezzle the federal budget) but instead complementary and symbiotic. Indeed, Crimea is a case study both of the way that the Kremlin uses criminals as instruments of state policy and also how the underworld and upperworld have become inextricably entwined as a consequence.

Crime And Commerce

From the first, Moscow's campaign to wrest Crimea from Kyiv depended on an alliance with local underworld interests. Sergei Aksyonov, the de facto prime minister of the new Crimean region, has a gangster past, having gone by the nickname of "Goblin" back when he was one of the "Salem" organized crime group in the 1990s. Aksyonov rejects this charge, of course. He recently told the Russian newspaper "Kommersant" that "It's all lies. If I had skeletons in the closet, I would not have gone into politics." However, the one time he tried to sue someone who made these allegations, the Appeals Court dismissed his defamation case as groundless.


Sergei Aksyonov, aka "Goblin"

Nonetheless, the respective trajectories of both Aksyonov and Salem tell us something about Crimea's own development, and the role the criminals could play in Russia's near-bloodless seizure of the peninsula. Even before the collapse of the U.S.S.R. at the end of 1991, Crimea in general and Simferopol in particular had become free-wheeling havens for smuggling, black marketeering, and a lucrative array of embezzlement schemes centering on the region's health spas and holiday resorts.

As independent Ukraine struggled in the early 1990s both with economic crisis and the near collapse of its law enforcement structures, organized crime assumed an increasingly visible and violent form. Simferopol was fought over by two rival gangs, the "Bashmaki" ("Shoes") and Salem (named after the Salem Cafe, in turn named after Simferopol's sister city). They were at once entrepreneurs and predators, forcing local businesses to pay tribute and sell their goods on pain of arson, beatings, and worse.

Viktor recalled one ferry trip to Kerch, at the eastern tip of the peninsula, in which he was accompanied by a courier carrying a suitcase stuffed with cans of whitefish roe, which Salem would force restaurateurs to buy as "beluga caviar," a gaggle of prostitutes recruited for brothels in Yalta, and a pair of hung-over and heavily tattooed "bulls," mob enforcers, returning from a party in Novorossiisk. As he put it, "all Crimean crime was on that boat."

This was an inherently unstable situation; not only was there pressure from political and business elites for the police to reassert their authority, but the gang war was beginning to prevent either side from actually turning a profit. The conflict escalated until a paroxysm of murder and violence in 1996 that appeared to leave both gangs all but destroyed. It also opened a window of opportunity for Gennady Moskal, the Crimean police chief between 1997 and 2000, to launch a crackdown on overt gangsterism.

Crimea became a more peaceful place, but claims that the gangs were broken was a convenient fiction. Through Viktor, I got to meet Alfrid Ibragimov, a grizzled Tatar veteran of the 1990s gang wars, and he put it that "the punks just grew up, they realized wars were bad for business and there was a lot more money to be made in business. Moskal just helped them make the jump."

To be sure, both the Bashmaki and Salem had suffered major blows, especially the former, and likewise the police were beginning to get their act together. However, in practice, the main damage had been done to the foot soldiers on each side. The more senior and less overtly thuggish leaders -- including one brigadier, or mid-ranking overseer, known as "Goblin" -- instead took their money and their connections and went (semi)legitimate, in business and politics. Indeed, usually they were involved in both, leveraging their continued, although less overt, criminal alliances to further their political and economic ends.

By the 2000s, these gangsters-turned-businessmen were increasingly dominant within Crimea. Kyiv appeared to have little interest in bringing good governance and economic prosperity to this peninsula of ethnic Russians, and this gave the local elites both free reign and also a perverse legitimacy. As one Crimean told me during Vladimir Putin's second inauguration as president, in 2004: "we want our own Putin. He may be a tsar, but he is a tsar who at least governs, and who knows what his people want."

Ukraine was at the time embroiled in the acrimonious campaign that led to the election of reformist Viktor Yushchenko against Party of Regions candidate (and subsequent president) Viktor Yanukovych. It was telling that Yushchenko had very little support in Crimea -- but Yanukovych, the ostensible candidate of the east and the Russian-speakers, received lackluster support there, too. Crimea regarded itself as neglected by and separate from the political mainstream.


A man holds a Soviet flag as he attends a pro-Russian rally at the Crimean parliament building in Simferopol in March.

In this political, economic, and social vacuum, the new mafia-business-political empires could thrive. As one U.S. Embassy cable in 2006 put it, these "Crimean criminals were fundamentally different than in the 1990s: then, they were tracksuit-wearing, pistol-wielding 'bandits' who gave Crimea a reputation as the 'Ukrainian Sicily' and ended up in jail, shot, or going to ground; now they had moved into mainly above-board businesses, as well as local government." It added that "dozens of figures with known criminal backgrounds were elected to local office in the March 26 elections." Viktor Shemchuk, former chief prosecutor of the region, recalled that "every government level of Crimea was criminalized. It was far from unusual that a parliamentary session in Crimea would start with a minute of silence honoring one of their murdered 'brothers.'"

The key commodities were control of businesses and, increasingly, land. Some of the former leaders of Bashmaki, for example, were accused of trying to take over SC Tavria Simferopol, Crimea's main soccer club, largely for the properties it owned. More generally, as prices rose -- especially as Tatars, displaced from their Crimean homelands under the Soviets, began to return home -- the gangster-businessmen and their allies within the corrupt local bureaucracy sought to snap up land and construction projects to take advantage of this market.

Crime And Conquest

One of the dangerously unremarked aspects of this creeping criminalization was its Russian connection, something also symbolized by Viktor's ferry ride. Although Crimea was part of Ukraine, many of the most lucrative criminal businesses, such as trafficking narcotics and counterfeit or untaxed cigarettes, depended on relationships with the Russian criminal networks. According to Alfrid, likewise the peninsula's dirty money was typically laundered through Russian banks and in the process became all but untraceable for the Ukrainian police.

This meant that when the Ukrainian state began to totter as President Yanukovych struggled with the Maidan protesters, already Moscow was able to begin to reach out to potential clients in Crimea through underworld channels. According to Mikhail of the Moscow police, representatives from Solntsevo had visited Crimea for talks with locals even before February 4, when Crimea's Presidium, or governing council, considered a referendum on its status and asking Russia to guarantee the vote, something the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) decided was potentially an act of subversion. The Muscovites came not just to feel out the scope for further criminal business, but also to gauge the mood of the local underworld.

Aksyonov, head of the Russian Unity party, seemed an ideal choice as a Kremlin figurehead. Even though he had been elected to the regional parliament in 2010 with just 4 percent of the vote, he was ambitious, ruthless, and closely connected with Crimean parliament speaker Vladimir Konstantinov, perhaps the pivotal powerbroker on the peninsula then and now. Konstantinov has also been persistently linked with organized-crime connections and allegations of construction and real-estate fraud, although these have not been tested in court. (Then again, not only does he enjoy immunity from prosecution as a parliament deputy, the question is whether anyone would dare go that far anyway; Sergei Mokrushin, an investigative journalist with independent local Chernomorskaya TV, describes him as "untouchable.")

When Moscow moved to seize Crimea, three different kinds of forces were used. There were the "little green men," Russian "Spetsnaz" commandoes and naval infantry marines, stripped of their insignia, but retaining their discipline and professionalism. There were local police, especially the Berkut riot police, who solidly supported the local coup, not least knowing that the protesters in Kyiv wanted their whole force dissolved or purged. And then there were unidentified thugs in mismatched fatigues and red armbands, but nonetheless often clutching assault rifles. These "self-defense forces" spent as much time occupying businesses -- including a car dealership owned by Ukraine's next president, Petro Poroshenko -- and throwing their weight around on the streets as they did actually securing strategic locations.

According to an official of the local prosecutor -- who again asked not to be named -- while some were veterans and volunteers, many were the foot soldiers of the peninsula's crime gangs, including Bashmaki and the descendants of Salem, who had temporarily put their rivalries aside to pull Crimea out of Ukraine. "They knew it would be good for them both," she adds, "and there were powerful people in Moscow who asked them to do it."

Who were these powerful people? With Crimea now part of the Russian Federation and Aksyonov ensconced as Moscow's local proconsul, the Kremlin seems generally happy to leave power in the hands of the very elites who presided over the corruption and misrule of previous years. The governing State Council is dominated by such holdovers. Even the notional agencies of control are dominated by locals closely associated with the people they are meant to be supervising.

In May, for example, Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev visited Simferopol for a meeting with local police, and introduced them to their new bosses: Sergei Abisov, appointed as Crimean interior minister, and his deputy, police chief Colonel Dmitry Nekludov. Both are locals, who previously had served in Crimea during Kyiv's ascendancy, and who as a result can hardly be considered fresh blood. Unconfirmed reports suggest that Kolokoltsev actually wanted to appoint an outsider instead of Nekludov -- as his position is more directly involved in operational matters -- but that this was overruled by the Kremlin, at least in part at the urging of the Federal Security Service (FSB).

The FSB's role is even more interesting, though. Whereas most of the police transferred their loyalties to the new regime, the local security apparatus of the SBU largely left the peninsula when the Russians moved in. The FSB occupied their headquarters on Simferopol's Franko Boulevard, and have made a point of claiming that their command structure is made of outsiders. The regional FSB director is indeed an import: Viktor Palagin, who had previously headed the FSB directorate in Bashkortostan. However, most of the rest of the directorate's senior ranks appear to be drawn from FSB officers who had previously been embedded within the Russian Black Sea Fleet. While long-standing Russian citizens instead of Crimean Ukrainian-turned-Russians, they are in effect already locals, having lived and worked alongside their counterparts for months or years.

Local sources claim that it was the FSB that brokered conversations between the Crimean political elite and many of the Slavic criminal gangs in the immediate run-up to the annexation crisis and at the time. They also liaised between them and the GRU (Russian military intelligence), which controlled the "little green men." Part of the deal appears to have been a promise for not only continued opportunities for enrichment but also support against the non-Slavic gangs who had begun to encroach onto their turfs, especially Tatars and North Caucasians.

In a signal of this pledge, in June FSB Director Aleksandr Bortnikov warned, in connection with the claim that a bomb attack in Crimea had been foiled, that "crime bosses and the heads of various extremist groups, with the support of their foreign sponsors, are continuing to carry out plans to commit terrorist acts in the Russian Federation." Immediately thereafter, the police and FSB began cracking down on Tatar organizations, as well as legal and illegal businesses controlled by non-Slavic gangs. Deals made were being honored.

Crime And Consolidation

As a result, Crimea's criminal and political elites are enjoying a range of new opportunities for enrichment. The first is through simple expropriation. Having already taken his Tavria leisure complex in Yalta, for example, the Crimean State Council has ordered the seizure of all properties owned by Ihor Kolomoyskyy, Ukraine's fourth-richest man and a supporter of Kyiv. According to Aksyonov, the properties are to be sold at auction, with the proceeds used to support the regional budget and also refund locals who had deposits in Kolomoyskyy's Privatbank, which then reneged on its commitments in Crimea.

However, if past experiences are anything to go by, the auctions will be carefully arranged to transfer assets into the hands of cronies and agents for the least price, or simply raise funds for subsequent embezzlement. More generally, Kyiv claims that the Crimean government has illegally seized some 80,000 hectares of land and properties worth 1.5 billion hryvnyas ($110 million), much of which already appears to have made its way into private hands.


The political campaign to marginalize and intimidate the Crimean Tatars extends to the underworld as well.

Alfrid Ibragimov, for example, makes no bones about the fact that he is taking many of his liquid assets, largely profits from sweetheart land deals in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as a cigarette smuggling ring, and using the cash to snap up properties. "This is like privatization in the 1990s," he says, "one of those chances in life when you can make a fortune if you move fast and know what you're doing." Disarmingly, the 60-something-year-old mobster-businessman calls this his "pension plan."

Furthermore, Moscow has committed itself to a slew of development projects that will represent honeypots for the gangsters, ranging from repairing roads to building a road bridge across the Kerch Strait to link Crimea to the Russian mainland. In August, Putin pledged 658 billion rubles ($18 billion) to this end, to which another 5 billion rubles ($139 million) will be spent to construct a new federal university there.

Perhaps most striking is Putin's decision to add Crimea to the list of areas allowed to run gambling ventures. Organized gambling was outlawed across the country in 2009, with the assertion that it was "a dangerous addiction and a magnet for organized crime." Nonetheless, a few locations were permitted to build and run casino complexes, especially with an eye to the overseas markets. Now Crimea (and Sochi) will be added to the list, with the resort city of Yalta the likely site for a new development. The government has suggested that this might bring in up to $750 million a year for the overstretched regional budget -- expected to run up a 55 billion-ruble ($1.5 billion) deficit this year -- but again it is unlikely that anything of the sort will actually end up in the public purse.

After all, casinos and their associated leisure complexes have long, rightly, been associated with organized crime. They are prime locations for loan sharking, money laundering, vice of every kind, and protection racketeering. Although the local media has talked up the prospect of clashes between Chechen gangs that in the past were heavily involved in illegal and legal gambling alike, as well as a new generation of Tatar gangster, the experience of other sites suggests that it is Russian groups, with political connections, that dominate.

Indeed, with official support, these gangs already seem to be moving to consolidate their position and not so much eliminate as constrain and tame their non-Russian rivals. The infamous Chechens, for example, have been forced to relax their previous tight grip on the local drug trade and instead hand a share over to the Slavic gangs.

Meanwhile, the Tatar gangs appear to be facing a coordinated bid to cut them down to size. The police have launched a number of raids in and around Tatar settlements. In the village of Zhuravki, for example, they were ostensibly looking for marijuana-growing sites and processing facilities. At Kolchugino, masked officers said they were after illegal migrants and evidence of banned literature. When they searched the Fontany mosque, they failed to give any reason beyond an "operational investigation."

In part, this reflects a political campaign to marginalize and intimidate the Crimean Tatars, in parallel with the decision to evict the Mejlis, their governing body, from its offices in Simferopol. However, this has also served notice on the emerging Tatar gangs that they operate under sufferance. Alfrid, for example, has already lined up Slavic partners for his property deals, including figures from the underworld and also local government. He refers to them as his "roof," the criminal term for protection.

Crime And Consequences

The common denominator in all these cases is that the gangs with political connections gain protection and privileged access to upperworld and underworld resources. In return, they kick back payments but also provide political support to their allies, in a self-sustaining loop. This is, after all, the essence of the Russian political system in a nutshell. The Kremlin rewards those who demonstrate utility and loyalty, and at the same time expects and demands that they continue to demonstrate those qualities. In the short term, this is a brutally effective means of creating an elite base and maintaining control over it: when everyone is compromised, everyone is vulnerable, and everyone needs regularly to demonstrate their commitment to the boss.

However, it can get out of control. First of all, the temptation in Crimea may be to turn the peninsula into a thoroughly criminalized enclave that goes beyond even the Kremlin's permissive bounds and begins to pose a challenge to Russian security and Moscow's credibility. The problem is that there is a potentially massive criminal opportunity for the Crimeans if they are able to supplant Odesa as the Black Sea smuggling entrepot of choice, especially if they can enhance that with the additional opportunities of easier links with Russian organized crime. According to Viktor the Solntsevo hanger-on, that particular network has continued to send representatives to Crimea, above all to develop local alliances, and by all accounts others of Russia's larger, inter-regional or international networks are doing the same.

Crimea is a relatively poor region, dependent on inefficient agriculture and often-dated industry, and while today Moscow may be willing to subsidize it and pay off the elites, some new crisis or priority may emerge tomorrow. The temptation to build autonomous funding streams and to take full advantage of the region's unofficial status (as the outside world is almost united in not recognizing its position as a part of the Russian Federation) will be great for a self-interested, under-controlled, and over-acquisitive elite.

Thus, while the Crimean experience -- and that of eastern Ukraine, too -- suggests that Moscow regards criminals as acceptable local representatives and useful agents of control and integration, there are also potential dangers for the center, too. The comparable illicit opportunities of the Sochi Games, the last Kremlin megaproject, led to small-scale gang wars and very nearly a major one, as well. Especially given the slowdown of the wider Russian economy, and thus the shrinkage of profit margins for gangs depending on embezzlement, protection racketeering, and the like, then the struggle for the criminal profits in Crimea could also spark wider gang conflicts. When both Mikhail and Viktor spoke of the opportunities in Crimea, in true Russian style they were also acknowledging that no such opportunity comes without serious risk.

Mark Galeotti is professor of global affairs at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, an expert on Russia's security services, and author of the blog "In Moscow's Shadows"

http://www.rferl.org/content/crimea-crime-criminals-as-agents-allies/26671923.html