Baltic Blog......Security & Intelligence Briefs, International, Baltic & Russia News June 27, 2008

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Breaking news & commentary Quote:
"America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold:its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life.If we can undermine these three areas,America will collapse from within."
-- Josef Stalin
The Fifth Generation Warfare
By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. LappenFrontPageMagazine.com 6/20/2008
[From Armed Groups: Studies in National Security, Counterterrorism, and Counterinsurgency; Edited by Jeffrey Norwitz; U.S. Naval War College, June 2008, chapter 28.]

The United States and the West cannot win the war against radical Islam merely with the most sophisticated military strategies. Winning requires understanding the role of shari'a and the Muslim Brotherhood in developing a global ideological and political movement supported by a parallel "Islamic" financial system to exploit and undermine Western economies and markets. This movement is the foundation and the major funding source for the political, economic, and military initiatives of the global Islamic movement.1

Shari'a finance is a new weapon in the arsenal of what might be termed fifth-generation warfare (5GW).2 The perpetrators include both states and organizations, advancing a global totalitarian ideology disguised as a religion. The end goal is to impose that ideology worldwide, making the Islamic "nation," or ummah, supreme.3

Rising oil prices and the West's dependency on Middle East oil, combined with willful blindness and political correctness, provide a surge of petrodollars, making financial and economic jihad so much easier to carry out. Moreover, according to shari'a, Muslims hold all property in trust for Allah.4 Therefore, under the shari'a, all current and historic Muslim acquisitions everywhere, including the United States, belong to the ummah, in trust for Allah. Full report via active link: http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID=5BF32F00-2C8F-47CF-8C69-93644CCFA710=========================================
Nicaragua: The Inherent Dangers of Being a Militant Mecca
Stratfor Today »-->June 25, 2008


By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
Diplomatic relations between Colombia and Nicaragua are once again in the news, with the two countries trading broadsides over the Nicaraguan government’s recent decision to grant asylum to three female members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega in June said that the FARC members in question reportedly survived the March 1 attack on a FARC camp just over the Colombian border in Ecuador that resulted in the death of Raul Reyes (Luis Edgar Devia Silva), FARC’s No. 2 and one of its most long-standing and experienced operational commanders. After the March 1 raid, Nicaragua briefly severed diplomatic relations with Colombia in protest of the country’s violation of Ecuador’s sovereignty.
Ortega accused the Colombian government of conducting “state-sponsored terrorism” against the FARC members in his explanation of why he granted them asylum. To emphasize this point, Ortega further accused the Colombian government of plotting to assassinate the three FARC members in Nicaragua. He then stressed that the three need Nicaraguan protection so they can serve as witnesses in a future trial of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez for “crimes against humanity.”
Nicaragua’s granting of asylum and Ortega’s rhetoric have outraged the Colombian government, which had formally requested extradition of the three FARC members. Colombia has said it finds it inconceivable that the Nicaraguan government should make heroines out of people who had been residing in the camp of a recognized “terrorist” organization — a group that has killed thousands of Colombian citizens, kidnapped more than 700 people and constantly attempted to overthrow the Colombian government. The Colombians have also said that it is unacceptable, offensive and irresponsible for the Nicaraguan president to accuse Uribe of committing crimes against humanity.
Ortega’s granting of asylum to the FARC members is consistent with the way the Sandinistas granted shelter, and even citizenship, to hundreds of Marxist militants when the Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990. Similarly, Nicaragua’s growing relationship with Iran is very similar to the relationships it enjoyed with U.S. foes such as Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein during the first Sandinista reign.
Nicaragua’s status as a sanctuary (and even an operational base) for these militants nearly resulted in terrible consequences for Ortega and his Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1993, when a group of jihadist militants attacked the World Trade Center in New York and one of the militants was found to have Nicaraguan identification documents in his jacket pocket.
Friend of Pariahs and a Marxist Sanctuary
There has always been a tight relationship between the Marxist FSLN and its ideological brethren and patrons in places like Cuba and the Soviet Union. This relationship manifested not only in terms of military training and equipment, but also in terms of foreign aid such as food, health care and education. This aid was made doubly important by the trade embargo placed on Nicaragua by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1985. In addition to receiving aid, the FSLN also assisted the Cubans and Soviets in providing aid to like-minded revolutionary groups in the region, such as the Salvadoran Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), FARC and others.
As the Soviet Union suffered economically in the late 1980s and eventually collapsed in early 1990, the amount of aid Soviets could provide to their Marxist friends and proxies declined dramatically. This drop in aid significantly affected Cuba’s economy. As a consequence, Cuba lost much of its ability to assist partners in the hemisphere such as the FSLN. This caused the Sandinistas to seek new sources of funding, and they found some help from the pariah nations of Libya and Iraq. In fact, at the end of the first Sandinista reign in 1990, the Libyan Embassy in Managua was several times larger than the U.S. Embassy there. The Libyans were situated in a large and imposing building, while the U.S. Embassy was literally housed in trailers — a temporary setup established after the 1972 Managua earthquake destroyed the former embassy.
The Libyans did have a presence at the United Nations in New York, but since those personnel were so closely scrutinized by U.S. authorities, they decided to use their embassy in Managua as the base for the vast majority of their intelligence operations in the Western Hemisphere.
However, the fall of the Soviet Union affected more than just economics. As the political landscape shifted in the late 1980s, places that had served as havens and training bases for Marxist militants, such as South Yemen and East Germany, became less welcoming. In 1990, both of those countries ceased to exist. This left a lot of fugitive Marxist militants looking for a place to go, and many of them relocated to Managua. What resulted was an influx of Marxist militants from European groups such as the Irish Republican Army, ETA and the Red Brigades, as well as Middle Eastern militants, such as representatives of the various Palestinian Marxist-oriented groups.
Some of the fugitives who moved to Managua were educated, skilled and surprisingly entrepreneurial. A couple from the Italian Red Brigades opened a popular Italian restaurant in downtown Managua, and members of the Basque group ETA opened an automobile repair garage in Managua’s Santa Rosa neighborhood.
Operational Base
Managua was not only a place of refuge, but also a base for operations. The automobile repair shop run by the ETA members made headlines on May 23, 1993, when a powerful explosion ripped through an arms and document cache stored in a sophisticated vault hidden under the shop. The explosion, which resulted in the deaths of two men, emphasized how unwise it is to store mortar rounds with their fuses installed (especially if those rounds get knocked over). It also provided an unprecedented glimpse into the activities of the international Marxist networks that called Managua home in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
While much attention was paid to the arms found in the cache (which included 19 surface-to-air missiles and a number of other weapons), it was a stack of surviving documents that shed the most light on the group’s activities. The stack included a large number of identification documents (more than 300 passports) as well as a number of targeting dossiers that had been assembled — and several actually used — to kidnap a number of industrialists in other Latin American countries, such as Mexico and Brazil. The cache was owned by the Popular Liberation Forces (PLF) faction of FMLN, which had to admit ownership after identification documents bearing the photographs of several PLF leaders were uncovered in the cache.
A U.S. team scanned the thousands of pages of documents, then loaded them in digital form onto a searchable database contained on a set of CDs. The documents revealed that as financial aid from the Soviet Union and Cuba began to diminish, the FMLN sought new ways to fund its revolution. One PLF group decided to use its foreign allies to kidnap wealthy industrialists in Latin America and hold them for ransom. The kidnapping scheme was truly an international endeavor, with the muscle for the operation being provided by experienced Chilean and Argentine Marxists and the cover provided by young Canadians. The Canadians, David Spencer and Christine Lamont, were members of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) who moved to Managua to help the FMLN and became involved with the PLF. The Canadians rented the safe-houses and cars used in the abductions, and they also conducted much of the pre-operational surveillance for the kidnappings. One way they ac complished the surveillance was by posing as graduate students and conducting ruse interviews of the victims as a way to assess their personal security arrangements. The industrialists seemed especially vulnerable to the wiles of Lamont, a beautiful young redhead.
The wheels fell off the kidnapping scheme in 1989, when Brazilian police stormed a safe-house the group was using to hold Brazilian supermarket mogul Abilio dos Santos Diniz. The police arrested five Chileans, two Argentines and a Brazilian, along with Spencer and Lamont, in connection with the crime. In addition to the targeting dossier on Diniz and newspaper accounts of the kidnapping and police raid, the Managua cache also contained a number of personal documents belonging to Spencer and Lamont — including Lamont’s Canadian passport, which had been oddly altered by attaching the photo of a middle-aged FMLN leader to the young woman’s identity document. The FMLN had managed to deny any connection to the case until the 1993 mishap at the arms cache made further denial impossible.
The U.S. investigation into the case uncovered that members of the Sandinista government, including the powerful Sandinista politician Tomas Borge, had known of and even sanctioned the group’s unorthodox fundraising activities. Borge also knew about the secret FMLN arms cache that exploded. According to credible eyewitness reports, Borge was among the first to respond to the scene of the blast — in his bathrobe.
Blowback
Ortega and the Sandinistas lost the presidential election in 1990 to Violeta Chamorro and the National Opposition Union. In the two months between the election and the inauguration of Chamorro, the Sandinistas held a sort of “going out of business” sale on Nicaraguan citizenship. During that time, the Sandinistas granted citizenship (and passports) to 890 foreigners from more than 30 countries. The list of naturalized people contained not only Marxists from Spain, Italy, Germany, Argentina and Chile, but also Palestinians, Iraqis, Algerians, Lebanese and Libyans. Although the Sandinistas would maintain tight control over Nicaragua’s military, police and interior ministry even after the inauguration, they would no longer control the entire executive branch. By granting citizenship to their friends, they hoped to protect them from extradition or deportation.
This policy was nearly disastrous for the Sandinistas. In March 1993, shortly after the bombing of the World Trade Center, U.S. federal agents executed a search warrant at the address listed on the driver’s license of Mohammed Salameh, the Palestinian jihadist who rented the van used in the bombing. Living at the address was Ibrahim Elgabrowny, an Egyptian who attempted to assault one of the agents executing the search warrant. Upon arresting him, the agents found a packet of Nicaraguan identity documents in Elgabrowny’s jacket pocket.
The documents — birth certificates, passports, cedulas (national identity cards) and driver’s licenses — had been issued under innocuous names but bore the photos of Elgabrowny’s cousin, El Sayyid Nosair, his wife Karen and their three children. At the time of this discovery, Nosair was serving time in Attica Prison for a conviction related to the 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, and Elgabrowny and his colleagues were planning an operation to free Nosair from prison.
Initially, there was strong suspicion that the Sandinista government had knowingly assisted the militants in issuing the documents — especially in light of their 1990 last-minute citizenship-granting spree. However, an exhaustive U.S. government investigation determined that the documents found in Elgabrowny’s possession had been issued in a very different manner from those the Sandinistas knowingly issued to militants. Some U.S. politicians had hoped the Nicaraguan documents would provide them with a smoking gun they could use to go after the Sandinistas with both barrels, and they were very disappointed by the results of the investigation. In fact, one powerful senator’s staff attempted to pressure the lead investigator in the case to change the findings of his investigation to show Sandinista complicity in the bombing in New York. Unfortunately for these politicians, the case was not an elaborate Sandinista plot to strike the United States. It was just plain old fraud, something that occurs with great frequency in Latin America as in other regions.
However, this case could provide a relevant warning for the Sandinistas today in the post-9/11 world. In 1993, the U.S. response to Sandinista complicity in an attack against the United States would likely have consisted of a renewal of the trade boycott and a ton of international pressure intended to drive them out of their posts in the Nicaraguan military, intelligence and police. But the world is a different place in 2008. The blowback on the Sandinistas could prove to be very severe if militants taking refuge in Nicaragua (or based out of a diplomatic mission in Managua) are implicated in a terrorist attack — especially an attack against the United States.
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Geopolitical Diary: A U.S.-Iranian Dance of Diplomacy
Stratfor Today »-->June 25, 2008

The United States has raised the possibility of opening a diplomatic interests section in Iran. To avoid giving the impression that the idea was an unqualified U.S. position, State Department officials carefully leaked word of an ongoing debate about the plan to the press. But the news was not met with immediate denial by U.S. officials. In fact, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused to rule the idea out — instead Rice said she preferred not to comment on internal U.S. deliberations.
Hours after her statement, the official Iranian news agency said Iran was prepared, in principle, to consider the request if it is officially made by the United States. So, a week after word was leaked to The New York Times of Israeli maneuvers in preparation for a possible air strike on Iran, the Administration has opened a diplomatic door.
Currently, American affairs in Iran are handled by the Swiss Embassy, without U.S. diplomats present. Under full diplomatic relations, which this new deal still would not be, the United States would have an embassy and ambassador in Tehran, and the Iranians would have one in Washington. This is a step short of diplomatic recognition. U.S. diplomats would be present in Tehran — and Iranians in Washington — but likely working under the auspices of the Swiss and Pakistani Embassies, which house their respective interest sections presently. The United States has this sort of arrangement with Cuba. It allows diplomatic presence and representation without full recognition.
Cuba is hardly a model of international warmth for the United States, but the question is trajectory. At the moment, there is no formal diplomatic presence in Iran. There would be if this were to happen. And that would obviously represent a major psychological shift in U.S.-Iranian relations. It is not that the Americans and Iranians don’t talk. Apart from direct meetings in Baghdad, the Iranians have high-level diplomats in New York. There have also been meetings, varying in degrees of formality, in Switzerland and other venues. In fact, the Americans and Iranians talk all the time, directly, indirectly and sometimes it appears in Haiku poetry. The idea that the United States and Iran don’t talk just isn’t true.
The importance of this offer is not what it would yield, but that it was made. The United States took the first step, even if it did not take it irrevocably and no formal offer was made. The administration is being cautious. The Americans still recall how in 2003 they were embarrassed by the Iranians who rebuffed an offer by the United States to send help and a visit by a high-level U.S. delegation, including the elder George Bush, to the earthquake-ravaged city of Bam.
Today the United States is not offering diplomatic exchanges. While it said it might offer them, the United States emphasized its division on the subject. U.S. diplomatic translation: “We’d like to exchange diplomats but if you say no, we never asked.” The Iranians quickly replied that if asked, they might agree. Iranian diplomatic translation: “Ask and we’ll say yes.” The speed of the Iranian response is telling. They were not surprised by the request. Their answer was ready. Which means, as one would expect, they were sounded out before.
So on Friday it appeared that the world was on the verge of war between Israel and Iran, with the United States supporting Israel. By late Monday, the United States was proposing raising the level of diplomatic relations and the Iranians were indicating that they were open to it. In our mind this reinforces the idea that the careful leaking of putative Israeli war games was part of a “bad cop, somewhat better cop” routine, designed to work the Iranians psychologically. They were offered the choice between Israeli air strikes or improving diplomatic relations. The second offer sounded much better than the first.
Setting aside the purple rhetoric on all sides, we have long believed that the Americans and Iranians were talking and actually working together in Iraq. The massive decline in casualties in Iraq is not simply due to U.S. military operations. The decision by the Iranians to rein in Shiite Iraqi militias had a significant impact on it. Indeed, in our view, the Iraq issue has always been more important to both countries than the nuclear weapon issue, and in Iraq, there has been progress.
Both governments are urgently concerned with face. Neither wants to appear to be conceding anything to the other. When the Great Satan meets the Axis of Evil, no public compromise is possible. So all compromising is done privately. And that’s what makes this important. The tentative offer is very public and comes from the highest levels of government. It has been acknowledged officially. Now, this is the United States and Iran so anything public can collapse quickly. But the offer itself, no matter how it was couched, is extremely significant as is the response. In many ways we regard this as more significant than the Israeli exercises. www.stratfor.com============================================
Russian state backs films that push Kremlin agenda
The Associated Press
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
MOSCOW: When Vladimir Putin visited the set of the latest movie by Oscar-winning filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, he sat in the director's chair while actors playing Soviet soldiers marched toward the front.
Putin didn't direct the action — he left that to his host. But the prime minister's presence at the $55 million "Burnt by the Sun 2," the most expensive film in Russia's post-Soviet history, was a potent symbol of his government's expanding role in the country's film industry.
Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin called cinema "the most important of all arts," and film was regarded by the Communist leadership as one of its most powerful propaganda weapons. Legendary directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, who made "The Battleship Potemkin," and Andrei Tarkovsky, whose brooding classics can still astonish, won acclaim even as they bent to the will of the totalitarian state.
Now the Russian government is trying to revive the Soviet film tradition, helping to produce movies and miniseries that push the Kremlin's political views, vilify its critics and glorify the military and intelligence services.
Artistically, the results have been decidedly mixed.
Outside of the work of Mikhalkov, whose international fame dates back to the 1960s and who won a best foreign film Oscar for 1994's "Burnt by the Sun," few government-sponsored films have won either critical acclaim or box-office success.
"History repeats itself with a farce, so this new propaganda seems ridiculous compared to textbook Soviet examples," said Yuri Valkov, a historian of Russian culture.
Throughout the 1990s, the Russian film industry was mostly limited to imitations of Hollywood blockbusters and attempts to preserve the old artistic traditions.
In the new millennium, Russian filmmakers have found themselves in a business-oriented environment of investments and profits. But the government has taken a greater role in film projects, and remains the country's largest film producer. Putin recently proposed a merger of three Soviet-era film studios into a mammoth, state-owned concern.
Some in the film industry — the largest in Europe alongside France — welcome the influence of authorities over what movies get made and the political lessons they teach.
"Law enforcement agencies are part of our state, and the government has the right to propagate whatever it considers necessary," said producer Leonid Vereshchagin of 3T, Mikhalkov's own production company, which has released several highly patriotic films.
But critics say government influence has stifled most critical and creative artists. Russian documentary filmmakers, for example, could probably never produce documentaries directly critical of the government, said Vyacheslav Shmyrov, chief editor of the Kinoprotsess magazine.
"A Michael Moore is impossible in Russia," he said, referring to the American filmmaker whose documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" was a scathing critique of the Bush administration.
This year's most controversial Russian documentary, "The Destruction of the Empire: a Byzantine Lesson," was written by an Orthodox monk who argued that Western ideas and institutions would ruin Russia as they did Byzantium centuries earlier.
Unlike in the Soviet era, there is no centrally directed state effort to use cinema for indoctrination. Instead, artists know that they can win state support for film projects that promote the views of those in power.
"There are attempts of artists, producers and film directors to profit from patriotic themes and get government funding for their projects," said political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky.
Films critical of the government or at odds with the Kremlin's view of Russian history can face problems getting made, or gaining recognition after their release. The macabre 2007 film "Cargo 200," with its Orwellian vision of Soviet society, provoked a scandal at last year's Kinotavr film festival and was rated X for limited distribution.
The result is films like this year's "Alexander: The Battle on the Neva," which celebrates a 13th century prince who repels a Swedish invasion on his city, puts down a riot of Western-leaning nobles and vows fealty to the Mongol empire.
The message could not be more clear: Russia needs a strong leader to defend it from a hostile West. The film was advertised as a prequel to Eisenstein's 1938 epic, "Alexander Nevsky," which was personally commissioned by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to stir anti-German sentiment on the eve of World War II.
Russian intelligence, police and military agencies have underwritten at least a dozen television series or films in recent years, spending tens of millions of dollars to polish their images.
Last year, the Fund to Support Patriotic Films — a nonprofit backed by the FSB, the main successor agency to the KGB — produced "The Apocalypse Code," a $15 million James Bond knockoff.
In the film, a seductively dressed female FSB spy blasts bad guys, outwits her rivals and saves the world from nuclear annihilation. The film flopped with critics and filmgoers. "The Code is a raving of a drunken horse," said critic Victor Matezen.
But failure didn't discourage the film's backers. Olesya Bykova, executive director of the Fund, said it plans a feature film, television series and interactive online projects targeted at a younger audience.
State-financed films have featured Kremlin foes, thinly disguised as fictional characters, as the bad guys. A character apparently modeled on the billionaire Boris Berezovsky plots terrorist attacks in the 2004 film "Personal Number." Berezovsky fled to London in 2001 after a falling out with Putin.
"The Apocalypse Code" and "Personal Number" were among the winners of the revived Soviet-era award for best works of art that "form a positive image of FSB officers."====================================================
Post-Soviet 'frozen conflicts' heat up as big-power interests collide
Tensions are growing as NATO and a resurgent Russia divide over future of breakaway statelets.
By Fred Weir Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the June 25, 2008 edition
OstIngur, AbkhazGeorgia border - Tensions are again spiking here on the lush, subtropical Black Sea coastal plain, where heavily armed Russian troops aided by United Nations observers have held apart the warring armies of Georgia and insurgent Abkhazia for 15 years.
Last Wednesday, two powerful bombs exploded in the Abkhaz capital of Sukhumi, destroying a section of a railroad recently repaired by Russian construction troops that Georgia says are illegally in the rebel statelet, which Tbilisi – supported by most of the world – views as Georgian territory.
The next day, a few miles from this border post, Georgian police arrested four of the Russian peacekeepers, who have been in place under a 1994 cease-fire deal, leading a top Russian general, Alexander Burutin, to warn that if it happens again, "the consequences will be grave and there could be bloodshed."
If the fragile 1991 settlement that enabled the former Soviet Union to break relatively peacefully into 15 countries starts to unravel, the flash point may well be right here. But the antagonists would not be ragtag irregulars of the 1993 war but real armies, probably backed on one side by a resurgent Russia, on the other by NATO.
Peering over the half-mile-long bridge that separates Abkhazia from the Georgian town of Zugdidi, Ruslan, a burly Abkhaz border guard, says he helped to drive the fleeing Georgian Army across that bridge 15 years ago and expects to see them – now trained and equipped by the US – attempt a return any day now. "We will never agree to be part of Georgia again," he says. "I intend to live as an Abkhazian in a free country, and I'll fight for as long as it takes."
Most of the world breathed a sigh of relief when the USSR's collapse did not bring vast Yugoslavia-like upheavals, and cheerful scenarios seemed to be borne out when the former Soviet Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined the European Union and the NATO alliance in 2004.
Little-noticed wars
Amid the hopeful 1990s, few people noticed the savage wars of secession that rocked the Caucasus region, leading to the emergence of fiercely pro-Moscow statelets like Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh in Azerbaijan.
Along with Transdniestria, a rebel Slavic republic in Moldova, these little pieces of post-Soviet unfinished business were tagged "frozen conflicts" because it seemed unlikely that any big country, even Russia, would ever recognize their de facto independence.
But dramatic geopolitical changes are threatening a return to hot war, this time with an oil-rich, stronger Russia standing unambiguously behind the separatist territories.
After many Western countries recognized the former Serbian territory of Kosovo earlier this year, despite Moscow's angry opposition, Russia eased its 14-year-old economic embargo on Abkhazia and the State Duma passed a resolution demanding full recognition. The prospect of NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine – a question that was postponed at NATO's Bucharest summit in April – has prompted Moscow to crank up its rhetoric against Georgia and send construction troops, not covered by the 1994 agreement, into Abkhazia. Those troops were tasked with reopening a dormant railroad link that runs from Rostov, Russia, through Sochi to Sukhumi, and would be crucial for supplying troops in the event of a conflict.
Though war does not appear to be on the immediate horizon, many here fear that it's coming. "Tensions are growing very fast, and we find ourselves on the line of confrontation between Russia and the West," says Oleg Damenia, director of the Center for Strategic Studies, an official think tank in Sukhumi. "Georgia's military budget is now 10 times larger than Abkhazia's. In this situation, we have no choice but to turn to Russia for support."
The Kremlin says the existence of separatist statelets in Georgia should make Europe wary of admitting such a fissiparous country to NATO. At the Bucharest summit, then-President Putin reportedly told President Bush that Ukraine is a similarly unstable place, whose pro-Russian east could tear away.
"Russia is trying to demonstrate the possible price of NATO expansion, by warning that Ukraine is an extremely fragile entity," says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a leading Moscow foreign policy journal. "If NATO will push toward Ukraine, Russia might turn to very ugly means. There is huge potential for Russian irredentism in Ukraine," he says.
Last month Moscow's nationalist mayor, Yury Luzkhov, was declared persona non grata in Ukraine after he said that Moscow should take back Crimea, a Russian-populated peninsula that is still headquarters of the Russian Navy's Black Sea fleet and which was a "gift" to Ukraine from former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954.
Some Russian nationalists go further and suggest the time is approaching for a wholesale redrawing of the post-Soviet map, to gather in Russian minorities and other pro-Moscow ethnic groups who felt stranded on foreign soil by the USSR's collapse.
"NATO expansion endangers our national interests, but at the same time Russia has grown much stronger and is in a position to revisit the status quo in the post-Soviet space," says Alexander Dugin, head of the International Eurasian Movement, a Moscow-based group of nationalist intellectuals, businessmen, and policymakers. "Russia understands that we cannot allow Ukraine to enter NATO as a whole state. We will witness a wave of separatism in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Russia is no longer weak and at the West's mercy; it's on its way to recreating itself as an imperial power."
Future redivision of territory?
Mr. Lukyanov says that such extreme views are unlikely to get much traction in the Kremlin, but neither do Russia's leaders rule out a future redivision of post-Soviet territory. "The Russian elite does not consider the current status quo as final," he says. "All the countries of this region are highly unstable, and subject to unpredictable shocks. No one here believes that the transition of the post-Soviet space has reached its final destination."
The new tone in Moscow is music to the ears of Abkhazia's rebel leaders, who believe all the attention now being paid them after 15 years of isolation could be their ticket to full statehood.
"Until now the world community has only recognized the partial collapse of the Soviet Union. But why can't the captive nations inside those states also have their freedom?" asks Garry Kupalba, Abkhazia's deputy defense minister.
"The world thinks we don't exist, but we do. We're building our own state, with all the attributes of a state, including armed forces. And Russia is helping us," he says. ========================================
Germany's Berlin Airlift saved city from falling to Soviets 60 years ago
Germany's Berlin Airlift saved city from falling to Soviets 60 years ago
26.06.2008
Source: AP ©
URL: http://english.pravda.ru/society/105603-berlin_airlift-0
Germany marked the 60th anniversary of the start of the Berlin Airlift on Thursday, celebrating an unprecedented undertaking that likely saved the city from falling to the Soviets and helped mend German-American wounds from World War II.
Often called the first battle of the Cold War, the airlift pitted the U.S. and the Soviets against one another for the first time and set the tone for the decades to come.
"I find the courage with which this operation was carried out truly admirable," German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said at a ceremony at the U.S. Army Airfield in Wiesbaden, from which many of the flights originated.
The airlift's significance wasn't immediately apparent, however, when it began on June 26, 1948.
The future looked "bleak" to Berliners at the time, said Helmut Trotnow, director of Berlin's Allied Museum. "There was no light at the end of the tunnel, but the airlift brought this light."
"If it hadn't been for the success of the airlift, history would have looked very different," he said. "It really is a turning point."
After the war, zones of western Germany were handed to Britain, France and the U.S. to administer, while the Soviet Union was handed the east. Berlin was inside the Soviet sector, but also divided among the four powers.
In an effort to squeeze the Western powers out of Berlin, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in June 1948 blockaded all rail, road and ship traffic into the city.
On June 26, the U.S. and Britain launched "Operation Vittles" - an unprecedented airlift that would supply some 2 million West Berliners with food and fuel for 11 months until the Soviets lifted the blockade; and several months after that in case Stalin decided to change his mind.
"It changed my life entirely," retired airlift pilot Gail Halvorsen, who lives in Utah, said at the Wiesbaden event. "We were operating with our former enemies for one common goal: freedom."
Neither side resorted to force - setting the tone for the Cold War - though 39 Britons, 31 Americans and at least five Germans were killed in accidents.
During the airlift, American, British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and South African pilots flew 278,000 flights to Berlin, carrying 2.3 million tons of food, coal, medicine and other supplies.
In one amazing day - April 16, 1949 - some 1,400 planes carried in nearly 13,000 tons over a 24 hour period. That was an average of one plane landing every 62 seconds.
On the ground in Berlin, ex-Luftwaffe mechanics were enlisted to help maintain aircraft, and 19,000 Berliners - almost half women - worked around the clock for three months to build Tegel Airport, providing crucial relief for the British Gatow and American Tempelhof airfields.
American airlift pilot Bill Voigt remembers that seeing the suffering - and determination - of the Berliners quickly erased any resentment lingering from the war.
"Regardless of how you felt about the Germans, you had to pay due homage to them for their determination," Voigt, 87, said on a recent trip to Berlin. "Most of the people in my squadron and the people I knew felt the same way - that they were putting up a gutsy fight to keep out of the hands of the Russians."
On the other side, Germans - especially Berliners - were shown the human face of their former enemies, working with the occupying western forces on a large scale for the first time against the Russians.
In an earlier interview, Halvorsen said it is too often forgotten that the Soviets offered better rations to West Berliners willing to register with communist authorities - an offer that only 20,000 accepted.
"If they had said 'we can't stand your dried eggs, we can't eat your dried potatoes, we can't eat your dried carrots, your dried milk' - if they had said that, they would have been Russian and West Germany would have been Russian," he said.
Halvorsen, 87, is probably the best known of the airlift pilots - remembered for dropping candy to Berlin children on parachutes made out of handkerchiefs. After he started "Operation Little Vittles" other pilots also joined in.
The operation really took off after a short Aug. 19, 1948 story by The Associated Press ran in newspapers across the U.S. with the headline "Lollipop Bomber Flies Over Berlin" - prompting a wave of candy and handkerchief donations. =====================================================
Fuel woes overshadow EU-Russia talks
By James Rodgers BBC News, Moscow
President Medvedev symbolises the power of Gazprom
They often admit that they don't see eye-to-eye, but Russia and the European Union are neighbours who know that being next door to each other can bring massive mutual benefits.
Russia is the EU's third biggest trading partner and half of all Russian exports go to the EU.
The two-day summit opening on Thursday will launch negotiations on a new partnership and co-operation agreement.
"It's most important that we start now, and have a speedy process. But it's of course a complex negotiation," admitted the EU's Commissioner for External Relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, on a visit to Moscow earlier this month.
No one is willing to say for sure how long it will take to reach a final agreement.
New wealth
Energy supplies are a key issue. Russia supplies around a quarter of the EU's gas. Past gas rows with its former Soviet neighbours - especially Ukraine - made Europe nervous.
The choice of the summit venue, Khanty-Mansiysk in Siberia, is no accident. Russia's European guests will find themselves at the heart of the region which is making Russia rich and powerful.
Russia wants to build further on that - by expanding westwards. So far, that has proved difficult.
"I think the key word is motivation. Russia wants to get as much of a role as possible in distribution and assets in Europe. The role of just a provider of gas and oil is not sufficient," says Mikhail Kroutikhin of the energy information group rusenergy.com.
As well as highlighting Russia's resource wealth, the Siberian summit venue also points to one of the challenges.
"Reserves are very costly to develop because they are scattered in the middle of nowhere," Mr Kroutikhin explains. "This is why Russia is more interested in getting something of value abroad than in developing these costly reserves, until prices are even higher than now."
The Kremlin is putting its weight behind those efforts. As a former chairman of Russia's energy giant, Gazprom, President Dmitry Medvedev is well acquainted with the business.
His foreign affairs adviser, Sergei Prikhodko, says the question of what he terms "the unfair prevention of Russian investment" in Europe will feature at the Siberian summit.
Mr Medvedev's recent arrival in office marks a new phase in the Russia-EU relationship.
Western Siberia's oil is very expensive to extract
How democratic is Russia?
Vladimir Putin, Mr Medvedev's predecessor in the Kremlin, and now Russia's prime minister, is not expected to attend the summit.
Differences during Mr Putin's time as president focused on Western concerns that Russia was moving away from the democratic path it chose following the collapse of communism.
"The new agreement should, of course, have a strong mention of democratic values and human rights," Ms Ferrero-Waldner told the Russian parliament during her visit.
Russia would insist that should include the question of "revision of history and the situation of our compatriots," as Mr Prikhodko puts it - a reference to Russia's recent rows with the Baltic States.
Russia was especially angered by the relocation of a Red Army war memorial in Estonia - and by the alleged ill-treatment of Russians still resident in the former Soviet republics.
The westward political and military movement of former members of the Soviet bloc has frustrated many in Moscow. The expansion of Nato has infuriated some.
Those sorts of concerns are expected to be played down at this summit. There is a sense in diplomatic circles here that whatever disagreements Russia may have with the West, Russia has to have a good working relationship with the EU.
"These questions aren't decided in Brussels, but in Washington," says a Kremlin source of Nato membership.
"The European Union isn't the initiator of the expansion of Nato."
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7474865.stm=============================================
"Russians tired of Norwegian arrogance"
2008-06-26

Photo: NRK.no Fishery cooperation in the Barents Sea could face problems in the future because of Norwegian arrogance towards Russian scientists, a new scientific report reveals.
The recently published report from Bodø University College and Fritjof Nansen Institute in Norway, studies the relationship between marine scientists in Norway and Russia, Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten writes.
The report reveals that there is a growing discontent among Russian scientists of the Norwegian knowledge control for management of the cod stock in the Barents Sea. The importance of the High North and the fish resources in the region is higher than ever. Russian acceptance of Norwegian control of the management is therefore no longer obvious.
Earlier the marine resources have been managed by the Institute of Marine Research in Norway and the Russian PINRO institute in Murmansk. In the past years the Russian federal marine research institute, VINRO in Moscow, has been more active in the management. VINRO has presented some alternative methods of estimating the stock of cod in the Barents Sea, but these methods has been firmly rejected by Norwegian scientists. This has led to discontent among Russian scientist and talks about Norwegian arrogance.
The Norwegian Institute of Marine Research does not agree with the reports description of the situation, but says to Aftenposten that they of course should be careful to appear with a Norwegian know-all attitude. ============================================Russian hackers planning attacks against Baltic countries and Ukraine
Recent Tweets on Twitter are pointing to grumblings in the blogosphere around suspicion of a planned attack against Baltic countries and the Ukraine. An article posted at The Baltic Course describes the planned attacks, as originally reported by Estonian television channel ETV24:
Recently, there have been multiple appeals in Russian Internet forums, calling for Russian hackers to unite and launch a large-scale attack on Internet websites of Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian government institutions.
Russian hackers are dissatisfied with “the way Russian-speakers are treated in the Baltic countries”, and the ban on use of Soviet and Communist symbols.
Ukraine, on the other hand, has caused Russian hackers’ disapproval with its NATO aspirations.
“All the hackers of the country have decided to unite, to counter the impudent actions of Western superpowers. We are fed up with NATO’s encroachment on our motherland, we have had enough of Ukrainian politicians who have forgotten their nation and only think about their own interests. And we are fed up with Estonian government institutions that blatantly re-write history and support fascism,” says the appeal that is being circulated on Russian Internet forums.
Russian hackers plan to replace the original content of the websites that they hack into with huge red stars and photographs of Soviet soldiers. This would not be the first politically motivated attack by Russian hackers against another country. Hopefully the advanced notice will help these governments prepare some.============================================
Probe: Jewish graves under Vilnius building?
By DPA
VILNIUS - Israeli experts launched a 10-day research project yesterday to determine if newly constructed offices and apartments sit on an old Jewish cemetery in Lithuania's capital. Questions about the site's past have caused international controversy. Lithuanian Jews, who opposed the construction work, say the site was a 15th century cemetery. Developers dispute their claim. Protests from abroad include a letter from then-U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution condemning the construction on the possible cemetery site. Last year, Jews from across Europe rallied in protest outside the headquarters of European Union institutions in Brussels. The Jewish community in Vilnius - called the Jerusalem of Europe - was almost wiped in the Holocaust during the World War II. Czarist Russian authorities shut down the cemetery in 1831 and partly built over it. In the 1950s, the Soviets built a stadium and concert hall on part of the site, allowing the remains of the Vilna Gaon to be removed. ================================================
USA and Lithuania possibly in missile shield talks, Moscow says
RBC, 25.06.2008, Moscow 09:32:22.Russia does not rule out that Lithuania and the USA could be engaged in unofficial talks to deploy missile defense systems in the Baltic state, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was cited by the Vesti channel as saying. This is partly confirmed by the fact that Russia has not yet received any official response from the USA to its query regarding possible negotiations with Lithuania. However, the US has said that as the talks with Poland were progressing slowly, it was considering some other options. According to Lavrov, Russia is concerned with the missile defense system in Eastern Europe as a whole, rather than in Lithuania in particular. =======================================
U.S. Missile Shield in Lithuania?
2008-06-25
The United States is holding talks with Lithuania on the possibility of locating parts of its National Missile Defense shield there if talks with Poland fail, Witold Waszczykowski, Poland's deputy foreign minister responsible for negotiations on the matter, said June 17.Waszczykowski added that the United States wanted to reach an agreement on the shield before the end of President George W. Bush's term in office. He added that the Americans were looking for an "emergency" solution, and Lithuania's proposal to host parts of the anti-missile shield meets those needs. He also said Poland was still negotiating the matter, awaiting an answer to the question of who would defend the base and whether the anti-missile system would be part of NATO in the future.As a condition for agreeing to host the anti-missile base, the Polish government wants extra American funding for the Polish armed forces. The U.S. government has refused and says it will seek another site in Europe for parts of the system.Lithuanian Foreign Minister Petras Vaitiekunas has refused to comment. Tom Casey, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, has said that only "general" talks have been held with the Lithuanians. The Pentagon has denied that any detailed negotiations are being held.America wants to locate parts of the anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. The United States wants to place 10 interceptor missiles in Poland, while a radar base to guide them is planned for the Czech Republic. A U.S.-Czech agreement is due to be signed in early July.
(The Warsaw Voice)
===============================================Baltic MidSummer Feast Draws on Distant PastBy Aleks TapinshRiga (Latvia), June 23 (DPA) Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians around the world are set to celebrate midsummer festivals Monday night with rites drawing deeply on pagan traditions of the Baltic people. Marking the two longest days of the year, the celebration is called Jani in Latvia, Jaanipaev in Estonia, and Saint Jonas festival in Lithuania.
Christianity adopted the sun-worship holiday as the one dedicated to John the Baptist, but centuries later, pagan traditions still remain an integral part of the celebration.
On June 23, Latvians crowned with wreaths of oak leaves flock to the countryside. Regarded as a holy tree in pagan times, the oak still features widely in Latvian folk songs.
As the evening draws in, Latvians and Estonians light bonfires and sing folk songs or jump through the flames, seen as a way to guarantee prosperity. The white sandy beaches of the Gulf of Riga light up with bonfires as Latvians and Estonians flee cities to nature.
Balts also grill shashliks, eat cheese and consume copious quantities of alcohol, although these are not generally seen as being specifically pagan traditions.
In Estonia and Latvia, the holiday has a meaning for lovers, who are set to seek a fern flower that is said to bloom only once a year on that night.
Estonian folklore tells a tale of two lovers, Koit (dawn) and Hamarik (dusk), who meet once each year to exchange kisses on the shortest night of the year. Single folks can find out whom they will marry.
None of the three Baltic nations quit celebrating the holiday when they were part of the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1991.
Those who fled their occupied homeland for the West because of the Soviet occupation continued celebrating the holiday in their homes in the United States, Australia and Britain - just like those who stayed behind.
It cemented their ethnic identities, connecting them to their distant ancestors, whether Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians found themselves in a foreign land or in the occupied home.
Early Tuesday, at least two Latvian towns will host a more modern tradition - pre-dawn naked runs. Police will be on hand for any “puritan” protesters, while the runners will be rewarded with beer.DPA===============================================
Adamkus forgives Germany for Nazi occupation
Jun 18, 2008By Adam Mullett
VILNIUS - The president has dismissed the idea of asking Germany for money for the World War II occupation, saying it might hurt relations between the two countries. Parliamentarians had previously suggested that Germany should foot the bill for their occupation of the country during World War II, but President Valdas Adamkus has vetoed the proposal. ========================================
Education Minister turns away university students
Jun 18, 2008By Adam Mullett

STUDENT LIFE NO MORE: The new education minister said that Universities are turning out too many chiefs and not enough Indians.
VILNIUS - The new Education and Science Minister, Algirdas Monkevicius, has spoken out against too many students wanting to go to university. In a statement which is bound to cause controversy in some circles he called the situation “unnatural.” About 90 percent of school graduates want to go to university directly after high school. Monkevicius said that he believes that young people should pursue vocational studies. ==========================================
EU blasts Parliament on gay rights vote
Jun 11, 2008By Adam Mullett
VILNIUS - The European Parliament threatened to slap Lithuania with sanctions after politicians moved to eliminate the provisions for gay people from the Law of Equal Treatment. The changes were shot down in a preliminary hearing, but another vote on the issue was scheduled to take place on June 12. The proposed amendments involve removing provisions protecting homosexuals in the Equal Treatment Law.========================================
Soldiers choose to stay the course
Jun 04, 2008By Sgt. Daniel T. West

Soldiers were faced with a difficult decision.
DELTA BASE, IRAQ - With only a week remaining in their six-month tour in Iraq, soldiers from Lithuanian Contingent 10, the Iron Wolf Brigade, faced a difficult choice. Two options remained following the news that the Lithuanian government had voted to extend the unit’s tour for two more months – the soldiers could volunteer for the extension or continue their redeployment. “Since [their things] were already packed and I knew how difficult it would be, I chose to ask for volunteers to stay.=============================================

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Inside a 9/11 mastermind's interrogation
By Scott Shane
Sunday, June 22, 2008
WASHINGTON: In a makeshift prison in the north of Poland, Al Qaeda's engineer of mass murder faced off against his Central Intelligence Agency interrogator. It was 18 months after the 9/11 attacks, and the invasion of Iraq was giving Muslim extremists new motives for havoc. If anyone knew about the next plot, it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a CIA offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called "knuckledraggers."
Martinez came in after the rough stuff, the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English. He achieved a rapport with Mohammed that astonished his fellow CIA officers.
A canny opponent, Mohammed mixed disinformation and braggadocio with details of plots, past and planned. Eventually, he grew loquacious. "They'd have long talks about religion," comparing notes on Islam and Martinez's Catholicism, one CIA officer recalled. And, the officer added, there was one other detail no one could have predicted: "He wrote poems to Deuce's wife."
Martinez, who by then had interrogated at least three other high-level prisoners, would bring Mohammed snacks, usually dates. He would listen to Mohammed's despair over the likelihood that he would never see his children again and to his catalogue of complaints about his accommodations.
Full story via active link: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/22/america/22ksm.php

Geopolitical Diary: The Saudis' Oil Game Plan
June 23, 2008 0158 GMT
The long-awaited Jeddah Oil Conference on oil supplies was held and yielded the long-expected answer. The Saudis are going to increase oil supplies by the amount floated a week ago, and are prepared to increase supplies even more if there is demand for more product, which they do not see at this time. The subtext of the meeting was simple. Oil prices are not the result of insufficient supply or extraordinary demand. Supply and demand are pretty much balanced. Therefore, $135 a barrel for oil does not represent a problem to be solved; it represents a reasonable price for crude.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the Saudi view. Making a $135 a barrel is better than making a $100 a barrel, and beats the hell out of making $50 dollars a barrel. In some cases, countries that buy oil might have non-economic leverage to use against oil producers. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the most important exporter, there is not much that can be done. On the contrary, the Saudis have the leverage.
The only country that could use political leverage against the Saudis is the United States, and at the moment the United States is more dependent on the Saudis politically than the other way around. The Saudis are critical to two major strategic U.S. initiatives: stabilizing Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian talks. The Saudis are not involved in these matters for Washington’s benefit, but Washington is benefiting. There are no non-economic threats the United States could make, assuming it would really want to bring down oil prices.
The fact is that the United States is benefiting geopolitically from higher oil prices. Certainly it is putting significant pressure on the U.S. economy, but nothing compared to the pressure being placed on China. The United States figures that while it can get cheap goods from China and elsewhere in the world, the weakening of China’s global position certainly does not cause the United States much grief. And the role the Saudis are playing in stabilizing the Middle East is also to the United States’ benefit. Relieving geopolitical pain in return for increasing economic pain sometimes makes sense. But the truth is that it really doesn’t matter what Washington thinks about higher oil prices. They are a reality, so Washington might as well get the benefits.
From Saudi Arabia’s point of view, there are three issues it must consider in determining how much oil to pump.
First, the Saudis want to maintain demand. They do not want to lead the world into a global recession, since that would reduce demand and decrease prices. They are clearly watching the global picture carefully, and we would think that what they are seeing is that any further increase in oil prices would lead to a serious recession. They are indicating that they will try to increase production so that oil prices don’t go any higher and perhaps increase production in the face of softening demand, allowing prices to go down a bit. Oil markets are acting as if this were the case, but the Saudis are too smart to pay much attention to the day-to-day fluctuation of oil markets.
Second, the Saudis have limits on what they can produce. In the short term, their productive capacity has some give in it, but it is not infinitely elastic. They need to be careful not to max out capacity. There has been much discussion of peak oil — the idea that the Saudis have peaked out in their oil supply. If that’s true, then they need to get the maximum price for every barrel produced. It could be argued that keeping prices high even in the face of global depression, if it could be done, would be the optimal long-term strategy for the Saudis. If peak oil is true, then the Saudis need to maximize the total revenue captured, not quarterly or annual revenue.
But the Saudis need to be aware of the third variable: alternative sources of oil and alternative energy supplies. The higher the price of oil goes, the more incentive there is to use previously uneconomic sources of oil and find other energy sources. This is not something the Saudis, or other oil producers, want to see happen. Over the long term, to the extent that they can control prices, the Saudis and others want the highest possible price that precludes significant investment in alternatives. That isn’t easy to calculate or to do, but it is their goal.
Thus, what the Saudis want is the highest possible price. The Riyadh conference affirmed that, but it also seemed to understand that the term “possible” is complex and flexible. If we can extract any meaning from this conference, it would appear to be that the Saudis do not want to see a major break in prices, but are probably wary of seeing the price going much higher and might prefer moderately lower prices to achieve their ends. But it is not clear to us that the Saudis really have that much control over markets, so their finely tuned wishes and reality might not be connected.
http://www.stratfor.com/

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Genghis Putin
By MICHAEL AUSLIN FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA

June 24, 2008
While Washington continues to fixate on Iraq, a resurgent Russia is steadily expanding its influence in Eurasia. If the next American president ignores Moscow's inroads, democratic development in Asia will come under threat and the United States may soon be faced with a strategic challenge in one of the world's most resource-rich regions.
Russia's main target of late is Mongolia, one of Asia's most vibrant democracies. Since first holding elections in 1990, Mongolia has developed a stable electoral system with more than 15 political parties and seen two peaceful handovers of power. Mongolians will vote on June 29 to elect a new parliament. Polls suggest the ruling ex-Communist Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, which regained power in 2000, could lose power to the opposition Democratic Party.
Regardless of the election outcome, Mongolia's relationship with Moscow will take centerstage. Russia's nationalized oil company, Rosneft, supplies more than 90% of Mongolia's oil. Over the past three months, it has increased prices twice -- by an average of 20% each time. This comes on top of surging prices that, since 2006, have pushed inflation in Mongolia to over 15% annually. Rosneft recently told Mongolian officials that it would "lower" oil prices if given the rights to "run oil production" in the country. Moscow also wants to build 100 gas stations throughout the country, which would solidify its overwhelming presence there and reduce consumers' energy choices even further.
Similar tactics are afoot in other sectors of Mongolia's economy. Russian enterprises already own 49% of Mongolia's national railway and its largest copper and gold mining companies. An industrial group founded by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wants to consolidate the Russian-controlled shares of all three companies, effectively giving Mr. Putin's cronies a near-stranglehold on key players in the Mongolian economy. Officially, Mongolian officials express confidence in the benefits of deeper economic relations with Russia. Privately, they admit to feeling pressured into opening up their markets to Moscow, and wish more Western companies would invest.
Despite these misgivings, Mongolian president Nambaryn Enkhbayar visited Moscow last month and agreed to discuss further joint uranium production and nuclear cooperation. New Russian President Dmitry Medvedev stated that bilateral trade will soon exceed $1 billion, cementing Russia's position as Mongolia's largest trading partner after China. If these trends continue, Mongolia may become an economic satellite of Mr. Putin's newly expansive Russia.
The stakes are high for fledgling Asian states, especially democracies, which must balance satisfying Russian demands with proving to their own people that they can protect their independence. If Russia succeeds in blackmailing Mongolia into economic subservience, then it can try to extend this tactic to other Central Asian nations.
Imagine the precedent that would set. China could also decide that painstaking negotiations and diplomacy are a waste of time when it can bring its export and import power to bear. Democratic Japan and South Korea could feel greater pressure to join exclusive trading blocs led by authoritarian regimes. Finally, Mongolia and other states might be asked to make strategic concessions to Russian security forces to "protect" Moscow's investments. In this way, Russia could gain new opportunities to expand its military footprint beyond its own borders.
What can Washington do? First, we must encourage greater U.S. trade with Mongolia. Total trade stood at about $120 million in 2007. We should push beyond our 2004 Trade and Investment Framework Agreement and start negotiations for a full free trade agreement. In addition, the U.S. government-funded Millennium Challenge Corporation should increase its outlay for infrastructure projects in Mongolia far beyond the current total level of $285 million. Mongolians can also help themselves in this regard: Lingering governance problems partly account for slack Western investment.
Second, we should marshal global opinion against Russia's strong-arm tactics and condemn exclusive economic arrangements. Developing states must be assured that no economic leverage will be used against them to secure unfair advantages. So far, the U.S. and other democracies in Asia have stood silently by as Russia has stepped up its bullying of Mongolia.
Third, America can push forward with the Asia-Pacific Democracy Partnership project proposed by President Bush at the 2007 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, and unite Asia's free nations to support democratic values and assist states building liberal systems. Mongolia should feel that the U.S. is committed to linking up democratic nations in the region and addressing common concerns, be they economic or strategic in nature.
Finally, the U.S. and Mongolia can deepen their impressive security cooperation, which includes joint training and peace-keeping exercises. Even without a formal security relationship with the U.S., Mongolia has built a training center for peacekeeping operations and dispatched nearly 200 troops to Iraq. For a young democracy, Mongolia has shown a welcome willingness to look beyond its borders and play a constructive role in the world. When President Bush visited Mongolia in November 2005, he called Mongolia a "brother in the cause of freedom." Now is the time for the U.S. to help protect that freedom from economic and political threats alike.
Mr. Auslin is a resident scholar in Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
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In Lithuania, Better Hide That Hammer and Sickle
By Sara Rhodin
MOSCOW — Even this many decades later, the legacy of World War II still arouses tensions in Eastern Europe. Consider the latest row between Russia and its Baltic neighbors.
Lithuania, a former Soviet republic, approved a law last week that bars the public display of Soviet symbols. In what the BBC referred to as the toughest such measure in the former Soviet Union, Lithuania also outlawed the playing of the Soviet national anthem and the public display of photos of high-ranking Soviet officials.
No matter that Lithuania’s law also covered the symbols and icons of Nazi Germany -– Russia quickly took offense at the law anyway. In Moscow, officials declared that the measure was an insult to the Soviet soldiers who defeated the Nazis.
On Sunday, Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, issued a statement that condemned “any attempt at the rewriting of history and the revising of the results of World War II.” He was joined by the president of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko.
A spokesman for the Kremlin told Reuters that the statement was directed toward Lithuania, the other two Baltic states –- Latvia and Estonia — and Ukraine.
Such disputes have repeatedly flared since the Soviet Union’s fall. Last year, when Estonia relocated a statue of a Red Army soldier out of the center of its capital, Tallinn, there were public disturbances in Tallinn and Moscow and accusations of “blasphemy” from the Kremlin. The crisis culminated in a series of cyber-attacks against web sites in Estonia.
Russians viewed the monument as a tribute to their countrymen who fought and died to free Estonia from German occupation. Many Estonians, however, remember that Soviet troops invaded what had been independent Estonia before the Germans did, and see the monument as a symbol of a half-century of Soviet occupation after the war.
Relations have also grown tense over the rights of the Russian-speaking minorities in Latvia and Estonia. Inability to speak their countries’ primary languages fluently has kept many Russian speakers from qualifying for citizenship after independence.
Last week, President Medvedev announced that such so-called stateless Russian speakers in the Baltics would be allowed to enter Russia without a visa. Estonia responded by asserting that Russia was trying to meddle in Estonia’s efforts to integrate these people into the nation’s social fabric.
New York Times: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/in-lithuania-better-hide-that-hammer-and-sickle/?ref=europe
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Putin’s Russia: Freedom of Fear
By Dmitry SidorovFrontPageMagazine.com 6/23/2008
Mel Brooks was right: It’s good to be the king. And it’s even better if you rule a country full of metals, diamonds, oil, and gas. But the size of the country matters as well as its history. The first tells you how much is up for grabs. The second suggests a strategy to keep the population calm and controlled. On both counts, Vladimir Putin has every reason to be a very happy man.
Publicly, bureaucrats in Russia call him Vladimir Vladimirovich. This is not just because all Russian men have middle names ending in -vich, but to show the utmost respect, emphasize their subordinate position, and demonstrate their fear of angering the Ruler.
We know Putin is King – or Tsar, or, in his current position, prime minister -- from the thunder and lighting he and his Kremlin associates have hurled at their own erstwhile comrades. This is how the King keeps his court on good behavior. As the Russian saying goes: Beat your own so that others will fear you.
Last year, according to stories told in hushed tones in Moscow, Vladimir Putin ordered a Russian general to conduct a quiet investigation of the FSB’s (former KGB’s) Economic Crimes Department. Within months, the general found himself behind bars by presidential mandate. The lesson was clear for both the FSB and the general’s men – the king has something on everyone.
This Byzantine approach extends beyond the king’s immediate entourage. The intelligentsia, even though it was among the first to hail the new chief, from time to time feels the grip of the Tsar. Not long ago, a well-known Russian director celebrated his birthday with a group of local celebrities in a Moscow restaurant. One of his friends, a noted tippler, had knocked back more than a few by the time Vladimir Putin joined the festivities.
The tipsy gentleman, as the story was told, stood up and walked over to the Tsar. “You should do something about traffic jams in Moscow that your movements around the city cause,” he said. “When your motorcade is on the way to or from the Kremlin, the police stop traffic for two or more hours, making it impossible for people,” the brave man greeted Mr. Putin.
As the President listened to this litany of complaint, another gentleman, a famous actor, passed by. Hearing part of the conversation, he turned to Mr. Putin and said loudly: “You should confess, Vladimir Vladimirovich.”
I don’t know whether the last line was a joke or a suggestion, but a movie director tried to strangle the actor that same night after the president left. The actor survived, but he was put on a stop list by the Russian TV for a month or so.
This story reminded me of a misfortune that befell the famous Russian poet and singer, Alexander Gorodnitsky. He was blacklisted during the Soviet times for an innocent song, “The French Ambassador’s wife.” The communist leadership decided that he might be willing to defect if allowed to travel because he sang about falling in love with the imaginary spouse of an equally imaginary French Ambassador.
The impact of Vladimir Putin’s rules of the game on business has been much graver. In the best-known case, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner of the oil company YUKOS, is now serving 10-year prison term in the God-forsaken city of Chita in the Russian Far East.
There is still disagreement in the West and in Russia about why Mr. Putin and his comrades went after Mr. Khodorkovsky. A majority of experts presume that the main problem was Khodorkovsky’s active involvement in politics, and his desire for independence from the President’s team. Many have said the mogul financed both the ruling and the opposition parties, endangering the balance created by the Tsar.
This sounds right, but I think that greed also played a significant role in the Kremlin’s decision making process. In 2003, when Mr. Khodorkovsky was still the head of Yukos, he was negotiating a merger with Exxon Mobile. If it had happened, the merger would have created the second-largest oil company in the world, something capable of undermining Mr. Putin’s power. Thus, the Kremlin decided to strip Khodorkovsky of his company, at the same time calculating that the proceeds from YUKOS oil exports would be enough for them to share without Exxon Mobil.
The path chosen by the Kremlin was painful for the President of YUKOS, but presumably profitable for the Tsar’s inner circle, one Russian source told me few years ago. Although there is no evidence of Putin’s direct involvement in the ensuing scam, it was the King himself who made confusing announcements about the fate of Khodorkovsky and YUKOS at the height of the conflict. His statements sent the company’s shares skittering up and down, presumably enabling knowledgeable people to make tens of millions of dollars.
The Russian business community quickly got the message and started to line up to show their support for the Tsar. Earlier this year, one prominent and very pro-Putin mogul managed to have a meeting with the President. After it was over, Mr. Putin’s “servants” told him that the President was very unhappy with his behavior. But why, asked the oligarch as goose bumps rose. He saw an attempt to be independent in your presentation, the answer came, and you should give this serious thought.
The Khodorkovsky case was the turning point of Mr. Putin’s presidency, a major victory that enabled him to stave off significant internal obstacles. It set the path for Russia to walk while he assumed the premiership, anointing the weak Medvedev to be the new President of Russia under the watchful eyes of Mr. Putin’s comrades still on the Kremlin team.
The Russian anecdote to prove the point has a waiter in a Moscow restaurant asking Putin and Medvedev what they would like to have for dinner. “I’ll have steak,” the Tsar responds. “And the vegetable?” the waiter inquires. “The vegetable will have steak, too,” Putin says quickly, nodding his successor.
It cost Mr. Putin enormous efforts to achieve such amazing results during only two presidential terms. “For eight years I worked like a galley slave, from dusk till dawn… I’m satisfied with the results of my work,” he was not too shy to admit at his last press-conference as the president of Russia on February 14, 2008.
He has every reason to be proud. In those eight years he became the King of Bureaucracy, overseeing an unprecedented expansion of officialdom even as he complained about the size and ineffectiveness of this ever-growing group of money-sucking clerks.
“Vasily Piskayrov, a senior official at the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General's office, has said that corrupt officials siphon off close to a third of the government's annual budget,” Forbes Magazine reported on June 6, 2008 quoting the Russian wire agency Interfax. According to Forbes: “that’s almost $120 billion, using the $376 billion set aside for 2008.” Mr. Putin likes the way the population treats him. Despite all their problems and hardships, the majority of people like him, no matter what he does. They believe in the Great Russia slogan the Tsar’s team has offered for their consumption, though the centuries have so tired them that they don’t seem to understand that they will never see it if current trends continue.
Since 2000 when Mr. Putin came to power, he was, and still is, in charge of the 6,5-million-square-mile country with a rapidly diminishing population and vast energy and mineral resources. According to the 2002 Russian Census, the population of the country was 145,166,731, and overwhelmingly concentrated in the Western European part of Russia. By 2008, the number of citizens came down to 142,008,838, based on data made public by the Russian State Statistics Service. If the pattern continues, in 60 years it will be difficult to find somebody responding in Russian to a phone call coming from Moscow to a place beyond the Ural Mountains, assuming there is a land line or cell connection.
Whatever programs were announced to overturn the situation have failed as a result of incompetence and stealing. The same fate, incidentally, befell the so-called national projects Mr. Medvedev was in charge of while he was deputy prime-minister of Russia. Centuries-long incompetence and stealing are two major problems afflicting Russian bureaucrats and the Kremlin itself. The other two, as Russian literary wisdom would have it, are “fools and roads,” a quotation attributed to various 17th- and 18th-century Russian writers.
Still, it’s good to be a King, even if your nation is shrinking in size and drowning in corruption. After me the deluge (“Apres Moi le deluge!”) Louis XVI once said sharing centuries old wisdom with present and future generations of Royal and self perceived royal colleagues in power.

http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID=1CB81AAA-7C75-4843-B443-8CEC7D6CC318
Dmitry Sidorov is the Washington D.C. Bureau Chief of Kommersant Publishing.

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Raiders of the Russian billions
Successful companies are bankrupted, sold off and their staff sacked after financial attacks by gangs who seem above the law
Luke Harding in Moscow
The Guardian,
Tuesday June 24, 2008
Article history
For 10 years Alexei Kurkov worked at a small factory in Moscow making fire-safety equipment. One morning in November 2004 he turned up to work as usual. The doors were locked.
Overnight, his company, Specialist Electrical Equipment, had been taken over. Its new owner was a mysterious firm registered in the British Virgin Islands. The owner promptly sacked all staff. The company's valuable property in Moscow was sold off.
"It was as if we had never existed," Kurkov said. "We took the case to court. But the judge said there was no proof we had worked there.
"Fictional employees had taken our place. We had been replaced by Dead Souls," he said - referring to the Nikolai Gogol novel where dead serfs are included in landowners' accounts.
Kurkov and his co-workers had fallen victim to raiders - criminal gangs who with the assistance of corrupt bureaucrats, policemen and judges have seized assets worth billions of pounds.
In the west, corporate raiders legally take over weak or struggling firms. In Russia, raiders target healthy or successful businesses - bankrupting them artificially and transferring ownership to dubious offshore shell companies.
Last week even BP's chairman Peter Sutherland used the word raiding. BP's Russian partners were trying to seize control of TNK-BP, their troubled joint venture, using dubious 1990s "corporate raiding" practices, he said.
The problem is most acute in Moscow. Raiders working with the connivance of local officials have recently bankrupted Moscow's planetarium - and are threatening two historic houses belonging to artists and sculptors.
Other acquisitions have a surreal flavour. In Kazan, raiders have attacked a firm making orthopaedic legs. And in the Siberian town of Omsk a criminal gang has tried to take over the tank factory. Victims have included river ports and nuclear science institutes.
Rule of law
Dmitry Medvedev - Russia's president - has pledged to wipe out raiding, known by Russians as reiderstvo. Medvedev, a former St Petersburg lawyer, has made it clear he wants to end bureaucratic corruption and what he calls Russia's "legal nihilism". In a speech this month, he suggested that establishing the rule of law was his most urgent task as president. "Our job is to create absolutely independent modern courts," he declared.
Questions remain about whether Medvedev can deliver judicial reform - assuming, that is, he wants to. In the Putin era, the Kremlin famously used the courts to punish its political enemies. Judges unfailingly gave the verdict the state wanted. Individuals who displeased the Kremlin found the law applied to them with pedantic vigour. Favoured defendants didn't need to turn up. What counted wasn't the law but the person it was applied to.
Analysts are sceptical that Medvedev can curb the Kremlin's meddling in judicial affairs. "Russian leaders have been talking about legal reform since the time of Ivan the Terrible," Mikhail Delyagin, the head of Moscow's Institute for Global Problems, told the Guardian. "Putin also talked repeatedly about reform, but the results were the opposite of what he declared. Maybe Medvedev will succeed. But I doubt that Putin's loyal apprentice would wish to correct his master's actions.
"We shouldn't forget that Medvedev was Putin's main lawyer. It was Medvedev who wrote the laws ramping up pressure on the opposition and who ruled out the possibility of legal opposition activity in Russia."
Experts estimate that there are 70,000 cases of raiding in Russia a year - most of them instigated by corrupt senior officials. The standard method is for a company to be hit by a large invented tax bill. The owner is then arrested. While the owner is in prison, raiders using forged documents and shareholder protocols sell the bankrupted company to another firm. By the time the owner emerges the business has been re-sold numerous times.
Yesterday one raider, speaking anonymously, said the profits from raiding were enormous. "It costs around $120,000-$170,000 [£60,000-£85,000] to bankrupt an average company. But you can then make $3-4m profit."
Typically, raiders bribe officials in Russia's equivalent of Companies' House as well as bureaucrats in the agency for property registration and the bureau of land management, he said.
"Basically raiding is robbing. The people who do it are educated and well dressed. They drive good cars. Most importantly, they have a calm head. They already have money but want more." Asked whether he felt guilty, he said: "I feel sorry for the victims."
Cops as robbers
The primary target of the raiders is property. Office rental space in central Moscow costs £1,250 a square metre a year - the second most expensive in the world after the West End of London. In extreme cases, police have been known to arrest owners and release them only after they have signed over property to raiders.
According to researchers, only a handful of cases ever make it to court - a fact that suggests the widespread complicity of law-enforcement agencies and the FSB, Russia's post-Soviet spy agency. The agency is supposed to battle economic crime.
Asked why officials did not intervene, Valeria Filimonova of Moscow's centre for political technologies said: "They are the ones who order the raiders' attacks." They included senior members of the administration, she admitted.
In a recent report, the head of the centre, Igor Bunin, went further. Illegal raids had become "the main problem afflicting the country's economy", he said. His report lists several other recent victims of raiding: Arbat Prestige - Russia's biggest cosmetics chain; an ammonia factory; and Moscow's Domodedovo airport.
Kurkov's woes did not end when his company in the south Moscow suburb of Yasenevo was taken over. The white square building surrounded by 1960s apartment blocks and children's playgrounds now belongs to an internet firm.
Kurkov joined the company in 1995, when it employed about 2,000 people. By 2004 the workforce had shrunk to 100. Its chief accountant then seized the firm with help from a gang of professional raiders, Kurkov says. She refused to pay employees their wages and failed to return their workbooks, necessary to obtain a full pension.
Kurkov and 14 colleagues went to court. But the accountant produced documents showing he had never worked there. The judge mysteriously agreed. "I don't want to say the judge was bribed," Kurkov said. "But what other conclusion could I come to?"
Kurkov said that he had approached unions for help and complained to various ministries. In March, just before the presidential election, he even wrote to Medvedev. His quest for justice got nowhere. Medvedev's office wrote back telling him to get in touch with prosecutors. But prosecutors weren't interested, he said. "Nobody wanted to know. I believe Medvedev is doing his best. But I personify legal nihilism."
Now 68 and retired, Kurkov survives on 5,000 roubles (£110) a month. This is despite the fact that in Soviet times he received a hero of labour medal, for his productivity.
He estimates the shadowy raiders made off with around £15m. "This kind of injustice would have been impossible in the Soviet Union," he said. "In the Soviet Union I was somebody. Now I'm nobody."
About this article
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This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday June 24 2008 on p25 of the Financial section. It was last updated at 01:12 on June 24 2008.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/24/russia.internationalcrime/print

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Putin, Tymoshenko to meet on June 28


24/06/2008 18:18 MOSCOW, June 24 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's premier and his Ukrainian counterpart will meet in Moscow on June 28 to discuss energy cooperation, NATO enlargement and Russia's Black Sea Fleet, a Russian government spokesman said Tuesday.
Vladimir Putin and Yulia Tymoshenko last met in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in late May, when they announced their countries' readiness to launch talks on a strategic agreement for Russian natural gas supplies to Ukraine.
"During negotiations involving the heads of a number of ministries and departments from Russia and Ukraine, [the premiers] are expected to discuss bilateral cooperation in key areas, such as energy, transport, aircraft building, space, the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and others," the spokesman said.
"Pressing issues, concerning NATO expansion plans, will not be left out either. Certain aspects of the implementation of basic agreements on the Black Sea Fleet are also expected to be considered," he added.
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vasyl Kirilich said earlier Tuesday that Russia's Black Sea Fleet would have to leave its base in Sevastopol by May 29, 2017.
There have recently been frequent disputes between Russia and Ukraine over the lease of the Sevastopol base. Some senior Russian officials have controversially questioned the status of the port city, transferred from Russia to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet era.
Moscow also staunchly opposes Kiev's NATO membership plans. Ukraine's pro-Western leadership has been pursuing NATO membership since 2004, when President Viktor Yushchenko came to power. Ukraine failed to secure an agreement on a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP), a key step toward joining the alliance, at the organization's summit in April, but was told the decision would be reviewed in December.





Stalin meant to lure U.S. into Korean War
June 25, 2008


A U.S. veteran cries yesterday while viewing names engraved at the War Memorial in Seoul of fellow soldiers who fell during the Korean War, which broke out on June 25, 1950, 58 years ago today. [YONHAP]
WASHINGTON - The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had tried to draw the United States and China into the Korean War, according to a letter he wrote to the president of Czechoslovakia at the time, Klement Gottwald. The letter was brought to light by Kim Dong-il, a Korean history professor at Beijing University. In a paper that Kim wrote based on Stalin’s letters, he asserted that Washington’s massive aid to Western European countries after World War II under the Marshall Plan was beginning to destabilize many Eastern European countries. “Stalin needed to defuse this by diverting U.S. attention to the Korean War instead,” Kim said. “Otherwise, Russia would have spent enormous amounts of money to aid Eastern European countries in order to compete against the United States.”Stalin’s letter to Gottwald sharply contradicts the widespread belief that Stalin had vehemently opposed North Korea’s plans to wage war because he feared it would give the U.S. an excuse to gain a foothold on the Korean Peninsula. “Let’s think about the results if the U.S. government continues intervening in the Korean War and China also ends up embroiled in the Korean Peninsula,” Stalin wrote in the letter on Aug. 27, 1950, two months after the war broke out. “It will gain us time to strengthen socialism in Europe and will also benefit us in international political dynamics.” The Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950. The Soviet Union refused to vote at a United Nations Security Council session in early July of that year and as a result, UNSC member countries were able to reach a unanimous decision to send UN forces to defend South Korea. In response to a question from Gottwald about why he didn’t veto the proposal, Stalin said he intentionally abstained from voting “to help the U.S. get UN Security Council approval to send troops more easily.” By Lee Yong-jong JoongAng Ilbo [hawon@joongang.co.kr]






Russian-German Baltic gas pipeline ready by late 2011
Published: 24 Jun 08 16:17 CETOnline: http://www.thelocal.de/12685/
The Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea should be operational by late 2011, the head of German energy giant EON Ruhrgas said here Tuesday.
"The partners in the project are convinced that it will be functioning by autumn 2011," EON Ruhrgaz chief executive Bernhard Reutersberg said in an Interfax news agency report.Reutersberg acknowledged, according to Interfax, that there had been unexpected problems with the pipeline regarding clearance from transit countries, several of which have opposed the project.The Baltic states and Poland have objected to Nord Stream, concerned at being bypassed by a major Russian gas supply route to Europe, which dependsheavily on Russia for energy.The Nord Stream consortium is led by Russia's Gazprom, with 51 percent, while EON Ruhrgas and Wintershall Holding have 20 percent each and Holland's Gasunie owns nine percent.Earlier this month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel championed the project, which besides angering eastern European states has worried environmental groups."I will promote this project, which is in the interest of many countries," Merkel said after talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Berlin."I will strive to overcome all objections," she added.
AFP (news@thelocal.de)




Baltic Sea gasps for air as marine dead zones spread: WWF
by Staff WritersStockholm (AFP) June 23, 2008The World Wildlife Fund cautioned Monday that the spread of so-called marine dead zones, where nothing can survive due to lack of oxygen, could cause the Baltic Sea ecosystem to collapse.
"In the Baltic Sea, the marine dead zones could cause a total collapse of the entire ecosystem if their spread is permitted to continue," head of the WWF's Swedish branch Lasse Gustavsson said in a statement.
Ironically, marine areas are drained of life when they receive excess nutrients, mainly nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture and other runoff, that act as fertilisers and enhance plant growth.
When the excess algae and other organisms die and sink to the bottom, they are decomposed by bacteria that suck up all the available oxygen, in a process called eutrophication.
Since 1995, the number of such dead zones around the world have soared from 44 to 169, according to WWF.
Around the world last year "marine dead zones covered an area double the size of arable land in Sweden, or 70,000 square kilometres (27,000 square miles)," the group said, citing data from the World Resources Institute.
Of the world's 10 largest marine dead zones, seven are according to WWF located in the Baltic Sea, which has long been considered to be on the verge of environmental catastrophe.
The semi-enclosed Baltic, which was in 2004 designated as a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area, takes far longer than many other large bodies of water to flush out toxic and other harmful substances.
"WWF demands quick and decisive action to reduce emissions, not least from agriculture around the Baltic Sea," the statement said.
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Baltic_Sea_gasps_for_air_as_marine_dead_zones_spread_WWF_999.html



Italy's Saipem signs ¤1 billion contract with Nord Stream to lay gas pipeline under Baltic Sea
2008-06-24 11:30:08 -
ROME (AP) - Italy's Saipem said Tuesday it has signed a contract with Russian-controlled Nord Stream AG to lay a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea _ a project that has raised environmental and security concerns from several countries.Under the deal, which is worth more than 1¤ billion (US$1.55 billion), Saipem will begin laying the first line of the twin Nord Stream pipeline in early 2010 and complete it in the first half of 2011, the company said in a statement.The laying of the second line is scheduled for 2011 and 2012. Two pipe-laying vessels will be used for the job, the company said.Saipem said it is also in negotiations with Nord Stream AG, the pipeline's owner, for other contracts, including shore approaches, tie-ins, rock dumping and testing.Saipem is 43 percent owned by Italian oil and gas giant Eni SpA and is a leader in providing services and engineering to the oil and gas industry.The planned pipeline would carry gas from the northwestern Russian port of Vyborg to the northern German port of Greifswald, bypassing current land routes through Poland, Belarus and Ukraine.Though EU officials have defended the project, it has provoked strong opposition in Poland, which gets transit fees from Russian gas crossing its territory.Some other countries on the Baltic Sea worry that the pipeline poses a major risk to the environment and that Russian activity in their territorial waters could compromise military security.Nord Stream AG _ controlled by Russia's state gas monopoly OAO Gazprom _ has said the project is environmentally sound and that it has commissioned independent environmental studies.The project is a joint venture between Gazprom and German companies BASF AG and E.On AG. Dutch gas company Gasunie signed a deal to join the project with a 9 percent stake.
http://www.pr-inside.com/print660941.htm
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Latvians mark Midsummer with theater classics
WATCH VIDEO
Source: CCTV.com
06-24-2008 10:19
In virtually all cultures, Midsummer remains a special time for celebration. In northern Europe, residents of Latvia jump over bonfires and stay awake until after sunrise.
In virtually all cultures, Midsummer remains a special time forcelebration. In northern Europe, residents of Latvia jump over bonfires and stay awake until after sunrise.(Photo: CCTV.com)
There is another essential element to the festivities: the performance of a 20th century Latvian play called "Tailor Days in Silmaci". The work was written in 1902, by one of Latvia's best known playwrights and novelists, Rudolfs Blaumanis. It became the country's most widely performed play.
At a National Theatre performance in Riga each year, tickets are sold out. Hundreds of people flock through turn styles decorated for the occasion with birch-boughs. The story involves three star-crossed couples whose complicated relationships are resolved by the play's conclusion with wedding bells.
"Tailor Days in Silmaci" has been staged more than 50 times in 100 years. That makes it the most frequently performed play in Latvia's history.

Editor:Liu Fang