Russian Duplicity

Sickening Conduct

Germany has confirmed that Alexei Navalny has been poisoned by a Soviet-era "nerve agent."  Navalny, of course, is (or was) one of Vlad's strongest critics. 

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the same type of Soviet-era nerve agent that British authorities identified in a 2018 attack on a former Russian spy, the German government said Wednesday.

The findings – which experts say point strongly to Russian state involvement – are likely to increase tensions between Russia and the West. German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the poisoning on Navalny attempted murder and said it was meant to silence one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics.  [Stuff, September 3, 2020]

It's well past time that the law-abiding international community ruled that Vlad's post-Soviet Russia is in actual fact a rogue state.  It will be interesting to see just how far Angela Merkel will take the issue.  Since Germany has signed up to import Russian natural gas on a grand scale our expectations of something meaningful in the way of sanctions against Vlad remain low. 

We expect that Angela will take a couple of disprins and it will be "business as usual" before lunchtime. 

Vlad's Tyrannical Corruption Likely Up On Stage Again

Russian Opposition Leader Alexei Navalny Allegedly Poisoned

John Hayward
Breitbart News

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has been frequently arrested and legally harassed for his unrelenting criticism of President Vladimir Putin, became seriously ill while flying from Siberia to moscow on Thursday and was placed on a ventilator. Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh claimed he has been poisoned.

“We assume that Alexei was poisoned with something mixed into the tea. It was the only thing that he drank in the morning. Doctors say the toxin was absorbed faster through the hot liquid,” Yarmysh said via Twitter.  The Associated Press quoted Yarmysh, who was on the plane with Navalny, saying he began to sweat profusely and asked her to keep talking to him so he could “focus on the sound of a voice.” She said he passed out while using the restroom and has not regained consciousness since.

“Looks like Putin is doing really badly – was handed some data on protest sentiment growing explosively – if he made the decision to poison Navalny,” Navalny ally Vladimir Milov said when news of his condition broke.

CNN described video footage taken aboard the plane that appeared to show 44-year-old Navalny groaning in distress, and later showed him being transported to an ambulance in a wheelchair. The plane made an emergency landing in Siberia, and Navalny is currently a patient in the acute poisoning unit of a hospital in Omsk.

The head physician of the hospital told reporters Navalny is on a ventilator and in serious condition, but stable. He said poisoning “is considered as one of the possible reasons for the deterioration of his state,” but added there could be “a number of conditions that started acutely and led to the same clinical reactions.”

According to Yarmysh, the hospital prevented Navalny’s wife Yulia from visiting him because she didn’t bring her marriage certificate and he did not consent to see her. Yarmysh sounded deeply skeptical of this explanation.

“They’re not letting her in because ‘the patient has not agreed to a visitor.’ They’re literally saying that,” she snorted. If nothing else, it seems odd to expect a comatose patient to give his consent for a visitor.  Yarmysh was also deeply skeptical of state media reports that the police think it is “not unlikely” that Navalny had an allergic reaction to something he consumed, rather than being poisoned.  “Of course. It’s just the tea was bad. This is what the state propaganda is going to do now — yell that there was no deliberate poisoning, he [did something] accidentally, he [did something] himself,” she said sarcastically on Twitter, with edits from the Associated Press. . . .

The New York Times recalled Moscow’s lamentable history of poisoning dissidents, most famously including former intelligence agents Sergei Skripal, who was attacked in the United Kingdom along with his daughter in 2018, and Alexander Litvinenko, who suffered a very messy assassination in London in 2006 that apparently involved slipping radioactive polonium into his tea.

Litivenko’s widow Marina, who now lives in Sicily, told the Associated Press it was “obvious” Navalny would “not be stopped” from exposing corruption and criticizing Putin, so “maybe they decided to do a new tactic not to stop him just with an arrest but to stop him with poison.”

In addition to mounting periodic political challenges to Putin, Navalny established an anti-corruption foundation that published highly critical reports on the Russian elite, famously including Dmitry Medvedev, who has been both prime minister and president.

Navalny’s foundation was shuttered last month after a lawsuit from Kremlin-linked businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, commonly nicknamed “Putin’s Chef” for his role in organizing state dinners. Prigozhin filed a $1.2 million suit against Navanly’s foundation for allegedly defaming one of his catering companies. Russian courts have a pronounced tendency to side with the plaintiffs in such lawsuits against Navalny. Navalny said he could never pay the penalties Prigozhin and others were seeking, so he dissolved the foundation, then vowed to recreate it under a new name and continue investigating corruption.

Fading Country

Russia: A Bleak Perspective

. . . Putin's Russia is not the Soviet Union.  The Cold War really is over.  We are not in a bipolar global order, rivalled by a tyrannical Soviet empire.  Modern Russia is a fading country.  Its first-rate weaponry, armed forces, and intelligence agencies scarcely obscure its third-rate economy, declining population, pervasive societal dysfunction (high levels of drunkenness, disease, and unemployment), and lowering life expectancy.

Behind the facade of democratic elections and constitutional restraints, Russia has less a principled system of government than a marriage or rulers, oligarchs, and organized crime.  To endure, Vladimir Putin's regime must terrorize the Russian people.  [Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, (New York: Encounter Books, 2019), p.2.]

Putin Moves to Perpetual Control

Deck Chairs on Putin's Titanic 

What are we to make of Vlad the Impaler's re-arrangement of the deck chairs on his own personal Titanic?  It is hard to get beyond the initial cynical chortling over an aging fool trying to push back Father Time.

The failure of Vlad's authoritarian rule over Russia is made evident because he clearly cannot let go.  His most recent moves underscore this yet again.  The entire Russian Government has been made to resign.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev made a startling announcement on Wednesday that he and his entire government will resign to get out of President Vladimir Putin’s way as Putin rewrites the Russian constitution.  Putin seeks to add provisions that would allow him to remain in power indefinitely, although he might still have to forfeit the title of “president.”  [John Hayward, Breitbart]

So, what game is Putin playing?

Rivers of Duplicity

Russian Security Agencies Targeting Christians

Punitive Restrictions Under New “Anti-extremism” Law

Barnabas Fund

Russian security agencies are using sweeping surveillance powers of the “Yarovaya Law”, introduced in 2016, to impose harsh restrictions on evangelical Christian groups in the name of tackling vaguely defined “extremist” activities.

The punitive law, which imposes tough fines and even potential expulsion from Russia, places heightened restrictions on religious groups including requiring an official permit to meet outside officially registered religious buildings. This, in effect, outlaws prayer and other meetings held in Christians’ homes as well as criminalising house churches.




Russian President Vladimir Putin [Image credit: kremlin.ru]

The controversial provisions of the law give security agencies access to private communications held by telecom companies including ‘phone conversations and text messages. Concerns have been raised that email and other electronic communications inviting interested individuals to church services could also be banned.

The restrictions of the "Yarovaya Law" clearly target Protestant Christian groups and activities. However, Russian Orthodox leaders have also raised alarms in the past three years over the draconian law.

Pull The Other One . . .

What's With Winston and Russia?

In New Zealand we have a senior politician--the Deputy Prime Minister in fact--who seems to have a deep attachment to Russia.  No-one is quite sure why the attachment exists, but in his role as Foreign Minister, Winston Peters endeavours to put a positive gloss on anything and everything the Russian state does.  It is puzzling.

When Russia was publicly accused of using two professional spies from its secretive GRU to attempt to assassinate two Russians in the UK, Peters played it down.  As the evidence mounted he reluctantly "got on board" with the rest of the human race and agreed that it was a bad look for Russia.  This was one horse Peters ought never to have backed.

The two GRU agents had since returned to Russia and gone to ground.  But when the formal accusations and indictments came forth from the UK, the hapless duo were paraded on Russian state TV for an interview in which they claimed they had merely been tourists in the UK.

The Daily Mail has shot holes in their clumsy story.

The Coming Dark Ages?

Can Russia Remain a Great Power?

Is its demographic predicament too large to overcome?

Marcus Roberts
Mercatornet


In the Second World War the people of the Soviet Union suffered enormously. By official counts (estimates) the number of Soviets who died was about 27 million people – an eighth of the pre-war population. Such a catastrophe continues to have effects through the decades. Fewer people after the war had fewer children, as these children grew up, they had fewer children and so on. Demographers call it a “wave” of population troughs and crests that undulate through the subsequent generations; its effects are still being felt in the successor states to the Soviet Union.

After Russia’s population stabilised at about 144 million people for about ten years (and was then boosted by the addition of over 2 million Crimeans – remember that?), it is once again shrinking as more Russians die than are born. Last year there was a decline in the number of Russian births by 11 percent. This decline in the number of births is set to continue: by 2032 the number of women in prime childbearing age is expected to decline by 28 percent from today’s figures, meaning that there will be fewer babies being born in the years ahead. Unless something drastic happens, the United Nations is expecting the Russian population to decline by 17 percent to 119 million by 2050.   

This state of demographic affairs is of concern to the newly re-elected Russian president, Vladimir Putin. As Bloomberg reports, Putin said that:

“‘Preserving the nation of Russia and the wellbeing of our citizens is the essence of everything,’ he said in his state of the nation address last month as a chart detailing the statistical “war echoes” loomed on a screen overhead. ‘Falling behind is the main threat. That’s our enemy.’”

In this speech to Parliament, Putin laid out a number of demographic and economic goals for his fourth term. These included propelling Russia into the top five economies. But he is battling some immense demographic headwinds.

The Gangster State

The Urki  Eventually Take Control


In 1956 the Soviet Union's tanks rolled into Hungary.  It was the beginning of the end for Western communism (although hard to perceive so early on).  What the invasion, the shootings, and the executions demonstrated for all to see was that Communism in the Soviet Union could continue to stumble onwards only through the power which grows out of the barrel of a gun.  The Eastern European communist states kept the faith because of the gun barrels pressed firmly to their temples.

It was a radical moment of self-realization.  Then came the unseemly spectacle of Khrushchev banging his removed shoe on the bench at the UN General Assembly.  His erratic misdirections and re-directions continued with the missile crisis in Cuba in 1963.  Supreme dictators were putting on a poor show.

Back home, statist socialism was also wearing thin.

. . . Khrushchev's more ambitious reforms failed to produce the promised food surpluses (another reason why his colleagues were to dump him in October 1964)  The cultivation of hitherto "virgin" lands in Kazakhstan and southern Siberia was especially disastrous: half a million tons of topsoil washed away each year from land that was wholly unsuited to forced grain planting, and what harvest there was frequently arrived infested with weeds.  In a tragic-comic blend of centralized planning and local corruption, Communist bosses in Kyrgyzstan urged collective farmers to meet official farm delivery quotas by buying up supplies in local shops.  There were food riots in provincial cities . . . . By January 1964, following the disastrous 1963 harvest, the USSR was reduced to importing grain from the West.  [Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage Books, 2010), p.423. Emphasis, ours.]

It's at this point that we need to make the point once more that wherever statist socialism has been applied the only growth industries have been rampant corruption and crime.  What Venezuela is going through today is normal for statist socialism wherever it has been applied. 

But, ironically, in some parts of the USSR, food production was prospering splendidly:

Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Kara-Murza

Cry The Beloved Country

[We have characterized Vladimir Putin as a step child of Vlad the Impaler.  Some readers may wonder why we would connect Putin with such a former Russian tyrant.  Hyperbole?  Well, yes.  We concede there is an element of truth to the charge.  But the following piece suggests that the comparison may well be much more apt than might first appear.  Ed]

Boris Nemtsov’s Legacy Haunts Putin’s Russia

A new documentary on the liberal opposition figure shines a light on his achievements.

By Nat Brown
National Review Online


Amidst the hundreds of Russia-related headlines saturating the current U.S. media landscape, it was almost inevitable that a small but significant one of them would go almost unnoticed. On May 13, the U.S. Senate came one step closer to renaming the Washington, D.C., street on which the Russian embassy is located after one of the Kremlin’s most vocal critics: the late Boris Nemtsov.

Nemtsov, who once served as Boris Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister and was one of the most important liberal political figures in 1990s Russia, ended his life a steadfast opponent of Vladimir Putin and his authoritarian regime. On February 27, 2015, he was shot to death by a car full of assassins while walking home across a Moscow bridge mere yards away from the Kremlin.

Nemtsov’s life and work is the subject of a new documentary written and directed by Vladimir Kara-Murza, himself a well-known Kremlin critic and former adviser to Nemtsov who worked closely with him in various human-rights- and democracy-promotion efforts. With a running time of just over an hour, the film does an excellent job of deftly laying out Nemtsov’s many achievements, both as one of the principal figures of the Yeltsin era, and later as a key figure in the liberal opposition to the Putin government.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America (About Killers)

When Seared Consciences Lust for Power

The president caused a stir the other day when he told Bill O’Reilly that there are lots of killers out there, and that America is “not so innocent.” This was in response to a question about how Trump could work with Putin, in that, as O’Reilly objected, “he’s a killer.” This is quite true. He is a killer, thug, and kleptocrat. Defenders of Putin have a moral compass that, instead of pointing true north, has a needle sticking out the side in order to point to Sheol.

That answer from Trump was taken by some as mightily offensive, as though he were flattening all differences between Russia and the United States, making the two morally equivalent. This is something liberals used to do all the time in the Cold War, where they would say things like “well, sure, the Soviets have the Gulag but we must never forget that the all-you-can-eat buffet at Ruby Tuesday is out of the reach of our working poor.” Stuff like that.

But the offense that was taken to Trump’s remark had a curious religiously indignant feel to it, as though the president had just heaved a dead polecat at the high altar.  How dare he compare us in any way to the lousy Russians?

There are just a couple of points to make here, and it shouldn’t take long.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

What Shouldn’t Oughter

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

This is already a very cheerful time of the year, but the Lord apparently thought I needed to be cheered up even a little bit more, and so He very kindly arranged to have the Democrats start yelling at us over the startling news that the Russians hacked our sacred electoral processes.
Now I do need to emphasize at the outset that it is our electoral processes that are sacred. As in, America’s electoral processes. It is quite important not to make a mistake here. When it is other nation’s elections we are talking about—those very pedestrian kind of foreign elections—it is simply the case that the same kind of civic dignity and majesty are not exuded by them. It doesn’t waft off of them, the way it does off of ours. I say this merely out of a desire to use off of twice in one sentence. These are antinomian times.



This is why, for example, there is no problem with President Obama interfering with the British Brexit vote, popping up during their campaign in order to do his sanctimonious professor thing—which he admittedly does very well—so that he might inform the benighted British public that a yes vote on Brexit would have DIRE consequences.

For Want of a Nail . . .

Where is a Decent Spam Filter When It is Needed

OK.  We confess.  We find ourselves chortling with amusement over the public discomfort of the Democratic Party in the United States.  With each news cycle, the discomfort seems to get worse.  

Eventually it will pass.  One can only mourn for so long.  Eventually emotional exhaustion sets in, the stages of grief are worked through, and things begin again.  But at the moment, the cognoscenti and nobility of the Democratic Party are in the "Grinch has Stolen Christmas" phase.  [We note, in passing, that Hillary Clinton is publicly framing and pushing the mourning, eeerr, complaining--which is a sure sign that she and Bill have not given up her aspirations to the presidency.  2020-21 beckons.]

We are surprised that the public discombobulation and mourning has continued this long, but there you go.  There have been a number of scapegoats offered up by Democratic opinionistas as to why the election and the presidency was stolen from she-to-whom-it belonged-by-divine-right.  First vote counting machines were alleged to be at fault.  Then, it was the Director of the FBI.  Then it was the alt-Right.  Now, it is the Russians and Machiavellian, Vlad the Impaler Putin who allegedly hacked into the US electoral process to defame Hillary.

Now, we have no doubt that Vlad the Impaler is not to be trusted.

Will Anyone Bother to Vote?

Oh, What a Lovely Election

The upcoming US election will be interesting when one is able to assess the turnout.  Never in our lifetime have we observed an election in that country where both candidates were so strongly disliked--by their respective parties.

It is shaping up to be a Monty Python election.  It will appear as a moral tribute to democracy.  Those cautious of what democracy may produce will be muttering that the most estimable quality of the democratic system is that it produces precisely those leaders that the people deserve.

Donald Trump is so substantial he risks drowning in a puddle.

Letter From America (About The End of History And the Last Man)

Brexit and the End of International Progressive Inevitability

Whose side is history on now?

By David French
National Review Online

I’m old enough to remember when history had a side. History, you see, had chosen to progress toward an international order that de-emphasized international sovereignty, elevated a bureaucratic and technocratic elite, and sought to solve international conflict through a combination of moral and economic pressure. Nations caused wars, so nationalism (and even patriotism) had to be set aside. Democracy unleashed bigotry, so “the people” mattered mainly when they agreed with the elite.

It was a system that worked remarkably well for the international upper class. Men and women dedicated to commerce enjoyed unprecedented access to international markets. Activists dedicated to social justice could engineer their societies without ever truly facing the accountability of the ballot box. The logic of the system was self-proving. It would triumph through the sheer force of its virtue.

Unable to grasp the extent to which the new international order had endured and prospered not so much through its self-evident goodness but through the protection of American arms, it proved completely incapable of meeting the challenge when America chose to retreat.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About Vlad the Impaler)

5 Reasons for Thinking that Putin is No Constantine

By Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

The reason for this small piece is that some Western Christians, who really ought to know better, have been taken in by Russian photo ops, propaganda, and posturing, and have begun to describe Vladimir Putin as a new Constantine. It just goes to show. What, I am not sure exactly, but it does go to show.

I want to outline five reasons why I believe this is not the case, but first I want to put an important disclaimer up front. Some of my reasons below are critical of Eastern Orthodoxy, and so I want to place some important context here as a preamble. We live in a generation when not a small number of eastern Christians have been beheaded rather than deny Christ, and nothing said here should be taken as disparaging the honor of those martyrdoms. They bowed to icons more than they should have, but they have also died for the sake of Jesus Christ more times than I have. So that should be kept in mind. And second, none of my arguments should be taken as justification for continued Western apathy about the plight of such Christians in the Middle East. What we should do about it is a subject for another time, but what we should not do is continue to not care.

That said, why is Putin not a new Constantine?

Letter From the UK (About Russia as Rogue-State)

Russia must choose between respecting the law of nations and becoming a rogue state

By Daniel Hannan 
Last updated: July 19th, 2014
The Telegraph


Lord Palmerston was our last Whig prime minister, and probably the most ebullient patriot ever to occupy 10 Downing Street. When a French Ambassador politely told him, "If I had not been born French, I should wish to have been born British," Palmerston replied, "If I had not been born British, I should wish to have been born British". On another occasion, informed by his French counterpart that the English had no word equivalent to the French word sensibilité, he snapped back: "Yes we have – humbug!"

So when, in 1858, the French government demanded restitution from Britain over a failed attempt on the life of Napoleon III by an Italian nationalist named Felice Orsini, who was said to have had support from British radicals, many expected a brusque response from the peppery 76-year-old PM: perhaps the despatch of a gunboat to the Seine to teach Frenchie better manners.

Instead, Palmerston reacted with horror to what had happened. He ordered prosecutions against the British radicals accused of having abetted Orsini, and introduced a Conspiracy to Murder Bill into Parliament. He did these things at a time when the United Kingdom was without question the world's leading power, able to enforce her will on every continent and archipelago.

Note that no one was accusing the British state, either directly or indirectly, of having been implicated in the assassination attempt. The complaint, rather, was that the authorities had not kept a proper eye on potential terrorists living under British jurisdiction. Orsini had learned how to make his bombs, and seemed to have acquired his materials, while exiled in London. The modern equivalent might be – to pluck an example from the air – turning a blind eye to the acquisition of a surface-to-air missile launcher by a paramilitary group supported by your own armed forces.

The Lusts of Vlad the Impaler

Good Luck with Finland

It has been reported that Vlad the Impaler has his eyes on restoring Russia's borders to the 1917 status quo.  In Vlad's mind, international law and treaties are null and void after that year. This, from the NZ Herald:

After annexing Crimea and with troops massed on the border of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin will not stop trying to expand Russia until he has "conquered" Belarus, the Baltic states and Finland, one of his closest former advisers has said.  According to Andrej Illarionov, the President's chief economic adviser from 2000 to 2005, Mr Putin seeks to create "historical justice" with a return to the days of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Speaking to the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Mr Illarionov warned that Russia will argue that the granting of independence to Finland in 1917 was an act of "treason against national interests".  "Putin's view is that he protects what belongs to him and his predecessors," Mr Illarionov said.  "Parts of Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and Finland are states where Putin claims to have ownership."

Let's think about Finland.

Letter from the UK (About Vlad the Impaler)

 A Good News Day

In politics and government, the unintended consequences are usually the silent killer.  In this case, however, it appears the unintended consequences of Vlad the Impaler's lawless soft-war overreach into the Ukraine, with its implicit threats to Europe, is going to prove a great boon to the European Union, whilst ending up a  self-inflicted economic blow to Crazy Ivan.  Vlad will have impaled his own nation's foot with his short-guy-syndrome, tough-talk sabre-rattling. 

Vlad had calculated that Europe would be suppliant and cowering before the might of the Russian bear, since it depends upon Russia for natural gas. But . . . 
 

Vladimir Putin: Hero of the European Union

By James Delingpole  

14 Mar 2014

Breitbart Britain

Vladimir Putin's adventurism in the Ukraine has had a strange side effect: it may well have prolonged the life of his chief rival and antagonist – the European Union – by several years. (h/t Benny Peiser - Global Warming Policy Foundation)

Until Russia began rattling its sabre, the EU's economy was locked in a downward death spiral.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

President of Presidents

Posted on Saturday, September 14, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog 

I want to begin this exhortation with two qualifications. The first is that I know you have heard this point from me before. But as Paul says in Philippians, to repeat the same things over again is not a trouble to me, and it is helpful to you. Secondly, this is a word to Americans—and I know that not all of you here are Americans. You are nevertheless invited to listen in, and there are truths here that any believer may apply, making the necessary adjustments as you go.

As the recent op-ed by Vladimir Putin showed, the assumption of American exceptionalism is offensive to him. But because he is a former KGB thug, we shouldn’t really care that it is offensive to him. What we should care about is the way in which this manner of speaking might be offensive to God.