So Putin appeared in St. Petersburg today to meet Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atanbayev at the Konstantinovsky Palace and it seemed that the last set of hypotheses under point no. 12 I made the other day obtained -- the more-or-less normal course of things -- and not a coup, a change of leaders, or a no-show. At least not yet.
But that doesn't mean everything is ok.
As I've often explained, Kremlinology is a very tainted field. It has always been occupied by people who need to keep their visas and their access to Russia, and their access in Washington and "policy relevance." I find it hard to get people to debate freely and critically in this field because they are always hobbled by fear -- fear of ridicule, fear of lack of access, fear of seeming out of touch.
The loons who yammer on about American imperialism and whataboutism re: Kosovo or Iraq or Ferguson aren't a substitute for critical analysis -- they're a distraction. Sure, go debate those issues if you want with the Twitter trolls, but the US and Russia aren't morally equivalent because we don't have mass numbers of journalists and opposition figures killed, and our president doesn't disappear for 10 days -- to cite just two big differences. Therefore, I want to focus on examining our actual enemy here which I view as a big threat to the world not only due to invading Ukraine and threatening the Baltic states and other European states, but due to aiding and abetting Syria, Iran and other bad actors in the world.
Say, why did that North Korean foreign minister make a surprise, unscheduled visit to Moscow while Putin was missing -- and there were even said to be an arranged judo session between the two leaders?
We didn't have any independent coverage of this event today in St. Petersburg -- and it's important to keep explaining, as Leonid Bershidsky eloquently did on Bloomberg, that we are dealing with a dictatorship, and that's mean they hide information and deliberately disinform.
Because there were no reliable, independent journalists on the scene, how can we tell that the entire thing wasn't faked -- not held, or held somewhere else or taped earlier?
Of course RT.com and other Kremlin propagandists -- and Bryan McDonald was brought out for the occasion -- found Putin "healthy" as did Irina Titova at AP. This is the establishment consensus and it will then be hard to break.
But you can just compare how Putin looked on March 4 and March 5, when he was known to be taped and was looking rather tired, jowly, and with more wrinkles, and look at him today -- where he is still tired, with somewhat bruised-looking shadows under his eyes - but very taught and shiny -- even sweaty.
Here's a juxtaposition:
I think most people would surmise that he had another Botox treatment, which could tighten up his face but leave some lingering bruises -- which can take up to 10 days to go away. That's about what was available here, as Putin was gone 11 days.
He may have other things wrong with him -- his pushing hard on the table may be a sign of steadying himself or pain or distress -- and maybe the story of the Austrian spinal therapist is true.
Well, by triangulating at least among the available sources, we can more or less assure ourselves that the event took place where it was supposed to -- there's the Tass photo, the tweets from Dmitry Smirnov of Komsomolskaya Pravda, and the online pictures of Konstantinovsky.
Konstantinovsky 3D panorama online (probably not this room as the chairs are different but rugs, upholstery, wall paper all the same):
Tass:
And a live tweet camera-phone photo:
Вот как выглядит комната. Обыденно все, не так ли? pic.twitter.com/wYtO2s7b4S
— Дмитрий Смирнов (@dimsmirnov175) March 16, 2015
But here's the problem: Putin barely talked. The photo opportunity -- it can't be called a press conference -- was very brief, no questions were asked, and no statements were spoken or handed out to the press. There was just this prefabbed chatter of the sort always said during photo ops just to keep their mouths moving.
So:
1. Atambayev did a lot of the talking, he was more aggressive and his voice was louder. He took the lead in reprimanding those who gossiped about the president and said this "wasn't good" and he would tell journalists in plain Russian -- "you won't get away with this!" Will it now become a crime to insult the president in Russia as it is in some of the Central Asian countries (although not Kyrgyzstan, the most liberal.)
2. Peskov did a warm-up and an after-action chat and both he and Atambayev stressed that Putin himself had got behind the wheel and himself driven around the grounds of the palace. But wait!
a. Top officials, especially the president, do not do their own driving in Russia (or much anywhere). They are driven. The last time Putin demonstratively drove anything was a Formula 1 race car in 2010.
b. Obviously security dictates that a president can't be allowed to just drive around -- there's the risk of accidents from other cars, but even in a setting that is secluded and free of other traffic, still the risk that he might get into an accident -- in fact from lack of practice driving, as he is driven everywhere.
c. Then there's the strange optics -- which millions of Central Asians were watching, especially labor migrants for clues to their own fortunes -- of the Russian leader serving as chauffeur to the Kyrgyz. Really?
d. This may have been merely scripted by some over-eager PR apparatchik who wanted the "messaging" to be literally that "Putin is taking the wheel here" and "driving the Eurasian Union." But the chauffeur image would be indelible for many.
Add to this that Putin was already on sufferance meeting Atambayev half-way in St. Petersburg, where he came to see his daughter in university, and it's -- odd. But it's also part of the Eurasian honorifics where people out do themselves to seem more humble than the next one.
More on this in a minute, but let's look at what else happened.
3. There was no live feed. That's strange, usually there are live-feeds. Even the Donetsk Airport had a live feed -- even though it occasionally showed Russian tanks were on the road (oops). RT.com and other slavishly loyal state TV are known for airing hours and hours of Putin -- his speeches at the annual Valdai conference, his press conferences which can be hours long -- TV is saturated with him in ways that US TV is not at all saturated with camera-shy Obama. So why so live feed?
4. EurasiaNet.org reported that Kyrgyz journalists said they were not allowed to come on the trip -- it was a "working meeting" and not a "summit," they were told. Another oddity and a red flag.
In the hours before Putin appeared, as the suspense grew in St. Petersburg, some noted that Kyrgyz journalists had not been invited on the trip with Atambayev.
Asel Omurakunova, who often accompanies Atambayev on trips abroad for Bishkek’s AKIpress news agency, told EurasiaNet.org the president’s office said this trip was “a working trip not an official visit.” Interfax’s Kyrgyzstan correspondent said the local media is often invited on such trips, but not always.
“Generally the press go with Atambayev for bilateral meetings, but on this occasion they did not. That sometimes happens,” said a representative of Atambayev’s press team, in lieu of an explanation.
5. RT.com came up with only two short clips -- not a single, 10-15 minute long clip of the entire event, front to back. Why?
a. This led to a number of us, when we saw the first clip and we were live-blogging to say, but Putin isn't saying anything, he's barely whispering, it's actually quite scary, Atambayev is doing all the talking.
Putin reappeared today. The video is short. He is sweaty and does not speak.— Ben Judah (@b_judah) March 16, 2015
b. Cue in the vicious Kremlin trolls -- who have been paralyzed with fear about which way to jump in the last week and actually feel into radio silence -- who pounced and said, oh, but you're spreading lies and rumors and disinformation, why, here's this other clip (as if planned that way).
c. The other clip was not much better, because while Putin spoke in full sentences, it was also very short and he was soft-spoken and the statements were very canned.
6. Let's look at Dmitry Smirnov's feed, because for lack of anything better, this is as independent as it gets. He's from Komsomolskaya Pravda, the old Communist youth organization organ which today is technically in private hands but pro-Kremlin. Occasionally articles of theirs will be censored post-printing such as happened in their investigation (or structured leaking exercise) about Andrei Stenin's death last summer. KP is still putting up even more conspiratorial theories about Nemtsov's murder than the state media, if that's possible -- and it is. We now have Kommersant, an independent paper which in my view has gone downhill, and the state media saying there are Kadyrov Chechens who are suspects, and KP out of line saying yes, it's a Chechen, but an anti-Kadyrov pro-Kiev Chechen. Yes, this is what passes for pluralism.
KP is vicious about the war in Ukraine -- they are gung-ho pro-separatist and have two of the most famous war correspondents in the country, Kots and Steshin, constantly and tendentiously covering the fighting in the Donbass. But Dmitry has his moments, like this one, at the Minsk 2 peace talks, where he caught Putin standing alone in the palace seemingly "contemplative" and wrote "Curiously, Vladimir Putin didn't leave right away. He stood a little bit in contemplation in the center of the palace" -- as well he should, since he's responsible in this round for the deaths of more than 6000 civilians and thousands of soldiers on both sides:
Любопытно, что Владимир Путин уехал не сразу. Он постоял немного в задумчивости в центре дворца pic.twitter.com/PPLutjsYYB
— Дмитрий Смирнов (@dimsmirnov175) February 12, 2015
Now, cringe along with me as you see this sad herd of the Kremlin pool summoned into the hall for the photo opp -- they will not ask any questions -- they couldn't be there if they objected or overrode that:
Позвали прессу в зал pic.twitter.com/7tAxTKXzac
— Дмитрий Смирнов (@dimsmirnov175) March 16, 2015
Песков: Путин минут 20 катал Атамбаева на машине по Стрельне, показывал - как тут красиво
— Дмитрий Смирнов(@dimsmirnov175) March 16, 2015
Встреча Путина и Атамбаева началась pic.twitter.com/Fv9mLwy9dw
— Дмитрий Смирнов(@dimsmirnov175) March 16, 2015
Спрашивают: почему под новостью ТАСС фото, на котором у Путина другой галстук? Потому что это архивное фото, новое не успели еще, наверное
— Дмитрий Смирнов (@dimsmirnov175) March 16, 2015
@dimsmirnov175 кхм..у него и галстук -хамелеон pic.twitter.com/6rIEE1O5rz
— сурикат (@kolaresurs) March 16, 2015
Dmitry even had to fend off disbelievers on his own turf who wondered if the thing was fake once they saw the TASS photo was different (they actually had it labelled properly as a previous meeting with Atambayev in 2014, but it got lost in the re-tweeting). People asked him why Putin's tie was different.
Сегодня и кресла другие, если вы не заметили. А то фото с другой встречи. Читайте твиттер, здесь все самое свежее pic.twitter.com/Zhooy7Yjb4
— Дмитрий Смирнов (@dimsmirnov175) March 16, 2015
So looking over these tweets on his time-line, which are all the ones from the press conference, what do you notice? Answer: he never quotes Putin. Here he was in the room with him, and wouldn't you, even as a myrmidon in the Kremlin press pool, be a little excited at your chance to tweet the Big Boss at an occasion like this? Indeed, wouldn't you view it as your job?
To be sure, maybe Dima got flustered or faced the kind of things I faced trying to live-blog him and translate him as he fed these tweets out -- pages that won't load, Adobe flash errors (a special place in hell for those coders), Twitter issues, etc. But there's nothing. Nothing. In fact, there was such a lag while I was live-blogging him, that I stopped to go see a) what the rest of the pool was saying (hardly anything) and b) what other news there was. Ten minutes went by. So that's odd. And yet, as we see from these two clips, there were things to quote, right? The footage seems smooth without jumps, the patterns in the wallpaper don't change, etc. so it seems it's just a close-up where Putin talks. So why didn't it get tweeted? Eventually, that line about how "life is more interesting with gossip" got tweeted everywhere.
7. Now, aside from all the drama of Putin's absence -- which he never explained -- and the possible coup, fast or slow-moving, and fires and everything else, there's just the issue on the table, the Eurasian Union. And even without any of those other strains, that would be a handful, because, if you'll note, Kyrgyzstan isn't in the ECU. It wasn't among the founders and is only promising to join May 9 -- or so it seems.
Putin said they had to meet separately -- he fell on the word to stress it -- to go over all the issues. Atambayev spoke of issues that had "accumulated" -- which means they piled up and Moscow didn't address them.
What are those issues? Well, take a look at some of my past blogs -- I covered Central Asia for 6 years -- and you can see that I disagree that Atambayev is "the most pro-Russian of all the stans" -- because if that were true, he'd be in the ECU already. He isn't.
It used to be Russians could bully the Central Asians more. Then they acquired two other friends -- the US -- which Russia forced them to kick out (Kyrgyzstan) or we had to leave because they committed massacres (Uzbekistan) -- and China. The US is barely a factor now that troops are being withdrawn from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, China has bought up half of Central Asia, and Russia can't be too vocal about that because Russia is also selling itself off to China, as much as it isn't happy to be doing that. So it's step lightly.
There is the Manas air base where the Russians owned the fuel concession, and the other Russian base -- consider that really almost like two Russian bases although the Kyrgyz converted Manas into a civil air base. The US was kicked out of its lease on Manas.
Then there's the hydroelectric power station which Russia said it would fund, and various other things to deal with -- security, given Islamists and the fact that 1,000 militants from Osh Region alone, site of mass pogroms against the Uzbek minority, went to fight with ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
So obviously aside from any coups or anything, there was stuff to talk about -- and a deal to be made that in fact was likely a hard one, which is why Putin was playing chauffeur and also getting the advantage of talking without leaky scribes around him.
Bishkek has no objective reason to join the ECU -- and didn't -- so to join, it needs to get paid, and it's just a question what that payment is -- for a long time the Russians didn't pay their rent on the base, and Atambayev, crazy guy that he was, kept trying to get them to pay; finally Russia wrote off Kyrgyzstan's debt and finally I guess this was settled in 2012. When the US was kicked out under Russian pressure last year, Bishkek lost $60 million in rent annually, plus all the spillover business. Since then, Russia has reinforced and upgraded its military presence as it has everywhere else in the region while nobody pays attention.
Obviously the meeting was secret with not even a sanitized press release, but what would Atambayev want? One thing is visa-free entry, as Kyrgyz were forced to move to a visa regime last year -- and that's why he invoked the notion of the memory of World War II veterans who fought for the Soviet Union (Mother Russia) and who remember a day when they didn't need visas to travel to Russia because it was all one big happy Soviet Union. Won't the ECU be a kind of visa-free Schengen area? Central Asian labor migrant flows are greatly reduced due to the crash of the ruble, which made the cost of migrating and trying to support oneself and send home remittances too high. Would visa-free regimes even make a difference? It might, and it's a point of principle.
Now that we have Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and likely Kyrgyzstan -- and Egypt might be added (as Putin discussed in his recent trip), and South Ossetia might be added -- and even the "Donetsk People's Republic" or something, basically you see what he's doing here: restoring the Soviet Union.
I began to wonder idly today if the Russians would renege on the Belevezhsky treaty (that broke up the USSR) the way they have on OSCE and the Budapest Memorandum.
I also began to wonder idly if all the fuss around the army in Kaliningrad -- which is where some of the Western Military District troops are, and this special committee on Kaliningrad development with Lavrov on it will mean, well, that they will "develop" Kaliningrad...
So what's next? Well, the Soviet Union is going to have 4 of its old members re-join -- 4 out of the original 15 in the USSR, and now minus the Baltics and certainly Ukraine, which will hardly want to join, 4 out of 11.
What are these Union things for, primarily? Well, for people like Pal Palych Borodin -- who once, remarkably, was held in a Brooklyn jail cell but we let him go -- to move around people and goods and make cash.
Putin in the house https://t.co/pZdhC1IVAX
— The Interpreter (@Interpreter_Mag) March 16, 2015
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