Minding Russia

What's Down on The Kremlin Troll Farm These Days

The Flying Monkeys were the foot soldiers of the Wicked Witch of the East in Wizard of Oz

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

I've been thinking in a conceptual way about how the Moscow influence operations worked in the 1960s-1980s, and how they work today -- similar, of course, but with many new affordances from the invention of social media and also the reformation and deformation of Russia itself.

Skip down to the list at the end of this post if you like and think about it more directly and quickly -- or read the back story as you wish.

We've been under attack lately by the usual low-grade trolls, more sophisticated operatives, opportunistic actors, and so on. It's not that "it's getting harder to tell them apart" -- and they encourage brand confusion -- but that maybe it doesn't matter, that function and not form should be followed. In any event, food for thought, but remember when it was more like this?

• Moscow Center - the actual employee of the KGB or GRU or state media, such as Vladimir Posner
• Agent of Influence - the emigre figure or Western journalist or UN officials they had coopted -- Victor Louis was a character like that; 
• Active Measure - the operation that Moscow Agent performed in tandem with AoI to influence media or harass you as a journalist or human rights worker
• Fellow Traveler - the socialist parties, the leftist academics who followed the Moscow line, sometimes slavishly, sometimes less so but mainly travelling along -- the word in Russian is "sputnik" as in the satellite and news agency by that name.
• Pragmatic Industrialist - this would be Armand Hammer or somebody who would sell wheat or oil or Coca Cola to the Soviets in the belief this would bring world peace dynamically on its own
• Double Agent - the person working for both sides
• Defector - a KGB agent or ballet star who defected to the U.S. or another country from the Soviet Union
• Emigre - first wave (tsarists, Whites), second wave (DPs, World War II), third wave (Jews, Baptists, Volga Germans, etc.)
• Peaceniks -- these might be already Fellow Travelers or already turned to Agents of Influence but they also included many sincere marchers for peace in Birkenstock sandals who drank green tea and sang John Lennon songs
• Exchange Students -- this was an inapt name for people like me, who studied at LGU in 1978-179 because we had no "counterparts" -- there was no "exchange" of students allowed to study as we were -- there were only officials and operatives, people like Georgy Arbatov.
• Soviet Friendship Society, Soviet Peace Committee - fake state agencies staffed by real KGB to interact with foreigners
• Kremlinologists - this was a high caste of people with visas valid to the Soviet Union who did not criticize the Soviet Union or they would ose their visas
• NGOs - human rights groups, ethnic groups like Ukrainian Self-Help groups, veterans' groups etc that might or might not take a critical role regarding the USSR - not to be confused with GONGOs, which are "government organized" entities like the Soviet Friendship Society

In other words, the roles were pretty clearly defined. There weren't some roles that were so capacious that almost anything could be meant by them. In part this is caused by the institutions themselves in Russia and even the West breaking down; in part it is due to the Internet; maybe it was the drive of inertia but there it is, it's just not so defined. That is, when was the last time you heard of a defector? It would be good if there were still defectors who would say "I have defected from this evil regime, here is my story" and people would either help with literary jobs or put them in federal protection programs or what have you. 

Today, you have these phenomen:

 

• Fourth wave -- which includes Google engineers who come to live for years on H1 visas but are still allied with Moscow and are fine with the VPK (military-industrial complex) that maybe just didn't pay them enough but might some day; students who can now  study abroad and return; relatives of people who can live abroad and return after 3 or 6 months; even businessmen who don't have to have big-picture pragmatism and money to waste on Soviet reality, but who might merely sell toner refill cartridges or something
• Rossotrudnichestvo -- the state's "cooperation" agency which is little more than the Soviet Peace Committee under Arbatov, really, but now has a way bigger budget and the ability to form or cooperate with think-tanks, committees, projects, trips, conferences, etc. Endless.
• Faux Friends -- these are people who have an institute that sounds like a Western one, like "Comparative Agricultures" or "Policy Studies" or even have a name like "Carnegie" or "an IBM sponsorship" in their set-up -- but are NOT the same as a free, independent, untrammeled institution in the West.
• Russianology or area studies or thematic studies (health) with a regional component -- now more actual research can be done in-country; now more of a range of views and theories are tolerated, but still, this field is visa-dependent and also constantly ducks to avoid being called "neo-con" or some other political career killer that might affect their university's government grants or even private grants
• Social media -- and here where the field is enormous, on steroids, a fire hose, and really, only to be controlled by Moscow Center, which has the will and the manpower and the grudges -- Westerners just don't have those things in enough amounts at any level.
• Kremlin Troll Farm -- semi-state operations by shadowy figures in Russia that do influence partly as a business, partly as a political favor that helps them in their more lucrative businesses (like Prigozhin's Defense Ministry contracts for catering, etc.)

 

There's probably more I could add to the complexities of the forces and entities at play here  -- "metasticizing Russian mafia inside the health benefits system of America" is the kind of thing I mean -- that is partly about fourth wave, which doesn't really leave Mother Russia even if it does physically by bringing its worst features and embedding them in Western life; "Londongrad" is another one of these entities of criminality. So I won't get into all that now but let me just sketch out the list of "roles" that I see played out mainly on Twitter or Facebook which make the whole Moscow Center game now so much more effective (for them) and tiring and frenetic (for us).

In the old days, a KGB agent, perhaps with the help of an Agent of Influence, could infiltrate an emigre group, get them fighting with each other, pressure somebody facing a divorce or who was an alcoholic and turn them, smear people in the newspapers with their AoI journos, and mission accomplished. They could recruit spies or pen a podval (the so-called "basement" on the bottom of the page of Pravda or Izvestiya which either denounced a certain figure or institution in the West, or carried their recantation with titles like "How My Eyes Were Opened") -- so that if you saw a name in the podval you'd know they'd be arrested or expelled or fired -- or worse. What the KGB could not do was get into your Kiwanis Club or bowling nights on Tuesdays. Now it can.

Basically, in the old model, Moscow Center couldn't really leverage the concept that there were supposed non-agents that could be decent and have those pro-Moscow views on their own -- because they didn't exist, or there were far less.

That is, either somebody was an out-and-out agent, or they were bought, like some UN official or businessman, with bribes or merely drinks or girls or whatever, blackmailed perhaps, or actually put on the payroll, or the "influence" agents were in short supply -- even if you were a peacenik or a socialist, you wouldn't want to go ride on a Volga Boat Trip in the Soviet era unless...well, wait, Bernie Sanders did that, AND actually spent his honeymoon going up the Volga with such a Ship of Fools...

But what I mean is...people didn't have the ability or capacity or couldn't get the visas (the Soviets didn't grant them) such as to go backpacking around Buryatia and get roped into a mafia/intelligence scheme by stupidity or ominously, wind up dead in the taiga -- the opportunity wasn't there. There wouldn't be someone who worked in a Citibank or a Pizza Hut in Moscow the way they would in Vienna or Tokyo who might become a witting or unwitting agent -- they didn't exist as positions. There wasn't that vast field of activity of ordinariness possible -- and there wasn't that vast ability to get into the interstices like bed bugs and stay forever and wreck havoc.

If you ran the Moscow line in the 1980s, you were an actual agent, or paid in cash or kind, or in a very lonely place in your sectarian magazine that no one found credible -- if you were honest, and few believed you were. And here I'll say there were always arguments (like about Alger Hiss) and I personally found I.F. Stone (in the 1980s before his death) to be honest and decent; I worked with him in fact-checking a number of articles, we would speak on the phone now and then, and didn't believe him ever to have been a committed Moscow agent, although the arguments that rang in Alcove 1 and Alcove 2 in the old days about this still ring in the virtual equivalents of those Alcoves today.

That is re: Stone, I'd say even if you present proof that he worked for Moscow in 1936-1938 (and you might be able to do that -- and that's terrible!) he would have atoned for his sins in the 1980s by exposing the decided incompleteness of Gorbachev's glasnost in the 1980s and by really getting it about Moscow in general.

After all, Wikipedia is accurate about the critical position he took on the Moscow purges, for example, although I think he was wrong about the Korean War. I.F. Stone's Weekly was the first blog, and a good thing for the country, in my view. The problem is that the many, many sources on what Stone really did in the 1930s when he met with Soviet press attaches and ran front groups against the Nazis aren't clear - like this accusatory one  or this exculpatory one. That is, I just never see anybody going frame by frame what the activities and positions were -- how Moscow's agenda was advanced, if they didn't pay for lunch.

To me, to have lunch with the Soviets in the 1930s, especially if you condemned the Moscow trials, was just bad judgment and maybe arrogance that you could remain above it all and unstained by this. The stricter categories for these roles are gone now -- the case for or against Izzy hinges on a defector being able to say he was a paid agent or an unpaid agent -- and that's it. It's like Alger Hiss. That is you can draw in all kinds of other evidence like "what was his position on the Moscow trials or Korea" -- but the bottom line is, it's about a former Moscow agent's word against you, take it or leave it. Today, there are no defectors whose ruling on an American figure can paralyze entire intelligence agencies for year.

Instead, there's Twitter.

The arguments about what Izzy was or wasn't will never be solved. 

But here's the thing: now everybody -- EVERYBODY -- is Izzy Stone at lunch with the Soviet press attache because EVERYBODY could accidentally retweet a Russian bot, or be influenced by a Russian operative, or get themselves tangled up in knots with some smear or Twit fight and end up with dozens of "new friends" they will never shake. 

(BTW, the thrashing given to Altman here is spot on, and exactly the problem with these apologists for the KGB, and exactly the problem we still see today in dramaticizing the role of foundations or think-tanks or grants and the unwillingness to allow civil society to be -- with freedom of association and freedom of speech. That is, I can think generally Stone's legacy can stand without calling his life's work "a KGB operation" -- ridiculous -- but I can sure condemn Altman for his smear of the people who merely tried to find facts as well they should about the vast lying machinations of the Soviets.)

SO at any event, you have to think in a more sophisticated fashion about what the job is here -- if the job in the 1960s and 1980s might be plausibly to show "who takes Moscow gold" (the Communist Party, that front socialist group) or "who was really an agent of influence" (they lunched with the Soviet press attache even if they picked up their own tab) or "who is an objective agent of Moscow" (remember that whole "objective" debate that really Lenin started), today, your job is to bypass the argumentations of that quagmire of people trying to goad you into calling them "agents of Moscow" -- when they readily can show they take no pay, have no institutional affiliation, and "came by their views honestly".

Your job is always and everywhere to show that their views are aligned with Moscow's, and Moscow's views are wrong, cruel, brutal, etc. -- let's say on the war in Syria, the war in Ukraine, and so on.

Your job is to keep saying that if they were honest, independent, socially-conscious and right-thinking their views would not align with Moscow by definition.

Your job is to keep saying, "but if you are that independent thing, why are your views aligned with Moscow's? Because they are. Why would you support bombing Syrian villages where there's no ISIS?" "Why do you think Right Sector and NATO is fighting in Ukraine when it's the regular Ukrainian army fighting Russia's GRU battalions plus "volunteers" who are really contractors in the army at best and at worst operatives of ultraright groups" and so on. 

Some people think they establish their credibility by saying "yes, those are my views, but I oppose Putin's position on gays or women". Or they say, "Yes, Russia bears the brunt of blame for Syria but the US is wrong and we should work on our own government's policies -- MISTIA is right around the corner here."

Well, your job is to show them that you don't  have credibility when you can weep for Chechen gays but not weep for Boris Nemtsov killed by Chechen soldiers run by the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. They are all part of the same phenomenon. 

So I don't pretend this is easy, or that I have even found a good working method to try to address the moral equivalency squad, especially among the Cypsters but I think the first thing is just study the types and characters and realize the complexities of the situation. And to keep saying things like this -- that if you tendentiously supported Chelsea Manning in the process of feigning to report on her "objectively", you are working for WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is an agent of influence of Moscow. So why are you defending WikiLeaks? 

So here's a chart of the roles of yesteryear, during the Cold War:

 

• Moscow Center  - this is the same old thing, Same As It Ever Was, it didn't change -- the KGB is the FSB and SVR; the GRU, it doesn't matter, it's the secret police
• Vanya or Masha at IRA - these people aren't exactly KGB agents (or FSB agents) today but something different -- they are cadres for the semi-state entities like the Internet Research Agency. They might be enthusiastic VPK types; they might be moonlighting grad students; they might be single moms with toddlers who need a job -- it's a range. Some of them defect like the old KGB defectors, but only defect to the Internet and then they get either a similar job or they fade into obscurity - there's lots more of these people than there used to be. Some of them work like an American English major might work reluctantly at an ad agency -- just wanting a job, a resume builder, hoping to get out of that creepy business; others work at the IRA with zealous, ideological enthusiasm as if they were not only a VP in an ad agency but a political campaign director.
• Active Measures- the thing they do is still the same -- lie, spread disinformation that is 90% true, distract, disrupt, denigrate, sabotage etc.
• Flying Monkeys - this is my collective term for all of them but the first wave sent out in a big operation to distract, discredit, paralyze, disrupt
• Flunkies -- these are people who work in state institutions, or even private business who feel they have to support the Kremlin for survival reasons or authentic reasons who will not fight for any space of freedom for others -- the people in this video, for example -- that is, there may be some very nice nurses or decent school teachers or skilled plumbers among the flunkies -- which is only their job by day, as by night, they may be "sobels" -- but from the perspective of the social project of how you oppose the malice and murder of the Kremlin, they are "part of the problem, not part of the solution". Still, normal relations with them building on thematic or single-interest or human commonality ties work to a point to mitigate the more awful aspects of the regime. 
• Scribes -- These are people who work for the state press, or fake independent press (an oligarch who has a license because he is Putin's crony).  Rule 1: never sit on a panel with them and never go on their media entities believing you are "helping to get the word out" about freedom or facts or anything outside their world. The only way to avoid losing the game with Scribes is never to play.
• Bots -- these are scripted entities that either tie to spam kings who just do political jobs like they would do a bank robbery or a credit card theft, or ideologically-driven types who make or buy or sell bots to perform operations to serve their own interest group -- for example, a group of Afghan veterans who support the People's Republic in Donbass and maybe work as policemen -- they're not Moscow Center at the FSB, they're just a force aligned with it that may be even more malevolent and capable of greater damage to targets precisely because they have no institutional constraints -- like Anti-Maidan. Keep in mind that you can't always tell a bot from a real person, and they play on that. So your work here is not to identify "bots" but to oppose their malevolent ideas, whether authentic or real.
• AoI - this is the Agent of Influence who is now 2.0 -- an Internet commodity, perhaps available for rent by groups even with opposite agendas, a "work for hire" type - these people are more flexible now, and have entire web sites and think tanks which I call Open Source Active Measures -- available to be used by just about anybody (like Registan or Storify) but which become suborned quickly by those with means and mind for mayhem, like RT.com journalists or Uzbek security goons.
• Cypsters - this is my contraction for Cynical Hipster especially because they "sip" a lot of alcohol in bars -- and are willing to drink with Alexander Boroday of the DNR and MH17 infamy, for example, and tweet nasties about Navalny. These are generally young men in their 20s or 30s with their first grad school or media or business or travel in Russia -- but they can occasionally be young women who work in a Soros AIDS project and then sometimes they stay five years and write for obscure lefty magazines and do fixing for real journalists for a lot of money and then maybe marry a Russian woman or man. The Cypsters believe they are Above it All and Russia and America are morally equivalent, and they have just the fact-filled nuanced 140-character version of why this true, with a meme photo ready at the hand -- that maybe actually Konstantin Rykov gave them or sent them, and from which they may not even wipe off the electronic identifiers. In their middle age, Cypsters may upgrade at best to AoIs or perhaps be revealed finally as Scribes. There is no redemption here.
• Contrarian Authoritarians - these people are more skilled, established, invested in careers but their entire world, which started with Opposing the Man, is now about providing the Critical (Marxist otherwise) stance about [fill in topic] -- always being contrarian to what they few as the stampede, the pack journalism, the benighted people who think their own country, America is superior to Russia because despite the Trump horrors it is still under the rule of law -- and that matters.. Steve Cohen is a good example of this type of character. I say "Authoritarian" about some of them because their recipe is usually to shut down free speech, accuse others of having called them "agents of Moscow" or even write their bosses and tell them they should fire people for what they said on Twitter.
• Listless Liberals -- this should be self-explanatory, and why these other characters succeed -- not enough spine, too much fear, wary of losing a visa to Moscow or being called a "neo-con" etc.
• Adjuncts -- these are people who have those low-level jobs in academe that they think should be paid more -- except then people like the semi-drug addicted unemployable, the failed businessman with a drinking problem who can at least teach business writing to feed his family, the former gentry family scion rich fallen on hard times, the new immigrant -- they have no place they can get jobs, and they should. Bloomberg is harsh on these people and tells then to get a real job. Sarah Kendzior who matches the description of a number of roles here is a big champion of adjunct rights past the point of sanity. This job exists and is low paid so that those who should be low paid can at least get that -- and really, the solution isn't "publish or perish" or "get tenure" -- which can be hard now for all kinds of reasons -- but to be willing to be a paralegal, and then either becoming a lawyer, run for office, or become a business executive or even a New York City school teacher. The need is greater there. In the Kremlin Troll battle context, the adjuncts are horrible because they are underemployed, feel no pressure to write real articles when they can tweet all day, have all the time in the world to sit at conferences and junket around at least with couch-surfing and so they never really work for a living even as they whine that they are underpaid -- they won't even paint houses. Moscow doesn't have to pay them -- New School for Social Research does.
• Granolas - these are like Peaceniks, but with better health and while they home-school or sell Amway, they might be on Twitter all day with a vengeance and they may decide the Russian bot line du jour -- hate Musk, release the memos, cheer the underdog Russian Olympians are all viable Apple Pie positions. Don't misjudge them.
• MISTIA "More In Sorrow Than in Anger" -- people who share your views, but they begin to think you are Counterproductive if you are Too Harsh in your criticism; they call for nuanced discourse; they urge dialogue; they say maybe there's another way to look at this, they view themselves as ABOVE like the Cypsters, but they may drink less, and actually be more grown-up in their fields of employment or the ability to Affect Change. The MISTIAS can include just weepy girls who think Russian cats are cute but really, it's about established professionals who think really, it's going too far to say things like "Putin should go to the Hague" and we Need to Be More Temperate In Our Language.
• Clueless Gits - these are people who wander into Twitter wars about facts and realities with no idea of where Russia is on a map, or even the next state over from the one they live in, in America. They have all kinds of totally random ideas -- did they see that thing about Russia on the Discovery Channel? No, they saw "The Americans" or somebody had a video on Facebook. They can go stampeding after the actual agents, and you can't count on them to know American civics or world history well enough to have some natural checks and balances, as you could in the 1960s. 
• Pugilists - these are people who actually fight Russian trolls or try to oppose the mayhem, from amateur civic positions, from professional positions in NGOs or institutes, from whatever,  but they become so wrapped up on it that it is easy for Moscow Center to play on their egos, vanities, insecurities, and narcissisms and just "play" them by ensuring they themselves do the splitting of groups; they themselves undermine solidarity with stubborn suspicions and so on
• PlayCops -- these are people who maybe actually worked in law-enforcement or intelligence but don't anymore. Now they play on Twitter. Or they wish to be cops someday, and play one on Twitter. At one level, Preet Bharara is a very, very good and skillful version of PlayCop that is actually a very needed thing in civil society -- a former federal prosecutor fired by Trump who takes outstanding civic positions and tries to be helpful and knowledge -- but since Obama could have fired him just as well (they are all fired when a new president comes in) it has to be seen in context. Try to grasp that this isn't an insult -- I'd vote Bharara for mayor of New York City. Yes, PlayCops when they really have a robust cop history and really know their field (Schindler) are generally vital to the Twitter discourse. The problem is that they are NOT the real thing -- and the real thing does not function. You also can't tell, if you just have a bunch of kids at John Jay School of Criminal Justice, or Moscow agents pretending to be intelligence, or prison guards in Columbus, OH when you have some nit saying he is in "law-enforcement" and begins to talk with that gabble of long, official words and colloquialisms that make up the average cop patoir. 

 

Well, I've sketched it out. Lots more to think about...

Krebs on the Russian Hacker Arrests and My Thoughts and Response

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Brian Krebs, a respected cybersecurity specialist whose blog I've read for years, has an interesting post up about the Russian hackers.

The problem I have with it is the claim that Russian media is saying these hackers leaked to American cybersecurity expects.

The Russian media hasn't said that. They've maybe quoted some people who have speculated on it but it's more of a social media thing. Like you'll see this kind of tweet:

  Арестован майор ФСБ(ОУ ЦИБ) Дмитрий Докучаев, теперь на его группу повесят все вторжения в системы в США. Отмена санкций в обмен на хакеров

— Vladimir Garnachuk (@volgaport) January 27, 2017

Translation: FSB Major (OU TsIB) Dmitry Dokuchayev has been arrested, now all the hacking into the US systems will be hung on his group. Cancellation of the sanctions in exchange for the hackers.

This is just a tweet, guys. It's not a found fact. It is not in a charging sheet or indictment or even in an investigator's statement leaked to the press. It's just someone rushing to the pessimistic conspiracy-theory conclusions that everybody rushes to in Russia because it's in Russia.

I think all such talk has to be expressed and debated and looked at. I'm not a net-nanny who says people shouldn't "rush to conclusions" and publish the  names of suspects they've heard on police radio chat during the hunt for the Boston bombers ahem. I think the only way you get to the truth with a black box like Russia and a black sack like these hacker arrests is you talk, theorize, see if things fit, see if it sticks.

But you do have to point out that there is no CONNECTION. There is nothing to TIE these people to the US.

What's interesting about Krebs is the solid information based on his professional expertise that he HAS brought to this case, for example, although he's putting it himself in the form of speculation -- and later as you see, some interesting facts he has brought about ALLEGATIONS OF an American connection:

The arrests may very well be tied to a long-running grudge held by Pavel Vrublevsky, a Russian businessman who for years paid most of the world’s top spammers and virus writers to pump malware and hundreds of billions of junk emails into U.S. inboxes.

But we don't know that Vrublyovsky - arrested and given a relatively light sentence which he served -- is going to turn around and now talk to American security researchers sympathetically about how the DNC was hacked. We don't know that he OR his hired guns at the FSB hack shop are going to do that. We just don't. The fact that Vrublyovsky has blown in Mikhailov with these accusations for his own personal reasons -- he thinks he's part of the mob that got him in jail -- can't be accepted as facts on the ground because he's not a trustworthy interlocutor as an ex-con in a mafia world with a grudge.

The first thing I thought of when I learned Vrublyovsky (I'm translating it the way it is pronounced in Russian) was a spam king -- hmm, you mean like those marketing people -- spam for some people -- that were said to be on Trump's server talking to Alfa's server? Any relation?

Krebs then goes on to tell you about King Servers, which we already knew about from the New York Times:

That report was based in part on an August 2016 alert from the FBI (PDF), and noted that most of the Internet addresses were assigned to a Russian hosting firm called King-Servers[dot]com.

But then you'd have to tie the King Servers affair to the material we have from the FSB leaks to see if it "fits".

Krebs then tells you about a statement on Chronopay's website (I had alluded to his counter-argument in one of my stories):

“The analysis of the internal data allows King Servers to confidently refute any conclusions about the involvement of the Russian special services in this attack,” Fomenko said in his statement, which credits ChronoPay for the translation. “The company also reported that the attackers still owe the company $US290 for rental services and King Servers send an invoice for the payment to Donald Trump & Vladimir Putin, as well as the company reserves the right to send it to any other person who will be accused by mass media of this attack.”

Let me put my translation:

The company King Servers, which owns the servers from which hacker attacks were made on the servers of the Democratic Party in Illinoise, have declared the absence of any "Russian trail" in the organization of this cybercrime. This company also says that the miscreants owend $290 to the company for the rental of the servers and are retaining the right to send a bill for payment to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and any other people who are accused by the media in this attack.

Krebs then writes some more interesting detail:

I mentioned Vrublevsky in that story because I knew Fomenko (a.k.a. “Die$el“) and he were longtime associates; both were prominent members of Crutop[dot]nu, a cybercrime forum that Vrublevsky (a.k.a. “Redeye“) owned and operated for years. In addition, I recognized Vrublevsky’s voice and dark humor in the statement, and thought it was interesting that Vrublevsky was inserting himself into all the alleged election-hacking drama.

That story also noted how common it was for Russian intelligence services to recruit Russian hackers who were already in prison — by commuting their sentences in exchange for helping the government hack foreign adversaries. In 2013, Vrublevsky was convicted of hiring his most-trusted spammer and malware writer to attack one of ChronoPay’s chief competitors, but he was inexplicably released a year earlier than his two-and-a-half year sentence required.

All of this is interesting and useful, but the claim that “many Russian media outlets now report the men are suspected of leaking information to Western investigators about Russian cyber intelligence operations.” They haven't said that (read everything I've done this); if there is one English-language source saying it, it's speculative.

Well, sure. Except we need to dig deeper here. Why was Vrublyovsky trying to hack and mess up a competitor? Who put him up to that? What is Asset (the rival) all about? Who is behind it? Does Aeroflot itself have any preference or payout or thing that would lead us to suspect they had a preferred payments processor? And so on.

This story can't be looked at SOLELY from the perspective of the field of cybersecurity -- although it may turn out to be about that. Hackers are not just powers in society themselves; they are hired guns for other people, maybe more than they are in the US so this might be hard to contemplate for some.

Sure, the FSB needs hackers, and so does the NSA, which is why they make poor hiring choices involving ex-cons or people like Snowden.

But really, a spam king hired by X Big Gun in Russia is hired by the FSB just because they need hackers? This is only true if the people who put him up to attacking Asset were utterly aligned with the FSB or WERE the FSB, because THEY had a business interest in having one payment system over another. SUCH an interest that they'd be willing to cause poor Aeroflot, which is now private and has had a shit-ton of its own internal problems, to lose more than a million dollars over loss of ticketing services for days. Truly, guys, that bit has to be researched because it explains MOTIVE.

The "inexplicable release" can't be ONLY explained by the FSB's need for hackers. After all, Russia is a vast country of nerds and educated programmers, and not all were fortunate enough to escape to get a job for Google or Facebook in California. Sure, they may need some very sophisticated ones. And the issue here isn't the Vrublyovsky himself sits and bangs the keyboard, what this may be about is an understanding that he comes "with" a team or at least a very clever hacker that is his gunman, and that's what the FSB wanted. We don't know. But just looking at it all from my perspective, I'm thinking the early release comes from some business interest with connections that wanted Aeroflot or Asset harmed, and had the assets in the Investigative Committee or the Federal Corrections System to spring Vrublyovsky, likely using the UDO "time off for good behavior" system. Many an "asset" has been sprung in this way; we have only to recall the former minister of defense's mistress when they were all caught in an apartment sale scam.

This bit from Krebs is interesting, just like the original story by Andrew Kramer which is VERY INTERESTING, but I need to see the guy:

Meanwhile, the malware author that Vrublevsky hired to launch the attack which later landed them both in jail told The New York Times last month that he’d also been approached while in prison by someone offering to commute his sentence if he agreed to hack for the Russian government, but that he’d refused and was forced to serve out his entire sentence.

That is, forgive me for being a tad skeptical of weepy stories that suddenly appear in the NYT at a time when we need to imagine that there are some people who might turn to helping us prove the Trump dossier is totally real.

That is, I voted for Hillary and I'm quite prepared to believe all these bad things, but I have spent a lot of time myself trying to research the Russian connection to Trump. And I don't find the smoking gun. There are many promising angles that maybe some journalist will push through to such a smoker -- and in my view, the Alfa-Trump servers story is very likely, and I utterly disbelieve Glenn Greenwald and Snopes on this -- I think Franklin Foer got it right and I'm glad he persisted to his second story.

PS just as an aside, guys. How come all the same hackers and lefty geeks and Anon script kiddies and crypto kids, as well as the lefty and liberal blog sites and media who feed off them who were blasting us all for months on end saying the Russians couldn't POSSIBLY be behind the DNC and other hacks and there was "no proof" are instantly finding a million angles to show the Trump dossier is real because an ex-con spam king says so, or because the fact of arrests of Russian hackers at/around the FSB tells us this?

Seriously, it is awfully damn strange. What are the explanations for this?

1) Russia is now working overtime through its networks of influence to get people to believe in the authenticity of the Trump dossier, because they know if they do that, they can endlessly keep busy chewing and arguing about whether Michael Cohen was really in Prague, or whether the Russian in the cybersecurity firm is in Kaspersky Lab or King Servers or WHERE, and never focus on the fact that this is a decoy, and the FBI has OTHER information, but maybe they can't close in on the suspect.

2) These people had a change of heart when Trump was really elected and the veil fell from their eyes and they now have gotten religion about Russia.

Well, alright.

The most important thing Krebs has is information we couldn't have known as it was his private knowledge he didn't relate until now:

In that conversation, Vrublevsky said he was convinced that Mikhaylov was taking information gathered by Russian government cybercrime investigators and feeding it to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies and to Zenz. Vrublevsky told me then that if ever he could prove for certain Mikhaylov was involved in leaking incriminating data on ChronoPay, he would have someone “tear him a new asshole.”

But we already know from the Russian media (leaks from the FSB and whatever) that Vrublyovsky has been trying to wriggle out of the charges against him -- which we don't know are true or not given that he is a spam king and the sort of person to hire creepy cyber thugs for his work -- that Vrublyovsky was crying the blues about how these nasty FSB men were ganging up on him.

I'm afraid to go look for who really owns Chronopay and Assets because this is likely above my pay grade as a blogger. I do recall that on railroad ticket processing apps operating on the Internet, Navalny was able to uncover a big scam from by Putin's friend Vladimir Yakovlev, former CEO of Russian Railways. So, I figure both the air ticket systems are of that nature -- big oligarchs behind them because they involve lots of cash payments that perhaps are easily not recorded and turned into slush funds or diverted offshore.

Let's do back up here, however. Why would this good, trained, solidly employed FSB agent Mikhailov, who, unlike the other people arrested didn't previously work for an FSB rival (Department K a the police) like Stoyanov, and weren't hackers forced to become FSB agents, like Dokuchayev and Anikeyev, decide he needed to blow things into the Americans. Why?

Would any pay that our probably not terribly competent spy people could offer him, or any operational cover they could offer him (obviously blown now if they were really in it), be worth it?

Obama promised the Russians that he would respond to the Russian hack of the DNC and the other bad things "in kind". Is this the blow-up of that thing? That equal things would be done to the Russians. Were they done? Did they work? Or? I remember when I read that I was worried, because I don't think intelligence under Obama is capable of that. Forgive me, but it's not just the lack of leadership and the waning of skills for 8 years, but it's just a general sense that Russian specialists don't exist in these places anymore capable of this kind of job, and these agencies are hopelessly penetrated by moles, which is why we have Snowden. I have absolutely no reason to think that other than a hunch, so maybe -- I hope -- I'm wrong. Perhaps the arrest of Mikhailov is a failed CIA operation. But for me, it's more plausible scenario to believe it's a failed operation by German Gref.

It's hard for me to believe that anybody in Eugene Kaspersky's shop would be helping American intelligence, for lots of reasons.

This theory Krebs puts forth, based on the ex-con Vrublyovsky's variant is that Mikhailov is crooked and helping the Americans. About Ruslan Stoyanov, Vrublyovsky said he is a former agent of the Interior Ministry's BSTM, which we knew, but he adds that he was "fired for who the hell knows why" and that he "took direct part in the operation with the British police on the DDoS attacks on the British casino by the group from Saratov.

Well, we need British intelligence/journalists/somebody to corroborate that there was this thing.

He says Stoyanov organized a mini-company called Indrik that had no website and it's not clear if it is even a registered company which is supposed to be involved in DDoS protection. "Kiryushen, in the last attack on Aeroflot, recommended them. Likely not without Sergei's help," i.e. Mikhailov.

You see, if these things were true, they happened on Kaspersky's clock, and then Eugene is either in on them or not. Perhaps the reason he is absolutely silent about this man's arrest is that he has nothing to do with this (or everything to do with it, but likely the former) and just will let him burn. Obviously it wouldnt' be good for his business, which relies on the FSB's good graces, to have such a hobby thing like this going on.

I still want to know how Department K's guy at Kaspersky got to hob-nob and do ops with the FSB's Mikhailov. Were they in Komsomol together? No, too young. Karate class? These are not natural allies so that means this is either a very weak place in this story or there's "a thing" we haven't seen, i.e. "another Russian". That is, Kaspersky's finally-public collaboration with the FSB on fighting cyber-crime announced in 2013 when Stoyanov was said to be hired does not explain it. It might even have been hard for the FSB to accept that Kaspersky's guy, from their rival, Department K, was someone they now had to play nice with for the sake of crime-fighting for the Motherland. I just don't know the dynamics. We need more here. The theory of the case asks us to believe these two colluded AND they had an American angle, and I'm not buying either completely.

Obviously, as much as we think of Russia as a monolith with companies and government and intelligence all intertwined, in fact it is more complicated and a harried Aeroflot official has to find some hacker-helper for his site ticketing problems like any executive in the world, and hires a private company not knowing what he gets, or even hires them but doesn't realize that even unknown to them, some guy is working some other angle.

Cyber-anarchists are the people who really run things in the world as I explained in my book three years ago. Krebs quotes Vrublyovsky's email -- my translation:

Stoyanov has an employee whom nobody knows about -- Dmitry Levashov. Levashov lived for a long time with a certain Kimberly Zenz. She in turn is the main official specialist on Russian issues for the company iDefense. Almost all negative documents about Russia (DDoS attacks on Estonia, Georgia, the mythical RBN) are signed by her.

Well, here I'd interpret Vrublyovsky as being pro-Putin, pro-FSB largely speaking and therefore not a friend to the cause of finding out who hacked the US. So I'd be careful.

What he's doing here is burning Mikhailov with the things he think he can best burn him -- contact and leaking to the Americans. He continues:

Sergei Mikhailov's main asset is the ability to look at data in wallets in the Webmoney system using the cooperation with the FSB TsIB of the latter. And they in turn in secret from the user collect an enormous collection of data on system users, and accordingly know the wallets of any ill-doer; to find him out exactly is next to elementary. It looks like Ruslan and Sergei found various "marks" who were easily turned or on whom there was a large base of evidence and through Kimberly, leaked to iDefense, so that the later turned now already for their own profit an even or a crime into one with a global international hue, and officially through US intelligence dumped to Russia, where it landed on Sergei's desk and thus often made a mountain out of a molehill; the later would defend itself elegently, and iDefense would receive incredible grants from the USA in the struggle with the Russian threat.

Well, the acidic tone of this piece, which Krebs also remarks on, and the cynical and anti-American feeling shining through, let's me know that this testimony itself is not trustworthy. Maybe Mikhailov did these things; maybe not.

I personally don't buy the theory of "large grants from the US government" as a reason for the motivation of cybersecurity companies because I think a) this isn't true for all of them at least b) things don't work here as they do as in Russia and c) it's a very primitive explanation for the motivation of professionals who aren't required to get government contracts (as they are in Russia) but can go to private companies and likely earn more.

But hey, now that we know that "the system works this way," according to Vrublyovsky, we'd have to wonder if the entire story of "brave Russian hackers leak the truth about Putin's hack of the DNC to US intelligence to save the world from Trump" in fact works this way, i.e. is fake. I guess I don't buy that narrative for a 100 reasons which I can put in another post if you don't get it.

Krebs then quotes the lady in question, Kimberly Zenz:

“It is hard for me imagine how Vrublevsky would be so powerful as to go after the people that investigated him on his own,” Zenz told KrebsOnSecurity. “Perhaps the infighting going on right now among the security forces already weakened Mikhaylov enough that Vrublevsky was able to go after him. Leaking communications or information to the US is a very extreme thing to have done. However, if it really did happen, then Mikhaylov would be very weak, which could explain how Vrublevsky would be able to go after him.”

Bingo. There is some oligarch, person, thing behind all this -- go back to that huge loss Aeroflot suffered. Aeroflot is a government company but as an "asset" it must belong to a certain clan/mafia group. More research is needed. I agree that on his own, this low-level guy who may have gotten an FSB friend to moonlight for him, wouldn't do all these other things. 

Since Zenz and all the others in this story are really basically interested in the success of their commercial field, which relies on trust, this comes next:

Nevertheless, Zenz said, the Russian government’s treason case against Mikhaylov and Stoyanov is likely to have a chilling effect on the sharing of cyber threat information among researchers and security companies, and will almost certainly create problems for Kaspersky’s image abroad.

“This really weakens the relationship between Kaspersky and the FSB,” Zenz said. “It pushes Kaspersky to formalize relations and avoid the informal cooperation upon which cybercrime investigations often rely, in Russia and globally. It is also likely to have a chilling effect on such cooperation in Russia. This makes people ask, “If I share information on an attack or malware, can I be charged with treason?’”

Andrei Soldatov said the same thing to the Guardian; others have said that the main lesson learned from this story is that all these relations between Russian/international cybersecurity firms with the FSB and their set of recruited or hired hackers are going to have to be re-negotiated.

Forgive me if I'm not staying up late worrying about their problem, and wondering if it is a good idea to date Russians if your job is to deal with security related to Russia. The reality is, this world is impossibly interbred now. The main hope of our proof for the DNC hack (or least a major source of the proof) is a Russian emigre (Dmitry Alperovsky) that you have to hope to God doesn't have a grandmother in Russia having her pension removed now, or some other form of pressure. 

No one is going to listen to my thoughts on this because I'm a crazy cat lady and not a geek but I think some may accept the premise that not every Russian citizen or emigre will be trustworthy and in that kind of situation, you have only one hope: triangulate, triangulate, triangulate with other Russians to try to get the story.

My answer to Krebs:

There isn’t any Russian media actually saying that point; I’ve covered this story pretty extensively, translating the main articles. Perhaps there’s one story in the English-language Moscow Times or something, but be specific.

I think there has been speculation on Russian social media, and comments sometimes reported by media that maybe there is some “leak to Westerners” angle on this. I was the first to report this in English and I explained the complicated way in which one *might* extract how this *might* be a swoop down by counter-intelligence to burn people who exposed Russian officials in the Trump dossier or something related to the US. That’s extrapolation from known facts, which is like lost-wax casting.

That’s because it’s Russia. We don’t know. There is no indictment, no lawyer, no weeping relatives, no human rights groups with a shred of info from other prisoners, no co-workers leaking, no neighbours talking about strange men in masks — NOTHING. ALL we have are two or three FSB agents leaking a story told from THEIR perspective.

I urge you to read through everything we’ve published to see if you can put together any other hypotheses, which are always useful.

Fourth Arrest Comes to Light in Russian Hackers’ Case
http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-update-january-28-2017/#16023

‘Hybrid Cyberwars’: Are the Russian Hackers’ Arrests About American or Internal Russian issues?
http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-up … 017/#16021

Novaya Gazeta Learns of 3rd Arrest in Hackers’ Treason Case: Is FSB Agent Major Forb the Head of Shaltai-Boltai?
http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-up … 017/#16021

Russian Hackers and FSB Agents Arrested in Moscow for ‘Treason’ on Suspicion of Leaking to US Intelligence
http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-up … 017/#16007

Top Manager of Kaspersky Laboratory and FSB Officer Arrested in ‘Treason Case,’ Kommersant Reports
http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-up … 017/#15997

Kaspersky Lab Denies Arrested Russian Cybersecurity Expert Was ‘Top Manager’; Case Related to His Previous Work
http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-up … 017/#15999

 

PS I should add in fairness that now we have the news Krebs has brought about Vrublyovsky's emails. But we already knew Vrublyovsky was fuming and busy trying to find a way to "get" the FSB people he thought had burned him. So it's just not enough until we find out more who is behind the companies, German Gref, etc.

How Garbled and Tendentious the Story of the Russian Hackers' Arrest is Getting

I'm going to park a copy of this post to Ars Technica, Snowden's old favourite haunt and a place of absolutely despicable cyber anarchists as well as reasonable, moderate and intelligent cybersecurity professionals -- not to mention thin-skinned geeky moderators like all such places -- just in case:

 

https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/01/kaspersky-labs-top-investigator-reportedly-arrested-in-treason-probe/?comments=1&start=40

What I'm astounded at here in this discussion is the entirely uncritical attitude toward Kaspersky Laboratory and apparent lack of knowledge about Kaspersky's past -- he was educated at a KGB cryptography school and worked for military intelligence. If this seems benign to some of you, then you don't realize it is not the equivalent of anything in the US whatsoever. Russia is a country where not one couple who some believe were "framed" went to the electric chair (they were both guilty as Soviet files later indicated) but tens of millions were executed or worked or starved to death with the predecessors of the people Kaspersky worked for presiding over it, and becoming victims themselves.

I don't need a recitation of Kaspersky's valiant achievements. His reporting of Stuxnet first lets you know he may have state capacity behind him.

Even if you want to put an entirely apolitical spin on it and say that Kaspersky was (now publicly) working since 2013 with the FSB (the KGB's successor) to do the good deed of catching cybercriminals who stole credit cards, there is just too much that is murky here to accept what you see at face value.

Why didn't Kaspersky sound the alarm about the arrest of his own "top manager" as Kommersant called him (which the PR of Kaspersky denies)? He's been tweeting tips on security and cat pictures for week while his colleague sat in Lefortovo. Why did he throw him under the bus? They have utterly disassociated themselves from this man who spoke at international conferences and was never disrespected before this; indeed, he worked for the FSB's rival at Department K of the MVD, and maybe that's the problem.

So little is known about the other two FSB men arrested along with Stoyanov, but truly, there isn't any hard evidence or even convincing link that they hacked the DNC or Arizona's election system or are the people named in the Trump dossier. All of that is pure speculation as various theories spun in the Russian media. LawFare doesn't have any fact to make this claim, only the opinion that people arrested in such a dramatic way may be suffering payback if the Russians thought -- after reading the Trump dossier -- that they were penetrated and had to punish the leakers instantly. I was the first to explain that theory in detail last week, but never with any indication that we have any evidence of it, indeed as we have no evidence that the Trump dossier is real, only a lot of interesting stories some of which haven't checked out but "sound" plausible.

For all we know, the Trump dossier is an FSB/GRU concoction to distract people from the real files. But when so much of this story of the arrests revolves around internal business and contract turf wars in the cybersecurity business, even with the desire we all have to find the Trump connection in anything that might expose the creepy ties to Russia, you have to find facts and not link spots on the moon. Just because Lawfare and Rachel Maddow now speculate in the way people you hated speculated only a few years ago about Russia's evil doesn't mean it's true.

I also thinks it's inappropriate to think only of this story may harm your own skin, or be "coming soon here" due to Trump, or some other nonsense. Perhaps you could have a little solidarity for your fellow geeks? At least one of them is a show-off hacker who wrote for the Russian Hacker magazine then went to work for the FSB. Is your friend Snowden any different?

Everything in the official and pro-government press -- not that this can be trusted at all -- gives a different version of the story that has to do with a 2011 case involving two rival ticket processing services online becoming embroiled in a story about how one of them hired hackers from the FSB to DDoS the other. Frankly, that sounds very plausible. It seems more likely that the result of the arrests and the media leaks is that now more attention is shed on that very dubious "collaboration" between Russian government intelligence and "private" firms that only roughly parallels what goes on in the US -- and the nature of the government matters.

Some Russians are tweeting the Putin will extradite these hackers to Trump and give them his heads saying they hacked America without his knowledge. For Putin, it will be a "limited hangout" as in the Nixon era. And Trump will give up the gun runner Victor Bout, whom even Obama would not release to the Russians.

Here are links to translations and analysis of the main media stories in the Russian press:

'Hybrid Cyberwars': Are the Russian Hackers' Arrests About American or Internal Russian issues?
http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-up ... 017/#16021


Novaya Gazeta Learns of 3rd Arrest in Hackers’ Treason Case: Is FSB Agent Major Forb the Head of Shaltai-Boltai?
http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-up ... 017/#16021


Russian Hackers and FSB Agents Arrested in Moscow for 'Treason' on Suspicion of Leaking to US Intelligence
http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-up ... 017/#16007


Top Manager of Kaspersky Laboratory and FSB Officer Arrested in 'Treason Case,' Kommersant Reports
http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-up ... 017/#15997


Kaspersky Lab Denies Arrested Russian Cybersecurity Expert Was 'Top Manager'; Case Related to His Previous Work
http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-up ... 017/#15999

 

and here

 

TechGeek wrote:

show nested quotes

There was a plot floated on the Maddow show that maybe this guy was supplying info to that MI6 agent on Trump. Keep in mind today all non elected senior officials in the State Dept were canned. There is also info that sanctions on Russia will be lifted as soon as Tillerson gets confirmed.

1) No, not all senior officials in the State Department were canned. Read Vox:
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/27/1440 ... signations

2) Everything we know about this story (see all my links and the links to the Russian originals and translations) , which comes from the FSB telling their friends at two pro-government news outlets (meaning it may or may not be true, all or in part), speaks of a case in 2011. And *Kaspersky Lab itself* speaks in their press release of the fact that the reasons the FSB arrested their colleague was related to a case that PRE-DATED his employment, which they say in their press release was in 2013. (To be sure, one paper gives another date but it could be a mistake). So you're scientists, take the only two facts that match at all in this entire blur of hypotheses and put them together: the FSB leak to Tsargrad TV saying it's the 2011 Aeroflot-related case with Vrublyovsky, and Kaspersky's press release saying it's a case that "predates his 2013 employment," i.e. therefore possibly in 2011 -- and PS not related to Trump.
All press articles, independent and state, make the point about "2011" which suggests this isn't related to Trump.

3. I found one Russian tweeting provocatively that he thought Putin would give Trump their heads and say they hacked Arizona. It strikes me that "Arizona" is the lease offensive of all the Russian hacks although the only one related to actual voting booths. That's because it's caught, and hacking voting machines is hard and even when done, not massively influencing elections. Meanwhile the DNC hack and the Trump dossier, which are social hackers, are much more destructive.

0 (0 / 0)

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All these loathsome little upvotes and downvotes quoted texts and sheer, idiotic snark -- I'm glad I don't spend as much time as I used to on those geek boards.

There's a lot one could say about Kaspersky. But one doesn't because he pressures journalists to write another more sympathetic round about his story if he doesn't like how the first round came out. There's been several such famous scandals, in Wired and in Bloomberg. Suffice it to say that the US government doesn't allow Kaspersky AVs, and I uninstalled mine years ago out of concern it may phone home. Perhaps geeks working with very sophisticated mafia/state/criminal/etc hacking/theft find that they need to have someone connected to the government like this to be effective. I'm not playing though.

Thoughts on the Trump Intel Report - It Has a Lot of Weird Things in It

So, my thoughts on this big Trump intel report leaked by BuzzFeed:

The bit about Alpha is understandable as anyone would anglicize the name that way. Barvikha *does* have dachas set aside for top officials, even if cooks and maids live there, too, as well as oligarchs.

But there are way more important oddities in this report:

o Claim that Rossotrudnichestvo, a state agency to cultivate emigres and foreigners abroad, is some kind of "parastate" agency or "cover" -- it *is* a state agency, like the Soviet Friendship Committee. So it's not very secret and wouldn't be use for a covert meeting although it's used to find agents of influence. Also, Cohen denies he was in Prague, and it's a long way to drive from Italy. Czech Republic could be asked to confirm or deny.

o Carter Page denied he met Rossneft CEO Igor Sechin (and why would someone as important as Sechin meet with a lowly maybe-advisor to Trump?). But what's odd about the claims for that meeting are that Sechin would have offered Page/Trump the 19% of shares in Rosneft that eventually went to Qatar and Glencore. It just doesn't make sense that Sechin would offer these shares to an American real estate mogul without cash for investment (it was expensive) not even in the oil business. RBC was sued by Sechin for reporting that the government warned BP, which already owns shares in Rosneft off this deal, and it was frequently rumored to be shopped to "Asians" or proxies for Rosneft/Russia itself. It just doesn't seem plausible that it could ever have been offered to Americans in any form, especially these Americans. And to get Trump onside, they wouldn't need to force him to spend money he didn't have on an oil company in Russia where he would stick out like a sore thumb.

o Most weird of all to me is the notion that presidential administration spokesman Dmitry Peskov was handed this very sensitive dossier on Trump kompromat [compromising material] to manage, and then overdid it. It makes no sense to have the PR voice of the presidential administration handling a dossier that he himself didn't publicize (unless as part of his office's job telling state media what to write and not write) and wouldn't have compiled as part of his job description in the first place. Intelligence would have done that. It's plausible that Ivanov, in the PA, as a trusted KGB crony of Putin's might have had this job "outside the usual channels," but the claim is that he was "backed by the SVR" then (not the FSB, which would have had to gather the kompromat inside Russia) and that this dossier went "from the MFA to Ivanov/SVR to Peskov". All just very weird. Intelligence just doesn't work that way. Then the claim is that Ivanov was removed from his job over this blowback. Well, interesting because it *was* sudden and nobody knows why, but really? Very bizarre. Perhaps that's the reason it is authentic -- but equally could be the reason it's fake, because the authors don't realize how the Kremlin works.

Perhaps this is a very garbled version of a story that does involve Ivanov as handling the Trump dossier. Even after he was fired, Ivanov was sent out to do spin control on the "Russia wants Trump as president" story, walking it back. That was both evidence that Ivanov was still very much in favour in the Kremlin and that the Kremlin needed to dial the story back. But the wild bungling and overplaying of hands that needed only a slight nudge to be effective -- the main message of this report -- don't add up as a Russian M.O.

o The part that has the most attention is the least substantiated, someone as important as Trump orders prostitutes who do golden showers in the presidential suite, and they all disappear and are silent after bribes? Really? Seems bizarre and meant as a red herring. Trump is very careful to surround himself with aides and lawyers that keep scandal away. We're to believe that he'd be indiscreet enough in Russia to hire prostitutes?

o The most important aspect of this report is not whether it is true or flawed but the use to which it has been put -- notably by the US intelligence community in confronting Trump and trying to get him to believe he could be compromised by the Russians. Obviously, it's easier for the IC to use a thing like this than its own real reports.

Or it could be a Russian disinformation operation of its own, as now total chaos has broken out in the media, with calls for the FBI to investigate Michael Cohen, and him saying he was in Italy, and at his son's baseball games in the US not in Prague.

o The point is, this agents' network of a figure close to British intelligence exists. That means it is available to UK intelligence which cooperates with US intelligence. The US may have its own sources or the same sources.

o The sources have very high access and that seems surprising, then, that they end up in a report that is shopped around widely like this. Because with some digging, any of them could be exposed. Who is that Russian emigre in the Trump camp? Is that Felix Satter or somebody else?

o All in all, this report "can't be unread," as a colleague put it. It will remain indelibly part of the landscape. I wonder what Russian pundits think of this theory of Ivanov and Peskov, would love to hear their assessment.

A Pretty Smart Op-Ed Piece by William Burns on Russia.

by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Here's a pretty smart op-ed piece on Russia by William Burns.

I haven't always liked everything that came from Bill Burns -- he was the implementer of the ill-advised re-set, after all, and didn't quit in protest. Finally he did leave the Administration, early, and strangely went to Carnegie. Strangely, because I thought he was more critical of Russia than that, and would be better suited somewhere else. But where? He's not so critical to be at the McCain Institute. He's a liberal, and couldn't go to Heritage or AEI. I don't know if those academic think tanks like CSIS had a place for him that was worthy of his stature. The thing is, Carnegie remains prestigious, even if it tilts to Moscow and is at times shameful, as Jamie Kirchick has aptly chronicled.

Even so, William Burns knows more about Russia than you or me. He's been there many more times, and met with much higher-up leaders. I've lived in Russia for long periods in the past, but have not been there in recent years. I've met Yeltsin, and some other top officials, but so what? That's nothing like negotiating with them, and having high-level talks with them in private. I haven't always had the luxury to spend all day, every day, studying and interacting on Russia. He has done all these things, and more, so I respect that. He's one of those experts and former officials you simply need to respect.

I still think he is too gingerly on Russia. He doesn't provide enough of a quick recipe in this piece about DETERRENCE which is the only thing that makes sense with Russia. He mentions how we have to respond to the hacking -- so I take it he approves of the expulsions, which are pretty thorough and I think warranted. We need to hear more from him on deterrence -- would he be for getting involved with this grand bargain of a "new architecture" crap the Russians are trying to foist on Europe? Hope not! I don't think so.

But here's what's smart:

o he says the US has lurched between wanting Russia as a partner to treating it as a sullen, declining power (which is what it is, and which is how it does in fact need to be treated in my view. I'm glad he's put the description "out there". I once said Russia was behaving "like a sullen teenager" when I gave a briefing to a room full of ambassadors at the UN, and while the Russian was not among them, I still felt that the Europeans didn't like that frank talk and some didn't ask me back after that. But "sullen" is how to understand it. Amb. Samantha Power, in an essay that later became a book I believe*, talked about the role of spite in understanding the Serbians. Serbians do spite even worse than Russians, but spite is big. Spite, rooted in that inferiority complex they have, is indeed what they are all about. 

o Burns is right that the US can't make up its mind and be consistent -- and this is because it becomes a political platform for each successive administration -- Putin has ensured havoc for generations to come by making pro-Kremlin policy a preserve of the right as well as the left. But Burns' caution against making friends with Russia through personal rapport and a "grand bargain" is aimed at Trump -- it won't work because there are too many other issues.

o the issues are Putin mainly, but not only, as he believes Putin has a spiteful agenda to do damage on every single issue he can't get success on -- if he can't stop the war in Syria, he will degrade the rebels and prop up Assad; if he can't keep Ukraine from turning West, he will grab Crimea and invade Donbass and so on. As Burn says:

The ultimate realist, Mr. Putin understands Russia’s relative weakness, but regularly demonstrates that declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising powers. He sees a target-rich environment all around him.

o Burns is particularly smart on Ukraine -- which is rare in a Russian hand, or rare as a positive thing, since too many are awful on Ukraine:

A third step is to stay sharply focused on Ukraine, a country whose fate will be critical to the future of Europe, and Russia, over the next generation. This is not about NATO or European Union membership, both distant aspirations. It is about helping Ukrainian leaders build the successful political system that Russia seeks to subvert.

That's an interesting take, although of course arming Ukraine would be better. But it does mean we should do more to give aid and trade to Ukraine. There's all those eggs that Andrew Kramer says don't have buyers. Couldn't some cake batter manufacturer use these? Or somebody? McDonalds?  We should be trying to help. Ukraine is the "Un-Russia". That's more important than being in NATO as a weak junior partner. What we need to show is a way for Soviet states to reform in such a way that not only are they acceptable partners to the West, they bring prosperity and security to their citizens without the Soviet ideology or economic model (which the Donbass represents).  That's a help to reformers within Russia, too, although Burns doesn't say that. I seem to recall that when he was penning or at least signing cables at the US Embassy, he wasn't very positive about the Russian opposition. 

The second step before this was "reassure our allies of a commitment to NATO". But..what? Continue the same aid for the military, even if some countries can't pay up? Of course we should.  We need more than battalions. There are already some good EU disinformation shops. But we really should have some kind of center or clearing house that examines each and every incident of Russian encroachment, near-miss, provocation etc on land, air, and sea. And Russian claims of same from NATO's side. Each time one of these things happen, I struggle to find some statement on it, it's often late in coming from the specific country involved. It would be great if some center immediately filled the air waves with the truthful story of these incidents.

There's more, but I think basically, William Burns is telling Trump not to give away the store with Russia and to keep our allies close, and that's important. He doesn't have to mention "Trump" or "Tillerson" because there are scores of Kremlinologists in his world saying the same thing as those elected or appointed leaders. So it's good he represents in fact a non-Carnegie line on this score.

Of course, he's padded these insights with lots of stuff about how we need to "respect" Russia. But he's actually also added that he has learned the hard way to do this -- as in respect that a bully in your schoolyard may knock you over, and to give him a wide berth.

This idea that we've "ignored" Russia just doesn't sit well with me because as long as I can remember (40 years plus), we've obsessed about Russia at every turn. It's never been "taken for granted" even after the coup. I don't think Obama has said anything disparaging about it. Or has he? What is that about? 

If he said Russia is a declining power, well, it is. We're learning how vicious that decline can be...

 *I recall this as a piece in the New Republic, but I don't see that among her 3 pieces in the New Republic archives -- or anywhere. To be continued....

Kremlin Turns On the Spin Cycle with Ivanov's Interview in FT

Sergei Ivanov (L), Vladimir Putin (C), Anton Vaino (R)

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Today an interview has been published in the Financial Times with Sergei Ivanov, President Vladimir Putin's former chief of staff for the last five years who was recently dismissed from this post and made "presidential special representative for transport and environment." If that sounded like he was being demoted and being literally let out to pasture, now we know that's not true -- but we knew it when we saw that he remained a permanent member of the Russian Security Council. 

Says FT:

“We are always ready for Realpolitik,” Sergei Ivanov, a member of Mr Putin’s security council, told the FT. In his first interview to international media since stepping down as presidential chief of staff in August, Mr Ivanov said the Russian leadership had been “insulted” by anti-Russian rhetoric during the US election, but counted on American pragmatism to prevail.

“We are prepared for that. We just have to wait until the end of the election campaign. We have to wait a couple more weeks, we just have to be patient.”

So the purpose of this interview is for the Kremlin, through a supposedly "less hawkish" figure, to convey three points:

1. The US has merely ratcheted up the rhetoric due to its own election campaign and this will all be over in a few weeks and Russia can then do Realpolitik sort of business with the US.
2. Russia doesn't want Trump to be president.
3. Russia didn't hack the DNC or anything else in the US to try to influence its election.

But none of these claims are true, all of them are designed to snow pundits and publics alike, and instead of nodding at them like a bunch of bobble-heads, people should be debunking these claims -- simply by recalling yesterday's newspaper, and the papers in the day before that.

One useful exercise is to see how RBC, a seasoned critic of the Kremlin, even with its wings clipped, covers this same story. Their emphasis is different, and headline is accordingly different. The FT says "Putin Aide Signals Thaw in Russia’s Ties with Next US President" whereas RBC says "Sergei Ivanov, Security Council Permanent Member, Calls Cold War 'A Fact of Life". Why does that matter? Because Ivanov's interview isn't any signalling of any thaw, but merely subterfuge, and what matters is a flat admission that there is now a Cold War. For months -- years -- the US has been saying there "isn't" a Cold War and you will find Russian figures saying the same. But that's not true. There is, and we need to plan and execute deterrence accordingly.

The first point about "ratcheting up rhetoric" is designed to make it seem as if Russia is happy to let bygones be bygones and dismiss anything said up until now -- "to do business" -- but as RBC points out, Russia feels "insulted" by this rhetoric of the US campaign, like some teen-ager with machismo who is now going to pop you one. Insulted, as if we're supposed to now...apologize. But wait. Insulted? It's not an "insult" to point out that Russia has bombed a hospital in Syria, or invaded Ukraine and killed people; this is the truth. It's not a "smear" of a nation or a people; it's calling out specific bad behavior of a leadership. It's not as if the US "makes up stuff" when it points out these facts or says some "mean thing:; it's condemning actual bad behavior. That's important to remember when the Kremlin bristles with all this umbrage -- it's fake. Perhaps they've talked themselves into thinking it's merely mean-spirited rhetoric and not actuality, but no that doesn't make it any less true.

What is this "campaign rhetoric" of which Ivanov speaks? He means Hillary Clinton's criticism of Russia -- which isn't all that strenuous, when it comes down to it, it's just not craven as Trump is. That's all. Her criticism -- even John Kerry's calling out of possible Russian war crimes -- is fact-based and real, not "rhetoric" for some "political advantage". The Kremlin can't be allowed to get away with this game that this is just "talk".

People might argue endlessly about what is "mere talk" and what is actuality, but let's look at the other two factual statements that are "verifiable" or "non-verifiable" as the logical positivists might say:

2. "Russia doesn't want Trump to be president". Nonsense. Russia just spent months and months doing everything possible to help Trump be president, by having Putin say positive things about him (and remember, he didn't say Trump was "flamboyant" or "colourful" when he called him yarkiy, misleadingly translated as "bright" (although technically not incorrect); he called him "vivid" and added that he was talented. That is not a slur or  a depiction of Trump as a clown, but actually comes from a place of Soviet-style admiration that only a former KGB can have for men they believe to be big entrepreneurs, larger than life -- oligarchs, in a word. Trump is the kind of oligarch that Putin has for his friends. Through its propaganda media at home and abroad, Russia has pumped for Trump and dumped on Hillary -- and not only by having Zhirinovsky say on both CBS and Ren-TV that she supposedly suffers from Parkinson (she does not). There are a thousand ways Russia has pushed for Trump -- most importantly by hacking the DNC and other institutions -- and to come now at the 11th hour and claim the opposite is just a bald-faced lie of the sort the Kremlin is good at telling -- because Westerners aren't always prepared to deal with leaders who lie in their face so blatantly (although they're getting more experience with Trump, perhaps). (This article being RT'd around lately [from July] seems like tabloid fare, until you read the three links that it is summarizing very starkly, all of which report Trump operatives in the tank with Putin and promoting the Kremlin line, and Trump's own dubious business deals related to Russia. This lets you know why it doesn't matter whether Trump read Sputnik cue cards or an alt-right tweet; it's all part of the same resonating tuning fork).

3. "Russia didn't hack the US and America has presented no evidence." Nonsense, through and through. Very serious pronouncements have been made by top US law-enforcement and leadership of the sort that is never made about a rival state to avoid unnecessary exacerbation. And evidence has indeed been supplied with the run-down on Fancy Bear and Cosy Bear and such (a good summary of all this is in Esquire); Leonid Volkov, the opposition activist who was skeptical about the alleged state nature of this Russia hack has now turned around and said he was wrong -- he's now said it is indeed Russian state hackers behind the hacks of the DNC and others -- and the chief way he knows is because the list of the enemies exposed -- including his own party. Basically his point is that there are very few -- none, really -- script kiddies or zero-day zeroes who are going to bother to have Parnas (his party) as an enemy such as to hack it. That's something only the FSB is going to bother with. And already has bothered with, including by hacking Leonid's phone during the Russian election campaign. (Good clue that: watch to see the people who were hacked and harassed and harried during the Russian election campaign, then note that the same list of enemies shows up related to the American hack.) Volkov's post is very important, because one of the ways in which this point about Russia's culpability has been dismissed and distracted from is by claiming that Russian dissidents, too, think the claim is fake. 

So no one should be bobbing their heads here. These are lies, and should be exposed.

For some odd reason, FT notes that Ivanov is seen as "less hawkish" than others. Really? By whom? How? Ivanov, if anything, has been seen as even more hardline than Putin and was rumored as the possible coup-meister (or one among a group of siloviki) who was going to take over when Putin disappeared -- and he himself disappeared for a time last year. There is nothing in the resume of a former KGB officer, former top Kremlin official and current PERMANENT security council member (RBC repeats that feature of his profile several times) that suggests "dove" or even "less hawkish". 

One thing people have to understand is how much Russians love Nature -- and how much Putin loves Nature and loves to place himself in its setting. Far from being a demotion, this job is a way to have Ivanov continue to do something useful and needed (Russia's terrible roads are a huge problem, too) while remaining right there in the tent. 

This is a very telling line from that FT interview:

Mr Ivanov has just swapped offices with his successor and former deputy Anton Vaino and now works just a few steps away from Mr Putin’s other deputy chiefs of staff.

This means Ivanov took the literal office room occupied by the former chief of protocol, and the current chief of protocol was put in another office, so that Ivanov is right alongside the other deputy chiefs of staff -- not in some other building far away where you would think someone with the mere title of "presidential representative of X" would sit. One rumor is that Ivanov was not in good health or at least psychologically affected, after the death of his son in a car accident, and unwilling to take on the administrative burdens of the Kremlin. Now Vaino, with his belief in the Noosphere, is assuming those burdens as more of an administrator, with lesser stature than Ivanov himself had, and Ivanov if anything is freer to play politics: hence this FT interview worthy of Surkov.

Ivanov of course always remained in the Security Council so he was never going to be just checking the status of Amur tigers in Primorye, but at the center of things.

So what does this interview mean? Nothing has changed, there is nobody different in the Kremlin, nothing about a country that is among America's major threats -- as the Defense Secretary explained -- has changed, but if anything, the US has to double down -- as he also explained -- and deter Russia's aggression.

That's not achieved by buying the latest line about "not hacking" or "not wanting Trump" or being "less of a hawk" but by dismissing this as rhetoric and watching on the ground what Russia actually does -- in the North Caucasus at home, to the opposition and critics at home, in Ukraine, and in Syria. And there aggression continues apace and is likely to for some time.

 

 

 

Sympathy for the Devil: Rustem Galitch as Lermontov's Demon in A Magical Evening of Romantic Tragedy

I was recently fortunate to attend a performance of Rustem Galitch of The Demon at Theater on St. Mark's, directed by Igor Konyukhov with set and costumes by Olga Maslova and featuring the Georgian dance troupe Pesvebi.

And that's just it -- I had expected an evening of dramatic declamation of poetry where I'd struggle to keep up (although I'm fluent in Russian) -- but I got way more than I bargained for. It turns out that Rustem's idea of a poetry reading is in fact a play, or rather a musical -- actually dramatic action with swordplay, even -- and majestic Caucasian dancing by the Pesvebi Georgian Dance Ensemble. It's quite amazing!

Those of you who know Russians and more so if you know the Russian language, you will know that unlike Americans, Russians can recite reams of poetry -- they learn to memorize it in school, but also they just know and like poetry and memorize it on their own. It's quite extraordinary to Americans who are lucky if they can struggle through even one stanza of William Allingham's The Fairies ("Up the airy mountain/down the rushy glen/We dare not go a'hunting/for fear of little men") let alone Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" ("Half a league, half a league/half a league onward/All in the valley of death/rode the six hundred.")

So Galitch has not only memorized The Demon, but memorized it to enact it as a shaped, vibrant thing together with dancers who bring it to life as an exotic force.

A strong memory for me of Joseph Brodsky in New York City is him reciting a poem in a Soho art gallery in that dramatic Russian style, proclaiming mournfully, "Proplyvayut oblaka, proplyvayut oblyka" while a throng of Brighton Beach types stood outside the gallery, gabbing and smoking. You couldn't even get in, so it meant standing outside and hearing that sad drama. ("The clouds are sailing, the clouds are sailing" which is actually translated better as "Drifting Cloud" although that happens to be an illiterate translation as a whole).

We had read Lermontov in 2nd year Russian in university, in both Russian and English, but it was Hero of Our Time and The Tale, not the Demon so I was not very familiar with it. In fact The Demon was banned in the tsar's day, and hasn't been published until recently in Russian and translated into other languages. I'm not sure what the Soviet attitude to this work was per se (A Hero of Our Time wasn't banned) but maybe it wasn't "life-affirming").

But every Russian knows this story and knows and loves Lermontov, even the Caucasians who might not appreciate Russian imperialism very much. Recently, as I wrote, a group of Russian and foreign journalists covering the outrages in Kadyrov's Chechnya were attacked by a group of Chechen thugs on the border of Chechnya and Ingushetia. Ingush police in fact came to rescue them, and as the journalists, some of them badly wounded, gave their accounts at the precinct, the policemen, apparently finding resonance in the journalists' tale with Lermontov's work, recited stanzas from The Novice (Mtsyri), finishing each other's lines (it's a tale about a young Georgian boy attacked in the mountains and captured by a Russian general, who then turns him over to monks to be raised in isolation. He tries to escape and then resigns himself to his fate; there is that same theme of embracing evil to transform it to good.

The Demon is also set in the Caucasus and involves a character who might appear in Faust, Satan himself, who broods over the craggy mountains to which he is drawn for their beauty and who is jealous of the happiness of mortals, until his eye falls on the Georgian Princess Tamara dwelling in a mountain village.

Tamara is joyfully awaiting her wedding day, oblivious to impending doom but the Demon, envious, decides to ruin it. He instigates an attack on her bridegroom who is galloping through the mountain towards his beloved and their wedding, and he kills him. The groom's horse arrives in the village with his master's lifeless body in the saddle.

Tamara, grieving and harassed by the Demon, seeks refuge in a convent. Yet the Demon convinces her to feel sorry for him, continues to seduce her and ultimately she dies in his embrace. This is a theme that has inspired a number of famous Russian paintings, such as that of Konstantin Makovsky (1889)

Theater on St. Mark's is not a huge theater although larger than La Mama it is not as large as the Public. When you first see the darkened stage and just drapes and a few boxes, you think it's going to be stark, minimalist, even.

And truly, it is like a sudden cold shower to realize instantly you are witness -- participant -- in a real human performance, where in fact mere boxes can evoke the majestic Caucasus mountains and where you come to believe you are in a real Georgian village. You realize what a mediated existence you live -- "the Society of the Spectacle" -- where you spend so many hours at the computer screen all day, only to switch to the phone screen and at best, slip a Google cardboard over the end of your phone to feel as if you are "there" in a virtual-reality film.

But you aren't there, and you are only there in the theater in the round, with the real human voice and authentic human presence and the vibrancy of human gestures and even dance. This is real.

The Georgian dance troupe Pesvebi comes in at all the right moments as if Lermontov cued them -- at first I felt puzzled by their lezginka dance as if it were "off" but I realized that's because I am most familiar with the Chechen lezginka, which is a different style that Georgians' lezginka and other dances. The costumes are gorgeous and you feel as if the choreographer must have been the Left-handed Craftsman working with this relatively small space, fitting these exotic dances and swordfights on a dime. They do not land in your laps; they might. If you have been lulled to sleep by Galitch's mellifluous poetry recitation, they will ensure that you wake up and follow the plot.

I should explain that the performance is musical although not a musical per se, quite -- on stage were two men who seemed to fit right in as village elders who happened to play the accordion and the pan-pipes, and happened to pipe up at the right emotional and dramatic moments. They are seated in the dark a bit off stage and organically blend in. Sometimes they play by themselves; sometimes they play as accompaniment to the recited poetry.

The only bit that is jarring is when other, taped music inserts into the action, at times sounding like the soundtrack to an American horror movie (well, this is a horror show!) or worse, lounge music from Atlantic City; obviously the live little band at stage right is more authentic. But here's the thing. Once you've made a decision to have a musical performance, you have to "go the whole hog and pay the postage," as Gurdjieff's Beezlebub once said to his grandson (he must have read The Demon). You can't have mournful folk tunes when Tamara is weeping in the graveyard but then have no music at all for other dramatic scenes when the folk instruments don't quite fit. So that accounts for a music track -- and well, it is what it is. Mostly the music doesn't call attention to itself and is the tone for the poem -- but occasionally it does.

Alex Condie Stephen, a 19th century translator of Lermontov writes of the "quaint complication and musical flow" of Lermontov's language -- and that is exactly what Rustem Galitch is so talented at capturing and why the decision to put it to music and dance fits. Here's a video of him performing a section from The Demon in 2010:

 

You will feel as if Russian is almost turning into Italian in its cadences -- the extraordinary breadth of Galitch to perform the span of the Demon's emotions is quite something to see.

Lermontov's poem fits into a book of some 50 pages of single-spacing with spaces in between sections; Galitch performs his recitation -- his embodiment, I should say -- in 90 minutes without an intermission. You couldn't possibly have one, as  it is too gripping.

It's an odd concept in Western culture -- sympathy for the devil, the subject of a famous Rolling Stones song but of course there was Faust and Mephistophles before that which are cautionary tales, not macabre love stories -- but you won't end up sympathizing too much with this soul-destroyer in the end, don't worry. 

As the 19th-century translator Stephen explains in a very helpful preface to his translation available at Internet Archive, the story is like Faust but unlike, in that it provides for the possibility of evil to be softened through love; the devil seems "only too human" but then of course unleashes his satanic destruction.  But...How could Tamara go with him?! How could she! to understand this is perhaps to understand the souls of the people of the former Soviet Union who went along with the Georgian Stalin. Perhaps it happens when there is no hope.

The theater was packed with Russians, and I think there were few Americans there - the play had a number of performances at two venues in February and May but I didn't see any reviews. To be sure, there was a translation into English during the play which was also cleverly woven into the scene. Instead of headphones -- which are ghastly in a playhouse and really ruin a show because they create cricket-like noise of the still-audible sound of the translation coming out of a hundreds of earphones -- there were wispy white words superimposed over the top of the curtain, as if they were clouds. Sitting in the back row, I couldn't make them out so well but likely it would be useful. I thought of getting a crib off the Internet from my phone while watching, but really, that would break the immersiveness.

My children, who are half-Russian, were attentive but their Russian is more fluent even than mine as they grew up bilingual. To be sure, they aren't attuned to 19th-century poetry. In fact, my daughter chanced to make the acquaintance of Rustem through an emigre theater director she knows. He then happened to press my son, who is an actor, into one of his other shows as a pinch-hitter due to another actor's absence. So I was hoping that some of the "Tsar's Russian" as I suppose you could call the equivalent of "the King's English", that Rustem speaks so elegantly, would rub off on my children, who speak a mixture of the Krivy Rog Ukrainian Russian dialect of their father and the Brighton Beach Russian with its awful Anglicisms of their grandmother and nanny. Indeed, thanks to Rustem, they began to learn some lines and new words: zvyozdy yarkiye kak ochi/"stars as bright as eyes".

Rustem has performed The Demon a number of times and seems to have some avid groupies whom I will join and try to be better prepared for the next performance.

He was born and raised in Kazan, Tatarstan, which is an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation and is predominantly Muslim. To give you an idea, Tatarstan is the last republic where the leader still demands to hold on to the title "president" which other such republics have been forced to drop under Moscow's pressure. Rusten is a graduate of the Shchepkin Academy, a theater school at the Maly Theater. He emigrated to the US in 2000 and began working for Russian American Radio RTN and NTV International as a narrator and reporter and also producing concerts and other performances. He has recently been in St. Petersburg, but in Florida, not in Russia. It's not clear if he ever goes back to his homeland.

Galitch writes that he was trained at an actors' department at Shchepkin in the art of khudozhestvennoye slovo or "artistic recitation" I guess I would translate it as, and called a "chtets" or "reader" which he calls "a dying but highly interesting genre" which he believes is still alive in America but I may not understand this correctly. It seems to me it is still alive in Russia but never was a genre here in quite the same way but maybe it was once and is coming back.

Rustem is often required to explain that he is not a relative of the famous Alexander Galitch, the poet and singer; that bard's name in fact is a pseudonym that was made up from Alexander's wife's first name Galya. (I didn't know that, but Rustem explains it). Meanwhile, Rustem says, as with many immigrants, his "American name" is a short form of his honorable old Tatar last name which is Engalychev.

And now I'll give you some translations to give you a sense of Lermontov's work and Galitch's triumph. Take a look at these three translations:

Francis Storr in 1894

O'er many a loft Caucas peak
The exile's soaring pinion rose
Below him, as with gems, Kazbek
Sparkled with everlasting snows
And Darial's opposing sides
Showed black, as when a serpent hides
Its winding coils in some dark lair

Robert Burness in 1918 in Petrograd

Now o'er Caucasian heights with pinions slow
The outcast spirit steered his course; below,
Gleamed like a diamond facet Kasbek's snow
And, in the deep-cleft gorge, where dragons hide
He saw the Darial like a serpent glide;

Alex Condie Stephen in 1875

When downwards he his course inclining
Discerns the Caucasus below
Behold! Kazbek, like a diamond shining
Beams in its wealth of endless snow,
And far beneath, in winding banks' embrace,
As in a cleft where serpents breed their race,
The waters of the Darial flow;

I think Stephen's is the best but they are all interesting. What you see is how wildly different than English can come out of what is actually a very basic, simple and even stark poem of Lermontov's in the original Russian.

Lermontov himself was a tragically romantic figure, a Russian Byron. His mother, who had married at 16, died of tuberculosis, bitter over her husband's infidelities, at the age of 21. He was separated from his father and raised by his grandmother and was himself sickly. He seems to be a decidedly unlikeable character and wasn't liked by his peers; he criticized the court and blamed them for the great Alexander Pushkin's death in a duel - he was banished to exile for this speech crime. It was in exile in the Caucasus, where he had been before with his family, that he was inspired to The Demon and his other works set in this stunning scenery. He himself was killed in a duel at the age of 27.

So out of the cult of honour and death of the tsarist era grew this enduring tale of jealousy, love -- if you could call it that -- and treachery and tragedy enough to fill centuries.

Fortunately, the entire performance was filled and uploaded to YouTube and Galitch and company do not appear to mind the copyright issues. Enjoy!

 

If nothing else, watch the last part, where Rustem looms over the stage with hands upraised.

Скала угрюмого Казбека
Добычу важно сторожит.
И вечный ропот человека
Их вечный мир не возмутит.

Stephen:

O'er all, Kazbek with gloomy rock-hewn crest
Watches his prey and frowns -- none shall molest
That greedy tyrant's spoil, nor can
Again disturb their everlasting rest
The ever during wail of man.

Storr:

Dark Kasbek guards her secret; she has peace
where slanderous whispers, tongues of malice, cease.

Burness

Kazbek's grim barrier guards for ever
The secret of its icy breast,
And busy hum of men may never
Break through their everlasting rest

Here, I think Burness is the best.

 

 

 

 

Chinese Menu for Kremlin Trolls

I get tired of answering the same things over and over to the same trolls or even new trolls let alone thoughtful and sensitive freelance journalists on Twitter who keep spouting the Kremlin line, deliberately, either cynically or out of true belief or ignorance.

I used to think that it was worth "talking over the shoulder" to even a paid Olgino cadre troll because there were "impressionable young minds" out there who might benefit from the facts and a good argument. But more and more, I don't know if that works, and in any event, I don't want to achieve this goal one tweet at a time.

Hence, my Chinese Menu of Replies to Kremlin Trolls -- which is really just a short version of a grander thing I want to do some day more generically about "Invalid Interlocutors" in general. So for now, here's my 20 points, and I'll just be using these numbers now most likely -- and you should make your own menu, too, and I'll link to yours:

Appetizers

1. Tank Rolls [Egg Rolls]

Yes, those are Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine and on the field of battle manned by separatists. No, the separatists didn't steal that T-72B1 or B3M tank from the Ukrainians in battle, it is not a "trophy". No, Ukraine doesn't manufacture them. No, it didn't even when it was part of the Soviet Union. No, Ukraine has not deployed these tanks in battle in southeastern Ukraine. No, Russia does not export these particular tanks to Ukraine or its neighbors now or has it in the future.

Seldom has any fighter shown a tank of this type after a battle as it was being "pinched"; it's generally only seen coming into Ukraine by the known routes from Russia in a convoy or before battles.

2. Noodles on Ears [Cold Sesame Noodles]

There are a number of big lies in this war told to foreigners who come as journalists, aid workers, fact-finding politicians:

-- Ukrainians deliberately shell civilians.

-- Ukrainians starve people and block aid.

-- Ukrainians are fascists.

The Ukrainian government is filled with pro-Moscow Russians, Yanukovych cadres, Party of Regions' supporters, outright Russian spies. Not a single one of these sources has ever been able to come up with a scintilla of proof that any Ukrainian unit of any kind deliberately, cynically and wantonly fired on civilians as a policy to achieve a goal either of terrorizing the population or any other motive.

In shelling the DNR, they have not pulled out the stops as the DNR itself has, with Russia's backing, and there is a simple way to prove this: look at the map.

Look at the map. Look at the map. Who gained territory? Pro-tip: not Kiev. We recommend also No. 6 on the menu!

There is no mass outbreak of polio despite claims that this could be expected or that vaccinations were blocked. In fact, the DNR blocks aid and has expelled foreign aid workers and even kidnapped and held them until forced to give them up, evidently by Moscow after  prodding by the US. They've done the same thing with the OSCE workers.

Ukrainians did not vote a single ultrarightist party into parliament as a party -- neither Right Sector or Svaboda or any other group of this nature crossed the 5% threshold needed to come into the parliament as an organized party. Only handfuls -- less than 20 seats -- are held by some of the leaders of these factions and none of them have a significant vote or bloc. That's all she wrote. The end. The fat lady has sung. Ukrainians are not fascists as a nation, have no fascistic party in government, nor policy of fascistic practices. They have corruption and human rights violations like other post-Soviet states and like even liberal democratic states. Meanwhile, there is mounting evidence of the Kremlin's own fascism and encouragement of neo-Nazi movements at home and abroad.

3. Lied Kremlin [Fried Wonton]

There's been a number of whoppers told again and again:

- That the Russian language was suppressed and was a reason for warfare -- it never was, and a planned law to make Ukrainian the state language and not have bilingualism as a policy was never about oppression of Russian  and was rescinded anyway; people speak Russian in Kiev, even; even commanders of battalions fighting for Kiev speak Russian. Total non-issue.

- That there is "genocide of the Russian people" -- no plan or intent or execution of such a notion has been indicated whatsoever, and in fact ethnic Russians and Russian speakers are also on the side of Kiev and fighting the separatists. The Kremlin's constant propaganda on this score and their opening of cases even under these charges have never produced a single fact. The preposterous charges against the Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko is evidence of how much good faith they have in actually researching their own claims: none.

Savchenko did not kill any journalists' nor serve as a spotter to get them killed; they had the poor judgement to go to a separatist-held checkpoint, embedded with the separatists, without any protective gear, and when this checkpoint -- a legitimate target of war -- was shelled, and a shell didn't go off, they were killed by shrapnel. That's what happens in war zones when you spend time in objects that are targeted. Russia has produced zero evidence that any spotting or deliberate plan to kill journalists per se, as distinct from separatists; meanwhile the defense and provided ample details on how Savchenko was kidnapped.

- That Ukraine was going to join NATO and threaten Russia's security -- it was never in the EU Association Agreement, Ukraine trained with NATO before the war and Russia didn't complain; in 2008 at the Bucharest summit of NATO, at Germany's behest, Russia was placated and Ukraine did NOT start on a path to join NATO. This shows why placating Russia doesn't work.

4. Putin Platter [Pu Pu Platter]

- Putin is the cause of the war and bears the blame for every combatant and civilian death; he is the engineer of much of the turning points of the war, whether the decision to invade and annex Crimea or sponsor the takeover of a 100 administration buildings leading to the DNR and LNR thugocracy or various invasions and offensives such as Ilovaisk He has pulled on the separatists' strings at crucial times and also pulled on the West's strings (Iran, Syria) to gain compliance.

- There are no madcap boyars running amok in semiboyarshchina; these are cadres deployed to make planned things look like chaos; they are turned on hot and cold just as the fingers of Moscow squeeze on the map on and off to take over territory.

Did I mention that you should just look at a map of Ukraine?

- Because he has controlled and implemented the war, it is natural to sanction his top officials and oligarchs. This is not "hating Russia"; it is not "Russophibia"; it is not "Cold War thinking," it's just identifying where the problem for instigation of war originates, and acting appropriately to deter it.

- No one can understand why Russia threatens a veto of a tribunal of a war crime, the downing of MH17 by Russian-backed combatants in territory they controlled, when Russia claims also it has nothing to do with these fighters or their weapon, a Buk not in the working arsenal of the UAF. If they are as uninvolved as they say, why all the agida about the tribunal?

5. Steamed Duma [Steamed Dumplings]

- The Duma is irrelevant except for the purpose of creating both state TV shows (Mizulina) and also YouTube fan channels (Zhirinovsky). It doesn't matter whether they "gave" Putin the power to wage war and "took it away." They also receive draft laws from the Kremlin administration every week to rubber-stamp. The Kremlin is where the action is.

6. Poroshenko's Territory Slices [Roast Pork Slices]

- The biggest argument against all the Russian lies about this war is to look at the maps.

HEY YOU AMERICANS WHO DON'T STUDY GEOGRAPHY CAN YOU LOOK AT THE MAPS? HINT: UKRAINE IS NEXT TO, BUT NOT THE SAME AS, RUSSIA

Here's some time-lapse maps on YouTube where you really see the true terribleness of it.

Here's the first four months:

 

Here's April to June, 2015:

 

 

Combined Russians and separatists took first 500 square kilometers after the September Minsk "ceasefire" agreement, then have gone on to take about another 250 more since February and Debaltsevo. This is salami tactics, maybe it seems to some like the Ukrainians are to blame all along the way for defending their own territory and PS not being willing to overthrow their own constitutional order to create a fake "federative" state that really means handing over sections to Russia. But when you look at the map, well, it's hard to find a need to do anything else.

The UN General Assembly -- that same creature that has more politicized resolutions on Israel than any other country even with massive war casualties, i.e. Sudan or DRC; that same creature that can condemn the US at the drop of a hat for all kinds of things real or imagined; that creature upheld Ukraine's territorial territory and voted thereby to condemn the annexation of Crimea. Russia lost; even Russia's only allies voted directly against it or abstained, costing it votes.

Here's how the bald-faced Kremlin lie works:

a. Russians/separatists advance on X town, say, Pervomaisk (the one near Popasnaya).

b. Ukrainians fight back to retain their territory.

c. Russian/separatist media scream about shelling of civilians and suffering of civilians killed or wounded, real or imagined, with houses damaged.

d. Unable to fight back with "progressive world community" pressuring on one hand, citizens on another and unable to win against a superior neighbour, Ukraine yields.

e. Russia/separatists take over yet another town. In whose hands in Pervomaisk today? Yes, the LNR (Lugank People's Republic). Look at the map. That's how it works.

f. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Soups

7. Lugansk OGA Bomb Drop [Egg Drop Soup]

- Yes, the Ukrainian army dropped a bomb from a plane on the Lugansk Regional State Administration Building (OGA) in June of last year, and yes they killed civilians including a woman who died a torturous death with her legs blown off, lying on the sidewalk pleading for help, and yes, I've seen the video many times, thank you, and no, my including of this or any other death in this parody doesn't mean disrespect for this woman or her family; your continued exploitation of her visible death is that disrespect, and you should stop that.

The death of any civilian in this war is wrong. There is nothing to indicate that the Ukrainians deliberately targeted civilians in this or other cases, real or imagined.

- Did you realize that the Lugansk OGA is a legitimate target of war? Yes, it is. War isn't illegal; war is allowed by the UN charter, but it has rules. A country may defend itself; it may shoot at targets such as buildings that armed insurgents have occupied.

Don't want to be killed in this war? Don't hang around targets  -- like checkpoints and administrative buildings of armed insurgents.

Yes, you can be killed in the seeming safety and privacy of your own little cottage, too, but that's because armed insurgents keep trying to take over territory -- not defend themselves, but take over territory which hey, they succeeded in doing.

If rebels overrun its police and administration buildings and puts Russian colonels like Strelkov or Bezler in charge, those buildings become targets of war.

- What happened before this, did you admit that? First, Russians -- yes from Russia -- and separatists overran the border guard post, killing Ukrainian border guards. They took over the border base - and the border, hell0. That's why ever since, they have been able to keep sending in tanks (hundreds) and troops (20,000, by OSCE's total admitted today); there's no border. So the OGA bombing didn't come out of thin air, wasn't a deliberate attack on civilians, and wasn't a war crime. It was a tragedy.

And BTW, it was due to that tragedy and another in Snezhnoye, where Ukraine bombed an apartment building in which 11 people died -- not long before the separatists shot down a civilian airline and killed 298 people (people forget this sequence of events!) that Ukraine hasn't waged an air war.

What preceded that apartment bombing in Snezhnoye? Oh, yes, right. First separatists came in on tanks and took over the town completely, putting armor in all the main public squares. And then shot down Ukrainian planes. So yes, Ukraine fights back, but no, there is no evidence that Kiev deliberately targeted civilians in an apartment building.

Nor Stanitsa Luganskaya, which is where separatists also took over the police station and checkpoints right next to people's homes, heedless that yes, they are legitimate targets and those people can then be struck.

Let me think. Were the separatists in Stanitsa Luganskaya protecting the Russian language which was in danger of eradication?

Note that this is not like the Korean War; it's not like Vietnam War; it's not like Libyan War. Why? Because there are no airplanes, it's all on the ground. This is because the Russians kept knocking Ukrainian planes out of the sky - and did so before the big battle at the Donetsk Airport in May 2014 where more than 40 died, most of them Russians.

Say, why are you using the tragic public death of the Lugansk woman to try to win a fight on Twitter? You don't have facts? These aren't facts you are presenting; they are war pornography. There is absolutely no evidence that the Kiev authorities deliberately planned to kill this woman or others who went to look at the list of separatists missing or dead posted at the OGA or to solve their considerable problems that have ensued since the takeover of this Soviet-like partisan force.

This building was targeted because a) Russia overrun the Ukrainian border and has held it since b) Russian-backed separatists held this building and took over Lugansk  and environs with it and Ukraine wished to seize back control of their territory.

They get to to that; it is Ukraine, not Russia. The UAF serves a legitimate, democratically elected president, unlike Putin.

Note: If Russia hadn't overrun the border, taken over a border post and killed border guards and taken over the OGA building, Ukraine wouldn't have had to do any shelling whatsoever, and that woman would be alive today.

What was the reason Russia ran the border again? Russian language oppressed, was it? Ukraine joining NATO, was it?

8. One Ton "Humanitarian" Aid [Wonton Soup]

- No one knows what is in these trucks because they are not inspected. No, the Red Cross does not endorse these trucks and never did. No, Russia does not allow inspection of each truck, as even Canada would demand of America, with appropriate paperwork, etc. So fighters can and do come on these runs as we know from their own testimony, and it is possible some war supplies and weapons also come in -- we just don't know.

No, the Moscow Red Cross head never admitted this, it was a distortion by a Ukrainian news site, and yet he never followed up on his own concern that a militarized organization -- the Emergencies Ministry -- and not a civilian body -- the Moscow Red Cross -- was handling these convoys.

If some aid gets to ordinary people, that's great, but a lot of it is stolen, too, or resold by the separatists. No, it is not true that Ukraine "blocks aid" or that Right Sector "blocks aid"; one incident on one day where Right Sector/Aidar Battalion blocked a truck of the philanthropy supported by oligarch Rinat Akhmetov's isn't "blocking aid" and "starving the Donbass" -- don't be fucking ridiculous.

Why was this truck blocked on this one day? Or maybe another truck blocked on another day? Because they felt it was feeding the separatists' directly with cigarettes, etc. in fact took another route, and while that "drama" was happening -- hyped by Amnesty and the press -- in fact Russia was sending yet another huge truck load of aid that didn't get stopped by anybody, and wouldn't, as they control the border! 

The separatists' own propaganda videos showing ample aid being distributed at the Donbass arena lets us know that Aidar didn't starve the Donbass. Generally, the separatists make people go hungry by causing war.

Thousands of Russian churches, civic groups, army veterans' groups etc are providing aid for this war. It is a seamless continuum for them to aid starving old ladies and babies along with armed militants, they make no distinction.

 

MEALS

9. Crimea Mine [Roast Pork Gat Yat Mein]

- If there was such popular will for the annexation to Russia, why were there no demonstrations on the street or NGOs or any kind of significant public movement in Crimea (or Donbass) until February 2014, where even then such demonstrations were orchestrated by Russia? Why was force needed if everybody was so willing? Why did Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars have to be forced out of this workers' vacation paradise if it was all so peaceful?

- What has happened since the annexation is as bad as the annexation itself -- if there is nothing to hide, nothing wrong, and there is all this popular will, why did all the press have to be shut down? Why Crimean Tatar TV?

10. Roast Donetsk [Roast Duck]

- What exactly did the separatists need the Donetsk Airport so badly for that they had to destroy the airport and kill many soldiers and people living near it? Would that be to militarily control territory? But hey, we thought this was a local self-management exercise and a cross-border sister-city collaboration like they have in Europe? What was this for? It's not true you "fed Kiev" as Kiev has fed this 11% of the population and has even been paying its electricity bills, whatever it's rust-belt manufacturing output was -- which is now damaged by the DNR's shelling anyway. Why was the "problem solved" by destroying this multi-million recently-renovated airport and what could possibly justify such a loss of life?

- Yes, the separatists "shoot at themselves." This has got to be one of the lamest Kremlin troll arguments on two legs that they have "no reason" to "shoot at themselves." Please.

Like Ukrainian forces, separatists accidentally kill civilians when they return fire. Separatists also attract fire when they do things like fire Grads from apartment building complexes. If they are firing at what they claim is  a Ukrainian position repeatedly (as in the apartment complex today) is this really self defense? No, it's territorial takeover. That's why the separatists have Debaltsevo  and 500 kilometers plus of territory!  They don't just "defend themselves" as the "evil junta" shoots at them; they keep encroaching outward, shooting as they go, and taking more territory. Like the DAP. And like even part of Avdeyevka.

- Yes, there is evidence that the separatists recklessly shoot near civilian areas because they are cynical and don't care. They may plan this to pin on the Ukrainians, but in fact that's not the reason for most of these incidents. The separatists have powerful weapons and positions to the east of Donetsk, for example, where they shot at the airport but also at Avdeyevka; this sometimes went astray, or hit certain regions of Donetsk because they didn't care. That this was the case is verifiable from various shelling incidents where there is no way the shells could have come from Ukrainian positions at Pesky, Avdeyevka or the DAP, but came from the separatists own positions.

Why do Kievsky and Kuibyshevsky districts keep getting shelled at? There's one reason: because not content with grabbing Donetsk and the Donetsk Airport, the separatists want to take over the suburbs of Avdeyevka and Pesky, too. There isn't any other reason. The end.

11.  No Mariupol [Chicken +with Snow Peas]

- Yes, both Russian and the separatists want to take over Mariupol; did you forget that they killed more than 30 people last January by firing Grads on Mariupol from Shirokino? Yes, Mariupol is part of the "land bridge" to Crimea. That never went away, because we still live on planet earth.

Yes, that Shirokino, which the separatists took over, and ensured now remains in a flattened state with wrecked buildings mainly devoid of people. That OSCE made them leave along with the UAF is a fiction because they pulled back a few miles and have the capacity to keep shelling it and do keep shelling it.

- The idea that the separatists won't take Mariupol or won't attempt it now doesn't mean they don't have long-term eyes on it. And it's immaterial whether there is evidence of a build-up to do this particular task;  Russians could take over other cities that could put Mariupol in a pincer or just cause havoc while they take over more little towns between Donetsk and Mariupol. Again, watch the map, not Kremlin.ru  or TASS or RIA Novosti.

12. US Mercenaries [Beef with Mixed Vegetables]

- There are no US mercenaries fighting in Ukraine. None. No, the American citizen killed fighting for Dnipro Battalion wasn't a mercenary, he was a Ukrainian=American who had lived in Ukraine for 12 years and joined as a volunteer. No, the man working as a de-miner filmed by Russian TV in Mariupol is not American, not a mercenary, and not any kind of combatant and was lied about by Russian propaganda TV. No, there are no fields strewn with black Americans who died in combat; there was an Indian student arrested and tortured by the DNR.

- No, there is no Blackwater. Did you realize they changed their name to US Training Center in 2009, and to "Academi" in 2011 by new owners, after being sold? Is your propaganda as out of date as your information?

- Again, there is absolutely no evidence of any Americans fighting for the UAF. This is a war where everyone has a camera phone out and there are hundreds of thousands of videos, VK pages, Instagram photos etc. and if there was anything like this, it would get out.

- Do you ever wonder why there are so many thousands of photos of Russian tanks only from Russia, and Russians only from Russia, made even by those Russians themselves on Facebook? Tanks, tanks, tanks! Even British pro-Kremlin reporter Graham Wilson shows us Russian tanks unwittingly in his filsm.

And not a single one of such a thing involving Americans or American weapons.

The only thing we see are Soviet-style fake plants of this story in Vzglyad, a pro-Kremlin propaganda site and other Kremlin assets. The only American we see fighting now is a Texan fighting with Givi in the DNR.

- No, the US is not arming Ukraine. Humvee gifts or MREs or bullet-proof vests are non-lethal aid, which is no secret. There are no arms coming to Ukraine via some other country. If there were, we'd see them on the battlefield. The thousands of Russians, including numerous GRU agents would have spotted and tweeted them by now, even if nobody else did!

Specialities of the House

13. Col. Strelkov's Chicken [Gen. Tso's Chicken]

- The fact that this Russian citizen who admits he was in the FSB and is also said by the EU to have been in the GRU was leading the troops until July of last year lets us know this isn't a civil war but Russian-backed separatism. The fact that he was pushed aside doesn't mean the separatists have run amok or that Putin can't control them. He sent Russians in to do the job in August in Ilovaisk and many of them were killed. He sent more Russians in to Debaltsevo. It doesn't matter if the soldiers found are contractors and have their passports with them as evidence of that status. A contracted soldier is still given orders by central Russian military command and deployed in Ukraine to wage war that leads to taking of territory.

- Strelkov did in fact authorize the VKontakte group to use his name and banner and issue his statements; indeed they issued one such authorized Strelkov report two hours before the downing of MH17 on July 17, 2014. He never disavowed this massive (currently 450,000 people) group that is a major fund-raiser and recruiter for separatists. Two notices went up on this group July 17, 2014 about downing what they thought was a Ukrainian cargo plane. Both were removed.

But it's not true that these were not authorized by Strelkov. The notices were taken from a hidden forum, Antikvariat.ru which Strelkov moderates closely and posts too frequently -- and which the moderator of this trusted VKontakte group could see -- you can't invoke the authenticity of Antikvariat and then forget to acknowledge that point. Furthermore, my research shows posts were removed from that forum, including what may well have been his first report of the downing of the plane -- and in any event he knew about these posts as he posted once and hour throughout the day and was a frequent reader and poster of this forum. It doesn't matter if he has personal social media accounts or not; he has this, and on this forum is where the news of the bragging occurred and was suspiciously removed from both this forum and VK.

-- It's not true that Russia burns, betrays, and kills operatives like Strelkov when they are finished using him. He's been in the Chechen, Bosnian, and Abkhazian wars and was involved in Transnistria as were other DNR leaders. Such people are kept for the next round and he continues to influence social media and the legion of ultranationalists that support the war.

14. No Masha Gaidar [Mu Shu Pancakes]

-- It doesn't matter if Masha Gaidar thinks Crimea was rightfully returned to Russia even if she later said it was done wrongfully. She's not being asked to run negotiations to return Crimea; she's being asked to help run Odessa, a strategic region rife with corruption as it is a sea port through which Russia sends masses of its arms for sale, which the separatists keep attacking with terrorist attacks (and here the term "terrorist" is appropriate where it is not with their conventional warfare in other settings). Masha has experience as a deputy to the government of Kirov; she is the daughter of a famous economist, Yegor Gaidar.

-- No, Masha is not an agent of the US, a tool of Western imperialism or anything except an opposition figure who rightfully criticized Putin. While it would be ideal if Poroshenko let think thanks and NGOs produce visions and consulting for his administration in the more sophisticated way of the West rather than actually putting foreigners in his administration, he's in a war for his very country and he's doing it his way, inviting known critics and even enemies of Putin to help fortify his rear which is weak in the area of corruption and management.

- Say, I know another foreign country that has sent hordes of advisors over to its neighbor to attempt to create a new country and whose nationals even serve in such high office as prime minister, commanders of troops and many other kind of officials, let alone governor of a region or deputy to a governor. Just sayin!

There is no international law violated here as it isn't against the UN covenants to go and advise foreign governments in a think tank or even as a government employee.

I never heard Russia complain when a Turkish citizen assumed a  high-ranking position in Turkmen national security nor when Dmitry Trenin who works for whomever he works for becoming an influential figure in Washington at Carnegie.  Nothing to see here, move along.

15. Russia [Happy Family]

- It is not Russophobic (if the term indeed has any meaning) to criticize Russia.

- You do not "hate Russians" if you criticize Putin's war.

- I am personally not "a Russophobe" if I have two children who are half Russian by my Russian ex-husband, Russian in-laws, and Russian friends; speak, read and write Russian fluently; spent my whole like studying Russia and translating Russia; read Russian literature and press avidly.

- Sanctions are rightly put in place to punish bad behavior in the interconnected international arena. They are not there to demolish competitors in business or to establish a "uniplolar world."

Say, about that "unipolar world." 

What country can't stop a war in which hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed? What country can't stop a war in which "only" 6,500 people have been killed? What country can't stop the annexation of other countries' territories?

Hint: Not Russia.

16. Poroshenko Done Wrong [Egg Foo Young]

- Poroshenko should not have to divest himself of his companies or wealth to serve in public office. This is a strange Soviet socialist idea that shouldn't have been imposed on him. No Western president or leader has had to do this.

-- Poroshenko has actually dealt with corruption in ways far outstripping the Greeks, getting rid of a powerful regional governor, gotten rid of the SBU and other officials,  removing police and security instantly after the Right Sector shot and killed a security guard and wounded police and civilians in Mukachevo in a tangled mess of corruption and patronage and contraband.

17. Buryats in Donbass  [Mongolian Chicken]

- Yes there are a number of highly visible Buryats fighting in Ukraine. Actually, most of the videos and pictures are of the same guy. The most famous Buryat was severely burned and gave the lie to the notion that there were "no" Russian citizens. Contractors are ordered and deployed. They aren't volunteers. Who ordered these Buryat non-volunteers into Ukraine?

18. Aleksandr Zakharchenko [Curry Shrimp]

- None of you ever make groups fanning Zakharchenko; you almost never feature him on TV or the news unless he makes a dramatic threat on Mariupol; we don't know what he did in his "fight club" all those years; he's supposed to be the indigenous leader of this not-Russian-invasion, yet...not even a t-shirt.

Why?

19. Motorola Givi [Moo Goo Gai Pan]

- Meanwhile, these two clowns were massively injected into mainstream state media and "Novorossiya" resources for months on end in every conceivable sit-com variation.

Yet now, when Strelkov says they've been fired as actors and don't even seem to be in the theater of battle, none of you have a word to say. I mean, not word one.

Why?

20. Russian-backed Separatists [Sweet and Sour Pork]

Once you ponder the previous two entries, you'll have to explain this one.

- No, there is no civil war. Before the takeover of Crimea and more than a 100 buildings in the Donbass, there were no terrorist attacks with a message of separatism; there were no mass demonstrations; there were not even any NGOs. The DNR flag showing up at Seliger a year before the "little green men" is interesting, but not a significant mass movement.

- No, there is no indigenous uprising. It was created and launched in the Kremlin. It's a hybrid war. But that doesn't mean there aren't real local fighters who think they are defending their homeland and their family, especially that one guy who is shown over and over again on Novorossiya TV. Sure there are. But where they before February 2014? Nowhere. And why are there so few of them? In fact, more have fled to Russia as refugees than have taken up arms to defend their homeland. Why? The leadership is constantly fretting about this and shaming people -- starting with a fighter who appears to be Givi in Lugansk (er, what was this fellow from Ilovaisk doing in Lugansk anyway?) and on through Strelkov's every message -- that the men are pussies and hiding behind the women on refugee buses.

If things are so swell in the DNR, why all these refugees? The separatists took over the DAP, yet the problems remained and the refugees kept fleeing.

- There is  now a massive body of data showing Russian presence in Ukraine; Cargo 200 (dead bodies returning to the motherland from the battlefield) is only the most obvious grim reminder.  Anyone who reads the daily OSCE SMM reports can't miss their reports of constant infusions of armor and people in areas where they are in training bases or staging areas.

Fortune Cookie

What does this fortune cookie say?

#RussianInvadedUkraine

Lindsay Mills, Snowden's Girlfriend Is in Moscow

by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Perhaps you've noticed that Lindsay Mills, Snowden's girlfriend, has started her LS Journey again on Flickr -- and it's public (the Instagram requires approval). See here as well, where there is more text.

From the latest pictures, I think it's fairly certain that she's in Moscow. Has she gone there for good? Does she go back and forth? Do the feds drill her when she does that? Who knows? No journalists ever show any curiosity about this because they're so mesmerized by the Snowden hoax -- still.

This photo dated May 12, 2015 sure looks like a Russian sauna -- although it could be a gym room in Snowden's own house/apartment/place inside a GRU compound/whatever. Snowden's house has wood paneling as we recall.

The exposed pipes say "Russia." So do the shelf brackets.

 

This very recent photo dated June 11, 2015 seems almost certain to be taken at the edge of the Moscow River, across from the Luzhniki Stadium, just past the bridge with the Vorobyov Hills stop up inside it (a unique architectural spot), about here on Google Maps. It could be Lindsay, or her friend (see below) or somebody else.

 

I'll walk you through my proof. First, think about it -- what water body in the world in an urban setting is going to have a pedestrian walkway right at the edge like that, with no fence or curb or anything? Only Moscow, where they aren't very safety-conscious. And what place has had a lot of rain and flooding in recent weeks, that would put the river level up high like that? Moscow.

So -- Moskva-Reka -- but where?  Well, find a view that has a peculiar set of two buildings like that on the horizon -- one tall and thin one, one short and fat one.

How about here? This is across from Luzhniki.

But Lindsay's picture is right down at the river's edge. Is there a walkway along the Moscow river there that looks like that?

Yes, there is, as we find from this mommy blog:

And yes, it gets pretty eroded in places.

What about the other things in the scene? Just in case it's in some other city with identical skyscrapers. Well, there's that yellow bit -- to the left of the skyscrapers at the river's edge, next to the white boat?

This:

You can see something yellow in this view of the Moscow River at this area by Luzhniki:

So then there's this other picture of Lindsay under what looks like a bridge with yellow pillars -- this is dated five days later, June 16, 2015 -- which means she has come here more than once, may come here often -- is she taking courses at MGU? Is Edward? Is he working there?

It makes sense that if she was sitting by the river's edge, she might also explore a bridge nearby, or visa versa -- and there is one, nearby. Note that her hair is in a bun in the same way as the picture in the chair, but the shirt is different (different day).

Here's a view from Google Street View:

In Lindsay's photo, from under the bridge, across the river, you can see a pink building that looks like a classic Russian pastel Rastrelli-type building, don't you agree?

The pink pastel for a building, the windows -- it's Russia, not the Netherlands, for sure. And if you turn to the right on Google Street View, you see there's also a pink building across the river, by the bridge.

 

Here it is close up:

So many of the elements in these scenes matching clinches it for me, especially the pink house and the edge of the river with the skyscrapers in the view and the yellow to the left. But what does the underneath of the bridge look like?

Here's Lindsay's photo again:

Well, here's one picture from Google by X3anus of this same view here on Google Maps:

Those pillars are tan-yellow just like in Lindsay's picture, but this view is on to the middle of the river, above which is the metro stop Vorobyov Hills, which is inside the bridge.

Or maybe it's the next bridge up?

She's also got another bridge photo -- but it's very different, and with rocks, not pavements by the edge, and taken May 14.

 

But it seems to be from the same opera. I think it's safe to say she's on the Moscow river by that metro stop. No Edward in sight. I don't think this is where they live, it's an outing.

Now here's a picture that looks like it could be a Moscow metro stop, too. But I couldn't match it anywhere. The graffiti looks like it could be "Mak" written in Russian script but for all we know, this is in California.

 

Here it is reversed:

She has a bunch of pictures in this strangely-constructed open-air modern-looking parking garage sort of thing.

Yasenevo Metro?

Well, I don't think so. My theory has always been that Edward is being kept in a safe house in Yasenevo, which is where the GRU is headquartered and where it has apartment complexes for its employees.

Here's Lindsay with Edward on a love swing. Inside some sort of compound -- doesn't it say "compound" to you? Those big towers on the other side -- they're like Gulag prison lights. But of course, this could just be a Moscow suburb somewhere. "Brief escape from an imposed reality," writes Lindsay on this photo.

This to me looks like a classic besedka or gazebo or playhouse in a Russian park. The bright colors, the architecture look Russian. But I couldn't find a match.

Lindsay on some steps. This could be also in the park. Or not even in Russia at all and taken earlier in Hawaii, but I just throw it in here.

Here's someone who looks like she could be Eurasian -- but it's Lindsay, it has to be, as it says "self-portait," and describes being sick, which she mentions in several photos.

Why do I think "Russian"? Hairstyle? Eyebrows? Glasses? Tea cup? But, she could be in California. I'm just saying my hunch.

Maybe she is looking more Russian, being in Russia. Here her hair seems darker than normal, and she has glasses. But judging from her staring eyes sometimes, I think she has contacts normally. Anyway, this proves she puts her hair in a bun, which then matches the woman in the river and bridge pictures.

Lindsay also writes that she went to the Oscars for CitizenFour -- Vanity Fair spotted her.

 

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FACTS | VROCKSIO

"We Haven't Hit Bottom Yet": On Russian and Western Journalists Drinking with Boroday

by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

This is a complicated story with diverse twists and turns and layers which isn't what it seems at first -- although it may actually be worse.

 A PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND TWITTER FIGHTS

When I saw this picture on Instagram taken by Max Avdeev, I instantly found it revolting -- the public face of the horrid self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic" -- "prime minister" Aleksandr Boroday, a Russian citizen and long-time propagandist -- posing in the center of a group of Russian and Western journalists in a Moscow reporters' hang-out called Redaksiya [Editorial Office].

 

Here are some of the IDs:

I found it revolting because I don't think a journalist should hang out socially with Aleksandr Boroday, the former "prime minister" of the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic", or if they happen to bump into him in a bar, drink with him, and then pose for what some are calling a "selfie" (although it isn't a selfie in fact, it's a photograph by the stunning war photographer Max Avdeev.)

THE MORAL SLIDER

I don't think it's right to sit down with the leader of the Russian-backed separatists especially after MH17 -- which he was the DNR PR face for, blocking access to the bodies and crashed plane. Not to mention everything else in the Donbass that happened while he represented it -- hundreds of buildings taken over, people kidnapped, tortured, killed, shot, homes shelled, civilians killed, everything.

But while I found the picture to be the epitome of everything that is wrong about Russian journalism (and Western journalism covering Moscow) and the most evocative capture I've ever seen of the cynical hipster "Moscow bubble" as sometimes the journalist scene is called in Moscow, I knew there was a more complicated back story.

I knew there'd be a justification. I knew while everyone was debating it furiously as whether it would be right or wrong, there'd be an explanation, and one that once given, would involve telling us to shut the fuck up, or else we'd be seen not only as screeching moralizers and couch warriors, but hopeless rubes when it comes to fathoming that great nuanced and sophisticated enterprise called journalism, and the bohemian culture of the media worker.

I have a friend who is trained as both a journalist and a lawyer and practiced in both fields for many years who describes journalism as an "occupation" not a "profession" and I tend to agree.

In case there are any doubts that this is a picture from drinking together with Boroday in a bar (because they're all shown standing up outside it), there is another picture of some of them actually at the table drinking with Boroday:

#Бородай #хипстер'ом стал?) #Москва #МСК #Каныгин #ДНР #Захарченко pic.twitter.com/GTO9tZOuou

— RAZIN (@lilrvzin) June 19, 2015

 

When I posted the picture to Facebook (on that version it has the wrong "Noah" labelled by Avdeev, who corrected it later), I simply said "Why I'm not a journalist." Because I do think there are borders of right and wrong that shouldn't be crossed, but I think most journalists would not set the slider where I would because they think many things are justified to get a story. I accept that, and don't expect to have much influence over the hipsters on this question.

CRAZY RUSSIAN VIOLENCE

Unfortunately, the debate veered off quickly in the Russian context first to be something else, sort of like that endless debate about why people who met Hitler early in his career or even after he began massively killing the Jews didn't attempt to kill him.

Russians began asking on Twitter why those who met Boroday didn't hit him over the head with a brick. Ilya Azar (@A3AP) did a poll asking people whether they thought he should have hit Boroday over the head with a brick -- in retaliation for all the lives harmed or extinguished by the DNR.

Then there was a Facebook debate parallel to this, when Julia Ioffe reproached Karina Orlova who said Boroday should have been physically attacked -- and of course we can all agree that regardless of the horrors Boroday is responsible for -- evasion of responsibility for MH17 looming large in the public's mind -- the answer in a civilized society isn't physically attacking him but arresting him and giving him a fair trial.

Then argument went on and then it depends ultimately whether Ioffe meant that even criticizing the idea of sitting at the table with Boroday would mean you should go into activism and not journalism -- it's likely she thinks that but it's not clear.

THE 'NEWSMAKER' IS OUTSIDE MORALITY

Once you get past that peculiarly Russian debate that sidetracked the basic moral debate for a time, there was still this: what possible justification could you have to sit at the table with this figure responsible for mass murder? The front man for crimes against humanity?

I suggested right away on Twitter that the excuse would be that he was a "newsmaker." "Newsmaker" is a category nearly as sacred as "journalist" that we are not to apply morality to if we are consumers of news. Putting Putin on the cover of Time, for example, isn't "immoral" because he is a "newsmaker."

Interestingly, a lot of the Russians in the debate used the English transliterated word in Russian "newsmaker" as well, and I don't think they got it from my tweet. They got it from their absorption in their culture of this concept of the "newsmaker" which exculpates your coverage of him, your even putting him on front pages and covers, which means you might have to lunch or drink with him.

Indeed that was the excuse a number of those involved, particularly Pavel Kanygin made -- that he was a "newsmaker". Kanygin -- who astoundingly, had just gotten arrested and beaten by the DNR only days before and expelled back to Russia -- indignantly challenged those disapproving of this hipster occasion of journos meeting "a source" (I don't think he's a hero for any of them) by saying that readers were happy to click on and like all his reports of the war, including interviews with Boroday, of which he has done at least two in the past, and they should understand this was "work" and "for work" and not be so squeamish, it's not a big deal.

'ZAPODLO' OR BAD FAITH

I disagree. It's precisely because Kanygin has not only just been beaten by the DNR (for saying he was "for peace" when asked which side he was for), and really should consider it zapodlo (a word used in the Gulag to mean violation of the code of the political prisoner which calls for not making common cause or voluntary contact with the warden and the authorities). It's because there isn't any "newsmaking" that he can get out of this encounter that he couldn't get by calling up Boroday on the phone and scheduling an interview during business hours as he has already done. Or even in a bar if that's what he had to do to get those interviews.  THAT would be "work" with a "newsmaker". Drinking in a bar on an impulse and then adding insult to injury by snapping an Instagram isn't work. It's bad judgement.

The picture part of it was what bothered many people the most -- but to this war photographer, who has crawled in the mud among fighters' blown-off limbs to get the very heart of evil of Debaltsevo in probably the most stunning photographs of the war (which only Mashable could publish) -- it was only documentation, proof that they really met Boroday.

"Pics or it didn't happen" sort of thing, as Olaf Koens said.

And you know, he was good as his word -- this picture -- not distributed as much as the "family photo" Instagram, is worthy of a Great Master or Norman Rockwell -- the shadows, the poses, the crumbling wall, the American sports jacket -- really...

Pic or it didn't happen. pic.twitter.com/MqKMQBKrQU

— Olaf Koens (@obk) June 18, 2015

 

Boroday is a has-been since he was withdrawn, evidently by the Kremlin backers of the DNR escapade, or at least the Kremlin's cutaway Malofeyev, who admittedly bank-rolled the "PR" for the bloody invasion via his old colleague Boroday, who in turn brought in the infamous Col. Igor Strelkov (Girkin).

He occasionally makes some criticism of the DNR that people lap up, or has some tidbit or useful analysis which is why he is still on alternative talk shows and still referenced and still having interviews now and then in the "independent" media. So he's not so reclusive and reticent as to justify having to drink with him to get a nugget of information out of him. Now, if Bezler  -- who has been missing and even presumed dead -- for months showed up in a bar, that might be worth overcoming your inner revulsion to try to find out where he has been and what made him left. But Boroday has been interviewed and re-interviewed -- and as I said, by Kanygin himself.

So where's the story? Where are all the articles based on this "insiders' information" that came from this encounter? Where is even an interesting blog post? Or a Tweet, even? In fact, what DID they talk about?

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER -- TO GAIN ACCESS TO THE DNR 

And here the story takes another twist, so bear with me.

It seems from putting the social media snippets together that it wasn't really anything about the war itself, or actually getting "news" from a "newsmaker" but more fundamentally about the rules of the media game and the DNR's treatment of journalists -- because these self-same journalists want to keep their access to the DNR, so they can go on covering the war. Novaya Gazeta's Dmitry Muratov's mounted big cannon to protest about Pavel's release and would have mounted even more if he hadn't been promptly let go, likely with some intervention from the Kremlin.

Not surprisingly, Kevin Rothrock instantly took the hipster journo side of this (which I view as reprehensible) and parsed it -- so that people who should know better like Aric Toler would praise it just for rounding up the tangled story out of the Russian for a wider audience. That shouldn't be confused with the other thing he does, which is tacitly approve it. And even not so "tacitly" given what side of the story he emphasizes -- the hipster side.

As Rothrock's piece indicates -- and there's more -- they didn't just accidentally run into Boroday, because he just happened to be at Redaksiya, a reporters' watering hole; Ilya Azar first bumped into him on the street, then invited him to drink at Redaksiya, where he knew Kanygin to be, who was still showing the bruises from his "re-education" by the DNR.

That then raises the question about the answer Andrew Roth of the New York Times gave when confronted by people on Twitter about this saga.

@ninaivanovna @EvgenyFeldman @obk nobody went to the bar to drink with Borodai

— Andrew Roth (@ARothNYT) June 19, 2015

Now, that implies they didn't deliberately go to the bar to drink with Boroday, but ran into him. Yet Azar says he first ran into him, then invited him to drink. Perhaps Roth was already in the bar with Kanygin and others and didn't expect Boroday?

He further elaborated in answer to my query:

@catfitz @KevinRothrock @A3AP @ninaivanovna @EvgenyFeldman Azar suggested he talk to kanygin who was at the bar. This wasn't planned outing.

— Andrew Roth (@ARothNYT) June 22, 2015

So I commented:

@ARothNYT It was about securing access to the DNR, bargaining. It was a Russian thing. And it ends up on DNR's terms. pic.twitter.com/cTaWmvWasA

— CatherineFitzpatrick (@catfitz) June 22, 2015

Because the issue wasn't about whether it was a planned outing or not -- all the evidence shows that it wasn't planned. But what was planned was the decision to take the spontaneous encounter and turn it into a discussion about why Kanygin was arrested and essentially "smooth things out" with the DNR through this "back channel". I will explain the meaning of Boroday holding up the phone chat in a minute.

But to understand more, read on.

TV Rain explains it as follows:

Azar said he ran into Boroday on Stoleshnikov Lane in Moscow in the company of Ilya Vasyunin and discussed with him "the urgent problems of the DNR." According to Azar, Boroday explained the "insufficient universal human morality" among the separatists by "the influence of Hollywood films" and also justified the beating of Kanygin -- "a journalist should not work on both sides of the conflict." Then Azar offered Boroday to meet Kanygin personally in the bar.

(Notice how he's "blaming America first" for causing the DNR to be violent because they watch movies, not taking responsibility for their violence which is inherent.)

Rothrock doesn't go past the narrative that this bar encounter was all in a day's work for journalists and we gawkers who at the end of the day read all this stuff should just shut up with our moralizing. As I've indicated, however, there is more to it.

It seems to me Kanygin was arrested because of his interview in which the captured GRU officer says far from having quit the armed services and become a contractor or volunteer, he was on active duty in the regular army. There has never been anything like this confirmation in the Russian press. If it wasn't this story, it was the story of the townspeople who confirmed that Zaroshchenskoye wasn't the location of the Buk launch, but Grabovo was could have been a reason.

TV Rain's account, or really, Azar's account indicates that this wasn't about merely the happenstance of running into a newsmaker and using the occasion to extract some news "off the record."

This was different.

This was about the philosophy of journalism of the DNR and the liberal media and the problem of access to the DNR.

KANYGIN'S JUSTIFICATION - WHY WE NEWS CONSUMERS SHOULD SHUT UP

On Facebook, Kanygin said he unexpectedly ran into Boroday in Moscow:

that he said journalists shouldn't be beaten, the Zakharchenko behaves like a welder who wound up heading the tractor facting. But in war, he says, there isn't any impartial journalism. Journalism isn't war. Update. Boroday immediately asked to rebut the words about Zakharchenko as "a factory welder" -- he doesn't consider him a welder, and he didn't call him a welder.

It seems on that side, everything exploded due to our accidental meeting.

Kanygin himself then posted a more angry and justifying explanation it as follows:

 

A few things have to be explained.

First, this was an accidental meeting with Boroday -- for me, for Ilyusha [Ilya] Barabanov, for Andrew [Roth] and Olga [Koens], for Noah Sneider and Vasyunin, Nigina and Yegor -- this was a meeting with a newsmaker which turned out fortunate. I don't know how it is for you, dear firends and colleagues, sitting in Moscow and Kiev, but for us, this boroday here -- he's not a friend, but a part of work, he is a bearer of information -- how can I explain it more to you?  -- who you will then read, and comment in your columns, and review, and raise criminal cases over, and admire or shower curses on from your couches, or ask his contact information or film your shows based on the information obtained. For us, for me at least, it doesn't matter, I am doing my job, and sorry, I am responsible for the mess.

I interviewed this man twice and I don't regret it. Each time it was very intriguing, each time it provided an understanding of the picture and the way of thinking of these people. It was also interesting for you, judging from the views and responses. Why they hypocrisy now?

Further. Whoever wants to teach how to behave with a newsmaker and what newsmakers to select, what is hell and what isn't hell, I would propose that at first you as zealously head somewhere to Donetsk or Kramatorsk or Mariupol, to an Azo base and then to the Vostok Battalion. And travel along the holes and bomb shelters, hwere there is typhoid and dirty children who beg for something to eat and a mortar launcher is thundering nearby. Then we can talk about hell.

Further -- on the photo. If it bothered someone, I sincerely regret it and I ask for forgiveness. But if it seemed to someone that we were "somehow friendly and nice to a torturer" -- don't twist it, we only observed the niceties after a difficult conversation. After answering our questions, this man left. and no general drinking bout took place or could have taken place.

That's all I have. Colleagues, you may add something I left out.

 

He then lists Ilya Azar, Serguei Parkhomenko, Arina Borodina, Rustem Adagamov, Arkady Babchenko, Oleg Kashin, Olga Romanova, Anton Krasovsky. These aren't people who were there, but just bloggers with an opinion about it.

DON'T CONFER LEGITIMACY

Sorry, but I think young Pavel has been had here -- the way all the young and earnest (despite their cynical hipster pose) journalists still participating in the Moscow media scene have been had -- by others way, way more cynical -- and actually more evil than they will ever be, because at worst they are venal.

In dealing with the brutality and sinister cunning of the Kremlin, there is not always a lot you can do -- the West doesn't have leverage or even strength, much less the Russian opposition or the independent media. But we -- they -- can do this much: not confer legitimacy. When all else fails, we have that. The Kremlin craves legitimacy. We must never give it.

WHO WINS WHEN YOU NEGOTIATE WITH THE DNR

The independent press, after the beating of Kanygin and his expulsion, should have boycotted the DNR with a news blackout until they relented.

Lurking behind this entire story, however, is basically the fact that Russian journalists, even the most independent, still feel some kinship with the DNR and its cause because while they may find the methods reprehensible, they may think there are "issues" -- if they are sophisticated enough to understand there are no authentic issues with suppression of the Russian language, they still think Ukraine has wronged the Donbass and wronged them further by shelling people's homes and killing some of them -- and they'll have criticism of Kiev even if they think the DNR is deformed or stupid. And Western journalists, while they will view the DNR critically, or humorously (that's how communism tends to be dealt with, unlike Nazism -- with ridicule, not condemnation), still tilt toward the Donbass cause and against Kiev, where they think means corrupt oligarchs and ultranationalism which undo the good of Maidan.

There have only been two or three journalists that come to mind who have actually embedded with the Ukrainian army and described their struggle from their side. All the others are in fact embedded with the DNR because they all have press passes from them and depend to one degree or another on their protection, and even have them as escorts so that they can get to sources. But it is never described as "embedded" and they would reject the term or reject any notion of bias even if they are on sufferance from the DNR.

And this belief that maybe the DNR can be "better" or "trained to be good" or at least "bargained with" that underlines this entire incident with Boroday, as Ollie Carroll's tweets indicate in his telling of the story:

 

Kanygin on his detention + deportation. Might more sensible heads in Donetsk apologise 4 shocking violence? (Rus) http://t.co/lfeCni7f0v

— Oliver Carroll (@olliecarroll) June 18, 2015

Kanygin: Borodai said DNR PM Zakhachenko behaving "like a welder put in charge of tractor factory", that journos should not be beaten (2)

— Oliver Carroll (@olliecarroll) June 19, 2015

B is then reported as saying "no such thing as neutral journalism in war". Kanygin: "no, you're mistaken. Journalism. Is. Not. War." (3)

— Oliver Carroll (@olliecarroll) June 19, 2015

Apropos earlier tweet re Borodai, Kanygin now seems to accept words on Zakharchenko were not those uttered https://t.co/wt435ipPQk

— Oliver Carroll (@olliecarroll) June 19, 2015

 

There's no such thing as neutral journalism, period, of course but that's another debate.

What's really most stomach-churning in this episode is then this photo, not seen or discussed (that I've seen) that shows a smugly triumphant Boroday showing a picture of his dialogue with Kanygin on his cell phone, after the bar meeting, and after Kanygin posted about it on his Facebook:

Here's a translation of the chat on the phone:

Boroday: Pash, you have simply stuck your own words under my name. And then you write that I asked you to "rebut my !!! words about Zakharchenko." That's really not pretty. It's jerking around [the words].

Kanygin: I re-did it already. I already too out the word "his own" a long time ago.

Boroday: Alright. I didn't see it yet.

But what's most important, this is already being used by all the Ukrainian media. And after that, you and your crowd cry about objectivity and that you aren't working on the side of the enemy?

Kanygin: I'm guilty before you, I'm sorry!

So while they may have gone to the bar with the notion of educating a "better" DNR and getting Boroday to concede that beating Kanygin was wrong (which they did), in the end, it's Boroday teaching them, instructing them how not to sound like they are on Kiev's side -- "the enemy's side" -- and Kanygin nearly groveling with apology -- AND for good measure, publicizing the fact of Kanygin's groveling. Of course there was a lot of disgusted surprise at this denouement in the comments.

THIS WAS A VERY RUSSIAN EVENT

Russian culture is more collectivist -- or if you get into the Russian Orthodox mysticism -- "communalist," and often want to solve contradictions between people by drinking to break down barriers and communicate at the level of the soul. An American might not feel it appropriate to drink with "a source," especially a source who was an MH17-related criminal, not only because of the ethics, but because "a source" wouldn't be in his social class or because it "might look bad" and he might fear disapproval from the public.

And he wouldn't feel a burning need to remove barriers with someone on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Like someone going to cover the murders of the church-goers in Charleston would find it undesirable to sit and drink with someone from the Council of Conservative Citizens who are said to have inspired the murderer to his hate crime. I'm quite certain that all those Washpo and Huffpo "iPhone photog" print journalists covering Ferguson didn't drink with the police later.

But I think journalists do this "crossing over" more than others, and especially abroad because they are thrown together on beats or in wars or whatever, and also because I think they feel they are in a caste superior to others. Everybody else reads the news; they write it. They have superior perception and penetrate to see "all sides" of the conflict, ostensibly; everyone else is hopelessly blinkered bound in their own prejudices.

The other turn this discussion took was a debate really similar to the "zapodlo" I described above, whether journalists should adopt a neutral or friendly attitude toward the regime, the very regime that is of course busy suppressing them.

Julia Ioffe, who herself left Russia and stopped working there because of this oppression  -- who once told us we should resign ourselves to Putin's power and be "realists" shortly before switching course to enthusiastically cover the white-ribbon protests because suddenly it seemed things might be different -- spoke up in the debate with Karina Orlova saying that if she thought Boroday should be assaulted, then she was an activist not a journalist and in the wrong line of work.

She's mainly concerned about the issue of physical violence but still, the implication here is that if you think it's wrong to drink with Boroday(or it could be Peskov or Kiselyev or any other face of the regime and its work), then you aren't a professional journalist.

I find this the most awful because it implies that there isn't a range of morality here that a journalist might pick a higher end of, and still be considered worthy of the profession, or that thinking, moral people concerned about the appearance of evil and the "optics" of this situation can't walk away from it without seeming "uncool" or worse, "not doing their job." I'm sorry, that's just fucked. While Ioffe is right that no one should advocate violence against a figure like Boroday, the other proposition -- that you shouldn't photograph yourself at a bar with him -- is also a legitimate one that you can endorse without forfeiting your right to be considered a professional journalist. I can't help thinking that some editors were wincing at this photo, if they heard of it, merely because it became an occasion of scandal, and they'd prefer their reporters not be involved in scandals.

WAR CORRESPONDENTS ARE HEROES SO SHUT UP

Oleg Kashin sees it differently -- or at least, judging from the beginning of his essay on Slon.ru (it's behind a paywall that I can't even pay, so I don't know, maybe someone will have it):

Heroes are allowed a little more than ordinary people. If they consider it permissible to photograph themselves with Boroday, only other heroes can judge them for that, or not even, other heroes can't either, only God. Before ordinary people, before us, the incident with Boroday poses other simpler questions.

But then there's this: it's not bias, it's not prejudice, it's not uncool to be for freedom of speech and the media and stand against a regime that suppresses it. Journalists always view themselves as fighting for openness (Peter Baker kept invoking this value when I debated him about publishing the hacked TPP drafts -- and indeed the entire question of whether a liberal democratic government "must" be "transparent" on negotiating positions on a treaty.) Journalists are aggressive champions -- and obviously practitioners of -- free speech. So why can't they concede that drinking with regime tools sponsoring murder and even the beating of journalists isn't hip but actually uncool and self-defeating? And

In the miserable, compromising, self-censoring, self-justifying world of the "independent" media in Moscow  (which unfortunately has to be termed such in scare quotes for nearly all of the former independent media now), hanging with Boroday is considered chic, and yet appearing on TV1 would be laughably wrong.

A journalist wrote recently that he was invited on a TV1 talk show and refused. TV1, after all. But then the host called him back again and pleaded, saying "We haven't hit bottom yet, we're still considered good."

Okay. So I agree. At one level, as Loren Feldman might say about such a situation after scoring it ruthlessly, "It doesn't matter." And it doesn't, given that these are the "cream" of the war correspondents' community -- and it is a tiny and brave one -- and they have produced amazing stories under terrible conditions and much might be forgiven them, even this. It isn't the bar scene that might cause Kanygin or any of them to become now more biased toward the DNR; it's the chat on the phone that Boroday, the consummate regime PR flak, holds up triumphantly -- the idea that he has schooled Kanygin.

Since the text about the welder remains on Kanygin's Facebook, and is copied by TV Rain and the Ukrainian media, I don't know what his apology means, or whether the "edited" or remarks about changing it amount to him merely explaining that Boroday asked to rebut it.

I've spent dozens of hours translating Kanygin's work although I've never spoken to him, and of course he's among the best there is. I don't think if you admire someone's work or general independence you have to exempt them from criticism. Naturally I resent -- as many would -- the idea that just because you haven't crawled through the mud and blood of the war in the Donbass that you aren't fit to pass judgement on the morality of this or that journalistic act. These men haven't suffered the blood and guts of childbirth, say, or some other ordeal that others have suffered that they many never  suffer (losing a limb in actual combat, for example, as the soldiers and fighters do) but that wouldn't disqualify them from writing a story on those subjects or having an opinion on them.

I can understand that in the sausage-making of getting a story (which is among the things I don't like and won't do myself in journalism, like asking a man whose whose wife has just been stabbed to death "how do you feel"), Kanygin might have felt he had to do business with this creepy Boroday to get his press pass back. Then why the photo?  That turns it into a triumphant social occasion instead of a transactional measure that was part of the dirty business of covering a dirty war.

And why were the foreign journalists there? Kanygin is Russian; this is a very Russian story, trying to reason with the persecutor.  What excuse would the foreigners have?

THE JOURNALISTS WHO OBJECTED

I think it is important to note that other journalists, even being part of the independent media scene, found it objectionable. Leonid Martynyuk, who produced reports with Nemtsov and the video on MH17, said it was wrong -- but then, other Russians would say he is a political party member more than a journalist if he thinks that. Thank God there are people like Leonid, however, who do know right from wrong.

Yevgeny Feldman, a photographer for Novaya Gazeta, summed it up:

https://t.co/YnKoC8G2FW Or as @EvgenyFeldman said: if you drink with Boroday, beware your reputation @ARothNYT @obk

— Nina Ivanovna (@ninaivanovna) June 19, 2015

 

And Babchenko, a respected war correspondent himself, has written the most in condemnation of this incident.

He cites Olga Romanova:

According to the feng-shui I shouldn't drink with prison wardens and you shouldn't drink with Boroday.

She uses the Chinese philosophical idea of harmony and balance, say, in structuring your home but it's similar to the "zapodlo" etiquette of the prisoners I indicated above.

Here's an excerpt -- He says that the borders erode when you are covering wars and things you might do in a war zone you wouldn't -- or shouldn't back home in Moscow. But he cites Olga Romanova with the same idea I've articulated about the "zapodlo"


Here, in fact, I have a separate criticism, that with such a level of newsmakers, you, colleagues, are going to reduce the news down to the level of the mice, because Oleg Tsarev on TV Rain and Ekho -- well, bros, well, that's really the limit, really only after that would you get interviews from mice, I don't understand why you make them public figures, why you talk with them, why you write with them and then read all that, the level of your newsmakers indicates only and strictly the level of your professionalism, and not at all the ability the extract hot information, as perhaps it seems to you, and wit that, to make a point, you are dumping on the market of journalism, you are lowering the level, and that is not the best game.

So to read about the "insider" in this specific case -- well, gentlemen, that is even in some sense shameful.

In fact, like reading "all that liberal journalism -- it's a collection of pederasts and nothing more from the Moskaley can be expected." It's the same tomatoes, only from a different angle.

In sum he said his simple advice was "Don't drink with everybody and his brother, my friends. Don't lose the sense of boundary. Even if it is your work. Donetsk is one thing, but a bar in Moscow is another. Don't violate the feng-shui.

CONCLUSION

 Well, finally, there was this:

Speaking of selfies https://t.co/H0L30ZlXfb

— Andrew Roth (@ARothNYT) June 20, 2015

 

There was no question that Roth, in referencing "selfies" (which was what the photo op with Boroday was called) meant to invoke the drama around Boroday, and then show "on the other side," here were these Ukrainian soldiers in Dnepro-1 Battalion willing to pose with Sen. McCain.

That's why I asked this question:

@ARothNYT Sen. John McCain is different than Aleksandr Borodai, right?

— CatherineFitzpatrick (@catfitz) June 22, 2015

 

Roth dismisses concerns about the incident because it "wasn't a planned outing" but a chance encounter -- although really it was a chance encounter that led to a plan to "do something" about securing access to the DNR for journalists, given that one had just been expelled.

Rothrock doesn't go past the narrative that this bar encounter was all in a day's work for journalists and we gawkers who at the end of the day read all this stuff should just shut up with our moralizing. As I've indicated, however, there is more to it.

It seems to me Kanygin was arrested because of his interview in which the captured GRU officer says far from having quit the armed services and become a contractor or volunteer, he was on active duty in the regular army. There has never been anything like this confirmation in the Russian press. If it wasn't this story, the story of the townspeople who confirmed that Zaroshchenskoye wasn't the location of the Buk launch, but Grabovo was could have been a reason.

If it wasn't one of these stories, it was another recent one that triggered the arrest -- the immediate reason was likely the coverage of the unexpected anti-war demonstration against the DNR held in the center of Donetsk. That immediate reason couldn't have been the only reason for something as dramatic as an arrest, however, and likely there was an accumulation of irritation over these other stories I mentioned.

Ultimately, Kanygin -- and the whole liberal media, as he was an object lesson -- were being published for "covering both sides of the war" which Boroday, a propagandist of war, not only believes is wrong; it's wrong enough to be arrested and even beaten over.

In other words, the values that these liberal journalists are ostensibly fighting for -- sturdy impartiality and an iron gut that lets them drink with murderers for the sake of news-gathering; being willing to talk to "anybody" for the sake of a story; getting both sides of the war -- these are all values that the DNR rejects, which is why its agent bashed Kanygin on the head.