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Part Fourteen

Putin Back in Political Power: 2012 to Present

(Colton, Chapters 5-6; Stent, Chapters 10-12

Public Protests Against Putin’s Third Presidential Term Putin’s Public Persona: Putin was 59 years old when he entered his third term in office in March 2012 following the rokirovka tandem with Medvedev. His family status was undergoing change. As president and then prime minister and then again as president his relation to his wife Lyudmila became more and more estranged, until in they announced their formal separation in 2013, and which was followed by a formal divorce in 2014.

Their two daughters had married high-ranking business executives of Gazprom. The younger daughter Katerina had become something of a celebrity in her own right as a competitive dancer of pop art recognition, and who served as a vice-president of the World Rock and Roll Confederation. Katya’s youth and celebrity status served her father well as an active political campaigner to compliment the more stolid political image identified with Vladimir Putin’s own public persona. Political Strain between Putin and Medvedev: The reversal of rokirovka relations continued the strain in the Putin-Medvedev tandem when Putin returned as president and Medvedev assumed the post of prime minister in 2012. There actually emerged two executive administrations: that of Putin’s personal presidential staff, and that of the official council of ministers under prime minister Medvedev. The council of minister under Medvedev, located in the White House as the seat of the legislature, saw an influx of new members of a more liberal reform outlook. Chief among them was Vladimir Kolokoltsev as minister of the interior and Arkady Dvorkovich as deputy prime minister of energy. Right after Putin’s inauguration, Medvedev called for the further privatization of remaining state-owned enterprises to attract foreign capital investment and modernization.

Medvedev hoped that his aspiration to achieve liberal reform might be realized in serving a two terms as prime minister under Putin, and as president following two new terms of office as president by Putin himself. Such a strategy would represent Medvedev’s own rokirovka gambit. As such, Medvedev continued to speak out against “legal nihilism” and the right of public protests to do the same as exemplified in not suppressing the “white ribbon” movement in his own term as president. As prime minister Medvedev criticized the two-year jail sentence handed down to the members of the Pussy Riot (see below); and also, on October 22, 2012, publicly opposed the Putin supported policy of allowing state holding companies to buy controlling shares in privatized enterprises. While such differences never came to open political conflict, the third term of the silovik political rule of Putin as president displayed a certain marked difference from the more neo-liberal political orientation of Medvedev. The “Pussy Riot” and Bolotnaya Square: Resistance of the “white ribbon” movement to Putin’s third term as president signifying the continuation of silovik power and political corruption continued right up to Putin’s March 4, 2012 presidential election. Protests 80,000 and 100,000 strong assembled in Moscow on December 10, 2011, and December 24, 2011, with banners declaring “down with Putin.” What became the most notable pre-Putin election protest was that staged by feminists called the “Pussy Riot.”

On February 21, 2012, five of the feminist punk art leaders led by Ekaterina Samutsevich dramatized the group’s protest against authoritarian government in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior by “punk prayer,” which declared “Mother of God, drive Putin out of Russia.” Then they declared: “Shit, shit, shit of our Lord,” in addressing the historical political subservience of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Russian state. Orthodox clerics and the government declared that the Pussy Riot action, which was indeed ill-conceived, was one of sacrilegious blasphemy. But the Pussy Riot leaders declared that it was only intended to be a political message of civic protest against the historic collusion of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian State, resurrected under Yeltsin and aggressively

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pursued under Putin. Eventually the five Pussy Riot leaders were condemned to two years in prison, but were subsequently released with suspended sentences.

However, after the presidential elections, on May 6, 2012, the day before Putin’s inauguration for a third term in the presidential office, another protest took place in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square in which some 400 people were detained by police authorities. This led to a new more restrictive law of public assemblies passed by the Putin dominated State Duma in early June 2012, placing an almost impossible fine on anyone accused by police authorities of promoting “riots.” The result was another public protest set for June 12, 2012, not only to protest the more restrictive government sanctions against public demonstrations, but in a “Free Russia” manifesto called for disbanding the existing State Duma and new legislative and presidential elections. Among those sponsoring the rally were: Ilya Yashin, the leader of Solidarity; Aleksei Navalny, the self-appointed ombudsman against government economic and political corruption; and Ksenia Sobchak, the daughter of Putin’s own former close mentor in Saint Petersburg and a reform political activist.

It is estimated that some 60,000 gathered for the June 12 rally; but closely guarded and infiltrated by Putin’s police, it dissolved with little result. By now, Putin’s method of repression was to arrest threatening leaders of the political opposition after the fact of political rallies by falsified charges of various forms of illegality. Such charges emanated from a new Russian Investigative Committee wholly independent the General Prosecutor’s Office. Most notable was the case against Aleksei Navalny. Navalny as a private legal jurist had taken part in Yale University’s six-month World Fellows Program in 2010. For his part in the June 12, 2012, protest Navalny was charged with trumped up economic crimes.

At his trial in April 2013, Navalny tried to publicly turn the tables on Putin’s silovik government with the accusation of massive government collusion and corruption with high-level oligarchs who financially supported Putin’s political rule. Navalny further asserted that such oligarchs representing 0.5 percent of the population held 83 percent of the country’s wealth. On July 18, 2013, Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison, but the next day, at least partially in response to a Moscow demonstration on July 18, 2013, Navalny was released on bail, pending an appeal; the appeal heard on October 16, 2013 upheld but commuted Navalny’s sentence. However, an amendment to the criminal code in July 2013, extended the prohibition against holding public office for the convicted to eight years instead of six years to insuring that Navalny would not be able to challenge Putin’s political rule with his own presidential candidacy. Putin Strengthens His Silovik Political Rule: As opposed the formal government of prime minister Medvedev and his council of ministers, the real silovik political rule of Putin’s presidential administration included: Viacheslav Volodin as first deputy head of Putin’s presidential administration (Volodin had been responsible for organization Putin’s Russian Popular Front and he replaced Vladislav Surkov who had served in that capacity from 1999 to 2011 as the chief ideologist of “managed democracy”); Sergei Ivanov as chief-of-staff replacing Sergei Naryshkin ( Sergei Ivanov had served as minister-of-defense from March 28, 2001 to February 15, 2007); and Igor Sechin as minister of energy heading the combined holdings of Yuganskneftegaz-Sibneft and Gazprom. Ideologically, Putin sought ever greater popular support for silovik political rule in continuing to emphasize hardline stance in international affairs in the “second Chechnya war,” and the Russian military role in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In this he hoped to draw still greater voting strength from the ultra-nationalist sentiment of the traditional supporters of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia on the far right and Communist Party of the Russian Federation on the far-left. Putin’s Tightening of Domestic Political Suppression: In November 2012, Putin signed a law that required all Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that received foreign funding to register as “foreign agents.” This eventually led to a targeted search of all NGOs organized for the protection of human rights that received international funding, such as the Human Rights Watch. The Federal Security Service particularly harassed Golos (The Voice) which monitors various types of election fraud. Aleksander Bortnikov replaced Nikolai Patrushev as Director of the Federal Security Service (Federal’naia Slushba Bezopastnosti - FSB) on May 12, 2008; Patrushev, Putin’s old crony from the Saint Petersburg days, had been head of the FSB from the time Putin resigned from the post himself on August 9, 1999 to become Yeltsin’s last prime minister until Bortnikov’s appointment.

206 The campaign against liberal political democracy was also extended to include the criminalization of those

who organized public actions that disrespected the attitudes of religious believers. The “blasphemy law,” passed in the wake of the Pussy Riot’s “punk prayer,” was designed chiefly protect the Russian Orthodox Church as the subservient supporter “Great Russian nationalism.” Then on May 19, 2013, a compliant parliament adopted legislation that prohibited all government officials from opening foreign bank accounts. The idea was to ensure their continued political allegiance to Putin by holding all their earnings in Russian banks and recognizing the risk of government confiscation of their financial assets for breaking their political loyalty to Putin.

Human Rights and Russian-American Relations The Magnitsky Act: Despite the Obama administration’s initial effort to “reset” American-Russian foreign policy relations in March 2009, after heavy American political criticism over Russian military action in South Ossetia in August 2008, new political criticism arose over what was seen as heavy handed suppression of political expression in Putin’s third presidential term—especially in police action and arrests against the protests of the Pussy Riot and Bolotnaya Square. In this context, Congress passed the Magnitsky Act on December 14, 2012, named after the Russian anti-corruption lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.

In 2011, Magnitsky, a civilian lawyer, had uncovered a large-scale Russian government tax fraud conspiracy in which three individuals, who already had criminal records, demanded and received some a $230 million government refund for supposed unjust levied tax revenue. Subsequently, numerous government officials suddenly came into sudden economic wealth from what Magnitsky charged were kickbacks to government officials participating in a tax fraud conspiracy instigated by the three individuals claiming the refund of the $230 million tax overpayment. But instead of arresting the conspirators, the government arrested Magnitsky and charged him with absconding the $250 million for himself. Magnitsky, only 37, died in prison on November 16, 2009 while awaiting trial. While the official Russian government report attributed Magnitsky’s death to pancreatitis, in 2011 a human rights group convincingly argued the Magnitsky had greatly suffered from beatings and the denial of medical aid.

To register its protest against what it saw as an egregious violation of human rights, the American Congress ultimately passed its Magnitsky Act on December 14, 2012. The Magnitsky Act empowered the executive branch of government to deny visas and freeze American commercial dealings with foreign actors abusing human rights as so identified by Human Rights Watch and confirmed by the United Nations. In the Magnitsky case, the ban applied to eighteen Russian nationals. Putin’s Russia responded by banning the American adoption of Russian children. In passing the ban, the Duma cited a 2008 case where a Russian child died of heat stroke attributed to neglect by the adoptive American father. And finally, on July 11, 2013, Magnitsky was posthumously found guilty of tax evasion.

In 2012 the Obama administration imposed economic sanctions and travel restrictions on twelve Russian nationals under the Magnitsky Act. Since 2014, a number of other critics of Putin’s executive political rule or government corruption under Putin’s executive political rule have also been victims of unsolved murders, most notably Aleksander Perepilichnyi in the United Kingdom in 2012, and Boris Nemtsov who was shot just outside on a bridge in front of the Kremlin in 2015. Then in conjunction against the use of the nerve gas Novikchok against a former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Lyudmila, in the United Kingdom on March 4, 2018, the Trump administration levied the American sanctions against more than 50 Russian nationals under the Magnitsky Act, which included the son of the Russian prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, and the Putin political strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of Chechnya.

William Browder, who heavily lobbied Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act, has since promoted an international adoption of its provisions under as the Global Magnitsky Act. Since its enactment by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Baltic States and Gibraltar have enacted the same provisions of economic sanctions against Russian financial tycoons who have collaborated with the Putin government in the violation of human rights. And currently, eight other countries are ready to join the Global Magnitsky provisions: Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Australia, South Africa, and Ukraine.

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The Edward Snowden Episode: Putin found a way to turn American critique of his government’s abridgement of human rights back against the United States in the Snowden episode. In 2013, Edward Snowden, who worked with the National Security Agency, leaked thousands of classified documents to The Washington Post detailing American government surveillance of private American citizens and even foreign government officials of our own allies, such as German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Snowden revealed that NSA intelligence gathering expanded even into the social media. According to Snowden such U.S. intelligence gathering also extended to Russia politics monitoring the conversations of such opposition leaders as Boris Nemtsov and Aleksei Navalny for Russian public exposure of Putin’s violation of human rights. As it turned out, Snowden found himself in Moscow while trying to elude arrest by American authorities. Snowden asked for and received political asylum in the Russia Federation on August 1, 2013. Snowden declared that his only motive in making such leaks was to warn the American public about increasing pressure against freedom of expression in the United States.

Whatever the case, Putin used the Snowden leaks as a cause celebre to ague to the world that it was Washington and not Moscow that was the great violator of human rights. Perhaps to buttress his credibility, Putin, in July 2013, also allowed for Aleksei Navalny, who for a year had been held on trumped up charges of embezzlement, to be freed and allowed to run in upcoming Moscow mayoral elections. The 2013 mayoral elections in Moscow were the first under a new Duma statute which restored direct popular gubernatorial elections in some 48 district gubernatorial elections and city elections in Moscow and Saint Petersburg since the Beslan school shooting in 2004. They Navalny candidacy, which gained 26 percent of the vote in the Moscow mayoral elections in August 2003, enhanced his national image as one of the leading opponents to Putin silovik rule. Then, in December 2013, Putin also supported a Duma law granting amnesty to those accused of blasphemy and promoting public disorder in the Pussy Riot and Bolotnaya protests of 2012. In this, two of the last prominent five of the Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Maria Aliokhina were immediately set free.

Finally, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who after serving a five-year sentence in 2009, and then again being sentenced to an additional thirteen-year sentence under new charges was released with the understanding that he would emigrate to Germany. There, with still considerable wealth in foreign holdings, Khodorkovsky continued his campaign against Putin’s silovik rule. But by this point in his second administration, Obama was completely disabused of reestablishing closer relations with the Russian Federation under Putin political rule. He even refused to make an appearance at the Sochi Winter Olympic games in February 2014.

Putin’s Economic and Military Programs

Economic Infrastructure Programs: In Putin’s first year in office in 2012, the Russian economy had slowed to a 3.4 percent annual growth, which was only about half of the 7.0 annual growth of the preceding decade. To recover a more robust annual growth Putin became committed to a stimulus plan involving greater government spending, with an emphasis on infrastructure development.

Most notably, Putin called for the construction of a new high-speed rail service from Moscow to Kazan and a new Central Ring Road around Moscow. He also called for the improvement of transportation facilities to the Pacific Far East for better access to the Asian market. The building of a new Asian petroleum pipeline, negotiated in conjunction with the Chinese government, promised to deliver 45 million tons of oil for the next 25 years to China. Igor Sechin the minister of energy would play a paramount role in effectuating the petroleum deliveries. Government spending for these projects, along with increased welfare benefit, without an increase in tax revenue again put inflationary pressure on the national monetary system. Military Modernization: Even greater increased government spending was to devoted to the modernization of the Russian military. This policy, already begun in 2007, after the second Chechen War under Anatolii Serdiukov, who was defense minister from 1999 to 2011, and then even more aggressively pursued by Sergei Shoigu who succeeded Serdiukov as defense minister in 2011 to the present.

208 An Increased allocation was $725 billion was authorized over the ten-year period from 2010 to 2020—an

average annual increase of 75 percent over the $90.7 billion funding registered in 2012. While still far below the United States annual military spending of $682 billion, as compared to a new ten-year Russian annual maximum of $163.2 billion, it represented a far higher military percentage expenditure of its gross domestic product (which was still less than that of Italy) than the United States.

The new funding was to lower the troop level from 1,200,000 to 900,000, but establish a more efficient combat structure with greater authority at the brigade level composed of more professional soldiers (kontraktniks). New armaments would include 2,300 new T-14 Armada battle tanks, 1,200 new aircraft, and 50 new surface ships and 28 new submarines with submarine-launched ballistic missiles with mirved warheads. Eight of the submarines would have a 1,000-mile strategic range of their ballistic missiles. New land-based missiles of comprising part of its total 400-missile arsenal would also have mirved warheads that could avoid incoming anti-ballistic missiles. Putin has also proudly announced that Russia is developing a low-flying cruise missile that could circle the world and attack its target from any direction presumably also offsetting any anti-missile capability. In its ensemble, the new Russian missile program seems intended to offset any American ABM system, begun by George W. Bush in 2002, and restore a standoff of mutually assured destruction. Today Russia possesses 7,000 warheads and the United States 6,800, greatly down from the some 20,000 warheads each possessed before SALT I in 1972. Government Spending and Monetary Stability: The huge increases in government infrastructure and military spending was compounded by Putin’s determination to make the Sochi resort area just above the northern Caucasian mountains on Black Sea coast, which had been awarded to the Russian Federation for the 2014 Winter Olympics, the show place of the world. The entire Sochi coastal area was reconstructed into a massive complex of roads, tunnels, and railways in addition to the sports venues themselves that transformed the entire geological landscape. The cost, originally estimated at $12 billion, already twice the cost of the Winter Games at Vancouver, Canada in 2010, actually burgeoned in multiple sums beyond even the original estimate. But Putin was determined to use the Sochi Winter Sports complex, which he actively oversaw since the beginning of its construction in 2010, was intended to show the world that Russia had indeed recovered to become a first-rank economic power along with other members of the G-7. Likewise, it was intended to reinforce his own domestic support by a ostentatious display of Great Russian pride. Faced with such huge new areas of government spending, Aleksei Kudrin, a neo-liberal economist and finance minister from 2000 to 2011, resigned to be replaced by Igor Sechin. Putin supported by Sechin argued that new high-level government deficit spending would be obviated a continued high-level balance-of-trade surplus from the Russian export of petro-chemicals. But as it turned out, beginning in 2013 the international price of oil began to slide below the $80 a barrel mark, and Kudrin’s concern about overly high government deficit spending and inflation began to again significantly affect Russian monetary stability.

Syria and Russian-American Relations 2011-2013

Syria, Demographic and Political Background: Syria, covers an area of 71,498 square miles (about the size of the state of Missouri), and in 2010 Syria had a population of over 21 million before the outbreak of civil conflict in its “Arab Spring.” Syria has an 80-mile coastline with the Mediterranean Sea, and borders on Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq. Its ethnic breakdown includes an 87 percent Arab population (of which 74 percent is Sunni Muslim and 13 percent Alawite Shi’ite Muslim). Syria is also the historical homeland of a 13 percent minority Kurd population and a 10 percent minority Armenian population. By 2016, after some five years of civil war, the population of Syria had shrunk to just over 17 million, with an estimated 320,000 killed, and some 4,000,000 displaced from their homeland as political refugees.

Since the coming to power in 2000, Bashar Assad, continued in the path of the autocratic power of his father Hafez Assad, who ruled from 1970 to 2,000. Likewise in continuing the path of his father, Syria under Bashar Assad established ever closer political and economic ties to Russia. By 2010, Russian companies had more than $20 billion invested in natural gas extraction, and supplied most of Syria’s modernized military hardware, including an

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anti-aircraft missile defense system. Likewise, Syria allowed Russia to establish a naval anchorage base at the warm water seaport of Tartus in southwestern Syria just north of Lebanon on the Mediterranean Sea.

Like, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Iraq, the Assad regime came under a popular attack in 2011 in the quest for human rights, especially political freedom. Against the resolute opposition of Bashar Assad, the protest movement eventually challenged Assad’s government as a guerilla military force of disparate demographic forces and political goals under the heading of a “National Coalition for Syrian Rebel and Opposition Forces,” more popularly known as the Syrian Democratic Force. Most militarily prominent and successful of the disparate demographic forces were the Kurds, as a well-disciplined and well-armed guerrilla force known as the Pesh Merga. The Kurdish Pesh Merga force had been in existence for decades and were as much fighting for Kurdish independence, presumably in a large Kurdish independent state to include substantial and hostile Kurdish minorities in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran as well. Russian Involvement in the Syrian Conflict: As already noted, Putin had made it a point in his presidential campaign in 2012 to note what he saw to be an increasing quest for American political hegemony in the Middle East by its actions in Iraq, beginning in 2003, and later in Libya in 2011, which led to the deaths of Sadam Hussein in 2006 and Muammar Qadaffi in 2011. Both of these despotic leaders had maintained relatively close relations with the Russian Federation during their tenure of power based on their hostility to the West and lucrative Russian arms deals and petroleum cooperation. However, the prime target of Russian political influence in the Middle East was Syria. For Putin, paramount Russian political influence in Syria was the geopolitical key to contain American-NATO political hegemony in the Middle East, which Putin saw emerging in American military engagement initiated in Iraq and Libya in 2003 and 2011.

While Russia did not commit direct military forces to the conflict, it did increase a corps of military advisors to assist the Assad regime, especially air defense crews to help with the technological handling of its own modern aircraft defense forces; and, by the same token, Putin was certain to veto any United Nations resolution to enforce a no-fly zone against Assad forces in Syria as it had against Qaddifi’s forces in Iraq. The United States, in turn, under President Barack Obama, also drew back from any direct military engagement, not wanting to become involved in a large-scale ground troop commitment against a government of regime change as was the case in Iraq. Indeed, in the case of Iraq, in 2008, the United States and then Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Malaki, agreed to the evacuation of all American ground troops from Iraq by 2011, which had reached some 100,000 in the height of the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein, leaving only 4,000 American military advisors. The Obama “Red Line” in Syria and the Artful Role of Vladimir Putin: But in the case of Syria, President Obama had warned as early as 2011 that if the Assad regime resorted to the use of nerve gas, it would cross a “red line” regarding American military intervention. And beginning in early 2013, American and international intelligence concluded that there was increasing evidence that Assad was resorting to chemical weapons to combat his increasing military vulnerability to guerrilla opposition forces. Faced with this threat, the United States supported a United Nations’ resolution of June 13, 2013, to lift its ban on the foreign assistance of military of military hardware to the rebel guerilla forces. And the prospect of American intervention became more ominous when, in August 2013, American and international intelligence sources declare that rockets with the toxic nerve gas sarin had been fired by the Assad regime and had struck a suburb of Damascus, killing 1,400 people.

For several weeks Obama agonized on his most appropriate course of action. On the one hand, he would seemingly lose political-military credibility if he did not respond with American counter-missile strikes in short order to uphold his “red line” declaration in 2011. On the other hand, Obama was warned that even if counter-missile strikes successfully targeted the Syrian chemical weapons facilities, such strikes would release additional stored sarin gas into the atmosphere, perhaps killing more innocent Syrian civilians that Assad’s own initial launch strike. Additionally, Obama determined that he should seek a special authorization from Congress to launch an American missile strike, and this in turn would eliminate the element of surprise. Finally, British prime minister David Cameron informed Obama that the United Kingdom as America’s most trusted ally would not commit to support such an American missile response.

Putin, also having a stake in the pending crises as Assad’s closest political regime support, then intervened with an artful political proposal. At a September meeting of the G-20, Putin succeeded in getting Obama to sit down in

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face-to-face discussions on the pending crisis in Syria. Here Putin assured Obama that the Russian government would use its economic and military leverage to see to it that Syria would dispose of any existing chemical stockpiles, verified by international inspection. The United States, in turn, would refrain from any missile strikes. Obama agreed, seeing that he was being offered a face-saving solution to his “red line” ultimatum. But Putin himself emerged as an even greater political winner. He was accorded a peaceful crisis resolution role not just in Russia but also in the international press. Some argued, including the independent Russian media outlet NTV (Nezavisimoe Televedenie), that Putin’s role in preventing a potential chemical weapons disaster made him worthy of gaining the Nobel Peace Prize. In any case, the whole episode allowed Putin to reclaim much of the human rights credibility that he had lost in suppression of the large-scale democratic protests that accompanied the beginning of his third term in the presidential office.

The Threat of ISIS (The Islamic Syria and Iraq State)

The Islamic Radicalism of Abu al-Zarqawi: After the fall from power of Sadam Hussein in Iraq, where in 2003 where he was finally captured in his underground hideout in mid-December 2003, Nouri al-Malaki was elected to power on May 20, 2006 as the official head of government. During this period, despite the presence of some 130,000 American occupation forces civil bloodshed broke out between the Shi’ite majority constituting 62 percent of the population and Sunni minority constituting 34 percent of the population with the Sunni minority. The Sunni minority, concentrated in the northern sector of Iraq, charged that it was being discriminated against by the Shi’ite majority. In the wake of such civil discord a radical Islamic Jihadist identified with al-Qaeda, Abu al-Zarqawi, arrived on the scene from Syria to gather a band of some 600 cutthroats in the city of Fallujah about 30 miles from the capital of Bagdad. Unfortunately, to counter Zarqawi’s terror campaign United States military officials sanctioned the most brutal physical abuse and sexual humiliation of captured terrorists held in Bagdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. Video photographs were subsequently made public in April 2004. The horror story told by such photographs played directly into the hands of Zarqawi who then propounded the doctrine that the only guarantee of radical Islam Sharia law was the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate. The Bush administration immediate reacted to the deteriorating situation in Iraq by dispatching a special “surge force” of 20 thousand additional marine forces to liquidate Zarqawi’s influence in Iraq, centered in Fallujah. And, by and large the surge campaign was successful. The additional American military force, and the general aversion even among Sunni insurgents to Zarqawi’s reign of terror, led to the general government pacification of Iraq by 2007. Zarqawi himself was hunted down and killed by American forces in 2006. At that point, pressure from the Iraqi government and domestic forces in the United States promoted a call for a gradual withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, which by 2007 had reached 170,000. According to a campaign commitment by President Obama in agreement with Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki, a gradual withdrawal of all American occupation forces took place, beginning in 2009 so that by December 15, 2011, only some 5,000 American military advisers remained in Iraq. This, after some 4,486 American troops had been killed in what George W. Bush had label “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” beginning in March 2003. But tension and civil bloodshed continued between Shi’ites and Sunnis as saw Malaki as a corrupt leader favoring his Shi’ite Muslim majority. By 2013 the United Nations reported over 8,000 deaths from 2007 to 2013 as civilian casualties from civil conflict. ISIS Under Abu al-Baghdadi: In 2013, the civil war in Syria had allowed a new radical Islamic jihadist Abu al-Baghdadi to come to power with from his headquarters in Raqqa, Syria, proclaiming itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Baghdadi’s terrorist extremism was even more brutal than that of al-Zarqawi, so much so that even al-Qaeda renounced its identity with Baghdadi as engendering too much negative world publicity. ISIS featured videos of public beheadings, including those of American journalists.

Baghdadi’s terrorist military forces, larger in number and much better trained that Zarqawi’s, achieved unbelievable conquest throughout the spring and summer of 2014. From its revolutionary caliphate in Raqqa, Syria, ISIS military forces swept over all of north-central Syria and north-central Iraq, capturing such cities as Aleppo and Homs in Syria and Ramadi, Fallujah, Tikrit and Mosul in Iraq. In total, by the end of the fall of 2014, ISIS controlled

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an area the size of the state of Indiana. In Mosul, in July 2014, Baghdadi had himself proclaimed the world leader of a newly emerging world Islamic state. Russian-American Collaboration in the Defeat of ISIS: Russian political support for the Assad regime was not only tied to its geopolitical strategic interest on the Mediterranean Sea with its seaport at Tartus, but the fact that Bashar Assad was a Shi’ite Muslim of Alawite persuasion. Although representing only a 13 percent Shi’ite Muslim population against a 74 percent Sunni Muslim of Syria, the fact that the Assad regime held political power promoted close political ties between the Syrian government and the government of Iran with a 95 percent Shi’ite population. This presented Russia with a countervailing force to Sunni Persian Gulf states headed by Saudi Arabia, oriented towards the exercise of American political influence in the Middle East against the Iranian regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini sworn to the destruction of Israel. This made Russian support for the preservation of the Assad regime all the more imperative.

Along with Russian military hardware, the Assad regime also came to also be supported by elite Iranian guerrilla militia forces. But it was not until the spring of 2015, that Russia became directly involved in the Syrian conflict with air strikes and military advisers. On the one hand, the Syrian Democratic Force continued to gain ground against Assad’s government forces, but even more critically more threatening was the ISIS force, which threatened to overrun both the Assad regime and the rebel Syrian Democratic Force. The pressing threat of ISIS promoted a certain level of cooperation between the American sponsored Syrian Democratic Force and the Russian sponsored Assad government, which included an only partially honored provisional mutual cease-fire, until their combined forces could vanquish ISIS. Russia and the United States also agreed to a mutual warning system in their aerial zones of ISIS bombardment. Both Russia and the United States beefed up their respective support for the Assad government and the rebel Syrian Democratic Force against ISIS with air strikes, military hardware, and ground advisors. The combined forces of the Syrian Democratic Force and the Assad government eventually carried the day. By April 1, 2015, the Iraqi forces retook Tikrit and the struggle began to turn around. Ramadi was in turn retaken on December 28, 2015, Fallujah on June 26, 2016, and in the fall of 2017 and spring of 2018 all of Mosul. Similar successes was registered in the recapture of Aleppo, Homs, and finally the last ISIS redoubt of Raqqa as the headquarters of its Caliphate. By the end of the spring of 2018, ISIS forces were reduced to scattered pockets of resistance in the Iraqi and Syrian hinterlands.

The Present Status of Syria and the Middle East

The Present Status of the Syrian Civil War: Russian military intervention in the Syrian conflict has seemingly allowed Bashar Assad to re-establish his authoritarian political rule in Syria with the complete defeat of ISIS. But United States support the Syrian Democratic Force, still acting as a rebel challenge, still controls some 25 percent of the countryside. The question is what will become of the United States backed insurgent coalition of the Syrian Democratic Force, which remains a significant rebel force in the Syrian countryside?

The Syrian Democratic Force itself is a heterogeneous composite of Syrian tribal guerrillas and Syrian Kurdish Pesh Merga. And just as the Iraqi Kurdish Pesh Merga were an instrumental military force in the recovery of Iraq from ISIS, so also has been the fighting spirit of the Syrian Kurdish Pesh Merga. The Overall Outlook for the Middle East: Kurdish minorities in the Persian Gulf and eastern Mediterranean areas number 7.3 percent in Syria; 23 percent in Iraq; 13 percent in Iran; and 18.9 percent in Turkey respectively. Kurds in all these countries have struggled for either greater political autonomy or outright political indepdence. The possible solution to the Syrian civil war of a partitioned Syrian state seems out of the question under the political rule of Bashar Assad, however. And complicating the issue is the call by the militant Kurdistan Worker’s Party for a broad Kurdish state encompassing he Kurdish minorities in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. Such would endanger both United States relations with Iraq and Turkey and Russian relations with Syria and Iran. Compounded by the United States and Russian conflict over Saudi Arabian and Iranian power, Russian-American relations suggest to continue to be a political loggerheads in the Persian Gulf area of the Middle East.

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Ukraine and Russian-American Relations

Ukraine, Demographic and Political Background: Ukraine with a territory of 233,032 square miles (only slightly less that the state of Texas) and a population of 44,209,733 was the birthplace of the Tsarist Russian state when Prince Oleg moved his headquarters from Novgorod on the Volkhov River in northwest Russia to Kiev midway on the Dnepr River in 879 A.D. Kiev under its Grand Prince remained the center of Russian rule under the Tartar conquest of 1240 A.D. It remained for the principality of Muscovy in north-central Russian to reestablish a new independent Great Russian state over all subordinate princes, and vanquish all Mongol rule by 1480 A.D. It was during the period of the Tartar conquest that the Ukraine developed a distinctive linguistic and cultural identity of its own from the Great Russian imperial identity of Muscovy, especially under the influence of the Jagiello dynasty of its western neighbors Poland and Lithuania. Noteworthy, is that the eastern Ukraine, extending from the Dnepr River of the Ukraine to the Don River region of southern Russia, was never under the same Western influence as the western Ukraine, and has kept a more pronounced Great Russian identity as the largest component of the 17.3 percent Great Russian percent of the total Ukrainian population. The most concentrated areas of Great Russian population in the Ukraine are in Donets and Luhansk in the Donets and Don river basins, which are also the chief industrial areas of coal, steel, and chemical production in Ukraine. And perhaps the greatest concentration of Great Russian in Ukraine until February of 2014 was in the Crimean Peninsula at the mouth of the Dnepr River flowing into the Black Sea (see below).

Tsarist Russia reestablished its political control over the eastern Ukraine in the seventeenth century after it had come under the political influence of the Ottoman empire after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and then reestablished its political control over the western Ukraine in the three divisions of Poland under Catherine the Great in 1772, 1793, and 1797. Except for a brief period during the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1921, Ukraine only established its modern permanent independent sovereignty in November 1991, as the first state to initiate the formal breakup of the Soviet Union. At first, Ukrainian relations with the Russia Federation were quite amicable under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. In 1993, Ukraine and the Russian Federation agreed to divide up the Black Sea Fleet and provide for permanent Russian anchorage rights at Sevastopol. In 1994, Ukraine and the Russian Federation signed the Budapest Memorandum, endorsed by the United States and Great Britain, which obligated the Russian Federation to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or independence of Ukraine.” In the same context, Article 2 of a Friendship Treaty in 1997, upholds the territorial integrity and inviolable borders of the two countries. And, in 1994, Ukraine agreed to denuclearize, sending its cold war nuclear weapons to the Russian Federation. Ukraine and Putin’s Foreign Policy: No doubt, Russia hoped that Ukraine would join a Eurasian Economic Union, beginning with a customs union of the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan, already completed on July 1, 2011, and projected to include “a single economic space” of product standardization and the complete free movement of goods, services, and people, much like the internal market dynamics of the European Union, to be formalized by January 1, 2012.

Ultimately, under Putin, Russia planned to include Uzbekistan and Kirgizstan along with Ukraine, bringing most of the central Asian states and much of former East European Russia back into a political fold similar to the present European Union. Armenia and Kyrgyzstan did join the original three in 2015. For Putin it was an expression of a Novorossiia relationship of strategic “Near Abroad” countries of the former Soviet Union, with 17.3 percent of the population of and 23.7 percent of the population of Ukraine and Kazakhstan being of Great Russian extraction. And for Ukraine, the Russian Federation was her largest trading partner and was especially dependent upon the Russian Federation for her supply of natural gas. The Russian Federation, in turn, was dependent upon pipelines through Ukraine for the transport of her natural gas export to Western Europe (although Putin was already planning to build a separate pipeline to Western Europe along the floor of the Black Sea.).

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Ukraine and the European Union: But Ukraine, under the tenure of its president Viktor Yushchenko from 2004 to 2010, was more interested in the West and the European Union for her future economic and political well-being. Throughout his tenure in office from 2004 to 2010, Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko had promoted Ukrainian membership in the European Union, which would first begin with a free trade association with the European Union. This Putin naturally opposed because it was designed to lead to eventual full Ukrainian membership in the European Union, which would also include membership in the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union, and almost certainly eventual Ukrainian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as well. Conversely, Viktor Yanukovych, who succeeded Yushchenko in the 2010 presidential elections, was of a pro-Russian economic and political orientation. Putin wished to work through Yanukovych to block any final agreement to a Ukrainian free trade agreement as a first step in admission to full membership in the European Union. Formal commitment to a free-trade association of Ukraine and the European Union was scheduled to take place at the European Union Lithuanian summit in November 2013. In attempting to disabuse Ukrainian public sentiment from to gaining admission to the European Union, Putin used the stick and the carrot. On the one hand, Putin threatened Ukraine with high restrictive tariffs on her exports to the Russian Federation; but on the other hand, Putin promised he would slash the price of natural gas to Ukraine well below world market prices, from $400 per cubic meter to $268 per cubic meter and a $15 billion grant, as an inducement to look toward membership in the Eurasian Economic Union as opposed to the European Union.

Putin’s influence seemed to work, because on November 21, 2013, Yanukovych backed out of a final commitment to a free-trade association agreement of Ukraine with the European Union. This sparked new public protests in Kiev and other cities of the Ukraine, this time featuring purple flags of the European Union, as distinguished from the Orange Revolution of 2005. Yanukovych as president was seen as capitulating to Putin’s foreign policy goal of blocking Ukrainian membership in the European Union. The protests culminated in a massive demonstration on February 18, 2014, in Kiev called the Maiden revolt in reference to the “Main Plaza” (Maiden Nezalezhnosti) in Kiev, where the protesters congregated demanding the removal of Yanukovych as president. Although Yanukovych sought to assuage the protesters by agreeing to a new early presidential election, he soon lost control of his own police, and was impeached. On February 23, 2014, Yanukovych with Putin’s assistance first fled to southern Russia and subsequently to Moscow where he has been in residence ever since. Rather soon after, Petro Poroshenko, a pro-European Union advocate, was elected the new president of Ukraine on May 25, 2014. Ukraine then formally committed to a free trade association as a first step toward membership in the European Union with an initial customs union to be established in 2016. The Russian Annexation of the Crimean Peninsula: The Crimean Peninsula – simply the Crimea – is a strategic geopolitical peninsula of 8,000 square miles and 2.7 million inhabitants. It juts out into the Black Sea separating Ukraine from southern Russia above the North Caucasian mountains. At its most eastern point, the Crimea is separated from southern Russia only by a 6-mile divide of the Kerch Straits where the Sea of Azov empties into the Black Sea. The Crimea was annexed from the Ottoman Empire under Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century, and today 63 percent of the population of the Crimea is of Great Russian extraction. It remained part of the Great Russian republic under the Soviet Union until 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev, rather arbitrarily, granted the Ukrainian republic government formal sovereignty over the Crimea. The Great Russian population of the Crimea felt minimized and persecuted under Ukrainian government sovereignty ever since. Another 10 percent of the population is of Tartar extraction, which also speak Great Russian as it native tongue, and has felt equally minimized and persecuted by the greater Ukrainian government authority. The capital city of the Crimea is Simferopol, but its most well-known geopolitical site is the military seaport of Sevastopol.

Although Ukraine as an independent nation-state agreed in 1993 to share the Crimean naval fleet with the Russian Federation, along with guaranteed naval anchorage rights at Sevastopol, the prospect of full Ukrainian membership in the European Union was naturally seen by the Kremlin as threatening its strategic naval interests in the Black Sea area of Turkey and the Balkans. It was this geopolitical consideration that probably most motivated Vladimir Putin to annex the Crimea by military action. The Russian annexation began on February 28, 2014, by sending an elite guard of Russian forces to seize control of strategic military sites in the Crimea. The forces bore no official insignias so as not be directly identified as Russian military forces, but only dressed in non-descript military

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wear as “little green men.” After asserting military control over the entire Crimean Peninsula, the Russian military forces then orchestrated a meeting of the Crimean regional parliament which voted to hold a regional referendum on the future political status of the Crimea.

Putin’s action was taken quite unilaterally in conjunction with his current FSB director, Aleksander Bortnikov, outside of the framework of many of his own close government associates. Even his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and American ambassador, Sergei Kislyak were not prepared to make any immediate coherent response to the operation. At the outset, Putin argued that the military action was taken to protect the rights of Great Russians against erupting “chaos” in Ukraine as a whole. Putin even went on to blame political machinations of the West, especially the United States, for the civil discord in Ukraine. Only on March 4, 2014, did Putin publicly acknowledge that the “little green men” were actually Russian special forces. And while Putin withheld any direct comment on the ultimate political status of the Crimea, the conclusion was foreordained. On March 16, 2014, under Russian military occupation, a regional referendum in the Crimea voted overwhelmingly to renounce Ukrainian sovereignty in favor of joining the Russian Federation. Two days later on March 18, 2014, the Russian Parliament unanimously voted to accept the Crimea as an integral political component of the Russian Federation. The Ukrainian Reaction: The Ukraine has never accepted the Russian annexation of Crimea. And the insurgency in the eastern Ukraine that quickly followed (see below) only hardened its already tense relations with the Russian Federation. Under President Poroshenko, Ukraine has not only rejected any discussion of membership in the Eurasian Economic Union, but signed the proposed free trade agreement with the European Union in on June 27, 2014, to be effectuated in 2016, and which was taken to be a first official step in reaching full membership in the European Union. Full membership in the European Union would bring Ukraine under the protective arm of the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union.

To ensure Ukrainian national security Poroshenko has gone even further in proclaiming a commitment to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by 2022. Under NATO, Ukrainian security would also be guaranteed by the United States as Article 5 of the NATO Charter declares that an attack on any of its members would be considered an attack on all of its members. No doubt, Poroshenko believes that full membership in the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would greatly strengthen Ukrainian government sovereignty over the eastern Ukraine against Russian sponsored breakaway insurgency. Russian and Western Political Reaction: The annexation of the Crimea was received by the great majority of the Russian population with enormous enthusiasm, as something of the reclamation of a “territory irredenta.” And despite the heavy-handed military action of Putin, it probably was genuinely approved the Great Russian population of the Crimea. Banners claiming “The Crimea is Russian land” (Krym russkaia zemlia) appeared throughout Moscow and other major Russia cities. The annexation of the Crimea also catapulted Putin to some of his highest ratings (over 80 percent according to most polls). Putin could argue that the annexation of the Ukraine both met the political aspirations of the great majority of the Crimean population (Tartars as well as Great Russians) and firmly security secured the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol and Russian strategic interests in the Black Sea. At the same time, the annexation incurred a substantial economic cost. It meant providing Russian pensions for the population of what was now one of the poorer areas of the Russian Federation at an estimated additional annual cost of $5 to $7 billion, and construction costs for the Kerch Bridge across the 6-mile Kerch Strait to the Krasnodar region of southern Russia, and underwater power lines from Krasnodar to the Crimean Peninsula.

The United States and the Western powers reacted to the Russian occupation to Putin’s annexation of the Crimea in several ways. The members of the former G-7 of the most economically advanced countries immediately cancelled a G-8 Summit meeting that would have included Russia and was scheduled to be held in Sochi in the summer of 2014. Instead the initial G-7 members met in Brussels ostracizing Russia from its membership (hence a return to the G-7 of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States). Additionally, the Western powers sponsored a United Nations resolution denouncing the Russian action in annexing Crimea, only to have it blocked by the negative votes of Russia and China on the Security Council. In the General Assembly, 100 nations voted for the resolution and only 11 nations voted against the resolution, while 82 other nations either officially abstained or refused to vote.

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The Western powers argued that United Nations protocol sanctions breakaway referendums such as that held by Russian authorities in the Ukraine only if the parent country agrees. Putin responded that the United Nations approved the 2008 referendum on Kosovo independence, even though it was renounced from the parent country of Serbia. Recognizing the non-reality of the use of military force to reverse Russian annexation of Crimea, the Western powers instead responded by the application of economic sanctions against doing business with financial oligarchs known to have backed Putin’s power play, most notably: Igor Sechin and Arkadii Rotenberg of the petroleum industry and Yurii Kovalchuk, the head of the Bank of Russia. Additionally, the United States denied visa status to such high-placed government figures as Sergei Ivanov, Putin’s chief of staff. Russia has responded by canceling its projected “South Stream” pipeline to transport petroleum to Central Europe through Ukraine and along Black Sea to a “North Stream” pipeline running directly from Russia along the Baltic Sea.

Civil Conflict in the Eastern Ukraine

Breakaway Insurgency in the Eastern Ukraine: Following the annexation of the Crimea by the Russian Federation on March 18, 2014, civil violence erupted in the eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists of Great Russian extraction in the areas of the Donets Basin and Luhansk Basin. The pro-Russian separatists in the Donets and Luhansk regions of the eastern Ukraine seized control of as much as 10,000 square miles of territory populated with a population 10 million people, and declared the areas to be founded as “People’s Republics” of independent sovereign rule to protect the rights of their Great Russian populations. Like in Ukraine the insurgents were supplied with advanced Russian weaponry and supported by “little green men” of elite Russian military forces, who were now openly designated as “volunteers” acting on their own choosing independently of official Russian government authority. The insurgency forces in the Donets and Luhansk regions reached 30,000 in number.

Ukrainian president Poroshenko immediately sent Ukrainian government forces to suppress the uprising, and in the civil-military conflict that followed in the Donbas. The insurgents made world news headlines when they mistakenly shot down a Malaysian Airlines commercial flight on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 on board, believing it to be air support of the government forces. While several efforts have been made to establish a lasting cease-fire in the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 agreements of September 5, 2014, and February 12, 2015, intermittent fighting continued with more than 9,000 dead May 2016. Today, about half of the population of the Donbas and Luhansk areas remain under rebel control.

Although Putin has denied that his government fomented the insurgent uprisings in the eastern Ukraine, Putin has also declared that, if circumstances demand, Russia has a moral right to formally intervene to protect the rights of Great Russians in the eastern Ukraine all the way from Odessa to the border of south Russia near the Don River. More ominously, Putin refers to the eastern Ukraine within the context of Novorossiya of the Russian Near Abroad. Putin has suggested that Russia would support United Nations occupation forces and provisional bipartite autonomous rule like the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995 in Bosnia.

Russia and the Balkans

Moldova: Moldova (formerly the Russia Soviet Republic of Moldavia), is country of 13,070 square miles and a population of 3,510,485, and mostly rests in the area between the Dniester River and the Prut River, but also with a Transdniestria sector contiguous with Ukraine. Ukraine borders Moldova to the north and east and Romania to the west. Also called Bessarabia, Moldova has strategic access to the Black Sea and was annexed by Tsarist Russia from the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century. Moldova has a significant 5.9 percent minority Great Russian population. The bulk of the minority Great Russian population lies in the Transdniestria area and has sought autonomous self-rule with closer relations to the Russian Federation. By way of contrast, the bulk of the country has adopted a pro-Western orientation and on June 27, 2014, signed agreement with the European Union presaging an application for eventual full membership in the European Union. Russian foreign policy has aimed at preventing Moldavian membership in the European Union, and most likely NATO as well. Barring

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prevention of such a pro-Western orientation, Moscow has encouraged a stance of political independence of the pro-Russian Transdniestria area.

Albania: Albania is a country of 11,000 square miles and a population of 3,036,604, and rests between Greece and Montenegro on the Adriatic Sea. Its geopolitical importance lies in the Balkan Peninsula separating the Adriatic Sea from Aegean Sea and the Black Sea. Albania played a significant role in Kosovar revolt against Serbia in 1999 by accepting some 450,000 Kosovar refugees. Albania joined NATO in 2009, and was granted candidate status to the European Union in 2014. The pro-western orientation of Albania naturally became a source of concern to the Putin regime, because Russia has sought to exercise political influence in the Balkans since the demise of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Albania’s pro-Western stance is today tied to close relations with its equally pro-Western the orientation of its Adriatic Sea neighbor, Montenegro. Montenegro: Montenegro is a country of 5,333 square miles and a population of only 644,578, and rests above Albania and also borders on Bosnia to the north and Serbia to the east is also strategically located on the Adriatic Sea. The country asserted its independence from Serbia in 2006, and applied for membership the European Union and NATO. While its status with the European Union is still on hold, on May 19, 2016, Montenegro formally joined NATO. Montenegro’s warm-deep water seaport at Kotor makes it a valuable ally to NATO and equally potential threat to Russia in the Balkans. Bulgaria: Bulgaria is a country of 42,811 square miles and a population of 7,144,653, and rests on the eastern edge of the Balkans bordering directly on the Black Sea bordered by Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, and Greece to the south. Bulgaria, with Slav population closest to the eastern Slav culture of the Great Russians, has always been a prize of Russian influence since the demise of the Ottoman Empire. But in 2006 Bulgaria along with Romania joined the European Union, and both subsequently joined NATO. Only with the election as president of the pro-Russian, Rumen Radev, on November 13, 2017, has Putin found greater hope for the promotion of Russian foreign policy interests in Bulgaria. Radev declared that he took comfort President Trump’s pledge to “work for a better dialogue” with Russia.

BRICS as a Global Russian Sponsorship BRICS as a Strategic Third Force”: Somewhat unrecognized by the popular media, Russia has also sponsored the development of what might be called a “third force” to American power in the European Union and Russian power in the Eurasian Economic Union in the establishment of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, and China in 2006, and joined by South Africa in 2010. It is intended to be global organization of Russia and China with top second-world countries, aspiring for first-world economic status.

BRICS is designed to promote mutual trade and economic investment among its member countries within the framework of a “fairer world order.” The latter presumably refers to current disadvantageous trade arrangements between these up-and-coming second world countries and the G-7 countries of the Western world. BRICS has also taken on a quasi-geopolitical function insofar as led by Russia at Bashkortostan in 2015, BRICS membership resolved to support Brazil, India, and South Africa for permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. According to Colton, the BRICS countries represent 43 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of the world’s economy. Military Budget: To establish Russia’s role as one of the world’s great powers, Putin must depend upon his arsenal of modernized weapons – which he tried to exhibit to the world on March 1, 2018, with a video presentation to the Federal Assembly showing missiles, unassailable to any anti-ballistic missile system, targeting the United States.

Still it is difficult to see how Putin can move toward a more diversified education based digital economy with its current level of military spending. And this when Putin sees Russia’s military power to the foundation of its role as competing world power to the United States. At present, Russian military spending accounts for 16 percent of its annual budget as compared to military spending accounting for 7 percent of the annual American budget. But even here Russia’s 2012 military budget of $90.7 billion was dwarfed by the $682.5 billion American military budget. of the United States. China’s military budget $166.1 billion was actually second to the United States, and the United

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Kingdom ranked fourth behind Russia at $60.8 billion, followed by France at $58.9 billion as the fifth largest national military budget.

The 2017 Parliamentary Election and the 2018 Presidential Election Background: By the time of the 2017 parliamentary election, some of the enthusiasm for Putin’s political rule had abated. On the one hand, there were cutbacks in government spending and employment programs given the fact that in 2017 the price of oil had fallen to $67 a barrel, a steep drop from its all-time high of $127 a barrel in 2012, and well below a minimum $80 a barrel necessary to support normal government spending. Likewise, faced with the possibility of a continuing economic shortfall, Putin was forced to raise the retirement age from 62 to 65 years of age. This was extremely unpopular among rank-and-file members of the work force, who had been accustomed to a very generous retirement age even under Soviet rule. But moderate disaffection was acerbated by the continuing campaign by neo-liberals against corrupt silovik rule, that had first emerged before the 2012 presidential election in the Pussy Riot and Bolotnaya Square protest. In a sequel to the past, on “Russia Day” of June 12, 2017, thousands of demonstrators protesting corrupt silovik political rule took to Tverskaya Street in Moscow, along with the same protest in more than 160 other cities. The protestors again rallied around Aleksei Navalny, who planned to run for the presidency in 2018 on an anti-silovik corruption campaign. Navalny, now joined by Vladimir Kara-Murza in a national organization of “Open Russia” to continue the struggle against silovik corruption, was himself arrested an hour before the opening of the demonstration on a trumped up charge by police official. Protester signs read: “Free Navalny” and “Navalny for President.” Eventually, more than 1,000 protesters were also arrested arbitrarily arrested by the police. The protest of June 12, 2017, had already been preceded by a similar demonstration against siloviki rule on March 26, 2017. The State Duma Election of September 18, 2016: The results of the State Duma elections of September 18, 2016, were as follows: United Russia gaining 54.20 percent of the vote and 343 seats; the Communist Party of the Russian Federation gaining 13.34 percent of the vote and 42 seats; the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia gaining 13.14 percent of the vote and 39 seats; and A Just Russia gaining 6.22 percent of the vote and 7 seats. The rest of the vote was split among seven other parties, none of which could win any seats in the single-member districts nor meet the 5 percent threshold to share in the proportional representation pool. With 343 seats United Russia could claim a 76.22 percent majority of the seats with 54.20 percent of the popular vote. The reason for this is that it could dominate in the single-member districts over all other parties, and the minor parties receiving less than 5 percent of the vote could not share in the proportional representation pool. The Presidential Election of March 23, 2018: In the presidential elections of March 23, 2018, Vladimir Putin scored an overwhelming first-ballot victory with 76.69 percent of the vote. His closet two competitors were Pavel Grudinin of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation with 11.77 percent of the vote and Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the Liberal Democratic Party with 5.65 percent of the vote. Ksenia Sobchak, the daughter of Anatolii Sobchak representing the reformist Open Russia movement received on 1.68 percent. Aleksei Navalny was not permitted to run on the basis of a technically of not having received sufficient endorsement signatures before the election.

President Trump and Russia

Russian Cyber Hacking: Throughout his present tenure as president, Donald Trump has argued for changed political relations with the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin to accommodate friendly relations with a “good competitor.” Even during his campaign Trump went so far as question whether the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was not indeed “obsolete.” And as president, Trump refused to accept that Russia meddled in the 2016 American election campaign under its State Intelligence Administration (the GRU – Gosudarstvennoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie) to attempt to influence the outcome of the American 2016 presidential election in his favor against Hilary Clinton. And, indeed, Russia under Putin’s rule would have had good reason to do so. As secretary of state, Hilary Clinton publicly cast aspersions on the legitimacy of the Russian 2011 parliamentary

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elections, and scoffed at Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union as an expedient effort to begin to put back together the Soviet Union. Trump has scoffed at such allegations of Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election as simply an attempt by Democratic liberals to delegitimize his own public mandate to hold the American presidential office. This, despite the fact that in 2017, the then director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed that all sixteen federal intelligence networks had concluded that Russia attempted to meddle in the 2016 American presidential elections. The was notably was accomplished by hacking Hilary Clinton e-mails and files of the Democratic National Committee, and then releasing them in trolling on the social-media accounts through Guccifer 2.0. Beyond this, there were meetings of various Trump campaign officials with representatives of the Russian government, most notably the meeting of Paul Manafort, Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner with Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in June 2016. The American Government Response: In late December 2016, President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomates and closed two Russian diplomatic compounds in retaliation for Russian hacking. Later in 2017, Congress by a vote of 97 to 2 voted to impose additionally imposed general economic trade sanctions. President Trump himself in November 2017, also approved specific financial and travel sanctions against 19 Russian individuals and five organizations. But in doing so, only half-heartedly admitted that Russian officials had indeed been involved in American election meddling.

Perhaps most importantly, President Trump has taken no leadership in organizing an all-out campaign against what experts say in currently turning into a “cyberspace war” that would include not only the continued Russian hacking of American political elections, but also marshaling of an ability to shut down the American electrical grid system and neutralize a nuclear second-strike capability. The Trump-Putin Relation and NATO: Despite domestic concern over Russian political hacking, President Trump has sought to continue court a special simpatico with President Putin that has also involved American relations with its closest allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a mutual security pact that has endured for some seventy years and has proved to arguably be the most successful instrument to preserve the international order in human history. Before, proceeding on to Helsinki, Finland on Monday, July 16, 2018, for a special summit meeting with Vladimir Putin, Trump spent two days at a NATO summit meeting in Brussels with America’s NATO allies. And here it should be noted that Trump, before the meeting, had asserted that he as the American chief executive had the authority to unilaterally withdraw from NATO. He has also publicly cast doubt on an American commitment to defend Montenegro as the most recent member of NATO, throwing into question the most important provision of the NATO agreement, Article 5 which provides for the mutual military commitment to defend the national security of all members of the alliance.

Such comments have stunned the American national security establishment along with all other 29 members of the NATO alliance. On the one hand, there is no constitutional basis for such American presidential authority as NATO is a treaty, ratified by the Senate under constitutional law, and not an “executive agreement” subject to independent presidential authority. Recognizing the danger of such comments to the very viability of NATO as the bastion of American security policy in the post-world war two era, Congress immediately passed a resolution confirming an on-going American commitment to NATO. Trump’s comments have been quite in keeping with his earlier campaign declaration that NATO might be considered as being “obsolete.” Nothing could have pleased Russian President Vladimir Putin more.

Then at Brussels on Tuesday, July 10, 2018, Trump proceeded to continue to vex America’s NATO allies by publicly chastising its members not meeting their financial obligations to defense spending. At the Brussels summit in 2014, it had been agreed that all members should reach a 2.0 percent threshold of annual gross domestic product over a ten-year period. So far only five members have met this threshold, but almost all have stepped up their spending commitment since the past NATO summit of 2014 established the 2.0 percent threshold. But instead of endorsing the present direction of NATO membership defense spending, Trump seemed intent on chastising the entire organization. Indeed, Trump suggested that the United States was being cheated by most of the other

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membership, since he said the American commitment was 4.0 percent of its gross domestic product (actually it is 3.5 percent of the American gross domestic product).

Trump also again went out of his way to alienate Angela Merkel by suggesting that she was abetting Russian expansive foreign goals by sanctioning the construction of the North Stream oil pipeline. Merkel retorted that Trump has no business chastising someone who had to live under Russian sponsored Communist government in East Germany for so many years of her life. The overall tenor of Trump’s demeanor at the 2018 Brussels NATO summit left America’s allies perplexed and disturbed. German foreign minister Heiko Mass went so far as to declare: “We can no longer completely rely on White House.” The Trump Helsinki Summit: After the Brussels NATO summit, Trump, after a several-day stopover in the United Kingdom traveled to Helsinki, Finland for a private bilateral talk with Vladimir Putin on Monday, July 16, 2018. Although totally unprepared by extensive prior groundwork, which all successful direct talks by heads of state require, Trump, not even being accompanied by staff members, held a two-hour private conversation with Putin on the afternoon of July 16, 2018. And just a week before the meeting Mueller’s had identified over 300 Russian GRU officials involved in the hack of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the summer of 2016, and specified their headquarters on Kirova Street in Moscow.

But in a press statement afterward, Trump, standing beside a smirking Putin, intimated that his private bilateral meeting with the Russian president had been quite productive. Addressing the present general tenor of Russian-American relations, Trump went on to blamed both sides, declaring: “I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish.” And regarding Russian meddling in the 2018 American elections, Trump declared: “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” And more specifically regarding Russian hacking, Trump declared: “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Later under negative American publicity Trump said that he meant to say wouldn’t.

Putin himself asserted that he wanted Trump to win the presidency in order to restore normal Russian-American relations, and, allowed that there could have private Russian meddlers, but none working under the authority of the Russian state. And Putin offered to allow American officials to question Russian GRU operatives in Russia regarding the hacking charge, provided that Russian officials would also be able to question in Russia William Browder, a British citizen, and Michael McFaul, the American ambassador to Russian from 2012 to 2014. The procurator general’s office in Russia accused Browder, a British citizen of funneling $400,000 into the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. Although, the reason for question Michael McFaul was never specified, American public opinion considered such a proposal a preposterous indignity to American sovereignty, but Trump responsible that Putin’s proposal was “incredible” in the positive sense of the term.