“And you are lynching Negroes” 

Finally Putin has figured out how to sell his invasion to Obama.

Unlike Soviet Russia, Putin’s Russia can’t count on a reliable leftist base for its propaganda. So it bombards the margins with messages tailored to them. This tactic mainly targets the extremes, the far left and the far right, conspiracy theorists, anarchists, people who are willing to embrace anything that is anti-establishment. That’s the basic principle of Russia’s RT which fuses tabloid sensibilities with radical politics. The tactic occasionally picks up traitors like Edward Snowden, a Ron Paul supporter who turned into the Aldrich Ames of the 21st century, selling out American secrets to Moscow.

Mostly it works on people who aren’t paying attention because there are too many contradictory messages.

Putin’s Russia (unlike America) is a place where you can really be free under a strong regime. It doesn’t invade other countries (like America) but when it does, it’s only because America backed it into a corner. It’s a strong “Christian” country that doesn’t oppress Muslims, but strongly fights terrorism, but not in a bad American way that violates civil rights.

Anyone who knows what’s actually going on in Russia knows all this is up there with the old Soviet propaganda about how Americans were starving while Soviet agriculture was booming.

Russia and Ukraine have both struggled to make Americans care about their war. (Shooting down a plane helped do it.) For Russia, it’s a more uphill battle. To the margins, it dispatches messages about a neo-conservative globalist international conspiracy that forced it to invade and annex part of another country. This stuff plays well to the Glenn Greenwald-Ron Paul crowd that believes it anyway.

Making anyone else believe it is harder. So here comes a new talking point to warm the cockles of the Social Justice Warrior heart. Ukraine is racist.

This comes from Mikhail Klikushin, who has been noted for throwing out Russian government talking pointsbefore.

Unlike his peers, he has a very personal reason to want this happen. Zhan Beleniuk is a typical Ukrainian in every way but his skin color. His father, who he never knew, was from Rwanda. He was a student of the Aviation Institute in the Soviet Ukraine and, being a pilot, was killed in action at the time of war in this African country. Zhan’s Ukrainian mother, Svetlana, raised him alone.

Considering the kinds of people the USSR tended to train, we can hazard a guess about poor dear Zhan’s father. But finally Putin has brought back that classic staple of Soviet propaganda, “And you are lynching Negroes”

The American asks: “How many decades does it take an average Soviet man to earn enough money to buy a Soviet car?” After a thoughtful pause, the Soviet replies: “And you are lynching Negroes!”

So now Ukraine is “lynching negroes”.

There are others in the country whose looks don’t fit the profile of an Aryan Ukrainian, a profile celebrated by Ukrainian nationalists enjoying their moment in a lot of places of power in the country, other much more vulnerable than Zhan, who for different reasons came to Ukraine from Africa and now have to experience racism on the streets almost every day.

In the end of July, a number of Ukrainian newspapers broke the story of 23-year-old Asi, a refugee from the African state of Sierra Leone who came to Ukraine just six months ago. At the bus station at the town of Uzhgorod, which is in West Ukraine, the young woman and her 8-month-old son were trying to board the bus but were violently thrown off by the furious passengers who didn’t want to travel in her company because she “was not like them.” The violent attack was filmed by the angry crowd that was shouting “Tie her to the fence together with the kid!” The bus driver called police, who upon arrival … hand-cuffed and took away the unfortunate victim of racial abuse who was hysterically screaming in English, facing the hostile crowd of Ukrainian “Europeans” who couldn’t understand her pleas.

You invade Ukraine. But they’re lynching negroes.

In Russia though, this kind of thing does not happen because no one is racist in Russia and everyone loves Africans who show up there. Sometimes they love them to death.

The men who jumped the Ivory Coast migrant at a crowded Moscow train station last November did not rob him. But they damaged his jaw to the degree that doctors had to install a metal plate to hold it in place. It took Bazie four months to raise the $3,600 to undergo surgery.

Africans in Russia: In the Nov. 2 Section A, an article about hostility against African blacks in Russia said there had been 177 reported acts of violence against blacks in Russia since 2010, according to the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis. There were actually 177 reported violent acts against blacks since 2008, SOVA officials say, six of which ended in death.

His story is not uncommon, Russian civil and human rights leaders say. African migrants face widespread hostility and racism that usually go unpunished.

This sort of thing happened a lot back in the Soviet days when the regime was importing African Communists to train as terrorists at their universities on a regular basis.

It shouldn’t be surprising because, contrary to liberal dogma, 90 percent of the world is racist. Including Africa. And I’m being generous here. Russia and Ukraine are just as racist and Russian propagandists really need to stop moving old Soviet propaganda here.

There’s a reason, “And you are lynching Negroes” became a cliche, a sign of how bankrupt and dishonest Soviet propagandists were.

The only people who believe this garbage also believe everything Max Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald say.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/259778/new-russian-propaganda-ukraine-racist-daniel-greenfield

This is just satire.

The woman being satirized is Margarita Simonyan, head of RT, the main Russian propaganda outlet.

Pretty good likeness, eh?

If you’ve ever had the nagging suspicion that RT is just a nest of foul Kremlin propagandists slavishly following Pontius Putin’s iron-fisted commie will, don’t fret. Now there is ironclad proof. McCain and Killary can now rest easy in the firm knowledge that their paranoid fantasies are confirmed.

Source: http://www.sott.net/article/308373-RT-Kremlin-propaganda-exposed

Measures Of Effectiveness: MOE

We suck.

Way back in 2005, the CEO of the Lincoln Group confided in me that one of the ways they measured the effectiveness of their operations by the number of bakery bombings.  If the number of bombings went down, they were effective.  Crude and very unscientific, but that was the best they could do.

2005 is also the year I stood up a little group called the Senior Information Operations Advisory Council, the SIOAC. It was an email discussion group, members had to be invited and vetted.  It was very private and not advertised at all.

At one point I discussed a potential information campaign with simple goals and methods.  I received a very simple response from Dr. Dorothy Denning, one of the pioneers in information security and author of the book Information Warfare and Security. Addison-Wesley, Denning, Dorothy E. (1999). ISBN 0-201-43303-6: 

What are your Measures of Effectiveness?

That simple question has kept me grounded, even to this day.

This past week I sat down with Colonels, Lieutenant Colonels and Majors – and one Greek two-star General, the leaders, of Psyops and Information Operations and associated fields in NATO, from the US and the other 28 member states.  They are all seeking ways to better measure effectiveness.

Hearkening back ten years, once again, I visited the SAIC foreign media monitoring system, a very human-intensive center in Alexandria, VA.  Headed by a friend of mine, also a member of the SIOAC, the center employed a lot of very educated natives of the countries we were monitoring.

Fast forward five years and one small company in downtown Washington DC did this virtually, monitoring developing themes and memes. Their claim was that they predicted Arab Spring one week in advance, far ahead of the intelligence agencies. They received a lot of contracts with CENTCOM, AFRICOM and others.  The wars ended and they folded like a deck of cards. A great friend, also in the SIOAC, went on to greener pastures.

DARPA released a Broad Agency Announcement called SMISC in 2011, I met with the PM and told him the capabilities they were seeking already existed.  They were also asking for a ‘persuasion engine’, I had that as well.  Someday I’ll discover what SMISC produced, the PM didn’t believe my claims, so I couldn’t save him millions of dollars.

I agreed with the NATO Senior Psyop Chief to investigate companies claiming they have the capability to assess effectiveness of information operations.

This morning I met with one company with the same capabilities, including the persuasion engine. This afternoon I’m meeting with yet another, with another member of the SIOAC.  I have yet another company standing by.

Oh, yeah, I stumbled across a Russian company with the same capabilities one year ago.  I took a look and it is bad…  I mean real bad. Slick briefing but when you read their brochures, with my background I can understand what they’re saying, they’ve achieved what SAIC did back in 2005.

Funny thing, this. NATO has a need, I have the information. A marriage made in heaven.

The United States has the tools to defeat the Islamic State and Russia’s propagandists, but is squandering them.

• BY DAVID ENSOR
• DECEMBER 14, 2015

In a world where terrorists recruit on the Internet and Russian President Vladimir Putin weaponizes “news” on his propaganda television channel, what role should the United States play in the new world of information warfare?

It is clear that America cannot prevail with hard power alone, yet since the closing of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) back in 1999, America’s capacity to participate in the global battle of ideas has declined, even as the information challenges continue to grow and change. Both of the areas USIA used to oversee — public diplomacy and international broadcasting — urgently need renewed focus and resources.

In his recent Oval Office speech to the nation, President Barack Obama called for “high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice.” Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was more specific earlier that day. Terrorists, she said, “are using websites, social media, chat rooms and other platforms to celebrate beheadings, recruit future terrorists and call for attacks. We should work with host companies to shut them down.”

Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others are still reeling from the Edward Snowden revelations about NSA surveillance. Though they understand the need for not allowing their platforms to be used by would-be terrorists, they are not keen on collaborating with the U.S. government or monitoring customers’ online accounts. For them, it is critical to protect Internet freedom. If the Obama administration — or any future administration — seeks some adjustments on Americans’ privacy in favor of greater security, it will need to make its case and engage with the companies on an ongoing basis.

There is a counter messaging part of this, too. The State Department currently has a modest $5.8 million effort to counter ISIS recruiting and other hateful propaganda (including the much-derided anti-ISIS Twitter account). The undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, Richard Stengel, says the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications has “a campaign […] which is using direct testimony from dozens and dozens of young men and women who have come back from Iraq and Syria and said ‘the Caliphate is a myth.’ You know, ‘I was abused there. They’re not religious. They’re venal and money-grubbing.’ So that type of campaign to refute their disinformation is the kind of thing we’re doing.”

The work is important but the effort is far too modest. Recently the Pentagon, unhappy that the State Department’s anti-terrorism recruiting effort is so limited, obtained a green light from Congress to launch an effort of its own, written into the 2016 Defense Authorization Act. That is not a bad thing: The Pentagon can add much greater resources both to disrupt the Islamic State’s online activities and to countermessage against their recruiters. But the work should be coordinated at a high level, and should be under civilian control.

Teams in the Arab world should be funded to follow the Islamic State and al Qaeda affiliates on every possible chat room and website, countering their appeals in real time.

Teams in the Arab world should be funded to follow the Islamic State and al Qaeda affiliates on every possible chat room and website, countering their appeals in real time. And the communication should all be done by Arab partners in the region, not by Washington.

Overall, since public diplomacy programs moved to the State Department in 1999, they have suffered from budget cuts and leadership turnover. It’s a sad reality that public diplomacy efforts tend not to be valued by the State Department as highly as conventional diplomacy. In the digital age, that thinking is out of date.

There has also been a shortage of clarity and resources over at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which was established as USIA closed, to oversee U.S. broadcasting and media, including the Voice of America (VOA). In January 2013, Secretary Hillary Clinton didn’t mince words about what she thought of its efforts, telling the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the BBG was “practically defunct in terms of its capacity to be able to tell a message around the world.”

Now, some three years later, it’s clear that the nine part-time appointees that comprise the BBG should never have been asked to run a complex group of media companies — part Federal, part independent grantees — through a period of rapid change in global media. Though the bipartisan board was needed to create a firewall protecting the independence of the journalism from interference by policymakers, it was often unable to play an effective executive decision-making role. As a result, there was a damaging period of policy drift, bureaucratic rivalry, and budget cuts. It did not help that there were long periods when the board was not complete — positions were left empty by the White House and Senate, sometimes for over a year.

Fortunately, BBG Chairman Jeff Shell and the current board understand the structural problem and what to do about it. The BBG’s recent appointment of a full-time chief executive officer for U.S. international media is an excellent first step. But CEO John Lansing, a seasoned media manager, needs legislation giving him clear authority over all budgets and personnel. A proposal in the House of Representatives (HR 2323) could actually make things worse, accentuating the rivalry and competition for resources by placing VOA under a different board and CEO than its three smaller sister entities: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

Despite the problems and even though its budget has declined in real dollars, VOA’s audience over the last four years has increased 40 percent from 134 million to almost 188 million in over 45 languages. In a world where broadcasters like RT, formerly Russia Today, peddle half-truths, spin, and disinformation, journalism done with the old-fashioned goals of objectivity and balance is more important than ever.

Or is it? During the four years I served as VOA director, a number of influential voices in Washington called for VOA to be made a full-throated advocate for American policy, rather than a journalistic enterprise. They argued that in the digital age, when there are hundreds of competing, opinionated voices out there, everyone would need to have to “spin” in order to have real impact. Might they be right?

For a research paper I’ve been working on at Harvard, I have been looking at the two very different models in the marketplace, comparing VOA and the BBC World Service with newer channels that advocate and spin for their governments: Russia’s RT and China’s CCTV. Though audience data on RT and CCTV is hard to come by, the evidence is clear.

RT claims a worldwide audience of 630 million people in 100 countries, but the claim is false. The Russians are using “potential audience reach” as RT’s metric rather its actual viewership — which is much smaller. For example, RT does not even have a Nielsen rating in the United States, which means although it is available on many cable systems in this country, not even 30,000 American households watch it daily. In Britain, as of May 2013, RT ranked 175 out of 278 channels, with approximately 120,000 viewers per day. As RT’s coverage of the Russian invasion — or, as they called it, the “liberation” — of Crimea and of eastern Ukraine became increasingly one-sided and shrill, that number dropped even further. Doubtless, RT has somewhat bigger audiences in other markets, but compared to the BBC World Service, which has a global audience of more than 300 million people, its reach and impact are clearly minuscule.

The same goes for China’s CCTV. Despite billions invested, and a priority to build its audience in Africa, data collected in 2013 revealed that just 2 percent of Kenyans had watched CCTV the previous week, as compared to 17 percent watching CNN, 7 percent for the BBC World Service, and 52 percent for Citizen TV, a local station. Former CCTV employees speak of not being allowed to mention African countries that have relations with Taiwan, and talk of censoring stories on elephant poaching, so as to leave out a major cause of it: Chinese demand for ivory. Such biased coverage simply does not have credibility with African audiences.

As Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, who first coined the term and concept of “soft power,” likes to say: “The best propaganda is not propaganda,” but truth.

“It’s by being impartial that the World Service helps to promote Britain,” former BBC World Service Director Peter Horrocks told me. “We absolutely reflect British values, and British values of fairness and impartiality are absolutely the bedrock.”

VOA’s robust audience growth over the past four years has been possible because of its similar dedication to honest journalism, even when the story is about America’s challenges and shortcomings, such as the Abu Ghraib scandal, Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance, or protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere against police shootings of young African-American men. But innovations in digital media and a new model of partnership with media around the world on television and radio have also played a crucial role. If the United States upped its game, there could be enormous additional audience impact for VOA and its sister stations. That would require more resources, and leadership with the legal authority to cut through bureaucratic rules and fiefdoms.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy took the issue seriously enough to recruit the famed journalist Edward R. Murrow to advise him on the war of ideas, and to run USIA. Perhaps President Obama should hire an information advisor who is similarly experienced in the field. The Cold War is over, but the importance of engaging in the battle — and of exporting reliable information — has only grown.

Source: http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/14/how-washington-can-win-the-information-war/

“Laws mean nothing to us!”

Russia has that sort of an attitude in almost everything they do.  ‘We can invade countries when we want to’. ‘We can abuse human rights when we want to’. ‘Murder? Murder? We murder whoever we want. Political assassinations are passè’ ‘We are accountable to no one! We make our own laws.’

Now Russia has codified that mindset in law, and the world quietly observes.

This makes me wonder if Russia will ever sit at the ‘grown-up table’.  Putin is 63 years old but acts like a 12 year old.

Dear Russia.  Nobody respects you because you refuse to act like adults.

No outsiders shall judge Russia’s actions.

12/15/2015 02:59 am ET

MOSCOW, Dec 15 (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin has signed a law allowing Russia’s Constitutional Court to decide whether or not to implement rulings of international human rights courts.

The law, published on Tuesday on the government website, enables the Russian court to overturn decisions of the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) if it deems them unconstitutional.

Human Rights Watch has said the law is designed to thwart the ability of victims of human rights violations in Russia to find justice through international bodies.

The law comes after the ECHR ruled in 2014 that Russia must pay a 1.9 billion euro ($2.09 billion) award to shareholders of the defunct Yukos oil company, a verdict that added to financial pressure on Moscow as it struggles with shrinking revenues due to tumbling oil prices and Western sanctions.

The ECHR said it had received 218 complaints against Russia in 2014 and that it had found 122 cases in which Moscow had violated the European Convention on Human Rights, including the deportation of Georgian citizens in 2006 and the incarceration of defendants in metal cages during Russian court hearings.

Russia’s parliament approved the new bill last week and Putin signed it into law on Monday.

Valery Zorkin, the head of Russian Constitutional Court, told Putin on Monday that Russia was in favor of “dialog” in case there was a problem.

“I don’t see any problem there, I think that people are worrying for nothing,” Zorkin said.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/russia-human-rights-law_566fc6bbe4b011b83a6c7040

Confirmation:

• Vladimir Putin signs law allowing Russia to ignore international human rights rulings
• Putin signs law allowing Russia to overturn international human rights court rulings
• Putin signs law allowing Russia to overturn rulings of international rights courts

Siberian featured in Islamic State beheading video is part of group’s propaganda efforts aimed at Russia 

By PAUL SONNE

Dec. 15, 2015 5:30 a.m. ET

MOSCOW—For Russia, it was a shock: A blue-eyed Siberian with shaggy brown hair raged against his homeland in an Islamic State video before slicing the throat of a fellow Russian accused of being a spy.

The executioner, identified by Russian media and his friends as a 28-year-old named Anatoly Zemlyanka from the city of Noyabrsk, has risen to infamy in Russia since Islamic State released the undated video from Syria on Dec. 2.

Russian authorities, while not confirming his identity in the propaganda video, have put him on Interpol’s wanted list. Russian media have dubbed him Jihadi Tolik, based on the Russian nickname for Anatoly, in describing his apparent transformation from Siberian college student to the Slavic face of Islamic State brutality.

Mr. Zemlyanka’s image has spurred comparisons to Jihadi John, or Mohammed Emwazi—the British militant whose appearances in videos presiding over the beheadings of Western hostages while leveling demands at President Barack Obama made him a prime propaganda tool for Islamic State. But instead of speaking English and condemning Mr. Obama, Mr. Zemlyanka is speaking in Russian and berating Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Listen to me, Putin, you dog, and let your henchmen hear me too!” Mr. Zemlyanka says in the video. “Before your arrival, the Assad regime bombed us, then America bombed us with its cowardly coalition, and now you’re bombing us. But nothing has come of it, apart from the fortitude and conviction that we’re on the side of truth.”

Islamic State is increasingly pointing its propaganda apparatus at Russia, as the Kremlin steps up its military support for Syrian leaderBashar al-Assad. The campaign appears aimed at raising Russian fears of possible further retribution from Islamic State, particularly after the suspected Oct. 31 bombing of a Russian charter flighttraveling to St. Petersburg from Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh.

“If, before, they cut off the heads of people from Western governments…today for [Islamic State] the main enemy has become Russia,” said Stanislav Ivanov, senior researcher at the Russian global-affairs institute IMEMO.

The Islamist extremist group has long sought to exploit symbolism in well-produced propaganda videos such as the one featuring Mr. Zemlyanka, who Russian media outlets say went to Syria to join Islamic State two years ago. The images of a Russian beheading a fellow citizen at the direction of Islamic State in a far-off land have shocked Russians.

Magomed Khasiyev is shown in this image from the Islamic State propaganda video before being beheaded by Mr. Zemlyanka.

“This is straight out of the Islamic State playbook—creating videos that scare people and potentially creating a brand out of the individual doing it,” saysCharlie Winter, senior research associate at Georgia State University. “These kinds of things are very carefully thought through to maximize impact.”

Mr. Winter said the extent of Mr. Zemlyanka’s transformation into the Russian equivalent of Jihadi John would depend on whether Islamic State possesses more Russian hostages and whether the Siberian extremist is shown killing them in other videos.

Worries about homegrown extremism have been mounting in Russia. The case of Moscow State University student Varvara Karaulova, who authorities say made contact with an Islamic State fighter online and tried to join him in Syria, has dominated headlines here in recent months.

Authorities detained Ms. Karaulova on the border between Turkey and Syria in June and repatriated her to Russia. The 20-year-old student is now awaiting trial in Moscow on charges of participation in a terrorist group. In an interview with a Moscow newspaper, her mother said Ms. Karaulova had fallen in love with the Islamic State fighter online but denied the charges.

Mr. Zemlyanka has triggered the same fears. Interpol published a high-priority “red notice” for his arrest on Friday. The notice said that Russian authorities had charged him with participation in an illegal armed formation.

Russian media have depicted Mr. Zemlyanka as a relatively reserved and unremarkable student from the Yamal region’s city of Noyabrsk, a frosty oil-and-gas hub a few hundred miles from the Arctic Circle.

Friends and acquaintances told Russian state television that he liked to listen to the German industrial-heavy metal band Rammstein, worked out obsessively and devoted much of his time to martial arts. Russian tabloid website Life News printed an old photo that appeared to show Mr. Zemlyanka doing the Nazi “Sieg heil” salute and quoted a school friend saying that he at one point toyed with far-right beliefs.

According to acquaintances speaking to Russian media outlets, he underwent a transformation after moving to the Siberian city of Tyumen in 2006 to finish college, where he studies customs affairs. He converted to Islam, renamed himself Tolik Taymullah—a mix of his Russian diminutive and an Arabic name that means servant of god—and ultimately departed for Syria in 2013.

Ksenya Lisyanskaya, a classmate who studied with Mr. Zemlyanka in both Noyabrsk and Tyumen, said she never noticed any aggression or cruelty. She said she knew him as a regular, warm person but added that they were not close friends.

He grew more somber after his conversion to Islam, she said. “He changed, he retreated somewhere inside himself,” Ms. Lisyanskayasaid. Still, she didn’t expect to find him on television as an Islamic State executioner. “I am in shock, how else can you describe this situation?”

According to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors and tracks radical groups online, the Islamic State media office for the Raqqa province released the Dec. 2 video. In the footage, a bearded Mr. Zemlyanka appears, threatening to kill Russian children and destroy Russian homes in retribution for Muslim deaths in Syria.

“Blood for blood, and destruction for destruction,” he vows.

The victim appears in an orange jumpsuit on his knees and introduces himself as 23-year-old Magomed Khasiyev from Russia’s Republic of Chechnya before saying that Russian security services had coerced him into going to Syria as an informant.

Family members and officials told Russian news outlets that Mr. Khasiyev was born to ethnic Russian parents as Yevgeny Yudin and later adopted from an orphanage by a Chechen family. It wasn’t immediately clear how Mr. Khasiyev ended up in Syria, or whether there was any truth to the on-tape confession given under duress.

The video’s grim aesthetic closely mirrors that of footage of Mr. Emwazi, who appeared in videos showing the executions of American and British hostages including journalist James Foley last year. U.S. officials said in November they were “reasonably certain” Mr. Emwazi had been killed in a drone strike.

The Russian video has had less impact than Mr. Emwazi’s tapes because of the profile of the victim. The deaths of Mr. Emwazi’s victims—Western journalists and aid workers—elicited public outrage and heartbreak. In Russia, uncertainty regarding Mr. Zemlyanka’s victim, Mr. Khasiyev, has limited the public sympathy.

In an interview with Russian state television, family members denied that Mr. Khasiyev had been fighting for Islamic State. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said in a statement released on Instagram that Mr. Khasiyev wasn’t part of any group in Syria aimed at “neutralizing bandits posing a real threat to Russia.”

Mr. Kadyrov added: “If [Khasiyev] was not an IS fighter, those guilty of his execution will receive their deserved punishment where they least expect it.”

Russian officials apart from Mr. Kadyrov have not commented on the matter. The Kremlin and Russia’s security service didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Ivanov, the senior researcher at IMEMO, said Islamic State could be warning Russian security services against trying to infiltrate its ranks, while also trying to reach out to more radically-inclined Russian recruits.

But Mr. Ivanov said the basic message was the same as Jihadi John’s: “They’re putting the emphasis on, ‘Among you there are people who are ready to serve us and chop off people’s heads.’”

Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-grapples-with-its-own-jihadi-john-as-moscow-steps-up-role-in-syria-1450175412

Dear colleagues,

Thank you very much for all your reports.

In the past week, pro-Kremlin media focused predominantly on repeating older, already debunked pieces of disinformation. Thus, we see reincarnations of stories like “Turkey / Ukraine buying ISIS oil” with no new supporting evidence. Also, conspiracy theories are repeated about the downing of Russian Su-24, e.g. alleging that the EU paid Turkey to do this, as one Georgian media outlet claims: http://bit.ly/1OTXh5U.

In the Disinformation Review, you will also see the reappearance of a topic of disinformation that is as old as the conflict in Ukraine itself – that Ukraine deploys ethnic cleansing. Such claims have been used for the past two years to justify both Russian and pro-Russian forces’ military actions in Ukraine.

The only new “minor trend” we have seen in the past week concerns sanctions against Russia. Several media outlets have repeated that it is not the EU that decides whether EU sanctions are imposed on Russia, but the United States. The number of articles stating this was limited, but the disinformation message was repeated e.g. by Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov himself; and it was multiplied not only in Russian (http://bit.ly/1Z7qZY5), but also in English (http://bit.ly/1QrJEus) and German (http://bit.ly/1Qg9Eea).

On the other hand, a completely different evaluation of the EU – in a mixednews.ru article (http://bit.ly/1Qmp5RQ) – states that the EU is not a body whose decisions are dictated by a third party, but is in fact established by secret elites with the aim of forming a new world government.

There is some interesting information this week about the different publishing pathways of single stories. It is quite common for pro-Kremlin media to multiply the same message in different languages, but this usually takes some time (e.g. the German article mentioned above was published at the end of November, then took two weeks to appear in English; and last week’s Slovakian article (http://bit.ly/1jQDVS8) about ISIS being financed by the USA is a translation of a Spanish RT article which is more than a year old (http://bit.ly/1mcXZ2S). On the other hand, some articles are translated and published in other countries and languages almost instantly: an article about the USA bringing 100,000 troops to Iraq appeared on the Russian site vesti.ru (http://bit.ly/1J4nrg0) first, and as you will see in the Review, was translated into English and Czech within 24 hours. Similarly, we saw the same disinformation about Turkey detaining Russian ships in the Black sea appearing in both English and Czech languages within 24 hours.

Also noteworthy this week is the technique deployed by Russia Beyond the Headlines, which quoted a “UK Honorary Consul” saying that Great Britain and Russia must set aside their differences and face their common enemy. In fact, Tim Lewin is no “UK Honorary Consul” but has been given this title by the Russian authorities, for a territory whose annexation is internationally unrecognized.

Russian media widely covered an incident with a Turkish fishing boat, whose fishermen, according to vesti.ru (http://bit.ly/1TKpBHh), were trying to ram a Russian destroyer, provoking warning shots from the Russian vessel to avoid a collision. The Turkish fishermen presented a different and less dramatic version of events: “We passed within a mile of a warship which was at anchor. We didn’t even know that it was a Russian ship, we thought it was a NATO ship. We didn’t realise we had been fired at,” said the captain of the boat (http://yhoo.it/1QgbhbU).

Technical note: Next week we will publish the last Disinformation Review of this year, but we are ready to collect your stories even during the Christmas and New Year period. The next Disinformation Review after that will be published on Tuesday, 5th of January 2016.

DOWNLOAD DISINFORMATION REVIEW WEEK SEVEN (.pdf)

For contributions, please e-mail jakub.kalensky@eeas.europa.eu

When you advertise this product, please use this link for automated subscriptions.

Thank you very much once again for your reports, we are looking forward to the new ones,

East StratCom Task Force
Follow us on Twitter @EUvsDisinfo

Source: http://us12.campaign-archive1.com/?u=8bc86e9f6ee27330e8902729c&id=2217fee98c&e=f9d3e9dbe4

DECEMBER 10, 2015 BY ERIC OLSON

U.S. Navy Adm. Eric Olson (ret.) is the former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. He is adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Although Americans by now understand that we are not in a traditional war against an armed state, we still fail to comprehend the true complexities and profound challenges of conducting a broad range of military and law enforcement actions in smaller, less straightforward operations against terrorists and their organizations.

We are trying to oversimplify the pandemonium of war. Violence, frequent and savage, is brought upon us by non-state entities and their ideological subscribers who do not hold to the traditional justifications or methods of armed conflict. Barbaric behavior has become the norm. Our enemies’ use of technology will continue as cyber attacks become commonplace, digital media are used to frighten and incite, and remote detonation of bombs is exported from the roadside improvised explosive devices of Iraq and Afghanistan to the streets of Middle America.

Our national security is of course dependent on the entire U.S.government—including the CIA, State Department and others—but I want to focus here on the armed forces. We need to rebalance our military forces to develop capabilities that are very different from the wars of earlier generations.

Our military units must remain, without doubt, masters of death and destruction. The need to kill our most violent and unrepentant enemies is real and urgent. Deploying special operations and other combat forces for this mission is necessary, and we should be unhesitant and unapologetic about doing so. But it is not always the first or best answer and it is never enough on its own. We must be ready to kill, but we cannot kill our way to victory.

Increasingly, violent conflict is taking place in what experts call the “gray zone.” That is, as the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, Gen. Joe Votel, said, where entities or groups “seek to secure their objectives while minimizing the scope and scale of actual combat.” It is in this murky middle that, Votel explained, “we are confronted with ambiguity on the nature of the conflict, the parties involved, and the validity of the legal and political claims at stake. These conflicts defy our ‘traditional’ views of war.”

Look around the world: it is hard to find a conflict that is not in the gray zone. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its continued activities in eastern Ukraine; the self-proclaimed Islamic State’s barbaric control of key parts of Iraq and Syria; Chinese construction on disputed reefs in the South China Sea; Boko Haram’s continued reign of terror in Nigeria; and the ongoing Houthi rebellion in Yemen are just some of the most recent examples.

It is not only the outbreak of new violence that should be forcing us to rethink conflict—it is also the underlying environmental, economic and social trends. These include resource competition; radical demographic shifts; the rise of coastal mega-cities in developing countries; increasingly visible corruption and patronage; the changing climate; and explosive technological advancement and information connectivity.

So amidst all this disorder, how do we organize and prepare America to excel against non-traditional threats? What is the role of our military in addressing this emerging range of non-traditional national security issues?

Adversaries the world over are developing new approaches to conflict in ways that are designed to mitigate the advantages of more powerful military opponents. But we in the U.S. have neither changed our military enough, nor developed non-military alternatives that are trained, equipped and expeditionary enough to respond robustly to crises that are not primarily military in nature.

There is an element of the U.S. military that arguably specializes in these kind of ‘submilitary’ conflicts: special operations forces, or SOF. But only about 3 percent of U.S.troops are SOF. What SOF—whose operators are older, speak more languages and operate in smaller teams—do well is leverage larger organizations and networks, especially in working ‘by, with’ and through’ local partners. They are pioneers in adapting emerging technologies (such as man-hunting drones), restructuring organizations, flattening communications and developing new tactics and equipment.

Our special operations forces are already sufficient in quantity. We shouldn’t ask them to take on every military mission. But the SOF example is a good one. It should inspire us to recruit into the armed forces more mature, more globally oriented and experienced people who can be further trained and educated to manage complexity and deal with ambiguous threat environments and diverse populations.

I am not just a former SOF officer arguing that SOF answers all, but the new era does require much more SOF-like thinking. It is worth reviving the approach of the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. We need experts not just in warfare, but also in languages, foreign cultures, religions, global micro-regions and more.

We need institutional fixes for a U.S. military that has not yet fully accepted the value of non-traditional career paths in which coveted command positions may not be the best use of individual talent. We need to renew or reinvent our forces for the new normal. Our initiatives should include temporary appointments of civilians to officer and non-commissioned officer ranks in order to answer unique and precise needs, focused recruiting of foreign-born personnel, sabbaticals for travel and research, and repetitive assignments of individuals to specific countries and localities around the world.

We need to reject old doctrine in favor of relevant knowledge, reject quantity in favor of quality, and reject our traditional notion of military victory in favor of local acceptance of enduring success. The budget, not just the conversation, must also reflect this.

Source: http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/12/americas-not-ready-todays-gray-wars/124381/

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Linas Linkevičius, who attended the premiere, stressed that while carrying out its information aggression against the West, Russia sought to undermine trust among members of the transatlantic family, raise doubts about such basic values of the Western world as democracy and respect for human rights, also to conceal violations of international law under the guise of different opinion.

The head of Lithuania’s diplomacy said that in order to effectively resist Russia’s information aggression, the European Union, NATO and the entire international community had to become more active in their joint effort.

During a discussion, which was moderated by the Executive Director of the Brussels Office of the German Marshall Fund Ian O. Lesser, Linkevičius noted that the documentary film ‘War 2020 Russia’s Information Aggression’ revealed principles of propaganda against the West, methods and sources, which would help provide a more clear understanding of the actual situation and would be Lithuania’s further contribution to countering Russia’s information aggression.

“You will encounter scarcely anything new here. Things are explained in simple words,” said Starkus who co-authored the film. His colleague Jonas Banys added: “Even though the film’s target audience is supposed to be Lithuanians, the goal is to show that propaganda is disseminated not only in Lithuania, but in the whole of Europe”.

The event was co-organized by the Permanent Representation of Lithuania to the EU and the German Marshall Fund.

Please click here to view the film.

Souce: https://www.urm.lt/default/en/news/premiere-of-lithuanian-documentary-film-on-russias-information-aggression-held-in-brussels-

Moscow – ISIS: interview of the turncoat

DECEMBER 16TH, 2015 10:20

According to the Eugene’s interview given to the Ukrainian channels, during his service in FSB he focused on counter-terrorism operations, had a relatively high security clearance and is able to render proof of the evident links between Russia and ISIS as well as Moscow’s and its agents within Islamic communities abroad being complicit to the terrorist hustle-and-bustle occurred in Europe.

For example, Eugene said that the breakdown of shops in London during 2009-2011 were organized in compliance with plans hatched by FSB and SVR against British security service.

Along with that, agent infiltration into Muslim diasporas of the European countries has been carried out by Russia for years.

Moreover, Russian renegade outlined that if to take into account the number of Russian agents in Muslim entities around Europe, it is obvious that Moscow perfectly knew about the upcoming terrorist attacks witnessed by Paris later.

The bulk of the foregoing facts mentioned by the former FSB officer were outlined earlier, thus now it is quite possible to arrive with a number of provisional conclusions regarding Moscow’s policy in the Middle East, which came to light from sources other than the revelations of the mysterious chekist operative.

1. Let alone Eugene, but many other Russian experts said that Paris terrorist attacks were hugely beneficial to Moscow.

Furthermore, tactics played by Russian media as well as Kremlin’s political establishment stood as a sheer proof to the aforementioned conclusion.

Particularly, major Russian channels saw the speakers maintaining the idea that Europe pays for mistakes of the USA policy in the Middle East, and “its necessity to look up to Russia instead of taking the lead of America”.

Hence, Moscow used terrorist attacks as a step forward in its geostrategic goal aimed at dividing NATO and the EU, which was proclaimed by Belarus experts a month before the attacks took place.

Considering the foregoing, it seems that Russia is hardly interested in putting an end to ISIS.

2. All the domestic and foreign policy scenario of Russia is fine-tuned to confront the West or at least the USA. This is clearly illustrated by the conflict with Turkey and multiple informational attacks against the unity of the EU and NATO.

It is suffice to mention professionally-shot video clips spread via the Internet after Paris tragedy, where the Russians were called to fight not against ISIS, but to combat America. The latter was labeled in the video as the creator of ISIS in particular and international terrorism in general. Interestingly, similar opinion was repeatedly rendered by V. Putin.

“Russia pushes hard to weaken the USA’s stance in the region in order to make a dent in Iranian-American partnership or force American’s into a tough choice between the relations with Tehran or El-Riyadh.

As well as that, Moscow cherishes hopes to lay its grip on Mediterranean seashore of Syria in order to be able to call shots in ongoing and future oil / gas development projects implemented by states and companies of the Middle East and Europe”, – stated Mr. Arseniy Sivickiy, director of Strategic and Foreign Policy Studies Center long before the revelations of Eugene.

Consequently, Russia appears to be rather an ally of terrorist in the part to combat the West, although there is no direct link between the former and the latter.

Besides, the aforesaid is explained by the fact that major part of Putin’s problems is associated with the West, i.e. imposition of sanctions initiated by the European countries, not to mention their support to Ukraine, prevent Russia to achieve its primary goals on the post-Soviet arena.

3. Russia wields certain leverages of influence on ISIS. For the record, this fact came to light also before the confessions of the turncoat named Eugene.

Rabbi Abraham Shmulevich, president of Eastern Partnership Institute, outlined that the majority of ISIS militants is recruited in Russia and former Soviet republics.

Also, there are many ISIS commanders who came to be Russian-educated Iraqi generals having served in Saddam Hussein’s army in the times of his regime.

“Russian intelligence has detailed files on many of ISIS commanders, but the questions remains as regards to the use of these files? Suspicions towards that matter are still alive, but Russia ceases to do nothing to have them stopped. Hence, in present situation we can state that Russia had its part in the creation of ISIS”, – said Shmulevich.

Stanislav Belkovskiy, Russian oppositional political expert, told media that Putin knew about Paris terrorist attacks, because he has huge agent networks within ISIS. Belkovskiy said that those networks were operated by E. Primakov.

The foregoing is partially proved V. Milov, former Russian MP, but now the leader of oppositional political party named “Demokraticheskiy Vybor” (in English stands for “Democratic Choice”).

4. Russian and old Soviet weaponry is somehow appeared with ISIS.

Noteworthy, in this regard Russian propaganda blames Ukraine, America, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

Apart from that, some experts state that an array of weapons for ISIS (not to mention other similar groupings) were vigorously re-exported during the hostilities from the territory of Donbas held by pro-Russian militants and annexed Crimea.

By the way, there are undeniable facts that portable anti-aircraft systems enjoyed major popularity in ISIS.

In line with experts’ opinion, dummy leaders of LNR / DNR could not let themselves to make such decisions without prior go-ahead from Moscow.

To crown it all, it seems that the aforesaid facts about the links between Russia and ISIS fully overlap with the statements made by Eugene.

Basically, defected FSB officer proved the opinions expressed by many other experts, including Russia’s arms trafficking, FSB / SVR large agent networks in ISIS, which stirs the suspicion that present situation in the Middle East is quite beneficial for Kremlin.

Source: http://my.telegraph.co.uk/russiaisis/albertson/3/moscow-isis-interview-of-the-turncoat/

The Soviets did something called Active Measures, Russia continues this practice today – badly.

There is a big difference between propaganda and Active Measures, propaganda is one of the many tools of Active Measures.  According to Dr. J. Michael Waller:

“Propaganda is the message. Active measures is the Soviet term for the range of efforts to achieve a political objective: what we would call propaganda, public relations, public diplomacy, political warfare, psychological operations, psychological warfare, economic warfare, ideological warfare, terrorism, insurgency, guerrilla warfare, regime change, etc.”

From Wikipedia:

Active measures (Russian: активные мероприятия) is a Soviet term for the actions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD,KGB) to influence the course of world events, in addition to collecting intelligence and producing “politically correct” assessment of it.^[1] Active measures ranged “from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence”. They were used both abroad and domestically. They included disinformation, propaganda, counterfeiting official documents, assassinations, and political repression, such as penetration into churches, and persecution of political dissidents.^[1]

Active measures included the establishment and support of international front organizations (e.g. the World Peace Council); foreign communist, socialist and opposition parties; wars of national liberation in the Third World; and underground, revolutionary, insurgency, criminal, and terrorist groups.^[1] The intelligence agencies of Eastern Bloc states also contributed to the program, providing operatives and intelligence for assassinations and other types of covert operations.^[1]

Retired KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin described active measures as “the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence”: “Not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.”^[2]

My synopsis:

• False sources aka fake news sites
• False actors, especially fake ‘international’ organizations
• False allegations aka lies which establish fake charges

Russia continues this Soviet tradition today. The difference is both qualitative and quantitative. Russia is throwing huge amounts of active measure stories against the wall to see what sticks. A myriad of fake news sites have been established for these false stories to be published. The fake stories allege anything which:

• Promotes Russian national interests
• Undermine Western countries and alliances
• Divides or sows divisiveness in Western countries and alliances
• Promotes distrust of Western countries and alliances

I wanted to get this out quickly in light of today’s StopFake.org feature (below), Active Measures are being used – widely and often – by the Russians.  Russia does not seem to care that they are absolutely ruining their reputation in the journalist / news communities, their goal appears to be to smear the West at all costs.

A word of caution here. What Russia is doing appears to be loud, brash and bold, as Dr. Christopher Paul stated “A firehose of BS or a hosepipe of bollocks”.  Anytime I see someone SHOUTING and it appears very obvious, I wonder if it is too obvious, providing a cover for a more subtle, intelligent, sophisticated and insidious fabrication.

StopFakeNews #64. [ENG] with Irena Chalupa

Among this week’s fakes are Russian media claims that US Vice President Joe Biden proposed to federalize Ukraine. Western and Russian media both inaccurately reported that Italy was intent on blocking the extension of EU sanctions against Russia. Ukrainian and Russian media featured a fake story alleging that a Norwegian military clothing company was suing Ukraine for stealing army uniform designs, while an Italian wire service interview with the son of the president of Turkey was completely misrepresented by Russian media and portrayed his as buying oil from ISIS. Following the ISIS theme Russian media also claimed that a Ukrainian volunteer battalion wanted to fight alongside this terrorist group.

Source: http://www.stopfake.org/en/stopfakenews-64-eng-with-irena-chalupa/

Russian television is not the trusted news source it was when Putin reassumed the Presidency of Russia.

Almost 50% loss in trust in Russian television by Russians.

Perhaps Russians are beginning to see they are systematically being lied to by the Russian government, who controls all Russian media.

Russia, you are losing the battle with your own people, they see what you are doing, they realize the truth, they know you are lying to them, they no longer trust Russian television.

I wonder what else Russians are starting to realize?  Perhaps that Putin is the most corrupt Russian president ever? That the Russian people are only controlled by the Russian government, not appreciated?

New surveys in Russia show that the number of people who trust television news had dramatically decreased in the past six years.

According to a poll from the Moscow-based Levada Center independent polling and sociological research organization, only 41 percent of those who mainly rely on TV for news actually trust it.

That is well below the 79 percent who said they trusted television news in 2009.

The Levada Center poll shows that 85 percent of respondents get most of their news about Russia and abroad from television.

The survey showed that the main consumers of television news are people with lower incomes who either cannot afford or do not use the Internet.

Russian opposition activists have accused the Kremlin of using television to promote its internal and foreign policies.

Based on reporting by Kommersant and Interfax

Source: http://www.stpetersburgnews.net/index.php/sid/239506715

“Russian personnel are in Ukraine.”

With those simple words Putin acknowledged what the world already knew.

WHY did Russia deny this for so long only to acknowledge Russian soldiers are in Ukraine?

All the rest only proves Putin is just plain insane.

BY SIOBHÁN O’GRADY

DECEMBER 17, 2015 – 12:44 PM

A Russian online reporter, Yekaterina Vinokurova, managed to upstage the President of Russia, in what was supposed to be Putin’s yearly show of self-worship.

Yekaterina Vinokurova stated a list Russian officials charged with corruption, incidents which displayed State corruption and implied Putin’s entire regime, starting with him, was corrupt.  She asked:

“When you came to power in 2000, is this the sort of result you expected?” the reporter, Yekaterina Vinokurova, asked Putin. “Maybe there are some things that should be corrected, maybe it’s not yet too late?”

This was followed by a lot of applause, mostly by journalists who were supposedly friendly to Putin.

Kremlin princelings cause awkward moment for Putin

Vladimir Putin has a knack for reading the Russian people’s mood, yet for a brief moment on Thursday, when asked about alleged privileges enjoyed by the offspring of his associates, he found himself at odds with popular sentiment.

Putin was giving his annual news conference — a platform to show off his commanding presence and folksy wisdom — when a reporter said a generation of privileged Russians could act with impunity because their parents were part of Putin’s circle.

“When you came to power in 2000, is this the sort of result you expected?” the reporter, Yekaterina Vinokurova, asked Putin. “Maybe there are some things that should be corrected, maybe it’s not yet too late?”

The comment from Vinokurova, who works not for a major media outlet but an online publication based in Ural mountain city of Yekaterinburg, elicited applause from the audience, unusual for an event attended by large numbers of journalists sympathetic to Putin.

After waiting for the clapping to end, Putin replied that if anyone was guilty of corruption, it was up to the legal system to investigate and that people’s careers could not be ended on the basis of unproven allegations.

Describing corruption scandals as “side effects” that happen in almost every country, he said people should not forget his main achievements were increasing the size of the economy and restoring the armed forces.

It was a subdued response compared to the outspoken rhetoric he deploys on other subjects and contrasted with a growing furore about the issue outside the Kremlin walls.

Russian truckers have been protesting against a new system of tariffs that is being administered by a firm co-owned by Igor Rotenberg, whose father is Putin’s close friend and former judo sparring partner.

Oleg Kashin, a high-profile journalist, alleged that he was beaten up by people connected to Andrei Turchak, the 39-year-old governor of the Pskov region in north-west Russia. Turchak, the son of a businessman with long-standing ties to Putin, has denied the allegation.

Earlier this month, Russia’s Novaya Gazeta published allegations that a son of Russian Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika owned two hotels in Greece and a property in Switzerland, among other foreign assets.

Chaika has said the allegations were fabricated on the orders of people threatened by his crackdown on crime.

PRINCELINGS

Alexei Grazhdankin, deputy director of independent pollster Levada Center said Russians were disturbed by signs of political patronage. “People who are in power and have some kinds of privileges and preferential treatment and build a business on these links provoke a certain amount of irritation,” he said.

At the moment that was not damaging Putin’s personal popularity, he said. Polls give him an approval rating of around 85 percent, and that support is unlikely to collapse soon.

But Grazhdankin said Putin was only safe from reputational damage as long as Russians were satisfied with their lot.

As ordinary people see their income shrink because of a recession made worse by Western sanctions, they are likely to pay more attention to the gulf between the rich and the poor, and especially to the wealthy individuals around Putin.

People who have spent time in Putin’s company say he finds stories about corruption among his circle distasteful, but that he is loyal to his friends. One reason he is tolerant on sleaze is that he believes that if he sacks someone, whoever replaces them is likely to be more corrupt, they say.

Some people have described the children of Putin associates as “princelings”, a phrase more usually used to describe the offspring of senior Communist Party officials in China.

At Thursday’s news conference, the reporter described Igor Rotenberg, and Chaika’s son, and Andrei Turchak as members of a generation of elite offspring “who will never be able to revive Russia, or protect Russia”.

She said whenever journalists raised questions about people in this clique, officials accused them of carrying out the orders of the West to discredit the Kremlin.

At the end of his response, Putin got into his stride, recounting a joke he said had been doing the rounds during Soviet rule, when a bureaucrat decided not to give someone a promotion on the basis of a false rumour involving a fur coat.

“We cannot behave that way,” in the case of allegations against the offspring of Kremlin associates, Putin said.

“We need to look at the essence of the problems, and not try to use a particular complicated situation to serve some kind of quasi-political ends.”

(Editing by Philippa Fletcher)

Source: http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-putin-russia-princelings-idUKKBN0U02G920151217

Your map does not include Crimea.   Thanks!  We’ll take it back now.

Your map does not include Crimea.   Thanks!  We’ll take it back now.

By Paul Goble

December 12, 2015

Staunton, December 11, 2015 The flood of news stories from a country as large, diverse and strange as the Russian Federation often appears to be is far too large for anyone to keep up with. But there needs to be a way to mark those which can’t be discussed in detail but which are too indicative of broader developments to ignore.

Consequently, Windows on Eurasia will present a selection of 13 of these other and typically neglected stories at the end of each week. This is the fourteenth such compilation. It is only suggestive and far from complete – indeed, this week once again, one could have put out such a listing every day, but perhaps one or more of these stories will prove of broader interest.

1. Stalin Drew Wolves But Putin Doodles. A photographer has captured Vladimir Putin doodling as he gives an interview. But he can’t always hold his audience: Dmitry Medvedev again slept through part of Putin’s speech and he can’t tell the truth.

2. Putin Updates Nazi Vocabulary. A Moscow commentator shows the ways Vladimir Putin has updated Hitler’s words, as Russian historians have shown the way Hitler copied Stalin’s techniques, including horrific medical experiments on inmates.

3. ROC Says Pray for Putin, Avoid Fast Food, and Treat Other Faiths as Foreign Agents. Patriarch Kirill has come up with a special prayer for Russians about Vladimir Putin. His aide Vsevolod Chaplin has called eating fast food a sin even though he doesn’t avoid it himself. And the Moscow Patriarchate wants the Duma to extend the foreign agents law to religious groups.

4. Turkish Crisis Catches Russia with Its Pants Down. Vladimir Putin’s ban on imports from Turkey has created numerous problems, the most humorous being Moscow’s inability to produce anti-Turkish t-shirts; the most serious being that Russians may not be able to buy new underwear as most of that now on sale comes from Turkey. Perhaps these problems provide additional evidence for one Moscow scholar’s contention that Russia has now finally succeeded Turkey as “the sick man of Europe.”

5. Russians Don’t Need Tolerance: They have ‘Friendship of the Peoples.’ A conference of regime ideologists has concluded that Russians don’t need the false Western value of tolerance because they have “friendship of the peoples,” even though Soviet behavior thoroughly discredited that term for almost everyone.

6. Russian Internet Both ‘More Mobile’ and a Lot Less. A new study finds that Russians increasingly go online via mobile devices. In what may be an ironic related development, Russian officials have announced that WIFI will soon be available at several of Moscow’s largest cemeteries.

7. Silantyev Wants to ‘De-Turkify Islam’ in Russia. Roman Silantyev, a specialist on Islam with close ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, has called for “de-Turkifying Islam”in the Russian Federation, an appeal which fits in with the current anti-Turkish hysteria and also reflects the fact that many in Russia divide Islam not between Sunni and Shiia but between Turkish and Iranian. If Silantyev’s plan were to be implemented, there would be far fewer Sunni mullahs and far more Iranian Shiite imams.

8. Crimeans who Say They have No Electricity Face Penalties. The Russian occupation authorities have said that those Crimeans who say they have no electricity will face criminal penalties. And these authorities have also announced that they will “never recognize” the United States (capital.ua/ru/news/56860-aksenov-krym-nikogda-ne-priznaet-ameriku).

9. As Crime Rises with Economic Decline, Russia Opens World’s Largest Prison. Russian statistics show that crime in Russia is on the rise, a natural result experts say of the decline in the standard of living (profile.ru/obsch/item/102080-krizis-zakonoposlushaniya). Russian officials are ready, however. They’ve announced that they have opened what is the world’s largest prison.

10. Official with Villa Abroad Tells Russians Foreign Vacations are ‘Harmful to their Health.’ A senior Russian official has told Russians that taking vacations abroad would be harmful to their health, a position he maintains even though he owns a vacation home abroad and echo.msk.ru/blog/corruption/1672518-echo/).

11.Finno-Ugric Nations to Develop Their Own Computer Terminology. Instead of simply borrowing from Russian which in this area has borrowed from English, Finno-Ugric nations in the Russian Federation say they will develop their own computer terminology, drawing on words from the three Finno-Ugric peoples who currently have their own countries, Estonia, Finland and Hungary.

12. Lake Baikal a ‘Well for China?’ In a development that will enrage some Russians,a Chinese firm is now taking water from Lake Baikal and sending it back to a thirsty China, a move that has prompted one Russian site to ask whether the lake is on its way to becoming “a well for China”.

13. Russian Updates Pastor Niemoeller’s Aphorism. Reacting to the spread of repressive measures from one group to another in Putin’s Russia, many there and elsewhere now recall Pastor Niemoeller’s observation of why he didn’t protest Nazi attacks on groups he wasn’t a member of and what that led to. Russian activist Ildar Dadin came up with an update: He held a sign saying “Stay Quiet — Tomorrow When They Come for You, the Next Person Will Then Stay Quiet about You.” This week Dadin was sentenced to 3 years for picketing under a new law mandating imprisonment of repeat violators of the law on demonstrations.

And three more from what some Russians still call “the near abroad:”

14. Armenia Hands Over a Mosque to Iran. The Armenian authorities have handed control of a mosque in Yerevan to Iran, a nominally religious move with all-too-obvious political implications.

15. Kyrgyz Hats Now Made in China. The hats that symbolize Kyrgyzstan for many are now produced not in that country but in China, a shift in production that suggests a shift in orientation as well.

16. Tajikistan Laws Make President ‘Leader of the Nation’ and Limits What Other Tajiks Can Call Themselves. The Tajikistan parliament has adopted a law formally making the incumbent president “the leader of the nation,” a move that some post-Soviet states have already taken and that more may. In addition, Tajik officials have come up with a list of approved names from which Tajik parents can choose to give to their children. Other names will not be allowed.

Source: http://www.interpretermag.com/a-bakers-dozen-of-neglected-russian-stories-no-14/