I’ve lived with a number of dogs across the years. Until recently I’d never lived with one who made me feel like I was being outsmarted. Or like I …
THIS DAMN DOG
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TUESDAY 20 FEBRUARY 2024
MORNING NEWS NOTES
Oh Boy:
- Russia fires North Korean missile with US parts. The joys of capitalism.
- Source: CNN
- The Russian economy, despite much touted sanctions, is growing.
- The Russian economy is allowing Putin to move further and further into authoritarian control. See Telegraph 2/20/24.
- “I think there was a lot of wishful thinking at the beginning of the war.”
- “I don’t see any kind of risks for the political situation because of unhappiness with the war,” says Alexandra Prokopenko, a visiting fellow on the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. Before the war she advised Russia’s central bank.
- “Unfortunately, the death of Alexei Navalny shows to me that any possibility of democratic transit of power after Putin’s death is now closed because there is no such figure among the Russian opposition,” she adds.
- Fullscreen button
- “I think there was a lot of wishful thinking at the beginning of the war. Historically, there has never been an example of immediate economic catastrophe as a result of sanctions,” says Konstantin Sonin, a political economist at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.
- Waging a war requires huge amounts of money and labour, with the growth figures boosted by high military spending. The numbers show that Putin has presided over a shift to a “highly militarised economy”, Prokopenko says.
- Meanwhile, subsidised loans to businesses and people to meet strong domestic demand have also helped push up the figures.
- “All these should be served with a sauce of lax enforcement of Western sanctions and tolerance to inflation from the population and so-called technocrats,” Prokopenko adds.
- Richard Connolly, an expert on Russia’s economy at the Royal United Services Institute in London, says optimism about how hard sanctions would bite shows a lack of understanding in the West and a failure to learn from what happened in 2014 during the annexation of Crimea.
- “I think it was arrogance, I think it was also ineptitude,” says Connolly, who adds that economists should not underestimate the impacts of war-related growth.
- “A lot of people say it doesn’t count because it’s military spending. But you have to pay people to work in factories, you have to pay for all of the inputs,” he says. “While it’s true that you’re producing goods that are going to end up exploding and you’d say there’s no ultimate benefit from that, there is a benefit for the people who are paid to produce them. As a result, we’ve seen real incomes rise last year for the first time in years.”
- Meanwhile, unemployment is at a record low meaning that anyone who wants a job will find one, he adds.
- Russia has been forced to find new trading partners in response to the sanctions and now trades far more with countries including China, India and Turkey.
- “Sanctions always create winners and losers. We tend to focus on the losers but there are a lot of winners too,” Connolly says.
- Many observers argue that the absence of economic collapse in Russia reflects the slow-burn nature of sanctions, with pain being stored up for the future. Connolly is less convinced.
- He believes Russia is adapting, and so sanctions may become less effective over time.
- “They’ve [Russia] reoriented their trade flows dramatically,” says Connolly. “Even during the Cold War its biggest trade partner was Western Europe, and now it’s non-Western countries. There has never been a shift like this in Russian economic history – I don’t mean since 1991, I mean since 1500.”
- Soldiers going to fight in Ukraine will receive huge sums of money, dwarfing what they otherwise could have earned.
- “My neighbour lost her husband and they got a really good payout for it,” says Elina. “What they ended up doing is taking that payout and going to Thailand and living there for six months afterwards. She was very proud that he died defending his country.”
- The strength of the Russian economy will only embolden Putin further, warns Connolly.
- Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-the-russian-economy-allowed-putin-to-silence-navalny-forever/ar-BB1iytHD
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For years, strongmen and autocrats had a novel weapon in their hunt for political enemies. They used Interpol, the world’s largest police organization, to reach across borders and grab them — even in democracies.
An award-winning Venezuelan journalist was detained in Peru. An Egyptian asylum seeker was stopped in Australia. And Russia has tried repeatedly to secure the arrest of William F. Browder, a London-based human rights campaigner.
In response, Interpol has toughened oversight of its arrest alerts, known as red notices, making it harder than ever to misuse them. But as Interpol adapted, so did strongmen. They have turned to the agency’s lesser-known systems to pursue dissidents, a New York Times investigation has found.
Belarus and Turkey, for example, have turned Interpol’s database of lost and stolen passports into a weapon to harass dissidents or strand them abroad. Abuse of this important antiterrorism tool got so bad that Interpol temporarily blocked Turkey from using it. Belarus is now subject to special monitoring after Interpol spotted a wave of politically motivated entries, officials said.
Stephen Bailey, a lawyer and an author of the book “The Legal Foundations of Interpol.”
www.nytimes.com/2024/02/20/world/europe/interpol-strongmen-abuse.html
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SUNDAY 18 FEBRUARY 2024
ARTICLE NOTES:
Weekend Article: The Death of Alexander Navalny
In 2021 Alexander Navalny was imprisoned when he returned to Russia after being poisoned and almost killed by the Russian government,. He is now dead at the age of 47. “The forces that Navalny has unleashed are unlikely to go away.” (Foreign Affairs 2/17/24)
Even though Navalny’s death was not unexpected, it left even his close friends and colleagues in a state of shock.
They commented in interviews that Navalny just seemed larger than life (and I suppose larger than death). Friends said that Navalny did not seem like a real person. Navalny and his friends thought he would survive Putin and become president of Russia someday. They were waiting for planning for that day. And, every time Navalny escaped a murderous Kremlin attempt the belief in his invincibility grew even stronger.
One commentator said that when Navalny returned to Russia in 1921 after almost dying from the novochok poisoning, some people portrayed him as having risen from the dead. This reflects the mythical status Navalny had.. So, when friends and colleagues were asked if the death was a surprise, they said yes. This was the case even though Navalny himself has talked about what his followers should do after his death: Not give up.
Some questioned why Putin would chose to murder Navalny now, confined as he was to an already murderous prison regime beyond the Arctic Circle. But silencing Navalny once and for all made “perfect sense.” Navalny was “a master of social media.” In 2020, he even managed to get a confession out of his own “would-be government assassins.” Even more dangerous was “Navalny’s extraordinary boundary-defying popularity.” Uniquely in Russian history, his following went beyond the urban elites. Navalny was appealing even to young Russians who many thought were too young to even have a sense of what democracy might mean for their lives. In a Russian society that was “confused, depressed, and constantly besieged by an ever more repressive regime” Navalny was a “unifying figure.”
For traditional Russian liberal politicians the rural/urban divide was insurmountable. Only in the urban areas were there people receptive to their arguments. In the hinterlands, people didn’t seem to understand the democracy thing. But, when Navalny explained it, they seemed to rally to the ideas.
Navalny produced a documentary in 2017 (“Don’t Call Him Dimon”) in which he exposed the corruption of the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, close friend of Putin’s. This video helped Navalny organize protests in 100 cities and towns across Russia. This “allowed him to destroy the Kremlin’s conceits that he was just another lonely liberal in an ivory tower in Moscow, dreaming of implausible reforms.”
Putin lost a narrative he had used successfully for years. Putin had talked about the people in the rural areas, people he thought didn’t understand or lean towards “Western Freedoms” as the “real Russians.” It was assumed that “for these ordinary Russians, liberalism meant anarchy, and for this reason, it was too early to give them Western-style rights.”
So Putin implemented what he called “managed democracy” which meant the appearance of democracy (like elections) and a strongman at the top.
But, Navalny had a lawyers “knack for unearthing precise, prosecutorial evidence with innate gifts as a communicator and a keen sense of the issues ordinary Russians cared about most…” When, for example, in 2015 Russia annexed Crimea. There was a Kremlin consensus that Putin’s propaganda had succeeded with Rusia’s youth. The reasoning was that they had never experienced the talk about democracy and were too young to remember the democratic reforms of the 1990s. After years of indoctrination and top-down rule, the young and the people in the hinterlands were content to leave politics to the professionals.
Navalny’s organization, FBK, Anti-Corruption Foundation, exploded that myth. Crowds of teenagers joined Navalyn’s protests. For the first time there was a national opposition party.
Then, Navalny repeatedly found technological ways around the Kremlin’s attempts to silence him. Even when he was in prison, he managed to get messages out and even videos. The day before he was murdered he was videotaped smiling and joking with authorities, essentially making fun of them. Ridicule is powerful.
The murdering of Navalny was “a dark new step in Putin’s ruthless pursuit of power.” But, it wasn’t as if murder was something new. “For more than two decades, Putin…made political assassination an essential part of the Kremlin’s toolkit.” It has been used against “troublemakers such as the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko.” It has been used against “political opponents Boris Nemtsov Vladimir Kara-Murza, poisoned twice and now in prison.”
Source: Soldatov, Andrei and Irina Borogan (2/16/24) Putin Cannot Silence the Opposition Leader’s Movement
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This article is from 2016
www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/world/europe/russia-sweden-disinformation.html
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For Russian society, confused, depressed, and constantly besieged by an ever more repressive regime, Navalny was a lone uniting figure.
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/how-navalny-changed-russia -
According to the police, the attacker emerged from a car carrying Israeli license plates at the Re’em-Masmyyia junction and fired a gun at a nearby bus station.
The police’s Central District Commander Avi Bitton says the attacker was shot to death by a civilian armed with a gun who drove by the site of the attack.
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At almost 400 pages, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation report on the Coffee County caper looks impressive. It’s not.
— Read on www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-the-gbi-missed-in-coffee-county
