A long read … read the articles written I real time since 1999 about Russia and the rise of Putin. Many years befire the fake news items, British anti-Russia propaganda and the espionage cases by and against Russia. Show me a state with clean hands in the 21st century and War on Terror. No, instead the AngloSaxon world of conservatives have chosen to demonize an alleged enemy and setting stiff sanctions as punishment. Framing of a narrative by means of an investigation with tunnel vision. Not uncommon, not at all a surprise once it’s stipulated where to look and what to neglect.
Putin bandwagon looks unstoppable now | The Guardian – Jan. 1, 2000 | [cached]
Enigmatic ex-KGB man is promising a strong state
Ian Traynor in Moscow
Saturday January 1, 2000
The GuardianIn his resignation statement yesterday, Boris Yeltsin said it was time for Russia’s old guard, born and bred under communist rule, to make way for a new generation of leaders. There is no doubt that he meant the 46-year-old former spy and black belt judo aficianado who is currently breaking political box office records in Russia.
Vladimir Putin, the prime minister who launched a vicious war in the north Caucasus within days of taking office last August and has been reaping the political dividends ever since, already looks unassailable as Mr Yeltsin’s successor.
If successful, Mr Putin, too, will go down in history as the first beneficiary of a democratic handover of the presidency in Russia. If he is elected the new Russian president on March 26, it will, staggeringly, be the first time he has ever held an elected office.
Continued below the fold …
The father of two daughters and a law graduate of his native Leningrad, now St Petersburg, he spent almost 20 years in the KGB. He served mainly in Leipzig and Dresden in what was then east Germany, and has a reputation for being bright, quick, determined, and modest.
After being plucked from obscurity by the Yeltsin staff who run Russia, Mr Putin has risen by virtue of being a fresh face in a society where most people are sick of the opportunists and cronies ruling Mr Yeltsin’s Russia.
“Putin is not associated with the past seven years,” said an aide to the prime minister.
The contrast between the ageing, frail, part-time president in the Kremlin and the young, dynamic, hardworking prime minister in the White House that is the Moscow seat of the Russian government has worked wonders for Mr Putin and the sharp-suited marketing men who have masterminded his political ascent.
“Putin is the right guy in the right place at the right time,” says Andrei Biryukov, a political consultant. “The Putin phenomenon is that he and his team have created and implemented the myth of a strong and responsible leader in Russia. It’s very attractive. It’s what we Russians have been pining for.”
But despite the masterly salesmanship, the prime minister remains an enigma. Former Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, was quoted as saying:
“Putin is not as strong as he seems because his opinions are unknown. Putin is holding on thanks to his mystery – his mysterious appearance, his mysterious glance, his mysterious phrases. But sometimes it happens that a man opens his mouth and he has nothing to say.”
That sums up the prime minister’s enigmatic qualities, but looks premature as an assessment of his leadership ability. While Mr Putin appears shy, he is growing into his role and also sending signals to his international peers.
For their part, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder and others are responding, eager to get to know Mr Putin better. A visit to Russia by Mr Blair is being organised and Mr Clinton has been invited. Putin aides also say the prime minister is being inundated with invitations from abroad.
A western diplomat who recently saw the prime minister reported an attentive, self-confident figure, quick to command his brief. It may be that Russia is about to enter a different era led by a new type of politician – managerial, competent, non-ideological. In short, a Russian version of the current western predilection for leaders like Mr Clinton, Mr Blair, and Mr Schröder.
That Mr Putin will stop at little to cement his power is evident from his ruthless prosecution of the Chechen war where Russian forces yesterday stormed villages in the south and continued to shell Grozny, the Chechen capital.
But yesterday for the first time, Mr Putin announced that he was about to turn his attention to the economy, the area in which any Russian president will ultimately be judged. “Putin definitely wants to continue the market reforms. There will be no deprivatisation or renationalisation,” says the prime ministerial aide. “He’s very rational and pragmatic.”
Mr Putin is known to be close to Anatoly Chubais, the free marketeer who helped devise the mass privatisation and sell-offs of the 90s.
Mr Putin is also allied with the party of young economic liberals – Union of Rightwing Forces – which performed better than expected in the parliamentary elections two weeks ago and which could make a disproportionately large contribution to a new government appointed by a President Putin.
But he also appears to embody a fledgling statist ideology, a new Russian “patriotism” aimed at rebuilding a strong Russian state after the chaos and decline of the 90s.
In his most detailed policy statement to date earlier this week, Mr Putin argued for the restoration of strong statehood based not on western liberal notions but on Russian history and tradition, the tradition of the strongman leader, whether Soviet communist or tsarist. He has already declared that there is no need to change the constitution Mr Yeltsin engineered in 1993 and which gives the president sweeping powers.
In his lengthy statement this week, Mr Putin called for a “new Russian idea” based on “patriotism, social solidarity, a strong state, and great power status”.
“Our state, its institutions and structures have always played an extremely important role in the life of the country and the people. To the Russian a strong state is not an anomaly, something to fight against. On the contrary, it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and the main power behind all changes.”
Apart from Mr Putin, the most popular of the five prime ministers Mr Yeltsin went through in the past two years has been Yevgeny Primakov, a former communist, foreign minister, and spymaster who, at the age of 70, will be hard-pressed to mount a formidable challenge to the younger man in March.
But in his new “strong state” doctrine, Mr Putin has borrowed heavily from Mr Primakov on the centre-left who favours greater regulation and state control, particularly in economic policy where the Chubais-led reforms engendered criminalisation, profiteering and corruption, in the process souring the democratic experiment for many ordinary Russians.
Mr Putin quit a career in the KGB in 1990 to return to St Petersburg where he worked in the administration of the city’s liberal mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, and met several of the young group of politicians and fixers who have played such a prominent role in the new Russian politics of the 90s.
By 1996, his political star was rising when Mr Chubais, then Kremlin chief of staff, brought him to Moscow and into the Yeltsin administration.
By 1998, Mr Putin had moved on to head the FSB, the main successor to the KGB, before being made prime minister in August this year.
If the Chechen war was the first exercise aimed at having Mr Putin prove his political mettle, the prime minister’s triumph came two weeks ago this weekend in the elections for the new duma, or lower house of parliament.
Again, it was an election in which Mr Putin was not standing. But the phantom party that the Kremlin insiders created in September as a parliamentary and campaign vehicle for a Putin presidency bid took almost a quarter of the vote after the prime minister endorsed it.
Then this week Mr Putin went to the founding congress of the party, Unity, in a Moscow cinema and was feted as a hero.
The question exercising the minds of pundits in Moscow last night was not so much whether Mr Putin would win the presidential election, but whether he would win outright in the first round against a predicted four opponents.
There is much that can go wrong between now and March 26, but the Russian presidency is Vladimir Putin’s to lose.
Miscalculations Paved Path to Chechen War | LA Times – March 2000 |
A year ago this spring, Aslan Maskhadov, Chechnya’s first elected president, urgently demanded a meeting with Russian President Boris Yeltsin to bolster his own dwindling power and warn of the threat of another costly war with Russia.
Over the next months, Maskhadov, the silver-haired former Soviet artillery officer who had led the Chechen rebellion in the mid-1990s, made repeated entreaties for an audience at the Kremlin. But he never got a meeting.
Today, Maskhadov is in hiding, branded a terrorist by Russia. The Chechen capital of Grozny lies in ruins from Russian shells. The second war in Chechnya in six years has left thousands dead on both sides, completely redrawn the political landscape in Russia and touched off new criticism from the West.
…
According to Russian accounts, Putin accelerated a plan for a major crackdown against Chechnya that had been drawn up months earlier. Moreover, when Putin became prime minister last Aug. 9, he inherited what he has called a legacy of Russian neglect of Chechnya. Russian officials had staked their hopes on Maskhadov bringing order to the separatist region, but in the months before the war, he lost control. The growing chaos was thrown into high relief for Moscow when a Russian general was kidnapped last March after Maskhadov had said he would guarantee his safety.On the Chechen side, rebel leaders launched an attack against neighboring Dagestan last August in the mistaken belief that they would encounter weak Russian resistance and spark an Islamic uprising. The uprising didn’t materialize, and the incursions were repelled.
…
Turning Points
A turning point toward the second war came March 5, 1999, at the Grozny airport.
Gen. Gennady Shpigun, the Russian Interior Ministry representative in Chechnya, boarded a Tu-134 passenger plane for Moscow. Masked gunmen grabbed Shpigun and bundled him off the plane and into a waiting car.
The kidnapping outraged officials in Moscow, but it was not unusual. In the aftermath of the first Chechen war, hostage-taking became a flourishing business as Chechnya’s economy hit bottom. Foreign aid workers, clergymen, journalists, law enforcement officials, soldiers and bystanders were sucked into the trade in people.
In Moscow, Boris Berezovsky, a business tycoon who was closely connected with the Kremlin staff around Yeltsin, succeeded in winning the release of some Russian hostages through direct contacts with the Chechens. Berezovsky has said he has been in frequent telephone contact with Basayev, the Chechen warlord who was a rival to Maskhadov and later led the incursion into Dagestan. Others have charged that Berezovsky sent money to the Chechens as well .
When the Shpigun kidnapping occurred, Sergei Stepashin, then the interior minister, had already been through a painful personal experience with Chechnya. He was involved in planning the disastrous first war that ended with a Russian withdrawal, and had been fired by Yeltsin after Basayev led a rebel raid on a hospital in 1995 in which more than 100 civilians were killed.
Shpigun’s kidnapping, despite Maskhadov’s assurances, was “over the top,” Stepashin recalled. At the time, Stepashin warned of tough measures against Chechnya if Shpigun were not released in three days. The ultimatum was ignored, but Moscow remained cautious about leading the country into another Chechen war.
○ Globalizing Jihad? North Caucasians in the Syrian Civil War | MEPC |
○ CIA and Freedom Fighters In Caucasus by Oui @BooMan on April 2, 2017
The Chechnya Conflict:
Freedom Fighters or Terrorists? by James Hughes, LSEArmed conflict radicalized Basayev, and his awareness of and sympathy for the global rise of Islamic jihad is evident from his visits in 1992-94, along with some of his Abkhazia Battalion, to Khost province in Afghanistan to train in mujahadeen camps run by Osama bin Laden.
Equally, his military success against Russian forces, notably the key role played by his fighters in the annihilation of the Russian armored column that entered Grozny in December 1994, greatly enhanced his authority within the resistance. The infamous raids on Budennovsk by Basayev’s forces in June 1995 and on Kizliar and Pervomaisk by Raduyev in January 1996 may have been designed as military raids (in the former case, on government and police buildings, and in the latter, on a military airport) to deflect Russian military pressure within Chechnya, but they degenerated into hostage taking and terrorist attacks on civilians.
Basayev’s early militant activities
When some hardline members of Soviet government attempted to stage a coup d’état in August 1991, Basayev allegedly joined supporters of Russian President Boris Yeltsin on the barricades around the Russian White House in central Moscow, armed with hand grenades.
A few months later, in November 1991, the Chechen nationalist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev unilaterally declared independence from the newly-formed Russian Federation. In response, Yeltsin announced a state of emergency and dispatched troops to the border of Chechnya. It was then that Basayev began his long and notorious career as an insurgent — seeking to draw international attention to the crisis. Basayev, Lom-Ali Chachayev, and the group’s leader, Said-Ali Satuyev, a former airline pilot suffering from schizophrenia, hijacked an Aeroflot Tu-154 plane, en route from Mineralnye Vody in Russia to Ankara on November 9, 1991, and threatened to blow up the aircraft unless the state of emergency was lifted. The hijacking was resolved peacefully in Turkey, with the plane and passengers being allowed to return safely and the hijackers given safe passage back to Chechnya.
Basayev and several hundred other Chechens have been accused of training in Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Rohan Gunaratna, has made allegations that Basayev, along other leading militants such as Ibn Al-Khattab and Walid have all had close relations with Osama bin Laden, and they have, in turn, set up terrorist camps in Chechnya.
Georgian-Abkhaz conflict
Later in 1992, Basayev traveled to Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia, to assist the local separatist movement against the Georgian government’s attempts to regain control of the region–a conflict in which, ultimately, a minority of 93,000 Abkhaz were successful in ethnically purging a majority of Georgians (numbering some 250,000) from the region. Basayev became the commander-in-chief of the forces of the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus (a volunteer unit of pan-Caucasian nationalists, composed mainly of Chechens and other Muslim people from the Caucasus).
Their involvement was crucial in the Abkhazian war and in October 1993 the Georgian government suffered a decisive military defeat, after which most of the ethnic Georgian population of the region was driven out by ethnic cleansing.
It was rumored that the volunteers were trained and supplied by some part of the Russian army’s GRU military intelligence service. According to The Independent journalist Patrick Cockburn, “cooperation between Mr Basayev and the Russian army is not so surprising as it sounds. “In 1992-93 he is widely believed to have received assistance from the GRU when he and his brother Shirvani fought in Abkhazia, a breakaway part of Georgia.” No specific evidence was given.
All the details of the attack by Basayev’s detachments were supposedly worked out in the summer of 1999 in a villa in the south of France with the participation of Basayev and the Head of the Presidential administration, Aleksandr Voloshin. Furthermore, it is alleged that the explosive materials used were not supplied from secret bases in Chechnya but from GRU stockpiles near Moscow.
Pravda American Style: “Putin, Poison, and Murder”
In testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on May 17, 2007, David Satter explained who benefited from the bombings.
“With Yeltsin and his family facing possible criminal prosecution, a plan was put into motion to put in place a successor who would guarantee that Yeltsin and his family would be safe from prosecution and the criminal division of property in the country would not be subject to reexamination.”
Satter continued:
For “Operation Successor (?)” to succeed, however, it was necessary to have a massive provocation. In my view, this provocation was the bombing in September 1999 of the apartment building bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk. In the aftermath of these attacks, which claimed 300 lives, a new war was launched against Chechnya. Putin, the newly appointed prime minister who was put in charge of that war, achieved overnight popularity. Yeltsin resigned early. Putin was elected president and his first act was to guarantee Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. In the meantime, all talk of reexamining the results of privatization was forgotten.
In his book Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (2003, Yale University Press), Satter amassed impressive evidence to demonstrate that the “Chechen” terror attacks in Russia were indeed provocations of the Russian intelligence agencies, the FSB and the GRU.
Since then the evidence supporting that thesis has, well, exploded. As Russian expert Amy Knight, whom the New York Times has described as “the West’s foremost scholar” of the KGB, has written, the proof is now “overwhelming” that these terror attacks were the work of the Russian authorities.
Among the major works that have provided important details about the terror provocations are: Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror by FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko [paid agent for Berezovsky and later MI-6 spy] and journalist Yuri Felshtinsky (2007); Allegations by Alexander Litvinenko (2007); The Assassination of Russia, a film by Jean-Charles Deniau, based on the book Blowing Up Russia; The Litvinenko File by BBC reporter Martin Sixsmith (2007); Disbelief, a documentary film by Andrei Nekrasov; and The Moscow Bombings of September 1999: Examinations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule by Hoover Institution Senior Fellow John Dunlop (2012).
Unfortunately, none of these works have received the attention they deserve. In fact, they have been studiously ignored or panned by the vast majority of the media’s terrorism “experts.”
Ryazan: The Game Changer
In our January 22, 2007 article, “Putin, Poison, and Murder,” we provided this brief, thumbnail sketch of “The Ryazan Incident”:
On the night of September 22, 1999, an alert resident of an apartment complex in the Russian city of Ryazan reported suspicious activities to local police. Responding, the police found a large quantity of hexogen explosive, timed to detonate at 5:30 the next morning. They evacuated the building and captured some of the bombers, who turned out to be (surprise!) FSB agents. Caught red-handed, the FSB then claimed that this had been merely an “exercise” and the substance was not really hexogen, but sugar. Litvinenko, in his book and in interviews, showed that the planned Ryazan bombing was to be the culminating incident justifying the invasion of Chechnya.
The author: David Satter, the Hudson Institute – The ‘Trump Report’ Is a Russian Provocation
Running afoul with oligarchs and cronies. How does Russia compare to the US and the drone assassinations? Killing US citizens who are considered traitors or a danger to national security interests … hondreds of civilians have been killed in assassination attempts targeting terrorist leaders across the globe. The extenson of Bush’s War on Terror.
○ If U.S. Government Can Kill An American Child In A Drone Strike, Is Anyone Safe?
○ AQAP Leader Anwar al-Awlaki Killed in Yemen
○ Cruise missile strike: Al-Awlaki Tribe Members Killed in Yemen
○ Imam al Awlaki Killed in Yemen Raid After U.S. Intelligence
How the Bull fell foul of the Russian bear | The Guardian – Nov. 1999 |
In 1997 Gen Aleksandre Lebed set his sights on becoming governor of Krasnoyarsk. He was widely tipped as a possible successor to the ailing President Boris Yeltsin but he knew he could not win the governorship without Mr Bykov’s support.
Mr Bykov had already begun to fall out with the incumbent, and was looking for a new man with whom he could reach an “understanding”.
But after the general won the election with a lavishly funded campaign, the two men began to disagree. Two guns cannot fit in one holster, as the locals put it.
“He wanted a tame governor,” snarls Gen Lebed, coiled behind his governor’s desk. “He demanded total control over the biggest enterprises in Krasnoyarsk – the life-blood of the region. My reply was unprintable.”
Gen Lebed ‘s real reply was to ask the Kremlin to send a team of police investigators to Krasnoyarsk, to dig for dirt on Mr Bykov. The Kremlin obliged.
After several months the Russian authorities issued an arrest warrant and Mr Bykov was forced to flee the country. He travelled to Europe, had minor back surgery, visited the US as president of the Russian boxing federation, and vowed to run in next month’s elections as an MP for Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s ultra-nationalist party.
But on October 29 his luck ran out, and Mr Bykov was arrested by Interpol [NYT] as he tried to drive across the border into Hungary. He is now sitting in jail in Budapest, fighting Russian attempts to extradite him.
Anatoly ‘The Bull’ Bykov
From an article posted in the Washington Monthly – The Odd Chabad Connection Between Putin and Trump.
A rebuttal published in the Times of Israel – Politico Says Chabad Is Trump’s Partner In — Something. Not So Fast.
