Another Big Win For Putin!!!
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He has a strange obsession with Mother Russia. I haven't figured out why that is
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Fast Money & Foreign Objects
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Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Why Russia Spent 2015 Half-Assing It in Ukraine
By Ryan Faith
December 31, 2015 | 10:10 am
What went on in Ukraine in 2015 (after Russia sneaky-invaded the country in early 2014 and annexed Crimea) was not a Cold War or frozen conflict, where the shooting and killing lie either in the past or in a potential future. Nor was it a hot, high-intensity fight in which two countries spent their blood, toil, tears, and sweat on an existential battle to the death. It wasn't even an American-style quagmire like Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
So what was it? From the Ukrainian perspective, it was and continues to be a sausage grinder consuming money and young lives. But it's not so clear how it all looks from Moscow. Is Russia winning? Losing? Or did they just doze off?
Related: Russia Is Weaponizing Jedi Mind Tricks
It's reasonable to surmise — based if nothing else on the nature of NATO's concerns about the Baltics — that if Russian president Vladimir Putin got the itch, the Russian military would be fully capable of mustering enough firepower to flatten Ukraine. But then again, the Russian military had more than enough brute force to prevail easily in their first (1994–1996) and second (1999–2000) wars in Chechnya, yet it prevailed only in the second conflict. So it might not be as cut and dried as simply counting the number of guys with guns in the Russian Army.
A lot has been written about why Putin may have gotten involved in Ukraine's Donbass region following the Great Crimean Heist of 2014. For starters, there's the slightly messianic vision of Putin as Protector of All Russians. He's been making increasingly louder noises about Moscow's responsibility to safeguard the various ethnic Russians scattered throughout the post-Soviet republics.
Secondly, Putin has taken it upon himself to make Russia a strong counterbalance to creeping US hegemony — the bully who bullies the bullies. Busting into Ukraine and (metaphorically speaking) driving a big-ass Russian tank through the Western conceptions of a post-Cold War world has got to have some appeal.
If fighting Kiev to the last Ukrainian is a popular concept in Russia, shouldn't winning be an even bigger victory for Putin, so to speak?
A final, frequently cited reason for Putin's actions is that this Ukraine kerfuffle has done him no end of good at the polls. But Putin, as ballsy as he may be, is perfectly aware that gambling on a war going well forever is foolish. Why run the risk when he has the political capital right now to jump in with both boots and end this thing for good, locking in his successes while he still can?
It may be that this polling success is just a byproduct of the first two reasons: standing up for Russians everywhere while facing down the big bully America. But it doesn't explain why Russia is still dikking around in the Donbass. If fighting Kiev to the last Ukrainian is a popular idea in Russia, shouldn't winning be an even bigger victory?
This question is a bit vexing for Western observers. The vast majority of Western thinking aligns with the idea of war as a means to an end. A war is something you engage in to achieve some particular goal or objective — a.k.a., politics by other means. Even in the 70 years since World War II, the US is still wrestling with the idea that war isn't a straight-up two-position switch with settings at War and Peace.
Anything that doesn't involve regular, uniformed people on the ground is deemed Peace — as far as the US public seems to be concerned, Special Forces and airstrikes don't count. Meanwhile, War is preferentially something with a bold, heroic campaign and decisive victory. It's taken decades for the US to even grudgingly admit to the existence of low- and medium-intensity wars, like Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Even today, it's still possible to find politicians nattering on about "declaring war" against the Islamic State, or pundits endlessly parsing this or that particular permutation of "boots on the ground."
Related: Here's What US Boots on the Ground in Syria Really Means
And so in the West, the idea that Russia chooses to remain stuck in the middle of a war it could win at any time can seem rather baffling.
One common rationale is that Putin won't pull the trigger on Ukraine because he fears the backlash from the West. But the logic doesn't hold water. After all, the Washington, DC crowd is all aflutter about the possibility that the US sending Ukraine proper anti-tank missiles will be seen as a sharp escalation in the conflict, drawing a dramatic Russian reaction. If the US is already cowed into a tepid response, then it sounds like Washington is a lot more afraid of Russia than vice versa. Besides, Putin appears to have trouble giving any shyts whatsoever about what the West thinks of him.
All of that said, a few potential reasons remain for why Putin hasn't dropped the hammer on the Ukraine still remain.
First, overrunning Ukraine brings its own problems. If the Russians aren't careful, they could earn themselves a nasty case of insurgency. Russia has made an important observation about warfare from both its various Chechen adventures and its observations of the US experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"Taking territory isn't the same thing as holding it," says Olga Oliker, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. "Ukraine, as a whole, doesn't want the Russians and can make it painful for Russia."
But what if Russia contented itself with simply making off with the parts of Ukraine that do seem eager to be Russian: the secessionist Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People's Republic (LPR), which together make up the heart of the Donbass region. To begin with, owning the Donbass would involve paying a pretty hefty service fee for repair and cleaning, since that area was already a hot mess before everyone got around to trashing the merry hell out of it.
And besides, Oliker notes, the longer that separatists in the DPR and LPR keep creating problems for the Ukrainian central government in Kiev, the longer Moscow can rail against Kiev for not living up to ceasefire and election promises in the breakaway territories.
Watch VICE News' Russia's Ghost Army in Ukraine.
Or maybe Russia simply can't deliver the coup de grace. Phillip Karber, president of the Potomac Foundation, has toured the conflict zone numerous times and points out that the Russian military is in the midst of modernization and, as such, is broken into two tiers. There's a first level of highly trained volunteer troops that make up the leading edge of the modern military. But behind that well-trained professional group is a larger body of poorly motivated and badly led conscripts.
"The entire Russian Army, as currently mobilized, is only 50 percent larger than the Ukrainian Army," Karber says. So while the Russian Army could, in theory, scare up a lot more manpower, it couldn't do so without throwing the entire Russian Army into the mix — meaning, the Bad News Bears conscripts — which would bring its own complications.
Russia has done very well in Ukraine with a mix of professional Russian soldiers, mercenaries, oddballs, and freshly trained separatist Ukrainians. But stepping up to the next level would involve digging into the larger body of lower-grade recruits. The fact that the fighting in Ukraine is pulling units from all over Russia — for example, naval infantry from the Arctic port of Murmansk were brought in to fight for the Donetsk airport — Karber says, is a sign that Russia is scrambling to find enough high-quality troops to keep the pressure on.
Switching to the vast, untapped legions of low-grade grunts would also shift the conflict into a new, more politically risky phase, Pavel Felgenhauer, a noted Russian military analyst,explained in a July interview. Russia has, like the Soviets before them, a pretty sizeable box of tools for low-intensity conflict and intervention in foreign wars. The problem is that going in full-strength as an advanced combined arms team — meaning, the close integration of air power and all flavors of ground forces, like tanks and artillery — would not just reach deep into the less-reliable mass of conscript troops, it would mean the active use of Russian aircraft for air support in Ukraine. If that were to happen, then the polite fiction of Russian non-involvement would come to a screeching halt, endangering all of Putin's political gains from the conflict.
So why doesn't Putin just declare victory and call it a day?
"The Russians could leave tomorrow if they wanted to — but they want a mess," Oliker says. "They want to show what happens when you have a Maidan movement: disaster follows."
In other words, a more traditional, short, all-out war differs from the Russian approach in Ukraine the way that an execution by lethal injection differs from a crucifixion: Both are intended to kill the prisoner, but one is intended to make a very public demonstration of a long and agonizing death in order to send a message to others. In this punitive scenario, cruel and unusual punishment is a feature, not a bug.
This narrative, although chilling, makes sense. For years, Russia and its allies have been of the firm opinion that the so-called color revolutions that keep popping up all around the world, toppling dictators and authoritarian regimes, aren't, in fact, homegrown, natural movements. Rather, the allegation is that they are "AstroTurf" campaigns supported and funded by the West in general and the US in particular, with an intent to destabilize and remove governments. If you assume that the allegation has some truth to it, then the Maidan movement — a wave of civil demonstrations in Ukraine in 2013 — would be interpreted not as the ousting of an unpopular president, but the willful destabilization of a key Russian ally.
Thus, the objective of intervening in Ukraine would ultimately be deterring other Maidan wannabes from getting too uppity and eloping with the West. Moreover, intervening in Ukraine would demonstrate to the West that Russia will counter any moves against its close neighbors and client states. So, according to Oliker, keeping the fight going is a way to prove that the government in Kiev is incompetent, can't control its own country, and can't comply with the provisions of the Minsk ceasefire agreements related to regional self-determination. If Russia were to just swoop in and take the place, it would let Kiev off the hook.
An interesting riff off this idea is described more fully by Felgenhauer. His contention is that this whole thing is analogous to World War I's Verdun campaign. Sparing all of the historical details, the nut of it is the theory that if things can be made to go badly enough, it will cause political support for the government in Kiev to crumble.
So, in a way, it's not about what Russia needs to do to seize the territory, but rather what it can do to make the Ukrainian government collapse and, in so doing, surrender the contested regions.
Moreover, land surrendered by the Ukrainians to Russia would be far less likely to give rise to a viable insurgency, thus making the post-conflict peace a lot easier. If the local opposition to Russia has already been sold down the river by the central government in Kiev, is there really any reason for them to fight Moscow just to rejoin Ukraine?
Future historians are the ones who'll figure out which of these scenarios is really happening, but in all likelihood, it's a combination of factors. The Russians probably look at Ukraine as not being worth the extra headache of defeating outright, because it would require making a serious military commitment and probably earn Russia a nasty insurgency problem. But if the Russians outlast the Ukrainians (which they almost certainly can do) and simply wait for Ukraine to cry uncle, then it makes all the relevant political points, domestically and internationally, far more persuasively than a pure smash-and-grab would.
Related: Russian Soldiers Have Given Up Pretending They Are Not Fighting in Ukraine
There are some relevant lessons for observers in the West here, beyond the obvious ones involving Putin's world-class levels of crankiness. The traditional Western mode of thinking, particularly about high-intensity modern warfare, is that it's either an on or off thing. A great deal has been written about "escalation ladders" and steps to raise or lower tensions in a conflict. Once you've tipped over into war, the conventional wisdom goes, then it's best to be as brutal and violent as possible, bringing about an end as quickly as you can manage.
But US adventures in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have shown that there are limitations to this approach. And Russian involvement in Ukraine is showing the broader range of possibilities available to a country that doesn't put all of its military options on one neat sliding scale from peace to war.
Why Russia Spent 2015 Half-Assing It in Ukraine | VICE News
By Ryan Faith
December 31, 2015 | 10:10 am
What went on in Ukraine in 2015 (after Russia sneaky-invaded the country in early 2014 and annexed Crimea) was not a Cold War or frozen conflict, where the shooting and killing lie either in the past or in a potential future. Nor was it a hot, high-intensity fight in which two countries spent their blood, toil, tears, and sweat on an existential battle to the death. It wasn't even an American-style quagmire like Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
So what was it? From the Ukrainian perspective, it was and continues to be a sausage grinder consuming money and young lives. But it's not so clear how it all looks from Moscow. Is Russia winning? Losing? Or did they just doze off?
Related: Russia Is Weaponizing Jedi Mind Tricks
It's reasonable to surmise — based if nothing else on the nature of NATO's concerns about the Baltics — that if Russian president Vladimir Putin got the itch, the Russian military would be fully capable of mustering enough firepower to flatten Ukraine. But then again, the Russian military had more than enough brute force to prevail easily in their first (1994–1996) and second (1999–2000) wars in Chechnya, yet it prevailed only in the second conflict. So it might not be as cut and dried as simply counting the number of guys with guns in the Russian Army.
A lot has been written about why Putin may have gotten involved in Ukraine's Donbass region following the Great Crimean Heist of 2014. For starters, there's the slightly messianic vision of Putin as Protector of All Russians. He's been making increasingly louder noises about Moscow's responsibility to safeguard the various ethnic Russians scattered throughout the post-Soviet republics.
Secondly, Putin has taken it upon himself to make Russia a strong counterbalance to creeping US hegemony — the bully who bullies the bullies. Busting into Ukraine and (metaphorically speaking) driving a big-ass Russian tank through the Western conceptions of a post-Cold War world has got to have some appeal.
If fighting Kiev to the last Ukrainian is a popular concept in Russia, shouldn't winning be an even bigger victory for Putin, so to speak?
A final, frequently cited reason for Putin's actions is that this Ukraine kerfuffle has done him no end of good at the polls. But Putin, as ballsy as he may be, is perfectly aware that gambling on a war going well forever is foolish. Why run the risk when he has the political capital right now to jump in with both boots and end this thing for good, locking in his successes while he still can?
It may be that this polling success is just a byproduct of the first two reasons: standing up for Russians everywhere while facing down the big bully America. But it doesn't explain why Russia is still dikking around in the Donbass. If fighting Kiev to the last Ukrainian is a popular idea in Russia, shouldn't winning be an even bigger victory?
This question is a bit vexing for Western observers. The vast majority of Western thinking aligns with the idea of war as a means to an end. A war is something you engage in to achieve some particular goal or objective — a.k.a., politics by other means. Even in the 70 years since World War II, the US is still wrestling with the idea that war isn't a straight-up two-position switch with settings at War and Peace.
Anything that doesn't involve regular, uniformed people on the ground is deemed Peace — as far as the US public seems to be concerned, Special Forces and airstrikes don't count. Meanwhile, War is preferentially something with a bold, heroic campaign and decisive victory. It's taken decades for the US to even grudgingly admit to the existence of low- and medium-intensity wars, like Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Even today, it's still possible to find politicians nattering on about "declaring war" against the Islamic State, or pundits endlessly parsing this or that particular permutation of "boots on the ground."
Related: Here's What US Boots on the Ground in Syria Really Means
And so in the West, the idea that Russia chooses to remain stuck in the middle of a war it could win at any time can seem rather baffling.
One common rationale is that Putin won't pull the trigger on Ukraine because he fears the backlash from the West. But the logic doesn't hold water. After all, the Washington, DC crowd is all aflutter about the possibility that the US sending Ukraine proper anti-tank missiles will be seen as a sharp escalation in the conflict, drawing a dramatic Russian reaction. If the US is already cowed into a tepid response, then it sounds like Washington is a lot more afraid of Russia than vice versa. Besides, Putin appears to have trouble giving any shyts whatsoever about what the West thinks of him.
All of that said, a few potential reasons remain for why Putin hasn't dropped the hammer on the Ukraine still remain.
First, overrunning Ukraine brings its own problems. If the Russians aren't careful, they could earn themselves a nasty case of insurgency. Russia has made an important observation about warfare from both its various Chechen adventures and its observations of the US experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"Taking territory isn't the same thing as holding it," says Olga Oliker, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. "Ukraine, as a whole, doesn't want the Russians and can make it painful for Russia."
But what if Russia contented itself with simply making off with the parts of Ukraine that do seem eager to be Russian: the secessionist Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People's Republic (LPR), which together make up the heart of the Donbass region. To begin with, owning the Donbass would involve paying a pretty hefty service fee for repair and cleaning, since that area was already a hot mess before everyone got around to trashing the merry hell out of it.
And besides, Oliker notes, the longer that separatists in the DPR and LPR keep creating problems for the Ukrainian central government in Kiev, the longer Moscow can rail against Kiev for not living up to ceasefire and election promises in the breakaway territories.
Watch VICE News' Russia's Ghost Army in Ukraine.
Or maybe Russia simply can't deliver the coup de grace. Phillip Karber, president of the Potomac Foundation, has toured the conflict zone numerous times and points out that the Russian military is in the midst of modernization and, as such, is broken into two tiers. There's a first level of highly trained volunteer troops that make up the leading edge of the modern military. But behind that well-trained professional group is a larger body of poorly motivated and badly led conscripts.
"The entire Russian Army, as currently mobilized, is only 50 percent larger than the Ukrainian Army," Karber says. So while the Russian Army could, in theory, scare up a lot more manpower, it couldn't do so without throwing the entire Russian Army into the mix — meaning, the Bad News Bears conscripts — which would bring its own complications.
Russia has done very well in Ukraine with a mix of professional Russian soldiers, mercenaries, oddballs, and freshly trained separatist Ukrainians. But stepping up to the next level would involve digging into the larger body of lower-grade recruits. The fact that the fighting in Ukraine is pulling units from all over Russia — for example, naval infantry from the Arctic port of Murmansk were brought in to fight for the Donetsk airport — Karber says, is a sign that Russia is scrambling to find enough high-quality troops to keep the pressure on.
Switching to the vast, untapped legions of low-grade grunts would also shift the conflict into a new, more politically risky phase, Pavel Felgenhauer, a noted Russian military analyst,explained in a July interview. Russia has, like the Soviets before them, a pretty sizeable box of tools for low-intensity conflict and intervention in foreign wars. The problem is that going in full-strength as an advanced combined arms team — meaning, the close integration of air power and all flavors of ground forces, like tanks and artillery — would not just reach deep into the less-reliable mass of conscript troops, it would mean the active use of Russian aircraft for air support in Ukraine. If that were to happen, then the polite fiction of Russian non-involvement would come to a screeching halt, endangering all of Putin's political gains from the conflict.
So why doesn't Putin just declare victory and call it a day?
"The Russians could leave tomorrow if they wanted to — but they want a mess," Oliker says. "They want to show what happens when you have a Maidan movement: disaster follows."
In other words, a more traditional, short, all-out war differs from the Russian approach in Ukraine the way that an execution by lethal injection differs from a crucifixion: Both are intended to kill the prisoner, but one is intended to make a very public demonstration of a long and agonizing death in order to send a message to others. In this punitive scenario, cruel and unusual punishment is a feature, not a bug.
This narrative, although chilling, makes sense. For years, Russia and its allies have been of the firm opinion that the so-called color revolutions that keep popping up all around the world, toppling dictators and authoritarian regimes, aren't, in fact, homegrown, natural movements. Rather, the allegation is that they are "AstroTurf" campaigns supported and funded by the West in general and the US in particular, with an intent to destabilize and remove governments. If you assume that the allegation has some truth to it, then the Maidan movement — a wave of civil demonstrations in Ukraine in 2013 — would be interpreted not as the ousting of an unpopular president, but the willful destabilization of a key Russian ally.
Thus, the objective of intervening in Ukraine would ultimately be deterring other Maidan wannabes from getting too uppity and eloping with the West. Moreover, intervening in Ukraine would demonstrate to the West that Russia will counter any moves against its close neighbors and client states. So, according to Oliker, keeping the fight going is a way to prove that the government in Kiev is incompetent, can't control its own country, and can't comply with the provisions of the Minsk ceasefire agreements related to regional self-determination. If Russia were to just swoop in and take the place, it would let Kiev off the hook.
An interesting riff off this idea is described more fully by Felgenhauer. His contention is that this whole thing is analogous to World War I's Verdun campaign. Sparing all of the historical details, the nut of it is the theory that if things can be made to go badly enough, it will cause political support for the government in Kiev to crumble.
So, in a way, it's not about what Russia needs to do to seize the territory, but rather what it can do to make the Ukrainian government collapse and, in so doing, surrender the contested regions.
Moreover, land surrendered by the Ukrainians to Russia would be far less likely to give rise to a viable insurgency, thus making the post-conflict peace a lot easier. If the local opposition to Russia has already been sold down the river by the central government in Kiev, is there really any reason for them to fight Moscow just to rejoin Ukraine?
Future historians are the ones who'll figure out which of these scenarios is really happening, but in all likelihood, it's a combination of factors. The Russians probably look at Ukraine as not being worth the extra headache of defeating outright, because it would require making a serious military commitment and probably earn Russia a nasty insurgency problem. But if the Russians outlast the Ukrainians (which they almost certainly can do) and simply wait for Ukraine to cry uncle, then it makes all the relevant political points, domestically and internationally, far more persuasively than a pure smash-and-grab would.
Related: Russian Soldiers Have Given Up Pretending They Are Not Fighting in Ukraine
There are some relevant lessons for observers in the West here, beyond the obvious ones involving Putin's world-class levels of crankiness. The traditional Western mode of thinking, particularly about high-intensity modern warfare, is that it's either an on or off thing. A great deal has been written about "escalation ladders" and steps to raise or lower tensions in a conflict. Once you've tipped over into war, the conventional wisdom goes, then it's best to be as brutal and violent as possible, bringing about an end as quickly as you can manage.
But US adventures in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have shown that there are limitations to this approach. And Russian involvement in Ukraine is showing the broader range of possibilities available to a country that doesn't put all of its military options on one neat sliding scale from peace to war.
Why Russia Spent 2015 Half-Assing It in Ukraine | VICE News
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Oil price briefly falls below $30 a barrel
Image copyrightGetty Images
Image captionRussian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev (right) on a visit to a factory that makes steel pipes for the oil and gas industry in the Urals
Oil prices have briefly fallen below $30 a barrel on international markets for the first time since April 2004, before recovering again.
Brent crude, used as an international benchmark, fell as low as $29.96, but bounced back to trade at $30.22.
Oil prices have fallen by 70% in the past 15 months.
Earlier, Russia's Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, warned tumbling oil prices could force his country to revise its 2016 budget.
He said that the country must be prepared for a "worst-case" economic scenario if the price continued to fall.
Taxes from oil and gas generates about half the Russian government's revenue.
The 2016 federal budget that was approved in October was based on an oil price of $50 a barrel in 2016 - a figure President Vladimir Putin has since described as "unrealistic".
Government departments have been ordered to cut spending by 10%, repeating a policy imposed in 2015, Reuters reported.
Pensions and pay for government workers will be protected from the cuts, which could save as much as 700bn roubles (£6.3bn; $9.1bn).
Finance minister Anton Siluanov said that the Russian budget could only be balanced at an oil price of $82 a barrel.
'New realities'
He said the 2016 budget should be revised to assume an oil price of $40 a barrel.
"Our task is to adapt our budget to the new realities," Mr Siluanov said.
Image copyrightGetty Images
Image captionRussian finance minister Anton Siluanov
Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev warned that Russia faced a long period of low commodity prices with oil at $15 or $20 a barrel.
"The biggest risk is that there will be low prices for a long time - that is, for years, for decades," he said.
Mr Medvedev also said that high interests rates were holding back economic growth in Russia.
The Bank of Russia held rates at 11% last month, with governor Elvira Nabiullina warning of "high volatility" in global markets.
A year ago the central bank shocked markets by increasing rates from 10.5% to 17%.
Inflation stands at 15% in Russia, but the bank hopes it would fall to 4% by next year.
Oil price briefly falls below $30 a barrel - BBC News
- 1 hour ago
- From the sectionBusiness
Image captionRussian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev (right) on a visit to a factory that makes steel pipes for the oil and gas industry in the Urals
Oil prices have briefly fallen below $30 a barrel on international markets for the first time since April 2004, before recovering again.
Brent crude, used as an international benchmark, fell as low as $29.96, but bounced back to trade at $30.22.
Oil prices have fallen by 70% in the past 15 months.
Earlier, Russia's Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, warned tumbling oil prices could force his country to revise its 2016 budget.
He said that the country must be prepared for a "worst-case" economic scenario if the price continued to fall.
Taxes from oil and gas generates about half the Russian government's revenue.
The 2016 federal budget that was approved in October was based on an oil price of $50 a barrel in 2016 - a figure President Vladimir Putin has since described as "unrealistic".
Government departments have been ordered to cut spending by 10%, repeating a policy imposed in 2015, Reuters reported.
Pensions and pay for government workers will be protected from the cuts, which could save as much as 700bn roubles (£6.3bn; $9.1bn).
Finance minister Anton Siluanov said that the Russian budget could only be balanced at an oil price of $82 a barrel.
'New realities'
He said the 2016 budget should be revised to assume an oil price of $40 a barrel.
"Our task is to adapt our budget to the new realities," Mr Siluanov said.
Image captionRussian finance minister Anton Siluanov
Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev warned that Russia faced a long period of low commodity prices with oil at $15 or $20 a barrel.
"The biggest risk is that there will be low prices for a long time - that is, for years, for decades," he said.
Mr Medvedev also said that high interests rates were holding back economic growth in Russia.
The Bank of Russia held rates at 11% last month, with governor Elvira Nabiullina warning of "high volatility" in global markets.
A year ago the central bank shocked markets by increasing rates from 10.5% to 17%.
Inflation stands at 15% in Russia, but the bank hopes it would fall to 4% by next year.
Oil price briefly falls below $30 a barrel - BBC News
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Girl who kissed Putin' warns about rise of Russian nationalism
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLERJAN 06, 2016
Masha Drokova is best known as the girl who kissed Vladimir Putin.
She planted one on the Russian president's cheek while a leader of Nashi, the now defunct pro-Kremlin youth organization dubbed "Putin's private army" by critics.
Nashi brought Drokova moderate fame and future. For a while she had her own talk show. Her connections to the Kremlin, where she often met with top officials, helped get her into a Moscow university. She was able to afford a flashy car and an apartment in the pricey Russian capital.
Drokova's rise from an ordinary teenager to an activist who took meetings with Russia's elite behind the red walls of the Kremlin is rivaled only by her fall from the grace of those who brought her in. It's a cautionary tale partly documented in the 2012 film "Putin's Kiss."
A screenshot of Masha Drokova in a scene from "Putin's Kiss." in which she describes Vladimir Putin.
IMAGE: KINO LORBER FILMS
Today, disillusioned with Russia's leadership, the 26-year-old has left Moscow and resettled in New York, where a small but growing population of Russians who have fallen out of favor with authorities or else fled repression have landed.
SEE ALSO: Russia's pro-Putin media darling loves his new life in Brooklyn — minus the hipsters
Drokova now does public relations consulting for global tech companies. As a rule, she stays away from politics in conversation and rarely talks about her past. But she spoke toMashable about her humble upbringing in a sleepy town outside Moscow, her admiration for Putin and how she fell out of love with him while raising concerns about the potential dangers of the militant nationalism and a sort of second coming of militant youth groups that has gripped Moscow in recent months.
It's a story that sheds light on a dark side of Russia's political sphere.
Nashi activists rally in Moscow, on National Unity Day, Nov. 4, 2011.
IMAGE: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Joining Nashi
Drokova is part of a generation of Russians who came of age after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Born in 1989, she was raised in a middle-class family in small town 300 miles south of Moscow. School bored her. She got poor grades and was interested in little other than her Motherland and her leader, Putin.
Founded in 2005, Nashi — "ours" in Russian — emerged in the wake of Ukraine's Orange Revolution to counter Russian opposition groups that might have been inspired by the uprising. It was a youth group whose members, mostly ideological teens from the provinces born in the turbulent 1990s, were fanatically loyal to Putin and adopted his message of "restoring Russia's greatness." Nashi grew quickly to have more than 100,000 members in just two years.
Masha joined Nashi when she was 15, because she wanted to find a way to express her love for her country, and because other youth organizations "were boring." In Nashi, she would also find self-confidence.
Project Network is one such group. While emphasizing traditional Orthodox Christian values, it often stages flashy events, such as the art show at a building adjacent to the Kremlin it held last June where teenagers strutted out on catwalks wearing gas masks and t-shirts screened with Kalashnikovs, glorifying Russia's war in Ukraine.
Visitors chat in front of paintings by artist Alexei Sergiyenko during the opening of the exhibition "President. The kindest person" devoted to Vladimir Putin's 60th birthday in Moscow, Sunday Oct. 7, 2012.
IMAGE: AP PHOTO/SERGEY PONOMAREV
Children may be too young to join an organization, but the Kremlin is targeting them, too, with nationalistic propaganda. At one Moscow school, children were taught to recite a poemthat went: "Russian land, who has offended you? There is no forgiveness for foes."
Last week the government more than doubled funding for a five-year "patriotic education" plan.
Putin himself has designed a character for a long-running Russian children's television show, "Good Night, Little Ones."
Children with portraits of Vladimir Putin on their t-shirts and pro-Kremlin activists attend a rally in support of Putin's policy in Crimea and Ukraine at Pushkinskaya Square in Moscow, Russia, March, 10, 2014.
IMAGE: SASHA MORDOVETS/GETTY IMAGES
Falling out of love with Putin
Drokova said she met with Putin on more than four occasions. But her most famous encounter with him came when she spontaneously walked up to him and kissed his cheek during a Nashi event, "because it would be fun," she said.
Putin appeared to enjoy it, too, smiling while he gave Drokova a little squeeze.
Masha Drokova kisses Vladimir Putin on the cheek.
IMAGE: KINO LORBER FILMS
Their meetings were usually more formal. Before visiting Putin at the Kremlin, Nashi leaders and Kremlin officials would remind her: "There should be fun questions, there should be unusual questions, serious questions," she said.
"They told me, 'You should be dressed nice and cute when you meet [Putin].'""They told me, 'You should be dressed nice and cute when you meet [Putin].'"
Her disenchantment with Nashi began when the group changed to more aggressive tactics in targeting opposition activists and politicians. She left Nashi for good after the group's leadership questioned her loyalty.
When a friend of hers, the journalist Oleg Kashin, was brutally attacked within inches of his life for being critical of authorities, she said she know the decision to leave was the right move.
Activists and supporters of Nashi rally with posters saying "Russia's Disgrace" marking Russian National Unity Day in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Nov. 4, 2010.
IMAGE: AP PHOTO/MISHA JAPARIDZE
Drokova has since relocated to New York. But she keeps an eye on Moscow and visits often. She worries about what Putin is doing to Russia, and about the resurgence of groups like Nashi. Speaking to her now, she sounds more like the opposition activists she once protested against than the Putin-loving teenager she used to be.
"There should be a change of elites and power in Russia," she said.
'Girl who kissed Putin' warns about rise of Russian nationalism
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLERJAN 06, 2016
Masha Drokova is best known as the girl who kissed Vladimir Putin.
She planted one on the Russian president's cheek while a leader of Nashi, the now defunct pro-Kremlin youth organization dubbed "Putin's private army" by critics.
Nashi brought Drokova moderate fame and future. For a while she had her own talk show. Her connections to the Kremlin, where she often met with top officials, helped get her into a Moscow university. She was able to afford a flashy car and an apartment in the pricey Russian capital.
Drokova's rise from an ordinary teenager to an activist who took meetings with Russia's elite behind the red walls of the Kremlin is rivaled only by her fall from the grace of those who brought her in. It's a cautionary tale partly documented in the 2012 film "Putin's Kiss."
A screenshot of Masha Drokova in a scene from "Putin's Kiss." in which she describes Vladimir Putin.
IMAGE: KINO LORBER FILMS
Today, disillusioned with Russia's leadership, the 26-year-old has left Moscow and resettled in New York, where a small but growing population of Russians who have fallen out of favor with authorities or else fled repression have landed.
SEE ALSO: Russia's pro-Putin media darling loves his new life in Brooklyn — minus the hipsters
Drokova now does public relations consulting for global tech companies. As a rule, she stays away from politics in conversation and rarely talks about her past. But she spoke toMashable about her humble upbringing in a sleepy town outside Moscow, her admiration for Putin and how she fell out of love with him while raising concerns about the potential dangers of the militant nationalism and a sort of second coming of militant youth groups that has gripped Moscow in recent months.
It's a story that sheds light on a dark side of Russia's political sphere.
Nashi activists rally in Moscow, on National Unity Day, Nov. 4, 2011.
IMAGE: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Joining Nashi
Drokova is part of a generation of Russians who came of age after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Born in 1989, she was raised in a middle-class family in small town 300 miles south of Moscow. School bored her. She got poor grades and was interested in little other than her Motherland and her leader, Putin.
Founded in 2005, Nashi — "ours" in Russian — emerged in the wake of Ukraine's Orange Revolution to counter Russian opposition groups that might have been inspired by the uprising. It was a youth group whose members, mostly ideological teens from the provinces born in the turbulent 1990s, were fanatically loyal to Putin and adopted his message of "restoring Russia's greatness." Nashi grew quickly to have more than 100,000 members in just two years.
Masha joined Nashi when she was 15, because she wanted to find a way to express her love for her country, and because other youth organizations "were boring." In Nashi, she would also find self-confidence.
Project Network is one such group. While emphasizing traditional Orthodox Christian values, it often stages flashy events, such as the art show at a building adjacent to the Kremlin it held last June where teenagers strutted out on catwalks wearing gas masks and t-shirts screened with Kalashnikovs, glorifying Russia's war in Ukraine.
Visitors chat in front of paintings by artist Alexei Sergiyenko during the opening of the exhibition "President. The kindest person" devoted to Vladimir Putin's 60th birthday in Moscow, Sunday Oct. 7, 2012.
IMAGE: AP PHOTO/SERGEY PONOMAREV
Children may be too young to join an organization, but the Kremlin is targeting them, too, with nationalistic propaganda. At one Moscow school, children were taught to recite a poemthat went: "Russian land, who has offended you? There is no forgiveness for foes."
Last week the government more than doubled funding for a five-year "patriotic education" plan.
Putin himself has designed a character for a long-running Russian children's television show, "Good Night, Little Ones."
Children with portraits of Vladimir Putin on their t-shirts and pro-Kremlin activists attend a rally in support of Putin's policy in Crimea and Ukraine at Pushkinskaya Square in Moscow, Russia, March, 10, 2014.
IMAGE: SASHA MORDOVETS/GETTY IMAGES
Falling out of love with Putin
Drokova said she met with Putin on more than four occasions. But her most famous encounter with him came when she spontaneously walked up to him and kissed his cheek during a Nashi event, "because it would be fun," she said.
Putin appeared to enjoy it, too, smiling while he gave Drokova a little squeeze.
Masha Drokova kisses Vladimir Putin on the cheek.
IMAGE: KINO LORBER FILMS
Their meetings were usually more formal. Before visiting Putin at the Kremlin, Nashi leaders and Kremlin officials would remind her: "There should be fun questions, there should be unusual questions, serious questions," she said.
"They told me, 'You should be dressed nice and cute when you meet [Putin].'""They told me, 'You should be dressed nice and cute when you meet [Putin].'"
Her disenchantment with Nashi began when the group changed to more aggressive tactics in targeting opposition activists and politicians. She left Nashi for good after the group's leadership questioned her loyalty.
When a friend of hers, the journalist Oleg Kashin, was brutally attacked within inches of his life for being critical of authorities, she said she know the decision to leave was the right move.
Activists and supporters of Nashi rally with posters saying "Russia's Disgrace" marking Russian National Unity Day in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Nov. 4, 2010.
IMAGE: AP PHOTO/MISHA JAPARIDZE
Drokova has since relocated to New York. But she keeps an eye on Moscow and visits often. She worries about what Putin is doing to Russia, and about the resurgence of groups like Nashi. Speaking to her now, she sounds more like the opposition activists she once protested against than the Putin-loving teenager she used to be.
"There should be a change of elites and power in Russia," she said.
'Girl who kissed Putin' warns about rise of Russian nationalism
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Putin says he didn't mean to scare Merkel by bringing his dog to meeting
BY BRIAN RIES2 DAYS AGO
Russian President Vladimir Putin says he didn't mean to scare German Chancellor Angela Merkel by bringing his dog Konni to a meeting between the two leaders in Sochi in 2007.
Merkel, whose aversion to dogs has been widely documented — she was bitten by one when she was young — was said to show "apparent discomfort" when the black labrador was brought into the room. "The dog does not bother you, does she? She's a friendly dog and I'm sure she will behave herself," Putin said at the time.
SEE ALSO: 'Girl who kissed Putin' warns about rise of Russian nationalism
He likely knew what he was doing; the meeting came a year after Putin gave Merkel a small dog toy with a short leash — a symbol that left German diplomats scratching their heads.
"I understand why he has to do this — to prove he's a man," said Merkel after the 2007 encounter. "He's afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this."
told German newsmagazine Bild in an interview published this week that it wasn't a power move meant to intimidate, but a simple mistake.
Putin's dog Koni makes an unusual appearance during his meeting with Merkel at the Bocharov Ruchei residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Jan. 21, 2007.
IMAGE: DMITRY ASTAKHOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
"I knew nothing about it," he said in the interview. "On the contrary, I wanted to do something pleasant when I introduced her to my dog."
"Afterwards, however, I explained everything and apologized," he said, later adding that "the level of trust between us is very high."
Putin says he didn't mean to scare Merkel by bringing his dog to meeting
BY BRIAN RIES2 DAYS AGO
Russian President Vladimir Putin says he didn't mean to scare German Chancellor Angela Merkel by bringing his dog Konni to a meeting between the two leaders in Sochi in 2007.
Merkel, whose aversion to dogs has been widely documented — she was bitten by one when she was young — was said to show "apparent discomfort" when the black labrador was brought into the room. "The dog does not bother you, does she? She's a friendly dog and I'm sure she will behave herself," Putin said at the time.
SEE ALSO: 'Girl who kissed Putin' warns about rise of Russian nationalism
He likely knew what he was doing; the meeting came a year after Putin gave Merkel a small dog toy with a short leash — a symbol that left German diplomats scratching their heads.
"I understand why he has to do this — to prove he's a man," said Merkel after the 2007 encounter. "He's afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this."
told German newsmagazine Bild in an interview published this week that it wasn't a power move meant to intimidate, but a simple mistake.
Putin's dog Koni makes an unusual appearance during his meeting with Merkel at the Bocharov Ruchei residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Jan. 21, 2007.
IMAGE: DMITRY ASTAKHOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
"I knew nothing about it," he said in the interview. "On the contrary, I wanted to do something pleasant when I introduced her to my dog."
"Afterwards, however, I explained everything and apologized," he said, later adding that "the level of trust between us is very high."
Putin says he didn't mean to scare Merkel by bringing his dog to meeting
Girl who kissed Putin' warns about rise of Russian nationalism
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLERJAN 06, 2016
Masha Drokova is best known as the girl who kissed Vladimir Putin.
She planted one on the Russian president's cheek while a leader of Nashi, the now defunct pro-Kremlin youth organization dubbed "Putin's private army" by critics.
Nashi brought Drokova moderate fame and future. For a while she had her own talk show. Her connections to the Kremlin, where she often met with top officials, helped get her into a Moscow university. She was able to afford a flashy car and an apartment in the pricey Russian capital.
Drokova's rise from an ordinary teenager to an activist who took meetings with Russia's elite behind the red walls of the Kremlin is rivaled only by her fall from the grace of those who brought her in. It's a cautionary tale partly documented in the 2012 film "Putin's Kiss."
A screenshot of Masha Drokova in a scene from "Putin's Kiss." in which she describes Vladimir Putin.
IMAGE: KINO LORBER FILMS
Today, disillusioned with Russia's leadership, the 26-year-old has left Moscow and resettled in New York, where a small but growing population of Russians who have fallen out of favor with authorities or else fled repression have landed.
SEE ALSO: Russia's pro-Putin media darling loves his new life in Brooklyn — minus the hipsters
Drokova now does public relations consulting for global tech companies. As a rule, she stays away from politics in conversation and rarely talks about her past. But she spoke toMashable about her humble upbringing in a sleepy town outside Moscow, her admiration for Putin and how she fell out of love with him while raising concerns about the potential dangers of the militant nationalism and a sort of second coming of militant youth groups that has gripped Moscow in recent months.
It's a story that sheds light on a dark side of Russia's political sphere.
Nashi activists rally in Moscow, on National Unity Day, Nov. 4, 2011.
IMAGE: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Joining Nashi
Drokova is part of a generation of Russians who came of age after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Born in 1989, she was raised in a middle-class family in small town 300 miles south of Moscow. School bored her. She got poor grades and was interested in little other than her Motherland and her leader, Putin.
Founded in 2005, Nashi — "ours" in Russian — emerged in the wake of Ukraine's Orange Revolution to counter Russian opposition groups that might have been inspired by the uprising. It was a youth group whose members, mostly ideological teens from the provinces born in the turbulent 1990s, were fanatically loyal to Putin and adopted his message of "restoring Russia's greatness." Nashi grew quickly to have more than 100,000 members in just two years.
Masha joined Nashi when she was 15, because she wanted to find a way to express her love for her country, and because other youth organizations "were boring." In Nashi, she would also find self-confidence.
Project Network is one such group. While emphasizing traditional Orthodox Christian values, it often stages flashy events, such as the art show at a building adjacent to the Kremlin it held last June where teenagers strutted out on catwalks wearing gas masks and t-shirts screened with Kalashnikovs, glorifying Russia's war in Ukraine.
Visitors chat in front of paintings by artist Alexei Sergiyenko during the opening of the exhibition "President. The kindest person" devoted to Vladimir Putin's 60th birthday in Moscow, Sunday Oct. 7, 2012.
IMAGE: AP PHOTO/SERGEY PONOMAREV
Children may be too young to join an organization, but the Kremlin is targeting them, too, with nationalistic propaganda. At one Moscow school, children were taught to recite a poemthat went: "Russian land, who has offended you? There is no forgiveness for foes."
Last week the government more than doubled funding for a five-year "patriotic education" plan.
Putin himself has designed a character for a long-running Russian children's television show, "Good Night, Little Ones."
Children with portraits of Vladimir Putin on their t-shirts and pro-Kremlin activists attend a rally in support of Putin's policy in Crimea and Ukraine at Pushkinskaya Square in Moscow, Russia, March, 10, 2014.
IMAGE: SASHA MORDOVETS/GETTY IMAGES
Falling out of love with Putin
Drokova said she met with Putin on more than four occasions. But her most famous encounter with him came when she spontaneously walked up to him and kissed his cheek during a Nashi event, "because it would be fun," she said.
Putin appeared to enjoy it, too, smiling while he gave Drokova a little squeeze.
Masha Drokova kisses Vladimir Putin on the cheek.
IMAGE: KINO LORBER FILMS
Their meetings were usually more formal. Before visiting Putin at the Kremlin, Nashi leaders and Kremlin officials would remind her: "There should be fun questions, there should be unusual questions, serious questions," she said.
"They told me, 'You should be dressed nice and cute when you meet [Putin].'""They told me, 'You should be dressed nice and cute when you meet [Putin].'"
Her disenchantment with Nashi began when the group changed to more aggressive tactics in targeting opposition activists and politicians. She left Nashi for good after the group's leadership questioned her loyalty.
When a friend of hers, the journalist Oleg Kashin, was brutally attacked within inches of his life for being critical of authorities, she said she know the decision to leave was the right move.
Activists and supporters of Nashi rally with posters saying "Russia's Disgrace" marking Russian National Unity Day in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Nov. 4, 2010.
IMAGE: AP PHOTO/MISHA JAPARIDZE
Drokova has since relocated to New York. But she keeps an eye on Moscow and visits often. She worries about what Putin is doing to Russia, and about the resurgence of groups like Nashi. Speaking to her now, she sounds more like the opposition activists she once protested against than the Putin-loving teenager she used to be.
"There should be a change of elites and power in Russia," she said.
'Girl who kissed Putin' warns about rise of Russian nationalism
Aspergers?Putin says he didn't mean to scare Merkel by bringing his dog to meeting
BY BRIAN RIES2 DAYS AGO
Russian President Vladimir Putin says he didn't mean to scare German Chancellor Angela Merkel by bringing his dog Konni to a meeting between the two leaders in Sochi in 2007.
Merkel, whose aversion to dogs has been widely documented — she was bitten by one when she was young — was said to show "apparent discomfort" when the black labrador was brought into the room. "The dog does not bother you, does she? She's a friendly dog and I'm sure she will behave herself," Putin said at the time.
SEE ALSO: 'Girl who kissed Putin' warns about rise of Russian nationalism
He likely knew what he was doing; the meeting came a year after Putin gave Merkel a small dog toy with a short leash — a symbol that left German diplomats scratching their heads.
"I understand why he has to do this — to prove he's a man," said Merkel after the 2007 encounter. "He's afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this."
told German newsmagazine Bild in an interview published this week that it wasn't a power move meant to intimidate, but a simple mistake.
Putin's dog Koni makes an unusual appearance during his meeting with Merkel at the Bocharov Ruchei residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Jan. 21, 2007.
IMAGE: DMITRY ASTAKHOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
"I knew nothing about it," he said in the interview. "On the contrary, I wanted to do something pleasant when I introduced her to my dog."
"Afterwards, however, I explained everything and apologized," he said, later adding that "the level of trust between us is very high."
Putin says he didn't mean to scare Merkel by bringing his dog to meeting
Oil price briefly falls below $30 a barrel
- 1 hour ago
- From the sectionBusiness
Image copyrightGetty Images
Image captionRussian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev (right) on a visit to a factory that makes steel pipes for the oil and gas industry in the Urals
Oil prices have briefly fallen below $30 a barrel on international markets for the first time since April 2004, before recovering again.
Brent crude, used as an international benchmark, fell as low as $29.96, but bounced back to trade at $30.22.
Oil prices have fallen by 70% in the past 15 months.
Earlier, Russia's Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, warned tumbling oil prices could force his country to revise its 2016 budget.
He said that the country must be prepared for a "worst-case" economic scenario if the price continued to fall.
Taxes from oil and gas generates about half the Russian government's revenue.
The 2016 federal budget that was approved in October was based on an oil price of $50 a barrel in 2016 - a figure President Vladimir Putin has since described as "unrealistic".
Government departments have been ordered to cut spending by 10%, repeating a policy imposed in 2015, Reuters reported.
Pensions and pay for government workers will be protected from the cuts, which could save as much as 700bn roubles (£6.3bn; $9.1bn).
Finance minister Anton Siluanov said that the Russian budget could only be balanced at an oil price of $82 a barrel.
'New realities'
He said the 2016 budget should be revised to assume an oil price of $40 a barrel.
"Our task is to adapt our budget to the new realities," Mr Siluanov said.
Image copyrightGetty Images
Image captionRussian finance minister Anton Siluanov
Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev warned that Russia faced a long period of low commodity prices with oil at $15 or $20 a barrel.
"The biggest risk is that there will be low prices for a long time - that is, for years, for decades," he said.
Mr Medvedev also said that high interests rates were holding back economic growth in Russia.
The Bank of Russia held rates at 11% last month, with governor Elvira Nabiullina warning of "high volatility" in global markets.
A year ago the central bank shocked markets by increasing rates from 10.5% to 17%.
Inflation stands at 15% in Russia, but the bank hopes it would fall to 4% by next year.
Oil price briefly falls below $30 a barrel - BBC News
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Fast Money & Foreign Objects
