dagblog - Comments for "Projection Some: Russia's Sea Change"

lol @ "the real fake news"

artappraiser — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 15:02:27 +0000

In reply to Shades of Slim Shady: will

lol @ "the real fake news"

Shades of Slim Shady: will

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 08:41:02 +0000

In reply to Definitely a race to the

Shades of Slim Shady: will the real fake news please stand up, please stand up?

more: Vladimir Putin Doesn’t

artappraiser — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 08:06:48 +0000

In reply to Definitely a race to the

more: Vladimir Putin Doesn’t Know Which Syria Conspiracy Theory to Believe

by Robert Mackey @ The Intercept (!!! yez, Greenwald's place!), April 12

Definitely a race to the

artappraiser — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 01:49:27 +0000

In reply to They'll have Spicer announce

Definitely a race to the bottom!

Putin Hoists Trump on His Own Fake News Petard By Jack Shafer @ Politico.com April 12, 2017

Got me thinking: why the hell did we expect anything different? Geez the news on Trump himself today is depressing, really showing himself to be an idiot. Where's Mike Bloomberg to defend the notion that not all billionaires are idioits or psychopaths and are capable of governing rationally? All he had was a little minor anal retentive disorder.

They'll have Spicer announce

PeraclesPlease — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 23:15:50 +0000

In reply to Tillerson and Putin Find

They'll have Spicer announce that at least Russia never gassed its own people - a similar claim United's CEO noted about its customers. These are indeed times for low expectations and lower behavior.

Lavrov splains for you wassup

artappraiser — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 22:59:20 +0000

In reply to Projection Some: Russia's Sea Change

Lavrov splains for you wassup in Putin's return in 2012, as told to Susan B. Glasser four years ago @ ForeignPolicy.com, in an audience he granted. Nothing much seems to have changed, they continue with this program:

Minister No

Sergei Lavrov and the blunt logic of Russian power.

By Susan B. Glasser, April 29, 2013, Foreign Policy Feature

In the mid-19th century, Russia was not doing well. It had just been humiliated in the Crimean War, and the other European great powers were busy intriguing about the tsarist empire’s frontiers now that the Turks had stopped Russian expansion to the Black Sea. It was in response to these setbacks that Alexander Gorchakov, the prince who served as Russia’s foreign minister, issued his famous diplomatic circular. “Russia is not sulking,” he proclaimed. “She is composing herself.”

By the late 1990s, that must have sounded like a perfect retort to a Russian nationalist whose country was on the ropes. Yevgeny Primakov, a crusty old product of the Soviet diplomatic corps elevated to foreign minister by an increasingly beleaguered President Boris Yeltsin, dusted off the tsarist history books and resurrected Gorchakov as a model for a new Russian diplomacy. He cited him in speeches, wrote a long article extolling Gorchakov’s clever realpolitik maneuvers, and even installed his bust in the creaky grandeur of the Foreign Ministry, a Stalinist Gothic skyscraper filled with thousands of underemployed and barely paid bureaucrats still reeling from the Soviet Union’s abrupt collapse a few years earlier and the Russian state’s quick descent into financial crisis, international debt, and even, on its southern frontier, civil war. So what if we had a few setbacks, Primakov seemed to be saying; Russia can still be a great power. And to prove it: Here’s our very own Bismarck.

It wasn’t entirely a surprise then, when not quite an hour into my recent audience with the current Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, the 19th-century prince again made an appearance. I had asked the famously combative Lavrov what had changed in Russia’s foreign policy since Vladimir Putin had returned to power in the Kremlin last year. I had in mind the angry recriminations between the United States and Russia once again making front-page headlines, the tit-for-tat new laws banning human rights-violating Russian officials from America — and American citizens from adopting Russian babies. Or perhaps the tense negotiations over the bloody civil war in Syria, as the United States accused Russia of propping up Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime. Or the angry words exchanged near daily on subjects as diverse as missile defense, gay rights, and the arrest of the Putin-protesting punk band Pussy Riot.

But Lavrov, a diplomat since the Brezhnev era who has spent a lifetime haggling, blustering, scheming, and speechifying on behalf of the battered Russian state (“his religion,” one top U.S. official told me), chose to go in a different direction, right back in history to Alexander Gorchakov. He cited the princely foreign minister as an example of the blunt style in Russian politics, as a reason for why Russia has absolutely no intention of following America’s lead in the Arab world — or, by extension, anywhere else. Gorchakov, Lavrov proudly noted, had managed “the restoration of the Russian influence in Europe after the defeat in the Crimean War, and he did it … without moving a gun. He did it exclusively through diplomacy.”

When Lavrov did get around to the question at hand, of foreign policy in Putin’s Russia, he offered a sharp lecture on how the Kremlin’s boss had managed to make Russia great again after the indignities of the 1990s — and, more to the point, how a great Russia can once again afford to have an “assertive” foreign policy:

As for the changes in the Russian foreign policy, yes, we have more domestic strength, if you wish. We have become stronger economically; we have been successfully resolving the social problems, raising the level of living — the standards of living — of the population. Yes, a lot is to be done. But the change is very much noticed. And we feel the change. And Russia feels more assertive — not aggressive, but assertive. And we have been getting out of the situation where we found ourselves in the early ’90s when the Soviet Union disappeared and the Russian Federation became what it is — you know, with no borders, with no budget, no money, and with huge problems starting with lack of food and so on and so forth. It is a very different country now. And of course we can now pay more attention to looking after our legitimate interests in the areas where we were absent for quite some time after the demise of the Soviet Union.

The areas he mentioned? Africa, Latin America, Asia. In other words, pretty much the entire rest of the world. The message was clear if chilling to those who remember what the assertive foreign policy of the Soviet era looked like: Russia is not sulking, and she is just about done composing herself.

LAVROV, AT AGE 63, is already the longest-serving of Russia’s post-Cold War foreign ministers. Hard-drinking, hard-charging, a relentless and smart negotiator who has by turns infuriated and impressed his many diplomatic interlocutors over the years, he has come, more than anyone perhaps aside from Putin himself, to personify Russia’s return to the world stage.

Whatever you think of Lavrov personally — “he’s a complete asshole,” one former official from George W. Bush’s administration told me bluntly — it’s his relentless willingness to take on the United States globally, to challenge, whenever and wherever possible, America’s view of itself as the indispensable power, that has earned him admirers among his often more tactful counterparts. “He’s certainly got to be among the most effective foreign ministers in the world today,” the foreign minister of another major emerging power told me not long ago [...]

MUCH MORE, THAT'S LIKE 1/3 OF THE ARTICLE

... how do you lose them at

A Guy Called LULU — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 22:43:17 +0000

In reply to Serious? A lot of tomahawks

... how do you lose them at sea when shooting offshore towards land?

Serious? You do know what is between a ship at sea and the shore don't you? More sea. In this case I believe it was hundreds of miles of sea but I haven't verified my memory on that.

By the way, just ran across

artappraiser — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 22:38:27 +0000

In reply to Maybe I missed it, but where

By the way, just ran across this April 5 piece, which contradicts earlier Russian spin:

Evidence Contradicts Russia’s Account of the Syria Chemical Attack

By JEFFREY MARCUS @ The New York Times

Tillerson and Putin Find

artappraiser — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 22:31:40 +0000

In reply to Projection Some: Russia's Sea Change

Tillerson and Putin Find Little More Than Disagreement in Meeting

By DAVID E. SANGER @ The New York Times, 1 hr. ago

Includes a clip of the A.P. video of Tillerson's statement to the press after the meeting, i.e. "low level of trust" between the two countries

Excerpt, note my bold about China and Tillerson stating that interference in the U.S. election is a fact:

[....] Further punctuating the Syria dispute, Russia vetoed a Western-backed resolution at the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday condemning the chemical weapons attack.

It was the eighth time in the six-year-old Syria conflict that Russia, one of the five permanent Security Council members, had used its veto power to shield the Syrian government. But in a possible sign of Russia’s isolation on the chemical weapons issue, China, the permanent member that usually votes with Russia on Syria resolutions, abstained.

Asked about President Trump’s description of Mr. Assad as an “animal,” Mr. Tillerson said that characterization “is one that Assad has brought upon himself.”

Mr. Tillerson said Russian interference in the presidential election was a settled fact. In response, Mr. Lavrov gave what amounted to a long lecture on what he described as an extensive list of American efforts to achieve “regime change” around the world, from Serbia to Iraq to Libya. He described them all as failures — an implicit warning against any efforts to achieve the same end in Syria.

For hours after Mr. Tillerson’s arrival in Moscow, it was unclear whether Mr. Putin would even meet with him because of the tense state of relations, which has have worsened just in the past few weeks.

Their meeting lasted almost two hours and ended just before 8 p.m. local time [.....]

Could it be that Trump is responsible for that China abstenion?!!!

And after Tillerson said that about interference in the election, are they gonna trot out Kellyanne to say it was an alternative fact?

Maybe I missed it, but where

artappraiser — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 22:08:18 +0000

In reply to Serious? A lot of tomahawks

Maybe I missed it, but where is it reported that so many of the missiles did not strike? Am serious, because all I find is the Russian propaganda arm media saying that:

https://www.rt.com/news/384420-pentagon-syria-tomahawk-efficiency/

and I just ran across this article at Asia Times that explains how Russia has a lot riding on proving that their S-400 defense system being used in Syria, which they just sold to India and China, works well:

http://www.atimes.com/mixed-signals-china-india-russias-s-400-syria/

Looks to me that maybe what is going on is a propaganda war between the Pentagon and Russian military about who has the better toys. And that we don't really have the truth about what failed and what didn't fail, from all sides.