“Russian occupation authorities are likely increasingly recognizing their inability to successfully hold sham referenda in occupied areas of Ukraine due to Russian military failures and ongoing Ukrainian resistance in occupied territories.”
They introduced a simple stop-light system and then created a infinite number of gradations (including 🟢🔴) so that nobody could understand it...
- Finally, I just want to doff my cap to the for once again making its nuclear risk communication as confusing as possible.
- First was his explicit statement that the power lines into the plant are a target. We know the lines have been down a lot recently.
- He said that it is clear that those who have military aims know how to "hit where it hurts" so that the plant becomes very problematic.
- Reading between the lines there, I think this implicates the Ukrainian military. They know they can't hit the plant, but they can disrupt its operations by striking the power lines.
- If Russia wanted to conduct a false flag, they'd strike the plant directly.
- And sure enough, we've had three SCRAMs at the plant in the past week. Two at Unit 5 and one at Unit 6. That may have also, according to Russian media, disrupted power to Russian-held territory, which presumably depends on the plant.
- If this is true, it's a high-risk game.
- The second statement regarded Russian forces at the site.
- "The [RUS] military presence did not approach us in any way and were not available. It was evident that this group was very withdrawn throughout our presence there," Grossi said. That's not good.
- The IAEA has left a very small inspection team at the site. It will eventually be just 2 inspectors. If the Russian military isn't even talking to them, it's hard to imagine they could offer security to the inspectors.
- We also didn't hear whether the IAEA was able to talk to personnel. Prior to the arrival of the agency there were unconfirmed reports of ROSATOM staff being spirited away to Melitopol. Those are just rumors, I think, but it's an open question.
- I expected no less from an agency full of nuclear engineers.
- Keep it up! Your red-but-also-green stoplight rating system is keeping me in a job as public radio journalist!
//END
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Putin has said that “De-Nazification” of Ukraine is one of his key objectives, and that it is the main justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin media even brands all those who oppose Russian aggression as “Neo-Nazis.”
At the onset of the invasion, Russian propaganda clearly distinguished between the Ukrainian “fraternal people” and the “criminal regime” in Kyiv.
[...]
Later, the Kremlin and the pro-government media began to substitute certain concepts: “nationalists” and “Neo-Nazis” became synonymous with the Ukrainian Army, volunteer battalions, and territorial defence forces, which have put up massive resistance against the Russian invaders. Pro-Kremlin media headlines and newscast rhetoric are full of phrases about “hours spent under targeted fire by nationalists” or Russian units and their proxies “who managed to drive nationalists out of the most residential areas in the city.”
But still after 8 weeks of war, the Kremlin propagandists refer to Ukrainians daring to oppose Russian occupation as “Nazis.”
[...]
The uncomfortable truth is that Russia has long and regularly made accusations against former Soviet republics about supporting neo-Nazism, But the reality as borne out by the obscene behaviour of the Red Army in Ukraine is that Russia is itself the main breeding ground for today’s Nazis, and it is this evil that the world must address urgently and destroy the demon before it spreads.
www.eupoliticalreport.eu/...
Energy exports have been a central element of Russian foreign policy, as well as its economy, for decades. *Very* broadly, before Feb 2022 Russia took one approach to energy relations with Western(ish) Europe and another approach with the other states of the former USSR.
EU-Russia relations were (and again, I’m generalising) broadly cooperative and interdependent. The EU needed Russia’s gas; Russia needed the EU’s cash. Both sides had a strong interest in keeping the energy relationship as stable as possible and their policies reflected this.
The energy relationship with ex-Soviet neighbours was a completely different story. Since the 90s, Russia has used the energy dependence of these neighbours as a coercive instrument, to force these states to make concessions on issues of security or foreign policy. Some examples.
In the 1990s, the Russian govt used Ukraine’s large energy debt as a means to acquire most of the ex-Soviet Black Sea Fleet (BSF) and its Crimean bases. Russia and Ukraine agreed to split the BSF assets after years of arguing about who was legally entitled to what.
Under the 1997 deal, Ukraine handed over most of its share of the BSF in exchange for forgiveness of gas debts. Of course, it was that deal that allowed the Russian armed forces to maintain and develop their presence inside Ukraine, in Crimea.
This enabled them to annex Crimea in 2014, which has, in turn, facilitated their current invasion. So there’s a direct link between Russia’s use of an energy deal as a coercive instrument to advance their security interests in the 1990s and their 2022 war against Ukraine.
In the mid-00s, after the Colour Revolutions produced pro-Western govts in Georgia and Ukraine, both countries became involved in disputes with Russia over increased gas prices. These were widely seen as designed to pressure govts that the Kremlin regarded as unfriendly.
In Jan 2006, when Russia-Georgia relations were very bad, mysterious explosions on the same day shut down the gas pipeline and one of the main Russia-Georgia electricity cables. Georgian president Saakashvili claimed it was an attempt to pressure Georgia.
In 2007, the Estonian govt relocated a Soviet WW2 Red Army monument. This did not go down well with the Russian government.
A week later, among many other actions during the ‘Bronze soldier crisis’, the Russian govt cut oil and coal supplies, claiming railway maintenance as the reason. This was not, it’s fair to say, widely believed.
In December 2020, Moldova elected a president who rapidly moved the country towards closer integration with the EU and a closer relationship with non-Russian neighbours, including the Ukrainian govt.
In August 2021, she took part in a Crimea-related summit with the presidents of Ukraine, Poland, and Romania and then invited them to Moldova to celebrate its independence anniversary – the first time this had ever happened.
Within a few weeks, Gazprom raised the gas price for Moldova, the Russian govt said it would demand payment of over $700m of gas debts if the new deal wasn’t signed, and threatened to cut off the gas supply to Moldova on 1 December.
These are just a few examples of the way that the Russian govt has used threats of price rises, cutoffs, and other more opaque methods to attempt, not always successfully, to try to coerce states in the region of what was the USSR.
The Russian govt’s actions seem to have two purposes in these cases: to coerce the other state into doing/not doing something, and/or to punish the other state for something it has already done (moved a WW2 monument, for example).
This behaviour is a result of the Kremlin’s imperial attitudes towards what it sees as Russia’s sphere of influence, its “near abroad”. But it should also be seen, I think, as a reflection of a wider worldview (of which the idea of a sphere of influence is one element).
The Russian govt worldview is crudely realist (in the IR theory meaning of the word). Power is what matters in international relations. A powerful state is to be respected; a weak state is to be despised.
This used to be at odds with their rhetoric about the importance of a law-based international order resting on sovereign equality of all states, the primacy of the UNSC, etc but was obvious anyway.
These days, even that veneer has largely been abandoned. Now, Russian statements emphasise the idea that the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. Interactions are zero sum.
Sovereignty a condition of legal equality among states, it’s earned by being able to assert control – with the implication that it’s forfeited if another state can push a state off its territory. It’s international politics as survival of the fittest.
If Germany or the UK or any other Western state attempts to reduce its support for Ukraine as part of an attempt to repair the energy relationship with Russia, the Russian govt will take it as a sign of that state’s weakness.
The Russian govt has talked for a long time about Western decline and weakness. It seems to view democracy and civil society as vulnerabilities for Western states – vulnerabilities that the Kremlin has sought to exploit in various ways (disinformation, election interference, etc)
If popular alarm about energy costs puts govts under domestic pressure to cut a deal with Russia that involves any Ukraine-related concessions, it will be a huge victory for Russia in its genocidal war.
But it’s also very likely to be seen by the Kremlin as confirmation that Russia is strong and Europe is weak and coercible.
Given the way it treats the energy relationship with those states it regards as weak and coercible in the post-Soviet space, this would be a disaster for European energy security.
In the last 6 months, Russia has, inevitably, become much less dependent on a good energy relationship with Europe. The idea of an interdependent energy relationship has gone for the foreseeable future.
So if the UK or other European states tried to repair the energy relationship, they wouldn’t get the stable, mutually beneficial arrangement of the past, they’d be likely to get trapped in same kind of the zero sum, coercive energy relationship as Russia’s neighbours.
This would be highly damaging to UK and/or EU security, and not just energy security but security more generally. Energy relations with Russia would become a choke chain on which the Kremlin could pull if states step out of line.
Do something the Russian govt doesn’t like - increases to NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence, perhaps, or EU enlargement - and prices might go up or the gas taps might be shut off. What democratic govt would be able to survive that happening?
I’m sure that the UK and EU govts are very well aware of this. But it seems (to me, at least) that a lot of people outside govt and academia aren’t.
As prices go up and people start suffering, there’s likely to be a lot more talk of weakening support for Ukraine and doing a deal with Russia.
For the sake of future Western security as well as the future of Ukraine, govts need to get out in front of this now and start explaining *very* clearly and repeatedly why this won’t work.
(Final word: apologies for calling Russia’s neighbours ex-Soviet – a very problematic characterisation. But the shared experience of being part of the USSR (legally or not) shapes their relations with Russia on the energy issue and Russian perceptions so it seems relevant here.)
Inevitably, I've found missing text in one of these tweets. Should have read...
Sovereignty is no longer talked about as a condition of legal equality among states, it’s earned by being able to assert control – with the implication that it’s forfeited if another state can push a state off its territory. It’s international politics as survival of the fittest.
It seems this thread was a bit more timely than I expected.
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