Category Archives: News

Adygeyan parliament adopts resolution on Syrian Circassians

Posted on by
Reply

The Adygeyan parliament today passed a resolution sent to Dmitry Medvedev as well both houses of the federal parliament asking for help in resettling Syrian Circassians to Russia. A group of 115 members of the Circassian diaspora in Syria sent a letter to Russian officials on Monday asking to be repatriated to their original homeland in the North Caucasus because of the danger and instability surrounding them in Syria. By some estimates, there are 80-90 thousand ethnic Circassians currently living in Syria, which would make it the second largest Circassian diaspora community in the world after Turkey. Hundreds of thousands of Circassians fled Russia in the 1860s due to repression (termed by some as a genocide) by Russian armies the Caucasus; many of those fleeing settled in the Ottoman Empire.

Read more (in Russian) here:

“Circassian of Syria ask President of Russia and head of Agygeya to take measures for their resettlement in Russia” Caucasian Knot

“Russian Circassian organizations support their compatriots in Syria” Caucasian Knot

Drilling platform Kolskaya sinks in Sea of Okhotsk

Posted on by
Reply

At least four people are confirmed dead after the Kolskaya drilling platform sank in storm Sunday morning, about 200 km north of Sakhalin Island. Press reports have put the number of people aboard at anywhere from 57 to 76 at the time when the platform went down. 14 people have been reported rescued at the time of writing in conditions featuring waves of up to 5 meters (16.5 feet) and winds up to 51 miles per hour (23 meters/sec). The causes of the sinking are being investigated and so far, a couple of news reports are citing Emergency Ministry sources reporting that there isn’t any threat to the environment, but we will see as more information becomes available.

Could the Duma elections actually help Putin? All signs point to…

Posted on by
Reply

If there’s a better way to jump start a blog than a good, old-fashioned polemic, then I (obviously) can’t think of one. That’s partly why I’ve decided to write about Greogry Feifer’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post, but also to refute an argument I find, well, befuddling. Feifer writes that, contrary to popular belief, the Dec. 4  Duma election results in Russia – when United Russia’s vote total dropped about 15% from the 65% of all votes cast – actually represent a strengthening of Vladimir Putin’s political position. This flies in the face of the collective wisdom that holds that the drop in the official count (to say nothing of the unofficial count, which many believe to be as much as 10-15% less) shows that Russians are growing tired of Putin. And because it flies in the face of what we all collectively “know,” I really wanted to like what Feifer wrote. I wanted to like it because it adds some balance to the Washington Post’s largely anti-Kremlin and anti-Putin editorial page. But, I just couldn’t.

The reason why I can’t get behind Feifer is that he is being too clever by half. As someone guilty of this on occasion (and more frequently, being not clever by more than half), I sympathize with Feifer, but I have to disagree with him here. Sometimes, the collective wisdom is right and this happens to be one of those times. His argument that United Russia’s loss is Putin’s gain ignores a pretty basic truth about the elections. The vast majority of people who voted against United Russia (and this is the dominant reason for its drop as opposed to anything the other parties did) were casting a vote against Putin and the system he has fostered over the last 11 years. If you accept this to be true, then Feifer has to be wrong.

Feifer’s arguments against this line of thinking largely uncritically accept the comestic and

semantic distance Putin has put between himself and the party. The fact that Dmitry

Everyone knows Putin didn't get stronger from the election, but what this presupposes is, maybe he did?

Medevedev and not Putin headed the national party list misses the point, as does mentioning that Putin is technically not even a member of the party. United Russia, as the ‘party of power,’ wholly exists as an extension of Putin’s personal authority and the authority of the system of governance he heads. It is difficult to really, honestly separate the two, regardless of Putin’s ineffectual efforts to create distance between himself and the ‘Part of Crooks and Thieves.’ Tellingly, these efforts have been basically ignored by Russians, who are not so stupid as to not see through it no matter what they think of Putin.

This is the dagger in the heart of Feifer’s argument – whether or not Russians were technically voting for or against Putin, they believed they were. This perception that a vote against United Russia was a vote against Putin manifests itself when crowds chant things like ‘Putin is a thief.’ A lessening of popular support does not translate into a strengthening of his political position no matter which way you slice it. Feifer tries to get around this by arguing that by weakening United Russia and, by extension, parliament’s say over government policy, Putin is strengthening his institutional position as president.

To make this argument, however, is to lend too much credence to a purely mechanical reading of how Russian politics are structured. Sure, Putin can rule as President purely by decree or without much reference to parliament, but the whole reason behind creating United Russia was so that he did not have to. In any event, the actual structure and institutions underpinning and legitimizing Putin’s power are of secondary importance to Putin’s personal authority, as Feifer basically acknowledges at the end of the piece. The Duma election results – since United Russia is so closely tied to Putin in the minds of most people – have to be read as a blow to that authority.

If all this is obvious, then I half-heartedly apologize. The basic point to be made here is that, no matter how various analysts try to spin it, Putin cannot be happy with the way things have turned out. How it actually affects his hold on power is not at all clear, but it seems to me there is a long-term threat to him here. Putin has maintained his power in large part due to his ability to unite the country’s major political cliques behind him.  His authority in doing this stems from a combination of economic success (including the personal economic success of the elite), his political gravitas and a general consensus that as helmsman of the country, he charted the correct course out of the 1990s. If some of these political elites – such as the more liberal clique cultivated during Medvedev’s presidency – start to sense cracks forming in Putin’s personal authority (for example, if they start to agree with anti-Putin factions that he is no longer leading the country in the right direction) then that could become a major, if not existential, challenge to his political future. Whether the Duma elections and their aftermath represent the first crack, it is far too early to tell, but it should start becoming more clear in the next weeks and months.

A hero of our time: how we should remember Yuri Gagarin

Posted on by
6

Gagarin, American hero?

The 50th anniversary of the first man in space. Just let the thought, shared by countless generations over thousands of years, bounce around your head for a little while. The idea that someone broke through that most impenetrable of barriers, space, 50 years ago yesterday is awesome. In the history of human kind, its difficult to think of something that comprehensively trumps leaving the planet we call home for the first time. Yuri Gagarin’s 1 hour orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961 affirmed many things to many people, not all of which came to fruition. Most critically, however, it affirmed man’s belief in himself.

I thought about writing something commemorating the flight yesterday, but decided that I couldn’t add anything that hadn’t already been said. So I contented myself with reading other people’s articles commemorating the flight. Vadim Nikitin’s blog has a good summary of some of the more interesting tidbits (inside a good article in its own right) so if you’re looking for some fun Gagarin facts, check it out. There’s another page (Bizneslanch, clinging to some shred of an ethical sense, can’t take credit for finding it) at russianspaceweb.com about Gagarin worth checking out. Like I said, I didn’t put a whole lot effort into digging up anything original and I would be the first to admit to not being particularly well read in the history of the Soviet space program so maybe it’s for the best.

Still, one thing struck me while reading about Gagarin. There was almost no sense that Gagarin’s flight was an event shared and celebrated by everyone on the planet. Most articles made reference to the Cold War, most talked about how proud Russians are (this obviously includes Russian articles), some ruminated on the current state of the Russian space program and the Washington Post decided that its incredibly random, buried-on-A5 story should lead with an anecdote about people power washing the Gagarin statue on Leninsky Prospekt in Moscow and end with quotes from a Molodaya Gvardiya activist. It seemed to me that they all failed the see the most important aspect of the story, which is the reality that 50 years ago changed the way we look at the world around us.

The Cold War context in which Gagarin’s flight – and the Apollo 11 moon mission 8 years later – took place was undoubtedly an important factor. It lent, to a lesser or greater extent, an urgency to the effort to get a man into space. Nevertheless, the focus on this Cold War context ultimately misses the point since the success of Gagarin’s flight was one of those exceptionally rare events that transcended the context in which it took place. Do most people know – or perhaps more importantly, care – that Christopher Columbus was an Italian hired by the king and queen of Spain? Or even why he did it? No, they don’t and they won’t with Gagarin either.

Ultimately, people won’t remember the ideological competition between the U.S. and Soviet Union that is still at the center of our Gagarin narrative. A fifty-year blip in history will not overshadow the culmination of a human ambition thousands of years old as it still regretfully does today.

Gagarin didn’t build his Vostok 1 spacecraft himself and didn’t launch it himself; hell, he didn’t even fly it himself. His flight was unquestionably the product of a massively intense effort directed by the Soviet Union so its difficult to separate the flight from its national character, but us non-Russians should do just that and celebrate it as a common achievement. Russians richly deserve to celebrate Gagarin and Sergey Korolyov, the lead Soviet rocket designer, and I would be the last to advocate for this.  That doesn’t in any way exclude everyone else from sharing equally in that celebration.

Gagarin

Gagarin’s flight deserves nothing less than this. Why label it solely as a “Soviet” achievement; this is undoubtedly true, but when we attach such a label, it strips us as a species at-large of our common ownership of the feat. Even worse is the ludicrous continuing focus on who “won” and “lost” the space race ; who “beat” whom? More to the point, who lost? You don’t even need to resort to some dialectic-driven theory of history (a la “the two diametrically opposed systems struggled against each other, thus creating a historical advance ,etc.”) to understand the general importance of Gagarin’s flight.

It’s this sentiment that should grab everyone regardless of whether your country “won” or “lost” the space race or did not even participate. True, Biznesslanch probably wouldn’t be writing about this if Gagarin had not been Russian so there is a little disingenuousness in this stance, I suppose, but the point remains. Ultimately, the first man in space wasn’t really a product of the Cold War or the space race or anything other than man’s ageless desire to explore what we could always see, but never really touch until April, 12 1961.

It’s time that we shed this image of Gagarin as a Soviet ubermensch and see him as one of us. After all, he was just that, a man. The first man in space.

A shootout in Chechnya, then questions

Posted on by
2

After a month-long текнологический перерыв, Biznesslanch is back. To anyone bored enough to be waiting for a new post here over the winter holidays, I apologize; holidays and starting a new job apparently aren’t conducive to writing a blog.

A shootout outside an army base in Chechnya last Sunday got whole lot more interesting last week when one of the people wounded turned out to be a Chechen policeman currently wanted by Austrian prosecutors for murder. That would be the murder of Umar Israilov, a former Ramzan Kadyrov bodyguard who was giving up all kinds of dirt on his old boss to NY Times journos and the European Court of Human Rights, in broad daylight in Vienna in January 2009.

Investigators are trying to figure out how Lecha Bogatyrev, the man wanted in Austria, managed to find himself of the middle of what was apparently a fairly sophisticated ambush targeting 35-year old Lt. Colonel Bislan Elimkhanov, a former commander of the ‘Zapad’ (West) battalion made up of Chechens fighting against separatists under the auspices of the GRU (Russian military intelligence).

The details of that ambush near Khankala, a suburb of Grozny, in which three people were killed, have trickled out slowly; the news that Elimkhanov was involved came out a day after the event and Bogatyrev’s wounding a week after that. Details are still murky, as is most of the back story involving Bogatyrev  and Israilov (I don’t want to get too deep into the details as it’s not the main point here), but the incident has various sources speculating that a war between security forces in Chechnya may be brewing.

The Ambush

The actual attack on the three car convoy in which Elikmkhanov and his men were traveling seems to have been fairly complex. According to Elimkhanov’s interview in Kommersant, the convoy was around 20 meters away outside a military checkpoint leading into the Khankala base when it had to slow down for a torn-up patch of road. As the cars slowed, they were hit by a hail of gunfire from at least two sides, including fire from automatic weapons and sniper rifles.

Elimkhanov, a former commander of the GRU's 'Zapad' battalion, was seriously wounded in a Jan. 9 ambush (photo courtesy of Kommersant)

Elimkhanov (photo courtesy of Kommersant)

Elimkhanov’s driver Adam Isayev was killed and Elimkhanov was struck several times, including in the stomach, arm and leg. Elimkhanov’s soldiers in the convoy returned fire at a car wash where the sniper fire allegedly originated, and a Lada parked on the side of the road, both around 150 meters from the gate. In the resulting firefight, one of the apparent shooters – Ruslan Tatabayev, wanted for fatally stabbing a man in a bar outside Moscow in 2008 – was killed as was another person, described as a local resident. Six servicemen (including Elimkhanov), at least two other men not in Elimkhanov’s convoy and Bogatyrev were wounded.

There doesn’t seem to much doubt on the part of people involved and investigators that the ambush was not a random attack by separatist militants. “I doubt that the militants have the ability to organize this kind of attack, much less in a part of Grozny close to a heavily guarded military base,” a source told the website Caucasian Knot, adding that it was his belief that the attack was personally directed at Elimkhanov. Other comments made by sources in the security services to various other media outlets have echoed this suspicion.

Any theory that it was a random attack was further eroded when Elimkhanov revealed that the convoy had been stopped 5 or 6 kilometers from the base for a document check by security service members in black uniforms at a GAI (road inspectorate) checkpoint. Elimkhanov told Kommersant in an interview from the hospital that one of the men who looked over his documents was none other than Tatabayev. Tatabayev, according to a Moskovsky Komsomolets article, was often seen with Chechen police officers despite being wanted on federal murder warrant. The same article also cited ‘unofficial information’ that three attackers, not one, were killed when Elimkhanov’s men returned fired, a claim I couldn’t find echoed in other sources.

Consequences and Theories

The dominant theory among Russian media sources following the story is that the ambush was sprung on Elimkhanov in revenge for an incident in November 2010 in which some of his men got into a fight with local police that resulted in a road police lieutenant, Gelani Akhmedov, being killed. Local security services accused Aslan Magomadov, a member of Elimkhanov’s company better known by his radio call-sign ‘Tyson’, of pulling the trigger. Military investigators, however, said they weren’t able to establish whether Tyson really did kill Akhmedov or whether one of Akhmedov’s comrades accidentally shot him in the chaos of the fight.

In any event, local security forces effectively blockaded Elimkhanov and his men in their base and demanded that he hand over Tyson. Elimkhanov refused and, according to a Rosbalt article, the situation was teetering on the edge of breaking out into another gun battle until higher-ups in Moscow intervened. (read more about the incident here 1 2 3)

With this information in hand, everything seems to fit into a coherent theory. According to this theory, the stop at the GAI post was set up in order to determine which car Elimkhanov was sitting in. An unnamed soldier in the convoy quoted in the Moskovsky Komsomolets article said that as the cars were pulling away from the checkpoint, another car sped past them, with the implication being that it contained Tatabayev and whoever else participated in the attack. The professionalism of the attack also suggests that the people responsible knew exactly what they were doing.

It also accounts for motive. To be fair, there are any number of separatist groups that would not need an excuse to shoot up a special forces convoy, but the fact that the attackers targeted Elimkhanov specifically seems to point to a dispute of a more personal nature. Chechen security services furious over Elimkhanov’s protection of Tyson fit the bill nicely as the avengers in the standard tit-for-tat killing narrative. That the now-defunct GRU ‘Zapad’ and ‘Vostok’ battalions – Vostok, in particular – had a long history of bad blood with the local security forces under Kadyrov’s control just lends more support to this idea.

Bogatyrev - on the far left - apparently showed up during a Vesti news report in November, almost 2 years after fleeing Austria

The question of Bogatyrev’s presence raises another possibility that can be built into this basic theory. Bogatyrev has claimed that he just happened to be on the scene by chance, but the serviceman quoted in the Moscow Komsomolets article placed Bogatyrev in one of the cars at the GAI checkpoint and it’s a suspiciously large coincidence that Bogatyrev – himself a local security service member – simply chanced to be at an ambush sprung by local police officers.

If Austrian prosecutors are to be believed, Bogatyrev had already participated in one hit on a Kadyrov enemy organized by one of Kadyrov’s advisers, Shaa Turlayev. According to Rosbalt, Kadyrov, discussing the Akhemdov slaying and Tyson’s involvement, said in December, “If today the investigative committee, the military prosecutors, the command staff don’t deliver him [Tyson], then we’ll find a punishment.” These two facts could point to Kadyrov’s involvement, as speculated by Liz Fuller at RFE/RL’s Caucasus Report.

Fuller goes further, saying that the attack could have been intended to take out Bogatyrev – who would be killed in the return fire, thus negating any pressure from Austria – and Elimkhanov. This is a little much, as Bogatyrev seems to have been protected by someone in the almost two years he had been back in Chechnya and there would have been ample opportunities to silence him in a much less public way. Moreover, Kadyrov’s involvement, while plausible due to the record of people who fall foul of him ending up dead in very public killings, isn’t necessary to developing a credible theory of the attack; it just adds more intrigue. I have no problem believing that the attack could have occurred without Kadyrov or his immediate circle knowing about it, although if it came out that Kadyrov was, in fact, involved, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Whatever the case, the case shows at the very least that Kadyrov’s hold on power isn’t as ironclad as some would have people believe. That there can be ambushes laid by police on military formations under his watch demonstrates that there are still fractures within the security apparatus in Chechnya, particularly between local and federal forces. According to the worst case scenario, as floated by the Rosbalt piece, the incident could even trigger a war between local, Kadyrov-controlled forces and forces under federal control. Whatever the case, the situation is Chechnya is still extremely delicate and looks to remain so.