ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

MOSCOW — The separatist demonstrations again churning through eastern Ukraine have raised fears of a Crimean-style invasion by the 40,000 Russian troops coiled just over the Russian border. But Moscow’s goals are more subtle than that, focused on a long-range strategy of preventing Ukraine from escaping Russia’s economic and military orbit, according to political analysts, Kremlin allies and diplomats interviewed this week. Toward that end, the Kremlin has made one central demand, which does not at first glance seem terribly unreasonable. It wants Kiev to adopt a federal system of government giving far more power to the governors across Ukraine. “A federal structure will ensure that Ukraine will not be anti-Russian,” said Sergei A. Markov, a Russian political strategist who supports the Kremlin. Russian officials have said they envision a system in which the regions elect their own leaders and protect their own economic, cultural and religious traditions — including the forging of inde...

DONETSK, Ukraine — Facing threats of forcible eviction by the Ukrainian government, pro-Russian demonstrators who have seized the 11-story government headquarters in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine’s biggest city, suffered a further blow Wednesday when local political barons who share their deep dislike of Ukraine’s new government demanded that they give up and hand over any weapons. The protesters, however, vowed to stand firm, fortifying barricades erected around the Donetsk regional administration building as a thinning crowd of several hundred supporters chanted “Russia, Russia” and cheered calls for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to protect them. In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said at a news conference that demonstrators who have seized buildings in Donetsk and at least two other eastern cities had two options — “political negotiations and force.” He said the crisis would be resolved one way or the other within 48 hours. Interior Ministry troops hav...

By Peter Koenig  - Russia has just dropped another bombshell, announcing not only the de-coupling of its trade from the dollar, but also that its hydrocarbon trade will in the future be carried out in rubles and local currencies of its trading partners – no longer in dollars – see Voice of Russia Russia’s trade in hydrocarbons amounts to about a trillion dollars per year. Other countries, especially the BRICS and BRCIS-associates (BRICSA) may soon follow suit and join forces with Russia, abandoning the ‘petro-dollar’ as trading unit for oil and gas. This could amount to tens of trillions in loss for demand of petro-dollars per year (US GDP about 17 trillion dollars – December 2013) – leaving an important dent in the US economy would be an understatement. Added to this is the declaration today by Russia’s Press TV – China will re-open the old Silk Road as a new trading route linking Germany, Russia and China, allowing to connect and develop new markets along the road, especially in ...

By Sergei Lavrov  " The Guardian " - The profound and pervasive crisis in Ukraine is a matter of grave concern for Russia. We understand perfectly well the position of a country which became independent just over 20 years ago and still faces complex tasks in constructing a sovereign state. Among them is the search for a balance of interests among its various regions, the peoples of which have different historical and cultural roots, speak different languages and have different perspectives on their past and present, and their country's future place in the world. Given these circumstances, the role of external forces should have been to help Ukrainians protect the foundations of civil peace and sustainable development, which are still fragile. Russia has done more than any other country to support the independent Ukrainian state, including for many years subsidising its economy through low energy prices. Last November, at the outset of the current crisis, we supported Kie...

Karam Jamal/Reuters Free Syrian Army fighters prepared a homemade missile in Deir al-Zour on Saturday. The city has been one of the centers of fighting since the civil war began. In recent months, the government of President Bashar al-Assad has made gains against the rebels. By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI ASPEN, Colo. — A senior American intelligence official on Saturday warned that the Syrian conflict could last “many, many months to multiple years,” and described a situation that would most likely worsen regardless of whether the Syrian leader, President Bashar al-Assad , fell. Multimedia Graphic An Arms Pipeline to the Syrian Rebels Video Coverage of the Conflict in Syria The comments by David R. Shedd, the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency , were one of the strongest public warnings about how the civil war in Syria has deteriorated, and he seemed to imply that the response from the United States and its allies had so far been lacking. Mr. Shedd suggested th...

Indian External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid’s admission in February that the Indian government has asked its Ministry of Water Resources to clarify whether the Chinese dams on the Yarlung Tsangpo (called Brahmaputra in India) are run-of-the-river type or storage dams proves conclusively that New Delhi has so far taken all Chinese assurances in this regard with a pinch of salt. It appears that diplomatic nicety, rather than carefully analyzed facts, had earlier induced not only the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh but some other responsible government ministers to accept Beijing’s stand that the proposed hydro-electric projects on the Brahmaputra in Tibet are all run-of-the-river types and hence pose no threat to India’s downstream interests. But beneath diplomatic compulsions, doubts about the Chinese river training activities on the Brahmaputra persist in Indian minds and therefore New Delhi has been raising the issue again and again with Beijing. Very recently an inter-depar...

To many, Russia’s – and more pointedly, Putin’s – incursion into Ukraine revealed a desire to reclaim the lands that ‘got away’ during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, this blunt-force, defy-all-international-norms takeover of Crimea might have done quite a bit to weaken and potentially destabilize Russia’s relations with Belarus and Kazakhstan, arguably the two post-Soviet states most open to any sort of reconfiguring of the post-Soviet space that might mirror Soviet foreign policy. But first, some background. For the past few years, Putin has been advancing a project to reconstruct the economic network which formally existed between Moscow and its satellite states by launching negotiations to create a ‘customs union’ which would abolish tariffs and visas between participating countries and fortify inter-nation trade. The core partnership would be between Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, with the expectation that goods would flow freely over borders and greatly in...

By The Saker It is hard to get a good picture of what is happening in the eastern Ukraine, but looking at various sources it appears to me that large protests have occurred in the cities of Lugansk, Kharkov and Donetsk. From the video footage some rather large crowds, including a lot of women, have assembled in the city centers. In Donetsk and Lugansk the demonstrators have seized the governmental buildings including the local HQs of the Ukrainian SBU(security service). In Donetsk the demonstrators have gathered into something like a popular assembly and have declared the creation of a "People's Republic of Donetsk" and have announced that they plan to hold a referendum on the future of the region on April 11th. The best sign, however, that things are becoming very serious in that the entire top ruling elite of the revolutionary government in Kiev - including Yulia Timoshenko - has relocated to the eastern Ukraine to try to get the situation under control. My sense i...