Russia – Newropeans Magazine

Russia’s demography

14:36 9-02-2018 gefira.org

The Russian Federation is the world’s largest country in terms of area, the largest producer and exporter of natural gas, crude oil, and many food products, which is why this state exerts a significant influence on others. If anything goes wrong there some countries will be rubbing their hands in delight that one of their competitors is getting weaker, while others will be in a difficult, situation, losing their main supplier or buyer.

Moscow is concerned about the demographic decline which negatively affects the country’s geopolitical, economic and military potential. Though the Russian population is not threatened with extinction in the foreseeable future, the media often describe the country’s demographic situation as difficult or critical. The labour force is said to be declining by 800 thousand workers every year. Immigration could be a solution but for a disproportionately high number of umie educated people among foreigners. A brain drain is yet another problem that the government needs to deal with.Certainly, pension expenditure will have to be increased because of the growing number of seniors or pensions will have to be reduced. There could arise a need to levy a higher income tax and extend the retirement age. As for now the authorities are focused on encouraging families to have children.

A global military confrontation?

7:43 18-09-2017 gefira.org

The situation in the world raises the question of whether and when there may be armed confrontation between China and Russia on the one hand and the United States on the other.
Americans have begun to implement the offshore balancing concept which means that local powers, located far away from the US, have to take care of their own security. China’s economic and military activity is very extensive. Through the Belt and Road concept Beijing is striving for domination in Eurasia and the whole world. The conflict in Ukraine is going on, US-Russian relations are strained.

Russia feels encircled by the NATO and so is strengthening its ties with China. We can also talk about a trade war between USA and Russia. Germany and France are in opposition to Trump’s administration and the role of the United States in Europe and in the world. The effectiveness of NATO is questionable. NATO member Turkey has just bought the Russian S-400 air-deference system while Germany has put all major arms exports to NATO ally Turkey on hold. Americans do not want to lose their present dominant position. The political atmosphere in Europe and in the world is highly charged. One more impulse, one more conflict and another global war may break out. Therefore, it is well-founded to analyze forces of the global players: China, Russia and USA.

Russia and China: Frenemies

6:20 20-05-2017 gefira.org

China and Russia both pursue mysterious policies and pose challenges to Western diplomats. Their relations are one of the most important topics in modern international politics.

The Sino-Russian relations did not develop smoothly. In 19th century, the Russian Empire used China’s weakness and seized a great amount of its territory, which caused indelible resentment among the Chinese. Although the Soviet Union helped Mao’s regime to come to power and both countries were communist, it did not averted conflicts in the mutual relations. Following the ideological tensions after Stalin’s death due to more liberal new Soviet policy and border wars in 1960s, China perceived Russia as a bigger enemy than the USA; the latter, by the way, also decided to ally itself with China against the strong USSR. A normalization in the Sino-Russian relations came in 1980s. In 1996 a “strategic partnership” was established and in 2001 a Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation was signed.In September 2016, Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi proclaimed that “the depth and scope of coordination between both countries are unprecedented.” One of the reasons, China sees Russia as a partner is that the latter does not criticize the Chinese political system.

Geopolitically, both countries want to deprive the US of its globalleadership and bring about a multi-polar world with corresponding spheres of influence. China would concentrate on Asia and Russia on Eastern Europe.The two countries have already made steps against the present world order. Russia annexed Crimea and started supporting pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine; China resurrected maritime territorial disputes in the Chinese Sea and makes its military exercises, annoying the USA.An attempt to create a global governance without Western powers was the BRICS group, where Russia and China are the most influential actors.

Turkey, Serbia and Russia are preparing for the looming war in the Balkans

12:04 7-02-2017 gefira.org

A break-up of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia’s claims to legal authority over Kosovo will be the next setback for the European establishment. It is not a matter of if but rather when the war in the Balkans will resume. The consequences will be more detrimental to European stability than the Bosnia war in the nineties. A war in Bosnia will increase the tension between the Muslim and the native populations in West Europe, with the latter being more and more vocal in its opposition to the Islamisation of Europe.

The 1999 NATO bombardments of Belgrade forced the Serbian authorities to withdraw their troops from the province of Kosovo. Unlike Bosnia, Kosovo was an integral part of the Serbian Republic.By all international standards, the bombardments of Serbia were an illegal act of war. The European Union and Washington recognised Kosovo in 2008 as an independent state; 45% of the countries in the world did not follow suit, seeing the forced secession as a dangerous precedence incompatible with international law.To tell the truth, there is no such thing as international law; there is only international diplomacy where war is a strategic tool to bend the weaker party to the will of the stronger one.

“Russia did it” – the last stand of neoconservatism

6:16 23-12-2016 gefira.org

In 1992, at the end of the Cold War, an American political scientist infamously proclaimed “the end of history:” liberal democracy and the capitalist system has won, the rest of the world will eventually embrace western ideas as superior to theirs because only they are able to provide peace and prosperity.
This line of reasoning has since become the West’s dogma in international relations, and so under the pretext of spreading human rights and parliamentary democracy all over the world the West perceives itself to be on a mission. For a while, it worked. Most of Eastern Europe readily embraced Western democracy and capitalism and even Russia seemed to follow.

Brussels will force the Dutch to accept their failed Ukraine policy

7:26 16-11-2016 gefira.org

61% of the Dutch voters rejected the Ukraine association treaty in a referendum this year. 31% of the population showed up, which is a far larger number than of those who turned up at Maidan to protest. For the second time the Dutch population cast its vote in a referendum, for the second time the outcome will be nullified in the name of European Democracy.

European leaders have celebrated the Maidan revolution as the attempt of Ukrainian people to join the family of liberal democracies of Western Europe. It couldn’t be further from the truth. In the official version presented in the West, Maidan protests were spontaneously sparked off when the pro-Russian Yanukovich government renounced to ratify an association agreement with the European Union.

Yet in November 2013, before the Maidan movement even started, Oleg Tsarov, member of the Ukrainian parliament, had reported in a parliamentary session on the recruitment of activists organized by the US embassy in Kiev for unknown purposes.

The US embassy in Kiev, via its representative Victoria Nuland, would later become a primary actor in pressuring for a regime change and the formation of a pro-West government in the first months of 2014. For clarity, Victoria Nuland is the third in charge of the US foreign policy, second only President Obama and John Kerry, who had been busy negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran.

The Centre of Russian World Affairs Is Moving East

14:10 27-09-2016 Archive Redaction

Earth globe — photo Shutterstock/Umberto Shtanzman

It is customary for European schools to resume their activities with the beginning of September, which provides us all with the opportunity to picture ourselves back in a school bench and pore over the map of the world. Some of the facts that we learnt back then and have long forgotten might turn up handy to help us through today’s unstable geopolitical situation. Others will let us unravel the complex networks that we, accustomed to our European perspective, have lost sight of. A look at a world’s map is enough for us to put everything in the right perspective. Nowadays we are facing a number of agendas that are propagandized by the powers that be. Facts are propaganda’s most implacable enemies since they provide an average citizen with food for thought, enabling him to come up with his own worldview. Such facts can surely be found in a world’s map.

Kazakhstan: the next victim of chaos and global games

11:00 16-06-2016 Archive Redaction

The time of Kazakhstan’s stability and prosperity is just passing away. And this conclusion does not come from recent protests and shootings in the city of Aktobe, but from the panicky reaction of President Nursultan Nazarbayev. According to the 75-year old declared Leader of the Nation and his officials, latest developments are a “color revolution” aiming at a “coup” made by “pseudo-religious extremists” financed by detained pro-Russian businessmen; the President voices this opinion despite the fact that previously he claimed it was the “fifth column” of undefined third (western) powers that attempted to interfere with Kazakhstan’s internal policy. Madness. As if it were not the sharp decline in oil revenues has nothing to do with that in a country which produces 1.7 million barrels per day.

Making things even worse, it is questionable if the Aktobe event was prepared by Wahhabis or other Islam terrorists. Religious extremists usually do not attack gun shops and military units, but prefer bombings and random mass killings. Moreover, they usually wear beards, whereas most of Aktobe assailants were clean-shaven. Radio Liberty attributes the responsibility for the attack to the “Army for the Liberation of Kazakhstan,” which, according to officials and some other experts, does not even exist. The level of misinformation is enormous.

Europe is surrounded by adversaries

11:40 13-05-2016 Archive Redaction

European gas supply

Currently, less than half of the EU’s gas demand is met by domestic production. The rest is imported, mainly from Norway (36%), Russia (41%) and Algeria (10%). In recent years, LNG, or liquefied natural gas, has accounted for around 10% of the imports, with most of them coming from Qatar, Algeria, and Nigeria.

Russia’s International Standing

10:20 3-03-2016 Archive Redaction

Up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union the world had been bipolar: there had been two superpowers, the USSR and the USA, with two rivalling military (NATO, the Warsaw Pact) and economic (the European Economic Community and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in the West known as COMECON) blocs of vassal states. When the Soviet Union collapsed (1991) the world was left with but one superpower: the USA.

Did Mr Orban blaze the trail?

7:26 11-02-2016 Archive Redaction

Horst Seehofer, Bavarian CSU prime minister, paid a visit to Moscow at the invitation of Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, where he held talks with President Putin. Though the talks centered around fostering cultural and economic relations between Russia and Bavaria, (Bavaria accounts for 20 percent of all Russian-German economic ties with fifty percent of Germany’s investment projects in Russia being of Bavarian origin¹) and building up mutual trust in solving the Ukrainian and Syrian conflicts², Berlin did not seem to be pleased.

Ruthenia delenda est

7:25 11-02-2016 Archive Redaction

It took three wars for Rome to destroy Carthage. Carthago delenda est was the catchphrase of the day. Weakened though Carthage was, it was not allowed to exist. It took two wars for the Atlantic Anglo-Saxon alliance to destroy Germany. Germany must perish¹ was the catchphrase of the day. And so Germany perished in the firestorms of carpet bombings. Now Germany is an American protectorate with a docile government and a people so re-educated that it has been turned into German self-haters. What will it take to destroy Russia? Because Ruthenia delenda est, Russia must perish, has been the catchphrase of the day for years now. And will be.