Old warriors rattle nuclear sabre

Well it didn’t take long for the West to match the Russians in their willingness to use nukes preventatively did it?

Russian war-planners will go ah-hah! Especially given that one of the authors is this manifesto is of Georgian heritage. But this isn’t about Russia. It’s about Iran; where the key facility may be too big and too deep underground to be taken out by conventional bunker-busters.

Mapping the 2007 State Duma elections: turnout analysis

A friend and colleague showed me the above chart which has been bouncing round the Russian blogosphere this weekend. It shows, along the bottom, percentage voter turnouts, against the number of constituencies.

Your eye might first be caught by the far right of the chart: the number of constituencies reporting over 90% turnout. Well, my colleague points out, that this is not so unusual actually. In some parts of Russia there would have been near ubiquitous turn-out: far-flung military bases being a good example (which form tiny constituencies all of their own).

No, the interesting thing to note – and this data comes from the Central Election Commission’s own stats – are those little peaks: around 60%, 70%, 80% etc. in most non-compulsory election systems you would expect a normal distribution (or bell) curve; peaking around the 50-60% mark. The peaks around some fairly…um … ‘headline’ numbers are interesting.

There have been some snarky comments about this in the Russian blogosphere. I won’t comment: not least as I am reminded that, in Russia, it is a criminal offense for foreigners to criticize the government, state, church or cultural institutions. Said colleague may have been tempted to post about this on our corporate blog, which sadly I would have to veto: that would be the wrong sort of political development for our corporate blog to discuss. Either reader, though, looking at the chart, may care to draw their own conclusions.

Gathering mushroom clouds...

It is not exactly heart-warming when the head of the Russian army goes on State TV and tells the Russian population: "... to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia and its allies, military forces will be used, including preventively, including with the use of nuclear weapons..."

This will, in tomorrow's Western media, cause quite the storm; especially in the UK where everyone is now rabidly Russophobic. The excellent blog Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces suggests that this is because Russia is feeling more isolated and vulnerable.

[The picture above, BTW, is a Topol M ICBM, or RT-2UTTH. NATO IDENT: SS-27]

Russia feeling insecure is becoming a rich theme at present. Rupert Wingfield Hayes, one of the BBC's better correspondents in Moscow, broadcast about 'Russia's inferiority complex' just before Christmas. Personally, I struggle to understand why Russia should feel inferior - its got Europe by the gas-guzzling balls; is likely to be one of the few economies to experience GDP growth in 2008 - although perhaps less than the government reckons it will achieve - and has wrested political stability from the edge of fracture and chaos. But perhaps the key is that - in Presidential election year - it is thought that the people need to be reminded they have enemies all around them and would be under threat if not for the might of the state. Of course there is no real truth or necessity to this statement: but it is good domestic realpolitik. Especially if Ukraine pours fuel on the fire of Russo-Occidental relations by pushing NATO membership.

Personally, I think NATO membership for Ukraine is bad for both Ukraine and NATO, let along Russia. RIA Novosti published an interesting comment piece on this last week, which I think gets it about right.

Speaking of Ukraine, the excellent English-language blog on Ukrainian politics, Foreign Notes (which is worth reading, despite the very crappy template it uses) has just flagged the latest paper from the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom which has published Russia and the West: a reassessment. You can download it. It will be my bedtime reading tonight, but I think it starts spot-on:

"A powerful Russia... is a fact of life... They are no longer seeking [the West's] approval... The post-Cold War partnership, founded at a time of Russian disorientation and weakness, is history.

"...Although Russia is not a global threat, it seeks to be both enabler and spoiler. It will exploit our difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan and leverage its influence in Iran to diminish Western influence in the former USSR, where it will use both hard and soft power to resurrect its dominance." [my emphasis]

Recently, there has been some colourful talk in Moscow about the 'resurrection of the USSR by 2010' (I gather radio Ekho Mosckviy ran a talk-show on this) and I have even found a delightfully barking blog dedicated to this idea. I am not sure I buy the remake of the USSR, but I suppose a lot of Cold Warriors will be feeling nostalgic today.

I think it was my mate, Talleyrand, who first said: "Russia is never as strong as she looks; Russia is never as weak as she looks". Which not so long ago, President Putin amended this to comment: "Russia was never so strong as it wants to be and never so weak as it is thought to be."

Too true. Nukes are of course central to Russian defence if, for a moment, you consider how the military top brass struggles with a largely conscript army of uncertain efficacy where, apparently, it is proving harder and harder to boost the number of contract soldiers.

[The map above is from the Natural Resource Defence Council, those cuddly US-greenies. It is what they call their 'US playbook for nuclear attack'. The blue dots are de-commissioned missiles silos, the NRDC claims to have tracked from de-classified US military sources concerning nuclear attack targets. The red dots, they say, are the sites of 360 operational nuclear silos the US has pre-programed as targets, according to declassified sources. But as I recall, most of the Russian nuclear missile capability is road-mobile or submarine based: precisely because the USA has so many of the land silos identified.]

Time to remember where you put all your suitcases?

I think the commentators at (snazzy new look) Siberian Light have got it about right when they say that, however London tries to spin it, the closure of the British Council offices in St Pete’s and Yekaterinburg is a slam-dunk victory for the Russian government.

From the very first it was clear that, closure having been ordered, there were never going to be any circumstances under which the British Council would be allowed to keep these outfits open, in bald defiance of the Russian government’s orders.

Seen from the perspective of us Brits living in Moscow, this looks like a classic UK New Labour spin doctor’s game: adopt a position certain to provoke a Russian reaction and then pretend to ‘take the moral high-ground’ and spin out how – while not conceding Moscow’s point – London has shut down the two complained of offices (as initially instructed) ‘in the interests of staff safety’. It is exactly how I would have played it. As chess moves go, there have been no missteps here, by either side. This game has played out in a way that each side can exploit to the full.

It is clear though that Official Russia – and the tabloid storm it whips up – would gladly like now to see some Brits in the private sector expelled, thus to enforce the idea that Britain has sent enemies into Russia, far and wide across the country. I think that will be next.

This is purely a personal observation, for which I have no empirical evidence, but it seems to me there is more than the Litvinenko thing going on here. I suspect the Russian government has good reason to suspect a substantial upsurge in UK SIS activity in Russia.

That said, and less melodramatically, even the British Council’s best friends would say that some of their cultural programs were sailing very close to the wind. I was slack-jawed, at a private lunch with BC managers last year, as they described their support for Chechen activists…sorry… theatre groups. To be fair, one BC manager privately conceded to me that they needed to tone down the politics of some of the arts programs they were supporting. It seems they didn’t do so soon enough.

My sense of unease today was not helped when one staffer, with FSB mates, warned me: “I’ve been told that all British citizens resident in Russia are being reviewed by the FSB”. Needless to say, as someone who – as it says at the top of this blog – is ‘An Englishman in Moscow, whose life is a slalom between the attitudes, aspirations and realities of modern Russia and the prejudices and politics of the West’ – one feels the tiniest bit exposed…

Three random facts of life in Moscow

Visa hell. And although my bosses say ‘steer clear of all admin, refer it all to HQ’, I am sucked into it…

Not mine. New hires and the other expats. My Chief of Staff is complaining at the document load – and the cost – for six expats. The problem is magnified because we are changing from one legal entity to another – in the West this would be a quick paper-trail exercise: in Russia of course it means cancelling existing permits and visas and starting all over again. To compensate I have vetoed a Russian hire I would otherwise have done this side of summer. I am nothing if not budget-management boy…

We estimate it’ll cost about Euros 3,000+ in legal fees each for work permit renewal / initial grant; and about 3 person-days of admin for each one. The most painful, interestingly, is for a Lithuanian (but one well worth the hassle); and for a US hire who already has a work permit, but I have poached from a local competitor. So, again, the process starts from scratch. Oh, if only Russia had Green Cards…

In the light of HM’s Ambassador’s latest ‘up yours’ to Russia, one colleague – a dual-nat – I have told to switch her work permit / visa application from her UK to her Irish passport. And resolve not to hire more Brits. Apropos of which I curse myself for rejecting the chance I myself had to be a dual-nat: then to avoid the other country's national service. Ironically, I now think I would have been a much better person to have been in the services and wish I had done so. Strange huh?

Russo-UK relations are only going to get worse not better, so prudent risk management means reducing exposure to UK nationality staff where we can. Once again, I ponder that I could do my job just as well based in lovely Kyiv: it is time to give that move much more serious thought…

In passing, I no longer understand what the UK government is playing at with its approach to Russia – apparently ‘diplomacy’ is no longer a New Labour requisite for the FCO.

Having been fair summoned to my mother’s sixtieth birthday* party at the beginning of February, I have been searching for a cheap way home (ideally in and out the UK in three days). Nah…

[* I was an…er…unexpected present at university]

Searching for even economy fares to fly to the airport in the North – where our English house is – airlines want absurd amounts to do a Moscow-[via]-[Northern England]-[via]-Moscow flight (Air France wanted $3,000 – in economy????). And then the scheduling proved impossible. OK, I thought, fly to London and take the train for the weekend trip… um…no. UK rail does ‘engineering’ on Sundays so the usual 2 ½ trip would take…five hours. If only RZhD ran Britain’s railways…

It would have been a third of the total cost – and much better weather – if the party had been held at our French place. North Yorkshire? In February? Go figure.

So locking into a ludicrous schedule – into London Thursday night from Moscow; train ‘oop North’ Friday morning (in time for the sacred party, at which all my mother’s Slow friends will attend, but let’s not use the word gruesome); train to London Sunday, fly home Monday. Three days’ leave.

It will be interesting, though, to see which of my half-Step siblings turn up…

Tonight I was surfing the schedules of the Moscow opera and ballet companies I like. Q1 looks like the most tedious schedule I have ever witnessed. I trawl just four things to go to between now and the end of March. Four? In 2 ½ months?

It is not helped by the fact that I have now, it seems, seen everything – I mean *everything* - currently in repertoire at the Bolshoi. So I go for ‘favs’ amongst current productions: Tosca; Nabucco; In the Upper Room and Chaika. I am embarrassed to count how many times I have now seen the last two in Moscow. But – lame as this may sound – if I don’t see opera or ballet fairly regularly I honestly feel my soul starting to wither…

Good news, bad news...

Pleased to read in the Moscow Times today that Nashi (Russia site here) was for once on the opposite side to the authorities yesterday. Their picketing of the EU ‘Embassy’ (sic) in Moscow, now and then, is almost as irritating as when they harass HM’s Ambassador.



That said, the authorities normally cut Nashi a lot of slack; which makes me wonder when I read that dozens of them were detained for an illegal demonstration. Now that the State Duma elections are over – and any neo-Orange threats apparently safely put to bed, now is the time the Kremlin can focus on a calm transition between Presidencies. In other words, Nashi has kind of served its purpose for now.

A post-Soviet Komsomol was always going to have its attractions for the nostalgic. But, boy-scouts aside, Nashi as political shock-troops? I just wonder if there isn’t a sense that they need to be on a shorter leash. One can but hope…

…but then I saw this on the BBC so, perhaps then, reasonableness is not about to break out all around.

Admittedly the Americans and their bloody shield started it, but – groans – this is not a hugely helpful development.

Dmitry Rogozin is a ‘pick a fight’ politician and not someone inclined to improve Russo-NATO relations. He makes John Bolton look like Talleyrand.

Russian arms exports

This magnificent beast below is the Su-34 fighter-bomber (NATO Ident: “Fullback”). Aficionados of big, hairy weapons systems (and I am not one) say that it creams the F-16 in performance terms.



According to Kommersant today, Australia is thinking of buying them too. Obviously Australia isn’t a part of NATO – small issue of geography there – but they have snuggled up close to it.

Which begs the question about interoperability: the slightly spooky RAND Corporation has written well on this issue.

But can you imagine the hullabaloo amongst the US right / military if the Aussies buy Ruskie? That would be fun to watch…