Belarus will conduct a wise and cautious policy but the country must be able to protect its sovereignty, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said in a speech to the commanders of the Armed Forces of Belarus on Thursday, February 19, reports Espreso TV, citing the Belarusian news agency BELTA.

“If necessary we must be able to defend the independence and sovereignty of our country, but we will never get involved in senseless confrontations with anyone else. We will conduct a wise, cautious policy: we do not want what belongs to others and we will not give up what belongs to us. This is the essence of our policy. If we have to die for it, then we will die for it,” he said.

He noted that after the events in Ukraine it has become clear to everybody that “we must feed our soldiers and army and we must have enough to secure our own interests.” He added that “we must keep our powder dry.”

“No one can think that all is well today, that here we are great peacemakers, intermediaries, and that someone will pay us for it and that we will continue to have peace and tranquility. Do not be fooled. I emphasize again that no one can guarantee us a peaceful life. We will do everything for this life to be peaceful, but we must have an efficient army,” Lukashenko concluded.

Russia Sold Off $22 Billion in U.S. Bonds to Slow Economy's Slide

Russia jettisoned $22 billion worth of U.S. treasury bonds in December as the Kremlin scrambled for cash to battle a plunging ruble and fund a crisis spending program amid an emerging recession.

The sale means that Russia currently holds just $86 billion of U.S. government debt, the lowest level since 2008, according to figures released late Wednesday by the U.S. Treasury Department

"The Central Bank needed cash," said Vladimir Tikhomirov, chief economist BCS Financial Group in Moscow. "Treasuries are one of the most liquid holdings you can have."

Russia's foreign currency reserves — including the contents of two rainy day oil funds — fell by $124 billion last year as the Central Bank struggled to prop up the ruble.

Moscow had $368.3 billion of international reserves on Feb. 13, the latest date for which figures are available, according to Central Bank data. That is the lowest level since April 2007

Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka says his country is ready for a "constructive dialogue" with NATO.

Speaking to top Belarusian military officials in Minsk on February 19, Lukashenka said: "As a sovereign state we are open, in particular, to constructive dialogue with NATO on parity and transparency principles."

He added that "we have a lot of common issues [with NATO]; joint work on which fully meets Belarus’s interests."

Lukashenka -- who has ruled for 21 years and been called the last dictator of Europe -- said the fighting in Ukraine has shown that Belarus must have an army capable of protecting "its national interests."

"If need be, we have to be able to defend the independence and sovereignty of our country," he said.

Lukashenka added that additional finances will be allocated for the ongoing systemic renovation of arms in Belarusian armed forces which is scheduled to be accomplished by 2020.

Russian Economy May Collapse Through War

A diplomatic spat erupted as the Irish Government warned it was “absolutely unacceptable” that the two Tupolev 95s were in Irish-controlled airspace for five hours without notifying the authorities.

The planes were flying with their transponders switched off – meaning they could not be ‘seen’ by civilian aircraft as they passed through the busy airspace, where around 1,800 planes a day travel.

The Republic's Defence Minister Simon Coveney warned Russian military aircraft “should not” enter Irish airspace without notification but said there would be no “knee-jerk reaction”. He will discuss the matter with the Taoiseach to decide a course of action.

But a spokesman for Russian ambassador to Ireland Maxim Peshkov insisted the aircraft were in international airspace and there was no threat to commercial airlines.

Mr Coveney last night told the Irish Independent: "What happened was two Russian planes, without filing any flight plan or giving any pre-notification, came into international airspace that is controlled by the IAA.

"It should not happen and it did. That is a very busy airspace - about 1,800 planes a day fly through that. The IAA did a really good job in managing it."

The EU has sent a tough message to President Vladimir Putin that it will keep up the pressure over Ukraine by slapping sanctions on three Russian military leaders, prominent Ukrainian separatists, and a popular singer known as Russia’s Frank Sinatra.

The sanctions, officially termed “restrictive measures in respect of actions undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine”, were imposed on 19 individuals and nine organisations on Monday, despite last week’s Minsk peace deal and a shaky weekend ceasefire in eastern Ukraine.

Topping the names added to the list of those subject to travel bans and asset freezes are two Russian deputy defence ministers, Arkady Bakhin and Anatoly Antonov, who, according to the EU, were “involved in supporting the deployment of Russian troops in Ukraine”. Russia denies deploying troops in Ukraine.

Also sanctioned was Andrei Kartapolov, director of the main operations department and deputy chief of the general staff of the armed forces of the Russian Federation. “In both capacities he is actively involved in shaping and implementing the military campaign of the Russian forces in Ukraine” the EU said.

Two members of the Russian parliament (Duma) were included in the new sanctions list – Valery Rashkin and Joseph Kobzon. Rashkin, first deputy chairman of Duma’s committee on ethnicity issues, is described as the founder of the civil movement Krassnaya Moskva (Red Moscow – Patriotic Front Aid) which organised public demonstrations supporting separatists.

Kobzon is a more colourful figure, known in Russia for his long Soviet-era career as a singer whose repertoire brought comparisons with Sinatra. Born in Chasiv Yar, in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, Kobzon rose to national prominence during Leonid Brezhnev’s time at the helm of the former Soviet Union, and was a popular act at official concerts. In 1980, he was honoured as “people’s artist of the USSR”.

A total of 151 individuals and 37 organisations have been sanctioned since the EU started taking active measures after the March 2014 annexation of Crimea. Additional economic sanctions were imposed after the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in July.

Vladimir Putin’s bombast and aggressiveness both is rooted in and helps conceal the underlying reality: “the situation of Russia is much more difficult than it appears,” as even the most superficial examination of Russian realities demonstrates, according to Moscow political analyst Vasily Zharkov.

In a commentary in yesterday’s “Novaya gazeta,” the scholar at the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences points to five reasons that Moscow propaganda has with some success sought to conceal not only from Russians but from citizens of other countries as well.

First, he writes, “Russia is a poor country.” However much people focus on the limousines of its wealth, the future pensions of its citizens are so small that they would elicit only pity “in the poorest of the EU countries” and the state of its villages and other rural areas is comparable to “the poorest countries of Africa.”

Indeed, Zharkov says, “the shine of the capital windows is not so much a sign of wealth as evidence of the bestial inequality and injustice which somehow is accepted as the norm.”

Second, he argues, “Russia is far from united. Moscow and the provinces are not simply different countries,” but on opposite sides of the border “between the first and third worlds.” As it has worked out, Russia has established “within itself” the global inequality which exists elsewhere between countries.

Third, having lost Soviet political institutions but “not acquired any others in exchange, Russia is balanced at the edge of a war of all against all,” an “internal” conflict which was concealed during the period of high prices of oil but is now very much on public view for anyone who will look.

It is not really a state in the modern sense. Instead, it is a “neo-feudal” structure in which corruption plays the key role. Theft of oil and gas revenues are in fact at the core of the much-ballyhooed “power vertical” because they and not anything else are “the basis of loyalty to ‘the system.’”

Fourth, “Russia cannot any longer be considered a big country” because its “enormous territory has still not been colonized completely.” Instead, it is hollowing out as a result of irreversible demographic decline, something that won’t be reversed because Russia “remains among those countries least attractive for immigrants.”

Some people are afraid that the depopulation of Russia will lead to its occupation by others, “but there is another variant,” one in which it will become a territory no one needs or wants except for its natural resources. Those others will be able to take because Russia will not be able to prevent them from doing so.

And fifth, Zharkov writes, “Russia is no longer a country where Nobel laureates are born. All out cultural and scientific achievements are in the past. In the present, libraries burn, schools and universities contract, obscurantism replaces humanitarian knowledge with magicians driving out contemporary medicine.”

Some say that Russia can lift itself out of all these problems as it did in the 1930s by a mobilization regime. But that is a false hope. There aren’t any more peasant masses who could become a new “labor army,” and bringing in labor migrants from abroad is going to be ever more difficult, whatever the government thinks.

Moreover, he points out, Russia has succeeded in getting embroiled in a fight with the West, “without the participation of which over the last 500 years not a single branch of industry in Russia has arisen.” Even Stalin’s industrialization would have been impossible “without the technological participation of the United States and Germany.”

Many Russians have exalted in the annexation of Crimea without recognizing that that action carries with it a threat to their country as well: if Russia doesn’t respect the borders of other countries, it “shouldn’t be surprised if at some point” its own borders are changed and “not only by our will.”

Still, many Russians and others are convinced that Moscow still has the ultimate support – nuclear weapons, “which were achieved for the USSR by the American family of the Rosenbergs in the name of the unachievable idea of the construction of communism.”

In recent months, Moscow has threatened the world with its nuclear weapons, something that will work only until the US and China develop new weapons that Russia cannot and leads the rest of the world to wonder “what can be done with a country which threatens to organize the end of the world.”

“By its own policies,” Zharkov says, “Russia has put itself and its future at risk. The world looks at [it] with surprise and horror.” For a time, it may be frightened into going along. But as with everything, there is a limit to this – and the world may decide that it can do without Russia just as it has learned to live without Carthage and without the Golden Horde.

Anti-American sentiment and criminal activities have increased in Moscow since Russian forces took over Ukraine’s Crimea and continue to destabilize eastern Ukraine, a recent State Department security report reveals.

The social and political unrest in Ukraine has led to increasing political tensions between the Russian Federation and the U.S. and other Western nations,” the report, based on reports from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, said. “As a result, anti-American and anti-Western sentiment appears to be increasing, especially in certain media outlets.”

Embassy reports indicate a number of Americans were verbally harassed and physically assaulted in the last part of 2014, but the report said so far no major campaign of targeted attacks against Americans was detected.

The report concluded that Russia’s political, economic, and social climate “changed markedly as a result of the country’s illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, ongoing support for military separatists in eastern Ukraine, U.S./Western economic sanctions, and a dramatic drop in the price of oil that significantly weakened the value of the
Russian ruble.”

Mods sticky pls.

-PB

An extraordinary letter addressed to the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, among other recipients, reportedly sent from the Russian Parliament paints the war in Ukraine as a fight against Nazism and says Russia is ready to “mobilize all forces” to defend stability in Europe, provoking both ridicule and anger in Sweden, after surfacing there this week.

The sensational letter, signed by the State Duma chairman Sergey Naryshkin, a known hardliner with a close relationship to Putin, warns of a “fragmentation in Europe” and says that continuing sanctions, the crisis in Ukraine, and January’s terror attacks in Paris, jeopardise “the possibility of a peaceful life for over 800 million Europeans”.

Several Swedish politicians have expressed their anger at the letter’s threatening tone, and some Swedes go as far to say that it constitutes a threat of war, albeit one couched in diplomatic language. In the same week that the terms of a ceasefire were hashed out in Minsk over the crisis in Ukraine, Swedes are saying the letter is a way of warning Europe to leave Russia to take care of Ukraine.

Patrik Oksanen, political editor of Swedish daily newspaper Hudiksvalls Tidning, says the letter shows that “in indirect words, they are threatening World War Three in Europe. It is not a direct threat, but another instrument of the Russian propaganda.”

Relations between Sweden and Russia have been growing increasingly tense, particularly in the wake of last year’s hunt for a Russian submarine thought to be lurking in the Stockholm archipelago.

A leading Russian MP and close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned the European Parliament of an “all-out war” scenario of the United States decides to supply weapons to the Ukrainian government. U.S. President Barack Obama had previously announced that Washington was considering the option of sending lethal weapons to help Kiev.

Alexel Pushkov spoke about the dire consequences before the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. He gave the warning after Mr Obama said the U.S. was not ruling out sending weapons to Ukraine if diplomacy did not succeed.

Russia Investors On 'War Watch' Wednesday

War or peace? Russia investors will be betting either way on Monday.

The market’s preferable day trade into Russian equities may have impressed last week, but this week promises to be a doozy. Leaders from the so-called Normandy Four — Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia — will sit down yet again to hammer out a cease fire agreement in Minsk on Wednesday. If diplomacy fails, investors holding the Market Vectors Russia (RSX) exchange traded fund will dump, and dump hard.

whenever a cease fire agreement is deemed plausible, Russian equities rally hard. Russian equities are pure momentum plays, because the economic fundamentals are not sound. Sanctions and weak oil prices promise to push Russia into a recession this year.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said today that security in Europe required stable relations with Moscow. “Permanent security in Europe can only be reached together, not against Russia,” he said while addressing the Munich Security Conference.

In typical foreign policy fashion, however, the U.K. is tilting more towards the U.S. than Germany on this one. If no substantial progress is made in Minsk, U.K. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond hinted that weapons could be supplied.

“We do not think that supplying arms is the right thing to do,” Sky News quoted him saying today. “But if the situation on the ground changes we’ll keep that position under review.”

So you're saying that your opinion is the only one that should be seen, got it.

Edited by paladisious: 8/2/2015 06:32:19 AM

No, i don't...it's better for people to read, then to comments on things they don't know anything about

Do you wonder why you're the only one posting in this thread?

Bloomberg) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin struck a defiant tone a day after talks in Moscow with the leaders of Germany and France failed to achieve a breakthrough in resolving the Ukraine crisis.
Russia won’t tolerate the post-Cold War global system dominated by a single leader, Putin said Saturday at a meeting with the Federation of Independent Trade Unions in Sochi.
“That type of world order has never been acceptable for Russia,” Putin said. “Maybe someone likes it and wants to live under a pseudo-occupation, but we won’t put up with it.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande met the Russian leader for more than five hours Friday to discuss spiraling violence in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russian-backed separatists. A breakdown of the diplomacy may strain trans-Atlantic unity in dealing with Russia, as Europe’s consensus on economic sanctions shows signs of fraying.
Ukraine, the U.S., the European Union and NATO say Russia is supporting the separatists with hardware, cash and troops, accusations the Kremlin denies. Russia says Ukraine is waging war on its own citizens and discriminates against Russian speakers, a majority in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Heavy fighting has forced more than 1.5 million people to flee their homes, with some 600,000 Ukrainians seeking refuge abroad since last February, the United Nations’ refugee agency said in a report. The conflict has killed more than 5,350 people since April, according to the UN.
Arming Ukraine
Some U.S. officials and diplomats in Washington are openly discussing supplying weapons to the Ukrainian army, a position that has been rejected by Germany and is viewed skeptically by President Barack Obama. Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said in an interview in Munich that the U.S. could provide defensive weapons to Ukraine.
NATO plans to boost its military presence in eastern Europe risk provoking confrontation, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg Saturday at a meeting on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich.
NATO is setting up military headquarters and command centers from the Baltic to the Black seas along Russia’s borders and plans to ultimately field a rapid-reaction force of 30,000 troops as relations with the Kremlin have deteriorated.
Merkel, Hollande, Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko plan a conference call Sunday to discuss a potential settlement. Amid the cease-fire bid, Ukraine said rebel forces are readying a new offensive to extend their territorial gains in the east

A columnist for Russia's Vedomosti newspaper, a joint venture between the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, has advised readers to pull their savings out of banks and convert them into physical dollars.

The ruble has tanked over the past year, falling over 50% from 33 rubles to the dollar to 67 rubles at market open Friday. The collapse in the currency's value has helped drive up prices in the country, which is heavily reliant on imports, with inflation surging to 15% in January.

It is better to keep money in foreign currency (dollars more than euros as the US economy is doing better than the EU) and prepare for what many economists are already saying could be a return to the conditions of the 1990s ... It is better to take your savings, or at least a portion of them, out of the banks. Who can guarantee that what will happen next won't be a situation in which all foreign currency deposits are forcibly converted [into rubles] or frozen? After all, the black market in cash worked even in Soviet times.

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman has angrily dismissed a Pentagon study that claimed the Russian leader had Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism.
“That is stupidity not worthy of comment,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Gazeta.ru news website.
His comments came after USA Today reported that a 2008 study carried out by an internal Pentagon think tank, the Office of Net Assessment, suggested that Mr Putin has Asperger’s syndrome, giving him a need to exert “extreme control” on his surroundings and is uncomfortable with social interaction.

Russia's inflation hit 15 percent in January, official data showed Thursday, underscoring the growing economic pain from sliding oil prices and Western sanctions linked to the Ukraine conflict.

Inflation has been shooting up in recent months as a result of a slide in the ruble, which has made imports dearer, as well as restrictions imposed on many food imports from the West in retaliation for the sanctions.

"We think the big jump in import prices as a result of the plunge in the ruble may now have happened," Liza Ermolenko, emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, said in a note. "But the lagged effects will continue to feed through over the coming months and could push inflation to around 17.5 percent or so in Q2."

The surge in inflation is embarrassing for the Central Bank, coming just days after it unexpectedly cut its main lending rate to 17 percent from 15 percent, prompting many analysts to warn that it was taking risks with inflation.

The bank's governor, Elvira Nabiullina, on Tuesday defended the cut by saying that real interest rates — the difference between nominal rates and inflation — remained positive.

That claim has now been quickly proved wrong.

"Inflation is at the level of rates, which is very risky … In theory, they need to raise rates," said Vladimir Osakovsky, Russia economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "The decision of the Central Bank looks, to put it mildly, premature."

Russian officials have forecast that inflation will reach 15-17 percent in the coming months, but the speed of the increase comes as a surprise. A month earlier, inflation was running at 11.4 percent.

Analysts polled at the end of last month predicted that inflation would reach 13.3 percent in January, with an increase of 2.6 percent month-on-month.

Analysts at Alfa Bank predicted in a note that inflation would stay in the 15-16 percent range until May, adding: "In such an environment, another rate cut should be seen as a policy deviation from the inflation targeting priority."

The Economic Development Ministry revised its forecasts at the end of January to say inflation would end 2015 at 12 percent, higher than last year.

Maybe I just don't understand anything in this life, but it seems that a kilo of nuts can't possibly cost the same as 200 loaves of bread.

Members of the Russian parliament are creating a task force to estimate the damages inflicted on Russia by Germany during WWII, in a bid to demand financial compensation from the German state almost 70 years after the end of the conflict, Russian daily newspaper Izvestia reported on Tuesday.

The initiative is a direct response to trade sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and EU, for its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in March and continuous support of separatist fighters in Eastern Ukraine since, according to Mikhail Degyaterov, an MP from the Liberal Democrat Party of Russia, who has proposed the task force.

“Practically, Germany paid nothing to the USSR for its wave of destruction and savagery during the Second World War,” said Degyaterov.

After the Yalta convention the USSR took back some German assets - largely looted furniture, clothes and industrial equipment, as well as some spoils of war - but largely there was no compensation of the war’s economic blow to the USSR,” Degyaterov added.

“It appears that, with all that considered, under the current exchange Germany owes reparations of no less than €3-4 trillion, which it must pay to the successor of the Soviet Union - Russia,” Degtyarev said.

A RUSSIAN bomber intercepted over the Channel last week was carrying a nuclear missile designed to destroy Trident submarines, it emerged last night.

RAF Typhoon fighter jets were scrambled on Wednesday after two long-range TU-95 “Bear” bombers were detected flying over the English Channel.

Sources within the Ministry of Defence last night revealed that one of the two long-range bombers was carrying at least one air-dropped “seek and find"d nuclear warhead-carrtying missile, designed to seek and destroy a Vanguard submarine.

Both Prime Minister David Cameron and Defence Secretary Michael Fallon were alerted after cockpit conservations confirming the bomber’s nuclear payload were intercepted by a Norwegian military listening post, and shared with the Ministry of Defence.

Morgan Stanley is out with a pretty scary forecast, too.

"We downgrade 2015 growth from -1.7%Y to -5.6%Y and revise our 2016 growth from a mild (0.8%Y) recovery to a 2.5%Y recession," writes Morgan Stanley's Alina Slyusarchuk. "The key new assumption that triggers the revision is the signifcantly weaker oil price, combined with a tighter policy response. At the same time, we see risks to our call as being titled to the downside, given the enhanced risk of further sanctions, and concerns over increased state control over the economy."

Unless there's a rebound in oil prices or western-imposed sanction, Morgan Stanley highlights three risks:

"We see the implementation risk that 'top-down' stabilization is undermined by special deals to help particular banks and companies" — weakening the ruble and driving inflation.
Further potential sanctions on Russia "might trigger rating downgrades and index exclusion, which would drive another wave of capital outflows" — again weakening the ruble and driving inflation.
The government might finally introduce capital controls.
Now here's the scariest part of the latest Morgan Stanley report: Although initially analysts and Russian politicians alike were likening the current economic crisis in Russia to that of 2009, the latest Morgan Stanley note suggests this one is could be much more severe

Lithuania is publishing a manual to advise its citizens on how to survive a war on its soil as concerns grow that Russia's intervention in Ukraine heralds increased assertiveness in its tiny Baltic neighbors.

"Keep a sound mind, don't panic and don't lose clear thinking," the manual explains. "Gunshots just outside your window are not the end of the world."

In the event of invasion, the manual says Lithuanians should organize themselves through Twitter and Facebook and attempt cyber attacks against the enemy.

"The examples of Georgia and Ukraine, which both lost a part of their territory, show us that we cannot rule out a similar kind of situation here, and that we should be ready," Defence Minister Juozas Olekas told Reuters.

The Lithuanian army and its paramilitary reserve force have seen increased recruitment since the crisis in Ukraine.

"When Russia started its aggression in Ukraine, here in Lithuania our citizens understood that our neighbor is not friendly," Olekas added.

The government is also considering requiring all future buildings to incorporate a bomb shelter on the premises.