_-

the DON JONES INDEX…
		GAINS POSTED in GREEN LOSSES POSTED in RED 3/25/24... 14,885.81 3/18/24... 14,887.68
	6/27/13… 15,000.00
(THE DOW JONES INDEX: 3/25/24... 39,476.90; 3/18/24... 38,722.69; 6/27/13… 15,000.00)

LESSON for MARCH TWENTY FIFTH, 2024:

“MAD VLAD’S HATEFUL INCANTATIONS to and GRATEFUL ELECTORAL ADULATION for the STATE of HIS NATION!”

RAD VLAD’S ПОЛОЖЕНИЕ НАЦИИ (STATE of the NATION) 2/22/24

Three weeks before President Joseph Biden addressed his American people, the avowed enemy (one of them, at least), held forth at amidst an audience of government officials, members of parliament and civil society figures gathered at Moscow's Gostiny Dvor shopping mall in St. Peterburg to spread the word to His. Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed his Deputies, the Duma (Russian Congress) and the people in a two hour discourse, touching on a wide range of subjects... notably the war in Ukraine and the prospect of nuclear war with America and the West – to which prospect he addressed a warning...

“...the Russian Ministry of Defense and Rosatom must ensure readiness for testing Russian nuclear weapons. Of course, we will not be the first to do this, but if the United States conducts tests, then we will conduct them. No one should have the dangerous illusion that global strategic parity can be destroyed...”

And hopeful hope – for Himself, if not Don Jones or Ivan Badenov – that, as existing, disused American nukes deteriorate and eventually become inoperable, the productive capacities of Russia will push and prod The Nation into an eventually overwhelming superiority – facilitating world conquest, abetted by his faithful boy wonder, China’s President Xi...

(Or maybe not...)

“Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday delivered a nearly two-hour long State of the Nation address, among many other wide-ranging topics, assessing the invasion of Ukraine he ordered a year ago,” Mirage News introduced their translation of the speech. (See Attachment “A” below)

And then, one Alexander Motyl of The Hill (Attachment One – after the Speech but before the votes were actually counted) ventured the opion that, contrary to conventional belief and numbers, Putin actually lost the subsequent election as a consequence of... get this, and extrapolite... his narcissism, vanity and delusional comparisons to a world-conquering superstars like Caesar or Napoleon (both of whom failed, in the end) or Charlemagne or the Greeks’ Alexander the Great (whose empires foundered after their deaths).

“Vladimir Putin officially won 88 percent of the vote in Russia’s presidential elections on March 17, but his victory is both a symptom of weakness and a harbinger of defeat. Think of him as modern Russia’s equivalent of (another) premodern Greek king Pyrrhus, who suffered unacceptably high casualties while almost toppling Rome in the third century BC. Like his ancient predecessor, Russia’s ruler has actually snatched defeat from the jaws of a seemingly resounding victory and will soon come to rue his decision to falsify the electoral results so immodestly.

“Winning with a mere 70 percent would have done the trick, but Putin evidently decided that he needed the equivalent of an overwhelming mandate to continue ruling. Why go for broke and claim a win that is reminiscent of Soviet elections, where the sole candidate always won 99.99 percent? Strong, self-confident and genuinely beloved leaders don’t have to falsify so outrageously. They can just let the people show their love in a fair and free election. Weak, self-doubting, and genuinely unloved leaders, in contrast, need to feign popularity and legitimacy, because they know — and the people know — that they’d lose a free vote.

“It’s therefore a mistake to conclude that Putin’s super-strong electoral showing enhances his power.”

Popping that balloon of delusion, however, will be dangerous. Perhaps the most disturbing (but familiar) of Putin’s tirades in advance of the already-secured but still dangerous re-election campaign was yet another threat to blow up the world... America, himself, Russia and, for all we know, Samoa or Bolivia... if provoked by the United States or one of its NATO allies, resisting his ambitions.

In what the Associated Press called “an apparent reference to French President Emmanuel Macron’s statement that the future deployment of Western ground troops to Ukraine should not be “ruled out” (coupled with Manny’s release of boxing pose pix reminiscent of Georges Carpantier’s pre-fight bravado against Jack Dempsey), Putin warned that such a move would lead to “tragic” consequences for the countries who risk doing so.

“What (the West) are now suggesting and scaring the world with, all that raises the real threat of a nuclear conflict that will mean the destruction of our civilization.”

Threatening that: “Russia won’t let anyone interfere in its internal affairs,” Mad Vlad vowed to fulfill Moscow’s goals in Ukraine, and do whatever it takes to “defend our sovereignty and security of our citizens.” (Attachment Two)

Putin also alleged that the influence of the U.S. and its allies was waning while the developing countries of the Global South are quickly gaining political and economic weight. He argued that the West has eroded its own economic power by using its currencies and financial system to strike Russia with sanctions and that the BRICS alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa is poised to account for 37% of the global economic output in 2028 while the share of the Group of Seven richest countries will drop to 28%.

“We remember the fate of those who sent their contingents to the territory of our country,” Putin continued, alluding to Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union. (Moscow Times, 2/224, Attachmen Three) “Now the consequences for the potential interventionists will be much more tragic.”

Attached at the close of Attachments to this Lesson is the full text transcript in English of Putin’s exhaustive (a critic might even scoff “rambling”) discourse independently translated from the original speech in Russian. (Mirage News, 2/22/24, Attachment “A” below) Note that Russia refers to the Russia-Ukraine War as a special military operation).

The sentiment of the State of the Nation was lost to the thousands of Russians who braved the cold for hours “to honor the opposition politician Alexei Navalny after his funeral (which occurred after the regime, under pressure from domestic and internationsl quarters, released his body to his widow). Navalniks chanted anti-war slogans and covered his gravesite with so many flowers that it disappeared from view.

Unable to prevent the funeral, Putin at least was able to keep it off Russian television – replaced by a documentary “extolling the virtues of domestically built streetcars”. A handful of malcontents watched the services on social media “using tools to circumvent state restrictions. But most still rely on state television, which floods them with the Kremlin’s view of the world. Over time, the effect is to whittle away their desire to question it,” according to Fox News (March 11^th, Attachment Four)

“Propaganda is a kind of drug and I don’t mind taking it,” Victoria, 50, from Russian-occupied Crimea told somebody who told somebody who told Fox. She refused to give her last name because of concerns about her safety.

“If I get up in the morning and hear that things are going badly in our country, how will I feel? How will millions of people feel? … Propaganda is needed to sustain people’s spirit,” she said.

When Putin first addressed Russians as their new president on the last day of 1999, he promised a bright path after the chaotic years that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse.

“The state will stand firm to protect freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of mass media,” he said.

Yet just over a year later, according to Fox, he broke that promise: The Kremlin neutered its main media critic, the independent TV channel NTV, and went after the media tycoons who controlled it.

“In the following decades, multiple Russian journalists, including investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, were killed or jailed, and the Russian parliament passed laws curbing press freedoms.

“The crackdown intensified two years ago after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”

By trumpeting military victories, the Kremlin is focused on creating a “happy feeling,” ahead of the elections, said Jade McGlynn, an expert on Russian propaganda at King’s College London.

But, Fox concluded, Victoria (above) said “I don’t plan to vote in the elections.”

Reiterating his readiness to use nuclear weapons in an interview with Russian state television aired early Wednesday before the three days of voting began on Friday, the fifteenth, the Associated Press predicted that the dictator (Attachment Five) is “set to win by a landslide, relying on the tight control over Russia’s political scene he has established during his 24-year rule.”

In truth, opined Timothy Garton Ash of the liberal Guardian U.K. on Thursday (Attachment Six) Russian voters have no genuine choice this weekend, since Putin has killed his most formidable opponent, Alexei Navalny, and ordered the disqualification of any other candidate who presented even a small chance of genuine competition.

“Encouraged by signs of western weakness such as the refusal of the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine and Pope Francis’s recommendation for Ukraine to hoist the white flag, Russia’s brutal dictator will continue to try to conquer more of Ukraine. Not only does Putin believe that Ukraine belongs historically to a Russia whose manifest destiny it is to be a great, imperial power,” ventured GUK, (Attachment Six), Putin’s Paradise, unlike western governments, is both politically and economically committed to continue this war, “with as much as 40% of its budget devoted to military, intelligence, disinformation and internal security spending, and a war economy that can’t easily be switched back to peacetime mode.”

Yet the Guardian also expressed hope that the Navalny funeral has shown that there’s still an Other Russia, “as there was an Other Germany even at the height of Adolf Hitler’s power in the Third Reich.”

These chanted “Navalny! Navalny!”, “Stop the war!” and “Ukrainians are good people!”

Other brave campaigners for a better Russia, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza and Oleg Orlov, are in prison, and, GUK admitted, “we must fear for their lives. Outside the country, Yulia Navalnaya carries on her husband’s fight with extraordinary courage and dignity, also making it plain that she condemns Putin’s war in Ukraine. Giving a fine example of the more “innovative” politics she recently advocated to the European parliament, she has called for Navalny supporters to turn out at polling stations this Sunday at high noon, to create a visible image of the Other Russia without directly endangering any individual citizen. Some have said they will write the word “Navalny” on their ballot papers. Meanwhile, many hundreds of thousands of Russians who loathe the Putin regime, and passionately want Russia to belong to Europe and the west, have resettled abroad.”

The Guardians ferreted out an “experienced observer who still lives in Russia and told Mr. Ash that he reckons “about 20% of the population actively support Putin, 20% actively oppose him, and 60% passively accept things as they are – without enthusiasm, but also without a belief that change can come from below.:

But, GUK appended,”that can only be a guess.”

Early voting opened on February 26 in the more remote parts of Russia, Newsweek reported on Wednesday (Attachment Seven) but citizens across 11 time zones go to the polls in earnest between Friday and Sunday “when Putin is expected to declare victory and start a fifth term that will last until 2030.”

"[T]he numbers he (Putin) gets don't matter because it's not elections in a democracy, it's a special electoral operation in a dictatorship," Aleksei Miniailo, a Russian opposition politician who co-founded Chronicles, a group of sociologists that conducts independent polling, told Newsweek.

A survey of 1,600 adults conducted on March 2 and 3 by the state-run Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) found that 75 percent of respondents would vote for Putin.

The other candidates, who are all pro-Kremlin and from parties that have broadly backed his policies, trail well behind.

These are Vladislav Davankov from the New People Party at 6 percent, Nikolai Kharitonov from the Communist Party at 4 percent and the ultra- nationalist Leonid Slutsky, from the Liberal Democratic Party, who got the support of 3 percent of respondents in the poll that had a sampling margin of error of 2.5 percent.

Back in January, a survey by the Center of Studies of Russia's Political Culture (CIPKR) found Putin with only 60 percent support compared with 0.3 percent for Davankov, 4 percent for Kharitinov and 3 percent for Slutsky. “The major difference was that. at the time, former State Duma Deputy Boris Nadezhdin got the backing of 7 percent of respondents; but, on February 8, Nadezhdin (an ally of the murdered Navalny)    due to alleged "irregularities" in the signatures of voters supporting his candidacy, according to Russia's Central Election Commission (CEC).

And the Independent UK (Attachment Eight) rather presumptuously promised “everything you need to know” about the weekend and its “sham presidential polls/” which, if anything, underestimated Putin’s ultimate margin of victory.

One of these “things” IUK disclosed, was that voting would also take place in what Russia calls its new territories – “parts of Ukraine now controlled by Russian forces that have been placed under Russian law.”

As to the legitimacy of the election, Russian politics professor Samuel Greene, of King’s College London said that problems for any candidate unvetted by Bad Vlad began with surmounting regulations preventing dissidents from getting on the ballot, then, if they did (which nobody did last week) campaigning only “within red lines set by Putin” – meaning that “they won’t say anything too controversial like criticising the war in Ukraine.”

Putin could theoretically still be in the Kremlin in 2036, noted Independent columnist Mary Dejevsky.

Standing (or, at least, reclining) in the dictator\s way were, Mary said...

Kharitonov

A 75-year-old member of Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, Nikolai Kharitonov is the official candidate of the Communist Party...

Slutsky

A senior member of the State Duma, Leonid Slutsky, 56, is the leader of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) – a gross misnomer in light of his hatred for Americans, Ukrainians and... more or less... all non-Russians and plenty of Russians, too, being even more maniacal than Putin’s...

Davankov

The puppet “youth candidate” and New People politician Vladislav Davankov is deputy chair of the State Duma, a Putin ally and, at 40, looks ahead to a bright future (for him, as for the nation) - his main campaign slogans are “Yes to changes!” and “Time for new people!” being in the context of Russian politics – as someone who is more liberal. Without mentioning Ukraine by name, he has said he favours “Peace and talks. But on our terms and with no roll-back”.

The surviving Navalniks are calling all Russian citizens frustrated with the leader’s rule to head to the voting booths all at the same time on the final day in a display of discontent. Skeptics suggest that it is a plot to gather all of Mad Vlad’s critics in one place and then machine gun them.

Early Friday morning, the uncharacteristically belligerent French reported that the three token candidates above were fewer than the seven candidates who qualified for the 2018 contest (France 24, Attachment Nine) with the first polls in the three day presidential election opening in the country’s easternmost Kamchatka Peninsula region at 8am local time Friday, “with the vast voting exercise spanning 11 time zones set to finish in the westernmost Kaliningrad enclave at 8pm on Sunday.”

"Between the 'foreign agent’ labels, the fines, imprisonments and the incredible hardening of the regime, the number of candidates is limited,” opined the angry frogs before they turned delusional, citing Jean de Gliniasty, former French ambassador to Russia and current senior research fellow at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS) and editorializing: “However, they represent real political forces. The nationalist right carries political weight in Russia, as do the Communists, whose score could be in the region of 10 percent,” according to Putin's critics.

These three quasi-opponents, integrated into the Russian political system, perform an important function: “to channel the discontent of various strata of society and provide a pluralist veneer for the vote, while the real opposition has been wiped out by years of repression.

"Throughout history, Russian power has always been extremely careful to respect formal rules. Even a very authoritarian regime faces public opinion and cares about it. This election remains a test of Putin's legitimacy and popularity. Even if this test appears to be a formality, it has value for those in power," xplained deGlinasty. “Boris Nadezhdin could have stood for election if he had achieved a modest score, but faced with the enthusiasm generated by his candidacy, the Kremlin preferred to send him packing.”

Before her mollification in being allowed to retrieve her husband’s remains, Alexei Navalny's widow Yulia Navalnaya called the election a "masquerade" and urged Russians to cast protest votes.

Other Navalny supporters received letters last week warning them that prosecutors had reason to believe they will be participating in an illegal event that “bore signs of extremist activity”, an accusation Russia often levies at enemies of the Kremlin. 

The foreign press supported or ridiculed Putin’s excuses as reflected their geopolitical leanings.

Sources in Germany tapped by DW.com (Attachment Ten) asked why the dictator would even “bother holding elections” – then grudgingly admitted that it was to demonstrate that the Russian people are united around their leader, said Konstantin Kalachev, a political analyst and former Kremlin adviser.

"And externally, it's to show that Putin is implementing [foreign] policy based on people's demands," Kalachev told DW. "It demonstrates that the president and the Russian majority are united and (Team Putin hoped) dispels any illusions in the West [to the contrary]."

The goal is a voter turnout of 80%. This is done, reported Meduza, an independent news website based in Latvia: "by mobilizing the electorate dependent on the government: public sector employees, employees of state corporations and large companies, loyal to the government, as well as their relatives and friends."

Government and party officials can see exactly who turns out because of electronic voting or digital codes used to identify voters (and either reward supporters or punish the couch potatoes).

With Nadezhdin kicked off the ballot, DW allosed that... between then... the young guy (Davankov) and the Communist (Kharitonov) might secure ten percent of the vote. (The existence, let alone the candidacy, of madder-than-Vlad Slutsky was not even mentioned.)

Still, Navalny’s widow Yulie beseeched Russians to resist and protest (and possibly face her husband’s fate). "You can ruin the ballot, you can write 'Navalny' in big letters on it," she said in a recent YouTube video. "And even if you don't see the point in voting at all, you can just come and stand at the polling station and then turn around and go home," she suggested, adding people should vote for "anyone but Putin."

A despair perhaps not unfamiliar to Americans as their Election from Hell between the two cranky old men cranks up!

Further down south and east, Al Jazeera (Qatar) solicited such support or skepticism about their Fearless Leader from Russians who spoke on conditions of anonymity.

“I’m voting for Putin because I trust him,” 69-year-old Tatyana, from Moscow, told Al Jazeera.

“He is very educated and sees the world globally, unlike the leaders of other countries. I support the direction of development of our country under the leadership of Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] because we see no other way. Once upon a time, I don’t remember when, I voted for [Boris] Yeltsin.”

In recent years, the Muscovian MTG alleged, “the West has demonised Russia, and it was clear even to me that we were being prepared for slaughter. And if you look at the world map in 2020, you will see how NATO bases have surrounded our country. 1+1=2!!! The mosaic has come together.”

On t he other hand, 33 year old “Viktor from St. Petersburg” told the Jazzies: “Do I vote? Hell no! It’s not like a hard stance, I just don’t bother. The thing with Russian political thinking, if you’re against Putin, is that it’s heavily infected with moralism. Like you must vote, just because you don’t have any other ways to express your indignation.”

“I just forgot about elections at all,” added a friend of Viktor’s.

Few of the Russians Al Jazeera interviewed appeared particularly passionate, one way or the other.

“I think this is because the result is predictable,” said 70-year-old Valentina.

Another 33 year old, Alexey, derided the other candidates on the ballot, “but if you had to choose one, then the least cannibalistic one is [Vladislav] Davankov”, he said – probably risking a lengthy prison term, if identified. “He at least supported [Boris] Nadezhdin. He’s not that conservative. It seems to me that he is against the war [in Ukraine], he’s just afraid to talk about it at this time. In a situation of normal competitive politics, I would not choose him. If Nadezhdin had been allowed to participate in these elections, I would have voted for him.”

While not running on an openly peacenik platform, Davankov has called for negotiations with Ukraine while being highly critical of both wartime censorship, and what he termed “cancel culture”.

Otherwise, Davankov is best known as the lawmaker behind the bill banning sex change surgery in Russia... this playing Saint Ron to Putin’s Trump. And “Alexey” said that, while the form that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation takes in Russia is of course not socialism or communism, at least “...there are some reasonable people within the party.”

Domestically, CNN summed up the race on Thursday before polling began and concluded that Putin benefits heavily from apathy; “most Russians have never witnessed a democratic transfer of power between rival political parties in a traditional presidential election, and expressions of anger at the Kremlin are rare enough to keep much of the population disengaged from politics.”

Writing on social media in February, opposition activist and Navalny’s former aide, Leonid Volkov, dismissed the elections as a “circus,” saying they were meant to signal Putin’s overwhelming mass support. “You need to understand what the March ‘elections’ mean for Putin. They are a propaganda effort to spread hopelessness” among the electorate, Volkov said.

Volkov was attacked with a hammer outside his house on Tuesday in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius on March 12^th, and called the assault a typical “gangster’s greeting” from Putin. Lithuania’s intelligence agency agreed that the attack was likely “Russian organized.”

“Putin killed my husband exactly a month before the so-called elections. These elections are fake, but Putin still needs them. For propaganda,” said Yulia Navalnaya (Attachment Twelve) He wants the whole world to believe that everyone in Russia supports and admires him. Don’t believe this propaganda,” she said.

Fox, itself conflicted over the American candidacy of its former poster boy turned rogue, Djonald DeBankruptcy, also posited several Q & A’s about the Russian race.

Abbas Gallyamov, a political analyst who used to be Putin’s speechwriter, has described the vote as one where “multiple choice is replaced with a simple, dichotomic one: ‘Are you for or against Putin?’” and has said that it will be a ”referendum on the issue of the war, and a vote for Putin will become a vote for the war.” (Attachment Thirteen)

Also on the day before voting began, the Associated Press repored from its eyrie in Estonia that, while there’s “little electoral drama” in the race, what Putin does after he crosses the finish line “is what’s drawing attention and, for many observers, provoking anxiety.”

“Putin has often postponed unpopular moves until after elections,” Bryn Rosenfeld, a Cornell University professor who studies post-Communist politics, was cited by the A.P. – contending that probably the most unpopular move he could make at home would be to order a second military mobilization to fight in Ukraine; “the first, in September 2022, sparked protests, and a wave of Russians fled the country to avoid being called up,” recalled Rosenfeld. However unpopular a second mobilization might be, it could also, in dog-in-the-manger Russia, “mollify relatives of the soldiers who were drafted 18 months ago.” (Attachment Fourteen)

While Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at the RAND Corporation think tank told The Associated Press that “Russian society must be organized for perpetual warfare.”

But Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, says Putin doesn’t need a mobilization partly because “many Russians from poorer regions have signed up to fight in order to get higher pay than what they can earn in their limited opportunities at home.”

Alexandra Vacroux, executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University told A.P that Putin, within the next few years, will strike out against NATO, the West and the rest of the planet in order to become Master of the World, if not the Universe.

“I don’t think that Putin thinks that he needs to be physically, militarily stronger than all of the other countries. He just needs them to be weaker and more fractured. And so the question for him is like ... instead of worrying so much about making myself stronger, how can I make everyone else weaker?” she said.

Although it is not a NATO member, the country of Moldova is increasingly worried about becoming a Russian target. Since the invasion of Ukraine, neighboring Moldova has faced crises that have raised fears in its capital of Chisinau that the country is also in the Kremlin’s crosshairs.

The congress in Moldova’s separatist Transnistria region, where Russia bases about 1,500 soldiers as nominal peacekeepers, have appealed to Moscow for diplomatic “protection” because of alleged increasing pressure from Moldova.

That appeal potentially leaves “a lot of room for escalation,” said Cristain Cantir, a Moldovan international relations professor at Oakland University. “I think it’s useful to see the congress and the resolution as a warning to Moldova that Russia may get more involved in Transnistria if Chisinau does not make concessions.”

And after?

The Baltics? The Balkans? Balmoral Castle, or... Baltimore? (“What’s the real story,” conspiracy theorists ask, “about that runaway cargo ship last night?”)

BAD VLAD’S СУПЕР УИКЕНД (SUPER WEEKEND) 3/15 to 3/17/24

COMMENTARY: SUPER ELECTION WEEKEND (3/15 to 3/17/24)...

The vast geographic streatch of the former Soviet Union and certain other... ah, particulars... have led the Russians to conduct their Presidential elections over three days instead of one, as in America. These days began Friday, March 15^th... early voting also was permitted... and closed on Sunday night, the 17^th.

Dispatches from the Old World explaining more of these Russian particulars mocked Putin’s electoral puppets... more or less what rasslin’ fans would call “jobbers” (ring worms of little talent and less charisma operating on the reasonable “pay me, pin me” ethos)... these being the Boy Wonder, the Communist, and Slutsky,

Polls... to the extent that Russian polling can be trusted... had all ventured that Vlad had nothing to fear from his three remaining opponents (after his leading domestic critic, Aleksei Navalny, was murdered in prison, Navalny supporter Volkov was stomped in Lithuania, other would-be challengers like Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova were thrown off the ballot and the rest of those other dissident-sorts were intimidated into silence by these examples.

“With little margin for protest, Russians crowded outside polling stations at noon Sunday, on the last day of the election, apparently heeding an opposition call to express their displeasure with Putin. (Time, March 17^th, Attachment Fifteen) Still, the impending landslide underlined that Russian leader would accept nothing less than full control of the country’s political system as he extends his nearly quarter-century rule for six more years.”

He has already succeeded in unnerving the Kremlin from beyond the grave. (Time, Attachment Fifteen “A”) Hundreds of people have been detained across Russia while publicly mourning Navalny’s death over the past month. Students in Moscow reported receiving threats of expulsion from their universities for attending any public rallies on the day of Navalny’s funeral.

By the time that polls closed in Russia (hours before the West tested and digested results, monitoring of election resuls remained extremely limited. According to Russia’s Central Election Commission, Putin had some 87% of the vote with about 90% of precincts counted.

Mrs. Navalny haunted polling places in Berlin to hector absentee electors before seizing a ballot and writing in her husband’s name, but no Russian goons showed up to break her legs or spirit.

“Please stop asking for messages from me or from somebody for Mr. Putin,” she told the WestPress. “There could be no negotiations and nothing with Mr. Putin, because he’s a killer, he’s a gangster.”

Meduza (above) reported that dissidents had defaced or mutilated ballots and displayed photographs of write-in “candidates” like “Killer”, “Thief” or “The Hague awaits you” – that last referring to an arrest warrant for Putin from the International Criminal Court that accuses him of personal responsibility for abductions of children from Ukraine.

Anticipating the obvious victory... not dissimilar to the Super Tuesdasy blowouts by Putin “bro’” Trump over Nikki Haley (despite Vermont) and even more ridiculous rout enjoyed by President Joe over Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips and somebody named Palmer (escept in Samoa)... Bad Vlad’s celebratory rompings and post-electoral dissident stompings were under way before the ballot results were posted.

Several people were arrested, including in Moscow and St. Petersburg, after they tried to start fires or set off explosives at polling stations while others were detained for throwing green antiseptic or ink into ballot boxes.

Ruslan Shaveddinov of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation said: “We showed ourselves, all of Russia and the whole world that Putin is not Russia, that Putin has seized power in Russia.” (Guardian U.K., Sunday evening, Attachment Sixteen)

Ella Pamfilova, Russia’s election commissioner, said those who spoiled ballots were “bastards”, and the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said those responsible could face treason sentences of 20 years. Among those “captured” by the police were a Moscow couple arrested because the husband wore a scarf bearing the name Orwell, a reference to George Orwell, whose dystopian novel 1984 was about a repressive totalitarian state. “Others were arrested for laying flowers at memorials for Navalny, and some have been detained for standing alone holding up blank sheets of paper.” (Washington Post, Sunday evening EDT, Attachment Seventeen)

On the other hand, the WashPost also reported that Putin had reported at his midnight victory party that “talks had been underway” to exchange Navalny for Russians imprisoned in the West.

“A few days before Mr. Navalny passed away some people told me there is an idea to exchange him with some people who are incarcerated in Western countries,” Putin said. “You can believe me or not but even before the person could finish their phrase I said I agree. But what happened happened unfortunately. I had only one condition — that we swap him and that he doesn’t come back. Let him sit there. But this happens. You can’t do anything about that.”

Bad Vlad’s glee was bolstered by the latest economic reportage showing that, despite sanctions and confiscation of assets of some of the more foolish oligarchs who left their personages or their money in places where the wiggly, wriggly Western worms could snatch them up, the Russian economy rebounded to expand by an estimated 3% last year, and the International Monetary Fund recently raised its growth forecast for this year from 1.1% to 2.6%.

Inflation, which spiked to nearly 18% in April 2022, has cooled significantly to 7.5% in February. Unemployment has dropped to record lows under 3% in recent months. Even the beleaguered ruble, which fell to a 16-month low against the dollar last fall, has strengthened. (Business Insider, Attachment Eighteen)

The sunny situation is a far cry from what many experts predicted. Russia defied their forecasts by quickly pivoting its economy away from the West and toward friendly nations, capitalizing on the fact that sanctions were not universally adopted or enforced.

What the B.I. called “...a shadowy consortium of shipping, insurance, and oil-trading companies” emerged to connect Russia with India, China, Turkey, the UAE, and other willing partners.

“So-called ghost fleets transported Russian oil under other countries' flags, resulting in the nation's energy revenues holding up much better than expected. Russia was able to cash in on high energy prices, import military equipment and other supplies, and obtain Western products like phones and microchips via neighboring countries like Georgia and Armenia.”

And the B.I. also made mention of the political infighting in the US over whether to continue funding Ukraine, which has arguably undermined the sanctions, “as it's signaled that America isn't united in standing against Russia.”

On the debit side of Putin’s economy, the war has led to a severe labor shortage... particularly in electronics, the automotive industry and agriculture... which has driven up wages and prices, and fueled “labor hoarding” by companies.

Russians have also faced shortages of staples like beef and chicken, which contributed to a 40% surge in the price of eggs last year as households scrambled to buy food. Gasoline is also in short supply, which has prompted Russian officials to clamp down on exports until domestic demand can be met. Tax revenues are down, increased sanctions are pressuring countries like India to cut back its oil purchases and the war has created “an exodus of people and money, declining access to tech and related expertise, reduced foreign investment, and pressure on the ruble as it's become harder to convert into other currencies.”

GUK (March 15^th, Attachment Nineteen) opined, as the elections began on Friday, that the Kremlin will claim a mandate for that war, “enshrining Putin’s bloodiest gamble as the country’s finest moment.”

Instead, in what the GUKsters called a “bleak” post-election outlook, , Putin is seeking to wed Russia’s future, including an elite and a society that appear resigned to his lifelong rule, to the fate of his long war in Ukraine.

“You are dealing with the person who started this war; he’s already made a mistake of such a scale that he can’t ever admit it to himself,” a former senior Russian official told the Guardian. “And he can’t lose that war either. For him that would be the end of the world.

“We all – thanks to Putin – have been led into such a shitshow that there is no good outcome. The only options go from very bad to catastrophic,” he added. And if Putin begins to lose, the person added, then “we may all see the stars in the sky” – suggesting a potential nuclear war.

One of Putin’s goals in these elections is to “deprive most Russians of the ability to imagine a future without him”, wrote Michael Kimmage and Maria Lipman in Foreign Affairs. And the prospects for his next term, or even two terms until 2036, appear clear: a forever war, an increasingly militarised society, and an economy dominated by the state and military spending.

Russia is devoting an estimated 7.5% of its GDP to military spending, the highest proportion since the cold war, and the government’s lavish spending has meant that factories making weapons, ammunition and military equipment are working double or triple-shift patterns, and welders collecting overtime can make as much as white-collar workers. A defence insider predicted that levels of spending would only continue to increase, he said, calling the change a “new permanent phase” that could last “many years”.

On the home front, restaurants in Moscow and St Petersburg remain full, projecting an image of normality, “parallel imports” – importing of western goods via third countries – and other new schemes have sought to prevent Russians from noticing a loss of creature comforts and luxury products.

“The Kremlin wants to cosplay the Soviet Union but without the food and product deficits,” said a well-connected source in Moscow media circles. “Their generation remembers the consumer goods deficits really well and wants to prevent them at all costs.”

Where will Putin’s money come from now?

Speaking before Russia’s legislature last month, Putin announced an initiative called the Time of Heroes, a programme meant to bring veterans of the invasion of Ukraine into the upper ranks of government.

But the announcement was also clearly targeted at Russia’s liberal elite, whom Putin said had disgraced themselves through insufficient patriotism since the outbreak of the war.

“You know that the word ‘elite’ has lost much of its credibility,” he said. “Those who have done nothing for society and consider themselves a caste endowed with special rights and privileges – especially those who took advantage of all kinds of economic processes in the 1990s to line their pockets – are definitely not the elite.”

For young Russians, often referred to as Generation Putin, another decade looms under the increasingly authoritarian rule of the only president they have ever known.

“I am pessimistic about the long-term prospects of Russia,” said a biznessman living under sanctions. “I would advise young people with a good education to leave and build a new future abroad. Russia is not going to run out of money … It will just be a stagnant, militaristic nation.”

Also from GUK came a prediction one week ago that the “landslide” would be more fuel to fire up the dogs of war. It was not enough for the Kremlin to win the election – it also had to demonstrate public engagement. There was a push for early voting, especially in the occupied territories in Ukraine, where electoral officials accompanied by armed men in uniform knocked on people’s doors and politely asked them if they would like to vote early. Those who did not yet have Russian passports were allowed to use their Ukrainian IDs. In Russia there were distractions: the usual raffles, discos and canteens at polling stations to entice people out to vote.

However, the majority of the population still support the regime. Veteran Russia analyst Mark Galeotti suggests that without fraud, Putin would still have been easily elected with a 60% majority in the first round. Putin also seemed emboldened by how well the election went; at his post-electoral press conference, he finally said Navalny’s name out loud. With his power comfortably cemented, he is no longer afraid of his arch-nemesis, or even his ghost. (Attachment Twenty)

If, as GUK presumed, the election result was a facade for “a rotten regime that is hollow at the core and needs lies, violence and war to survive,” they also agreed that Mad Vlad had (and now, even more, has) method behind the madness. He also remembers how fast communism fell in Europe once a small chain of events created a tidal wave.... carrying the geriatric dictatorship away and carrying some of the Soviet satellite autocrats into early or not-so-early graves... Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu for one.

So dire are circumstances, another Business Insider speculated (Attachment Twenty One) that Russia cannot afford to either win or lose the Ukrainian war, according to aconomist Renaud Foucart, a senior economics lecturer at Lancaster University who averred that the war was now “the main driver of Russia's economic growth" in an op-ed for The Conversation this week.

"A protracted stalemate might be the only solution for Russia to avoid total economic collapse," Foucart wrote. "The Russian regime has no incentive to end the war and deal with that kind of economic reality. So it cannot afford to win the war, nor can it afford to lose it. Its economy is now entirely geared towards continuing a long and ever deadlier conflict."

He suggested that the regime might even collapse without the aid grudgingly (but reliably) supplied by China.

Mark Galeotti, a Russia analyst at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, said this outcome of the vote showed that Putin’s regime has shifted from an earlier model of “managed democracy” and is now “heading into its banana republic stage.” (Washington Post, March 18^th, Attachment Twenty Two).

“Russians, by choice or not, are now locked into Putin’s repressive, increasingly totalitarian path — his bloody war in Ukraine and decisions to shun the West, isolate Russia’s economy and escalate hostility toward NATO. Western leaders, meanwhile, face a strident, emboldened adversary in command of a nuclear arsenal,” as well as some of their own isolationist inclinations which, if continued, may compel these neo-Soviets to contemplate what would happen if they actually won the war.

The simplest expedient... go invade somebody else.

To survive, Putin needs the energizing effect of a mobilized militaristic, nationalist minority to cow internal dissent and reinforce the regime.

“The level of repression is already very high,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “The war of attrition is continuing, and any other methods of conducting it are not really being reviewed.”

PUTIN’S ELATION NATION FROM THE AFTERWORLD to THE PRESENT... and FUTURE (MARCH 18^th TO PRESENT (with an unpleasant but exploitable turn of the screw...)!

GUK, having forecast a “bleak future” for Russia as the voting began, acknowledged that the dictator-in-all-but-name had pulled off his “re-election” with dispatch and aplomb, racking up 87.8% of the vote; Communist candidate Nikolai Kharitonov finished second with just under 4%, newcomer Vladislav Davankov third, and ultra-nationalist Leonid Slutsky fourth, partial results suggested.

Putin took to the Red Square stage down the road a bit from the Crocus concert hall (see below) for Monday’s election celebration that seemed to carry a grander message for the flag-waving crowd of thousands, and for the world: “Together, hand in hand — we will move on,” he proclaimed before singing along to the national anthem, just hours after claiming a landslide win in a stage-managed election with no opposition.

Flanked by his favorite musical acts, pro-war celebrities and the three officially approved figures put on the ballot with him, he led this celebratory event to mark the 10th anniversary of his annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Ukrainian officials told NBC News that the party was nothing but propaganda, and decried as illegal coercion the votes held for the first time in four newly annexed regions. “The crowd — mostly students, some of whom said they had been given free tickets to the event — cheered and sang along as Russian stars performed patriotic ballads.” (Attachment Twenty Three, March 19^th)

Crimea, which is crucial to Russia’s naval power, has been used as a major hub and launchpad for the war against Ukraine, which has vowed to reclaim it along with all of its occupied territory and has increasingly targeted Russian military targets on the peninsula.

“Crimea is not Russian,” Tamila Tasheva, Kyiv’s permanent representative in Crimea, told NBC News. “Legally, the territory is Ukrainian. And this, by the way, is very clearly understood subconsciously in Russia itself, and that is why such ‘celebrations’ are held in order to convince themselves of the nonexistent,” she said of the event in Red Square.

By this week, some of the fenceposts of Putin’s new administration of “retribution and revenge”... to echo his American “bro’”... was identifying and punishing some of Bad Vlad’s favorite targets... though his renewed campaigns against gay, lesbians and other “deviants” echoed back a few years.

“Two employees of an LGBTQ+ club in the Russian city of Orenburg have been arrested on suspicion of being members of an "extremist organisation"

It is the first criminal case of its kind since Russia's Supreme Court outlawed the so-called "international LGBT movement" last November and, since the Court’s ruling, the rainbow flag is now also considered “a symbol of extremism”, according to the BBC. (Attachment Twenty Four) Police raided the club, called Pose, in early March following a request from the local prosecutor.

They were reportedly accompanied by members from a local nationalist group called "Russian Community".

Ksenia Mikhailova, a lawyer for Russian LGBT group "Coming Out", said the Orenburg case was "a big surprise" which could show the authorities are now treating instances of so-called LGBT propaganda as a criminal rather than an administrative offense, as had previously been the case.

The government’s new campaign against gays was heartily backed by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia – a lifelong adversary of sin, sodomy and Western lukewarm Christianity.

“In witnessing the remarkable outcomes of your unwavering and extensive efforts for the benefit of our homeland, the citizens of our nation have once again reaffirmed their trust in you and overwhelmingly endorsed your candidacy,” expressed the Patriarch in his congratulatory message published in the Orthodox Times (March 19^th, Attachment Twenty Five).

The Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church is convinced that with the election of Vladimit Putin, “fellow citizens associate hopes for further strengthening the power of the Russian state, for joint creative work and new achievements, for a peaceful and prosperous life.”

“It is heartening to acknowledge the constructive relations that have flourished in recent years between public authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church,” Kirill declaimed. “These relations are directed towards fortifying traditional moral values within society, fostering spiritual enlightenment, and instilling patriotic education among the youth.”

Kirill stood out amidst a rogue’s gallery of reprobates, dictators, thugs and murderers – including more than a few world and national leaders, each of whom offered their own brand of congrats and tributes to Mad Vlad. (GUK, Attachment Twenty Six)

While 141 countries voted in favour of a UN resolution condemning the invasion. However, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), that headline figure conceals the reality that two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries that were neutral or Russia-leaning.

On Monday, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, echoed Xi, saying he looked forward to strengthening New Delhi’s “time-tested special and privileged strategic partnership” with Moscow.

Since Russia’s war against Ukraine began in February 2022, Modi has walked a diplomatic tightrope that has seen him refuse to take a forceful stance against the invasion... positioning himself as “a leader of the global south – a loose collection of developing countries and formerly colonised nations – many of which continue to support Russia.”

India has also emerged as the single biggest buyer of Russian oil.

Putin’s win was celebrated by leaders in Latin America who have been historically at odds with the US. Experts say Russia’s isolation from the west has only pushed it closer to countries such as Cuba and Venezuela, whose foreign minister recently characterised Moscow as a “victim on the international stage”.

The country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, responded to the results of Sunday’s vote by saying: “Our older brother Vladimir Putin has triumphed, which bodes well for the world.”

Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, called the result “a credible indication that the Russian population supports [Putin’s] management of the country”.

Putin’s victory was also warmly received in several countries in west and central Africa which are ruled by juntas after a number of coups since 2020 – including Mali and Niger - after they severed ties with their traditional French and US allies following the military uprisings.

And beyond post-colonial resentment, Russia has also resported to bribery... specifically as applicable to grain, with Ukrainian supplies cut by the war.

Putin has promised deliveries of free grain to Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, the Central African Republic and Eritrea. “The first deliveries were shipped last month, according to the Russian government.”

In Burkina Faso, a daily newspaper summed up the changing global dynamics in an editorial on Monday, writing that in Africa, the election “could sound like a non-event”, but that it takes on a particular meaning because “Putin embodies the new geopolitical balance of power on the continent with a growing [Russian] presence and influence.”

And the Russians’ strongest commercial and military ally, the People’s Republic of China, congratulated the neighboring dictator as bringing “certainty to a world in turbulence”.

After declaring victory on Monday, Putin used a speech to supporters to again declare that “Taiwan is an inherent part of the People’s Republic of China”, in comments that were likely directed at the government in Beijing which claims Taiwan as a province of China, and which has made “reunification” a crucial policy.

Coincidentally, Reuters reported that... following his electoral sweep... Putin would be hitting the road in May: not to Disneyland, but to Beijing where he will confer with Xi Jinping and compare their respective plans for the populations of Taiwan, Ukraine and other targets of interest. (Attachment Twenty Seven)

“China and Russia declared a "no limits" partnership in February 2022 when Putin visited Beijing just days before he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, triggering the deadliest land war in Europe since World War Two.”

“The United States casts China as its biggest competitor and Russia as its biggest nation-state threat while U.S. President Joe Biden argues that this century will be defined by an existential contest between democracies and autocracies.

“Putin and Xi share a broad world view,” Reuters declared, “which sees the West as decadent and in decline just as China challenges U.S. supremacy in everything from quantum computing and synthetic biology to espionage and hard military power.”

A wildcard in this assembly of alliances, however, is the potential restoration to power of former President (and current indicted felon, suspected bankrupt and poll-leading candidate in the November 2024 election.

Although the Ex consistently mocked the Obama/Biden/Hillary troika as subservient to “China China China” during his regime, relationships between Beijing and Washington were better four years ago, relationships between Trump and Putin were much better.

“Trump praised the Russian president as a “genius” and “pretty savvy” when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, and has boasted he would end the war in a “day”, sparking critics’ fears that if he’s elected again Trump would help Russia achieve a favorable peace deal by cutting off aid to Kyiv. Trump also recently greenlit Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to Nato members who don’t pay enough to the alliance,” GUK reminded the West. (Attachment Twenty Eight)

Trump’s adulation for autocrats was displayed again this month at Mar-a-Lago, where he hosted Viktor Orbán, the far-right Hungarian prime minister who is a close Putin ally and foe of Ukraine aid, whom Trump extolled. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán,” Trump said.

In turn, Orbán lauded Trump as “a man of peace”, and said if Trump is re-elected, he “won’t give a penny” to Ukraine and the war will end.

“Putin much prefers the chaos agent of Trump because it undermines the US,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and a national security official in the first two years of Trump’s administration. “Trump’s not worried about national security, but focused on himself.”

So self absorbed, in fact, that as the clock ticks down on Djonald’s New York civil fraud case and the $480+ million bail bond demand imposed by Judge Erdogan, rumours have whistled through Washington that Desperate Don might even evade confiscation of his hotel, office and golf course real estate properties by borrowing money from oligarchs within and without Russia... or even Putin himself. (March 21, Attachment Twenty Nine)

Various testimonies from economists and experts have estimated Putin's total net worth to sit between $70 billion and $200 billion. Putin's net worth 'rivals Elon Musk' ventured Fox Business, but a 'cobweb' of bank accounts, and shadowy assets hides his full value.

Fox News’ Martha MacCallum asked Trump attorney Alina Habba if there was "any effort" on Trump's defense team to try to secure the total bond amount "through another country," such as Saudi Arabia or Russia.

"There's rules and regulations that are public," Habba responded. "I can't speak about strategy. That requires certain things, and we have to follow those rules."

National security lawyer Mary McCord told MSNBC over the weekend that there are "certainly plenty of people who might want to bail him out," suggesting that some entities could be "foreign, some of those might be Russian oligarchs," or people and companies within the U.S.

And Newsweek (February 25^th, Attachment Thirty) also suggested that Russian oligarchs... acting either under orders from Putin or on their own oligarchial initiative... might slip a few million Benjamins to the former President in exchange for, well, depends on whether they’ve been sanctioned, exiled or just lovey dovey with Vlad.

Also citing the McCord/MSNBC suggestion of a Putin payoff , Newsweek ventured that former national security adviser John Bolton said that the legal issues Trump faces is one reason why the former president is not fit for office.

"I think this is one of the demonstrations why Trump is really not fit for office because he is consumed by these troubles, his family is consumed by them, and I think foreigners will try to take advantage of it one way or another. They may be doing it already," he said.

Now re-elected, Putin has returned to his nuclear sabre-rattling (Attachment Five and above) emphasizing that Russia’s nuclear forces are in full readiness and “from the military-technical viewpoint, we’re prepared.”

Putin said that in line with the country’s security doctrine, Moscow is ready to use nuclear weapons in case of a threat to “the existence of the Russian state, our sovereignty and independence.”

Comparing the Russian Republic to the Roman in the deep, dark days of civil war and assassination, The Hill... after comparing the blown up insurrectionist Yevgeny Prigozin to Brutus... cited a German intelligence report suggests that Russia could attack a NATO country — possibly the Baltic countries or Finland — as early as 2026 . — due to NATO repudiation by Hungary and Slovakia and the American political gridlock.

“Meanwhile, neither French President Emmanuel Macron nor Poland and Estonia are ruling out Western troops in Ukraine,” the Hill reported. (Attachment Thirty One) Macron upped the ante by declaring the Russia-Ukraine war as “existential” and, coupled with Czech President Petr Pavel’s efforts to secure funding for 800,000 rounds of artillery, the Kremlin’s window of opportunity to win may be closing.”

NATO must anticipate a strike against one of its members, the Hill warned (Attachment and Putin clearly sees the Baltic States as NATO’s weakest link.

NATO allies must begin actively planning for the defense of Europe from any potential Russian aggression, and they must do so for two parallel timeframes. 

The first is in the near term, while the war in Ukraine is still being fought. The second is for a resumption of combat operations ten to twenty years after its conclusion.

NATO is already making urgently needed progress in the long war. Sweden’s formal accession has strengthened the alliance’s defenses in the Baltic Sea and Arctic, and Brussels is transforming the 57th Air Base in Mihail Kogălniceanu, Romania into what will become the largest NATO base in Europe.

Yet, this is only a start. Far more defensive capabilities will be needed in Poland and the Baltic States. 

Ukraine is just Putin’s opening act. He wants more and he has said so. Crimea was not enough in 2014 to sate his appetite for dominance once again of the Black Sea, and Ukraine will not be enough if he wins.

And Russia’s “fifth column” is, according to GUK’s Simon Jenkins, the American media.

“The West’s derisive reporting of Vladimir Putin’s election victory this week was a mark of his success.” It was described as an abuse of democracy, “rigged”, “fixed” and “a sham”... the other candidates were shadows, “while Putin’s true opponents were imprisoned, exiled or dead.”

But contempt is misplaced, denial denied.

“As he celebrated his win to an adoring crowd in Red Square on Monday, we saw Putin as the new Ivan the Terrible against a backdrop of Ivan’s St Basil’s cathedral. He even made an offhand quip about his murdered rival Navalny. The image was of absolute power smilingly defying the enemy. Two years ago, he was supposedly crippled by western sanctions. We don’t hear that now.” (Attachment Thirty Two)

“How we describe other countries matters when our concern is not how it seems to them, but how it feels to us. Almost half a century of George Kennan’s policy of containment and cohabitation with communism has given way to a shrill new agenda. Not just Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Syria, but states across Asia and Africa are regularly castigated as tyrannical, terrorist or genocidal.”

The number of democracies has declined since 2015. Political bookshelves heave with predictions of democracy’s decay and death. Most alarming was last year’s polling from Open Society Foundations... surveying nations across the globe, it found that only 57% of 18 to 35s regarded democracy as their preferred form of government, against more than 70% for those over 56. Each successive younger generation has a lower respect for democracy. More than a third of the world’s under-35s would today support some sort of “military rule”, by a “strong leader” who did not hold elections or consult a parliament.

To vote for Putin, GUK’s Simon Jenkins postulated, “you did not need to support his regime or his war with Ukraine. You might well be content with the one thing he promises: security and a patriotic response to western abuse.” (Attachment Thirty Three)

Over the weekend, escalating Russian missile and drone strikes targed Ukrainian infrastructure – destroying the country’s largest dam and hydroelectric plants. “Several major power facilities were hit in the south-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, including the country’s largest dam and the Dnipro hydroelectric power plant, one of Europe’s biggest. Ukrainian authorities said there was no risk of a breach but a generating unit was in critical condition after dramatic images posted online showed a fire at the dam.

“The goal is not just to damage, but to try again, like last year, to cause a large-scale failure in the operation of the country’s energy system.”

The immediate challenge to Putin, Kirill and the Soviet... er, Russian... people, however, came not from the decadent devils of the United States, Europe and some tagalong nuisances, but from an old enemy... the Afghan based ISIS-K terrorist gang.

On Friday evening (afternoon in America) at least four terrorists armed with automatic rifles mowed down what was first said to be “at least 40 killed” and many more wounded and then, to close out their show at the Crocus Concert Hall in Moscow, tossed Molotov cocktails this way and that, ultimately bringing down the house. Literally. (Guardian U.K., Attachment Thirty Four)

Russia’s top investigative agency, the Investigative Committee, said that it would be investigating the events as a terrorist attack.

Throughout the weekend, as police, firemen and citizens with shovels excavated the ruins to exhume more corpses, the toll kept climbing... finally, as of Monday afternoon, over 33,000.

GUK compared the carnage to the 2002 hostage massacre committed by Chechen militants in which 129 hostages and 41 of the insurrectionists were killed and to another Chechen militant attack two years later, when more than 330 people, about half of them children, were killed.

In its timeline of Friday afternoon (EDT), Guardian reporters posted a warning from the United States State Department advicing Americans to “avoid the area and follow instructions of local authorities.”

Videos and photos have emerged showing the Crocus City Hall engulfed in flames and from the attack, showing at least four gunmen opening fire from automatic weapons as panicked Russians fled for their lives.

As they did, Putin’s politicians were shaping the atrocity to profit from the pain and peril. Inevitably, Putin blamed the attack on Ukraine, and when four suspects and several more persons of interest were intercepted on their way south, he asserted that they were headed to Kyev to receive congratulations from Zelenskyy... even though Afghanistan is in the same direction.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, tweeting that “Ukraine certainly has nothing to do with the shooting/explosions in the Crocus City Hall (Moscow Region, Russia). It makes no sense whatsoever...

“Ukraine has been fighting with the Russian army for more than two years. And everything in this war will be decided only on the battlefield. Only by the quantity of weapons and qualitative military decisions. Terrorist attacks do not solve any problems ...

“Ukraine has never resorted to the use of terrorist methods. It is always pointless. Unlike, by the way, Russia itself, which uses terrorist attacks in the current war against Ukraine…”

As the death toll swelled to 100, then 111, then 137, Western optimists... bloodthirsty optimists, to be sure, but optimists nonetheless... saw in the attack and the excuses a “lethally negligent failure” which can’t be covered up, leaving the dictator “weaker than ever.”

“The mask of invincibility is slipping ever further, and eventually that will matter,” GUK’s Simon Tisdall predicted (although without immediate confirmation). “This debacle won’t be forgiven or forgotten.”

Further, while here is no doubt that he, as Russia’s head of state and overall chief of its security forces, bears ultimate responsibility for what was by any measure a catastrophic failure which, in “any normal political system,” would lead to resignation, removal or worse was, in fact, said Simon, merely a sign that his dictatorship has “eviscerated checks and balances within Russian society, eliminating means of independent scrutiny. Any call for him to take personal responsibility would barely be heard, let alone acted on.”

Despite explicit videos published online by Islamic State, which has admitted that it undertook the attack, Putin persists in blaming Ukrainian “Nazis”. This is beyond cynical,” Simon said, “...(i)t’s borderline psychotic.”

Loading up the brickbats, rotten tomatoes and Molotov cocktails, Mister Tisdall termed Sad Vlad’s power an “edifice of lies” based on “systemic falsehoods, fed daily to a captive nation on an epic scale.”

With Putin, “it’s always all about him,” Simon said, about his own insecurity, his need for absolute power, “his delusions of revived Russian imperial grandeur.”

Sound familiar?

“Putin has remade the Russian state in his own image: brutal, incompetent, ignorant, distrustful, delusional and isolated.” In the optimistic view, Putin is “one more step down the road towards a final reckoning. It’s coming, do not doubt it. It’s coming.”

Of course, different people have different notions of what “it” is.

Simon’s GUK-ish cohorts (Jason Burke and Jonathan Yerushalmy) reported that the ISIS-K toll was even higher than the Paris 2015 massacre, and that the four suspects... identified as citizens of Tajikistan by a Russian news agency... have pleaded guilty, probably under some duress.

IS leaders have long seen attacks against distant targets as an integral part of their extremist project. Such operations – when successful – terrorise their enemies but also mobilise existing supporters and attract new ones.

“Russia has been in the cross-hairs of IS for many years. IS leaders, like many Islamic militants, are mindful of Russian support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. A key point made by IS propaganda from Pakistan to Nigeria is that Moscow is part of the broader coalition of Christian or western forces engaged in an existential, 1,400-year-old battle against Islam,” posited Burke and Yerushalmy. But just because they call themselves an Islamic State does not mean that Islam gets a free pass... they have also attacked Iran, according to Sunday talkster Jonathan Karl (below) and, while Time has noted that the Saudi kingdom, an active promoter and sponsor of Wahhabism, the fundamentalist strain of Islam that serves as the backbone of modern Islamic extremism, and is the second largest source of foreign fighters for ISIS — roughly 2,500 have joined. But ISIS considers modern Saudi Arabia “a perversion of Islamic statehood” making it also a terrorist target itself. In July 2016, it suffered a triple suicide-bombing attack across three cities; in May 2015, an ISIS bombing killed 21 people.

The ISIS Afghan branch, known as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), battled Russians as they studied them in the disastrous 1987 war that overturned the Soviet Union... a nugget of history that Bad Vlad may choose to ignore despite the ease with which the terrorists slithered across the border and into Moscow while Russian “intelligence” either failed or denied.

As this Lesson was being prepared, Russians were still mourning their dead, searching for more bodies while Putin has claimed without evidence that the four arrested gunmen planned to flee to Ukraine. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, replied that Putin and others close to him are seeking to divert the blame from Russian intelligence failings.

Maybe the Putin Patrol can find a few more queers to beat up.

China is watching and waiting. Hamas and Israel are calculating their potential gains and losses, while the US has said it received “intelligence” that ISKP acted alone.

	Our Lesson: March Eighteenth through Twenty Fourth, 2024
Monday, March 18, 2024 Dow: 38,790.43	Surprise! The Russian vote is counted and... Putin wins! 87% compared to less for President Joe and only a comparative pittance for Donald Trump on Super Tuesday. (After the fact, he says he would’ve freed Navalny. Sure!) Domestically, Biden boasts of raising 150M to only 40M for Djonald DisPossessed who, at an angry rally, plays the Star Spangled Banner for the One Six hostages and promises a bloodbath if he loses. Then he confesses he can’t make bail in the NY real esate fraud case after “thirty insurance companies” reject his entreaties and evil DA Letitia James starts machinations to seize Trump Tower and other big buildings. The Stormy case is pushed back too, but only for a month. She’ll testify, and so will bagmanMichael Cohen. NCAA’s Selection Sunday ranks #1 choices: UConn, Purdue, Houston and N. Carolina. See full list and brackets here.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024 Dow: 39,110.76	It’s the first day of spring – but Djonald UnSprung can’t find a bro’ among American billionaires... Elon Musk turns him down. Trump then blames the Jews, saying that those who are Democrats hate their religion. Off to jail goes another flunkey... Peter Navarro. No love lost, either, beteen PM Netanyahu and President Joe as hapless Blinken fails to convince Bibi not to invade Rafah, kill the rest of Hamas and whatever civilians are in the way. To prove it, he sends the troops into a hospital where terrorists are presumably hiding. US military chopper rescues thirty Americans from Haiti, but there are still a thousand trapped in cities like Port au Prince where the gangs are fighting for control of the government (and whatever’s on hand to loot). Hospitals are jammed, children are starving and talking heads debate who has it worse, Haitians or Gazans. Drug warriors give up and allow birth control pills to be sold, both online and over the counter. The usual suspects take sides, women who want to bring back Roe v. Wade vs. evangelicals.
Wednesday, March 20, 2024 Dow: 39,812.13	Fed decides not to raise interest rates now, and maybe lower them in June. This cause the stock market to soar - making for happy retirees with IRSs. MLB season opens in Korea as the interpreter for Japanese superstar Ohtani is arrested for theft and fraud to cover his gambling losses. Coincidenally, oddsmakers tout league play and World Series oddswhile cashing in on BBall playoffs (Barack Obama picks UConn for men’s and says S.Carolina will beat Iowa and Caitlin Clarkin the women’s finals). Among the cinematic distractions, another spring and summer of sequels is on the way. Ghostbusters Two, new Popeye and Godzilla flix and, among prequels, another Star Wars. But for all these present and coming distractions, the USA drops out of the list of the Twenty Happiest Counties in the World. America has fallen from 15^th place to 23^rd, losing the affections of youth – although the U.S. is still in the top ten for those 60 and older, though trailing Denmark. Finland was ranked happiest for the seventh year in a row; Lithuania was Number One among people under thirty.
Thursday, March 21, 2024 Dow: 38,965.55	Records continue falling on Wall Street as the Dow nears the 40,000 ceiling based on the Fed’s semi-promise to lower the interest rate. Even better... eventually and for only two Americans... the Powerball and Mega Millions lottery jackpots are approaching a billion each. Elon Musk is already a billionaire, many time over, and controversial, too, but even critics are hailing his latest invention, computer chips that can interface with the brains of paralytics so that they can move around and move things around “with their minds”! Medicine also advances when doctors in Boston transplant a pig’s kidney into a human – then presumably go out to lunch and enjoy a nice meal of pork and beans. Nothing could go wrong with either of these new developments, could it? Not according to Porky Pig, who shouted: “A rat! A rat! You can’t get away with that!” Well, Apple has reaped its own billions through telephone technology, but the Department of Justice says it has achieved and maintained its dominance by a dis-compatability with competitive models, And in a reversal of self, the EPA now says that some gas-powered cars can go green as Big Science improves fuel efficiency (and also helps drivers save on gas). The truth: electric cars still remain expensive and it will be many more years before there are enough charging stations to serve them.
Friday, March 22, 2024 Dow: 39,476.90	What goes up... must come down (“Blood, Sweat and Tears” advised) – the spinning wheel goes round and around and, for the Dow, spun back down five hundred points after almost crashing 40,000. But the blood was in Moscow where ISIS-K terrorists shot up a concert hall killing fifty, as first reported, then a hundred, wounding hundreds more. Russia was just celebrating 150 missile strikes on Ukraine, their biggest ever, and then... this! The sweat was pouring off Hot Congresspersons late, late into the night but they finally wiped their foreheads and passed a $1.2T budget bill, then passed by the Senate and signed by President Joe. The tears were for Princess Kate, who revealed that she had cancer and was undergoing chemo, like her father in law, the King. Well wishers clamoured to be noticed... President Joe, PM Sunak, even Harry and Meghan.
Saturday, March 23, 2024 Dow: Closed	Angered that Speaker Mike Johnson had had to collude with that other party in order to get the budget bill passed, hard-right Republicans, led by the inevitable Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga), pulled the pin on Speaker Mike and voted to “vacate” him (just as Congress wheels into yet another two week vacation) not long after the 22 days of chaos and dysfunction as accompanied the ejecting of Speaker K-Mac. “He’s a good man,” MTG told the hungry media, “but he’s a Democrat.” The death toll in Moscow kept rising... a hundred, then a hundred fifteen. Despite the long history of Afghan ISIS hate for Russians, as for all Christians, Savvy Vlad blamed Ukraine, hoping to shore up support for his war. Also intransigent... Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu, who kicked Biden’s much-abused flunky Antony Blinken out of his office, promising that he would invade Rafah and kill everybody no matter what the U.S., the U.K., the U.N, you or anyone says.
Sunday, March 24, 2024 Dow: Closed	As the Crocus massacre death toll rose and rose and rose, four suspects from Tajikistan who admitted to doing the deed for the Afghan ISIS-K were captured... Putin saying that they were trying to seek sanctuary in Ukraine as Israel was contending that they had terminated eight hundred Hamas fighters in their invasion of the Al Shifa hospital. On the Sunday talkshows, Jonathan Karl (ABC) related some of the ISIS-K history, including attacks on Russia, America, even Iran. As speculation grew that Donald Trump might have to beg Vladimir Putin for money to throw his bail, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fl) said it was a shame that he was being persecuted, while Melissa Murray spoke on the dispute between Djonald and his lawyers over how much money he really had. “Is there any way that Trump can get out of this?” Karl asked. And there was... a New York appellate court knocked the levy down to a manageable $150M which Trump paid just as President Joe was affixing his signature to the latest last-minute budget bill. Over on CBS Sunday, rejected Speaker K-Mac said he believed that MTG’s new attempt to purge Speaker Johnson from the party, the podim and pulpit would fail. And talking head Fareed Zakaria lamented that “it’s not easy to be an optimist these days.”
Both the Dow and the Don stopped their month long slide, but the gains went to the haves, not the have-nots as stock prices rose after the government settled its debt crisis and prevented reopening and real estate prices and sales both soared (good for owners, bad for wannabees and renters). Have-somes did better if they owned their homes or had retirement savings accounts. Foreigners did especially worse as the wars kept slaughtering Arabs, Israelis, Haitians and Ukrainians while a sort of bad karma fingered Moscow concert goers but probably to the benefit of Bad Vlad, who cynically blamed Ukraine for the ISIS terror in a ploy to escalate his rampages while China just sat back and smiled.

THE DON JONES INDEX

CHART of CATEGORIES w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000

(REFLECTING… approximately… DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013)

Negative/harmful indices in RED. See a further explanation of categories here…

ECONOMIC INDICES		(60%)
CATEGORY	VALUE	BASE	RESULTS by PCTG.			SCORE		OUR SOURCES and COMMENTS
INCOME	(24%)	6/17/13 [revsd. 1/1/22	LAST	CHANGE	NEXT	LAST WEEK	THIS WEEK	RESULTS by STATISTIC.
Wages (hrly. Per cap)	9%	1350 points	3/18/24	+0.17%	4/24	1,497.86	1,497.86	https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wages 29.71
Median Inc. (yearly)	4%	600	3/18/24	+0.028%	4/1/24	668.84	669.03	http://www.usdebtclock.org/   39,438
Unempl. (BLS – in mi)	4%	600	3/18/24	-5.13%	4/24	584.92	584.92	http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000/  3.9
Official (DC – in mi)	2%	300	3/18/24	+1.65%	4/1/24	243.74	239.71	http://www.usdebtclock.org/      6,659
Unofficl. (DC – in mi)	2%	300	3/18/24	+0.13%	4/1/24	246.76	246.45	http://www.usdebtclock.org/     13,432
Workforce Participation Number Percent	2%	300	3/18/24	+0.008% -0.013%	4/1/24	301.45	301.41	In 161,238 Out 100,461 Total: 261,699 http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 61.62
WP % (ycharts)*	1%	150	3/18/24	-0.48%	4/24	150.95	150.95	https://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate 62.50
OUTGO	(15%)
Total Inflation	7%	1050	3/24	+0.4%	4/24	966.34	966.34	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.4
Food	2%	300	3/24	nc	4/24	274.07	274.07	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.0
Gasoline	2%	300	3/24	+3.8%	4/24	237.18	237.18	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm    +3.8
Medical Costs	2%	300	3/24	-0.1%	4/24	292.24	292.24	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     -0.1
Shelter	2%	300	3/24	+0.4%	4/24	265.78	265.78	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.4
WEALTH
Dow Jones Index	2%	300	3/18/24	+1.97%	4/1/24	324.05	330.43	https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/index/ 39,476.90
Home (Sales) (Valuation)	1% 1%	150 150	3/18/24	+9.50% +1.42%	3/24	129.80 273.38	142.13 277.27	https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics Sales (M):  4.38 Valuations (K):  384.5
Debt (Personal)	2%	300	3/18/24	+0.05%	4/1/24	267.66	267.53	http://www.usdebtclock.org/    75,697
GOVERNMENT	(10%)
Revenue (trilns.)	2%	300	3/18/24	+0.23%	4/1/24	398.46	399.40	debtclock.org/       4,698
Expenditures (tr.)	2%	300	3/18/24	-0.25%	4/1/24	318.85	319.66	debtclock.org/       6,475.90
National Debt tr.)	3%	450	3/18/24	+0.22%	4/1/24	389.64	388.77	http://www.usdebtclock.org/    34,599
Aggregate Debt (tr.)	3%	450	3/18/24	+0.054%	4/1/24	406.07	405.38	http://www.usdebtclock.org/    97,952
TRADE	(5%)
Foreign Debt (tr.)	2%	300	3/18/24	+0.02%	4/1/24	299.77	299.71	http://www.usdebtclock.org/    8,236
Exports (in billions)	1%	150	3/18/24	+0.39%	4/24	159.74	159.74	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 257.2
Imports (in billions))	1%	150	3/18/24	-1.29%	4/24	168.76	168.76	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 324.6
Trade Surplus/Deficit (blns.)	1%	150	3/18/24	+7.72%	4/24	311.84	311.84	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 67.4
SOCIAL INDICES		(40%)
ACTS of MAN	(12%)							1841
World Affairs	3%	450	3/18/24	-0.2%	4/1/24	449.37	448.47	U.K. tabloid trolls greet Kate’s cancer diagnosis with conspiracy theories and an abundance of “noise”. Israel tells diplomat Blinken to go to... back to America. Niger’s coup leaders tell America... same.
War and terrorism	2%	300	3/18/24	-0.8%	4/1/24	290.14	287.82	ISIS-K shoots up a Russian rock concert, killing over a hundred/ Putin blames and bombs Ukraine. American tourists and expats fleeing Hairi as the government falls and gangs battle for power. Boston Marathon bomber seeks a new trial claiming the jury was biased (against bombers).
Politics	3%	450	3/18/24	+0.1%	4/1/24	474.30	474.77	Donald Trump’s bail bankruptcy averted by mystery money; he has $500M which, less the 483M bail, leaves him with 16 million – about the wealth of a used car dealer in Detroit. NY appeals court then cuts his bail by 70%. Rich again! CVS starts selling abortion pills enraging God’s Army and state legislators. The matter will be taken up by SCOTUS. And George Santos quits the Republican party to seek re-election as an Independent. So will Bob Menendez.
Economics	3%	450	3/18/24	+0.3%	4/1/24	441.50	442.82	Fed decision to keep interest rates steady and then lower them in June sparks a brief Dow rally. RIP Joanne Fabrics as more small chains teeter on the brink. “No Coke, Pepsi!” says Subway Sandwiches; rival Jersey Mike’s will donate all Thursday’s proceeds to charity. Chick Fil-A, meanwhile, will start selling the birds as have been bio-engineered with pro-, anti- and just plain biotics.
Crime	1%	150	3/18/24	-0.2%	4/1/24	237.81	237.33	“Juggers” hang around ATM to rob and kill the suckers. Neo-Nazi “Aryan Knights” prison gangster freed by cohorts who shoot cops and assorted people in Idaho but get captured again as do 14 and 15 year old cop shooting escapees – tracked down by bloodhounds. Parents rat out bank robbers aged 11, 12 and 15, Interpreer for LA Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani arrested for fraud and theft... and then things start getting really weird. Pervy Starbucks employee in San Jose arrested for putting cameras in restroom. L.A. busjacker crashes it into the Ritz Carlton hotel
ACTS of GOD	(6%)
Environment/Weather	3%	450	3/18/24	-0.2%	4/1/24	386.41	385.64	Warm weather causing Washington DC cherry blossoms to bloom earlier, but more cold rain and snow arrives for the weekend – Philadelphia sets a record for the most rain ever on a day in March on Saturday and New England experiences blizzards and 50 MPH winds.
Disasters	3%	450	3/18/24	nc	4/1/24	420.09	420.09	Over a thousand Americans stranded in Haiti as civilians dodge bullets and try to find food. Disaster debaters who’s worst off: Ukraine, Gaza or Haiti. Brakes fail on Boeing jet in Houston after “repairman” mis-connects the electrical and hydraulic cables. So, in time of airplane turbulence, a pilot brings his infant daughter aboard to be admired by passengers.
LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX		(15%)
Science, Tech, Educ.	4%	600	3/18/24	+0.1%	4/1/24	632.75	633.38	Geriatric Internet inventors (Bob Kahn, Vint Cerf and Steve Crocker) meet the press and say: “Now you can invent new things in new ways.” EPA relaxes emission standards and says some gas-powered cars can go green. DoJ accuses Apple of dis-compatability to squelch competitors; the monopolists reply: “This threatens who we are.”
Equality (econ/social)	4%	600	3/18/24	+0.1%	4/1/24	644.26	644.90	“The Color Purple” sweeps NAACP Image Awards. Jasmin Paris becomes the first woman to complete the Barkley Marathons, a footrace that requires participants to navigate 100 miles of rugged Tennessee terrain in no more than 60 hours. Former DNC chair and ABC fixture Donna Brazile defends President Joe’s scheme to use technicalities to disqualify third party candidates... as in Russia. More migrants storm the border as Fed enforces and Texas National Guard face off against each other.
Health	4%	600	3/18/24	+0.1%	4/1/24	467.60	468.07	Princess Kate struggles with cancer of the undisclosed – Richard Simmons admits he has skin cancer. TV docs say Alzheimer’s is up and costs America $60B/year. Trader Joe’s cashews recalled for salmonella. Elon Musk invents neural chip to allow paralyzed people to move things with their minds. Fisher-Price recalls 200,000 Donald Duck figurines whose heads pop off and are swallowed by kids, killing them. Pig kidney transplanted into Boston man.
Freedom and Justice	3%	450	3/18/24	-0.1%	4/1/24	468.21	467.74	Donald Trump on the verge of failing to make bail makes money manifest and his half-bill cash on hand just covers the bill. Flunky Peter Navarro not so lucky – off to jail he does. Fani’s fling puts One Six prosecution in limbo, Mike Cohen and Stormy await prosecutors sorting through 30,000 pix – some sexy, some not. Six “Goon Squad” cops convicted of torturing black people in... who knew?... Mississippi.
CULTURAL and MISCELLANEOUS INCIDENTS			(6%)
Cultural Incidents	3%	450	3/18/24	+0.1%	4/1/24	522.09	522.51	March Madness brings the NBA and NCAA championships (women’s too) and an avalanche of upsets on the way to the Sweet Sixteen - as well as opening of MLB season in... Korea? And movie sequels slide into the sceye... Ghostbusters 2, Godzilla, Popeye and a prequel Star Wars (Negative one) while the Grammys Hall of Fame inducts ten and Dr. Dre gets his gold star on Hollywood Boulevard. RIP: Centenarian Shigeichi Negish who invented karaoke, actor M. Emmett Walsh (Blade Runner), Commander of the Apollo Ten moon landing Thomas Stafford,
Misc. Incidents	3%	450	3/18/24	+0.1%	4/1/24	508.49	509.00	Powerball and MegaMillions lottery jackpots climb to a billion. Spring breakers, Miami cops and TSA officials prepare for annual debauch. Congress awards Medal of Honor to three of seven surviving Ghost Army WW2 saboteurs. Goat in Minnesota catches bird flu. Kids hunting crawdads find paleolithic sloth bone.

The Don Jones Index for the week of March 18th through March 24th, 2024 was UP 18.13 points

The Don Jones Index is sponsored by the Coalition for a New Consensus: retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian Doohan, Administrator. The CNC denies, emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers (including former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works, “Entropy and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best, mere pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders.

Comments, complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com.

ATTACHMENT ONE – FROM THE HILL

PUTIN LOST THE ELECTION

BY ALEXANDER J. MOTYL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 03/21/24 6:00 PM ET

Vladimir Putin officially won 88 percent of the vote in Russia’s presidential elections on March 17, but his victory is both a symptom of weakness and a harbinger of defeat. Think of him as modern Russia’s equivalent of the premodern Greek king Pyrrhus, who suffered unacceptably high casualties while almost toppling Rome in the third century BC. Like his ancient predecessor, Russia’s ruler has actually snatched defeat from the jaws of a seemingly resounding victory and will soon come to rue his decision to falsify the electoral results so immodestly.

Winning with a mere 70 percent would have done the trick, but Putin evidently decided that he needed the equivalent of an overwhelming mandate to continue ruling. Why go for broke and claim a win that is reminiscent of Soviet elections, where the sole candidate always won 99.99 percent? Strong, self-confident and genuinely beloved leaders don’t have to falsify so outrageously. They can just let the people show their love in a fair and free election. Weak, self-doubting, and genuinely unloved leaders, in contrast, need to feign popularity and legitimacy, because they know — and the people know — that they’d lose a free vote.

It’s therefore a mistake to conclude that Putin’s super-strong electoral showing enhances his power. That would be true if the vote were genuine. But since Putin and his minions fudged the numbers, it’s obvious that they did so to create the illusion of unadulterated mass popularity.

In fact, Putin is anything but the strongman his image proclaims he is. He is indecisive when he needs to be decisive and decisive when he needs to be indecisive. He is prone to enormous blunders — the greatest being invading Ukraine and thereby losing it and strengthening NATO. His throne has been under assault — by Yevgeny Prigozhin, Alexei Navalny and Boris Nadezhdin, as well as by Russian elites skeptical of his ability to guide the ship of state in such stormy weather.

Despite his bluster, Putin has to know that he’s not the master of the universe he once claimed to be. Unless he’s completely out of touch with reality (which is possible), he knows that he’s set his country on a path to perdition. The war in Ukraine cannot end in victory, because, even if Ukraine loses on the battlefield, Russia will have lost up to a million soldiers; its army and economy will have been shattered; and its occupation of Ukraine will be long-lasting, costly and ultimately ineffective. Ukraine has become a lose-lose case for him.

Putin must also know that his popularity is nowhere near 88 percent, if only because he felt obligated to reach for the stars instead of settling for the real number. Two Russian analysts say that, according to their Kremlin sources, Putin actually garnered about 39 percent of the vote, while his antiwar challenger, the unknown Vladislav Davankov, got about 27. Despite their unverifiability, the numbers accord with the guesstimates of pro-Putin sentiment that many respectable opposition Russian analysts make.

Naturally, Putin will claim that he now has the mandate to intensify the war effort. Many more Russians will be forced to give up their lives in exchange for marginal gains of Ukrainian territory. Putin desperately needs a breakthrough of some kind: the collapse of Ukrainian defensive lines, the capture of some still intact city or the assassination of a leading Ukrainian. Moreover, that breakthrough must happen soon, so as to permit him to argue that it’s the direct result of his election victory.

But Ukrainian lines are likely to hold, capturing a small town will be nothing to crow about and assassination is difficult and could easily backfire, increasing Western support of Ukraine. All Ukraine needs to do is hold out in 2024 and then resume its offensive in 2025. That would be disastrous for Putin.

The economy is no less of a mess, despite some Western claims to the contrary. Russian opposition economists, such as Vladimir Milov, Igor Lipsits and Mikhail Krutikhin, convincingly argue that, first, Russian statistical data cannot be trusted; second, even when used, the data shows selective growth in military-related sectors, and not overall growth of the consumer economy; third, that Russia has already incurred a huge budget deficit and will be hard-pressed to meet its war-related obligations without raising taxes and squeezing the middle class; and fourth, that Ukraine’s destruction of Russian oil refineries will have a variety of negative effects, ranging from gas shortages to higher inflation.

In any case, even if one rejects these Russians’ analysis, it’s clear that Putin will have to perform some magic to get the economy moving again. Like Leonid Brezhnev, who was mired in “old thinking” and came to be associated with what Mikhail Gorbachev called the “era of stagnation,” Putin is the last man in the Kremlin to produce fresh ideas for reforming Russia’s economy. As with the USSR, the primary obstacle to reform is the regime: Brezhnev had to go for the Soviet Union to experience perestroika, and Putin will have to go for the same to happen in Russia.

Putin would have been far better off retiring to his bunkers and leaving the Russian mess to someone else. Instead, he decided to opt for a Pyrrhic electoral victory and join Comrade Brezhnev on the “ash heap of history.”

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”

ATTACHMENT TWO – FROM AP NEWS

FROM NUCLEAR RISK TO HELPING YOUNG FAMILIES: THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT PUTIN’S STATE-OF-THE-NATION SPEECH

BY VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV

Updated 11:17 AM EDT, February 29, 2024

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday delivered a blunt message to the West, warning that it risks provoking a global nuclear war if it expands its involvement in the fighting in Ukraine.

At the same time, Putin focused his 2-hour state-of-the-nation address on a wide range of economic and social issues, vowing to boost the national economy, revamp education and healthcare and support young families ahead of the March 15-17 vote in which he is all but certain to win another six-year term.

Here is a look at things to know about Putin’s speech.

What did Putin say about the threat of a nuclear war?

In an apparent reference to French President Emmanuel Macron’s statement that the future deployment of Western ground troops to Ukraine should not be “ruled out,” Putin warned that such a move would lead to “tragic” consequences for the countries who risk doing so. (And then Manny veered off into his own delusional believing that he could box the Soviet... presumably to the death...and, like a Shakespearean monarch, conquer and claim his rule and his glory.)

Putin said that while “selecting targets for striking our territory” and “talking about the possibility of sending a NATO contingent to Ukraine” the West should keep in mind that “we also have the weapons that can strike targets on their territory, and what they are now suggesting and scaring the world with, all that raises the real threat of a nuclear conflict that will mean the destruction of our civilization.”

What was Putin’s response to the U.S. warning about evolving Russian space weapons?

Putin rejected the U.S. allegations that Russia has pondered the deployment of space-based weapons as a false claim. He said it was intended to draw Russia into talks on nuclear arms control on American terms even as Washington continues its efforts to deliver a “strategic defeat” to Moscow in Ukraine.

“Ahead of the U.S. election, they just want to show their citizens, as well as others, that they continue to rule the world. It won’t work,” Putin said.

What did Putin say about the fighting in Ukraine?

Putin vowed to fulfill Moscow’s goals in Ukraine, and do whatever it takes to “defend our sovereignty and security of our citizens.” He claimed the Russian military has “gained a huge combat experience” and is “firmly holding the initiative and waging offensives in a number of sectors.”

“The fulfillment of all our plans directly depends on our soldiers, our officers and volunteers = all servicemen who are fighting on the front now, from the courage and resolve of our comrades-in-arms who are defending the motherland,” he said.

How did Putin describe the role of the Global South?

Putin alleged that the influence of the U.S. and its allies was waning while the developing countries of the Global South are quickly gaining political and economic weight. He argued that the West has eroded its own economic power by using its currencies and financial system to strike Russia with sanctions.

He declared that the BRICS alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa is poised to account for 37% of the global economic output in 2028 while the of the Group of Seven richest countries will drop to 28%. Fact check

“Together with friendly countries we will continue to create efficient and safe logistical corridors and use a new technological basis to build a new global financial architecture that will be free of political interference,” he said. “Even more so as the West has discredited its own currencies and its banking system, undermining the very foundation it has relied upon for decades.”

What did Putin say on domestic issues?

Putin said that the eradication of poverty remains a top task for his government, acknowledging that 13.5 million of Russia’s population of 144 million currently live below the poverty line. He said that the of the poor should be reduced to less than 7% by 2030.

He said that the country will extend cheap mortgages to help young families, particularly those with children, and promised to pour more government funds into health care, education, science, culture and sports.

Putin also pledged to create more incentives for small businesses and reduce the state pressure on the private sector.

“We are one big family, we are together and we will do everything we plan and want to do,” he said.

What is Putin’s vision of Russia’s new elite?

Putin hailed Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine and said that military veterans should form the backbone of the country’s new elite, inviting them to join a new federal program for training future leaders.

“When I look at these brave people, some of them very young, my heart is filled with pride for our people,” Putin said. “They should take the leading positions in the education system, public organizations, state companies, business, state and municipal governing structures, lead the regions, enterprises and the biggest national projects.”

ATTACHMENT THREE – FROM THE MOSCOW TIMES

PUTIN SENDS MESSAGE OF DEFIANCE TO WEST IN STATE OF NATION ADDRESS

Updated: Feb. 29, 2024

President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual State of the Nation address on Thursday, using the speech to send a message of defiance to the West, which he accused of instigating the war in Ukraine, but also to highlight state social support programs and the Russian economy's resilience against Western sanctions.

“The West miscalculated and ran into the firm position and determination of our multinational people,” Putin told an audience of government officials, members of parliament and civil society figures who gathered at Moscow's Gostiny Dvor. 

“Russia won’t let anyone interfere in its internal affairs,” he added.

While constitutionally mandated, the State of the Nation address — which comes days after the second anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and weeks before Putin seeks re-election next month — was as much of a pitch for Putin's leadership as it was a formality.

Putin accused the West of forcing Russia into an arms race and said Moscow’s “strategic nuclear forces are in a state of full readiness for use,” though he warned that a global nuclear conflict would “destroy civilization.”   

“They [in the West] should finally understand — and I just told them — that we too have weapons that can destroy targets on their territories,” he said.

“We remember the fate of those who sent their contingents to the territory of our country,” Putin continued, alluding to Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union. “Now the consequences for the potential interventionists will be much more tragic.”

Moving to domestic policies, Putin announced a slew of new national projects, including those providing state financial support to Russian families and youth as well as job skills training in the high-tech sector.

He also boasted that Russia’s economy grew at a rate higher than the global average in 2023, outpacing that of the United States and other G7 countries despite facing a wide array of sanctions and being cut off from Western markets. 

Similarly, Putin used his State of the Nation address to set out Russia’s production goals for 2030, calling on domestic manufacturers to ramp up production of high-tech goods by 150%. Among other priority areas for boosting domestic manufacturing, he listed consumer products, medicine and automobiles.

Putin urged companies to keep their assets in the country by promising “minimal” and “risk-oriented” business inspections starting in 2025, while also calling for an amnesty for small businesses accused of tax evasion.

“Russian businesses should not move their funds abroad where one can lose everything.”

He then went on to list several other state support programs for everything from satellites that provide high-speed internet to artificial intelligence and big data startups, stressing that the government was taking all the necessary steps to develop critical technologies at home amid Russia's isolation from Western markets.

But by the end of his address, Putin made clear that he sees Russia's military victory over Ukraine as the true measure of the country's success and the key to its future. 

“Fulfilling all of these plans directly depends on the servicemen who are currently fighting at the front, on the courage and determination of our comrades who sacrifice themselves for us, for the sake of the Motherland,” the Russian leader said.

“I believe in our victories and success and in the future of Russia.”

ATTACHMENT FOUR – FROM FOX NEWS 4

ON RUSSIAN TV AHEAD OF THE ELECTION, THERE’S ONLY ONE PROGRAM: PUTIN’S

by: EMMA BURROWS, Associated Press Posted: Mar 11, 2024 / 12:06 AM CDT Updated: Mar 11, 2024 / 12:06 AM CDT

LONDON (AP) — Thousands of Russians braved the cold for hours earlier this month to honor the opposition politician Alexei Navalny after his funeral. They chanted anti-war slogans and covered his gravesite with so many flowers that it disappeared from view.

It was one of the largest displays of defiance against President Vladimir Putin since he invaded Ukraine, and happened just weeks before an election he is all but assured to win. But Russians watching television saw none of it.

A leading state television channel opened with its host railing against the West and NATO. Another channel led with a segment extolling the virtues of domestically built streetcars. And there was the usual deferential coverage of Putin.

Since coming to power almost 25 years ago, Putin has eliminated nearly all independent media and opposition voices in Russia — a process he ramped up after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin’s control over media is now absolute.

State television channels cheer every battlefield victory, twist the pain of economic sanctions into positive stories, and ignore that tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine.

Some Russians seek news from abroad or on social media using tools to circumvent state restrictions. But most still rely on state television, which floods them with the Kremlin’s view of the world. Over time, the effect is to whittle away their desire to question it.

“Propaganda is a kind of drug and I don’t mind taking it,” said Victoria, 50, from Russian-occupied Crimea. She refused to give her last name because of concerns about her safety.

“If I get up in the morning and hear that things are going badly in our country, how will I feel? How will millions of people feel? … Propaganda is needed to sustain people’s spirit,” she said.

PUTIN’S BROKEN PROMISES

When Putin first addressed Russians as their new president on the last day of 1999, he promised a bright path after the chaotic years that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse.

“The state will stand firm to protect freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of mass media,” he said.

Yet just over a year later, he broke that promise: The Kremlin neutered its main media critic, the independent TV channel NTV, and went after the media tycoons who controlled it.

In the following decades, multiple Russian journalists, including investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, were killed or jailed, and the Russian parliament passed laws curbing press freedoms.

The crackdown intensified two years ago after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

New laws made it a crime to discredit the Russian military, and anyone spreading “false information” about the war faced up to 15 years in prison. Almost overnight, nearly all independent media outlets suspended operations or left the country. The Kremlin blocked access to independent media and some social media sites, and Russian courts jailed two journalists with U.S. citizenship, Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva.

“The Putin regime is based on propaganda and fear. And propaganda plays the most important role because people live in an information bubble,” said Marina Ovsyannikova, a former state television journalist who quit her job at a leading Russian state television channel in an on-air protest against the war.

THE KREMLIN MEDIA DIET

The Kremlin regularly meets with the heads of TV stations to give “special instructions on what can be said on air,” said Ovsyannikova.

Every day, TV stations serve up a mix of bluster, threats and half-truths — telling viewers the West wants to destroy their country, that sanctions make them stronger and that Russia is winning the war.

The Kremlin’s goal is to squeeze out any opposition so that citizens “remain inert and compliant,” said Sam Greene, a director at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington.

The strength of the Kremlin’s grip on the media means that while Navalny’s death in an Arctic penal colony was major news in the West, many Russians didn’t know about it.

One out of five Russians said they had not heard about his death, according to the independent Russian pollster Levada Center. Half said they only had vague knowledge of it.

The most memorable event for Russians in February, the polling found, was the Russian military’s capture of the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka.

By trumpeting military victories, the Kremlin is focused on creating a “happy feeling,” ahead of the elections, said Jade McGlynn, an expert on Russian propaganda at King’s College London.

Anti-war candidates are banned from the ballot, and there is no significant challenger to Putin. State television broadcasts dull debates between representatives of Putin’s opponents.

Putin is not openly campaigning but is frequently shown touring the country — admiring remote tomato farms or visiting weapons factories.

The idea that Russia is thriving under Putin is a potent message for people who have seen their living standards fall since the war — and sanctions — began, driving up prices for food and other staples.

The war has also pushed Russia’s defense industry into overdrive, and people like Victoria from Crimea have noticed.

“If they tell me that new jobs have appeared, should I be happy or sad? Is this propaganda or truth?” she asked.

GRANULES OF TRUTH

Russian propaganda is “sophisticated and multifaceted,” said Francis Scarr, a journalist who analyzes Russian television for BBC Monitoring.

There is some “outright lying,” he said, but often Russian state media “takes a granule of truth and massively over-amplifies it.”

For example, while unemployment in Russia is at a record low, news reports don’t explain it’s partly because tens of thousands of Russians have been sent to fight in Ukraine or have fled the country.

Many Russians know this, yet the idea that Russia is prospering – even if it contradicts what they see with their own eyes – is still attractive.

“The greatness of Russia tends to be measured throughout history in the greatness of the state and not in the greatness of the quality of life for its people,” said McGlynn of King’s College London.

Ahead of the election, state TV is ramping up that nationalistic theme, telling viewers it is their patriotic duty to vote. The Kremlin, experts say, is worried Russians may not come out in large numbers.

Videos released on social media – but not directly linked to the Kremlin – are aimed at combating apathy, especially among younger voters.

In one, a woman berates her husband for not voting. “What difference does it make? Will he not get elected without us,” the husband asks, indirectly referring to Putin. To which his wife warns him: inaction could leave their child without maternity payments.

The Kremlin wants high voter turnout, experts say, to lend an aura of legitimacy to Putin, whose reelection would keep him in power through at least 2030.

INDEPENDENT RUSSIAN MEDIA

People can bypass government restrictions by using special links to foreign websites or accessing the Internet over private networks.

But it’s questionable whether many Russians — especially those living in Putin’s conservative heartland — even want to hear news conveyed in the language of the liberal West.

To “break through to the people who are not putting flowers on Navalny’s grave, they’re going to have to meet those viewers where they are and speak to them in a language that they understand,” said Greene. That means striking a balance between criticism of Putin’s regime and pride in the nation.

Even those soothed by the Kremlin’s propaganda also could long for a real choice at the polls.

“I don’t see any opposition in modern Russia,” said Victoria, pointing out that the candidates running alongside Putin all have the Kremlin’s approval.

“I don’t plan to vote in the elections,” she added.

ATTACHMENT FIVE – FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

VLADIMIR PUTIN SAYS RUSSIA IS READY TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS IF THREATENED

BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS UPDATED: MARCH 13, 2024 5:00 AM EDT | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: MARCH 13, 2024 3:00 AM EDT

President Vladimir Putin said that Russia is ready to use nuclear weapons if there is a threat to its statehood, sovereignty or independence, voicing hope that the U.S. would refrain from actions that could trigger a nuclear conflict.

Putin’s statement was another blunt warning to the West ahead of a presidential vote this week in which he’s all but certain to win another six-year term.

In an interview with Russian state television released early Wednesday, Putin described U.S. President Joe Biden as a veteran politician who fully understands possible dangers of escalation, and said that he doesn’t think that the world is heading to a nuclear war.

At the same time, he emphasized that Russia’s nuclear forces are in full readiness and “from the military-technical viewpoint, we’re prepared.”

Putin said that in line with the country’s security doctrine, Moscow is ready to use nuclear weapons in case of a threat to “the existence of the Russian state, our sovereignty and independence.”

The Russian leader has repeatedly talked about his readiness to use nuclear weapons since launching the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The most recent such threat came in his state-of-the-nation address last month, when he warned the West that deepening its involvement in the fighting in Ukraine would risk a nuclear war.

Asked in the interview if he has ever considered using battlefield nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Putin responded that there has been no need for that.

He also voiced confidence that Moscow will achieve its goals in Ukraine and issued a blunt warning to Western allies, declaring that “the nations that say they have no red lines regarding Russia should realize that Russia won’t have any red lines regarding them either.”

He held the door open for talks, but emphasized that Russia will hold onto its gains and would seek firm guarantees from the West.

“It shouldn’t be a break for the enemy to rearm but a serious talk involving the guarantees of security for the Russian Federation,” he said.

Putin said that a recent spike in Ukrainian drone attacks deep inside Russia is part of efforts to derail the country’s three-day presidential election, which starts Friday and which he is set to win by a landslide, relying on the tight control over Russia’s political scene he has established during his 24-year rule.

Russian authorities reported another major attack by Ukrainian drones early Wednesday. The Defense Ministry said air defenses downed 58 drones over six regions. One of the drones hit an oil refinery in the Ryazan region, injuring at least two people and sparking a fire. Another drone was downed as it was approaching a refinery near St. Petersburg.

Ukraine, meanwhile, reported more Russian attacks early Wednesday.

A Russian strike killed two people and injured another five in the town of Myrnohrad in the eastern region of Donetsk, about 30 kilometers (about 20 miles) from the front line, according to Gov. Vadym Filashkin. Local rescuers managed to pull a 13-year-old girl out of the rubble of an apartment building that was hit by a Russian missile.

A five-story building in the northern city of Sumy was struck by a drone launched from Russia overnight and 10 people were rescued from the rubble, including eight who sustained injuries, according to the regional administration.

In President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, the death toll from a Russian missile attack the previous night rose to four, said Gov. Serhii Lysak. He said that 43 people were wounded in of Kryvyi Rih, including 12 children, the youngest of them two and eleven-month-old.

“Every day our cities and villages suffer similar attacks. Every day Ukraine loses people because of Russian evil,” Zelensky said.

ATTACHMENT SIX – FROM GUK

THIS ‘ELECTION’ WON’T KICKSTART ANY CHANGE IN RUSSIA – BUT A DEFEAT FOR PUTIN IN UKRAINE CAN

The countless individual tributes to Alexei Navalny show there is another Russia, and it’s one the west must support

By Timothy Garton Ash Thu 14 Mar 2024 03.00 EDT

By next Monday, Vladimir Putin will have been “re-elected” president of Russia. In truth, Russian voters have no genuine choice this weekend, since Putin has killed his most formidable opponent, Alexei Navalny, and ordered the disqualification of any other candidate who presented even a small chance of genuine competition. This plebiscitary legitimating procedure – quite familiar from the history of other dictatorships – will also be implemented in some parts of eastern Ukraine, which Russian official sources describe as the New Territories. Large percentages for turnout and the vote for Putin must be expected, and will be no more accurate than his historical essays on Russo-Ukrainian relations.

Encouraged by signs of western weakness such as the refusal of the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine and Pope Francis’s recommendation for Ukraine to hoist the white flag, Russia’s brutal dictator will continue to try to conquer more of Ukraine. Not only does Putin believe that Ukraine belongs historically to a Russia whose manifest destiny it is to be a great, imperial power. Unlike western governments, his regime is both politically and economically committed to continue this war, with as much as 40% of its budget devoted to military, intelligence, disinformation and internal security spending, and a war economy that can’t easily be switched back to peacetime mode.

Yet these past few weeks have shown us that there’s still an Other Russia, as there was an Other Germany even at the height of Adolf Hitler’s power in the Third Reich. Tens of thousands of Russians of all ages and classes took the risk of subsequent reprisals in order to pay tribute to Navalny, producing that unforgettable image of his grave covered in a sheer mountain of flowers. At his funeral, they chanted “Navalny! Navalny!”, “Stop the war!” and “Ukrainians are good people!”

Other brave campaigners for a better Russia, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza and Oleg Orlov, are in prison, and we must fear for their lives. Outside the country, Yulia Navalnaya carries on her husband’s fight with extraordinary courage and dignity, also making it plain that she condemns Putin’s war in Ukraine. Giving a fine example of the more “innovative” politics she recently advocated to the European parliament, she has called for Navalny supporters to turn out at polling stations this Sunday at high noon, to create a visible image of the Other Russia without directly endangering any individual citizen. Some have said they will write the word “Navalny” on their ballot papers. Meanwhile, many hundreds of thousands of Russians who loathe the Putin regime, and passionately want Russia to belong to Europe and the west, have resettled abroad.

It’s impossible to gauge how much support this Other Russia really has inside the country. An estimated 20,000 protesters have been arrested since the beginning of the full-scale invasion just over two years ago. Increased repression produces increased fear – including the fear of saying what you really think to pollsters, journalists or diplomats. On top of this comes the psychological difficulty of accepting that your country, which sees itself as the historic victim of invaders from Napoleon to Hitler, is itself a criminal aggressor against its nearest neighbour. And, as many other nations can testify, the loss of an empire is always difficult to accept.

An experienced observer who still lives in Russia tells me he reckons about 20% of the population actively support Putin, 20% actively oppose him, and 60% passively accept things as they are – without enthusiasm, but also without a belief that change can come from below. That can only be a guess. Of one thing alone we can be certain: if the Other Russia finally triumphs, the number of those who all along supported it will multiply like relics of the true cross, as retrospective members of the resistance did in France and Germany after 1945.

Whatever happens this weekend, it would clearly be naive to expect regime change, or even major policy change, in the Kremlin anytime soon. “Political risk” consultants may earn fat corporate fees for making predictions about Russian domestic politics. In truth, the only statement you can confidently make about Russia’s future is that no one knows when or how political change will come, and whether that change will be for the worse or for the better – or, most likely, first one and then the other.

How, in these circumstances, to craft a Russia policy? A brilliant observer of Russian affairs has commented that before 2022 the west had a Russia policy but no Ukraine policy, whereas now it has a Ukraine policy but no Russia policy. I would argue that our Ukraine policy is our Russia policy – and the only effective one available at the moment. That’s also because Putin’s Ukraine policy is his Russia policy.

Former Russian president and leading Putin-amplifier Dmitry Medvedev recently stood in front of a giant map, on which all of Ukraine except a tiny rump around Kyiv was shown as Russia, and declared: “Ukraine is definitely Russia.” Notice the ultimate colonial grammar: not Ukraine “belongs with” Russia, but Ukraine is Russia. Compare: Ireland is Britain (1916), Poland is Germany (1939), Algeria is France (1954). A Russia that incorporates Ukraine remains an empire. A Russia without Ukraine must start down the long painful road travelled by other former colonial powers, from empire to something like a more “normal” nation state.

That process usually takes decades, accompanied by instability and conflict. More immediately, however, a victory for Ukraine – which, despite recent siren calls to the contrary, necessarily requires Ukraine to recover most of its territory over the next few years – would be a major defeat for Putin. That defeat would be more likely to catalyse political change in Russia than any alternative scenario.

In the short run, this will bring an increased risk of an escalatory response from Putin, and instability in his wake. For that reason, a realistic Russia policy must include keeping open all possible lines of information-gathering about and communication with Russia; detailed contingency planning for every eventuality, from worst to best; and clear messaging to the Kremlin about the cost of further Russian escalation. The west should also do more to support the Other Russia wherever it can, which at the moment means mainly outside Russia and through virtual channels.

We are at the beginning of a new period of European history and what we do this year will have consequences for decades to come. Enabling Ukraine to win this war is not just the only way to secure a democratic, peaceful future for Ukraine itself. It’s also the best thing we can do to improve the long-term chances for a better Russia.

· Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. The author’s Homelands: A Personal History of Europe is out in paperback with an updated chapter on the war in Ukraine

ATTACHMENT SEVEN – FROM NEWSWEEK

PUTIN'S CHANCES OF WINNING RUSSIAN ELECTION, ACCORDING TO POLLS

Published Mar 13, 2024 at 4:00 AM EDT Updated Mar 13, 2024 at 5:16 AM EDT

Putin is assured of retaining power in Russia's presidential election, according to state-run polling firms, the latest surveys of which conclude the only question is how big his majority will be.

Nevertheless, the details of the results—notably turnout—could yet provide clues as to the scale of underlying dissent in the increasingly authoritarian country.

Early voting opened on February 26 in the more remote parts of Russia but citizens across 11 time zones go to the polls in earnest between Friday and Sunday when Putin is expected to declare victory and start a fifth term that will last until 2030.

In December, while meeting veterans of the war in Ukraine, Putin made the unsurprising announcement he would stand again in a ballot which his spokesman,   had previously said, would see him 

The prediction of no real competition is turning out to be true, according to state-run surveys. The results are also likely to be skewed by the restriction on freedoms in Russia and a clampdown on dissent, both of which have deepened since the start of the war.

"[T]he numbers he (Putin) gets don't matter because it's not elections in a democracy, it's a special electoral operation in a dictatorship," Aleksei Miniailo, a Russian opposition politician who co-founded Chronicles, a group of sociologists that conducts independent polling, told Newsweek.

A survey of 1,600 adults conducted on March 2 and 3 by the state-run Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) found that 75 percent of respondents would vote for Putin.

The other candidates, who are all pro-Kremlin and from parties that have broadly backed his policies, trail well behind.

These are Vladislav Davankov from the New People Party at 6 percent, Nikolai Kharitonov from the Communist Party at 4 percent and the ultra-nationalist  , from the Liberal  , who got the support of 3 percent of respondents in the poll that had a sampling margin of error of 2.5 percent.

The firm's polling from February also saw three-quarters (75 percent) of respondents back Putin while roughly the same support was given to Davankov (5 percent) Kharitonov and Slutsky (both 4 percent).

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A survey by the Center of Studies of Russia's Political Culture (CIPKR) on January 11 and 12 found Putin had 60 percent support compared with 0.3 percent for Davankov, 4 percent for Kharitinov and 3 percent for Slutsky.

The major difference was that at the time former State Duma Deputy Boris Nadezhdin was a presidential candidate, and he got the backing of 7 percent of respondents in the poll of 1,004 people that had a 6.6 percent margin for error.

Nadezhdin was an ally of murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and entered the race as a candidate for the Civic Initiative party and spoke out on the campaign trail against the war in Ukraine.

But on February 8, Nadezhdin   due to alleged "irregularities" in the signatures of voters supporting his candidacy, according to Russia's Central Election Commission (CEC). Nadezhdin needed to gather 100,000 signatures across at least 40 regions in order to be a candidate.

Kremlin opponents have frequently been prevented from running in elections in Russia on the grounds of supposed technical infringements.

Why Turnout Is Important to Putin

Putin will therefore have an unchallenged run in this weekend's election, although the Kremlin will want a high turnout so it can claim his legitimacy.

"All potential opponents are removed, jailed or even killed. So what we should look at aren't the results of March 17, but what Russians aspire to," Miniailo told Newsweek.

He said  y showed that more than 50 percent of Russians want a political direction "that is totally opposite to Putin's." This included 83 percent of respondents who wanted a focus on home affairs and 58 percent who wanted a truce with Ukraine.

"When asked about preferable alternative candidate, participants of our focus groups described them as a person who is able to solve international issues through diplomacy, not war, and who is dedicated to solving social and economic problems of Russia, especially in the regions," Miniailo added.

Newsweek has contacted the Kremlin for comment.

Putin became president in 2000. The previous terms of the constitution allowed only two four-year terms, so Putin stood aside in 2008 for   to take over while he became prime minister.

Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. Changes to the constitution would first extend the presidential term to six years and then allow him to potentially hold office until 2036. This would see him overtake Joseph Stalin as the longest-serving Russian leader in over 200 years. Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for nearly 30 years before his death in 1953.

ATTACHMENT EIGHT – FROM THE INDEPENDENT UK

RUSSIA ELECTIONS: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SHAM PRESIDENTIAL POLLS THAT WILL HAND PUTIN FIFTH TERM

Over 100 million Russians are set to vote for candidates vetted and approved by the Kremlin, starting from Friday

By Alexander Butler

Millions of Russian citizens have started to head to the polls in a sham election that will confirm Vladimir Putin’s presidency for at least another six years.

The stage-managed vote will also take place in parts of Ukraine now controlled by Russian forces.

But with the election and candidates tightly controlled by the Kremlin, is the Russian election rigged, how does it work and what does it mean for Mr Putin? The Independent has put together all you need to know below.

The election is expected to confirm Russian president Vladimir Putin as president for at least another six years

The election is expected to confirm Russian president Vladimir Putin as president for at least another six years (AP)

When is the election?

The Russian presidential election will be held between 15 March and 17 March. Results will follow shortly afterwards and the winner will be inaugurated in May.

Voting will also take place in what Russia calls its new territories - parts of Ukraine now controlled by Russian forces that have been placed under Russian law.

A remote online voting system will be available for the first time in a Russian presidential election. There are 112.3 million people with the right to vote in the election.

The Russian population is around 143.4 million. Around 70-80 million people usually cast ballots. Turnout in 2018 was 67.5 per cent.

The Russian presidential election will be held between 15 March and 17 March. Pictured: Ballots to be used in 2024

The Russian presidential election will be held between 15 March and 17 March. Pictured: Ballots to be used in 2024 (AFP via Getty Images)

How does the election work?

Russian politics professor Samuel Greene, of King’s College London, explained getting onto the ballot was a complicated process controlled by the Kremlin which sees genuine Putin critics barred.

He told The Independent: “Getting on to the ballot is a complicated process. Parties that have representation in parliament have guaranteed access to the ballot.

“Everybody else has to go through a system of petitions and collecting tens of thousands of signatures that have to be verified.

“The government authorities invariably find problems with the signatures that have been collected by genuine opposition candidates.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin meets with residents following a visit to a greenhouse complex near Moscow ahead of elections this weekend

Russian president Vladimir Putin meets with residents following a visit to a greenhouse complex near Moscow ahead of elections this weekend (AP)

Is the election rigged?

Prof Greene added that all parties are vetted by the Kremlin in an illegal process separate to the Central Election Commission, which checks regular conditions like nationality and criminal records.

“All parties that are able to function in Russia are coordinated by the presidential administration. Candidate lists are vetted by the Kremlin; fundraising is both limited and enabled by the Kremlin,” he said.

He explained Russian candidates are only allowed to campaign within red lines set by Putin and don’t really expect to win the election - which means they won’t say anything too controversial like criticising the war in Ukraine.

“The opposition candidates are being careful not to be any more aggressive than Putin is in his campaigning. They don’t really expect to win,” he said.

All parties in Russia are vetted and approved by the Kremlin, experts say (AP)

Who are the candidates?

There are four candidates that have been vetted by the Kremlin and who are on the ballot for this year’s Russian presidential election.

Vladimir Putin

In charge of all the levers of state, incumbent Vladimir Putin, 71, is expected to easily win a landslide victory and another six-year term.

Already the longest-serving ruler of Russia since Joseph Stalin, will win a fifth and unconstitutional term after polls close on Sunday.

His standing in the election comes as a result of a referendum in 2020 amending Russia’s constitution to reset presidential term limits – having previously opted in 2008 merely to swap places with prime minister Dmitry Medvedev to sidestep the two-term limit.

While that move triggered the largest protests of his rule, the changes ushered in by the referendum in 2020 were largely unopposed, and Putin could theoretically still be in the Kremlin in 2036, notes Independent columnist Mary Dejevsky.

Nikolai Kharitonov

A 75-year-old member of Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, Nikolai Kharitonov is the official candidate of the Communist Party, whose candidates have finished a distant second to Putin at every election since 2000.

Mr Kharitonov, a Siberian, stood previously in 2004 and won 13.8 per cent of the vote to Putin's 71.91 per cent. A state pollster said in February that its research showed that around 4 per cent of Russians were ready to vote for him.

The state Tass news agency has quoted Kharitonov as saying he would not find fault with Mr Putin, because “he is responsible for his own cycle of work, why would I criticise him?”

Mr Kharitonov supports the war in Ukraine, but has previously opposed some of the ruling pro-Putin United Russia party’s domestic policies. He enjoys the backing of Gennady Zyuganov, the 79-year-old veteran Communist Party leader.

Leonid Slutsky

A senior member of the State Duma, Leonid Slutsky, 56, is the leader of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), and has long chaired the parliament’s international affairs committee – voicing support for the Ukraine war and the need to keep food prices down.

A regular anti-Western mouthpiece on Russian state TV, Mr Slutsky took over as the party’s permanent leader after veteran firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky died in 2022. He is seeking to tap into his late predecessor’s popularity by campaigning on the slogan “Zhirinovsky lives on”.

A state pollster said in February that its research also showed that around 4 per cent of Russians were ready to vote for him. In 2018, a group of female journalists accused Mr Slutsky of sexual harassment. A parliamentary commission exonerated him, which his accusers labelled a whitewash.

Vladislav Davankov

New People politician Vladislav Davankov is deputy chair of the State Duma, and has received a state award from Mr Putin in the past.

Aged 40, heis the youngest registered candidate and has said he won’t criticise his political opponents. His main campaign slogans are “Yes to changes!” and “Time for new people!” A state pollster said in February that its research showed that over 5 per cent of Russians were ready to vote for him.

Mr Davankov has tried to position himself as someone opposed to excessive curbs on people’s personal freedom and – in the context of Russian politics – as someone who is more liberal. Without mentioning Ukraine by name, he has said he favours “Peace and talks. But on our terms and with no roll-back”.

What does the election mean for Putin?

Prof Greene explained the elections are designed to give an air of legitimacy to Vladimir Putin and Russia’s political system without alienating the majority of Russians.

“The Kremlin knows there are people in Russia who won’t vote for Putin,” Prof Greene said. “But it would rather people vote for a candidate and party that is controlled by the Kremlin and can be relied on not to cause problems, instead of people becoming disaffected and protesting for broader change.

“They want people to feel like they have a voice in the system and have somebody they can vote for so they lost the election fair and square.”

What have critics said about the Russian ballots?

Critics of the Kremlin have warned that the ballots are unlikely to bear any resemblance to true democracy.

Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg said: “We know already that opposition politicians are in jail, some are killed, and many are in exile, and actually also some who tried to register as candidates have been denied that right,” he said.

And an EU spokesperson said: “We know, given the track record of how votes are being prepared and organised in Russia under the current Kremlin administration and regime, how this will look. It’s very difficult to foresee that this would be a free, fair and democratic election where the Russian people would really have a choice.”

And as Nato warned Russia’s attempts to organise elections in four Ukrainian regions it claims to have annexed would be “competely illegal”, as the Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol – Vadym Boychenko – alleged that at least two “Chechen military men with machine guns” had been seeking to enforce voting there.

A fortnight after the death of Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident community has convened a plan to disturb this rubber-stamping exercise, dubbed “Noon Against Putin”, in which Russian citizens frustrated with the leader’s rule are being called to head to the voting booths all at the same time on the final day in a display of discontent.

The campaign has been dubbed “Navalny’s political testament” by independent media outlet Novaya Gazeta, and has been backed by the opposition leader’s widowed wife Yulia Navalnaya, along with a host of prominent anti-Putin figures, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly Russia’s richest oligarch, and Gary Kasparov, the chess grandmaster turned opposition figure.

ATTACHMENT NINE – FROM FRANCE 24

RUSSIA'S PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: THREE PUTIN CHALLENGERS BUT LITTLE SUSPENSE

President Vladimir Putin faces just three rivals in Russia's March 15-17 presidential election after anti-war candidates were barred from running. But Leonid Slutsky, Nikolai Kharitonov and Vladislav Davankov do not pose much of a challenge for the Russian leader, who is all but guaranteed to secure another six-year term. 

Issued on: 15/03/2024 - 16:21

The first polls in Russia’s March 15-17 presidential election opened in the country’s easternmost Kamchatka Peninsula region at 8am local time Friday, with the vast voting exercise spanning 11 time zones set to finish in the westernmost Kaliningrad enclave at 8pm on Sunday.

The election holds little suspense. Incumbent Vladimir Putin – who has been in power either as president or prime minister for nearly a quarter-century – is set to secure another six-year term. 

But a longtime autocrat requires a veneer of legitimacy, even in Russia. Voters will thus have a choice between the almost guaranteed victor and three pre-approved candidates.   

Ultranationalist   of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), Vladislav Davankov of the relatively liberal New People's Party and veteran candidate Nikolai Kharitonov of the Communist Party are the supporting characters in 2024's electoral choreography. In a possible sign of Russia’s shrinking tolerance for political challenges, that’s four fewer candidates than qualified for the 2018 presidential election. 

Competition and criticism was severely curtailed in the lead-up to the 2024 vote, with authorities blocking a number of opposition hopefuls and critics using a variety of means, including labeling them as “foreign agents”.   

"Between the 'foreign agent’ labels, the fines, imprisonments and the incredible hardening of the regime, the number of candidates is limited. However, they represent real political forces. The nationalist right carries political weight in Russia, as do the Communists, whose score could be in the region of 10 percent,” noted Jean de Gliniasty, former French ambassador to Russia and current senior research fellow at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS).

‘I don’t dream of beating Putin’

But while some of the candidates represent established political parties, they do not pose much of a challenge to Putin, nor have they put up much of a fight on the campaign trail.

Shortly after registering his candidacy in December 2023, Slutsky – the candidate from the ultranationalist LDPR founded by the late right-wing populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky – appeared certain of defeat.

“I don’t dream of beating Putin. What’s the point?” Slutsky told reporters. The 56-year-old Russian politician who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian lower house, the State Duma, then predicted "a huge victory" for Putin.

At 75, Kharitonov is the oldest candidate on the ballot. A veteran Communist Party politician who has been a State Duma deputy since 1993, Kharitonov ran for president in 2004, coming in second to Putin with 13.7 percent of the vote.

This time, Kharitonov ran a low-key campaign, focused on Soviet-era issues, including criticising capitalism, promoting industrial nationalisation and an increase in the Russian birth rate.

Davankov, 39, is the youngest of the opposition candidates. The former businessman-turned-politician promotes greater freedom for businesses and a stronger role for regional authorities. 

The deputy chairman of the State Duma, where his party holds 15 of the 450 seats, Davankov has tried to position himself as a candidate opposed to the Kremlin's excessive curbs on personal freedoms. He favours peace talks with Ukraine, following the Kremlin’s official line, while reiterating that it should be “on our terms and with no rollback”, meaning Russia should not cede territory it has occupied.

"Each candidate presents juxtaposed ideologies and domestic policies, but collectively these contribute to Putin's goal of tightening his grip on Russia during his next presidential term," noted Callum Fraser of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in a column, "Putin’s Grand Plan for Russia’s 2024 Elections".According to Putin's critics, these three quasi-opponents, integrated into the Russian political system, perform an important function: to channel the discontent of various strata of society and provide a pluralist veneer for the vote, while the real opposition has been wiped out by years of repression.

"Throughout history, Russian power has always been extremely careful to respect formal rules. Even a very authoritarian regime faces public opinion and cares about it. This election remains a test of Putin's legitimacy and popularity. Even if this test appears to be a formality, it has value for those in power," explained de Gliniasty.

No political space for anti-war candidates

But not all positions on the political spectrum are represented on the ballot this year. In the lead-up to the presidential election, criticism of the Ukraine invasion was effectively suppressed with the arrests of tens of thousands of peaceful protesters. Hefty fines were also slapped on anyone voicing opposition to the war, according to international rights groups.

Two independent presidential hopeful running on anti-war platforms, Yekaterina Duntsova and Boris Nadezhdin, were barred from running by the Central Electoral Commission (CEC).

While the CEC barred Duntsova in December, Nadezhdin’s candidacy attracted attention, with thousands lining up in cities across Russia in January to give their signatures supporting the anti-war candidate.

That did not work in Nadezhdin’s favour.

"The question obviously arose of leaving out a voice that could have played a symbolic role and brought in, dare I say it, left-leaning, liberal voters. Boris Nadezhdin could have stood for election if he had achieved a modest score, but faced with the enthusiasm generated by his candidacy, the Kremlin preferred to send him packing,” explained de Gliniasty.

A 'noon vote' campaign for Navalny supporters

Despite the sweeping crackdowns, some of Putin's opponents have vowed to express their opposition at the polls. On March 5, Alexei Navalny's widow Yulia Navalnaya called the election a "masquerade" and urged Russians to cast protest votes.

"You can vote for any candidate except Putin. You can spoil your ballot paper, you can write 'Navalny' in big letters," she urged.

In an action called "Noon against Putin", Navalny supporters plan to go to their local polling station on Sunday exactly at midday, stand in line for a voting slip, and then vote in a way that expresses their protest.

Such social mobilisation comes with serious risks. Some Navalny supporters received letters last week warning them that prosecutors had reason to believe they will be participating in an illegal event that “bore signs of extremist activity”, an accusation Russia often levies at enemies of the Kremlin. 

The ‘non-war’ across the border

Although the outcome of the vote is certain, the authorities have gone through great lengths to encourage Russians to go to the polls, dialing up the patriotism and presenting the vote as an essential step towards "victory" in Ukraine.

Over the past few weeks, Putin did several media appearances with the heroes of the "special military operation", as the Ukraine war is still called in Russia.

But the campaign did not feature any debate on the conflict in Russia’s neighbouring state.

"One might have expected the subject of war to be central to the election campaign," said Anna Colin-Lebedev, a specialist in post-Soviet societies at Paris-Nanterre University. "However, the debates – which did not excite the Russian public – were mainly devoted to other subjects such as education, culture, the economy, agriculture, demographics [and] housing" in what she called a "framed", pre-approved narrative.

More than two years after Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin is attempting a tricky balancing act on the subject, according to experts.

"The authorities are caught in a contradiction," noted de Gliniasty. "They want to talk as little as possible about the war in Ukraine, as if to say that everything is fine, that everything is normal and that it's just a special operation. But at the same time, it wants this election to serve to legitimise the invasion." 

The turnout barometer

Given the stakes, the authorities are deeply invested in keeping up appearances by holding elections under the guise of a functioning democracy.

"These elections are very important for the Kremlin," Nikolai Petrov of London-based Chatham House told the AFP. "It is needed to demonstrate that Russians overwhelmingly support Putin" during the military offensive.

Turnout then becomes a critical issue, as it does in most authoritarian countries holding questionable elections.

Some managers at state companies have ordered employees to vote – even asking them to submit photographs of their ballot papers, reported Reuters, quoting six sources who did not want to be named. Cash machines also remind Russians to vote. And in Russian-occupied Ukraine, residents have   of pro-Russian collaborators with ballot boxes going from house to house looking for voters accompanied by armed soldiers. 

Then there’s the question of vote-rigging.

"Parliamentary elections may be rigged in Russia, but presidential elections are not," said Jean de Gliniasty, former French ambassador to Russia and current senior research fellow at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS).

"There are cameras and observers in polling stations. There's no need for rigging because everything has been cleaned up beforehand so the result will be perfectly acceptable." 

But given the context of the Ukraine war and the hardening stance of the Russian regime, "we cannot predict what will happen in these elections", admitted the former French ambassador.

Putin won nearly 77 percent of the vote in 2018, 14 points more than in 2012. At the country's helm for almost a quarter-century, the indisputable master of the Kremlin has yet to name a successor. Putin signed into law a  constitutional amendment in 2021 that altered term limits and will allow him to remain in power until 2036.

This article has been translated from the  French .

ATTACHMENT TEN – FROM DW (GERMANY)

RUSSIA VOTES: WHY DOES PUTIN BOTHER HOLDING ELECTIONS?

By Sergey Satanovskiy

Although President Vladimir Putin is certain to win the 2024 election, analysts say he wants to give the illusion of democracy.

Critics have regularly said Russia is a dictatorship but nonetheless, between March 15 and 17, the country will hold a presidential election. But the outcome has been predicted long before this week: Vladimir Putin, who has been in charge of the country for the past 25 years, will win a fifth term. That means he would remain in power in the Kremlin until at least 2030.

The only clear opposition figure, liberal politician Boris Nadezhdin, has been barred from running by Russian courts, including the Supreme Court, on appeal.

Other candidates include Nikolai Kharitonov, 75, who represents the local Communist Party. This party's candidate usually comes second to Putin — albeit a distant second. Kharitonov has criticized some of Putin's domestic policies but supports Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Vladislav Davankov is also in the running. At 40, he's one of the youngest candidates and has presented himself as more of a liberal when it comes to the curbing of individual freedoms in Russia. However, he has also said he won't criticize his political opponents.

According to the Reuters news agency, Kharitonov and Davankov might each receive between 4% to 5% of the total vote.

Election shows that Putin, Russian majority 'are united'

But although all Russia watchers have said Putin is poised to win, the Russian presidential election does actually serve a purpose. Its objective is to address internal and external challenges faced by Putin's regime, said Konstantin Kalachev, a political analyst and former Kremlin adviser.

Inside the country, the election allows for the legitimation of the president's power and demonstrates that the Russian people are united around their leader, he said.

"And externally, it's to show that Putin is implementing [foreign] policy based on people's demands," Kalachev told DW. "It demonstrates that the president and the Russian majority are united and dispels any illusions in the West [to the contrary]."

In a country where everybody assumes the outcome is a given, it can be hard to persuade people to go out and vote. But as Meduza, an independent news website based in Latvia, wrote earlier this month, Russian authhorities are taking measures to ensure that the presidential election looks as legitimate as possible.

The goal is a voter turnout of 80%. This is done, Meduza reported, "by mobilizing the electorate dependent on the government: public sector employees, employees of state corporations and large companies, loyal to the government, as well as their relatives and friends."

Members of Putin's own party, United Russia, are encouraged to bring at least 10 people with them to polling stations, the news outlet said, citing contacts close to the political party.

Government and party officials can see exactly who turns out because of electronic voting or digital codes used to identify voters.

In his state of the nation speech to Russia's Federal Assembly in late February, Putin also offered ordinary Russians a number of sweeteners before the elections, including a pledge to boost the economy. He also repeated his resolve to continue the military operation (as he calls it) in Ukraine.

Will Russians come out and protest?

Even though the only genuinely anti-Putin candidate, Nadezhdin, has been barred from participating, there may still be some form of protest vote.

Most Russian opposition forces have fled the country, but they have called upon their supporters to take action during the elections.

The widow of recently deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, called on supporters to turn up at voting booths en masse at midday on Sunday, March 17 as a tribute to her late husband.

"You can ruin the ballot, you can write 'Navalny' in big letters on it," Yulia Navalnaya said in a recent YouTube video. "And even if you don't see the point in voting at all, you can just come and stand at the polling station and then turn around and go home," she suggested, adding people should vote for "anyone but Putin."

Having large crowds turn up to polling booths all at once won't change the final result, but it could certainly disrupt the impression that Russians overwhelmingly support Putin, said Nikolay Petrov, a visiting fellow in the Eastern Europe research division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

That's quite likely to irritate Putin, he added.

"It's a mistake to think that it's easier for authoritarian regimes to have elections than for democracies," Petrov said. "It's very important for Putin to demonstrate to his political elite that he is supported by the vast majority of Russians.

"That's why the Kremlin wants to demonstrate very good results and also avoid any scandals."

Edited by: Cathrin Schaer and Kate Hairsine

ATTACHMENT ELEVEN – FROM AL JAZEERA

‘DO I VOTE? HELL NO’: RUSSIA HEADS TO PREDICTABLE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

While 71-year-old Putin is all but certain to win, some Russians refuse to engage in the political process while others plan protest votes.

By Niko Vorobyov Published On 14 Mar 202414 Mar 2024

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On Friday, Russians will head to the polls to cast their ballots in a presidential election that has an all but certain outcome.

Incumbent President Vladimir Putin is widely predicted to win a fifth term.

Russia’s presidential election: Putin, power, the possibility of protests

How has modern Russian culture been shaped by Putin’s war in Ukraine?

Putin resumes ‘sabre-rattling’ with warning Russia ready for nuclear war

Putin says Russia is ready to use nuclear weapons

Assuming he serves the full six years until 2030, if taken together with his time as prime minister from 2008 to 2012, he would become the longest-reigning Russian leader since Joseph Stalin.

But formally, at least, he is pitted against three other presidential hopefuls: Leonid Slutsky of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), Vladislav Davankov of the centre-right New People, and Nikolai Kharitonov of the Communist Party.

“I’m voting for Putin because I trust him,” 69-year-old Tatyana, from Moscow, told Al Jazeera.

“He is very educated and sees the world globally, unlike the leaders of other countries. I support the direction of development of our country under the leadership of Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] because we see no other way. Once upon a time, I don’t remember when, I voted for [Boris] Yeltsin.”

As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine continues, Tatyana believes Western powers are at fault.

“In recent years, the West has demonised Russia, and it was clear even to me that we were being prepared for slaughter. And if you look at the world map in 2020, you will see how NATO bases have surrounded our country. 1+1=2!!! The mosaic has come together,” she said.

According to the latest figures from the independent Levada polling agency in February, 86 percent of Russians approve of Putin’s presidency and his running of the country.

Although the reliability of collecting such data in states such as Russia, with a hardline leader, has been questioned, Putin still undeniably enjoys support and his victory is considered a given.

That, together with allegations of vote rigging and the careful vetting of candidates, has left many opposition-minded Russians thinking: Why bother?

Even so, some Russians are planning protest votes while others won’t be casting a ballot at all.

“Do I vote? Hell no,” said 33-year-old Viktor from St Petersburg. “It’s not like a hard stance, I just don’t bother. The thing with Russian political thinking, if you’re against Putin, is that it’s heavily infected with moralism. Like you must vote, just because you don’t have any other ways to express your indignation.”

He believes that “such imperatives don’t have any firm ground beneath”.

“I just forgot about elections at all,” added a friend of Viktor’s.

Few of the Russians Al Jazeera interviewed appeared particularly passionate, one way or the other.

“I think this is because the result is predictable,” said 70-year-old Valentina, an academic from St Petersburg. Neither she nor her husband have yet decided whether they’re going to vote.

“I don’t remember elections anywhere in the world with an element of surprise. Perhaps there will be an illusion of surprise.”

But 33-year-old Alexey, also from St Petersburg, is determined to fulfil his civic duty.

“Yes, that’s right, I plan to vote,” he told Al Jazeera.

“I’m choosing between coming and ruining the ballot, or not voting for Putin,” said Alexey, requested to be identified only by his first name.

He derided the other candidates on the ballot, “but if you had to choose one, then the least cannibalistic one is [Vladislav] Davankov”, he said. “He at least supported [Boris] Nadezhdin. He’s not that conservative. It seems to me that he is against the war [in Ukraine], he’s just afraid to talk about it at this time. In a situation of normal competitive politics, I would not choose him. If Nadezhdin had been allowed to participate in these elections, I would have voted for him.”

Boris Nadezhdin took a cautiously open antiwar stance, still referring to it by the official euphemism of “special military operation”. By February, he amassed the 100,000 signatures required to run for the presidency.

Neither Nadezhdin nor another dovish hopeful, Yekaterina Duntsova, were considered serious challengers to Putin, but rather a way of letting antiwar Russians express their frustration.

But both were disqualified by the central election committee, leaving Davankov as the least hawkish candidate.

In January, Davankov signed for and supported Nadezhdin’s candidacy, despite disagreements on some issues.

While not running on an openly peacenik platform, Davankov has called for negotiations with Ukraine while being highly critical of both wartime censorship, and what he termed “cancel culture”.

Otherwise, Davankov is best known as the lawmaker behind the bill banning sex change surgery in Russia.

“Any other result other than a VVP victory is impossible, this is fantasy,” Alexey continued, referring to Putin.

“I’m going to vote just to clear my conscience – this is the last opportunity to protest in Russia without the obvious danger of getting arrested. In general, I think that it is important to go to elections, even if they never decide anything in Russia. I also often listened to [Alexey] Navalny’s Smart Voting advice, in both regional and Duma [parliamentary] elections.”

The late Kremlin opponent Alexey Navalny, who died mid-February at a penal colony, and his team came up with the concept of Smart Voting in 2018. The idea was to vote tactically for any candidate, of any party, with the best chance of beating Putin’s United Russia party in any local or regional election, with the aim to weaken Putin’s grip over lawmakers.

The strategy was criticised for endorsing candidates who are not members of United Russia but are de facto aligned with the Kremlin, the so-called “systemic opposition”.

The Communist Party benefitted most from Navalny supporters. Although the party leadership often broadly aligns with the Kremlin and has rallied behind Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it has also historically organised protests against election results.

“Most often I voted for the Communists, because they have the greatest opportunity to rally the protest electorate around themselves,” continued Alexey.

“I will say right away that the form that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation takes in Russia is of course not socialism or communism, but there are some reasonable people within the party.”

ATTACHMENT TWELVE – FROM CNN

PUTIN IS COASTING TOWARDS ANOTHER TERM IN POWER. HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT RUSSIA’S PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

By Rob Picheta, CNN Updated 7:58 AM EDT, Thu March 14, 2024

Russia is holding a presidential election that is all but certain to extend Vladimir Putin’s rule throughout this decade and into the 2030s.

The vast majority of votes will be cast over three days from 15 March, though early and postal voting has already begun, including in occupied parts of Ukraine where Russian forces are attempting to exert authority.

But this is not a normal election; the poll is essentially a constitutional box-ticking exercise that carries no prospect of removing Putin from power.

The president’s dominance over the Russian electoral system has already been reinforced as the election looms. The country’s only anti-war candidate has been barred from standing, and Alexey Navalny, the poisoned and jailed former opposition leader who was the most prominent anti-Putin voice in Russia, died last month.

Here’s what you need to know about the election.

When and where is the election taking place?

Voting will be held from Friday March 15 until Sunday March 17, the first Russian presidential election to take place over three days; early voting was underway earlier, including among Russia’s ex-pat population around the world.

Voting has also been organized in the four Ukrainian regions Russia said it would annex in September 2022, in violation of international law. Russia has already held regional votes and referenda in those occupied territories, an effort dismissed by the international community as a sham but which the Kremlin sees as central to its campaign of Russification.

A second round of voting would take place three weeks after this weekend if no candidate gets more than half the vote, though it would be a major surprise if that were required. Russians are electing the position of president alone; the next legislative elections, which form the make-up of the Duma, are scheduled for 2026.

How long has Putin been in power?

Putin signed a law in 2021 that allowed him to run for two more presidential terms, potentially extending his rule until 2036, after a referendum the previous year allowed him to reset the clock on his term limits.

This election will mark the start of the first of those two extra terms.

He has essentially been the country’s head of state for the entirety of the 21st century, rewriting the rules and conventions of Russia’s political system to extend and expand his powers.

That already makes him Russia’s longest-serving ruler since Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Putin’s previous efforts to stay in control included a 2008 constitutional amendment that extended presidential terms from four years to six, and a temporary job swap with his then Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev the same year, that preceded a swift return to the presidency in 2012.

Is Putin popular in Russia?

Truly gauging popular opinion is notoriously difficult in Russia, where the few independent think tanks operate under strict surveillance and where, even in a legitimate survey, many Russians are fearful of criticizing the Kremlin.

But Putin undoubtedly has reaped the rewards of a political landscape tilted dramatically in his favor. The Levada Center, a non-governmental polling organization, reports Putin’s approval rating at over 80% – an eye-popping figure virtually unknown among Western politicians, and a substantial increase on the three-year period before the invasion of Ukraine.

The invasion gave Putin a nationalist message around which to rally Russians, boosting his own image, and even as Russia’s campaign stuttered over the course of 2023, the war retained widespread support.

National security is top of mind for Russians as the election approaches; Ukrainian strikes on Russian border regions have brought the war home to many people inside the country, but support for the invasion — euphemistically termed a “special military operation” by Russia’s leaders — remains high.

The Levada Center found at the end of 2023 that “increased inflation and rising food prices may have a lasting impact on the mood of Russians,” with the proportion of Russians cutting back on spending increasing.

But that is not to say Russians expect the election to change the direction of the country. Putin benefits heavily from apathy; most Russians have never witnessed a democratic transfer of power between rival political parties in a traditional presidential election, and expressions of anger at the Kremlin are rare enough to keep much of the population disengaged from politics.

Putin’s former speechwriter, Abbas Gallyamov, told CNN last month that discontent against the president was increasing in Russia. Gallyamov said Putin is attempting to eliminate opposition leaders from society to at least ensure such discontent remains “unstructured,” “disorganized” and “leaderless” ahead of future elections.

Who else is running?

Candidates in Russian elections are tightly controlled by the Central Election Commission (CEC), enabling Putin to run against a favorable field and reducing the potential for an opposition candidate to gain momentum.

The same is true this year. “Each candidate fields juxtaposing ideologies and domestic policies, but collectively they feed into Putin’s aim of tightening his grip on Russia during his next presidential term,” wrote Callum Fraser of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank.

Nikolay Kharitonov will represent the Communist Party, which has been allowed to run a candidate in each election this century, but has not gained as much as a fifth of the vote since Putin’s first presidential election.

Two other Duma politicians, Leonid Slutsky and Vladislav Davankov, are also running. Davankov is deputy chair of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, while Slutsky represents the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, the party previously led by ultra-nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who died in 2022. All are considered to be reliably pro-Kremlin.

But there is notably no candidate who opposes Putin’s war in Ukraine; Boris Nadezhdin, previously the only anti-war figure in the field, was barred from standing by the CEC in February after the body claimed he had not received enough legitimate signatures nominating his candidacy.

In December, another independent candidate who openly spoke out against the war in Ukraine, Yekaterina Duntsova, was rejected by the CEC, citing alleged errors in her campaign group’s registration documents. Duntsova later called on people to support Nadezhdin’s candidacy.

Writing on social media in February, opposition activist and Navalny’s former aide, Leonid Volkov, dismissed the elections as a “circus,” saying they were meant to signal Putin’s overwhelming mass support. “You need to understand what the March ‘elections’ mean for Putin. They are a propaganda effort to spread hopelessness” among the electorate, Volkov said.

Volkov was attacked outside his house on Tuesday in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Lithuania’s intelligence agency has said it believes the attack on former Navalny aide Leonid Volkov was likely “Russian organized.”

The Kremlin on Thursday declined to comment on the assault on Volkov.

Are the elections fair?

Russia’s elections are neither free nor fair, and serve essentially as a formality to extend Putin’s term in power, according to independent bodies and observers both in and outside the country.

Putin’s successful campaigns have been in part the result of “preferential media treatment, numerous abuses of incumbency, and procedural irregularities during the vote count,” according to Freedom House, a global democracy watchdog.

Outside of election cycles, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine targets voters with occasionally hysterical pro-Putin material, and many news websites based outside Russia were blocked following the invasion of Ukraine, though more tech-savvy younger voters have grown accustomed to using VPNs to access them.

Protests are also tightly restricted, making the public expression of opposition a perilous and rare occurrence.

Then, as elections come into view, genuine opposition candidates almost inevitably see their candidacies removed or find themselves prevented from seeking office, as Nadezhdin and Duntsova discovered during this cycle.

“Opposition politicians and activists are frequently targeted with fabricated criminal cases and other forms of administrative harassment designed to prevent their participation in the political process,” Freedom House noted in its most recent global report.

How did Navalny’s death affect the run-up to the election?

The timing of the death of Alexey Navalny – Putin’s most prominent critic – served to emphasize the control Russia’s leader exerts over his country’s politics.

In one of Navalny’s final court appearances before his death, he urged prison service workers to “vote against Putin.”

“I have a suggestion: to vote for any candidate other than Putin. In order to vote against Putin, you just need to vote for any other candidate,” he said on February 8.

His death cast an ominous shadow over the campaign. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, urged the European Union to “not recognize the elections” in a passionate address to its Foreign Affairs Council a few days after she was widowed.

“Putin killed my husband exactly a month before the so-called elections. These elections are fake, but Putin still needs them. For propaganda. He wants the whole world to believe that everyone in Russia supports and admires him. Don’t believe this propaganda,” she said.

Thousands then gathered for Navalny’s funeral in Moscow despite the threat of detention by Russian authorities.

Navalnaya has urged Russian people to turn out at noon on the final day of the elections, March 17, as a show of protest. In a video posted on social media, Navalnaya told Russians they could “vote for any candidate besides Putin, you can ruin your ballot, you can write Navalny on it.”

She added that Russians did not have to vote, but could “stand at a polling station and then go home… the most important thing is to come.”

CNN’s Anna Chernova, Pauline Lockwood and Mariya Knight contributed reporting.

ATTACHMENT THIRTEEN – FROM FOX 2

THIS WEEK’S ELECTION IN RUSSIA IS EXPECTED TO CEMENT PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN’S GRIP ON POWER UNTIL AT LEAST 2030.

Any opposition figures who could have challenged him are either in prison or exiled abroad. Independent media outlets that could show criticism of his policies have been blocked. And the Kremlin maintains rigid control over the political system and electoral process in the country of 146 million.

Still, the Russian election will be closely watched by those looking for insight into the major nuclear power as it continues its 2-year-old full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Here’s what you need to know about the upcoming election, how voting works, who is on the ballot and whether the vote will be free and fair.

WHO CAN VOTE IN THE RUSSIAN ELECTION?

Any Russian citizen over age 18 who is not in prison on a criminal conviction can vote. The Central Election Commission says there are 112.3 million eligible voters inside Russia and Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, and another 1.9 million eligible voters live abroad.

Turnout in Russia’s 2018 presidential election was 67.5%, although observers and individual voters reported widespread violations, including ballot-box stuffing and forced voting. Turnout in the 2021 parliamentary election was 51.7%.

HOW WILL VOTING UNFOLD?

Voting across the vast country will largely be carried out starting Friday and ending Sunday. It is the first time in a Russian presidential election that polls will be open for three days instead of one.

Russia first used multiple-day voting in the 2020 referendum on constitutional reforms orchestrated by Putin to allow him to run for two more terms.

It’s also the first presidential election to use online voting — the option will be available in 27 Russian regions and Crimea, which Moscow illegally seized from Ukraine 10 years ago.

The vote will also take place in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — the four regions annexed after the full-scale invasion in 2022, even though Russian forces don’t fully control them. Kyiv and the West have denounced holding the vote there. Early voting has already started in some regions and will be gradually rolled out in others.

WHO IS ON THE BALLOT?

Putin, 71, is listed as an independent candidate and is seeking a fifth term in office, which would keep him in power for another six years. He will then be eligible to run for another term, having pushed through constitutional changes that reset his term limits in 2020. First elected in 2000, he is now the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Others on the ballot were nominated by Kremlin-friendly parties represented in parliament: Nikolai Kharitonov of the Communist Party, Leonid Slutsky of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, and Vladislav Davankov of the New People Party. Kharitonov ran against Putin in 2004, finishing a distant second.

They broadly support Kremlin policies, including the war in Ukraine. Previous elections have shown such candidates are unlikely to get enough votes to mount a challenge to Putin. In 2018, the Communist Party runner-up got 11.8%, compared with Putin’s 76.7%.

Boris Nadezhdin, a liberal politician who made ending the war his main campaign theme, had drawn unusually broad support while gathering signatures to qualify for a spot on the ballot. But he was barred from running by election officials who declared that many of those signatures were invalid.

Also not on the ballot are opposition figures who could have posed a challenge to Putin. They have been either imprisoned or fled the country. Russia’s best-known opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, died in prison on Feb. 16 while serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges. His attempt to run against Putin in 2018 was rejected.

WILL THE RUSSIAN ELECTION BE FREE AND FAIR?

Observers have little hope the election will be free and fair.

Independent observers have criticized extending the vote over several days and allowing online balloting, saying such tactics further hinder election transparency.

Opposition groups in 2021 said digital voting in parliamentary elections showed signs of manipulation. Activists reported practices such as forced voting, with video on social media showing ballot-box stuffing.

In the 2018 presidential election, an International Election Observation Mission from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said that vote lacked genuine competition and was marred by “continued pressure on critical voices.”

DOES THE ELECTION EVEN MATTER?

Abbas Gallyamov, a political analyst who used to be Putin’s speechwriter, has described the vote as one where “multiple choice is replaced with a simple, dichotomic one: ‘Are you for or against Putin?’” and has said that it will be a ”referendum on the issue of the war, and a vote for Putin will become a vote for the war.”

But with no real alternatives to Putin on the ballot, the fractured and weakened opposition sees the election as a somewhat limited opportunity to demonstrate discontent with him and the war.

Shortly before his death, Navalny urged voters to show up at the polls at noon on Sunday, the final day of voting, to push that message in a way that the authorities cannot stop.

“Putin views these elections as a referendum on approval of his actions. Referendum on approval of the war,” Navalny had said in a statement passed on from behind bars. “Let’s break his plans and make sure that on March 17, no one is interested in the fake result, but all of Russia saw and understood: the will of the majority is that Putin must leave.”

ATTACHMENT FOURTEEN – FROM the AP

THE DRAMA IN RUSSIA’S ELECTION IS ALL ABOUT WHAT PUTIN WILL DO WITH ANOTHER 6 YEARS IN POWER

President Vladimir Putin has called on Russian citizens to cast their ballots in the upcoming presidential election, calling it a “manifestation of patriotic feeling.”

BY JIM HEINTZ Updated 1:24 PM EDT, March 14, 2024

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — As Vladimir Putin heads for another six-year term as Russia’s president, there’s little electoral drama in the race. What he does after he crosses the finish line is what’s drawing attention and, for many observers, provoking anxiety.

The voting that concludes on Sunday is all but certain to allow Putin to remain in office until 2030, giving him a full three decades of leading Russia as either president or prime minister.

The heft of that long tenure and the thorough suppression of effective domestic opposition voices gives Putin a very strong — and perhaps unrestrained — hand.

That position is bolstered by the Russian economy’s surprising resilience  despite wide-ranging Western sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine.

It’s also strengthened by Moscow’s incremental but consistent battlefield advances in recent months, flagging support for military aid to Kyiv from the United States and other quarters, and growing skepticism in some Western countries over more progressive social attitudes that echoes Putin’s push for “traditional values.”

Putin, in short, would head into a new term with few obvious restraints, and that could manifest itself quickly in major new actions.

“Russia’s presidential election is not so important as what will come after. Putin has often postponed unpopular moves until after elections,” Bryn Rosenfeld, a Cornell University professor who studies post-Communist politics, said in a commentary.

Probably the most unpopular move he could make at home would be to order a second military mobilization to fight in Ukraine; the first, in September 2022, sparked protests, and a wave of Russians fled the country to avoid being called up. However unpopular a second mobilization might be, it could also mollify relatives of the soldiers who were drafted 18 months ago.

Some in Russia believe it could happen.

“Russian leaders are now talking of ‘consolidating the whole of Russian society around its defense needs,’” Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at the RAND Corporation think tank told The Associated Press.

“The precise meaning of this phrase is not entirely clear, but it suggests that Russia’s leadership understands that the war Putin describes will go on for a long time, and therefore resources must be mobilized,” he added. “In other words, Russian society must be organized for perpetual warfare.”

But Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, says Putin doesn’t need a mobilization partly because many Russians from poorer regions have signed up to fight in order to get higher pay than what they can earn in their limited opportunities at home.

In addition, Putin’s apparent confidence that the war is turning in Russia’s favor is likely to make him continue to insist that the only way to end the conflict is for Ukraine to sit down at the negotiating table, she said. “Which, in fact, means capitulation.”

While support for Ukraine lags in Washington, both French President Emmanuel Macron and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski have said recently that sending troops to back Kyiv is at least a hypothetical possibility.

With those statements in mind, Putin may be motivated to test the resolve of NATO.

Alexandra Vacroux, executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, posits that Russia within several years will make an attempt to assess NATO’s commitment to Article 5, the alliance’s common defense guarantee under which an attack on one member is considered an attack on all.

“I don’t think that Putin thinks that he needs to be physically, militarily stronger than all of the other countries. He just needs them to be weaker and more fractured. And so the question for him is like ... instead of worrying so much about making myself stronger, how can I make everyone else weaker?” she said.

“So in order to do that, it’s like you have to find a situation where you could test Article 5,” and if the response is mild or uncertain “then you’ve shown that, like NATO is just a paper tiger,” Vacroux said.

Russia could run such a test without overt military action, she said, adding, “You could imagine, like, one of the big questions is what kind of cyberattack constitutes a threat to attack?”

Although it is not a NATO member, the country of Moldova is increasingly worried about becoming a Russian target. Since the invasion of Ukraine, neighboring Moldova has faced crises that have raised fears in its capital of Chisinau that the country is also in the Kremlin’s crosshairs.

The congress in Moldova’s separatist Transnistria region, where Russia bases about 1,500 soldiers as nominal peacekeepers, have appealed to Moscow for diplomatic “protection” because of alleged increasing pressure from Moldova.

That appeal potentially leaves “a lot of room for escalation,” said Cristain Cantir, a Moldovan international relations professor at Oakland University. “I think it’s useful to see the congress and the resolution as a warning to Moldova that Russia may get more involved in Transnistria if Chisinau does not make concessions.”

On the Russian home front, more repressive measures could come in a new Putin term, even though opposition supporters and independent media already are cowed or silenced.

Stanovaya suggested that Putin himself does not drive repressive measures but that he approves such actions that are devised by others in the expectation that these are what the Kremlin leader wants.

“Many players are trying to survive and to adapt, and they compete against each other and often they have contradictory interests,” she said. “And they are trying all together in parallel to secure their own priorities and the stability of the regime.”

Russia last year banned the notional LGBTQ+ “movement” by declaring it to be extremist in what officials said was a fight for traditional values like those espoused by the Russian Orthodox Church in the face of Western influence. Courts also banned gender transitioning.

Ben Noble, an associate professor of Russian politics at University College London, said he believes the LGBTQ+ community could face further repression in a new Putin term.

In the Kremlin’s eye, they “can be held up as an import from the decadent West,” he said.

ATTACHMENT FIFTEEN – FROM TIME

VLADIMIR PUTIN BASKS IN RUSSIA ELECTION VICTORY THAT WAS NEVER IN DOUBT

BY EMMA BURROWS, DASHA LITVINOVA AND JIM HEINTZ / AP

UPDATED: MARCH 17, 2024 10:04 PM EDT | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: MARCH 17, 2024 5:04 PM EDT

Russian President Vladimir Putin basked in a victory early Monday that was never in doubt, as partial election results showed him easily securing a fifth term after facing only token challengers and harshly suppressing opposition voices.

With little margin for protest, Russians crowded outside polling stations at noon Sunday, on the last day of the election, apparently heeding an opposition call to express their displeasure with Putin. Still, the impending landslide underlined that Russian leader would accept nothing less than full control of the country’s political system as he extends his nearly quarter-century rule for six more years.

Putin hailed the early results as an indication of “trust” and “hope” in him—while critics saw them as another reflection of the preordained nature of the election.

“Of course, we have lots of tasks ahead. But I want to make it clear for everyone: When we were consolidated, no one has ever managed to frighten us, to suppress our will and our self-conscience. They failed in the past and they will fail in the future,” Putin said at a meeting with volunteers after polls closed.

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter: “The polls have closed in Russia, following the illegal holding of elections on Ukrainian territory, a lack of choice for voters and no independent OSCE monitoring. This is not what free and fair elections look like.”

Any public criticism of Putin or his war in Ukraine has been stifled. Independent media have been crippled. His fiercest political foe, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic prison last month, and other critics are either in jail or in exile.

Read More: Navalny Challenges Putin from Beyond the Grave

Beyond the fact that voters had virtually no choice, independent monitoring of the election was extremely limited. According to Russia’s Central Election Commission, Putin had some 87% of the vote with about 90% of precincts counted.

In that tightly controlled environment, Navalny’s associates urged those unhappy with Putin or the war in Ukraine to go to the polls at noon on Sunday—and lines outside a number of polling stations both inside Russia and at its embassies around the world appeared to swell at that time.

Among those heeding call was Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, who joined a long line in Berlin as some in the crowd applauded and chanted her name.

She spent more than five hours in the line and told reporters after casting her vote that she wrote her late husband’s name on the ballot.

Asked whether she had a message for Putin, Navalnaya replied: “Please stop asking for messages from me or from somebody for Mr. Putin. There could be no negotiations and nothing with Mr. Putin, because he’s a killer, he’s a gangster.”

But Putin brushed off the effectiveness of the apparent protest.

“There were calls to come vote at noon. And this was supposed to be a manifestation of opposition. Well, if there were calls to come vote, then ... I praise this,” he said at a news conference after polls closed.

Unusually, Putin referenced Navalny by name for the first time in years at the news conference. And he said he was informed of an idea to release the opposition leader from prison, days before his death. Putin said that he agreed to the idea, on condition that Navalny didn’t return to Russia.

Some Russians waiting to vote in Moscow and St. Petersburg told the Associated Press that they were taking part in the protest, but it wasn’t possible to confirm whether all of those in line were doing so.

One woman in Moscow, who said her name was Yulia, told the AP that she was voting for the first time.

“Even if my vote doesn’t change anything, my conscience will be clear ... for the future that I want to see for our country,” she said. Like others, she didn’t give her full name because of security concerns.

Meanwhile, supporters of Navalny streamed to his grave in Moscow, some bringing ballots with his name written on them.

Meduza, Russia’s biggest independent news outlet, published photos of ballots it received from their readers, with “killer” inscribed on one, “thief” on another and “The Hague awaits you” on yet another. The last refers to an arrest warrant for Putin from the International Criminal Court that accuses him of personal responsibility for abductions of children from Ukraine.

Some people told the AP that they were happy to vote for Putin—unsurprising in a country where independent media have been hobbled, state TV airs a drumbeat of praise for the Russian leader and voicing any other opinion is risky.

Dmitry Sergienko, who cast his ballot in Moscow, said, “I am happy with everything and want everything to continue as it is now.”

Voting took place over three days at polling stations across the vast country, in illegally annexed regions of Ukraine and online. As people voted Sunday, Russian authorities said Ukraine launched a massive new wave of attacks on Russia, killing two people—underscoring the challenges facing the Kremlin.

Despite tight controls, several dozen cases of vandalism at polling stations were reported across the voting period.

Several people were arrested, including in Moscow and St. Petersburg, after they tried to start fires or set off explosives at polling stations while others were detained for throwing green antiseptic or ink into ballot boxes.

Stanislav Andreychuk, co-chair of the Golos independent election watchdog, said that pressure on voters from law enforcement had reached unprecedented levels.

Russians, he said in a social media post, were searched when entering polling stations, there were attempts to check filled-out ballots before they were cast, and one report said police demanded a ballot box be opened to remove a ballot.

“It’s the first time in my life that I’ve seen such absurdities,” Andreychuk wrote on the messaging app Telegram, adding that he started monitoring elections in Russia 20 years ago.

The OVD-Info group that monitors political arrests said that 80 people were arrested in 20 cities across Russia on Sunday.

That left little room for people to express their displeasure, but Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said that the opposition’s call to protest had been successful.

Beyond Russia, huge lines also formed around noon outside diplomatic missions in London, Berlin, Paris, Milan, Belgrade and other cities with large Russian communities, many of whom left home after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Protesters in Berlin displayed a figure of Putin bathing in a bath of blood with the Ukrainian flag on the side, alongside shredded ballots in ballot boxes.

Russian state television and officials said the lines abroad showed strong turnout.

In Tallinn, where hundreds stood in a line snaking around the Estonian capital’s cobbled streets leading to the Russian Embassy, 23-year-old Tatiana said she came to take part in the protest.

“If we have some option to protest I think it’s important to utilize any opportunity,” she said, only giving her first name.

Boris Nadezhdin, a liberal politician who tried to join the race on an anti-war platform but was barred from running by election officials, voiced hope that many Russians cast their ballots against Putin.

“I believe that the Russian people today have a chance to show their real attitude to what is happening by voting not for Putin, but for some other candidates or in some other way, which is exactly what I did,” he said after voting in Dolgoprudny, a town just outside Moscow

ATTACHMENT FIFTEEN (A) – FROM TIME

FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE, RUSSIAN DISSIDENT ALEXEI NAVALNY CHALLENGES VLADIMIR PUTIN AT THE POLLS

BY SIMON SHUSTER

MARCH 15, 2024 6:00 AM EDT

In the final years of his life, Alexei Navalny developed a plan for Russia’s next presidential election. That vote is due to take place this weekend, exactly a month after Navalny’s death in a Russian penal colony, and the results will not be much of a surprise: Vladimir Putin is sure to take another six-year term in power. But Navalny, even from the confines of his prison, saw the election as an opportunity for Russians to voice their dissent, and to weaken Putin’s hold on power.

“People are afraid,” he wrote in a letter to TIME in 2021. “But their hidden politicization is growing.”

As evidence, Navalny cited the way his election strategy, known as “smart voting,” played out during the local and legislative ballots held in many regions of Russia in the fall of that year. Despite widespread vote-rigging, Putin’s party barely clung to power in several of those regions. An independent analysis of voting patterns found that it was the worst result in the party’s history. Even in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, the party won only a third of the vote in the race for city council.

“Yes, they falsified the vote to steal our victory,” Navalny wrote of those results. “But the fact remains: for the first time in 20 years under Putin, people voted in such massive numbers against him and his party.”

Another measure of the strategy’s success was the furious reaction it provoked from the regime. The Kremlin moved to ban websites that used the phrase “smart voting.” It declared Navalny’s activist group an “extremist organization” and began jailing its representatives across the country. Under pressure from Russian authorities, Google and Apple removed Navalny’s Smart Voting app from their app stores before the vote.

The crackdown made it nearly impossible for Navalny’s organization to operate in Russia. Its activists fled abroad or went into hiding, while the terms of Navalny’s confinement became increasingly brutal. Guards at his penal colony locked him in a “punishment cell” for the smallest of infractions, such as a failure to properly state his name during a roll call. (The filthy cells featured a speaker that played Putin’s speeches for hours, a tacit acknowledgement, Navalny joked, that the ranting of the president counts as a form of punishment.)

Still, in the weeks before his death on Feb. 16, Navalny and his allies prepared to run a smart-voting campaign during this month's presidential ballot. Their aim was to demonstrate that opposition to Putin remains widespread, and they came up with some clever ways to achieve that. In messages smuggled out of the prison, Navalny called on his supporters to show up at their local polling stations to vote precisely at noon on election day. The tactic would set the stage for hundreds if not thousands of anti-Putin flash mobs, which authorities would not be able to disperse without hindering the vote itself.

In marking their ballots, Navalny also urged voters to choose any name other than Putin. None of the other candidates are independent; their primary role in Russia’s electoral system is to give the process a thin veil of legitimacy. But Navalny argued that turning out to vote for any of these dummy candidates would be more effective than boycotting the elections.

“The goal is not to influence the voting results, which will be falsified anyway, and it is not to support any of Putin’s puppets allowed on the ballot,” Yulia Navalnaya, the dissident’s wife, who has taken up leadership of the opposition movement since his death, wrote in the Washington Post a few days before the ballot. “Alexei wanted this to be a nationwide protest, emphasizing the illegitimacy of Putin’s election and the resistance of Russian civil society.”

He has already succeeded in unnerving the Kremlin from beyond the grave. Hundreds of people have been detained across Russia while publicly mourning Navalny’s death over the past month. Students in Moscow reported receiving threats of expulsion from their universities for attending any public rallies on the day of Navalny’s funeral.

Navalny’s longtime ally and former chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, was attacked with a hammer near his home in Lithuania on March 12, only three days before the start of voting in Russia. (Authorities in Lithuania blamed the attack on Moscow, but no arrests have yet been made.) While receiving treatment for his injuries, Volkov, who fled Russia several years ago to escape arrest, called the assault a typical “gangster’s greeting” from Putin. “We’ll keep working,” he said. “And we will not surrender.”

This weekend, no matter how predictable the results of the ballot may be, they will present Navalny’s allies with their best chance to put his political strategy into action. The ultimate goal he described in his prison letters is for Russia to hold free elections, and enough of them for democracy to take hold over time.

“Russia sorely needs at least 4-5 cycles of fair elections under the control of an independent judiciary before we finally break the vicious cycle of authoritarianism and determine, once and for all, that changes of power at every level will henceforth take place only this way.”

Throughout his career in politics, he dreamed of taking part in a presidential race like that, but the state under Putin kept him off the ballot every time. Now, a month after his death, Russian voters will get another chance to try his electoral strategy, and to test how much Navalny’s message will continue to shape political events. 

ATTACHMENT SIXTEEN – FROM GUK

RUSSIANS FORM LONG QUEUES AT POLLING STATIONS IN ‘NOON AGAINST PUTIN’ PROTEST

Voters in some cities answer Yulia Navalnaya’s call to turn up at midday to signal dissent against president

Sun 17 Mar 2024 11.15 EDT

Long queues formed at several polling stations in Moscow and other Russian cities as people took up a call from Alexei Navalny’s widow to head to the polls at noon on Sunday in a symbolic show of dissent against Vladimir Putin’s all but certain re-election as president.

In the run-up to the three-day presidential elections, Yulia Navalnaya urged her supporters to protest against Putin by appearing en masse at midday on Sunday in a legal show of strength against the longtime Russian leader.

The polling protest was labelled “noon against Putin” and Navalny endorsed the plan before he died.

Navalny’s team called on voters to spoil their ballot papers, write “Alexei Navalny” across the voting slip or vote for one of the three candidates standing against Putin, though the opposition regards them as Kremlin “puppets”.

Reports from the ground suggested queues suddenly formed at numerous polling stations across Russia’s big cities as the clock struck midday.

“At 11.55, there was no line at all. At 12.01 there was already a line of about 80 people,” Mediazona, an independent Russian outlet, reported from a polling station in the north-east of Moscow.

Fontanka, a St Petersburg-based outlet, published footage of a long queue forming at a polling station on Nevsky Prospekt, the principal avenue in the centre of Russia’s second biggest city.

Leonid Volkov, a Navalny aide who was attacked by an unknown assailant with a hammer in Vilnius last week, said several thousand queues had formed at midday at polling stations across the country.

Ruslan Shaveddinov of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation said: “We showed ourselves, all of Russia and the whole world that Putin is not Russia, that Putin has seized power in Russia.”

There was no independent tally of how many of Russia’s 114 million voters turned out at noon to show opposition to Putin, and many polling stations did not report an increase in the flow of voters.

Still, the long queues at some stations will be seen by many as a rare display of dissent at a time of unprecedented repression in the country.

Independent Russian media outlets also published images of spoiled ballots posted by voters, with “killer and thief” inscribed on some as well as the name “Navalny.”

Sunday is the final day of a presidential election that is guaranteed to cement Putin’s hardline 24-year rule until at least 2030.

The Russian leader has faced no meaningful contest after the authorities barred two candidates who had voiced their opposition to the war in Ukraine. Three other politicians running in the election do not directly question Putin’s authority and their participation is meant to add an air of legitimacy to the race.

Long queues also formed at noon in places popular among Russian émigrés such as Berlin, Yerevan in Armenia, London and the Thai island of Phuket. Hundreds of thousands of Russians are estimated to have left their country since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago.

“This action was Navalnly’s last wish, we just had to come today at noon,” said Dmitry, a Russian voter who moved to Phuket shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine, who asked for his last name to be withheld for fear of repercussions.

“I am here to honour his legacy,” he said, adding that he had spoiled the ballot by writing Navalny’s name.

The German Deutsche Welle outlet estimated more than 2,000 voters turned up for the midday protest outside the Russian embassy in Berlin.

Among the participants was Yulia Navalnaya, who was greeted with huge applause and chants from voters. She took photos with fellow protesters and thanked people for turning up to honour her husband a month after his sudden death in an Arctic prison.

Russian prosecutors had on Friday threatened any voters who took part in the noon against Putin action with five years in prison. In the southern city of Kazan, police detained more than 20 voters who had joined the protest, according to the independent rights monitor OVD-Info. Arrests were also reported in Moscow and St Petersburg.

Individual acts of protest including pouring dye into ballot boxes and arson attacks at polling stations had already taken place before Sunday.

Ella Pamfilova, Russia’s election commissioner, said those who spoiled ballots were “bastards”, and the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said those responsible could face treason sentences of 20 years.

Putin has won previous elections by a landslide, but independent election watchdogs say they were marred by widespread fraud.

Before this election, the state-backed VTsIOM polling agency predicted Russians would give Putin 82% of the vote, his highest ever return, on a turnout of 71%.

To bolster turnout, the Kremlin rolled out a series of new tools to help its “get out the vote” campaign, including a three-day voting period and electronic voting in 29 regions including Moscow, as well as efforts by the heads of state-run enterprises to entice or force thousands of workers to the polls.

By Sunday morning Russia’s electoral commission said turnout had exceeded 73%, surpassing 2018 levels an hour before the end of polling.

An exit poll will be published shortly after voting ends at 6pm GMT.

Stanislav Andreychuk, co-chair of the Golos independent election watchdog, said the pressure on voters from law enforcement had reached absurd levels.

“It’s the first time in my life that I’ve seen such absurdities and I’ve been observing elections for 20 years,” Andreychuk wrote on Telegram, referring to the actions of police who he said were checking ballots before they were cast.

Under constitutional changes he orchestrated in 2020, Putin is eligible to seek two more six-year terms after his latest expires next year, potentially allowing him to remain in power until 2036.

If he remains president until then, his tenure will surpass even that of Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union for 29 years, making Putin the country’s longest-serving leader since the Russian empire.

The elections are taking place against a backdrop of intensifying Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil facilities and a rare cross-border raid by anti-Putin militias.

Putin on Friday lashed out at Kyiv for the continuing raid along the Russian border, which he called an attempt to “disrupt the voting process [and] intimidate people in at least those areas which border Ukraine”.

Ukraine continued its drone strikes on Russia on Sunday, launching 35 against broad areas of the country, sparking a brief fire at an oil refinery, targeting an airport in Moscow and disrupting electricity in border areas, Russia’s defence ministry said.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, praised Kyiv’s ability to strike deep inside Russian territory in his overnight address on Saturday. He said it had become clear in recent weeks that Ukraine could use its weapons to exploit what he called vulnerabilities in the “Russian war machine”. “What our own drones can do is truly a long-range Ukrainian capability,” he said.

ATTACHMENT SEVENTEEN – FROM WASHPOST

RUSSIAN VOTERS, ANSWERING NAVALNY’S CALL, PROTEST AS PUTIN EXTENDS HIS RULE

By Francesca Ebel and Robyn Dixon Updated March 17, 2024 at 6:30 p.m. EDT|Published March 17, 2024 at 6:31 a.m. EDT

MOSCOW — On the final day of a presidential election with only one possible result, Russians protested Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian hold on power by forming long lines to vote against him at noon Sunday — answering the call of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and undercutting preliminary results Sunday night that led Putin to claim a landslide victory.

Russia’s Central Election Commission, which routinely bars any real challengers from running, reported late Sunday that Putin had received more than 87 percent of the vote with 75 percent of ballots counted. Putin quickly claimed a fifth term in office, extending his rule until at least 2030. He said he would continue his war against Ukraine where “in some areas our guys are simply cutting the enemy to pieces right now.”

Russia’s elections have long been widely condemned as neither free nor fair and failing to meet basic democratic standards, with the Kremlin approving opposition candidates and tightly controlling media access. That meant Putin’s victory was preordained. The turnout of protesters in wartime Russia, by contrast, was far less certain. Navalny had urged the midday action before dying suddenly in prison last month.

Putin wins Russia election with no real competition

President Vladimir Putin claimed a landslide victory in Russia’s pseudo election on March 17 as thousands of his opponents protested at polling stations. (Video: Reuters)

In remarks claiming victory after midnight, Putin commented on Navalny’s death for the first time and confirmed reports that talks had been underway to exchange Navalny, long his most formidable political critic, for Russians imprisoned in the West.

“A few days before Mr. Navalny passed away some people told me there is an idea to exchange him with some people who are incarcerated in Western countries,” Putin said. “You can believe me or not but even before the person could finish their phrase I said I agree. But what happened happened unfortunately. I had only one condition — that we swap him and that he doesn’t come back. Let him sit there. But this happens. You can’t do anything about that.”

Russian authorities said Navalny died of natural causes while Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, has accused Putin of ordering his murder. The Kremlin rejects the allegations.

The “Noon Against Putin” protest, with voters forming queues at polling stations in major cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Tomsk and Novosibirsk, was a striking — if futile — display of solidarity and dissent and challenged the Kremlin’s main message: that Putin is a legitimate president who commands massive support.

Russian voters hold ‘Noon Against Putin’ protests

Voters in Russia held “Noon Against Putin” protests outside polling stations on March 17, the final day of the presidential election. (Video: Naomi Schanen/The Washington Post)

Many polling stations in Moscow were deathly quiet on Sunday morning, but long lines appeared at exactly 12 p.m. — despite authorities sending mass text messages warning people against participating in “extremist” actions and in the face of severe repression of dissent since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which has resulted in hundreds of arrests.

Navalny, who had long crusaded for free and fair elections in Russia and was blocked from running for president in 2018, had urged Russians to vote against Putin at noon Sunday. It turned out to be Navalny’s final political act before his death.

A polling station in Moscow on Sunday. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

Many voters also posted photographs of their spoiled ballots with protest slogans such as “Navalny is my president,” “No to war, no to Putin,” and “Putin is a murderer.”

Voting took place over three days, beginning Friday, which some critics said would allow greater opportunity for ballot manipulation and other fraud. Voting was also taking place in areas of Ukraine occupied by the Russian military, with reports of electoral teams accompanied by soldiers forcing people to vote at gunpoint. In 27 Russian regions and two in occupied Ukraine, voters were also able to use a widely criticized opaque online voting system, with no way to verify votes or guard against tampering.

But the three days of balloting also gave voters ample opportunity to visit polling stations at a time of their choice, making it all the more obvious that the sudden crowds at midday Sunday had not materialized by accident.

At least 65 people were detained at polling stations in 16 Russian cities on Sunday, according to OVD-Info, a legal rights group. Among them were a Moscow couple arrested because the husband wore a scarf bearing the name Orwell, a reference to George Orwell, whose dystopian novel 1984 was about a repressive totalitarian state.

Protesters sabotage Russian polling sites

Scenes of disruption broke out at polling sites across Russia on March 15, as the country voted on extending President Vladimir Putin's rule. (Video: Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post)

In addition to Putin, three other candidates were on the ballot, all essentially Kremlin-friendly figures with low profiles, in a highly managed election designed to offer a veneer of legitimacy without posing any serious threat. Two antiwar candidates, Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova, who might have become flash points for antiwar sentiment, were barred from running.

Putin, in response to a reporter’s question on Sunday night, dismissed Western criticism of the vote. “What did you want? For them to stand up and applaud,” he asked. “They set themselves the goal of restraining our development. Of course, they will tell you whatever they want.”

At one polling station next to Polyanka metro station in central Moscow, a line of dozens extended around the block by 12:30 p.m., mainly Muscovites in their 20s and 30s. A police van and two patrol cars hovered nearby, and the entrance to the polling station was guarded by several police officers and security agents.

“We came here to vote against Putin,” said Elizaveta, 21. “We are going to put three crosses to show that we are for everyone but him. Literally anyone else is better than him.”

The Washington Post is not fully identifying her or other voters interviewed for this article because of the risk of serious repercussions from Russian authorities, including criminal prosecution.

Elizaveta’s mother, Marina, added: “He has been in the same place for too long.”

In Belgorod, Russian city hit hardest by war, Putin is still running strong

The Noon Against Putin demonstration is the third recent sign of significant Russian protest or political dissent through long lines.

In January, citizens formed long lines to sign petitions required for Nadezhdin, the antiwar candidate, to secure a place on the ballot. He was later barred by authorities, who cited irregularities with the signatures.

This month, thousands waited in huge lines to attend Navalny’s funeral and for days afterward to lay flowers and leave letters at his grave.

In Russia’s climate of political fear, protests are largely symbolic, with authorities expected to maintain tight control in the months ahead, amid a war exacting massive Russian casualties.

Still, the signs of public anger are unmistakable. Some frustrated Russians did not even wait for the Sunday protest and instead expressed their anger as soon as voting started on Friday, by setting fire to polling stations or ballots or dumping liquid into ballot boxes.

The Noon Against Putin protest was designed not only to denounce an election widely condemned as neither free nor fair, but also to demonstrate support for the fragmented, often demoralized critics of Putin and the war, many of whom are now living in exile.

Navalny’s team broadcast a live stream, narrating the day of protest, on his YouTube channel. One of the anchors was Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s longtime top political adviser, who was recently attacked by assailants with a hammer outside of his home in Vilnius, Lithuania. Volkov appeared on the broadcast with his arm in a sling.

Two friends, Arina, 17, and Maryana, 19, arrived at the Polyanka polling station together, to protest Putin.

Arina said the protest offered hope that a “civilized and democratic Russia is possible.”

“We came here so as to not feel alone,” Arina said. “I wanted to show my position in a safe and legal way because there are barely any opportunities to do this anymore.”

She added: “I think this action has been successful because it gives people a feeling of strength and power. People will at least see the queues and hear about it, and that means something.”

Maryana said: “We wanted to do a peaceful protest of the current power, to show that we don’t support it and we won’t support it.”

Nikolai, 28, who was at the same polling station, said he was surprised by the big turnout, though some other protesters said they had hoped for even larger crowds.

“I came here today to express my position and do my part to show that there is still a political life in the country and that there are different opinions,” Nikolai said. “It’s important to show that people are not alone and that there is still support for this kind of action.”

For Putin’s election in occupied Ukraine, voting is forced at gunpoint

It is difficult to stage any form of protest in wartime Russia. Authorities swiftly disperse even small street gatherings and have cracked down mercilessly on activist and opposition groups. Citizens have been arrested for laying flowers at memorials for Navalny, and some have been detained for standing alone holding up blank sheets of paper.

Russian courts, one of the regime’s major tools of control, have imposed long prison sentences on people for trivial actions, such as social media reposts or replacing price tags in supermarkets with information about the war.

The Noon Against Putin protest was particularly striking at Russian embassies in nations with significant numbers of Russians who fled after the invasion of Ukraine. They included those in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Germany, China, Portugal, Britain and others.

It was impossible to estimate how many people participated in Russia and around the world, but photos and videos showed lines of hundreds of people at many polling stations.

Even pro-Kremlin analyst Sergei Markov, who routinely echoes Kremlin talking points, admitted that the protest “was brilliant from the point of view of political technology.”

Markov said that it covered an extremely wide area, had a great slogan and that all opposition groups had joined in.

“Pretending that the enemy is weak is a manifestation of your weakness,” he said. “The opponent is strong and smart and can make strong moves.”

Stanislav Andreyshuk, co-chairman of Golos, an independent election watchdog that was declared a foreign agent by Russian authorities, said there had been many reports of apparent ballot stuffing, with bundles of voting papers in the official boxes. He said signs of anomalies also were seen in the turnout data published by the Central Election Commission.

By midafternoon Sunday, Golos mapped more than 1,400 reports of potential violations. The group’s co-chairman, Grigory Melkonyants, is in detention awaiting trial.

In one report to Golos, a state employee in Chechnya, in southern Russia, complained that he and others were bused from one polling station to another to vote multiple times. The employee said he voted seven times in the first two days.

Since taking power on Dec. 31, 1999, Putin has steadily destroyed Russia’s fledgling democracy, curbed rights and crushed dissent. His main political rivals have been jailed, killed or forced to flee the country, while protesters risk long prison terms for criticizing the war or Putin.

Why does Putin always win? What to know about Russia’s pseudo election.

Putin has repeatedly found ways to defy term limits to stay in power, starting in 2008 when he swapped jobs with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev while remaining the country’s supreme political authority. Four years later, they swapped again. In 2020, Putin engineered constitutional changes that would allow him stay in power until 2036. The term he will claim after this weekend’s vote runs to 2030.

Unlike in Ukraine, which has had five presidents elected during Putin’s time in power, the Russian election offers no democratic choice. The Kremlin blocks genuine opposition candidates from the ballot, controls media coverage and, critics allege, falsifies results.

Independent Russian media, such as Dozhd television, which was shuttered by Russian authorities and now operates from Amsterdam, described the current balloting as a “so-called election.”

Most civil servants and employees of state-owned enterprises were ordered by their managers to vote on Friday and were strongly discouraged from voting on Sunday, according to numerous reports in independent Russian-language media, including Faridaily, the Telegram channel of journalist Farida Rustamova, who said she received hundreds of reports from state employees.

In Russia’s tightly controlled society, even just seeing fellow protesters attend Noon Against Putin felt empowering, Arina said.

“I love the atmosphere here,” she said, “because I feel strong and I’m surrounded by like-minded people, and that’s so rare nowadays. Maybe I will even make new friends today, with people who think like me.”

Her friend Maryana echoed that optimism but said she was also realistic about the slender hope for change.

“I think that today’s protest was a success in that it gave people a bit of a lift. It supports people mentally,” she said. “But of course it won’t affect the authorities in any way.”

Dixon reported from Riga, Latvia. Mary Ilyushina in Berlin and Natalia Abbakumova in Riga contributed to this report.

ATTACHMENT EIGHTEEN – FROM BUSINESS INSIDER

PUTIN'S WAR FIRED UP RUSSIA'S ECONOMY AND BEAT SANCTIONS — BUT BIG PROBLEMS LIE AHEAD

Russia's invasion of Ukraine spurred the US and its allies to slap Moscow with sanctions aimed at crushing its war effort and economy.

Two years on, Russia has emerged stronger than virtually anyone predicted. Here's how the nation upended expectations — and why experts are skeptical its success will last.

Western nations rushed to punish Russia's aggression by imposing price caps on its oil exports, limiting its imports of electronic components, freezing a big chunk of its foreign exchange and gold reserves, seizing the overseas assets of the Russian elite, and curtailing its central bank's ability to use dollars and euros.

Skirting sanctions

The sweeping restrictions helped drag Russia into a recession in 2022. But its economy rebounded to expand by an estimated 3% last year, and the International Monetary Fund recently raised its growth forecast for this year from 1.1% to 2.6%.

Inflation, which spiked to nearly 18% in April 2022, has cooled significantly to 7.5% in February. Unemployment has dropped to record lows under 3% in recent months. Even the beleaguered ruble, which fell to a 16-month low against the dollar last fall, has strengthened.

President Vladimir Putin was just reelected for a fifth term after winning 87% of the public vote in a sham election. He's on track to become the longest-serving Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the 1700s.

Russians may be tired of the war, but a Gallup poll in December found a record 56% believed their local economy was improving. The of respondents who said the same about their living standards also climbed to a new high of 46%.

India and China to the rescue

The sunny situation is a far cry from what many experts predicted. Russia defied their forecasts by quickly pivoting its economy away from the West and toward friendly nations, capitalizing on the fact that sanctions were not universally adopted or enforced.

A shadowy consortium of shipping, insurance, and oil-trading companies emerged to connect Russia with India, China, Turkey, the UAE, and other willing partners.

So-called ghost fleets transported Russian oil under other countries' flags, resulting in the nation's energy revenues holding up much better than expected. Russia was able to cash in on high energy prices, import military equipment and other supplies, and obtain Western products like phones and microchips via neighboring countries like Georgia and Armenia.

More recently, political infighting in the US over whether to continue funding Ukraine has arguably undermined the sanctions, as it's signaled that America isn't united in standing against Russia.

"The escape valve provided by China, Russia's ability to maneuver around many of the sanctions, and the US Congress's blocking of military aid to Ukraine have substantially eroded the symbolic and substantive power of such sanctions," Eswar Prasad, a senior professor of international trade policy at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Business Insider.

Trouble ahead?

Russia's spending on making military equipment and other war assets boosted its headline growth and bolstered the regions where defense-related production occurs. But other industries and territories benefited far less.

"That has been a stimulus, but other sectors are quite weak," Anne Krueger, a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies who has held high-level positions at both the IMF and the World Bank, told Business Insider.

"Parts and supplies shortages may bite over time as the economy is on a war footing and consumers are losing," she added.

Western sanctions have had a "painful impact" on Russia's aviation sector, which has been unable to find adequate substitutes for Airbus and Boeing, Volodymyr Lugovskyy, an associate professor of economics at Indiana University, told Business Insider.

He also flagged the automotive sector, which has struggled to access vital electronic components due to export bans, and the agricultural industry, which faces a severe labor shortage.

Indeed, Russia is weathering a wider shortfall of workers because so many people are now serving in its military or have fled the country. That has driven up wages and prices, and fueled labor hoarding by companies.

Drone attacks

Russians have also faced shortages of staples like beef and chicken, which contributed to a 40% surge in the price of eggs last year as households scrambled to buy food. Gasoline is also in short supply, which has prompted Russian officials to clamp down on exports until domestic demand can be met.

The Russian government has a budgetary headache as tax revenues have tanked while spending has surged. Moreover, Russia's increased reliance on oil exports means that any disruptions, such as this month's drone attacks that destroyed an estimated 12% of its refining capacity, could have "dire consequences," Lugovskyy said.

At the same time, India is poised to cut back on its Russian oil purchases in the face of tighter sanctions, after becoming one of Russia's biggest customers in the post-invasion era.

More broadly, Russia is dealing with an exodus of people and money, declining access to tech and related expertise, reduced foreign investment, and pressure on the ruble as it's become harder to convert into other currencies.

Spending crunch

It's also unclear how long Putin can keep spending so briskly, and what his all-in approach to investing in the military-industrial complex will mean for Russians' quality of life and economic growth in the long run.

"Since the main drivers of the growth in 2023 were public investments and public consumption, it remains to be seen whether the Russian government will be able to maintain the last year's trend," Igor Delanoë, the deputy director of the Franco-Russian Observatory in Moscow, told Business Insider.

It's fair to say that if Western sanctions keep jamming up Russia's supply of vital imports while it's navigating so many other challenges, the nation could run into serious problems.

"Russia's ability to weather sanctions should not be overestimated, as the war effort has given the economy a boost, but this will not necessarily translate into a productive and prosperous peace-time economy," Prasad said.

Still, it's worth emphasizing the West misjudged Russia's resilience and could do so again. Delanoë cautioned that understaffed embassies, and experts traveling less to Moscow and communicating less with their peers there, will likely make it harder and harder to get a good view of the Russian economy from the outside.

"The risk for Western decision-makers is to have a distorted picture of Russian economic realities, which do not match the political expectations such as the collapse of the Russian economy and regime," Delanoë said.

ATTACHMENT NINETEEN – FROM GUK

A FOREVER WAR, MORE REPRESSION, PUTIN FOR LIFE? RUSSIA’S BLEAK POST-ELECTION OUTLOOK

The president will use his inevitable win in the polls as a mandate for continuing the assault on Ukraine and going after domestic ‘elites’

Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer

Fri 15 Mar 2024 01.00 EDT

For a few weeks in 2022, Vladimir Putin’s world was unravelling fast. Russian troops had failed to take Kyiv and the west was coalescing around Volodymyr Zelenskiy, freezing Russian assets abroad and imposing unprecedented sanctions. Putin himself appeared unhinged, railing against Lenin or appealing to Ukrainians to overthrow their “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis”.

As Russians go to the polls on Friday in an election with only one possible result, the Kremlin will claim a mandate for that war, enshrining Putin’s bloodiest gamble as the country’s finest moment. The Russian leader has often succeeded by presenting his opponents with only bad and worse options; these elections are no different. Now convinced that he can outlast the west, Putin is seeking to wed Russia’s future, including an elite and a society that appear resigned to his lifelong rule, to the fate of his long war in Ukraine.

“You are dealing with the person who started this war; he’s already made a mistake of such a scale that he can’t ever admit it to himself,” a former senior Russian official told the Guardian. “And he can’t lose that war either. For him that would be the end of the world.

“We all – thanks to Putin – have been led into such a shitshow that there is no good outcome. The only options go from very bad to catastrophic,” he added. And if Putin begins to lose, the person added, then “we may all see the stars in the sky” – suggesting a potential nuclear war.

Putin’s re-election campaign, which has included a more than £1bn propaganda push, according to leaked documents obtained by the Estonian outlet Delfi and reviewed by the Guardian, has put the war front and centre, as he envisages a militarised society stripped of its liberal trimmings.

Insiders said that while his team had insisted that he focus on a positive agenda of social spending or cultural achievements he instead chose to declare his candidacy while speaking with veterans of the war, whom he has said should help form a new “management class” to replace the old, disgraced elite.

And he has appeared confident on TV as he suggests he is ready to continue fighting until victory.

“It would be ridiculous for us to start negotiating with Ukraine just because it’s running out of ammunition,” Putin said in an interview this week with the propagandist Dmitry Kiselev.

One of Putin’s goals in these elections is to “deprive most Russians of the ability to imagine a future without him”, wrote Michael Kimmage and Maria Lipman in Foreign Affairs. And the prospects for his next term, or even two terms until 2036, appear clear: a forever war, an increasingly militarised society, and an economy dominated by the state and military spending.

Consolidated elite

In May 2022, Boris Bondarev, a counsellor at the Russian mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva, resigned in protest against the war. At the time, he accused the foreign ministry of “warmongering, lies and hatred” and wrote: “never have I been so ashamed of my country”.

Two years later, Bondarev remains the only Russian diplomat to have publicly defected to the west since February 2022. Asked why, he said: “Because I am the only one maybe without a sound mind,” adding: “All the others are sitting at home, probably feeling pretty good, even better now. They are getting their salaries, can still travel and are not mobilised for the war. They now think, soon we will win and we will be able to travel to the west again once sanctions are lifted.” He said he had been looking for a job since defecting.

Only a handful of top businessmen, including the billionaire banker Oleg Tinkov and Yandex’s Arkady Volozh, have spoken out against the war, and they have done so from relative safety outside the country. Both no longer have businesses in Russia.

There was a moment when others could have been peeled away from the Kremlin, observers believe. But as Russia has stabilised its battlefield position and its economy, and western support for Ukraine has become mired in political infighting, the shifting balance of power has discouraged further defections.

“I don’t talk with people still in Russia about their futures,” one major businessman who has had sanctions imposed on him told the Guardian. “That is a stupid question. Everyone has already made their choice.”

At the same time, the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the crackdown on all opposition politics in the country have raised the stakes for any perceived opposition to Putin.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the ex-oligarch who was imprisoned under Putin and is now a member of the exiled opposition, said that the moment for a schism among the elite “has been missed.”

“Without suffering an obvious military defeat,” he said, conflicts among the elite would not provoke “serious change, at least while Putin is alive”.

Increasingly, Russia has sought to lure back the more than half-a-million people who fled the country after the war began, including some of its most educated and wealthiest citizens.

“I don’t believe there will be any public defections,” said the businessman who has received sanctions. “And what for? Clearly, it hasn’t worked out very well for those who left. Those who say it should be easy to speak out [against the war] don’t understand the realities and the consequences.”

Forever war footing

Although Putin’s war planners envisaged a lightning attack that would take Kyiv in a matter of days, diplomats, insiders, observers and activists largely believe that Putin is now ready for a far longer conflict that could take years, if not decades.

“Putin appears to have dug in; he will not stop the war unless he is forced to do it,” said a senior western diplomat in Moscow. “We do not believe he is serious about any peace talks and it would be up to Ukraine anyway to decide them. From my rare meetings with Russian diplomats, I get a sense that they are feeling more self-assured than after the start of the war.”

Russia is devoting an estimated 7.5% of its GDP to military spending, the highest proportion since the cold war, and the government’s lavish spending has meant that factories making weapons, ammunition and military equipment are working double or triple-shift patterns, and welders collecting overtime can make as much as white-collar workers. A defence insider predicted that levels of spending would only continue to increase, he said, calling the change a “new permanent phase” that could last “many years”.

On the home front, restaurants in Moscow and St Petersburg remain full, projecting an image of normality, “parallel imports” – importing of western goods via third countries – and other new schemes have sought to prevent Russians from noticing a loss of creature comforts and luxury products.

“The Kremlin wants to cosplay the Soviet Union but without the food and product deficits,” said a well-connected source in Moscow media circles. “Their generation remembers the consumer goods deficits really well and wants to prevent them at all costs.”

Publicly, Putin has played down the potential for an all-out war with the west, saying this week he did not believe that the United States was planning on nuclear war by modernising its strategic forces. But, he added, “If they want to, what is there to do? We are ready.”

And while Putin claimed he is “ready to negotiate” with Ukraine this week, he also dismissed “wishful thinking” and smeared Zelenskiy as a drug user. “I don’t want to say this, but I don’t trust anyone,” he told Kiselev of potential security guarantees from the west.

“I believe any signals that Putin might be sending about wanting peace are just a way for him to delay western weapon deliveries to Ukraine,” said Bondarev.

Even anti-war Russians regularly parrot views that the west bears some culpability for propping up the Ukrainian side, either by deterring possible moments to conclude a peace or prolonging a conflict that they believe Putin will never allow himself to lose.

“It’s clear that this war isn’t going to end with a victory for either of the sides,” said the former senior Russian official. “It won’t end. It will end as a frozen conflict. And that frozen conflict is going to continue for 100 years.”

If Donald Trump is re-elected US president in November, it will put pressure on Ukraine to concede territory as he has vowed to end the war “in one day”.

Societal transformation

Speaking before Russia’s legislature last month, Putin announced an initiative called the Time of Heroes, a programme meant to bring veterans of the invasion of Ukraine into the upper ranks of government.

But the announcement was also clearly targeted at Russia’s liberal elite, whom Putin said had disgraced themselves through insufficient patriotism since the outbreak of the war.

“You know that the word ‘elite’ has lost much of its credibility,” he said. “Those who have done nothing for society and consider themselves a caste endowed with special rights and privileges – especially those who took advantage of all kinds of economic processes in the 1990s to line their pockets – are definitely not the elite.”

Even senior members of the pro-Kremlin cultural elite, who often mingle with senior Russian officials and meet Putin, now find their positions are no longer secure.

In a crackdown that highlighted Russia’s conservative shift, household names like pop icon Philipp Kirkorov were forced to make tearful apologises after footage spread of them attending a raunchy “almost naked” celebrity party in Moscow.

“For many of the elites, the naked scandal backlash was the most alarming event of the year; it shook them even more than Prigozhin’s rebellion,” said the Moscow media source. “Many realised that their private lives would no longer be off-limits.”

Putin’s recent rhetoric could summon images of a Mao Zedong-style restructuring of Russian society reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, although most observers played down that comparison.

“The government is clearly worried about the loyalty and morale of the military, and the defence industry,” said the person close to that industry. “They know that they need to at least choose some examples of people who fought in the war who are now in positions of power.”

But the programme is part of a larger issue that will trouble the Russian state for coming years and has been lobbied for by the country’s loudest war hawks: how to manage the influx and return of tens of thousands of soldiers, many with serious injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, thousands of whom were recruited from Russian prisons.

“Now our guys, fighters, are returning from their training, many of them are very smart people with education and experience, of course, they should get their place in the management apparatus,” Anastasia Kashevarova, a former assistant to State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin and one of the most vocal pro-war bloggers, told the Guardian.

Under constitutional changes he orchestrated in 2020, Putin could remain in power until 2036, when he will be 83 years old.

For young Russians, often referred to as Generation Putin, another decade looms under the increasingly authoritarian rule of the only president they have ever known.

“I am pessimistic about the long-term prospects of Russia,” said the businessman living under sanctions. “I would advise young people with a good education to leave and build a new future abroad. Russia is not going to run out of money … It will just be a stagnant, militaristic nation.”

ATTACHMENT TWENTY – FROM GUK

PUTIN HAD TO CONTRIVE A ‘LANDSLIDE’ – BECAUSE HE KNOWS CRACKS ARE SHOWING IN RUSSIAN SOCIETY

The Kremlin will use this victory to justify an intensified war. But even the state news agency reported election rebellion

By Samantha de Bendern Mon 18 Mar 2024 07.34 EDT

Although Vladimir Putin’s landslide victory with 87% of the vote in the Russian election was no surprise, these elections were important both for the Kremlin and for those in opposition to Putin.

With voter turnout at 74% – the highest in history – anything less than a landslide victory would have suggested that those who did not vote for Putin represented a significant force in Russian politics. This would have been particularly awkward in the case of young upstart Vladislav Davankov, who, with 3.79% of the vote, came a close third place. Davankov has been mistakenly described as an anti-war candidate – he supports peace and negotiations, “but on Russia’s conditions and without one step backwards” – but his platform also called for “freedom of speech and opinion, instead of intolerance and denunciations”, and “openness and pragmatism instead of searching for new enemies”.

Several opposition figures, including the well-known blogger Maxim Katz, and barred candidate Boris Nadezhdin, publicly stated they would vote for him. According to Vote Abroad, Davankov gained the majority of votes at Russian polling stations in other countries. With such a “subversive” candidate on the ballot sheet, nothing other than absolute victory would have allowed Putin to sleep at night.

It was clear for some time that the Kremlin saw this election as a test of the regime’s legitimacy. It is reported to have spent close to €1bn on the election campaign, with funds overwhelmingly devoted to ensuring a large turnout. It was not enough for the Kremlin to win the election – it also had to demonstrate public engagement. There was a push for early voting, especially in the occupied territories in Ukraine, where electoral officials accompanied by armed men in uniform knocked on people’s doors and politely asked them if they would like to vote early. Those who did not yet have Russian passports were allowed to use their Ukrainian IDs. In Russia there were the usual raffles, discos and canteens at polling stations to entice people out.

The elections also marked the culmination of weeks of modest but consistent protest for those opposed to Putin. Alexei Navalny’s widow called for his supporters to turn up at polling stations around Russia at noon on 17 March to show their solidarity with the anti-Putin movement. The turnout for these protests, both in Russia and abroad, was significant. Navalny’s grave, which authorities had cleared of the flowers that mourners had brought since his funeral, was covered instead with ballots voters had brought from polling stations.

Other acts of rebellion marked the elections as well, which even the official press could not ignore. State-owned news agency Tass reported arrests after a number of fires and explosions, with voters throwing molotov cocktails at polling stations, or else ballot spoilage by pouring paint, or green disinfectant, known as zelyonka, into ballot boxes. The ironic symbolism of the latter will not have been lost on voters or the regime: Navalny was seriously injured in the eye when he was doused with the green disinfectant mixed with a corrosive substance in 2017.

In many ways, even though the result was known in advance, these elections have some telling lessons. We should be heartened by the acts of brave resistance, which show that Russian civil society is still alive in spite of Putin’s attempts to repress it. However, the majority of the population still support the regime. Veteran Russia analyst Mark Galeotti suggests that without fraud, Putin would still have been easily elected with a 60% majority in the first round.

That Putin would obviously try to push that number upward despite widespread support shows that the Kremlin has abandoned any pretence that Russia is anything other than a one-party dictatorship. Putin also seemed emboldened by how well the election went; at his post-electoral press conference, he finally said Navalny’s name out loud. With his power comfortably cemented, he is no longer afraid of his arch-nemesis, or even his ghost. It is likely he will use the result of these Potemkin elections as a stamp of legitimacy to justify more repression, intensified war and another round of mobilisation.

Perhaps Putin’s rule is safe. But the splits in Russia’s society have been laid bare, be it the hundreds of thousands of voters who signed up for banned anti-war candidate Nadezhdin, or the many who protested in support of Navalny, and didn’t vote or spoiled their ballots on which his name could not appear. The election result is a facade for a rotten regime that is hollow at the core and needs lies, violence and war to survive. And it is likely discontent will grow as the privations of war and repression dig in.

It may take years for the rift in Russian society to weaken the regime. But, the rift is there – and Putin’s need for absolute victory shows that he is aware of it. He remembers how fast communism fell in Europe once a small chain of events created a tidal wave. He is also known to be fond of the symbolism of dates. It is tempting therefore to taunt him with this little reminder: on 17 March 1985, Romania’s brutal dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was re-elected with 100% of the votes of the rubber-stamp parliament, which had in turn just been re-elected with nearly 100% of the popular vote. Four years and nine months into his term, revolution toppled his regime, and he was shot dead by his secret police.

· Samantha de Bendern is an associate fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House and a political commentator on LCI television in France

ATTACHMENT TWENTY ONE – FROM BUSINESS INSIDER

RUSSIA'S ECONOMY IS SO DRIVEN BY THE WAR IN UKRAINE THAT IT CANNOT AFFORD TO EITHER WIN OR LOSE, ECONOMIST SAYS

Russia's economy is completely dominated by its war in Ukraine, so much that Moscow cannot afford either to win or lose the war, according to one European economist.

Renaud Foucart, a senior economics lecturer at Lancaster University, pointed to the dire economic situation facing Russia as the war in Ukraine wraps up its second year. 

Russia's GDP grew 5.5% year-over-year over the third quarter of 2023, according to data from the Russian government. But most of that growth is being fueled by the nation's monster military spending, Foucart said, with plans for the Kremlin to spend a record 36.6 trillion rubles, or $386 billion on defense this year.

"Military pay, ammunition, tanks, planes, and compensation for dead and wounded soldiers, all contribute to the GDP figures. Put simply, the war against Ukraine is now the main driver of Russia's economic growth" Foucart said in an op-ed for The Conversation this week.

Other areas of Russia's economy are hurting as the war drags on. Moscow is slammed with a severe labor shortage, thanks to young professionals fleeing the country or being pulled into the conflict. The nation is now short around 5 million workers, according to one estimate, which is causing wages to soar.

Inflation is high at 7.4% — nearly double the 4% target of its central bank. Meanwhile, direct investment in the country has collapsed, falling around $8.7 billion in the first three quarters of 2023, per data from Russia's central bank.

That all puts the Kremlin in a tough position, no matter the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Even if Russia wins, the nation can't afford to rebuild and secure Ukraine, due to the financial costs as well as the impact of remaining isolated from the rest of the global market. 

Western nations have shunned trade with Russia since it invaded Ukraine in 2022, which economists have said could severely crimp Russia's long-term economic growth.

As long as it remains isolated, Russia's "best hope" is to become "entirely dependent" on China, one of its few remaining strategic allies, Foucart said.

Meanwhile, the costs of rebuilding its own nation are already "massive," he added, pointing to problems like broken infrastructure and social unrest in Russia.

"A protracted stalemate might be the only solution for Russia to avoid total economic collapse," Foucart wrote. "The Russian regime has no incentive to end the war and deal with that kind of economic reality. So it cannot afford to win the war, nor can it afford to lose it. Its economy is now entirely geared towards continuing a long and ever deadlier conflict."

Other economists have warned of trouble coming for Russia amid the toll of its war in Ukraine. Russia's economy will see significantly more degradation ahead, one London-based think tank recently warned, despite talk of Russia's resilience in the face of Western sanctions.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY TWO – FROM WASHPOST

WITH PUTIN’S NEW CORONATION, KREMLIN CULTIVATES IMAGE OF LEADER FOR LIFE

By Robyn Dixon and Catherine Belton March 18, 2024 at 11:30 a.m. EDT

When Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared for a late-night news conference to claim a fifth term, he looked visibly elated, as if manipulating another election to remain indefinitely in power with 87.28 percent of the vote were a triumphal victory in a real competition.

The tally, virtually unimaginable in any democratic nation, suggests that the Kremlin is now less focused on manufacturing a veneer of electoral legitimacy and more on creating a cult of personality around Putin as Russia’s undisputed national patriarch and leader for life.

Mark Galeotti, a Russia analyst at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, said this outcome of the vote showed that Putin’s regime has shifted from an earlier model of “managed democracy” and is now “heading into its banana republic stage.”

“We should see elections under Putin as not being about popular sovereignty, but about popular subordination,” Galeotti said. “It is about the masses voting to accept Putin as their czar.”

He added: “It’s not just that the Kremlin is no longer embarrassed to rig the election. I think it’s almost, ‘So, what can you do about it?’ — a kind of challenge to civil society, ‘Of course you know we’re lying, but you’re going to have to swallow it because you’ve got no alternative.’”

Russians, by choice or not, are now locked into Putin’s repressive, increasingly totalitarian path — his bloody war in Ukraine and decisions to shun the West, isolate Russia’s economy and escalate hostility toward NATO. Western leaders, meanwhile, face a strident, emboldened adversary in command of a nuclear arsenal.

In autocracies, much of politics ends up revolving around the obsessions of the supreme leader — in Putin’s case, eliminating all personal political competition and destroying Ukraine as a large and thriving Western-leaning democracy on Russia’s border.

It was telling that Putin mentioned both of those threats in his late-night victory address. Appearing supremely confident, Putin shrugged off the “unfortunate” death of his main rival, Alexei Navalny, in prison last month, which has left Putin with no conceivable challenger. He even spoke Navalny’s name aloud, which he is known to have done only once before.

Putin also staked out his determination to continue the war against Ukraine, even at the risk of war with NATO. “It is clear to everyone that this will be one step away from a full-scale World War III,” Putin said, blaming the West for providing support to Kyiv.

Putin’s 87.28 percent election result generally tracks with his recent wartime public approval ratings. But Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who served at Russia’s U.N. mission in Geneva and resigned over the invasion of Ukraine, said that no one in Russia’s elite is convinced by the numbers.

“I think they don’t really care about the figures,” Bondarev said. “They just know that everything is still under control, that Putin still manages to outplay anybody. And, of course, nobody from the very beginning considered these elections to be elections.”

Some observers speculate that Putin, an impenetrable and often seemingly isolated figure, is the only person who fully believed the Kabuki theater of Russia’s election.

“This is the result of his team’s work, which is bringing him on a tray whatever he wants to see,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of R.Politik, a Russian political consultancy, now based in France. “But he sincerely believes … that the population supports him. He really does believe these figures are true.”

Stanovaya added, “Putin lives in the picture of the world he created for himself, and everything that doesn’t fit into it is removed from him.”

The message of the election to Russia’s opposition supporters is that they will always be dismissed as a tiny minority who can never win — despite Sunday’s remarkable protest, dubbed Noon Against Putin, in which voters in Russia and cities abroad formed long lines outside polling stations at precisely 12 o’clock.

The protest spoiled Putin’s picture of overwhelming popularity and showed that many Russians are still fired up by Navalny’s dream of a free and democratic Russia.

The noon protest, however, posed no threat to the regime. Nor did other displays of frustration, including a flood of photos of ballots spoiled with anti-Putin slogans posted on Russian social media.

Official tallies outside Russia, where Putin was beaten by little-known candidate Vladislav Davankov in cities such as Warsaw, Prague, The Hague and Yerevan, Armenia, highlighted the extent to which the Russian opposition has been forced into exile.

Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who has accused Putin of ordering the murder of her husband, attended a protest in Berlin. On Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed Navalnaya and her allegations.

“There are a lot of people who are completely detached from their homeland,” Peskov said. “Yulia Navalnaya you mentioned belongs to the camp of those people who are losing their roots, losing ties with their homeland, losing their understanding of their homeland and ceasing to feel the pulse of their country.”

Amid his late-night elation, Putin dismissed Western criticisms of the election in comments that offered insight into the real problem of nearly a quarter-century of Putin’s rule. He craves the legitimacy that democracy offers, but he fears democracy’s safeguards against corruption and abuses, as well as its accountability.

“What did you want? For them to stand up and applaud?” he said, portraying the criticisms as just part of a Western military war against Russia. “They set themselves the goal of restraining our development. Of course, they will tell you whatever they want.”

But the path he has taken — war against Ukraine, isolation and repression of all opposition — forces Russia into a cycle of repression and harsher authoritarianism. To survive, Putin needs the energizing effect of a mobilized militaristic, nationalist minority to cow internal dissent and reinforce the regime.

“The level of repression is already very high,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “The war of attrition is continuing, and any other methods of conducting it are not really being reviewed.”

Russia’s Central Election Commission, which routinely bars genuine opposition candidates from running against Putin and airbrushes manipulations, announced the turnout at more than 77 percent. Putin attributed this to the unifying impact of the war, in comments that highlighted the benefit to the regime of an extended conflict and its mobilizing effect on hard-line nationalists.

“This is linked to the dramatic nature of events that Russia is going through, linked to the present-day situation, linked to the fact that we are forced to literally protect the interests of our citizens, our people, with arms in hands and create the future for a full-fledged, sovereign and safe development of Russia, our motherland,” Putin said in his late-night news conference. “The results, and primarily turnout, show that common people feel this and understand that very many things depend on them.”

ATTACHMENT TWENTY THREE – FROM NBC

PUTIN SHOWCASES HIS UKRAINE AMBITIONS AT RED SQUARE CELEBRATION AFTER ELECTION WIN

Having extended his rule over Russia, President Vladimir Putin signaled his focus would be tightening his grip on Ukrainian territory as he led an event to mark the 10th anniversary of the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.

By Keir Simmons, Natasha Lebedeva and Yuliya Talmazan March 19, 2024, 9:54 AM EDT

MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin took to the Red Square stage Monday for an election celebration that seemed to carry a grander message for the flag-waving crowd of thousands, and for the world: Having extended his rule over Russia, his focus would be tightening his grip on Ukrainian territory.

“Together, hand in hand — we will move on,” he proclaimed before singing along to the national anthem, just hours after claiming a landslide win in a stage-managed election with no opposition.

Flanked by his favorite musical acts, pro-war celebrities and the three officially approved figures put on the ballot with him, he led this celebratory event to mark the 10th anniversary of his annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Ukrainian officials told NBC News that the party was nothing but propaganda, and decried as illegal coercion the votes held for the first time in four newly annexed regions.

After three days of voting, Russia’s electoral commission said Putin had received 87% of the ballots, the biggest win of his political career, in what the Kremlin painted as an unequivocal public stamp of approval for his invasion of Ukraine, even though critics of the war were barred from running.

Just hours later, the Russian leader was in Red Square, where his face was beamed onto huge screens so that it could be seen from Lenin’s mausoleum and beyond.

From a stage beneath the colorful domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, the music was at times as loud as thunder and the red-brick walls of the Kremlin flickered with the lights of the stage. The crowd — mostly students, some of whom said they had been given free tickets to the event — cheered and sang along as Russian stars performed patriotic ballads.

Mostly under 20 years old, many had their faces painted in the colors of the Russian flag. Putin, in power for the last 24 years, is the only leader they have ever known. They may be well into adulthood before seeing another.

“He has made Russia a lot better than it was,” Maksim Druzhinin, 18, said, speaking in English. Asked whether he expected to turn 30 before Putin might leave office, the teen, who is a student at the capital’s prestigious Higher School of Economics, said: “There is a question: Who else?”

“He has been keeping the country together for many years,” said Alexandra Volkova, a programming student, speaking in Russian. “He is definitely the most reliable candidate out there,” the 18-year-old said.

Of course, the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent means gauging public opinion in Russia is difficult. And this was an especially pro-Putin crowd, not filled with those who turned out at noon Sunday in a silent show of defiance called for by the opposition, or quietly resigned to life under Putin.

‘Crimea is not Russian’

Putin used the occasion to promise to extend the Russian railroad system all the way to occupied Crimea, as an alternative to the bridge connecting the peninsula to the Russian mainland that has come under frequent Ukrainian attacks.

The Russian leader also commended the people of Crimea for what he said was their dedication to Moscow.

“They are our pride,” Putin said. “They never separated themselves from Russia. And this is what allowed Crimea to return to our common family.”

That “return,” which boosted Putin’s approval ratings and set the course for Russia’s expansionism in the decade to follow, is considered an illegal land grab by most of the international community, rather than a historic homecoming.

Crimea, which is crucial to Russia’s naval power, has been used as a major hub and launchpad for the war against Ukraine, which has vowed to reclaim it along with all of its occupied territory and has increasingly targeted Russian military targets on the peninsula.

“Crimea is not Russian,” Tamila Tasheva, Kyiv’s permanent representative in Crimea, told NBC News. “Legally, the territory is Ukrainian. And this, by the way, is very clearly understood subconsciously in Russia itself, and that is why such ‘celebrations’ are held in order to convince themselves of the nonexistent,” she said of the event in Red Square.

Eight years after occupying Crimea, Russia annexed four other regions from Ukraine in 2022: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south, as well as Donetsk and Luhansk in the east. Some of those regions are only partially controlled by Russian troops, though that didn’t stop the Kremlin from holding a vote that saw armed men at some polling stations.

The Russian electoral commission said that in four out of the five annexed regions, including Crimea, voters gave Putin more than 90% of the vote.

These results are “fictitious” and are devoid of any legitimacy while Ukrainians there who oppose the Kremlin continue to suffer at the hands of the Russians, said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Tasheva dismissed the claimed results as “primitive propaganda.”

But for the Kremlin, the message of the three-day election, and its Monday night celebration, was clear. Ukraine will have to fight to keep hold of its territory, with Putin’s eyes now set firmly beyond the Red Square stage to the battlefields that will define his legacy.

Keir Simmons and Natasha Lebedeva reported from Moscow, and Yuliya Talmazan from London.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY FOUR – FROM the BBC

TWO ARRESTED IN RUSSIA'S FIRST LGBTQ+ EXTREMISM CASE

By BBC Russian,BBC News

Two employees of an LGBTQ+ club in the Russian city of Orenburg have been arrested on suspicion of being members of an "extremist organisation".

It is the first criminal case of its kind since Russia's Supreme Court outlawed the so-called "international LGBT movement" last November.

If found guilty, the defendants face up to ten years in jail.

The hearing was held behind closed doors.

The art director of the club, Alexander Klimov, and administrator Diana Kamilyanova will remain in custody until 18 May.

The court said that the defendants "acted in premeditation with a group of people... who also support the views and activities of the international public association LGBT".

Police raided the club, called Pose, in early March following a request from the local prosecutor.

They were reportedly accompanied by members from a local nationalist group called "Russian Community".

A statement posted on the nationalist group's site said that the items confiscated during the police raid at the club included a female stage costume, five female wigs, and fake female breasts.

The administrators of the site praised "Russian Community" members, saying they had "demonstrated a high level of training and organisation" in their "first successful raid".

Police began raiding gay clubs across Russia soon after the Supreme Court's decision last year.

Ksenia Mikhailova, a lawyer for Russian LGBT group "Coming Out", said the Orenburg case was "a big surprise" which could show the authorities are now treating instances of so-called LGBT propaganda as a criminal rather than an administrative offense, as had previously been the case.

The case could set a precedent for how the law is applied to LGBTQ+ people in Russia.

It is also a sign of the growing crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights in the country.

Since Russia's Supreme Court labelled the "international LGBT movement" as an extremist organisation, the rainbow flag is now also considered a symbol of extremism.

Last month, a woman in the city of Nizhny Novgorod was detained for five days after police spotted her wearing earrings featuring a rainbow symbol.

In recent years Russia's LGBT community has come under increasing pressure from the authorities.

In 2013, a law was adopted prohibiting "the propaganda [amongst minors] of non-traditional sexual relations".

President Vladimir Putin has previously said he sees LGBT activism as part of an attack by the West on "traditional Russian values".

Last July, gender reassignment surgery was banned.

'Putin has to find a new scapegoat - LGBT people'.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY FIVE – FROM ORTHODOX TIMES

PATRIARCH OF MOSCOW ON PUTIN’S RE-ELECTION: OUR COLLABORATION WILL CONTINUE TO FLOURISH

Mar 19, 2024 | 09:54

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia congratulated Vladimir Putin on his victory in the presidential elections in the Russian Federation.

“In witnessing the remarkable outcomes of your unwavering and extensive efforts for the benefit of our homeland, the citizens of our nation have once again reaffirmed their trust in you and overwhelmingly endorsed your candidacy,” expressed the Patriarch in his congratulatory message.

“The centuries-old history of Russia bears witness to the immense responsibility vested in the head of state when exercising their powers and making diverse, sometimes fateful decisions. These decisions not only shape the present and future of the country but also safeguard its true sovereignty,” Patriarch Kirill remarked.

The Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church is convinced that with the election of Vladimit Putin, “fellow citizens associate hopes for further strengthening the power of the Russian state, for joint creative work and new achievements, for a peaceful and prosperous life.”

“It is heartening to acknowledge the constructive relations that have flourished in recent years between public authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church. These relations are directed towards fortifying traditional moral values within society, fostering spiritual enlightenment, and instilling patriotic education among the youth. Additionally, they are instrumental in preserving our abundant historical and cultural heritage,” he added.

“I trust that with your steadfast support, our collaboration will continue to flourish, yielding fruitful outcomes,” expressed Patriarch Kirill. He extended his sincere wishes to the Head of State, praying for fortitude in both mind and body, the abundant assistance of God, and the attainment of blessed success in further endeavors in the “esteemed and weighty role” of President of the Russian Federation.

Translated from Russian: Konstantinos Menykta

ATTACHMENT TWENTY SIX – FROM REUTERS

EXCLUSIVE: PUTIN TO VISIT CHINA IN MAY

By Laurie Chen, Yew Lun Tian and Guy Faulconbridge March 19, 20249:24 AM EDTUpdated 9 hours ago

BEIJING/MOSCOW, March 19 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin will travel to China in May for talks with Xi Jinping, in what could be the Kremlin chief's first overseas trip of his new presidential term, according to five sources familiar with the matter.

Western governments on Monday condemned Putin's re-election as unfair and undemocratic. But China, India and North Korea congratulated the veteran leader on extending his rule by a further six years, highlighting geopolitical fault lines that have widened since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

"Putin will visit China," one of the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters. The details were independently confirmed by four other sources, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

Another of the sources said Putin's trip to China would probably take place in the second half of May. Two of the sources said the Putin visit would come before Xi's planned trip to Europe.

The Kremlin, when asked about the Reuters report, said information on Putin's visits would be released closer to the date.

Several presidential visits and several high-level contacts are being prepared at the moment," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. "We will inform you as we get closer."

China's foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

China and Russia declared a "no limits" partnership in February 2022 when Putin visited Beijing just days before he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, triggering the deadliest land war in Europe since World War Two.

The United States casts China as its biggest competitor and Russia as its biggest nation-state threat while U.S. President Joe Biden argues that this century will be defined by an existential contest between democracies and autocracies.

Putin and Xi a broad world view, which sees the West as decadent and in decline just as China challenges U.S. supremacy in everything from quantum computing and synthetic biology to espionage and hard military power.

PUTIN AND XI

China has strengthened its trade and military ties with Russia in recent years as the United States and its allies imposed sanctions against both countries, particularly Moscow for the invasion of Ukraine.

Foreign diplomats and observers said they expected Putin to make China his first stop after being re-elected. Putin's formal presidential inauguration is due to take place around May 7.

Putin told reporters on Sunday that Russia and China d a similar global outlook and enjoyed resilient relations in part due to his good personal relations with Xi, and that Moscow and Beijing would develop ties further in coming years.

Xi visited Russia in his first post-pandemic overseas trip in March last year, shortly after commencing his precedent-breaking third term as Chinese president.

The two leaders have often touted their close personal friendship and have met over 40 times, most recently in October when Putin was the guest of honour at China's Belt and Road summit in Beijing.

China-Russia trade hit $218.2 billion during January-November, according to Chinese customs data, exceeding a goal to increase bilateral trade to over $200 billion by 2024 that was set by the two countries.

Xi, in a call with Putin last month, said both sides should resolutely oppose interference in domestic affairs by external forces, indicating the U.S.

Chinese vice foreign minister Sun Weidong said bilateral ties were "at their best in history" when meeting his Russian counterpart in Moscow last month, according to a Chinese foreign ministry readout.

China is considering taking part in a peace conference aimed at ending the war in Ukraine to be hosted by neutral Switzerland in the coming months, its ambassador to Bern told local media on Monday.

Beijing launched a 12-point Ukraine "peace" plan last year but so far has not taken significant steps to resolve the conflict besides attending Western-led peace talks in Jeddah last summer.

China's special envoy for Eurasian affairs Li Hui met officials in five European capitals including Moscow and Kyiv earlier this month.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY SEVEN – FROM GUK

WHO CONGRATULATED PUTIN ON HIS ELECTION VICTORY AND WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT GLOBAL ALLIANCES?

While the Russian election results were condemned in the west, the reaction across Asia, Africa and Latin America shows a new global dynamic is emerging

By Jonathan Yerushalmy Tue 19 Mar 2024 01.45 EDT

After Vladimir Putin’s landslide presidential election victory on Sunday, western governments lined up to characterise the win as unfair and undemocratic.

The elections underlined the “depth of repression” in Russia, according to British foreign minister David Cameron, while the US state department said the jailing and disqualification of opponents meant the process was “incredibly undemocratic”.

The comments from leaders across Europe and the US stood however in sharp contrast to messages of congratulation that flowed from countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

These contrasting reactions underscore the geopolitical faultlines that have been cleaved wider since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago, triggering a crisis in relations with the west.

‘Certainty’ for China

China’s president Xi Jinping was quick to congratulate Putin on his victory, saying Beijing would continue to promote the “no limits” partnership that it forged with Moscow just before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Questions around the democratic process are entirely absent from coverage of the election in Chinese state media, in which Putin’s victory is characterised as bringing “certainty to a world in turbulence”.

In the face of increasingly strained relations with the US, China has sought to expand its influence internationally. Galvanised by the belief that the era of US hegemony is at an end, Beijing has attempted to secure its own sphere of influence that stands in contrast to the west – and Russia under Putin has proved a willing partner in this effort.

After declaring victory on Monday, Putin used a speech to supporters to again declare that “Taiwan is an inherent part of the People’s Republic of China”, in comments that were likely directed at the government in Beijing which claims Taiwan as a province of China, and which has made “reunification” a crucial policy. Putin also accused other countries of creating “provocations” around Taiwan and said they – and their sanctions on China – were “doomed to fail”.

China and Russia are also members of the Brics group of emerging economies, which aim to challenge US domination of the global economy by uniting emerging economies including Brazil, South Africa and India.

A ‘special relationship’ with India

After Russia began its war against Ukraine, 141 countries voted in favour of a UN resolution condemning the invasion. However, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), that headline figure conceals the reality that two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries that were neutral or Russia-leaning.

The EIU’s analysis found countries including Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Africa – and most importantly India – have done their utmost to avoid picking sides in the conflict.

On Monday, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, echoed Xi, saying he looked forward to strengthening New Delhi’s “time-tested special and privileged strategic partnership” with Moscow.

Since Russia’s war against Ukraine began in February 2022, Modi has walked a diplomatic tightrope that has seen him refuse to take a forceful stance against the invasion.

In recent years, India has sought to position itself as a global powerhouse. Newly minted as the world’s most populous country – as well as its fifth-largest and fastest-growing economy – western leaders have rolled out the red carpet for Modi, despite his government overseeing a period of democratic backsliding and growing authoritarianism.

At the same time, Modi has positioned himself as a leader of the global south – a loose collection of developing countries and formerly colonised nations – many of which continue to support Russia.

India has also emerged as the single biggest buyer of Russian oil. India’s refineries have taken advantage of vastly reduced prices, after Europe banned Russian oil imports. In stepping in to fill the void left by buyers in the west, India has helped to soften the blow of western sanctions on Moscow.

Our ‘older brother’ has triumphed

Putin’s win was celebrated by leaders in Latin America who have been historically at odds with the US. Experts say Russia’s isolation from the west has only pushed it closer to countries such as Cuba and Venezuela, whose foreign minister recently characterised Moscow as a “victim on the international stage”.

The country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, responded to the results of Sunday’s vote by saying: “Our older brother Vladimir Putin has triumphed, which bodes well for the world.”

Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, called the result “a credible indication that the Russian population supports [Putin’s] management of the country”.

Putin’s victory was also warmly received in several countries in west and central Africa which are ruled by juntas after a number of coups since 2020 – including Mali and Niger.

Russia has sought to court many of these countries in the Sahel region after they severed ties with their traditional French and US allies following the military uprisings.

Putin has also used the breakdown of an agreement that ensured continuing food export from Ukraine to global markets – many of them in Africa – as a means of bolstering his support in the region. In July 2023 he promised deliveries of free grain to Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, the Central African Republic and Eritrea. The first deliveries were shipped last month, according to the Russian government.

In Burkina Faso, a daily newspaper summed up the changing global dynamics in an editorial on Monday, writing that in Africa, the election “could sound like a non-event”, but that it takes on a particular meaning because “Putin embodies the new geopolitical balance of power on the continent with a growing [Russian] presence and influence.”

ATTACHMENT TWENTY EIGHT – FROM GUK

PUTIN BROMANCE HAS US INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS FEARING SECOND TRUMP TERM

Ex-president’s support for the Russian strongman has experts fretting over American interests and security sources overseas

By Peter Stone in Washington Mon 18 Mar 2024 06.00 EDT

Donald Trump’s continuing lavish praise and support for Vladimir Putin are fueling alarm among former intelligence officials and other experts who fear another Trump presidency would benefit Moscow and harm American democracy and interests overseas.

Trump praised the Russian president as a “genius” and “pretty savvy” when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, and has boasted he would end the war in a “day”, sparking critics’ fears that if he’s elected again Trump would help Russia achieve a favorable peace deal by cutting off aid to Kyiv. Trump also recently greenlit Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to Nato members who don’t pay enough to the alliance.

“Trump views Putin as a strongman,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and a national security official in the first two years of Trump’s administration. “In a way they’re working in parallel because they’re both trying to weaken the US, but for very different reasons.”

More recently, instead of criticizing Putin for the death of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition figure, who the Kremlin once tried to kill with poison, and who died suddenly last month in an Arctic penal colony, Trump weirdly equated the four criminal prosecutions he faces with Navalny’s fate.

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our country,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform

Trump’s adulation for autocrats was displayed again this month at Mar-a-Lago, where he hosted Viktor Orbán, the far-right Hungarian prime minister who is a close Putin ally and foe of Ukraine aid, whom Trump extolled. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán,” Trump said.

In turn, Orbán lauded Trump as “a man of peace”, and said if Trump is re-elected, he “won’t give a penny” to Ukraine and the war will end.

Ex-officials fret, too, that Trump would gut US intelligence by appointing far-right loyalists such as retired Lt Gen Michael Flynn, who briefly served in 2017 as Trump’s national security adviser and later plead guilty of lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition.

Deep concerns about another Trump presidency are rooted in part on his acceptance of Putin’s word in 2018 that Russia didn’t meddle in the 2016 election, despite strong evidence to the contrary from US intelligence officials, a bipartisan Senate panel report and an inquiry by special counsel Robert Mueller.

In paring back the US government and appointing loyalists, Trump will get rid of vital security expertise

Fiona Hill

A two-year investigation by Mueller found that Russian interference to help Trump win in 2016 was “sweeping and systematic”.

There were other significant signs of Trump cozying up to Russia during his presidency, including a bizarre Oval office meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister where Trump d classified information.

Now veteran intelligence officials and other experts say they have strong worries should Trump become president again, in light of the ongoing Putin-Trump bromance.

“Putin much prefers the chaos agent of Trump because it undermines the US,” Hill said. “Trump’s not worried about national security, but focused on himself. In paring back the US government and appointing loyalists, Trump will get rid of vital security expertise.”

“Trump is shockingly ignorant” about foreign affairs, Hill added. “Trump rarely read materials he was given before meetings. Trump is less a threat to Russia, and more to the US given his approach to governance.”

Other ex-officials raise related concerns.

“I think Trump and Putin are natural bedfellows,” said Douglas London, a retired senior CIA operations officer and author. “They complement each other well. They have common goals and objectives.

Given Trump’s oft stated agenda to seek retribution against his enemies, London worries that via executive orders Trump will “use the CIA like his own Praetorian guard. Trump could do this by using the agency’s unique capabilities and authorities to spy on, silence and perhaps even bring harm to his enemies.”

There is literally nothing about Trump that suggests he would put our country’s interests ahead of his own interests under almost any circumstances

Sheldon Whitehouse

Similarly, key Democrats are deeply worried about the international and domestic repercussions if Trump wins the presidency again.

“There is literally nothing about Trump that suggests he would put our country’s interests ahead of his own interests under almost any circumstances,” said Sheldon Whitehouse.

“So when he has a close and long standing, almost servile, relationship with a foreign enemy, who is also a multi-billionaire oligarch, the recipe for disaster is self-evident,” the Democratic senator said.

Trump’s efforts to placate Putin and undercut US intelligence were underscored by their infamous 2018 meeting in Helsinki, Whitehouse noted.

“We’ve seen Donald Trump’s assault on our national intelligence community prefigured by his horrifying performance with Putin where he said that he accepted Putin’s representations about election inference, election meddling and other mischief, putting our own intelligence agency’s determinations to the contrary, right under the bus.”

Likewise Charlie Dent, the ex-Republican Representative, voiced fears about another Trump presidency given Trump’s adulation for Putin. “Trump identifies with illiberal, populist and authoritarian leaders,” Dent said. “Trump has autocratic inclinations, and Putin is simply an autocrat.”

On the campaign trail, Trump has sparked new criticism with bizarre statements underscoring his authoritarian instincts.

One example: as Trump has ratcheted up his attacks on prosecutors who have charged him with 91 felony counts including 17 for conspiring with others to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, he even cited cynical comments by Putin last fall that echoed Trump’s false charges of political persecution.

“Even Vladimir Putin says that Biden’s – and this is a quote – politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia, because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” Trump told a New Hampshire rally this year before the state primary.

“Trump speaking favorably about Putin and using him as a credible source, is the language of extremist politics,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor and coauthor of How Democracies Die. “Trump is an authoritarian personality if there ever was one in American politics.”

In a cagey twist, after Putin last month said he’d prefer a Biden victory this year because he’s “more experienced”, and “more predictable”, Trump tried to capitalize on the former KGB spy’s comments by thanking Putin for paying him a “great compliment”.

“Putin’s trying to make as much mischief as possible,” said Hill. “It inoculates Trump and Putin if Biden is re-elected. Putin is covering all his bases.”

Still, ex-intelligence officials see Trump’s pro-Putin affinities leading to a politicized intelligence community if Trump wins again, weakening intelligence sharing with allies and benefitting Russian interests.

“Trump almost certainly will politicize the intelligence community by going forward with his public promise of installing people on the extreme fringes of rightwing politics such as Michael Flynn and Kash Patel,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior intelligence service official.

Patel, a former defense department official in the Trump years who has been touted as a possible acting attorney general or top CIA official if Trump wins again, late last year echoed Trump’s talk of seeking retribution against his enemies. Patel told Steve Bannon’s War Room: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in the government but in the media … who helped Joe Biden rig elections”

Polymeropoulos stressed that appointments of Flynn or Patel by Trump “would damage US ties with key allies. You’ll see old allies not sharing critical intelligence, and for good reason. They’ll slowly reduce sharing, so as not to provoke the ire of Trump, but their source protection concerns will be paramount and over-ride all else. The intelligence will dry up.”

“If Trump wins, forget the Brits or French – two of our best bilateral intelligence partners in Europe – ever sharing anything significant with us on Russia, for example.”

Likewise, London sees a second Trump presidency posing extraordinary dangers for the US and its allies. “Trump terribly underestimates Putin. It’s in his interests to keep the US preoccupied domestically and politically polarized,” he said.

Various testimonies from economists and experts have estimated Putin's total net worth to sit between $70 billion and $200 billion.Feb 20, 2024

Putin's net worth 'rivals Elon Musk,' but 'cobweb' of bank accounts, assets hides his full value, expert says

Putin hides his wealth in real estate — domestically and in the West — and offshore tax havens. The non-existent paper trail for Putin’s assets makes it difficult to fully appreciate the wealth the Russian leader has amassed since his humble roots as an intelligence officer.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY NINE - FROM FOX NEWS

FOX NEWS ASKS ALINA HABBA IF DONALD TRUMP'S BOND WILL COME FROM RUSSIA

Published Mar 20, 2024 at 8:05 PM EDTUpdated Mar 21, 2024 at 2:31 PM EDT

alina Habba was asked on Wednesday if   was working to secure his New York civil fraud bond from foreign entities amid speculation that the former president could look overseas to post his $454 million in penalties.

The former president is   to a deadline on Monday to come up with a financial guarantee to post his total bond amount, which stems from a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. If Trump fails to do so, state prosecutors could start the process of enforcing the judgment, which includes targeting Trump's assets and real estate properties.

Speaking with  ' Martha MacCallum on Wednesday afternoon, Habba, Trump's lead defense counsel in the case, said that the $454 million in penalties is "completely ridiculous," and condemned the ruling by New York State   Justice  , who found Trump, his two adult sons and others associated with The Trump Organization liable of misleading lenders and insurance companies for better terms.

"It is intentionally to interfere in the election, to hurt President Trump, to try and ruin his company, and ruin a person and a family whose private company, not public company, has made the skyline of New York changed forever," Habba added.

Trump maintains that he is innocent and has said that he intends to appeal the ruling, which would require an additional $10 million to his total bond amount. The former president is also the presumptive GOP nominee for the 

MacCallum also asked Habba if there was "any effort" on Trump's defense team to try to secure the total bond amount "through another country," such as Saudi Arabia or Russia.

"There's rules and regulations that are public," Habba responded. "I can't speak about strategy. That requires certain things, and we have to follow those rules."

Some critics of the former president have raised concerns that Trump's growing debt among his legal cases could pose a national security risk depending on who or what entities agree to post the bond. According to a court filing from Trump's lawyers on Monday, the defense team has asked   to cover the bond: All of such requests have been denied.

National security lawyer Mary McCord t  that there are "certainly plenty of people who might want to bail him out," suggesting that some entities could be "foreign, some of those might be Russian oligarchs," or people and companies within the U.S.

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"Any time you are talking about someone who is running for president or holding any elected office and potentially could have some indebtedness or feeling of owing somebody else something, that's very dangerous," McCord added.

Democratic Congressman Sean Casten   about Trump's legal ramifications in a post to X, formerly  , on Monday, writing that the former president's position of being "desperate" for help covering his bond "makes him a massive national security risk; any foreign adversary seeking to buy a President knows the price."

Newsweek on Wednesday reached out to Trump's campaign for comment on the speculation over his bond.

Trump was able to secure   after his civil suit loss to  , who sued the former president for defamation and sexual assault. Despite being ordered to pay Carroll by two different juries for defaming the former magazine columnist, Trump maintains that he is innocent.

ATTACHMENT THIRTY – FROM NEWSWEEK

RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS MAY WANT TO BAIL OUT DONALD TRUMP: NAT'L SECURITY LAWYER

By Natalie Venegas Published Feb 24, 2024 at 2:52 PM ESTUpdated Feb 25, 2024 at 7:45 AM EST

Amid  's growing debt among his legal cases, Russian oligarchs may want want to bail out the former president, according to national security lawyer Mary McCord on Saturday.

New York Attorney General Letitia James in a lawsuit filed in September 2022 accused Trump, his two adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, The Trump Organization and two firm executives, Allen Weisselberg and Jeff McConney of   to secure more favorable bank loans and taxation deals.

Last week, Judge   ruled that Trump will be fined roughly $355 million and   for three years after a monthslong civil trial from late last year into early January. Trump has maintained his innocence in the case and claimed it was politically motivated.

The New York judgment comes weeks after Trump was ordered to pay $83.3 million to former Elle columnist   for damaging her reputation after she accused him of sexually assaulting her during an incident in the 1990s. A separate jury last year awarded Carroll $5 million from Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. Trump has also denied any wrongdoing in the case.

In an interview with  's The Weekend on Saturday McCord, who previously served as acting assistant attorney general for national security at the   (DOJ), was asked by host Symone Sanders-Townsend if Trump's financial exposure poses a national security risk.

"Yes, we are talking about how difficult it might be for him to post this near half a billion dollar bond, but he has certainly plenty of people who might want to bail him out on that. Some of those might be foreign, some of those might be Russian oligarchs, some of those might be people right here in the U.S.," McCord said.

McCord added that Trump's fondness of Russian President   is also cause for concern, saying that there may be other countries that see the possibility of Trump becoming president as a way to earn favors from him.

"Anytime you are talking about someone who is running for president or holding any elected office and potentially could have some indebtedness or feeling of owing somebody else something, that's very dangerous. Particularly here as we know his fondness for Putin, his continuing praise of Putin and the way he governs Russia and that's something I could very much see people there who have the means to help him out. There's plenty of other countries that would like to get some favors from Donald Trump should he become the president again," she said.

Newsweek has reached out to Trump's spokesperson via email for comment.

At a rally earlier this month, Trump   after saying he would "encourage" Russia to do "whatever the hell" it wants to members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( ) who insufficiently contribute financially to the military alliance.

"I said, 'You didn't pay, you're delinquent?'" the former president told the crowd. "In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills."

McCord is not the first to suggest the former president's debt makes him   Last week in an interview with with MSNBC's  , Trump's former national security adviser   said that the legal issues Trump faces is one reason why the former president is not fit for office.

"I think this is one of the demonstrations why Trump is really not fit for office because he is consumed by these troubles, his family is consumed by them, and I think foreigners will try to take advantage of it one way or another. They may be doing it already," he said.

ATTACHMENT THIRTY ONE – FROM THE HILL

WILL PUTIN RISK WORLD WAR III?

BY MARK TOTH AND JONATHAN SWEET, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 03/21/24 7:00 AM ET

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers his state-of-the-nation address in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024.

The Ides of March have come and gone at the Kremlin, and Russian President Vladimir Putin remains standing. He is now free of domestic distractions. 

Washington and Brussels should be alarmed.

Brutus, in the form of Yevgeny Prigozhin, is dead, killed last August when his private jet exploded. Putin’s chief political rival and most outspoken critic, Alexei Navalny, died last month at the high security penal colony in Yamal near the Arctic circle, where he had been imprisoned. He allegedly died during a walk.

Putin may soon be at his most dangerous vis-a-vis the short- and long-term security of eastern and central Europe, after winning a fifth sham presidential election. A recently disclosed classified German intelligence report suggests that Russia could attack a NATO country — possibly the Baltic countries or Finland — as early as 2026.

Other Red Team scenarios should be considered as well, given that NATO is tattering at the edges in Hungary and Slovakia, while the U.S. increasingly is distracted by fractious election-year politics. 

Meanwhile, neither French President Emmanuel Macron nor Poland and Estonia are ruling out Western troops in Ukraine. Macron upped the ante by declaring the Russia-Ukraine war as “existential.” Coupled with Czech President Petr Pavel’s efforts to secure funding for 800,000 rounds of artillery, the Kremlin’s window of opportunity to win may be closing.

The question is whether Putin could respond by escalating the war. Might he attack the Baltic States or Moldova? Or elsewhere?

NATO must anticipate a strike against one of its members, and Putin clearly sees the Baltic States as NATO’s weakest link.

Putin could conduct a limited strike outside of Ukraine for several reasons — to expedite victory or retain control of the Donbas and Crimea in the midst of impending defeat. Either way, he would challenge what he considers to be a divided NATO to make a critical decision: Defend NATO, or defend Ukraine? 

Russia’s advantage in artillery and its ability to sustain relentless ‘meat assaults,’ proved decisive in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to tactically withdraw in February from Avdiivka. Consequently, Putin has scoffed at the notion of negotiating with Zelensky “just because [Ukraine] is running out of ammunition.” Nonetheless, this “advantage’ has only bought Putin a few kilometers, not the hundreds he needs to defeat Ukraine.

To break the stalemate, Putin must change NATO’s calculus and willingness to continue supplying Ukraine’s war effort. Putting NATO in a defensive posture by striking targets with conventional weapons in the Baltic States could be one way of shifting the NATO effort away from Ukraine, even though it would risk a comprehensive response by the alliance. 

Escalating conflict to deescalate is an oft-used Russian diplomatic and military tactic, known as the Gerasimov Doctrine. The idea is simply to create chaos and then take advantage of it. Putin could deploy the tactic to create pandemonium in Brussels and to counter Macron’s bold declaration that he is willing to send French troops to Ukraine

During his presidential election victory speech on Sunday, Putin said, “It is clear to everyone that this conflict between Russia and NATO will just be one step away from World War III.” Putin cannot back down, as this would bring humiliation upon him and Russia, as well as his own downfall. This speech suggests he is willing to escalate outside of Ukraine in order to win inside Ukraine.

NATO needs to be ready for this.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Llyod Austin and newly installed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown, Jr. attended the 20th meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Ramstein Germany on Tuesday. Fifty nations participated in the summit, yet its scope is no longer sufficient.

Austin noted that “Ukraine’s survival is in danger.” Yet, should Putin strike, NATO’S survival could be in peril too.

NATO allies must begin actively planning for the defense of Europe from any potential Russian aggression, and they must do so for two parallel timeframes. 

The first is in the near term, while the war in Ukraine is still being fought. The second is for a resumption of combat operations ten to twenty years after its conclusion.

NATO is already making urgently needed progress in the long war. Sweden’s formal accession has strengthened the alliance’s defenses in the Baltic Sea and Arctic, and Brussels is transforming the 57th Air Base in Mihail Kogălniceanu, Romania into what will become the largest NATO base in Europe.

Yet, this is only a start. Far more defensive capabilities will be needed in Poland and the Baltic States. 

Ukraine is just Putin’s opening act. He wants more and he has said so. Crimea was not enough in 2014 to sate his appetite for dominance once again of the Black Sea, and Ukraine will not be enough if he wins.

Putin, regardless of wishful thinking, is not going away. Every day, his propaganda media talking heads remind us that Moscow is intent on rebuilding its empire. Sergey Mardan was the latest. As Julia Davis, a Russian media expert, noted on X, Mardan recently asserted “that the dissolution of the USSR was meaningless and did not provide legitimacy to the nations that used to be a part of it.”

Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia are therefore the most likely candidates, should Putin opt to escalate against NATO to de-escalate. Potentially Poland too. NATO must be vigilantly and proactively on guard. 

Meanwhile, NATO must contend with its own would-be ‘Brutuses.’ Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico are likely to add to or at least prolong any chaos Putin causes. Both NATO member state heads are Putin apologists and have parroted Russian propaganda against Kyiv. Fico even claimed in January that, “Ukraine is not an independent and sovereign country.”

The Baltic States and Poland are under no such delusions. Their d memories of Soviet repression are likely the reason Putin will have miscalculated if he strikes them. Warsaw, as a military near-peer to Russia, would likely lead in taking the fight militarily to a weakened Russia. 

Putin’s calculus could be that Washington and Brussels are unwilling to risk World War III by fulfilling their NATO obligation to defend the Baltic States. In that regard, he might prove right, or at least create considerable chaos inside of NATO as the alliance seeks consensus on how to respond.

Washington, London, Paris and Brussels must fully disabuse Putin of that notion. The West must make it clear to Putin that any attempt to escalate the war in Europe will only result in swift and decisive escalation by NATO.

Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer. 

ATTACHMENT THIRTY TWO – FROM GUK

PUTIN IS A DICTATOR AND A TYRANT, BUT OTHER FORCES ALSO SUSTAIN HIM – AND THE WEST NEEDS TO UNDERSTAND THEM

Kneejerk criticism of regimes in Russia, China or India may make us feel better, but there’s no evidence it is making the world a safer place

Simon Jenkins Fri 22 Mar 2024 02.00 EDT

The west’s derisive reporting of Vladimir Putin’s election victory this week was a mark of his success. It was described as an abuse of democracy, “rigged”, “fixed” and “a sham”. The other candidates were shadows, while Putin’s true opponents were imprisoned, exiled or dead. According to this narrative, the 87% who voted for him were mere victims of coercion, the queues of silent protesters were the stars.

Putin’s vote had nothing to do with democracy. It was a rerun of his 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, a global dressing-up, a rallying of support. As he celebrated his win to an adoring crowd in Red Square on Monday, we saw Putin as the new Ivan the Terrible against a backdrop of Ivan’s St Basil’s cathedral. He even made an offhand quip about his murdered rival Navalny. The image was of absolute power smilingly defying the enemy. Two years ago, he was supposedly crippled by western sanctions. We don’t hear that now.

I sometimes think what fun it would be to spend a month as the London correspondent for a totalitarian state newspaper. The evidence of relentless failures by the British government would fuel my daily contrasts with the order and stability back home. I would ponder when these bickering politicians and their corrupt donors would fade to nothing. I would report on the excluded populists – the Johnsons, Andersons, Farages and Galloways – waiting in the wings to pounce, while Rishi Sunak twists and turns frantically to avoid an election.

How we describe other countries matters when our concern is not how it seems to them, but how it feels to us. Almost half a century of George Kennan’s policy of containment and cohabitation with communism has given way to a shrill new agenda. Not just Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Syria, but states across Asia and Africa are regularly castigated as tyrannical, terrorist or genocidal. They are made victims of economic aggression through sanctions, distorting global trade and impoverishing millions. There is no evidence this castigation has advanced the cause of democracy an inch – quite the opposite.

One survey suggests the number of democracies has declined since 2015. Political bookshelves heave with predictions of democracy’s decay and death. Most alarming was last year’s polling from Open Society Foundations. Surveying nations across the globe, it found that only 57% of 18 to 35s regarded democracy as their preferred form of government, against more than 70% for those over 56. Each successive younger generation has a lower respect for democracy. More than a third of the world’s under-35s would today support some sort of “military rule”, by a “strong leader” who did not hold elections or consult a parliament.

When I asked a Russia expert what he thought would be the true tally of electoral support for Putin’s dictatorship, his view squared with this survey. He suggested it would be about 60%, though lower in Moscow and St Petersburg. This sounded much like my visits to Moscow in the post-communist 1990s. Russians would concede the virtues of western democracy, but they pleaded the more urgent need for order, security and prosperity.

To vote for Putin, you did not need to support his regime or his war with Ukraine. You might well be content with the one thing he promises: security and a patriotic response to western abuse. Nato’s escalation of its logistical aid to Ukraine into an all-out economic war on the Russian people enabled Putin to construct an anti-west coalition. It now extends from China and India to embrace a stage army of authoritarians across the globe. This economic war has clearly been counter-productive. The Economist reports this week that the sanctions have in fact “juiced the [Russian] economy”. Russian GDP growth of approximately 3 % in real terms last year outstripped Britain’s. Western policy is actively helping Putin retain power.

As the historian of modern Russia Mark Galeotti points out, Putin’s defiance of his western critics has entrenched his “shabby police state”, possibly for his lifetime. We can hurl abuse at him, as we can at Xi, Modi and the rest. It may make us feel better. And perhaps we should, not least on moral grounds: these are not regimes we would cast as admirable. But let’s be realistic. There is not the slightest evidence that in doing so we are making the world a safer place for democracy; probably the reverse.

ATTACHMENT THIRTY THREE – FROM GUK

OVER 1M UKRAINIANS WITHOUT POWER AFTER MAJOR RUSSIAN ASSAULT ON ENERGY SYSTEM

Kyiv says the country’s largest dam and hydroelectric plant were hit as Moscow unleashed 88 missiles and 63 drones

By Pjotr Sauer Fri 22 Mar 2024 12.09 EDT

More than a million Ukrainians have been left without power after Russia launched one of its largest missile and drone attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure to date.

The Ukrainian air force said Russia had launched 88 missiles and 63 Iranian-made Shahed drones. Of them, 37 and 55 respectively were shot down, but others hit the country’s largest dam and caused blackouts in several regions, and killing at least five people.

The strikes came as the Kremlin stepped up its rhetoric over the conflict, saying that Russia was “in a state of war” in Ukraine and casting aside its usual depiction of the invasion as a “special military operation.”

Russia’s defence ministry said it launched the “massive” air strikes as revenge for Ukrainian attacks on its border regions over recent weeks.

Several major power facilities were hit in the south-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, including the country’s largest dam and the Dnipro hydroelectric power plant, one of Europe’s biggest. Ukrainian authorities said there was no risk of a breach but a generating unit was in critical condition after dramatic images posted online showed a fire at the dam.

“The enemy is carrying out the largest-scale attack on the Ukrainian energy industry in recent times,” said the energy minister, German Galushchenko.

“The goal is not just to damage, but to try again, like last year, to cause a large-scale failure in the operation of the country’s energy system.”

Russia routinely struck Ukrainian power and hydroelectric plants, substations and heat generation facilities in the winter of 2022-23, leaving the average Ukrainian household without electricity for weeks, but the country appeared better prepared and able to shield its energy infrastructure in the early months of the second winter of the war. A delay in vital US aid has however significantly weakened Kyiv’s ability to withstand attacks.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, sharply criticised the continued uncertainty over western support. “Russian missiles have no delays, unlike aid packages for Ukraine,” Zelenskiy wrote on social media after Friday’s attacks.

“Shahed drones have no indecision, unlike some politicians. It is critical to understand the cost of delays and postponed decisions. Our partners know exactly what is needed. They can definitely support us. These are necessary decisions. Life must be protected from these savages from Moscow.”

The strikes came as there was anger in Ukraine over areport by the Financial Times that Washington had urged Kyiv to halt drone strikes on Russian energy infrastructure for fear of driving up global oil prices.

Ukraine has used domestically-produced drones to wreak havoc with Russia’s energy infrastructure since the start of the year. Attacks have led to the shutdown of several key Russian oil refineries deep inside the country that account for about 12% of Moscow’s refining capacity. The attacks have also led to a surge in oil prices, which have risen nearly 4% since 12 March.

Citing sources with knowledge of the matter, the Financial Times reported that US officials were worried that a further rise in the country’s petrol prices could weaken Joe Biden ratings and undermine his campaign to win a second term as president.

The report is likely to cause more friction between Kyiv and its western allies. Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration said that her country “understands the appeals of our American partners.”

“At the same time, we are fighting with the capabilities, resources and practices that we have today,” Stefanishyna said during the Kyiv Security Forum on Friday.

“Stop projecting fear! Ukraine should and will strike into Moscovian oil refineries. This is the most effective energy sanction so far,” wrote Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Centre, on X.

The Kremlin’s rare use of the term “war” on Friday comes as Moscow seeks to increase domestic support for the Putin invasion while signalling to its population that it should gear up for a prolonged conflict

“It started as a special military operation,” the Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said. “But as soon as … the collective west became involved in this on the side of Ukraine, it became a war for us.”

The Kremlin has taken a notably more aggressive line towards the west since the French president, Emmanuel Macron, opened the door to sending European ground troops to Ukraine. Vladimir Putin has previously told Nato countries they risk provoking a nuclear war if they send troops to fight in Ukraine.

Macron told a summit of EU leaders in Brussels on Friday that anyone who thinks that Moscow will stop in the Donbas and Crimea is mistaken

Tatiana Stanovaya, a political analyst and founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik, said Peskov’s war comments signalled a new chapter in the conflict.

“Now it’s official. The special military operation is now recognised as a war,” she wrote on Telegram.

“Of course, de facto, the special military operation became a war long ago. But we have now passed a certain psychological boundary, beyond which more will be demanded both from population and the elites.”

Responding to journalists’ questions later, Peskov said his comments did not mean the country would introduce any legal changes adding that Russia’s actions in Ukraine were still legally qualified at home as “a special military operation”

Moscow has shown no signs it plans to slow down its assault on Ukraine two years after launching a full-scale invasion, but the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) executive board said on Thursday that it expected the war to wind down by the end of 2024.

A senior IMF official made the comments as the organisation approved a third review of Ukraine’s $15.6bn (£9.2bn) loan programme, allowing the release of $880m for budget support.

ATTACHMENT THIRTY FOUR – FROM GUK

MOSCOW CONCERT HALL SHOOTING: AT LEAST 40 KILLED AND 100 WOUNDED IN ATTACK; ROOF COLLAPSING AS FIRE RIPS THROUGH VENUE – LATEST UPDATES

More than 100 people injured in attack on Crocus City Hall, says FSB, as Russian officials investigate incident as terrorist attack

By Léonie Chao-Fong (now) and Maya Yang (earlier) Fri 22 Mar 2024 16.37 EDT

From 1h ago 15.20 EDT

40 dead, more than 100 wounded, says FSB

Forty people are dead and more than 100 others are wounded following shooting attacks at Crocus City Hall outside Moscow on Friday night, according to Russia’s Federal Security Service.

According to IFX, up to five gunmen were involved in the attacks.

Russia’s top investigative agency, the Investigative Committee, said that it is investigating the events as a terrorist attack, the Associated Press reports.

The agency did not say who may be responsible for the attacks.

Updated at 15.39 EDT 10m ago 16.37 EDT

Here is some background coming from the Associated Press on previous terrorist attacks in Russia:

Russia was shaken by a series of deadly terror attacks in the early 2000s during the fighting with separatists in the Russian province of Chechnya.

In October 2002, Chechen militants took about 800 people hostage at a Moscow theater. Two days later, Russian special forces stormed the building and 129 hostages and 41 Chechen fighters died, most of them from effects of narcotic gas Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.

And in September 2004, about 30 Chechen militants seized a school in Beslan in southern Russia taking hundreds of hostages. The siege ended in a bloodbath two days later and more than 330 people, about half of them children, were killed.

15m ago 16.32 EDT

Children among those injured in shooting - report

Children are among those injured in the shooting incident and fire at the Crocus City Hall concert centre, Russia’s state-owned Ria news agency is reporting.

Andrey Vorobyov, the governor of Moscow oblast, has posted to his Telegram account that five people are in serious condition.

19m ago

16.28 EDT

Search for concert hall attackers ongoing - reports

The Russian national guard is searching for those who attacked the Crocus City Hall concert centre near Moscow, Russian news agencies are reporting.

21m ago

16.26 EDT

The US state department has said its embassy in Moscow is aware of reports of an ongoing terrorist incident at Crocus City Hall.

In a social media post, it advised US citizens to avoid the area and follow instructions of local authorities.

31m ago

16.16 EDT

Putin receiving regular updates on attack, says Kremlin

The Kremlin has said that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is receiving regular updates about the shooting at the Crocus City Hall concert hall.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, in a statement carried by Russia’s Tass state news agency, said:

In the first minutes of the incident at the Crocus City Hall, the president was informed about the start of the shooting. The president is constantly supplied by all relevant services with information about what is happening and the measures being taken. The president has already given all the necessary instructions.

35m ago

16.12 EDT

Here are some of the latest images we have received from the newswires from outside the Crocus City Hall venue in Moscow. (See website)

16.16 EDT

39m ago

16.08 EDT

Videos and photos have emerged showing the Crocus City Hall engulfed in flames and from the attack, showing at least four gunmen opening fire from automatic weapons as panicked Russians fled for their lives.

In one video, three men in fatigues carrying rifles fired at pointblank range into bodies strewn about the lobby of the concert hall. The attackers also apparently detonated explosives, as the sounds of blasts could be heard in other videos from the attack.

54m ago

15.53 EDT

Ukraine denies involvement in attacks

Ukraine has denied involvement in the attacks, with Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, tweeting the following statement:

Ukraine certainly has nothing to do with the shooting/explosions in the Crocus City Hall (Moscow Region, Russia). It makes no sense whatsoever …

Ukraine has been fighting with the Russian army for more than two years. And everything in this war will be decided only on the battlefield. Only by the quantity of weapons and qualitative military decisions. Terrorist attacks do not solve any problems ...

Ukraine has never resorted to the use of terrorist methods. It is always pointless. Unlike, by the way, Russia itself, which uses terrorist attacks in the current war against Ukraine …

And thirdly, long before the events in #Crocus_City_Hall, we had heard public warnings from foreign embassies stationed in #Moscow about the possibility of such bloody excesses.

As a conclusion: there is not the slightest doubt that the events in the Moscow suburbs will contribute to a sharp increase in military propaganda, accelerated militarization, expanded mobilization, and, ultimately, the scaling up of the war. And also to justify manifest genocidal strikes against the civilian population of Ukraine ...

1h ago

15.38 EDT

Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny who died in February in a Russian penal colony, has expressed her condolences after the attacks on Friday night.

In a post on X, Navanlnaya wrote:

What a nightmare in Crocus. Condolences to the families of the victims and recovery to the injured. All those involved in this crime must be found and held accountable.”

1h ago

15.20 EDT

40 dead, more than 100 wounded, says FSB

Forty people are dead and more than 100 others are wounded following shooting attacks at Crocus City Hall outside Moscow on Friday night, according to Russia’s Federal Security Service.

According to IFX, up to five gunmen were involved in the attacks.

Russia’s top investigative agency, the Investigative Committee, said that it is investigating the events as a terrorist attack, the Associated Press reports.

The agency did not say who may be responsible for the attacks.

2h ago

15.16 EDT

Roof of concert hall where shooting took place is collapsing

The roof of Crocus City Hall where gunfire and flames were heard and seen on Friday night is collapsing, RIA reports.

2h ago

15.10 EDT

Here (see website) is a map of Crocus City Hall which is located about 20km from Moscow’s Red Square:

2h ago

14.57 EDT

A helicopter has been called in to extinguish the fires at Crocus City Hall following the gun attacks, TASS reports.

ATTACHMENT THIRTY FIVE – FROM GUK
PUTIN’S LETHALLY NEGLIGENT FAILURE CAN’T BE COVERED UP. THE MOSCOW ATTACK LEAVES HIM WEAKER THAN EVER

The mask of invincibility is slipping ever further, and eventually that will matter. This debacle won’t be forgiven or forgotten

By Simon Tisdall Mon 25 Mar 2024 08.32 EDT

Each time Vladimir Putin messes up, the same question is asked: will it make any difference? Last week’s terrorist attack on the Crocus City concert hall near Moscow, which killed 137 people, is one of the bigger crises Putin has faced in his 25-year rule. There is no doubt that he, as Russia’s head of state and overall chief of its security forces, bears ultimate responsibility for what was by any measure a catastrophic failure. In any normal political system, his resignation would be expected.

The fact this is more or less unimaginable is not necessarily a sign of Putin’s strength. His dictatorship has eviscerated checks and balances within Russian society, eliminating means of independent scrutiny. Any call for him to take personal responsibility would barely be heard, let alone acted on. Yet the Russian people, while chronically misled and serially misinformed, are not stupid.

With blood on the streets and a nation in mourning, there’s no hiding that the Putin superman myth just took a serious, bubble-bursting beating.

The Kremlin is estimated to have spent more than £1bn on “information management”, meaning lies and propaganda, to ensure Putin’s recent presidential election “victory”. In addition, there was a reported 20-fold increase in state spending on internet and media. All this had a single aim: to portray Putin as an invincible, indispensable modern-day tsar who bravely protects Mother Russia from her enemies.

Yet on Friday, four gunmen comprehensively demolished that myth in an anarchic frenzy of merciless violence. The attackers were unopposed, the victims had no warning, and all of Putin’s huge security apparatus – all this usurper king’s horses and men – were unable to stop the butchering of defenceless citizens.

Even in a society as tied down as Russia’s, this lethally negligent failure will not be forgotten or forgiven.

That’s on Putin. And it points to another fundamental weakness in his personal and political position: he is so out of touch, so isolated from day-to-day Russian realities, that he believes his own mendacious narratives. Despite explicit videos published online by Islamic State, which has admitted that it undertook the attack, Putin persists in blaming Ukrainian “Nazis”. This is beyond cynical. It’s borderline psychotic.

There is not a jot of evidence to support this deranged calumny, fiercely denied in Kyiv. Yet it’s no surprise. Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories are Putin’s stock in trade. The expectation is that the Kremlin, not satisfied with the recent murder of leading regime critic Alexei Navalny, will exploit the attack to further suppress domestic dissent, expand political controls, escalate the Ukraine war, even order a mass mobilisation.

If Putin is incapable of telling, or at least of accepting, the difference between reality and make-believe, it’s because he himself squats atop an edifice of lies. His power and his presidency are based on systemic falsehoods, fed daily to a captive nation on an epic scale. The basic contract, as it is sometimes called, between Putin and the people is that he delivers security and they deliver support. Yet this is the biggest lie of all.

Putin does not give a damn for the security and the wellbeing of ordinary Russians. At Crocus City, the big lie was cruelly exposed. As innocent people died or writhed in agony, Putin silently skulked, sulked and schemed for 19 hours about how best to dodge the blame and spin the fallout.

His selfish, cold-eyed insouciance has been witnessed again and again. Remember his callous attempts to ignore the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000 and the carnage he oversaw during the second siege of Grozny. Most recently it has led to the stupidest geostrategic blunder of modern times – his inept invasion of Ukraine – and resulting mass Russian casualties. He just doesn’t care.

With Putin, it’s always all about him, about his own insecurity, his need for absolute power, his delusions of revived Russian imperial grandeur. It’s never about other people, let alone “the people”.

The damage done to Russia by Putin’s war and the standoff with the west, in terms of lives, treasure and reputation, is incalculable. Yet it’s his abiding obsession. Everything he thinks and does appears related to it. Speaking after this month’s election, he vowed yet again to make it his main focus. Why? Because, deep in his shrivelled, desiccated heart, he knows it was a terrible mistake.

Most Russians, understandably, do not share Putin’s obsession. Instead they see, with growing clarity, the harm his war does to their families, their living standards, their shrinking freedoms, their personal safety. Regime-manipulated polls are misleading. Many Russians want it to end. Their silence is not consent, nor does it signify approval. It is rooted in fear.

Putin is vulnerable. He should have seen the terrorists’ attack coming. But arrogance and complacency blinded him. When the US generously shared an explicit heads-up about an imminent plot, he dismissed it as a disinformation ploy. When the security services should have been tracking Islamist militants, they were harassing opponents, journalists and gay people on his orders.

Putin has remade the Russian state in his own image: brutal, incompetent, ignorant, distrustful, delusional and isolated. It is fundamentally weak, as is he. Incrementally, as one calamity succeeds another, his grip slips, his authority weakens and fear of him dissipates. The Crocus City atrocity will accelerate this process. It does make a difference.

By helping shatter the altar screen of mythical omniscience behind which he cowers like a defrocked priest, it has forced Putin one more step down the road towards a final reckoning. It’s coming, do not doubt it. It’s coming.

· Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator

ATTACHMENT THIRTY SIX – FROM GUK

MOSCOW ATTACK EXPLAINER: WHY WOULD ISLAMIC STATE ATTACK RUSSIA AND WHAT WILL PUTIN’S RESPONSE BE?

After IS claimed responsibility for shooting in Moscow’s Crocus city hall, questions remain about how Russia will respond

By Jason Burke and Jonathan Yerushalmy Mon 25 Mar 2024 02.01 EDT

The attack on Moscow’s Crocus City concert hall is the deadliest attack claimed by the Islamic State (IS) on European soil, with 137 people confirmed to have been killed.

On Friday evening, attackers carrying assault rifles entered the concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, shooting for nearly an hour as panicked concertgoers scrambled to escape. Then the attackers set the venue on fire.

The death toll is slightly higher than the devastating Paris attacks of 2015, which came at the height of the IS’s power.

Since Friday, events have moved quickly, with four suspects – identified as citizens of Tajikistan by a Russian news agency – appearing in court on Sunday, pleading guilty to being involved.

Questions remain, however: the shape that President Vladimir Putin’s response will take is unclear, while experts are seeking to explain the precise motive for the attack.

Why would IS attack Russia?

There are practical, historical and ideological reasons why IS would attack Russia.

IS leaders have long seen attacks against distant targets as an integral part of their extremist project. Such operations – when successful – terrorise their enemies but also mobilise existing supporters and attract new ones.

Often, targets are determined by what resources are available. Nine years ago, a cohort of French and Belgian recruits in Syria led to a wave of attacks in both countries. In the past 18 months, IS has made a concerted effort to recruit central Asian militants through its Afghan branch, known as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). Being Russian speaking, or even Russian nationals, these recruits can easily reach a target in Moscow, offering multiple new opportunities for attacks.

Russia has been in the cross-hairs of IS for many years. IS leaders, like many Islamic militants, are mindful of Russian support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. A key point made by IS propaganda from Pakistan to Nigeria is that Moscow is part of the broader coalition of Christian or western forces engaged in an existential, 1,400-year-old battle against Islam.

IS statements claiming responsibility for the attack boasted of “killing Christians”.

Leaders of ISKP may also see Russia as supportive of the continued rule of the Taliban, which has repressed them. They will also remember brutal Soviet military operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s and “the Jihad” waged by their fathers or grandfathers against Moscow’s forces. Russia’s bloody war in Chechnya in 1999 may be a factor too.

What will Russia’s response be?

Many terrorist attacks seek to provoke a powerful repressive response from authorities, with the aim of further escalating violence. If this was part of the IS plan for Moscow, they are unlikely to be disappointed.

Russian authorities’ interrogation of the suspects appears to have been particularly brutal.

Videos circulating of their interrogations suggest that the men were tortured; one of the videos appears to show members of the security forces cutting off the ear of a suspect and then stuffing it into his mouth.

In court, all of the suspects appeared heavily bruised with swollen faces. One of them was brought to court directly from hospital in a wheelchair. He was attended by medics and was seen with multiple cuts.

Putin has vowed to punish those behind the “barbaric terrorist attack” – and Muslim minorities in Russia are likely to face a wave of repression.

In the Russian ruler’s only public remarks on the massacre he made no reference to IS’s claims of responsibility.

Instead, despite IS claiming the attack and releasing footage to corroborate those claims, Russia has still sought to place some blame on Ukraine.

On Saturday, Putin claimed without evidence that the four arrested gunmen planned to flee to Ukraine. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said Putin and others close to him are seeking to divert the blame from Russian intelligence failings.

The US has said it received intelligence that ISKP acted alone.

Will the death toll rise?

As of the Monday after the attack, emergency workers said they were continuing to search for anyone who may be left wounded or dead inside the severely damaged concert hall. The death toll rose multiple times over the weekend as more bodies were found.

Many families were left not knowing if relatives present at the concert hall on Friday night were alive. Igor Pogadaev told the AP news agency that he was desperately seeking any details of his wife’s whereabouts after she went to the concert and stopped responding to his messages.

Pogodaev said he scoured hospitals in the Russian capital and the broader Moscow region, looking for information on newly admitted patients. But his wife was not among those reported injured or on the list of victims identified so far, he said.

Moscow’s health department said on Sunday it had begun using DNA testing to identify the bodies of those killed, a process that would take at least two weeks.

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report

LETTERED ATTACHMENTS

ATTACHMENT “A” – FROM MIRAGE NEWS

22 FEB 2023 12:16 AM AEDT

Full Text of Putin State of Nation Speech 21 Feb 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday delivered a nearly two-hour long State of the Nation address, among many other wide-ranging topics, assessing the invasion of Ukraine he ordered a year ago.

Below is the full text transcript in English of his speech independently translated from the original speech in Russian (Russia refers to the Russia-Ukraine War as a special military operation):

Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon!

Dear deputies (members) of the Federal Assembly - senators, deputies of the State Duma!

Dear citizens of Russia!

With today's Address, I am speaking at a difficult time - we all know this very well - a milestone time for our country, at a time of cardinal, irreversible changes throughout the world, the most important historical events that determine the future of our country and our people, when each of we have a huge responsibility.

A year ago, in order to protect people on our historical lands, to ensure the security of our country, to eliminate the threat posed by the neo-Nazi regime that emerged in Ukraine after the 2014 coup, a decision was made to conduct a special military operation. And step by step, carefully and consistently, we will solve the tasks before us.

Starting from 2014, Donbass fought, defended the right to live on its own land, speak its native language, fought and did not give up in the conditions of blockade and constant shelling, undisguised hatred from the Kiev regime, believed and waited for Russia to come to the rescue.

Meanwhile - and you know this well - we did everything possible, really everything possible to solve this problem by peaceful means, patiently negotiated a peaceful way out of this grave conflict.

But a completely different scenario was being prepared behind our backs. The promises of the Western rulers, their assurances about the desire for peace in the Donbass turned out to be, as we now see, a forgery, a cruel lie. They simply played for time, engaged in chicanery, turned a blind eye to political assassinations, to the repressions of the Kiev regime against objectionable people, to mockery of believers, and more and more encouraged Ukrainian neo-Nazis to carry out terrorist actions in the Donbass. In Western academies and schools, officers of nationalist battalions were trained and weapons were supplied.

And I want to emphasize that even before the start of the special military operation, Kyiv was negotiating with the West on the supply of air defense systems, combat aircraft, and other heavy equipment to Ukraine. We also remember the attempts of the Kyiv regime to acquire nuclear weapons, because we talked about it publicly.

The United States and NATO rapidly deployed their army bases and secret biological laboratories near the borders of our country, mastered the theater of future military operations in the course of maneuvers, prepared the Kiev regime subject to them, the Ukraine they had enslaved, for a big war.

And today they admit it - they admit it publicly, openly, without hesitation. They seem to be proud, reveling in their treachery, calling both the Minsk agreements and the Normandy format a diplomatic performance, a bluff. It turns out that all the time when the Donbass was on fire, when blood was shed, when Russia was sincerely - I want to emphasize this - it was sincerely striving for a peaceful solution, they were playing on people's lives, they were playing, in fact, as they say in well-known circles, with marked cards.

This disgusting method of deception has been tried many times before. They behaved just as shamelessly, duplicitously, destroying Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria. From this shame they will never be washed off. The concepts of honor, trust, decency are not for them.

Over the long centuries of colonialism, diktat, hegemony, they got used to being allowed everything, got used to spitting on the whole world. It turned out that they treat the peoples of their own countries just as disdainfully, like a master – after all, they cynically deceived them too or deceived them with fables about the search for peace, about adherence to the UN Security Council resolutions on Donbass. Indeed, the Western elites have become a symbol of total unprincipled lies.

We firmly defend not only our interests, but also our position that in the modern world there should be no division into the so-called civilized countries and all the rest, that an honest partnership is needed, which in principle denies any exclusivity, especially aggressive.

We were open, sincerely ready for a constructive dialogue with the West, we said and insisted that both Europe and the whole world needed an indivisible security system equal for all states, and for many years we suggested that our partners discuss this idea together and work on it. implementation. But in response, they received an indistinct or hypocritical reaction. This is about words. But there were also specific actions: the expansion of NATO to our borders, the creation of new positional areas for missile defense in Europe and Asia - they decided to hide behind us with an “umbrella”, this is the deployment of military contingents, and not only near the borders of Russia.

I want to emphasize, yes, in fact, it is well known to everyone: not a single country in the world has such a number of military bases abroad as the United States of America. There are hundreds of them, I want to emphasize this, hundreds of bases around the world, the whole planet is littered, you just need to look at the map.

The whole world has seen them pull out of fundamental armaments agreements, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, unilaterally tear apart the fundamental agreements that keep the world on track. For some reason, they did it - they don’t do anything just like that, as you know.

Finally, in December 2021, we officially submitted draft security assurance agreements to the US and NATO. But in all key, fundamental positions for us, they received, in fact, a direct refusal. Then it finally became clear that the go-ahead for the implementation of aggressive plans was given and they were not going to stop.

The threat is growing, and every day. The incoming information left no doubt that by February 2022, everything was ready for another bloody punitive action in the Donbass, against which, let me remind you, the Kiev regime threw artillery, tanks, and planes back in 2014.

We all remember well the pictures when air strikes were carried out on Donetsk, air strikes were carried out not only on it, but also on other cities. In 2015, they again attempted a direct attack on the Donbass, while continuing the blockade, shelling, and terror against civilians. All this, let me remind you, completely contradicted the relevant documents and resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council, completely - everyone pretended that nothing was happening.

I want to repeat this: it was they who unleashed the war, and we used force and use it to stop it.

Those who planned a new attack on Donetsk, Donbass, and Luhansk clearly understood that the next target was a strike on Crimea and Sevastopol, and we knew and understood this. And now such far-reaching plans are also openly spoken about in Kyiv - they have revealed, they have revealed what we already knew so well.

We protect people's lives, our own home. And the goal of the West is unlimited power. They have already spent more than $150 billion on aiding and arming the Kyiv regime. For comparison: according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the G7 countries have allocated about $60 billion in 2020-2021 to help the world's poorest states. Understandable, right? For the war - 150, and for the poorest countries, which are allegedly constantly taken care of - 60, and even under the well-known demands of obedience from the countries - recipients of this money. And where is all the talk about the fight against poverty, about sustainable development, about the environment? Where does it all go? Where did it all go? At the same time, the flow of money for the war does not decrease. Also, they spare no expense to encourage unrest and upheavals in other countries, and again all over the world.

At a recent conference in Munich, there were endless accusations against Russia. One gets the impression that this was done only so that everyone would forget what the so-called West has done in recent decades. And it was they who let the genie out of the bottle, plunged entire regions into chaos.

According to American experts themselves, as a result of wars - I want to draw attention to this: we did not come up with these figures, the Americans themselves give them - as a result of the wars that the United States unleashed after 2001, almost 900 000 people died, more than 38 million became refugees . Now they just want to erase all this from the memory of mankind, they pretend that nothing happened. But no one in the world has forgotten and will not forget this.

None of them consider human casualties and tragedies, because, of course, trillions and trillions of dollars are at stake; the ability to continue to rob everyone; under the guise of words about democracy and freedoms, to spread neoliberal and inherently totalitarian values; hang labels on entire countries and peoples, publicly insult their leaders; suppress dissent in their own countries; creating the image of an enemy, diverting people's attention from corruption scandals - after all, all this does not leave the screens, we see it all - from the growing internal economic, social, interethnic problems and contradictions.

Let me remind you that in the 30s of the last century, the West actually opened the way for the Nazis to power in Germany. And in our time, they began to make “anti-Russia” out of Ukraine. The project is actually not new. People who are at least a little immersed in history know perfectly well: this project goes back to the 19th century, it was cultivated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in Poland, and other countries with one goal - to tear off these historical territories, which today are called Ukraine , from our country. That's what this goal is. There is nothing new, no novelty, everything is repeated.

The West accelerated the implementation of this project today by supporting the 2014 coup. After all, the coup is bloody, anti-state, anti-constitutional - as if nothing had happened, as if it was necessary, they even reported how much money was spent on it. Russophobia, extremely aggressive nationalism, was laid in the ideological basis.

Recently, one of the brigades of the armed forces of Ukraine, ashamed to say - we are ashamed, they are not, - was given the name "Edelweiss", as the Nazi division, which participated in the deportation of Jews, the execution of prisoners of war, in punitive operations against the partisans of Yugoslavia, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Greece . The Armed Forces of Ukraine and the National Guard of Ukraine are especially popular with the chevrons Das Reich, "Dead Head", "Galicia", other SS units, , which also have blood on their hands to the elbow.  The identification marks of the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany are applied to Ukrainian armored vehicles.

Neo-Nazis do not hide whose heirs they consider themselves to be. It is surprising that in the West, none of the powers that be does not notice. Why? Because they, excuse me for bad manners, do not care. It doesn't give a damn who to bet on in the fight against us, in the fight against Russia. The main thing is that they fight against us, against our country, which means that everyone can be used. And we saw it, and it happened: both terrorists and neo-Nazis, even if the devil is bald, you can use it, God forgive me, if only they would fulfill their will, serve as a weapon against Russia.

The “anti-Russia” project is, in fact, part of a revanchist policy towards our country, to create hotbeds of instability and conflicts right at our borders. And then, in the 30s of the last century, and now the plan is the same - to direct aggression to the east, to kindle a war in Europe, to eliminate competitors by proxy.

We are not at war with the people of Ukraine, I have already spoken about this many times. The people of Ukraine themselves became a hostage of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, who actually occupied this country in the political, military, economic sense, destroyed Ukrainian industry for decades, and plundered natural resources. The natural result was social degradation, a colossal increase in poverty and inequality. And in such conditions, of course, it is easy to scoop up material for military operations. Nobody thought about people, they were prepared for slaughter and eventually turned into consumables. It's sad, it's just scary to talk about it, but it's a fact.

Responsibility for inciting the Ukrainian conflict, for the escalation, for the increase in the number of its victims lies entirely with the Western elites and, of course, with the current Kiev regime, for which the Ukrainian people are, in fact, a stranger. The current Ukrainian regime serves not national interests, but the interests of third countries.

The West is using Ukraine both as a battering ram against Russia and as a training ground. I will not now dwell on the West's attempts to turn the tide of hostilities, on their plans to increase military supplies - everyone is already well aware of this. But one circumstance should be clear to everyone: the more long-range Western systems will come to Ukraine, the further we will be forced to move the threat away from our borders. It `s naturally.

The elites of the West make no secret of their goal: to inflict - as they say, this is direct speech - "the strategic defeat of Russia." What does it mean? For us, what is it? This means finishing with us once and for all, that is, they intend to transfer a local conflict into a phase of global confrontation. This is exactly how we understand all this and will react accordingly, because in this case we are talking about the existence of our country.

But they also cannot but be aware that it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield, therefore they are conducting more and more aggressive information attacks against us. First of all, of course, young people, young generations are chosen as the target. And here again they constantly lie, distort historical facts, do not stop attacks on our culture, on the Russian Orthodox Church, and other traditional religious organizations of our country.

Look at what they are doing with their own peoples: the destruction of the family, cultural and national identity, perversion, abuse of children, up to pedophilia, are declared the norm, the norm of their life, and clergy, priests are forced to bless same-sex marriages. God bless them, let them do what they want. What do you want to say here? Adults have the right to live as they want, we have treated this in Russia and will always treat it this way: no one intrudes into private life, and we are not going to do it.

But I want to tell them: but look, excuse me, the sacred scriptures, the main books of all other world religions. Everything is said there, including that the family is the union of a man and a woman, but these sacred texts are now being questioned. The Anglican Church, for example, has been reported to be planning—planning, though only just yet—to explore the idea of a gender-neutral god. What can you say? God forgive me, they don't know what they're doing.

Millions of people in the West understand that they are being led to a real spiritual catastrophe. The elites, frankly, are just going crazy, and it seems that there is no cure. But these are their problems, as I said, and we are obliged to protect our children, and we will do it: we will protect our children from degradation and degeneration.

It is obvious that the West will try to undermine and split our society, to rely on national traitors who at all times - I want to emphasize this - have the same poison of contempt for their own Fatherland and the desire to make money by selling this poison to those who are ready pay for it. It's always been that way.

Whoever embarked on the path of direct betrayal, committing terrorist and other crimes against the security of our society, the territorial integrity of the country, will be held accountable under the law.

But we will never be like the Kyiv regime and the Western elites who are engaged in and have been engaged in the “witch hunt”, we will not settle scores with those who took a step aside, retreated from their homeland. Let it remain on their conscience, let them live with it - they have to live with it. The main thing is that the people, the citizens of Russia gave them a moral assessment.

I am proud - I think that we are all proud - that our multinational people, the vast majority of citizens have taken a principled position regarding the special military operation, understood the meaning of the actions we are doing, supported our actions to protect Donbass. In this support, first of all, real patriotism was manifested - a feeling that is historically inherent in our people. It amazes with its dignity, deep awareness by everyone, I emphasize, by everyone, of their own inextricable fate with the fate of the Fatherland.

Dear friends, I want to thank everyone, all the people of Russia for their courage and determination, to say thank you to our heroes, soldiers and officers of the army and navy, the National Guard, members of the special services and all law enforcement agencies, soldiers of the Donetsk and Luhansk corps, volunteers, patriots who fight in the ranks combat army reserve BARS.

I want to apologize: I'm sorry that during today's speech I can't name everyone. You know, when I was preparing this speech, I wrote a long, long list of these heroic units, then I took it out of today's speech, because, as I said, it is impossible to name everyone, and I was simply afraid to offend those whom I would not name.

Low bow to the parents, wives, families of our defenders, doctors and paramedics, medical instructors, nurses who save the wounded, railway workers and drivers who supply the front, builders who erect fortifications and restore housing, roads, civilian facilities, workers and engineers of defense plants, who now work almost around the clock, in several shifts, to rural workers who reliably ensure the food security of the country.

I thank the teachers who sincerely care about the young generations of Russia, especially those teachers who work in the most difficult, in fact front-line, conditions; cultural figures who come to the war zone, to hospitals to support soldiers and officers; volunteers who help the front and civilians; journalists, above all, of course, war correspondents who take risks on the front lines to tell the whole world the truth; pastors of Russian traditional religions, military priests, whose wise word supports and inspires people; civil servants and entrepreneurs - all those who perform their professional, civic and simply human duty.

Special words for residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. You yourself, dear friends, you yourself determined your future in referendums, made a firm choice, despite the threats and terror of neo-Nazis, in conditions when military operations were very close, but there was and is nothing stronger than your determination to be with Russia, with your Motherland.

(Applause.)

I want to emphasize that this is the audience's reaction to the residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson. Once again: low bow to all of them.

We have already begun and will continue to build up a large-scale program for the socio-economic recovery and development of these new subjects of the Federation. This includes reviving enterprises and jobs, the ports of the Sea of Azov, which has once again become an inland sea of Russia, and building new modern roads, as we did in Crimea, which now has a reliable land connection with all of Russia. We will definitely implement all these plans together.

Today, the regions of the country provide direct support to the cities, districts and villages of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson region, they do it sincerely, like real brothers and sisters. Now we are together again, which means that we have become even stronger and will do everything so that the long-awaited peace returns to our land, so that the safety of people is ensured. For this, for their ancestors, for the future of children and grandchildren, for the restoration of historical justice, for the reunification of our people, fighters, our heroes are fighting today.

Dear friends, I ask you to honor the memory of our comrades-in-arms who gave their lives for Russia, civilians, the elderly, women, children who died under shelling at the hands of neo-Nazis and punishers.

(Moment of silence.)

Thank you.

We all understand, and I understand how unbearably hard it is now for the wives, sons, daughters of the fallen soldiers, their parents, who raised worthy defenders of the Fatherland - the same as the young guards of Krasnodon, like the boys and girls who during the Great Patriotic War fought against Nazism, defended the Donbass. All of Russia today remembers their courage, steadfastness, the greatest fortitude, sacrifice.

Our duty is to support families that have lost their relatives, loved ones, help them raise, raise their children, give them an education and a profession. The family of each participant in a special military operation should be in the zone of constant attention, surrounded by care and honor. Their needs must be responded to immediately, without red tape.

I propose to create a special state fund. Its task will be targeted, personal assistance to the families of fallen soldiers and veterans of the special military operation. It will coordinate the provision of social, medical, psychological support, resolve issues of sanatorium treatment and rehabilitation, help in education, sports, employment, entrepreneurship, advanced training, and in obtaining a new profession. A separate most important task of the foundation is the organization of long-term care at home, high-tech prosthetics for everyone who needs it.

I ask the Government, together with the State Council Commission on Social Policy, the regions, to resolve all organizational issues as soon as possible.

The work of the state fund should be open, and the procedure for providing assistance should be simple, on the principle of "one window", without treasury and bureaucracy. For each family, I emphasize, for each family of the deceased, for each veteran, there should be assigned a personal social worker, a coordinator who, in the course of personal communication in real time, will resolve emerging issues. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that already this year the fund's structures should be deployed in all regions of the Russian Federation.

We already have measures to support veterans of the Great Patriotic War, combat veterans, and participants in local conflicts. I think that in the future the state fund, which I mentioned, can also deal with these important issues. We need to work it out, and I ask the Government to do it.

Let me emphasize that the creation of a special fund does not remove responsibility from other structures and levels of power. I expect all federal departments, regions and municipalities to continue to pay close attention to veterans, military personnel, and their families. And in this regard, I want to thank the leaders of the subjects of the Federation, mayors of cities, heads of regions, who constantly meet with people, go to the line of contact, and support their fellow countrymen.

What would you like to highlight in particular? Today, professional servicemen, mobilized and volunteers endure the hardships of the front together - we are talking about supplies and equipment, about monetary allowances and insurance payments in connection with the wound, about medical care. However, the appeals that come to me and to the governors - they also report to me about this - to the military prosecutor's office, to the Commissioner for Human Rights, indicate that far from all these issues have been resolved yet. It is necessary to understand in each specific case.

And one more thing: service in the zone of a special military operation - everyone understands this very well - is associated with colossal physical and psychological stress, with everyday risks to health and life. Therefore, I consider it necessary to establish for the mobilized, in general for all military personnel, for all participants in a special military operation, including volunteers, regular leave lasting at least 14 days and at least once every six months, excluding travel time, so that each soldier I had the opportunity to visit families, to be close to relatives and friends.

Dear Colleagues!

As you know, we have approved a plan for the construction and development of the Armed Forces for 2021-2025 by Presidential Decree. Work on its implementation is underway, the necessary adjustments are being made. And I would like to emphasize that our further steps to strengthen the army and navy and the current and prospective development of the Armed Forces must, of course, be based on real combat experience gained during a special military operation. It is extremely important to us, one might even say, absolutely priceless.

Now, for example, the level of equipping Russia's nuclear deterrence forces with the latest systems is more than 91 percent, 91.3 percent. And now, I repeat, taking into account the experience we have gained, we must reach the same high quality level in all components of the Armed Forces.

Officers and sergeants who have shown themselves to be competent, modern and decisive commanders – there are a lot of them – will be promoted to higher positions as a matter of priority, sent to military universities and academies, and serve as a powerful personnel reserve for the Armed Forces. And, of course, they should be in demand in the civilian population, in government at all levels. I just want to draw the attention of colleagues to this. It is very important. People must understand that the Motherland appreciates their contribution to the defense of the Fatherland.

We will actively introduce the most advanced technologies that will ensure an increase in the qualitative potential of the army and navy. We have such developments, samples of weapons and equipment in each direction. Many of them are significantly superior to their foreign counterparts in their specifications. The task now before us is to deploy their mass, mass production.

And this work is in progress, ongoing, its pace is constantly increasing, and on our own, I want to emphasize this, on our own, Russian scientific and industrial base, due to the active involvement of small and medium-sized high-tech businesses in the implementation of the state defense order.

Today, our factories, design bureaus, and research teams employ both experienced specialists and more and more young people, talented, qualified, committed to a breakthrough, faithful to the traditions of Russian gunsmiths - to do everything for victory.

We will certainly strengthen guarantees for labor collectives. This also applies to salaries and social security. I propose launching a special program of preferential rental housing for employees of defense industry enterprises. The rental rate for them will be significantly lower than the market rate, since a significant part of the housing payment will be covered by the state.

We certainly discussed this issue with the Government. I instruct you to work out all the details of this program and, without delay, start building such rental housing, primarily, of course, in cities - our significant defense, industrial and research centers.

Dear Colleagues!

As I have already said, the West has deployed not only a military, informational, but also an economic front against us. But nowhere has it achieved anything and never will. Moreover, the initiators of the sanctions are punishing themselves: they provoked price increases, job losses, plant closures, an energy crisis in their own countries, and they say to their citizens - we hear this - they say that the Russians are to blame for everything.

What means were used against us in this sanctions aggression? They tried to break economic ties with Russian companies, disconnect the financial system from communication channels in order to crush our economy, deprive us of access to export markets in order to hit incomes. This is the theft - there is no other way to say - our foreign exchange reserves, attempts to collapse the ruble and provoke destructive inflation.

I repeat, anti-Russian sanctions are just a means. And the goal, as the Western leaders themselves declare - a direct quote - is to "make suffering" our citizens. "Make suffer" - such humanists. They want to make the people suffer, thereby destabilizing our society from within.

But their calculation did not materialize - the Russian economy and management system turned out to be much stronger than the West believed. Thanks to the joint work of the Government, Parliament, the Bank of Russia, the constituent entities of the Federation and, of course, the business community, labor collectives, we ensured the stability of the economic situation, protected citizens, saved jobs, prevented a shortage in the market, including essential goods, supported the financial system, entrepreneurs who invest in the development of their business, and therefore in the development of the country.

So, already in March last year, a package of measures to support business and the economy was launched for a total amount of about a trillion rubles. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this is not an issuance policy, no, no, everything is being done on a solid market basis.

At the end of 2022, the gross domestic product decreased. Mikhail Vladimirovich called and said: I would like you to tell me about it. Yesterday, in my opinion, this information came out, and rightly so, on time, as expected, everything is according to plan.

We were predicted, remember, economic recession of 20-25 percent, ten. More recently, we said: 2.9 - I said. A little later - 2.5. Gross domestic product fell 2.1 percent in 2022, the most recent data. At the same time, let me remind you that back in February-March of last year, as I said, they predicted that we would simply collapse the economy.

Russian business has rebuilt logistics, strengthened ties with responsible, predictable partners – and there are many of them, most of them in the world.

I would like to note that the share of the Russian ruble in our international settlements doubled compared to December 2021 and amounted to one third, and together with the currencies of friendly countries, this is already more than half.

Together with our partners, we will continue to work on the formation of a stable, secure system of international settlements, independent of the dollar and other Western reserve currencies, which, with such a policy of Western elites and Western rulers, will inevitably lose their universal character. They do everything with their own hands. It is not we who reduce settlements in dollars or in other so-called universal currencies - they do everything with their own hands.

You know, there is such a stable expression: guns instead of butter. The defense of the country is, of course, the most important priority, but while solving strategic tasks in this area, we must not repeat the mistakes of the past, we must not destroy our own economy. We have everything to ensure security and create conditions for the country's confident development. It is in this logic that we act and will continue to act.

For example, many basic, I would like to stress that it is the civilian sectors of the domestic economy, not only did not reduce, but significantly increased production over the past year. For the first time in the modern history of our country, housing commissioning volumes exceeded 100 million square meters.

As for our agricultural production, last year it showed double-digit growth rates. Thank you very much, low bow to agricultural producers. Russian farmers have harvested a record harvest: over 150 million tons of grain, including over 100 million tons of wheat. By the end of the agricultural year, that is, by June 30, 2023, we will be able to bring the total volume of grain exports to 5,560 million tons.

Even 10-15 years ago it seemed just a fairy tale, an absolutely unrealistic plan. If you remember – and certainly some here remember, the former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture is here – not so long ago, we collected 60 million in general – for the year, and now there will be 55–60 only for export potential. I am convinced that we have every opportunity for a similar breakthrough in other areas.

We have not allowed a drawdown in the labor market; on the contrary, we have achieved a reduction in unemployment in modern conditions. Today, in the face of such great difficulties on all sides, the labor market has become more comfortable for us than it was before. Remember, before the pandemic, unemployment was 4.7 percent, and now it is 3.7, in my opinion. Mikhail Vladimirovich, how much is 3.7? 3.7 is a historical low.

I repeat, the Russian economy has overcome the risks that have arisen – it has overcome it. Yes, many of these risks were impossible to calculate in advance, we had to respond literally from the wheels, as problems arose. Both at the state level and in business, decisions were made as quickly as possible. I would like to note that private initiative, small and medium-sized businesses have played a huge role here – this should not be forgotten. We have avoided excessive administrative regulation, the bias of the economy towards the state.

What else is important? The economic downturn last year was recorded only in the second quarter - already in the third and fourth quarters, growth and recovery were noted. We have actually entered a new cycle of economic growth. According to experts, its model and structure acquire a qualitatively different character. New and promising global markets are coming to the fore, including the Asia-Pacific [Asia-Pacific region], our own domestic market, scientific, technological, human resources: not the supply of raw materials abroad, but the production of goods with high added value. This makes it possible to unleash the enormous potential of Russia in all spheres and areas.

Already this year, a solid increase in domestic demand is predicted. I am sure that our companies will take advantage of this opportunity to increase production, produce the most demanded products, and occupy niches that have been vacated or are being vacated after the departure of Western companies.

Today we see the whole picture, we understand the structural problems that we need to solve in logistics, technology, finance, and personnel. We have been talking a lot and constantly about the need to change the structure of our economy in recent years, and now these changes are a vital necessity, and this is changing the situation, and in this case for the better. We know what needs to be done for the steady progressive development of Russia, and specifically sovereign, independent development, despite any external pressure and threats, with a reliable guarantee of the security and interests of the state.

I draw your attention and want to emphasize this in particular: the point of our work is not to adapt to the current conditions. The strategic task is to bring our economy to new frontiers. Now everything is changing, and changing very, very quickly. This is a time of not only challenges, but also opportunities - today this is true, and our future life depends on how we implement them. It is necessary to remove - I want to emphasize this - to remove any interdepartmental contradictions, formalities, insults, omissions, other nonsense. Everything for the cause, everything for the result - everything should be aimed at this.

The successful start of Russian companies, small family businesses is already a victory. The opening of modern factories and kilometers of new roads is a victory. A new school or kindergarten is a victory. Scientific discoveries and technologies are, of course, also a victory. Everyone's contribution to the overall success is what matters.

In what areas should the partnership work of the state, regions, domestic business be focused?

First. We will expand promising foreign economic relations and build new logistics corridors. A decision has already been made to extend the Moscow-Kazan expressway to Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Tyumen, and in the future to Irkutsk and Vladivostok with access to Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, which, among other things, will significantly expand our economic ties with the markets of Southeast Asia.

We will develop the ports of the Black and Azov Seas. We will pay special attention - we are already paying it, those who do it on a daily basis know - we will pay special attention to the North-South international corridor. Already this year, vessels with a draft of at least 4.5 meters will be able to pass through the Volga-Caspian Canal. This will open up new routes for business cooperation with India, Iran, Pakistan and the countries of the Middle East. We will continue to develop this corridor.

Our plans include the accelerated modernization of the eastern direction of the railways, the Trans-Siberian Railway and the BAM, and the expansion of the capabilities of the Northern Sea Route. This is not only additional cargo traffic, but also the basis for solving national problems for the development of Siberia, the Arctic and the Far East.

The infrastructure of the regions, the development of infrastructure, including communications, telecommunications, and the road network, will receive a powerful impetus. Already next year, in 2024, at least 85 percent of the roads in the largest agglomerations of the country, as well as more than half of the roads of regional and intermunicipal significance, will be brought to a standard state. I'm sure we'll do it.

We will continue the free gasification program. A decision has already been made to extend it to social facilities: kindergartens and schools, clinics, hospitals, feldsher and obstetric stations. And for citizens, such a program will now operate on an ongoing basis: they will always be able to apply for connection to gas supply networks.

This year, a large program for the construction and repair of housing and communal services begins. Within ten years, it is planned to invest at least 4.5 trillion rubles in this area. We know how important this is for citizens, how neglected this area is - we need to work, and we will do it. It is important that the program immediately get a strong start, so I ask the Government to ensure its stable funding.

Second. We will have to significantly expand the technological capabilities of the Russian economy and ensure the growth of the capacities of the domestic industry.

An industrial mortgage tool has been launched, and now it will be possible to take a soft loan not only for the purchase of production facilities, but also for their construction or modernization. The amount of such a loan was discussed many times and they wanted to increase it, a decent amount, as a first step - very good: the amount of such a loan is up to 500 million rubles. It is available at a rate of three or five percent for up to seven years. It seems to me a very good program, and it should be used.

Starting this year, a new mode of operation of industrial clusters has also been in effect, in which the fiscal and administrative burden on resident companies has been reduced, and the demand for their innovative products, which are just entering the market, is supported by long-term orders and subsidies from the state.

According to estimates, these measures should ensure the implementation of demanded projects in the amount of more than ten trillion rubles by 2030, and already this year the expected amount of investments may be about two trillion. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that these are not just forecasts, but clearly established benchmarks.

Therefore, I ask the Government to speed up the launch of these projects as much as possible, lend a shoulder to business, and offer systemic support measures, including tax incentives. I know how the financial bloc does not like to provide benefits, and I partly share the following position: the taxation system should be integral, without any niches, exceptions, but a creative approach in this case is in demand.

So, starting this year, Russian companies can reduce income tax payments if they purchase advanced domestic IT solutions and products using artificial intelligence. Moreover, these costs are taken into account with an increased coefficient, one and a half times more than the actual costs. That is, for every ruble invested by the company in the purchase of such products, which I just mentioned, there is a tax deduction of one and a half rubles.

I propose extending this tax benefit to the purchase of Russian high-tech equipment in general. I ask the Government to make proposals on a list of such equipment by industry in which it is used and on the procedure for granting benefits. This is a good decision that will revive the economy.

Third. The most important issue on the agenda for the development of economic growth is new sources of investment financing, we also talk about this a lot.

Thanks to a strong balance of payments, Russia does not need to borrow abroad, bow down, beg for money and then have a long dialogue about what, how much and under what conditions to give. Domestic banks operate stably and steadily, have a solid margin of safety.

In 2022, the volume of bank loans to the corporate sector has grown, you know, it has grown. There were many fears about this, but growth has been recorded, and it has grown by 14 percent, which is more than in 2021, without any military operation. In 2021, the growth was 11.7 percent, and now it is 14 percent. The mortgage portfolio also added 20.4 percent. Development is underway.

As a result of last year, the banking sector as a whole worked with a profit. Yes, it is not as big as in previous years, but decent: profit - 203 billion rubles. This is also an indicator of the stability of the Russian financial sector.

According to estimates, already in the second quarter of this year, inflation in Russia will approach the target level of four percent. Let me remind you that in some EU countries it is already 12, 17, 20 percent, we have four, well, five - the Central Bank, the Ministry of Finance are sorting out among themselves, but it will be closer to the target indicator. Taking into account the positive dynamics of this and other macroeconomic parameters, objective conditions are being formed for reducing long-term lending rates in the economy, which means that credit for the real sector should become more accessible.

Everywhere in the world, long-term savings of citizens are an important source of investment resources, and we also need to stimulate their flow into the investment sector. I ask the Government to expedite the submission of bills to the State Duma to launch the relevant state program from April this year.

It is important to create additional conditions for citizens to invest and earn at home, within the country. At the same time, it is necessary to guarantee the safety of citizens' investments in voluntary pension savings. There should be the same mechanism as in the system of bank deposit insurance. Let me remind you that such deposits of citizens in the amount of up to one million 400 000 rubles are insured by the state and their return is guaranteed. For voluntary pension savings, I propose to establish twice the amount - up to two million 800 000 rubles. It is also necessary to protect citizens' investments in other long-term investment instruments, including from the possible bankruptcy of financial intermediaries.

Separate solutions are needed to attract capital to high-growth and high-tech businesses. They will be provided with support for the placement of shares on the domestic stock market, including tax incentives, both for companies and for buyers of such shares.

The most important element of economic sovereignty is the freedom of enterprise. I repeat: against the backdrop of external attempts to contain Russia, private business has proved that it can adapt to a rapidly changing environment and ensure economic growth in difficult conditions. Therefore, every business initiative aimed at benefiting the country should receive support.

In this regard, I consider it right to return to the issue of revising a number of norms of criminal law in terms of the so-called economic offenses. Of course, the state must control what is happening in this area, permissiveness cannot be allowed here, but there is no need to go too far either. It is necessary to move more actively towards this decriminalization, which I spoke about. I hope that the Government, together with the Parliament, law enforcement agencies, and business associations, will consistently and thoroughly carry out this work.

At the same time, I ask the Government, in close contact with the Parliament, to propose additional measures that will speed up the process of deoffshorization of the economy. Business, primarily in key sectors and industries, must operate in Russian jurisdiction - this is a basic principle.

And in this regard, dear colleagues, a small philosophical digression. What would you like to say separately?

We remember the problems and imbalances faced by the late Soviet economy. Therefore, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its planned system, in the chaos of the 90s, the country began to create an economy based on market relations, private property - in general, everything is correct. In many ways, Western countries served as examples here - advisers, as you know, there were a dime a dozen here - and it seemed enough just to copy their models. True, they were still arguing among themselves, I remember this: the Europeans were arguing with the Americans about how the Russian economy should develop.

And what happened as a result? Our national economy has largely become oriented specifically towards the West, primarily as a source of raw materials. The nuances, of course, were different, but in general as a source of raw materials. The reasons for this are also understandable: the new, emerging Russian business was, of course, aimed, like all other businesses in all other countries, primarily aimed at making profit, and quick and easy at that. What brought her? This is the sale of resources: oil, gas, metals, timber.

Few people thought, and perhaps there was no such opportunity to invest for a long time, so other, more complex sectors of the economy developed poorly. And to break this negative trend - everyone saw it perfectly, in all governments - it took us years, adjustment of the tax system and large-scale public investments.

We have achieved real, visible change here. Yes, there is a result, but, I repeat, we need to take into account the situation in which our, primarily large, business developed. Technology - in the West, cheaper financial sources and profitable markets - in the West, of course, and capital began to flow there too. Unfortunately, instead of going to expand production, to buy equipment and technologies, to create new jobs here, in Russia, they were also spent on foreign estates, yachts, and elite real estate.

Yes, then they began to invest, of course, in development, of course, but at the first stage, everything went there in a wide stream to a large extent for these purposes - for consumption. And where there is wealth, there, of course, are children, their education, their life, their future. And it was very difficult for the state to track and prevent such a development of the situation, almost impossible - we lived in the free market paradigm.

Recent events have convincingly shown that the image of the West as a safe haven and a haven for capital turned out to be a ghost, a fake. And those who did not understand this in time, who considered Russia only as a source of income, and planned to live mainly abroad, lost a lot: they were simply robbed there, even legally earned money was taken away.

Somehow as a joke - many probably remember - addressing the representatives of Russian business, I said: you are tormented by swallowing dust, running around the courts and offices of Western officials, saving your money. That's exactly how it all happened.

You know, now I will add a very important - simple, but very important - thing: believe me, none of the ordinary citizens of the country took pity on those who lost their capital in foreign banks, did not pity those who lost their yachts, palaces abroad, and so on, and the like, and in conversations in the kitchen, people probably remembered both the privatization of the 90s, when enterprises created by the whole country went for nothing, and the ostentatious, demonstrative luxury of the so-called new elites.

What else is of fundamental importance? All the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West did not stop trying to set fire to the post-Soviet states and, most importantly, finally finish off Russia as the largest surviving part of our historical state space. They encouraged and incited international terrorists against us, provoked regional conflicts along the perimeter of our borders, ignored our interests and used means of economic deterrence and suppression.

And big Russian business - why I say all this - is responsible for the operation of strategic enterprises, for thousands of labor collectives, determines the socio-economic situation in many regions, which means the state of affairs: when the leaders and owners of such a business find themselves dependent on governments that pursuing an unfriendly policy towards Russia, poses a great threat to us, a danger - a danger to our country. Such a situation cannot be tolerated.

Yes, everyone has a choice: someone wants to live out his life in an arrested mansion with blocked accounts, tries to find a place, it would seem, in an attractive Western capital or in a resort, in another warm place abroad - this is the right of any person, we we don't even try it. But it's time to understand that for the West, such people were and will remain second-rate strangers with whom you can do whatever you want, and money, and connections, and purchased titles of counts, peers, mayors will not help here at all. They must understand: they are second class there.

But there is another choice: to be with your Motherland, to work for compatriots, not only to open new enterprises, but also to change life around you - in cities, towns, in your own country. And we have many such entrepreneurs, such true fighters in business - it is for them that the future of domestic business is behind them. Everyone should understand that both the sources of well-being and the future should be only here, in their native country, in Russia.

And then we will really create a solid, self-sufficient economy that does not shut itself off from the world, but uses all its competitive advantages. Russian capital, money received here should work for the country, for its national development. Today, we have great prospects in the development of infrastructure, manufacturing, domestic tourism, and many other industries.

I want to be heard by those who have encountered the wolf habits of the West: trying to run with outstretched hands, humiliate yourself, begging for your money, is pointless and, most importantly, useless, especially now that you understand well who you are dealing with. Now you should not cling to the past, try to sue something, beg. We need to rebuild our lives and our work, especially since you are strong people - I am talking to representatives of our business, I know many personally and for many years - who have gone through a difficult life school.

Launch new projects, earn money, invest in Russia, invest in businesses and jobs, help schools and universities, science and healthcare, culture and sports. This is how you increase your capital, and earn recognition, gratitude from people for a generation to come, and the state and society will certainly support you.

We will consider that this is a parting word to our business - to build work in the right direction.

Dear Colleagues!

Russia is an open country and at the same time a distinctive civilization. In this statement there is no claim to exclusivity and superiority, but this civilization is ours - that's the main thing. It was given to us by our ancestors, and we must preserve it for our descendants and pass it on.

We will develop cooperation with friends, with everyone who is ready to work together, we will adopt all the best, but rely primarily on our potential, on the creative energy of Russian society, on our traditions and values.

And here I want to say about the character of our people: they have always been distinguished by generosity, breadth of soul, mercy and compassion, and Russia as a country fully reflects these traits. We know how to be friends, keep our word, we will not let anyone down and will always support in a difficult situation, without hesitation we come to the aid of those who are in trouble.

Everyone remembers how, during the pandemic, we provided - the first, in fact - support to some European countries, including Italy, other states, in the most difficult weeks of the covid outbreak. Let's not forget how we come to the rescue in case of an earthquake in Syria, in Turkey.

It is the people of Russia who are the basis of the country's sovereignty, the source of power. The rights and freedoms of our citizens are inviolable, they are guaranteed by the Constitution, and, despite external challenges and threats, we will not retreat from them.

In this regard, I want to emphasize that both the elections to local and regional authorities in September this year and the presidential elections in 2024 will be held in strict accordance with the law, in compliance with all democratic, constitutional procedures.

Elections are always different approaches to solving social and economic problems. At the same time, the leading political forces are consolidated and united in the main thing, and most importantly, fundamental for all of us is the security and well-being of the people, sovereignty and national interests.

I want to thank you for such a responsible, firm position and recall the words of the patriot and statesman Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin - they were said in the State Duma more than a hundred years ago, but they are fully in tune with our time. He said: "In the matter of defending Russia, we all must unite, coordinate our efforts, our duties and our rights in order to maintain one historical supreme right - the right of Russia to be strong."

Among the volunteers who are now at the forefront are deputies of the State Duma and regional parliaments, representatives of executive authorities at various levels, municipalities, cities, districts, rural settlements. All parliamentary parties, leading public associations participate in the collection of humanitarian supplies and help the front.

Thank you again – thank you for such a patriotic stance.

A huge role in strengthening civil society, in solving everyday problems is played by local self-government - the level of public authority closest to people. The trust in the state as a whole, the social well-being of citizens, their confidence in the successful development of the whole country largely depends on its work.

I ask the Presidential Administration, together with the Government, to submit proposals for creating tools for direct support of the best management teams, practices in large, medium and small municipalities.

The free development of society is the readiness to take responsibility for oneself and for loved ones, for one's country. Such qualities are laid from childhood, in the family. And of course, the education system and national culture are extremely important for strengthening our common values and national identity.

Using the resources of the Presidential Grants Fund, the Cultural Initiatives Fund, the Internet Development Institute, and other tools, the state will support all forms of creative research - modern and traditional art, realism and avant-garde, classics and innovation. It's not about genres and directions. Culture is called upon to serve goodness, beauty, harmony, to reflect on sometimes very complex, controversial issues of life, and most importantly, not to destroy society, but to awaken the best human qualities.

The development of the cultural sphere will become one of the priorities for the revival of peaceful life in the Donbass and New Russia. Here it will be necessary to restore, repair and equip hundreds of cultural institutions, including museum funds and buildings, something that gives people the opportunity to feel the relationship between the past and the present, connect it with the future, feel belonging to a single cultural, historical, educational space of centuries-old, great Russia .

With the participation of teachers, scientists, specialists, we must seriously improve the quality of school and university courses, primarily in the humanities - history, social science, literature, geography - so that young people can learn as much as possible about Russia, its great past, about our culture and traditions.

We have a very bright, talented young generation that is ready to work for the good of the country in science, culture, the social sphere, business and public administration. It is for such people that the Leaders of Russia competition, as well as the Leaders of Revival competition now taking place in the new regions of the Federation, opens up new horizons for professional growth.

I would like to note that a number of winners and finalists of these projects volunteered for combat units, many of them are now working in the liberated territories, helping to establish economic and social life, while acting professionally, decisively and courageously.

In general, the school of military operations cannot be replaced by anything. People come out of there differently and are ready to lay down their lives for the Fatherland, wherever they work.

I want to emphasize that it is those who were born and raised in the Donbass and Novorossiya, who fought for them, who will be the main support, should be the main support in the common work to develop these regions. I want to address them and say: Russia is counting on you.

Taking into account the large-scale tasks facing the country, we must seriously update our approaches to the system of personnel training and science and technology policy.

At the recent Council on Science and Education, we spoke about the need to clearly set priorities, to concentrate resources on obtaining specific, fundamentally significant scientific results, primarily in those areas where we have good groundwork and which are of critical importance for the life of the country, including transport, energy, the same system of housing and communal services, medicine, agriculture, industry.

New technologies are almost always based on fundamental research, fundamental research done in the past, and in this area, as well as in culture, I want to emphasize this, we must provide scientists and researchers with greater freedom for creativity. It is impossible to drive everyone into the Procrustean bed of the results of tomorrow. Fundamental science lives by its own laws.

And I will add that setting and solving ambitious tasks is a powerful incentive for young people to go into science, an opportunity to prove that you are a leader, that you are the best in the world. And our scientific teams have much to be proud of.

Last December I met with young researchers. One of the issues they raised was housing. The prose is such, but important. We already have housing certificates for young scientists. Last year, an additional one billion rubles were allocated for these purposes. I instruct the Government to determine the reserves for expanding this program.

In recent years, the prestige and authority of secondary vocational education has grown significantly. The demand for graduates of technical schools and colleges is simply huge, colossal. You see, if our unemployment has fallen to a historic low of 3.7 percent, it means that people are working and new personnel are needed.

I believe that we should significantly expand the “Professionality” project, within the framework of which educational and industrial clusters are created, the educational base is updated, and enterprises and employers, in close contact with colleges and technical schools, form educational programs based on the needs of the economy. And of course, it is very important that mentors with experience in real, complex production come to this area.

The specific task is to train about a million blue-collar workers for the electronics, robotics, mechanical engineering, metallurgy, pharmaceuticals, agriculture and defense industry, construction, transport, nuclear and other industries that are key to ensuring Russia’s security, sovereignty and competitiveness over the next five years.

Finally, a very important question is about our higher education. Significant changes are also overdue here, taking into account the new requirements for specialists in the economy, social sectors, and in all spheres of our life. A synthesis of all the best that was in the Soviet system of education and the experience of recent decades is needed.

In this regard, the following is proposed.

The first is to return to the traditional for our country basic training of specialists with higher education. The term of study can be from four to six years. At the same time, even within the same specialty and one university, programs can be offered that differ in terms of training, depending on the specific profession, industry and labor market demand.

Secondly, if the profession requires additional training, narrow specialization, then in this case the young person will be able to continue his education in a magistracy or residency.

Thirdly, postgraduate studies will be allocated as a separate level of professional education, the task of which is to train personnel for scientific and teaching activities.

I want to emphasize that the transition to the new system should be smooth. The government, together with parliamentarians, will need to make numerous amendments to the legislation on education, on the labor market, and so on. Here you need to think through everything, work out to the smallest detail. Young people, our citizens should have new opportunities for quality education, employment and professional growth. I repeat: opportunities, not problems.

And I would like to emphasize that those students who are studying now will be able to continue their education according to existing programs. And also, the level of training and diplomas of higher education of citizens who have already completed training in the current undergraduate, specialist or master's programs are not subject to revision. They must not lose their rights. I ask the All-Russian Popular Front to take all issues related to changes in the field of higher education under special control.

This year has been declared the Year of the Teacher and Mentor in Russia. A teacher, teacher is directly involved in building the future of the country, and it is important to increase the social significance of teaching work so that parents tell their children more about gratitude to the teacher, and teachers about respect and love for parents. Let's always remember this.

I will dwell separately on the support of children and Russian families.

I would like to note that the so-called children's budget, or the volume of budget expenditures to support families, has grown in Russia in recent years not by some percentage, but by several times. It is the fastest growing section of the main financial document of the country - the budget, the budget law. I would like to thank the parliamentarians and the Government for such a unified, consolidated understanding of our national priorities.

Since February 1, maternity capital in Russia has been indexed again, as we said, by the amount of actual inflation over the past year, that is, by 11.9 percent. The citizens of Russia, residents of the new subjects of the Federation, now have the right to such a measure of support. I propose to provide maternity capital in the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions to families in which children were born since 2007, that is, from the moment this program began to operate throughout Russia. Let me remind you that we once made the same decision for the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol.

We will continue to implement large-scale programs aimed at improving the well-being of Russian families.

Let me stress that the Government and the constituent entities of the Federation have been given the objective task of ensuring a noticeable, tangible growth in real wages in Russia.

An important indicator, the starting point here is the minimum wage, as we well understand. Last year it was raised twice, by almost 20 percent in total.

We will continue to increase the minimum wage, and at a rate above inflation and wage growth. Since the beginning of this year, the minimum wage has been indexed by 6.3 percent.

I propose that starting from January 1 next year, in addition to the planned increase, one more increase will be carried out - by an additional ten percent. Thus, the minimum wage will increase by 18.5 percent and amount to 19,242 rubles.

Now, regarding the adjustment of the tax system in the interests of Russian families: since last year, families with two or more children are exempt from paying tax on the sale of housing if they decide to purchase a new, more spacious apartment or house.

We need to make more active use of such tools - they have proved to be in demand - so that family budgets have more funds, and families can solve the most important, pressing problems.

I propose to increase the size of the social tax deduction: for the cost of educating children - from the current 50 000 to 110 000 rubles a year, and for the cost of their own education, as well as for treatment and the purchase of medicines - from 120 to 150 000 rubles. The state will return 13 percent of these increased amounts to citizens from the income tax they paid.

And of course, it is necessary not only to raise the amount of the deduction, but also to increase its demand so that the deduction is provided in a proactive mode, quickly and remotely, and is not burdensome for citizens.

Further: the well-being and quality of life of Russian families, and hence the demographic situation, directly depend on the state of affairs in the social sphere.

I know that many subjects of the Federation are ready to significantly accelerate the renewal of social infrastructure, cultural and sports facilities, the resettlement of emergency housing, and the integrated development of rural areas. This attitude will certainly be supported.

We use the following mechanism here: the funds for national projects, which are reserved in the federal budget for 2024, the regions will be able to receive and use right now through interest-free treasury loans - they will be automatically repaid in April next year. Good tool.

We will keep this issue under constant operational control, and I ask the State Council Commission on Economics and Finance to join this work.

At the same time, we do not need storming and the pursuit of volumes, especially to the detriment of the quality of the objects being built. Additional financial resources should work with high returns and effectiveness.

This is especially important for the modernization of primary health care - such a large-scale program was launched in our country in 2021. I ask the Government and regional leaders not to forget that the main criterion, as I have said many, many times, is not the numbers in the reports, but specific, visible, tangible changes in the availability and quality of medical care.

I also instruct the Government to adjust the regulatory framework for organizing the procurement of ambulances with a set of diagnostic equipment. They make it possible to carry out medical examinations and preventive examinations directly at enterprises, schools, institutions, and remote settlements.

We have launched a large school renovation program. By the end of this year, a total of almost 3,500 school buildings will be put in order. I draw your attention to the fact that most of them are in rural areas, we did this on purpose. This year, such work is also unfolding in the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, in the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. It is meaningful and visible, people really see what is happening. This is very good.

From 2025, federal funds for the repair and renovation of kindergartens, schools, technical schools and colleges will be allocated to the regions on a regular, systematic basis, in order to basically prevent situations when buildings are in a state of disrepair.

Next, we have set a meaningful goal of building more than 1,300 new schools between 2019 and 2024. 850 of them are already open. It is planned that another 400 will be commissioned this year. I ask the regions to adhere to these plans, strictly adhere to them. The amount of funding for this program from the federal budget from 2019 to 2024 is almost 490 billion rubles. We are not reducing these costs, we will keep it all.

This year we have increased the amount of infrastructure budget loans. We are sending additional funds – I would like to emphasize this: not as previously planned, but additionally – 250 billion rubles for the development of transport, utilities and other infrastructure in the regions.

I instruct the Government to allocate another 50 billion rubles in addition to these funds - they will be purposefully used to upgrade public transport in the constituent entities of the Federation this year, moreover, based on modern technologies. At the same time, I ask you to pay special attention here to small towns and rural areas.

We have already decided to extend the Clean Air project until 2030, the goal of which is to improve the environmental situation in the largest industrial centers. I draw the attention of both industrial companies and regional and local authorities: the task of significantly reducing harmful emissions is not removed from the agenda.

Let me add that we have made good progress in reforming the waste management industry. Increasing recycling and sorting capacity to move towards a circular economy. The priority is the further elimination of old garbage dumps and dangerous objects of accumulated harm. I ask the Government, together with the regions, to prepare now a list of those objects of accumulated harm that will be eliminated after the completion of the current program.

We will continue the rehabilitation of unique water bodies, including Lake Baikal and the Volga, and in the medium term we will extend this work to our rivers such as the Don, Kama, Irtysh, Ural, Terek, Volkhov and Neva, Lake Ilmen. We must not forget about our medium and small rivers. I draw the attention of all levels of government to this.

On the instructions given earlier, a draft law on the development of tourism in specially protected natural areas has also been prepared. Recently discussed it with colleagues from the Government. It must clearly define what and where can and cannot be built, and in general the principles of the ecotourism industry. A very important issue for our country. I ask the State Duma to expedite consideration of this bill.

Now a few more words about what is happening around us.

Dear colleagues, I will dwell on one more topic.

In early February of this year, the North Atlantic Alliance made a statement with a de facto demand on Russia, as they say, to return to the implementation of the strategic offensive arms treaty, including the admission of inspections to our nuclear defense facilities. But I don't even know what to call it. This is a theater of the absurd.

We know that the West is directly involved in the attempts of the Kyiv regime to strike at the bases of our strategic aviation. The drones used for this were equipped and modernized with the assistance of NATO specialists. And now they also want to inspect our defense facilities? In the modern conditions of today's confrontation, this sounds like some kind of nonsense.

At the same time – and I would like to draw special attention to this – we are not allowed to conduct full-fledged inspections within the framework of this agreement. Our repeated applications for the inspection of certain objects remain unanswered or are rejected on formal grounds, and we cannot really check anything on the other side.

I want to emphasize that the US and NATO openly say that their goal is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. And what, after that they are going to drive around our defense facilities, including the newest ones, as if nothing had happened? A week ago, for example, I signed a decree on putting new ground-based strategic systems on combat duty. Are they going to stick their nose in there too? And they think it's so easy - we're going to let them in just like that?

By making its collective statement, NATO actually made a bid to become a party to the Strategic Offensive Arms Treaty. We agree with this, please. Moreover, we believe that such a formulation of the issue is long overdue, because, let me remind you, NATO is not just one nuclear power - the United States, the UK and France also have nuclear arsenals, they are being improved, developed and also directed against us - they are also directed against Russia. The latest statements of their leaders only confirm this - listen.

We simply cannot ignore this, we have no right, especially today, as well as the fact that the first Strategic Offensive Arms Treaty was originally concluded by the Soviet Union and the United States in 1991 in a fundamentally different situation: in conditions of reducing tension and strengthening mutual trust. In the future, our relations reached a level where Russia and the United States declared that they no longer consider each other adversaries. Great, everything was very good.

The current Treaty of 2010 contains the most important provisions on the indivisibility of security, on the direct relationship between issues of strategic offensive and defensive arms. All this has long been forgotten, the United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty, as you know, everything is a thing of the past. Our relations, which is very important, have degraded, and this is entirely the "merit" of the United States.

It was they, it was they who, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, began to revise the results of the Second World War, to build an American-style world, in which there is only one owner, one master. To do this, they began to rudely destroy all the foundations of the world order, laid down after the Second World War, in order to cross out the legacy of both Yalta and Potsdam. Step by step, they began to revise the existing world order, dismantle security and arms control systems, planned and carried out a whole series of wars around the world.

And all, I repeat, with one goal - to break the architecture of international relations created after the Second World War. This is not a figure of speech - this is how everything happens in practice, in life: after the collapse of the USSR, they forever seek to fix their global dominance, regardless of the interests of modern Russia and the interests of other countries too.

Of course, the situation in the world after 1945 changed. New centers of development and influence have been formed and are rapidly developing. This is a natural, objective process that cannot be ignored. But it is unacceptable that the United States began to reshape the world order just for itself, exclusively in its own, selfish interests.

Now, through NATO representatives, they are giving signals, and in fact putting forward, an ultimatum: you, Russia, carry out everything that you have agreed on, including the START Treaty, unquestioningly, and we will behave as we please. Like, there is no connection between the START issue and, say, the conflict in Ukraine, other hostile actions of the West against our country, just as there are no loud statements that they want to inflict a strategic defeat on us. This is either the height of hypocrisy and cynicism, or the height of stupidity, but you cannot call them idiots - they are still not stupid people. They want to inflict a strategic defeat on us and climb on our nuclear facilities.

In this regard, I am compelled to announce today that Russia is suspending its participation in the Strategic Offensive Arms Treaty. I repeat, it does not withdraw from the Treaty, no, it suspends its participation. But before returning to the discussion of this issue, we must understand for ourselves what such countries of the North Atlantic Alliance as France and Great Britain still claim, and how we will take into account their strategic arsenals, that is, the alliance's combined strike potential.

They have now made their statement, in fact, an application for participation in this process. Well, thank God, come on, we don't mind. There is no need to just try again to lie to everyone, build yourself out as champions of peace and detente. We know all the ins and outs: we know that the warranty periods of validity for combat use of certain types of nuclear weapons of the United States are expiring. And in this regard, as we know for certain, some politicians in Washington are already thinking about the possibility of natural tests of their nuclear weapons, including taking into account the fact that the United States is developing new types of nuclear weapons. There is such information.

In this situation, the Russian Ministry of Defense and Rosatom must ensure readiness for testing Russian nuclear weapons. Of course, we will not be the first to do this, but if the United States conducts tests, then we will conduct them. No one should have the dangerous illusion that global strategic parity can be destroyed.

Dear Colleagues! Dear citizens of Russia!

Today we are going through a difficult, difficult path together and overcoming all difficulties together. It could not be otherwise, because we were brought up on the example of our great ancestors and are obliged to be worthy of their precepts, which are passed down from generation to generation. We only go forward thanks to devotion to the Motherland, will and our unity.

This solidarity manifested itself literally from the very first days of the special military operation: hundreds of volunteers, representatives of all the peoples of our country, came to the military registration and enlistment offices, decided to stand next to the defenders of Donbass, fight for their native land, for the Fatherland, for truth and justice. Now warriors from all regions of our multinational Motherland are fighting shoulder to shoulder on the front lines. Their prayers sound in different languages, but they are all for victory, for comrades-in-arms, for the Motherland. (Applause.)

Their hard, military work, their feat find a powerful response throughout Russia. People support our fighters, they don't want to, they can't stand aside. The front is now passing through the hearts of millions of our people, they are sending medicines, means of communication, equipment, transport, warm clothes, camouflage nets and so on to the front line - everything that helps to save the lives of our guys.

I know how letters from children and schoolchildren warm front-line soldiers. They take them with them into battle as the most precious thing, because the sincerity and purity of children's wishes are touched to tears, the fighters have a stronger understanding of what they are fighting for, whom they are protecting.

It is very significant for the soldiers and their families, for civilians, and the care that volunteers surround them with. From the very beginning of the special operation, they acted boldly and decisively: under fire, shelling, they took out children, the elderly, everyone who was in trouble from the basements, they delivered food, water, clothes to hot spots and still do this, they deploy humanitarian aid centers for refugees , help in field hospitals and on the line of contact, at the risk of themselves, save and continue to save others.

Only the Popular Front, within the framework of the “Everything for Victory!” collected more than five billion rubles. This flow of donations is ongoing. The contribution of everyone is equally important here: both a large company and entrepreneurs, but situations are especially touching and inspiring when people with modest incomes transfer part of their savings, salaries and pensions. Such unity to help our soldiers, civilians in the war zone, refugees is worth a lot.

Thank you for this sincere support, solidarity and mutual assistance. They cannot be overestimated.

Russia will respond to any challenges, because we are all one country, one big and united people. We are confident in ourselves, confident in our abilities. The truth is behind us. (Applause.)

Thank you.

ATTACHMENT “B” – FROM REUTERS

PUTIN'S ADDRESS TO THE NATION ON CONCERT ATTACK

March 23, 20249:17 AM EDT Updated a day ago

MOSCOW, March 23 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin made the following address to the nation.

The following is an unofficial Reuters translation from the Russian.

"Citizens of Russia!

"I am addressing to you in connection with the bloody, barbaric terrorist act, the victims of which were dozens of peaceful, innocent people – our compatriots, including children, teenagers, and women.

"Doctors are now fighting for the lives of the victims, those who are in serious condition. I am sure they will do everything possible and even impossible to save the lives and health of all the wounded. Special thanks to the ambulance and air ambulance crews, special forces soldiers, firefighters, rescuers who did everything to save people's lives, get them out from under fire, from the epicenter of fire and smoke, and avoid even greater losses.

"I cannot ignore the help of ordinary citizens, who in the first minutes after the tragedy did not remain indifferent and, along with doctors and special services, provided first aid and took the victims to hospitals...

"I express my deep, sincere condolences to all those who lost their loved ones. The whole country and our entire people are grieving with you. I declare March 24 a day of national mourning.

"Additional anti-terrorist and anti-sabotage measures have been introduced in Moscow and the Moscow region, in all regions of the country. The main thing now is to prevent those who are behind this bloodbath from committing a new crime.

"As for the investigation of this crime and the results of operational investigative actions, the following can currently be said.

"All four direct perpetrators of the terrorist attack, all those who shot and killed people, were found and detained. They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them from the Ukrainian side to cross the state border. A total of 11 people were detained.

"The Federal Security Service of Russia and other law enforcement agencies are working to identify and uncover the entire terrorist support base: those who provided them with transport, planned escape routes from the crime scene, prepared caches, caches of weapons and ammunition...

"It is already obvious that we are faced not just with a carefully and cynically planned terrorist attack, but with the organised mass murder of peaceful defenceless people. The criminals were cold-blooded and purposefully going to kill, shoot our citizens at point-blank range - our children.

"Like the Nazis who once carried out massacres in the occupied territories, they planned to arrange a demonstrative execution, a bloody act of intimidation. All the perpetrators, organisers and those who ordered this crime will be justly and inevitably punished. Whoever they are, whoever is guiding them. I repeat, we will identify and punish everyone who stands behind the terrorists, who prepared this atrocity, this strike against Russia, against our people.

"We know what the threat of terrorism is. Here we count on cooperation with all states that sincerely our pain and are ready to really join forces in the fight against a common enemy – international terrorism - in all its manifestations. Terrorists, murderers... who do not and cannot have a nationality, face one unenviable fate – retribution and oblivion. They have no future.

"Our common duty now, our comrades–in-arms at the front, all citizens of the country, is to be together in one formation. I believe it will be so, because no one and nothing can shake our unity and will, our determination and courage, the strength of the united people of Russia. No one will be able to sow the poisonous seeds of discord, panic and discord in our multinational society. Russia has been through the hardest, sometimes unbearable trials more than once, but it has become even stronger. So it will be now."