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Putin Visits Abkhazia On Anniversary Of Russia-Georgia War

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has visited Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia and reiterated Russia’s support for the separatists.

The Georgian government condemned the August 8 visit, which coincided with the ninth anniversary of the five-day Russia-Georgia war, as a “cynical action.”

Following the 2008 war, Georgia and Russia broke off diplomatic relations and Moscow recognized Abkhazia and another Georgian breakaway region, South Ossetia, as independent countries. Only a few countries followed Russia’s lead.

“The most important thing is that we have entirely special relations with Abkhazia,” Putin said as he met with the region’s separatist leader Raul Khadzhimba in the Black Sea resort of Pitsunda.

“We reliably guarantee the security, self-sufficiency, and independence of Abkhazia,” he added. “I am sure that will continue to be the case.”

Putin also said that the two sides need to find ways to develop Abkhazia’s economy to create jobs, adding, “This is what we will be talking about today.”

After the talks, the Russian president said that he considers it possible to soon ease controls and customs procedures on the border with Abkhazia to encourage travel and facilitate trade.

The anniversary of the 2008 war was marked in Georgia with the political leaders paying tribute to the Georgian soldiers who died in the conflict.

Following a wreath laying ceremony at a military cemetery in the outskirts of Tbilisi, Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili told journalists that the Georgian government is “building a united, strong, prosperous, democratic, truly European Georgia in order to make it a common home for Georgians, Abkhaz, and [South] Ossetians.”

President Giorgi Margvelashvili, who also visited the cemetery at Mukhatgverdi, said, “No Georgian will ever tolerate the [Russian] occupation.”

Meanwhile, the Georgian Foreign Ministry said Putin’s visit to Abkhazia “serves for legitimization of forceful change of borders of the sovereign state through military aggression, ethnic cleansing, and occupation.”

The ministry also urged the international community to respond to Russia’s “aggressive steps.”

Russia maintains thousands of troops in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in what Georgia considers an occupation, and Georgian authorities have accused Moscow and the separatists of taking control of additional territory in recent months.

A NATO spokesman said that Putin’s trip was “detrimental to international efforts to find a peaceful and negotiated settlement.”

“NATO is united in full support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia within its internationally recognized borders,” Dylan White said in a statement. “We will not recognize any attempts to change the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as regions of Georgia.”

During a visit to Tbilisi last week, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence reaffirmed Washington’s support for Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and denounced Russia’s “aggression” and “occupation” of Georgian territory.

With reporting by TASS, Interfax, civil.ge, AFP, AP, and Reuters

Breaking News: Putin, Responding to Sanctions, Orders U.S. to Cut Diplomatic Staff by 755

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President Vladimir V. Putin on Sunday in St. Petersburg. Credit Olga Maltseva/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR,

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin announced on Sunday that the number of workers at American diplomatic posts in Russia would be cut by 755 by Sept. 1, escalating the tensions between Washington and Moscow.

Although the reduction had been announced on Friday, in response to the new law passed in Congress last week expanding sanctions against Russia, the president’s statement was the first to confirm the large number of embassy personnel involved.

Speaking in a television interview on the Rossiya 1 network, Mr. Putin said that Russia’s patience in waiting for improved relations with the United States had worn out.

“We waited for quite some time that maybe something will change for the better, had such hope that the situation will somehow change, but, judging by everything, if it changes, it will not be soon,” Mr. Putin said in the interview, according to Interfax news agency.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/world/europe/russia-sanctions-us-diplomats-expelled.html?emc=edit_na_20170730&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49769097&ref=headline

Putin says US not Russia’s enemy

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Putin says US not Russia's enemyRussian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that the US was not an enemy of his country, saying his country had “many friends” in America, Nbcnews.com reports.

“We have been through two wars together,” he said during his annual nationwide televised call-in show. “The Russian Empire was key in securing U.S. independence.”

Putin added: “I know the mood of our people, we don’t believe America is our enemy … There is hysteria in the media and it affects the mood, but many people in Russia admire the achievements if the American people, and I hope relations will normalize.”

He also addressed his personal life, saying that his two daughters and two grandchildren reside in Russia.

“Despite all rumors, my daughters live here, in Moscow,” he said.

“My grandchildren are in preschool,” he adding, stating that he wanted to keep their identities and ages a secret. “I want them to be normal people, and for that they need to mix with ordinary people. But if I mention their names, they will not be left in peace. This will damage them. Please understand me.”

Putin Says ‘Nobody Would Survive’ U.S.-Russia ‘Hot War’

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Putin Says 'Nobody Would Survive' U.S.-Russia 'Hot War'

In comments to Hollywood director Oliver Stone, Russian President Vladimir Putin vents long-held grievances against the United States.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says in a documentary set to air on U.S. television that “nobody would survive” a war between the nuclear-armed countries.

Putin made the comments to Hollywood director Oliver Stone during a series of interviews for the film, in which the Russian leader appears to be given ample room to vent long-held grievances against the United States.

The four-part series, slated to begin airing on June 12 on the Showtime network, comes on the heels of a series of public appearances by Putin in which he has sharpened his criticism of Washington, which he accuses of meddling in Moscow’s affairs and exploiting NATO for its own foreign-policy interests.

These themes emerge in his interviews with Stone as well, according to excerpts that have been released online in advance. Asked by the director if the United States would be “dominant” in a “hot war” with Russia, Putin replies, “Nobody would survive.”

U.S.-Russian ties cratered in the wake of Moscow’s 2014 seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine. The United States and the European Union slapped sanctions on Moscow over the land grab, and NATO has bolstered its defenses in its easternmost member states in what it calls a defensive move in response to Russian aggression.

Putin’s comments to Stone echo comments he has made over 17 years in power, including a speech at an international economic forum in St. Petersburg last week in which he portrayed NATO a foreign-policy tool exploited by Washington.

“NATO is a mere instrument of U.S. foreign policy. It has no allies, it has only vassals. Once a country becomes a NATO member, it is hard to resist the pressures of the United States,” he tells Stone in the documentary titled The Putin Interviews.

He says in the interview that Russia would be forced to bolster its military preparedness in response to what he called NATO “threats.” The alliance has repeatedly said it poses no threat to Russia and that it is merely protecting its member states in line with the NATO charter.

In parts of the documentary released in advance, Stone appears to offer a comfortable forum to Putin, whose critics accused him of steadily curtailing civic freedoms, prosecuting political opponents, and cronyism that has enriched his friends, family, and associates.

Bloomberg, which was given the first two hourlong episodes by Showtime, noted that “the documentary avoids fact-checking Putin’s remarks or interviewing opposition figures.”

It also features some of Putin’s trademark off-color comments, including the statement, “I am not a woman, so I don’t have bad days.”

“I am not trying to insult anyone. That’s just the nature of things. There are certain natural cycles,” Bloomberg quotes Putin as telling Stone.

Stone told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation late last month that he “liked” and “respected” Putin, whom he says has been misrepresented in the West with a “politically, ideologically driven image.”

He added of Putin: “I challenged him and I teased him and I angered him, I hit every note I could.”

In a trailer released by Showtime, Stone can be heard asking Putin about U.S. allegations that a Kremlin-directed hacking-and-influence campaign aimed to help President Donald Trump, who says he seeks better ties with Moscow, defeat Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in last year’s election.

“Why did you hack the election?” Stone is heard asking.

It was not immediately clear how Putin answered, though he has repeatedly denied the accusation. Last week Putin suggested Russian involvement for the first time publicly, saying “patriotic-minded” hackers might target Kremlin critics. But he insisted the government was not involved in such efforts.

With reporting by Bloomberg, TASS, and ABC.net.au

Putin says Russia not responsible for recent global cyber attack

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global cyber attack

global cyber attack 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has stressed that his country had nothing to do with the recent global “ransomware” cyber attack that targeted some 150 countries over the weekend.  

“Microsoft’s management has made it clear that the virus originated from US intelligence services,” said Putin while addressing reporters in the Chinese capital Beijing on Monday.

Earlier, Microsoft President Brad Smith noted that US intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA), were to blame for the attack because they stockpiled malicious software code which was used by the hackers.

The NSA claims the software used in the attacks had been stolen from it.

“Once they’re let out of the lamp, genies of this kind … can do damage to their authors and creators,” said Putin. “So this question should be discussed immediately on a serious political level and a defense needs to be worked out from such phenomena,” he added.

Putin went on to stress that Russian institutions were not significantly affected in the attacks.

The Russian president also noted that last year Moscow had called on the US to engage in negotiations about dealing with cyber threats. “Unfortunately, they refused our proposal,” he said.

“The previous administration told us they were interested in reaching back to this proposal again, but nothing was actually done,” he added. On Friday, hundreds of thousands of computer systems across the world were targeted in a cyber attack.

When the ransomware virus infects a computer system, data on that system get encrypted, and images appear on monitors demanding a payment of $300 in the almost untraceable virtual currency Bitcoin.

The payment must be made within three days, otherwise the price would be doubled; and if none is received within seven days, the locked files will be deleted, according to the screen messages.

Putin slams ‘unacceptable’ accusations over alleged chemical attack in Idlib

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has condemned as unacceptable the “unfounded accusations” about a purported chemical attack in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib earlier this week, calling for an international probe.

During a telephone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, “the two sides exchanged views on the chemical incident that took place on April 4,” the Kremlin said in a statement.

Putin “pointed out that it was unacceptable to make groundless accusations against anyone without conducting a detailed and unbiased investigation.”

Earlier on Thursday, Israeli Minister for Military Affairs Avigdor Lieberman told Hebrew-language Yedioth Ahronoth daily that he was sure Syrian government forces were behind the “chemical weapons attack.”

Over 80 people were reportedly killed in the suspected chemical incident in the town of Khan Shaykhun in Idlib province on Tuesday. According to the UN children’s fund, at least 27 children were among those killed in the attack.

The United States and its allies have put the blame on the Syrian government.

Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem has dismissed any accusations that the Syrian army deployed chemical weapons in Idlib.

He told a press conference in Damascus on Thursday that foreign-sponsored Takfiri terrorist groups continue stockpiling chemical weapons in the country’s urban and residential areas.

Al-Nusra Front, also known as the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, Daesh “and other terrorist organizations continue to store chemical weapons in urban and residential areas,” Muallem said.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic are both investigating the Khan Shaykhun attack.

Muallem said Syria would provide the OPCW and the UN with “intelligence on the transfer of chemical substances from Iraq into Syria, or from Turkey into Syria.”

He said Damascus needs assurances that any fact-finding mission into the Idlib attack would not be politicized, adding that his country’s past experience with international inquiries had not been “encouraging.”

Russia’s Putin hosts French presidential hopeful Le Pen in Kremlin

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President Vladimir Putin met French far-right party leader Marine Le Pen in the Kremlin on Friday, March 24, handing her a potential boost to her campaign to win next month’s presidential election in France, Reuters reports.

Putin told Le Pen Moscow reserved the right to meet any French politician it wanted and that she represented “quite a fast-growing element of European political forces.”

“Of course I know that the election campaign in France is actively developing,” said Putin. “We do not want to influence events in any way, but we reserve the right to talk to representatives of all the country’s political forces.”

A meeting with Putin is a coup for Le Pen and could help her burnish her foreign policy credentials. While increasingly popular in France, she has struggled to get any backing abroad apart from support offered by other far-right parties.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, told reporters on a conference call that Putin and Le Pen had not discussed the possibility of Russia offering any financial help to her political party.

Le Pen, who has said she admires the Russian leader, was visiting Russia at the invitation of Leonid Slutsky, head of the lower house of parliament’s foreign affairs committee.

Earlier on Friday, Le Pen had cut short a schedule of events in the Russian parliament to meet Putin.

Reporters had been told she would give a news conference at the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, after meeting Russian lawmakers, but she did not turn up for the event at the designated time.

On Friday morning, Le Pen explained to Russian parliamentarians why she opposed European Union sanctions imposed on Moscow over its role in the Ukraine crisis.

She also said that Russia and France needed to unite to fight global terrorism, a sentiment later echoed by Putin who has long advocated teaming up with the West to take on the Islamic State group.

Sargsyan-Putin meeting kicks off in Kremlin

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The meeting of Armenia’s President Serzh Sargsyan and President of Russia Vladimir Putin kicked off in the Grand Kremlin Palace, the correspondent of “Armenpress” reports.
It is expected that during the talks a number of key issues related to the bilateral mutual partnership between the two strategic partner countries in political, trade-economic, humanitarian, cultural spheres, as well as issues related to the integration processes within the Eurasian space will be discussed.
President Sargsyan and Vladimir Putin will also exchange views on a number of pressing international and regional issues, meanwhile touching upon the process of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement.

Flynn Saga, Trump Foreign Policy Have been Hijacked By nefarious “hawks” in Effort To Thwart Improved Russia Ties

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(rferl) A popular Russian daily said the key issue in Michael Flynn’s downfall was not his conversations with Sergei Kislyak but his participation in a gala celebration of Russian state broadcaster RT’s 10th anniversary in Moscow in 2015, sitting at the same table with Vladimir Putin.

Unofficially, however, leading Kremlin-connected politicians and analysts have been nearly unanimous in attributing the resignation to nefarious efforts by U.S. “hawks” to derail a possible improvement in U.S.-Russian relations. They attribute the efforts variously to the “mainstream media,” the Democrats stung by freshly inaugurated President Donald Trump and his Republican Party’s electoral victories, the U.S. intelligence community, and Republicans they label as “Russophobes.”

Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on February 14 that “we are not going to comment on this in any way…. It is not our business.” The Foreign Ministry issued a similar statement.

But top figures in Russia’s foreign-policy establishment outside the executive branch were actively commenting on the development, nearly unanimously arguing that the pressure on Flynn was really aimed at preventing warmer relations between Moscow and Washington.

Federation Council member Aleksei Pushkov, who was formerly the chairman of the State Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee, posted on Twitter a photograph of the front page of the New York Daily Mail with the blaring headline: Russian For The Exit. He said it was a telling example of the “aggressive campaign by U.S. mainstream media” targeting “not Flynn, but relations with Russia.”

Pushkov’s successor heading the lower house’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Leonid Slutsky, told Interfax the same thing.

“A pretext was selected — [Flynn’s] contacts with the Russian ambassador, although this is a normal diplomatic practice,” Slutsky said. “In these circumstances, one comes to the conclusion that the target was Russia-American relations and undermining confidence in the American administration.”

Sergei Kislitsyn, a specialist in North American affairs with the Russian Academy of Sciences, also said contacts such as those between Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak were “normal.” “If Flynn had been speaking with the British ambassador or the French, or whomever, there would not be so much attention,” he said.

Flynn, Kislitsyn said, “is just a victim of a struggle going on between Trump’s supporters and his opponents.” In general, he said, “anti-Russian rhetoric” is “a major problem” in the United States and will hamper any efforts to improve bilateral relations.

Federation Council member Konstantin Kosachyov, chairman of the upper house’s International Relations Committee, charged that in the United States “even a willingness to engage in dialogue with Russians is seen by the hawks in Washington as a thought crime (in the words of the immortal George Orwell).”

The pressure against Flynn, Kosachyov said, “is more than just paranoia, but something immeasurably worse.”

Flynn’s willingness to engage in dialogue with Moscow, Kosachyov said, “is definitely better than whatever is being pushed about Russia by [Republican Senator John] McCain and Republicans like him.”

McCain has been vocal in his warnings that Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted and staunch in his public defense of Russian neighbors like Georgia and Ukraine, each of which has territory outside its control due to Russian military invasion.

Vladimir Batyuk, an expert with the Institute of the United States and Canada, described the Flynn incident as “a very serious blow to Moscow’s trust in the new [U.S.] administration.”

“When Kislyak was communicating with Flynn, he was absolutely convinced he was communicating with a representative of Trump,” Batyuk said. “Now it turns out that this was not the case.” He argued that the loss of trust “will have negative consequences for the future of the Russian-American dialogue.”

The WikiLeaks website, which has been accused of being a tool of alleged Russian efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election in favor of Trump, tweeted an argument similar to that put forward by the Russian experts, saying Flynn resigned because of a “destabilization campaign by US spies, Democrats, press.”

The popular daily Moskovsky Komsomolets said the key issue in Flynn’s downfall was not his conversations with Kislyak but his participation in a gala celebration of Russian state broadcaster RT’s 10th anniversary in Moscow in 2015, sitting at the same table with Putin.

“It is hard not to remember the famous words of [18th-century] French Foreign Minister Talleyrand, who said of a similar situation in his day: ‘It was worse than a crime. It was a mistake.'”

Relations between Washington and Moscow have been particularly strained since Russia’s 2014 seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region and its alleged active political and military support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Moscow was also irked after Washington adopted individual sanctions targeting Russian officials believed to have been involved in human rights abuses, the so-called Magnitsky List — named after whistle-blowing Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in police custody.

Trump campaigned on pledges to try to improve bilateral relations and work with Moscow to combat the threat from “radical Islamic terrorism.”

Robert Coalson covers Russia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Send story tips to coalsonr@rferl.org

Trump calls Putin to jump-start US-relations with Russia

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US President Trump and Russian President Putin have agreed to develop relations “as equals” in their first phone call since Trump took office. The conversation focused on “mutually beneficial trade and economic ties.”

Describing the phone call as a “positive” exchange, the Kremlin said the two leaders discussed a number of subjects, including the peace efforts between Israelis and Palestinians and the conflict in Ukraine. Other issues reportedly included the Iranian nuclear deal and ongoing tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a statement that the two sides had expressed “a willingness to work actively together to stabilize and develop Russian-American cooperation on a constructive basis, as equals, and to mutual benefit,” adding that their top priority would be the fight against international terrorism.

The Kremlin further said that US President Donald Trump was hoping to organize a meeting with Putin soon.

To sanction or not to sanction

The US and Russian leaders had spoken for the first time on the phone in November 2016, just after Donald Trump’s election victory. At the time, they agreed to “normalize” relations between Moscow and Washington following tensions during the previous US administration of former President Barack Obama over the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine.

Relations between the US and Russia had plunged to their lowest point since the Cold War after Washington, alongside the European Union, imposed economic sanctions on Russia for its 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. The subject of those sanctions was not reportedly raised in the most recent conversation between Putin and Trump, according to statements made by Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov to the Interfax news agency.

Trump had said a day earlier that it was “too early” to speak about easing the sanctions.

“We’ll see what happens. As far as the sanctions, very early to be talking about that,” Trump explained on January 28. The White House has not made any new comments since the phone call between the two leaders occurred.

Staunch opposition

Two Republican senators – Arizona’s John McCain, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Ohio’s Rob Portman, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee – cautioned the White House about the prospect of easing the sanctions on Moscow, warning that they would work to turn the sanction into law if Trump were to signal a departure from the current policy: