sábado, 15 de março de 2014

Why London turns a blind eye to Russia's adventurism. / The Guardian. Wolves Descend on Crimea / NEWSWEEK

It's hard to know how much Russian money is flowing through Britain: the City and accountability are not even nodding acquaintances. Photograph: David Levene

 Why London turns a blind eye to Russia's adventurism
Threats to Russia over its actions in Ukraine are undermined by the warm welcome its billionaires continue to receive in the west
Nick Cohen

The kleptocracies that have replaced the old Soviet empire are vulnerable, I wrote on these pages as the Ukraine crisis began. The freezing of their assets was a non-violent response to the threat to the integrity of a sovereign state that had not committed genocide or developed weapons of mass destruction; that had not threatened to invade a neighbour or provided any other casus belli beyond having a revolution against a fantastically corrupt government.

We might have threatened Putin's elite support and made his backers realise that they had to choose between supporting Russian adventurism or holding on to their loot. I believed we had a fair idea of what their choice would have been.

Russia is exposed. Putin's central bank estimated that two-thirds of the $56bn moved out of Russia in 2012 might have been the proceeds of crimes, bribes to state officials and tax fraud. English bankers and lawyers, British and Dutch tax havens in the Caribbean, and estate agents in Mayfair, the Cote d'Azur and Manhattan launder the loot.

Never mind asset freezes and visa bans; a vigorous investigation into immoral earnings by the European and north American authorities would have spread panic among the crime bosses. David Cameron sniffed weakness. He warned Moscow at the beginning of March that Russia would pay "significant costs" if it did not back down.

The crisis escalates today as Crimea votes on an anschluss with Russia under the eyes of Putin's troops. The failure to date to impose sanctions on or make believable threats against Russian assets tells us much about Britain and the wider west, none of it flattering.

It isn't certain what choice our rulers will make if they have to choose between opposing Russian adventurism and holding on to Russian loot. Cameron may surprise us. But as things stand, it appears that the love of money is not confined to the Kremlin. Those who covet it, those who have pocketed or hope to pocket it, are as much in its thrall as the oligarchs who possess it.

Consider the extent of Russian financial power in Britain. Soviet-born billionaires occupy three of the top five slots in the Sunday Times Rich List. One owns the satirically titled Independent newspaper and the London Evening Standard. Another owns Chelsea Football Club. More Russians have received special "tier one" investor visas than the citizens of any other country. The first-class visas allow the British state, which bellows about its toughness on immigration, to sell residency rights at £1m a pop.

BP, a struggling corporation with many connections to Downing Street, needs Putin's favours. The Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 forced the company to freeze dividends and sell assets worth $38bn, including half of all its offshore platforms and refineries, to meet the $42bn costs of the clean-up. The company's involvement in Russia adds nearly 1m barrels a day to its oil production. So dependent on Moscow's goodwill has it become that the Economist speculated that it "now exerts pressure on the British government to pursue a Russia-friendly policy".

Analysts find it harder to be precise about the scale of Russian money flowing through the British financial system: the City and accountability are not even nodding acquaintances. But Thomson Reuters calculated that companies from Russia and former Soviet states have raised $82.6bn in London in the past two decades, large chunks of which the City creamed off as fees.

The "English" courts are easier to monitor because cases must take place in public. Lawyers often compare themselves to taxi drivers, who will carry anyone who can pay the fare. I find a comparison to an older profession more satisfying. Whichever one you care to use, Russian money proves its truth. The lowest moment in recent history of the libel courts came when eminent solicitors and one of London's most expensive QCs tried to sue the London-based investment fund manager Bill Browder.

He first developed the use of asset freezes as a weapon against Putin, in his case because Russian gangsters and state officials were complicit in the murder of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. Our legal profession was not bothered in the slightest that Magnitsky was a better and braver lawyer than they would or could ever be; a man who had died in a Moscow prison for the "crime" of exposing a gigantic tax fraud. That their case that a former Russian secret policeman had the right to sue Browder in London was deemed by the judge to be hopeless did not appear to concern them either. They still picked up hundreds of thousands of pounds in fees.

Between March 2008 and March 2013, 61.6% of litigants fighting in London commercial courts came from outside England and Wales. As I've said before, the government is denying access to justice to the native poor and working class with its legal aid cuts. Extortionate legal fees have become too much for the middle class to bear. But as it closes the courts to the British, the coalition is following a deliberate policy of turning them over to the global oligarchy, in the hope that fat fees for QCs will produce tax revenues for the Treasury.

If you look at the luxury market, the picture is the same. Art, prime London property, the finances of several Premier League clubs and the private schools are trapped in a dependency culture. As is the British right.

The Eurosceptic dream can sound attractive when you have had one beer too many. Let us turn our back on the collective security of the European Union, be the great trading nation we once were, and send our ships out on to the wide blue oceans. They forget that Victorian Britain was a great power as well as a great trading nation. It was strong enough to put security interests beyond economic interests. Today, Cameron worries not only about losing Russian business, but the chilling example sanctions would set to the buyers from China and other dictatorships shopping in London. Would they be so willing to spend if they saw the authorities using Moscow gold as a weapon in a diplomatic crisis?


A comparison with 1914 is instructive. At the start of the First World War, Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George were so determined to maintain the European balance of power they were prepared to risk bankrupting the British empire. We will find out later today whether David Cameron and George Osborne are prepared to risk bankrupting a Mayfair estate agent a century on.

Chetniks, known for rape, murder and ethnic cleansing, have arrived to back the Russians Sergii Kharchenko/NurPhoto/Corbis

Wolves Descend on Crimea
By Janine di Giovanni / March 12, 2014 / http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/wolves-descend-crimea.html

When Vladimir Putin gave his first press conference since the Ukraine crisis began, he oddly said there were no Russian troops in Crimea—aside from those who were already stationed at a Russian Navy base.

The armed men outside administration buildings and airports are not Russian soldiers, Putin claimed—these are "self-organized local forces of volunteers."

Putin may be delusional—German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently remarked he had lost the plot—but he has a valid point. There are self-organized volunteers in Crimea.

Some have arrived via social media—one Web page, the Civil Defense of Ukraine ("Russian Get Up!") on Vkontakte, the Facebook of Russia, already has 7,000 followers. It encourages men, ages 18 to 45, to rush to the Crimea to defend Russian values.

But Serbian Chetniks, led by a former Kosovo war fighter named Milutin Malisic who brought a group of fighters to Crimea nicknamed "The Wolves," says there are other reasons: Serbs have a responsibility to their Orthodox brethren.

"We [represent the] Chetnik movement, and we can compare with the Cossacks in Russia," he said. "During the wars in Yugoslavia, a lot of volunteers fought on the Serbian side and we have decided to help them. It is our duty to be here."
Malisic added that he did not expect many Serbian fighters to join him. "We are a small nation," he said. "But we also cultivate a great love for Russia."

The Chetniks might be small in number but their presence in Crimea is still alarming. From 1992 to 1995, in the former Yugoslavia, the word Chetnik sparked instant terror in Bosnian Muslim and Croat civilians.

These fighters wore balaclava style ski masks instead of the traditional long beards and furry hats modeled after Russian Cossacks, but their names were synonymous with war crimes: rape, murder, ethnic cleansing and other hideous acts of atrocity.

They were a revival of Serb nationalists with roots that sprang from a monarchist paramilitary that formed a resistance force first against the Ottoman Empire in 1904.

The original Chetniks participated in the first Balkan war, and both World War I and II, where their conservative nationalism was directed not only against the German invader, but also the Communists, led by a Croat, Josip Broz Tito.


Crimea and Punishment
They came to the attention of the legendary British war hero, Fitzroy Maclean, who was sent into Yugoslavia during World War II by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to penetrate the guerrilla war and work with Tito and his partisans.

Part of Maclean's brief was to find out "who was killing the most Germans," regardless of political ideology or affiliation. It was believed to be royalists and their military arm, the Chetniks, led by General Draza Mihailovic.

Maclean and Churchill's focus was more directed toward Tito. Postwar, there was some regret about lost opportunities: that military aid had not been given to Mihailovic and his men, but instead was given to Tito and the Communists. (Maclean did eventually conclude that the partisans were killing even more Nazis than the Chetniks).

When Yugoslavia broke up after 1991, it was no great surprise that ultra-Serb nationalists went back to men they considered heroes—the Cossack-like Chetniks. But according to Tim Judah, an expert on Serbia, their appearance in Crimea was expected.

"Just as small numbers of Russians, Greeks and others came to help the Orthodox Bosnian Serbs during the Bosnian war, a handful of Serbs have now turned up to help their Russian brothers in Crimea," he said.

But he finds a strange irony in their mission. "They are self-proclaimed Chetniks, whose forebears in the Second World War both fought against and collaborated with the Nazis against Communist forces," he says. But their alliance is a "weird distortion of history," as the Russians claim they are against "fascist" Ukrainian Banderovts—who were Ukrainian nationalists and, just like the Chetniks, both resisted and collaborated with the Nazis against the Communists.

The British journalist Misha Glenny called the revival of the Serb nationalists in Yugoslavia in the 1990s one of the most "hideous and frightening aspects of the fall of communism in Serbia and Yugoslavia."

"This breed, which finds nurture in the perpetration of unspeakable acts of brutality, encapsulates all that is irrational and unacceptable in Balkan society," he wrote in his book The Fall of Yugoslavia.

At the time, Glenny observed that the thought pattern and actions of the nationalists were not "peculiar to Serbia, but only here have they been allowed to fulfill their sick potential with no barriers."

After the Kosovo War in 1999, the Chetniks laid low. But the Ukraine crisis has clearly sparked a common feeling of Slavic unity.

The Serbian press responded by saying there are only a limited number of Chetnik fighters in Crimea—five, to be exact—and that they were being used for minor jobs, such as manning checkpoints. They also questioned Malisic's background and motives.

"If the Russians did their homework, they will certainly beg the Chetniks not to help them," says Zoran Kusovac, who is based in Belgrade for Jane's Defense Weekly. He says the Chetniks are basically bandits.

"Wherever these pompous 'defenders,' with idiosyncratic headgear, appeared, the population they allegedly were there to protect disappeared for good," he says. "As did all video recorders, televisions, fridges, tractors and cars—regardless of their owners' ethnicity or creed—that were within reach of these bearded creatures."

Traditionally, Serb and Russian nationalists are closely aligned by their Orthodox Christian religion, their Slavic roots and their anti-Western perceptions.

In Tito's Yugoslavia, most school children were taught Russian as a second language; and when Yugoslavia disintegrated, Russia became the natural hiding place for war criminals and other disreputable Serbs—such as the much-loathed Mira Markovic, wife of former wartime President Slobodan Milosevic, who died in prison while defending himself against war-crime charges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Serbia has always been something of a foothold for Russia inside the Balkans, and the Russians have poured large amounts of money into the dire Serbian energy sector.

While other Europeans reacted with horror to Putin's interference in the Ukraine, in Belgrade, several thousand pro-Russia demonstrators took to the streets on March 3, holding placards reading: "Crimea is Russia and Kosovo is Serbia."

Officially, though, Serbia is playing it diplomatically. This year Serbia began talks to join the European Union and most young Serbs, when interviewed, say they would prefer to forget their pariah reputation and their past—the war crimes, the international isolation, the U.N. sanctions, the bombardment by NATO—and move on.

"Let's face it," said one young Belgrade-based graphic artist. "The future is in Europe. It's not here."

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