Russia: Future Nuclear Waste Capital of the World

FOX News, among many others, is reporting:

Russia Wants to Store Nuclear Waste
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
By H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON — Russian President Vladimir Putin is maneuvering to take the nuclear waste the rest of the world shuns, hoping for a financial bonanza _ and President Bush, in a reversal of U.S. policy, is offering to help.

The two countries will announce as part of the upcoming G-8 summit that they will begin negotiations on a civilian nuclear agreement that would clear the way for Putin to achieve one of his top energy goals: expanding his country’s power reactors and using Russia’s vast territory as a storehouse for the world’s used reactor fuel.

A majority of the spent reactor fuel now at power plants _ especially in such countries as South Korea, Japan and Taiwan _ came from the United States and can’t be shipped anywhere without U.S. approval.

The United States has civilian nuclear agreements with nearly two dozen countries, including China, but it has opposed negotiating one with Russia, mainly because Russia has been helping Iran develop its nuclear energy program.

While U.S. officials have emphasized the desire to increase cooperation with Russia on civilian nuclear matters, some major hurdles must be overcome before an agreement can be reached, including assurances that any U.S.-origin waste that would go to Russia will be secure and safe.

Given that Russia has the world’s largest territory, La Russophobe guesses that it makes sense for Russia to become the world’s nuclear garbage dump. And it may well be an effective way to keep the Chinese from grabbing Siberia to laden it down with hazardous atomic contamination that makes it unfit for human habitation. However, La Russophobe has got to wonder whether Vladimir Putin’s ardent desire to receive the world’s nuclear garbage doesn’t perhaps give the lie to any notion that Russia is rolling in cash and on the verge of returning to “world power” status. However, the near total absence of popular protest against this decision may indicate that the Russian people are getting precisely what they deserve.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Bottom Drops out of Saturated Russian Cell Phone Market

The Moscow Times reports that, contrary to the absurd propaganda campaign being conducted by the Kremlin regarding Russia’s oil wealth, nothing has changed for the ordinary Russian on the street. Already the cell phone market has become saturated and begun to dry up:

Mobile phone sales fell by 20 percent to 13.51 million handsets in the first six months of the year compared to the first half of 2005, Yevroset electronics retailer said Tuesday.

The ongoing crackdown on illegal imports has pushed up phone prices, contributing to a drop in sales, market watchers said. They predicted that sales would remain sluggish through the end of this year.

Phone retail prices climbed 20 percent to a six-month average of $190 per handset, Yevroset said in a statement. Since the volume of handset sales dropped by the amount of the price hike, the retailer said, total sales remained at $2.59 billion in the first half of 2006, the same as in the first half of last year.

An especially bitter winter contributed to the slowdown in sales during the first couple of months of this year, when “sub-zero temperatures hurt all retailers,” said Mikhail Alekseyev, a telecoms analyst with AC&M Consulting.

Still, rising prices were the main culprit in the slowing handsets sales, said Eldar Murtazin, head of Mobile Research Group.

“I don’t see any reasons for prices to drop in the near term,” Murtazin said. The market is set to shrink by about 30 percent by the end of the year, he said, because people are buying new phones less often due to rising prices.

The number of handsets sold in the second quarter of the year dropped 21.9 percent compared to the second quarter of 2005, with the total sales volume shrinking 8.9 percent in dollar terms, Yevroset said.

This helps to explain why, as the Moscow Times documents, Russia was utterly shut out at the G-8 meeting, humiliated and denied at every turn, because the G-8 members know full well that the idea of Russian economic potency is pure fiction:

No major breakthroughs were made. Talks on energy security, Russia’s priority for the summit, went nowhere and took a backseat to international crises such as violence in the Middle East. U.S. President George W. Bush met the heads of leading nongovernmental organizations. German Chancellor Angela Merkel singled out NGOs as an issue that worried her. British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife offered legal aid.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Take that! Georgia Blocks Russia’s WTO Access

Kommersant reports (with English editing supplied by La Russophobe):

Georgia’s Right to Close WTO for Russia Duly Confirmed

Georgia may resume negotiations about Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), spokesmen of the latter confirmed yesterday. The withdrawal of the approval that Georgia provided to Russia in 2004 could not be challenged in any courts. This past Friday, Georgia‘s Economic Development Minister Irakly Chogovadze addressed a letter to his Russian counterpart German Gref in which he suggested resuming negotiations on Russia’s entry into the WTO. Right after that, the lawyers of Russia’s Economic Development Ministry focused on validity of such a withdrawal, as the negotiators’ agreement of May 28, 2004 duly specifies the Georgian approval. But under the WTO regulations, member states may resume negotiations any time till everything has been finally agreed on. To withdraw the approval, Georgia will have only to refuse sealing the report of the working group and the entrance protocol. By doing that, Georgia will make work on the memorandum absolutely impossible, while Russia won’t be able to go to court or challenge the refusal in the WTO, as it is no member or observer of the latter. It is worth mentioning that the letter of Chogovadze didn’t specify the recall of signatures. According to the Georgian minister, the three challenge points are (1) denying the access to checkpoints in Abkhazia and South Ossetia to customs officers of Georgia, (2) closing of Upper Lars checkpoint by Russia and (3) banning the deliveries of Georgian wine to Russia. The issues could be decided only at a personal meeting of two presidents, Chogovadze specified.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

On Russian Pride

“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

The Bible
Proverbs 16:18

Writing for the Carnegie Endowment in Foreign Affairs, Russian Dmitri Trenin shows that Russian pride comes before Russian truth, if such a thing can be said to exist at all. Trenin can hardly conceal his glee that Russia is thumbing its nose out the outside world: “The United States and Europe can protest this change in Russia’s foreign policy all they want, but it will not make any difference. They must recognize that the terms of Western-Russian interaction, conceptualized at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse 15 years ago and more or less unchanged since, have shifted fundamentally. The old paradigm is lost, and it is time to start looking for a new one.” You can almost feel the Russian pride coursing through Mr. Trenin’s patriotic veins as he thinks about being able to thumb his nose at the world yet again, subjugate helpless smaller countries and strike fear into the heart of thousands, even if the price is another century of Neo-Soviet mistery for the mass population following by the implosion of the country. How different are Mr. Trenin’s remarks from those of his Soviet forebears? Not in the slightest do they differ.

A typical Russian, he is unwilling to require the Russian people to be accountable for their actions (peruse his lengthy diatribe and try to find a single word ascribing and kind of blame to them), and only to willing to blame others: “The West deserves some of the blame for the shift in Russian foreign policy.” Really, Mr. Trenin? If only the West hadn’t erred, Russians wouldn’t have elected a proud KGB spy as their second president in history? They wouldn’t have allowed him to obliterate local government, destroy indepedent television and revive the Soviet National Anthem? They would have stood up and opposed his outrageous war in Chechnya just the way Americans oppose President Bush’s war in Iraq? It’s quite amazing that Russians still think they can get away with this kind of nonsense, that they can still get so drunk on tiny accomplishments like the rising price of oil that they imagine they can take over the world. Cold War I destroyed the USSR when it had twice America’s population and a roughly comparable economy; what will Cold War II do to Russia, with half America’s population and 1/10th its economy? Mr. Trenin doesn’t seem to care.

Another vivid example comes in the Russian Dilletante’s response to my comment about Russian complicity in the criminal acts committed by Belarus. Here is what RD writes:

It shows that you’re a Russophobe. When it comes to politics, most Russians are little kids. They have not had the kind of schooling and experience that Americans and most Europeans have. The Russians’ political idiocy can be infuriating but it is not their fault. Most Russians are too busy earning their living to find out the truth about Lukashenko. They hear that education and health care are good and free in Belarus (while Putin is working to make both inaccessible to millions) and that alone is enough for them to give Lukashenko their support. The West has so far failed to produce a counterexample: Ukraine, for instance, is still a mess.

Sound familar? Poor, helpless, innocent little Russians are not to blame for anything, only the cruel overlords they freely elect and blithely fail to supervise or even criticize. How long have Russians been justifying their failure on this basis? For how many centuries have they been refusing to accept responsibility for their own actions, even while pointing an accusatory finger at other nations? And more importantly, how long can they continue doing so until they are utterly destroyed?

Your guess is as good as LR’s, gentle reader.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Gray Lady Down

Readers will perhaps remember when La Russophobe boldly declared “Wow, the New York Times sucks!” due to the NYT’s shoddy level of customer service which she personally experienced.

Now it turns out that the Times really is in trouble, and is going to impose a massive staff layoff and even reduce the physical size of the paper in order to try to keep its head above water. The ultimate cut may be that if you search this issue on Google you don’t even get a Times story reporting the news.

Maybe the Times should consider instead of staff cuts and paper shrinkage abandoning the insane left-wing dogma that characterizes the drumbeat of its boring, predictable editorials. Maybe it should actually be liberal, and attack the rise of the Neo-Soviet Union (the ultimate quintessence of anti-liberal danger) rather than constantly attacking the world’s most stable constitutional democracy in the United States. Or maybe even better, the paper could just drop it’s absurd ideological slant entirely and just start accurately reporting the news with no editorializing of any kind, and take a few courses in customer service.

The Times editorials have always had a yearning admiration for the Soviet Union and its promised socialist paradise, and throughout the Cold War the Times was constantly placing blame for rising tensions on America’s doorstep, saying its policy towards the USSR was paranoid and misguided, that Russians were just victimized by a few bad apples. Of course, when Russians freely elected a proud KGB spy as their president, the Times had considerable egg on its face, so its crazed editorial line then became an argument that Putin was a “necessary transitional figure.” In other words, it chose to ignore the rise of the Neo-Soviet Union in order to shield its own reputation, perhaps the low-water mark in the paper’s storied history. (The Times editorials have also committed numerous other blunders, such as lauding Jimmy Carter’s laughable deal with North Korea, and the Times has yet to apologize to readers for any editorial error, in fact they are often not even acknowledged as such.) In short, the Times editorials practice the exact same kind of arrogance and insularity that they attack the Bush administration for, the height of pathetic hypocrisy. So it’s not suprising that the Times now finds itself, like Russia, teetering on the brink of extinction.

The NYT is listed on the blogroll of La Russophobe and she continues to find value in the Times coverage of Russia, but the Times drops the ball on Russia far more often than it carries it for a touchdown.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

More Evidence of the Charade that is Russian Tennis

At the WTA Tour event in Cincinnati, Serena Williams returned on Wednesday to obliterate Russian Anastasia Myskina, ranked #11 in the world and seeded second in the tournament, in the first round. Though Williams had not played tennis for six months due to injury, was unseeded and not even ranked in the top 100 in the world, Myskina was able to win only four of the 16 games they played as Williams easily blew her off the court. One was reminded of the ease with which Martina Hingus destroyed the vaunted Maria Sharapova under similar circumstances, and of the fact that a Russian has hardly ever won a really significant match against a highly-ranked foreigner in form in the whole history of tennis (two of the three grand slams Russians have won came against other Russians, while the third came against Serena when she was hobbled by injury and about to disappear from the game).

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !