Russia’s Real Enemies

Russia’s Real Enemies

Lev Rubinshtein

December 1, 2008

Grani.ru

Translated from the Russian by The Other Russia

I know now who is yelling the loudest and the most forcefully about those “cursed nineties,” when Russia was “trampled in the mud,” and people “wiped their feet” on her, during the epoch of Russia’s Great Humiliation by the Horrible West. I know, who strains themselves most of all while hysterically recounting the Worldwide Russo-phobic conspiracy. [A conspiracy] led, as is easy to guess, by that infernal America, for whom Russia’s undeniable greatness– as a country with unrecognized constructive-destructive possibilities and an inexhaustible oil-and-gas-based spirituality– is the single, though insurmountable barrier to global domination. I know who they are.

Horsepower for Gazprom

An equine solarium

Novaya Gazeta reports:

Gazprom’s website has published a request for bids. It’s soliciting a contract for the supply of equipment to its equine stables in the village of Bogorodskoye, in the Leninsky District of the Moscow Region.

The company is requesting the installation of a Warendorfer Standard II Solarium with a set of built in thermal showers, to be completed by the end of this year, with a maximum contract price of 338,000 rubles (roughly $12,000). Only experienced tradesman are solicited.          

Another Original LR Translation: Beslan and the KGB

A note from the translator: The following article which I have translated from Novaya Gazeta raises a number of very pertinent questions about what exactly was going on at the Beslan tragedy. If true, and I can see no reason to doubt that it is, the Beslan tragedy may be more a crime of state terrorism than Islamic terrorism. The information, collected by Ella Kesayeva, co-chairman of the All-Russian Voice of Beslan Public Organisation, certainly raises some very nasty doubts and suspicions that this is yet another criminally botched Russian secret police operation along the lines of the Moscow flat bombings, the Nord-Ost theatre debacle, the Litvinenko murder, and so on. In my translation below, I have mostly rendered the interminable and semi-mystical acronyms for the various police, state security, and other legal institutions by their Latin letters. Russian bureaucracy, in law-enforcement too, is labyrinthine. I think that for the most part it is sufficient to remember that any acronym with VD in it means “cops” of one sort or another from the Ministry of the Interior and any acronym with FSB somewhere in it means “KGB goon of one sort or another” from the Federal Security Service. The precise body can be ascertained by those who wish to do so by reconverting the Latin letters into Cyrillic.

Terrorists or Agents?

Strange facts about the Beslan Tragedy

by Ella Kesayeva

 Novaya Gazeta

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

The investigation into the Beslan tragedy is now into its fifth year but no clear answer has yet been provided to one of the main questions: precisely how many terrorists were there at Beslan and who were they? According to the investigators’ version, the terrorist group was composed of 33 people. The identities of most of them were established from their fingerprints. This means that all these terrorists must, at one time or another, have been registered by the North Caucasus regional UBOP and UFSB [anti-organised crime police and KGB, in our parlance], been on the wanted list, been detained or arrested, or in some cases condemned.

Vladimir Putin, Hoist with his own Petard

A De-Facto Confession

Vitaly Portnikov

Grani.Ru

11/21/08

Translated from the Russian by The Other Russia

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin became yet another high-ranking Russian civil servant to admit that an economic crisis exists in the country. He did this loudly and solemnly at a congress of the party of power. And having promised that there would not be a repeat of the 1998 collapse, he took personal responsibility for the social impact of the crisis, which even such a mighty national leader doesn’t have the power to prevent.

Another Original LR Translation: Latynina on Golodomor via Essel

The “So-Called” Golodomor

Yuliya Latynina

Yezhednevny Zhurnal

24 November 2008

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev did not attend the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Golodomor. Instead, he sent a letter in which he waxed wrathful about the wedge being driven between two brotherly peoples by ill-wishers who speak of a “so-called” Golodomor.

“The tragic events of the early 1930s are being used to further transient and fleeting political aims,” the President wrote.  He added:  “Without waiting for the results of a wide-ranging study of the problems by competent experts, we are having a simplistic depiction of the past imposed on us. The people who are promoting the thesis of a “genocidal man-made famine” do not care in the least about scientific accuracy. Their aim is to drive a wedge between our fraternal peoples.”

Last Friday, I was on Savik Shuster’s “Shuster Live” program which was dedicated to the Golodomor. The guests on the programme divided into two parties. One group consisted of Russophile politicians. The view they expounded was that firstly, there wasn’t any Golodomor, secondly, the Americans were to blame, and thirdly, that everyone suffered from it.

Dima Medvedev in 25 Words or Less

Особенность Дмитрия Медведева заключается в том, что он ― абсолютно независимая фигура. В том смысле, что от него совсем ничего не зависит.

What uniquely distinguishes Dmitri Medvedev is that he is a completely independent figure. In the sense that nothing whatsoever depends on him.

From Alexander Golts’ Ezhednevny Zhurnal report on Mevdedev’s recent European visit , translated from the Russian by Dave Essel.

Another Original LR Translation: Essel on the Russia Motorcar

A note from the translator:  I’m not the sort to deny myself or feel guilty about Schadenfreude, particularly when it comes to Russia and the Russian “élite” (whom I wouldn’t let come nearer me or mine than a – preferably spiked – barge pole would permit). So I couldn’t resist translating this for LR readers. (It was either this or more on the freon submarine).

That however, would have been more of the same – underfunded shipyard, loss of specialists, unpaid subcontractors, what one can expect for mothballing a complex piece of engineering for 22 years, poor planning of systems upgrades, and so on and so forth. The usual for Russia.

This, therefore, was the better laugh. Not feeling easy in a Bentley . . . The Rich are Selling Their Premium Class Vehicles; Working Folk are Buying Them.

Pavel Kalygin, “Our anti-crisis correspondent”

Novaya Gazeta

15 November 2008

Translated by Dave Essel

The world crisis is steadily worming its way into stranger and stranger places, confounding our dreams of stability and undermining our way of life and habits. The middle class is already profoundly affected and has lost everything: creditworthiness, quarterly bonuses, free lunches… But the premium class is striving to stand firm against the crisis. It is not proving easy for them as I discovered when I took a trip to the Rublevka and saw the scale of the damage, the actual costs of their battle. I was shaken: a Porsche Cayenne S, fresh from the factory in March this year, going for a mere 1,5 million roubles (~$55K)…

“That’s mind-boggling!” I said to Maxim Denisov, the manager of this second-hand car dealership on the Rublevka. “It’s worth twice that.”

Stock Market Fun, with Dave Essel

Stock Market Fun

by Dave Essel

Prompted by LR’s post “Freefall on the Russian Stock Market”, I decided to visit the RTSI (www.rts.ru) website. It was good fun. The site is quick and responsive and the charts are something! Click and see a daily, yearly, weekly, monthly, yearly, or 3-year graph.

The way the markets reflect politics is simply wonderful. You don’t need to look further for proof that people put their money where their mouth is, or, in other words: where the mouth (i.e. the information) is, thither goes the money.

In this case, it is OUT of Russia. As well it should be if you value your assets…

Another Original LR Translation: Of mice and men and submarines

A note from the translator:  One of the things I find most striking about Russia’s recent misadventure with its submarine is how little sense is being written about it. This is one of the best I could find. Yet, it, too, disappoints – in a very Russian way. Here we have a professional, writing a popular explanation in what is left of Russia’s free press. Well and good. But he too suffers from a peculair Russian syndrome. The question that immediately occurred to me – and I am sure it would to any Western reader – was: how is fire prevention and firefighting done on the submarines of other countries? The author of the article below writes as if submarines are only made in Russia. [Any submariners out there among LR’s readers willing to enlighten me/us?] Why do Russians always have to re-invent the wheel? This clearly sensible writer appears to live on an island called Russia, just like the people he disapproves of.

Of Pikes and Freon

by Alexander Pokrovsky, Submariner and Author

Novaya Gazeta

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

“On 8 Novermber at 20:30 local time, the multipurpose submarine Nerpa (project 971 Shchuka-B [shchuka = pike] sailed from its ZATO (Closed Territorial-Administrative Settlement ) Bolshoi Kamen base to undergo sea trials. During these trials, the freon-release fire extinguishing system went off unexpectedly. Six servicemen and 14 civilians died. A further 22 people required hospital treatment. All told, there were 208 people on board the submarine, of whom 81 were servicemen.” Thus the official press release.

The press office of the navy later issued a correction: the dead consisted of 3 servicemen and 17 civilians.

One of the things that makes the Project 971 Shchuka-B special is that it involves more automated systems that previous designs. Command and control is from a single central command centre. The boat is run by a crew of 73.

Another Original LR Translation: Listening to Dima Medvedev

A note from the translator: This, I think, ranks amongst the best of the many reviews of the state of the nation address made by Pooty’s Teddy to the Federal Assembly. It’s written in the rather histrionic, hysterical style that Russian journalists like to adopt occasionally. To the Western reader, this may appear overly self-conscious, like a novice writer for a provincial paper, but here it’s a accepted style.

Call-and-answer

Boris Suvarin

Yezhedevny Zhurnal

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Medvedev’s first state of the nation address has been interpreted in many ways.

The simplest – don’t worry your head about it! It’s a ritual, a farrago of words… Words were in order and words were spoken. “Freedom (bureaucracy) is better than slavery (the population). We’ve heard it before and we’ll hear it again…. (Incidentally, why do we actually need all the “phonemes about freedom”? The West couldn’t care; inside the country, they are as unpopular with the natives as they are with the inhabitants of the Kremlin; and no one would want a liberal, even if one was being given away for free. And the same goes in reverse: the liberals don’t want these speeches which they don’t believe or trust in the slightest. So why give the address? Is it something he just enjoys?)

Nonetheless, whatever you may think of Medvedev and his speech, objective facts remain: they can’t be abolished. Russia has come up against a challenge. And its leaders simply MUST do something about it. As everyone knows, a failure to respond is also a response.

Another Original LR Translation: Russia’s Rent-a-mob Racket

Russia’s Rent-a-Mob Racket

by Dave Essel

We all know that neo-nazi Russia does not permit genuine popular demonstrations. I can never quite get it through my mind how one can have a constitution permitting the freedom to demonstrate and the fact on the ground that authorisation to demonstrate has to be sought and obtained. Unauthorised demonstrations lead to broken heads and arrests – to a greater or lesser extent depending on whether it is neo-nazi youth getting a bit too turbulent without having been invited to do so (in which case expect some nominal arrests and quick releases with a warning, as was the case last November 4, or people genuinely moved to demonstrate about a genuine evil, in which case it’s 14 days in the cells as it takes that long for semi-literate cops to compose a case).

So it was with particular interest that I read this report in Novaya Gazeta about how actual demonstrations are organised.

Just as capitalism in Russia bears only a slight resemblance to the real thing – more 19th century factory screwing workers by paying in factory notes that can only be used for purchases in the company store than voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange of goods/service for money) so Russian demonstrations are not spontaneous manifestations – of course, but rent-a-mob with the added element of manages to screw the rented mob and make money for the stewards!

Sweet land of блат, pork (in very small portions for all but the select), and exploitation of the disenfranchised….

What can Russians do to Help Americans?

What Russia can do to Help America

Argumenty i Fakti

October 21, 2008

Translated from the Russian by Ekateriana Blinova (WorldMeetsUS.com)

Alexei Malashenko, a Scholar-in-Residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center, Vladimir Sergievsky, strategist for Russian Investment Company FINAM, and Yefim Rachevsky talk of what Russia might be able to do to help the United States.

The current political week began with a comical incident: Russia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations received a letter signed by U.S. presidential candidate John McCain, with a request for financial assistance. In the letter, McCain appealed to Russian Ambassador Vitaliy Churkin for a rather modest sum to support his election campaign – from 5,000 to 35,000 dollars. McCain himself, as well as representatives of his campaign, assured us that this was a result of a regrettable computer glitch; But the mere fact that America would ask Russia for financial aid is somewhat symbolic, especially given the backdrop of the global financial crisis. We asked our respondents in what ways Russia could help the United States:

Special Extra: Another Original LR Translation — Happy “National Unity Day,” Russia!

Russia’s 4th of July*

by Dave Essel

Newspeak is undergoing a serious revival in Pooty’s Russia. The new November 4th public holiday that desperately tries and fails, like so many of Russia’s endeavours, to be something and mean something, is just another case in point. Even not very free-thinking Russians see it. In big things and small, neo-nazi Russia is truly the heir to the Commie Soviet Union, right down to the fact that most things means their opposite – except when they don’t: and woe betide you if you get it wrong, because that’s when your kidneys and more will be battered until you see sense. The Russian Federation has, after all, replaced the Soviet Union’s “most humane legal system in the world” with its own.

I cried ‘til I laughed.

Here from Zagolovki.ru, a news-in-brief site, is a précis of the issue.

Another Original LR Translation: The Perils of Svetlana Bakhmina

Svetlana Bakhmina, in Kremlin custody

A note from the translator: Yuliya Latynina is a great columnist with the requisite gifts of perception and clear-sightedness and the ability to write straightforwardly. This is very noticeable when one translates things. Some texts just flow from the Russian through the keyboard into English, others are a struggle. Milov, for example, is much harder to translate than Yuliya. It’s not a matter of subjects, it’s a matter of good thinking and expression. I see it the other way round too — I can read a free translation of an Economist article out loud to my wife [the Economist has strict style standards] but pieces from other journals are always harder. Translateability, therefore, can be a measure of the excellence of the author. Yuliya ranks high. 

A note from the editor:  You can sign a petition to call for Bakhmina’s freedom here. A second piece about Bakhmina’s plight from the same Russian source follows Latynina’s.

First she did not Apply
and Secondly she Withdrew the Application

Yulia Latynina

Yezhedevny Zhurnal

31 October 2008

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Cops flag down a black Mercedes on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. They find a body with a bullet in its head in the trunk. “What’s all this, then?’ they ask. “Well, our friend here committed suicide and we’re on our way to bury him,” answers the driver. “And why’s he got a soldering iron up his rectum?” “Oh, that was the deceased’s last wish.”

I was reminded of this wonderful anekdot [TN: the Russian анекдот is so special it does not deserve to be translated by the word ‘joke’] when I saw the Kremlin’s reaction to Svetlana Bakhmina’s request for release on parole. The Kremlin said she had made no such application. The camp authorities said she had withdrawn her application. As for Bakhmina herself, not even her lawyers are able to get in touch with here – she’s been hidden away in hospital.

Isn’t that just typical of those liberal swine: they raise Cain in support of Bakhmina but she never even asked for parole and in any case has rescinded her request!

Another Original LR Translation: Milov on the Crisis

A word from the translator:  Having translated both Milov/Nemtsov white papers, I have developed a respect for Milov’s way of thinking and am always on the look-out for more from him. This exposition of his appeared in Novaya Gazeta last week and is, as always, interesting and self-evidently right. The sad thing, of course, is that what is self-evidently right to LR readers and anyone with an inkling of good sense, is a тёмный лес (dark wood) to most Russians. It seems to me that if we could discover the reason why this is the case, we would be able to “cure” Russia instantly. Dream on.

We Will Be Last In Line

Why Russia will not be able to rise up from its knees
without help from Western capital

by Vladimir Milov

Novaya Gazeta 

October 31, 2008

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

It is quite evident that the growth model followed by Russia in recent years has now collapsed and that there is nothing around that can take its place, at least in the foreseeable future. Because the 7-8% GDP growth of the last four years derived exclusively from the inflow of foreign capital.

Bear in mind that, unlike the three other countries forming the BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China], where capital inflow consisted in the main of direct foreign investment, the money that came into Russia was mostly in the form of foreign loans. These were the engine of our development to an even greater extent that oil and gas were. And these loans were not ‘our money’ coming back home, as some assert, but real foreign money. And then, this money was not spent on modernising the country in any way but was instead mostly frittered away: for example, most of the borrowing by the Russian companies which held IPOs in the last few years was spent on buying shares and real estate while only 20-30% went into the implementation of genuine development projects.

Essel on Russian Corruption

Corruption: Don’t We All Just Love Greasing the Wheels?

by Dave Essel

In a recent translation of mine published in LR, Russia was referred to as a swamp. The following news item is descriptive of one aspect of this swamp. Corruption is a strange thing, enmiring as it does both the corrupt official and the bribe giver, for both of whom it is a convenience. For the bribe-giver it is also a burden, but by the nature of the transaction a lesser burden than the alternative. I don’t really see how it can be stopped except by radical surgery, like amputation to prevent the spread of gangrene.

Consider this story from Novaya Gazeta sourced from Ekho Moskvy radio:

Essel on Russia vs. Zimbabwe

Russia Still Second, Zimbabwe Still Leads…

by David Essel

Russia is still a runner-up to Zimbabwe in the economic mismanagement stakes but the two countries are competing in the same league of Commie Mentality States.

Another Original LR Translation: Latynina on Khodorkovsky

What a biography they invented for him!

On the fifth anniversary of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s arrest

by Yuliya Latynina

Novaya Gazeta 27.10.08

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Do you remember what you were doing on the day they arrested Khodorkovsky? I certainly do. I was sitting and writing a piece about the Tuzla Peninsula when I got a phone call and the poor peninsula immediately and irrevocably ceased to exist.

It’s not that often that we remember precisely what we were doing on some particular day five years ago. In my case I remember it because I went to sleep in one country and woke up in another.

This has happened to us several times since then. We woke up in a different country after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. After Litvinenko’s poisoning. After Beslan and the abolition of the election of governors. After the Russo-Georgian War. But the first time this happened to us was when Khodorkovsky was arrested.

Special Extra: Cash Clampdown in Moscow?

Is Putin’s Russia heading for its own Great Depression? Dave Essel translates the following item from the pages of Novaya Gazeta  about ATM cash withdrawal problems in Moscow that he first saw reported by Grigory Pasko a couple of days ago in a brief item on Robert Amsterdam’s blog (the Moscow Times also had a story on banks freezing deposits, perhaps illegally, and we report the latest jaw-dropping plunge in the Russian stock market below).

Banks Restricting Client Cash Withdrawals

A banking panic is now seriously in the cards – due, furthermore, to those very institutions. In Moscow, Globeks Bank is refusing to allow clients to close their deposits before term (in other words telling them that they can withdraw their money and interest only when their deposit has reached the end of its term). Outside Moscow, in the regions, major banks are limiting the maximum amount that may be withdrawn in any one week and are furthermore charging high commission fees of up to 20% on such withdrawals.

Another Original LR Translation: Sokolov is the New Sakharov

The following is a staff translation (not from our experts, corrections welcome!) of two items from the Russian press which detail the horrific neo-Soviet persecution that is now underway against those who dare to challenge the KGB regime of Vladimir Putin.

A Professor is Fired for Writing about Saakashvili

by Olga Gorelik

Moi Raion

September 26, 2008

Professor Boris Sokolov

Over the past month, the historian Boris Sokolov has lost his job not once but twice.

First, he was suspended from his position as an op-ed columnist for the Gazeta newspaper.  Then his resignation was demanded from his other employer, the Russian State Social University (”RSSU”).  Both incidents were the result of a column Sokolov wrote for Gazeta in August entitled “Did Saakashvili Win or Lose?” in which he questioned the Kremlin’s version of the events in South Ossetia. 

Soon after the column was published, Sokolov says, the newspaper’s editor in chief Pyotr Fadeyev was fired and the text was removed from its website.  The paper then informed Sokolov that it was no longer interested in carrying his work.  “My colleagues all said that this occurred after the paper received a telephone call from the offices of the presidential administration.”

When Sokolov did not tender his resignation, he says, on September 17th he was fired by RSSU, where he was a professor of social anthropology. “The Dean of my faculty made no attempt to hide the fact that the decision to terminate my employment was made by RSSU’s rector after several phone conversations with presidential administrative staff,” Solokov says.  RSSU denies there was any political motivation behind the termination; according to Dina Tanatova, Acting Dean of the Factulty of Sociology, Sokolov voluntarily resigned because he preferred to engage in professional rather than academic work.  “I very much regret his resignation,” said Tanatova.

Gazeta told a similar story.  “Solokov probably misunderstood me,” claimed Dmitry Balburov, a newspaper spokesman. He asserts that the Professor has simply not submitted any publication-worthy material since the piece about Georgia appeared, and that he never said the relationship had ended.  Further, he claimed that the disappearance of the Georgia text from the newspaper’s website was attributable to “technical reasons” and denied that the editor-in-chief had been terminated against his will.  Anonymous sources at Gazeta confirmed Solokov’s version, however.

LR:  The following is the text of Sokolov’s article (after that is the Russian original). It was obtained from a comment to an article on the same topic which appeared on the Grani.ru website, authored  by dissident Valeria Novodvorskaya – an article we published in English shortly after it appeared and which has now collected nearly 1,500 comments on the orginal Russian page):

Oborona on the Market Crash: Putin must Go!

An editorial (staff translation, corrections welcome) from Oleg Kozlovsky’s Oborona opposition group on the Russian stock market collapse:

A financial crisis has exploded upon Russia and the world, the Broke out in Russia and the world financial crisis, the predictable result efforts by governments to fund growth through the excessive use of credit.

However, it would be wrong to place all the blame for the collapse of the Russian stock markets on global trends. Vladimir Putin and his ministers for many years have tried to convince us that the Russian economy is reliably protected from such crises. They have bragged about their  budget surplus, near absence of public debit, their large stabilization fund and their secured ruble reserves. Even on October 6th, when the stock market shook the country at its foundations, state television continued to reassure citizens that our economy is significantly more robust than any other major nation.

Yet, it is our stock market that has fallen faster, and further, than any such country amidst this crisis.

Another Original LR Translation: An Inhabited Island

An Inhabited Island
by Boris Vishnevsky
Kasparov.ru
Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

“I say ‘Well done’ that they gave Saakashvili one in the kisser”, stated my uncle in a satisfied way as he sat opposite me at the dinner table loaded with party fare for his son’s birthday. “That’s propaganda speaking,” responded his wife with a note of scepticism. But it was a minority voice: most of those present held to the view that while Putin and Medvedev are, to put it mildly, not a bed of roses, at least they did right this time. Attempts to explain that the picture of the events in the Caucasus presented to Russia’s television viewers was radically out of line with reality met with little success. For the record, the members of the gathering (your traditional democratic voters), had never voted for the Communists, for United Russia, for the LDPR [Zhirinovsky’s party], or United Russia. But still they had this most peculiar way of looking at things…

Another Original LR Translation: Now, About those Ossetian Passports, via Dave Essel

Platinum Passports

Boris Suvarin, Ezhednevny Zhurnal, 8 September 2008

translated from the Russian by Dave Eseel

South Ossetia has a population of 60 thousand people. Almost all of them hold Russian passports. Strangely enough, who ordered that they should be given them and why is still a mystery. Some say it was A.S. Voloshin [former chief of Russian presidential administration] but he is not being asked to step forward. For his part, he is keeping his mouth tight shut.

Be that as it may, Ossetians, unlike, say, many of the people from the Caucasus living in Moscow, most certainly did not have to pay for their passports. On the contrary, it was Russia which paid for the pleasure.

Over the last 10 years, South Ossetia has received $100 million a year, paid out of the Russian budget. Of course, no accounts for these funds have ever been produced. No one is asking how precisely Mr. Kokoity spent the money – on the needs of his people, of course. That’s clear since no one is complaining, right?

By a rough calculation, that means every inhabitant of South Ossetia has been having fifteen hundred dollars of Russian budget spent on him every year. It’s worth bearing in mind that South Ossetia contributes no taxes to the Russian budget.

Then came the war.

Another Original LR Translation: Nemtsov on Georgia

A mistake we will all have to pay for

by Boris Nemtsov*

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Today’s recognition by Medvedev of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is a strategic and long-term mistake, the consequences of which will be felt by practically all of Russia’s citizens.

Another Original LR Translation: Milov on the Georgia Crisis

Cracks in the Tandem’s Frame

Gazeta.ru — 25 August 2008 

by Vladimir Milov*

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

The Russo-Georgian conflict has still further confused observers as to the state the Putin-Medvedev tandem is in. One should particularly note two main tendencies of the last fortnight. Premier Putin has, following his loud speeches about the politics of the conflict at its start in Vladikavkaz on 9 August, has completely ceased to appear in public or to comment on the situation. Instead, he recently chaired a meeting to discuss Russian development up to 2020 which looked at such matters as plans for education and science and the creation of competition. He has not become involved publicly in anything to do with the conflict. Putin’s only overt activity was to discuss the allocation of humanitarian aid and provision of funds for the restoration of South Ossetia’s war-damaged infrastructure.