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"ACTION UKRAINE REPORT"
In-Depth Ukrainian News and Analysis
"The Art of Ukrainian History, Culture, Arts, Business, Religion,
Sports, Government, and Politics, in Ukraine and Around the World"

WEST WATCHES NERVOUSLY AS RUSSIA FLEXES ITS MUSCLES
Moscow is playing tough in relations with neighbours

"New disputes could also emerge, for example, over Ukraine, where Viktor
Yushchenko, a leading candidate to succeed President Leonid Kuchma in
elections this autumn is seen as a threat because he has strong US backing."

Report by Andrew Jack and Stefan Wagstyl
Financial Times, London, UK, Wednesday, March 3, 2004

The nomination of Mikhail Fradkov as Russia's next prime minister will do
little to soften the Kremlin's increasingly assertive foreign policy,
especially in the countries of the former Soviet Union.

Mr Fradkov, a long-serving diplomat whose name was put forward on Monday
by President Vladimir Putin, will bring to the post considerable experience
of international relations. But he will also arrive with a history of close
ties with the security services. While his personal views are not known, he
is a member of the siloviki, the current and former members of the security
services, headed by Mr Putin, who now dominate the Kremlin.

This group has presided over increasing state control in political and
economic affairs. In foreign policy, its members have taken a tougher
approach to Russia's neighbours.

Igor Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, insists the country has
legitimate interests to protect and is right to challenge US attempts to
increase its influence, for example in Georgia.

In a recent meeting with foreign journalists, Mr Ivanov said: "Our political
scientists are very concerned at how the US has created a circle around
Russia. We have a national strategy and interests in the former Soviet
Union. They reflect historical links that we are developing. They should not
be seen as a re-establishment of Soviet relations . . . The main interest of
Russia is to create around [the country] a security zone."

The country is also concerned about the 20m ethnic Russians living in
surrounding states and about its expanding economic interests, notably
investments by energy companies such as Gazprom, the gas monopoly, and
UES, the electricity giant.

However, the US and the EU are worried about Russia's motives. The European
Commission last month accused Russia of "assertive" behaviour towards
neighbours. A senior American official told the FT there were parallels
between developments in domestic policy and increasing assertiveness towards
former Soviet neighbours.

The arguments date back to the 1990s, when a crisis-torn Russia was forced
to accept the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eastward expansion of
Nato and the European Union. In the past year, led by an effective president
and fuelled by economic recovery, the Kremlin has raised flags on several
fronts.

It began with a dispute last year with Brussels over access to the
Kaliningrad exclave, which will be surrounded by EU territory when Poland
and Lithuania join the union in May. This was followed by a border row with
Ukraine in the Sea of Azov; arguments with Washington over the triumph in
Georgia of Mikheil Saakashvili, the new US-oriented president; and a clumsy
one-sided Russian effort to end the long-standing division of the troubled
state of Moldova.

These disputes have been compounded by Russian attempts to influence the
deployment of Nato forces in the Baltic states, all ex-Soviet republics.
Russia last month threatened to pull out of the Conventional Forces in
Europe treaty, a key east-west accord.

The Kremlin has also raised last-minute objections to the EU's eastward
expansion, complaining of threats to Russia's economic interests. Brussels
wants to extend to its 10 new members the existing partnership and
co-operation agreement (PCA) covering EU-Russia relations. Moscow has
demanded the accord be renegotiated.

Finally, Moscow has demonstrated the political value of its domination of
regional energy supplies by briefly cutting off the main gas pipe to the
west which crosses Belarus. The move was aimed at putting pressure on Minsk
in a payment dispute, but it caused a political storm in Poland.

Some of these rows will settled but others will rumble on. New disputes
could also emerge, for example, over Ukraine, where Viktor Yushchenko, a
leading candidate to succeed President Leonid Kuchma in elections this
autumn is seen as a threat because he has strong US backing.

Mr Putin will almost certainly try to prevent these rows affecting global
relations with the US and leading European states, including France, Germany
and the UK. He knows the west dominates the international community to which
he wants to belong. He also appreciates the US-led anti-terrorism war which
serves Moscow's interests by targetting terrorist threats on Russia's
southern borders.

However, the siloviki and others who want to play tough have plenty of
scope. Mr Fradkov's appointment, which is due to be confirmed later this
week by the Duma, is unlikely to stop them. (END) (ARTUIS)

"ACTION UKRAINE REPORT"
In-Depth Ukrainian News and Analysis
"The Art of Ukrainian History, Culture, Arts, Business, Religion,
Sports, Government, and Politics, in Ukraine and Around the World"

"VAST LAND BOUND BY TRAGEDY"
Arkady Ostrovsky reads of dark acts in post-Stalinist Russia, pieced
together with forensic precision...they are part of a vicious circle of
wretchedness, fear, denial and self-destruction which the book describes.

Book Review by Arkady Ostrovsky, FT's Moscow
Financial Times, FT.com site; London, UK, Feb 27, 2004

"Black Earth: Russia After the Fall"
by Andrew Meier, HarperCollins, Euro 25, 511 pages

Three weeks ago, on February 6 2004, a bomb ripped through a Moscow
underground station killing 40 people. Vladimir Putin, the Russian
president, blamed Chechen terrorists for the attack, and hours later a
nationalist Russian politician and Putin supporter called it an "ethnic"
crime. A few days later, a gang of skinheads in St Petersburg, Russia's most
westernised city, killed a nine-year-old Tajik girl in an apparent racist
attack. Her body had 11 knife wounds and bruises from being beaten with a
chain.

These events are not described in "Black Earth," a book by Andrew Meier who
worked as a Time Magazine correspondent in Moscow between 1996 and
2001 - but they are part of a vicious circle of wretchedness, fear, denial
and self-destruction which the book describes.

Meier's book is not strictly a history or political analysis - although it
does provide both. He is first and foremost a reporter who travels across
Russia, recording its striking features, collecting details and personal
testimonies and trying to piece together a portrait of the country 13 years
after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is not a flattering portrait. Composed from a hundred small details, it
reveals a nation in limbo, demoralised and haunted by its past, drenched by
a bloody war in Chechnya, faced with alcoholism, Aids and TB - and
uncertain about its future.

It is a thorough journalistic investigation into the state Russia is in
today and it raises core questions which stretch outside the time and
geographic scope of the book. The most burning question of all is posed by
the father of a 20-year-old conscript killed by the Chechens who, in "a
deal" with Russian officers, paid their way through checkpoints: "Can a
country live without a conscience?"

To find out, Meier travels to the four extreme corners of Russia to compose
his portrait: south to Chechnya, north to Norilsk - the site of Stalin's
largest Gulag camps - east to Sakhalin and west to St Petersburg. Divided by
thousands of miles and several time zones, each of these corners of Russia
reveal human tragedies and chilling tales of self-destruction.

His survey of post-Soviet Russia begins in the war-torn republic of
Chechnya. On February 5 2000, two months before Vladimir Putin became
the president of Russia, contract soldiers - "easy to spot because they look
like criminals" - marched into the Chechen village of Aldy. They killed 52
men and eight women, and looted and burned their houses.

In Russian this was called a "zachistka" - a clean-up operation. "To
Chechens 'zachistki' meant state-sponsored terror, pillage, rape and
murder."

Meier collected testimonies from survivors in order to reconstruct minute by
minute, yard by yard, house by house what happened when Russian soldiers
marched into the village. With forensic precision, he separates eye-witness
accounts from hearsay and arrives at a chilling conclusion: what happened in
Aldy was not a zachistka but a massacre, ignored by the world and hushed up
by Russian authorities.

Meier's reporting answers the key questions, when, where, who and how. The
one question he struggles with is why. Why did these soldiers beat and kill
innocent men and women? Why, on the day Putin became president, did a
Russian colonel in another Chechen village hit, rape and kill an 18-year-old
Chechen girl? And what was going on in the head of this colonel when that
very night he celebrated the birth of his own daughter? And, even more
disturbingly, why did people applaud Putin's brutal policy in Chechnya,
which propelled him to the Kremlin and then refuse to hear about its
victims? What kind of country is it?

The subsequent chapters may not provide a full answer, but they give some
idea of what has happened to Russia and its people over the years.

Meier moves north to Norilsk, above the Arctic Circle. But he is also
travelling back in time, winding back the story of Russian suffering.
Norilsk is home to Norilsk Nickel, the word's largest nickel producer, built
on the bones of prisoners from Stalin's Gulag. Today it is controlled by a
Moscow business tycoon.

Meier meets some of the survivors of the Gulag and their children who grew
up playing among the graves of those who perished in the permafrost land -
their bones and skulls still protrude through Norilsk's thin layer of earth.

He is told that in 1953 Soviet troops quelled a revolt in Norilsk by simply
opening fire on the camp and killing at least 100 people. Yet despite all
these atrocities, Stalin's victims continued to believe in the communist
system and in Stalin.

Meier does not link the killings in Norilsk to the atrocities in Chechnya
but they are part of the same tragic chain that binds Russian history.

Stalin was not the first to use forced labour. In 1890 Chekhov travelled to
the island of Sakhalin, infamous for its "katorga" - a system of forced
labour and servitude instituted by Peter the Great. Meier retraces Chekhov's
steps, and finds a place which is rich in oil and gas and poor in every
other aspect of human life, a place where vodka is the only consolation.

Meier ends his journey in St Petersburg, Russia's most beautiful city, yet
the one that has suffered most. The "fairytale", as St Petersburg is
sometimes called, consumed the lives of thousands of those who built it on
the marshes of the Neva river. Its streets still bear the signs of the siege
of Leningrad that lasted 900 days and claimed a million lives.

Back in Moscow, Meier asks an old Jewish woman, who survived both the
ravages of the war and of Stalinism, the difference between Hitler and
Stalin. She answers without a pause: "Hitler killed only his enemies."

Yet despite all the soul-draining descriptions of suffering, Meier's is not
a dark book. It is lightened by his passion for the country and the people
he meets: a doctor who helps the parents of soldiers killed in Chechnya to
identify and bury their children, a woman who entertained the wounded during
the siege of Leningrad, or a historian who dedicated his life to the memoirs
of Stalin's victims.

These are the people who try to break through a vicious circle of
wretchedness. But they face an inhuman task. (END) (ARTUIS)