Zero Hedge — Russian PM: "The U.S. Just Declared Full-Scale Trade War On Russia"

Smackdown.

Zero Hedge
Russian PM: "The U.S. Just Declared Full-Scale Trade War On Russia"

Tyler Durden

Alexander Mercouris — Protests in Russia fizzle as Medvedev corruption case unravels

The allegations of corruption made against Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev by the opposition activist and blogger Alexey Navalny have been given short shrift in – of all places – an article in the Washington Post.

In an unusual flurry of objective reporting, the Washington Post also admits that the turnout at follow on opposition rallies in Moscow on 2nd April 2017 was derisory and that Navalny – the individual the Western media regularly touts as the leader of Russia’s opposition – is widely disliked and has little support.…

Unusually the Washington Post not only admits the incontrovertible fact that the turnout at the protests on Sunday 2nd April 2017 was derisory, but has now also admitted in a separate article that Navalny’s case that Medvedev is corrupt is based less on fact than on innuendo.…

Elsewhere, in its article about the protests on 2nd April 2017, the Washington Post article actually admits that Navalny is extremely unpopular….

The was already widely known to anyone that cared to examine the reporting, but the wishful thinking Western media ran away with the idea that the Russian government was on the verge of toppling. Completely ridiculous.

The Duran
Protests in Russia fizzle as Medvedev corruption case unravels

Alexander Mercouris

Alexander Mercouris — Protests in Moscow and across Russia fail to shake the Kremlin

The protests were called by the Russian neoliberal ‘non-system’ activist and ‘anti-corruption’ campaigner Alexey Navalny, purportedly in order to protest against the alleged corruption of Russia’s Prime Minister and former President Dmitry Medvedev.

Medvedev seems an unlikely target for these protests. His time as President from 2008 to 2012 is sometimes seen as a sort of liberal heyday, and it is indeed a fact that in the last weeks of his Presidency he rushed through a series of liberalisation measures in response to the protests which took place in Moscow and elsewhere following the 2011 Duma elections. The fact that the very same liberals who whilst he was President hailed Medvedev as their hero and who are the main beneficiaries of his liberalisation of the political system should now turn on him does rather seem like a case of of them biting the hand that fed them.….

As I discussed recently in an article written immediately after last autumn’s parliamentary elections in Russia, Parnas – the party with which Navalny is most closely associated – only won 0.70% of the vote in that election, whilst the combined vote of all the anti-government liberal parties in that election came to no more than 2.56%. That this is a totally insufficient electoral base from which to launch a serious bid for the Presidency should not need explaining.

It is in fact highly doubtful that Navalny genuinely believes that he can win the Presidential election next year, or that he seriously aims to. However he has to show to his supporters and funders – both those in Russia, and more importantly, those in the West – that he is an active force in Russian politics and that he is providing some value for all the backing they are giving him. That leads him to make wild allegations against people like Medvedev, to announce a bid to stand in an election he cannot win, and to call a protest in Moscow and across Russia which on any objection assessment simply highlights the absence of widespread support for him.

It is this need to retain attention which explains why Navalny not only called the protest today but insisted on holding it in the form of an unsanctioned march along Tverskaya in central Moscow rather than in the various locations offered him. Through this act of seeming ‘defiance’ Navalny is able to strike a heroic (though fake) pose (since he knows nothing will actually be done to him), provoke conflict – including his own arrest – and disguise the fact that only a few thousand people turned up to support him (the police in Moscow put the number between 7,000 to 8,000) by mixing his supporters up with ordinary pedestrian traffic and the large number of onlookers who might normally be expected on a Sunday in what is Moscow’s main and busiest thoroughfare....

The Duran
Protests in Moscow and across Russia fail to shake the Kremlin
Alexander Mercouris

Interfax — Russia’s Medvedev agrees with ex-minister on need for reform

Medvedev backs neoliberal former finance minister Alexei Kudrin. Kudrin is a walking disaster. See Business Insider, Putin's former finance minister says the Russian government is running out of money, by Ben Moshinsky, Dec. 8, 2015, whereas his rival Sergei Glaziev understand the fiscal space available to a sovereign currency issuer.

Kudrin also wants closer ties with the West on Western terms. Putin rebuked him saying that Russia's national sovereignty is not a bargaining chip.

Johnson's List
Russia’s Medvedev agrees with ex-minister on need for reform

Interfax

F. William Engdahl — Russia’s Achilles Heel – Reflections from St. Petersburg

The first thing that is important to understand is that in Russia's governmental structure there are essentially two governments. The prime minister, currency Dimitry Medvedev, is responsible for domestic policy including economic policy, and the president, now Vladimir Putin, is responsible for foreign and military policy. The Central Bank of Russia is politically independent and responsible for monetary policy.

Secondly, it is important to grab that domestic affairs under Prime Minister Medvedev is deeply beholden to the ideology and economics of Western economic liberalism, introduced at the time the USSR collapsed. This cohort adheres to the the Western paradigm.

 Russia's Achilles heel is the economic liberalism inherited from the Yeltsin years and Harvard boyz by the proteges of Yegor Gaidar, the former Acting Prime Minister that introduced shock therapy. Current prime minister Dimitry Medvedev and central bank chief Elvira Nabiullina are economic liberals who follow the Washington Consensus that is based on neoliberalism as economic liberalization, deregulation, and privatization, along with low taxes and perks for "job creators." The prescription for economic policy is "expansionary fiscal austerity" in order to increase business confidence. The business of the central bank is solely to keep inflation low and the exchange rate stable.

What I experienced in my discussions at the conference–this year with record attendance of more than 12,000 business people and others from around the world–was a sense that there coexist two Russian governments, each the polar opposite of the other. Every key economic and finance post is firmly occupied at present by monetarist free-market liberal economists who might be called “Gaidar’s Kindergarten.” Yegor Gaidar was the architect, along with Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, a Soros-backed economist, of the radical “shock therapy” that was responsible for the economic hardships that plagued the country in the 1990s resulting in mass poverty and hyperinflation.
Today’s Gaidar Kindergarten includes former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, another Euromoney favorite in 2010 as international Finance Minister of the Year. It includes Economics Minister, Alexey Ulyukaev. It also includes Medvedev’s Deputy Prime Minister, Arkady Dvorkovic.

Dvorkovic, a graduate of Duke University in North Carolina, is a protégé, directly serving during his earlier years under Yegor Gaidar. In 2010 under then Russian President Medvedev, Dvorkovic proposed a lunatic scheme to make Moscow into a world financial center by bringing in Goldman Sachs and the major Wall Street banks to set it all up. We might call it inviting the fox into the hen house. Dvorkovic’s economic credo is “Less state!” He was the chief lobbyist in Russia’s WTO accession campaign, and tried to ram through rapid privatization of the assets that remain state-owned.

This is the core group around Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev today who are strangling any genuine Russian economic recovery. They follow the western playbook written in Washington by the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury. Whether they do this at this stage out of honest conviction that that is best for their nation or out of a deep psychological hatred for their country, I’m not in a position to say. The effects of their policies, as I learned in my many discussions this month in St Petersburg are devastating. In effect, they are self-imposing economic sanctions on Russia far worse than any from the USA or EU. If Putin’s United Russia party loses the elections on 18 September, it will be due not to his foreign policy initiatives for which he still enjoys 80+% popularity polls. It will be because Russia has not cleaned the Augean Stables of the Gaidar Kindergarten.

From various discussions I learned to my shock that the official policy of Medvedev’s economic team and of the Central Bank today is to follow the standard IMF “Washington Consensus” budget austerity policies.…

I had the honor of appearing on a major panel together with several members and founders of this group. It included a co-founder of the Stolypin Club, Boris Titov, a Russian businessman and open ideological foe of Kudrin, who is chairman of the All-Russian “Business Russia” organization. He insists on the need to increase domestic production of goods, stimulate demand, attracting investment, tax cuts and the cuts to the refinancing rate of the Central Bank. Titov is a central figure today in Russia’s recent China initiatives. He served as chairman of the Russian part of the Russian-Chinese Business Council, and member of the Presidium of the National Council on Corporate Governance.

My panel also included Stolypin Club leading members Sergei Glazyev, Adviser to the President of the Russian Federation, and Andrey Klepach, Deputy Chairman of the VEB Bank for Development. Klepach, a co-founder of the Stolypin Club, was formerly Deputy Economics Minister of Russia, and director of the macroeconomic forecasting department of the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade. My impression was that these are serious, dedicated people who understand that the heart of true national economic policy is human capital and human well-being not inflation or other econometric data.…

What was clear from my St Petersburg talks this time is that events are approaching a decisive “do or die” turn in which either economic policy is formally put into the hands of competent national economy circles such as those of Boris Titov, Andrey Klepach and Sergey Glazyev, or she will succumb to the insidious poison of Washington Consensus and liberal free market nonsense. After my recent private talks I am optimistic regarding prospects for a positive change.

NEO

Russia’s Achilles Heel – Reflections from St. Petersburg

F. William Engdahl

Alexander Mercouris — Kudrin Returns?

If you are following developments in Russia and the Russian economy, you probably want to read this. It is the most detailed and objective analysis I have seen in English.

The Duran
Kudrin Returns?

Alexander Mercouris

Slon — Medvedev Announces Start of New Cold War

Prime Minister of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, stated the beginning of a new cold war between NATO and Russia. He made this statement at the Munich security conference, reports "Interfax".

"In our assessment, the political line of NATO against Russia remains unfriendly and closed. It can be said frankly: we have fallen into a time of a new cold war," Medvedev said.

The Prime Minister complained that "every day we (Russia) are declared the most terrible threat for NATO as a whole, separately for Europe, for America and other countries." In this case, Medvedev noted that Russia and the West have a chance to unite in order to withstand external threats such as international terrorism.…

This is implies a renewed arms race and nuclear ramp-up.

Fort Russ
Medvedev Announces Start of New Cold War
Translated by Ollie Richardson for Fort Russ
Slon

Xinhua — Russian Prime Minister suggests federal budget cut amid economic downturn

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Friday suggested that the country's 2016 budget be slashed and a host of projects be scrapped amid economic downturn.

China — Europe
Russian Prime Minister suggests federal budget cut amid economic downturn
Xinhua

Dmitry Medvedev — Ankara defends ISIS, Turkish officials have financial interest in oil trade with group

Some Turkish officials have ‘direct financial interest’ in the oil trade with the terrorist group Islamic State, Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev said as he detailed possible Russian retaliation to Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane in Syria on Tuesday.

“Turkey’s actions are de facto protection of Islamic State,” Medvedev said, calling the group formerly known as ISIS by its new name. “This is no surprise, considering the information we have about direct financial interest of some Turkish officials relating to the supply of oil products refined by plants controlled by ISIS.”

State sponsored terrorism is a serious charge. Go directly to the Hague material.

RT
Ankara defends ISIS, Turkish officials have financial interest in oil trade with group - PM Medvedev

RT — Russia faces toughest economic challenges in modern history – Medvedev

This is completely wrong. 

First, Russia was in much worse shape economically after the October Revolution and as a result of WWII and the Nazi invasion. The current crisis can't compare with those events. In addition, the condition of the country after liberalization (privatization) was worse, too.

Secondly, Medvedev doesn't realize the implications of currency issuance.

"We still maintain a relatively low level of public debt. The federal budget deficit, although slightly increased, according to the results of this year will remain at an economically safe level. Unemployment remains within reasonable parameters, it is low against corresponding conditions in other countries," Medvedev said.

RT
Russia faces toughest economic challenges in modern history – Medvedev