BREAKING: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says the Ukraine crisis is the result of what he calls 25 years of efforts by Western countries to strengthen their own security at the expense of others.
From Bloomberg's "Putin Said to Back Crackdown on Corruption as Sanctions Bite," by Evgenia Pismennaya and Irina Reznik:
Vladimir Putin sat motionless as the minister, seizing on the Russian leader’s first major meeting with his economic team in months, itemized the challenges.
Recession is imminent, inflation is getting out of hand and the ruble and oil are in free fall, Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev told Putin, according to people who attended the meeting at the presidential mansion near Moscow in mid-October. Clearly, Ulyukayev concluded, sanctions need to be lifted.
At that, Putin recoiled. Do you, Alexei Valentinovich, he asked, using a patronymic, know how to do that? No, Vladimir Vladimirovich, Ulyukayev was said to reply, we were hoping you did. Putin said he didn’t know either and demanded options for surviving a decade of even more onerous sanctions, leaving the group deflated, the people said.
Days later, they presented Putin with two variants. To their surprise, he chose an initiative dubbed “economic liberalization,” aimed at easing the financial burden of corruption on all enterprises in the country, the people said. It was something they had championed for several years without gaining traction.
The policy, which Putin plans to announce during his annual address to parliament next month, calls for a crackdown on inspections and other forms of bureaucratic bullying that cost businesses tens of billions of dollars a year in bribes and kickbacks, the people said. It entails an order from the president to end predatory behavior, with prosecution being the incentive for compliance, they said.
“Wastefulness, an inability to manage state funds and even outright bribery, theft, won’t go unnoticed,” Putin said at a meeting with supporters in Moscow yesterday.
Read the full story here.
More from RFE/RL's News Desk on Lavrov's address to the State Duma today:
Russia has lashed out at the West over Ukraine, saying the political turmoil and armed conflict there is the result of what Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called 25 years of efforts by Western countries to strengthen their own security at the expense of others.
Addressing Russia's lower parliament house on November 19, Lavrov said the West "must support the process of mutually acceptable agreements instead of supporting the party of war in Kyiv, closing its eyes on outrageous human rights violations, lawlessness, and war crimes."
Lavrov tempered the message by saying that there is no alternative to cooperation between Russia and the European Union.
But he blamed the EU for the strains and said Russia's relations with the West must be based on the assumption of equality, echoing a demand President Vladimir Putin set out on the first day of his third term in 2012.
BREAKING: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says that the conflict in eastern Ukraine is an internal issue and "all attempts to turn Russia into a party to the conflict are counterproductive and have no chance of success."
From RFE/RL's News Desk:
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Moscow will not pressure its "allies" to recognize Crimea as a part of Russia or to join it in recognizing Georgia's breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions as independent states.
In a question-and-answer session following an address to Russia's lower parliament house on November 19, Lavrov said the security and economic groupings that Russia is currently building with other former Soviet republics are aimed to "protect the legitimate interests of our countries' security."
He said that "on some issues, including the status of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, or Crimean history, we are not making our partners share our assessments 100 percent, as we do not want to put them into an awkward position if for some reason it is uncomfortable for them."
The remarks appeared aimed to assuage concerns among ex-Soviet republics that Russia, which annexed Crimea in March in a move that Kyiv and the West say was illegal, wants to diminish their sovereignty or control their foreign policy.
A wonderful video from RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service:
It’s been a tumultuous year for Halyna Trofanyuk. At the beginning of the year she traveled from her small village in western Ukraine to brave freezing conditions and brutal security forces at the protests in Kyiv. It was a decision that brought her to the very center of Ukraine’s political drama, but which also had far-reaching consequences for her personal life: a relationship won and lost, a grandson conceived on the Maidan. But what future will the baby have? Halyna is not optimistic -- and now says she’s sometimes ashamed to have joined the protests.
Here is today's situation map of eastern Ukraine by the National Security and Defense Council:
