Syria Begins to Break Apart Under Pressure From War

By BEN HUBBARD

Published: May 16, 2013 NYT

Instead, three Syrias are emerging: one loyal to the government, to Iran and to Hezbollah; one dominated by Kurds with links to Kurdish separatists in Turkey and Iraq; and one with a Sunni majority that is heavily influenced by Islamists and jihadis.

Fueling the country’s breakup are the growing brutality of fighters on all sides and the increasingly sectarian nature of the violence.

Russia Raises Stakes in Syria 

Russia has sent a dozen or more warships to patrol waters near its naval base in Syria, a buildup that U.S. and European officials see as a newly aggressive stance meant partly to warn the West and Israel not to intervene in Syria's bloody civil war.

Russia's expanded presence in the eastern Mediterranean, which began attracting U.S. officials' notice three months ago, represents one of its largest sustained naval deployments since the Cold War. While Western officials say they don't fear an impending conflict with Russia's aged fleet, the presence adds a new source of potential danger for miscalculation in an increasingly combustible region.
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Moscow's deployments appeared designed to show that Russia intends to keep Tartus, its only remaining military outpost outside the former Soviet Union, senior U.S. officials said. Though spare by Western military standards—it consists of a pair of piers staffed by about 50 people, according to Russian data—the base provides a toehold in the region that has grown in strategic and symbolic importance for Moscow.

"It's not really a base," said Andrei Frolov, an analyst at CAST, a Moscow military think tank. "It's more like a service station" that can do limited resupply and very modest repairs.
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In January, the Russian navy used these and other ships to conduct what it billed as some of the largest exercises in recent years in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea for a force that has had relatively low international presence since the Cold War. State media reported that as many as 21 ships and three submarines were involved, as well as planes and other forces.

Before the start of the Syrian civil war, Russian ships stopped at the port only irregularly. But in the last three months, 10 to 15 Russian ships have been near the Syrian port at any one time, U.S. and European officials say. They say Russia currently has 11 ships in the eastern Mediterranean, organized into three task forces, that include destroyers, frigates, support vessels and intelligence-collecting ships. Another three-ship group of amphibious vessels is headed to the region. But U.S. officials said they expect that group to replace one of the groups currently in the region.

Russia Detains US Diplomat Accused of Undercover CIA Work

MOSCOW, May 14 (RIA Novosti) – Russian counterintelligence officials briefly detained a US diplomat suspected of being an undercover CIA officer and trying to recruit a Russian agent, the Federal Security Service (FSB) said Tuesday.

A US Embassy press officer in Moscow said by telephone that she could not comment on the report.

According to an FSB statement, the diplomat, identified as Ryan Christopher Fogle, a third secretary in the political department, was detained the night of May 13 as he attempted to recruit an officer from one of Russia's special services.

The diplomat was found to be in possession of “special technical devices, written instructions for the Russian citizen being recruited, a large sum of cash and means of changing his appearance,” the statement said.

Melting Ice Opens Fight Over Sea Routes as Arctic Club Convenes

May 13 (Bloomberg) -- When 16th and 17th century European explorers sailed west in pursuit of a trade route to Asia, their search for a Northwest Passage was foiled by Arctic ice.

Five hundred years later, melting icecaps have set off a global race to control new shipping lanes over the North Pole. Just as the discoveries of Ferdinand Magellan and Vasco de Gama gave seafaring Portugal routes around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, the opening of the Arctic, with its shortcut from the Atlantic to northeast Asia and its untapped oil reserves, can redraw the geopolitical map and create new power brokers.

When the U.S., Russia and six other major stakeholders of the Arctic Council meet May 15 in the northernmost Swedish city of Kiruna, they’ll be joined by nations with observer status, including China and the European Union, that are angling for an elevated status in the diplomatic club and a greater say in the region’s future.

New passages linking Asia to America and Europe will be as revolutionary as was the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal, which boosted European trade with Asia by connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and shortening the journey for cargo vessels, according to President Olafur R. Grimsson of Iceland, home to the world’s biggest glaciers and a member of the council.

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The countries that make up the Arctic Council -- Russia, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, the U.S. and Canada - - will sign a treaty on oil-spill preparedness and response, discuss their agenda for the next two years and possibly vote on adding to the roster of permanent observers, which includes Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the U.K. and Poland.

With Many Despairing, Bulgaria Heads to Polls

By MATTHEW BRUNWASSER

Published: May 10, 2013  New York Times

VARNA, Bulgaria — Early one morning this past winter, Plamen Goranov, a 36-year-old photographer, stood on the steps of City Hall in this once grand and now crumbling port city on the Black Sea and held up a sign demanding that the mayor and City Council resign. He then took a bottle of gasoline from his backpack, poured it over himself and set himself on fire. He died 11 days later in a hospital.

U.S. and Russia Plan Conference Aimed at Ending Syrian War

MOSCOW — Russia and the United States announced on Tuesday that they would seek to convene an international conference aimed at ending the civil war in Syria, jointly intensifying their diplomatic pressure on the combatants to peacefully settle a conflict that has taken more than 70,000 lives and left millions displaced and desperate. 

Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, announced their agreement to arrange the conference, possibly within the next few weeks. Mr. Kerry, who was visiting Russia seeking to find common ground on the Syria conflict, told reporters at a joint appearance with Mr. Lavrov in Moscow that the aim would be to push the government of President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian opposition to attend. 

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“I would like to emphasize we do not, we are not interested in the fate of certain persons,” Mr. Lavrov told reporters on Tuesday. “We are interested in the fate of the total Syrian people.” 

It was unclear how Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov would persuade the antagonists in the two-year-old Syrian conflict to put aside their hostilities for talks. But word of the Russian-American diplomatic effort was nonetheless an optimistic spot on what was otherwise a bleak day in the conflict. 

“The alternative is that there is even more violence,” Mr. Kerry told reporters. “The alternative is that Syria heads closer to the abyss, if not over the abyss and into chaos.”

Russia suspects international PR to justify use of force in Syria intervention

There are signs that the international public opinion is being prepared for the possibility of intervention with force in the Syrian crisis, the Russian Foreign Ministry holds.

“Moscow is concerned by the signs of preparing the public opinion in the world to the possibility of intervention using force into the lingering internal conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic,” reads Monday statement by the ministry’s spokesman Aleksandr Lukashevich.

He also noted that the situation in Syria and around aggravated sharply in past few days.

“A lot of reasoning appeared in a number of Arab and other international mass media regarding the use of chemical weapons in the standoff between the government forces and the opposition guerillas,” Lukashevich warned.

The Russian side again drew the attention of the international community to the statement made by Carla Del Ponte, a member of the independent commission for investigation of human rights abuse in the republic. Del Ponte claimed that the UN expert possessed some data that could testify for the possible use of chemical weapons by anti-Assad rebels and not the government troops.
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The Russian representative also expressed particular concern over the Israeli airstrikes on targets near Damascus on May 3 and May 5. The Russian side is verifying and analyzing all circumstances connected with this dangerous development, he said.

Why NATO remembers the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan 

While NATO is preparing to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in 2014, Russian pundits and international observers try to account for the Organization’s recent attempts to take a closer look at the Soviet experience. Some experts believe that it may prevent NATO from making fatal diplomatic and military mistakes, yet others argue that it will be very challenging to establish fruitful collaboration between Russia and NATO.

In mid-April, NATO officials sent an unofficial request to Russia’s Defense Ministry, asking to share documents and analysis on the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to reports from the respected Russian media outlet Kommersant. 

 This NATO stance may indicate that misgivings about the tensions in Central Asia have been increasing in the West and have led it to seek Russia’s involvement.
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The Soviet Union’s “Afghan syndrome” and the post-Soviet Russian experience in the North Caucasus fuel Russia’s fears. Moscow keeps in mind the worst Afghan scenario, which may bring more instability if the Karzai government falls and NATO troops withdraw precipitously.

“The scenario carries a sense of déjà vu: The Taliban had come to power in Afghanistan, which encouraged Central Asian Islamists and offered training camps to Chechen rebels,” the Carnegie bulletin reads. “Russia fears a rise in Islamist radicalism across the region.  … Some Russians espouse a kind of domino theory and expect the ‘disaster area’ to spread all the way to Russia’s own borders.”

According to Malashenko, Afghans perceive the U.S. withdrawal in same manner as they did the Soviet one – as “defeat” of the enemy.

Soviet Veterans Return to Afghanistan for Rematch

MAZAR-I-SHARIF/KABUL, Afghanistan, April 26 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti)

A team of 22 retired servicemen who were part of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979-1989 toured their former battleground earlier this month, playing football with the locals, including their erstwhile enemies.

Russia has largely cut ties to Afghanistan after the troops’ pullout, which began 25 years ago next month, and the Central Asian country is mostly seen in Russia as a perpetual war zone whose inhabitants still loathe “the Shuravi,” or Soviets, and their successors.

But the messengers of “football diplomacy” – fully a delegation of 44, which included 11 non-playing vets and as many journalists – saw a surprisingly cordial reception in Afghanistan, where the Shuravi are now mostly remembered for the schools and factories they built, not the villages they bombed.

But the mini-football game ended with a 5-5 draw. Both sides got ovations, and there was no storm.

China Is Seen Nearing U.S.’s Military Power in Region

TOKYO — China’s growing industrial might is likely to allow it to mount an increasingly formidable challenge to the military supremacy of the United States in the waters around China that include Japan and Taiwan, though it will probably seek to avoid an outright armed conflict, according to a detailed new report by a group of American researchers.  

The report by the nine researchers, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the most likely outcome for the next two decades showed China narrowing the gap with the United States in military abilities, in areas including building aircraft carriers and stealth fighter jets. At the same time, the report, to be released Friday, said China’s economic interdependence with the United States and the rest of Asia would probably prevent it from becoming a full-blown, cold-war-style foe, or from using military force to try to drive the United States from the region. 

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For the whole region, the report found the most likely outcome to be what it called an “eroding balance” — essentially, a continuation of the current situation, in which American hegemony is slowly undermined by China’s increasing military abilities and growing willingness to assert its interests. The report said the biggest risk in this environment would be an accidental escalation of a limited dispute, like the current clash with Japan over the disputed islands. 

At the same time, the report said that for the foreseeable future, China would not follow the former Soviet Union in becoming a global rival to the United States. Rather, it said, China would remain a regional power with a narrow strategic focus on territorial disputes with its immediate neighbors. Even so, the report warned, that would still make it a serious challenge to the United States, which has vowed to increase its military presence in Asia despite budget cuts. 

“Can the United States maintain its primacy of the past 60 years?” asked Mr. Swaine. “The United States says so, but whether it actually can is not entirely clear.”