Thread: Asian leaders watching Obama's 'capitulation'

WND EXCLUSIVE

Asian leaders watching Obama's 'capitulation'

U.S. response to Crimean takeover gets attention of Chinese, North Korean leaders

Published: 16 hours ago

WASHINGTON – As the United States looks to “pivot” its strategic policy to Asia, the Obama administration’s response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea has sent reverberations into East Asia, casting doubt on its commitment to prevent aggression from China or North Korea.
Victor Cha, professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Beijing and Pyongyang haven’t missed the U.S. “capitulation” by President Barack Obama to Putin’s assertiveness in Crimea.
And there have been signs Putin may not stop there.
Cha told Asia Times that Putin is a “threat to Asia,” even though, like the U.S., the Russian leader is showing his assertiveness in East Asia through developing increased trade and military ties.
Last June, Putin, in a speech at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, announced a plan to boost Russia’s economic growth in the Asia-Pacific region rather than in Russia’s traditional markets in Europe.
His speech at the time represented a new direction for Russia, which for decades had played down strategic and economic interests in the Asia-Pacific region.
Putin envisions massive investments in infrastructure and upgrading the Trans-Siberian Railway that links his country to the Pacific.
Putin also is looking to increase investments in energy.
Russia’s new assertiveness in the Far East poses potential conflicts as China views the East and South China Seas as its domain, coupled with increased U.S. economic and military interests in the region.
Nevertheless, Moscow has emphasized it wants cooperation with China.
“China does not worry us,” Putin said. “China and Russia will cooperate on many questions.”
“Russia shares the current understanding that the rise of China comes at the expense of the United States and the West,” according to Fiona Hill of the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
The reality, she said, is that Asia, for Russia, will remain a sideshow in its foreign and security policy.
“For all its posturing about turning Russia into a hub of intra-Asian trade and cooperation, Moscow’s strategic focus is still stuck on the West – its population is mostly in the West, its economic ties are mostly to the West, and its official military doctrine remains fixated on the United States and NATO,” she said.
She added that the focus on the West will remain for the foreseeable future, since old patterns will be hard to break.
Georgetown University’s Cha, however, said leaders in China and North Korea have seen that Moscow clearly has a greater commitment to Ukraine than the U.S. They may reason that if they act like Putin, U.S. reaction will be the same as it was toward Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
“Crimea shows that power matters less than commitment,” Cha said. “And as powerful as the United States is, it is not as committed to Crimea as Russia. The danger of Putin’s action is the ‘demonstration effect’ – it sets a bad precedent for others to follow.”
Cha said the bottom line is that Putin got what he wanted and was able to “pull off a fait accompli against Crimea based on the perception of a lack of U.S. resolve or commitment.”
“What is to stop others from thinking the same way?” Cha asked. “Why shouldn’t (Chinese President) Xi Jinping think the same way regarding the claim of another air defense identification zone (ADIZ)? Or why shouldn’t (North Korean leader) Kim Jong-un feel that a fait accompli action in the West Sea would work to his advantage?”
Obama recently had B-52s flown in what China regards as its ADIZ over the South China Sea, but civilian airlines were directed to inform Chinese authorities of their presence.
As for North Korea, its leadership saw Obama’s reaction and immediately fired a number of short-range missiles and initiated artillery fire into South Korea.
The concern is how to prevent others in Asia from acting like Putin.
“The answer is to create a strategic environment that effectively deters China or North Korea from ever considering such actions,” Cha said.
One approach Cha recommended is closer U.S.-Japan military cooperation, including the right of collective self-defense and revision of defense guidelines.
Even with the military cooperation, leadership in Japan and South Korea have shown skepticism over U.S. security commitments, prompting them to consider more assertive military buildups, including the prospect of making their own longer-range missiles and nuclear warheads.
For some time, military relationships between the U.S., Japan and South Korea have created uncertainty in Tokyo and Seoul.
“If North Korea sees a rift among the three countries, then they are not creating the right strategic environment to prevent Putin-like actions in Asia.” Cha said.
However, before that can happen, a long-simmering dispute between Tokyo and Seoul also would need mending, although Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is attempting to do just that.
Abe has complied with Seoul’s demand to apologize for Japan’s forcible World War II conscription of sex slaves of Koreans, known as comfort women.
“Reconciling Japan-South Korean relations is good for both countries in terms of their own security to prepare for the next North Koran provocation,” Cha said. “In the longer term, it is important for setting the strategic environment that avoids a Crimea in Asia.”


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/04/asian-lea...MZIoY5t4hzP.99

Originally Posted by HAPPY2BME

NOT ONE BIT, NOW OR EVER!!

Putin Corruption Network Revealed


Ruling mafia-style ‘Lake Cooperative Physicists Group’ stole billions

BY: Bill Gertz
April 7, 2014 5:00 am

Corruption by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his administration in Moscow has produced tens of billions of dollars worth of illicit funds for the Russian leader and his top aides, according to U.S. officials.
Putin is estimated to have amassed a fortune worth at least an estimated $28 billion through kickbacks from projects like construction at the Sochi Winter Olympic games, holdings in Russian real estate and energy conglomerates, and kickbacks from deals with associates going back to the late 1990s.
Corruption by Putin and his inner circle is said to be pervasive and a normal part of business under his authoritarian regime. For the first time in at least a decade, Putin is beginning to come under fire from the West after the military annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.
In the past, the Obama administration had imposed a strict political ban on critical reporting within policy, intelligence, and law enforcement circles as part of the failed “reset” policy designed to win closer ties to Russia.
Following the Crimea annexation and facing new threats of military action against Ukraine, the administration last month launched a limited campaign of financial sanctions aimed at the Putin regime.
The Treasury Department on March 20 imposed financial sanctions on 16 Russian officials associated with Putin’s corrupt financial network, as well as Bank Rossiya, the financial institution used by Putin and his cronies to both launder funds and conduct deals.
The Putin corruption network is centered in a network of associates, many of whom are former KGB political police and intelligence officials like Putin.
The corruption network vastly expanded once Putin became president in 2012.
“Corruption has ceased being a problem in Russia; it has become a system,” says a 2011 report by Russian opposition figures. “Its metastases have paralyzed the country’s social and economic life. The annual turnover of corruption in Russia now stands at $300 billion.”
Former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, one of the report author’s told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that key figures linking Putin to billions of dollars worth of corruption are largely unknown to most Russians.
What the Russian public does not know is that these friends of Putin “got rich not because they created Facebook or Google, or something else, but did so absolutely at the expense of the state and state property,” Nemtsov said.
U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity provided an outline of official corruption under Putin, including several officials among the 16 sanctioned by Treasury, and additional associates that were not targeted by the administration’s financial sanctions:

• Putin controls an estimated 37 percent of shares in the oil and gas company Surgutneftegaz; a 4.5 percent stake in the huge gas company Gazprom; and 50 percent of the oil trading company Gunvor. Putin has obtained cash from Gunvor through an associate, Gennady Timchenko, one of those sanctioned by Treasury and described as “directly linked to Putin.”

• Putin and his associates stole between $25 billion and $30 billion from funds used in developing Sochi for the Olympics.

• Putin has spent the illicit funds since the early 2000s on luxury items, including 20 residences, 58 aircraft, and four yachts.

• Putin controls the largest energy company in the world, Gazprom, which was set up in 1989 when all assets of the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Gas Industry were converted to a “private” concern. Through Gazprom, Putin has siphoned off cash from the company’s capital expenditures that in 2011 were estimated to be worth $52 billion. Corruption through Gazprom is known by the euphemism, according to the Russian opposition study, as “value detraction” and was estimated to be 70 percent of the capital expenditure.

• Putin also cashed in through his links to the Russian-German firm Saint Petersburg Real Estate Holding Co., serving as a director and on its advisory board prior to becoming president. The company, known by its Russian acronym SPAG, has been linked to Russian and Colombian organized crime money laundering operations in Liechtenstein.

• A key corruption vehicle for Putin is the Ozero Dacha Cooperative, a housing cooperative founded by Putin and his neighbors in 1996 that is located in a northern coastal suburb of St. Petersburg. Russia’s corrupt power elite under Putin has been dubbed the Ozero Cooperative Physicists Group. Ozero is Russian for lake.

• One of the co-founders of the cooperative, Vladimir Yakunin, was sanctioned by Treasury and was identified as head of the state-owned Russian Railways company and was described as “a close confidant of Putin.” Yakunin is a key Putin financial contact and has set up a huge business empire outside Russia and is also a director at Gunvor.

• The Putin-Gazprom connection was identified as connected to Sergei Fursenko, who is on the Treasury sanctions list. Fursenko is head of Gazprom Gas-Motor Fuel, a subsidiary of Gazprom, and was on Putin’s council for sports development. Andrei Fursenko, Sergei’s brother, also is a Putin associate, having helped start the Ozero cooperative and also working as head of two Russian ministries since 2002.

• Putin’s personal banker and the official who knows the most about Putin’s illicit wealth and corruption was identified as Yuri Kovalchuk, who is the largest shareholder in Bank Rossiya, the sole institution hit by the Treasury sanctions. Kovalchuk controls the bank and was described by Treasury as one of Putin’s “cashiers.”

• Putin is believed to have benefitted from another deal involving Vladimir Smirnov, who heads a nuclear export company called Techsnabexport that was linked by U.S. officials to the illicit export of polonium—the poison used by Russian intelligence to kill KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. Smirnov, a SPAG director, was the beneficiary of a Putin decree in 1996 that gave his company, Petersburg Fuel Co., a monopoly over retail gasoline sales in the St. Petersburg, allowing him to amass a fortune. Smirnov’s partner in the gasoline business was Vladimir Kumarin, head of the Tambov Gang organized crime group.

• Two other key Putin cronies are Nikolai Patrushev, former head of the Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, and currently head of Russia’s Security Council, the key policymaking body in the Kremlin; and Victor Cherkesov, a former KGB official who once headed Russia’s counter-drug agency. Cherkesov currently heads the Russian Federal Agency for the Procurement of Military and Special Equipment. Both Patrushev and Cherkesov are linked to Putin through the Ozero cooperative.

• Another key figure in the Putin corruption network is Nikolai Shamalov, a major shareholder in Bank Rossiya who formerly owned what is called “Putin’s Palace,” a large residence on the Black Sea near Krasnodar. Shamalov’s son Yuri is president of Russia’s largest pension fund Gazfond, which was sold by Gazprom in 2006 to the SOGAZ Insurance Co. That fund was controlled by Bank Rossiya.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry this week threatened unspecified retaliation against JP Morgan Chase after the bank, in seeking to comply with U.S. financial sanctions, temporarily blocked a funds transfer from the Russian embassy in Astana, Kazakhstan to SOGAZ.
A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman called the action “absolutely unacceptable, illegal and absurd” in a statement issued this week. “Washington must understand: Any hostile actions against the Russian diplomatic mission not only constitute a flagrant violation of international law but are also fraught with retaliatory measures that will inevitably affect the work of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. consulate general offices in Russia,” the statement said.
JP Morgan Russia said through a spokeswoman that after consulting regulators “we are processing this transaction.”

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http://freebeacon.com/national-secur...work-revealed/

Ruling mafia-style ‘Lake Cooperative Physicists Group’ stole billions

It appears we have two peas in a pod here!!!!