Putin is smiling tonight: His friend IOC President Bach fixed Russian participation in the Rio Olympics

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is smiling tonight. His friend, the German President of the IOC Thomas Bach, did what he was asked to do:

The Russian flag will be flying at the Summer Olympics, after all, as the International Olympic Committee decided Sunday that athletes from the nation mired in an ongoing drug scandal will be allowed to compete on the sporting world’s largest stage next month in Rio de Janeiro.
Less than two weeks before the start of the Rio Games, the International Olympic Committee ruled against barring Russia from the Summer Olympics but did approve measures that could reduce the number of Russian athletes participating.

Here is how sports, business and "friendship" mix in Bach´s world:

Bach has been a regular visitor to Russia in his three years as head of the IOC, both before and after the Sochi Olympics. Putin has also shown himself willing to travel to improve contacts with the IOC, giving a well received speech in 2007 in Guatemala — delivered in English, which is rare for Putin — ahead of the vote which gave Sochi the 2014 Olympics.
Since he won Olympic gold in 1976, Bach’s chosen sport of fencing has been transformed, most recently by Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, a Putin ally who has pumped large sums of his own money into the sport over eight years as president of the International Fencing Federation.
That money has increased the profile of one of the more niche sports on the Olympic program, making for a bigger media presence and glitzier competitions.
Bach also has business connections in Russia. After becoming president of the IOC, he kept his other role as chairman of the supervisory board of Weinig, a Germany company which produces woodworking machinery. Weinig, which did not respond to requests for comment, has a strong presence in Russia, with a headquarters near Moscow and offices across the country.
Besides Bach, several other influential IOC members have long been sympathetic to Russia.

Putin´s mafia state will not host the football World Cup 2018

It is becoming more and more obvious that Putin´s mafia state will not host the football World Cup in 2018. Vladimir Putin bought the cup through massive corruption, which in itself should be enough to move the games to a more civilized environment. Now there is the case of massive Russian state sponsored doping:

Russia’s hosting of the World Cup is becoming increasingly problematic for FIFA’s leaders after the International Olympic Committee withdrew support for sporting events being staged in the doping-tainted nation.
The IOC’s move followed this week’s second damning World Anti-Doping Agency report, which accused Russia of state-sponsored doping.
The scandal landed at FIFA’s door after Russian football was for the first time implicated in the alleged doping cover-up by a country that has been entrusted with football’s most prestigious event in 2018.
Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, whose department is accused of orchestrating the deception, is also head of the country’s football federation and is a member of FIFA’s ruling council.
Football’s governing body is standing by the 2018 hosts – just as it has done throughout six years of scrutiny since the contentious vote to hand the World Cup to Russia for the first time.
“Preparations for the World Cup are in full swing,” Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, said Wednesday. “FIFA said yesterday that they are preparing for the World Cup to be held in Russia.”
And 2018 is not the only countdown. FIFA is less than 11 months from staging the Confederations Cup, an eight-team warm-up competition, in Russia.
Dick Pound, the former WADA president who authored the earlier report on doping in Russian track and field, said FIFA now has another “credibility issue” to confront following McLaren’s findings.

Putin´s Russia should be banned from all international sports events

Russia under Putin should be banned from all international sport events after this:

Dozens of Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, including at least 15 medal winners, were part of a state-run doping program, meticulously planned for years to ensure dominance at the Games, according to the director of the country’s antidoping laboratory at the time.

The director, Grigory Rodchenkov, who ran the laboratory that handled testing for thousands of Olympians, said he developed a three-drug cocktail of banned substances that he mixed with liquor and provided to dozens of Russian athletes, helping to facilitate one of the most elaborate — and successful — doping ploys in sports history.

It involved some of Russia’s biggest stars of the Games, including 14 members of its cross-country ski team and two veteran bobsledders who won two golds.

In a dark-of-night operation, Russian antidoping experts and members of the intelligence service surreptitiously replaced urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier, somehow breaking into the supposedly tamper-proof bottles that are the standard at international competitions, Dr. Rodchenkov said. For hours each night, they worked in a shadow laboratory lit by a single lamp, passing bottles of urine through a hand-size hole in the wall, to be ready for testing the next day, he said.

By the end of the Games, Dr. Rodchenkov estimated, as many as 100 dirty urine samples were expunged.

None of the athletes were caught doping. More important, Russia won the most medals of the Games, easily surpassing its main rival, the United States, and undermining the integrity of one of the world’s most prestigious sporting events.

“People are celebrating Olympic champion winners, but we are sitting crazy and replacing their urine,” Dr. Rodchenkov said. “Can you imagine how Olympic sport is organized?” 

Corruption pervades everything in Putin´s kleptocracy. This rotten mafia state does not deserve to be part of any civilized international co-operation. That´s why Russia should be banned from the Rio Olympic games. And, of course, FIFA (with its own corruption problems) should not allow Russia to host the football World Cup.

Panama Papers: Putin and his friends

An excellent video about the world´s richest and most corrupt political leader and his friends:

It’s inconceivable, though, that the network could have existed without the knowledge and support of Putin, said Karen Dawisha, a U.S. political scientist who has written extensively about Putin and his regime.
“He takes what he wants,” said Dawisha. “When you are the president of Russia you don’t need a written contract. You are the law.”

Here you can read more.

Brexit quote of the week: Former UK ambassador compares the EU with Titanic

Former British ambassador Charles Crawford is right! :

Yes, a Brexit vote carries all sorts of risks. Yes, Vladimir Putin will enjoy the spectacle and seek to exploit it. But staying on the Titanic in an iceberg zone also carries risks. A Brexit vote opens the way for the rest of Europe and Russia alike to look hard at first principles and adjust accordingly. Several new smaller, lighter, more manoeuvrable ships sailing along nicely together, instead of one massive sluggish vessel that’s taking on water?

Putin inspects his future escape car

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has inspected the vehicles at his disposal when he - at some stage, hopefully in the not too distant future - is driven out of the country he has terrorized for far too long now.

Not much room in the well protected vehicles, but the KGB FSB interior decorators have at least made certain that Putin´s extravagant $700,000 watch collection fits in ...

John McCain´s message at the Munich security conference

US Senator John McCain´s message at the Munich security conference is clear: You cannot trust Vladimir Putin in Syria, nor anywhere else. Watch the speech here.

Two excellent articles about Putin´s Russia

Two must read articles focusing on the reality in Putin´s Russia. Here are two excerpts:

In general, an autocratic regime’s foremost concern is its own survival, and, when economic circumstances threaten its existence or even its legitimacy, the regime must pursue policies that either cure the problem or distract from it.
Rather than embrace the cure of structural economic reform and market liberalization, Putin has consistently opposed such measures, a decision rooted in his preference to keep himself and other Russian kleptocrats wealthy and in power at the expense of the Russian people. Opting for the second option taught in Autocratic Regimes 101, Putin has chosen to disguise widespread economic malaise at home by engaging in adventurism abroad, all in the name of demagogic nationalism and the “rescue” of “repressed” Russian minorities in neighboring ex-satellite states. Irrespective of the actual outcomes of such a foreign policy—which, as I would argue, is really a domestic policy—Putin’s state media will continue to craft an image of Russian triumph and adversarial acquiescence.

Read the entire article here

The leaders of the United States and the European Union are making a grievous error in thinking that President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a potential ally in the fight against the Islamic State. The evidence contradicts them. Putin’s current aim is to foster the EU’s disintegration, and the best way to do so is to flood the EU with Syrian refugees.

Russian planes have been bombing the civilian population in southern Syria forcing them to flee to Jordan and Lebanon. There are now 20,000 Syrian refugees camped out in the desert awaiting admission to Jordan. A smaller number are waiting to enter Lebanon. Both groups are growing.

Russia has also launched a large-scale air attack against civilians in northern Syria. This was followed by a ground assault by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s army against Aleppo, a city that used to have 2 million inhabitants. The barrel bombs caused 70,000 civilians to flee to Turkey; the ground offensive could uproot many more.

Read the entire article here

US official: The US government has known for "many, many years" that Putin is corrupt.

At last somebody in the US government speaks out about the corrupt Russian president:

Adam Szubin, who oversees US Treasury sanctions, told BBC Panorama that the US government had known Mr Putin was corrupt for "many, many years".
It is thought to be the first time the US has made such a direct accusation.
Washington has already imposed sanctions on Mr Putin's aides, but has stopped short of levelling corruption allegations at the president himself. --

In the programme, Mr Szubin spoke of how "we've seen [Mr Putin] enriching his friends, his close allies, and marginalising those who he doesn't view as friends using state assets", whether it concerned Russia's energy wealth or state contracts. "To me, that is a picture of corruption," he said. --

US government officials have been reluctant to be interviewed about President Putin's wealth, and Mr Szubin would not comment on a secret CIA report from 2007 that estimated it at around $40bn (£28bn).
But he said the Russian president had been amassing secret wealth. "He supposedly draws a state salary of something like $110,000 a year. That is not an accurate statement of the man's wealth, and he has long time training and practices in terms of how to mask his actual wealth."

Garry Kasparov: "Trying to ally w Putin to fight ISIS is like giving yourself cancer to fight a cold"

Garry Kasparov ‏@Kasparov63 6 hrs6 hours ago

Trying to ally w Putin to fight ISIS is like giving yourself cancer to fight a cold. He supports terror, Iran, Assad, & wants more refugees.

 

Garry Kasparov is of course right. Sadly, the weak US, UK and German "leaders" are again doing their utmost to please this dictator, who has blood in his hands.

Edward Lucas on the claims that the Ukraine crisis was NATO´s and EU´s fault

A number of foreign-policy expterts have blamed NATO and the EU for the crisis in Ukraine. Edward Lucas looks at how the predictions made by political scientist John Mearsheimer and others have fared:

The Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault. That has been the contention of a slew of foreign-policy experts, notably the distinguished political scientist John Mearsheimer, who wrote a much-quoted piece in Foreign Affairs in August last year called “The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin.”

For those who missed it, Mearsheimer blamed the crisis in Ukraine on NATO enlargement, saying that Russia had adamantly opposed it (which is not true); that it breached undertakings given to the Soviet Union (also false); and that Putin feared that the “coup” against Yanukovych was a prelude to a NATO base in Crimea (also untrue).

Mearsheimer also argued that the EU had been “marching eastward” and therefore provoking Russia and that the West was recklessly promoting democracy with the aim of turning Ukraine into a “Western stronghold on Russia’s doorstep.”

The counter-arguments to this are well known. The biggest is that they remove from Ukrainians and others any say in their own future. They are just counters in a board game played by others. As Mearsheimer argues, might is right and countries Ukraine’s position just have to get used to it.

That is both inaccurate and morally dubious (given how much the countries of the “bloodlands” have suffered in the past century). It is right to say that Russia, not the West, gets to decide what constitutes a threat to Russia. We can’t help it if Russia’s ex-KGB regime is afflicted by paranoia. But if Russia’s threat-perception becomes the paramount and unchallenged factor in regional security, we are in effect assenting to a new Yalta.

Read the entire article here

Putin is right on global warming!

There are not many issues on which I agree with Vladimir Putin. However, here is one:

While Western media have examined the role of rising temperatures and drought in this year's record wildfires in North America, Russian media continue to pay little attention to an issue that animates so much of the world.

The indifference reflects widespread public doubt that human activities play a significant role in global warming, a tone set by President Vladimir Putin, who has offered only vague and modest pledges of emissions cuts ahead of December's U.N. climate summit in Paris.

Russia's official view appears to have changed little since 2003, when Putin told an international climate conference that warmer temperatures would mean Russians "spend less on fur coats" while "agricultural specialists say our grain production will increase, and thank God for that".

The president believes that "there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries including Russia," says Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and critic of Putin. "That is why this subject is not topical for the majority of the Russian mass media and society in general."

 

 

Russian journalist: Putin´s 15 years have been "a monumental moral catastrophe"

Kashin to Putin: "Whoever comes after you will have to create Russia
 all over again, from scratch."

Oleg Kashin, one of Russia´s most prominent independent journalists, who in 2010 was nearly killed in an attack, has written an open letter to Vladimir Putin and his puppet Dmitry Medvedev, which should be read by all the western leaders who are eager to co-operate with the Russian dictator:

But don’t flatter yourself: the last 15 years haven’t been a revival for Russia, and the country hasn’t risen from its knees. This time has been a monumental moral catastrophe for our generation. And both of you, Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev, are personally responsible for it.
In Russian society today, even obvious questions about good and evil have become impossible. Is it OK to steal? Is it OK to cheat? Is murder ethical? With each of these questions, it’s become customary in Russia now to answer that things aren’t so simple. All your good works have left the nation demoralised and disoriented.
But you carry on, managing your problems without even realising that you’re digging the hole yourselves. “Things aren’t so simple” is what the angry crowd will tell you in unison, when it comes time for you to run away. I suspect that you’re afraid of this crowd, but just remember that it was you who created it, and you’ve got nobody to blame but yourselves.

Having cut yourselves and your elites off from society, you’ve also cut yourselves off from reality. There’s a wall separating you from the rest of us, and everyone on our side shudders each time the next one of your goons decides to show what a thinker he is by stepping up to a podium and talking about how the population is being controlled by computer chips, about the “Euro-Atlantic conspiracy,” or about how the Americans are weaponising cellular research.

Whoever comes after you will have to create Russia all over again, from scratch. This is your only service to history– what you’ve spent 15 years achieving. Your favourite justification for all this (the only one, there are no others) are the troubles of the 1990s, but it’s important to understand that you preserved and strengthened everything about this period that we’ve come to hate today. You didn’t fix anything. You only made it all worse.

"Putinism" - Anne Applebaum´s outstanding analysis

An outstanding lecture on Putinism:

 

Anne Applebaum´s report on Putinism

Strongly recommended reading!

Botched Russian Navy missile launch

Russian frigate Ladny´s botched missile demonstration at the Crimea Navy Day parade:

Here is a list of other recent Russian military accidents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_military_accidents

Finland acts against possible Russian threat: New Rapid reaction units close to Russian border

Great news from Finland:

HELSINKI — Finland's Armed Forces Command has added a quick response dynamic with plans to locate rapid reaction units (RRUs) to military districts that fall under the command of the country's four military provinces.
Defense Minister Jussi Niinistö described the initiative as necessary to strengthen operational readiness and bolster Finland's overall defense and deterrence capabilities against rising regional tensions over Russia's military intervention in Ukraine.
The focus of deployment for the RRUs, which constitute a new feature within Finland's territorial-based, infantry-centered defense strategy, will be military districts close to Finland's 833-mile border with Russia.

Leslie Gelb as Putin´s useful idiot

Vladimir Putin can still count on a number of useful idiots in the US. Leslie Gelb (former correspondent and columnist, former senior Defense and State Department official) is one of them. In his view the US and Europe are solely to blame for Putin´s aggression in Ukraine. And, indeed, the Baltic states should never have been allowed to join NATO!

Here are a couple of excerpts from Gelb´s latest "research":

Over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, NATO conferred membership upon much of Eastern Europe. In many cases, this was a sound strategy for the West, Russian resentment notwithstanding. The alliance, however, pushed its advantage provocatively far. It extended its protective wing up to Russia’s borders in the Baltic states.
---

When some neighbors rejected Russia in favor of the West, Moscow chose force. In Georgia, Russia solidified control over the provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. A democratic uprising in Ukraine triggered Russian support for revolts in Ukraine’s eastern provinces and the annexation of Crimea.
At some point over the last quarter century, Washington might have realized that the Kremlin was not going to sit around and wait for the West to determine Russia’s fate. Russia’s leaders countered with what came naturally to them—military power—to ensure they would shape their own future.

"Wait for the West to determine Russia´s fate"?!!

Vladimir Putin: Perfection created by God

 

Vladimir Putin: Perfection created by God:

And for the final question of the interview, Mr Putin was asked by Fontana: "Is there an action that you most regret in your life, something that you consider a mistake and wouldn't want to repeat ever again?"

According to the paper's report, Mr Putin pondered the question for a short while before his eyes lit up and he replied softly: "I'll be totally frank with you. I cannot recollect anything of the kind. It appears that the Lord built my life in a way that I have nothing to regret."

Canada´s PM Stephen Harper: There is no return for Putin´s Russia to G7

While Barack Obama has been strangely silent on this, Canada´s PM Stephen Harper hits the right note:

"I don't think Russia under Vladimir Putin belongs in the G7. Period," Harper told the Associated Press. "Canada would very, very strongly oppose Putin ever sitting around that table again. It would require consensus to bring Russia back and that consensus will just not happen."
The G7 suspended Russia from the grouping of leading industrialized nations following its annexation of Ukraine's Crimea last March, but has not ruled out a possible return under changed circumstances.
Harper, who is to visit Kyiv for talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk before heading to Bavaria for the G7 summit, said there was no room for conciliation with the Kremlin in light of the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and its alleged support of pro-Russia separatists fighting government troops in eastern Ukraine.
"This is a country that has shown a willingness to invade its neighbors, to actually seize territory that does not belong to it, and so I don't think we should take this escalation of a hostile military posture lightly. It needs to be treated seriously," said Harper, whose country is home to more than one million people of Ukrainian heritage.

"Qatar and Russia shoul be stripped of the World Cup"

Fortunately there are still journalists who are not afraid of telling the truth:

To hell with diplomatic repercussions; every tournament awarded by Fifa must now be re-allocated or boycotted. To do otherwise would be to endorse or condone near-total corruption.

It is unlikely that Vladimir Putin will unashamedly make the opening ceremony to Russia’s 2018 World Cup a celebration of the annexation of Crimea, or an interpretative dance sequence commemorating the supply of surface-to-air military equipment that resulted in the deaths of 298 people when MH17 was shot down. But the event has clearly been purchased for the further glorification of a president more deserving of the attention of the International Court of Justice than the world’s sporting community.