Daily Briefing: RUSSIA’S GEOPOLITICAL CHALLENGES: IMPLICATIONS FOR ISRAEL AND THE U.S. (October 20,2020)

Iran-China-Russia Axis Threatens US and Israeli Interests:  Douglas Fraser, The Defense Post, Oct. 14, 2020
In Search of a Solution to Russia’s Strategic Problem:  George Friedman, Geopolitical Futures, Oct. 13, 2020
Armenia and Azerbaijan: The Conflict Explained:  Andrew E. Kramer, NY Times, Oct. 17, 2020
Yuri Dmitriev: Historian of Stalin’s Gulag, Victim of Putin’s Repression:  Olivier Rolin, The New York Review, Oct. 7, 2020
______________________________________________________Iran-China-Russia Axis Threatens US and Israeli Interests
Douglas Fraser
The Defense Post, Oct. 14, 2020

In the last several weeks, a troubling relationship has been growing in Southwest Asia that has serious geostrategic implications for both the United States and Israel.

Birthed from decades of geopolitical pragmatism and a shared antipathy towards the West, China and Iran are working to form a 25-year strategic pact, while at the same time Tehran has signaled its intent to extend a 20-year deal with Moscow.

The geostrategic impact of these relations on the US and Israel could have far-reaching implications. As evidence of this, per US intelligence, all three countries are attempting to interfere in its presidential election in one way or another.

Reaffirming Old Relationships

Iran’s relationships with Russia and China are not new. In the 1980s, China supplied Iran with military weapons and equipment during the Iran-Iraq war and remains a long-term investor both in Iranian infrastructure and its energy sector. In addition, Iran serves as a key outpost in southwest Asia of China’s One Belt One Road Initiative.

Similarly, as Russia deals with American sanctions, it has little to lose from engaging with Tehran in the oil and gas sector, aviation, and the military – even indicating its willingness to sell advanced weaponry to Iran when the UN arms embargo expires on October 18, 2020.

First and foremost, the rekindling of this marriage of convenience between Iran, Russia, and China provides Tehran with a safety net against economic sanctions imposed by the United States. Both Russia and China’s recent maneuvers in Ukraine and Hong Kong have demonstrated their commitment to reducing the influence of the West and propping up Iran in the face of an American-led pressure campaign.

In Ascendant China’s Best Interests

From an American and Israeli perspective, this burgeoning three-way friendship may spell a weakening of sanctions against Iran. China’s efforts to curry favor with Iran show the importance of Southwest Asia to China and its desire to increase its regional influence through a strategy emphasizing “development peace” over “democratic peace.”

Is Tehran naive to Beijing’s longer-term ambitions? Some in Iran argue for increasing economic dependency on China to gain short-term relief from sanctions. Depending on the terms of their agreement, Tehran’s relief from sanctions in the short-term could lead indirectly to China’s long-term control over Iranian ports and, by default, the Strait of Hormuz. This would solidify China’s footprint in the region for decades. These steps would have significant security implications for Israel and the United States.

Additionally, China is looking to broaden its energy resources through oil agreements with Iran. Since Saudi Arabia is currently the biggest supplier of crude oil to China and one of the United States’ principal allies in the Middle East, China’s newfound coziness with Iran could reduce China’s dependence on Saudi oil while further cementing its influence in the region. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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In Search of a Solution to Russia’s Strategic Problem
George Friedman
Geopolitical Futures, Oct. 13, 2020

Russian President Vladimir Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in history. Though it may not be true of all of history, it is certainly true of modern Russian history, because it cost Russia what it needs most: strategic depth. Until 1989, Russia’s western border was effectively in central Germany. The Caucasus shielded Russia from the south. Central Asia was a vast buffer against South Asia and potentially China. The Russian heartland, in other words, was secure from every direction.

The fall of the Soviet Union pulled its western border back behind the Baltics, Ukraine and Belarus. Russia retained the North Caucasus but lost the South Caucasus – Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. Central Asia broke down into independent states. This contraction of Russia represented not only a diminution of size but a decreased distance between potential enemies.
Russia inevitably sought to redraw the borders before a serious threat emerged. That no serious threat existed gave Russia some time. But for a country like Russia, insecurity can manifest quickly. Germany went from being a national wreck to an existential threat in less than a decade. The Russians had to increase their strategic depth, but they had to do so without triggering the attack they feared before their depth was increased.

We have seen three events in recent months – one in Belarus, one in the South Caucasus, one in Kyrgyzstan – that together encompass portions of the borderlands Russia lost. To be clear, it is always possible to see three disconnected events connected by logic, and to assume that this logic has anything to do with Russia’s strategic problem. Coincidences abound in history and these three events do not even constitute a perfect coincidence. Even so, where coincidences are accidents that appear to be deliberate, it is easy to dismiss deliberately connected events as simple coincidence. The answer to this is to simply note that a coincidence has occurred, and that regardless of intent by anyone, a coincidence could have the same consequence as an intentional event.

In Belarus, a key buffer on the North European Plain, longtime President Alexander Lukashenko was reelected in what many describe as an illegitimate election in August. Protests against the results have gone on more or less ever since. Russia’s relationship with Lukashenko is complicated – he tries to balance between Russia and the West when he can – but Lukashenko could hardly be described as pro-West. He and Moscow have their differences, but Moscow has always been very influential in Minsk and thus has always had an imperfect solution to its strategic dilemma to the west. If Lukashenko were replaced with someone more antagonistic toward Russia or more sympathetic to the West, it could effectively move NATO, Poland and the Americans farther east, relegating cities such as Smolensk to border towns.

In Kyrgyzstan, which sits between Russia and China, there is similar political unrest. Here, too, an election has resulted in claims of fraud and large-scale demonstrations. The Russians have some military facilities there, but the most important point is that it provides a buffer between Russia and China. Russia and China are not currently at odds, but they fought each other as recently as the 1960s. Though that was 60 years ago, geopolitics tends to repeat itself, and whatever current interests might guide them, both are old hands at the shifts of history, and neither wants the other to have an advantage. It’s unclear whether the Belarusian playbook will work here, but Moscow has a stake in what happens, and given the likelihood that an arbiter will be needed, involvement would not be surprising. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Armenia and Azerbaijan: The Conflict Explained
Andrew E. Kramer
NY Times, Oct. 17, 2020

A simmering, decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh erupted in late September into the worst fighting the area had seen since a vicious ethnic war in the 1990s.

Skirmishes have been common for years along the front lines of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is internationally recognized as a part of Azerbaijan but is home to ethnic Armenians.

This time the conflict is different, analysts and former diplomats say, because Turkey has offered more direct support to Azerbaijan, and because of the scale of the fighting. Both sides have been using drones and powerful, long-range rocket artillery, they say.

Turkey’s direct engagement in support of its ethnic Turkic ally, Azerbaijan, in an area of traditional Russian influence, risks turning the local dispute into a regional one.

And the attacks have spread far from the front lines. Cities in Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia have been hit by long-range weaponry fired by combatants on both sides. The capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, Stepanakert, has been repeatedly bombarded.

Azerbaijan accused Armenia of firing powerful rockets at the country’s second largest city, Ganja, and at a hydroelectric station, suggesting an effort to destroy civilian infrastructure.

Even the impetus for the latest hostilities, which began on Sept 27, is in dispute. Azerbaijan said Armenia shelled its positions first, while Armenia says an Azerbaijani offensive was unprovoked. On Oct. 10, the countries agreed to a limited cease-fire brokered by Russia to exchange prisoners and collect the dead from the battlefield, but that deal soon fell apart. A second, similar truce, with France as the main mediator, was declared on Oct. 17.

Here’s a guide to the conflict and why it has flared again.

The region is an ethnic tinderbox. Nagorno-Karabakh has long been ripe for renewed local conflict.

A war that began in the late Soviet period between Armenians and Azerbaijanis set the stage for the fighting today. At that time, the ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan declared independence and was nearly crushed in the ensuing war before its fighters captured areas of Azerbaijan in a series of victories leading up to a cease-fire in 1994.

But the tensions go back further, to at least World War I, during the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when Armenians were slaughtered and expelled from Turkey in what many now consider a genocide. That history, Armenians say, justifies their military defense of their ethnic enclave. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Yuri Dmitriev: Historian of Stalin’s Gulag, Victim of Putin’s Repression
Olivier Rolin
The New York Review, Oct. 7, 2020

Western democracies have expressed concern and outrage, at least verbally, over the Novichok poisoning of Alexei Navalny—and this is clearly right and necessary. But much less attention is being paid to the case of Yuri Dmitriev, a tenacious researcher and activist who campaigned to create a memorial to the victims of Stalinist terror in Karelia, a province in Russia’s far northwest, bordering Finland. He has just been condemned on appeal by the Supreme Court of Karelia to thirteen years in a prison camp with a harsh regime.

The hearing was held in camera, with neither him nor his lawyer present. For this man of sixty-four, this is practically equivalent to a death sentence, the judicially sanctioned equivalent of a drop of nerve agent.

After an initial charge of child pornography was dismissed, Yuri Dmitriev was convicted of sexually assaulting his adoptive daughter. These defamatory charges appear to be the latest fabrication of a legal system in thrall to the FSB—a contemporary equivalent, here, of the nonsensical slander of “Hitlerian Trotskyism” that drove the Great Terror trials. It is these same charges, probably freighted with a notion of Western moral decadence in the twisted imagination of Russian police officers, that were brought in 2015 against the former director of the Alliance Française in Irkutsk, Yoann Barbereau.

I met Yuri Dmitriev twice: the first time in May 2012, when I was planning the shooting of a documentary on the library of the Solovki Islands labor camp, the first gulag of the Soviet system; and the second in December 2013, when I was researching my book Le Météorologue (Stalin’s Meteorologist, 2017), on the life, deportation, and death of one of the innumerable victims murdered by Stalin’s secret police organizations, OGPU and NKVD.

In both cases, Dmitriev’s help was invaluable to me. He was not a typical historian. At the time of our first meeting, he was living amid rusting gantries, bent pipes, and machine carcasses, in a shack in the middle of a disused industrial zone on the outskirts of Petrozavodsk—sadly, a very Russian landscape. Emaciated and bearded, with a gray ponytail, he appeared a cross between a Holy Fool and a veteran pirate—again, very Russian. He told me how he had found his vocation as a researcher—a word that can be understood in several senses: in archives, but also on the ground, in the cemetery-forests of Karelia.

In 1989, he told me, a mechanical digger had unearthed some bones by chance. Since no one, no authority, was prepared to take on the task of burying with dignity those remains, which he recognized as being of the victims of what is known there as “the repression” (repressia), he undertook to do so himself. Dmitriev’s father had then revealed to him that his own father, Yuri’s grandfather, had been shot in 1938. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:

Nagorno-Karabakh: Azerbaijan’s Jewish Communities Fear Attack:  Al Jazeera English, YouTube, Oct. 16, 2020 — It has been the scene of conflict since the early 1990s. Armenia says Nagorno-Karabakh must be an independent state, while Azerbaijan says it is Azeri territory.

The Man Who Knew Russia: A Tribute to Stephen F. Cohen:  Bill Bradley, The National Interest, Oct. 9, 2020 — I knew Steve Cohen for over fifty years from my time with the New York Knicks (he loved basketball) to the U.S. Senate (he loved politics) to business (it couldn’t hold his attention).

The Afterlife: David Bezmozgis, Tablet, Oct. 14, 2020 –In November of 2018, at the National Arts Club in New York City, I attended a screening for the film Sobibor, which was described in the program as “First Russian Oscar Contender About Holocaust” (sic). The screening was part of a promotional campaign to secure a nomination in the best foreign film category, and was presented by the film’s producers, along with the Alexander Pechersky Foundation and the Russian American Foundation.  

How China, Russia Could Cripple U.S. Satellites and Threaten the U.S. Military and Economy: Brandon Weichert:  Jan Jekielek, The Epoch Times, Oct. 3, 2020 — Russia and China have weaponized space and pulled far ahead of America in the space race, says geopolitical analyst Brandon Weichert.