Kremlin rejects claims Navalny poisoned with Novichok

 MICHAEL MAINVILLE (AFP) 10 HOURS AGO IN WORLD

The Kremlin on Thursday rejected claims that Moscow was behind the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, as calls mounted for international action after Germany said he had been dosed with Novichok.

Western leaders are demanding answers from Moscow after Berlin said Wednesday there was "unequivocal evidence" that the 44-year-old Kremlin critic had been afflicted by the infamous nerve agent.

Navalny, one of President Vladimir Putin's fiercest critics, fell ill on a flight last month and was treated in a Siberian hospital before being evacuated to Berlin.

Germany's claim that he was exposed to Novichok -- the same substance used against Russian ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English town of Salisbury two years ago -- prompted widespread condemnation and demands for an investigation.

Recent high-profile poisonings or attempted poisonings of politicians, dissidents or spies
Alain BOMMENEL, Sophie RAMIS, AFP

Russia denies there is any evidence that Navalny was poisoned and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that Berlin had not provided Moscow with proof.

"There is no reason to accuse the Russian state," Peskov said, rejecting talk of economic sanctions and urging the West not to "rush to judgement".

Already suffering from wide-ranging Western sanctions imposed over its 2014 annexation of Crimea, as well as the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and the drop in oil prices, Moscow will be anxious to avoid any further pressure on its economy.

- 'Poisoned relations with West' -

Germany's announcement on Wednesday sent the ruble plunging to its lowest level against the euro since 2016 and Moscow's RTS stock exchange fell more than three percent.

"Russia's relations with the West have once again been poisoned by Novichok," wrote business daily Kommersant, adding it was clear that the European Union and United States were seriously considering new sanctions.

Berlin's announcement that Navalny was poisoned with Novichok sent the ruble plunging to its lowest level since the height of Russia's coronavirus epidemic in the spring
Dimitar DILKOFF, AFP

"The main question is, how far will they decide to go?" it said.

A new crisis in relations with the West could also threaten Russia's Nord Stream 2 project, a 10 billion-euro ($11 billion) pipeline near completion beneath the Baltic Sea which is set to double Russian natural gas shipments to Germany.

The project has been delayed for months after Washington moved to impose new sanctions on companies involved in Nord Stream 2, over fears of growing Russian influence.

Germany voiced anger over the US moves, saying Washington was interfering in its internal affairs.

But the country's biggest newspaper Bild on Thursday called for the project to be suspended, saying that "if the (German) government does not stop the construction of Nord Stream 2, we will soon be financing Putin's Novichok attacks".

Peskov rejected such calls as "emotional statements," saying the project "is in the interests of Russia, Germany and the entire European continent."

- 'Only Russia can answer' -

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the Novichok findings raised "some very serious questions that only Russia can and must answer", while the United States, Britain, France, the EU and NATO all expressed shock.

Navalny is still in intensive care at Berlin's renowned Charite hospital
Odd ANDERSEN, AFP/File

The nerve agent, whose name means "newcomer" in Russian, is a poison developed by the Soviet government towards the end of the Cold War that can be deployed in an ultra-fine powder, liquid or vapour.

It was famously used against Skripal in Britain in 2018, an assassination attempt that the West believes was ordered by the Kremlin, but which Russia denies.

Navalny fell ill after boarding a plane in Siberia last month, with aides saying they suspect he drank a cup of spiked tea at the airport.

He was initially treated in a local hospital, where doctors said they were unable to find any toxic substances in his blood, before he was flown to Berlin for specialised treatment on August 22.

The charismatic Yale-educated lawyer, who has been Russia's leading opposition politician for around a decade, is still in the intensive care unit and remains on a ventilator.

'It’s possible that I created it myself’ Chemical weapons experts explain who is capable of making ‘Novichok’ poisons and why their lethality makes them weapons to kill, not maim

September 3, 2020 Source: Meduza

Chemical weapons stored for destruction at a facility in Gornyi in Russia’s Saratov region, May 20, 2020 AP / Scanpix / LETA

On September 2, the German government announced that Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok-type nerve agent. At a press conference on Wednesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel stated unequivocally that Navalny is the victim of a crime, and added that she believes someone tried to “silence” him. As the Kremlin insists that the West is jumping to conclusions, the public response has turned to questions about responsibility for the attack. Does the use of a nerve agent mean that Russia’s intelligence community is to blame? Meduza asked three chemical weapons experts what they think.

OPCW BIOCHEMIST
Marc-Michael Blum

Of course, it’s impossible to say who did this simply by identifying the [poison’s] chemical compound. But we can say you wouldn’t be able to create this substance in your kitchen or even in a typical university laboratory. You’d need to be able to synthesize a highly toxic material and it takes a lot of experience.

But does that automatically mean it was the intelligence services, even if it seems very likely? It’s not entirely clear. For example, there might be a chemist who used to work in a program creating such substances and he wants to sell his knowledge, and there might be people who want to use it. I agree, though, that there’s definitely a legitimate suspicion that this [substance] is from a professional lab.

You can’t just go out and buy substances like this. You need somebody with a lot of experience creating very toxic compounds. There aren’t many people in the world who can do this. Mainly, this is probably people from programs for creating chemical weapons and the specialized labs where they actually create them. So either one of these people decided to earn some money [by creating this poison] or it was one of the state-supported labs.

I was a bit shocked that it turned out to be a substance from the Novichok group — especially because I don’t understand why anyone would use it after what happened in 2018 [when the Skripals were attacked in England]. Even if it’s not the exact same compound, the class of the substance is the same. It’s certainly exotic.

If Navalny hadn’t ended up in Germany, he probably would have died and no one would have known why. So the usual argument that “this was a signal for everyone else” doesn’t really work here. It could be that it all comes down to the fact that certain people simply like this poison. Because there are cases where it doesn’t work, though maybe there are undisclosed cases where it worked well.

Was this an attempted murder? Absolutely yes. This wasn’t just a warning. These substances are so toxic that Navalny is lucky to be alive, but they absolutely wanted to kill him. When poisoned like this, there’s a very small window between being hospitalized and being killed.

MORE FROM DR. BLUM
‘There are better poisons if you really want to kill someone’ The chemical weapons expert who led the OPCW’s mission to Salisbury after the Novichok attack on the Skripals explains Alexey Navalny’s situation
ASSOCIATE ADJUNCT PROFESSOR, SCHOOL OF PHARMACY AND PHARMACEUTICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

Zoran Radic

I don’t have the information needed to give an exact answer [about the potential involvement of Russia’s intelligence services], but I think it would be very difficult even for an experienced chemist to synthesize this type of nerve agent safely outside of a well-equipped and authorized laboratory. There’s also the possibility of the black market [for stolen substances created at authorized laboratories]. Compared to other nerve agents, “Novichok” powder can be stored relatively easily in a well-insulated container.

One reason for using a Novichok-class substance could be that its detection protocols aren’t as well known, accepted, or widely standardized as they are for other nerve agents. And that could mean the poison wouldn’t be detected.

Most likely, this was an attempt to cause serious harm or to kill. After all, some types of “Novichok” are among the most toxic substances humanity has ever manufactured.
ONE OF NOVICHOK’S ORIGINAL DEVELOPERS
Vladimir Uglev

It’s impossible to use Novichok to “rattle” somebody. If they’d only wanted to scare Navalny, they could have done it simply with [the nervous system blockers] atropine or scopolamine. Novichok isn’t the kind of thing you use to scare someone.

[Thinking about Navalny’s poisoning], I’ve laid awake at night, going over it again and again. Why did I rule out Novichok initially? Because Navalny showed certain signs: he became inexplicably ill, he collapsed, and he fell into a coma. That doesn’t happen with Novichok. If, for example, the substance gets on the skin, it fibrillates at the point of contact, then there’s sweating, convulsions, then involuntary defecation and urination, paralysis, and death. But there’s no coma! I’ve never once been able to speak to anyone who’s come into contact with it — it’s been fatal everywhere. After contact, people have even gone home, but they didn’t slip into comas.

If these were [the liquid forms of “Novichok”] А-230, А-232, А-234, then other people [around Navalny] would have suffered. I’ve been thinking some about the solid form: A-242. It was created primarily for submunitions. The substance was applied to these arrows that you’d fire at someone. Ten minutes later and it was all over.

A-242 is a solid substance. Its melting point is 95–96 degrees Celsius [about 204 degrees Fahrenheit]. Therefore, if scattered on a tabletop, it will have no effect. At the same time, A-242 is highly soluble in water. Imagine that an A-242 solution was applied to Navalny’s clothes and they added something like [the sedative] clonidine. The clonidine would manifest first: Alexey would fall into a coma, and signs of A-242 poisoning would be secondary by then. Members of his entourage and the paramedics might not see them at all.

I myself was once exposed to A-242: I was recrystallizing the substance in a solvent when it boiled over and splashed onto my hand. So I dunked my hand in hydrochloric acid and held it there, before washing it under the tap and treating it with a sanitary solution. Still, for years to come, my hand would sweat and serious effects remained.

In any case, this substance was made in a lab. It’s possible that [the poisoners] may have used old supplies — maybe even reserves that I created myself.

Meduza: Does the use of a Novichok-class nerve agent mean the involvement of Russia’s intelligence community?

Well, [Navalny] didn’t stumble upon it himself like that madam in Amesbury. Navalny was investigating local municipal deputies [in Siberia] — maybe they manufactured the substance or got it somewhere? As they say in Shrek: “Like that’s ever going to happen. What a load of sh—.”


Interviews by Farida Rustamova and Andrey Pertsev

Translation by Kevin Rothrock

‘There are better poisons if you really want to kill someone’

 The chemical weapons expert who led the OPCW’s mission to Salisbury after the Novichok attack on the Skripals explains Alexey Navalny’s situation

September 2, 2020
Source: Meduza

An ambulance brings Alexey Navalny to the airport in Omsk for medical evacuation to Berlin, August 22, 2020
Anastasia Malgavko / Reuters / Scanpix / LETA

Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, Alexey Navalny, has been in a coma for more than two weeks. On August 20, his flight home to Moscow was forced to make an emergency landing in Omsk after he became violently ill. Russian doctors treated Navalny for roughly two days before he was transferred abroad in an air ambulance to the Charité Clinic in Berlin, where specialists found evidence that he’d been poisoned with cholinesterase inhibitors. Physicians have been unable to identify the exact substance responsible for Navalny’s condition, but German officials announced on September 2 that experts have collected “unequivocal evidence” that he was poisoned with a substance similar in composition to the nerve agent Novichok. To understand more about Navalny’s poisoning, Meduza science editor Alexander Ershov spoke to Marc-Michael Blum, a biochemist who studies decontamination, countermeasures, and mitigation of chemical warfare agents. In 2018, following the Novichok poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skirpal in England, Dr. Blum led the team sent by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to Salisbury and Amesbury.


We currently know very little for certain about what happened to Alexey Navalny. Perhaps the most substantive information comes from the Charité Clinic’s press release on August 24: “Clinical findings indicate poisoning with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors. The specific substance involved remains unknown, and a further series of comprehensive testing has been initiated.” Can you explain what that means? How is it possible to detect that someone was poisoned without identifying the poison itself?

Yes, it’s possible. You take a blood sample and in the blood you have cholinesterase. And there are tests where you can check if they work. Cholinesterase is an enzyme — it helps to speed up a certain chemical reaction [vital for the transmission of nerve impulses] — and there is a test where you are not using acetylcholine but acetylthiocholine (very similar) and the cholinesterases work on that, as well. What you get is a product that you can react with something else and it creates a yellow color. That’s a classical test for activity. With that, you measure the activity of the cholinesterase in the blood plasma. What they [at the Charité Clinic] probably saw was significantly reduced activity level.


It’s only when you get to almost zero levels that your symptoms become severe. With the symptoms Navalny showed and the fact that they had to put him in an induced coma and the fact that they probably tested the cholinesterase in his blood and probably saw very low levels, that triggered the press release saying: we see it as a cholinesterase inhibitor, but we don’t know which one. Because they just tested the enzyme activity. Now, in the second step, you’re looking for the poison.

It’s very hard to say, of course, but what’s the likelihood in your view that the exact substance will be identified?

If your cholinesterases are in fact inhibited and most of it is inhibited, it means something is sitting inside or on that enzyme. It’s still there because, if it’s not there, then it would be active. When you measure blood that shows big inhibition of the cholinesterases, the poison is there. If the poison were already gone, the activity would return. That’s a good sign that the poison can be found. There is a cholinesterase in blood that we mainly look at called butyrylcholinesterase that’s soluble and easy to work with. If you have an inhibitor, it will inhibit that cholinesterase, as well. Then you look at it and there are two possibilities: some of the inhibitors are actually reversible, meaning that they stick like glue but can come off again, and some others like nerve agents actually bind to the enzymes and you cannot break that anymore. It’s really just like super glue. It’s irreversible.

Then you look for the fragments from these poisons that sit on the enzyme. So you take the enzyme, you cut it into small, little pieces, and there’s a very characteristic piece and, on this piece, you expect to find something sitting on it. Then you use mass spectrometry [an analytical technique that measures the mass-to-charge ratio of ions] and you know the mass of the fragment if it’s normal and then you expect that fragment also to be heavier because something is on it. And from these exact masses, you can deduce what’s on it. Once you think you’ve found something, ideally, if you have that poison available, you take some blood plasma from somebody else, and in the test tube you add it and you also measure this. If it looks identical, you have confirmation that you found the poison.

The doctors who treated Navalny in Russia say they tested him for poisoning with cholinesterase inhibitors but couldn’t get confirmation. Is there any rational, scientific explanation for the disparity between what Russian and German doctors have said? Maybe the physicians in Omsk didn’t have sensitive enough mass spectrometers? Is that possible?

I don’t think so. The first step is testing for cholinesterase activity — quite a simple test. You take the plasma, you have your acetylthiocholine, and you do that in a little glass cuvette and it creates color. All you need is a photometer, which is very ordinary lab equipment. You have that everywhere. You don’t need super-sophisticated technology for that. With that, you can do the test. If they found cholinesterase inhibitors [in Berlin], it should have been found in Russia, as well.

What you hear now is speculation, on Twitter and so on, that maybe he was poisoned on the way [to Berlin] on top of this metabolic condition he had. Of course, that’s a possibility, but how likely is that? He was severely ill when he was found and taken off that airplane.

A question I ask myself is that the Russian hospital said he got atropine [a medication used as an antidote to certain types of nerve agent and pesticide poisonings] but they also say he had very low blood sugar. When you have very low blood sugar, normally your heartbeat goes very fast and you sweat. But atropine is given if your heartbeat is very low — you don’t give it if it’s really high. It’s very unusual. If they gave him atropine, there must have been a reason to give it, and I think they have not yet explained why they gave him atropine. You’re not just giving atropine to somebody who is severely ill just as a precaution. There must be a clear indication of why you’re giving a certain antidote or why you think you need that emergency medicine to stabilize the patient. I haven’t read anything saying why he received atropine. There’s no good explanation at this moment.

For a long time, Navalny’s transfer to Germany wasn’t permitted. The air ambulance that came to Omsk for him was stuck on the tarmac for hours and hours. As a result, some of Navalny’s supporters theorize that he was kept in Russia as long as possible to give the poison in his body time to disintegrate, making detection impossible. How plausible is that theory and how quickly do poisons break down inside the human body?

Some of these compounds hydrolyze quite fast in the body. The nerve agent sarin, for example, hydrolyzes very quickly. But it attaches to the enzyme permanently and you can always measure that. The body is remaking cholinesterases. If you’ve knocked out the cholinesterases, it takes about two months to get back to normal. Effectively, you can take samples three or four weeks after exposure and you’ll still find it. What goes quite fast are the metabolites in the urine — only two or three days and then it’s gone. But what sits on the protein, on the enzyme, that stays for a very long time. If it had been hydrolyzed and completely gone, Charité would not have measures inhibited cholinesterases.

So keeping him there just for the poison to disappear doesn’t really work in the case of this poison group. There are other poisons where waiting for a couple of hours is quite effective. Everyone says he was poisoned by drinking a cup of tea, but that is not proven. He could have had contact with a poison somewhere else: earlier on in his hotel, on the way to the airport, in the airport, or wherever. People focus on the tea, but we’ve recently had other poisonings like Sergey Skripal, for example. Yes, he went to town with his daughter and they had a pint of beer in a pub, yet the poisoning occurred somewhere else. For me, it’s not totally clear that it was the tea. It depends on what they will find in the end — if the tea theory is plausible or if it’s more likely that it happened somewhere else.

But if it happened somewhere else and he came in contact through the skin, then, of course, it’s also quite dangerous for everybody around him because he’s contaminated and he could potentially spread that contamination to other objects and people he touches.

Now that German specialists have determined that Navalny was poisoned by cholinesterase inhibitors, is there any chance they will be unable to identify the exact substance responsible?

Is it possible they won’t be able to identify the poison? Yes. Because there’s such a wide range of possibilities here and the concentrations you look at are very small, which means you have to look for every single possibility. First, you go through the usual suspects, the usual nerve agents, the most-used pesticides, and so on, and it can be quite a long list. Also, you would look to see if there’s still something in his urine or some hydrolysis product in the blood — a small molecule or a metabolite. Maybe they’d take skin samples to see if anything’s still there that might help support the analysis of the cholinesterase in the blood.

You’re looking from a lot of different angles. I’m still quite confident that they’ll find what it was, or at least the general class. One issue is that it isn’t the whole poison molecule that attaches to the cholinesterase. A part is lost. With sarin, for example, the fluorine is lost. So they might say the poison was something that looks like sarin, but instead of fluorine, there was cyanide or something. Or bromine — another possibility. You don’t know because that part of the molecule is lost, but the rest looks like sarin and it was powerful enough to attach to the cholinesterase, so you know it’s definitely a nerve agent. I’m actually quite confident that it will be found because his condition indicated quite severe poisoning, which means he probably ingested or absorbed quite a high dose.

In order to identify a poison, do you need to know more than its chemical formula? Or do you need to have a sample of the substance itself? How long might it take to complete all this analysis?

You can do some interpretation of the spectra you find. Ideally, once you know what you think it is, either you have it in your stocks and you can take it from the drawer and use it, or alternatively, if you don’t have it, there’s the possibility of making it — synthesizing it in very small amounts. Just enough to carry out your tests. That would take a few days extra, of course.

In principle, the whole thing is a three-step process: the first step is screening. You just screen to see what it might be. The second step is identification. Of course, because this is a very high-profile case, you want to be sure for the third step, which is confirmation. You confirm with another method, you use a reference chemical, and only when you have that are you probably confident enough to put it in a report. I would guess that we’ll see it this week or maybe next week.

Marc-Michael Blum’s personal archive

So, by next week, we should know exactly what kind of poison we’re talking about?

At the latest. If we don’t hear by then, it’s more likely that we will not know what it was. Also, I don’t know who makes the decision to make that information public. Once the chemical is identified, I’m very sure the information will be given to the treating doctors because it might affect his therapy, and they will also probably tell his wife. By that time, it will probably be made public, I would guess. But it’s unknown how they’ll go about this. The laboratory talks to the Charité, but there might be some consultations about when to make it public because it’s a political case.

UPDATE
Germany confirms that Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny was poisoned with substance from ‘Novichok’ group of nerve agents

At this point, though, we can at least be certain that we’re looking at a chemical warfare agent that’s difficult to obtain and not an ordinary pesticide that acts in some similar way?

Some of the pesticides are organophosphorus compounds, just like the nerve agents — a bit different in structure, but the big difference between them is the toxicity. You need to ingest a lot more of the pesticide to have these severe toxic effects. Let’s take something very poisonous: VX. A little drop on your skin could kill you. If you take one of the usual pesticides, a drop will not kill you. The difference in toxicity might easily be a thousandfold. There are really big differences.

If you look back in history at how the nerve agents were discovered, it was normally work on new pesticides and insecticides. Some of these turned out to be very effective but unfortunately too toxic for use because they were really toxic to humans. Those developments would then go to military use. They’d say, “Ah, this is probably a very good warfare agent.” And those that are effective against insects and not that toxic to humans would go for civilian use and become pesticides.

There are also some other cholinesterase inhibitors. For example, there are even some medicine therapeutics used against Alzheimer’s, and there are carbamates — a nonphosphorus class of inhibitors. All these substances can also have such effects. That’s why it’s hard to find — you have to look at so many different classes of chemicals. At the moment, given what we know, it’s really very difficult to speculate. If it was a normal pesticide, you’d think there must have been a lot in that tea! (If the tea hypothesis is right.) It wouldn’t be enough just to touch some surface contaminated with a pesticide — that wouldn’t be enough to kill you.

That said, there are ways to enhance chemicals’ penetration through your skin. That’s also a possibility. There are still so many unknowns. I think the next thing to do is to wait for the identification. Once we have an identification of what the chemical is, then we go forward and ask if it’s still likely that the tea was the source of the poisoning. Between the tea and the moment he really dropped down on the airplane, there was a bit more than an hour. Is that realistic [if the tea theory is correct]? Even a lot of pesticides act faster. After 10 or 15 minutes, especially on an empty stomach, people would start to show symptoms.

But what we need to know now is the identity of the chemical.

Why does Navalny remain in a medically induced coma if his condition is stable? What are the doctors waiting for?

In principle, they want to see his cholinesterase levels go up again. If you’re really knocked out on the cholinesterase symptoms you show, even with atropine, there will be the typical symptoms: you cannot control your muscles, you need ventilation, you cannot breathe on your own, and being intubated for the whole time is quite harsh on the patient if he is conscious.

Normally, you sedate people and put them in a shallow coma. Without pain, they can tolerate the ventilation much better. Also, you don’t take them out of the coma abruptly, they just slowly stop administering the medicine responsible for the coma. And you monitor the patient’s reaction. If you see that he’s in a lot of pain or he’s getting spasms, you’ll keep him in the coma, measuring his cholinesterase in parallel. If he’s back to 10 or 15 percent, you can start taking him out again. In the end, that decision lies with the treating physician — they’re the guys who really know. Basically, it’s about reducing pain. Being ventilated is not a very pleasant experience, so it makes sense to keep the body down. [Navalny’s] coma might easily last for a couple more weeks.

They’ve said his condition is improving, that it’s severe but stable, which means it’s not life-threatening anymore. But “severe” probably means we’re keeping him in that coma for the time being.

That amount of time is roughly what the body needs to synthesize enough cholinesterase to fulfill its function as neurotransmitters?

Yes, the body has to remake it. Atropine doesn’t help with the blocked enzyme. It only helps by working against the symptoms. There’s a second class of therapeutics called oximes (pralidoxime, obidoxime) and some organophosphate compounds that can reactivate the cholinesterase. If that works, they can help get you out of that condition, but it only works with certain compounds and not with others. If it doesn’t work, you simply have to wait until (a) all the poison is gone from your body and cannot inhibit the newly made cholinesterase, and (b) your body reproduces [the cholinesterase], which can take several weeks.

With each of these failed poisonings, we see theories that the culprits wanted only to frighten their victims, not assassinate them. Is it possible to administer poisons in concentrations calculated exactly to bring people close to death without killing them?

Assuming it’s a military nerve agent, I would say it’s definitely an attempt to kill. You can’t fine-tune it. With these kinds of compounds, you basically have a curve where you start seeing effects at a certain dose and then they die at the next dose. With the nerve agents, this window is extremely small. Between the first symptoms and death, the window is very narrow. It’s wider with the pesticides. You’ll see symptoms, but you’ll still need a lot more of the stuff to actually kill you. That’s also true for some other inhibitors. That’s why I say it’s important to see which poison was used.

If this was a military nerve agent, you would say it was, in all likelihood, a real attempt to kill him. If it was something else, you could still speculate that maybe it was just a warning. On the other hand, it doesn’t really look like a warning, given the severe condition he was in.

If the use of chemical warfare agents is always attempted murder, why have these attempts failed time and again? It brings to mind, of course, the most striking recent example: the attack against the Skripals in England.

It’s very cynical to say this, but there are better poisons if you really want to poison a single person and kill him. There are poisons that are much harder to detect and faster to act. Just because something is used as a chemical warfare agent, where you think about battlefield use and using it in grenades — the poison there is different from the perfect poison to assassinate somebody, where you need a different profile. [Navalny’s poisoning] is very exotic. You could also say, if you want to kill somebody, people might just disappear, have a car accident, whatever — or just they’re just shot. By using poison, there’s probably an additional message to bring attention to the case.

In the case of the Skripals, one has to say that both he and his daughter were extremely lucky that the ambulance arrived as fast as it did when they collapsed, and gave them treatment and moved them to the ICU so quickly. There are numbers out there saying that they probably would be dead if the ambulance had arrived 10 minutes later.

Of course, we’ve also had very exotic poisonings that succeeded: [former KGB and FSB officer Alexander] Litvinenko with the polonium — again, very exotic. Why go through all the hassle of using polonium, which is very hard to get? If you simply want to kill somebody, there are probably easier ways.

It’s very hard to say. Maybe it’s also — and this is pure speculation — that someone wants to carry out an assassination but if he or she survives, at least the message has been sent. It might also be simply a lack of experience on the operator’s part. Whoever did it — the people who actually gave him the poison or put it somewhere — are probably not the experts in its poisonous properties. They were probably told what to do and they used a bit too much or a bit too little.


I think it’s always very difficult when using a contact poison — something you have to touch. You never know what will happen next. The person touches it with his hand and, for some reason, he thinks: I should wash my hands. Then most of the poison is off again. Or others might simply not notice [the contact point] and miss it entirely. It’s very unpredictable. If you put something in a drink and you know the person will drink it completely, then that’s a bit easier.

But all that is pure speculation. We should wait to find out what it is. That might enlighten the situation a bit about what’s behind it. Chemical analysis alone will never be able to show who the perpetrator is. You need police work for that. Even if you find small amounts of poison in his body, the concentrations are so low that it doesn’t have a fingerprint or signature where you can say: oh, based on these properties or impurities, it was probably made in this or that way. That might be possible if you have a lot and you can analyze the pure substance, but that’s implausible in a person.

Interview by Alexander Ershov

© 2020 Meduza. All rights reserved

Back to school: Belarusian students and school children clash with police  

OMON and Belarusian students clashed in Minsk during an unscheduled rally on the first day of term


By Ben Aris in Berlin September 2, 2020 BNE INTELLINEWS

September 1 and all of Eastern Europe goes back to school at the end of the long summer holiday. Usually it is an exciting day, where the whole family puts on their best, but this year in Minsk students and even school children clashed with OMON riot police as Belarus' self-appointed President Alexander Lukashenko's renewed crackdown on his own population gathers momentum.

Thousands of students showed up for the first day of term, but many chose not to go to lectures but began an impromptu rally that marched into the centre of Minsk, only to be met with lines of OMON trying to prevent the unorganised demonstration.

While the young protestors were entirely peaceful, clashes broke out after OMON moved in and started detaining the demonstrators, dragging them off to awaiting paddy wagons.

The worst of the violence came in the first three days following the elections on August 9. Human rights organisations have documented over 450 cases of torture since the protests began, according to the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (OHCHR).

“The prohibition against torture is absolute under international human rights law,” the OHCHR said in a statement. “It cannot be justified for any reason. Similarly, no circumstances whatsoever, whether internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked to practise, tolerate or justify enforced disappearances. Authorities in Belarus must immediately put an end to all human rights violations and combat impunity.”

Six people have died, and at least two of these appear to have been beaten to death and there are numerous reports of women being raped by police batons. More than 50 remain missing, according to the NGOs.

The OMON presence was beefed up and sent to campuses, where in one incident a tightly packed crowd of female students faced off against the OMON and began to sing Kupalinka, an old Belarusian folk song.


Shockingly the OMON also raided schools. At an elite state school OMON officers entered the school territory and arrested at least three teenagers, frogmarching them off the school grounds to awaiting vans.

A history teacher at the school bravely intervened to rescue a group of students who were carrying the red and white Belarusian flag that has become a symbol of the opposition, only to be detained in their place.

In another incident a crowd of protesters passing a school were greeted with shouts of “Long live Belarus!” by the children in the playground, some of whom were as young as eight, which were met with roars of approval.


Lukashenko has  emboldened after Russian President Vladimir Putin commented that he was prepared to send a security force to Belarus to quell unrest “if necessary.”

The Kremlin had been sitting on the fence, but has now come out decisively in Lukashenko’s defence, as it is keen to prevent an uncontrolled change of power that it can’t influence. The Kremlin has now confirmed it regards the massively falsified August 9 presidential elections as valid and Lukashenko as the legitimate president.

Moreover, the Kremlin also said in a statement on September 1 that it concurs with the Belarusian authorities that the newly established Coordinating Council that represents the opposition movement is unconstitutional. The authorities have opened some 50 criminal cases against the Coordinating Council, accusing it of trying to organise a coup d'état.

For their part the protesters show no sign of fatigue and indeed the increasing, but selective, violence of the OMON has only tempered the resolve to protest.

The Nexta Telegram channel that is the de facto organiser of the protests has called for a renewed general strike from September 1 in an effort to cripple the economy and force the government to the negotiating table.

Anecdotal evidence from reports on social media suggest that so far the strike is widespread and holding, despite factor managers' best efforts to cajole and intimidate works back to work.

Union State moving ahead

Lukashenko is due in Moscow in the near future, where it seems increasingly likely he will sign off on documents to finalise setting up a Union state – a sort of Eurozone of the east.

A general agreement to create the Union state, that will nix borders between Belarus and Russia and create a single currency, was signed in 1999, but Lukasheno has been resisting putting the deal into place.

Belarus is already a member of the Eurasia Economic Union (EEU), which is based on the idea of the European Union (EU) and harmonises trade, tax and financial regulations amongst the members. However, the Union State would significantly deepen the economic integration between the two states.

In comments on the upcoming meeting in Moscow Lukashenko mentioned that the goal was to create a market that stretched from Brest in western Belarus to Vladivostok on Russia’s eastern seaboard.

This is an echo of Putin’s oft repeated long-term foreign policy goal of creating a single market that spans the entire Eurasian continent from “Lisbon to Vladivostok.”

Rather than annex Belarus like Russia did with the Crimea, it seems more likely that Putin’s goal is to use Lukashenko’s weakness to create a single market structure with Belarus that is a step towards his goal of creating the Eurasian single market that the Kremlin feels is necessary to counter the rise of China as a global power. That means the Union State deal will be more sophisticated than a simple annexation, but will bring the two countries a lot closer together, both politically and economically.

At the same time Lukashenko gave some more details of the constitutional changes he is proposing as a peace offering to the protesters.

“Lukashenko openly admits that the entire political-judicial system is in his hands. The courts are subservient, but he interferes in an open manner, not from the back door. His control of the justice is overwhelming. Even the criminal cases are traced by him,” tweeted Dionis Cenusa, a PhD candidate that follows Belarus.

However, the text of the new constitution will not be drawn up in co-operation with the opposition and while it may devolve some more power away from the president it is unlikely to make Belarus any more democratic.

“It seems that Lukashenko doesn’t exclude a certain degree of democratisation, though a controlled one through “checks and balances” of non-democratic nature,” Cenusa commented.


VIDEOS

 

U.S. Troops in Syria Stuck Fighting 'Forgotten War' for Oil as Russia Advances Around Them

Trump Says It's Time U.S. Passes War On ISIS To Russia, Iran, Iraq And Syria, Focuses On Oil Instead

BY TOM O'CONNOR AND NAVEED JAMALI 9/3/20 NEWSWEEK

A Growing number of incidents involving U.S. and Russian forces in Syria has highlighted yet another strategic blindspot in the Middle East for Washington, as its shifting politics leave U.S. troops essentially stranded to guard oil and gas resources while Moscow presses on with a five-year effort to stabilize the war-torn nation.

With no clear path forward, a range of voices within the U.S., Russian and Syrian governments, and on the ground in areas under the control of a Pentagon-backed autonomous administration in the country, have expressed doubts to Newsweek over the current approach.

"It's a clusterf**k in Syria," one senior U.S. intelligence official, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, told Newsweek. "We don't have a strategy."

The frustrations come as the U.S. nears an election in which both candidates vow to end the "endless wars" waged by their predecessors. Come January, either former Vice President Joe Biden—who oversaw U.S. support for insurgents fighting to overthrow the Syrian government under former President Barack Obama—or President Donald Trump—who inherited a campaign then focused on fighting the Islamic State militant group (ISIS)—will steer a U.S. policy on Syria that is currently presented with mixed messages, even among the government's own agencies.

Officially, the Pentagon's mission remains "to ensure an enduring defeat" of ISIS, according to the most recent press releases sent to Newsweek by the U.S.-led coalition. The State Department additionally calls for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to negotiate his departure, and for the withdrawal of Iran and Iran-backed forces supporting him.

For his part, President Trump, as he told reporters last month, said the U.S. has simply "kept the oil."

The president has made no secret of his desire to send U.S. oil companies to operate in Syria, and to let others such as Moscow, Tehran and Damascus take on the task of preventing a resurgent ISIS. Last October, he repositioned personnel away from outposts under the control of the mostly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, and sent what he called a "small force" of U.S. troops to guard oil and gas fields in the northeast.

Russia, for its part, seized the opportunity to expand its presence in support of the Syrian government, taking control of former U.S. positions in some cases. Now two of the world's most powerful militaries led by geopolitical rivals operate side-by-side in northeastern Syria, with only a deconfliction channel to prevent accidents.

"The Coalition does not coordinate or share intelligence with Russia in Syria," Pentagon spokesperson Navy Commander Jessica McNulty told Newsweek. "From time-to-time we are incidentally apprised of planned Russian strikes on ISIS targets West of the Euphrates River, as part of our routine de-confliction communications."

This precarious situation has resulted in a number of international incidents involving U.S. and Russian forces apparently trying to block one another's patrols as they occupy the same roads in northern and eastern Syria.

A picture taken on June 3 shows a U.S. soldier standing guard as a Russian Mil Mi-24 military helicopter gunship flying over the northeastern Syrian town of Al-Malikiyah at the border with Turkey. Moscow backs the Syrian government based Damascus, Washington supports an autonomous and mostly Kurdish-led administration in the north and east, while Ankara sponsors an insurgency along the border and in northwestern Idlib province.DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES


One high-profile instance last week saw U.S. troops injured after their vehicle collided with a vehicle of the Russian forces. The Pentagon said that the incident demonstrated "deliberately provocative and aggressive behavior" by the Russians.

"We have advised the Russians that their behavior was dangerous and unacceptable," the Pentagon said in a statement. "We expect a return to routine and professional deconfliction in Syria and reserve the right to defend our forces vigorously whenever their safety is put at risk."

The senior U.S. intelligence official who spoke to Newsweek characterized Moscow's moves as posturing.


"The Russians are and will be aggressive, that's their definition of 'strength,' and at times it's as simple as not properly deconflicting routes, patrols, etc.," the official said.

The dust-up led to a call between the top military officials of the two countries. During the discussion, Russian Chief of the General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov told U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Army General Mark Milley that "the commanders of the International anti-terrorist coalition were notified in advance of the Russian military police convoy," according to remarks delivered by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov and shared by the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Gen. Gerasimov proceeded to blame the U.S. military for the collision between the forces of the two countries.


"Despite this, in violation of existing agreements, U.S. military personnel attempted to block a Russian patrol," he added. "In response to this, the military police of the Russian Federation Armed Forces took the necessary measures to prevent the incident and further fulfill their task."

READ MORE
Syria Says Trump 'Stealing' Its Oil, After U.S. Company Makes Deal to Drill

Moscow's argument is based on the premise that the U.S. does not have the right to be in Syria in the first place.

"We proceed from the fact that American military presence in Syria (both in At-Tanf and in the Northeast) is illegal," Nikolay Lakhonin, a spokesperson for the Russian embassy in Washington, told Newsweek. "Neither the U.N. Security Council, nor the government in Damascus gave their approval for the U.S. to deploy troops."

Not only deeming it illegitimate, Moscow argues the presence of U.S. troops in Syria has exacerbated the suffering of its population.

"Besides the clear violation of international law, American presence in Syria has an undeniable negative impact on the lives of Syrians," he added. "By occupying major oil and gas reserves in the Northeast, the U.S. deprives the people of Syria from its own vital resources."


Lakhonin also warned of "severe humanitarian effects" such as in the Syrian Democratic Forces-run Al-Hol camp in Al-Hasakah and Al-Rukban camp in U.S.-backed insurgent-held Al-Tanf. Both refugee sites have been regular subjects of desperate U.N. appeals, which are also directed toward civilians caught in bombardments by Russia and Syrian warplanes.

While Western powers still disregard Assad over war crime accusations, Russia sees his leadership as the only path forward.

"In our contacts with the U.S. officials," Lakhonin said, "we urge them to end this illegal occupation, and let the Syrian government restore control over its legally recognized territories."

A U.S. armored vehicle drives past an oil field in the countryside of Al-Qahtaniyah town in Syria's northeastern Al-Hasakah province near the Turkish border, on August 4. "In Syria, we're down to almost nothing, except we kept the oil," President Donald Trump said last month. "We did keep a small force, and we kept the oil."DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Damascus' ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Jaafari, also condemned U.S. policy in Syria. He too took note of Trump's public enthusiasm in tying U.S. military presence in Syria to oil, and challenged the legitimacy of this deployment in remarks delivered to the U.N. Security Council and sent to Newsweek by the Syrian U.N. mission.

"The U.S. occupation forces, in full view of the United Nations and the international community, took a new step to plunder Syria's natural resources, including Syrian oil and gas," Jaafari said, through a company he called "Crescent Delta Energy."


A similar name, "Delta Crescent Energy," appeared in U.S. outlets citing sources familiar with the arrangement. The State Department later confirmed that the U.S. government had facilitated such a license, though the Treasury Department declined to offer details to Newsweek as a matter of legal protocol.

Jaafari went on to accuse the U.S. of theft, saying that it was "stealing Syrian oil and depriving the Syrian state and Syrian people of the basic revenues necessary to improve the humanitarian situation, provide for livelihood needs and reconstruction."

The vehicle crash between U.S. and Russian forces in Syria is not an isolated incident among rival forces. In another confrontation about a week earlier, a tense situation reportedly turned deadly at a Syrian military checkpoint in the same northeastern province of Al-Hasakah. The Syrian government accused the U.S. of killing one of its soldiers and wounding others, while the U.S.-led coalition troops said they had returned fire after being shot at.


Meanwhile, the ebb and flow of various armed factions have taken a toll on the local population of northern and eastern Syria, which has become increasingly suspicious of Washington's true intentions.

Mohammed Hassan, a Syrian Kurdish fixer and journalist who has witnessed and recorded a number of U.S.-Russia encounters firsthand, said the two countries' diverging strategies were readily apparent.

"The strategy for the Russian forces is to be deployed in all of north and eastern Syria," Hassan told Newsweek. "They are planning to do this, but about the Americans, they are just interested in the oil and gas fields in areas like Rmelan, like Al-Hasakah, like Al-Shaddadi, like Al-Hol and like Deir Ezzor."


Hassan said that the United States Syria policy is all about the oil.

"We all know about the American withdrawal from Kobani, from Manbij, from Ayn Issa, from Ras al-Ayn, from Tel Abyad," he said. "We know there are not any oil and gas fields there."

Hassan recalls scenes last October of teary-eyed civilians throwing stones at departing U.S. military convoys, shouting as they feared an imminent Turkish invasion. The incursion was partially halted by successive U.S. and Russian deals with Turkey, but Hassan said the views of locals armed and unarmed toward the U.S. fundamentally shifted after this decision.

"All of us will remember how this relationship between the Americans and local civilians changed," Hassan told Newsweek. "I remember this moment until now. I cannot forget it ever."

U.S. Marines with 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment take part in a combat marksmanship range in Syria, August 21. There are roughly 500 U.S. troops deployed to Syrian Democratic Forces-controlled northerm and eastern Syria as well as a southern garrison in the opposition-held Al-Tanf region.SERGEANT BRENDAN CUSTER/13TH MARINE EXPEDITIONARY UNIT /U.S. MARINE CORPS

Russia has since hosted meetings with officials from Turkey, Iran, the Syrian government and its opposition, and the Syrian Democratic Forces' political wing. Each side is struggling to find common ground with the other in a conflict that will reach its deadly tenth anniversary next March.

That same month will mark two years since President Trump declared victory over ISIS, the primary goal for a mission that Washington has yet to officially replace. Still, U.S. troops linger in a country accounting for a mere .2 percent of the world's proven oil reserves and .12 percent of gas reserves.

"I think that American strategy here it's not clear enough, especially on the politics side," Hassan said. "Maybe on the military side, it's clear in some ways. I think the mission for the American forces here, it's successful, but the political mission, it's not successful."

Malcolm Nance, a former U.S. Navy intelligence and counter-terrorism specialist, put the situation in perspective, comparing it to another bloody quagmire for the Pentagon.

"A few special forces supported by artillery and armor units is very much akin to 2002 in Afghanistan," Nance said. "It is now a forgotten war."

Like Hassan, Nance saw a political game with little payoff.

"The oil fields that U.S. forces are now occupying do not produce anything that comes to North America, and has no value save either for Russia and the Assad regime or the SDF allies whom we have abandoned," he told Newsweek. "Trump is sitting on this field and risking U.S. lives to say 'we took their oil.'"

The irony, Nance says, is that while there are oil fields, little is actually produced.

"The oil remains in the ground, the fields are unworked," Nance said, "and U.S. soldiers are dying to fulfill a feeble man's pledge."

Climate change and the Russian economy
Russia is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs) but with modest Paris Accord targets it can actually increase CO2 emissions in the next few years and global warming will actually improve the economy in some colder regions.


By Ben Aris in Berlin September 3, 2020


Russia has signed off on the Paris Accord this year and has joined the global fight to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But it has only set itself modest targets and made modest progress. As one of biggest producers of emissions in the world it could do more, but with its economy so heavily geared to the production of oil and gas that change is going to be hard to effect.

A recent paper from Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition (BOFIT) called “Climate change and the Russian economy” has dug into the details, looking at the issues that Russia faces and how well it is doing.

“Russia often treats climate change as a subset of issues within the spheres of foreign or security policy. Awareness and recognition of climate-related risks have increased in recent years, but climate issues still garner low policy priority. Russia only gave official acceptance to the Paris agreement in October 2019, making it one of the last of the major carbon-emitter countries to do so,” wrote Heli Simola, the author of the BOFIT paper.

Russia introduced its first national climate doctrine in 2009 that was aspirational but very general. A framework to deal with climate change was laid out but no details were given.

In spring 2020, the Ministry of Economic Development presented a draft version of "The strategy of the long-term development of the Russian Federation with low level of GHG emissions until 2050" (hereafter, Low emission strategy 2050). The strategy aligns with Russia’s modest national targets under the Paris agreement.

The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has been more active in promoting climate issues. It joined the recently established international co-operation group, the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), and wants to stimulate public debate on climate issues through publications that discuss climate risks to the financial sector and aspects related to green financing.


The problem

The average global temperature is presently estimated to be increasing by about 0.2 °C per decade. In Russia, warming is much faster than the global rate, i.e. an estimated average of 0.45 °C per decade and 0.8 °C per decade in the Arctic region.

“Without mitigation measures, the IPCC foresees the increase in carbon emissions will raise the average global temperature by 3-4 °C compared to pre-industrial times by the end of this century. To avoid reaching a tipping point, climate experts want to constrain the increase in average global temperatures to a level 1.5-2 °C above the pre-industrial baseline. Most countries committed to this target in the framework of the 2015 Paris agreement,” Simola said.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that mankind will have to attain zero net carbon emissions globally by around 2070 to stay within the 2 °C limit. Any delays in emission cuts imply sharper and deeper cuts later as that deadline approaches.

Russia is a top CO2 emitter both in absolute and per capita terms. The country accounts for about 5% of global emissions.

As elsewhere, Russia’s GHG emissions are mainly caused by energy use. Half of energy-related emissions in Russia originate from energy-producing industries, 15% from transport and 10% from manufacturing and construction activity. Within the manufacturing sector, the metal and chemical branches account for the largest shares of emissions.


The silver lining to the collapse of the Soviet Union was that it came with a massive reduction in CO2 emissions as industry just stopped working.

The recovery of the economy since has led to an increase in CO2 emissions, but thanks to the investment and upgrading technology this has meant that the increase of CO2 emissions has been more moderate and remains below the previous peaks. This low base effect means Russia will have a much easier time of meeting the Paris Accord commitments than most other countries.

“Emissions have increased slightly in recent years, but still are only about half of the level of 1990, the base year for contributions laid down in the Paris agreement for Russia and most other countries. Russia gave formal acceptance to the Paris agreement last year and targets restricting its GHG emissions in 2030 to 70-75% of the level of 1990. Indeed, Russia’s low emission strategy 2050 allows for emissions to rise throughout the upcoming decade,” Simola said.

The risks

There are two kinds of risk. Physical risks arise from the climate-related hazards such as extreme weather or rising sea levels. Transitory risks arise from a society’s shift to a low-carbon economy and affect policy choices.

Crop destruction due to extreme weather events may even cause an increase in global food prices.

Extreme weather events also pose risks to the financial sector. Global weather-related disasters generated a record $320bn in economic damage in 2017. Insurance companies face distress from increased claims due to the higher frequency and severity of extreme weather events.

Russia has experienced an increase in the severity and frequency of extreme weather events in recent decades (Roshydromet, 2017). During the 2010s, for example, the total costs of severe extreme weather events are estimated to have amounted to around $7bn, mosty due to wild fires.

The heatwaves and droughts in 2010 and 2012 cut Russia’s grain production substantially and pushed up cereal prices on global markets.


Physical gradual changes

The findings from the literature on global warming suggest that an increase in the average temperature tends to have a negative effect on the economy. There is a threshold: if the average annual temperature of a region exceeds 15 °C, an increase in the average temperature has a negative effect on the economy.

A recent survey estimates that a 3 °C increase in the global average temperature leads to a 2-10% lower level of global GDP compared to a baseline with no global warming.

“With the exception of a handful of regions in southern Russia, the average annual temperature in Russian regions is well below the 15 °C threshold. Therefore, studies that report estimates for Russia separately tend to find that at least a moderate increase in the average annual temperature would have a slightly positive effect on [the] Russian economy,” Simola said.

The uncertainty related to these estimates is extremely high, especially with respect to longer time horizons and larger temperature rises.


Transitional risks

Transition risks refer to effects arising from the shift to a low-carbon economy and the policies to achieve that goal.

Mechanically, there are three ways to reduce carbon emissions:
reduce production,
reduce energy intensity of production, or
reduce carbon intensity of energy production.

As the latter two alternatives are less costly in economic terms, so governments tend to adopt policies that concentrate on improving overall energy efficiency and reducing the use of carbon-intensive energy sources such as coal and oil.

A key policy objective is to price carbon emissions in a way that reflects the long-term costs to society. The most widely proposed economically optimal policy solution is the carbon tax. In practice, however, it is extremely difficult to estimate the appropriate level of the tax, i.e. the social cost of carbon (SCC). Estimates vary hugely across models and even within models as assumptions change.

“Despite the difficulties related to the optimal tax design, several countries and regions have developed policy measures for pricing carbon, e.g. the EU’s emission trade system (ETS). There are also several other (primarily fiscal) policy measures geared to climate change mitigation. These include subsidies and credit guarantees to support low-carbon investment, direct public spending on e.g. infrastructure that supports the shift to a low-carbon economy and regulation restricting use of carbon and carbon-intensive products,” Simola said.

There are financial risks to these changes too as the shift to low-carbon economy means that carbon-intensive assets become stranded or obsolete, Analysts estimate there are $1-4 trillion worth of assets in danger of becoming stranded.

Countries remain conflicted, as changing their source of energy is a hugely expensive and complicated process. The Polish government in September said that it would put restrictions on where utilities get their power from in an effort to bolster the Polish coal-mining industry, a big employer.

On the flip side governments have been encouraging investment into green energy or building nuclear power stations as the most viable way to reduce emissions.

Earlier this year the Italian-owned Enel Russia utility company sold its biggest coal-fired power station that accounts for a third of its generation capacity, as the company is in the vanguard of Russian power companies trying to go green. It has instead switched all its investments into developing renewable energy sources.

Green investment in Ukraine has boomed as foreign investors rushed in to take advantage of generous green tariffs, but got caught out when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government abruptly tried to unilaterally cancel the deals earlier this year.

And as bne IntelliNews reported, Russia has become a world leader in the export of nuclear power technology, with some 40 projects under way in countries and worth around $130bn.

“[For] Russia, transition risks related to domestic policies seem quite modest for the near term. As noted above, Russia’s targets on curbing carbon emissions are unambitious and allow for emissions to rise at least through the end of this decade. Although legislation is under preparation, CO2 emissions remain unregulated by the state. Introduction of a carbon-pricing scheme is not on the agenda, but has been mentioned in the low emission strategy,” Simola said.

Btu Russia is in more danger of other countries’ efforts to add taxes to CO2 products. The EU’s new green strategy to make Europe carbon zero by 2050 could see the imposition of a tax on Russian imports of gas and oil and that will heavily affect Russia’s biggest export industry.

Russian exports are heavily focused on energy and other carbon-intensive sectors. Carbon-intensive products such as mineral fuels, metals and wood account for about 80% of Russian goods exports – and there has been little change in their composition over the past two decades.

“In 2018, the value of these exports was $360bn (22% of GDP). The literature also suggests little progress in diversification, complexity or quality improvements in Russian exports over recent decades. The average carbon intensity of Russian exports is many times higher in all industrial sectors compared to the EU average,” Simola said.

If these EU carbon taxes come into effect they will only further erode the competitiveness of Russian goods, which are amongst the most carbon intensive in the world.

According to the latest rating by the Russian journal Expert, oil, gas and coal companies accounted for a third of the combined net sales of Russia’s 400 largest companies in 2018, while metallurgical companies accounted for an additional share of almost 10%. Likewise, the banks are heavily exposed to carbon producers with a third (35%, RUB13 trillion) of the loan book of the biggest banks made up of loans to the oil and gas companies.

Russia has some easy gains it could employ to reduce its emissions. As bne IntelliNews reported in “the cost of carbon in Russia”, big gains have already been made in reducing emissions in the power and housing sectors simply by upgrading to more modern and efficient technology.

However, the energy intensity of production in Russia remains amongst the highest in the world for middle and high-income countries, and more could be done.

“The energy intensity of Russia’s most important products is 1.5 to 4 times higher than that of best-practice countries. There is much potential for energy-efficiency improvement in Russia, especially in its industrial and residential sectors,” Simola said. “Improving energy efficiency of power generation, industrial production and buildings is mentioned in Russia’s low emission strategy 2050 as the main means of restricting carbon emissions in the next decades. In 2018, investment in energy saving and energy efficiency amounted to a mere 0.2% of GDP.”

What change is happening in Russia at the moment is happening at the corporate level, where some big companies have started to invest heavily in literally cleaning up their act as part of their environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategy. What moved them was the state pension fund of Norway’s decision to ban pension funds from buying the equity of companies that are not ESG compliant. That led to massive outflows of investors at some Russian companies, goading them into action.

And in general the Kremlin also has always wanted to move away from its reliance on oil and gas as a means of reducing exposure to commodity price swings. Russia’s current national development goals for 2030 also include a target for increasing non-energy exports, but little progress has been made so far.

 Can Lebanon Rebuild Not Just Beirut, but Its Broken Political System

World Politics Review

Patricia Karam

 

The devastating explosion that tore through Beirut earlier this month exposed the elite corruption at the heart of Lebanese governance. The blast itself, which was almost certainly caused by a stockpile of highly explosive ammonium nitrate that had sat unguarded at Beirut’s port since 2013, may not have been deliberate. But it had everything to do with Lebanon’s history of conflict and the elderly politicians, many of them former warlords, who still hold power in its dysfunctional, sectarian and clientelist political system. With the public mobilizing against the country’s kleptocracy, the survival of the status quo is in question. But whether a reformist alternative can take its place remains uncertain.

Since the 1970s, Lebanon’s political elites have eschewed the hard work of governing in favor of plundering the country’s resources and concentrating power among themselves. To date, as much as $100 billion have been squandered from the country’s banking system in corrupt deals. Now, with more than 200 people dead from the blast and thousands more injured and displaced, Lebanon’s leaders are once again determined to escape blame for a disaster of their own making by rejecting an international investigation into its causes and culprits.

Lebanon had already been seething before the explosion. In last year’s so-called “October Revolution,” a series of protests erupted over a new tax on the popular messaging service WhatsApp, in a sign of the increasing popular frustration with the old order. At the forefront of this uprising was a new generation of activists who recognized the serious problems facing Lebanese society and the failure of the political class to address them in any meaningful way. The fact that the recent catastrophe was caused by negligence has only sharpened their resolve for an alternative.

Demands to overhaul the entire governing system have also become synonymous with calls to disarm Hezbollah, the Shiite militia and political party that has seized on the state’s weakness to become a central player in Lebanon’s kleptocracy. Despite high rates of disaffection with the political establishment, the most recent legislative election in 2018—after nine years of political paralysis—yielded a Parliament dominated by incumbents from traditional parties, with more than 70 of the total 128 seats going to Hezbollah and its allies. This came as a surprise to many reformists who had counted on higher youth participation in politics to bring genuine change.

This shows that transforming Lebanon’s political culture will not be easy. Enacting needed reforms involves overhauling a system of perverse incentives that perpetuate kleptocratic practices, such as the unchecked and opaque network of patronage that controls appointments to public offices. Lebanon’s citizens feel the injurious impacts in myriad ways. In 2015, for example, mountains of uncollected trash built up in the streets as elites wrestled over lucrative waste management contracts. Still, the recent protests have had a minimal impact on the quality of governance, which attests to the need for more structured policy advocacy that not only mobilizes a wide spectrum of the Lebanese population, but also recruits reformist candidates and influences the platforms of political parties.

 But that is a long-term project. For now, the next phase will likely involve the appointment of a new technocratic government that will not be very different from the last one, led by Prime Minister Hassan Diab, which resigned after the explosion. Without altering the rules of the game, whoever takes Diab’s place will probably agree to concessions demanded by the International Monetary Fund for the bailout package required to extend a short-term lifeline for Lebanon’s economy, and perhaps even to early elections. Yet neither of these measures are sufficient to save Lebanon from further disintegration, nor are radical changes likely to be secured by the protest movement. And despite the popular outrage at Hezbollah, it remains the only party in Lebanon that is both part of the system and above it. Its military power is superior to that of the Lebanese Armed Forces, and if threatened, Hezbollah will resort to violence.

The disastrous state of the economy also presents serious challenges to political reform. For decades, the government kept its currency pegged to the dollar at a rate of 1,500 Lebanese pounds. That system amounted to a multi-billion-dollar pyramid scheme, subsidizing imports at the expense of domestic industries, while large businesses were allowed to qualify for loans in dollars at low rates. Deposits held in Lebanese pounds earned high interest, helping to attract remittances.

But the system came to its breaking point last fall, when the central bank ran perilously low on dollars and cut back on conversions, causing the currency peg to effectively implode. The Lebanese pound sharply depreciated; it is currently trading on the black market at a rate of around 7,000 to 7,500 per dollar. Monthly inflation reached 112 percent in July, as food prices soar and imports are scarce. The banking sector no longer functions, and the economy is expected to contract this year by 25 percent. Most importantly, Lebanon’s debt, at a staggering 170 percent of GDP, exceeds $92 billion. The millions pledged in international aid are nowhere close to meeting Lebanon’s needs.

For this reason, any financial rescue plan must be tied to concrete steps to enhance transparency and governance, introduce financial stability and clamp down on institutionalized corruption. As the international community sends emergency aid to rebuild following the explosion, it should ensure that its benefits are equally distributed, and that new divisions do not emerge among communities affected by the disaster. Local initiatives need to be strengthened as drivers of civic empowerment.

However, while the international community has an important role to play in encouraging reform, the Lebanese themselves must ultimately change their political culture. Given the resilience of the existing system and the limitations on what protests can achieve, the opposition needs to play the long game, and focus on using future elections as opportunities for new, reformist politicians to gain more political power. This includes building organizational structures and get-out-the-vote apparatuses to compete with established sectarian groups who rely on deep-seated clientelist networks for support. As part of this strategy, the positive momentum and energy of citizen-led responses to the explosion offer an opportunity. New and emerging networks of solidarity are mobilizing in response to the crisis, highlighting a sharp contrast with the government’s absenteeism.

Lebanon needs a new social compact grounded in democratic principles of accountability, fair play and the rule of law. The Lebanese need to be able to imagine a sovereign and prosperous future that rejects the scourges of sectarianism, corruption, and dependency. Despite the multiple crises it has suffered over the past year, the country is endowed with a wellspring of untapped potential, including a large pool of skilled workers who are eager to put their talents to use. Now, it is up to the Lebanese—with support from the international community—to undertake the daunting task of rebuilding not just the rubble-strewn streets of Beirut, but the crumbling foundations of their polity.

Navalny case poisons ties between Germany, Russia
BY DEBORAH COLE (AFP) 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel faced mounting pressure Thursday to toughen her ambivalent stance toward Russia following her announcement that Berlin has "unequivocal" proof that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a deadly nerve agent.

The Navalny case is only the latest in what Berlin has seen as a series of bitter provocations by Russian President Vladimir Putin that have damaged ties and called future cooperation into question.

But German politicians and media said a line had been crossed with the use on Navalny of military-grade Novichok, a poison first developed by the Soviet Union towards the end of the Cold War.

Merkel was confronted with insistent calls in particular to abandon the controversial German-Russian energy project Nord Stream 2, a multi-billion-euro gas pipeline nearing completion that has drawn the ire of US and European partners alike.

"Diplomatic rituals are no longer enough," the head of the German parliament's foreign affairs committee, Norbert Roettgen, tweeted.

"After the poisoning of Navalny we need a strong European answer which Putin understands: The EU should jointly decide to stop Nord Stream 2," said Roettgen, a candidate to be the next leader of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party.

The top-selling Bild daily issued a full-throated appeal to abandon the pipeline, saying that pursuing it was "tantamount to us financing Putin's next Novichok attack".

- 'Strategic weapon' -

Bild slammed Merkel for comments last week that Nord Stream 2 should be judged independently from Moscow's actions.

"Vladimir Putin views the gas pipeline as an important strategic weapon against Europe and as a vital source of funding for his war against his own people," it said.

Navalny fell ill after boarding a plane in Siberia last month, with aides saying they suspect he drank a cup of spiked tea at the airport.

He was initially treated in a local Russian hospital, where doctors said they were unable to find any toxic substances in his blood, before he was flown to Berlin for specialised treatment on August 22.

Navalny's poisoning comes a year after a daylight murder of a former Chechen rebel commander in a Berlin park, which German prosecutors believe was ordered by Russia.

Merkel had also revealed in May that Russia had targeted her in hacking attacks, saying she had concrete proof of the "outrageous" spying attempts.

Moscow has denied involvement in the string of allegations, with the Kremlin saying Thursday "there is no reason to accuse the Russian state" over Navalny's poisoning.

Russia has long been a divisive issue in German politics, and a deterioration in transatlantic ties under US President Donald Trump had revived sentiment that Berlin couldn't afford to alienate Moscow.

Wolfgang Ischinger, the head of the Munich Security Conference, often a forum for airing Russian-Western tensions, warned against cutting ties too abruptly.

"We can't put up a wall between us and Russia," he told public broadcaster ARD.

- 'Dark clouds' -

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas of the Social Democrats, junior partners in Merkel's government and typically strong advocates of maintaining close ties with Russia, said Berlin would now consult with EU and NATO allies about an "appropriate reaction" to the Navalny case.

In a speech earlier this week in Paris, Maas acknowledged that while "constructive ties" remained essential, "dark clouds" now hung over relations between the EU and Russia.

ARD commentator Michael Strempel noted that Merkel's statement Wednesday that "Navalny was meant to be silenced and I condemn this in the strongest possible terms" marked an unprecedented hardening of her tone.

"I have never seen the chancellor so determined on foreign policy," Strempel said. "Nor have I ever experienced her this critical and demanding of Russia."

Now Merkel's credibility is on the line, he said, calling for new economic and political sanctions against Moscow.

The EU has had sanctions targeting whole sectors of the Russian economy in place since 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea.

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said the time had come to go further.

"A European response is vital, but if the usual suspects refuse to play ball then Germany will have to react bilaterally, too. We are talking about attempted murder after all."