Russian ships move to resume Baltic pipeline construction

December 05, 2020

MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian pipe-laying ship sailed into position Saturday to resume construction of a German-Russian gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea that the United States has vehemently opposed. The Akademik Cherskiy vessel reached the area off the coast of Poland where a section of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline remains uncompleted, according to ship monitoring data. Another Russian pipe-laying ship, Fortuna, sailed off from the German port of Wismar, apparently heading to a different location where another pipeline section is to be built.

The maneuvers followed Russia pledging to complete the pipeline despite the threat of U.S. sanctions. Russia's state-controlled natural gas company Gazprom has moved to finish construction of the multibillion Baltic Sea pipeline with its own resources after a Swiss company doing the building work at sea opted out of the project a year ago under the threat of U.S. sanctions.

Gazprom had to send the Akademik Cherskiy on a long voyage from the port of Nakhodka on Russia's Pacific coast to the Baltics. The vessel has been moving between various Baltic ports since May as the Nord Stream 2 construction plans were thrown into uncertainty by the sanctions threat.

The U.S. has argued that the Nord Stream 2 would erode European energy security at a time when Russia-West relations have sank to post-Cold War lows due to crises such as Moscow's 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimea.

The Kremlin has countered by accusing Washington of trying to derail the project in a bid to force European customers to purchase U.S. liquefied natural gas instead of the cheaper Russian natural gas.

Moscow opens dozens of coronavirus vaccination centers

December 05, 2020

MOSCOW (AP) — Thousands of doctors, teachers and others in high-risk groups have signed up for COVID-19 vaccinations in Moscow starting Saturday, a precursor to a sweeping Russia-wide immunization effort.

The vaccinations come three days after President Vladimir Putin ordered the launch of a “large-scale” COVID-19 immunization campaign even though a Russian-designed vaccine has yet to complete the advanced studies needed to ensure its effectiveness and safety in line with established scientific protocols.

The Russian leader said Wednesday that more than 2 million doses of the Sputnik V jab will be available in the next few days, allowing authorities to offer jabs to medical workers and teachers across the country starting late next week.

Moscow, which currently accounts for about a quarter of the country's new daily infections, moved ahead of the curve, opening 70 vaccination facilities on Saturday. Doctors, teachers and municipal workers were invited to book a time to receive a jab, and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that about 5,000 signed up in a few hours after the system began operating on Friday.

Russia boasted that Sputnik V was the world’s “first registered COVID-19 vaccine” after the government gave it regulatory approval in early August. The move drew criticism from international experts, who pointed out that the vaccine had only been tested on several dozen people at the time.

Putin has shrugged off doubts about it, saying in August that one of his daughters was among the early vaccine recipients. Over the past months, Sputnik V has been offered to medical workers and teachers even as it was still in the middle of advanced trials. Several top officials said they also have received the jabs, and earlier this week the Russian military began vaccinating crews of navy ships scheduled to depart on a mission.

Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said Wednesday that more than 100,000 people in Russia already have received the shots. The free vaccine is offered to people aged 18 to 60 who don’t suffer from chronic illnesses and aren’t pregnant or breastfeeding.

The two-shot Sputnik V was developed by the Moscow-based Gamaleya Institute. An advanced study among 40,000 volunteers was announced two weeks after the vaccine received government approval and that is still ongoing.

Last month, developers of the vaccine said interim analysis of trial data showed it was 91.4% effective. The conclusion was based on 39 infections among 18,794 study participants that received both doses of either the vaccine or a placebo, which is a much lower number of infections than Western drugmakers have looked at when assessing the effectiveness of their vaccines. Two other Russia-designed vaccines are also undergoing tests.

On Wednesday, Britain became the first country in the West to authorize the use of a vaccine against the coronavirus developed by U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech. Russia has been swept with a resurgence of the outbreak this fall, with numbers of new infections exceeding the levels recorded early in the pandemic, but the authorities so far have refrained from a tight lockdown imposed in the spring.

On Saturday, Russia reported a new record high of daily infections at 28,782, including 7,993 in Moscow. The government task force has recorded a total of 42,684 virus-related deaths since the start of the outbreak.

Russia’s total of over 2.4 million confirmed cases is currently the fourth-largest caseload in the world behind the United States, India and Brazil.

Russia's health system under strain as the virus surges back

November 22, 2020

MOSCOW (AP) — When Yekaterina Kobzeva, a nurse at a preschool in Russia’s Ural Mountains, began having trouble breathing, she called an ambulance. It was four days before she managed to find a free hospital bed.

The ambulance first took her to get a scan — which showed damage from pneumonia to 50% of her lungs, an indication she had coronavirus. The paramedics then drove her around the city of Perm and its surroundings for hours as seven hospitals, one by one, turned her down, saying they didn’t have any beds available. At dawn, she went home.

The journey took her through “circles of hell,” Kobzeva, 60, recalled in an interview with The Associated Press by phone from a hospital, where doctors confirmed she had the virus. She was only admitted there days after her first attempt — and after her story made local headlines.

Russia’s health care system, vast yet underfunded, has been under significant strains in recent weeks, as the pandemic surges again and daily infections and virus death regularly break records. Across the country, 81% of hospital beds that have been set aside for coronavirus patients were full as of Wednesday. Three times last week, the Russian government reported a record number of daily deaths, and the number of daily new infections per 100,000 people has more than doubled since Oct. 1, from 6 to over 15. Overall, Russia has recorded over 2 million cases and over 35,000 deaths, but experts say all numbers worldwide understate the true toll of the pandemic.

Reports in Russian media have painted a bleak picture in recent weeks. Hospital corridors are filled with patients on gurneys and even the floor. Bodies in black plastic bags were seen piling up on the floors of a morgue. Long lines of ambulances wait at hospitals while pharmacies put up signs listing the drugs they no longer have in stock.

Russian authorities have acknowledged problems in the health system. President Vladimir Putin even urged regional officials not to paper over the situation, saying that “feigning the impression that everything is perfectly normal is absolutely unacceptable.”

Yet Russian authorities continue to insist there's no need for a nationwide lockdown or widespread closures of businesses, instead urging people to observe the measures ordered by regional governments.

But in most regions, those measures don’t go beyond mask mandates, limiting the hours of bars and restaurants, ordering the elderly to self-isolate, forbidding mass public events and requiring employers to have some staff work from home. Health experts say the moves are clearly not enough.

Paramedic Dmitry Seryogin says Kobzeva's experience is not unusual. In the southwestern Oryol region where he works, patients can wait for up to 12 hours for an ambulance and then might spend five more in it, looking for a hospital bed. Those who happen to arrive when others are being discharged get lucky, he told the AP, but the rest are sent home.

While the Perm region, where Kobzeva sought treatment, was among the top 20 of more than 80 Russian regions in terms of daily new infections last week, Oryol ranked somewhere in the middle. Still, 95% of hospital beds slated for coronavirus patients there were full last week, reflecting the pressure on a system crippled by widely criticized reforms that sought to cut state spending.

“We’re witnessing simply a collapse of the health care system in the region,” Seryogin said. “It is absolutely not coping.” A partial six-week coronavirus lockdown in March only added to long-brewing public frustrations over Russia's already weakened economy. Soon after that, Putin delegated the powers to impose virus-related restrictions to regional governors. Critics saw the move as an effort to inoculate himself from any more fallout over the pandemic.

During the fall resurgence of the virus, the Kremlin has consistently pointed fingers at regional governors. “Colleagues, you have received broad powers for implementing anti-pandemic measures. And nobody has relieved you of personal responsibility for the adopted measures — I really do hope that they were adopted on time,” Putin reminded the governors last week.

But just like the Kremlin, governments in the vast majority of Russian regions have been loath to shut businesses or impose lockdowns. The only exception has been the Siberian republic of Buryatia, where last week the region’s governor ordered cafes, restaurants, bars, malls, cinemas, beauty parlors and saunas to shut down for two weeks.

Regional governors find themselves in an impossible position, explained political analyst Abbas Gallyamov. They face public frustration if they don’t impose tough restrictions and the outbreak continues to rage, and they face it if they do because they don’t have the funds to ease the pain of closures.

“All the finances have been long centralized, and the regions don’t have spare money,” Gallyamov said. “So de jure, a governor’s hands are untied, but de facto they’re still tied because they don’t have the money to impose a lockdown and compensate people for their financial losses.”

In addition, Putin has so thoroughly centralized power that regional governors are not used to acting independently, noted Judy Twigg, a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, specializing in global health.

In the meantime, many Russian regions are buckling under the growing tide of patients. In Buryatia, the Siberian republic that has imposed the country's strictest measures, Dr. Tatyana Symbelova told the AP that as the number of patients rose, her hospital kept adding beds — “in the corridor, in the outpatient ward next door” — but “the situation, still, grew worse and worse.”

Symbelova, the chief doctor at Republican Infectious Disease Hospital in Ulan-Ude, and her colleagues are now taking patients whose condition was “severe or of moderate severity” and turning down those with milder cases. A new coronavirus ward with 180 beds opened last week in the city, and she hopes that and the shutdown will help.

But in the meantime, she is worried. “Such risks we're taking! Telling patients (with milder cases) they can go and treat themselves at home, when they may come in three days later with their lips blue," Symbelova said. "We’re very seriously choking.”

Moscow office of Navalny's organization searched during raid

November 05, 2020

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian bailiffs raided the offices of opposition leader Alexei Navalny's organization Thursday while the politician is still recovering in Germany from a nearly fatal poisoning. Navalny's associates linked the move to a court ruling that obliged his Anti-Corruption Foundation to pay damages to a school catering company reportedly linked to a tycoon with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Navalny, an anti-corruption investigator and Putin’s most visible and determined opponent, fell ill on Aug. 20 during a domestic flight in Russia and was flown to Germany two days later. He is still recovering there.

Tests conducted at labs designated by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed that the poison used on Navalny was a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent. Navalny asserted that his poisoning only could have been ordered by spymasters who wouldn’t have made such decisions without Putin’s personal involvement - claims the Kremlin has vehemently rejected.

The Russian hospital that first treated Navalny said it found no evidence he was poisoned. Russian authorities have said they conducted a preliminary investigation but argued that they needed proof of poisoning to launch a full-fledged criminal inquiry and lamented Germany's refusal to share the materials.

Russia FM: 2,000 Mideast militants fight in Nagorno-Karabakh

November 03, 2020

YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) — Russia's top diplomat said Tuesday that about 2,000 fighters from the Middle East have joined the fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, the worst outbreak of hostilities in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in more than a quarter-century.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's statement came as the warring parties traded accusations over new attacks in the region. “We are certainly worried about the internationalization of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the involvement of militants from the Middle East,” Lavrov said in an interview with the Russian business daily Kommersant. “We have repeatedly asked foreign players to use their potential to stop the transfer of militants, whose number in the conflict zone is approaching 2,000.”

Lavrov added that Russian President Vladimir Putin raised the issue in last week's phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Nagorno-Karabakh lies within Azerbaijan but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a war there ended in 1994. The latest outburst of hostilities began Sept. 27 and has left hundreds — perhaps thousands — dead, marking the worst escalation of fighting since the war’s end.

Azerbaijan has relied on strong support from its ally Turkey, which has trained Azerbaijani military and provided it with strike drones and long-range rocket systems. Armenian officials accuse Turkey of being directly involved in the conflict and sending mercenaries from Syria to fight on Azerbaijan’s side.

Turkey has denied deploying combatants to the region, but a Syrian war monitor and Syria-based opposition activists have confirmed that Turkey has sent hundreds of Syrian opposition fighters to fight in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The heavy fighting involving heavy artillery, rockets and drones has raged despite repeated international attempts to end hostilities. A U.S.-brokered truce frayed immediately after it took effect last week, just like two previous cease-fires negotiated by Russia, and the latest pledge by Armenia and Azerbaijan not to target residential areas was broken hours after it was made Friday. The warring sides have repeatedly blamed each other for violations.

Artillery fire hit the region's capital Stepanakert on Tuesday night and Nagorno-Karabakh emergencies ministry also said three rockets hit the strategically key city of Shushi. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has insisted that Azerbaijan has the right to reclaim its territory by force after three decades of fruitless international mediation. He said that Armenia must pledge to withdraw from Nagorno-Karabakh as a condition for a lasting truce.

Azerbaijani troops have reclaimed control of several regions on the fringes of Nagorno-Karabakh and pressed their offensive into the separatist territory from the south, trying to cut a link between the separatist territory and Armenia.

Lavrov said that Russia was continuing to push for hostilities to end, noting that it's working on a set of verification measures needed to achieve a lasting cease-fire, including the possible deployment of international observers under the aegis of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Associated Press writers Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow, and Aida Sultanova in London, contributed to this report.

Russian strikes kill dozens of Turkey-backed rebels in Syria's Idlib

Oct 26, 2020

Dozens of rebel fighters are dead following suspected Russian airstrikes on a training camp in northwest Syria Monday, activists and war monitors said.

As many as 100 others were reportedly injured when warplanes targeted a training base run by Failaq al-Sham, one of the main rebel groups backed by Turkey in the country’s civil war.

Failaq al-Sham operates in Idlib province, one of the last pockets of territory still in the hands of the opposition. Its training camp in the town of Kafr Takharim is about six miles (10 kilometers) from the Turkish border.

Capt. Naji Mustafa, a spokesperson for an umbrella group of Turkey-backed fighters known as the National Liberation Front, condemned what he called a Russian “provocation.”

“The raid is a clear and ongoing violation" of the truce agreed to by Russia, he told Al-Monitor in a statement on Monday, warning the rebels will take “revenge for our martyrs.”

The attack is among the deadliest since a cease-fire came into force last March, bringing an end to an 11-month government offensive on the region that killed more than 1,600 civilians and displaced over 1 million, according to the United Nations. Rights groups accused the regime and its main ally, Russia, of carrying out disproportionate and deliberate attacks against civilians in an effort to retake the rebel territory.

The March 5 truce was brokered by Moscow and Ankara, which back opposing sides in Syria's civil war. The deal managed to stem the flow of displaced civilians rushing to Turkey’s doorstep, but at the same time locked in the territorial gains made by Syrian government forces during their brutal offensive.

The attack on Failaq al-Sham comes on the heels of an American drone strike last week that targeted a meeting of suspected al-Qaeda senior leaders in Idlib.  The northwest enclave is home to a number of moderate rebel groups but is dominated by the hard-line Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. The al-Qaeda-linked group Hurras al-Deen also holds sway in the region.

Source: al-Monitor.

Link: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/10/idlib-russia-airstrike-failaq-al-sham-rebels-syria-turkey.html.

Police detain protesters in Russian city of Khabarovsk

October 10, 2020

MOSCOW (AP) — Police in a far eastern Russian city detained several dozen protesters on Saturday, the first such crackdown since rallies against the arrest of the provincial governor started three months ago.

Khabarovsk Gov. Sergei Furgal was arrested on July 9 on suspicion of involvement in murders and taken to jail in Moscow. Furgal, a former businessman, denied the charges, which his supporters say are a vendetta by his rivals.

Since his arrest thousands of demonstrators have regularly rallied in Khabarovsk, a city of 600,000 near the border with China, with attendance peaking on weekends. They protested Furgal's jailing and demanded that his trial is held in the city.

The protests are a strong challenge to the Russian government, which usually doesn't hesitate to disperse unsanctioned demonstrations. The authorities' reluctance to use force appeared to reflect concerns of provoking even wider discontent as well as hopes that the demonstrations will eventually fizzle.

But the regular demonstrations in Khabarovsk have continued, and their participants have increasingly adopted a broader agenda challenging President Vladimir Putin's rule. On Saturday, police didn’t intervene while thousands of protesters marched across the city, but later detained about 30 demonstrators when they set up tents on Khabarovsk’s central square.

For the Russian authorities, any such encampments are a reminder of massive protests that toppled Ukraine’s former Moscow’s friendly leader in 2014. The Kremlin responded by annexing Ukraine’s Crimea and supporting a separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine, the actions that triggered Western sanctions.

As the evening fell Saturday, several hundred protesters again gathered on Khabarovsk’s central square. Police warned them that the demonstration wasn’t authorized and they could be dispersed but didn’t immediately move to break up the rally.