Russia ties deepening over energy, security (Japan)

Japan Times ^ | Hiroki Sugita

[cunning_fish]

Political links boosted amid China moves, need for Sakhalin's fuels

Just 160 km from the northern tip of Hokkaido, Sakhalin is a desolate island that has long been ignored by world powers. Remnants of Japanese shrines are reminders that the island was governed by Imperial Japan until the end of World War II.

Now this lonely island, with huge reserves of oil and natural gas, is emerging as a strategic connection between Cold War-era foes Japan and Russia, making them close partners and even potential allies, with their leaders having met four times last year and discussed increased Russian energy exports to Japan.

“Although most Japanese don’t know it, Russia can rescue Japan from its energy quagmire. Russia has huge resources and her oil and gas prospects in Sakhalin and other parts of eastern Russia are geographically close to Japan,” said Kazuhiko Fuji, chief research fellow at the Institute for International Policy Studies.

Since the Fukushima nuclear disaster started on March 11, 2011, Japan has been increasing its oil and gas imports to make up for energy losses spawned by the shutdown of all its nuclear power stations.

Russia has its own motives for boosting natural gas exports to Japan. Despite having the largest gas reserves in the world, the country is in danger of losing markets in Europe and Asia. Shale gas produced in North America is sold internationally at a lower price, squeezing out Russian gas....

[Ronin]

Not quite as simple as this makes it seem. Mitsui has been working with Russian partners on and off in Sakhalin Island since the Mid-90s but Russians are notoriously hard to deal with and like to change bargains to their advantage whenever the mood suits them.

[ETL]

cunning_fish, like some others on here, is a diehard defender of the Russians. He and they believe KGB Putin is a pretty good guy. Someone we can and should trust. He even defends them as a key supporter of Iran.

[cunning_fish]

I’m not a fan of Putin and I’m fully aware of his background. The problem is ‘bad’ or ‘good guy’ aren’t a critical specifications of a national leader. Same about trustworthyness in global politics.

[thackney]

http://www.sakhalinenergy.ru/en/index.wbp

[bert]

the Sakhalin refinery

[bert]

There are some who do not dwell in the long gone past that can see that change is the only constant.

In this case, the change is business, trade,related. Trade makes the world go round

It is Putin’s task to renew the vigor to a near dear Russia

[ETL]

Then why are you always coming to his defense? Why are you always minimizing or dismissing the things he has done or is doing.

[ETL]

Wow, you’re even worse than cunning_fish. I can’t understand how you guys are allowed to stay on here.

[bert]

Being conservative does not automatically mean one must be opposed to being part of the world.

A very tight Amerocentric view prevents actually seeing what is in process outside our boundaries. The progress on
Sakalin is pretty remarkable.

[cunning_fish]

Not always. But what are your REALISTIC alternatives to a Russian foreign policy in the Middle East and Pacific?
Do you like Obummer’s Al-Qaeda takeover and feeding a Chinese crocodile in hope of being eaten last?

[ETL]

There are some who do not dwell in the long gone past that can see that change is the only constant.

Sounds to me like your boy Putin enjoys 'dwelling in the past' too.

"Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor as much as the late British lord protector, a 'cunning fellow' who "played a very ambiguous role in Britain’s history."

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131219/185734707/Putin-Says-Stalin-No-Worse-Than-Cunning-Oliver-Cromwell.html

[ETL]

(KGB) Putin thinks the "COLLAPSE" of the communist Soviet Union was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century"! In other words, the mass murdering communist Soviet Union was just about the best thing that happened for the world in the 20th Century (according to him).

"the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...
"World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'
http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html
____________________________________________________

"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmY0MjI1MDgyYjg1M2UwNDMzMTk2Mjk5YTk0ZTdlMWE=

[ETL]

From a 2007 article titled "Putin's Russia"...

"KGB influence 'soars under Putin,' " blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents."

In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin."

The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, expressed shock at her own findings. "I was very shocked when I looked at the boards of major companies and realized there were lots of people who had completely unknown names, people who were not public but who were definitely, obvious siloviki," she told Reuters.

Other supposed experts — in Russia and the West — have also expressed surprise and alarm at the apparent resurrection of the dreaded Soviet secret police. After all, for the past decade and a half these same experts have been pointing to the alleged demise of the KGB as the primary evidence supporting their claim that communism is dead.

From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian security apparatus Cheka (and its later permutations: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) had been the "sword and shield" of the communist world revolution.

"We stand for organized terror," declared Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka for Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, Dzerzhinsky launched the campaign of arrests and executions known as the Red Terror. Krasnaya Gazeta, the Bolshevik newspaper, expressed the Chekist credo when it reported approvingly in 1918 of the terror campaign: "We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood."

Unflinching cruelty and merciless, bloody terror have been the trademark of the communist secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB. Obviously, the demise of such an organization would be cause for much rejoicing. Hence, when the KGB was ordered dissolved and its chairman, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, was arrested in 1991 after attempting to overthrow "liberal reformer" Mikhail Gorbachev in the failed "August Coup," many people in the West were only too willing to pop the champagne corks and start celebrating our supposed victory over the Evil Empire.

But, as Mikhail Leontiyev, commentator for Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, recently noted, repeating a phrase popular among the siloviki: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over." And stumbling around in their post-inebriation haze, many of these Americans have only recently begun noticing that they had prematurely written the KGB's epitaph, even as it was arising vampire-like from the coffin.

However, there is really no excuse for Olga Kryshtanovskaya or any of her American counterparts to be stunned by the current siloviki dominance in Putin's Russia. For nearly a decade, even before he became Russia's "president," THE NEW AMERICAN has been reporting on Putin's KGB pedigree and his steady implementation of a long-range Soviet deception strategy, including the public rehabilitation and refortifying of the KGB-FSB. ..." (continues at link)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia

[cunning_fish]

>>>”the greatest geopolitic catastrophe of the [20th] century”<<<

Wasn’t it? I love how is this frase always picked out of context. He wasn’t crying about communism saying it for sure.
For some weird reason a collapse of communism in Soviet Union was the beginning of post-American world as well.

[ETL]

Wasn’t it?

Let me get this straight. You're agreeing with Putin that the 'collapse' of the mass murdering communist Soviet Union was the WORST thing that happened in the 20th Century? An estimated 20 MILLION were killed under the Soviets.

[ETL]

Russia, under Putin, stands behind Iran, Syria, North Korea, various Marxist/Socialist dictatorships throughout Latin America, including Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba, and the ChiComs. They also supported Saddam Hussein.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Memo to Nippon:

Beware the Bear's embrace.

[cunning_fish]

>>>Let me get this straight. You’re agreeing with Putin that the ‘collapse’ of the mass murdering communist Soviet Union was the WORST thing that happened in the 20th Century? An estimated 20 MILLION were killed under the Soviets<<<

Do you understanda difference between ‘worst thing ever’ and ‘worst geopolitical catastrophe’?

His vision is well beyond yours for sure and he makes perfect sense from American perspective in the first place.

The collapse of ‘Evil Empire’ has effectively ended an American century reshaping global affairs more heavily than WWII, which actually made US a leading global power at the time.
In that sense US has lost it’s mission as a center of the free world.

[ETL]

The collapse of 'Evil Empire' has effectively ended an American century reshaping global affairs more heavily than WWII, which actually made US a leading global power at the time. In that sense US has lost its mission as a center of the free world.

So Putin considers the collapse of the Soviet Union a catastrophe because it weakened America's position in the world?