- By Mike Eckel
Question about arms control, specifically about the treaty that is currently restraining the size of the world's two largest nuclear arsenals: the United States and Russia.
New START is due to expire in 2021, unless the two sides agree to extend the agreement.
The Kremlin has signaled for some months now that it's interested in extending. President Donald Trump's administration has given mixed signals. There's a vocal bloc of Republicans who dislike arms control treaties as a rule of thumb.
And there are others who distrust Russia, because of its development and deploying of a missile that, U.S. officials say, violates another treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty.
Putin says Russia is ready to extend the New START.
"If there's no New START Treaty, then there will be nothing in the world to contain an arms race, and that's bad," he says.
Putin on the founding father of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin:
"Lenin was not a statesman, but I think mostly a revolutionary. When creating the Soviet Union, he ignored the 1,000-year-long historical state order of Russia and offered not even a federation, but a confederation making administrative units based on ethnic groups residing there and giving to such units a right to break away from the country. And the boundaries were drawn not necessarily in just way.... Through that many painful points of contention were created, including issues inside the Russian Federation... There are 2,000 such points and if they reemerged it would be a huge problem.... As for Lenin's body in the mausoleum, it is too early to talk about [its possible removal], as there are so many people in our country for whom his name remains important."
Our correspondent on the scene, Matthew Luxmoore, writes that "Putin's comments on Lenin echo the counter-revolutionary discourse he has advanced since 2014, when Russia began backing strongmen it considers legitimate leaders of their countries in the face of alleged U.S. attempts at regime change."
That, Luxmoore says, "shifted the official line on Russia’s history in a way that portrays any revolution or uprising there as dangerous and wrong. Putin reiterated that today."
- By Mike Eckel
Interestingly, Putin is asked a question about the impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump.
(Just a few hours earlier, in Washington, the U.S. House of Representatives voted, along party lines, to impeach Trump. The charges relate to allegations that Trump sought to withhold military aid to Ukraine, as a way to force Ukraine's president to investigate one of Trump's political rivals).
Putin said he thought the allegations against Trump were far-fetched/dreamed up by Democrats, and he predicted it would hurt Democrats in the 2020 election. He also predicted that the Republican-controlled Senate would likely acquit Trump (not a bold prediction)
Also interesting is that the question was asked not by a journalist, but by Dmitri Simes, who heads the organization that used to be known as the Nixon Center, but is now known as the Center for the National Interest.
From RFE/RL's News Desk:
Russian President Vladimir Putin has addressed global warming as well as the banning of Russian athletes from the Olympics and other sporting events at his annual marathon news conference.
Fielding questions from Russian and foreign journalists in Moscow on December 19, Putin said Russia is warming more than twice as fast as the global average. He said that global warming could threaten Russian Arctic cities and towns built on permafrost. Putin said that Russia has abided by the Paris agreement intended to slow down global warming.
Regarding the banning of Russian athletes from the Olympics and other international sports event for four years, Putin said the the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) had acted unfairly. Putin said any punishment of Russian athletes should have been meted out individually and not collectively.
Putin says early Soviet leaders made a mistake in "tying the country's future with the future of the party."
"I worked for a long time in the intelligence services of a very politicized organization, the Soviet KGB. And I had my own opinions about our leaders and so on. But now, with my current experience, I understand that besides political factors there are also geopolitical ones, which weren't considered at all when the Soviet Union was created. Everything was very politicized-- the party started to break up and the country fell apart after it. This was an absolutely fundamental flaw in the creation of the [Soviet] government."
- By Mike Eckel
Gas War!
Russia and Ukraine are locked in serious negotiations about a new agreement about natural gas shipments supplying Ukraine, and transiting Ukraine (on their way to lucrative European markets).
The current agreement expires December 31.
The reason this is called a "Gas War" is that there have been two instances in the past decade or so when the two sides were unable to agree on terms, and it resulted in gas being interrupted to Europe-- leaving several European countries shivering in January cold.
An another element to this year's talks is a London arbitration court ruling in favor of Ukraine's state gas company Naftogaz, who had asked for the freezing of assets of Russia's gas company, Gazprom.
Asked about the potential for another "Gas War", Putin appears to signal that talks won't end up at that point, say he thinks there will be an agreement.
Ukrainian correspondent Roman Tsymbalyuk, who has asked about the war in Ukraine every year since it broke out in 2014, has once again been called on to ask a question.
Tsymbalyuk preceded this year's query (regarding compliance with the Mink agreement -- the road map for resolving the conflict in Ukraine's east) by noting that he gets no harassment as a journalist in Russia.
The Moscow correspondent for Ukrainian news agency UNIAN has done the rounds on Russian political talk-shows and appears to take an increasingly chirpy tone each year.
We profiled Tsymbalyuk in 2017.
Answering a question from a Ukrainian journalist, Putin says there are no "foreign forces" in the Donbas except for mercenaries on both sides who come from countries such as France and Germany.
Pro-Russian forces obtain tanks and heavy artillery from "government agencies that are sympathetic to them" in Ukraine, he says.