RUSSIAN MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-KLEPTOCRAT COMPLEX ALL OVER THE WORLD

The largest kickbacks originate in the military industry.Military procurement
is a corrupt business from top to bottom.The process is dominated by advocacy,
with few checks and balances.Most people in power love this system of doing
business and do not want it changed.War and preparation for war systematically
corrupt all parties to the state-private transactions by which the government
obtains the bulk of its military products.There is a standard 10% kickback to
kleptocrats for military purchases.of weapons.Despite the laudable cancellation of the S-300 air defense missiles
sale to Iran, Moscow still preserves the option of selling other weapons to
Tehran.It signed major energy deals with Tehran in 2010 and this summer has
advocated easing sanctions on Iran provided it cooperates with the International
Atomic Energy Agency an institution that has long since demonstrated how
easily Iran can deceive it concerning its nuclear program.

Cohen notes Moscow clearly wants to retain ties to Iran, which it regards as the
rising great power in the Gulf and Middle East and with whom it wants to
collaborate against any Western effort to consolidate a peaceful order.Moscow
has sold weapons such as antitank missiles to Iran and Syria, and these weapons
continue to migrate to Hamas and Hezbollah.

Participants in the military-industrial-kleptocrat complex(MIKC) are routinely
blamed for mismanagement, not infrequently they are accused of fraud, abuse,
kickbacks, and waste (FAKW), and from time to time a few of them are indicted
for criminal offenses.All of these unsavory actions, however, are typically
viewed as aberrations, misfeasances to be rectified or malfeasances to be
punished while retaining the basic system of state-private cooperation in the
production of military goods and services. These offenses are in reality
expressions of a thoroughgoing, intrinsic rottenness in the entire setup.

Igor Sechin, a former Soviet military interpreter, is the leader of the siloviki
clan of nationalist, exmilitary and security service officers fighting to
maintain a big state role in the Russian economy.Sechin is now a deputy prime
minister overseeing Russia's vast energy and metals sectors, the world's
biggest, and oligarchs snap to attention in his presence.

Stephen Blank points out Russia defends Bashar al-Assad's murderous regime
despite its bloody repression of its own citizens.This is, among other reasons,
because Russia has signed an agreement with Syria to return Soviet naval bases
in Latakiye and Tartus to Russian control.Therefore, Russia obstructs U.N.
resolutions of censure against Syria.French diplomats who negotiated with
Russia believe that Moscow most fears the loss of another ally in the Middle
East.

Blank notes Moscow has also sold billions in weapons to Hugo Chavez's regime in
Venezuela, including fighter jets, tanks, and wh*le Kalashnikov a*sault rifle
factories.Chavez used his increasing military power to aid the terrorist group
FARC directly and run narcotics from West Africa and Latin America into Central
and North America.

The notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, who now awaits trial in a New York
federal court, was caught offering to sell weapons to the FARC.Given Bout's
longstanding connections to senior officials of the Russian government, Moscow
moved heaven and earth to prevent his extradition from Thailand, where he was
arrested, to the U.S. It is quite likely that Bout's weapons would have been
earmarked for the FARC and/or similar narcoterrorists throughout Latin America.

Likewise, Russia has been China's largest source of foreign weapons since 1990,
even though those sales have declined due to Russian fears about Chinese
intentions and anger over Chinese piracy and subsequent sale of weapons in
competition with Russia in third-party markets.Nevertheless, arms sales and
advanced technology transfers from Russia to China still occur.

Offset contracts were also signed to the tune of many billion euros.Offsets are
arrangements made by purchasing governments with their suppliers, requiring the
contractors to reinvest a percentage of the value of the deal in the importing
country.The arms trade is already an incubator of corruption with such large
sums of money flowing around, and all that secrecy.It's so easy to avoid clear
accountability about what you've bought, and why.The best antidotes are
transparency and competition.But if you add offsets to the deal, it only gets
murkier.

Cohen points out the optics of Moscow's ties to anti-American states, which
build power to challenge the U.S. regionally and support and control extensive
terrorist and intelligence networks, clash dramatically with the optics of the
Obama Administration's reset.Tehran, Damascus, and Caracas have an interest in
destabilizing their regions and in acquiring advanced conventionaland likely
nuclearweapons. Such proliferation makes for a most problematic multipolarity,
which piles up obstacles to U.S.interests and security.

Despite the reset, it is in U.S.interests to find out to what degree Moscow
orchestrates or participates in joint activities among these problematic states,
including arms sales from Iran and Syria to Hamas and Hezbollah.Moscow surely
knows of the expansion of the Iranian intelligence, military, economic, and
political infrastructure in Iraq, as well as Iran's ties to Venezuela and those
two states' collaboration in uranium prospecting.

Cohen a*serts that U.S. policymakers should rea*sess the reset and develop
regional strategies that counter Russia's and China's agendas.Such policies
should increase pressure on Iran, the most anti-American regional power, and
cause the Assad regime in Syria and the Chavez government in Venezuela to stop
supporting terrorism.

Eurokleptocrats are in cahoots with Orthodox mafias and Orthodox oligarchs.The
three main Orthodox mafias are the Tambov gang from St.Petersburg and
Izmaylovskaya gang and Solntsevskaya Brotherhood from Moscow.Their activities
focus on political corruption, church corruption, protection money, blackmail,
drugs trade, shipping, commodity trade, and natural resources.

Orthodoxy's circle of tycoons, such as aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska, banking
magnate Vitaly Malkin, and shipping magnates, have been investigated by Europol
for involvement in crimes of Eurokleptocrats.Russokleptocrats use the
Orthodox Church to control Russians and influence Orthodox Christians all over
the world.

A reset policy that ignores Russia's global efforts to undermine the U.S.
recalls the ill-fated detente of the 1970s.It ran aground on Russian
expansionism and wars in the Third World, especially Afghanistan.Despite
profound changes since then, Russia's basic anti-American strategic orientation,
reset rhetoric aside, seems to be the same.In the trying times ahead, when it
comes to global challenges, the U.S.should relearn and practice international
balance-of-power politics.

The current Russian model of leadership under President Dmitry Medvedev and
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has become increasingly authoritarian.Despite
numerous commitments under international law, the government has tightened
controls on political life, civil society, and the media.

Disruption of political opposition's activities, restricting access to
state-controlled TV, human right violations, such as the beating of
demonstrators who support the Russian constitution, murder of journalists and
anti-corruption activists, disappearance and torture, abuse of the legal system
for monetary and political gain, all illustrate this negative trend.Putin, a
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