Six on History: Russia/U.S.S.R
panaritisp
Welcome back to Six on History.
PS: If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help Thanks John Elfrank
.JPG?part=0.18&view=1)
As for Russia under Vladimir Putin, since 2000, again there was virtually no notable Russian “meddling” in American politics until the Russiagate allegations began. (Not surprisingly, in light of the history of mutual “meddling,” Russian social media were active during the 2016 US election, but with no discernible impact on the outcome, as Aaron Maté has shown and as Nate Silver has confirmed.) American meddling in Russia, on the other hand, continued apace, or tried to do so. Until more restrictive Russian laws were passed, US funding continued to go to Russian media and NGOs perceived to be in US interests. Hillary Clinton felt free in 2011 to publicly criticize Russian elections, and, the same year, then–Vice President Joseph Biden, while visiting Moscow, advised Putin not to return to the presidency. (Imagine Putin today advising Biden as to whether or not to seek the US presidency.)"
Told by his granddaughter Lyubov, the story of his family sheds light on the history of the town and of the country, with more nuances than we would expect."
Video by Irina Sedunova Produced by Anna Bressanin
"(CNN)The US Air Force is deploying B-1 bombers to Norway for the first time in a move that sends a clear message to Moscow that the US military will operate in the strategically important Arctic region and demonstrate that it will defend allies in the area against any Russian aggression close to the country's border.
"One morning last August, Vladimir Putin, isolated at his Presidential residence in the forest outside Moscow, held a videoconference with his Cabinet. The ministers’ faces, stern yet deferential, populated a large screen in front of Putin’s desk—the Kremlin’s version of a pandemic Zoom call. The proceedings were broadcast on state television, and had the wooden quality of reality TV. The meeting’s ostensible agenda was the government’s preparations for the school year ahead, but the real news came in Putin’s opening remarks, when he revealed that Russia had granted approval to Sputnik V, the country’s first vaccine against covid-19. The vaccine, Putin noted, is “quite effective, helps develop immunity, and has gone through all the necessary trials.”
In fact, Russian scientists hadn’t published any data from their Phase I and Phase II trials, which test a vaccine’s safety and potential for efficacy among a limited number of volunteers, and hadn’t even started Phase III, which tests the vaccine in a much larger group of volunteers, using a placebo as a control. Still, Sputnik V had already begun to make its way through Russian society. In the Cabinet meeting, Putin mentioned that one of his daughters had been vaccinated. She’d had a slight fever afterward, he reported, but it had passed in a day or two. “She’s feeling well,” he said. An influential cultural figure who received the vaccine in August told me that he had “heard about it from people who pay attention and are careful.” He went on, “It felt a bit adventurous, but, the way the pandemic was going, I thought I’d give it a try.”
The vaccine’s name was the brainchild of Kirill Dmitriev, the director of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (R.D.I.F.), the sovereign wealth fund that is the vaccine’s chief lobbyist and financial backer. In speaking about Sputnik V, Dmitriev did not shy away from the history of superpower rivalry that the name evoked. (The “V” stands for “vaccine.”) As he told CNN in late July, referring to the world’s first satellite, launched by the U.S.S.R. in 1957, “Americans were surprised when they heard Sputnik’s beeping. It’s the same with this vaccine. Russia will have got there first.” Russian officials, including Mikhail Murashko, the country’s health minister, called Sputnik V “the first vaccine against the novel coronavirus infection.” A news anchor on Rossiya-1 proclaimed, “Just like sixty-plus years ago, headlines around the world again feature the Russian word ‘Sputnik.’ ” The Russian vaccine represented, the anchor said, a “turning point in the fight against the pandemic.” Putin praised the scientists responsible: “We owe our gratitude to those who have taken this first, very important step for Russia and the entire world.”
Sputnik V was developed at the Gamaleya Institute, in Moscow. Before the pandemic, the institute did not have a particularly high profile. Gamaleya scientists had produced vaccines for Ebola and mers (the respiratory illness, similar to covid-19, that emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012), but neither had been widely employed or authorized for use outside Russia. With little public data about Sputnik V, the question arose: Was it a scientific breakthrough or the dubious result of a rushed process?
In the past, it has taken years, even decades, to bring new vaccines to market. Attenuated vaccines, such as those for measles, mumps, and rubella, involve weakening a virus to non-dangerous strength; inactivated vaccines, as in most flu shots, render it inert. Developing such vaccines is a tricky process of trial and error. Research into mRNA vaccines—which, in contrast to traditional vaccines, are synthetic, carrying a portion of a virus’s genetic code—began in the nineteen-nineties. Though the mRNA technology was unproved until last year, it was also tantalizingly simple, akin to programming a script of computer software. Moderna, a pharmaceutical company founded in 2010 with a focus on mRNA, created its vaccine prototype during a weekend in January, 2020. In mid-March, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, working with the German company BioNTech, came up with twenty contenders for a vaccine; by early April, they had been whittled down to four.
The race is nearly complete, but distributing the doses will be a breathtaking challenge.
Sputnik V—like several other covid-19 vaccines, developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, in the United Kingdom; CanSino Biologics, in China; and Johnson & Johnson, in the United States—is what is known as a vector vaccine. This type of vaccine is much newer than the attenuated or inactivated kind but has a longer track record than the mRNA variety. In the nineties, scientists began exploring the use of disabled viruses as “vectors,” or carriers for implanting genetic material into human cells. Early experiments focussed on therapies for hemophilia and cystic fibrosis, among other genetic diseases. Soon, pharmaceutical companies and scientific centers around the world began looking into the potential application of the technology for vaccines. As Konstantin Chumakov, a Russian-American virologist who is an adviser to the World Health Organization and a member of the Global Virus Network, an international coalition that tracks viral pathogens, explained, the vector is “a Trojan horse to go in and deliver whatever you want.”
At the time of Sputnik V’s approval, Moderna and Pfizer were months away from announcing the results of their Phase III trials or filing for F.D.A. authorization to begin wide-scale vaccination programs. Scientific experts expressed concern at the speed with which the Russian vaccine had been registered for public use. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told an ABC News correspondent, “I hope that the Russians have actually definitively proven that the vaccine is safe and effective. I seriously doubt that they’ve done that.”
Scientists around the world were speaking of a spirit of unprecedented collaboration, but an undercurrent of international competition was hard to ignore. As Putin crowed about Sputnik V, President Trump promised an American vaccine as early as the fall. China’s position as a credible global power appeared to hinge on its role in helping the world emerge from a pandemic that began inside its borders. Meanwhile, the U.K. and the European Union, awaiting a final Brexit agreement, pursued divergent vaccination strategies. “Sadly, vaccine development was politicized everywhere, not only in Russia,” Chumakov told me. “Everyone wants to be first.”
The Sputnik V Vaccine and Russia’s Race to Immunity
Joshua Yaffa
When the pandemic struck, scientists in Moscow set out to beat the West.
"As the man in charge of developing Russia’s vast Arctic north, Aleksey Chekunkov faces more climate-related challenges than most, from permafrost sink holes to the emergence of West Nile fever in frozen tundra. Yet he’s no eco-warrior when it comes to fossil fuels.
“We have to be realistic, we are the largest country in the world,” the minister for development of the Arctic and Far East said in a video interview, projecting a 30-year future for natural gas as a mobile, clean alternative to coal. “Solar is not an option for the Arctic region and wind energy isn’t constant.”
Chekunkov’s approach reflects a Russian dilemma: Seen from Moscow, the melting of the polar ice cap is as much economic opportunity as natural disaster, opening the Northern Sea Route from Asia to Europe for shipping and creating access to potentially vast new reserves of minerals, oil and gas.
More broadly, of the bigger geopolitical players — China, the European Union, India, Russia and the U.S. — none risks as much from a successful transition from fossil fuels, if that should happen. Few are as dubious that it will.
“We also know how that’s working out,” President Vladimir Putin said of the transition, during a video call in early March with Russia’s coal industry bosses in which he called for increased exports to Asia. “Texas is frozen and the wind turbines there had to be heated in ways that are a long way from being environmentally friendly. Maybe that will lead to some corrections, too.”
In recent years, the Kremlin has bet the country’s economic and geopolitical future on natural gas, building new pipelines to China, Turkey and Germany, while aiming to take a quarter of the global LNG market, up from zero in 2008 and around 8% today.
Russia’s strategy, as for Saudi Arabia and other lower cost oil and gas producers, is to be among the last standing as others leave the market, unable to extract at a profit amid falling crude prices. Australia is acting to expand coal exports to Asia while it can, too. But Russia has made less effort to develop a renewable energy industry at the same time.
Putin and other Russian leaders have periodically flirted with outright climate change denial. Scientists have estimated that melting permafrost could cost Russia $84 billion in infrastructure damage by mid-century, while releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gases. Carbon Action Tracker, a non-profit, gives Russia’s climate policies a bottom grade of “critically insufficient.”
Public rhetoric has lately become more cautious, forced by a global shift in attitudes, according to Tatiana Mitrova, head of research at the Skolkovo Energy Center in Moscow. After Europe’s adoption of its Green Deal, China committing to carbon neutrality by 2060 and with President Joe Biden replacing climate skeptic Donald Trump in the White House, Russia looks increasingly isolated.
The question for the Kremlin, Mitrova says, is whether it now opts for real decarbonization, or “some fake reporting, playing with numbers, referring to the carbon absorption capacity of the Russian forests and so on.”
Hers is not the mainstream view. In Russia, fossil fuels are seen as a birthright and the country’s vast distances do pose challenges. Chekunkov, for example, said he’s a big fan of moving to electric cars, but it’s going to take a long time to roll out charging stations across 17 million square kilometers.
No Alternative“What’s the alternative? Russia can’t be an exporter of clean energy, that path isn’t open for us,” says Konstantin Simonov, director of the National Energy Security Fund, a Moscow consultancy whose clients include major oil and gas companies. “We can’t just swap fossil fuel production for clean energy production, because we don’t have any technology of our own.”
Within Russia, natural gas will always be cheaper than renewables and there’s nothing preordained about a low oil price, according to Simonov. It could bounce back with the global economy, once the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic recede. Brent crude traded at $69 per barrel Friday, up from lows of $16 last April.
“No one knows how fast the global energy transition will be,” said Simonov. Europe may be decarbonizing, but with demand for cheap accessible energy rising in Asia and India “the trend looks clear, but it actually isn’t.”
It wasn’t so long ago that “peak oil” and $120 per barrel prices were the big concerns for net importers. Western security conferences were consumed by Russia’s apparent coercion of neighbors by manipulating the price and supply of the natural gas it sold them through a web of pipelines.
“This perception Russia is a loser in the green transition, that is just in our minds. The best way out of the situation is to understand that Russia has a lot of opportunities to win from the green transition and that it’s in Europe’s interest to help Russia do it,” says Makarov. “It’s much more efficient to reduce carbon emissions in countries where reduction is cheaper.”
Still, it’s hard to see how a domestic market for hydrogen can emerge. Russia has no carbon pricing mechanism, giving companies little incentive to pay a higher price for clean energy. The energy majors have focused on building an export business, but without government support, Russia lags behind Saudi Arabia, Australia, Chile and other nations looking to become hydrogen providers to the world.
In the meantime, Chekunkov is focused on managing climate impacts and anticipating the jobs and tourist income that the melting of the Northern Sea Route could bring to the 5.4 million people who live in the harsh Russian Arctic.
The government expects to be moving 80 million metric tons of cargo through Arctic waters by 2024, up from 32 million in 2020. By Chekunkov’s own estimate, the once ice-bound passage could be open year round to ordinary ships by 2050, drawing traffic from the Malacca Strait and Suez Canal.
