POLITICAL SCIENCE
FIRST YEAR POSTGRADUATES
FINAL REVISION
PART I. CURRENT POLITICS
Translate into Russian:
1) Under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017, a law billed as a U.S. response to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the Treasury was asked to draw up a list of “oligarchs and parastatal entities” within 180 days.
2) The document was not designed to be a list of sanctioned individuals and there was no mandatory legal repercussions for inclusion on it. Former officials instead likened it to public shaming, and there was the suggestion that it could lead to economic action down the line. Bloomberg reported last week that a number of well-known critics of Putin had been consulted on the list.
3) There are two separate lists included in the classified document. The first, a list of “senior political figures,” features 114 individuals in the Russian government. It includes well-known names such as Medvedev, Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov and Dmitry Peskov, Putin's presidential press secretary
4) The second list features 96 business executives, including many of Russia's top oligarchs, with perhaps the best-known being Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich. Of a total of 210 individuals on these lists, about 22 have already been hit with sanctions by the United States.
5) Soon after the “Kremlin list” was made public, observers began to note that much of it appeared to almost exactly match two publicly available resources — the Kremlin's English-language list of top officials and Forbes Magazine's 2017 list of the wealthiest Russian business executives.
6) The Kremlin has ensured that Putin, 65, faces equally toothless opposition in March’s presidential election as he seeks to extend his rule to 2024 with a fourth and likely final term. His biggest challenge will be to build a team and a system capable of sustaining Putinism after he’s left office.
7) Now, Putin rules unchallenged at the apex of a highly personalized system of government. His approval ratings have remained consistently above 80 percent after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, even as public discontent about weak economic growth has grown following the longest recession this century.
8) The president recently installed a crop of younger officials as regional governors, road-testing their fitness for higher office while demonstrating that their futures depend on loyalty to him. That includes his former bodyguard, Alexei Dyumin, 45, who was put in charge of the western Tula region in 2016.
9) The Kremlin has lavished support and publicity on the new breed, highlighting their zeal to reform local bureaucracies and repair potholed roads and dilapidated housing. Meanwhile, several of the previous generation of governors have wound up in prison on corruption charges.
10) People around Putin believe he’ll choose as a successor someone young who owes his entire career to him, says one person close to the Russian leader. Hoping to thwart upstart contenders is Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, 52, who’s likely to stay in his post after the election and has every chance to be Putin’s pick, according to a former top Kremlin official.
11) The highly anticipated document, mandated by Congress over White House objections to punish Russia for alleged meddling in the 2016 election, had fueled alarm in Moscow and threatened to further escalate tensions between the Cold War rivals.
12) Joking that it was “offensive” that he wasn’t included, President Vladimir Putin told a campaign event that Russia will “refrain for the moment” from implementing serious retaliatory measures it has prepared. “In effect, all 146 million of us have been put on some list,” he said, calling it “indisputably an unfriendly act.”
13) “The power of U.S. sanctions is not in the specifics of people or companies blacklisted but in a simple message: those who want to do deals with Russians might have to deal with the United States,” Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote in Twitter.
14) A Syrian military statement published by state media on 4 April denied the use of "any chemical or toxic substance" in Khan Sheikhoun, adding that the military "has never used them, anytime, anywhere, and will not do so in the future".
President Bashar al-Assad subsequently said the incident was a "fabrication" used to justify a US cruise missile strike on Syria's Shayrat airbase on 7 April.
15) Moscow had sought to steadily destroy the moderate Syrian opposition on the battlefield, leaving only jihadist forces in play, and lock the US into a political framework of negotiations that would serve beyond the shelf-life of this administration.
16) Russia's intervention, seeks to minimise losses, relying largely on the ground power of other actors to do most of the fighting, with its officers embedded in order to glue the military effort together and coordinate air strikes.
17) The May 9 Victory Day parade is a major public ritual in Russia. It's a showcase of military might that marks the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. This year's event, however, is about more than just historic commemoration.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to view the parade on Wednesday. His high-profile visit to Moscow comes amid fallout from the US' decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.
Russia and Israel have complex ties. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a military ally of Iran, Israel's sworn enemy. And at Wednesday's parade, Netanyahu will be watching some of the hardware that Tehran seeks to boost its own arsenal.
The government also promotes the Immortal Regiment, originally a grassroots initiative in which marchers carry photographs of relatives who fought in the Second World War, and the wearing of the orange-and-black Ribbon of St. George.
The message is simple. As the slogan on a Victory Day mural in downtown Moscow puts it, "The world that was saved remembers."