The Kremlin is furious about America’s visa blacklist. But there is nothing Barack Obama can do about it

The Telegraph. By Michael Weiss

The Kremlin is furious about America’s visa blacklist. But there is nothing Barack Obama can do about it
By Michael Weiss Politics Last updated: July 28th, 2011

The Washington Post reported this week that the US State Department has blacklisted Russian officials implicated in the death of Moscow attorney Sergei Magnitsky, the enterprising young Moscow attorney who exposed a $230 million state-perpetrated tax fraud. Magnitsky was thanked for his efforts by being accused of the crime himself, jailed, tortured, deprived of medical attention, then left to die in a strait-jacket as prison doctors waited outside the room. L’affaire Magnitsky is a far-reaching state conspiracy that, in terms of its emotional resonance and long-term political consequences for Russia, merits comparison with the Kirov assassination in 1934. Sixty Russian officials, including the deputy interior minister and the deputy general prosecutor, have all been flagged by US Senator Ben Cardin for their complicity in Magnitsky’s imprisonment and demise.

The State Department announcement anticipates a Congressional vote on the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which is currently floating around the Senate on an air of bipartisan consensus. Its passage is only a matter of time. If successful, the law would not only create visa blacklists for corrupt Russian officials, it would also freeze their assets in the United States and act as a template for dealing with other international human rights violators who love to shop in New York or send their kids to private schools in Washington. European parliament last year adopted a resolution calling for similar EU sanctions on those implicated in the Magnitsky case.

You can just imagine the Kremlin’s response.

Several weeks ago, it dispatched Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s ideologist-in-chief, to lobby Washington to nix the bill on the grounds that this legislation would scupper the hyped “reset” between Russia and the United States, which has really only served as more of a pause on deep-seated mutual suspicion.
Despite a few treaties on nuclear arms reduction and bilateral trade agreements being signed, the reset has actually achieved very little in terms of normalising US-Russian relations. We still don’t agree on what to do about Iran. Dmitry Medvedev says he feels “sorry” for Bashar al-Assad as Russia threatens to veto any UN Security Council resolution on Syria. And Anti-Americanism remains the prevailing mood in the Kremlin. The large but disorganised anti-Putin opposition movement in Russia is routinely blamed on the CIA and the State Department. Ditto the post-2008 economic crisis, and before that the spate of Colour Revolutions that swept Ukraine and Georgia, into whose domestic political affairs Russia continues to exert itself.

According to the last known study, 78 per cent of the Russian elite have a KGB background. And Putinist propaganda, never a subtle affair to being with, has lately assumed a unmistakable neo-Soviet style. Consider the All-Russia People’s Front, a Kremlin-concocted “grassroots” organisation that adores United Russia, the ruling party, and yet which registers signatories at the speed of quantum mechanics. In a single day, 39,000 employees of the Siberian Business Union joined, no doubt without many of them even being aware of the Front’s existence. Membership is so easy that a few weeks back I registered as a Muscovite housewife called Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Cold War-style paranoia, and Stalinist methods of cultural suppression, never quit Putin’s Russia; it would foolish of Washington to believe otherwise. Lately, Kremlin aggression has manifested itself into overt acts of violence. According to a classified US intelligence document reported on by The Washington Times, the bomb that exploded outside the US embassy in Tiblisi last September was the work of a Russian military intelligence officer, Major Yevgeny Borisov. What if a US diplomat had been killed in that explosion? Vice President Biden, who can’t pronounce Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s name, might have had to pronounce an easier one on his last state visit to Moscow.

Obama has never been one to put human rights above America’s elusive likeability abroad. No wonder Medvedev told the Financial Times recently that “no one wishes the re-election of Barack Obama as US president as I do”. But the US president can no more veto a unanimous piece of human rights legislation than he can pardon Bernie Madoff. That’s the trouble with liberal democracies, as Putin himself would acknowledge: the man in this White House isn’t the only one in charge.
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