WSJ: Russia’s Dead Soul

Ethical Oil

We wrote recently about Russia’s horrific injustice and state brutality as epitomized by the outrageous case of Sergei Magnitsky, a fairly young lawyer who found himself framed, tortured and effectively murdered by Vladimir “KGB” Putin’s police state for having stumbled, apparently inadvertently, into one of the largest cases of tax fraud in Russia’s history. As befits the perverted nature of Putinian Russia, it was police committing the fraud.

Today the Wall Street Journal editorializes on some the latest developments we mentioned, specifically that Putin’s cronies had slapped down a recommendation by President Dmitry Medvedev’s own independent council that the doctors and police responsible for contributing to Magnitsky’s death be investigated. And that, as a final blow to Magnitsky’s reputation and his long-suffering family, the Moscow prosecutor’s office will re-open criminal investigations into the framed and killed lawyer, instead. The case, says the WSJ, “illustrates Russia’s contempt for law and human rights.” It didn’t mention, as we did, the connection of the Magnitsky case to Russia’s corrupt, state-run oil enterprises, and the unsavoury fact that Russia is one of the United States’ 10 largest oil suppliers. It should have. Americans need to be made aware how they are made to unwittingly support such villainy by the anti-oil sands lobby who would keep them dependent on foreign supplies like Russia’s, instead of more ethical Canadian oil.

Also worth reading is Foreign Policy magazine’s lament this week for the once-hoped for Russian democracy, now made a sham by Czar Putin. “With only four months to go until the Duma elections, and seven months until Russians elect a president…it’s a fake party here, a staged election stunt there,” writes Julia Ioffe from Moscow, while citizens suffer “monumental corruption, creeping stagnation, mounting ethnic tensions, a breakdown of safety oversight for civilian transportation systems, a stumbling reform of the rapidly decaying military, continued insurgency in the North Caucasus, continued dependence on resource extraction, an atrophied industrial sector, moribund and corrupt education and health systems.” buy over the counter medicines займы на карту срочно female wrestling https://www.zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com быстрые займы на карту