FPI Bulletin: Mr. President, Drop the Russian Reset
President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin met this morning on the sidelines of the G-20 Economic Summit in Mexico. Their bilateral meeting, however, came not only after Russian internal security services recently harassed, detained, and interrogated key political opposition leaders in response to large anti-government protests in Moscow, but also as the Kremlin continues its support of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s bloody campaign against opposition groups and civilians.
For over two years, the Obama administration has argued that its policy of “resetting” relations with Russia would lead to the Kremlin’s strong cooperation on a broad range of international issues. However, as the Foreign Policy Initiative has argued, it is clear that the Russian Reset has failed to fully yield the promised results.
Moscow continues to shield the Assad regime in the U.N. Security Council, and bolster Assad with air defenses and other military means. It opposes imposing crippling sanctions against Iran, even as Iranian efforts are bringing it ever closer to nuclear weapons-making capability. It continually excuses North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile provocations. More recently, the Kremlin has threatened retaliation if Congress passes the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act. Named after an anti-corruption lawyer who died after being tortured in a Russian prison, the Magnitsky Act would impose a set of wide-ranging sanctions against Russian officials responsible for internal human rights violations and corruption.
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Punish the Russian abusers
Washington Post
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S hopes of forging a partnership with Vladimir Putin after his return to the Russian presidency appear to be fading fast. With a meeting between the two presidents due Monday, Russia is rebuffing U.S. appeals for cooperation in stopping the massacres in Syria, while continuing to supply the regime of Bashar al-Assad with weapons. Meanwhile the Kremlin is cracking down on Russians seeking democratic reform or fighting corruption. This month a prominent journalist was forced to flee the country after a senior government official reportedly threatened to kill him.
Apart from occasional public expressions of exasperation, the administration isn’t reacting much to the cold wind from Moscow. Instead it is pressing Congress to pass a piece of legislation much sought by Mr. Putin: repeal of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which conditions trade preferences for Russia on free emigration. On its face the repeal makes sense; if the law is not changed, U.S. companies will be disadvantaged when Russia joins the World Trade Organization this summer. But a bill that grants Russia trade preferences and removes human rights conditions hardly seems the right response to Mr. Putin’s recent behavior.
That’s why momentum in Congress appears to be swinging behind a bipartisan initiative to couple the Jackson-Vanik repeal with a new human rights provision. The Magnitsky act, whose prime author has been Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.), would sanction Russian officials “responsible for extrajudicial killings, torture, or other gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”
The bill is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who uncovered a $230 million embezzlement scheme by Russia tax and interior ministry officials, then was imprisoned by those same officials and subjected to mistreatment that led to his death. The bill is due to be taken up Tuesday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and could later be attached to the Russia trade bill under a deal struck between Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
The appeal of the legislation is its sharp focus: It will affect only those found to be involved in Mr. Magnitsky’s death or the mistreatment of other Russians fighting corruption or abuses of human rights. It would punish people like the senior law enforcement official who allegedly threatened to kill Sergei Sokolov of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, then appoint himself investigator of the crime. Those sanctioned will be denied the U.S. visas they prize, and their dollar bank accounts — often used to siphon illicit gains out of the country — will be frozen. Importantly, their names will be published, which could make them pariahs elsewhere in the West.
Aware that the Magnitsky bill is needed to pass the trade legislation, the administration has been seeking to gut the former by introducing language that would allow the State Department to waive sanctions or the publication of names on national security grounds. Some waiver authority may be appropriate if it is narrowly cast; senators are considering a provision that would allow the names of some of those sanctioned to be classified temporarily on a case-by-case basis. What’s most important is that Congress send Mr. Putin and his cadres the message that their lawless behavior will have consequences. онлайн займы срочный займ на карту онлайн https://zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php быстрые займы на карту
The Magnitsky Act and Implications for Russia-U.S. Relations
Throughout the Cold War the U.S. Congress sought to penalize the Soviet Union for its human rights record. Legislation such as the Jackson-Vanik amendment became a long-term influence on bilateral trade between the two countries. That tradition was reinvigorated this past week, when the House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously approved the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, in a rare example of bipartisanship. This has potentially important implications for future of bilateral trade with Russia, which is expected to join the World Trade Organization later this year. Passage of the Act just prior to President Obama’s meeting with President Putin in Mexico this coming week adds greater complexity to the cooling bilateral relationship between Russia and the U.S., and enhances the prospect of further deterioration.
The Act is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer representing Hermitage Capital Management, an investment fund and asset management company that was dismantled by Russian authorities after it was accused of tax evasion. Magnitsky implicated top officials in a $230 million tax refund fraud against the Russian government. In 2008 he was arrested and died in prison after spending a year in pretrial detention; the case against him is ongoing posthumously. The U.S. State Department issued visa bans on several dozen Russian officials in connection to the Magnitsky case in 2011. Russia imposed travel bans on several U.S. officials in response.
After the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s approval of the bill, two additional committees (most likely the finance and judiciary committees since it deals with financial sanctions and criminal prosecution) must approve the bill or waive jurisdiction. Once passed in the House, the Senate is expected to introduce its own version of the bill for review.
The Obama administration has been opposed to the Act for two reasons, arguing that it will put U.S. businesses at a disadvantage in Russia, making it harder for them to compete, and possibly prompting the Russian government to favor non-U.S. suppliers or freeze U.S. corporate assets in the country. Adoption of the Act may also be inconsistent, if not oppositional, to another bill, which would grant Russia Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) as required under WTO rules.
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Russia Bans 11 U.S. Officials Over Guantanamo And Abu Ghraib
Russia barred 11 serving and former U.S. administration officials for human rights abuses at facilities including Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The ban on entry to Russia was enacted last year in retaliation for a U.S. visa ban for 11 Russian officials accused of playing a role in the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, President Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said in an e-mailed statement.
“These people are linked to high-profile human rights abuses, including torture and abuse of detainees in special prisons set up by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency in Guantanamo, Bagram in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq,” Ushakov said. Russia hadn’t previously made public the exact nature of its response to the U.S. visa ban, which was announced in July last year.
Russia is warning of further steps if Congress passes a law that would impose U.S. travel and financial curbs on any official abusing human rights in Russia, including all 60 people suspected of involvement in Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow jail in 2009. Ushakov criticized what he termed as an “anti- Russian” step that would complicate ties as Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama prepare to meet on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Mexico.
The U.S. Supreme Court in December 2009 refused to revive a lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other military leaders by four British men who said they were tortured while imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, a detention center at the U.S. military base in Cuba. Abu Ghraib photographs showing U.S. guards mistreating inmates surfaced in 2004.
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A real hero of Russia
Supposedly nobody likes a snitch. Presumably nobody who’s honest likes crooks either. That poses a moral conundrum. Not for the corrupt and the crooked infecting society. They’re incorrigible. But it does raise a problem for decent whistle blowers who too often pay a bigger price than the bad people they out.
That sticky moral dilemma can have negative effects in democracies where honesty and integrity are supposed to be valued above all else, and also in corrupt autocracies where they are not.
In many places, being honest will get you not just shunned and fired, but killed. That’s particularly true in Russia, where the government and the businesses it controls under President Vladimir Putin have become dens of thieves, and some say murderers too.
Putin recently won a new term in a rigged election. He was in China this week commiserating with the masters of Russia’s old Cold War ally about how the world – and the United States in particular – gives neither of them sufficient respect and keeps telling them what to do: Like stop behaving like a mafia, and stop beating, terrorizing and jailing political dissidents and their families.
Putin is particularly upset because the U.S. Congress is threatening to punish some really rich Russian officials for stealing a foreign-run investment fund and allegedly murdering the tax lawyer who uncovered the crime.
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Another Magnitsky-like case should not be allowed to happen
During the March of Millions on May 6th in Moscow protestors clashed with the police. Mostly this is attributed to the fact, that the special forces were not positioned according to the preapproved plan and a bottleneck was created where should have been none. A few masked provocateurs threw pieces of pavement and bottles at the police, resulting in injuries on both sides and obviously, investigation followed.
However, the subjects of investigation were only from the protestor’s side, even though attention should have been paid to the both sides of the conflict. Particularly, because there were legitimate questions about wrong position of the police forces and how the provocateurs managed to bring sticks and glass bottles through the search points.
As of today, 13 people are detained and despite arguably insufficient evidence, or even alibis in some cases, there is a strong possibility of a serious sentence for all of them, up to 8 years in jail.
One of these people is Alexander Kamensky. He has not even been at the Bolotnaya Square, where the clashes have happened on May 6th. He was detained at the Revolution Square, before ever getting to any place where protests were on. Nonetheless, he is being held under arrest according to the article 212 of the Criminal Code, for organizing, participation and instigation of the riots. There are witnesses who were arrested together with him that can confirm that he was nowhere near the scene of the protests. But the Basmanny Court has declined to call on these witnesses.
The first round of the hearing was held on June 13th, unfortunately at the time there were no any witnesses in support of the charges. The next day three witness reports have mysteriously appeared in support of the abovementioned charges.
What is making the court’s decision to keep him inder arrest even more questionable, is the fact, that Alexander has had a major surgery not very long ago and needs another one shortly. Considering the case of Sergey Magnitsky, who died under arrest from lack of proper medical care, the situation is quite serious and the court’s behavior might be interpreted as not just careless, but potentially criminal. займы на карту срочно hairy girls www.zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-in-america.php микрозаймы онлайн
Obama set to press Putin on Syria at G20
After a week when it sometimes felt as if the cold war had never ended, Barack Obama will finally get some quiet time on Monday with Vladimir Putin to press the new Russian president on the crisis in Syria.
With senior diplomats from both countries trading unusually aggressive barbs in recent days, Mr Obama plans to use a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Mexico to privately test whether the US and Russia can find common ground on Syria, according to senior US officials.
The first encounter between the two presidents since Mr Putin’s return to presidential office will be a critical showdown in the diplomacy of the Syrian crisis. But it also will provide an indication of where US-Russia relations are headed under a leader who has a notoriously sceptical view of US power – and who declined to attend last month’s G8 summit at Camp David, a move many interpreted as a snub.
Mr Obama faces the delicate task of trying to forge a good working relationship with Mr Putin while Congress is moving close to passing the Magnitsky bill, which criticises Russia’s human rights record.
Complicating matters even more, Mr Obama is in the midst of an election campaign in which his Republican opponent is looking to pounce on any signs of concessions.
“The Magnitsky case … supports my point that we are in for much more difficult times in the relationship with the US,” says Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee.
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Living with Putin, again
On the margin of the G20 summit later this month Russia’s new (but also old) president, Vladimir Putin, will meet America’s Barack Obama for the first time since his election in March. The atmosphere is likely to be chilly. That is as it should be, for since his decision last autumn to return to the Kremlin, Mr Putin has been stridently negative and anti-Western, most recently over Syria (see article). Such behaviour demands a stiff response from the West.
When Mr Obama came to power, his administration talked of a “reset” in relations with Russia. This new, friendlier approach had some useful consequences. It enabled America to negotiate and ratify a strategic arms-reduction treaty. It helped to bring about a slightly more constructive Russian attitude to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. And it secured Russia’s imminent entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Just as with China a decade ago, WTO membership should press Russia to compete more openly and fairly in world markets and to abide more closely by international trade rules.
But the reset was based in part on two misplaced hopes: that Dmitry Medvedev, who had been lent the presidency for one term by Mr Putin in 2008, would genuinely take charge of the country, and that some in his government had sound liberalising, pro-Western instincts. Those hopes were dashed by Mr Putin’s swatting aside of Mr Medvedev last September to allow his own return to the Kremlin, the rigging of elections, his crackdown on Moscow’s protesters and his new Nyet posture.
This should not lead to a total rupture with Russia. Constructive engagement should continue on the economic front. With the oil price falling, stronger economic ties to the West could help to create a business constituency inside Russia that sees the need for greater liberalisation to keep the economy growing. The West should certainly look at introducing reasonable visa rules for Russian businesspeople (Britain’s are absurdly tough). Other cold-war relics, such as America’s Jackson-Vanik trade restrictions, should also go. And why not dangle in front of the bauble-loving Mr Putin the prospect of Russian membership of the OECD rich-country club? Or a free-trade agreement with the European Union?
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Vladimir Putin steps out
NEXT week Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama will meet again. In July 2009, the only time the two have met before, Mr Putin—then Russia’s prime minister, now its president—gave the American president an earful on the insults Russia had suffered from America. Mr Putin thinks that the conciliatory steps he took in his first term, especially after September 11th 2001, encountered American aggression: the “orange” revolution in Ukraine, Western support for Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili, a missile-defence system. As Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, says, Mr Putin is “sincerely anti-American,” not because of his KGB past, but because of “his experiences with Bush-era America”.
The “reset” by the Obama administration in early 2009 was meant to respond to this by letting bygones be bygones. Mr Obama and his advisers, who included the present American ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, hoped that the reset would return the focus of relations to the countries’ shared interests. It coincided with some achievements: a new treaty reducing nuclear arsenals, greater co-operation on sanctions against Iran, an agreement to allow supplies for the war in Afghanistan to pass through Russia and Central Asia. The then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has even described the past three years as “the best period in US-Russia relations in history”.
But is it over? It was never clear if Moscow really believed in the premise of the reset. For many in the Russian foreign-policy establishment, says Angela Stent of Georgetown University, the reset was a one-sided “course correction,” in which Washington came to understand that it had not been treating Moscow properly. Moreover, Mr Putin cannot resist—now, as ever—forceful and confrontational gestures, such as his hostile speech at a security conference in Munich in 2007 or his attempt to blame Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, for the winter protests in Moscow. Changes in bilateral relations have been largely cosmetic. And that has added to the frustration over, for example, Mr Putin’s backing for Syria’s government or a senior Russian general’s statement that the country did not rule out the possibility of a nuclear first strike against missile-defence sites.
The spirit of co-operation that the reset was supposed to engender is being tested by the grim news from Syria and fresh talks on Iran’s nuclear programme in Moscow next week, as well as by the meeting between Mr Putin and Mr Obama on the margins of the G20 summit in Mexico. The most immediate issue is Syria. The Americans and Europeans want Russia to support a managed transition, in which President Bashar Assad would leave power but some of the underlying structures linked to his rule would remain in place. Yet Moscow is resistant to anything that resembles regime change, and is also more pessimistic about what might follow Mr Assad. Moreover Russia’s continued intransigence on Syria, says Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group, has value merely by giving the Kremlin a central part in resolving the crisis. The Russians know that if they give in to Western pressure on Syria “their role deflates considerably”, as the situation would no longer be under their control.
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To learn more about what happened to Sergei Magnitsky please read below
- Sergei Magnitsky
- Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?
- Sergei Magnitsky’s torture and death in prison
- President’s investigation sabotaged and going nowhere
- The corrupt officers attempt to arrest 8 lawyers
- Past crimes committed by the same corrupt officers
- Petitions requesting a real investigation into Magnitsky's death
- Worldwide reaction, calls to punish those responsible for corruption and murder
- Complaints against Lt.Col. Kuznetsov
- Complaints against Major Karpov
- Cover up
- Press about Magnitsky
- Bloggers about Magnitsky
- Corrupt officers:
- Sign petition
- Citizen investigator
- Join Justice for Magnitsky group on Facebook
- Contact us
- Sergei Magnitsky
