Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Expanding the Cardin List to the Very Top

The Moscow Times. By Yulia Latynina

Washington has already imposed sanctions against dozens of Russian officials from the “Cardin list” who were implicated in the wrongful death of former Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.

The Cardin list — named after its sponsor, U.S. Senator Ben Cardin — hits the most vulnerable part of Russia’s corrupt system. In contrast to the Soviet leadership, the current Russian regime is not dictatorial, but exponentially more corrupt. What is the point of stealing all of that money from state coffers, stashing it away in foreign accounts or investing in expensive foreign real estate if the corrupt officials are denied access to these assets?

The Kremlin did everything it could to fight the Cardin list. In Washington, senior U.S. senators were surprised to hear Kremlin first deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov tell them that the U.S.-Russian “reset” could end if the Cardin bill became law.

I am sure the senators had a difficult time understanding why key reset programs — such as providing the U.S. military transit routes to Afghanistan through Russia or U.S.-Russian cooperation on Iran — would be placed in jeopardy to protect corrupt officials at the Interior Ministry and the Federal Tax Service. In this way, Surkov was essentially threatening to kill the reset so that corrupt officials could keep their luxury villas in Dubai and on the Mediterranean coast.

It is clear, however, that the implied threat to kill the reset was a bluff.

The Kremlin’s foreign policy is very simple. It is good for the ruling clan if oil prices rise and bad if their foreign assets are frozen. That is why Russia’s leadership will always extend aid to rogue states in order to increase international tensions and drive up the price of oil, but they will stop short of turning Russia into a rogue state itself.

The Magnitsky affair began long before he was arrested in late 2008. Several years before that, Hermitage Capital founder William Browder began greenmailing state-owned companies. This provoked the siloviki to go after him. In any standard dictatorship, issuing a warrant for Browder’s arrest on criminal tax evasion charges would have been enough to solve the government’s “Browder problem.”

But something else occurred. Interior Ministry officials seized the corporate seals and registration documents of Hermitage subsidiaries, which allowed them to receive fraudulent tax rebates of $230 million from the state budget.

When Magnitsky blew the whistle on the scam, the Kremlin had to provide a cover for everyone involved because that is the way the government’s kleptocratic mafia network works.

State officials have the right to embezzle, but citizens have no right to prosecute them. As the Magnitsky case clearly shows, any attempt to expose government extortionists is punishable by arrest on trumped-up charges — and death in pretrial detention.

The main problem now facing the Kremlin is that the number of names on the Cardin list may be expanded to include senior Russian officials. In a June interview to Snob magazine, Browder said certain ministers stood behind the $230 million fraudulent tax rebate scheme.

Who are these ministers? Browder didn’t clarify, but it is interesting that Olga Stepanova, who has been implicated in the tax rebate scheme, served as head of the No. 28 tax inspection office while Anatoly Serdyukov, now the defense minister, headed the Federal Tax Service. It is also interesting that after leaving the tax inspection, Stepanova was named adviser to the head of the federal arms procurement agency, which reports to Serdyukov.

Read more: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/expanding-the-cardin-list-to-the-very-top/441518.html#ixzz1TxXuVL4m
The Moscow Times

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YUKOS BANKRUPTCY 5 YEARS ON

The St. Petersberg Times. By Tim Osborne

The Yukos Oil Company was forced into bankruptcy by the Moscow Arbitration Court five years ago on Monday. Its assets were seized by the state,and its top managers imprisoned or chased from the country. Its legacy of progressive corporate governance and transparency was decimated in favor of shadowy state control.

Nobody knows for sure why the Russian government destroyed its most successful post-Soviet company. It is certain, though, that the Yukos affair was a clear marker of Russia’s economic torpor and a signal to domestic entrepreneurs and foreign investors alike that their assets are simply there for the taking.

The biggest victims of the destruction of Yukos, however, are not former CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky or his business partner Platon Lebedev, who have nonetheless endured an ordeal that would test anyone. Rather it is the Russian people — on whose behalf the government supposedly acted — who have lost the most.

Although Russian stock trades around a 30 percent discount to other emerging markets and Russia’s economy lagged the other BRICs’ GDP growth by nearly 5.5 percent in 2010, according to the International Monetary Fund, the fallout from the Yukos affair cannot be measured in financial terms alone. The longer-term and far more detrimental effect is that there is now an assumption of political interference, corruption and the arbitrary use of state powers in civil disputes.

In June, the IMF confirmed that strengthening property rights and the rule of law together with reform of the judiciary and civil service are critical issues for Russia’s economic development. The fund said Russia’s poor business climate discourages investment, which, combined with political uncertainty, contributes heavily to net capital outflows. Reform or recession was the IMF’s underlying message.

Even almost a decade after Khodorkovsky’s arrest, the specter of the Yukos affair still haunts investors’ decision making. In Jochen Wermuth and Nikita Suslov’s June 16 comment in The Moscow Times titled “20 Ways to Improve Russia’s Investment Climate,” a chief investment officer of one of the world’s largest pension funds perhaps put it best: “The government stole assets from Yukos and Shell. You complain, you get expelled, like the BP manager. If you push too hard, you may even get killed in London, Vienna, Dubai or in pretrial detention. Now tell me why should I invest my clients’ money in Russia.”

With aging infrastructure in dire need of modernization, you might reasonably expect the government to bend over backward to tempt investors back and offer them, at least, a level playing field. Eventual Russian entry to the World Trade Organization will undoubtedly help, but the decision to withdraw from the Energy Charter Treaty was a big step backward, removing protection mechanisms for investments made after the date of withdrawal.

As the former majority shareholder of Yukos, we are critically aware of the need for that protection. Without recourse to binding international arbitration, we would be nowhere. Instead, an independent tribunal sitting in The Hague is currently hearing our arguments in the largest-ever commercial arbitration. Despite the Kremlin’s protests, the tribunal confirmed that Russia was fully bound by the Energy Charter Treaty until its formal withdrawal in October 2009.

President Dmitry Medvedev’s subsequent proposals to replace the energy treaty included clauses that would actually sanction discriminatory treatment against foreign investors. This measure will hardly encourage those same investors to part with the $2 trillion the Energy Ministry says is required to modernize the energy sector, increase production and improve supply.

But access to funding is not the most problematic factor for doing business in Russia. In its 2010-11 Global Competitiveness Report, the World Economic Forum reported that corruption was overwhelmingly identified by global businesses as the single most problematic factor for doing business in Russia.

The tragic case of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky shows how devastating that can be. Magnitsky, after uncovering a massive fraud allegedly perpetrated by corrupt officials in the Interior Ministry, was arrested on falsified charges and then refused medical treatment while in pretrial detention unless he testified against his client. He died in prison. Only now — three years later and following pressure from Western governments and international human rights organizations — has the Russian government initiated an investigation, although no one has been arrested yet.

No one should be under any illusions: Corruption was a problem before Yukos was destroyed. Some even speculate that Khodorkovsky was targeted because he was too vocal in highlighting corruption in state-owned companies. It has become much clearer since the beginning of the Yukos affair that corruption in Russia is now so endemic that it is simply a fact of life.

As the Russian government once again prepares to embark on a major state privatization program, foreign investors must clearly make their own calculations about whether the potential success of their Russian ventures outweighs the risks. For us, that calculation is simple. We have lost far too much already.

Tim Osborne is director of GML Ltd. срочный займ займы онлайн на карту срочно www.zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php hairy woman

Moscow’s Sanctions Tit-for-Tat Threatens to Kill the “Reset”

The Foundry

This week the State Department has placed some 64 Russian officials on a visa blacklist that would prevent them from entering the United States. These Russian prosecutors and policemen all played a role in the death of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the most famous whistleblower in post–communist Russian history. While the Foreign Ministry in Moscow loudly protested that the U.S. is being tough on Russia, the imposition of sanctions looks more like the State Department’s pre-emptive way to prevent the Senate’s Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2011 (S. 1039) from passage.

Russia has threatened to “respond asymmetrically” against the Obama Administration’s “reset” policy if the bill becomes law. In a tit-for-tat, the Russian Foreign Ministry reportedly is drawing up a list of U.S. officials who will be banned from Russia and prevented from banking there. While this may be of little concern to Washington, Russian threats to curb cooperation on Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, and North Korea are taken more seriously.

Russian ministry refuses to pursue Magnitsky case

Washington post

Russia’s Interior Ministry has refused to pursue charges against the investigators who oversaw the imprisonment and treatment of Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer who died in pre-trial detention, despite strong recommendations to do so from a presidential commission.

At the same time, the prosecutor’s office said Tuesday it might reopen a case against Magnitsky on accusations of tax fraud that was closed when he died. A recent court decision ruled such cases should be fully investigated because they might end in clearing the dead person’s name.

Magnitsky family lawyer Dmitri Kharitonov expressed skepticism that any good would come from reopening the case.

“As a matter of fact, I do not trust our investigative bodies,” he told the Interfax news agency. “Try as I might, I cannot imagine them admitting all of a sudden that they kept an innocent behind the bars.”

Obama Administration Attempts to Pacify Critics of Russia

Arutz Sheva Israel National News. by Amiel Ungar

In an attempt to salvage the “reset” with Russia, the Obama administration is slapping visa restrictions on Russian human rights violators.

The Obama Administration has put much stock in its “reset” policy with Russia. Under “reset”, the United States did not publicly criticize Russia for human rights violations and other practices that are inimical to democratic standards.

In response for such “realism”, the administration hoped to gain Russian support on such issues as Iran and North Korea, as well as an alternative supply route to Afghanistan. This policy satisfied the Russian leadership to the extent that President Dmitry Medvedev has already endorsed Barack Obama for a second term in office.

This week the reset was looking a bit tattered. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton informed Congress that the US was imposing visa restrictions on Russian officials connected with the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital.

Hermitage Capital was a seed fund started by banker Edmond Safra and Bill Browder (ironically, the grandson of the former American Communist Party leader Earl Browder) for investments in Russia. Magnitsky charged Russian police officials and bankers with tax fraud and the police turned around and charged Magnitsky with the same crime. During his remand he was denied medical treatment and as result he died at the age of 37. Browder has launched a crusade to punish the guilty.

Actually, the Administration announced the measure to head off a more comprehensive bill in Congress. The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act would not only blacklist the 60 police officials involved in that case, but also those involved in the murders of Russian reporters and human rights workers.

The State Department warned the law makers that the passage of the bill could jeopardize important American interests that required cooperation with Russia.

The Russians were not amused as visa blacklisting is a tactic frequently employed against Haitian or African dictators, but not exercised against states that regard themselves as great powers. The measure is viewed as “attempts to interfere in the course of the investigation and pressure judicial bodies”, hence inadmissible.

President Dmitry Medvedev ordered an independent investigation into the Magnitsky case when he sensed the diplomatic fallout. This effort has silenced criticism within the European Union but has not produced the same calming effect in the United States.

In the Russian Duma, nationalist deputies suggested that Russia could retaliate by restricting entry, freezing assets and banning business deals by foreigners suspected to have violated the rights of Russian citizens.

In another sign of growing tension, Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, called Republican senators John Kyl of Arizona and Mark Kirk of Illinois radicals and “monsters of the Cold War.” After meeting with them he came away convinced that if Barack Obama was defeated, US-Russian cooperation would collapse. hairy woman unshaven girl https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php https://zp-pdl.com/how-to-get-fast-payday-loan-online.php онлайн займы

Dark Clouds Gather Over U.S. Reset

The Moscow Times. By Nikolaus von Twickel

Dark storm clouds are collecting over the much-heralded “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations, with both sides working to blacklist the other’s officials, new tensions over U.S. missile defense plans, and a leaked CIA paper supposedly blaming Russia for a bomb blast near the U.S. Embassy in Georgia.

But analysts said it was too early to write off the reset, and that much of this week’s disquiet had more to do with both countries’ domestic politics than a sharp change in relations.

“The reset will continue, but with irritations, even if the Republicans return to power,” said Alexei Malashenko, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center.

This week’s cacophony started Tuesday when U.S. media reported that the U.S. State Department had put a number of Russian officials on a visa blacklist who are thought to be linked to the prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.

The reports were later confirmed, prompting the Foreign Ministry to announce late Wednesday that Moscow would retaliate to such “hostile steps.”

A Kremlin spokeswoman said by telephone Thursday that President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered the Foreign Ministry to prepare measures against U.S. citizens to counter a travel ban against the Russians officials.

The spokeswoman declined further comment but confirmed a statement made by Medvedev’s spokeswoman Natalya Timakova to Kommersant, which reported the president’s orders Thursday.

Timakova denounced the U.S. blacklist as a step that went beyond the worst days of the Cold War. “We are bewildered by the State Department’s position,” she said. “No such measures were taken even in the deepest Cold War years.”

Medvedev’s response might be all the more frustrating for U.S. President Barack Obama because the State Department’s authorization of the blacklist was actually a desperate attempt to save the reset with Moscow, which he considers a hallmark of his presidency. His administration had hoped that the blacklist would convince U.S. senators to abandon a bill that foresees much more sweeping sanctions like asset freezes against a broader number of people.

Obama’s administration makes it clear in its comments to the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, better known as the Cardin bill after its main sponsor, Democrat Senator Benjamin Cardin, that it wants the legislation abandoned because it, among other things, could cause the Kremlin to make good on a threat to cancel cooperation on issues like Iran and Afghanistan.

But the furious response from the Kremlin, the Foreign Ministry and numerous State Duma deputies seems to point another way.

“Moscow has not appreciated Washington’s generosity,” Kommersant wrote Thursday.

Duma deputies already are preparing a bill that would introduce similar sanctions on foreigners deemed to have violated the rights of Russian citizens.

Mikhail Fedotov, chairman of Medvedev’s human rights council, criticized the conflict Thursday, saying it was foolish to deny entry in a tit-for-tat manner.

Fedotov said Russian officials should worry less about the U.S. blacklist than about a list that his council is compiling as part of an independent investigation ordered by Medvedev into Magnitsky’s death. “Our list is much more fearsome. It does not close the road to America but opens the road to the Butyrskaya prison,” he told reporters in comments carried by Interfax.

In a new uncomfortable development, Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s representative to NATO, complained Thursday that influential U.S. lawmakers are opposed to cooperating with Moscow on NATO’s planned missile shield in Europe.

“They’re practically not hiding the fact that the system will be directed against Russia, not against some mythical state in the Middle East,” Rogozin said after returning to Brussels from talks in Washington, Interfax reported.

Rogozin said an opportunity remained for joint cooperation, touted by NATO officials as a key element in the Western alliance’s future strategy, but it all depends on the political will in Washington.

He also warned that if Obama is not re-elected next year and “Russophobes” come to power, this might “destroy the global political stability that has been built with so much effort over the last decade.”

Rogozin was bristling after meetings with Senators Jon Kyl and Mark Kirk, both staunchly conservative Republicans.

Kyl, the Senate’s Republican whip, also made Russia-related headlines this week when he was called for a congressional investigation into reports that Russian military intelligence officers were behind a bomb blast next to the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi last September.

Kyl’s comments appeared in a Washington Times report Wednesday that says a highly classified report drafted by the CIA but with input from other U.S. agencies has concluded that the General Staff’s intelligence directorate, or GRU, is to blame for the explosion.

No one was hurt in the minor blast outside an embassy wall, but Georgian police later arrested six people whom they accused of being Russian agents responsible for staging a series of explosions, including the one outside the U.S. mission.

Last month, a Tbilisi court found 15 people guilty of terrorism and sentenced them to lengthy prison terms. The court sentenced the suspected ringleader, Russian Army Major Yevgeny Borisov, to 30 years in prison in absentia.

The Georgian Interior Ministry accuses Borisov of working as a GRU officer in Abkhazia and has put him on an Interpol wanted list.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has denied the allegations. It also says Borisov has not been in Abkhazia since August 2010 and could not have been involved in the explosions, which occurred last fall.

The case has attracted little international attention, partly because Tbilisi, which has poor relations with Moscow, has accused the GRU of spying in a number of cases in recent months.

As evidence of the CIA report, The Washington Times report quotes two unidentified U.S. officials whom it says have read it.

Andrei Soldatov, who tracks the Russian intelligence community with the Agentura.ru think tank, said the GRU has in the past acted “autonomously” in Georgia but he has not seen enough evidence to support its involvement in the blasts.

About the Washington Times story, he said: “This report unfortunately does not give us any first-hand information.”

Malashenko, of the Carnegie Center, said that many of this week’s turbulence in U.S.-Russian ties is linked to domestic policy. Washington is boiling over the failure of Congress and the White House to reach an agreement to avoid a possible default on the country’s debt, while the elite in Moscow is on tenterhooks over the failure of Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to provide clarity on whether either will run in the 2012 presidential election.

Wednesday saw the publication of two much-discussed articles: Influential analysts Igor Yurgens and Yevgeny Gontmakher urged Medvedev to run in Vedomosti, while Reuters quoted “senior political sources” as saying Putin was likely to return to the presidency.

“Medvedev is in an extremely difficult position, and he must publicly protect those officials, even if they are his enemies,” Malashenko said. онлайн займ онлайн займ https://zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php микрозайм онлайн

Russia Rages At U.S. Visa Ban

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Reports of Russia’s muted response to the U.S. decision to bar 60 people allegedly involved in the death of hedge fund lawyer Sergei Magnitsky from entering the country may have been greatly exaggerated.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered his Foreign Ministry to investigate a response to the U.S. action. In a statement, the ministry warned that the U.S. visa ban “could introduce a serious irritant to Russian-U.S. relations.”

“We will not leave such unfriendly steps unanswered and we will take adequate measures, protecting the sovereignty of our country and the rights of Russian citizens against unjustified moves by foreign states.”

The U.S. move, which followed a Russian report that concluded that Magnitsky had been denied adequate medical care and beaten to death during his nearly one year in custody on tax fraud charges, was made in part to head off more serious action sought by a Senate bill, which would also have frozen the assets of the named Russian officials in the U.S.

State Dept. spokesman Mark Toner confirmed yesterday that the visa bans had been put in place. The restrictions were first reported to the senators backing the tougher bill; Russia was not formally informed.

William Browder, for whom Magnitsky worked at Hermitage Capital Management, cheered the U.S. move.

“Our main goal is to punish the people who tortured and killed him, but the probability in getting justice in Russia is very, very slim, and so we’ve been looking at ways of getting justice outside of Russia,” Browder told The Wall Street Journal. “There, the United States banning these people from coming into the U.S. is a very strong move, and will most likely be replicated in other countries, particularly in Europe.” payday loan buy over the counter medicines https://www.zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php buy viagra online

Browder: Visa Ban More Likely To Bring Justice In Magnitsky Case Than Russian Probes

Wall Street Journal Blogs. By Samuel Rubenfeld

William Browder, head of the investment firm Hermitage Capital Management, sees a visa ban on officials allegedly connected to the death of the firm’s lawyer Sergei Magnitsky as a strategy with more hope of success than pursuing the matter in Russia.

The State Department this week announced it would deny visas to officials it said it suspected of being involved in Magnitsky’s death. The lawyer died in custody in 2009 after alleging that senior police officials had defrauded Hermitage, the same officials who then arrested him. A Russian investigative committee said this month that Magnitsky died of heart disease and hepatitis and opened criminal charges against a doctor and a prison official.

“Our main goal is to punish the people who tortured and killed him, but the probability in getting justice in Russia is very, very slim, and so we’ve been looking at ways of getting justice outside of Russia,” said Browder in an interview. “Therefore, the United States banning these people from coming into the U.S. is a very strong move, and will most likely be replicated in other countries, particularly in Europe.”

Magnitsky has been hailed around the world by anti-corruption activists as a martyr, and Browder has been the principal voice in keeping his case alive.

The visa ban by the U.S. State Department was a way to head off passage of a bill proposed by two U.S. Senators that would place a visa ban and an asset freeze on officials tied to Magnitsky’s death, and would apply to other cases such as the unsolved murder of investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya.

Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, stressed Wednesday during a press briefing that the ban should be seen “in the broader context of…upholding human rights obligations around the world.”

“In this specific case, it was the individuals that we believe are responsible for his death…The Magnitsky case has long been an issue of concern between us and Russia, and we’ve raised it with them many times,” Toner said.

The visa ban drew an angry response from Russia. Toner responded testily to questions Wednesday about the visa ban’s affect on U.S. relations with Russia.

“Our goal has always been to cooperate, as I said, where we’ve got these common interests. But that’s never going to be done at the expense of our principles or our friends,” Toner said.

Browder was undeterred in his support of the legislation, saying the bill strengthens the U.S. position vis-a-vis Russia.

“Russians make a lot of noise, but when push comes to shove they will not ruin their relationship with America to protect a number of corrupt torturers and murderers who work in their law-enforcement agencies,” Browder said.
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Russia Gives U.S. Warning on Magnitsky Case

The Moscow Times. By Nikolaus von Twickel

The Foreign Ministry issued a stern warning to Washington on Wednesday that U.S. entry bans for officials implicated in the prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky posed a serious irritant for efforts to improve ties.

The ministry condemned the “arbitrary punishment” of people who have not been proven guilty in court.

“Attempts to interfere in the investigation and to pressure the judiciary are absolutely unacceptable,” it said in a statement on its web site.

The ministry promised that Moscow would retaliate.

“Clearly we won’t let such hostile steps happen without a response and will take adequate measures to protect our country’s sovereignty and our citizens from such wrongful actions by foreign states,” it said.

The terse statement came a day after U.S. media reported that Washington had quietly issued entry bans on dozens of Russian officials accused by human rights activists of torturing and killing Magnitsky.

Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital, once the country’s biggest foreign investment fund, died in a Moscow prison in November 2009. His supporters are campaigning among Western governments to impose sanctions against those responsible.

European governments have been hesitant to act on those demands, arguing that sanctions would jeopardize the Kremlin’s efforts to investigate the case. Washington is the first to take any measures, casting a shadow on its much-touted reset of relations with Moscow.

The administration of President Barack Obama, in a commentary to U.S. senators that became fully public Wednesday, said current U.S. law “already bars admission … of aliens who have engaged in torture and extrajudicial killings.”

“Secretary [Hillary] Clinton has taken steps to ban individuals associated with the wrongful death of Sergei Magnitsky from traveling to the United States,” according to the document, which was published by a Washington-based blogger for Foreign Policy magazine, Josh Rogin.

That line of argument was angrily rejected as “absolutely cynical” by a senior United Russia official.

Andrei Klimov, deputy chairman of the State Duma’s International Affairs Committee, told The Moscow Times that the United States was in violation of international agreements by punishing people who have not been convicted in court. “They ignore the principle of innocent until proven guilty,” he said, adding that the decision “destroys the atmosphere of trust” that built up since Obama and President Dmitry Medvedev embarked on their reset policy.

Paradoxically, the move is actually an attempt to save the reset from greater damage looming in a Senate bill that envisages much wider and tougher sanctions.

The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act also includes asset freezes and would affect not only 60 law enforcement officers accused in the Magnitsky case, but also officials implicated in the killings of reporter Anna Politkovskaya and human rights worker Natalya Estemirova.

The Obama administration’s written commentary addresses that bill, trying to convince senators to abandon it.

The memorandum stresses that there is no need for additional legislation after Clinton’s decision.

It goes on to argue that “the threshold for naming names is ambiguous and would set a precedent for how the U.S. deals with human rights cases around the world,” and that it imposes “quasi judicial requirements” on visa officers having to judge on applicants’ eligibility.

It was unclear Wednesday whether senators would heed the arguments brought forward by the White House and the State Department.

But Democratic Senator Benjamin Cardin, the bill’s main sponsor, seemed to backtrack significantly by suggesting in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine that the bill’s future was up in the air.

“I’m working with the administration, working with the committee, and working with my fellow senators to determine how to proceed,” he was quoted as saying.

“Two things can change strategy: One is what happens in Russia, one is what happens in the State Department. Both are fluid at this point,” he said.

What makes Obama’s position further uncomfortable is that U.S. lawmakers have in the past linked a repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the passage of Cardin’s bill.

The White House has made lifting Jackson-Vanik, a Cold War-era set of trade sanctions, a policy priority because it would put the United States in violation of international law once Russia joins the World Trade Organization.

Obama has said he supports Moscow’s goal to achieve WTO entry by the end of this year.

Observers doubt that the White House, currently locked in a dramatic standoff with Congress about how to raise the U.S. debt ceiling and avoid a default, has enough clout to move both Jackson-Vanik and Cardin’s bill out of the way.

“The Magnitsky act’s value as a bargaining chip may be minimal. Either way, it’s clear that the Obama administration places great value on maintaining the gains of the reset and doesn’t want anything to get in  the way,” Rogin wrote on his blog Wednesday.

Andrei Piontkovsky, a veteran political analyst and a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, warned that an escalation of the affair could also jeopardize the confirmation of Washington’s next ambassador to Moscow.

White House sources said earlier this year that Michael McFaul, currently Obama’s top Russia adviser, would become the new ambassador, but no official announcement has been made and the Senate has yet to set a date for his confirmation.

“If the reset is in tatters, why should the Senate confirm McFaul, who is the architect of the reset?” Piontkovsky said. срочный займ займы без отказа https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php www.zp-pdl.com срочный займ