Boxer, Murphy, Shaheen, McCain Urge Focus on Russia’s Repressive, Discriminatory Policies at G-20 Summit
For Immediate Release:
August 30, 2013
Contact: Washington D.C. Office (202) 224-3553
Boxer, Murphy, Shaheen, McCain Urge Focus on Russia’s Repressive, Discriminatory Policies at G-20 Summit – Senators Ask President Obama to Call Attention to Violations of Basic Freedoms Under Russian President, Including Jailing of Opposition Figures and Laws Targeting NGOs and the LGBT Community
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Christopher Murphy (D-CT), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and John McCain (R-AZ), all members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, today sent a letter to President Obama urging him to use his upcoming trip to the G-20 Leaders’ Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, as an opportunity to call attention to the Russian government’s ongoing crackdown on human rights and civil society. The Summit begins on September 5.
“The United States must not give President Putin a free pass on repression,” the Senators wrote. “We hope we can count on you to prioritize advancing human rights as a central objective of U.S. relations with Russia.”
In the letter, Senators Boxer, Murphy, Shaheen and McCain called for a renewed focus by the U.S. and its allies on Russia’s deteriorating human rights situation and the government’s assault on basic freedoms—including criminalizing peaceful speech, discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, imprisoning those who criticize President Putin or his security force allies, and harassing and intimidating lawyers who stand up for human rights defenders.
The Senators wrote, “Russia is a great power with enormous potential to help solve the world’s problems. But great powers should respect international human rights norms and uphold the rule of law both at home and abroad.”
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Interpol open to abuse by ‘criminal states’
When Petr Silaev, a Russian journalist, got political asylum in Finland in April 2012 after escaping a crackdown in his home country, he felt safe and began a new life.
But in August the same year, he found himself handcuffed and shoved face-down on the floor of a police car on a seven-hour trip from Granada, Spain, where he went on holiday, to a detention centre in Madrid, where he risked extradition.
“The Spanish police treated me in a mind-breaking way … They kept saying: ‘You’ll be deported.’ They kept abusing me, saying: ‘You’re a Russian terrorist’,” he told EUobserver.
When Ales Mihalevic, an opposition candidate in Belarus’ presidential elections in 2010, fled his home country, he found himself, in July 2011, detained by Polish airport police and risking a similar fate.
The link in both cases was Interpol, the international police body based in Lyon, France.
Belarus and Russia had filed requests for their capture using Interpol systems and two of Interpol’s 190 fellow member states, Spain and Poland, took action.
Mihalevic and Silaev are not freak examples.
In January last year, Eerik Kross, an Estonian politician and a former director of Estonia’s intelligence service, also became a wanted man after Interpol issued a “red notice” on Moscow’s say-so.
Kross is a known adversary of the Kremlin.
He was a leading proponent of Estonia’s Nato membership. In the 2008 Georgia-Russia war, he helped Georgia to fight off Russian cyber attacks.
But Russia used the long arm of Interpol to reach out for him on different grounds.
It filed the notice saying Kross masterminded the hijack of a Russian ship, the Arctic Sea, off the coast of Sweden in 2009, a claim which Kross calls “idiotic.” It did so on grounds that a witness in an Arctic Sea trial had mentioned his name.
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Not Stupidity, but Malevolence
Critics of the current Russian regime often call its actions “stupid” and detrimental to its own image. According to author and analyst Alexander Podrabinek, however, what looks like government “stupidity” is actually a well-thought out strategy.
It is nice to think of your adversary as an idiot. It makes you feel better about yourself and reassures you by trivializing the threat: what foolishness did he or she think of this time? The same holds true when the adversary is the government. We fume about the Russian government doing this or that. How can it be so stupid? Does it not realize that it is undermining its own position and the image of the country? What we fail to appreciate is that the government understands everything it does; we just don’t understand its real motives. We judge the regime’s objectives, logic, and morals by our standards, when its own standards are completely different. Many of our troubles come from this lack of understanding.
Many of the government’s initiatives damage Russia’s image and result in international scandals. Prison sentences for members of the punk band Pussy Riot mobilized protests by top figures in the European music industry. Laws directed against homosexual propaganda have elicited fierce criticism of the Russian government from all corners of the world. The government’s insistence on protecting the law enforcement mafia in the Magnitsky case drew the world’s attention to a new instrument of government influence that violates human rights.
And we continue to wonder: What does the government think it is doing? How can it fail to foresee the possible consequences of its actions? Unfortunately, we just don’t understand the government. It very likely weighs its actions in advance and expects consequences. As much as we would like to think otherwise, it is anything but stupid. It simply has different objectives. In the Pussy Riot case, the government wanted to demonstrate that Russia is a religious and fundamentalist country, rather than a secular one; that the sentence handed down in the farce trial was a reflection of the people’s will; and that individual freedom pales before the power of the inferior mob.
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Putin’s own Cold War
Whose side is Vladimir Putin on? It’s a question worth asking, because of late the Kremlin has come closer and closer to the tipping point between obstreperousness and outright hostility towards the West. Last week Barack Obama cancelled a September summit with Putin after Russia offered asylum to the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. But in truth the Snowden affair is only the latest and most trivial of a long and growing list of issues where Russia and the US are on radically opposite sides.
Syria probably tops the list — at least in terms of urgency and human cost. Russia has offered diplomatic support to the Assad regime by using its veto on the UN Security Council to block sanctions and intervention. More seriously, Russia has become the arsenal of dictatorship, selling over $1.5 billion of arms to Assad since the start of the civil war. Last month Russia escalated its military aid still further after foreign minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed that Kremlin would deliver S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems to Damascus — the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, visited Putin in May to beg him not to do that. Lavrov insists that only ‘defensive’ materiel is being supplied to the Syrians. But the S-300 missiles will change the balance of the war — for instance by substantially complicating any western effort to impose a no-fly zone.
For the first time in a generation Russia and Nato find themselves backing opposite sides in a proxy war. Last June a Turkish jet was shot down off the coast of Syria by a Russian-supplied Panshir M-1 missile — possibly, according to Russian press reports, targeted by one of the Russian advisers sent to install the missiles and train Syrian operators. More Russian personnel are due to come and install the S-300 systems. At the same time the Pentagon confirmed in June that US F-16 warplanes and Patriot anti-aircraft missiles would remain in Jordan after the end of a joint drill this month, fuelling speculation that Washington was preparing for a no-fly zone. There’s debate over just what the S-300s can do, and whether they can be installed soon enough to make a difference. But the moment when a Russian officer aims and fires a missile at a Nato pilot — which almost never happened during the real Cold War — is likely to become a reality.
The idea that Russia and the West are engaged in a ‘new Cold War’ was first floated six years ago in a brilliant book of that name by Economist correspondent Edward Lucas. Lucas argued that the Kremlin’s bullying of its neighbours by cutting off gas supplies, sending assassins to murder dissidents in London and invading Georgia constituted acts of war. By that logic, Russia’s subsequent behaviour — Syria, Snowden, banning Americans from adopting Russian children, shutting down USAID offices for alleged ‘subversive activity’, wild accusations that the US is fomenting a rebellion against the Kremlin — are more bellicose still.
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It’s Time to Call Out Russia
President Obama decided to cancel a one-on-one meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin next month.He canceled for a host of reasons, not the least of which is Russia’s decision to grant Edward Snowden asylum. Nevertheless, there is a rising chorus of foreign policy realists in Washington who are alarmed by the decision. They’re wrong — Russia has taken a turn for the worse, and it’s time for the President to issue more gestures of contempt.
When Barack Obama came into office in 2009, American relations with Russia were at a low point. George W. Bush began his first term saying he saw into Putin’s soul, but ended his second with a bitter disagreement over Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia after Georgian troops killed Russian soldiers in South Ossetia. The “reset” policy, which Obama hoped would restore or, at the very least, de-escalate tensions, has not worked out as well as its authors hoped (though it is often unfairly maligned — relations with Russia are still not as bad as they were at the end of 2008).
Even so, Obama and President Medvedev seemed to have a polite, if not warm rapport at first. But when Putin came back into the presidency in May of 2012, that began to change.
Actually, the change happened earlier, in December of 2011. That was when Putin’s party, United Russia, lost its supermajority in Russia’s parliament. The protests that resulted sparked an outpouring of state violence against otherwise peaceful marchers, all for the crime of opposing a return of Putin to lead Russia.
In the U.S., the crackdown led to an odd congruence of commentary: Both human rights groups and conservatives condemned Russia in equally strong terms (culminating in Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney calling Russia “our biggest geopolitical foe” in March of 2012).
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The Rise and Probable Fall of Putin’s Enforcer
On June 4 2012, Russian reporter Sergei Sokolov was part of a press delegation accompanying the three-year-old Investigative Committee, often described as Russia’s FBI, on a trip to Kabardino-Balkaria, a republic in the Caucasus. Sokolov’s publication, Novaya Gazeta, is one of the few independent newspapers left in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a fact ominously borne out by the five journalists who have been removed from its masthead by being murdered — among them, Anna Politkovskaya. So the 59-year-old head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, might have expected a less-than-friendly audience in Sokolov, who had indeed already filed a blistering dispatch about the Committee’s bungled investigation into the murder of 12 people, including four children, in Kushchevskaya, a village in the Krasnodar region, which took place in 2010. Krasnodar is notorious for its gang violence and Sokolov was particularly incensed about what had happened to Sergei Tsepovyaz, a local state official who’d destroyed evidence in the case and whose brother was a known member of the gang that perpetrated the killings: the brother got off with a $5,000 fine. Sokolov not unreasonably alleged a state coverup and named Bastrykin and Putin as “servants” of Krasnodar gangsters. After being cornered by his quarry in Kabardino-Balkaria, however, the journalist apologized for some of his prior coverage, but Russia’s top cop was neither appeased nor amused. “I consider myself insulted,” Bastrykin replied, “and not just personally. In czarist times they would have called people out to duel over this.”
A duel wasn’t quite what happened next. The delegation, including Sokolov, returned safely to Moscow. Nine days later, on June 13, Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, published an open letter addressed to Bastrykin, in which he claimed that Bastrykin had threatened to behead and dismember Sokolov:
“Sokolov was placed in a car by your bodyguards. He was taken without any explanation to a forest near Moscow. There, you asked the bodyguards to leave you and remained face to face with Sokolov… The hard truth is that, in your emotional state, you rudely threatened the life of my journalist. And you joked that you would investigate the murder case personally.”
Bastrykin’s initial reaction, in an interview with pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia, was to say that he hadn’t even been in a forest “in years.” All the allegations made in Muratov’s letter, he said, were “outright lies.” However, his denial couldn’t stop an undeniably scandalous story — what Muratov later described as “bad Hollywood” — from gripping the nation’s attention. Five journalists were arrested for picketing outside the Committee’s headquarters in Moscow the day the letter was published. What then followed was unprecedented. Rather than retrench and perhaps lock up Muratov, Bastrykin invited the Novaya Gazeta editors to a meeting hosted by Interfax, another media outlet, whereupon the Committee chief issued a formal apology to Sokolov, who was by now well out of Russia, fearing for his life. (Sokolov returned a few days later.)
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The Wrong Way to Punish Putin
Punishing Russia is all the rage these days. After Moscow gave temporary asylum to the NSA leaker Edward Snowden, U.S. Senator John McCain proposed extending the “Magnistky List” of Russian officials barred from entering the United States, speeding deployment of missile defenses in Europe, and rapidly expanding NATO to include Georgia. The British actor Stephen Fry and various LGBT activists have advocated a boycott of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics to protest recent Russian policies targeting gays and lesbians. Gay bars in the United States have reportedly started dumping their stocks of Stolichnaya vodka.
Most significantly, on Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama canceled a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin that was supposed to take place in September in Moscow, expressing displeasure at the Kremlin’s granting of asylum to Snowden, among other things.
Anger with Russia’s behavior on these scores is perfectly understandable. Snowden has been charged with serious crimes and Washington has a legitimate interest in bringing him to trial. Russia’s recent law banning “pro-homosexual propaganda” has created a climate of aggression, in which vigilantes attack LGBT Russians and post horrifying videos of their violence online.
But before leaping into action, those eager to punish Russia should consider two things. First, why is Putin behaving in this way? And second, will the sanctions in question hurt him or actually benefit him? Given that Putin is currently fighting for his political life, a public showdown with the West will help him stay afloat. The Americans and Europeans who want to change Moscow’s course should therefore be careful not to play into Putin’s hands.
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McCain: Canceling Putin meeting not enough
Sen. John McCain said Sunday it’s “fine” that President Barack Obama canceled a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but Obama’s actions and statements show he does not understand how to deal with Putin.
“The president comparing him to a kid in the back of the classroom, I think, is very indicative of the president’s lack of appreciation of who Vladimir Putin is,” the Arizona Republican said on “Fox News Sunday,” referring to a comment Obama made in a press conference on Friday. “He’s an old KGB colonel that has no illusions about our relationship, does not care about a relationship with the United States, continues to oppress his people, continues to oppress the media and continues to act in an autocratic and unhelpful fashion.”
Canceling the meeting, which the president did last week after Russia granted asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, was “symbolic,” McCain said, but the U.S. needs to expand the Magnitsky Act and enforce human rights, get Georgia into NATO and expand missile defense systems in Europe.
“We also need very badly to understand that Mr. Putin does not have the United States-Russia relationships in any priority and treat him in a realistic fashion,” the senator said. “hat’s the way to treat Mr. Putin, not just canceling a meeting.” займ онлайн на карту без отказа срочный займ https://zp-pdl.com/fast-and-easy-payday-loans-online.php https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php микрозаймы онлайн
President Obama accused by senior Republican of ‘weak’ stance on Russia
President Barack Obama faced calls Sunday to pursue a more hawkish line on Russia, with an influential Republican foreign policy voice suggesting the US leader lacked sufficient insight over Vladimir Putin’s intentions.
Arizona senator and former White House candidate John McCain suggested that comments made by Obama following the cancellation of a meeting with the Russian president did not go far enough to address a series of grievances Washington has with Moscow, including the handling of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Obama spoke on Friday of worsening US-Russia relations but said that he did not have a “bad personal relationship” with Putin, despite the tension suggested by his body language – “that kinda slouch, like a bored kid at the back of the classroom” – when the pair meet.
Speaking on Fox News Sunday, McCain said: “The president comparing him to a kid in the back of the classroom, I think, is very indicative of the president’s lack of appreciation of who Vladimir Putin is.”
“He’s an old KGB colonel that has no illusions about our relationship, does not care about a relationship with the United States, continues to oppress his people, continues to oppress the media and continues to act in an autocratic and unhelpful fashion.”
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