A Russian ‘frenemy’
The White House is trying to revive the “reset” with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It is likely to be a wasted effort. The reset is dead not because of someone’s ill will or mistakes. It is because Washington and Moscow have reached the limit of accommodation that neither could overstep without compromising the central elements and moral content of their foreign and domestic policies. The Obama administration’s effort would be far better spent on devising a more realistic strategy that at least stabilizes the relationship, albeit on a lower level of interaction.
Two sets of factors are mostly responsible for the growing disjunction between the United States and Russia: the diminution of Russia’s geo-strategic relevance for some key U.S. objectives, and the increasing prominence and role that Kremlin domestic behavior plays in U.S.-Russian relations.
In Afghanistan, the rapid drawdown of U.S. troops obviates much of the need for personnel and materiel transportation through Russia after 2014. With regard to Iran, another key U.S. concern, Russia has unambiguously signaled the end of its support for even watered-down resolutions that it previously voted for at the U.N. Security Council.
Syria has been an even starker demonstration of the diversion in guiding values and objectives. Russia thrice vetoed U.S.-supported Security Council resolutions calling for sanctions against the murderous Assad regime. The last of the vetoes was cast in July, despite President Obama’s appeal to President Putin in an hourlong telephone conversation. Throughout the conflict, Russia has continued to sell weapons and technology to Assad.
On Russia’s domestic front, following Putin’s reelection in March 2012, the Kremlin has undertaken a concerted and consistent effort to repress, intimidate, marginalize and stigmatize not just the political opposition but also citizens participating in peaceful protests and members of nonpolitical, independent civil movements and groups. Since the run-up to the Duma election in the second half of 2011, from Putin on down, the regime has been using alleged subversion by external enemies to justify the crackdown.
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Magnitsky Partner Faces Charges In Gazprom Stock Case
Russian authorities say they are preparing to bring new charges against William Browder, the U.S.-born former employer of the late Russian anticorruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
The Interior Ministry on March 5 said Browder, the founder of the Hermitage Capital investment fund, is accused of illegally purchasing $3 billion in shares in Russia’s state-controlled company Gazprom.
Browder has campaigned for the prosecution of those responsible for the death of Magnitsky, who died in pretrial detention after accusing Russian officials of fraud.
“They can sort of whip themselves up into a crazy frenzy of misuse of their own justice system, but it really has no impact on our campaign,” Browder told RFE/RL’s Russian Service after the announcement. “They killed Sergei Magnitsky, they tortured him to death. We’re going to get justice for Sergei Magnitsy. And the more of this crazy stuff they do, the more obvious it becomes that there is a criminal regime going on in Russia who are basically doing everything they can to cover up the murder, and we’re not going to let them cover it up.”
The announcement of the new charges against Browder came one day after a Russian court announced on March 4 that an unprecedented posthumous trial against Magnitsky for tax evasion will start on March 11.
Browder is a co-defendant in the trial and will be tried in absentia.
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Trial against dead Russian lawyer to proceed
A Russian court has ordered the trial of a dead anti-corruption lawyer to proceed next week, ignoring calls by his family and lawyers to abandon a case they say is absurd and politically motivated.
Moscow’s Tverskoy Court said after a pre-trial hearing on Monday that the hearing on Sergei Magnitsky’s tax fraud case will open on March 11.
Defense lawyers said the 37-year old’s trial will be the first for a dead person in Russia.
“The trial is indeed absurd,” said lawyer Alexander Molokhov after the court rejected his application to defend Magnitsky.
The court had already appointed a legal team to defend Magnitsky after his own lawyers refused to take part in a trial, which his relatives say is politically motivated.
Magnitsky died while in custody in 2009, after he had complained repeatedly of being denied medical treatment. His death has damaged Russia’s image and triggered an ongoing diplomatic row with the United States.
Magnitsky’s mother, Natalya, has said previously that the case is a farce and her lawyer Nikolai Gorokhov likened the proceedings to “dancing on the grave of a dead man”.
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Trial due to start in Russia of lawyer who died in police custody
The controversial trial of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in police custody, is due to begin in Moscow next week.
Mr Magnitsky was arrested in 2008 after accusing officials of tax fraud but was later himself accused of those crimes.
His death has led to a diplomatic dispute between Russia and the United States.
Daniel Sandford reports.
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Sergei Magnitsky: Dead Russian lawyer trial to proceed
A judge in Moscow has ruled that the trial of the dead lawyer Sergei Magnitsky should go ahead next week, despite last-minute efforts to stop it.
Mr Magnitsky died in prison in 2009.
An investment fund auditor, he said he had uncovered a $230m (£150m) tax fraud involving Russian government officials.
The case has strained relations between Russia and the US. Amnesty International said the trial would “open a whole new chapter in Russia’s worsening human rights record”.
His family and lawyers refused to attend the pre-trial hearing on Monday, saying the case was politically motivated.
Also to be tried in absentia is Bill Browder, the head of Hermitage Capital Management, which employed Mr Magnitsky.
He was barred from Russia in 2006 and is in Britain.
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RUSSIA TO CHARGE MAGNITSKY’S EX-EMPLOYER
Russia’s Interior Ministry is preparing to bring criminal charges against U.S.-born investor Bill Browder, the latest turn in a feud which has led to U.S. sanctions against on some Russian officials, a Russian ban on adoptions of Russian children by Americans, and the upcoming trial of a dead man.
The dead man is Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who worked for Browder’s Hermitage Capital, once a minority shareholder in the state-controlled gas giant, Gazprom.
Magnitsky died in jail in 2009 after his pancreatitis went untreated. The Russian presidential council on human rights said in a 2011 report that Magnitsky had been repeatedly beaten and deliberately denied medical treatment. The lawyer’s death became a litmus test for the Russian government’s commitment to the rule of law: no one has yet been found responsible for his killing.
Magnitsky and Browder are due to be put on trial next week for tax evasion.
Russia’s top court ruled in August 2011 that posthumous trials are allowed, with the intention of letting relatives clear their loved ones’ names. In Magnitsky’s case, prosecutors re-filed charges although family members said they didn’t want another trial.
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Trial of dead lawyer Sergei Magnitsky may shine light on UK investigators
There were two empty chairs in Room 17 of Tverskoi court in Moscow yesterday. The defendants were indisposed.
One, Sergei Magnitsky, a whistleblowing lawyer, died more than three years ago in his prison cell. The other, the millionaire US businessman Bill Browder, expelled from Russia, was sitting in his office in Soho, Central London, fuming about a case that is worthy of the absurdist 19th-century Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol.
“We’re not going to dignify a Stalinist show trial by our presence,” said the head of the investment fund Hermitage Capital, a campaigner for sanctions against 60 officials who he claims were complicit in the torture and death of his associate.
He argues that the officials defrauded some $230 million from the Russian state using documentation stolen from Hermitage offices in Moscow. When he and Mr Magnitsky uncovered the conspiracy, the authorities turned the tables on the two whistleblowers, accusing them of a $17.5 million tax evasion.
The trial has given Mr Browder a chance to prod European investigators — including in Britain — into tackling those involved in the Magnitsky affair, which he describes as “potentially the Watergate of the Putin era”.
In mid-April, the US Government will publish the names and that should, Mr Browder says, galvanise Britain into action. The list include senior officials from the Interior Ministry, tax and customs officials and prison functionaries.
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Russia to try dead whistleblower on March 11
A Russian court will start the posthumous trial of a dead anti-corruption lawyer next week after ignoring calls by his family and lawyers to abandon a case they say is absurd and politically motivated.
Sergei Magnitsky’s death in custody in 2009, after he had complained repeatedly of being denied medical treatment, has damaged Russia’s image and strained ties with the United States.
But Moscow’s Tverskoy Court said after a pre-trial hearing on Monday that the trial itself would open on March 11, a court spokeswoman said.
Lawyers say Magnitsky, who was 37 and was accused of tax fraud after investigating similar claims against his accusers, will be the first dead person to go on trial in Russia.
“The trial is indeed absurd,” said lawyer Alexander Molokhov after the court rejected his application to defend Magnitsky.
The court had already appointed a legal team to defend Magnitsky after his own lawyers refused to take part in a trial which his relatives say is politically motivated.
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Russia’s trial of DEAD man gets go-ahead for next week
Russia’s bid to put a dead man on trial descended into farce today as even a state-appointed lawyer urged that the case against Sergei Magnitsky should be put on hold and sent back to the prosecutor’s office.
But the move was rejected by the judge and now the bizarre posthumous trial will go ahead on 11 March.
The 37-year-old lawyer and anti-corruption campaigner died in a Moscow detention centre after being arrested by senior law enforcement officials he had accused of large-scale $230 million financial corruption.
No-one has been found guilty of his death – and now he will be the first dead defendant in Russian or Soviet history to go on trial.
Magnitsky’s family refused to co-operate with the ‘macabre’ case, with his mother Natalya dubbing the case immoral, illegal and designed to turn her whistleblower son into a criminal.
Lawyer Nikolai Gerasimov appointed by the state against her will to act for her dead son demanded in a closed-doors session that the trial judge Igor Alisov send the case back to prosecutors due to legal inaccuracies. The bid was refused last night.
In a surprise move another lawyer Alexander Molokhov, claiming to represent Magnitsky’s friends, said he was refused permission to take part in the controversial hearing.
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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