Lilia Shevtsova: A new way to contain Russia
Traditional methods of dealing with Putin’s Kremlin have stopped working, writes Lilia Shevtsova.
For a prime example of a state with a split personality, watch Russia. On one hand, President Vladimir Putin writes to US counterpart Barack Obama, expressing hopes that their “relationship will move ahead in various areas”. On the other, the Kremlin returns to the mantra of “unique Russian civilisation” and does its best to close the country to the west. Western observers may shrug, saying they’ve seen it all before. But actually, things have changed.
First, Mr Putin’s team no longer cares what the west thinks. Second, the Kremlin has switched from imitating democracy to deterring European values. Anyone who thinks this shift will not affect Russian foreign policy is wrong. It is already having an impact. Look at Kremlin defence spending and Moscow’s attempts to create a Eurasian Union from former Soviet states.
But what, asks the optimist, about the partnerships of state-controlled energy group Rosneft with ExxonMobil and BP? Mr Putin needs western business to prolong his petrostate but the fate of Shell and BP in Russia proves they are at the mercy of the Kremlin’s moods.
The Kremlin is offering new rules that sound like an ultimatum. Accept the concept of total state sovereignty, allowing any regime (Syria included) to treat its people as it sees fit. Co-operate on trade, investment and other areas of mutual interest. Do not obstruct our elite’s activities in your countries, which means forgetting about the Magnitsky act barring Russian officials accused of human rights violations from the US. Accept that we have a “sphere of interests”. And no lectures about democracy.
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Russian “Grandma of Human Rights” Nominated for Nobel Prize
This week, Senator Benjamin Cardin (D–MD) nominated the “grandma” of the Russian human rights movement, Lyudmila Alekseeva, for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize.
Cardin’s nomination of the veteran of the dissident movement affirms the United States’ support for human rights activists in Russia and gives this “peacemaker” the recognition she deserves.
Alekseeva was born in 1927 in the Crimea and studied history at the prestigious Moscow State University. During her time there, Alekseeva fell in with the dissident crowd. By the 1960s, she protested the Communist Party’s crackdown on dissident writers and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She continued to work for human rights in the Soviet Union and in 1976 was one of the founding members of the Moscow Helsinki Group.
The group, named after its support of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which the Soviet Union signed, was founded in the apartment of dissident physicist and human rights leader Andrei Sakharov.
Only a year after she helped found the group, Alekseeva, like many other dissidents, was exiled from the USSR. She moved to the U.S. and kept up her work promoting human rights. She was frequently published and often appeared on Radio Liberty and Voice of America, U.S. government-funded stations that broadcasted to the Soviet Union.
Two years after the fall of communism, Alekseeva returned to Russia and in 1996 became chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights nongovernmental organization (NGO).
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Resetting Russian reset, and the rest of Obama’s foreign policy
While the president and new Secretary of State John Kerry are resetting reset, they would be wise to take a look at Freedom House’s new report on Russia. It is a sober assessment of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and where U.S. policy should go from here.
Authors David Kramer and Susan Corke explain:
Over the past year, driven by a fear that the democratic spirit of the Arab awakening would creep toward Russia, Putin and his adherents have launched a series of initiatives designed to close down civil society and eliminate any and all potential threats to his grip on power. New legislation has been crafted to increase criminal penalties for opposition protesters, censor and control the internet, taint nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive overseas funding as “foreign agents,” prohibit U.S. funding of Russian NGOs involved in “political activities,” drastically expand the definition of treason, and recriminalize libel and slander. Arrests, arbitrary detentions, and home raids targeting opposition figures are occurring on a level not seen since Soviet times. One opposition figure was even kidnapped from Kyiv, where he was seeking asylum, and brought back to Russia to be prosecuted based on a coerced confession. A Putin critic living in Britain, Aleksandr Perepilichny, died under mysterious circumstances last November, recalling the poisoning death of Aleksandr Litvinenko in 2006. Also during 2012, the Russian government forced the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) out of the country; the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute soon followed. The legal and practical space for civil society and political opposition in Russia is closing quickly.
They remind us that “Putinism is rooted in corruption. The regime uses the pliant legal system as an instrument to suppress all forms of opposition and protect the corrupt division of economic resources among loyalists. The most senior officials and business magnates are given control over valuable sectors of the economy, especially extractive industries. Such short-sighted perversion of economic forces almost ensures the system’s decline, preventing competition.”
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Moldova takes action on EU-Russia money laundering
Moldova has launched criminal proceedings in a money laundering case involving its biggest bank, the Russian mafia and six EU countries.
The move comes after a UK-based investment firm, Hermitage Capital, filed a complaint with the Moldovan prosecutor in June.
Documents obtained by Hermitage indicate that a Russian organised crime group – dubbed the Kluyev Group – in 2008 wired $53 million of stolen money from an account in Russia’s Bank Krainiy Sever to two accounts in Moldova’s Banca de Economii.
They also indicate that Banca de Economii later wired the money to multiple accounts in Austria, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Switzerland and Hong Kong.
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MEP Leonidas Donskis: The Magnitski list as a wake-up call
The Magnitski list becomes much more than merely a benign and disconnected political fantasy. After the United States Congress adopted this law, with its clear legal and political implications, Russia retaliated by prohibiting American citizens from adopting Russian orphans – a mean, regrettable, and ugly move from Russia’s side with a total confusion of political and humanitarian agendas. Now it is a decisive time for the EU to take a stand.
That Sergei Magnitski posthumously became a litmus test of our political sensibilities and moral commitments is obvious. A brave and conscientious Russian lawyer, who exposed shocking corruption of a cleptocratic regime, and who refused to abandon his struggle by cooperating with high-ranking officers involved in this money-laundering enterprise, Magnitski reached out to the world paying the highest possible price – his own life.
The Magnitski list of the aforementioned officers, whose bank accounts and assets would be frozen, who would be denied the EU entry visa, and who, in effect, would face charges and legal prosecution for a crime, appears as a slap in the face to Putin and his regime. The official Russia is quite used to EU lecturing on the grounds of its deteriorating human rights record and severe human rights violations, as if to say that these are parallel realities – you can talk as much as you wish, yet when it comes to oil and gas, just calm down and make up your mind.
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Russian money streams through Cyprus
A new parking scheme appeared late last year in some congested Moscow neighbourhoods. Street signs advised Muscovites either to buy a ticket at a nearby machine or text their licence plate details to a number: 7757.
Evgeny Schultz, a Moscow blogger, took a closer look. It turned out that the number 7757 had been bought by a company registered just six months previously, which itself had been founded by two Cyprus-registered companies whose ownership was unclear.
One of the names on the registration documents was the same as that of a senior adviser to the city’s department of transport and communications, which oversees the parking programme.
“This could just be a massive coincidence, of course,” Mr Schulz said, with an unmistakable note of sarcasm.
The city has defended the scheme, saying “every kopek” goes into its budget. But the episode underlines the unique, pervasive and dubious role that Cyprus plays in Russia’s economy.
In June, Cyprus became the fifth country in the eurozone to request an international bailout after lenders got caught up in the debt restructuring of Greece’s banks. Seven months later, the island is still waiting for funding amid EU fears that the island is a haven for Russian dirty money. Such fears are particularly strong in Germany and will need to be assuaged if Berlin is to back a bailout.
Estimates of the size of Russia’s deposits in Cyprus range from €8bn, according to some experts, to up to €35bn, according to a German intelligence report cited in Der Spiegel magazine.
In 2011, Cyprus was the number-one destination for Russian money being sent abroad and the number-one direct investor in Russia, with more than $13bn in investments, according to Russia’s Central Bank.
“From an economic perspective, Russia and Cyprus are so intertwined, Cyprus could almost be another region of the Russian Federation,” said Steven Dashevsky, founder of Dashevsky & Partners, a Moscow investment company.
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Medvedev Seen Clinging to Job as Putin Frets About Economy
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is clinging to his job as President Vladimir Putin grows increasingly frustrated with his protege’s inability to boost growth, three current and former Kremlin advisers said.
Putin criticized Medvedev’s government last week for failing to adapt to a “post-crisis” economic model. That followed what Izvestia, a newspaper owned by Putin ally Yury Kovalchuk, said Jan. 15 was a leaked Kremlin scorecard giving most ministers either average or “underperforming” marks. Medvedev said the scores were “plucked out of thin air.”
Medvedev, 47, is in a “very precarious position,” Sergei Markov, a political adviser to Putin’s staff and vice rector of the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, said in an interview in Moscow. “He has a promise from Putin about his role as prime minister, but there are some very powerful forces that see him as a threat.”
Putin, 60, was forced by the constitution to cede the presidency after his second-straight term ended in 2008. Medvedev, the prime minister at the time, became president and appointed Putin his premier. The two swapped jobs again last May after elections that sparked the biggest protests of Putin’s political career.
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Russia’s Adoption Ban Triggers a Diplomatic Crisis
On December 28, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a ban on adoptions of Russian children by American citizens. The ban was part of a broader law tailored to retaliate against the United States for passing a recent law intended to punish Russian human rights violators, the New York Times reports. Yet it may have spawned a need for crisis negotiations between the two countries.
The U.S. law honored a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who attempted to expose tax fraud by the Russian government. Magnitsky was arrested and died in prison in 2009 after allegedly being denied medical attention. The U.S. law bars Russians who have been accused of human rights abuses – such as the doctor who refused requests to treat Magnitsky – from traveling in the United States.
Russian Retaliation
Angered, Russian policymakers sought a diplomatic tit-for-tat. But given that few Americans travel to Russia or own homes there, a reciprocal response would have little effect. They stumbled upon an imperfect equivalent: a ban on American adoptions of Russian children. The ban was named after a Russian-born toddler, Dmitri Yakovlev, who died of heatstroke after his adoptive father accidentally left him in a parked car for nine hours.
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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
