Why Russia Won’t Budge On Iran – U.S. News & World Report (blog)
Russia is no friend of Iran. Since Vladimir Putin’s first term as president, the once-amicable relations between Moscow and Tehran have degraded sharply. Russia and Iran, previously united by their shared Eurasian identity, are now mired in a marriage of unembellished convenience. Iran, the Russians might tell you, is too refractory, too missionary, too fundamentalist in an age when militant Islam threatens to shatter Russia’s territorial integrity. More importantly, as Iran has divorced itself from mainstream international politics, it has become a liability for Moscow.
With this in mind, a few clever diplomatic demarches should let the United States breach the Russo-Iranian axis, depriving Tehran of one if its last sponsors. That, at least, was part of the thinking when President Barack Obama orchestrated his “reset” with Russia back in 2009.
But, nearly four years later, a Russo-Iranian split hasn’t materialized. Russia certainly has let its frustration with Iran be felt at times, and has scrupulously observed an arms embargo and allowed multiple rounds of sanctions through the Security Council (albeit in watered-down form). And yet, the breadth of Russian cooperation on Iran has left most in Washington unsatisfied. The political cost imposed on Washington by the Russians for every round of sanctions has been significant, Russian diplomats roundly criticize U.S. policy, and Russia continues to provide key assistance to Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor. In other words, notwithstanding the administration’s opening to Moscow, Russia has yet to significantly change course on Iran.
Nor is it likely to in the near future, unfortunately. That is because Moscow, now more than ever guided by cold realism instead of lofty idealism in its foreign policy, still sees practical benefit in its cooperation with Tehran.
First, while Russia does not want a nuclear Iran, it certainly is more sanguine about such a possibility than is the West. Russian leaders see their Iranian counterparts as rational actors who want nuclear weapons for deterrence rather than usage, and dismiss the anti-Semitic warmongering of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as mere rhetoric.
Second, Iran has much more leverage over Russia than it does over the United States. The region of Russia closest to Iran is an Islamist hornet’s nest, and Tehran can easily stir it up. Until now, Iran has acquiesced to Russia’s wars in the North Caucasus. But it could quickly change tack, and exacerbate the already-grave insurgency that challenges the security of the Russian state.
Third, and most importantly, Russia fiercely competes with China for influence in Tehran, and fears that if it abandons Iran, China will simply step into the breach. This is more than simply conjecture: In 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, Russian trade with Iran stood at $4.2 billion, while Chinese trade with Iran was more than $30 billion. In 2011, the latter had grown to more than $40 billion. Russia hoped that as sanctions whittled down Iran’s trade options, Tehran would lean on Moscow for support. Instead, it has increasingly courted Beijing. Russian fears of Chinese strategic competition are palpable, and letting Iran slip away would be an unconscionable blow to Russia’s international standing.
The result is that the price of substantive Russian support is too high. Per Russian reasoning, if Washington was serious about Iran, it would make all manner of costly concessions—from curtailing congressional human rights legislation (the so-called “Magnitsky Bill”) to aborting its plans for missile defense in Europe. Such steps, however, are utterly unacceptable for the United States.
All of that leaves Moscow and Washington worlds apart on the Iran issue, a state of affairs which no attempt at rapprochement can change. That bleak reality will prevail irrespective of who occupies the White House after November.
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The Putin Crackdown
Americans consumed by the Presidential election might spare a moment for Russia. Vladimir Putin timed his 2008 invasion of Georgia for the U.S. campaign season, and this year he’s doing the same with his latest political crackdown.
The Russian strongman has ruled since 2000, but his current domestic power play stands out for its ferocity. Last Friday Russian prosecutors charged a protest leader, Sergei Udaltsov, with plotting riots. If convicted by a puppet tribunal, Mr. Udaltsov could serve 10 years, long enough to keep him out of the way until well into a possible fourth Putin presidential term.
A week earlier Russian agents abducted Leonid Razvozzhayev in Ukraine and brought him back for trial alongside Mr. Udaltsov in Moscow. Mr. Razvozzhayev went to Ukraine to seek political asylum but he said he was grabbed off the street, tortured and forced to sign a confession.
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One Hour Eighteen Minutes – a play about Sergei Magnitsky at the Sputnik Theatre
Sputnik Theatre
16th of November 2012 – a significant date…
Dear friends,
Russia is rarely out of the news these days with the ongoing protests and the sentencing of Pussy Riot. But one story which is just as intriguing and Kafka-esque is the life and death of Sergei Magnitsky.
The 16th of November 2012 will be the third anniversary of Sergei Magnitsky’s death in police custody.
This year, Elena Gremina – one of Russia’s most important political playwrights, recently commissioned by the Tricycle Theatre as part of ‘The Bomb’ – has updated her play, One Hour Eighteen Minutes, to include the very latest developments of this story about Sergei Magnitsky, the whistleblower against government corruption. Gremina’s play is based on original, first-hand interviews.
The updated version of the play is being launched at Teatr.doc in Moscow at exactly the same time as Sputnik’s London production.
We’re delighted to welcome such a strong cast and creative team to Sputnik’s forthcoming show. You can read more about them below… We hope to see you there!
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Russian-American Voters Address members of Congress to Support Magnitsky Act
American Russian Speaking Association
American Russian-Speaking Association for Civil & Human Rights with its friends and allies mark the Day of Political Prisoners with online campaign in a dozen of states
October 30 is observed by many Russians around the world as the Day of Political Prisoners. It was introduced in 1974 in Soviet labor camps by human rights advocate and author Kronid Lyubarsky and a hero of the Soviet Jewry struggle for the right to emigrate Alexey Murzhenko. In 1991, Russian parliament officially recognized it as the national Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repressions.
20 years later, Russia is losing, at an ever increasing speed, the last vestiges of its democratic accomplishments of the 1990s, for which Soviet-era human rights defenders paid a heavy price. According to The Memorial Society, Russia’s most authoritative source of human rights information and research, there are currently about 80 people in jail or under prosecution for political reasons, even if official charges against some of them are of a different nature.
This situation has a negative impact on Russia’s neighbors, where authoritarian regimes are also increasingly persecuting their opponents, and poses a threat to international peace and security. It also increases pressure for emigration from Russia, a country which is currently the 7th largest source of asylum seekers in the world. Over the past two years, the number of Russians granted asylum in the United States increased by 35 percent.
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New Coordination Council Weighs Rally and Magnitsky
Members of the opposition’s newly elected Coordination Council agreed at their first meeting over the weekend to stage their next rally in December and press the U.S. to expand its Magnitsky list of banned Russian officials.
The opposition group, which met at a restaurant in central Moscow on Saturday, is tasked with trying to mount a structured challenge to President Vladimir Putin.
“They gave us the mandate of trust and made us responsible for coordinating efforts of dozens, hundreds, thousands and millions of people who want positive changes in our country,” said Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption blogger who collected the most votes in the Oct. 20-22 online elections for the Coordination Council.
After some bickering, the new group of 45 leaders agreed to hold the next rally in December to mark the anniversary of the first anti-Putin protests after disputed State Duma elections.
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Anti-Corruption Views – The rallying cry of an anti-corruption warrior
Launching a global anti-corruption movement is no mean achievement. When a band of evangelists founded Transparency International in 1993, Frank Vogl recalls they were scoffed at. The Economist magazine drew a cartoon depicting them as vainglorious Don Quixotes tilting at windmills. Bribery, like death and taxes, was viewed as unfortunate but a sin to largely tolerate.
Almost 20 years later, anti-corruption has moved to the centre of global policymaking. It was a driving force behind the Arab Spring, when protesters angered by poverty, lack of opportunity and pillaged national wealth overthrew dictatorial governments. It is discussed at meetings of G20 world leaders, enshrined in international conventions and in national legislation. Today there is a thriving lobby of specialists putting the squeeze on kleptocrats by exposing illicit money flows, revealing the revenues they pocket from oil, gas and mineral contracts and scrutinising how foreign direct aid is managed.
In this highly readable primer “Waging War on Corruption”, Frank Vogl, a former journalist and World Bank communications manager, describes how a band of former World Bank officials and lawyers angered by seeing development aid line the pockets of government and business elites, decided to do something about it. They rejected the idea that corruption is embedded in certain cultures and believed change can come from mobilising individuals. Today Transparency International has grown from its headquarters in Berlin to chapters in 90 countries around the world and is the leading voice in fighting corruption, its scoring of countries’ public sector in its Corruptions Perceptions Index followed as a benchmark. The simple but powerful idea was to hold government officials accountable, so that sunshine might have a sanitizing effect on behaviour.
The strength of Vogl’s book is in making clear the linkages between corruption and thwarted economic, political and social development; and between corruption and weakened international security. He tells a sweeping narrative of how the fall of the Berlin Wall inspired a new generation to rise up, and how the spread of communications technologies has further empowered the movement.
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Kidnapping, suspicious deaths and ‘torture’ as critics say Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on opponents is a return to the days of Stalin
IT was a ruthless operation harking back to the era of Soviet oppression as Russia’s secret services snatched a political foe from a foreign capital.
Masked men seized an opponent of hardline president Vladimir Putin in an audacious daylight abduction after the victim had sought sanctuary abroad.
Bound and gagged, Leonid Razvozzhayev was smuggled back to Moscow and says he was tortured.
The clinical operation in Ukrainian capital Kiev nine days ago has added to fears Russia is returning to the dark days of brutal commissar Joseph Stalin and his Gulag forced labour camps of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.
Razvozzhayev, 39, told activists who visited him in detention last week he had been left handcuffed in a dank cellar and not given food or drink or taken to the toilet for two days.
He also says he was threatened with an injection of a “truth serum”, a permanently disabling drug, to make him sign a confession of involvement in a plot to topple the Russian ruler.
“I was in a mask and a hat pulled over my face without slits,” he claimed. “They told me, ‘If you don’t answer our questions, your children will be killed.’”
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Russian Riled By Parliament
Members of the European Parliament may struggle sometimes to get their voice heard inside the European Union, but they’re doing a good job of riling their Russian counterparts.
Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the state Duma, contrasted the “realistic pragmatic approach” from the European Commission to the relationship with Russia to that it has with “the ideological institutions like the European Parliament.”
“There are quite a few people in the European Parliament who think the more they take decisions that irritate Russia the best it is for Europe. I’m not of this opinion. There is some kind of ideological wave which is unfurling over Europe, and it’s a very negative wave,” Mr. Pushkov told a group of academics and journalists in Moscow.
On Tuesday, the parliament adopted a recommendation calling on EU governments to implement sanctions on a list of officials responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a subsequent judicial cover-up and for the ongoing harassment of his mother and wife. The parliament recommended banning those people from entry into the EU, freezing their assets in the EU, and called on Russia to launch an independent investigation into his death.
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EU travel ban on Russian officials over Magnitsky case
The European Parliament has endorsed sanctions against around 60 Russian officials over the death of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. He died in custody in 2009 after being arrested on tax evasion charges. The 37-year-old had implicated top officials in a corruption case he was investigating.
The parliament has recommended an EU-wide travel ban. Kristiina Ojuland, the Estonian MEP who was the appointed by the parliament to investigate the case said: “We don’t want to see these individuals on EU territory.”
In addition to the visa ban, the resolution suggests Russian officials involved in the case should have their assets in the European Union frozen.
The move drew an angry response from Moscow. The Russian ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov said: “Unfortunately this is not improving the climate of our relations with the European Union. This is an attempt to politicise a human tragedy and to make political capital out of the death of Mr Magnitsky.”
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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