Posts Tagged ‘aleksanyan’
Obama lets Russia get away with murder
Last Thursday, the governments of Russia and China vetoed yet another United Nations Security Council resolution that would have put sanctions on the crumbling Syrian regime of Bashar Assad. The two authoritarian powers, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “are on the wrong side of history.”
This term has become a favorite expression of the Obama administration. In the past year, both Secretary of State Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice have used the language to describe Russian and Chinese intransigence against sanctioning Assad.
Correct as the description may be, however, it is trite coming from an administration that has lobbied hard to water down legislation aimed at putting pressure on Assad’s most important friend: Russian President-for-life Vladimir Putin. Indeed, while it continually castigates the Russians for opposing sanctions on Assad, it appears that the Obama administration, too, will be “on the wrong side of history.”
Last week, the Senate Finance Committee passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, named for the brave Russian lawyer who was arrested, tortured and killed by Russian authorities after exposing a $230 million tax fraud scheme perpetrated by the Kremlin. Magnitsky was denied medical treatment and subjected to worsening conditions and ever more squalid cells. He conveniently passed away in pretrial detention on Nov. 16, 2009, eight days before the one-year mark when the Russian government would have been forced to either try or release him.
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Why Some Russians Need the West’s Help
“The West will help us.”
Ostap Bender’s famous phrase from Ilf and Petrov’s “The 12 Chairs” may have been on Konstantin Fetisov’s mind when he met with Michael Posner — U.S. assistant secretary of state for the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor — in the Moscow region a week ago.
Fetisov is a leader of the movement opposing the construction of the Kremlin-supported $8 billion Moscow-St. Petersburg highway that will travel through the Khimki forest. He was beaten badly by unidentified assailants last November, leaving him with impaired speech and memory loss.
During his meeting with Fetisov, Posner said the United States needs to “redouble” its efforts to press Russia on protecting human rights.
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Turning the Chessboard
After the public humiliation of Medvedev on September 24, one would think that even his most devout followers, the ones who tried in vain to find the reform-minded characteristics of a “liberating tsar” in the pale image of Putin’s shadow, had ought to have turned their backs on him. The first one to emerge from their stupor was Sergei Aleksashenko (naturally, the people with the most direct connections to money will react to the operative changes of a situation quicker than others), who decided to refute our image of Medvedev as a weak leader without any willpower. After that, Igor Jurgens told us unabashedly that, regardless of the apocalyptic predictions that he and Yevgeny Gontmakher have been eagerly feeding the Russian press over the course of the past year, life is not going to end after Putin’s return to the Kremlin. “We will continue modernization, because there’s no other option,” – with this phrase, one of the main ideologues of systemic Russian liberalism has once again confirmed that the members of the Institute of Contemporary Development saw the campaign in support of Medvedev as a purely tactical measure related to additional opportunities to influence the situation in the country. Whereas it is impossible for liberals of the court to have strategic differences with the Putin regime.
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Ex-Cleary, Yukos Lawyer’s Death in Russia Called ‘Murder’ by Kremlin Critics
Vasily Aleksanyan, a one-time Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton attorney and former head of the legal department for embattled Russian oil giant Yukos, died this week at 39 from AIDS-related complications, according to Russian publication Pravda.
But Aleksanyan’s backers claim the true cause of death was even more insidious. Indeed, according to a report by the Financial Times, the former Cleary lawyer’s backers say he is essentially a victim of state-sanctioned murder as a result of the many years he spent incarcerated as a result of his Yukos ties.
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Aleksanyan worked at Cleary from 1992 until 1994. He spent the next two years as the top Russian in-house lawyer for British investment firm Sun Group, which invests in emerging markets.
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Russian lawyer denied prison medical leave dies
A former Yukos oil executive whose struggle to win medical treatment for Aids and cancer came to symbolise the harshness of the Russian prison system, has died.
Vasily Aleksanyan, a Harvard-educated lawyer who headed Yukos’s legal department and was briefly vice-president of the firm, was imprisoned in April 2006 as part of the sweep against the oil company.
He was diagnosed with HIV shortly after his arrest, and later with tuberculosis and cancer of the liver, as well as severely limited vision.
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Aleksanyan’s Death ‘Practically Murder’
Human rights activists said former Yukos vice president Vasily Aleksanyan, who died this week of AIDS-related illnesses, would have lived longer if the authorities had not kept him in prison for nearly three years on politically tainted charges.
Aleksanyan, who fought a protracted legal battle with the authorities before finally being freed on bail in 2009 to seek medical treatment, died at home Monday at the age of 39.
“It was practically a murder,” rights champion Valery Borshchyov told Business FM radio on Tuesday. “He could have lived longer if he had not been kept in detention.”
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