Posts Tagged ‘daily beast’
Obama Targets Russian Mob Boss
The U.S. government has publicly added 12 Russian officials to a list of human right violators but he head of the Russian Investigative Committee may be on a still secret part of that list.
The State and Treasury Departments Tuesday sanctioned a dozen Russian officials under the Magnitsky Act, adding them to a public list of human rights violators subject to asset freezes and visa bans in the United States. But Alexander Bastrykin, the powerful head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, was not on the list, at least the version released to the public.
The twelve names publicly announced for sanctions Tuesday include Dmitry Klyuev, the alleged kingpin of a Russian organized crime group. 10 of the 12 Russians on the list were associated with the death of Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian anti-corruption lawyer who died in prison after being severely tortured. Magnitsky was then posthumously convicted for tax fraud. The judge who convicted Magnitsky after he died, Igor Alisov, was also sanctioned Tuesday.
Bastrykin’s name was conspicuously not on the public list, but administration sources said one name was added to the classified version of the Magnitsky list. Administration officials declined to comment on whether or not that person was Bastrykin. If so, he would be the highest ranking Russian sanctioned thus far under the law.
In January, four senior senators used a provision of the law to force the administration to consider sanctions on Klyuev and Bastrykin. Both had been vetted and prepared for sanctions inside the administration last year but the White House ultimately decided not to add any names to the Magnitsky list at the time.
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Congress Presses Obama On Russia Sanctions
On Friday, key senators pressed the Obama administration to crack down on Russian human rights violators.
Four leading senators Friday called on President Obama to enforce U.S. law and sanction more Russian human right violators, despite the administration’s reluctance to rock the U.S.-Russian relationship.
Last month, the Obama administration declined to add names to a list of human rights violators in Russia created by Congress under the Magnitsky Act. The act is named in honor oof Sergei Maginitsky, a Russian anti-corruption lawyer who died in prison after being tortured after being arrested on charges widely viewed as politically motivated.
The decision not to add new names to the Magnitsky list came as a shock to lawmakers and human rights advocates, who had been told the State Department and Treasury Department were vetting several alleged Russian human rights abusers for addition to the list, an action that would subject them to visa bans and asset freezes.
Late Friday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and the ranking member, Bob Corker (R-TN) invoked a section of the Magnitsky Act that allows senior lawmakers to submit names to the administration for the list on a bipartisan basis. Sens. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and John McCain (R-AZ), the bill’s original co-sponsors, supported the move. The Obama adminstration is ultimately responsible for accepting or rejecting these recomendations to add names to the list.
“On December 20, 2013, we received the Department of State’s first annual report. Disappointingly and contrary to repeated assurances and expectations, this report indicates that no persons have been added to the Magnitsky list since April 2013 and does not provide adequate details on the administration’s efforts to encourage other governments to impose similar targeted sanctions,” the senators wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. “We look forward to your response to our request and hope you will also clarify when we can expect additional names to be added to the Magnitsky list as well as specific administration efforts to encourage other governments to adopt legislation similar to the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012.”
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Exclusive: Obama Declines to Add Names to Russian Sanction List
The administration had been preparing to beef up its list of Russian human rights violators. But at the last minute, they balked. Why?
The Obama administration has decided not to add any new names to a list of Russian human rights violators this year, an abrupt reversal that has left congressional officials and human rights advocates stunned.
For weeks, State Department officials had been signaling that they were preparing to expand a list of Russians subject to visa bans and asset freezes under a law signed by President Obama last year called the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law and Accountability Act, named after the Russian anti-corruption lawyer who died after being tortured in a Russian prison. Magnitsky was later convicted posthumously for tax evasion in a prosecution widely viewed as politically motivated.
In April, 18 Russian officials were sanctioned as a result of the Magnitsky law, which was heavily supported by lawmakers in both parties. The sanctions caused a rift in U.S.-Russian bilateral relations, and the Russian government retaliated by announcing their own visa ban list of alleged U.S. human rights violators and instituting a ban on Americans adopting Russian orphans.
Now, one year after the initial Magnitsky law went into effect, the State Department had been preparing to add between 10 and 20 new Russian names to the list—including Alexander Bastrykin, former First Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia and former Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office—according to officials, congressional aides, and experts.
But Thursday, administration and congressional sources said that the Obama team had abandoned plans to expand the list, thereby avoiding a new confrontation with the Russian government during a sensitive time in the U.S.-Russian relationship, as the two countries work together on issues like Syria and Iran.
“We had multiple high-level assurances that there had been new names,” one Congressional aide told The Daily Beast. “Now we hear today that there’s not going to be a new list. There’s no explanation.”
A mandated report on the implementation of the Magnitsky act was due on Dec. 14 but has still not been sent to Congress. The new names were widely expected to be added to the list when the report was delivered.
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Magnitsky Plaza? Let’s Rename the Streets Outside Dictators’ Embassies
In the ’80s, the Senate renamed the street outside the Soviet Embassy Sakharov Plaza to protest the dissident’s treatment. It’s time to give similar reminders to today’s dictatorships.
In May 1984, when the communist authorities prohibited Andrei Sakharov’s wife from traveling abroad for medical treatment, the Soviet dissident began a hunger strike. Four years earlier, the government had exiled Sakharov to the city of Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow, hoping to keep him out of the public eye. Sakharov had long been the most visible domestic political critic of the Soviet Union, winning the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, which the country’s leaders prohibited him from accepting. To keep Sakharov alive, they force-fed him. “First, they would do it intravenously, then through a tube in his nose,” Sakharov’s wife, Yelena Bonner, wrote in a note smuggled out of the country. “A clamp would then be put on his nose and whenever he opened his mouth to breathe, they would pour food down his throat. Excruciating.”
Three months later, the United States Senate took a seemingly small but provocative step in protest of Sakharov’s treatment. Responsible for much of the administration of Washington, D.C., the chamber passed a measure changing the mailing address of the Soviet Embassy from 1125 16th Street to No. 1 Andrei Sakharov Plaza. From that point forward, every Soviet official entering his place of work would be confronted with his government’s repression of its most outspoken critic. “Every piece of mail the Soviets get will remind them that we want to know what has happened to the Sakharovs,” then-Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-NY), who proposed the measure, said at the time. The following year, the Soviet authorities permitted Bonner to travel abroad, and the year after that, reformist Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev permitted Sakharov and his wife to return to Moscow.
Today, Sakharov Plaza is no more. But as Russia falls further into the depths of dictatorship under Vladimir Putin, the name of another human rights hero, Sergei Magnitsky, ought to grace the mailing addresses of Russian embassies and diplomatic postings in Washington and the capital cities of free countries around the world. A conscientious young lawyer who uncovered large-scale corruption by senior Russian government officials, Magnitsky was imprisoned, tortured, and denied medical treatment before suffering an agonizing death in 2009. A measure President Obama signed into law last year placing visa restrictions and asset freezes on Russian officials responsible for human rights violations was named after Magnitsky.
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McCain Blasts Putin in Pravda: He’s Made Russia a ‘Friend to Tyrants’
The senator promised to respond to the Russian president’s ‘New York Times’ op-ed—and he has with a blistering piece in Pravda, calling Putin a corrupt autocrat who cozies up to tyrants like Assad.
Sen. John McCain lambasts Russian President Vladimir Putin in an op-ed published on the Russian news site Pravda on Thursday, calling him a corrupt autocrat who suppresses democracy, political dissent, and economic progress to maintain his iron grip on power.
McCain’s op-ed is a response to Putin’s September 11 op-ed in The New York Times, in which Putin argued against a U.S.-led intervention in Syria and accused the U.S. of working against the interests of international law and human rights. McCain rarely mentions Syria—or Putin’s op-ed—in his Pravda piece but uses the opportunity to lay out his case that Putin is systematically disrespecting the Russian people and abusing Russia’s wealth and power to enrich a small group of wealthy associates to the detriment of the rest of the country. At a basic level, Putin doesn’t believe in the values of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the rule of law, political openness, and social equality, McCain writes in his op-ed, which is directed at the Russian people.
“President Putin and his associates do not believe in these values,” McCain writes in Pravda, a Web site founded in 1999 that is not connected to the official newspaper of the Russian Communist Party. “They don’t respect your dignity or accept your authority over them. They punish dissent and imprison opponents. They rig your elections. They control your media. They harass, threaten, and banish organizations that defend your right to self-governance. To perpetuate their power they foster rampant corruption in your courts and your economy and terrorize and even assassinate journalists who try to expose their corruption.”
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Fraud and the City: Russia’s Manhattan Money Laundering
Pussy Riot goes to prison while a gang accused of murder and mugging in Mother Russia gets luxury apartments in lower Manhattan. One federal prosecutor is calling Putin out.
Even as the United States and Russia were nearing an agreement over Syria’s chemical weapons, a federal prosecutor was filing papers that effectively accuse the Putin regime of tolerating, if not abetting, an organized gang of government officials and criminals who looted $250 million from the Russian treasury.
The immediate intent of the official complaint filed by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara on September 10 was to seize several high-end Manhattan properties. The two multimillion-dollar commercial spaces as well as four luxury apartments—these across from where George Washington was inaugurated as our first president—were allegedly purchased to launder proceeds from the Russian gang’s diabolically brilliant scheme involving corporate identity theft and a fraudulent tax refund.
The prosecutor’s effort can be seen as at least a small measure of justice for the 37-year-old Moscow lawyer who died in horrific circumstances after uncovering the massive fraud. The lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, reported the theft imagining that his government would be sure to act when the victim was the Russian people themselves, even if the crooks allegedly included senor law-enforcement and tax officials.
Instead, Russian authorities put those same law enforcement officials in charge of the investigation. Magnitsky was arrested in November 2008 by some of the very men he had accused. He resolutely resisted all efforts to make him withdraw his allegations against them and their alleged co-conspirators. He had been held without legal proceedings for just short of a year when he died in an isolation cell from causes that were subsequently listed as untreated pancreatitis, rupture of the abdominal membrane, and toxic shock.
“He was beaten by eight guards with rubber batons on the last day of his life,” the main prosecutor’s complaint says. “And the ambulance crew that was called to treat him as he was dying was deliberately kept outside of his cell for one hour and 18 minutes until he was dead.”
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End of the Affair: Inevitable Collapse of Obama’s Russian Reset
After Snowden and snubs, the relationship between Obama and Putin has reached an all-time low. Peter Pomeranzev on the death of the Russian reset.
It usually ends in tears. The Kremlin-White House romance, has fallen repeatedly from starry-eyed hope and foreign policy petting to hysterics and blame-gaming.
Jimmy Carter thought he could find a partner in Brezhnev. He cast off ‘containment’ and encouraged America to lose the ‘inordinate fear of communism’: by the end of his term he was boycotting the Moscow Olympics as the USSR invaded Afghanistan. Bill Clinton went in for drinking sessions and back-slapping with Boris Yeltsin, but the more he backed him the more corrupt Yeltsin’s regime became and the more the US was discredited: by the time NATO bombed Yugoslavia, the Kremlin was already grinding its teeth. George W. looked into Putin’s eyes and claimed he could “see his soul” (“I looked into Putin’s eyes and saw KGB” quipped the less smitten Colin Powell): by 2008 they were almost at war over Georgia and relations were back to a “Cold War low”. Obama’s decision today to snub his September tête-à-tête with Putin “due to a lack of progress on missiles, arms control, trade, commercial relations, global security, human rights, civil society and…Edward Snowden “ fell on the five year anniversary of the Georgian war. It feels like the beginning of the end of the ‘”reset with Russia”, the policy that has defined Obama’s own dalliance with the Kremlin.
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Putin Needs an Enemy After Berezovsky’s Death
After Boris Berezovsky’s death, Vladimir Putin has a problem—who will play the villain to make him look like a superhero? Peter Pomerantsev reports.
If Vladimir Putin didn’t have exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky as an enemy, the joke over the last decade in Moscow went, he would have needed to invent him. In the Kremlin narrative Berezovsky was the ideal caricature Penguin to Putin’s Batman: the evil Jewish schemer in his London palace looking to usurp good blonde Tsar Vlad. Whenever Putin had a problem state media would pin it on Berezovsky: Chechen terrorists have kidnapped a school in the Caucuses? Berezovsky is behind it. Pussy Riot? Berezovsky stooges.
Berezovsky became the symbol of the ideology Putin was presented as the antithesis of: the representative of the wild ’90s of oligarchs and Yeltsin and destitution, as opposed to the “stable” Putin era. Berezovsky was always the perfect foil, reveling in his role as the great schemer, claiming from his London exile he was behind the revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, that he would do anything to get rid of Putin. For the last half decade at least, once his last allies in the Russian parliament had been sidelined, it’s unclear whether he had much influence left in Russia at all. So both sides played along: the Kremlin pretending Berezovsky was an all-powerful master of darkness, the other continuing to act as if he were.
There were always rumors, typically conspiratorial for Moscow, that Berezovsky was in fact working with Putin, the two playing out their roles in a choreographed dance. This is hugely dubious, but there was something distinctly theatrical about their sparring, two sides of one performance. Now Berezovsky is dead the Kremlin is faced with a problem: Who will fill the role of uber-baddie to Putin’s goodie?
The easiest thing would be to pluck another exiled oligarch out of the sin bin. Vladimir Gusinsky, the exiled 1990s media magnate, is still around. Jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s allies are still at liberty in the West and make no secret of their grudge against the Kremlin. The problem for Putin is that his narrative as the brave warrior against oligarchical corruption has broken down. His rule is perceived to be just as, if not more, corrupt than the ’90s. His parliamentary party, United Russia, is nicknamed the “party of crooks and thieves.” Tales of his and his best friends’ yachts and castles are ubiquitous.
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Bill Browder: The Man Behind Russia’s Adoption Ban
Last month, when Vladimir Putin signed a law banning American citizens from adopting Russian children, it was widely seen as the latest indication that U.S.-Russian relations were spiraling downward. So who caused this turn of events? The obvious political figures certainly played their roles. But perhaps no one was more central to the unfolding drama than a businessman turned unlikely human-rights crusader named Bill Browder.
Browder’s grandfather, Earl Browder, had been general secretary of the American Communist Party, but his grandson spent most of his career in a very different pursuit: making money. Bill graduated from Stanford Business School the same year the Berlin Wall fell. “My grandfather was the biggest communist in America,” Browder recalls thinking at the time. “Now that the Berlin Wall has come down, I am going to be the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe.”
In 1996 Browder moved to Moscow and founded the Hermitage Fund, investing fortunes from America in newly privatized Russian companies like Gazprom. (Two years later he renounced his American citizenship and became a citizen of Britain.) At its peak, Hermitage was worth $4.5 billion. But Browder earned a reputation in this period as a “shareholder activist,” launching his own investigations into the shady dealings of Gazprom and other Russian companies—and angering the Kremlin in the process. He was expelled from Russia in 2005 and declared a threat to national security.
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