Posts Tagged ‘Foreign Policy’
The Wrong Way to Punish Putin
Punishing Russia is all the rage these days. After Moscow gave temporary asylum to the NSA leaker Edward Snowden, U.S. Senator John McCain proposed extending the “Magnistky List” of Russian officials barred from entering the United States, speeding deployment of missile defenses in Europe, and rapidly expanding NATO to include Georgia. The British actor Stephen Fry and various LGBT activists have advocated a boycott of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics to protest recent Russian policies targeting gays and lesbians. Gay bars in the United States have reportedly started dumping their stocks of Stolichnaya vodka.
Most significantly, on Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama canceled a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin that was supposed to take place in September in Moscow, expressing displeasure at the Kremlin’s granting of asylum to Snowden, among other things.
Anger with Russia’s behavior on these scores is perfectly understandable. Snowden has been charged with serious crimes and Washington has a legitimate interest in bringing him to trial. Russia’s recent law banning “pro-homosexual propaganda” has created a climate of aggression, in which vigilantes attack LGBT Russians and post horrifying videos of their violence online.
But before leaping into action, those eager to punish Russia should consider two things. First, why is Putin behaving in this way? And second, will the sanctions in question hurt him or actually benefit him? Given that Putin is currently fighting for his political life, a public showdown with the West will help him stay afloat. The Americans and Europeans who want to change Moscow’s course should therefore be careful not to play into Putin’s hands.
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Will Putin’s friends be on the Magnitsky list?
Next week, the State Department is expected to release a list of Russian human rights violators who could be subject to visa bans and asset freezes in the United States, but Congress is worried that State will avoid naming senior Russian officials in an effort to placate the Kremlin.
The list is required to be sent to Congress by April 13, according to the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012, which was passed by both chambers of Congress and signed by President Barack Obama last December. Lawmakers and NGOs working on the Magnitsky list want the State Department to include top Russian officials and several close associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The State Department is using a narrow interpretation of the law, arguing that a higher standard of evidence is required for legal reasons. But some lawmakers involved in the issue believe the narrower scope is meant to placate Moscow.
“We want to ensure that the administration carries out the law in the same spirit that Congress passed it. We didn’t do this for a press release; we did this because of the deteriorating human rights situation in Russia,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), an original sponsor of the bill, in an interview.
McGovern sent the administration his own list of 280 Russian officials (PDF) he believes should be included in the State Department’s Magnitsky list. Many of them are directly related to the case of Magnitsky, the anti-corruption lawyer who died in Russian prison after allegedly being tortured, and some are close personal associates of Putin.
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The Dead Man’s Trial
Without a word, a gloomy cleaning lady in a blue apron and pink rubber slippers over long woolen socks pushed a mop down the narrow corridor. A crowd of tired and quiet reporters shuffled aside to let her pass. Her mop rubbed the dirt from the wet floor of the waiting area of the Tverskoi Courthouse, only to be immediately muddied again by hundreds of boots. Five hours had passed since the scheduled start of the latest hearing in the trial of a dead suspect, the first such trial in Russia’s history. The suspect in question was Sergei Magnitsky, who died in jail at age 37, three years ago. Inside Courtroom Number 4, the benches and chairs remained empty. So did the suspect’s cage (shown above).
“Get out of here!” an annoyed security officer in black uniform shouted at reporters, pushing people away from the court door. Silence filled the stuffy space. People looked lost, trying to understand the true meaning behind the man’s statement. Did it mean that the trial would be once again delayed for many hours, or cancelled entirely? Nothing has made any sense so far. “Is there any scenario, any purpose for making journalists wait for so long?” I asked Vera ?heilsheva, an experienced court reporter for the Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta. “Clearly they want us to lose interest in Magnitsky,” she answered. And today she had no expectations of witnessing the miracle of justice in Russia.
Not one foot budged from the wet floor of the court door. From the day of his arrest in November 2008 to the day of his death in prison in November 2009, the young lawyer never had a chance to have his day in court. But he believed in justice and a fair trial, his family and supporters say, and continued to accuse senior Russian police and tax officials in organizing a $230 million fraud. “He was angry to see evidence of stupid falsifications, stupid lies at his preliminary court hearings, but he believed that somewhere there had to be some heroic judge of dignity and courage,” Magnitsky’s mother, Natalya Magnitskaya, said in a phone interview. Along with Sergei’s family members, friends, and civil society activists, Mrs. Magnitskaya boycotted the trial of her dead son and stayed at home today.
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Russia denies visa for leading congressional human-rights advocate
The Russian government has denied a visa for a prominent congressman in what that the lawmaker believes is clear retaliation for U.S. efforts to punish Russian human rights violators.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on human rights, has been traveling to Russia and before that the Soviet Union for decades. But this month, the Russian government denied him a visa for the first time, despite a personal intervention from the U.S. ambassador in Moscow.
In an interview Wednesday with The Cable, Smith said the Russians were already retaliating for a recent U.S. law that seeks to call out and punish Russian human rights violators. That bill, the Sergei Magnitsky Accountability and Rule of Law Act of 2012, was named after the Russian anti-corruption lawyer who died in prison, allegedly after being tortured by Russian officials.
Smith was an original sponsor of the bill.
“The Magnitsky bill is the reason I didn’t get the visa. This is the first time,” Smith said. “I was shocked. During the worst days of the Soviet Union I went there repeatedly.”
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Posthumous trial of Russian lawyer delayed
The trial of Russian lawyer and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky officially began yesterday, but has been postponed for several weeks. This was not, as one might expect, because Magnitsky died in prison more than three years ago, but because his defense team has chosen not to participate in the bizarre proceeding:
In Monday’s hearing, it was unclear who or what, exactly, went on trial. Mr. Magnitsky’s co-defendant, William F. Browder, the manager of the Hermitage Capital hedge fund, has been barred from entering Russia since 2005, so he did not appear in court.
The hearing was of a type in Russian practice that indicates that the police consider their work complete, and that the case can go to trial, Aleksandra V. Bereznina, a spokeswoman for Tverskoi Regional Court, said in an interview.
Judge Igor B. Alisov promptly postponed the trial because the defendants did not appear in the courtroom — as expected — but neither did lawyers representing their interests.[…]
The hearing took place in a closed courtroom. The defendants’ chairs were unoccupied, Ms. Bereznina said. Mr. Browder and relatives of Mr. Magnitsky have said they will boycott the proceedings.
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What Magnitsky Means to Me
This week, Congress voted to roll back a host of Cold War-era trade restrictions, granting Russia permanent, normal trade relations with the United States. Integral to that legislative package — which still has to be signed into law by President Obama — is the Magnitsky Act, a bill that would impose sanctions on a list of Russian officials who stand accused of human rights abuses.
The bill is named for Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian auditor who in 2008 exposed the massive defrauding of a British investment fund by officials in the Russian Interior Ministry, but was later arrested and tortured to death by the same officers that he had testified against. On Capitol Hill, Magnitsky’s death has become a cause célèbre, and the new legislation the bitter pill Moscow must swallow in exchange for the normalization of trade relations.
But for one family — my family — its passage comes just a moment too late.
On Nov. 28, Russian news outlets reported that police in Makhachkala, the capital of the restive northern region of Dagestan, attempted to arrest a man named Shamil Gasanov at his home. They allegedly sought Gasanov on suspicion of involvement in the 2010 murder of Makhachkala police chief Akhmed Magomedov — a crime that was reportedly carried out by Islamists — though the real reason for his arrest remains very much a mystery. According to the initial press accounts, Gasanov, who is by all accounts secular, resisted arrest and fired a gun at the officers, who returned fire, killing him.
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Moscow-on-Thames
When most people think of British-Russian relations, they imagine Bond films, iron curtains, Cambridge double agents, irradiated dissidents, and billionaire oligarchs who dress like Evelyn Waugh but behave like Tony Soprano and then sue each other in London courts. But there’s another element underwriting this not-so-special relationship.
British elites, elected or otherwise, have grown highly susceptible to the unscrutinized rubles that continue to pour into the boom-or-boom London real estate market and a luxury-service industry catering to wealthy Russians who are as bodyguarded as they are jet-set. This phenomenon has not only imported some of the worst practices of a mafia state across the English Channel, but it has had a deleterious impact on Britain’s domestic politics. And some of the most powerful and well-connected figures of British public life, from the Rothschilds to former prime ministers, have been taken in by it. Most surprising, though, is how the heirs to Margaret Thatcher’s fierce opposition to the Soviets have often been the ones most easily seduced by the Kremlin’s entreaties.
On Aug. 21, a new lobby group called Conservative Friends of Russia (CFoR) was launched at the London home of Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to Britain. The launch was attended by some 250 guests, including parliamentarians, Conservative Party members, businessmen, lobbyists, NGO representatives, and even princes. Yakovenko and Member of Parliament John Whittingdale, who chairs the Culture Select Committee in Parliament and is an “honorary vice president” of CFoR, both delivered keynote addresses. The lavish do in the backyard of the Kremlin envoy featured, as the Guardian reported, a “barbecue, drinks and a raffle, with prizes of vodka, champagne and a biography of Vladimir Putin,” and it came just days after the Pussy Riot verdict. It was an open invitation to controversy. If CFoR wanted to portray itself as merely a promoter of “dialogue” between Britain and Russia, it was an odd beginning for a group born looking and sounding a lot like “Tories for Putin.”
CFoR was founded by Richard Royal, a public affairs manager at Ladbrokes, a popular chain of betting parlors in Britain. He also owns his own company, Lionheart Public Affairs, which has no website but shares a registered address with the new pro-Russia lobby group. Responding to the storm of criticism his new project has provoked, Royal took to the Guardian’s website to defend the initiative against what he called “armchair critics on Twitter,” in language you’d expect from a PR professional. “Whether we like it or not,” Royal wrote, “Russia is an influential and essential part of the international community and its importance will only grow over time. We need to stop making decisions based on misconceptions that are decades old, and deal with reality.”
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Resetting the Reset
The United States needs to decide whether to treat Russia as a marginal global actor or an asset in America’s global strategy.
Whoever wins the U.S. presidency, Washington’s Russia policy needs a reassessment and a rethink. The “reset” has run its course. The Obama administration’s vaunted policy of engaging with Moscow did away with the irritants of the previous administration and allowed a modicum of cooperation on issues such as Afghanistan supply routes. It has failed to give America’s Russia policy a strategic depth, but this was never the intention. But Mitt Romney’s portrayal of Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe” and promising to be tough on Putin is not a policy either. Rhetoric has its uses on the campaign trail, but its value greatly diminishes when the challenger becomes the incumbent. The real choice for the new administration lies between keeping Russia on the periphery of the U.S. foreign policy, which means essentially taking a tactical approach, and treating Russia as an asset in America’s global strategy.
Frankly, the former approach appears much more likely. As the United States struggles with the plethora of issues in the Middle East, Iran, and Afghanistan, and focuses more on China and Asia, Russia will be seen as a marginal or irrelevant factor. In some cases, as in Afghanistan, Moscow will continue to provide valuable logistical support; in others, such as Iran’s nuclear program, it might be considered useful, but only up to a point; in still other cases, like Syria, it will be regarded as a spoiler due to its consistent opposition to the U.S. effort to topple the Assad regime. As regards China and East Asia, the United States will continue to ignore Russia, whose resources and role are believed to be negligible in that part of the world. Tellingly, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s seminal “pivot” article in Foreign Policy did not care to mention Russia at all.
When Russia’s cooperation on foreign policy is deemed to matter little, and its opposition regarded as little more than nuisance, Moscow’s interests and concerns are unlikely to be taken seriously in Washington. Reaching a deal on missile defense with the Russians and selling that deal in Washington may prove too much for the new Obama administration; a Romney White House would probably not bother to reach out to the Kremlin at all, even as it goes ahead with NATO deployments in Europe. That NATO’s further enlargement to the east would likely continue to stall would have more to do with the political realities in Ukraine and Georgia, however, than with any restraint in Washington.
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He’s With the Band: An interview with the first man of Pussy Riot.
Since the March arrest of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot, following their “Punk Prayer” at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, Tolokonnikova’s husband Pyotr Verzilov has acted as the group’s de facto media spokesman.
Verzilov and Tolokonnikova first rose to prominence as members of the radical performance art collective Voina, staging stunts like holding an orgy at a Moscow biology museum to protest the election of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, throwing cats over the counter at McDonald’s, and painting a “giant galactic space penis” on a St. Petersburg drawbridge.
This week, Verzilov is taking a different type of political action, holding meetings on Capitol Hill with supporters of the Magnitsky Act — a proposed law that would allow the U.S. to sanction Russian officials involved in human rights abuses. On Friday, he will accept the Amnesty International Prisoners of Conscience award, presented by Yoko Ono, on Pussy Riot’s behalf.
Verzilov is traveling in the United States in the company of the couple’s four-year-old daughter Gara and three of the band’s attorneys, two of whom have been placed under investigation themselves since taking up the case. On Wednesday, he sat down with FP at Amnesty International’s Washington office to discuss the latest on the case, the challenges of reaching the Russian public, and why no one should take Medvedev very seriously.
Foreign Policy: Can you tell me a little bit about your goals for this trip?
Pyotr Verzilov: Basically, our main goal is to have an extension of the list which will accompany the Magnitsky Act — the list of the people who cannot travel to the United States, open bank accounts, or basically do business with the United States — to people connected with the Pussy Riot case. In our opinion, this is the only thing which influences Russian authorities or members of the law enforcement in any way. Obviously, they’re well prepared for various proclamations letters, memorandums, and demonstrations, and signs of outrage of any kind. But the one thing they are not okay with is having their bank accounts frozen, with losing the ability to travel to the West, with losing their respected status and the possibility of a pleasurable lifestyle. In their minds, this is closely connected to the West and not with Russia.
One thing that a lot of people don’t understand about Russia and Russian authorities is that all these people — whatever the patriotism they show in their language — they see their lifestyle as something very closely connected to the West. Obviously, most Russian bureaucrats are heavily rooted in corruption, and all their funds, their children’s education, their vacations, everything is spent in nice places like the south of France. Their children get an education in the U.K., and other places. So the worst nightmare for all these people is to not have ability to continue this lifestyle in the West. And so the Putinist Russian elite is gravely scared of getting on the Magnitsky list, because in their eyes this will basically cut them off from the outside world. So this is exactly why Putin’s government has been reacting so nervously to this list, and why they oppose it as fiercely as they can. So, this is the question we bring up in all our meetings with U.S. officials: We want to press for people not only related to the death of Sergei Magnitsky, but also to the jailing of the three Pussy Riot girls to appear on this list.
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