Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

West needs to engage with ordinary Russians

Financial Times

Vladimir Putin, after a campaign dripping with anti-western vitriol, has won a presidential election that monitors and Russia’s newly-emboldened opposition say was deeply flawed. How should the west respond?

US and European Union leaders are already being criticised – including by Russian pro-democracy groups – for tepid criticism of the alleged voting fraud. One European parliamentarian has said there should be “no business as usual” with Mr Putin’s regime.

But many in Russian civil society and the intelligentsia say it is crucial for the west not to isolate Russia at the very moment that its middle-class political consciousness is flowering.

Doing so could provide cover for a Kremlin clampdown on the nascent opposition. It would make it harder, too, to counter official propaganda that the financial crisis and eurozone problems prove western-style market democracy is not a shining model for Russia.