Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Cameron, You Dropped the Ball

The Moscow Times

Dear Prime Minister Cameron,

During your recent visit to Moscow you claimed that you would like to take on the skeptics of the Russian-British relationship. I would like to accept that challenge.

In your speech at Moscow State University on Sept. 12, you outlined two types of skeptics — those who believe Britain is untrustworthy and for whom the relationship is connected to the Soviet past, and those, you said, who believe that Russia should not modernize, innovate and open up.

Taking your second set of skeptics first, I can think of almost no one who believes that Russia should not modernize, innovate or open up. Where did you get that from? You would have to be reliving the Cold War to believe that Russia should be deliberately kept down in any way. All reasonable people want a modern Russia, even if we only define modernization narrowly, as the Kremlin has done, as scientific-technical modernization.