Posts Tagged ‘lavrov’
Syria Crisis and Putin’s Return Chill U.S. Ties With Russia
Sitting beside President Obama this spring, the president of Russia gushed that “these were perhaps the best three years of relations between Russia and the United States over the last decade.” Two and a half months later, those halcyon days of friendship look like a distant memory.
Gone is Dmitri A. Medvedev, the optimistic president who collaborated with Mr. Obama and celebrated their partnership in March. In his place is Vladimir V. Putin, the grim former K.G.B. colonel whose return to the Kremlin has ushered in a frostier relationship freighted by an impasse over Syria and complicated by fractious domestic politics in both countries.
The tension over Syria has been exacerbated by an accusation by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday that Russia is supplying attack helicopters to the government of President Bashar al-Assad as it tries to crush an uprising. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, rejected the assertions on Wednesday, saying that Moscow was supplying only defensive weapons and countering that the United States was arming the region.
The back-and-forth underscored the limits of Mr. Obama’s ability to “reset” ties between the two countries, as he resolved to do when he arrived in office. He has signed an arms control treaty, expanded supply lines to Afghanistan through Russian territory, secured Moscow’s support for sanctions on Iran and helped bring Russia into the World Trade Organization. But officials in both capitals noted this week that the two countries still operated on fundamentally different sets of values and interests.
The souring relations come as Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin are preparing to meet for the first time as presidents next week on the sidelines of a summit meeting in Mexico. With Mr. Obama being accused by Mitt Romney, his Republican presidential opponent, of going soft on Russia and Mr. Putin turning to anti-American statements in response to street protests in Moscow, the Mexico meeting is being seen as a test of whether the reset has run its course.
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Magnitsky Bill Clears First Hurdle in US Congress
On Thursday morning, by a unanimous voice vote, the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs approved a bill that offers a rare example of congressional bipartisanship. The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, cosponsored by leading Republicans and Democrats in both houses of Congress, deals with an issue that the current and previous administrations were too timid (or too calculating) to address seriously: human rights violations in Russia. The bill drew the Kremlin’s attention as no other US congressional initiative has in years—perhaps not since the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which linked US-Soviet trade to the freedom of emigration. Hours after his inauguration on May 7th, Russia’s reinstated president, Vladimir Putin, signed a decree tasking his diplomats with “preventing the introduction of unilateral extraterritorial sanctions by the United States of America against Russian legal entities and individuals”—a thinly veiled reference to the Magnitsky Act.
Sergei Magnitsky was a Moscow lawyer who died in custody in 2009 after reportedly being tortured and denied access to medical care. A year earlier, he uncovered a $230 million tax fraud scheme—the largest known in Russian history—which involved the previously seized assets of Hermitage Capital Management, an investment fund he was representing. Magnitsky’s testimony implicated several law enforcement officials. The result was his own arrest. Almost three years after Magnitsky’s death, not one of the perpetrators has been punished: on the contrary, a number of interior ministry officials involved in his case have received awards and promotions. Indeed, the most prominent criminal investigation in Russia involving Magnitsky has been, astonishingly, the ongoing posthumous case against him.
The Magnitsky Act, which now advances to the House floor, proposes a targeted visa ban and asset freeze against individuals “responsible for the detention, abuse, or death of Sergei Magnitsky,” as well as for any “extrajudicial killings, torture, or other gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” in Russia. It is in defense of these fine citizens that Putin has mobilized the full force of his diplomacy. Both Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the Kremlin’s top foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, have called the bill “anti-Russian,” and threatened unspecified retaliation. Presumably, all those US officials with retirement savings in Russian banks have been put on notice.
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U.S. Senator Slams Putin for Protest Crackdown
Outspoken U.S. Senator John McCain has criticized President Vladimir Putin for a recent crackdown on protesters, as well as for oligarchy, corruption and activities in the Baltics and Ukraine.
In an interview with the Voice of America’s Russian service, McCain said Putin had to “understand that there is great resistance to the way he governs,” “the way the elections were held” and how “demonstrators were being cracked down” on last week.
“People in Russia are very unhappy with this oligarchy and corruption that goes from top to bottom,” McCain said in the interview Friday, adding that liberal opposition politician Boris Nemtsov had told him that the protest movement was “not gonna be stopped.”
McCain also said U.S. concern should be expanded to Putin’s activities in Ukraine, the three Baltic states and the “military buildup” in Kaliningrad.
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As Putin Postpones Meeting Obama, Analysts Seek Political Import
The first meeting between President Obama and President Vladimir V. Putin as the leaders of their respective countries was supposed to be an icebreaker, a moment for two outsize figures to put behind them some of the friction that surrounded the Russian elections two months ago.
But the announcement on Wednesday that Mr. Putin would skip the Group of 8 summit meeting of world leaders next week at Camp David – which Mr. Obama had promoted as an opportunity to “spend time” with Mr. Putin – bewildered foreign policy experts in both countries who have been waiting to see how the two leaders would get on.
During a telephone call on Thursday, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, assured Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that the cancellation was “not political,” a State Department official said. Other administration officials said they accepted Mr. Putin’s stated reason for canceling his trip – he told Mr. Obama that he had to finish setting up his new cabinet.
In fact, during a meeting last Friday in Moscow with Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, which was supposed to set up the Camp David meeting, Mr. Putin had warned that he might have to send his prime minister (and the former president), Dmitri A. Medvedev, in his place, according to a senior administration official with knowledge of the meeting.
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Russian Envoy Warns U.S. on Magnitsky Bill
Russia’s ambassador to the United States warned the U.S. on Wednesday that legislation to ban Russian officials implicated in the 2009 jail death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky could damage relations between the two countries.
The U.S. State Department expressed support last week for the so-called Magnitsky Act, which is being considered by Congress and would impose sanctions on foreign officials accused of human rights abuses.
“Trying to use it as an instrument of pressure on us will not bring any results except to damage Russian-U.S. relations,” Ambassador Sergei Kislyak said on Voice of Russia radio.
He also said the U.S. government was showing a lack of respect for Russia by intervening in the investigation into Magnitsky’s death. This “is Russia’s internal affair and is being investigated in accordance with Russian law,” he said in the interview, Interfax reported.
Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made similar comments last month, signaling Moscow’s strong irritation with U.S. actions on the case.
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Russia Slams Attempts to Link Jackson-Vanik with Magnitsky Case
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov strongly rejected on Thursday attempts by some U.S. lawmakers to link the repeal of the Soviet-era Jackson-Vanik amendment hampering Russian-U.S. trade with the adoption of new “anti-Russian laws” related to the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
“Attempts to replace an anti-Soviet amendment with anti-Russian laws are categorically unacceptable for us,” Lavrov said.
The Magnitsky case is Russia’s domestic affair which is being dealt with at the highest level, he said, and “before the court makes a decision in this case, we should not interfere.” The U.S. authorities know Russia’s position on the issue “very well,” he added.
A group of influential U.S. senators, including former Republican presidential candidate John McCain, proposed in mid-March introducing a blacklist of Russian officials allegedly linked to Hermitage Capital lawyer Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow pre-trial detention center in November 2009 in exchange for the cancellation of the Jackson-Vanik amendment.
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US Congress tries to replace Jackson-Vanik with anti-Russian legislation – FM
Russia is strongly against U.S. Congress’ attempts to replace the Jackson-Vanik amendment with new “anti-Russian legislation” in the form of the so-called Magnitsky Act that claims to protect human rights and democracy in Russia, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
He warned that the approval by the U.S. Congress of unilateral punitive measures against the persons purportedly responsible for Sergei Magnitsky’s death “will cause serious damage to bilateral relations”.
Lavrov stressed that the Russian leadership pays the closest attention to the investigation of Magnitsky’s death.
“This issue must not be politicised,” he added.
An informed source in Congress told Itar-Tass that the congressmen are not very eager to cancel the Jackson-Vanik amendment because of disagreements with Moscow over Syria and other issues, including human rights.
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Lavrov Dismisses Magnitsky Sanctions as ‘PR Stunt’
The recent steps by western countries introducing travel bans against Russian officials linked to the high-profile death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009 are nothing but a PR stunt, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday.
Magnitsky, who was detained after accusing officials of fraud, reportedly died due to torture and neglect. Two doctors were charged over his death in August last year.
“In line with international law, any country can refuse issuing a visa to anyone from any other country without giving any explanations. That is why all of this is to a large extent a pure PR stunt to show off how ‘cool’ we are. We are making lists and will not let anyone in,” Lavrov said.
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The Autumn of the US-Russia Reset
A colleague and I have described the post-Soviet era in Russia as the “age of impunity,” whereby even the most howlingly obvious crimes of man or state are implausibly denied or whitewashed in a manner redolent of Stalinist propaganda. Two such examples have furnished themselves in quick succession in the last month, one relating to the conviction of a notorious Russian arms dealer and the other to a Russian nuclear scientist’s facilitation of Iran’s atom bomb project. Both acts would have spelt the end of the US-Russian “reset” without the added complications of renewed brinkmanship over the placement of a US missile defense shield in Eastern Europe and the drubbing delivered to Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in a transparently fraudulent parliamentary election on December 4th.
First the arms dealer. On November 2nd, Viktor Bout was sentenced in a New York court of attempting to sell heavy weapons to FARC, Colombia’s Marxist-Leninist terrorist group. Nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” and vaguely the model for Nicolas Cage’s character in the forgettable film Lord of War, Bout was a one-man clearinghouse of post-Soviet munitions for dictators and murderous regimes. There was scarcely a civil war fought in Africa in the 1990s and 2000s—and consequently, a limb dismembered or body decimated—without Bout’s hardware. He was chummy with the indicted war criminal and ex-president of Liberia, Charles Taylor. According to Bout’s biographer, Douglas Farah, the Merchant of Death was also seen schmoozing with Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, just prior to the second Israel-Lebanon War, which saw the Party of God firing Russian-made, armor-piercing antitank weapons that shocked even the IDF in terms of their sophistication and impact.
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