Posts Tagged ‘Magnitsky’
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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Rare Assault on Putin Hits Russian Evening News
Viewers of the nightly news in the central Russian city of Chelyabinsk were given a rare glimpse recently of a report condemning President Vladimir Putin, when an allegedly disgruntled employee slipped the critical clip between glowing reports about pig farming and the region’s pro-Kremlin governor.
The anti-Putin item appeared on the Eastern Express channel during its evening news report on July 31, after the newsreader introduced a relatively benign story about new medical equipment in local hospitals, according to a portion of the broadcast later uploaded to YouTube.
Instead of that report, the item that appeared was called “The Epoch of Putin”—a polemic that blamed the president for the deaths of slain journalist and anti-Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya and lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison after exposing alleged corruption. It compared corruption levels under Mr. Putin to those in Togo and Uganda.
It also accused Mr. Putin of benefiting from a boost in the polls following a series of terrorist attacks around Russia that started just before his first term as president in 2000.
The report ran for more than two minutes before the channel switched abruptly back to footage of the regional governor, according to the online footage, which spread widely following the broadcast.
Critical broadcast news reports about Russia’s president are almost unheard of in the country, where national television networks are state controlled or have close ties to the Kremlin, and privately owned local stations tend to hold a similar line.
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Alan Mendoza discusses Magnitsky case with Al Jazeera
Alan Mendoza, Director of the Henry Jackson Society, discusses the recent posthumous conviction of Sergei Magnitsky and the failings of the Russian justice system.
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Returning to the Magnitsky Crime Scene
It is well-known that those guilty of murder often cannot resist the compulsion to return to the scene of their crime, even though they know that doing so will put them at great risk of being exposed.
In recent months, the world has witnessed a bizarre manifestation of this phenomenon in the absurd posthumous prosecution and conviction of Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer who unearthed a brazen $230 million dollar tax fraud scheme perpetrated by Russian police and tax officials. It is as though the Russian government, whose officials were implicated in the 2009 death of Magnitsky, could not keep itself from returning to the shameful events that led to his death. In so doing, Russia has put the depth of its legal bankruptcy and corruption on full public display.
In any nation with a legitimate legal system, Magnitsky would have been lauded as a whistleblower for his integrity, and the embezzlers, extortionists and those responsible for his death in pretrial detention would have been thrown in jail. In Russia, precisely the reverse happened. Magnitsky was instead arrested and charged with the very fraud he had uncovered and he died in prison after being severely beaten and being denied medical treatment. His death might have passed largely unnoticed as just another small tragedy in a nation where rule of law has become a thing of the past. But Magnitsky’s former client, Hermitage Capital CEO Bill Browder, felt a deep sense of responsibility to do everything in his power to attain a degree of justice for someone who had sacrificed his life in pursuit of integrity and the truth.
Thanks to the determined efforts of Browder and widespread outrage over the Magnitsky case, the U.S. passed a law imposing financial and visa sanctions on Russian officials implicated in Magnitsky’s death and in other human rights violations. Other nations are considering following suit. In their apparent fury after being exposed on a global scale, Putin’s government responded by doubling down against the victim. While clearing the dozens of officials implicated in the embezzlement scheme and Magnitsky’s death, the authorities instead put the heroic whistleblower on posthumous trial and, in a pre-determined outcome, he was duly convicted several weeks ago.
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Why Did Putin Grant Edward Snowden Asylum? Revenge
Face the Nation, one of America’s premier Sunday political talk shows, spent a good part of this weekend’s broadcast discussing something many in U.S. political circles have been wondering this week: why would Russian President Vladimir Putin give sanctuary to Edward Snowden?
Speaking of the decision to offer Snowden asylum, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer asked Senator Chuck Schumer, “Why do you think Putin did this? I mean, this, kind of, has a high school-like scenario to it. But, you know, often nations have some reason behind their actions. Do you think this was a calculated strategy on his part?”
The senior New York Democrat responded by saying that he felt it had to do with Putin’s resentment over Russia losing the Cold War and the general decline in Russian power.
Speaking to the New York Times’ David Sanger later in the show, Schieffer again returned to the subject, saying of Snowden’s decision, “It’s kind of following a kind of high school scenario here. Here you have Putin sort of — sort of taking on the role of Hugo Chavez. I mean, nobody thought Venezuela posed any kind of threat to the United States, but Chavez apparently thought he could really make his place in the world by poking his finger in the eye of the giant,” referring to the United States.
Sanger concurred saying, “I think that’s exactly right, Bob. This is half high school, half Cold War playbook.”
There may be some truth to these statements. Nonetheless, they show the complete lack of self-awareness that is too often commonplace among American leaders in their interactions with the outside world.
The truth of the matter is that if Edward Snowden had been a Russian spy who arrived in New York or Washington after telling the international press all about Moscow’s domestic surveillance programs, the U.S. would have provided him asylum without question.
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Senators Demand Repercussions For Russia In Wake Of Snowden Asylum
Pressure is building in Congress for President Obama to move the G-20 summit in September away from St. Petersburg in light of Russia’s granting Edward Snowden asylum on Thursday.
“Russia has stabbed us in the back, and each day that Mr. Snowden is allowed to roam free is another twist of the knife,” said Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in a statement. “Others who have practiced civil disobedience in the past have stood up and faced the charges because they strongly believed in what they were doing. Mr. Snowden is a coward who has chosen to run. Given Russia’s decision today, the President should recommend moving the G-20 summit.”
“Yes. Yes I do,” Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Buzzfeed when asked if she thought Obama should consider not attending the G-20 meeting.
“I think this is a troubling pattern,” Ayotte said, pointing to Putin’s support for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, his crackdown on adoptions and a string of other decisions in which he’s “basically just trampling on what we’ve expressed to him that we want to see happen … we’re not just talking about Snowden here.”
Other senators didn’t explicitly call for Obama’s plans to change, but strongly condemned Putin for allowing Snowden into Russia instead of returning him to the U.S.
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Letter Calls on President Obama to Cancel Meeting with Putin in Moscow
In light of recent disturbing developments for human rights in Russia, we urge President Barack Obama to cancel his summit meeting with President Vladimir Putin in September in Moscow and to revise U.S. policy toward Russia to reflect the aggressive, systematic assault on political and civil liberties taking place in Russia.
The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, DC
August 2, 2013
Dear Mr. President:
In the past several weeks, the already alarming deterioration of Russia’s respect for political and civil rights has accelerated. Ordinary citizens who participated in peaceful protests against the government are being tried in court on trumped-up charges, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was convicted posthumously in an absurd tax evasion case after having died from abuse in prison, and anti-corruption blogger and leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny was convicted of embezzlement in a politically-motivated trial.
Over the past year, Russia’s Kremlin-friendly Duma has hastily adopted laws that make Russians, particularly those engaged in civil society and journalism, vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment. Russia’s security services and law enforcement are pursuing a government agenda to harass and intimidate anyone perceived as a critic. Hundreds of non-profit organizations have been raided and investigated. Activists and opposition figures are targets of surveillance and harassment, even outside of Russia.
In light of these disturbing developments, we urge you to cancel your summit meeting with President Vladimir Putin in September in Moscow and to revise U.S. policy toward Russia to reflect the aggressive, systematic assault on political and civil liberties taking place in Russia. This request is independent of our concern about Russia’s handling of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who was granted temporary asylum today in Moscow. Even if Snowden were to be returned to the U.S. before your planned visit to Russia, which looks highly unlikely, we would still urge you not to travel to Moscow in September for the reasons stated.
While we recognize that certain levels of engagement with the Putin government are important and unavoidable, we also feel that U.S. policy should reflect Russia’s backsliding on human rights and recognize that it has an impact on the broader U.S.-Russia relationship. Such a policy is also important in dealing with other repressive governments elsewhere.
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The Russians murdered my husband – and I could be next: Widow of Kremlin whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky reveals she fled to London in fear of her life
The contents of the food parcel Natasha Magnitsky packed for husband Sergei were achingly spare: tea, sugar, biscuits and bread, a few carrots and turnips to bolster his prison diet, and some caramel as a treat. But when she attempted to hand them in at the little hatch in Moscow’s notorious Butyrka prison, a female official snapped: ‘No, he’s gone.’
Terrified that Butyrka’s squalid conditions – raw sewage running through the cells, a shift system for beds – had made him sick, Sergei’s mother Nataliya dashed to Matrosskaya Tishina, a prison in northern Moscow where there was a medical unit, while Natasha went to work.
At the prison, the official at the parcel desk was rather more specific: Sergei, an accountant who’d blown the whistle on a £150 million corruption scandal that stopped at the door of the Kremlin, was dead.
‘We had been a fortress, we two,’ says Natasha, who has since fled to London with the couple’s 12-year-old son. ‘Our marriage, our family was our life. In that moment my world and my belief system disintegrated around me. The fortress crumbled.
‘The last thing he said to me the night he was arrested was, “Don’t worry, I’ll be home tomorrow.” Right to the end he believed innocence could always be proved, but now I understand that nobody is safe. The unimaginable happened to my husband – why couldn’t it also happen to me?’
Traditionally, people are sent to prison because they’ve committed a crime. Sergei, 37, found himself locked away because he uncovered one. He was the auditor who followed an extraordinary paper trail that led from an illegal Interior Ministry raid on the Moscow offices of a London investment company to law enforcers, judiciary, bankers and mobsters.
He was incarcerated for a year without trial and investigated by those with a vested interest in closing down his inquiries. A week before his family were expecting his release he died, officially of heart failure and toxic shock from untreated pancreatitis, but also from brutal beatings. America led world condemnation of the best-documented abuse of human rights to emerge from Russia in the past 25 years. It led to the Magnitsky Act, allowing the US to withhold visas and freeze the financial assets of the Russian officials involved.
Russia retaliated by posthumously prosecuting Sergei for complicity in the tax fraud he revealed. His corpse was found guilty last month and his name has now joined the growing list of other brave citizens, from the late dissident Alexander Litvinenko to the young mothers of the anti-establishment pop group Pussy Riot, who are Russia’s very modern martyrs.
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Latvia: the Next Cyprus?
Earlier this month, EU finance ministers gave their approval for Latvia to become the eighteenth member of the Euro in January 2014. It seems counterintuitive that the country of two million people would want to enter the perpetually distressed and recession-stricken economic zone. But for Latvia it has a variety of benefits, not the least of which would be to allow its impressive financial sector easy and unfiltered access to the rest of the continent. The hope is that by embracing the euro and committing itself to the necessary structural preconditions for acceptance, that Latvia will see economic growth and avoid events like the massive drop in GDP it experienced after the 2008 global economic crisis.
Latvia joining the euro, taken by itself, would seem at the very least uninteresting to most observers and politicians sitting in Brussels and Washington D.C. But there is a more worrisome aspect that troubles those very same politicians and portends an economic crisis on the scale of Cyprus if it is not carefully addressed. That nefarious aspect is the country being used as an entry point for illicit Russian money seeking to enter the EU.
The concern over Latvia entering the EU is in part due to the striking similarities between the Cyprus and Latvia. Like Cyprus, Latvia has an oversized financial sector compared to its population, which it has made the centerpiece of its economy. Both countries have strikingly low corporate tax rates, with Latvia at 15 percent and Cyprus at 12.5 percent (the Euro average is 23.5 percent). Additionally, a majority of the services in these nations cater to foreign clients, particularly Russian clients—or from former Soviet states in Central Asia—hoping to escape the capricious and unstable legal and economic situations inside of their country. (More often they are simply hoping to move their money from the watchful eye of Rosfinmonitoring—Putin’s personal financial-intelligence-collection unit). But making Latvia even more dependent on Russian money is the fact that nonresidents account for 48.9 percent of deposits, compared to 43 percent in Switzerland (the perennial tax-cheat haven) and 37 percent in Cyprus. Since 2010 nonresident deposits have increased 32 percent (According to the Latvian central bank, foreign direct investment from Russia has increased from 268.6 million euros in 2010 to 356 million euros today). These statistics are especially troubling considering that in 2008 one of Latvia’s largest banks, Parex, was forced to seek a government bailout due to worried investors withdrawing over $120 million in November alone. Situations like Parex forced Latvia to seek a bailout.
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