Posts Tagged ‘putin’
Russia Squanders Its Chance at Democracy
In late August, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev appointed Georgy Poltavchenko governor of St. Petersburg. Poltavchenko has served as presidential envoy to Russia’s central-administrative district since 2000. More importantly, he is a loyalist to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and a KGB veteran. He replaces Valentina Matviyenko, another Putin confidante, who has moved on to chair the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian Parliament. Sergey Mironov, the former speaker of the Federation Council, is out. All this game of musical chairs has little to do with either President Medvedev or significant democratic developments. Rather, it demonstrates how Putin is rearranging his insiders.
Planned in secret as early as July, Poltavchenko’s appointment highlights the deep gap between democratic rhetoric and practice in today’s Russia. Analyzing the move, Nikolay Petrov, the Moscow Carnegie Endowment regional-politics expert, sounded baffled:
If United Russia were suffering from low ratings in St. Petersburg and the unpopular Matviyenko was dragging the party even further down, why replace her with a gray, low-profile presidential envoy who has about as much charisma as State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov? For all of her shortcomings—and there were many of them—Matviyenko at least was a colorful and charismatic politician.
Read More →
Facebook
Twitter
Google Buzz
LinkedIn
del.icio.us
Google Bookmarks
Yahoo! Buzz
Tumblr
StumbleUpon
FriendFeed
NewsVine
Digg
Remember Sergei Magnitsky
Who’s really running Russia? The smart money has been on Vladimir Putin, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky appears to underscore that conclusion. How the Magnitsky case is resolved will reveal the extent of Mr. Putin’s reach, even though Dmitry Medvedev serves as president.
Mr. Magnitsky was arrested by Russia’s Interior Ministry in 2008 shortly after he declared that he had evidence of police corruption and embezzlement at the ministry. The complaint said he had helped a client, American-owned investment firm Hermitage Capital, evade taxes. He died after 11 months in prison.
Now Russia has indicted two doctors for his death in a case that exudes the smell of a cover-up. It has strained U.S.-Russian relations and tested the relative powers of President Medvedev, an advocate of the rule of law, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
The Reset: Down–but not Out
During Wall Street’s latest gyrations, Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called the United States a parasite on the global economy. In response to the U.S. Senate’s recent unanimous resolution condemning Russia’s continued post-war military presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, President Dmitry Medvedev possibly called U.S. senators senile—or maybe it was just senior citizens. Either way, you get the point. And in the most recent spat over U.S. plans for ballistic missile defense in Europe, Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s Ambassador to NATO, labeled U.S. Republican Senators Jon Kyl and Mark Kirk “monsters of the Cold War.”
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
U.S. and Russia: Where’s the Reset?
When President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, U.S.-Russian relations were strained and delicate. Arms control agreements had all but disintegrated and acrimonious conflict had largely displaced cooperation. Indeed several observers, including Mikhail Gorbachev, even went so far as to proclaim the emergence of a new Cold War.
Although this assessment may have been an overstatement, tensions between the two former superpowers were certainly running high, particularly during George W. Bush’s presidency. During Bush’s first term, for instance, the United States consistently worked to expand NATO to Russia’s borders, completely disregarding George H.W. Bush’s promise to Gorbachev that NATO would refrain from expanding eastward beyond a reunited Germany. With the U.S. decision to withdraw unilaterally from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in June 2002, cooperation further deteriorated. The ABM treaty was commonly regarded as the foundation of Russia’s nuclear security. As both Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev have stated, the Kremlin felt “deceived and betrayed.”
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
WSJ: Russia’s Dead Soul
We wrote recently about Russia’s horrific injustice and state brutality as epitomized by the outrageous case of Sergei Magnitsky, a fairly young lawyer who found himself framed, tortured and effectively murdered by Vladimir “KGB” Putin’s police state for having stumbled, apparently inadvertently, into one of the largest cases of tax fraud in Russia’s history. As befits the perverted nature of Putinian Russia, it was police committing the fraud.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Loosening Putin’s grip
As dictators fall in the Middle East and even China’s leaders panic at the word “Jasmine,” a question arises: What about Russia? Is Vladimir Putin’s regime immune to this fourth wave of democratic pressures?
It’s a safe bet that folks in Putin’s inner circle are wondering the same thing. Only 43 percent of Russians surveyed say that they would vote for Putin’s ruling party, United Russia, in the parliamentary elections scheduled for December, down from 56 percent in 2009. People are angry about rampant corruption at the highest levels and about the unsolved murders of journalists and others who probe too deeply. A think tank close to United Russia argues that the government is suffering a “crisis of legitimacy.”
That the public mood is souring during an election season presents some stark choices to Putin and to the United States. Putin could respond by providing some outlet for discontent, allowing more room for a political opposition that he has squeezed almost into oblivion. A new political party led by respected Russian political figures Boris Nemtsov, Mikhail Kasyanov, Vladimir Milov and Vladimir Ryzhkov applied last month to register to run in the December elections. If Putin is smart, he’ll let them run. They can’t win, at least this time around, against the government apparatus. But Putin’s regime could claim greater legitimacy if a genuine liberal opposition were given a chance to compete.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Investors to Gauge Climate at Forum
When corporate leaders from around the globe gather in St. Petersburg on Thursday for the International Economic Forum, they will be treated to a picture of the country as modern and investor-friendly.
Special features this year include morning yoga, a business regatta and an open-air performance from British pop legend Sting on the city’s Dvortsovaya Ploshchad on Thursday evening, according to the forum’s cultural program.
Yoga might be welcome by participants eager to understand what is being said between the lines.
The Indian meditation practice aimed at achieving spiritual tranquility is reportedly a favorite pastime of President Dmitry Medvedev, who will attend the forum Friday and Saturday.
It is Medvedev’s political future that vexes investors as political uncertainty mounts in the run-up to December’s State Duma elections and the question over whether his “tandem” with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will continue after the March 2011 presidential vote.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Internet: Web becomes valued forum for free speech
When state television showed a dynamic Vladimir Putin at the wheel of a yellow Lada touring the provinces after devastating forest fires, a fuller picture was to be found on the internet.
Video shot by laughing onlookers and uploaded to the net showed that the prime minister was in fact followed by a motorcade of at least two dozen vehicles, including three spare yellow Ladas in case of a mechanical breakdown.
There are few sectors that better reflect Russia’s lopsided development than the internet. The web has grown strongly as a business, drawing on the nation’s strengths in maths and science to produce a domestic search engine, Yandex, that describes itself as “better than Google”.
Yet the government’s efforts to foster a Russian Silicon Valley outside Moscow show how a poor investment climate is letting down that human potential.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Lawlessness Unlimited
Despite the Kremlin’s ongoing efforts to combat legal nihilism, there is little or no evidence on the ground of a change in support for the rule of law in Russia, a new study has found. Russia fared the worst of its BRIC peers (Brazil, India And China) when it came to upholding the principle of separation of powers and the observance of fundamental human rights, according to the Rule of Law Index report released on Monday.
“The country shows serious deficiencies in checks and balances among the different branches of government (ranking 55th), leading to an institutional environment characterized by corruption, impunity, and political interference,” said the report, which was prepared by the World Justice Project and funded by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “Violations against some fundamental rights, such as freedom of opinion, freedom of association, and arbitrary interference of privacy are areas of concern.”
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
