Posts Tagged ‘putin’
So much for the reset
The news that Russia has no plans to hand over former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden casts an important light on the “reset” policy that has defined US–Russian relations for almost five years.
The Snowden case should be relatively straightforward. He has violated the laws of the US. His passport has been cancelled, and he cannot legally leave the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. The US has asked for his return. In the last five years, the US has returned 1,700 Russian citizens to Russia at the request of the government. Of these, 500 were criminal deportations.
Despite this, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Snowden had the right to “fly in any direction” from the transit zone. This type of response was exactly what the reset policy was supposed to prevent. The policy was based on the notion that President Bush had mishandled Russia and responsiveness to Russian concerns would produce positive results. The policy, however, had a serious flaw. It failed to account for the nature of the Russian system and the psychology of the Russian leaders.
In making policy toward Russia, the US has concentrated on what are called “deliverables” — treaties, agreements, working groups. In the interest of obtaining these deliverables, the US deliberately downplayed Russian violations of human rights. When Putin was elected president of Russia for the third time in elections marked by massive falsification, Obama congratulated him. At the 2009 Moscow Summit, Obama praised the “extraordinary work” that Putin had done in Russia. He described Putin as “sincere, just and deeply interested in the interests of the Russian people.” This was done despite credible reports that while running Russia, Putin had amassed a personal fortune of nearly $40 billion and was the richest man in Europe.
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Washington’s weak responses to Putin’s crackdowns set a bad example
Anything Russia can do, you can do, too. That is the message Washington is sending to repressive, power-hungry governments around the world. With each step that President Vladimir Putin takes to restrict the freedoms of the Russian people, like-minded leaders watch U.S. (and European) reactions and, seeing weak responses, are emboldened to abuse human rights in a similar manner.
Putin’s crackdown on human rights is motivated by his desire to quell the protest movement that arose in December 2011, when hundreds of thousands of Russians took to the streets to demonstrate against unfair parliamentary elections. In March 2012, protesters were further incensed by the unfair elections that returned Putin to the presidency.
In response, the Russian government has developed new repressive tools and technologies — most notably, using the law as a weapon — that Putin eagerly uses as he attempts to reassert and consolidate his power and position. And U.S. objections to his abuses are plaintive, feeble and ignored.
To Russia’s south, Azerbaijan is taking note. President Ilham Aliyev is standing for reelection in October and hopes to avoid the unrest that has dogged Putin. With Russia’s actions seeming to effectively enfeeble the opposition, Aliyev has preemptively followed that oppressive model.
To discourage protests, Russia a year ago increased the fine for participating in unsanctioned rallies from a maximum of 1,000 rubles ($31.50) to a ceiling of 300,000 rubles ($9,450). Last month, Human Rights Watch reported that Azerbaijan’s “maximum jail sentence for violating rules for organizing, holding, and attending unauthorized assemblies increased from 15 days to two months.”
In July, in a move designed to stifle free speech, Russia once again made libel a criminal offense. Predictably, Azerbaijan is in the process of expanding the definitions of “insult” and “slander” and plans to include online statements in the scope of its libel laws. The effect on free speech would be chilling.
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Russia: Kerry’s Chilly Kremlin Reception
This past Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met President Vladimir Putin of Russia in the Kremlin.
Kerry was seeking to repair frayed ties with Russia and obtain Moscow’s assistance with a settlement in Syria. The U.S. and its allies hope to put an end to the civil war, and the Obama Administration wants Russia to help.
Yet Putin gave Kerry the cold shoulder, and Russia’s help in Syria is unlikely. Russia does not want the West and its Gulf allies to topple the Assad regime. Putin believes Russia got a black eye when it abstained in the United Nations Security Council vote that toppled Muammar Qadhafi. However, Kerry agreed to a peace conference on Syria, which will take place in Geneva—with no preconditions, such as Assad’s departure.
This conference is an achievement for Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who will have a photo-op with Kerry; an achievement for Russia, which will appear as Washington’s equal in the international arena; and an achievement for Kerry, who will boast that he got the parties around the table.
The Obama Administration recognizes that there are problems with its Syria policy, where it finds itself stuck between the repressive Assad regime and Sunni extremists, including al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabha al-Nusrah. However, by agreeing to a Geneva conference with Russian co-sponsorship, Obama gained nothing while providing Moscow with a diplomatic advantage.
Kerry’s meeting with Putin was nightmarish. He was kept waiting for three hours for the master of the Kremlin, contrary to diplomatic protocol. Putin then appeared disinterested, fidgeting with his pen throughout the meeting.
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As a UK newspaper boss faces jail in Russia… A TV punch and the show trial that proves Putin will stop at nothing to silence critics of his gangster state
This has been a week for nostalgia in Moscow, courtesy of that hopeless romantic President Vladimir Putin.
Yesterday, I watched tanks and missiles rumble through Red Square to mark Victory Day. Seventy years have passed since the Battle of Stalingrad.
Many feel they were the dobroye staroye vremia — the ‘good old days’. The streets around were filled with veterans including Alexander, 90, who sported a Tolstoyan beard and Soviet medal awarded for rescuing a wounded comrade while under Nazi fire.
‘We looked after each other then,’ he reminisced to me. ‘The Great Patriotic War was terrible, but the country had a better spirit.
‘Today we are not threatened by external enemies. Our real enemies are within.’ Putin could not have scripted him better, particularly with regard to another Kremlin-orchestrated echo from Russia’s totalitarian past.
At the Ostankinsky district court on Tuesday, the trial began of a man who threw a punch. Nothing more than pride was really hurt in the scuffle, which lasted mere seconds.
Indeed, the incident would barely warrant a paragraph in a local newspaper, let alone the attention of the international media, were it not for two factors.
The first is that the ‘fight’ took place during the filming of a televised debate and therefore was ‘witnessed’ by several million.
Second, but far more important, are the profound implications of this prosecution for the freedom of the Press, not only in Russia, but the wider world.
When he stood before the judge, billionaire industrialist and media tycoon Alexander Lebedev did so as one of the most high-profile critics of the Kremlin regime.
As well as owning four London-based newspapers, including The Independent and the Evening Standard, Mr Lebedev is, along with glasnost pioneer Mikhail Gorbachev, a major shareholder in the leading Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
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Strongman Putin Is No Match for Corruption
President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on corruption is vital to Russia’s future. It’s also certain to fail unless he recognizes the shortcomings of his methods.
In 2008, under then-President Dmitry Medvedev, Russia began a genuine and somewhat successful effort to bring its corruption laws into the first world. At the same time, the state restricted investigative news media, stepped up its intimidation of nongovernment organizations, persecuted whistle-blowers and subverted the judicial system.
No bureaucracy can police itself effectively. That’s why international conventions (and now Russian law) clearly state that graft can be reduced only if whistle-blowers and nonstate actors play an active role. Yet Putin, back in power after four years as prime minister, is sending a message that he is Russia’s only anti-corruption champion, and that exposing dishonest officials is at the sole discretion of the Kremlin.
Corruption costs Russia about $300 billion a year, a whopping 16 percent of gross domestic product. And that measure doesn’t capture the distorted incentives and lost investment that are side effects. Russia placed last in Transparency International’s most recent Bribe Payers Index, which ranks countries according to their companies’ propensity to offer bribes.
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Don’t ’Reset’ With Putin, Crack Down on Him
As Secretary of State John Kerry visits Moscow today to try to shore up fraying relations, the show trial of the dissident Alexey Navalny also should be on the agenda.
The anti-corruption campaigner led demonstrations against Russian President Vladimir Putin after last year’s elections; he now faces a judge who has convicted 130 people and acquitted none in the past two years.
These days, friction between Putin and the West is the norm, and with good reason. Russia-U.S. relations don’t need another “reset.” Instead, the U.S. must carry out an honest recalculation of what it can expect to obtain from Putin — and at what price.
Conventional wisdom holds that Russian cooperation on a range of issues is so valuable — and U.S. leverage over Putin so minimal — that antagonizing officials in Moscow over human rights isn’t worthwhile. The U.S. should rethink that assumption, not merely because Putin’s approach to democracy and human rights is even worse than expected, but also because he has failed to deliver on critical national-security issues, such as Iran, North Korea and Syria.
On Iran, Russia voted for United Nations sanctions in 2010, but has since cozied up to the Tehran regime.
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Russians Go on TV to Say Sanctions Won’t Matter
Just two weeks after the Obama administration imposed sanctions on about two dozen Russians accused of human rights violations, Russian officials organized a very public “so what?” on Saturday, gathering officials on the list and assuring them in televised meetings that condemnation by the United States government would not hurt their careers. The jocular tone of the meetings suggested, in fact, that it might help.
“Are your knees trembling?” Interior Minister Vladimir A. Kolokoltsev asked Oleg F. Silchenko, an investigator who was included on the American list.
“I don’t feel my knees trembling, because there is always only one truth,” replied Mr. Silchenko, who oversaw the detention of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in prison in 2009 after accusing officials of embezzlement from the federal budget.
Other men and women on the list stepped forward to attest publicly that the American sanctions, which forbid them from traveling to the United States and freeze any assets held there, would have no effect on them at all. Col. Natalia Vinogradova, who oversaw the posthumous prosecution of Mr. Magnitsky, said the ban did not bother her because she had no desire to leave Russia.
“I don’t even have a foreign passport,” she said. “I have never once been abroad.”
Behind Saturday’s extravagant show of indifference, of course, is a deep vein of anxiety. The 18 Russians whose names have been made public (others are classified) are not high-ranking officials or people who stand to lose much if their foreign assets are frozen. But it is unclear how many other names will be added or how many other countries will adopt measures similar to the American government’s “Magnitsky list.”
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Putin rejects foreign adoptions by same-sex couples
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow should amend its adoption agreements with countries which have legalised gay marriage.
Asked about the legalisation of same-sex marriage and adoption in France, he said other countries should respect Russia’s “moral standards”.
French President Francois Hollande is expected to sign the bill into law after it was passed by parliament.
Moscow has also linked adoptions to a US black list of its officials.
It has emerged that Russia warned the Irish Republic last month that it could stop the adoption of Russian children by Irish parents if the parliament in Dublin endorsed the Magnitsky Act.
The act places sanctions on 18 Russians allegedly involved in the death of anti-corruption whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison in 2009.
Russia banned Americans from adopting Russian children soon after the US Congress passed the legislation in December.
MPs in several EU countries, including the Irish Republic, are considering following the American example.
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Cardin to meet with family of Russian lawyer
Sen. Ben Cardin is scheduled to meet Thursday with the family of a Russian lawyer whose death sparked an international outcry over human rights in that country, renewing focus on a controversy that has complicated U.S.-Russian relations at a sensitive time.
The meeting with the widow, mother and son of Sergei Magnitsky — who died in a Russian jail in 2009 after exposing corruption in the Russian government — comes just days after the State Department released a list of Russian officials barred from obtaining U.S. visas over alleged human rights abuses.
The list was required by a law championed by Cardin, a Maryland Democrat. He named the legislation for Magnitsky.
The Obama administration is trying to move beyond the controversy that erupted when Congress passed the law last year. While relations with Moscow remain strained — aggravated by differences over the civil war in Syria — the White House is seeking cooperation on Iran and the escalating tensions on the Korean peninsula.
Cardin, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he is not concerned that his meeting with the Magnitsky family or the naming of Russian officials prohibited from traveling in the United States might disrupt those broader international efforts.
“We can deal with more than one subject at a time,” he said in an interview.
The meeting, he said, “gives us a chance to underscore the importance of these new standards, of not abating on gross violators of internationally recognized human rights standards.”
Russian officials seem to be making a distinction between the White House and the Congress. The officials responded positively to a meeting with U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon this week and a letter from President Barack Obama to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. The two leaders are expected to meet later this year.
But those officials criticized what they described as a “Russiaphobic” Congress, a reference to the Magnitsky language. Lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in December to pass the measure after it was attached to a broader trade bill that was a priority for both countries.
The Putin administration has said the Magnitsky provision represents meddling in Russian affairs.
The measure required the State Department to publicly release a list of Russian human rights abusers, deny them visas and prohibit them from accessing U.S. banks.
The department released a list of 18 officials, most of whom were involved in the Magnitsky case, on Saturday. The Kremlin responded with a list that included several top U.S. officials involved with running the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Last year, Russia passed a law banning U.S. adoptions of Russian children. It is named after a young Russian orphan who died in Virginia in 2008 after being left in a car by his adoptive father but is viewed as a retaliation for the Magnitsky Act.
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