Posts Tagged ‘washington post’
How U.S. sanctions hope to strike at Putin’s allies without actually targeting Putin
On Monday, President Obama released a list of individuals sanctioned for their involvement in Crimea’s vote to join the Russian Federation. Of the 10 names on the list, seven are Russian.
One person, however, was notable by his absence: Russian President Vladimir Putin.
While Putin’s name appears three times in the list, U.S. officials have explained that it would be “extraordinary” for them to target a head of state in such a case, despite calls to do so from people such as Bill Browder, one of the key supporters of the Magnitsky Act.
The list does strike at Putin, however, by targeting some of his key allies. These people may not be household names in the United States or Western Europe, but they hold real power in Russia, which may not be apparent from the one-line descriptions given by the White House.
For starters, there’s Vladislav Surkov, described as a presidential aide to Putin. Surkov is notorious in Russia-watching circles as the theater director who later became a PR man for Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He eventually came to the Kremlin and used his understanding of publicity and image to help sustain and strengthen Putin’s presidency, with some even suggesting that he was the real power behind the throne. He was called “Putin’s Rasputin” in the London Review of Books, and the “Gray Cardinal” by many others. While he apparently fell out of favor after anti-Putin protests in 2012, he was brought back last fall to help deal with Ukraine and other situations.
Then there’s Sergei Glazyev, once a fierce critic of Putin and even a rival to his presidency, who was brought into the president’s fold in 2012, and is described as a “Presidential Adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin.” Glazyev was tasked with developing the Customs Union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, a precursor to the “Eurasian Union” that is said to be close to Putin’s heart. It had been hoped that Ukraine might join the Customs Union, and Glazyev had acted as Putin’s main emissary to the country over 2013. He had issued a number of warnings to Ukrainians as the Euromaidan protests progressed.
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The man behind the Magnitsky Act explains why now is the time to go after the Russian elite’s assets
As much as everyone is very mad at Russia right now for its actions against Ukraine, it still isn’t exactly clear what will happen next. Might the United States and Western Europe send troops into battle against Russia? Even if Russia weren’t a nuclear power, that seems incredibly dangerous.
Instead, the discussion is moving to economic measures, with the Obama administration saying it is “highly likely” they will use sanctions against Russia.
However, at least one person is arguing that there may be another option, one that could zero in on the interests of the Russian elite more accurately without hurting the Russian public in general: a 2012 human rights law known as the Magnitsky Act.
“This is exactly what the Magnitsky Act was created for,” Bill Browder, founder of the investment fund Hermitage Capital Management explained in a phone call from his London base Monday morning. For Browder, his link to the act isn’t just political — it’s also personal. The man for whom “the Magnitsky Act” is named worked for him.
The story of the Magnitsky Act began in 2008, when Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow-based lawyer working for the Hermitage Fund, testified in a Russian court that he had uncovered a huge scam by top police officials. According to Magnitsky, the officials had embezzled $230 million in taxes from money that Hermitage Fund companies had paid in 2006, with corrupt police officers using stolen corporate seals and documents seized in a 2007 raid on Hermitage’s Moscow offices to set up fake companies under the same names, and then used these fake companies to get a tax rebate.
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U.S. relations with Russia face critical tests in 2014 as Putin, Obama fail to fulfill expectations
With mutual trust all but gone, the United States and Russia enter a new year full of challenges that will test whether the world’s nuclear giants can salvage their relationship.
The Winter Olympics, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the case of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, turmoil in Ukraine and Syria, and the uncharted consequences of the shale gas boom all threaten to bring new difficulties and irritants.
Things were supposed to be easier by now.
Five years ago this month, the Obama administration took office vowing to repair Washington’s tattered relations with Moscow. In a burst of optimism, it set about cultivating a productive relationship with Russia’s relatively new and seemingly forward-looking president, Dmitry Medvedev.
That plan hasn’t worked out. The White House hadn’t counted on the determination of Medvedev’s patron and successor, Vladimir Putin, to turn Russia sharply away from integration with the West.
Today, President Obama’s approach — the much-vaunted “reset’’ — has fizzled, unable to deliver on its promise to build new trust between the two countries.
What went wrong? After a 2013 in which the extent of the breach became clear, each country freely blames the other.
Moscow says Washington doesn’t heed its opinions — most recently about Ukraine — and violated the spirit of the new relationship by interfering in Russian politics. Washington denies that and points to a steady stream of anti-American pronouncements and actions by Putin’s government.
The White House insists that it hasn’t given up on Russia, but there is only so much time and attention it can devote to low-reward relationships. Putin, on the other hand, appears to discern a threat in nearly everything the United States does, and it is clear that the collapse of the reset has left little momentum for further cooperation.
The two countries do, in fact, continue to work together on Afghanistan, on space travel, on nuclear security and terrorism, to some extent on Iran and recently even on Syria. Yet there is no agenda on nuclear arms, or Europe’s future or Asia’s, or global energy policy or the Arctic.
U.S. officials were interviewed for this article on the condition of anonymity in order to speak frankly about the meager gains of the administration’s approach to Russia. They acknowledged the difficulty of the relationship but argued that engaging with Moscow is better than the alternative.
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Fair Trials International group urges reforms for Interpol arrests
The case of a Russian environmental activist who fled the country but was later arrested, despite finding sanctuary in Finland, reveals how political motives can sometimes improperly influence international police work, a London-based group said this week.
The international police network in question is Interpol, which represents 190 member countries, including the United States, allowing them to issue international warrants or request information about suspects facing criminal charges at home.
Fair Trials International, an advocacy group for those arrested abroad, issued a report early Thursday asserting that the agency is used by some of its members — including Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Iran and Venezuela — to pursue political ends.
Pyotr Silaev, a 28-year-old Russian who took part in a protest in Moscow in July 2010 against the destruction of a forest in the suburb of Khimki, illustrates how Interpol can be wrongly used, according to Robert Jackman, a Fair Trials spokesman.
When police began arresting some of the demonstrators and accused Silaev of hooliganism, he fled to Finland, which accepted him as a political refugee.
Later, Silaev traveled to Spain and was arrested there on a Russian request issued through Interpol. He spent eight days in prison and six months stuck in Spain while fighting extradition to Russia. A Spanish court eventually refused to extradite him, ruling that his arrest was politically motivated. Fair Trials is trying to get his name stricken from the Interpol database.
When Moscow police wanted Interpol help to arrest William Browder, the investment banker who campaigned for the United States to punish Russia for human rights abuses, Browder quickly found a way to give the international agency his side of the story.
Interpol promptly declared the request to locate Browder — who fought for passage of the U.S. Magnitsky Act — politically motivated and deleted the entry from its database. Browder’s situation showed that individuals are shielded from abuse by Interpol, according to Ronald K. Noble, the agency’s head.
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Britain’s High Court throws out libel suit related to dead Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky
Britain’s High Court on Monday threw out a libel case brought by a former Russian police officer against a London-based financier who is a fierce critic of corruption in Russia.
Retired policeman Pavel Karpov sued Hermitage Capital Management and its chief executive, William Browder, who has accused Karpov of being part of a network of corrupt officials complicit in the death of a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.
Judge Peregrine Simon dismissed the suit, ruling that Karpov had only minor links to Britain and “there is a degree of artificiality about his seeking to protect his reputation in this country.”
Browder called the judgment a victory against so-called libel tourism — the practice of litigants taking cases to court in Britain, even when there is no strong link to the country, because the British legal system is perceived as friendly to their claims.
“I think this is a precedent-setting case,” Browder said “If you are a dubious foreign chancer, this precedent makes it much less likely you will succeed in the libel courts.”
The case is part of the labyrinthine saga surrounding the death of Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer hired by Hermitage Capital, who accused Russian police officials of stealing $230 million in tax rebates after illegally seizing Hermitage subsidiaries.
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Obama’s broken commitment to human rights in Russia
Like James “Whitey” Bulger, Vladimir Putin likes to make the bodies bounce.
Bulger is the reputed mob boss on trial for multiple murders in Boston. After Bulger learned that a confederate was singing to the FBI, according to some recent testimony, Bulger shot him, and shot him, and shot him, until “his body was bouncing off the ground.”
Putin is the president of Russia, who last week saw to the conviction for tax evasion of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who blew the whistle on massive corruption among Putin’s underlings. Magnitsky died three years ago, when he was beaten and denied treatment in prison. But Putin can’t stop shooting.
The ghoulish conviction is just one stop on a breathtaking rollback of rights and freedoms Putin has engineered since reclaiming the presidency in May 2012. The clampdown has been remarkable for its speed and comprehensiveness — and for President Obama’s apparent utter indifference to it.
Russia has been slipping since 2004, when Putin, in his first term, began dismantling laws that had allowed for political opposition. But in the past year, “the Russian government has unleashed a crackdown on civil society unprecedented in the country’s post-Soviet history,” as Human Rights Watch documented in a 76-page report this spring.
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Trials suggest a growing repression in Russia
Last week was a busy one for Russian authorities, who arrested the only nationally known opposition mayor for bribery, sought six years in prison for crusading blogger Alexei Navalny and asked a court to declare a long-dead lawyer guilty of tax evasion.
The trial of a dozen demonstrators accused of rioting and attacking police at Bolotnaya Square in Moscow on the eve of President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration ground on. Maria Alyokhina, a punk rocker sent to a labor camp for two years for a singing protest in Moscow’s main cathedral, lost an appeal. An appeal filed on behalf of the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has been in prison for nearly 10 years, was rejected.
Leonid Razvozzhayev, an opposition organizer who was kidnapped and returned to Moscow after he sought asylum in Ukraine, was given permission to get married in jail — perhaps because he is not expected to get out soon. He faces 10 years in prison if convicted of planning riots.
And Putin signed not one, but two laws aimed at gays.
By week’s end, it was clear to anyone who held out hope to the contrary that the future here looks more and more repressive. The authorities appeared intent on using all their resources — police, courts, legislature and media — to pursue that end and silence dissent for years to come.
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Europe may follow U.S. on Magnitsky sanctions
A report prepared on the death of Russian whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, presented Tuesday to a European body that promotes human rights, severely criticized Russia for failing to hold anyone accountable for his death in pretrial detention.
The report was prepared by Andreas Gross, a member of the Swiss parliament, for the 47 countries making up the Council of Europe and was given to the council’s human rights and legal affairs committee Tuesday. At a news conference in France, Gross said the report would provide material for the council’s Parliamentary Assembly to consider when it debates possible sanctions against Russia at its winter session.
Magnitsky, who died in Moscow in November 2009, accused Russian officials of using documents stolen from the Hermitage Capital investment fund to carry off a $230 million tax fraud. Instead of pursuing the officials, authorities charged Magnitsky with the fraud. Recently, Russia opened a new case against him — in death — and brought charges against Hermitage founder William Browder as well.
Gross, who interviewed numerous witnesses in Russia, told the news conference that high-level officials declined to talk to him. He said the evidence he accumulated, however, persuaded him that Magnitsky was innocent and responsibility lay with “a group of criminals, including the persons he had accused before these persons took him into custody, where he died.”
The report comes six months after the United States passed the Magnitsky law, which places financial and visa sanctions on certain Russian officials. Russia vehemently denounced the U.S. law, and on Tuesday Ilyas Umakhanov, the deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, criticized the Gross report. He called it full of “flaws, contradictions and myths.”
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Snowden’s Russia problem: Why a libertarian activist made friends with authoritarian states
When Edward Snowden announced to the world that he would stay in Hong Kong despite the looming threat of a U.S. extradition request, he explained that he trusted its reputation for rule of law and free speech, the same values he wished to promote in leaking information about classified U.S. surveillance programs. “My intention is to ask the courts and the people of Hong Kong to decide my fate,” he said. “I have been given no reason to doubt your system.”
That didn’t really work out. On Sunday, Snowden fled to Russia and may ultimately be bound for Ecuador by way of Cuba. That Snowden would switch strategies from throwing himself at the mercy of Hong Kong’s court system to seeking shelter with some of the world’s more authoritarian governments is a sign of how serious his dilemma has become. It’s a story of idealism giving way to self-preservation, but also of a young man who wanted to challenge state abuses getting swept up in geopolitics much larger than himself – and ending up an ally of governments that embody everything he wanted to fight with his initial leaks.
The trouble seemed to start for Snowden when he realized that if he stayed in Hong Kong, he could indeed face extradition to the United States on espionage charges. Even if he did win the right to political asylum, his case might have taken years – during which time he could have faced prison time and would likely have lost access to the computer that was so important to him. “If you were to deprive him of his computer, that would be totally intolerable,” a lawyer he retained told the New York Times. That lawyer also told the Financial Times, “He is a kid. I don’t think he anticipated that this would be such a big matter.”
Snowden learned the hard way that asylum cases do not always rest on simple ethical questions as to whether or not the host government sympathizes with the asylum-seeker. More often, they are grueling, years-long trials in which the accused must typically demonstrate that his government is seeking him primarily for his political opinion rather than his violation of U.S. law. That’s not an impossible case to make – he might have argued that U.S.’s treatment of Bradley Manning, a previous leaker, could be seen as rising to the level of political persecution – but it’s not an easy one, given that Snowden broke U.S. law his own admission.
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