Posts Tagged ‘washington post’
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.
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Trade and consequences
Washington Post
The next stage of President Obama’s “reset” with Russia will include trade favors, if the administration has its way. The president has promised the regime of Vladimir Putin that he will support Russia’s long-delayed accession to the World Trade Organization this year. For that to happen, Georgia, a U.S. ally subjected to a Russian invasion in 2008, must still sign off. Also, Congress must grant Russia fully normalized trade relations to avoid a conflict under WTO rules once Moscow is admitted. That means exempting Russia from a 1974 law conditioning trade on Russia’s emigration policies.
The law, known as Jackson-Vanik, is outdated; it was passed to try to force the Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate. But granting Russia trade privileges now rightly seems to many in Congress to be an unwarranted concession to a regime that, under Mr. Putin and partner Dmitry Medvedev, continues to engage in massive human rights violations — not to mention epic corruption.
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Lawmakers introduce Russian “reset”; Russian political prisoners’ appeal denied
Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the imprisoned former oil tycoon, lost an appeal of his second conviction for fraud Tuesday, but his sentence was cut by a year and now will end in 2016.
Khodorkovsky and his business partner and fellow defendant, Platon Lebedev, had been convicted in December of embezzling nearly $30 billion from Yukos, the oil company they ran. Khodorkovsky had antagonized Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and the charges were widely considered not only politically motivated but also legally dubious.
Khodorkovsky, to the applause of the courtroom crowd, had this stem-winder statement on the court’s ruling:
In what dusty cellar did they dig up that poisonous Stalinist spider who wrote this drivel?
What kind of long-term investments can one talk about with such justice?
No modernization will succeed without a purging of these cellars.
The authors of the verdict have shown both themselves and the judicial system of Russia in an idiotic light, having declared in a high-profile, public trial that in Russia injured parties from a theft receive a profit, that the aspiration to increase it is a crime, that the “right” prices for oil in Siberia must be equal to the prices in Western Europe, transportation, customs duties and restrictedness of export notwithstanding.
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Medvedev meets the press
Dmitry Medvedev, the blogging, tweeting, iPad-carrying president, gave his first full-scale news conference Wednesday, bringing 800 journalists to his favored tech-savvy business school, where the eternal Russia of the almighty czars was as powerful a presence as the high-speed Internet access.
Though Medvedev talks frequently of his vision for a modern Russia, with strong democratic institutions and a high-tech economy, he was given question after question suggesting little happens in this country unless the ruler in the Kremlin decrees it, just as it has always been.
Yearly car inspections are a senseless formality — how will you change this? (He’s drawing up a new law.) Local officials show you perfect villages — do you understand how people really live? (Yes, from blogging and reading the Internet.) Our veterans are suffering — can’t you guarantee each of them an apartment? (He issued a decree on that in 2008.) And what are you going to do about the parking problem in Moscow? (He has talked to the mayor.)
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European Parliament members: Russia must permit free assembly, elections
Two members of the European Parliament, visiting Moscow to meet with human rights organizations, called on Russia on Monday to permit citizens to assemble freely without harassment and to guarantee free and fair elections for parliament later this year and for president next year.
“If the elections are not free,” said Kristiina Ojuland, a member of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, “it’s clear the next Parliament would have no legitimacy.”
Ojuland and Heidi Hautula, head of the parliament’s human rights committee, praised Russia for promising an independent investigation into the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the imprisoned former billionaire, but said those officials responsible for the death in pretrial detention of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky must be tried and punished.
“We will see very soon if something is accomplished,” Hautula said, “or if it’s just another nice gesture by the president without too many consequences.”
Perhaps hundreds of other similar cases have not reached public attention, Ojuland said. payday loan hairy woman https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php https://zp-pdl.com займы онлайн на карту срочно
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In Moscow, Biden gets specific on corruption
Vice President Biden heaped praise on Russia on Thursday, calling it a nation of great creativity, great culture and great engineering, but he said it would have to get its legal house in order if it expected to attract more foreign business and investment.
In a formal speech at Moscow State University, Biden mentioned two of Russia’s most notorious recent cases involving business and the courts – those of imprisoned oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and lawyer and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow jail cell in 2009 – and then said that “no amount of cheerleading” would lure back “wronged and nervous investors.”
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No more Western hugs for Russia’s rulers
This year started quite symbolically in Russia. In the last days of 2010, government authorities decided to demonstrate their power and their intolerance for being challenged: The verdict issued at the farcical trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev had no relation to jurisprudence; leading opposition figures were detained for as many as 15 days on purely political grounds.
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In Russia, seeing only repression
In Moscow Russia has set off on an ever more authoritarian path as it heads toward a presidential election next year, sending ominous signals to the already weakened opposition and confronting the United States and Europe with vexing new political challenges.
President Dmitry Medvedev, who positions himself as Prime Minister Vladmir Putin’s liberal alter ego, repeatedly assures the West that just the opposite is true. At the Davos World Economic Forum this week, he said Russia was fighting corruption, developing rule of law – if slowly – and becoming increasingly democratic. “Russian citizens believe they live in a democratic state,” he said.
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Rights experts to investigate jail death of Russian lawyer
U.N.-appointed human rights experts have agreed to explore the death in pretrial detention of a Moscow lawyer who was arrested after filing accusations of police involvement in a multimillion-dollar embezzlement scheme, a colleague who has vowed to avenge his death said Thursday.
The decision comes at the request of Redress, a British human rights organization that works on behalf of torture victims. The lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who was outside counsel to the investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, died in a Moscow jail in November 2009 in what have been described as torturous conditions. He had been in jail 358 days.
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