No Justice in Chechnya means No Peace in Chechnya

Amnesty International has just released a review of “president” Dima Medvedev’s first year in office, in essence branding Medvedev a shameless liar for representing liberal intentions to the world when he took office.  A month ago, when Medvedev announced Russian forces would withdraw from Chechnya (and before he withdrew that declaration and ordered a major new military campaign to quell terrorism), AI condemned Russia’s barbaric history of human rights violations in Chechnya and declared there could be no peace until Russia acknowledged its culpability and paid the appropriate price:

Russia announced the end of its decade long “counter-terrorism operation” in Chechnya on Thursday, claiming that “normality” had returned to the territory. Amnesty International has warned that normalization is not possible without full accountability for the gross human rights violations of the last 10 years. “The true benchmark of a return to normality is to give people what they have been wanting for over a decade – they want the truth, and they want justice,” said Irene Khan, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.”They want to know the fate and whereabouts of relatives and friends who are among the disappeared, and they want those responsible brought to account. Only thorough and independent investigations into past and continuing human rights violations can bring normalization and security in Chechnya. Such investigations will be a deterrent to future violations. Opening the region to independent observers and journalists would be a signal that the authorities there are ready for transparency, but a change of status is absolutely meaningless without the political will to change reality.”

Babitsky on Chechnya

Persecuted Russian hero journalist Andrei Babitsky, writing on Prague Watchdog:

To sum up the results of a series of actions is the easiest thing to do, because the actions contain links that demonstrate tendencies, they hide the codes of a future that has not yet been fully revealed, but can be guessed. To analyze a void is not more difficult – it is not possible at all. A vacuum is aggressively silent, sending in response to all questions a guarded “I wasn’t here, am not here now, and won’t be here in the future.” Nevertheless, the upside of what happens when a void gapes in the space that is organized by human activity is that by its silence it exposes the poverty and futility of articulation.

May 11, 2009 — Contents

MONDAY MAY 11 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Putin and Portugal

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Russia Today is Really Tragic

(3)  Putin’s Stalin-like Purge of Russian Media

(4)  Putin’s Russia Cannot Feed Itself

(5)  Russia’s Oil Supply is Drying up Fast

NOTE:  Kim Zigfeld’s latest installment on the American Thinker exposes the wretched coverage of Russia being offered by the New York Times, which now has the audacity to charge $2 for a newsstand copy. Good luck with that!

NOTE: Once again, today’s issue offers a stark contrast.  Two items (#4 and #5) show how Russia’s food and oil supplies are disappearing because of Putin’s egregious mismanagment, the others document his response: Lies and oppression rather than review and reform.  In other words, the Soviet response Putin spent his whole life learning.

EDITORIAL: Putin and Portugal

EDITORIAL

Putin and Portugal

In a Moscow Times column which we republished on Sunday, Russian pundit Yevgeny Kiselyov (once the Russian Ted Koppel, now driven onto radio by the Kremlin’s crackdown on the TV networks) exposed yet another one of proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin’s ridiculous lies about the Russian economy:

Shortly after he was elected president, Putin pledged that Russia would reach the standard of living of Portugal, “the poorest country in [Western] Europe,” in 10 years. If you measure “quality of life” in terms of per capita gross domestic product for both countries in 2008, it is clear that Russia ($15,800) has no chance of catching up to Portugal ($22,000) by 2010.

Kiselyov was actually being far too generous.  According to the World Bank, Russia’s nominal per capita GDP in 2007 was $9,115 placing it #44 out of all countries in the world, right below Libya and well behind Poland.  Portugal, by contrast, was at #27 with a figure of $20,762 — more than double Russia’s figure.  Kiselyov’s suggestion that Portugal is “only”  30% ahead of Russia therefore seems highly misleading.

EDITORIAL: Russia Today is Really Tragic

EDITORIAL

Russia Today is Really Tragic

By now most Russia watchers are aware that the Putin Kremlin is squandering millions of dollars badly needed by its sick population (Russians don’t rank in the top 120 countries of the world for adult lifespan) on a shameless English-language propaganda TV network known as “Russia Today.”

It goes without saying that there is no more reliable information to be found in RT’s broadcasts than there was on the pages of Pravda or Izvestia  in Soviet Times. But the fully neo-Soviet character of the network’s material is nonetheless surprising and revolting.

Take, for instance, a recent report on religious freedom in Russia.

Putin’s Stalin-like Purge of Russian Media

Christopher Walker of Freedom House, writing in the Moscow Times:

In 1993, the United Nations General Assembly designated May 3 as World Press Freedom Day in order “to celebrate the fundamental principles of press freedom.” But in Russia, there is little to celebrate.  

Using a range of restrictive measures and methods, the authorities have continued to shrink the space for independent journalism. The repressive methods used by the Kremlin has made the country an exceptionally dangerous place for journalists to work.

Russia Cannot Feed Itself

The always brilliant Leon Aron, writing on the American Enterprise Institute website’s Russia Outlook section:

Although it contains millions of acres of some of the world’s most fertile soil and has implemented the world’s largest land privatization reform, Russia imports food in amounts that are inordinately high for a country of its size and per-capita GDP. The reliance on imported meat and poultry is especially large. Already under strain from rampant inflation, a very significant proportion of Russia’s population will find its access to food further diminished by deep depreciation of the ruble as well as such inevitable consequences of the crisis as unemployment and still higher inflation. While widespread hunger is not likely, the constraints on food consumption could add yet another perilous dimension to a political crisis that is bound to unfold alongside the economic one.

Russia’s Oil is Drying Up

Last week we reported on how Gazprom’s natural gas production has fallen by a shocking amount, and now the Wall Street Journal picks up on Russia’s equally horrific problem with plummeting oil production:

Is Russian oil production back?

After months of struggling to lift production volumes, Russia says its crude production rose in April by almost 1%. If sustained, that could bode well for global oil supplies in the event demand ever recovers. But take the latest data with a grain of salt. Russia’s Energy Ministry said Monday the country pumped 9.85 million barrels a day on average in April, up slightly from 9.79 million barrels a day in March. (The world’s next biggest producer, Saudi Arabia, currently pumps about 7.9 million barrels a day.)

But analysts at Sanford Bernstein rubbished the data, saying: “Despite perceived strength in March and April Russian oil production data, we do not believe the data supports a theory of returning output growth in the country.” Year-to-date production is still below last year’s, the analysts note.

May 10, 2009 — Contents

SUNDAY MAY 10 CONTENTS

(1)  Another Original LR Translation:  Golts on the Russian “Army”

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Russia’s So-Called “Army”

(3)  Exposing Russia’s Joke Judiciary

(4)  Another Round of Internet Crackdown in Putin’s Russia

(5)  The Kremlin Makes Policy by Hallucination

NOTE:  You can listen to Paul Goble and other experts discussing Russia’s population collapse here.

Another Original LR Translation: Golts on the Russian “Army”

A note from the translator:  One of the problems with Russia is that no contract, social or commercial, is considered binding. Thus deep lawlessness prevails. The consequences may be dire and, given what Russia presents today, I hope they will be. One good step down this path is seeing what happens if you piss off your Armed Forces. Russia’s vlasti (powers-that-be) look like they are setting about it. The voices of freedom should be making major propaganda about this but will probably remain polite little appeasement artists.

Tearing Up the Contract

Aleksandr Golts,

5 May 2009

Yezhedevny  Zhurnal

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Practically any medication can, if one uses it another way, become a poison. It all depends on the dose and how it is used. Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov recently issued orders for the extraordinary attestation (i.e. sudden re-testing) of all servicemen. Deputy Defence Minister Nikolai Pankov has reported that re-testing of 85% of the officer corps and 79% of the NCOs has now been completed. The only results so far made public are for the senior officer contingent. Of 250 generals and colonels serving in generals’ posts, 50 have been found to be substandard and will proposed for discharge from the armed forces. One can safely assume that no less than 20% of the remainder will also fail their attestations.

EDITORIAL: Russia’s So-Called “Army”

EDITORIAL

Russia’s So-Called “Army”

$840 million.

That’s roughly what it would cost the Kremlin in cash alone to honor its obligation to pay $5,600 to each of the 150,000 Russian army officers it plans to discharge in order to avoid the future cost of their upkeep as the Kremlin’s budget revenues plummet in the wake of falling oil prices.  The nation’s hundred-billion-dollar budgetary reserve fund is expected to fully exhaust by the end of next year attempting to make up for the lost revenues even with deficit spending and massive foreign borrowing.

Writing in the Moscow Times columnist and defense expert Alexander Golts (we’ve also translated his piece from the Russian press on the same topic in today’s lead item) says the Kremlin doesn’t have the money to cash them out, and that’s not the Kremlin’s only obligation. It also has to buy each one of them an apartment!

If the Kremlin Welshes on this obligation, as seems inevitable and as the Russian state has done so often in the past, stabbing its citizens in the back whenever the mood strikes, it will be a clear sign of just how low into neo-Soviet mire the Putin regime has already descended.

Exposing Russia’s Joke Judiciary

Paul Goble reports:

Moscow no longer has to use the Soviet-era practice of “telephone justice” in which senior officials called judges to tell them what decisions to announce, according to a Russian jurist. Instead, the Kremlin has developed a far more effective “power vertical” in which the judges themselves can be counted on to return “correct” verdicts.

Sergey Pashin, a retired federal judge who earlier helped to prepare the 1991 judicial reforms, argues that “the chief problem” is not ‘telephone justice’ but rather that judges themselves do not want to be independent.” With the possible exception of a brief period during the early years of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, Pashin writes, “Russia’s judges always were dependent.” Many people had hoped that they would become more so, but “then inertia took the upper hand and everything returned” to what it had been. “When people say that judges have become part of the executive power,” the former jurist says, they are deceiving themselves because “in fact there is no division of power in Russia” and consequently “judges are not part of the executive power but instead an element of the power vertical.”

Another Round of Internet Crackdown in Putin’s Russia

Other Russia reports:

Russian lawmakers are developing new measures to combat the spread of internet-slang into daily life. As the Novye Izvestiya newspaper reports, the project is still in its early stages, although ambitions run high.

The hubbub over net-speak—purposeful misspellings and emoticons combining into what Russians call “Olbanian” (a made-up language in itself a misspelling of Albanian)–comes as Russia’s lower house, the State Duma, is preparing draft legislation to regulate all aspects of the Internet. One part of the law intends to control the language used by Russians to communicate online, according to Yelena Zelinskaya, the deputy-chairwoman of the Public Chamber Commission on Preserving Cultural Heritage.

The Kremlin makes Policy by Hallucination

Russian pundit Yevgeny Kiselyov, writing in the Moscow Times:

After British writer H.G. Wells met Vladimir Lenin in the Kremlin in 1920, he described the visit in his book “Russia in the Shadows.” Wells referred to Lenin as “the Kremlin dreamer” after listening to Lenin’s utopian plans for rapidly developing a country in ruins after the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war.

Wells returned to the Soviet Union in 1934 to meet with Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin. Although Wells acknowledged that some of Lenin’s industrial plans had indeed been realized, he understood that they were achieved at a tremendous human cost through Stalin’s brutal tyranny that included the gulag and forced labor. In the end, Wells was convinced that Stalin was no better than Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini and that the West should never align itself with the Soviet Union.

May 9, 2007 — Contents

FRIDAY MAY 9 CONTENTS

(1)  Another Original LR Translation:  Pravda, Laid Bare

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Russia is a Deeply Psychotic Nation

(3)  In Russia, Jail the Mothers and Free the Rapists

(4)  Annals of Russia’s Unfriendly Skies

(5)  We must Embrace Ukraine

Another Original LR Translation: “There’s no Information in Truth”

The “Truth” Today

by Dave Essel

The contents of a newspaper provide a snapshot of the world view it contains, both mirroring and creating the society in which it circulates. Here then are all the headlines from the Russian newspaper Pravda’s website on 5 May 2009 (a random choice – it’s just the day I’m looking). ”Pravda” means “truth” in Russian and its rival Izvestia’s name means “Information.”  Both papers date back to Soviet times and retained their Soviet names when the USSR collapsed.  An old Soviet joke was:  “There’s no information in Truth and no truth in Information.”  

No surprise at what one finds: the mixture of nastiness, tendentiousness, stupidity and ignorance is just plain frightening!

WORLD

Lead story:
TERNOPOL TAKES PRIDE IN ITS UKRAINIAN SS DIVISION
“Ukraine is preparing in its own special way for the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. A plaque in honour of the Galicia SS division is to be erected in Ternopol…

Other stories:
THE WINDING PATHS OF THE INTERNET LEAD TO …JAIL
About how bloggers can be jailed for their writings. Article claims to quote Committee to Protect Journalists on how bloggers can be jailed for their writings, naming a number of countries but NOT Russia.

LOVE OF ‘PIGALLE’ GIRLS LEADS TO BERLUSCONI DIVORCE
No need for comment.

EDITORIAL: Russia is a Deeply Psychotic Country

EDITORIAL

Russia is a Deeply Psychotic Country

In a recent public opinion survey, only43% of Russian respondents said they thought the country was moving in the right direction, down from 59% a year ago.  That’s not surprising, of course, given that the ruble has lost one-third of its value, foreign exchange reserves are down by half the and stock market by three-quarters.

But what is surprising is that even though a clear majority of Russians believe the country is on the wrong path, 76% of them say “prime minister” Vladimir Putin is doing a good job, while 68% say “president” Dmitri Medvedev is doing fine.

There’s only one word for that contradiction, and that word is:  Psychotic.

In Putin’s Russia, they Free the Rapist Murderers and Jail the Mothers

Susanne Scholl, Moscow Bureau Chief for Austrian Public Television, writing in the Moscow Times:

Colonel Yury Budanov is a convicted rapist and murderer. After serving half of his 10-year prison sentence for the rape and murder of an 18-year-old Chechen, Elza Kungayeva, he was released in January on parole for good behavior.

Svetlana Bakhmina worked as a lawyer for former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2004, she was arrested and sentenced in 2006 to 6 1/2 years on embezzlement and tax fraud charges. Like Budanov, she applied for early release from prison in 2008. Her request was refused, as was her earlier plea in 2006 to suspend her sentence until her two small sons reached the age of 14 – a request she was entitled to make under Russian law.

Annals of Russia’s Unfriendly Skies

The Moscow Times reports that Russians are no more eager to be pilots in Russia’s unfriendly skies than they are to be passengers:

With its neat rows of houses surrounded by lush greenery, the state-run Sasovo flight school is a bucolic place, graduating up to 300 pilots a year in Soviet times. Today, students occupy only two out of the six dormitory buildings, and the graduating class this spring will total about 40.

A growing shortage of pilots, one of the industry’s most pressing problems before the economic crisis, has been masked partially by falling passenger numbers. But aviation experts expect it to re=-emerge in full force.  The average age of a Russian pilot is 50, and 900 pilots are forced to quit every year after failing to pass strict medical tests, according to Federal Aviation Agency statistics. The government has launched a program that aims to churn out 1,000 new pilots nationwide every year, but even that measure will not fill the gap overnight. Meanwhile, the fallout of last year’s high jet fuel prices and the collapse of the AiRUnion coalition of airlines are still ricocheting through the industry, exasperating the situation both for pilots and those who hire them.

We must Embrace Ukraine

Alexander Kwasniewski, formerly the president of Poland (1995-2005) calls Europe to task for failing to rally behind Ukraine, in the Wall Street Journal:

It will be 20 years later this month since President George H.W. Bush delivered his historic call for a “Europe whole and free” in Mainz, West Germany. The context in which he spoke was one of optimism and change made possible by Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. Four days later, Poland held its first competitive, multiparty elections in more than half a century. By the end of the year the Berlin Wall lay in ruins and a surge of people power had dismantled one-party rule from the Baltics to the Black Sea. The Soviet Union survived for another two years, but its fate had effectively been sealed.

May 6, 2009 — Contents

WEDNESDAY MAY 6 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Russia is (still) Burning 

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Russians Yearn to Breathe Partly Free

(3)  EDITORIAL:  Here we go Again

(4)  We must Defend Georgia!

(5)  They Serve (themselves) and Protect (criminals)

NOTE: Do not fail to appreciate the signifance of the interplay between our three editorials today. #1 and #3 document the increasingly egregious and painful failure of the Putin administration across a wide range of social policy challenges.  #2 makes clear that the only response the government has to this failure is the crackdown, denying information about it and keepiing the nation in the neo-Soviet darkness while brutally crushing anyone who dares to talk back.

NOTE:  Once again the world chess grand prix has been held on Russia soil and once again a non-Russian has taken the title. In fact, the Russians didn’t even make the finals. Ouch. How the mighty have fallen, Mr. Putin.

EDITORIAL: Russia is (Still) Burning

EDITORIAL

Russia is (Still) Burning

Russia watcher trivia quiz:  When was the last time Russian ruler Vladimir Putin spoke publicly about Russia’s horrifying problem with residential fire fatalities, and what is his proposal for making Russian homes safer from fire?  Bonus points for naming the last family of residential fire victims that Putin visited for comfort.

Last weekend, firey explosions killed eight Russians, seven in Irkutsk and one in St. Petersburg.  That’s only a tiny fraction of the nearly 20,000 fire-related fatalities that Putin’s Russia records each year, about fifty each and every single day of the year.  In the United States, fires claim the lives of only about 2,500 people per year, nearly eight times less than in Russia, a figure which is all the more stunning when you remember that the U.S. population is twice as large as Russia’s.  That means the rate of fire fatality in Russia is more than fifteen times higher per capita than in the United States.  Just one more reason that you take your life in your hands every time you choose to spend a night in Russia.

What does Putin have to say about all this?

EDITORIAL: Russians Yearn to Breathe Partly Free

EDITORIAL

Russians Yearn to Breathe Partly Free

The Statue of Liberty implores the world to send America all citizens who “yearn to breathe free.”  But this may be a bit much to ask where the barbaric denizens of Russia are concerned. Perhaps, all we can ask for is those who wish to breathe partly free — such is the state of the benighted quagmire they call home.

One  of our most-admired readers is known as “Penny” and last week directed our attention to the latest global press freedom survey by the internationally-known human rights institution Freedom House, which is doing yeoman work in plumbing the depths to which neo-Soviet Russia has descended under rule of KGB tyrant Vladimir Putin.

EDITORIAL: Here we Go Again

EDITORIAL

Here we Go Again

Russia’s foreign currency reserves are back in freefall, and Russia’s largest company, Gazprom, is withering like a raisin in the sun.  Welcome to the horror that is government by KGB spy.

We must Defend Georgia!

Defense policy analyst Zbigniew Mazurak, writing on the American Thinker (and quoting Kim Zigfeld!):

Unless European states and America suddenly adopt a hawkish foreign policy and strengthen their militaries, Europe will become a mere province of the Russian empire.

And, suprisingly, the fate of Europe will be decided not in Paris, Berlin, London, or Brussels, but in Georgia, a tiny, seemingly irrelevant country. The Caucasian republic hosts several strategic oil and gas pipelines. These pipes are the only fossil fuel corridors leading from Asia to Europe that are not controlled by the Russian Federation. Whoever controls Europe’s fossil fuel supply rules the European continent.

If the Russians seize those pipelines, their country will be a monopolist in Europe. The Old Continent will then have no choice other than to rely on Russia for the fossil fuel supply. This will mean that Russia will have a de facto veto right over the decisions of European governments. (Russia already has this power with regard to French and German governments; Germany obtains 40% of the natural gas it uses from Russia.)