Putin Condemns Politkovskaya

“This murder has done more damage to Russia — and the current authorities of Russia and Chechnya, which she has been covering lately in her work — than Politkovskaya’s articles.”

— Vladimir Putin, “President” of Russia, commenting for the first time on the assasination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya

“Putin said an outrageous thing today about Anna. What he said today [that Politkovskaya was an enemy of Russia] is so outrageous that it is unworthy of a man, and it is unworthy of the president of Russia.”

— Sergei Sokolov, deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya’s employer, after Putin’s remarks were broadcast

Putin then tried to blame the killing on his political enemies trying to make him look bad. He stated: “We have information, and it is reliable, that many people hiding from Russian justice have long been nurturing the idea of sacrificing somebody in order to create a wave of anti-Russia feeling in the world.” Oddly, though, Putin gave no warning before the killing that he had this “reliable information.” Isn’t that strange?

La Russophobe dares to wonder how much longer Mr. Sokolov has to live.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Now, with Politkovskaya’s Blood in the Water, the Feeding Frenzy Begins

The Washington Post reports on how Russia has become unhinged with bloodthirsty violence in the wake of the cowardly murder of Politkovskaya. Russians imagine themselves brave and heroic, yet they fear a lone woman with a pencil.

Internet postings are calling on Russian nationalists to kill government critics, death lists that underscore the dangers journalists and rights activists face in Russia.

Svetlana Gannushkina, a refugee rights activist, tops a list of 89 people published by a radical nationalist group, the Russian Will, which has urged “patriots” to take up arms and execute her and other friends of “alien” peoples.

“Since there is nothing I can do in this situation, I try not think about it,” the soft-spoken, 64-year-old Gannushkina said.

Slain investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya was on such a list, for her reporting on Chechnya and criticism of the Kremlin. Her slaying Saturday has cast a chill over human rights activists and journalists who criticize government policies and increasingly fear for their safety in a repressive climate.

Since President Vladimir Putin came to power nearly seven years ago, he has moved to silence critics, squeezing the opposition and tightening the screws on media critical of the Kremlin. He came under strong Western condemnation for a new law that severely limits the activities of non-governmental organizations.

Prosecutors have linked Politkovskaya’s slaying to her award-winning reports, fearlessly uncovering human rights abuses by government troops in war-ravaged Chechnya. She had been listed as one of 63 “non-friends of Russia” by the nationalist group National Sovereign Party of Russia.

Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, whose forces were accused of torture, abductions and murder by Politkovskaya, denied any role in her murder Wednesday.

Some colleagues have suggested Politkovskaya could have died at the hands of Russian nationalists at a time when xenophobia is growing and hate crimes take place almost daily. Rights activists complain the government is doing little to combat the alarming trend.

“I am horrified at what happened with Anya,” said Gannushkina, using Politkovskaya’s nickname. “Of course, I understand that considering what happened, we are all under the same threat.”

Gannushkina said she first learned in August of the Web site calling for her to be killed as an “advocate of alien migrants.” Other alleged enemies included journalist and commentator Yevgeniya Albats and veteran rights activist Sergei Kovalyov.

The site, http://www.russianwill.org , could not be accessed Wednesday. Gannushkina said it was shut down this week.

However, information on the targeted activists and journalists, including their phone numbers and addresses, has spread to numerous other nationalist sites and blogs and Gannushkina has received phone threats.

Gannushkina said she asked prosecutors to investigate the group’s activities in August, but prosecutors have failed to launch a probe. A spokesman for the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office declined comment.

Last year, Oksana Chelysheva, an activist and journalist with the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, which advocates for Chechen rights, discovered leaflets stuffed in mailboxes in her apartment building proclaiming her “a whore for the Chechens,” giving her full name and address and accusing her of supporting terrorists.

Chelysheva has kept up her work despite the threats. Her boss, Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, was convicted in February of inciting ethnic hatred and handed a two-year suspended sentence _ a verdict he condemned as part of a state assault on non-governmental organizations. This week, prosecutors asked a court to shut down the group.

Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, condemned the intimidation campaign against Gannushkina and her colleagues. He urged authorities to use the recently passed law on extremism to crack down on radical groups instead of targeting groups promoting ethnic tolerance.

“The climate is starting to resemble a fascist society where there is freedom to make money by friends of the rulers but critics and independent thinking are persecuted,” Rhodes said.

Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said Russian journalists, along with rights activists, face many threats.

“When a journalist is threatened, he is threatened either with courts or with death — either we will kill you or we will throw you in prison,” Panfilov said.

He declined to estimate how many journalists have been threatened, saying most threats are delivered by phone or in person, making them hard to document. But he said more than 40 journalists have been attacked in connection with their work this year alone.

Russia has become one of the deadliest countries for journalists. Forty-three journalists were killed between 1993 and 2005, many in Chechnya, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Gannushkina said she would continue her advocacy work despite the intimidation, rejecting her colleagues’ advice to hire a bodyguard, because she did not want to put anyone in danger.

“If I intend to live here, I intend to live and not hide in a burrow,” she said.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Now, with Politkovskaya’s Blood in the Water, the Feeding Frenzy Begins

The Washington Post reports on how Russia has become unhinged with bloodthirsty violence in the wake of the cowardly murder of Politkovskaya. Russians imagine themselves brave and heroic, yet they fear a lone woman with a pencil.

Internet postings are calling on Russian nationalists to kill government critics, death lists that underscore the dangers journalists and rights activists face in Russia.

Svetlana Gannushkina, a refugee rights activist, tops a list of 89 people published by a radical nationalist group, the Russian Will, which has urged “patriots” to take up arms and execute her and other friends of “alien” peoples.

“Since there is nothing I can do in this situation, I try not think about it,” the soft-spoken, 64-year-old Gannushkina said.

Slain investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya was on such a list, for her reporting on Chechnya and criticism of the Kremlin. Her slaying Saturday has cast a chill over human rights activists and journalists who criticize government policies and increasingly fear for their safety in a repressive climate.

Since President Vladimir Putin came to power nearly seven years ago, he has moved to silence critics, squeezing the opposition and tightening the screws on media critical of the Kremlin. He came under strong Western condemnation for a new law that severely limits the activities of non-governmental organizations.

Prosecutors have linked Politkovskaya’s slaying to her award-winning reports, fearlessly uncovering human rights abuses by government troops in war-ravaged Chechnya. She had been listed as one of 63 “non-friends of Russia” by the nationalist group National Sovereign Party of Russia.

Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, whose forces were accused of torture, abductions and murder by Politkovskaya, denied any role in her murder Wednesday.

Some colleagues have suggested Politkovskaya could have died at the hands of Russian nationalists at a time when xenophobia is growing and hate crimes take place almost daily. Rights activists complain the government is doing little to combat the alarming trend.

“I am horrified at what happened with Anya,” said Gannushkina, using Politkovskaya’s nickname. “Of course, I understand that considering what happened, we are all under the same threat.”

Gannushkina said she first learned in August of the Web site calling for her to be killed as an “advocate of alien migrants.” Other alleged enemies included journalist and commentator Yevgeniya Albats and veteran rights activist Sergei Kovalyov.

The site, http://www.russianwill.org , could not be accessed Wednesday. Gannushkina said it was shut down this week.

However, information on the targeted activists and journalists, including their phone numbers and addresses, has spread to numerous other nationalist sites and blogs and Gannushkina has received phone threats.

Gannushkina said she asked prosecutors to investigate the group’s activities in August, but prosecutors have failed to launch a probe. A spokesman for the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office declined comment.

Last year, Oksana Chelysheva, an activist and journalist with the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, which advocates for Chechen rights, discovered leaflets stuffed in mailboxes in her apartment building proclaiming her “a whore for the Chechens,” giving her full name and address and accusing her of supporting terrorists.

Chelysheva has kept up her work despite the threats. Her boss, Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, was convicted in February of inciting ethnic hatred and handed a two-year suspended sentence _ a verdict he condemned as part of a state assault on non-governmental organizations. This week, prosecutors asked a court to shut down the group.

Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, condemned the intimidation campaign against Gannushkina and her colleagues. He urged authorities to use the recently passed law on extremism to crack down on radical groups instead of targeting groups promoting ethnic tolerance.

“The climate is starting to resemble a fascist society where there is freedom to make money by friends of the rulers but critics and independent thinking are persecuted,” Rhodes said.

Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said Russian journalists, along with rights activists, face many threats.

“When a journalist is threatened, he is threatened either with courts or with death — either we will kill you or we will throw you in prison,” Panfilov said.

He declined to estimate how many journalists have been threatened, saying most threats are delivered by phone or in person, making them hard to document. But he said more than 40 journalists have been attacked in connection with their work this year alone.

Russia has become one of the deadliest countries for journalists. Forty-three journalists were killed between 1993 and 2005, many in Chechnya, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Gannushkina said she would continue her advocacy work despite the intimidation, rejecting her colleagues’ advice to hire a bodyguard, because she did not want to put anyone in danger.

“If I intend to live here, I intend to live and not hide in a burrow,” she said.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Now, with Politkovskaya’s Blood in the Water, the Feeding Frenzy Begins

The Washington Post reports on how Russia has become unhinged with bloodthirsty violence in the wake of the cowardly murder of Politkovskaya. Russians imagine themselves brave and heroic, yet they fear a lone woman with a pencil.

Internet postings are calling on Russian nationalists to kill government critics, death lists that underscore the dangers journalists and rights activists face in Russia.

Svetlana Gannushkina, a refugee rights activist, tops a list of 89 people published by a radical nationalist group, the Russian Will, which has urged “patriots” to take up arms and execute her and other friends of “alien” peoples.

“Since there is nothing I can do in this situation, I try not think about it,” the soft-spoken, 64-year-old Gannushkina said.

Slain investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya was on such a list, for her reporting on Chechnya and criticism of the Kremlin. Her slaying Saturday has cast a chill over human rights activists and journalists who criticize government policies and increasingly fear for their safety in a repressive climate.

Since President Vladimir Putin came to power nearly seven years ago, he has moved to silence critics, squeezing the opposition and tightening the screws on media critical of the Kremlin. He came under strong Western condemnation for a new law that severely limits the activities of non-governmental organizations.

Prosecutors have linked Politkovskaya’s slaying to her award-winning reports, fearlessly uncovering human rights abuses by government troops in war-ravaged Chechnya. She had been listed as one of 63 “non-friends of Russia” by the nationalist group National Sovereign Party of Russia.

Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, whose forces were accused of torture, abductions and murder by Politkovskaya, denied any role in her murder Wednesday.

Some colleagues have suggested Politkovskaya could have died at the hands of Russian nationalists at a time when xenophobia is growing and hate crimes take place almost daily. Rights activists complain the government is doing little to combat the alarming trend.

“I am horrified at what happened with Anya,” said Gannushkina, using Politkovskaya’s nickname. “Of course, I understand that considering what happened, we are all under the same threat.”

Gannushkina said she first learned in August of the Web site calling for her to be killed as an “advocate of alien migrants.” Other alleged enemies included journalist and commentator Yevgeniya Albats and veteran rights activist Sergei Kovalyov.

The site, http://www.russianwill.org , could not be accessed Wednesday. Gannushkina said it was shut down this week.

However, information on the targeted activists and journalists, including their phone numbers and addresses, has spread to numerous other nationalist sites and blogs and Gannushkina has received phone threats.

Gannushkina said she asked prosecutors to investigate the group’s activities in August, but prosecutors have failed to launch a probe. A spokesman for the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office declined comment.

Last year, Oksana Chelysheva, an activist and journalist with the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, which advocates for Chechen rights, discovered leaflets stuffed in mailboxes in her apartment building proclaiming her “a whore for the Chechens,” giving her full name and address and accusing her of supporting terrorists.

Chelysheva has kept up her work despite the threats. Her boss, Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, was convicted in February of inciting ethnic hatred and handed a two-year suspended sentence _ a verdict he condemned as part of a state assault on non-governmental organizations. This week, prosecutors asked a court to shut down the group.

Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, condemned the intimidation campaign against Gannushkina and her colleagues. He urged authorities to use the recently passed law on extremism to crack down on radical groups instead of targeting groups promoting ethnic tolerance.

“The climate is starting to resemble a fascist society where there is freedom to make money by friends of the rulers but critics and independent thinking are persecuted,” Rhodes said.

Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said Russian journalists, along with rights activists, face many threats.

“When a journalist is threatened, he is threatened either with courts or with death — either we will kill you or we will throw you in prison,” Panfilov said.

He declined to estimate how many journalists have been threatened, saying most threats are delivered by phone or in person, making them hard to document. But he said more than 40 journalists have been attacked in connection with their work this year alone.

Russia has become one of the deadliest countries for journalists. Forty-three journalists were killed between 1993 and 2005, many in Chechnya, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Gannushkina said she would continue her advocacy work despite the intimidation, rejecting her colleagues’ advice to hire a bodyguard, because she did not want to put anyone in danger.

“If I intend to live here, I intend to live and not hide in a burrow,” she said.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Now, with Politkovskaya’s Blood in the Water, the Feeding Frenzy Begins

The Washington Post reports on how Russia has become unhinged with bloodthirsty violence in the wake of the cowardly murder of Politkovskaya. Russians imagine themselves brave and heroic, yet they fear a lone woman with a pencil.

Internet postings are calling on Russian nationalists to kill government critics, death lists that underscore the dangers journalists and rights activists face in Russia.

Svetlana Gannushkina, a refugee rights activist, tops a list of 89 people published by a radical nationalist group, the Russian Will, which has urged “patriots” to take up arms and execute her and other friends of “alien” peoples.

“Since there is nothing I can do in this situation, I try not think about it,” the soft-spoken, 64-year-old Gannushkina said.

Slain investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya was on such a list, for her reporting on Chechnya and criticism of the Kremlin. Her slaying Saturday has cast a chill over human rights activists and journalists who criticize government policies and increasingly fear for their safety in a repressive climate.

Since President Vladimir Putin came to power nearly seven years ago, he has moved to silence critics, squeezing the opposition and tightening the screws on media critical of the Kremlin. He came under strong Western condemnation for a new law that severely limits the activities of non-governmental organizations.

Prosecutors have linked Politkovskaya’s slaying to her award-winning reports, fearlessly uncovering human rights abuses by government troops in war-ravaged Chechnya. She had been listed as one of 63 “non-friends of Russia” by the nationalist group National Sovereign Party of Russia.

Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, whose forces were accused of torture, abductions and murder by Politkovskaya, denied any role in her murder Wednesday.

Some colleagues have suggested Politkovskaya could have died at the hands of Russian nationalists at a time when xenophobia is growing and hate crimes take place almost daily. Rights activists complain the government is doing little to combat the alarming trend.

“I am horrified at what happened with Anya,” said Gannushkina, using Politkovskaya’s nickname. “Of course, I understand that considering what happened, we are all under the same threat.”

Gannushkina said she first learned in August of the Web site calling for her to be killed as an “advocate of alien migrants.” Other alleged enemies included journalist and commentator Yevgeniya Albats and veteran rights activist Sergei Kovalyov.

The site, http://www.russianwill.org , could not be accessed Wednesday. Gannushkina said it was shut down this week.

However, information on the targeted activists and journalists, including their phone numbers and addresses, has spread to numerous other nationalist sites and blogs and Gannushkina has received phone threats.

Gannushkina said she asked prosecutors to investigate the group’s activities in August, but prosecutors have failed to launch a probe. A spokesman for the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office declined comment.

Last year, Oksana Chelysheva, an activist and journalist with the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, which advocates for Chechen rights, discovered leaflets stuffed in mailboxes in her apartment building proclaiming her “a whore for the Chechens,” giving her full name and address and accusing her of supporting terrorists.

Chelysheva has kept up her work despite the threats. Her boss, Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, was convicted in February of inciting ethnic hatred and handed a two-year suspended sentence _ a verdict he condemned as part of a state assault on non-governmental organizations. This week, prosecutors asked a court to shut down the group.

Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, condemned the intimidation campaign against Gannushkina and her colleagues. He urged authorities to use the recently passed law on extremism to crack down on radical groups instead of targeting groups promoting ethnic tolerance.

“The climate is starting to resemble a fascist society where there is freedom to make money by friends of the rulers but critics and independent thinking are persecuted,” Rhodes said.

Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said Russian journalists, along with rights activists, face many threats.

“When a journalist is threatened, he is threatened either with courts or with death — either we will kill you or we will throw you in prison,” Panfilov said.

He declined to estimate how many journalists have been threatened, saying most threats are delivered by phone or in person, making them hard to document. But he said more than 40 journalists have been attacked in connection with their work this year alone.

Russia has become one of the deadliest countries for journalists. Forty-three journalists were killed between 1993 and 2005, many in Chechnya, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Gannushkina said she would continue her advocacy work despite the intimidation, rejecting her colleagues’ advice to hire a bodyguard, because she did not want to put anyone in danger.

“If I intend to live here, I intend to live and not hide in a burrow,” she said.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Now, with Politkovskaya’s Blood in the Water, the Feeding Frenzy Begins

The Washington Post reports on how Russia has become unhinged with bloodthirsty violence in the wake of the cowardly murder of Politkovskaya. Russians imagine themselves brave and heroic, yet they fear a lone woman with a pencil.

Internet postings are calling on Russian nationalists to kill government critics, death lists that underscore the dangers journalists and rights activists face in Russia.

Svetlana Gannushkina, a refugee rights activist, tops a list of 89 people published by a radical nationalist group, the Russian Will, which has urged “patriots” to take up arms and execute her and other friends of “alien” peoples.

“Since there is nothing I can do in this situation, I try not think about it,” the soft-spoken, 64-year-old Gannushkina said.

Slain investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya was on such a list, for her reporting on Chechnya and criticism of the Kremlin. Her slaying Saturday has cast a chill over human rights activists and journalists who criticize government policies and increasingly fear for their safety in a repressive climate.

Since President Vladimir Putin came to power nearly seven years ago, he has moved to silence critics, squeezing the opposition and tightening the screws on media critical of the Kremlin. He came under strong Western condemnation for a new law that severely limits the activities of non-governmental organizations.

Prosecutors have linked Politkovskaya’s slaying to her award-winning reports, fearlessly uncovering human rights abuses by government troops in war-ravaged Chechnya. She had been listed as one of 63 “non-friends of Russia” by the nationalist group National Sovereign Party of Russia.

Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, whose forces were accused of torture, abductions and murder by Politkovskaya, denied any role in her murder Wednesday.

Some colleagues have suggested Politkovskaya could have died at the hands of Russian nationalists at a time when xenophobia is growing and hate crimes take place almost daily. Rights activists complain the government is doing little to combat the alarming trend.

“I am horrified at what happened with Anya,” said Gannushkina, using Politkovskaya’s nickname. “Of course, I understand that considering what happened, we are all under the same threat.”

Gannushkina said she first learned in August of the Web site calling for her to be killed as an “advocate of alien migrants.” Other alleged enemies included journalist and commentator Yevgeniya Albats and veteran rights activist Sergei Kovalyov.

The site, http://www.russianwill.org , could not be accessed Wednesday. Gannushkina said it was shut down this week.

However, information on the targeted activists and journalists, including their phone numbers and addresses, has spread to numerous other nationalist sites and blogs and Gannushkina has received phone threats.

Gannushkina said she asked prosecutors to investigate the group’s activities in August, but prosecutors have failed to launch a probe. A spokesman for the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office declined comment.

Last year, Oksana Chelysheva, an activist and journalist with the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, which advocates for Chechen rights, discovered leaflets stuffed in mailboxes in her apartment building proclaiming her “a whore for the Chechens,” giving her full name and address and accusing her of supporting terrorists.

Chelysheva has kept up her work despite the threats. Her boss, Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, was convicted in February of inciting ethnic hatred and handed a two-year suspended sentence _ a verdict he condemned as part of a state assault on non-governmental organizations. This week, prosecutors asked a court to shut down the group.

Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, condemned the intimidation campaign against Gannushkina and her colleagues. He urged authorities to use the recently passed law on extremism to crack down on radical groups instead of targeting groups promoting ethnic tolerance.

“The climate is starting to resemble a fascist society where there is freedom to make money by friends of the rulers but critics and independent thinking are persecuted,” Rhodes said.

Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said Russian journalists, along with rights activists, face many threats.

“When a journalist is threatened, he is threatened either with courts or with death — either we will kill you or we will throw you in prison,” Panfilov said.

He declined to estimate how many journalists have been threatened, saying most threats are delivered by phone or in person, making them hard to document. But he said more than 40 journalists have been attacked in connection with their work this year alone.

Russia has become one of the deadliest countries for journalists. Forty-three journalists were killed between 1993 and 2005, many in Chechnya, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Gannushkina said she would continue her advocacy work despite the intimidation, rejecting her colleagues’ advice to hire a bodyguard, because she did not want to put anyone in danger.

“If I intend to live here, I intend to live and not hide in a burrow,” she said.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Ausgezeichnet! Germany Spits in Putin’s Eye

The Moscow Times reports that the Cold War has spread to Germany, as Russia alienates yet another major nation of the world:

President Vladimir Putin was rebuffed in his desire for a bigger Russian stake in aerospace firm EADS on Wednesday, as he ended a two-day German visit clouded by the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Putin had hoped to further Russian business interests on a trip that took him first to the eastern city of Dresden to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday, and to Munich on Wednesday, but he came at a time of deep suspicions in Europe over Russia’s intentions.

Bavarian state premier Edmund Stoiber said he had talked to Putin about EADS and told him there were limits to foreign investments in sensitive sectors.

“I asked him to understand that in some strategic industries there are limits to taking reciprocal stakes,” Stoiber said. “We must both respect each other’s interests.”

Germany worries that Moscow is trying to use revenues from its vast oil and gas reserves to wield greater global influence.

Stoiber’s comments were a clear warning to Putin — who makes no secret of his wish to invest further in Germany — that he should steer clear of seeking a strategic investment in EADS after a Russian bank bought 5 percent of it.

But Putin hit back in a speech to business leaders in the Bavarian capital.

“We do not understand the nervousness in the press about Russia investing abroad,” he said. “Where does this hysteria come from?” LR: Note that anyone who disagrees with Russia is “hystrical” and should be put in a mental ward. Everybody knows that, just ask Stalin! Russia kicks Europe and America out of the Shtokman project and then it’s “shocked, shocked” that they retaliate. Classic Neo-Soviet lunacy.

“The Russians are coming here, not on tanks and with Kalashnikov assault rifles in their hands; they are coming with money, and they deserve to be welcomed and helped in their work,” Putin said. “It’s not the Red Army that wants to come to Germany,” he said. “It’s just the same capitalists as you.” LR: They just can’t help talking about the army, can they? What’s the subtext? Give us what we want or the army will come?

Moscow has been pushing for a seat on the EADS board and Putin told the SЯddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Wednesday that he favored Russia boosting its stake in the Airbus parent, which has dual headquarters in Munich and Paris.

Putin also pushed for visa-free travel between Russia and other European countries. “Our goal is an exchange without visas,” he said. “After the fall of the Berlin wall, no new walls should be allowed to appear in Europe.”

Putin was meeting business and regional leaders in Munich and noted Bavaria’s strength in the high-tech sector.

“This is an especially important area of cooperation for us because one of the main jobs in the short term is for us to diversify the Russian economy,” Putin told reporters.

Putin brought with him Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref and IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman, as well as leading business figures such as Pyotr Aven, head of Alfa Bank; Oleg Deripaska of Russian Aluminum; and Alexei Mordashov, head of steelmaker Severstal.

A range of corporate deals has been signed during the visit, and both the president and Stoiber stressed the potential for closer cooperation in future.

Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering company, on Wednesday announced an agreement worth up to 450 million euros ($565 million) with Renova to upgrade Russian energy, transport and telecommunications resources.

The agreement covers areas including power generation, power distribution, telecommunications and airport modernization, Munich-based Siemens said in an e-mailed statement.

Putin has made much of Germany’s reliance on Russia for its future energy needs during his visit. Memories here are still fresh of the supply disruptions in January after Gazprom cut deliveries to Ukraine.

Germany is the biggest foreign end-user of Russian gas, importing 40 billion cubic meters per year. Imports will rise substantially when the Nord Stream pipeline is completed in 2010 to carry Russian gas directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Gazprom is building the pipeline with German utility E.On and chemicals group BASF. Dutch Gasunie is to take a 9 percent stake, and Putin said Germany could become a gas distribution hub for Europe.

The Bavaria talks come on the heels of Putin’s announcement in Dresden on Tuesday that Gazprom would use natural gas from the Shtokman field under the Barents Sea to more than double the amount of gas it sends to Germany each year, adding some 55 billion cubic meters per year.

Also on Tuesday, German Deputy Foreign Minister Gernot Erler said his government had drawn up plans to help German and Russian companies swap stakes in an attempt to foster political stability in Russia and mutual profit.

The German Foreign Ministry “is considering a program of intertwined companies,” Erler said. “We hope to develop a win-win situation based on mutual dependency.”

Questions about Saturday’s killing of Politkovskaya did not abate during the trip.

Stoiber said he had discussed the issues of freedom of speech and expression in light of the killing, and that Putin had assured him Russia would strengthen those freedoms.

Columnist Masha Gessen adds more detail (the column notes, without explanation, that this is Masha’s final column for the Moscow Times; LR would like to know why):

So Vladimir Putin, formerly a KGB agent in East Germany, and Angela Merkel, a former citizen of that former country, met in Dresden the other day. She forced him, finally, to utter the name of slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya in public. That goes to show how far each country, as personified by its leader, has come since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. And it goes to show some other things as well.

First, it shows that Putin will deign to respond to Politkovskaya’s murder only when international protocol — and an international leader — demands it. His one other comment on Politkovskaya came during a telephone conversation with U.S. President George Bush, who had expressed particular concern about the murder of Politkovskaya, who was born in the United States and had U.S. citizenship. Other than that, Putin was apparently too busy to mention the murder publicly or even to send condolences. The day after the murder, Putin congratulated figure skater Alexander Gorshkov on his 60th birthday. He wished the actor Leonid Kuravlev a happy 70th. But he did not find the time to express condolences to the family of Anna Politkovskaya.

Second, the statement Putin did make shed an unexpected amount of light on his view of Politkovskaya and the press in general. One might even deduce something of the way he views human life from his statement. “She had minimal influence on political life in Russia,” said the president. “This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications.”

There we have it. The measure of a journalist’s influence is the amount of harm he or she does to the state. Journalists, in other words, are saboteurs, enemies of the state — if effective — and pests and thorns in the president’s side if they are less widely read or heard. A number of measures Putin has instituted in this country since coming to power shifted Politkovskaya from the status of enemy of the state to that of pest. Ever since the Kremlin took over all national television channels, Politkovskaya disappeared from the airwaves — though she had been a frequent, and extraordinarily articulate, talk show guest during the early months of the second war in Chechnya. Ever since the retail sale of newspapers was effectively banned two years ago — an ostensibly counter-terrorist measure taken after Beslan was to forbid newspaper vending within 25 meters of a public transport stop — Novaya Gazeta’s press run dwindled to the point where its influence was really limited to the highly motivated few.

Unfortunately for the Kremlin — or, rather, for Putin’s apparent idea of what’s good for the state — he could do almost nothing to limit her international audience. Politkovskaya placed op-ed pieces in the major U.S. papers. Her books came out in English, French, German and the Scandinavian languages. She received a number of international journalism awards. She was in extremely high demand abroad as a public speaker. Outside Russia, she was as close to a celebrity as political journalists come. Did that make her a bit more than a pest? Probably. It may have made her an enemy.

But I have to agree with something Putin said. Politkovskaya’s murder has done, and continues to do, major damage to the Russian government, and perhaps even more specifically, to the Russian president. This is because the murder has exposed him, with unprecedented clarity, as a callous, cruel and cynical man. It has also exposed him as small-minded and afraid of responsibility. The head of state in a country where a journalist is killed for doing her job would properly feel responsible and concerned even if he were convinced that the murder was committed by some crazed thug. In this country, where government-appointed officials and law enforcement officers are among the most obvious suspects, the president apparently cares only about pointing the blame away from himself. This state is very badly damaged indeed.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Ausgezeichnet! Germany Spits in Putin’s Eye

The Moscow Times reports that the Cold War has spread to Germany, as Russia alienates yet another major nation of the world:

President Vladimir Putin was rebuffed in his desire for a bigger Russian stake in aerospace firm EADS on Wednesday, as he ended a two-day German visit clouded by the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Putin had hoped to further Russian business interests on a trip that took him first to the eastern city of Dresden to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday, and to Munich on Wednesday, but he came at a time of deep suspicions in Europe over Russia’s intentions.

Bavarian state premier Edmund Stoiber said he had talked to Putin about EADS and told him there were limits to foreign investments in sensitive sectors.

“I asked him to understand that in some strategic industries there are limits to taking reciprocal stakes,” Stoiber said. “We must both respect each other’s interests.”

Germany worries that Moscow is trying to use revenues from its vast oil and gas reserves to wield greater global influence.

Stoiber’s comments were a clear warning to Putin — who makes no secret of his wish to invest further in Germany — that he should steer clear of seeking a strategic investment in EADS after a Russian bank bought 5 percent of it.

But Putin hit back in a speech to business leaders in the Bavarian capital.

“We do not understand the nervousness in the press about Russia investing abroad,” he said. “Where does this hysteria come from?” LR: Note that anyone who disagrees with Russia is “hystrical” and should be put in a mental ward. Everybody knows that, just ask Stalin! Russia kicks Europe and America out of the Shtokman project and then it’s “shocked, shocked” that they retaliate. Classic Neo-Soviet lunacy.

“The Russians are coming here, not on tanks and with Kalashnikov assault rifles in their hands; they are coming with money, and they deserve to be welcomed and helped in their work,” Putin said. “It’s not the Red Army that wants to come to Germany,” he said. “It’s just the same capitalists as you.” LR: They just can’t help talking about the army, can they? What’s the subtext? Give us what we want or the army will come?

Moscow has been pushing for a seat on the EADS board and Putin told the SЯddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Wednesday that he favored Russia boosting its stake in the Airbus parent, which has dual headquarters in Munich and Paris.

Putin also pushed for visa-free travel between Russia and other European countries. “Our goal is an exchange without visas,” he said. “After the fall of the Berlin wall, no new walls should be allowed to appear in Europe.”

Putin was meeting business and regional leaders in Munich and noted Bavaria’s strength in the high-tech sector.

“This is an especially important area of cooperation for us because one of the main jobs in the short term is for us to diversify the Russian economy,” Putin told reporters.

Putin brought with him Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref and IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman, as well as leading business figures such as Pyotr Aven, head of Alfa Bank; Oleg Deripaska of Russian Aluminum; and Alexei Mordashov, head of steelmaker Severstal.

A range of corporate deals has been signed during the visit, and both the president and Stoiber stressed the potential for closer cooperation in future.

Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering company, on Wednesday announced an agreement worth up to 450 million euros ($565 million) with Renova to upgrade Russian energy, transport and telecommunications resources.

The agreement covers areas including power generation, power distribution, telecommunications and airport modernization, Munich-based Siemens said in an e-mailed statement.

Putin has made much of Germany’s reliance on Russia for its future energy needs during his visit. Memories here are still fresh of the supply disruptions in January after Gazprom cut deliveries to Ukraine.

Germany is the biggest foreign end-user of Russian gas, importing 40 billion cubic meters per year. Imports will rise substantially when the Nord Stream pipeline is completed in 2010 to carry Russian gas directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Gazprom is building the pipeline with German utility E.On and chemicals group BASF. Dutch Gasunie is to take a 9 percent stake, and Putin said Germany could become a gas distribution hub for Europe.

The Bavaria talks come on the heels of Putin’s announcement in Dresden on Tuesday that Gazprom would use natural gas from the Shtokman field under the Barents Sea to more than double the amount of gas it sends to Germany each year, adding some 55 billion cubic meters per year.

Also on Tuesday, German Deputy Foreign Minister Gernot Erler said his government had drawn up plans to help German and Russian companies swap stakes in an attempt to foster political stability in Russia and mutual profit.

The German Foreign Ministry “is considering a program of intertwined companies,” Erler said. “We hope to develop a win-win situation based on mutual dependency.”

Questions about Saturday’s killing of Politkovskaya did not abate during the trip.

Stoiber said he had discussed the issues of freedom of speech and expression in light of the killing, and that Putin had assured him Russia would strengthen those freedoms.

Columnist Masha Gessen adds more detail (the column notes, without explanation, that this is Masha’s final column for the Moscow Times; LR would like to know why):

So Vladimir Putin, formerly a KGB agent in East Germany, and Angela Merkel, a former citizen of that former country, met in Dresden the other day. She forced him, finally, to utter the name of slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya in public. That goes to show how far each country, as personified by its leader, has come since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. And it goes to show some other things as well.

First, it shows that Putin will deign to respond to Politkovskaya’s murder only when international protocol — and an international leader — demands it. His one other comment on Politkovskaya came during a telephone conversation with U.S. President George Bush, who had expressed particular concern about the murder of Politkovskaya, who was born in the United States and had U.S. citizenship. Other than that, Putin was apparently too busy to mention the murder publicly or even to send condolences. The day after the murder, Putin congratulated figure skater Alexander Gorshkov on his 60th birthday. He wished the actor Leonid Kuravlev a happy 70th. But he did not find the time to express condolences to the family of Anna Politkovskaya.

Second, the statement Putin did make shed an unexpected amount of light on his view of Politkovskaya and the press in general. One might even deduce something of the way he views human life from his statement. “She had minimal influence on political life in Russia,” said the president. “This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications.”

There we have it. The measure of a journalist’s influence is the amount of harm he or she does to the state. Journalists, in other words, are saboteurs, enemies of the state — if effective — and pests and thorns in the president’s side if they are less widely read or heard. A number of measures Putin has instituted in this country since coming to power shifted Politkovskaya from the status of enemy of the state to that of pest. Ever since the Kremlin took over all national television channels, Politkovskaya disappeared from the airwaves — though she had been a frequent, and extraordinarily articulate, talk show guest during the early months of the second war in Chechnya. Ever since the retail sale of newspapers was effectively banned two years ago — an ostensibly counter-terrorist measure taken after Beslan was to forbid newspaper vending within 25 meters of a public transport stop — Novaya Gazeta’s press run dwindled to the point where its influence was really limited to the highly motivated few.

Unfortunately for the Kremlin — or, rather, for Putin’s apparent idea of what’s good for the state — he could do almost nothing to limit her international audience. Politkovskaya placed op-ed pieces in the major U.S. papers. Her books came out in English, French, German and the Scandinavian languages. She received a number of international journalism awards. She was in extremely high demand abroad as a public speaker. Outside Russia, she was as close to a celebrity as political journalists come. Did that make her a bit more than a pest? Probably. It may have made her an enemy.

But I have to agree with something Putin said. Politkovskaya’s murder has done, and continues to do, major damage to the Russian government, and perhaps even more specifically, to the Russian president. This is because the murder has exposed him, with unprecedented clarity, as a callous, cruel and cynical man. It has also exposed him as small-minded and afraid of responsibility. The head of state in a country where a journalist is killed for doing her job would properly feel responsible and concerned even if he were convinced that the murder was committed by some crazed thug. In this country, where government-appointed officials and law enforcement officers are among the most obvious suspects, the president apparently cares only about pointing the blame away from himself. This state is very badly damaged indeed.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Ausgezeichnet! Germany Spits in Putin’s Eye

The Moscow Times reports that the Cold War has spread to Germany, as Russia alienates yet another major nation of the world:

President Vladimir Putin was rebuffed in his desire for a bigger Russian stake in aerospace firm EADS on Wednesday, as he ended a two-day German visit clouded by the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Putin had hoped to further Russian business interests on a trip that took him first to the eastern city of Dresden to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday, and to Munich on Wednesday, but he came at a time of deep suspicions in Europe over Russia’s intentions.

Bavarian state premier Edmund Stoiber said he had talked to Putin about EADS and told him there were limits to foreign investments in sensitive sectors.

“I asked him to understand that in some strategic industries there are limits to taking reciprocal stakes,” Stoiber said. “We must both respect each other’s interests.”

Germany worries that Moscow is trying to use revenues from its vast oil and gas reserves to wield greater global influence.

Stoiber’s comments were a clear warning to Putin — who makes no secret of his wish to invest further in Germany — that he should steer clear of seeking a strategic investment in EADS after a Russian bank bought 5 percent of it.

But Putin hit back in a speech to business leaders in the Bavarian capital.

“We do not understand the nervousness in the press about Russia investing abroad,” he said. “Where does this hysteria come from?” LR: Note that anyone who disagrees with Russia is “hystrical” and should be put in a mental ward. Everybody knows that, just ask Stalin! Russia kicks Europe and America out of the Shtokman project and then it’s “shocked, shocked” that they retaliate. Classic Neo-Soviet lunacy.

“The Russians are coming here, not on tanks and with Kalashnikov assault rifles in their hands; they are coming with money, and they deserve to be welcomed and helped in their work,” Putin said. “It’s not the Red Army that wants to come to Germany,” he said. “It’s just the same capitalists as you.” LR: They just can’t help talking about the army, can they? What’s the subtext? Give us what we want or the army will come?

Moscow has been pushing for a seat on the EADS board and Putin told the SЯddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Wednesday that he favored Russia boosting its stake in the Airbus parent, which has dual headquarters in Munich and Paris.

Putin also pushed for visa-free travel between Russia and other European countries. “Our goal is an exchange without visas,” he said. “After the fall of the Berlin wall, no new walls should be allowed to appear in Europe.”

Putin was meeting business and regional leaders in Munich and noted Bavaria’s strength in the high-tech sector.

“This is an especially important area of cooperation for us because one of the main jobs in the short term is for us to diversify the Russian economy,” Putin told reporters.

Putin brought with him Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref and IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman, as well as leading business figures such as Pyotr Aven, head of Alfa Bank; Oleg Deripaska of Russian Aluminum; and Alexei Mordashov, head of steelmaker Severstal.

A range of corporate deals has been signed during the visit, and both the president and Stoiber stressed the potential for closer cooperation in future.

Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering company, on Wednesday announced an agreement worth up to 450 million euros ($565 million) with Renova to upgrade Russian energy, transport and telecommunications resources.

The agreement covers areas including power generation, power distribution, telecommunications and airport modernization, Munich-based Siemens said in an e-mailed statement.

Putin has made much of Germany’s reliance on Russia for its future energy needs during his visit. Memories here are still fresh of the supply disruptions in January after Gazprom cut deliveries to Ukraine.

Germany is the biggest foreign end-user of Russian gas, importing 40 billion cubic meters per year. Imports will rise substantially when the Nord Stream pipeline is completed in 2010 to carry Russian gas directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Gazprom is building the pipeline with German utility E.On and chemicals group BASF. Dutch Gasunie is to take a 9 percent stake, and Putin said Germany could become a gas distribution hub for Europe.

The Bavaria talks come on the heels of Putin’s announcement in Dresden on Tuesday that Gazprom would use natural gas from the Shtokman field under the Barents Sea to more than double the amount of gas it sends to Germany each year, adding some 55 billion cubic meters per year.

Also on Tuesday, German Deputy Foreign Minister Gernot Erler said his government had drawn up plans to help German and Russian companies swap stakes in an attempt to foster political stability in Russia and mutual profit.

The German Foreign Ministry “is considering a program of intertwined companies,” Erler said. “We hope to develop a win-win situation based on mutual dependency.”

Questions about Saturday’s killing of Politkovskaya did not abate during the trip.

Stoiber said he had discussed the issues of freedom of speech and expression in light of the killing, and that Putin had assured him Russia would strengthen those freedoms.

Columnist Masha Gessen adds more detail (the column notes, without explanation, that this is Masha’s final column for the Moscow Times; LR would like to know why):

So Vladimir Putin, formerly a KGB agent in East Germany, and Angela Merkel, a former citizen of that former country, met in Dresden the other day. She forced him, finally, to utter the name of slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya in public. That goes to show how far each country, as personified by its leader, has come since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. And it goes to show some other things as well.

First, it shows that Putin will deign to respond to Politkovskaya’s murder only when international protocol — and an international leader — demands it. His one other comment on Politkovskaya came during a telephone conversation with U.S. President George Bush, who had expressed particular concern about the murder of Politkovskaya, who was born in the United States and had U.S. citizenship. Other than that, Putin was apparently too busy to mention the murder publicly or even to send condolences. The day after the murder, Putin congratulated figure skater Alexander Gorshkov on his 60th birthday. He wished the actor Leonid Kuravlev a happy 70th. But he did not find the time to express condolences to the family of Anna Politkovskaya.

Second, the statement Putin did make shed an unexpected amount of light on his view of Politkovskaya and the press in general. One might even deduce something of the way he views human life from his statement. “She had minimal influence on political life in Russia,” said the president. “This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications.”

There we have it. The measure of a journalist’s influence is the amount of harm he or she does to the state. Journalists, in other words, are saboteurs, enemies of the state — if effective — and pests and thorns in the president’s side if they are less widely read or heard. A number of measures Putin has instituted in this country since coming to power shifted Politkovskaya from the status of enemy of the state to that of pest. Ever since the Kremlin took over all national television channels, Politkovskaya disappeared from the airwaves — though she had been a frequent, and extraordinarily articulate, talk show guest during the early months of the second war in Chechnya. Ever since the retail sale of newspapers was effectively banned two years ago — an ostensibly counter-terrorist measure taken after Beslan was to forbid newspaper vending within 25 meters of a public transport stop — Novaya Gazeta’s press run dwindled to the point where its influence was really limited to the highly motivated few.

Unfortunately for the Kremlin — or, rather, for Putin’s apparent idea of what’s good for the state — he could do almost nothing to limit her international audience. Politkovskaya placed op-ed pieces in the major U.S. papers. Her books came out in English, French, German and the Scandinavian languages. She received a number of international journalism awards. She was in extremely high demand abroad as a public speaker. Outside Russia, she was as close to a celebrity as political journalists come. Did that make her a bit more than a pest? Probably. It may have made her an enemy.

But I have to agree with something Putin said. Politkovskaya’s murder has done, and continues to do, major damage to the Russian government, and perhaps even more specifically, to the Russian president. This is because the murder has exposed him, with unprecedented clarity, as a callous, cruel and cynical man. It has also exposed him as small-minded and afraid of responsibility. The head of state in a country where a journalist is killed for doing her job would properly feel responsible and concerned even if he were convinced that the murder was committed by some crazed thug. In this country, where government-appointed officials and law enforcement officers are among the most obvious suspects, the president apparently cares only about pointing the blame away from himself. This state is very badly damaged indeed.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Ausgezeichnet! Germany Spits in Putin’s Eye

The Moscow Times reports that the Cold War has spread to Germany, as Russia alienates yet another major nation of the world:

President Vladimir Putin was rebuffed in his desire for a bigger Russian stake in aerospace firm EADS on Wednesday, as he ended a two-day German visit clouded by the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Putin had hoped to further Russian business interests on a trip that took him first to the eastern city of Dresden to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday, and to Munich on Wednesday, but he came at a time of deep suspicions in Europe over Russia’s intentions.

Bavarian state premier Edmund Stoiber said he had talked to Putin about EADS and told him there were limits to foreign investments in sensitive sectors.

“I asked him to understand that in some strategic industries there are limits to taking reciprocal stakes,” Stoiber said. “We must both respect each other’s interests.”

Germany worries that Moscow is trying to use revenues from its vast oil and gas reserves to wield greater global influence.

Stoiber’s comments were a clear warning to Putin — who makes no secret of his wish to invest further in Germany — that he should steer clear of seeking a strategic investment in EADS after a Russian bank bought 5 percent of it.

But Putin hit back in a speech to business leaders in the Bavarian capital.

“We do not understand the nervousness in the press about Russia investing abroad,” he said. “Where does this hysteria come from?” LR: Note that anyone who disagrees with Russia is “hystrical” and should be put in a mental ward. Everybody knows that, just ask Stalin! Russia kicks Europe and America out of the Shtokman project and then it’s “shocked, shocked” that they retaliate. Classic Neo-Soviet lunacy.

“The Russians are coming here, not on tanks and with Kalashnikov assault rifles in their hands; they are coming with money, and they deserve to be welcomed and helped in their work,” Putin said. “It’s not the Red Army that wants to come to Germany,” he said. “It’s just the same capitalists as you.” LR: They just can’t help talking about the army, can they? What’s the subtext? Give us what we want or the army will come?

Moscow has been pushing for a seat on the EADS board and Putin told the SЯddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Wednesday that he favored Russia boosting its stake in the Airbus parent, which has dual headquarters in Munich and Paris.

Putin also pushed for visa-free travel between Russia and other European countries. “Our goal is an exchange without visas,” he said. “After the fall of the Berlin wall, no new walls should be allowed to appear in Europe.”

Putin was meeting business and regional leaders in Munich and noted Bavaria’s strength in the high-tech sector.

“This is an especially important area of cooperation for us because one of the main jobs in the short term is for us to diversify the Russian economy,” Putin told reporters.

Putin brought with him Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref and IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman, as well as leading business figures such as Pyotr Aven, head of Alfa Bank; Oleg Deripaska of Russian Aluminum; and Alexei Mordashov, head of steelmaker Severstal.

A range of corporate deals has been signed during the visit, and both the president and Stoiber stressed the potential for closer cooperation in future.

Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering company, on Wednesday announced an agreement worth up to 450 million euros ($565 million) with Renova to upgrade Russian energy, transport and telecommunications resources.

The agreement covers areas including power generation, power distribution, telecommunications and airport modernization, Munich-based Siemens said in an e-mailed statement.

Putin has made much of Germany’s reliance on Russia for its future energy needs during his visit. Memories here are still fresh of the supply disruptions in January after Gazprom cut deliveries to Ukraine.

Germany is the biggest foreign end-user of Russian gas, importing 40 billion cubic meters per year. Imports will rise substantially when the Nord Stream pipeline is completed in 2010 to carry Russian gas directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Gazprom is building the pipeline with German utility E.On and chemicals group BASF. Dutch Gasunie is to take a 9 percent stake, and Putin said Germany could become a gas distribution hub for Europe.

The Bavaria talks come on the heels of Putin’s announcement in Dresden on Tuesday that Gazprom would use natural gas from the Shtokman field under the Barents Sea to more than double the amount of gas it sends to Germany each year, adding some 55 billion cubic meters per year.

Also on Tuesday, German Deputy Foreign Minister Gernot Erler said his government had drawn up plans to help German and Russian companies swap stakes in an attempt to foster political stability in Russia and mutual profit.

The German Foreign Ministry “is considering a program of intertwined companies,” Erler said. “We hope to develop a win-win situation based on mutual dependency.”

Questions about Saturday’s killing of Politkovskaya did not abate during the trip.

Stoiber said he had discussed the issues of freedom of speech and expression in light of the killing, and that Putin had assured him Russia would strengthen those freedoms.

Columnist Masha Gessen adds more detail (the column notes, without explanation, that this is Masha’s final column for the Moscow Times; LR would like to know why):

So Vladimir Putin, formerly a KGB agent in East Germany, and Angela Merkel, a former citizen of that former country, met in Dresden the other day. She forced him, finally, to utter the name of slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya in public. That goes to show how far each country, as personified by its leader, has come since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. And it goes to show some other things as well.

First, it shows that Putin will deign to respond to Politkovskaya’s murder only when international protocol — and an international leader — demands it. His one other comment on Politkovskaya came during a telephone conversation with U.S. President George Bush, who had expressed particular concern about the murder of Politkovskaya, who was born in the United States and had U.S. citizenship. Other than that, Putin was apparently too busy to mention the murder publicly or even to send condolences. The day after the murder, Putin congratulated figure skater Alexander Gorshkov on his 60th birthday. He wished the actor Leonid Kuravlev a happy 70th. But he did not find the time to express condolences to the family of Anna Politkovskaya.

Second, the statement Putin did make shed an unexpected amount of light on his view of Politkovskaya and the press in general. One might even deduce something of the way he views human life from his statement. “She had minimal influence on political life in Russia,” said the president. “This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications.”

There we have it. The measure of a journalist’s influence is the amount of harm he or she does to the state. Journalists, in other words, are saboteurs, enemies of the state — if effective — and pests and thorns in the president’s side if they are less widely read or heard. A number of measures Putin has instituted in this country since coming to power shifted Politkovskaya from the status of enemy of the state to that of pest. Ever since the Kremlin took over all national television channels, Politkovskaya disappeared from the airwaves — though she had been a frequent, and extraordinarily articulate, talk show guest during the early months of the second war in Chechnya. Ever since the retail sale of newspapers was effectively banned two years ago — an ostensibly counter-terrorist measure taken after Beslan was to forbid newspaper vending within 25 meters of a public transport stop — Novaya Gazeta’s press run dwindled to the point where its influence was really limited to the highly motivated few.

Unfortunately for the Kremlin — or, rather, for Putin’s apparent idea of what’s good for the state — he could do almost nothing to limit her international audience. Politkovskaya placed op-ed pieces in the major U.S. papers. Her books came out in English, French, German and the Scandinavian languages. She received a number of international journalism awards. She was in extremely high demand abroad as a public speaker. Outside Russia, she was as close to a celebrity as political journalists come. Did that make her a bit more than a pest? Probably. It may have made her an enemy.

But I have to agree with something Putin said. Politkovskaya’s murder has done, and continues to do, major damage to the Russian government, and perhaps even more specifically, to the Russian president. This is because the murder has exposed him, with unprecedented clarity, as a callous, cruel and cynical man. It has also exposed him as small-minded and afraid of responsibility. The head of state in a country where a journalist is killed for doing her job would properly feel responsible and concerned even if he were convinced that the murder was committed by some crazed thug. In this country, where government-appointed officials and law enforcement officers are among the most obvious suspects, the president apparently cares only about pointing the blame away from himself. This state is very badly damaged indeed.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Ausgezeichnet! Germany Spits in Putin’s Eye

The Moscow Times reports that the Cold War has spread to Germany, as Russia alienates yet another major nation of the world:

President Vladimir Putin was rebuffed in his desire for a bigger Russian stake in aerospace firm EADS on Wednesday, as he ended a two-day German visit clouded by the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Putin had hoped to further Russian business interests on a trip that took him first to the eastern city of Dresden to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday, and to Munich on Wednesday, but he came at a time of deep suspicions in Europe over Russia’s intentions.

Bavarian state premier Edmund Stoiber said he had talked to Putin about EADS and told him there were limits to foreign investments in sensitive sectors.

“I asked him to understand that in some strategic industries there are limits to taking reciprocal stakes,” Stoiber said. “We must both respect each other’s interests.”

Germany worries that Moscow is trying to use revenues from its vast oil and gas reserves to wield greater global influence.

Stoiber’s comments were a clear warning to Putin — who makes no secret of his wish to invest further in Germany — that he should steer clear of seeking a strategic investment in EADS after a Russian bank bought 5 percent of it.

But Putin hit back in a speech to business leaders in the Bavarian capital.

“We do not understand the nervousness in the press about Russia investing abroad,” he said. “Where does this hysteria come from?” LR: Note that anyone who disagrees with Russia is “hystrical” and should be put in a mental ward. Everybody knows that, just ask Stalin! Russia kicks Europe and America out of the Shtokman project and then it’s “shocked, shocked” that they retaliate. Classic Neo-Soviet lunacy.

“The Russians are coming here, not on tanks and with Kalashnikov assault rifles in their hands; they are coming with money, and they deserve to be welcomed and helped in their work,” Putin said. “It’s not the Red Army that wants to come to Germany,” he said. “It’s just the same capitalists as you.” LR: They just can’t help talking about the army, can they? What’s the subtext? Give us what we want or the army will come?

Moscow has been pushing for a seat on the EADS board and Putin told the SЯddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Wednesday that he favored Russia boosting its stake in the Airbus parent, which has dual headquarters in Munich and Paris.

Putin also pushed for visa-free travel between Russia and other European countries. “Our goal is an exchange without visas,” he said. “After the fall of the Berlin wall, no new walls should be allowed to appear in Europe.”

Putin was meeting business and regional leaders in Munich and noted Bavaria’s strength in the high-tech sector.

“This is an especially important area of cooperation for us because one of the main jobs in the short term is for us to diversify the Russian economy,” Putin told reporters.

Putin brought with him Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref and IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman, as well as leading business figures such as Pyotr Aven, head of Alfa Bank; Oleg Deripaska of Russian Aluminum; and Alexei Mordashov, head of steelmaker Severstal.

A range of corporate deals has been signed during the visit, and both the president and Stoiber stressed the potential for closer cooperation in future.

Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering company, on Wednesday announced an agreement worth up to 450 million euros ($565 million) with Renova to upgrade Russian energy, transport and telecommunications resources.

The agreement covers areas including power generation, power distribution, telecommunications and airport modernization, Munich-based Siemens said in an e-mailed statement.

Putin has made much of Germany’s reliance on Russia for its future energy needs during his visit. Memories here are still fresh of the supply disruptions in January after Gazprom cut deliveries to Ukraine.

Germany is the biggest foreign end-user of Russian gas, importing 40 billion cubic meters per year. Imports will rise substantially when the Nord Stream pipeline is completed in 2010 to carry Russian gas directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Gazprom is building the pipeline with German utility E.On and chemicals group BASF. Dutch Gasunie is to take a 9 percent stake, and Putin said Germany could become a gas distribution hub for Europe.

The Bavaria talks come on the heels of Putin’s announcement in Dresden on Tuesday that Gazprom would use natural gas from the Shtokman field under the Barents Sea to more than double the amount of gas it sends to Germany each year, adding some 55 billion cubic meters per year.

Also on Tuesday, German Deputy Foreign Minister Gernot Erler said his government had drawn up plans to help German and Russian companies swap stakes in an attempt to foster political stability in Russia and mutual profit.

The German Foreign Ministry “is considering a program of intertwined companies,” Erler said. “We hope to develop a win-win situation based on mutual dependency.”

Questions about Saturday’s killing of Politkovskaya did not abate during the trip.

Stoiber said he had discussed the issues of freedom of speech and expression in light of the killing, and that Putin had assured him Russia would strengthen those freedoms.

Columnist Masha Gessen adds more detail (the column notes, without explanation, that this is Masha’s final column for the Moscow Times; LR would like to know why):

So Vladimir Putin, formerly a KGB agent in East Germany, and Angela Merkel, a former citizen of that former country, met in Dresden the other day. She forced him, finally, to utter the name of slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya in public. That goes to show how far each country, as personified by its leader, has come since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. And it goes to show some other things as well.

First, it shows that Putin will deign to respond to Politkovskaya’s murder only when international protocol — and an international leader — demands it. His one other comment on Politkovskaya came during a telephone conversation with U.S. President George Bush, who had expressed particular concern about the murder of Politkovskaya, who was born in the United States and had U.S. citizenship. Other than that, Putin was apparently too busy to mention the murder publicly or even to send condolences. The day after the murder, Putin congratulated figure skater Alexander Gorshkov on his 60th birthday. He wished the actor Leonid Kuravlev a happy 70th. But he did not find the time to express condolences to the family of Anna Politkovskaya.

Second, the statement Putin did make shed an unexpected amount of light on his view of Politkovskaya and the press in general. One might even deduce something of the way he views human life from his statement. “She had minimal influence on political life in Russia,” said the president. “This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications.”

There we have it. The measure of a journalist’s influence is the amount of harm he or she does to the state. Journalists, in other words, are saboteurs, enemies of the state — if effective — and pests and thorns in the president’s side if they are less widely read or heard. A number of measures Putin has instituted in this country since coming to power shifted Politkovskaya from the status of enemy of the state to that of pest. Ever since the Kremlin took over all national television channels, Politkovskaya disappeared from the airwaves — though she had been a frequent, and extraordinarily articulate, talk show guest during the early months of the second war in Chechnya. Ever since the retail sale of newspapers was effectively banned two years ago — an ostensibly counter-terrorist measure taken after Beslan was to forbid newspaper vending within 25 meters of a public transport stop — Novaya Gazeta’s press run dwindled to the point where its influence was really limited to the highly motivated few.

Unfortunately for the Kremlin — or, rather, for Putin’s apparent idea of what’s good for the state — he could do almost nothing to limit her international audience. Politkovskaya placed op-ed pieces in the major U.S. papers. Her books came out in English, French, German and the Scandinavian languages. She received a number of international journalism awards. She was in extremely high demand abroad as a public speaker. Outside Russia, she was as close to a celebrity as political journalists come. Did that make her a bit more than a pest? Probably. It may have made her an enemy.

But I have to agree with something Putin said. Politkovskaya’s murder has done, and continues to do, major damage to the Russian government, and perhaps even more specifically, to the Russian president. This is because the murder has exposed him, with unprecedented clarity, as a callous, cruel and cynical man. It has also exposed him as small-minded and afraid of responsibility. The head of state in a country where a journalist is killed for doing her job would properly feel responsible and concerned even if he were convinced that the murder was committed by some crazed thug. In this country, where government-appointed officials and law enforcement officers are among the most obvious suspects, the president apparently cares only about pointing the blame away from himself. This state is very badly damaged indeed.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Dishonesty and Delusion in Russia’s Neo-Soviet Regime

The Moscow Times contains two excellent exposé pieces on the increasingly bizarre, detached-from-reality quality that characterizes the government of Neo-Soviet Russia. First Georgy Bovt, editor of Profil magazine, and then the editors of the paper themselves, document the classically Soviet belief that the goverment can erect a country based on illusion and lies. It’s really quite breathtaking how quickly this ideology has returned to full flower in Russia, so soon after it brought the nation to its knees.

Here’s Bovt on the Georgia crisis:

Russia is in the grip of what you might call “Special Operation Georgia.” It is not called this officially, although local authorities in one Siberian region did come up with this title, apparently undisturbed by the echoes of ethnic cleansing.

The operation is being conducted nationwide under purely legal pretexts. The Federal Migration Service, for example, provided a legal explanation for the ban on entry visas for Georgians, saying it had suddenly uncovered “numerous instances of fake invitations used by Georgians to enter Russia.”

Just as suddenly, Russian Railways discovered that there were “no economic benefits from passenger service to Georgia.” Postal services and money transfers to Georgia were banned, according to the agencies in question, because the money was being transferred mainly by Georgians living illegally in Russia.

The Transport Ministry said land, sea and other links with Georgia had been cut because Russia “has serious questions” in all these areas, “particularly about safety.”

IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman said “there have been numerous instances on the Georgian side of breaches of bilateral and multilateral agreements.” He added that he had “many questions about printed matter and parcels arriving from Georgia.”

In Moscow, police seized the Georgian Embassy’s guesthouse, when it was suddenly discovered that “over many years the house was being occupied illegally, that the property rights for the building were not registered and that it was not the property of Georgia or being rented by the country.”

In the space of one day, all casinos in Moscow with “Georgian traces” — that is, Georgian capital — were closed. But not, the authorities said, because of their Georgian ownership. Instead, it was because of “numerous infringements” with regard to registration, licenses and unpaid taxes had been uncovered.

Even artist Zurab Tsereteli’s academy was searched. The tax service came to investigate the publisher of works by Boris Akunin (who is also Georgian). Previously, imports of Georgian wine had been banned because, the authorities said, it was of bad quality. Ditto for Borjomi mineral water.

No one in Russia believed these explanations for one minute, and they quickly became the subject of cynical jokes and stories. Everyone knows that the Georgians are being “rubbed out” — a term that continues to gain popularity in Russian politics — because they are Georgians. But they are not being targeted because of their ethnic background. They are being targeted as revenge against the regime of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

It seems to me that it would be much more honest to pass a law saying that Russia is at war — a cold one to start with — with Georgia, and then everything and everyone Georgian could be banned and subject to internment or deportation. But the current campaign looks more like the campaign against Yukos and its former CEO Mikhail Khodorokovsky. He was also “rubbed out,” not because he harbored inconvenient political plans and feuded with influential Kremlin insiders, of course. The explanation was that he didn’t pay his taxes. At one point, a rabbit-breeding firm under Yukos’ control was even found in order to accuse Khodorkovsky of ill-treating the bunnies.

The humane treatment of animals was used as a weapon by Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of the Natural Resources Ministry’s environmental inspectorate, in a dispute surrounding the Sakhalin-2 project. Instead of rabbits, this time it was gray whales and the Amur salmon, which are allegedly being poisoned by Western oil companies. If the companies agreed to split their share with Gazprom, it’s unlikely Mitvol would continue to worry about the whales.

In the current non-war with Georgia, the authorities are using laws that are the essence and content of contractual rights and the market economy as a whole, thereby discrediting them in the eyes of society and undermining any remnants of faith in their legality. People are cynically being shown that the law means nothing and that it can be used arbitrarily, depending on how the person applying them likes the person against whom they are being applied. Society is being made to understand that doing business legally here is impossible because any business can be targeted, infringements found, and the owner subjected to repression 24 hours a day. All, of course, in accordance with the law.”

This kind of application of the law is useful for street toughs. But when a state gets used to behaving in the same way, it becomes ripe for degradation and collapse.

And now the editorial on the Politkovskaya killing:

In his first public comments on the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, President Vladimir Putin played down the importance of the investigative journalist.

“She had minimal influence on political life in Russia,” Putin told reporters on Tuesday following a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Dresden, Germany. “This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications.”

Putin had a point. Despite Politkovskaya’s tireless exposes of brutalities committed by federal and local authorities in Chechnya and her efforts to help victims of these abuses through nongovernmental organizations, her influence on Russia’s policies in the North Caucasus was limited.

But the question is: Is it normal that her investigative reports had no impact on the decision-making process in Russia? If this is normal, then whose fault is it that the mass media, which in Western countries play an instrumental role in providing public oversight of the authorities, are increasingly toothless and lack impact, even when a reporter has the courage to expose a problem?

Putin’s decision to speak about Politkovskaya’s killing first during a private telephone conversation with U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday and later at the news conference with Merkel suggests that he believes it is of concern to Western democracies and of little importance to the Russian public, which gets most of its news anyway from state-controlled television channels.

Despite Putin’s condemnation of the killing and call for the perpetrators to be caught, the tone of his comments was chilling. He also suggested that unnamed fugitives from Russian justice had plotted the murder in an attempt “to create a wave of anti-Russian sentiment in Russia.”

His remarks suggest that the bottom line for the Kremlin is that Politkovskaya was of marginal importance and that it views her slaying as a threat to its power from exiled conspirators.

More than anything, Putin’s response might be an example of the paranoia that can be generated in the minds of leaders who through their own policies of control have little or no independent sources of information apart from their own security services.

Even if many Russians seem ambivalent toward basic democratic values such as free speech, and if Putin thinks little of his role as a guarantor of such liberties, as outlined in the Constitution, it should still be in the Kremlin’s interest to ensure there is independent media in this country. Robust and independent media are a vital source of information that a leader needs and should use when making crucial decisions.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Dishonesty and Delusion in Russia’s Neo-Soviet Regime

The Moscow Times contains two excellent exposé pieces on the increasingly bizarre, detached-from-reality quality that characterizes the government of Neo-Soviet Russia. First Georgy Bovt, editor of Profil magazine, and then the editors of the paper themselves, document the classically Soviet belief that the goverment can erect a country based on illusion and lies. It’s really quite breathtaking how quickly this ideology has returned to full flower in Russia, so soon after it brought the nation to its knees.

Here’s Bovt on the Georgia crisis:

Russia is in the grip of what you might call “Special Operation Georgia.” It is not called this officially, although local authorities in one Siberian region did come up with this title, apparently undisturbed by the echoes of ethnic cleansing.

The operation is being conducted nationwide under purely legal pretexts. The Federal Migration Service, for example, provided a legal explanation for the ban on entry visas for Georgians, saying it had suddenly uncovered “numerous instances of fake invitations used by Georgians to enter Russia.”

Just as suddenly, Russian Railways discovered that there were “no economic benefits from passenger service to Georgia.” Postal services and money transfers to Georgia were banned, according to the agencies in question, because the money was being transferred mainly by Georgians living illegally in Russia.

The Transport Ministry said land, sea and other links with Georgia had been cut because Russia “has serious questions” in all these areas, “particularly about safety.”

IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman said “there have been numerous instances on the Georgian side of breaches of bilateral and multilateral agreements.” He added that he had “many questions about printed matter and parcels arriving from Georgia.”

In Moscow, police seized the Georgian Embassy’s guesthouse, when it was suddenly discovered that “over many years the house was being occupied illegally, that the property rights for the building were not registered and that it was not the property of Georgia or being rented by the country.”

In the space of one day, all casinos in Moscow with “Georgian traces” — that is, Georgian capital — were closed. But not, the authorities said, because of their Georgian ownership. Instead, it was because of “numerous infringements” with regard to registration, licenses and unpaid taxes had been uncovered.

Even artist Zurab Tsereteli’s academy was searched. The tax service came to investigate the publisher of works by Boris Akunin (who is also Georgian). Previously, imports of Georgian wine had been banned because, the authorities said, it was of bad quality. Ditto for Borjomi mineral water.

No one in Russia believed these explanations for one minute, and they quickly became the subject of cynical jokes and stories. Everyone knows that the Georgians are being “rubbed out” — a term that continues to gain popularity in Russian politics — because they are Georgians. But they are not being targeted because of their ethnic background. They are being targeted as revenge against the regime of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

It seems to me that it would be much more honest to pass a law saying that Russia is at war — a cold one to start with — with Georgia, and then everything and everyone Georgian could be banned and subject to internment or deportation. But the current campaign looks more like the campaign against Yukos and its former CEO Mikhail Khodorokovsky. He was also “rubbed out,” not because he harbored inconvenient political plans and feuded with influential Kremlin insiders, of course. The explanation was that he didn’t pay his taxes. At one point, a rabbit-breeding firm under Yukos’ control was even found in order to accuse Khodorkovsky of ill-treating the bunnies.

The humane treatment of animals was used as a weapon by Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of the Natural Resources Ministry’s environmental inspectorate, in a dispute surrounding the Sakhalin-2 project. Instead of rabbits, this time it was gray whales and the Amur salmon, which are allegedly being poisoned by Western oil companies. If the companies agreed to split their share with Gazprom, it’s unlikely Mitvol would continue to worry about the whales.

In the current non-war with Georgia, the authorities are using laws that are the essence and content of contractual rights and the market economy as a whole, thereby discrediting them in the eyes of society and undermining any remnants of faith in their legality. People are cynically being shown that the law means nothing and that it can be used arbitrarily, depending on how the person applying them likes the person against whom they are being applied. Society is being made to understand that doing business legally here is impossible because any business can be targeted, infringements found, and the owner subjected to repression 24 hours a day. All, of course, in accordance with the law.”

This kind of application of the law is useful for street toughs. But when a state gets used to behaving in the same way, it becomes ripe for degradation and collapse.

And now the editorial on the Politkovskaya killing:

In his first public comments on the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, President Vladimir Putin played down the importance of the investigative journalist.

“She had minimal influence on political life in Russia,” Putin told reporters on Tuesday following a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Dresden, Germany. “This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications.”

Putin had a point. Despite Politkovskaya’s tireless exposes of brutalities committed by federal and local authorities in Chechnya and her efforts to help victims of these abuses through nongovernmental organizations, her influence on Russia’s policies in the North Caucasus was limited.

But the question is: Is it normal that her investigative reports had no impact on the decision-making process in Russia? If this is normal, then whose fault is it that the mass media, which in Western countries play an instrumental role in providing public oversight of the authorities, are increasingly toothless and lack impact, even when a reporter has the courage to expose a problem?

Putin’s decision to speak about Politkovskaya’s killing first during a private telephone conversation with U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday and later at the news conference with Merkel suggests that he believes it is of concern to Western democracies and of little importance to the Russian public, which gets most of its news anyway from state-controlled television channels.

Despite Putin’s condemnation of the killing and call for the perpetrators to be caught, the tone of his comments was chilling. He also suggested that unnamed fugitives from Russian justice had plotted the murder in an attempt “to create a wave of anti-Russian sentiment in Russia.”

His remarks suggest that the bottom line for the Kremlin is that Politkovskaya was of marginal importance and that it views her slaying as a threat to its power from exiled conspirators.

More than anything, Putin’s response might be an example of the paranoia that can be generated in the minds of leaders who through their own policies of control have little or no independent sources of information apart from their own security services.

Even if many Russians seem ambivalent toward basic democratic values such as free speech, and if Putin thinks little of his role as a guarantor of such liberties, as outlined in the Constitution, it should still be in the Kremlin’s interest to ensure there is independent media in this country. Robust and independent media are a vital source of information that a leader needs and should use when making crucial decisions.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Dishonesty and Delusion in Russia’s Neo-Soviet Regime

The Moscow Times contains two excellent exposé pieces on the increasingly bizarre, detached-from-reality quality that characterizes the government of Neo-Soviet Russia. First Georgy Bovt, editor of Profil magazine, and then the editors of the paper themselves, document the classically Soviet belief that the goverment can erect a country based on illusion and lies. It’s really quite breathtaking how quickly this ideology has returned to full flower in Russia, so soon after it brought the nation to its knees.

Here’s Bovt on the Georgia crisis:

Russia is in the grip of what you might call “Special Operation Georgia.” It is not called this officially, although local authorities in one Siberian region did come up with this title, apparently undisturbed by the echoes of ethnic cleansing.

The operation is being conducted nationwide under purely legal pretexts. The Federal Migration Service, for example, provided a legal explanation for the ban on entry visas for Georgians, saying it had suddenly uncovered “numerous instances of fake invitations used by Georgians to enter Russia.”

Just as suddenly, Russian Railways discovered that there were “no economic benefits from passenger service to Georgia.” Postal services and money transfers to Georgia were banned, according to the agencies in question, because the money was being transferred mainly by Georgians living illegally in Russia.

The Transport Ministry said land, sea and other links with Georgia had been cut because Russia “has serious questions” in all these areas, “particularly about safety.”

IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman said “there have been numerous instances on the Georgian side of breaches of bilateral and multilateral agreements.” He added that he had “many questions about printed matter and parcels arriving from Georgia.”

In Moscow, police seized the Georgian Embassy’s guesthouse, when it was suddenly discovered that “over many years the house was being occupied illegally, that the property rights for the building were not registered and that it was not the property of Georgia or being rented by the country.”

In the space of one day, all casinos in Moscow with “Georgian traces” — that is, Georgian capital — were closed. But not, the authorities said, because of their Georgian ownership. Instead, it was because of “numerous infringements” with regard to registration, licenses and unpaid taxes had been uncovered.

Even artist Zurab Tsereteli’s academy was searched. The tax service came to investigate the publisher of works by Boris Akunin (who is also Georgian). Previously, imports of Georgian wine had been banned because, the authorities said, it was of bad quality. Ditto for Borjomi mineral water.

No one in Russia believed these explanations for one minute, and they quickly became the subject of cynical jokes and stories. Everyone knows that the Georgians are being “rubbed out” — a term that continues to gain popularity in Russian politics — because they are Georgians. But they are not being targeted because of their ethnic background. They are being targeted as revenge against the regime of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

It seems to me that it would be much more honest to pass a law saying that Russia is at war — a cold one to start with — with Georgia, and then everything and everyone Georgian could be banned and subject to internment or deportation. But the current campaign looks more like the campaign against Yukos and its former CEO Mikhail Khodorokovsky. He was also “rubbed out,” not because he harbored inconvenient political plans and feuded with influential Kremlin insiders, of course. The explanation was that he didn’t pay his taxes. At one point, a rabbit-breeding firm under Yukos’ control was even found in order to accuse Khodorkovsky of ill-treating the bunnies.

The humane treatment of animals was used as a weapon by Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of the Natural Resources Ministry’s environmental inspectorate, in a dispute surrounding the Sakhalin-2 project. Instead of rabbits, this time it was gray whales and the Amur salmon, which are allegedly being poisoned by Western oil companies. If the companies agreed to split their share with Gazprom, it’s unlikely Mitvol would continue to worry about the whales.

In the current non-war with Georgia, the authorities are using laws that are the essence and content of contractual rights and the market economy as a whole, thereby discrediting them in the eyes of society and undermining any remnants of faith in their legality. People are cynically being shown that the law means nothing and that it can be used arbitrarily, depending on how the person applying them likes the person against whom they are being applied. Society is being made to understand that doing business legally here is impossible because any business can be targeted, infringements found, and the owner subjected to repression 24 hours a day. All, of course, in accordance with the law.”

This kind of application of the law is useful for street toughs. But when a state gets used to behaving in the same way, it becomes ripe for degradation and collapse.

And now the editorial on the Politkovskaya killing:

In his first public comments on the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, President Vladimir Putin played down the importance of the investigative journalist.

“She had minimal influence on political life in Russia,” Putin told reporters on Tuesday following a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Dresden, Germany. “This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications.”

Putin had a point. Despite Politkovskaya’s tireless exposes of brutalities committed by federal and local authorities in Chechnya and her efforts to help victims of these abuses through nongovernmental organizations, her influence on Russia’s policies in the North Caucasus was limited.

But the question is: Is it normal that her investigative reports had no impact on the decision-making process in Russia? If this is normal, then whose fault is it that the mass media, which in Western countries play an instrumental role in providing public oversight of the authorities, are increasingly toothless and lack impact, even when a reporter has the courage to expose a problem?

Putin’s decision to speak about Politkovskaya’s killing first during a private telephone conversation with U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday and later at the news conference with Merkel suggests that he believes it is of concern to Western democracies and of little importance to the Russian public, which gets most of its news anyway from state-controlled television channels.

Despite Putin’s condemnation of the killing and call for the perpetrators to be caught, the tone of his comments was chilling. He also suggested that unnamed fugitives from Russian justice had plotted the murder in an attempt “to create a wave of anti-Russian sentiment in Russia.”

His remarks suggest that the bottom line for the Kremlin is that Politkovskaya was of marginal importance and that it views her slaying as a threat to its power from exiled conspirators.

More than anything, Putin’s response might be an example of the paranoia that can be generated in the minds of leaders who through their own policies of control have little or no independent sources of information apart from their own security services.

Even if many Russians seem ambivalent toward basic democratic values such as free speech, and if Putin thinks little of his role as a guarantor of such liberties, as outlined in the Constitution, it should still be in the Kremlin’s interest to ensure there is independent media in this country. Robust and independent media are a vital source of information that a leader needs and should use when making crucial decisions.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Dishonesty and Delusion in Russia’s Neo-Soviet Regime

The Moscow Times contains two excellent exposé pieces on the increasingly bizarre, detached-from-reality quality that characterizes the government of Neo-Soviet Russia. First Georgy Bovt, editor of Profil magazine, and then the editors of the paper themselves, document the classically Soviet belief that the goverment can erect a country based on illusion and lies. It’s really quite breathtaking how quickly this ideology has returned to full flower in Russia, so soon after it brought the nation to its knees.

Here’s Bovt on the Georgia crisis:

Russia is in the grip of what you might call “Special Operation Georgia.” It is not called this officially, although local authorities in one Siberian region did come up with this title, apparently undisturbed by the echoes of ethnic cleansing.

The operation is being conducted nationwide under purely legal pretexts. The Federal Migration Service, for example, provided a legal explanation for the ban on entry visas for Georgians, saying it had suddenly uncovered “numerous instances of fake invitations used by Georgians to enter Russia.”

Just as suddenly, Russian Railways discovered that there were “no economic benefits from passenger service to Georgia.” Postal services and money transfers to Georgia were banned, according to the agencies in question, because the money was being transferred mainly by Georgians living illegally in Russia.

The Transport Ministry said land, sea and other links with Georgia had been cut because Russia “has serious questions” in all these areas, “particularly about safety.”

IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman said “there have been numerous instances on the Georgian side of breaches of bilateral and multilateral agreements.” He added that he had “many questions about printed matter and parcels arriving from Georgia.”

In Moscow, police seized the Georgian Embassy’s guesthouse, when it was suddenly discovered that “over many years the house was being occupied illegally, that the property rights for the building were not registered and that it was not the property of Georgia or being rented by the country.”

In the space of one day, all casinos in Moscow with “Georgian traces” — that is, Georgian capital — were closed. But not, the authorities said, because of their Georgian ownership. Instead, it was because of “numerous infringements” with regard to registration, licenses and unpaid taxes had been uncovered.

Even artist Zurab Tsereteli’s academy was searched. The tax service came to investigate the publisher of works by Boris Akunin (who is also Georgian). Previously, imports of Georgian wine had been banned because, the authorities said, it was of bad quality. Ditto for Borjomi mineral water.

No one in Russia believed these explanations for one minute, and they quickly became the subject of cynical jokes and stories. Everyone knows that the Georgians are being “rubbed out” — a term that continues to gain popularity in Russian politics — because they are Georgians. But they are not being targeted because of their ethnic background. They are being targeted as revenge against the regime of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

It seems to me that it would be much more honest to pass a law saying that Russia is at war — a cold one to start with — with Georgia, and then everything and everyone Georgian could be banned and subject to internment or deportation. But the current campaign looks more like the campaign against Yukos and its former CEO Mikhail Khodorokovsky. He was also “rubbed out,” not because he harbored inconvenient political plans and feuded with influential Kremlin insiders, of course. The explanation was that he didn’t pay his taxes. At one point, a rabbit-breeding firm under Yukos’ control was even found in order to accuse Khodorkovsky of ill-treating the bunnies.

The humane treatment of animals was used as a weapon by Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of the Natural Resources Ministry’s environmental inspectorate, in a dispute surrounding the Sakhalin-2 project. Instead of rabbits, this time it was gray whales and the Amur salmon, which are allegedly being poisoned by Western oil companies. If the companies agreed to split their share with Gazprom, it’s unlikely Mitvol would continue to worry about the whales.

In the current non-war with Georgia, the authorities are using laws that are the essence and content of contractual rights and the market economy as a whole, thereby discrediting them in the eyes of society and undermining any remnants of faith in their legality. People are cynically being shown that the law means nothing and that it can be used arbitrarily, depending on how the person applying them likes the person against whom they are being applied. Society is being made to understand that doing business legally here is impossible because any business can be targeted, infringements found, and the owner subjected to repression 24 hours a day. All, of course, in accordance with the law.”

This kind of application of the law is useful for street toughs. But when a state gets used to behaving in the same way, it becomes ripe for degradation and collapse.

And now the editorial on the Politkovskaya killing:

In his first public comments on the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, President Vladimir Putin played down the importance of the investigative journalist.

“She had minimal influence on political life in Russia,” Putin told reporters on Tuesday following a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Dresden, Germany. “This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications.”

Putin had a point. Despite Politkovskaya’s tireless exposes of brutalities committed by federal and local authorities in Chechnya and her efforts to help victims of these abuses through nongovernmental organizations, her influence on Russia’s policies in the North Caucasus was limited.

But the question is: Is it normal that her investigative reports had no impact on the decision-making process in Russia? If this is normal, then whose fault is it that the mass media, which in Western countries play an instrumental role in providing public oversight of the authorities, are increasingly toothless and lack impact, even when a reporter has the courage to expose a problem?

Putin’s decision to speak about Politkovskaya’s killing first during a private telephone conversation with U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday and later at the news conference with Merkel suggests that he believes it is of concern to Western democracies and of little importance to the Russian public, which gets most of its news anyway from state-controlled television channels.

Despite Putin’s condemnation of the killing and call for the perpetrators to be caught, the tone of his comments was chilling. He also suggested that unnamed fugitives from Russian justice had plotted the murder in an attempt “to create a wave of anti-Russian sentiment in Russia.”

His remarks suggest that the bottom line for the Kremlin is that Politkovskaya was of marginal importance and that it views her slaying as a threat to its power from exiled conspirators.

More than anything, Putin’s response might be an example of the paranoia that can be generated in the minds of leaders who through their own policies of control have little or no independent sources of information apart from their own security services.

Even if many Russians seem ambivalent toward basic democratic values such as free speech, and if Putin thinks little of his role as a guarantor of such liberties, as outlined in the Constitution, it should still be in the Kremlin’s interest to ensure there is independent media in this country. Robust and independent media are a vital source of information that a leader needs and should use when making crucial decisions.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Dishonesty and Delusion in Russia’s Neo-Soviet Regime

The Moscow Times contains two excellent exposé pieces on the increasingly bizarre, detached-from-reality quality that characterizes the government of Neo-Soviet Russia. First Georgy Bovt, editor of Profil magazine, and then the editors of the paper themselves, document the classically Soviet belief that the goverment can erect a country based on illusion and lies. It’s really quite breathtaking how quickly this ideology has returned to full flower in Russia, so soon after it brought the nation to its knees.

Here’s Bovt on the Georgia crisis:

Russia is in the grip of what you might call “Special Operation Georgia.” It is not called this officially, although local authorities in one Siberian region did come up with this title, apparently undisturbed by the echoes of ethnic cleansing.

The operation is being conducted nationwide under purely legal pretexts. The Federal Migration Service, for example, provided a legal explanation for the ban on entry visas for Georgians, saying it had suddenly uncovered “numerous instances of fake invitations used by Georgians to enter Russia.”

Just as suddenly, Russian Railways discovered that there were “no economic benefits from passenger service to Georgia.” Postal services and money transfers to Georgia were banned, according to the agencies in question, because the money was being transferred mainly by Georgians living illegally in Russia.

The Transport Ministry said land, sea and other links with Georgia had been cut because Russia “has serious questions” in all these areas, “particularly about safety.”

IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman said “there have been numerous instances on the Georgian side of breaches of bilateral and multilateral agreements.” He added that he had “many questions about printed matter and parcels arriving from Georgia.”

In Moscow, police seized the Georgian Embassy’s guesthouse, when it was suddenly discovered that “over many years the house was being occupied illegally, that the property rights for the building were not registered and that it was not the property of Georgia or being rented by the country.”

In the space of one day, all casinos in Moscow with “Georgian traces” — that is, Georgian capital — were closed. But not, the authorities said, because of their Georgian ownership. Instead, it was because of “numerous infringements” with regard to registration, licenses and unpaid taxes had been uncovered.

Even artist Zurab Tsereteli’s academy was searched. The tax service came to investigate the publisher of works by Boris Akunin (who is also Georgian). Previously, imports of Georgian wine had been banned because, the authorities said, it was of bad quality. Ditto for Borjomi mineral water.

No one in Russia believed these explanations for one minute, and they quickly became the subject of cynical jokes and stories. Everyone knows that the Georgians are being “rubbed out” — a term that continues to gain popularity in Russian politics — because they are Georgians. But they are not being targeted because of their ethnic background. They are being targeted as revenge against the regime of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

It seems to me that it would be much more honest to pass a law saying that Russia is at war — a cold one to start with — with Georgia, and then everything and everyone Georgian could be banned and subject to internment or deportation. But the current campaign looks more like the campaign against Yukos and its former CEO Mikhail Khodorokovsky. He was also “rubbed out,” not because he harbored inconvenient political plans and feuded with influential Kremlin insiders, of course. The explanation was that he didn’t pay his taxes. At one point, a rabbit-breeding firm under Yukos’ control was even found in order to accuse Khodorkovsky of ill-treating the bunnies.

The humane treatment of animals was used as a weapon by Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of the Natural Resources Ministry’s environmental inspectorate, in a dispute surrounding the Sakhalin-2 project. Instead of rabbits, this time it was gray whales and the Amur salmon, which are allegedly being poisoned by Western oil companies. If the companies agreed to split their share with Gazprom, it’s unlikely Mitvol would continue to worry about the whales.

In the current non-war with Georgia, the authorities are using laws that are the essence and content of contractual rights and the market economy as a whole, thereby discrediting them in the eyes of society and undermining any remnants of faith in their legality. People are cynically being shown that the law means nothing and that it can be used arbitrarily, depending on how the person applying them likes the person against whom they are being applied. Society is being made to understand that doing business legally here is impossible because any business can be targeted, infringements found, and the owner subjected to repression 24 hours a day. All, of course, in accordance with the law.”

This kind of application of the law is useful for street toughs. But when a state gets used to behaving in the same way, it becomes ripe for degradation and collapse.

And now the editorial on the Politkovskaya killing:

In his first public comments on the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, President Vladimir Putin played down the importance of the investigative journalist.

“She had minimal influence on political life in Russia,” Putin told reporters on Tuesday following a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Dresden, Germany. “This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications.”

Putin had a point. Despite Politkovskaya’s tireless exposes of brutalities committed by federal and local authorities in Chechnya and her efforts to help victims of these abuses through nongovernmental organizations, her influence on Russia’s policies in the North Caucasus was limited.

But the question is: Is it normal that her investigative reports had no impact on the decision-making process in Russia? If this is normal, then whose fault is it that the mass media, which in Western countries play an instrumental role in providing public oversight of the authorities, are increasingly toothless and lack impact, even when a reporter has the courage to expose a problem?

Putin’s decision to speak about Politkovskaya’s killing first during a private telephone conversation with U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday and later at the news conference with Merkel suggests that he believes it is of concern to Western democracies and of little importance to the Russian public, which gets most of its news anyway from state-controlled television channels.

Despite Putin’s condemnation of the killing and call for the perpetrators to be caught, the tone of his comments was chilling. He also suggested that unnamed fugitives from Russian justice had plotted the murder in an attempt “to create a wave of anti-Russian sentiment in Russia.”

His remarks suggest that the bottom line for the Kremlin is that Politkovskaya was of marginal importance and that it views her slaying as a threat to its power from exiled conspirators.

More than anything, Putin’s response might be an example of the paranoia that can be generated in the minds of leaders who through their own policies of control have little or no independent sources of information apart from their own security services.

Even if many Russians seem ambivalent toward basic democratic values such as free speech, and if Putin thinks little of his role as a guarantor of such liberties, as outlined in the Constitution, it should still be in the Kremlin’s interest to ensure there is independent media in this country. Robust and independent media are a vital source of information that a leader needs and should use when making crucial decisions.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !