Marina Litvinenko, widow of Alexander Litvinenko, Speaks
Alexander Litvinenko speaking on Anna Politkovskaya
Posted in sunday photos, YouTube
Time Magazine yearly announces its “Person of the Year” so La Russophobe thought it might be a good idea to initiate this tradition for Russia. Who do you think was the most important force in Russian current events in the year 2006? Remember, this is not an award for doing good things, Hitler got Time’s award one year, it’s about who influenced Russia the most, for good or ill, during the past year. Feel free to use the comments section to write in a candidate if your favorite is not represented, but also try choosing among those listed.
| Who is Russia’s “Person of the Year”? | |
| Vladimir PutinAnna PolitkovskayaAlexander LitvinenkoGeorge BushGarry KasparovBoris BerezovskySlavic RacistsThe Oil IndustryMikhail KhodorkovskyRoman AbramovichThe Chechen RebelsAlexander LukashenkoMikhail SaakashviliVictor YushchenkoThe CommunistsThe Staff of Novaya GazetaThe Western MediaThe Russia MediaThe Officers of the KGB/FSBThe Russian People | |
| Free polls from Pollhost.com | |
Time Magazine yearly announces its “Person of the Year” so La Russophobe thought it might be a good idea to initiate this tradition for Russia. Who do you think was the most important force in Russian current events in the year 2006? Remember, this is not an award for doing good things, Hitler got Time’s award one year, it’s about who influenced Russia the most, for good or ill, during the past year. Feel free to use the comments section to write in a candidate if your favorite is not represented, but also try choosing among those listed.
| Who is Russia’s “Person of the Year”? | |
| Vladimir PutinAnna PolitkovskayaAlexander LitvinenkoGeorge BushGarry KasparovBoris BerezovskySlavic RacistsThe Oil IndustryMikhail KhodorkovskyRoman AbramovichThe Chechen RebelsAlexander LukashenkoMikhail SaakashviliVictor YushchenkoThe CommunistsThe Staff of Novaya GazetaThe Western MediaThe Russia MediaThe Officers of the KGB/FSBThe Russian People | |
| Free polls from Pollhost.com | |
Time Magazine yearly announces its “Person of the Year” so La Russophobe thought it might be a good idea to initiate this tradition for Russia. Who do you think was the most important force in Russian current events in the year 2006? Remember, this is not an award for doing good things, Hitler got Time’s award one year, it’s about who influenced Russia the most, for good or ill, during the past year. Feel free to use the comments section to write in a candidate if your favorite is not represented, but also try choosing among those listed.
| Who is Russia’s “Person of the Year”? | |
| Vladimir PutinAnna PolitkovskayaAlexander LitvinenkoGeorge BushGarry KasparovBoris BerezovskySlavic RacistsThe Oil IndustryMikhail KhodorkovskyRoman AbramovichThe Chechen RebelsAlexander LukashenkoMikhail SaakashviliVictor YushchenkoThe CommunistsThe Staff of Novaya GazetaThe Western MediaThe Russia MediaThe Officers of the KGB/FSBThe Russian People | |
| Free polls from Pollhost.com | |
Time Magazine yearly announces its “Person of the Year” so La Russophobe thought it might be a good idea to initiate this tradition for Russia. Who do you think was the most important force in Russian current events in the year 2006? Remember, this is not an award for doing good things, Hitler got Time’s award one year, it’s about who influenced Russia the most, for good or ill, during the past year. Feel free to use the comments section to write in a candidate if your favorite is not represented, but also try choosing among those listed.
| Who is Russia’s “Person of the Year”? | |
| Vladimir PutinAnna PolitkovskayaAlexander LitvinenkoGeorge BushGarry KasparovBoris BerezovskySlavic RacistsThe Oil IndustryMikhail KhodorkovskyRoman AbramovichThe Chechen RebelsAlexander LukashenkoMikhail SaakashviliVictor YushchenkoThe CommunistsThe Staff of Novaya GazetaThe Western MediaThe Russia MediaThe Officers of the KGB/FSBThe Russian People | |
| Free polls from Pollhost.com | |
Time Magazine yearly announces its “Person of the Year” so La Russophobe thought it might be a good idea to initiate this tradition for Russia. Who do you think was the most important force in Russian current events in the year 2006? Remember, this is not an award for doing good things, Hitler got Time’s award one year, it’s about who influenced Russia the most, for good or ill, during the past year. Feel free to use the comments section to write in a candidate if your favorite is not represented, but also try choosing among those listed.
First the Kremlin stole the assets of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (it is now being reportd that it isn’t done persecuting him and will bring new trumped-up charges against him next week), then Royal Dutch Shell, and now it is moving on to British Petroleum. First Politkovskaya, then Litvinenko, then Gaidar. Who’s next? The Financial Times reports on the BP assault:
TNK-BP, the Anglo-Russian oil joint venture, is bracing itself for a full investigation within weeks into its licence agreement for a giant Siberian gasfield as the Kremlin tightens its grip on the country’s energy resources. Russia has used environmental audits and regulatory threats to restore state dominance over oil and gas supplies. This week saw Gazprom take a controlling stake in Royal Dutch Shell’s Sakhalin-2 project after months of pressure. People familiar with the situation said Gazprom’s negotiations with TNK-BP were likely to follow a similar pattern to Shell’s prolonged battle with state officials and the Russian gas monopoly. TNK-BP has already offered Gazprom majority control over the Kovykta gasfield, but has insisted that Gazprom should pay for its stake with cash or assets. Russian authorities have already stepped up pressure on TNK-BP, accusing it of breaking a licence agreement on production levels. The prospect of losing the licence for Kovykta is likely to soften TNK-BP’s negotiating position. Gazprom and TNK-BP have been talking about the joint development of the project for years but have not reached an agreement. Although TNK-BP has a licence to develop the field, expected to supply gas to Asian countries, it cannot do so without Gazprom agreeing to build an export pipeline for the field. Gazprom, which has a mono-poly over the pipeline network and gas exports, has been stalling negotiations for months. It says it has other priorities. The authorities have decided to investigate the Kovykta licence because of TNK-BP’s alleged failure to meet its conditions. Under the licensing agreement, TNK-BP was obliged to produce 9bn cubic metres of gas by the end of this year. TNK-BP has said it cannot produce anything near this amount of gas because it has nowhere to sell it. “We could not burn this gas,” TNK-BP said. The talks between Gazprom and TNK-BP have intensified in the past few months and it is understood TNK-BP has made Gazprom a more lucrative offer that includes participation in other gas projects. Once Gazprom reaches a deal with TNK-BP, the threat to the licence is likely to disappear. Alexander Medvedev, deputy chief executive of Gazprom, on Friday said Sakhalin-2 would not have encountered problems if Gazprom had been part of the project from the start.
These outrages are already having an effect, as a major shareholder group in Britain has issued a warning to avoid Russian investments. The Telegraph reports:
One of the City’s leading shareholder groups has warned about the “inhospitable” and “difficult” climate facing investors and companies wanting to do business in Russia. F&C Asset Management also questioned the wisdom of allowing so many Russian companies to list in London when their standards of corporate governance were below those in the UK.
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| Peter Hambro: Risky market |
More analysis from the Telegraph can be found here.
Posted in neo-soviet crackdown, russia, weaponizing energy
The New York Times reports that, in yet another conclusive bit of evidence that Russia is now the neo-Soviet Union, the Kremlin had decided it played no significant role in murdering hundreds in the Belsan disaster, and chosen to cover itself with a sham parliamentary report. David McDuff translates Marina Litvinovich’s reactions to the sham report from Ezhedevny Zhurnal on A Day at a Time.
A parliamentary commission Friday issued its final report on the worst terrorist act in modern Russian history — the seizure of a public school in Beslan in 2004 — briefly highlighting law enforcement mistakes but placing blame for the hundreds of deaths on the Chechan-led militants alone.
The long-awaited conclusion, read aloud by the commission’s chairman during a session of the parliament’s upper house, ended more than two years of investigation into the incident that shocked Russia and the world. The death toll of 334 included 186 children.
The report suggested a hardening of the Kremlin’s position on one of the most painful public episodes of President Vladimir V. Putin’s administration, brushing aside lingering questions about the events and insisting that authorities, in spite of many well-documented problems, had done an adequate job.
The Kremlin had pledged that the special commission, stacked with politicians loyal to Putin and working almost entirely out of public view, would establish the facts and report the truth.
But the delivery of the report’s summary in a speech did little to satisfy embittered survivors and bereaved families, some of whom labeled it a whitewash meant to shield the Kremlin from responsibility for government negligence and disregard for hostages’ lives.
Copies of the full report were given to the Kremlin and parliamentary leaders, but not released to the public or the news media, making it nearly impossible to evaluate the evidence upon which the commission’s conclusions were based.
More than 1,100 people were taken hostage at Middle School No.1 on Sept. 1, 2004, the first day of the academic year in Beslan, a town in North Ossetia, in southwestern Russia. The terrorists had been sent by Shamil Basayev, the fugitive leader of a group that sought the independence of Chechnya, a small Muslim republic in the Caucasus.
The captors demanded that Russian forces withdraw from Chechen soil, where they have fought two wars against the separatists since 1994.
In his remarks to parliament, the chairman of the special commission, Aleksandr P. Torshin, called some of the terrorists’ requests “in-executable demands.”
In the three-day siege at the school, 333 died, almost all of them after two explosions in the gymnasium, where the hostages were held, led to a chaotic battle. Another hostage, among hundreds injured and hospitalized, died later.
Torshin said the terrorists intentionally detonated bombs among the hostages, starting the last battle to the surprise of Russian negotiators and commanders.
“It has been established that one of the gang members, acting according to the previously developed plan, actuated a homemade explosive device in the gym,” he said.
That statement went beyond previous government descriptions of the blasts, which have typically said that the bombs exploded in an unexplained mishap, perhaps by accident, as many hostages said immediately after the siege.
The evidence for this new claim was not clear. Torshin had said last year that his commission was waiting for forensic evidence and expert examinations of the blast sites. He made no mention of such materials Friday.
Torshin also dismissed as politically motivated the theory, presented last year by a dissenting commission member, that the explosions began when Russian forces fired rockets into the gymnasium.
The evidence for that theory is incomplete and unclear. Torshin suggested it had been circulated by those who “try to blame the federal authorities with attempting an assault, and shift the responsibility on them for the explosion.”
His summary speech, read from a several-page text, offered the only publicly available insights into the report and the commission’s work.
After giving his speech, Torshin said the commission was disbanded, a quiet and unceremonious end to a project once presented as a way to answer the long list of questions about the siege.
Many of those questions remain matters of vigorous dispute, including how many terrorists were involved; whether they had stashed weapons and ammunition in the school before the siege; and whether some of them escaped or were captured and not acknowledged by the Russian government.
Doubts about the government’s management have also persisted. These include troubling questions about the nature and content of negotiations with the terrorists; why firefighters were not prepared to battle a blaze that consumed the gymnasium; and why so few ambulances were available to transport the hundreds of injured victims.
Ella Kesayeva, who leads the Voice of Beslan support group, suggested the report was meant as a signal that Putin and his circle were no longer interested in having a discussion about the details.
“We personally didn’t expect anything different from Torshin,” she said. Kesayeva lost a teenaged son in the siege.
“If he thinks, despite all the evidence and the testimony of hundreds of hostages,” she added, “that the power structures acted correctly, it is his personal opinion and we, the victims, are not interested in it.
“Who stands behind such a report? The ones who are guilty in this tragedy,” Kesayeva said.
On certain points, Torshin’s report did not seem to square with witness accounts.
He said, for example, that the commission concluded that tanks from Russia’s 58th Army did not fire into the school while hostages were in the building, as witnesses and survivors have said. Two journalists for The New York Times also witnessed two T-72 tanks advance on the school that afternoon; at least one of them fired several times.
In a brief series of points near the end of his speech, Torshin did criticize the authorities.
The command post, he said, was not properly trained. He noted that intelligence agencies had not adequately penetrated or gathered timely information about Chechen terrorist groups, which made preventing the attack difficult.
He also criticized the local police, saying they ignored warnings of imminent terrorist attacks and did not have adequate presence on the roads or near the school that day.
And Torshin noted that some of the terrorists had been arrested and charged with other crimes before the school was seized, but had inexplicably been set free.
Each of these findings, while critical on the surface, were in many ways self-evident and already well known. They offered little new insight into the public understanding of the event.
And in a final sign that the commission would tolerate clear mistakes, Torshin made a coldly understated reference to the repeated official insistence during the siege that only 354 hostages were in the school when, in fact, the government knew there were more than 1,100.
“The work on informing the population was not properly organized,” he said, describing statements that the victims have called outright lies.
President Vladimir Putin will retain a leadership role in Russia even if he steps down in 2008, as required by the constitution, a senior politician has said. “He will not leave,” Sergei Stepashin, head of Russia’s accounting chamber, was quoted as saying in the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily Saturday. “I think he will find the kind of formula in which he would step down, but stay on.” Stepashin, a former prime minister, secret services chief and KGB veteran, suggested that Putin’s post-Kremlin future could be modelled loosely on that of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who in the 1990s was widely considered to retain backroom power despite his retirement. Asked what sort of options Putin might consider, Stepashin answered: “Lots. Party leader, head of parliament, government, a new state council.”
Posted in halls of power, russia
President Vladimir Putin will retain a leadership role in Russia even if he steps down in 2008, as required by the constitution, a senior politician has said. “He will not leave,” Sergei Stepashin, head of Russia’s accounting chamber, was quoted as saying in the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily Saturday. “I think he will find the kind of formula in which he would step down, but stay on.” Stepashin, a former prime minister, secret services chief and KGB veteran, suggested that Putin’s post-Kremlin future could be modelled loosely on that of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who in the 1990s was widely considered to retain backroom power despite his retirement. Asked what sort of options Putin might consider, Stepashin answered: “Lots. Party leader, head of parliament, government, a new state council.”
Posted in halls of power, russia
President Vladimir Putin will retain a leadership role in Russia even if he steps down in 2008, as required by the constitution, a senior politician has said. “He will not leave,” Sergei Stepashin, head of Russia’s accounting chamber, was quoted as saying in the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily Saturday. “I think he will find the kind of formula in which he would step down, but stay on.” Stepashin, a former prime minister, secret services chief and KGB veteran, suggested that Putin’s post-Kremlin future could be modelled loosely on that of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who in the 1990s was widely considered to retain backroom power despite his retirement. Asked what sort of options Putin might consider, Stepashin answered: “Lots. Party leader, head of parliament, government, a new state council.”
Posted in halls of power, russia
President Vladimir Putin will retain a leadership role in Russia even if he steps down in 2008, as required by the constitution, a senior politician has said. “He will not leave,” Sergei Stepashin, head of Russia’s accounting chamber, was quoted as saying in the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily Saturday. “I think he will find the kind of formula in which he would step down, but stay on.” Stepashin, a former prime minister, secret services chief and KGB veteran, suggested that Putin’s post-Kremlin future could be modelled loosely on that of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who in the 1990s was widely considered to retain backroom power despite his retirement. Asked what sort of options Putin might consider, Stepashin answered: “Lots. Party leader, head of parliament, government, a new state council.”
Posted in halls of power, russia
President Vladimir Putin will retain a leadership role in Russia even if he steps down in 2008, as required by the constitution, a senior politician has said. “He will not leave,” Sergei Stepashin, head of Russia’s accounting chamber, was quoted as saying in the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily Saturday. “I think he will find the kind of formula in which he would step down, but stay on.” Stepashin, a former prime minister, secret services chief and KGB veteran, suggested that Putin’s post-Kremlin future could be modelled loosely on that of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who in the 1990s was widely considered to retain backroom power despite his retirement. Asked what sort of options Putin might consider, Stepashin answered: “Lots. Party leader, head of parliament, government, a new state council.”
Posted in halls of power, russia
The Associated Press reports that Georgia has successfully driven Russia’s military out of its capital:
TBILISI, Georgia: Russia handed over its military base in Tbilisi to Georgia on Saturday, a key step toward the full withdrawal of Russian forces from Moscow’s small southern neighbor.
Russian military officials and their Georgian counterparts signed an official protocol transferring the garrison to Georgian control.
“This is a historic moment as we will no longer have a Russian military headquarters in the capital,” said Georgia’s deputy defense minister Levan Nikoleishvili.
“This is a victory which our people have all worked toward,” he told The Associated Press.
The last of 340 Russian military personnel vacated the garrison Saturday, leaving the Georgian capital free of Russia’s regional military headquarters for the first time in more than 200 years.
Fifteen officers from the Tbilisi garrison will remain in Georgia until the closure of two Russian bases, one in the southern town of Akhalkalaki and the other in the Black Sea port of Batumi. They will be stationed in Batumi.
Georgia and Russia agreed last year, after months of contentious negotiations, that Russian forces would pull out of the two bases, which are scheduled to be closed by October 2008.
Relations between the two countries have plummeted in recent months as Georgia has accused Russia of supporting separatists while Russia fears Georgia is moving closer to the West.
Georgian authorities briefly detained four Russian military officers on spying charges in September, and Moscow retaliated with a transport and postal blockade and a crackdown on Georgian migrants in Russia.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov has said that the decision to speed up the withdrawal of the Tbilisi base was made because of tensions with Georgia.
Posted in cold war II, georgia, iron curtain
The Washington Post offers a spate of articles in Saturday’s isse on Russian history capped by an editorial on Russian present tense:
The Times of London reports the latest skirmish in Cold War II, where Britain now seems to be the front line. The Neo-Soviet Kremlin has shut down the British Embassy’s ability to each Russians English (apparently afraid that a bit of democracy might slip in with the charming accent):
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The Kremlin has opened a new front in its increasingly bitter diplomatic row with London by disrupting the activities of the British Council in Moscow. More than 1,500 students have been offered refunds after the British Council was forced to close a language centre this week. The 21 teachers have been offered posts at council offices in other countries. The closure was the result of the Foreign Ministry’s decision to impose a licence requirement on the council. Relations between London and Moscow are already strained, and the crackdown on the council will serve only to increase tensions. Russian pressure on Shell to sell a controlling share of the giant Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project to the state monopoly Gazprom alarmed the British Government this week, and Russian security services have been accused of involvement in murdering Alexander Litvinenko, a former spy, with polonium-210 in London last month. The Kremlin angrily denies the charge. Anthony Brenton, the British Ambassador in Moscow, has also complained of a four-month campaign of harassment by a Kremlin-backed youth movement, Nashi (Ours). Members of the group have trailed and heckled Mr Brenton, picketed the embassy and triggered a violent incident outside his residence in September, prompting fears for the safety of the envoy and his family. The British Council, which is the cultural arm of the British Government, had operated the centre for eight years without a licence. It had previously been told by the authorities that a licence was not required. There was no apparent explanation for the change of policy. Natalia Minchenko, head of communications at the British Council in Moscow, said: “We were informed in the autumn by the Russian Foreign Ministry that our teaching centre needed a licence.” He said that “getting such a licence is a time- consuming process” and involved requirements that the British Council would have difficulty meeting. The incident is the latest example of attempts by the Kremlin to restrict and discourage foreign organisations by tying them in red tape. Dozens of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were forced to suspend activities in October after failing to meet a deadline for complying with complex new registration procedures. The Government has also introduced new powers that compel NGOs to submit work plans for the year ahead and to drop any programmes that have not received official approval. The British Council was exempt from the requirement to register because it operates under a cultural agreement between Britain and Russia that was signed in 1994. It received the demand to register for a teaching licence in September. The council has come under repeated attack from Russian authorities. Police visited its 15 centres across the country in 2004 and demanded that officials hand over financial records. The Interior Ministry then opened a criminal investigation into alleged illegal business activities, which was closed last year because of lack of evidence. The FSB, the Russian security service, announced in January that it had reopened an inquiry into the St Petersburg office of the council. Broadcasts of FM, the BBC’s Russian service, in Moscow and St Petersburg suffered disruption at the height of coverage of the Litvinenko poisoning. The Russians blamed the interruptions on “technical difficulties”. Ms Minchenko said that students who were enrolled on courses at the Moscow language centre were told about the closure this week and offered refunds on their fees. The 21 teachers at the centre were being offered posts at council offices in other countries. The council announced the closure of its “valued English language centre” on its website, saying that it had benefited thousands of people. It said that it would seek to compensate for the loss by expanding exchange programmes to Britain and encouraging Russian students to enrol on courses in Britain.
Bringing Britain to the world
The British Council is the UK‘s cultural arm abroad It works in 109 countries, in arts, education, governance and science Lord Kinnock is the council’s head but it is ultimately controlled by the Foreign Office As well as teaching English in foreign schools, the Council works with the World Service to provide English teaching material worldwide. The Kremlin investigated the Council’s operations in 2004 but backed off after Tony Blair intervened personally The investigation restarted immediately after four British Embassy workers were caught spying this year. They hid a bugging device in a fake rock. Authorities insisted the spy row was coincidental
Posted in cold war II, iron curtain, russia
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