March 23, 2009 — Contents

WEDNESDAY MARCH 23 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Hope in Europe

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Conflict of Interest at the Moscow Times

(3)  EDITORIAL:  Justice, as Putin Defines it (Kozlovsky)

(4)  The War in Dagestan, Raging

(5)  Babushka Russia

(6)  Ariel Cohen before the U.S. Senate

EDITORIAL: Hope in Europe

EDITORIAL

Hope in Europe

We’ve had many tough words for European Russia policy in the past few weeks, but that’s certainly not to say that all hope is lost.  There are certainly women and men of conscience and courage in Europe, people who can remember their own recent history at the hands of Russian aggression, and who are calling for better policy.

EDITORIAL: Conflict of Interest at the Moscow Times

EDITORIAL

Conflict of Interest at the Moscow Times

We’re growing awfully tired — sickened, actually — of opening our virtual copy of the Moscow Times and finding an op-ed piece pontificating about the rosy prospects of the Russian economy written by a Russian stock broker looking to generate business for his firm without being required to declare his conflict of interest so that lay readers are not misled. We count ourselves as among the MT’s greatest fans, but if the paper cannot be a beacon of the standards of Western journalism in the benighted neo-Soviet dictatorship of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, it might as well not exist now that it has largely abandoned the tough pro-democracy editorial line that used to be its hallmark.

EDITORIAL: Justice, as Putin Defines it

EDITORIAL

Justice, as Putin Defines it

Oleg Kozlovsky announces on his blog the results of his lawsuit against the Kremlin for illegally imprisoning him for 13 days preemptively in advance of a Dissenters March last year.  A court ordered the government to pay Kozlovsky 10,000 rubles in damages, about $295 or roughly $23 per day of captivity.

Let’s put that in perspective.

The War in Dagestan

The Moscow Times reports more proof of how very well Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is doing keeping the peace in the Chechnya region. Send our athletes there in 2014 for the Olympics? That would be suicide.

Three days of intense fighting between police and insurgents in a wooded area of Dagestan ended Saturday with five officers and about a dozen militants left dead, officials said.  Clashes are frequent in Dagestan, but the fighting in an area near the border with Georgia and Azerbaijan was some of the most intense in recent months. Helicopter gunships fired on the militant positions.

Babushka Russia

Writing in the Moscow Times Nikolai Zlobin, the director of Russian and Asian programs at the Institute for World Security in Washington, describes Putin’s “babushka” state:

The age-old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, will probably never be put to rest since most people agree that one cannot exist without the other. The same could be said of the interdependence of politics and economics on the regional, national and global levels.

Cohen Testifies before the Senate

Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., a Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Security in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, testifed last week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by John Kerry. That rat bastard Andrew Kuchins, whose shameless Russophile fraud we have previously exposed, also testified.  Cohen’s testimony was based on a recent white paper he published on the Heritage Foundation website, which we touted both here on this blog and on Pajamas Media.  Here is Cohen’s testimony in full, if the Sentate listens attentively, there will be more hope for Russia and for us:

President Barack Obama has expressed a desire to constructively engage Russia and has also expressed concerns over Russia’s increasingly truculent behavior and the threat it poses to the current international system. These concerns are valid and the threat of a resurgent Russia is palpable. Moscow’s efforts at carving out a “sphere of privileged interests” in Eurasia and rewrite the rules of European security have negative implications for U.S.–Russia relations, international security, the autonomy of the independent former Soviet states, and Europe’s independence.

Despite these circumstances, the Obama Administration seems to be rushing ahead with a “carrots-and-cakes” approach to the Kremlin, judging by Vice President Joe Biden’s recent speech at the annual Munich international security conference. In this speech, the Vice President outlined the Obama Administration’s foreign policy vision for the first time on the world stage and suggested that America push “the reset button” on relations with Russia. Notably absent from this speech was any mention of any recent events in Eurasia.