As a UK newspaper boss faces jail in Russia… A TV punch and the show trial that proves Putin will stop at nothing to silence critics of his gangster state
This has been a week for nostalgia in Moscow, courtesy of that hopeless romantic President Vladimir Putin.
Yesterday, I watched tanks and missiles rumble through Red Square to mark Victory Day. Seventy years have passed since the Battle of Stalingrad.
Many feel they were the dobroye staroye vremia — the ‘good old days’. The streets around were filled with veterans including Alexander, 90, who sported a Tolstoyan beard and Soviet medal awarded for rescuing a wounded comrade while under Nazi fire.
‘We looked after each other then,’ he reminisced to me. ‘The Great Patriotic War was terrible, but the country had a better spirit.
‘Today we are not threatened by external enemies. Our real enemies are within.’ Putin could not have scripted him better, particularly with regard to another Kremlin-orchestrated echo from Russia’s totalitarian past.
At the Ostankinsky district court on Tuesday, the trial began of a man who threw a punch. Nothing more than pride was really hurt in the scuffle, which lasted mere seconds.
Indeed, the incident would barely warrant a paragraph in a local newspaper, let alone the attention of the international media, were it not for two factors.
The first is that the ‘fight’ took place during the filming of a televised debate and therefore was ‘witnessed’ by several million.
Second, but far more important, are the profound implications of this prosecution for the freedom of the Press, not only in Russia, but the wider world.
When he stood before the judge, billionaire industrialist and media tycoon Alexander Lebedev did so as one of the most high-profile critics of the Kremlin regime.
As well as owning four London-based newspapers, including The Independent and the Evening Standard, Mr Lebedev is, along with glasnost pioneer Mikhail Gorbachev, a major shareholder in the leading Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
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The Empty Chair
LRB Blog
Egor could clearly see the heights of Creation,where in a blinding abyss frolic non-corporeal, un-piloted, pathless words, free beings, joining and dividing and merging to create beautiful patterns. Vladislav Surkov, Almost Zero
Vladislav Surkov, the grand vizier of the Putin era, the creator of ‘managed democracy’ and ‘post-modern dictatorship’, today resigned (was sacked) from the Russian government. I saw him on 1 May when he gave the speech at the LSE that may have been his undoing. There was a small protest at the entrance to the lecture hall calling for him to be included on the list of Russian officials denied visas to the US for their part in the killing of the anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. In a gesture of patriotism Surkov had recently said he would be ‘honoured to be on the Magnitsky list’. Surkov avoided the protest and strode in through the back door. He was wearing a white shirt and a tightly cut leather jacket that was part Joy Division and part 1930s Chekist. He was smiling a Cheshire cat smile. He said that we were too clever an audience to be lectured at and that it would be much freer and more fun if we just threw questions at him. After one vague inquiry he talked for 45 minutes: it was his system of ‘managed democracy’ in miniature – democratic rhetoric and authoritarian practice.
‘ I am proud to be one of the architects of the Russian system,’ he said, ‘and today I am responsible for modernisation, innovation, religion’ – he paused and smiled again – ‘modern art.’ Jumping between roles, he played the woolly liberal one moment, saying Russia needs a Steve Jobs to become a creative, post-industrial society, before morphing into a finger-wagging nationalist demagogue the next: ‘The political system that we have in Russia reflects the mentality and the soul of the Russian people.’ All the time he indulged in his favourite practice of inverting reality: protests in Moscow ‘showed that the system was strong enough to stand up to extremists’ he said (the protests have led to dissidents being arrested on trumped-up charges). Surkov was a genius at using the language of rights and representation to validate tyranny, as well as trying to make tyranny hip.
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EU ministers to debate Cyprus money laundering report
An EU-mandated report on money laundering in Cyprus contains nothing shocking, sources say. But you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the level of secrecy.
The report was drafted by Moneyval, a branch of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, and an Italian unit of Deloitte Financial Advisory, a US-based accountancy firm.
Moneyval interviewed people at Cypriot government institutions to see how they implement international standards.
EUobserver understands that Deloitte audited a sample of Cypriot banks, but not Cyprus-based branches of foreign banks, to see how private firms do it.
One EU source familiar with the content told EUobserver: “They discovered much less [wrongdoing] than people expected.”
Another EU source said: “It’s not as bad as many people thought it would be.”
But in fact, expectations were quite low.
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Russia’s child-shields
To prevent corrupt Russian officials being barred from Europe, Russia is now using the threat of an adoption ban against European states.
I am no great fan of the international adoption business – it can easily turn into a corrupt, unregulated and even sinister market in children. It is much better to deal with the reasons that the children end up in institutions in the first place and to encourage people to provide homes for them in their own country.
Now Russia is threatening to ban international adoptions. Not as part of a big push to improve child welfare, but to punish foreign countries for their temerity in imposing visa sanctions and asset freezes on the people – mainly officials – involved in the death of the auditor Sergei Magnitsky, and the $230 million (€176m) fraud that he uncovered.
It is worth bearing in mind the nature of the fraud. My email inbox is peppered with complaints from foreigners who have fallen foul of officialdom or local competitors in Russia. My answer is always the same: tough. If you go mud-wrestling, in a seemingly lucrative contest where the referee is known to be corruptible, and where your adversaries are rich and unscrupulous, you will certainly get dirty and may well lose.
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Don’t ’Reset’ With Putin, Crack Down on Him
As Secretary of State John Kerry visits Moscow today to try to shore up fraying relations, the show trial of the dissident Alexey Navalny also should be on the agenda.
The anti-corruption campaigner led demonstrations against Russian President Vladimir Putin after last year’s elections; he now faces a judge who has convicted 130 people and acquitted none in the past two years.
These days, friction between Putin and the West is the norm, and with good reason. Russia-U.S. relations don’t need another “reset.” Instead, the U.S. must carry out an honest recalculation of what it can expect to obtain from Putin — and at what price.
Conventional wisdom holds that Russian cooperation on a range of issues is so valuable — and U.S. leverage over Putin so minimal — that antagonizing officials in Moscow over human rights isn’t worthwhile. The U.S. should rethink that assumption, not merely because Putin’s approach to democracy and human rights is even worse than expected, but also because he has failed to deliver on critical national-security issues, such as Iran, North Korea and Syria.
On Iran, Russia voted for United Nations sanctions in 2010, but has since cozied up to the Tehran regime.
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Under Child Adoption Threat, Ireland Scraps Magnitsky List
Ireland has dropped plans to impose U.S.-style Magnitsky sanctions on Russia after Moscow warned that it might respond by banning Irish parents from adopting Russian children.
The Russian opposition assailed Ireland for the reversal, saying it had not only bowed to Kremlin blackmail but had also shown a lack of leadership as the current president of the European Union.
Irish lawmakers had drafted legislation to blacklist Russian officials implicated of human rights violations in the Magnitsky case. But Russia’s ambassador to Ireland, Maxim Peshkov, wrote to the Irish parliament’s foreign affairs committee in March that any attempt to introduce a Magnitsky list might have a “negative influence” on an agreement on child adoptions between the two countries.
Several Irish parents subsequently contacted committee members after the letter was made public, expressing concern that pending adoptions for Russian children might be canceled.
Pat Breen, chairman of the foreign affairs committee, said Thursday that lawmakers had decided to scrap the Magnitsky list and instead pass a motion calling on the government to convey the committee’s concern over the death.
“We have reached a motion that fulfils our obligations on human rights,” he said, according to The Irish Times.
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Russia forced Ireland’s hand on Magnitsky case
It is rare the joint Oireachtas committee on foreign affairs and trade hits international headlines but that is just what happened in the last week. The normally sleepy committee made its way into the New York Times , the BBC and Russian media as it waded into a high stakes war being waged ever since Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer, died in a Russian jail after uncovering fraud among state officials.
The episode saw the committee consider and then back away from sanctioning Russian officials involved in the death. It has given a stark insight into the rough workings of Russian diplomacy and has pitted Irish families trying to adopt Russian children against international power politics.
The Oireachtas committee kicked off events when US businessman William Browder appeared before it in February describing what had led to the death of Magnitsky, who worked for his firm, Hermitage Capital.
After uncovering the theft by state officials of $230 million in taxes from the firm and testifying against them, Magnitsky was jailed and died a year later, in 2009. Russia’s own human rights council said he was denied medical treatment and was probably beaten to death. “It is my duty to his memory and his family to make sure that justice is done,” Browder told the committee.
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The Kremlin “Beat” the Opposition and Irish Parliament Beat Magnitsky
Vladislav Surkov, the architect of Putin’s “sovereign democracy” idea, and now the deputy prime minister for economic modernization, gave talk at the London School of Economics yesterday in which he said that the Kremlin “beat” the Russian opposition after the December 2011 Duma election protests:
Do you really think that the old system collapsed after the protests in December 2011? No, it beat the opposition. That’s a fact.
Surkov didn’t say how exactly the opposition was defeated, though he said he’d like to see a new political party emerge to rival United Russia (so would Putin). The Kremlin’s grey cardinal, speaking in a lecture hall that was only two-thirds full, seemed more interested in money than politics anyway. He was first asked about allegations of corruption related to the Skolkovo tech-sector project, which was designed to create counterpart to Silicon Valley near Moscow and drum up foreign direct investment in Russia. Although the questioner asked about the activities of the project’s vice president, Surkov dismissed the allegations that $750,000 was stolen as not worth the time or energy of the project’s president (whose net worth is over $15 billion, according to Forbes). The imputation here – that being mega-rich is a disincentive to steal – would be intriguing even if it hadn’t been delivered in the forum of the LSE.
Surkov went on to draw attention to his own sizable fortune, presumably to preempt any follow-up questions (or insinuations) as to whether or not he too is the beneficiary of shady deals:
“I am in the same position. I am not the poorest person after working in the business world for 10 years and I will, if necessary, work there again. I was successful in business before I joined the presidential administration. I was one of the most successful in my field.”
Meanwhile, the Irish parliament’s committee on foreign affairs watered-down the resolution on the Magnitsky case, which I blogged about at World Affairs last week. It passed unanimously today. An earlier version of the motion – modeled on the newly-passed U.S. Magnitsky Act – advocated that Ireland should adopt a law to sanction and deny visas to Russian officials credibly accused of gross human rights violations. It also called on the European Union, of which Ireland currently holds the presidency, to implement similar measures. The new motion is filled with pro forma calls for Russia to “investigate” a criminal conspiracy it has already said never existed or rather, was the brainchild of the man who uncovered it. Sergei Magnitsky, the whistleblower who exposed a $230 million tax fraud and identified the perpetrators as Russian state officials in bed with a transnational organized crime, was arrested, tortured and murdered in prison for his trouble. Now his corpse is being put on trial in Russia to prove his guilt posthumously.
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TDs and senators back down from sanctions on Russia over lawyer death
An Oireachtas Committee has backed down on proposed sanctions on Russian officials over the death of whistleblowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian jail four years ago.
The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade has redrafted a motion that instead calls for the Irish government to convey to the Russian authorities its concern and request for reassurances that they will comply with human rights legislation in the Magnitsky case.
This follows a warning from the Russian ambassador to Ireland about sanctions which would potentially prevent Irish parents from adopting Russian children as Moscow authorities have already done to the US in response to Congress there passing the Magnitsky Act last year.
The US legislation sought to punish Russian officials suspected of being responsible for the lawyer’s death. In his letter to the Oireachtas committee, Ambassador Maxim Peshkov warned that the committee’s original approach would “not enrich bilateral Russian-Irish relations”.
He added that it could “have negative influence on the negotiations on the Adoption Agreement between Russia and Ireland being proceeded”.
Sergei Magnitsky had been working as an auditor in Moscow when he uncovered what he claimed was massive fraud by interior ministry officials and police involving some €176 million.
After reporting it to authorities, he was detained on suspicion of aiding tax evasion. He died in custody in November 2009 with his colleagues claiming the case against him was a fabrication.
In its toned-down motion released yesterday, the Oireachtas committee said that it had agreed to note that Magnitsky died in prison having “been held for 358 days at the Butyrka detention centre in Moscow”.
It also noted an inquiry by the Russian Human Rights Council which found that Magnitsky died as a result of beatings by prison guards and that charges of negligence against two prison doctors who refused him treatment for gall bladder disease and pancreatitis were dropped.
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To learn more about what happened to Sergei Magnitsky please read below
- Sergei Magnitsky
- Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?
- Sergei Magnitsky’s torture and death in prison
- President’s investigation sabotaged and going nowhere
- The corrupt officers attempt to arrest 8 lawyers
- Past crimes committed by the same corrupt officers
- Petitions requesting a real investigation into Magnitsky's death
- Worldwide reaction, calls to punish those responsible for corruption and murder
- Complaints against Lt.Col. Kuznetsov
- Complaints against Major Karpov
- Cover up
- Press about Magnitsky
- Bloggers about Magnitsky
- Corrupt officers:
- Sign petition
- Citizen investigator
- Join Justice for Magnitsky group on Facebook
- Contact us
- Sergei Magnitsky
