Results tagged “russia”

In Russia's system it is apparent that Medvedev needs his own power base and this appears to be what he is trying to create. We should not overestimate the chances for democracy, although this could injure elite cohesion and lead to further reforms. For now, however, this initiative, if it takes place, is another Kremlin party, not an independent expression of autonomous social forces. That clearly is too much to stomach. 

Cyberspace is being nationalised rapidly. In some parts of the world, this has been going on for a while. Russia has been running a programme known by the delightfully sinister acronym Sorm-2 (System of operational investigative activities) since the late 1990s. This ensures that a copy of every single data byte that goes into, out of or around the country ends up in a vast storage vault run by the Federal Security Service. You can read about atrocities committed in Chechnya if you wish but you can be confident that somebody will be looking over your digital shoulder.

The president and chief executive of the Sochi 2014 organising committee, Dmitry Chernyshenko, said the Zorb had been chosen to represent a new Russia.

"The transparency of Zorbs also reflect the open, accessible and inclusive society that Sochi 2014 Games is helping to build," he said.

But inside the Russian government, the trend was going in the opposite direction. Medvedev and other liberals still felt trust for Obama and seemed ready to meet him halfway. But conservatives -- mainly old-school apparatchiks, security chiefs and former KGB officers like Putin -- began to express their doubts about the reset in relations. "It's been frustrating," the U.S. senior official tells TIME on condition of anonymity. "We came in with an aggressive reset mentality, and it was not necessarily shared by everyone in the Russian government. The Russians are overwhelmed by all the things we want to do tomorrow, and they say, Let's take time."

Rogozin puts the matter more bluntly. "Medvedev sincerely believes that Obama can be trusted," he tells TIME. "But that doesn't mean this opinion is shared at every level, especially the levels where the implementation of their agreements is borne out." This reality -- the disconnect between what Medvedev pledges and what Russia does -- has eroded the spirit behind the reset strategy as well as its practical objectives.

Dmitry Gololobov, former head of legal department of the liquidated Yukos oil company, is to take the post of vice-president of Rosneft. Told a source close to the management of Rosneft. 

According to the source, Gololobov, more than five years living in London, may return to Moscow and get to the new workplace "in April we will shake down the last legal formalities: in 2004 the lawyer was declared the Prosecutor General of Russia in the international wanted list for alleged involvement in illegal transactions with the shares of "Eastern oil companies" and Gololobov not be able to cross the border of Russia, while against him were withdrawn by the old charges. "The new employer Gololobov actively addressing the issue", - explained the source.

On Tuesday he told a video conference with regional governors and senior bureaucrats that he was fed up with officials ignoring his orders. "Very often these are just excuses . . . and when you get down to the crux of the matter it transpires that, in fact, nothing has been done," Mr Medvedev said.

"Those who do not fulfil [orders] must be removed from their jobs and thrown out on to the street." (...)

He ran the meeting with a breezy and confident manner. "I'm just trying to understand, what is taking so long? I made the order on November 19," he told a minister at one point, asking about legislation on transparency for state corporations. "The legislation should have already gone to the government. It hasn't, and so my order has gone unfulfilled." The minister stammered excuses.

If the Russian police are doing something very ham-fistedly and very doggedly, that means another agency is looming behind their back. And we can guess just which one.

No doubt many of us from the very beginning assumed that the story with the seizure of the computers in the office of the "Baikal ecological wave" in Irkutsk wouldn't end with a banal fine «for the unlicensed use of software». The initiators of the persecution of the ecologists went further and dug deeper. Would you expect any less? After all, no doubt standing behind the back is the «office of deep drilling»!

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In fact, there's nothing Washington could propose that Moscow would agree to, and it has nothing do with the missile shield (SM-3s have a range of 300 miles and it takes 10 of them to shoot down a single advanced missile). It's because opposition is an all-purpose diplomatic lever to bargain for what Russia needs. Keeping NATO's influence out of Russia's front yard is probably the most important Kremlin objective. But staying at the table of top nations is important to Moscow's pride too--and making problems is an effective, if not very constructive, way to make the world take you seriously.

Make no mistake: If the ECHR determines that Russia, a signatory to its treaty, violated basic international law when it stripped Khodorkovsky and his fellow shareholders of their property rights in YUKOS, it can order that property restored. And if the Kremlin won't pay?  The ECHR can order the seizure of Russian assets throughout Europe, and there are plenty of them available for seizure.

And what a poison it is: The particular hallmark of Russian poisons, besides their creativity, seems to be their relatively long kill time. A victim will languish for weeks, even months, in sheer agony before either barely surviving or dying. Volodarsky describes this tradition while tracing Soviet and Russian poisoneers (for lack of a better term) through early uses of merely unusual plant extracts to the industrial development of unique compounds. The resulting potions are engineered specifically to mimic other problems, usually some form of gastritis, so that by the time doctors eventually realize what's happened, it's too late to fix.

The inspiration for Volodarsky's history is the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the KGB defector slowly poisoned with Polonium-210 in 2006. While it can be difficult to parse the complicated history that Volodarsky writes -- this is a book by and for insiders -- the picture that emerges is damning of Russia going back decades. This might be where the book would fit in the pantheon of anti-Russia books: Volodarsky argues that the post-USSR poisoning activities of Russian intelligence demonstrate a strong continuity between Soviet and Russian activities.

The Russian Supreme Court has upheld a ban on the opposition Yabloko party taking part in upcoming elections to the Sverdlovsk Oblast Duma, RFE/RL's Russian Service reports.

Yabloko's press service told RFE/RL on March 12 that Yabloko filed a complaint with the Supreme Court against the Sverdlovsk Oblast Election Commission's refusal to register its candidates for the March 14 elections.

The election commission banned Yabloko from the elections because it said 50 percent of the signatures of the party's supporters appeared to be forged. The Sverdlovsk Oblast Court had upheld the commission's decision.

Mr Putin is making an aggressive pitch that it will be his country that brings India's air-strike capabilities into the 21st century. During talks today with Manmohan Singh, his Indian counterpart, he will play an ace card: technology that others, such as the US, are reluctant to give India.

He will extend Moscow's hand of co-operation in building a fifth-generation fighter jet - the T50 PAK FA.