by Patrick Armstrong
Change. More change working away. Last Sitrep I reported about a quarter of Russians had travelled outside the former USSR. Now we find that about 90% have cell phones and about 40% of adults use the Internet daily. ROMIR tells us that 70% of Russians have savings, the overwhelming majority in Rubles, many in banks. And a per-capita GDP is getting on for half that of Japan. I believe that easy communication, travel, access to the New Media and savings accounts are the outward signs of internal change: “middle class” things. I think it’s fair to say that Russia has never been a “middle class country” before: it’s not there yet but getting there.
Police. More police outrages: more torture cases revealed; a conviction for same; a conviction for murder. There is some pressure building to have the Interior Minister dismissed.
Corruption. Medvedev admitted his campaign had yielded only modest results. Putin said much the same thing at the end of his second term. For my money it’s Russia’s worst problem.
The emptiness of former flaps. Lugovoy has passed a lie detector test administered by people from the UK over the Litvinenko death. The standard view, re-typed by thousands of outlets, takes a hit.
Putin. Putin is stepping down as head of United Russia, because, “The president should be a non-party figure.” This is a common sentiment in the former USSR where the word “party” still has some bad connotations.
Investment climate. Putin and Medvedev have both spoken about Russia’s bad investment climate. It appears that improvements are on the agenda. Putin announced that there would be no export duties for new hydrocarbon projects on the Russian shelf and, lo! a few days later Rosneft and ExxonMobil announced a deal. He then proposed tax holidays for new production facilities in special economic zones.
Nonsense. SIPRI claims that Russia is the 3rd largest military spender in the world after the USA and China at US$71.9 billion. That kind of money would buy a lot more than 6 Su-35s and 30 Su-30s between now and 2015. NATO used similar PPP cooking in the past to claim Russia was Number 2.
Missile defence. The Chief of the General Staff agreed that there is a potential threat of nuclear weapons acquisition by Iran and North Korea and that it should be jointly defended against. Earlier the Director of the (US) Missile Defense Agency told a US Senate panel that cooperation with Russia could benefit the USA. There is to be a conference on the subject in Moscow next week: maybe something will be done about this unnecessary impasse.
Political parties. The rules for registering political parties have been relaxed and no fewer than 143 have applied. I’ll bet at least half are parties claiming to unite the liberals under a single leader.
Assumptions. A commonplace of comment, inside and outside Russia, is that every time a Western power(s) overthrows a government, Russia loses business there. Doesn’t actually seem to work that way: LUKoil has started work on the West Qurna-2 oilfield in Iraq.
Arrogance. The US State Department’s spokesman says that the investigation into the death of Sergey Magnitskiy has been “inadequate”. Maybe it’s time for Moscow to take up Conrad Black’s incarceration. But really, what arrogance: are we to presume that Washington knows the correct answer? there is an investigation in Russia, actually.
Abkhazia. There was an assassination attempt against President Ankvab of Abkhazia in February. Arrests have been made and two suspects are reported to have killed themselves. One theory is that it’s connected to corruption. I haven’t heard anyone suggest that it was Tbilisi.
I have written about the Magnitsky case elsewhere.
It is very troubling to see the way foreign governments and news media give themselves the right to meddle in Russian criminal and legal cases and seek to bully from a distance the Russian authorities and Russian courts to come to the "right" conclusions in complex and difficult cases, which might not in fact be the conclusions to which the facts eventually lead and to which the Russian authorities and the Russian courts might come to if left alone to decide these cases independently by themselves.
As anybody who has worked in a judicial environment knows, this sort of pressure does not make the impartial administration of justice easier but makes it more difficult. It is also far more likely to result in major errors since anyone applying pressure from such a distance is almost guaranteed in a complex case to get the facts wrong. By way of example the recent judgments of the European Court of Human Rights have shown conclusively that western commentators and western governments got the Khodorkovksy case completely wrong. If the Russian authorities and the Russian courts had done what western commentators and western governments had demanded of them a man who is by any definition a major criminal who has committed fraud on a simply Homeric scale would now be walking free.
This kind of bullying and interference in Russian criminal cases also grossly infringes the presumption of innocence of defendants in those cases such as the the Magnitsky case where they might at some point face serious criminal charges but who have not yet been tried. It should not be necessary to point out that the human rights of these people merit as much respect as do the human rights of someone like Magnitsky.
If only for the reasons I have just given this sort of unwarranted meddling in Russian criminal and legal cases does not enhance the rule of law in Russia, which western commentators and western governments claim to be concerned about, but instead undermines it.
Posted by: Alexander Mercouris | April 27, 2012 at 07:08 AM
Whenever something horrible happens in the world that Western governments and media outlets actually notice, we find two different reactions from Moscow and Washington. Moscow confines itself to anodyne statements about constitutional agreement, peace and so forth – admirable sentiments which do nothing. Washington, on the other hand, feels it has to pick a side and blame those that don’t. US media outlets either create this judgement or follow along (which comes first?). Washington then accuses Moscow (and others) of preventing it “doing something”; the media picks up this line and fills up with stories (many of which don’t prove to be true: this one again, for example)
Posted by: web knowledge base | July 19, 2012 at 03:24 AM