The next Russian election, the one that will inevitably elevate Vladimir Putin back to the presidency, is not until next March, but from a Czech source we see the political machine is already hard at work.

tiscali.cz: Předvolební kampaň na ruského prezidenta má první skandál: http://t.co/QasPJgmv

January 9, 2012 10:43 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

“Preliminary campaign for Russian president has its first scandal.” Yes, it’s scandalous, if not quite entirely straightforward, as explained in the accompanying article about the discovery made by opposition activists in Moscow of the wholesale fabrication of signature-petitions being perpetrated in local universities. (more…)

BACK in the USSR! We’ve already been treated recently to some prime Soviet nostalgia, in the form of the Yulia Timoshenko show-trial in the Ukraine. Now from Le Monde we see how that’s been joined by the lock-step Kremlin solidarity of old: current Russian president Dmitri Medvedev has endorsed his own replacement by Vladimir Putin.

Many commentators – rightly, and including the Le Monde editorial board itself – had seen Putin’s end-of-September announcement that he would run for (and therefore win) re-instatement as president in 2012 as taking Russian political development back to the Brezhnev era, if not even back to the time of the Czars. Not so, said Medvedev yesterday on Russian television – it is “something else . . . a means to resolve the challenges we have set for ourselves.” So he’s fine with missing out on the chance to “run” for the second presidential term he himself is entitled to under the Russian constitution.

On the other hand – surprise! – he’s not happy with the current state of Russian government:

I’ve been a lawyer, and I thought that I knew very well how the state apparatus works. I was mistaken, things are much more difficult and in a certain way more frightening. That’s why we must think about how to change the system of managing the State.

Aha, so there at least is a note of dissension! But note that this comes after he admits that he has only around one year left as president, and hasn’t even indicated what political function – if any – he will fulfill after that. Medvedev’s term in office has been chock-full of ambitious pronouncements like this – that Russia must be more investment-friendly, more subject to the rule of law, etc. – that came to nothing. This is certainly just one more.

The Berliner Zeitung tipped us off a few days ago: Last Warning for Novaya Gazeta. “Whazzat?” you may ask. Oh, it’s just about the only remaining Russian newspaper worth taking seriously. By this point Vladimir Putin has had 10 years to snuff out independent voices among the country’s government and media, so that now only a handful of outlets remain which still resist singing along with the party line. There are actually none such when it comes to TV broadcasters (naturally, the medium with the greatest reach by far); on the radio there is still Echo Moscow; and among newspapers the most prominent independent name has been Novaya Gazeta (“new newspaper”), which among other things had been the employer of Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative reporter murdered four years ago in a still-unsolved case.

At least up until now. But now BZ reporter Daria Afonina (definitely a Russian female name) tells us how the paper just received it’s “first warning” from the Ministry for Communication for allegedly spreading “fascist propaganda” through a piece it published back in January on extreme-right nationalists from an organization whose name translates to “The Russian Way.” A second warning means that the paper will have to shut down.

What Editor-in-Chief Sergey Sokolov thinks he sees in this development – if not sheer stupidity from a rogue bureaucrat, always a possibility – is an effort by the authorities to finish Putin’s work by rubbing out such independent media voices as remain. But he also vows to appeal any close-down order to “Strasbourg,” presumably meaning to the European Court of Human Rights located there (of which Russia is a member, not that that means there is much to hope for any such move).

Those still interested in the paper – while it is still a going concern – should realize that it does have an accompanying English-language version. Don’t expect a full-blown English translation of the Russian website, by any means, as the English material is much scarcer and generally out-of-date. When I visited today the left side of the homepage was dominated by an interview with Russian President Medvedev entitled “Medvedev’s declaration, 2009 year” which, yes, bore the dateline “18.04.2009.” But the tone of the questioning directed at the head-of-state was refreshingly challenging, and the rest of the slim pickings available on that homepage similarly showed why the state apparatus of which he is the head may not be too fond of the newspaper. There were namely two pieces on the Politovskaya murder case (“‘The State is showing a complete lack of interest in solving the murder of our mother,’ Vera and Ilya Politkovsky [yes, her children],” and “Second time around: The Politkovskaya murder case.”

One side-detail of the tragic plane-crash on Saturday that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski along with much of that country’s political, military, and even financial elite was that the reason all these worthies were headed to a Russian provicincial backwater like Smolensk in the first place was to participate in a very solemn ceremony there. That was to have commemorated the mass-execution, which began exactly seventy years ago, of around 20,000 Polish officers and other prominent citizens by the Soviet secret police, who had had them fall into their hands as a result of the USSR’s invasion of Poland (coordinated with Hitler’s Germany) in September, 1939. This prompted some commentators to write ponderously of a doom-laden Katyn parallel: Poland’s intelligentsia wiped out there in 1940, and then once again in 2010.

Unfortunately, these grim events are now totally obscuring the remarkable progress represented by the very fact that such a delegation of eminent Poles, headed by the President, was being allowed to go there in the first place – and by the no-less remarkable fact that Russian premier Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk had in fact participated in a commemoration ceremony there just last Wednesday. Looking back now at news coverage of these developments – that is, written before this past weekend’s tragedy – produces a very bittersweet feeling, especially from two articles on the Katyn legacy from among the elite of the German press, here the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt. In particular, the latter piece begins with the sentence “Seldom has the Polish public looked at Russia with so much hope as in these days” – on a webpage where, at the very same time, you can click over on the right-hand side (under “Current Videos”) to see a news-film of rescuers searching through the crash-site in the Russian forest!

(By the way, you could be sure that the German coverage of Katyn’s legacy was going to be thorough and high-quality, and not only because Germany’s sheer size of population and cultural inheritance ensures good journalism. Remember that, for decades, it was German soldiers who were alleged to have been at fault here, so you can be sure that German journalists will always be on top of this story to ensure the historic record remains set straight.) (more…)

I don’t cover the Polish press here that often; nevertheless, the overriding imperative of this weblog remains finding and discussing the most interesting goings-on within the wide ambit of my language-coverage, and these days that certainly has to lead us to the Polish front.

I use “Polish front” here deliberately, because yesterday’s headline event in Europe was without a doubt the convocation of several national heads-of-state at Gdansk, Poland for ceremonies marking the seventieth anniversary of the opening of that Polish front by Nazi Germany with the ground-attack that started the Second World War. This is understandably a sensitive historical matter for the host nation, and controversy was assured from the very beginning just by the list of attendees. That featured a few names who you would think simply did not belong at such a ceremony, for various reasons. Like James Jones, US National Security Advisor: why were the Americans sending such a relatively low-ranking official and not someone at least at the level of, say, Vice President Biden? There was also Russian premier Vladimir Putin, whose presence was sure to be controversial for more profound reasons, both contemporary (Putin has for years been engaged in an effort to glorify Russia’s past, particularly its involvement in the Second World War under Josef Stalin) and historical (that involvement notably involved the Red Army’s “stab-in-the-back” invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939, arranged according to the terms of the secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact negotiated only the month before).

“We can’t forget for a moment that what we have here is a great battle over memory,” preached Archbishop Henryk Muszyński of Gniezno at a Mass he held yesterday. “Preserving that memory and the entire truth about the Second World War is our obligation.” That is probably the wisest, most-reasoned remark made in connection with those ceremonies at Westerplatte, the specific spot on the coast at Gdansk where hostilities begain early in the morning of 1 September 1939, from among those cited in Rzeczpospolita’s main article covering the event, by Piotr Kubiak (After the war – the battle over memory). (more…)

The US presidential election is coming up soon, less than two weeks away. That means, among other things, that it’s endorsement season now, and lately those have taken somewhat of an international flavor. You might have already heard about al-Qaeda’s “endorsement” of McCain – perhaps I’ll have the opportunity to write more about that soon. As such, that nod of terroristic approval goes counter to pretty much the whole rest of the world, which prefers Obama as next US president by about a four-to-one margin. (But you’d sort of expect that Osama bin Laden and his henchmen would be inclined to go against the grain, now, wouldn’t you?) More conventional is Russia’s choice, or at least Russia’s seeming choice, as reported by Per Dalgård in the Danish opinion weekly Information (McCain asks Russia for help). (more…)

“Georgia – again?” Well, yes. What else would there be? The Republican National Convention? Coming up (we think). Sarah Palin? Not today, but definitely stay tuned on that one, it could turn spectacular. Hurricane Gustav? The European viewpoint there is probably not too interesting, even if we might be somewhat honored by the choice of that quintessentially (Central) European given name for bestowal on the storm. My best sense of the EU’s official position on Gustav – gathered from that extensive trawling through the various national presses that I do for you on a continual basis – is that it’s taken to be a bad thing, definitely.

Actually, developments on the Georgia story do keep on coming, especially if you take the unpleasantness there of last month (not at all unreasonably) as a proxy for the new Eurasian balance-of-power that conflict suddenly revealed to the world. Today is when the EU heads of government are due in Paris to meet on a European response (if any) to Russia’s recent behavior. Looking ahead last Friday, the Berlin correspondent for Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, Bartosz T. Wielinski, put forth a mostly pessimistic outlook on what could be accomplished (What the Union can do to Russia on Monday). (more…)

The hostilities in Georgia seem to be dying down now. Russian forces are withdrawing – or at least they are supposed to withdraw, under the terms of the cease-fire they signed, but there is considerable doubt as to whether they are actually fulfilling that obligation.

In the meantime, the countries of the NATO alliance struggle to come to terms with the new ruthless military face Russia has shown in this crisis. Germany now stands central in that military alliance, in the same way it has stood central for some time now within the European Union, again because of its sheer weight of population and economic power (and, who knows, maybe also its reputation for military ability in the past), which makes German commentary on these recent developments particularly interesting.

A very good contribution comes from Jochen Bittner, who writes a weblog, called Planet in Progress, that is carried off the Die Zeit webserver. (more…)

Back now to the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games. I mentioned before their rampant commercialism. That is certainly not a recent phenomenon by any means, but nonetheless an ever-growing annoyance, clearly at variance with the original “Olympic spirit” and quite possibly a major reason behind the awarding of the Games to Beijing in the first place (that huge Chinese market!), despite the country’s deficiencies in the area of human rights and free information that we have already seen, as well as Beijing’s own deficiencies in sheer clean air which we may be about to witness.

The guardian of the Games and their “Olympic spirit” is supposed to be the 110 members of the International Olympic Committee, lead by its president, the Belgian Jacques Rogge. For anyone who might have any confidence in that body as a defender of the Olympics against the seductions of money, the recent article by Evi Simeoni in the leading German daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (or FAZ) should provide a bracing corrective (The Rivalry of the Applicants). (more…)

“Is history about to repeat itself?” asks Clément Daniez of the French newsmagazine Le Point in his article published on-line today, Russians and Americans Replay the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vladimiar Putin has already explicitly spoken of such a thing: last October (2007) he warned that Washington’s plan to set up an anti-missile shield in Europe, with the radar in the Czech Republic and the interceptor missiles themselves in Poland, was setting the stage for a similar sort of serious confrontation between the two world powers as occurred in October, 1962. Of course, in the meantime the Bush administration has gone ahead anyway, as Condoleezza Rice was in Prague on July 8 to sign the agreement with the Czech government for setting up the radar. (more…)

Next Monday, 11 February, is promising to be quite an eventful day on the Gazprom front – that’s of course the gigantic Russan natural gas company, the largest extractor of natural gas in the world, of which the Russian government owns a majority stake. On the one hand, it’s the same-old same-old, what we’ve all seen before, for Monday is the day that Russia, speaking for Gazprom, will cut off all natural gas supplies to the Ukraine due to alleged non-payment by the latter of $1.5 billion. Curiously, Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko has been scheduled for some time to arrive in Moscow for a visit on Tuesday. At least he’ll be glad to be away from his native country and someplace instead where it’s actually warm inside the buildings, though one can imagine that the diplomatic talks he will engage in might still be rather frosty.

But that is all par for the course for a European winter; I can remember recently thinking to myself “Hmm, it’s already February – shouldn’t we have had the regularly-scheduled Russian energy cut-off crisis by now?” More interesting is that next Monday is also the evening of the going-away concert in honor of Dimitri Medvedev – Gazprom chairman now, but Vladimir Putin’s “recommended” candidate for president of the Russian Federation at the upcoming March 2 elections, and therefore also a shoo-in as the next Russian president. The concert will be headlined by the legendary English rock-n-roll band Deep Purple, and this was recently commented upon in the New York Time’s weblog “The Lede: Notes on the News,” by Mike Nizza, who notes that Putin himself will surely be present as well. (more…)

One of the key international figures involved in brokering the deal between the Ukrainian government and the opposition that finally led to the agreement for the election repeat on December 26 was Spain’s Javier Solana. But it’s vital here to stay up-to-date on Solana’s career path: he was NATO Secretary-General, but that was in the period 1995-1999. In 2004 in Kiev he has rather represented the European Union, as its High Representative for the Common Foreign & Security Policy (together with the presidents of Poland and Lithuania, who were also actively present there). Thus, it was the EU that was there on the scene, wielding influence from being not only Ukraine’s neighbor but also the club most Ukrainians wants to join. NATO, on the other hand, was not there; and, as Ole Bang Nielsen of Denmark’s Berlingske Tidende reminds us (NATO Puts Ukraine on Ice), the Ukraine cannot expect to find itself on NATO’s short-list of new-member candidates anytime soon. (more…)

Uh oh: looks like some funny business with the counting of the ballots. And don’t you find it a little suspicious that all the local election officials, the ones in charge of recording and counting the votes, are all professed partisans of the incumbent?

Yes folks, it’s the old bait-and-switch tactic again. All of this has truly been going on, but not (yet?) in Florida. I’m referring here instead to the recent “elections” in Belarus, commonly known as “Europe’s last dictatorship,” where to no one’s great surprise President Alexander Lukashenko managed to get passed the amendment to the Belarussian constitution that allows him to keep on running for re-election as long as he is physically able.

The key, of course, is that now that the Belarussian constitution allows him to run, it’s overwhelmingly likely that he will always win. This is not due to any special place Lukashenko occupies in the hearts of his countrymen, but rather to his efficiency in finding ways to win, irrespective of what may be the voters’ preferences. Johnni Michelsen of the Danish commentary newspaper Information managed to infiltrate the country to observe the Belarussian election process himself and send back a report: Chaotic Election Day in Belarus. (more…)

It’s been a full week now since the bloodbath at Middle School #1 in Beslan, and what effects has that incident had so far? OK, there have been some firings of officials in charge of security in North Ossetia, and indeed of the entire North Ossetian regional government save the top guy, President Alexander Dzasokhov. (Here’s a good summary of those developments – from Australia no less!) And after first refusing any public inquiry into the affair, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday relented, so that the Russian Senate will start its investigation later on this month.

Still, deeper questions remain, which even those Senators might be hesitant to broach. Like: What can Russia do to prevent such massacres happening again? What connection does it all have to the ongoing violence in Chechenya, and what implications does it have for that struggle? Josef Pazderka comes up with some interesting observations about this incident’s aftermath in his piece (What Changes After Breslan) in the Czech opinion-weekly Respekt. (more…)

The bloodshed that finally ended the two-day stand-off at Middle School #1 in Beslan, North Ossetia was reportedly started by accident: security forces’ reaction to shots being fired at hostages trying to escape and/or some explosives set by the terrorists going off accidentally. It should go without saying that that bloody conclusion to the crisis, which has claimed 335 lives and counting, was not supposed to happen. After all, the Russian authorities had made it plain that the safety of the hundreds of hostages being held captive on the school grounds had “absolute priority.”

Don’t believe it. Even if things came to the particular conclusion they did unintentionally – and even in view of the 25 people the authorities had persuaded the attackers to release unharmed the day before – a violent end to the drama was ultimately inevitable. Journalist Manfred Quiring makes this point well in his recent analysis for Die Welt (“Let It Cost What It Will). (more…)

This story almost ran away from me – the big game of hide-and-seek came to an end yesterday when Russian presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin telephoned his family and campaign staff in Moscow to say that he was alive and well and in a hotel in Kiev. That’s what I get for allowing myself to be distracted by the current controversy over George W. Bush’s performance of duty (or lack thereof) for the Texas or Alabama National Guard back in 1972 and 1973. But is the mystery over what happened to Rybkin really cleared up yet?

It’s too bad that I don’t read Russian very well. On the other hand, while gaining that facility would enable me to read Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and the like in the original (something worth being able to do, and I’m certainly not being ironic), it wouldn’t do much towards helping me read independent political commentary in the Russian press, since there’s precious little of that to be found anymore under Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime. The Polish press is therefore a substitute that may very well be better than the original. Poland is close-by (much too close, in the historical sense, most Poles will tell you) and certainly has a free press. An additional advantage may be that that history brings forth a suspicious, even hostile attitude towards Russian motives that can’t help but foster an ultra-critical perspective towards any Russian government pronouncements.

(A disadvantage, though, is that, once again, really only Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita have anything to say on the Rybkin case. Isn’t there any other national newspaper out there, and on-line, that will deal with events beyond Poland’s borders? Sorry, Zycie Warszawy just doesn’t seem to cut it. Grzybek! Help!) (more…)

The elections to the Russian Duma that took place last Sunday throughout the Russian Federation resulted in an overwhelming victory for the “Jedna Rosja” or “United Russia” party widely seen to be the vehicle of Russian president Vladimir Putin. But take a little closer look – you don’t need to go any further down than third place – and what else do you see? You see the “Liberal Democratic Party,” but don’t let that innocuous name fool you: that’s the right-wing nationalistic party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Remember him? He was one of those bizarre politicians whom the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 enabled to crawl out from underneath his rock to ride the crackpot vote to the Duma. Back in the early 1990s Zhirinovsky could be counted upon to utter the most amazing, and alarming statements – for example, I recall that he once threatened one of, or all, the Baltic states with invasion – that you would hope never to hear from a leading politician from the world’s second nuclear power. After providing a few years of that sort of bizarre comic relief, Zhirinovsky’s “Liberal Democrats” faded away in subsequent elections. But now they’re back – to a position in the legislature almost even with the Communists.

I’m no expert in Russia or Russian politics (and I don’t read Russian). But that’s not a problem in the EuroSavant context, which rather calls upon me to pass along the wisdom put forth on a given issue by some European country’s press. Today it’s time to look at the results of those recent Russian elections from the viewpoint of a country that knows Russia all too well: Poland. And there’s scarcely any good news to be found. (more…)

Continuing on the subject of the Polish military involvement in Iraq, prompted by the first Polish combat death last Thursday, in today’s Rzeczpospolita there is a longer, and more thoughtful, opinion piece (Big Disappointment) from Radek Sikorski. Sikorski works in Washington at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is director of something called the “New Atlantic Initiative.” His commentary article first appeared in the Washington Post last Friday, 7 November, and was in its original, English form entitled “Losing the New Europe.” But unless you pay for access to the WP archives (which I don’t), it’s not accessible. Luckily, if you can read Polish, you can still access it at Rzeczpospolita’s site. (more…)

Bad news for EU taxpayers, at least those who rather expect some concrete results from their representatives at European Union fora in return for the tax-euros they are paid. (Come on now – could anyone really be so naïve?) I know you recall that EU summit in Brussels that took place yesterday and the day before – Chirac also spoke for Germany during yesterday’s session, remember? (Covered in €S from both the French and German points-of-view.) That was nice, a great symbolic gesture and all that, but more pertinent might be the fact that little of note was actually accomplished. At least so the French on-line papers say. (more…)

In the run-up to the War in Iraq Germany joined Russia and France in what the Economist has termed the salon des refusés in opposition to the US hard line. Now, as yesterday’s entry showed, a deep split between the US and France has arisen on lifting economic sanctions and the legal basis for proceeding with Iraq’s reconstruction generally, while Germany has downplayed its differences with the Bush administration. What is the German judgment on the Franco-American tiff? (more…)