August 22:
Opposition United Civil Front activist Larisa Arap has just emerged from a 46-day imprisonment in two psychiatric hospitals in the Murmansk region, the Independent reports. “Pills were forced down her throat and she received injection after injection,” according to the British newspaper. “She doesn’t know what medications they were, or whether they will cause permanent damage. ‘I don’t feel very well, but I have a fighting spirit,’ Mrs. Arap said yesterday, adding that sometimes she was so drugged she could barely walk or speak.” Arap was released when a commission sent by Russia’s human rights ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, to look into her case said it found no reason for her to be forcibly confined to a psychiatric facility.
[Editor’s Note: On August 14th, the Novosibirsk Oblast Court ordered Nikolai Baluyev, an activist of the banned National Bolshevik Party (NBP) accused of terrorism and illegal storage of explosives, to enter a psychiatric clinic for compulsory treatment. According to Kommersant, the authorities claim Baluyev planned to bomb the Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters in the cities of Novosibirsk and Barnaul as well as a railway. Alexander Averin, press secretary to NBP leader Eduard Limonov, told Ekho Moskvy radio that the case against Baluyev and another NBP activist Vyacheslav Rusakov, who was sentenced to four years in prison, was fabricated.]
President Vladimir Putin has announced ambitious plans to revive Russia’s military power and restore its role as the world’s leading producer of military aircraft, the Guardian reports. Speaking at the opening of MAKS-2007, the largest air show in Russia’s post-Soviet history, Putin said he was determined to make aircraft manufacture a national priority after decades of lagging behind the West. Russia, he said, will also resume the large-scale manufacture of civilian planes. Meanwhile, presidential aides have hinted Russia could shortly resume the production of Tu-160 and Tu-95 strategic nuclear bombers now that the aircraft are again flying “combat missions.” The bombers would be used as a “means of strategic deterrence,” Putin aide Alexander Burutin has told Interfax.
August 23:
The 22-year-old son of ex-Russneft chief Mikhail Gutseriyev, who recently sold his oil company under pressure from tax and law-enforcement authorities, has died under murky circumstances, NEWSru.com reports. According to Polit.ru, Chingiskhan Gutseriyev died of a heart attack in a Moscow hospital after he was injured in a car accident. However, Ekho Moskvy radio cited reports that the younger Gutseriyev died of a heart attack in his sleep at home after a minor traffic accident for which he was not even hospitalized. Russneft, Russia’s seventh-largest oil company, has reportedly been bought out by Basic Element, the holding company owned by pro-Kremlin tycoon Oleg Deripaska.
Two policemen have been killed and seven wounded in an attack in Dagestan’s Buinaksk district, Lenta.ru reports. Citing Interfax, the website reports that gunmen ambushed convoy of vehicles carrying members of an OMON special police unit at the entrance to the Gimrinsky Tunnel, which connects Dagstan’s mountainous and low-lying districts. Five of the wounded OMON officers are in serious condition.
August 24:
The Moscow Times reports that an anti-corruption campaign focusing on regional officials is intensifying in what appears to be a Kremlin-orchestrated prelude to parliamentary and presidential elections. On August 22nd, prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into “multiple breaches of the law” during the sale of public land by Fyodor Yaroshevich, the mayor of the Kaliningrad region town of Baltiisk. In a case resurfacing from the past, the Prosecutor General’s Office has charged Igor Ivanov, the former Federation Council representative for the far eastern Primorye region, with heading up a criminal organization to import contraband goods from neighboring China.
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