January 11:
First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has launched his presidential campaign with visits to Kaliningrad, Russia’s westernmost region, and Murmansk, where he emphasized pension reform. “We are obligated to improve the pension system, we are obligated to raise the intolerably low pensions that a rather significant number of our citizens have,” Prime-TASS quotes him as telling reporters in the Arctic port city. Medvedev said pensions will be raised in line with decisions made by President Vladimir Putin and supported by the parliament.
January 13:
The Sunday Times reports that the Queen of England’s nephew, David Linley, is negotiating the sale of a multi-million-pound stake in his furniture and interior business to Sergei Pugachev, a Russian billionaire with close ties to President Putin. Pugachev is a member of the Federation Council, the Russian parliament’s upper house, who founded Mezhprombank in the 1990s and formed a close business relationship with then-President Boris Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko. London’s Evening Standard reported on January 11th that Russia’s state-controlled energy giant Gazprom is in talks to become a major sponsor of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London.
January 15:
Two State Duma deputies with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), Valery Rashkin and Sergei Obukhov, have complained to the Central Election Commission that Russia’s main television channels have been giving unequal airtime to prospective presidential candidates, Vedomosti reports. The KPRF legislators cited research by the Center for the Analysis of Russian Political Culture, which monitored the airtime devoted to political parties’ electoral congresses in December and found that Dmitry Medvedev, the candidate put forward by United Russia and three other pro-Kremlin parties and blessed by President Putin, was shown 2.5 times more often and 4.4 times longer than Gennady Zyuganov, the KPRF’s leader and presidential candidate.
The Glasnost Protection Foundation has stated in its annual report that the number of journalists killed in the line of duty in Russia dropped in 2007 while the number arrested and physically attacked grew, Novye Izvestia reports. It also found that pressure on media and censorship rose significantly, even on the Internet. According to the foundation, there were 1,502 incidents involving the violation of journalists’ rights last year (up from 1,345 in 2006), with 140 journalists arrested (up from 75 in 2006 and 47 in 2005) and eight killed (compared with nine in 2006 and seven in 2005). The head of the Glasnost Protection Foundation’s monitoring service, Boris Timoshenko, said that 20-30 Russian journalists were killed annually in previous years.
Russia’s Supreme Court has ruled that former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky cannot run for the Russian presidency, the Voice of America reports. Bukovsky had appealed an earlier decision by the Central Election Commission that he could not be a candidate because he had not been living in Russia for the past ten years. The court sided with the election commission.
January 16:
The Other Russia opposition group reports on its website that Russia has placed 134th out of 155 countries in the latest Index of Economic Freedom, compiled annually by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal. Of the countries comprising the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), only Belarus and Turkmenistan were ranked below Russia (coming in 150th and 152nd, respectively). Armenia came in 28th place, Kyrgyzstan 70th, Kazakhstan 76th and Moldova 89th. Ukraine came in 133rd place, just ahead of Russia, while Azerbaijan placed 107th.
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