January 26:
Russian authorities are increasingly using the threat of a military draft to intimidate young activists who oppose President Vladimir Putin, the Washington Post reports. Late last month, police picked up Oleg Kozlovsky, a 23-year-old student at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics who is a leader of the anti-Kremlin youth movement called “Oborona” (Defense), and took him to a military conscription office, which shipped him off to a military base to serve a year in the army. Kozlovsky and friends say his status as a student legally exempts him from service. As the Post notes, service in the army, which has a well-documented history of violent and sometimes fatal hazing, is feared by many young Russians, not just those who oppose the government.
Sergei Tretyakov, the former deputy head of intelligence at Russia’s UN mission who defected to the U.S. with his wife and daughter in 2000, has said he oversaw an operation that helped Saddam Hussein’s regime manipulate the price of Iraqi oil sold under the U.N.’s oil-for-food program – and allow Russia to skim the profits. Tretyakov told the Associated Press that his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500 million from the oil-for-food program. “It’s an international spy nest,” Tretyakov said of the UN in an interview coinciding with the publication of a book about him written by former Washington Post journalist Pete Earley. “Inside the UN, we were fishing for knowledgeable diplomats who could give us first of all anti-American information.”
January 27:
Human Rights Watch has criticized Russian authorities for detaining 12 journalists and others monitoring a protest. The 10 reporters and two human rights activists were reportedly among dozens arrested on January 26th during a demonstration in Nazran, Ingushetia, in which several buildings were set on fire. According to media reports, one of the journalists was beaten by police and several people were hospitalized. “Ingush authorities are trying to silence dissent by stopping journalists from doing their jobs,” United Press International quotes Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, as saying. Cartner called it “disgraceful” that two of the journalists, who were later released, were “ill-treated” for covering the protest.
Russia’s Central Election Commission has refused to register former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov as a candidate in the March 2nd presidential election, Ekho Moskvy radio reports. According to the commission, more than 13 percent of the two million signatures Kasyanov submitted in support of his candidacy were found to have been forged. An aspiring candidate is disqualified if more than 5 percent of the signatures they submit are found to be invalid. Kasyanov, a Putin critic, claims he was removed from the presidential race for political reasons.
January 28:
Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has denounced revelations by Sergei Tretyakov, the ex-deputy head of intelligence at Russia’s UN mission who defected to the U.S. in 2000, Reuters reports. “In any secret service of the world using treachery for self-publicity has always been considered disgusting, and treachery is viewed as a criminal act,” the SVR said in a statement. Reuters quotes Tretyakov as dismissing leading pro-Kremlin presidential contender Dmitry Medvedev as a “puppet” and incumbent Vladimir Putin as a “KGB loser” because he served at a KGB office in St. Petersburg rather than headquarters in Moscow.
January 29:
Fourteen long-range Russian bombers have flown over the North Atlantic off the coast of Europe as part of joint military exercises with the Russian navy. Interfax quotes Russian air force spokesman Alexander Drobyshevsky as saying that six Tu-95MC and eight Tu-22M3 bombers were accompanied by two A-50 airborne early warning aircraft.
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