February 22:
U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns has called on Russia to repudiate comments made by its envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin. According to the Associated Press, Rogozin called the recognition of Kosovo a “strategic mistake” but said Russia does not plan to get involved in an armed confrontation over Kosovo. However, he added: “If the European Union works out a single position and NATO goes beyond its current mandate in Kosovo, these organizations will conflict with the United Nations. And we, I think, will proceed from an assumption that to be respected, we have to use brute military force.” Burns said Rogozin’s statement was “highly irresponsible,” “cynical and ahistorical” and should be “repudiated by his own government.”
February 24:
A wave of contract killings reminiscent of Russia’s mafia wars in the 1990s is threatening to damage Vladimir Putin’s legacy of stability, the Daily Telegraph reports. In the latest incident, the head of procurement for AvtoVAZ, Russia’s largest carmaker, was stabbed to death in the city of Togliatti on February 21st, Lenta.ru reported. Saratov Oblast’s prosecutor and a leading Moscow lawyer were also murdered during the past week, with a general in charge of defense ministry contracts dying suspiciously. “A wave of contract killings has hit the country,” the Daily Telegraph quotes Prosecutor General Yury Chaika as saying
The New York Times reports that shortly before Russia’s parliamentary elections last December, foremen at the GAZ vehicle factory in Nizhny Novgorod ordered assembly-line workers to vote for President Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia, and phone in after they left their polling places or face punishment. “The city’s children, too, were pressed into service,” correspondent Clifford Levy writes. “At schools, teachers gave them pamphlets promoting ‘Putin’s Plan’ and told them to lobby their parents. Some were threatened with bad grades if they failed to attend ‘Children’s Referendums’ at polling places, a ploy to ensure that their parents would show up and vote for the ruling party.”
Meanwhile, activists with the opposition Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS) received hundreds of phone calls warning them to stop working for their candidates or they would be “hurt” along with their families, Levy reports. “Over the past eight years, in the name of reviving Russia after the tumult of the 1990s, Mr. Putin has waged an unforgiving campaign to clamp down on democracy and extend control over the government and large swaths of the economy,” he writes. “He has suppressed the independent news media, nationalized important industries, smothered the political opposition and readily deployed the security services to carry out the Kremlin’s wishes.”
Russia Today reports that Moscow police have detained 13 teenagers suspected of attacking a young Azeri man on February 23rd in the latest wave of apparently racially motivated attacks. Radio Free Europe, meanwhile, reports that two Kyrgyz nationals were killed in Moscow on February 19th and 21st, bringing the total number of Kyrgyz killed in apparent hate crimes in Russia this year to ten.
February 26:
Russia’s likely next president, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, is in Belgrade, where officials from Russia’s Gazprom and Serbia Gaz signed an agreement to build and operate the Serbian section of the South Stream pipeline, which will bring Russian and Central Asia natural gas to the EU. According to Gzt.ru, Medvedev, who chairs Gazprom’s board, called the pipeline agreement an “especially important” element in Russia’s “moral, material and economic” support for Serbia. Medvedev said on February 25th that the actions behind Kosovo’s independence “destroy the international security system, the international legal system, which mankind formed more than 100 years ago,” Agence France-Presse reported.