May 16:
The Federal Security Service (FSB) says it has detained Ramzan Turkoshvili, a Georgian-born ethnic Chechen-Kist who is a Russian citizen, who was allegedly working for Georgian intelligence. An FSB source told Interfax that Turkoshvili organized contacts between Georgia’s special services and “active participants in illegal armed formations” in Russia and was also paid to recruit Russian servicemen and government officials. In addition, the FSB source claimed that “despite repeated statements by Tbilisi and Washington,” Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge “is being used by international terrorists and extremist organizations as a support base for terrorist structures operating in the North Caucasus.”
According to the Associated Press, Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili denied the FSB’s accusation, calling it “a continuation of Russia’s policy of provocation toward Georgia, which has taken a particularly acute form recently.”
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said that Russia is building a new oil pipeline that will bypass Belarus en route to Europe. According to Radio Free Europe, Russian media quoted Putin as announcing that the state pipeline monopoly Transneft has chosen the port of Ust-Luga, in Russia’s northern Leningrad Oblast, as the terminal for the new pipeline. While Russia is unlikely to fully suspend oil transit through Belarus once the pipeline is completed, Yury Drakakhrust, a correspondent for RFE/RL’s Belarus Service, says the new pipeline will severely dent Belarus’s economy and bargaining power.
May 17:
Russia’s opposition has held the first session of what it is calling an alternative parliament, the National Assembly, in Moscow, NEWSru.com reports. The assembly’s participants, who vowed to restore political democracy in Russia, elected a presidium that includes former chess champion Garry Kasparov, who heads the opposition United Civil Front, Eduard Limonov, leader of the banned National Bolshevik Party, and former presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov. Kasparov said the assembly should become an alternative to the “waning, illegitimate, disgraceful State Duma.”
The New York Times reports that 12 million people “bursting with pent-up consumerism and oil rubles” and “unbothered by the economic uncertainty roiling much of the rest of the world” are expected to visit an Ikea furniture outlet and surrounding Mega mall in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk this year. According to Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate company, Russian developers were expected to open 4.6 million square meters, or 49 million square feet, of retail space in shopping centers in the second half of 2007 and 2008. That is more than double the new shopping center area planned in Poland, the European country with the second-largest pipeline of malls in development.
May 18:
The Sunday Times reports that Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is serving an eight year prison sentence on charges of fraud and tax evasion, has accused Igor Sechin, the putative leader of the faction of “siloviki” hardliners who was formerly a deputy Kremlin chief of staff and is now a deputy prime minister, of plotting to have him arrested and stripping his oil company of billions. Khodorkovsky, who is currently awaiting trial on fresh charges of embezzlement and money laundering that could lead to a new sentence of up to 27 years, alleged that both cases were instigated by Sechin. “He orchestrated the first case against me out of greed and the second out of cowardice,” the jailed tycoon told the British newspaper.
[Editor’s Note: Khodorkovsky’s public denunciation of Sechin suggests he believes that Dmitry Medvedev’s accession as president has weakened Sechin and his allies, who reportedly did not want Medvedev to succeed Vladimir Putin. The siloviki hardliners reportedly wanted Putin to serve a third term despite the Russian constitution’s ban on more than two consecutive presidential terms.]
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