Russia Reform Monitor: No. 1565

June 3:

President Medvedev has dismissed Gen. Yury Baluyevsky as chief of the Russian armed forces’ general staff, replacing him with Deputy Defense Minister Gen. Nikolai Makarov, NEWSru.com reports. Baluyevsky has been transferred to the Kremlin’s Security Council, where he will work as a deputy to Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, who himself was recently shifted to the Kremlin advisory body after being removed as Federal Security Service (FSB) chairman. Baluyevsky, who became chief of the general staff and first deputy defense minister in 2004, opposed plans to hire more civilian personnel and sell off military property, among other reforms proposed by Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.

Former chess champion and opposition leader Garry Kasparov has told world news industry leaders that Vladimir Putin has killed press freedom in Russia, the Associated Press reports. “Don’t let Putin and his cronies get away with this,” Kasparov told senior news industry executives during the World Newspaper Congress in Sweden. “Make sure they have to respond (to complaints about press freedoms) and make sure your governments raise the issue.”

The New York Times reports that after political analyst Mikhail Delyagin criticized Vladimir Putin on a TV Center television network talk show last fall, he and his remarks were “digitally erased” from the show before it was broadcast. “Mr. Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from TV news and political talk shows by the Kremlin,” the newspaper writes. “The stop list is, as Mr. Delyagin put it, ‘an excellent way to stifle dissent’.” According to the New York Times, the talk show’s host conceded Delyagin was digitally erased and TV Center news director Mikhail Ponomaryov said journalists and talk show hosts had to comply with the rules.


June 4:

Investigative journalist Douglas Farah writes on the Family Security Matters website that Russia’s ambassador in Thailand has met several times with the Thai prime minister and offered “sweetheart deals” on weapons systems, including fighter jets, and gas and oil deals for the release of Viktor Bout, the reputed Russian arms dealer. Bout was arrested in Thailand last March when he allegedly negotiated a weapons deal with two U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents posing as representatives of Colombia’s FARC rebels. Bout is “so valuable to the Russians,” Farah writes, because “he is deeply in bed and protected by the Russian military establishment and its intelligence services.”


June 5:

President Medvedev has said in a speech to German political and civic leaders in Berlin that Russia is becoming an integral part of Europe. “Having cast aside the Soviet system and given up any idea of its restoration, Russia has laid the foundations of a state that is completely compatible with the rest of Europe, or to be more precise, with the best of all that makes up the common heritage of European civilization,” Medvedev said, according to the Kremlin’s website. “To use the words of John Le Carre, Russia has ‘come in from the cold’ – returned after almost a century of isolation and self-isolation. And Russia is now actively returning to global politics and [the global] economy, bringing with it all of its natural, financial and intellectual resources and possibilities.”

Still, according to the Kremlin’s website, Medvedev said during a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that Russia is concerned about a “narrowing of mutual understanding” with Europe over such issues as U.S. plans to deploy a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe [and] NATO enlargement.