Russia Reform Monitor: No. 1597

October 6:

Russia’s Foreign Ministry has charged in a statement on its website that “certain forces in Tbilisi... are consciously aggravating the situation in the region and through a series of terrorist acts are trying to provoke new military actions.” The ministry said Russia will nonetheless stick to the agreement to withdraw its troops from Georgia by October 10th. Russia has accused Georgian special forces of being behind an October 3rd car bombing that killed seven Russian peacekeepers at their base in the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia. Georgia had denied the allegation.


October 7:

Iceland has said it is negotiating a 4 billion euro ($5.4 billion) loan from Russia to shore up its finances a day after trading in shares of Iceland’s major banks was suspended and the Icelandic krona lost a quarter of its value against the euro, the Associated Press reports. News of the Russian loan came as Iceland nationalized its second-largest bank, Landsbanki, under emergency legislation. Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Russia was favorably inclined toward Iceland’s request for credit.

The Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture, which has just concluded its fifteenth visit to Russia since its founding in 1990, has criticized Russia for the mistreatment of prisoners and detainees, the Moscow Times reports. “Unfortunately, there have been severe forms of ill treatment that could be considered as amounting to torture,” council representative Latif Huseynov told a Moscow conference dedicated to preventing the torture of inmates. Russian human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin received about 1,000 complaints in 2007 about the use of torture in detention facilities, a senior official of Lukin’s office, Yelena Sereda, told the conference. Torture is most often used by police to get “coerced confessions,” she said.


October 8:

President Dmitry Medvedev has said that the United States’ financial crisis has diminished its power and has called for a new security pact to rival NATO, USA Today reports. Medvedev told European leaders at a conference in Evian, France, that Washington abused its superpower status by invading Iraq, expanding NATO and espousing an “economic egotism” that led world markets to collapse. “A desire by the United States to consolidate its global domination led to it missing an historical chance” after the Sept. 11 attacks “to build a truly democratic world order,” Medvedev said. He proposed that European countries work with Russia to form a new trans-Atlantic organization in which the United States was no longer the dominant power.

Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov has said that Russia’s armed forces will be reduced to a million by 2012, Lenta.ru reports. According to the website, around 1.2 million people currently serve in Russian armed forces. Serdyukov told a joint meeting of the Russian and Belarusian defense ministries that the Russian armed forces’ officer corps will be reduced three-fold by 2012 – from 450,000 to 150,000 officers.


October 9:

Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko has denied reports that Russia plans to sell S-300 surface-to-air missiles to Iran, Agence France-Presse reports. “We have repeatedly said at the highest political level that we do not plan to deliver such types of weapons to countries in... unstable regions,” he said. “This corresponds neither to the political interests of our country nor to the interests of preserving stability in such regions of the world.” The comments follow Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s visit to Russia to urge it to stop possible arms sales to Iran and Syria. On October 6th, a spokesman for Russian state arms-export monopoly Rosoboronexport said the firm had “no information” about sales of S-300s to either Iran or Syria.