Russia Reform Monitor: No. 1643

July 16:

Another human rights advocate has been murdered in Chechnya. The Washington Post reports that Natalya Estemirova, an investigator for the Memorial human rights group whose work exposing atrocities in the restive Russian republic had received international acclaim, was kidnapped in the Chechen capital of Grozny and subsequently executed by unknown assailants on July 15th. Her body was found in the neighboring Russian region of Ingushetia. Human rights activists are chalking her murder up to a revenge killing carried out by the Moscow-supported government of Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. "Ramzan had already threatened Natalya and insulted her, and he thought of her as his personal enemy," Memorial chairman Oleg Orlov tells reporters. The killing was an attempt by Kadyrov and his cronies to "stop the flow of information from Chechnya."


July 17:

Russia's inhospitable Far East "may become a new theatre of confrontation between Russia and China in the decades ahead," writes commentator David Blair in the London Telegraph. That is because the Far East is progressively emptying of Russians; according to Blair, the population of the area between Lake Baikal and Vladivostok has constricted by almost a fifth since the 1980s, and now amounts to just 6.7 million people - "far less than the population of Greater London." This trend, moreover, is only expected to accelerate in coming years, and by the middle of the next decade "the Russian Far East is forecast to have only 4.5 million people."

The Chinese side of the Sino-Russian border, meanwhile, looks very different. "Of China's total population of 1.3 billion, at least 100 million inhabit the three provinces of Manchuria, directly adjacent to Russia," Blair writes. "This means that Manchuria already has a population density 62 times greater than the Russian Far East." Add to that China's ever-widening quest for natural resources, and the wealth of minerals, lumber and petroleum found in the Russian Far East, and the region is likely to become a new focal point of tension between Moscow and Beijing in the years ahead, Blair predicts.

Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov is lashing out at the Memorial rights group in the wake of activist Natalya Estemirova's brutal murder. Reuters reports that the regional leader is planning to sue Memorial for libel following accusations by the organization's head, Oleg Orlov, that Kadyrov was behind Estemirova's killing. "I prepared and will file a lawsuit to defend the reputation, dignity and business reputation of the Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov," Kadyrov's lawyer, Andrei Kreanenkov, has told a Russian news service. "I am sure we will win the case."


July 19:

Just days after the slaying of one of its most prominent investigators, the human rights group Memorial is closing up shop in Chechnya. According to Al-Jazeera, the group has "suspended" work in the restive Russian republic as a precaution. "We have seen that the work that Natalia [Estemirova] was involved in, the work done by our colleagues in Chechnya - documenting crimes committed by representatives of the authorities - is fatally dangerous," Alexander Cherkasov, a Memorial executive committee member, tells a Russian radio station. "We can't put them at risk."


July 21:

Is Dmitry Medvedev rethinking the separation between church and state in Russia? In what is sure to be a controversial and hotly debated move, the Russian president has officially announced his support for greater study of religion in the country's schools, and the hiring of additional chaplains for Russia's military. “I have made a decision to support... [the] teaching the basics of religious culture and secular ethics in Russian schools, and I also consider it expedient to organize on a regular basis the work of clergymen representing traditional Russian confessions in our Armed Forces,” Medvedev confirmed to top religious and government officials in comments carried by the Moscow Times. Both initiatives are strongly backed by the Russian Orthodox Church, which maintains that they would "boost the morals and spirituality of the younger generations," the paper reports.