Russia Reform Monitor: No. 1645

August 12:

President Dmitry Medvedev has expressed shock over Russia's ongoing rampant alcoholism. "If I speak openly, I think that one cannot speak of any change, nothing has changed," Reuters reports Medvedev telling senior government officials in Sochi. "Alcoholism in our country is a national disaster." Medvedev was reacting to the disclosure of official statistics estimating that the average Russian consumes some 18 liters of pure alcohol annually.

[Editor's Note: Alcoholism, a scourge during Soviet times, remains an epidemic in post-Soviet Russia. Medical professionals estimate that half of all deaths of Russians between the ages of 15 and 54 are related to alcoholism and alcohol-related diseases.]


August 15:

Moscow and Caracas are moving closer to a partnership that could reconfigure the military balance in Latin America. Qatar's Peninsula newspaper reports that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who is due to visit Russia in September, has signaled his willingness to acquire dozens of Russian-made tanks. The sale, if completed, would drag Russia into Venezuela's ongoing dispute with Columbia, which has come under pressure from Caracas for its decision to host U.S. military forces. Chavez' decision follows a recent tour of Latin America by Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who is spearheading the Kremlin's bid to revive Russia's Cold War-era client state relationships in the Western Hemisphere.


August 17:

The Russian government's military offensive against the Republic of Georgia last year was closely coordinated with civilian hackers in the first synchronized attack of its kind, a new study has charged. "Many of the cyber attacks were so close in time to the corresponding military operations that there had to be close cooperation between people in the Russian military and the civilian cyber attackers," the report by the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit research organization, has said, according to Information Week. "When the cyber attacks began, they did not involve any reconnaissance or mapping state, but jumped directly to the sort of packets that were best suited to jamming the Web sites under attack. This indicates that the necessary reconnaissance and the writing of the attack scripts had to have been done in advance."


August 18:

Russia and the Czech Republic have become embroiled in an intelligence war following the expulsion of two suspected Russian spies from Prague. “This unfriendly act by the Czech side, which declared two of our diplomats persona non grata, could not be left without a response,” Reuters reports a Russian official as saying. “Two Czech embassy workers in Moscow were told to leave Russia.” Ties between the two countries have worsened considerably over the past two years, in large part due to the Czech Republic's planned participation in the deployment of U.S. missile defenses in Europe.


August 21:

The hijackers of a Russian cargo vessel have been brought to the Russian Federation, the Times of London reports. The Arctic Sea was boarded in Swedish waters by eight hijackers, four of them Estonians, two Latvians and two Russians. The vessel subsequently was intercepted 300 miles off the West African coast. The hijackers have been taken to Moscow's Lefortovo prison for questioning by the FSB.


August 25:

Amid ongoing unrest in the North Caucasus, Kremlin officials are focusing on the underlying reasons for extremism in the region - and what can be done about them. "There is social disorder, poverty, high unemployment [in the region]. All this is made worse by problems in ethnic and interfaith relations as well as by a critical level of subsidies from the federal budget," Nikolay Patrushev, the Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, has told a gathering of law enforcement officials in Krasnodar territory in comments carried by Interfax. "All this creates breeding ground for carrying out terrorist attacks and growing extremism." Countering this trend, Patrushev stressed in his comments, will require leadership from local officials, greater coordination among law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and additional federal funding.