February 17:
Yelena Baturina, Russia's richest woman, is reportedly under investigation for fraud and embezzlement to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, police officials armed with machine guns have raided offices owned by Baturina, who is suspected of embezzling over $400 million from the Bank of Moscow. Baturina has insisted that the claims are false, and that the investigation has been fabricated to put pressure on her family. Baturina's husband, former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, was sacked last fall by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev following a high-profile political spat with the Kremlin.
February 18:
A top Russian law enforcement official has proposed a series of controversial new measures intended to better track migrant workers in Russia. According to the Agence France Presse, the plan - floated by Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia's newly-formed Investigative Committee - involves mandatory fingerprinting and DNA registration. In a recent press conference, Bastrykin justified such draconian measures on the grounds that “foreign nationals” were responsible for almost 49,000 crimes in Russia last year.
The proposals have generated outrage from rights groups, which have pointed out that the crime figure cited by Bastrykin represents less than two percent of the total national crime rate in Russia. According to them, Russian officials are essentially attempting to blame migrant workers for hate crimes that are being committed against them.
Russian Finance Minister Alexander Kudrin has suggested that economic growth and reform will not be possible without significant political change. The New York Times cites Kudrin, who is also deputy prime minister, as stating that the coming 2012 presidential elections must be “just and fair,” in order to provide “the mandate of trust that is necessary to undertake economic reforms.” Mr. Kudrin blamed the continuing decline of foreign investment on Russia’s weak management systems, including its government. Though a close associate to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Kudrin has made efforts of late to distance himself from Putin's brand of government, declaring a year ago that he no longer wished to be associated with the ruling United Russia party.
February 20:
Writing in the Washington Post, four of Russia's leading opposition leaders have decried the current state of Russian politics, and admonished the West for “undermining” the efforts of their country's democratic opposition. “We urge Western leaders to discontinue their kisses-and-hugs ‘Realpolitik,’ which has failed, and to stop flirting with Russian rulers,” write Mikhail Kasyanov, Vladimir Milov, Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov. “[This] behavior that has not brought any benefits to the West and produces in Russia an impression that Putin’s system is a decent one, like any other in the democratic world.”
Nor, according to the authors, are current Russian president Dmitry Medvedev's promises of democratic reform believable. Recent times, they note, were marked by “increasingly restricted and falsified elections; war against Georgia; eased constraints on the use of armed forces abroad; the torture and death in custody of Sergei Magnitsky;... lawlessness and corruption; and continued oppression of political opponents and dissent.” The West, they conclude, should by now have gotten the measure of the men who run the Kremlin: “The question was asked at Davos in 2000 who Putin really is. It should be clear now to everyone who Putin and Medvedev are.”
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