December 25:
A Reuters analysis suggests that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin might be losing touch with popular opinion in Russia in the wake of recent protests. “They do not understand,” one Kremlin source tells the news agency, referring to Putin and his protege, President Dmitry Medvedev. “One is weak and the other does not want to listen, though people have tried to explain the seriousness of the situation.” Even Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin's powerful deputy chief of staff, has suggested that the prime minister erred in his treatment of the country’s protestors. “The best part of our society, or rather the most productive part, is demanding respect. You cannot simply swipe away their opinions in an arrogant way.”
Signs of dissent increasingly run deep. Alexei Kudrin, a former Finance Minister and staunch Putin supporter, joined the most recent protest in Moscow, and cautioned that Russia “needed much more serious political reforms to ensure a stable development.” Another source cited by Reuters stated that even though Putin recognizes that he is losing his long-held popularity, he hopes to simply ride out the protests.
December 27:
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has appointed Vladislav Surkov as the new deputy prime minister. Under President Putin, UPI reports, Surkov was responsible for “domestic politics in the Kremlin,” which included the introduction of new restrictions on state media and opposition political groups, as well as the promotion of the pro-Kremlin youth movement "Nashi." Just days ago, however, Surkov questioned Vladimir Putin’s treatment of ongoing anti-government protests. Surkov’s new post will primarily focus on “modernization issues.”
December 28:
A new analysis of Russia’s disputed parliamentary elections suggests that as many as 14 million of 65.7 million votes cast may have been fraudulent. The analysis, carried out by the Wall Street Journal, found that in precincts which reported voter turnouts above the national average of 60.2 percent (which included thousands that reported 100 percent turnout), the ruling United Russia party saw dramatically higher levels of support. Only 0.3 percent of the districts in which United Russia took over 80 percent of the vote reported voter turnout below 50 percent. Although the numbers in and of themselves are not proof of voting fraud, they represent anomalies that many experts have struggled to explain. If estimates of 14 million falsified votes are accurate, United Russia would most likely still have finished with the highest vote totals, but would have fallen far short of preserving its majority.
December 30:
Gazprom’s efforts to build a second natural gas pipeline to bypass Ukraine have gotten a major shot in the arm with the acquisition of permits for undersea construction in Turkish national waters. The South Stream pipeline,according to UPI, will run from Russia to Bulgaria under Turkey's Black Sea territory, and allow the Kremlin to avoid granting price concessions to Ukraine, the traditional conduit for its energy exports to Europe. Once operational, the capacity of South Stream, when combined with the already-existing Nord Stream pipeline, would equal the amount that Gazprom currently ships through Ukraine. It would additionally discourage competing pipeline construction projects, including the EU-backed Nabucco pipeline, which is inteded to ship natural gas to Europe from the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey.
January 1:
An editorial by the New York Times suggests that Russia’s recent protests may have nudged the country onto a new, more pluralistic trajectory. “It has been so long since Russians went out in the streets in large numbers demanding political change,” writes the paper's Ellen Barry, “that the crowd—an estimated 50,000 people, calmly watched over by the police—resembled a natural wonder, like the aurora borealis.” She suggested that the protests represented the rise of the “critical mass of middle-class professionals,” a group that was neither “wild-eyed nor downtrodden.” “Russian leaders had no formula for dealing with protestors whose demands cannot be addressed with money,” Barry continued, “because that kind of crowd has not existed here, as a rule.” The author notes that after derisive initial responses, Vladimir Putin and his allies suddenly have begun to speak about the protestors “with a modicum of respect,” suggesting that “these latest protests have marked a change in the relationship between the Kremlin and crowds.” What that change is, Barry concludes, still remains unclear, but could resemble a more European-style democracy.
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