Russia Reform Monitor: No. 1763

January 3:

The New York Times reports that tensions over the continued presence of Russian troops in Transdniester have been heightened by the shooting of a Moldovan man at a military checkpoint. The Russian authorities who staff the checkpoint claim the man, an 18-year-old, was drunk and driving a car that didn’t belong to him, and was fired upon after he did not respond to an order to stop. Moldovan authorities, however, report a very different story: that the car was “’basically already stopped,’ since the peacekeepers had blocked the road with a barrier and one of the car’s tires was punctured.”

The resulting investigation has been handicapped by the fact that the weapon remains with Russian authorities, while the Moldovans have the bullet that killed the Moldovan man. Protestors gathered at the checkpoint following the incident to demand the removal of all checkpoints. The incident did nothing to aid negotiations in the Moldovan breakaway region, where a new president recently replaced the Kremlin-backed candidate who had held power in the area since 1991.


January 5:

Russia’s Central Election Commission chief Vladimir Churov has ignored calls for his resignation amid widespread accusation of voting fraud and manipulation. According to the Associated Press, Mr. Churov insisted that he would serve out the remaining four years of his term, unless otherwise directed by the nation's leaders. As for the evidence against him, Churov insisted that it was fabricated by the opposition. He claimed that his commission is investigating the alleged violations, but that the supposed footage that showed ballot stuffing was doctored. However, even a presidential commission for human rights backed the recent demands for Churov’s dismissal after the latest protest, stating that the accusations led to a “moral and political discrediting of the election system and the lower house of parliament, creating a real threat to the Russian state.”


January 6:

It will take at least a year-and-a-half to two years before Russia’s opposition can produce a candidate capable of challenging Vladimir Putin. That's the assessment from one of Russia's leading opposition figures. “Today everyone understands that whoever decides to compete with Putin in the March elections, including candidates who have not been registered, will lose even if the vote count will be the fairest ever,” RIA-Novosti has quotedfrom the blog of former Finance Minister-turned-opposition leader Alexei Kudrin. Kudrin's analysis is apt; the latest public poll places Putin’s closest challenger, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, at only 10 percent popularity. Kudrin has additionally cautioned against drastic actions ahead of approaching presidential elections. “An attempt to reform two out of three constitutional branches of power, the legislative and executive... at the same time is too risky for our country,” he wrote.


January 7:

In a rare departure from his typical pro-Kremlin stance, the leader of Russia’s Orthodox Church has urged the government to “make political changes” as a result of recent anti-government protests. “The main thing is for protests, which are properly expressed, to lead to a correction of the political course,” said Patriarch Kirill.According to Reuters, however, Kirill also warned against the other extreme, in which protestors risk being manipulated by opposition leaders seeking to seize power, as the communists did in 1917. “Then we were unable to preserve balance and wisdom,” he said. “We destroyed our country. Why did this happen? Because the fair protests of people are very easily manipulated by those political forces who are fighting for power.”


January 11:

Religious frictions in Tatarstan are escalating to new heights. Over the last five years, reports the Regnum news agency, ultra-conservative Wahhabi muslims have begun to act out against those Muslims who they believe do not live according to "true Islam." In particular, a growing trend is to view all property of such "kufr" as subject to seizure by "true" muslims - up to and including spouses. Upon returning from a business trip, for example, one man in Nizhnekamsk found that his wife had been kidnapped by the leader of a local madrassa, who viewed her existing marriage as void and sought to marry her to one of his fundamentalist "brothers." The situation was only resolved with the intervention of local authorities.