May 9:
Russia has marked the 67th anniversary of Victory Day with its annual parade of servicemen and nuclear-capable missiles through Red Square. "Sixty-seven years ago Nazism was crushed, a terrible and cynical force," Russian president Vladimir Putin told the assembled crowd from the Lenin Mausoleum, as 14,000 soldiers marched through the square and transport helicopters flew overhead. Though this year's parade was toned down from last year's commemoration, which involved 20,000 soldiers and warplane fly-overs, many opposition figures continue to criticize what they call "an element of propaganda." An editorial in the business daily Vedomosti has questioned the amount of money spent on the parade and its rehearsals, wondering “would it not be better to spend it on apartments for the veterans?”
May 10:
Russian authorities have announced that the country’s security agencies have uncovered a plot by Islamic militants targeting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Arms, ammunition, and explosives, including surface-to-air missiles and a flamethrower, were seized by Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee in the Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia. “Russia’s FSB was able to establish that the fighters planned to move the weapons to Sochi from 2012 to 2014 and use them to carry out terrorist acts before and during the Olympic Games,” authorities have confirmed in an official statement. The Caucasus Emirate, the same radical Islamist group that claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in January 2011 and the Moscow metro bombings in 2010, is believed to be behind the plot, Reuters reports.
May 11:
White House and Kremlin officials are working overtime to downplay Vladimir Putin’s recent decision to skip a meeting of the G-8 and a visit with President Obama at the Oval Office. The announcement, combined with Putin’s latest anti-Western rhetoric, suggests an end to the warmer relations seen during Medvedev’s presidency. Kremlin officials maintain Putin’s claim that the change of plans was made so he could “finish setting up his new government.” The G-8 meeting, the Associated Press reports, was moved from its scheduled location in Chicago (where a NATO summit will be held concurrently) to Camp David to appear more welcoming to Putin.
May 13:
Russian police have surprised many by allowing ten thousand people to gather in an unsanctioned protest led by well-known Russian novelists and poets in Moscow. According to the Huffington Post, the protestors managed to skirt the law, labeling the protest a “stroll” through the city to defend people’s right to gather without official permission. Demonstrators remained silent and carried no signs, even as one of the protest’s leaders explained that “The meaning of this stroll is to show that we didn’t like the way authorities treat us in the first days of Putin’s presidential term... He [Putin] can either change his ways or we will stay on the streets.”
May 14:
Although Vladimir Putin will be on his first foreign visit as President to Belarus while the G-8 meets in the United States, the Kremlin still plans to send a representative to the summit. Kommersant reports that Russia’s envoy will likely be Zamir Kabulov, Putin’s special representative on Afghanistan and head of the Foreign Ministry’s Second Asian Department. Despite the reassurance, reports RIA Novosti, the planned NATO-Russia meeting on the sidelines of the organization’s summit was cancelled. President Obama’s next scheduled meeting with Putin is at the G20 summit in Mexico in June.
May 17:
The Kremlin’s hopes that Putin’s inauguration would slow capital flight have been disappointed. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Russia-focused equity funds recorded $251 million worth of outflows at the beginning of May, compared to the $127 million China lost and $148 million that left India. Even more discouraging, $42 billion of capital has left the country in the first four months of 2012, over half of the total $80.5 billion lost across all of 2011. Experts blame the capital flight on the failure of the Kremlin to calm the country’s political unrest. “Investors had expected the protests to end with the presidential elections,” noted one analyst, “and even though they are at a low level, the glowing embers keep the risk they will turn into a raging inferno at some point.”
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