November 17:
Experts believe the Kremlin may be trying to turn the tide of corruption scandals in its favor, after the latest allegation in the Far East saw auditors claiming $472 million in construction financing was misallocated. According to the New York Times, President Vladimir Putin has always hesitated to expel or prosecute high-level officials, and so the recent rash of corruption scandals raised suspicions about what has changed. The answer, argue several analysts, is that Putin now seeks to portray the battle against corruption as a Kremlin-led effort. They point to a recent special aired on a pro-Kremlin television station, which promised that “A tough, uncompromising battle with corruption has begun.” Other experts remain skeptical. “It cannot become an overall ideology,” argued well-known activist Alexei Navalny, “because Putin’s system is dependent on corruption—on corruption as a form of management and a guarantee of loyalty from officials... they will not kick out from under themselves the stool that they are standing on.”
Moldova’s President, Nicolae Timofti, has blocked an attempt by Moscow to increase its presence in the breakaway Moldovan region of Transdniester. The President, elected last March, rejected a proposal from Russia to open an official consulate in the rebel region, insisting that such a move will not happen before the Kremlin removes its 2,500 troops from the area. Reuters reports that Moldovan authorities fear allowing the consulate’s creation would lead to Russia recognizing the territory’s self-declared independence. The region split from Moldova after a brief war in 1992.
November 19:
Several of Russia’s most prominent activists and organizations vowed to boycott the new law requiring foreign-funded NGOs to register as foreign agents. The Kremlin defended the bill, which will take effect on the 21st, as a “necessary protection against foreign meddling in Russian political affairs,” but opposition members argued that the law is an attack on the credibility of the organizations, in order to make a government crackdown more palatable. According to the Associated Press, the organizations pledging to boycott the new law include the human rights watchdog Moscow Helsinki Group, as well as the vote monitoring group Golos, and another widely respected rights group, Memorial. Oleg Orlov, the head of Memorial, said the new law will allow Kremlin officials to carry out continuous audits and other inspections of foreign-funded groups. “They don’t even need to close an organization,” he said, because “they can effectively paralyze it with endless checks.”
November 21:
Social networking sites were flooded with messages heralding the end of Internet freedom in Russia after YouTube.com spent a brief time on the Kremlin’s internet blacklist. Officials rushed to correct the “error,” which a spokeswoman explained was the result of several clips on the site depicting scenes of suicide. The site was removed from the list within an hour, reports the Wall Street Journal, and the offensive content removed, but the incident did little to improve public opinion of the list, which was intended to ban access to sites showing child pornography or promoting suicide or illegal drug use.
November 22:
Russian officials will not pursue a criminal investigation into the alleged abduction of opposition leader Leonid Razvozzhayev, who disappeared from Kiev while seeking political asylum. The case will be dropped, reports the New York Times, because Razvozzhaev failed to “present any documents or material evidence confirming the crimes committed against him,” and because he refused to submit to a lie-detector test. Razvozzhayev’s lawyer pledged to continue their own inquiries into the incident, and may take their case to the European Court of Human Rights. Razvozzhaev maintains that he was held in a basement by Russian authorities for over a day, bound and subjected to psychological pressure, and forced to write and sign a ten page confession regarding plans to cause mass riots in an attempt to topple the government.
November 23:
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov voiced concerns over Turkey’s request to NATO for the deployment of Patriot missiles on its border with war-torn Syria, reports Russia's RIA Novosti. The Foreign Minister emphasized the need for direct dialogue in order to ease the tensions between Turkey and Syria, which have already seen Turkish troops firing over the border in retaliation for Syrian shelling. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted that the missiles would contribute to the de-escalation of the crisis, and are intended only as a defensive safeguard against missile attacks. The same missiles were deployed to Turkey in 1991 and 2003 during the two Gulf Wars to protect Turkey from Iraqi Scud missiles.