July 16:
Recent cuts to the Federal health budget carried out by the Kremlin have exacerbated Russia's already-difficult fight against HIV/AIDS. Citing Russian news reports and UN statistics, Paul Goble writes in his Window on Eurasia blog that "the share of new cases of HIV infection continue to grow far more rapidly in Russia than in most other countries." The figures are significant - and alarming. "In 2015, Russia had 11 percent more cases than it did a year earlier, 919,500 as compared to 824,000 in 2014," according to Goble. "Most countries saw rates of growth of five to eight percent or much less." Those statistics mean that Russia has "surpassed Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda" in terms of rate of infection, and can only be "compared favorably with countries like Nigeria which have a far larger number of people already infected and also a larger number of new cases."
The culprit, notes Goble, is the so-called "optimization" of the national health system implemented by the Kremlin on Vladimir Putin's watch, which has left the Russian government's fight against the disease dangerously underfunded. Thus, "only 37 percent of those the Russian government has identified as having HIV are receiving treatment." Moreover, he writes, "if one compares the number treated to those estimated to be infected but not registered as such with the authorities, the share getting medical help is only 28 percent."
July 17:
A former British spymaster has revealed that Russian spying in the United Kingdom is now at its highest point ever, surpassing the Soviet Union's clandestine efforts in England during the Cold War. London's Daily Mailcites John Bayliss, a former official at the Government Communications Headquarters, Britain's signals intelligence service, as saying that Russia's contemporary spy activities in England have expanded to proportions not seen even at the height of the Soviet-Western Cold War rivalry. According to Bayliss, Russia now has six times more active spies than England, which boasts one of the world's most formidable clandestine services.
July 18:
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has released an investigative report outlining how the Russian government for years ran a national doping system encompassing all of its competitive sports. In a demonstration of just how deep the scandal runs, the report describes how cheating athletes were aided by Russian intelligence agents from the country's state security service, the FSB. According to the Washington Post, WADA is now calling for a comprehensive ban on all Russian athletes in the upcoming Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. However, the agency lacks the power to impose one itself, and must defer to the judgment of the International Olympic Committee.
The Kremlin, for its part, is pushing back against the accusations. In a public statement issued in response to WADA's latest report, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the conclusions lacked substance and were highly political in nature. "Recent events and the tense atmosphere that has formed around international sport and the Olympic movement involuntarily recall the situation in the early 1980s," when many Western countries boycotted the Moscow Olympics over Russia's invasion of Afghanistan a year earlier. "Today, we see a dangerous return to this policy of letting politics interfere with sport," Putin said.
July 19:
Russia's main investigative body is suddenly under the gun. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the country's federal security service, or FSB, has opened a formal investigation into three officials of the country's Investigative Committee, a top legal body that serves as a rough analogue to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. The investigation, which represents an intensification of long-simmering rivalries within the Russian federal bureaucracy, follows allegations that the three individuals in question have ties to Russian organized criminal groups. All three have been placed under arrest by a Moscow court pending the outcome of the FSB's inquiry.
Russia's top economic official is taking a rosy view of the country's fiscal horizons. The Itar-TASS news agency reports Minister of Economic Development Alexei Ulyukayev as saying that the "real sector" of the Russian economy "is improving," and that the Russian government expects "GDP dynamics to become positive in the coming future." Ulyukayev made his comments to Japanese businessmen while on an official visit to Tokyo to drum up greater trade and economic cooperation between the two countries.
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