http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?ID=10456
Unassailable Putin to stay the course More than anything, the Russian president's lengthy annual press conference last week highlighted the meekness of domestic and international forces in the face of a tough administration quick to sacrifice civil liberties for fast-track reforms designed to strengthen the federal government. By Nabi Abdullaev for ISN Security Watch (28/12/04) Some 700 journalists attended last Thursday's annual press conference hosted by President Vladimir Putin, and unlike the four previous ones, it was not a general recount of the year's achievements and future goals. Instead, it was a three-hour collective psychotherapy session conducted by the president - an immensely influential figure with whom the Russian people still look to for a better future, even as fatigue and disappointment with the lack of economic progress, the ineptness of security structures, a corrupt officialdom, and collapsing civil liberties begin to overwhelm the nation. Putin's answers to uncomfortable and challenging questions posed by journalists were, without exception, successfully executed attempts to reassure an edgy public. Putin repeatedly stressed that the ongoing political, administrative, and social reforms - such as the state's controversial and surely underhanded takeover of Yuganskneftegaz, the core production unit of the privately owned Yukos oil giant - have been executed in accordance with the law and for the good of the public. Concerning foreign policy, the president chose to focus on contradictions, slamming the West for using double standards to foment velvet revolutions in former Soviet republics - such as Georgia and Ukraine - but with a dose of caution to avoid overtly antagonizing Washington. Surprisingly, not one of the 51 questions posed by journalists at the Kremlin conference related to the September Beslan hostage-taking tragedy or the armed conflict in Chechnya - the most tragic event in Russia this year and the largest threat to Russia's security, respectively. The interference card European observers strongly criticized Moscow's overt intervention in presidential elections in Ukraine, Georgia's separatist republic of Abkhazia, and Chechnya, where the Kremlin made its influence felt in an attempt to ensure that incumbent regimes would stay in power to avoid opposition victories that would likely herald Kremlin-unfriendly regime changes. During the press conference, Putin did not attempt to justify Moscow's intervention in those regions, but focused on criticizing the West, the European Union, and particularly, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who had recently opined "Russia without Ukraine is better than Russia with Ukraine". After churning out figures aimed at indicating Poland's poor economic progress during the 1990s, Putin accused the West of pursuing a foreign policy designed to isolate Russia, and of "establishing elements [in Chechnya] that would destabilize the Russian Federation". Moscow has long been making overtures that the Chechen conflict is propelled to some degree by forces and institutions abroad, including in the West, though those institutions have never been specifically named. In Ukraine, Putin personally and very publicly voiced his support for Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, the hand-picked heir of outgoing Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. Despite his blatant interference in Ukrainian elections, Putin last week denounced what he called "dangerous attempts to solve political issues through non-legitimate means", referring to the so-called Orange Revolution in which opposition supporters held mass public protests in Ukraine, and the Rose Revolution in Georgia last year, which brought a pro-Western candidate to power there. Denying the possibility of genuine public protest in Georgia and Ukraine, Putin stressed that the two revolutions "were planned somewhere", and particularly noted that US financier and philanthropist George Soros was bankrolling the salaries of the senior Georgian officials. The Russian president unleashed much of his wrath for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for its refusal to recognize the results of the runoff presidential vote in Ukraine in November and to endorse presidential elections in Chechnya in August, while being willing to accept election results in Afghanistan - where a US-backed candidate won - and in Kosovo, and to participate in organizing elections in volatile Iraq. Nonetheless, Putin said he was satisfied with US-Russian relations, in which both partners were driven by national interests, such as energy cooperation and the "war on terror" - rather than "momentous, semi-scandalous… tactical issues". Putin also managed a few curt remarks to some foreign journalists, telling a Japanese reporter that Moscow had no plans to give up any of the disputed Kuril islands, and telling a Greek reporter why Russia would vote pro-Turk on UN issues related to Cyprus, pointing to Turkey's interests in the Russia economy. Yuganskneftegaz deal was `legal' Twice during the press conference Putin returned to the scandalous takeover by state-run Rosneft of the core production unit of the Yukos oil empire of imprisoned tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Earlier in the day, Rosneft had announced its acquisition of the Baikal Finance Group, a mysterious shell company that grabbed Yuganskneftegaz at an auction just over a week ago for a bid of US$9.4 billion. Putin defended the deal, saying it had been achieved by "market methods". In an apparent attempt to change public opinion about the deal, which had already been influenced by harsh criticism from many liberal and foreign commentators, Putin recalled the heavily rigged auctions that took place under former president Boris Yeltsin, when multibillion dollar oil assets were privatized for a symbolic sums by those who later emerged as oil oligarchs, including Khodorkovsky himself. As for the recent injunction by a US court barring state-owned Gazprom from participating in the Yuganskneftegaz auction, Putin blamed the court for incompetence rather than bias, saying that the US judge likely did not even know where Russia was located and questioning his knowledge of basic international law. Speaking about the corrupt officialdom, Putin said the state must withdraw from those spheres in which its presence was groundless - apparently not referring to oil, for which the state has now become the second largest producer after the privately owned Lukoil. Since July, Rosneft has been headed by Putin's top adviser and member of the presidential administration, Igor Sechin. No domestic policy problems, say Putin Putin responded rather casually to the topic of freedom of the press, which many in Russia believe is being seriously jeopardized by the panoply of anti-terrorist laws that were submitted to Duma by the so-called siloviki - representatives of the law enforcement, military, and security community - after the Beslan hostage crisis in September. The president used an anecdote from an Italian movie to compare the relationship between the state and the media: "a decent girl must resist, while a true man must keep insisting." What should bother the government, Putin said, was securing the economic independence of the media - a rather bizarre statement to make after a state-orchestrated financial attack put an end to the existence of two of the country's major independent television channels, NTV and TV6. It was also a strange statement to make at a time when Russian courts are routinely issuing rulings in defamation cases that threaten the mere existence of many newspapers. As for scrapping the popular election of governors - which was proposed by Putin shortly after the Beslan tragedy as a measure to increase the accountability of the regional bosses and adopted into a law by the Russian parliament earlier in December - the president denied that the move was an assault on democracy. Since regional parliaments would be endorsing candidates hand-picked by the president, their role as bodies of representative democracy would increase dramatically, he claimed. But he carefully omitted any mention of the law's provision that regional parliaments would be dismissed if they declined presidential candidates three consecutive times - hardly a measure strengthening the regional legislatures. Putin also defended the highly unpopular initiative to replace in-kind social benefits to the needy with cash payments and to shift the full burden of paying for communal facilities to the end user. The president said those innovations, which will come into force in the new year, were a necessity for the state, which has been pumping money into social services only to have it embezzled or misused by corrupt officials. That response was viewed by many observers as a highly inappropriate one coming from a leader portraying himself as a tough administrator. Trends locked in place Putin's longest appearance before the press has shed further light on the trends Russian foreign and domestic politics will likely follow in the future: further alienation from Europe on issues related to human rights and civil liberties, while pressing European partners into cooperation and engagement by using trade as a major tool; securing cooperation with the US in the "war on terror"; further boosting the state's role in the oil market, including through ownership of production units; the state's withdrawal from socially loaded and problematic sectors like communal facilities; continuing lack of confidence in genuine civil society forces, including independent media, and replacing them with representative but dirigible bodies; and strengthening the state's grip on regional elites. Most of the trends are detrimental to the development of democracy and liberal values in Russia, but the rather meek internal and external responses to the increasingly controversial actions of the Russian government throughout the year have demonstrated that there are no forces - either domestic or international - that can effectively reverse these trends. Nabi Abdullaev is ISN Security Watch's correspondent in Moscow. He also works for the Moscow Times. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
