VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
Nothing could be more transparent than Vladimir Putin's project to return to the Kremlin. President Medvedev, the protégé who has lived up handsomely to every forecast that he would be his mentor's mouthpiece, submitted a Bill to the Duma yesterday to extend the President's term from four to six years, while still allowing for two consecutive terms. The legislative process has been unaccountably accelerated, so that an idea first floated in a speech last week could be law by Friday, with all three parliamentary readings compressed into one day.
Thank goodness, they might be thinking at the US State Department and the British Foreign Office, for the financial crisis. Were it not for the ever-blacker news about the Western world's economy, another scandal would be vying for the headlines - and one where the blame would be easier to apportion. It concerns our two countries' relations with Russia and the truth about this summer's Georgia-Russia war.
Very few Europeans know the EU has a "security strategy". Adopted five years ago, the document contains threat assessments ranging from terrorism to nuclear proliferation and organised crime. There are also passages about the need for the EU's neighbours to be well-governed so that problems don't spill over into the area, but nothing very specific.
Vladimir Putin must be given a great deal of credit for his dedication to the rule of law. He has gone to considerable trouble to have his legal fixer, Dmitry Medvedev, come up with the brilliant idea of amending the Russian constitution so the presidency could be extended from four to six years. Harvard Law School, eat your heart out! The amendment concept was introduced during President Medvedev's first state-of-the-nation speech last week.
It didn't take long for Russia to lay down a cold-war-tinged challenge for President-elect Barack Obama. One day after the election, the Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, declared that he would put short-range missiles on Russia's border near Poland if the next American leader follows through on President Bush's plans to build a missile defense system in Europe.
Back in August, the conductor Valery Gergiev took the stage in Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, and denounced its "monstrous bombardment" by Georgia. Speaking both in Russian and, pointedly for the outside world, in English, he said Georgia had carried out a "huge act of aggression" and praised Russia as a savior. Then Mr. Gergiev - perhaps the world's most famous Ossetian - led the Kirov Orchestra of St. Petersburg in what was billed as a memorial concert for the dead in the five-day battle between the two countries.
If the two men who run Russia want to be seen by the world as democrats and not dictators, they are not doing a good job. On Wednesday, President Dmitri Medvedev announced his intention to amend the Yeltsin-era constitution to extend the presidential term to six years from four, igniting immediate speculation that the move would allow his mentor, Vladimir Putin, to return to the Kremlin for up to 12 years. The term of the Duma, Russia's parliament, would be lengthened as well.
Still Russia's dominant politician, Vladimir Putin can only relish the prospect of a new bout of Russian-US rivalry with American leader-in-waiting Barack Obama, say analysts.
W „Pierwszym kręgu" Sołżenicyna jest scena rozmowy dwóch zeków - Bobynina i Gerasymowicza - o „Rosji, która odchodzi". Ten ostatni wymienia charakterystyczne dla tego kraju typy ludzkie, które zostały zlikwidowane po przejęciu władzy przez komunistów. Konserwatyści, działacze państwowi, domorośli teologowie, raskolnicy, pątnicy z brodą po pas, chłopi powożący trojkami, zuchowaci kozacy i wolni włóczędzy.
There were elaborate explanations yesterday as to why the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, had chosen to greet the election of a liberal to the White House by deploying nuclear missiles in its western enclave of Kaliningrad. Russia, we were told, was laying down a marker. It was saying: you can not ignore us. Or Medvedev was testing a greenhorn leader to see how he would react. There was every explanation except the obvious one: cause and effect.
London; Washington; and Hanover, N.H - When war erupted in August between Russia and Georgia, it was the European Union (EU) president who achieved a cease-fire agreement. Was this just a lucky break for the EU, or a sign of Europe's strength?
Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, broke a taboo on constitutional change yesterday when he asked parliament to extend the presidential term from four to six years - a move that could pave the way for Vladimir Putin to return as head of state for a further 12 years.
Barack Obama's election victory prompted an impressive outpouring of goodwill from around the world yesterday -- but also the first hints of the testing that his running mate, Joseph R. Biden Jr., predicted. Kenya declared a national holiday, Britain's largest-circulation newspaper called Mr. Obama's victory "one giant leap for mankind" and even Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez proposed "new relations between our countries." Then came a Bronx cheer from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who delivered a speech harshly attacking the United States and reiterating threats to deploy new missile systems within range of U.S. NATO allies. It would be up to Mr. Obama, Mr. Medvedev suggested with a typical absence of subtlety, to "make a choice in favor of full-fledged relations with Russia."
An article in the pro-Kremlin Izvestia newspaper last week pointed smugly at Americans' purported latent racism, noting the 70th anniversary of Orson Welles' reading of War of the Worlds on the radio. "If on November 4 a black man gets into the White House, it will be no less a miracle than an alien landing on earth."
Two months ago, the United States. and Europe were jolted by a revived Russia. Flush with energy money, Moscow announced that it was back as a world power. Georgia was defeated, Ukraine was fearful, the Eastern Europeans were nervous, and the United States and Western Europeans argued over what to do. Was a new cold war imminent? They needn't have worried.
Russia's president Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday became the first world leader to throw down a gauntlet to US president-elect Barack Obama, declaring that the Kremlin would station missiles in the tiny Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Poland, in response to US plans for an anti-missile system in Eastern Europe.
The friend giving me a ride swapped just a couple of grim words with his wife on his cell phone, then turned to me. "They fired her," he said sadly. "There go our plans." The wife, who had enjoyed a cushy bank job, then joined the tens of thousands of Russia's new middle class who have found themselves newly unemployed.
Despite Russia's plunging stock markets, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, like other authoritarian capitalists in China and Venezuela, has at least been comforted by the thought that the financial crisis is a repudiation of the West's brand of free-market capitalism, and a golden opportunity for his country to shine. "Faith in the United States as the leader of the free world and the market economy and trust in Wall Street has been undermined forever," gloated Putin recently. Now, he predicted, Russia, China and India would be the "locomotives of world economic growth."
After the west heaped blame on Russia for the conflict, it ignores new evidence of Georgia's crimes of aggression. So now they tell us. Two months after the brief but bloody war in the Caucasus which was overwhelmingly blamed on Russia by western politicians and media at the time, a serious investigation by the BBC has uncovered a very different story.
From the vantage of a Moscow living room this week, it was easy to believe that the world had been magically beamed back to the worst days of 1962. On Monday, the state-controlled TV stations eagerly showed us a military delegation visiting Cuba in a mission, the first of its kind since Soviet times, to "exchange experience in organizing tactical air defence and in training officers," as the Kremlin put it.
