PRESIDENT OBAMA is preparing to reach out once again to Russian ruler Vladimir Putin in the hope of striking a new agreement to reduce nuclear arms. The president mentioned the initiative in hisState of the Union address; according to a senior Russian legislator, national security adviser Thomas Donilon will soon travel to Moscow with a letter outlining Mr. Obama’s ideas. The reduction of nuclear stockpiles is a top priority of this president and a worthy one. But what’s striking about Mr. Obama’s strategy is its seeming detachment from the reality of how Mr. Putin has governed Russiasince his return to the presidency last year.
Mr. Obama’s first nuclear-arms agreement with Mr. Putin, in 2010, came about in the context of a warming of U.S.-Russian relations. The new proposal will hit Moscow in the middle of a Putin-directed campaign against both his domestic political opposition and the United States, which in his mind are linked. In recent months Mr. Putin has expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development, placed new restrictions on local nonprofit organizations receiving foreign funds, bumped U.S.-funded Radio Liberty from domestic airwaves and overseen a propaganda campaign that accuses the United States of orchestrating anti-government demonstrations.
The regime, meanwhile, has steadily escalated a campaign against the leaders of the peaceful, pro-democracy demonstrations that erupted in Russia in late 2011. For Russians, the cynical tactics are bone-wearyingly familiar: Transparently trumped-up criminal cases are being brought against the activists, with the promise of lengthy prison terms. Alexei Navalny, the founder of an anti-corruption organization, has himself been charged with corruption. Last week leftist firebrand Sergei Udaltsovwas placed under house arrest ahead of his upcoming trial on charges of organizing an anti-Putin rally in May.
Some Russian analysts believe that the regime is well on its way to crushing the opposition movement, which attracted the support of much of the urban middle class. Others regard the repression as the death spasms of an exhausted autocracy. “There are classical criteria of a dying regime and its key signs are evident in Russia,” Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow office wrote recently, citing “the Kremlin’s inability either to preserve the status quo or begin changes.” Either side might be right, though our bet is with Ms. Shevtsova.
What’s strange is that the Obama administration would seek to undertake a major new piece of business with Mr. Putin without regard for this ugly climate. New U.S.-Russian nuclear warhead reductions, while welcome, are hardly urgent: The big challenges of nuclear weapons lie elsewhere in the world. At the same time, the survival of a pro-democracy movement in Russia is an important and pressing U.S. interest, just as Mr. Putin’s growing hostility to the United States threatens U.S. initiatives in the Middle East and elsewhere. Maybe offering Mr. Putin a new nuclear weapons deal is the best way to counter his noxious policies — but it is hard to see how.
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Russian officials have opened several spurious investigations into Navalny, designed to publicly discredit him. His family and friends are also being investigated, a guilt-by-association trick of the Soviet era. Since Navalny publicly described the ruling clique as the “party of crooks and thieves,” he has become a key figure in the opposition and a leader in exposing government corruption. He signaled interest in running for president in 2018, and his name recognition among Russians has soared from 6 percent to 37 percent, according to a recent Levada Center poll, leading the Kremlin to view him as a threat. If he is found guilty — Putin’s critics are rarely acquitted — he would be disqualified from public office.
That Navalny’s fate is sealed seems clear from the words of Vladimir Markin, a spokesman of the Russian Investigative Committee, which has launched inquiries against Navalny. Markin told the newspaper Izvestia: “The suspect is doing his best to draw attention to himself; one could even say he is teasing the authorities. So interest in his past grew, and the process of bringing him out in the open naturally sped up.”
Essentially, Markin acknowledged that the case is a show trial. Meanwhile, Markin’s boss, Alexander Bastrykin, who last year allegedly threatened to kill a journalist with the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, has never been investigated.
Since 1992, 54 journalists have been killed in Russia, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. And since he returned to the presidency in May, Putin has overseen the worst crackdown on human rights in Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
In the latest edition of its annual human rights report, the State Department listed numerous examples of infringement of universal human rights, including “laws that impose harsh fines for unsanctioned meetings”; the practice of identifying nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, as “foreign agents” if they engage in “political activity” while receiving foreign funding; suspending the licenses of NGOsthat have U.S. citizens as members or receive U.S. support and “pose a threat to Russian interests”;recriminalizing libel; the blocking of Web sites without a court order; and significantly expanding the definition of treason. “Skewed” elections in Putin’s favor and lack of due process in the courts were also noted.
More than a dozen Russians are in jail or under house arrest, awaiting trial for their alleged roles in the Bolotnaya Square protests last May; two — Konstantin Lebedev and Maksim Luzyanin — have been sentenced to penal colonies for 2½ years and 4½ years, respectively, for their alleged roles. Former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky has languished in prison for nearly a decade. An opposition activist seeking asylum in Ukraine, Leonid Razvozzhayev, was kidnapped in October by Russian agents and tortured into a confession; he remains in jail on trumped-up charges. Hundreds of NGOs have been raided across Russia in recent weeks; on occasion, a camera crew from Kremlin-friendly NTV was present to capture material used to condemn these groups as foreign agents. One group in Kostroma is being investigated because it hosted a round-table with a representative from the U.S. Embassy. Another, the respected election monitor Golos, has been fined for failing to register as a foreign agent.
Meanwhile, Kremlin officials, including Putin, regularly spew anti-American invective. And the State Duma’s ugly response last year to the Sergei Magnitsky Act, which banned visas for and froze assets of Russian officials involved in gross human rights abuses, was to bar the adoption of Russian orphans by U.S. families.
Aside from a State Department spokeswoman’s appropriate description of the NGO raids last month as a “witch hunt,” the Obama administration has voiced virtually no concerns about the crackdown — even when the victims are U.S. organizations or Russians who openly admire American freedoms. National security adviser Tom Donilon said nothing publicly about the human rights situation during his recent visit to Moscow. Instead, his trip seemed to signal U.S. eagerness to refocus relations on security and economic issues. Donilon delivered a letter from President Obama to the Russian president that Putin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov said “is written in a constructive tone and has a number of proposals promoting bilateral dialogue and cooperation.”
This is no time for business as usual. Instead, Washington needs to emphasize the deterioration in Russia’s human rights situation by pushing back against the crackdown and focusing attention on the regime’s corrupt, authoritarian nature while using the Magnitsky Act whenever appropriate. Continued cooperation on Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan and counterterrorism is important — but not at the expense of ignoring the internal situation in Russia.
Obama and Putin are scheduled to meet at summits in June and September. By then, Navalny may well be sitting in prison. With repression in Russia deepening by the day, it will become increasingly untenable for Obama to justify looking the other way.
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It’s worth exploring this twisted logic. It explains why Russia continues to support and supply Assad even as he systematically uses artillery, Scud missiles and, most likely, deadly sarin gas against his own people, but it also shows why Russia and the United States should never become full partners in counterterrorism, as Putin proposed last week.
Let’s look first at the wars in Syria and Chechnya — which, in fact, have quite a lot in common. In both countries, decades of repression prompted a popular rebellion with democratic goals. In both, the old regime refused to accept a new order. Instead, the predominantly secular independence movement of Chechnya, like the predominantly secular democracy movement of Syria, was subject to a massive military onslaught that made no distinctions among peaceful protesters, militants and innocent bystanders.
Putin oversaw the second Russian invasion of Chechyna in 1999, after the failure of an earlier campaign. The Chechen capital of Grozny, like the Syrian cities of Homs and Aleppo, was targeted indiscriminately by tanks and artillery and reduced to rubble. Thousands of suspected Chechen militants were abducted, tortured and killed. Villages where rebels were suspected to be operating were sealed off and subjected to sweeps in which all men and many boys were taken away. Though an accurate death toll has never been established, tens of thousands were killed.
The first leader of independent Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudayev , was so secularized that, according to the Economist magazine, he was not sure how many times a day Muslims pray. Another, Aslan Maskhadov, won a democratic election in 1997 with 59 percent of the vote, compared with 23 percent for an Islamist opponent. Both were assassinated by Russia. As the relentless offensive continued, the Chechen resistance, like that of Syria, radicalized. Islamic extremists filtered into the country from elsewhere and began building their own organizations.
Like Assad, Putin from the beginning of the war had claimed that the only resistance was terrorist. His brutality eventually made his propaganda mostly true; since 2002, attacks by extremist Chechens have haunted the North Caucasus as well as Moscow. Putin has responded to those with an equally heavy hand. When Chechens seized a Moscow theater in 2002, security forces killed 130 hostages by flooding the facility with gas. When a middle school in Beslan, North Ossetia, was taken over by another terrorist cell in 2004, security forces stormed it with heavy weapons; more than 330 hostages died, most of them children.
As I drove down highways until recently off-limits, my license plate identifiable as a foreign reporter’s, highway police would pull me over and demand to know who had given me permission.
“Your foreign minister,” I would say, handing them the treaty.
Sometimes they’d puzzle over the document, call a superior and wave me on. Sometimes they’d force me to turn back. Treaty or no, they knew what they knew: no foreigners allowed.
Over the following years, ingrained suspicions and deference to authority began to fade. Russians who had never before met a foreigner ceased to marvel at the novelty. People who would not have dared criticize those in power, at least beyond their kitchen walls, thought nothing of loud griping.
Now, says Tanya Lokshina, fear is returning. “It’s becoming a different country as we speak,” she told me during a recent visit to Washington.
To illustrate the point, Lokshina, deputy director of the Russia office of Human Rights Watch, described a recent trip to a region in Siberia. She was conducting research with a colleague on the paucity of palliative care in Russia, not your usual human rights subject, and her trip was actually a good-news mission: The region is an exception, a pioneer in offering humane care.
“So we weren’t worried,” Lokshina recalled. “It was a positive story, and not politically sensitive.”
Local bureaucrats at the Ministry of Health learned of their visit and summoned them. “Where was our permission to be in Siberia?” they demanded to know, as Lokshina recalled. “Where was our official permit to interview? Who invited us? Was George Soros involved?”
In years of dangerous human rights research in the war-torn Caucasus, Lokshina said, she’d never been questioned more intensively. The doctors they’d still hoped to interview canceled appointments, and those they’d already seen got into trouble. “What were you thinking, talking to foreign agents?” the doctors were asked.
The suddenly chilled atmosphere is precisely what Putin has been seeking since he reclaimed the presidency in May, after a four-year hiatus as prime minister. He has had his compliant parliamentredefine “treason” so vaguely that pretty much anyone who speaks to a foreigner or foreign organization will be nervous. “I’m liable just by job description,” Lokshina said. “I literally don’t have to do anything.”
Putin required any organization that takes foreign funds, which means most human rights groups, to declare itself a “foreign agent,” which to Russian ears sounds synonymous with “spy.” He expelled theU.S. Agency for International Development. Both the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute (IRI), which help political parties learn to function in democracies, have had to pull staff out after two decades in Moscow, IRI just last week.
Putin also set out to make examples of those who defy him. An independent-minded legislator was drummed out of the Duma. An opposition leader, Sergei Udaltsov, was charged with plotting mass disorder, and his associate was kidnapped from neighboring Ukraine and tossed into jail. The ludicrous persecution of the Pussy Riot musicians has been well documented, but 17 other protesters are being prosecuted, with one already sentenced to 4 ½ years. A daring opposition blogger, Alexei Navalny, and his brother are threatened with prison on byzantine, far-fetched allegations of bribery and fraud.
The phoniness of the case is the point: No one is beyond Putin’s reach, and no one will be protected by judges, the law — or innocence. Just as in his first term he broke one of the richest industrialists, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, to tame every other oligarch, so the prosecution of Russia’s best-known and most daring leaders cows everyone else, down to health-ministry bureaucrats in Siberia (and their brothers).
Putin is seeking to instill this fear because of his own. Large protests a year ago stunned him. “He’s frightened,” said Lokshina. “He wants to go back to 2007, when he was certain of stability and his popularity.”
Lokshina says that she doesn’t believe he will succeed. “It is a different society, and he cannot turn back the clock.”
But she also admits to being struck at how quickly self-censorship can regrow and flower even beyond what’s intended. When high-ranking officials in Moscow learned of her Siberia experience, one said, “This is not what we had in mind,” and Lokshina said she believes that.
“When you create repressive legislation, it acquires a life of its own,” she said. “It is easy to start, and almost impossible to stop.”
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IN TOURING Europe this week, President Obama has portrayed Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a ruler with whom he can build a “constructive, cooperative relationship that moves us out of a Cold War mind-set.” It’s a blinkered view that willfully ignores the Russian president’s behavior.
As Mr. Obama sees it, Mr. Putin is a plausible partner for a major new reduction of nuclear arsenals, including both strategic and tactical weapons; he is ready to “further deepen our economic and commercial relationships.” True, the two presidents have “differing perspectives” on Syria, but the Kremlin leader Mr. Obama describes shares his vision of how the Syrian war should end and over time can probably be persuaded on the tactics.
Most of all, Mr. Obama’s Putin is a leader whose domestic policies are irrelevant to his relations with the United States, his willingness or ability to strike all those deals or the American mission, extolled by Mr. Obama in Berlin on Wednesday, of “advancing the values we believe in.” Neither in that speech nor in his joint public appearance with Mr. Putin on Monday did Mr. Obama make any reference to Russian politics or human rights.
This is a vision entirely at odds with Mr. Putin’s record since he returned to the office of president last year. In an attempt to suppress swelling protests against his rigged reelection and the massively corrupt autocracy he presides over, Mr. Putin has launched what both Russian and Western human rights groups describe as the most intense and pervasive campaign of political repression since the downfall of the Soviet Union. Not just opposition leaders but also former senior Kremlin officials have been prosecuted or driven into exile; independent civic and human rights groups are being systematically stripped of funding and legal protection.
Having lost the support of the urban middle class in cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, Mr. Putin has been fortifying his base among Russia’s nationalists and Orthodox Christians. That means basing his foreign policy on anti-Americanism. U.S. aid programs have been shut down and Americans banned from adopting Russian children. An intense propaganda campaign is being waged by government-backed media, one of which recently claimed that the Obama administration has secretly allied with al-Qaeda. More substantively, Mr. Putin has devoted himself to thwarting the Western goal of regime change in Syria, a stance that serves his political goals at home as much as it does in the Middle East.
Unless and until President Bashar al-Assad loses Syria’s civil war — something Russia is trying to prevent with massive supplies of weapons — Mr. Putin will not alter this stance. Nor is he likely to seriously engage with Mr. Obama on the proposed reductions of nuclear weapons. Instead, he will use the issue to demand a dismantling of NATO’s missile defense architecture in Europe. Any serious progress on economic and commercial issues would require the Kremlin to purge corrupt bureaucrats and end its shakedowns of foreign firms — yet there, too, Mr. Putin is headed in the opposite direction.
It makes sense to maintain lines of communication with the Russian leader. But a strategy of silence on human rights in hope of cutting deals is neither realistic nor pragmatic. In fact, it is starry-eyed in its stubborn optimism, in spite of all the evidence, that bargains in keeping with U.S. interests remain likely.
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Newscom
In a well-reasoned broadside, The Washington Post’s editorial board blasted President Obama’s Russian policy and his Berlin speech this past Thursday.
The editorial justly criticized the naiveté with which Obama reached out to Russian president Vladimir Putin with a badly thought out proposal to cut a third of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, while ignoring Russia’s pointed lack of cooperation on a number of other key issues.
This desire to secure his “legacy” of nuclear disarmament and a nuclear-free world has roots in Obama’s days at Columbia University. There, the undergrad Obama penned a paper on the subject in 1983 calling for “global zero”—total nuclear disarmament.
To obtain this elusive goal, the President has remained mum about Russia’s truculence on Syria, support of Iran, implacable opposition to U.S. missile defense, and unprecedented human rights crackdown at home.
The Post wrote:
In an attempt to suppress swelling protests against his rigged reelection and the massively corrupt autocracy he presides over, Mr. Putin has launched what both Russian and Western human rights groups describe as the most intense and pervasive campaign of political repression since the downfall of the Soviet Union.… [I]ndependent civic and human rights groups are being systematically stripped of funding and legal protection.Having lost the support of the urban middle class,…Mr. Putin has been fortifying his base among Russia’s nationalists and Orthodox Christians. That means basing his foreign policy on anti-Americanism. U.S. aid programs have been shut down and Americans banned from adopting Russian children. An intense propaganda campaign is being waged by the government-backed media.
Having recently returned from a trip to Russia, I can say that for the first time in 25 years, Russians are again living in fear for their freedom and their children’s future.
Outspoken regime critics such as whistleblower Alexei Navalny face criminal prosecution on trumped-up charges. Opposition figure and world chess champion Garry Kasparov recently announced that he is going to emigrate. Overzealous government investigators have hounded Sergey Guriev, a prominent mainstream economist, into self-imposed exile. And no word on any of this from Obama.
As The Heritage Foundation has repeatedly pointed out since 2010, the Russian “reset” policy was doomed to failure from the beginning. It ignored Moscow’s outreach to America’s authoritarian foes from Caracas to Tehran as well as its massive military modernization, neo-imperialist policy, and Soviet-style suppression of dissent.
“See no evil” is bad foreign policy, and so is the abandonment of Russian democrats and America’s friends and allies in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The revival of the czarist, 19th-century ideological trifecta of Russian Orthodoxy, autocracy, and populism—aggravated by rabid anti-Americanism—is bad news for the security interests of the United States and Europe.
It is time for Obama to recognize the facts and listen to critics of his Russia policy.
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Heritage.org (blog) |
“Russian Reset”: Time to Listen to the Critics
Heritage.org (blog) Mr. Putin has been fortifying his base among Russia's nationalists and Orthodox Christians. That means basing his foreign policy on anti-Americanism. U.S. aid programs have been shut down and Americans banned from adopting Russian children. |
Their View: Obama must take more realistic approach in dealings with Putin
Las Cruces Sun-News Having lost the support of the urban middle class in cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, Putin has been fortifying his base among Russia's nationalists and Orthodox Christians. That means basing his foreign policy on anti-Americanism. U.S. aid... |
Mr. Putin has been fortifying his base among Russia's nationalists and Orthodox Christians. That means basing his foreign policy on anti-Americanism. U.S. aid programs have been shut down and Americans banned from ...
New York Times |
From Fugitive to Hostage for Snowden?
Commentary Magazine Though he was seemingly there only to catch his connecting flight, that would have been a strange development, considering that Vladimir Putin has more to gain from virtually any scenario other than one in which Snowden just passes through Russia on ... Edward Snowden leaves reporters chasing shadows around an airportThe Guardian all 3,141 news articles » |
Sydney Morning Herald |
Obama's starry-eyed view of Putin
Washington Post That means basing his foreign policy on anti-Americanism. U.S. aid programs have been shut down and Americans banned from adopting Russian children. An intense propaganda campaign is being waged by government-backed media, one of which... Oppose A Feel-Good Intervention In SyriaRedState Iran's Slide into Sectarianism: A Wrong Move?PKKH (blog) all 2,286 news articles » |
ABC News |
How Russia views nuclear disarmament — and why it may resist
MinnPost.com ... with much enthusiasm in Moscow, where President Vladimir Putin has made anti-Americanism a central theme of his third presidential term, and the Russian military is extremely dubious about any further cuts in their already-overstretched nuclear ... Obama loses German hearts and minds ahead of Berlin visitYahoo! News all 1,073 news articles » |
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Obama holds a warped view of Russia's Putin
Arizona Daily Star That means basing his foreign policy on anti-Americanism. U.S. aid programs have been shut down and Americans banned from adopting Russian children. An intense propaganda campaign is being waged by government-backed media, one of which... |
Washington Post: Rose-tinted diplomacy
Columbus Ledger-Enquirer That means basing his foreign policy on anti-Americanism. U.S. aid programs have been shut down and Americans banned from adopting Russian children. An intense propaganda campaign is being waged by government-backed media, one of which ... |
The Hindu |
AN EDITORIAL: Obama's starry-eyed view of Putin fails to help interests of U.S.
The Morning Journal That means basing his foreign policy on anti-Americanism. U.S. aid programs have been shut down and Americans banned from adopting Russian children. More substantively, Mr. Putin has devoted himself to thwarting the Western goal of regime change in ... Oppose A Feel-Good Intervention In SyriaRedState Iran's Slide into Sectarianism: A Wrong Move?PKKH (blog) all 2,120 news articles » |
ABC News |
Anti-American Ecuador may be Snowden destination
USA TODAY CARACAS, Venezuela — Edward Snowden's reported escape itinerary through Latin America — from Havana to Caracas to Quito, Ecuador — reads like a list of the last bastions of anti-Americanism in the region. Ecuador is an especially sensible pick for... Edward Snowden leaves reporters chasing shadows around an airportThe Guardian all 3,217 news articles » |
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