The Wall Street Journal identifies six candidates for the post of "President" of Russia in 2008. Who do you think is the best alternative from their slate? Vote below:

Who should succeed Vladmir Putin as "President" of Russia in 2008?
	Dmitry Medvedev
	Sergei Ivanov
	Mikhail Fradkov
	Vladimir Yakunin
	Mikhail Kasyanov
	Garry Kasparov
Free polls from Pollhost.com

While considering how to mark your ballot, consider this from the Washington Post on how the Kremlin is seizing control of even the most seemingly mundane aspects of the mass media to manipulate the public for its own crass purposes:

Every Sunday morning, two favorites of President Vladimir Putin play prominent supporting roles on a television game show called "Happy Bus." In sunny clips spliced into the show's airtime, Dmitri Medvedev and Sergei Ivanov hand out awards and urge young people in general to live healthy lives. Ostensibly, the two men have perfectly straightforward reasons for appearing on the show: Each week, one team of contestants is sponsored by Gazprom, the state-controlled energy giant chaired by Medvedev. The opposing team is sponsored by the New Generation Foundation, headed by Ivanov, who is also defense minister.

But "Happy Bus" is widely viewed here as proof of the Kremlin's ability to commandeer the airwaves -- even the most trifling show -- to aid Putin in anointing a successor. By most accounts, the president has narrowed his choice to Medvedev or Ivanov, and over the last year each man's image, particularly Medvedev's, has been rigorously burnished. "Happy Bus" debuted in May on NTV, a network owned by a Gazprom subsidiary.

With the centralization of power in the Kremlin, Russian politics has become ever more tightly scripted, and genuine electoral competition has withered. Whoever turns out to be Putin's nominee will dominate television and almost certainly ride unimpeded through the presidential elections in early 2008, analysts said. "Putin, Medvedev and Ivanov are the three main heroes, the three main characters on the news," said Anna Kachkayeva, a professor of broadcast journalism at Moscow State University. "It's a command from the administration." Producers at Russian television stations, including the makers of "Happy Bus," declined to discuss coverage of Ivanov and Medvedev.

In presidential politics, Russia has an electoral college of one -- Putin. When Vladimir Ustinov, the former prosecutor general and a perceived favorite of the security services, started making some very president-in-waiting noises last year, Putin fired him. He was rehired as justice minister, a much less influential position. Putin himself denies he is the decider. "There will be no successors. There will be candidates for the post of president of Russia," he said Thursday at his annual news conference, which this year ran to three hours and 30 minutes and was attended by about 1,200 journalists. "I reserve the right to express my preference. But I will only do it once the election campaign begins."

Since the reelection of Boris Yeltsin in 1996, when a group of media tycoons threw the full weight of their television stations behind his faltering candidacy and demonized his Communist opponent, tight management of broadcast journalism has been a critical instrument in Russian presidential elections, including Putin's two campaigns. But unlike in 1996, when the power of television was wielded by wealthy businessmen, today those media assets are controlled by the state or companies loyal to the Kremlin.

Ivanov, 54, has long been well known both at home and abroad as minister of defense. Medvedev, 41, was an obscure figure until 15 months ago. In November 2005, Medvedev and Ivanov were simultaneously made first deputy prime ministers, in addition to their other titles. Since then, Medvedev's public image, down to his haircut (shorter and more stylish), weight (he's clearly lost a few pounds) and choice of clothes (more casual), has been carefully refashioned. The makeover has become the talk of the town. The wooden, cautious and loyal official of a year ago has become a self-confident and assertive politician tinged with some very Putinesque characteristics -- in particular, his occasionally brusque scoldings, sometimes directed at other ministers, delivered with the colloquial phrases and tightly coiled physicality that many Russians love in their president.

Speaking in November about improving health care and access to drugs, Medvedev said: "There are swindlers who manufacture pharmaceuticals. Then there are other swindlers who sell those pharmaceuticals, and there are still other swindlers who act as intermediaries using state funds. The situation in the pharmaceutical industry is disgusting."

Medvedev, who is married and has one child, is a lawyer by training and first worked with Putin in the city administration of St. Petersburg in the 1990s. Putin brought him to the Kremlin, where he became chief of staff in the presidential administration. He is regarded as a relatively liberal counterweight to the staffers around Putin who served in the security services. Medvedev has no background in the KGB or its successor agencies.

He never publicly criticizes Putin, however. And he defends Gazprom, where the Kremlin placed him in charge in 2002, from charges that it is secretive, bloated and inefficient, and is used by the state as a political weapon to punish neighboring countries. On television recently, he called Gazprom a "crucial Russian company" and noted that its capitalization has jumped from $10 billion to $225 billion under state control.

Increasingly, Medvedev speaks of his modest background. "Just like everyone else, I lived in the kinds of apartments that used to be given to Soviet citizens, first a communal one and later a cramped apartment in St. Petersburg," he said in a television interview in November. "And like everyone else, I went, and still go, to a polyclinic," the state-run outpatient facilities that many Russians avoid. For all the campaign-style insights he offers into his background, Medvedev remains studiously ambiguous about his ambitions. "I find it distressing that I have been made a participant in some sort of race," he said. Nonetheless, he is now the second-most-popular politician in Russia after Putin, according to opinion polls and analysts. In a poll conducted in November by the independent Levada Center, 38 percent of respondents said they would vote for Medvedev for president, making him the leading candidate. Ivanov trailed with 23 percent. Little more than a year ago, Medvedev's rating was barely above zero.

While image-building is not unique to Russia, and Medvedev's new position in government ensured he would get more news coverage, the almost universally friendly treatment he has received on Russian television has been striking. Among 2,064 news stories on Medvedev in 2006, there was not a single negative report on the news broadcasts of six television channels, including the three major national stations, according to a survey by Medialogia, an analytical group in Moscow. There were 17 negative reports on Ivanov, most of them centered on a brutal hazing incident in the military to which he was slow to respond, according to Medialogia.

Other potential candidates are not treated so kindly. In the same period, there was not a single positive report on Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister and Putin critic who has said he may seek the presidency. Of the 40 stories in which Kasyanov was the main subject, 60 percent were negative and the balance neutral, according to Medialogia statistics. The Kremlin declined a request to allow a Washington Post reporter to accompany Medvedev on a typical daily event; he is normally covered by a small pool of reporters.

Last week was typical. Three of the national channels, ORT, RTR and NTV, ran expansive reports Wednesday night on a meeting chaired by Medvedev in which he talked about raising the birthrate and other projects. Medvedev held up a certificate that will guarantee cash payments to women who have a second child, and his remarks were spliced with images of cooing babies in maternity wards.

No critic of the management of the so-called National Projects was quoted on any of those news reports. The Kremlin declined a request to allow a Washington Post reporter to accompany Medvedev on a typical daily event; he is normally covered by a small pool of reporters.

"The National Projects are an imitation of activity," Ivan Melnikov, deputy chairman of the Communist Party, said in parliament last month. "Upbeat TV pictures that we see practically every day have nothing to do with the real state of things."

"He is being built up, and he is changing himself," said Igor Bunin, head of the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow, referring to Medvedev. "The first task was to get people to recognize him. . . . The next task was to associate him with most pleasant things from the state. He cuts all the ribbons now. "At the beginning, he was soft, like a teddy bear, but now he seems much stronger. Like Putin, he can summon up some thunder and lightning when he criticizes incompetent officials." Bunin added, "There may be no final decision, but he is candidate number one, with Ivanov in reserve."

A reader points out the following story from Radio Free Europe in which the duplicity of Kremlin-controlled Russian media outlets is exposed:

Russia: Misprint Or Provocation?

By Victor Yasmann

A reader offers the following fascinating tale of Russian corporate intrigue from the Ukraine:

It seems that Russia and Norway are locked in a battle for control of a Ukrainian telecommunciations company called Kyivstar GSM. In 2004, a Russian-controlled company called Storm LLC and a Norwegian-controlled company called Telenor Mobile Communications AS established Kyivstar as a joint venture, and signed a shareholders agreement (this followed about six years of negotiations). Storm was the proxy of the Russia-controlled firm Altimo Holdings & Investment Ltd., the Russian control being funneled through a Cyprus proxy company known as Hardlake and a minority shareholding company called Alpren. They soon began to fight over control (basically, the Russian side wanted to seize it), and proceeded to arbiration in New York as per the terms of the 2004 agreement (Telenor insisted on this provision because it feared the reliability of the Ukrainian courts and the motivations of its Russian partner, which turned out to be quite a good idea).

Despite entering into arbitration, Storm immediately began to claim that the arbitration clause was not binding (likely as soon as it saw that it had little chance of winning in the American court). It claimed that its General Director, one Valeriy Nilov, was not authorized to sign the arbitration agreement with Telenor and tried to disavow it. Shortly after the arbitration began, Alpren filed a lawsuit in Urkaine seeking to have the arbitration agreement declared invalid. In a classic Russian move, it "forgot" to tell either Telenor or the New York arbitrators that it had done so until the Ukrainian court had ruled in its favor. It then informed the New York arbitrators of the results, but they valiantly refused to stop their activities and Storm filed suit in a New York state court to block the arbitration from going forward based on the Ukrainian court's order. Telenor moved the case to federal court where it convinced the judge to side with Norway.

On December 15th of last year, the federal judge determined that the Ukrainian court proceeding "had a number of curious features." First of all, though a representative of Storm appeared and claimed to oppose the proceedings because it was in arbitration, the whole thing only lasted ten minutes. Then, Storm's representative in the proceeding was not only not a lawyer, he was an Altimo executive. This caused the federal judge to decide that Storm's opposition may have been "somewhat perfunctory." In other words, it was a classic Russian tour-de-force. Therefore, though the Russian companies were represented by expensive lawyers from the top American firm of Cravath Swaine & Moore, the federal judge nullified the Ukrainian proceedings and ordered the arbitration to go forward.

The Economist confirms suspicions that Russia is losing control over its nukes and couldn't care less (either that, or it's intentionally abusing its nukes in concerted effort to undermine the West):

A CHANCE, you might think, for Russia to show the co-operation that its president, Vladimir Putin, regularly promises in clamping down on the global traffic in dangerous nuclear materials. Yet the release last week of new titbits about a Georgian sting operation which reportedly netted just short of 80 grams of highly-enriched weapons-useable uranium, a Russian citizen from Vladikavkaz in North Ossetia (a part of Russia) and several Georgian accomplices—was a “provocation”, thundered Russia's foreign minister.

The sting was first reported in February last year, and Russia loathes Georgia. But there is more to the Kremlin's nuclear frostiness. While it continues to co-operate with America in securing dangerous nuclear materials around the world—most recently airlifting back to Russia a whopping 286 kilos of highly-enriched uranium fuel from a research reactor in Dresden in former East Germany—Russian officialdom's souring mood at home augurs ill.

Russia is not the only country with a nuclear-smuggling habit. Excluding the Georgian sting operation, a database maintained by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations nuclear guardian, has clocked 16 confirmed cases worldwide since 1993 where highly-enriched uranium or plutonium (both, in the right form, can be used as the fissile core of a nuclear weapon) has been lost, stolen or seized from would-be traffickers, mostly in Europe and Russia. But not all countries bother to report: China, India and Pakistan have been among the 95 contributors to the list only since last year. Coverage is most patchy in the least secure parts of the world, including Africa and the Middle East.

The Georgian case is alarming. The uranium being hawked was enriched to about 90%, and intended for weapons use (fuel for nuclear-power reactors is typically enriched to 5% or less; most research reactors run on more highly-enriched stuff, meaning 20% or more). Georgian officials say their prisoner revealed that his bagful came from an as yet undiscovered stash of 2-3kg; not enough for a weapon—that takes up to 25kg—but still a threat.

This case uncannily resembles one in 2003, when 170 grams of similar material was seized on the Georgian-Armenian border; its Armenian smuggler said he had picked it up in Vladikavkaz too, though tests showed the material had originated at a Russian nuclear site in Novosibirsk.

Though the quantities of weapons-grade material seized by police are usually quite small, the consequences of any falling into terrorist hands are huge. Al-Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, has called the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction a “religious duty”. Some experts think building a bomb is beyond the capabilities of such a group; others don't. But a “dirty bomb”, made by packing conventional explosives around the nuclear waste and other radioactive materials that make up most of the lost or stolen material reported to the IAEA, would be horribly disruptive.

And reported cases may hardly be the half of it. Those trying to find a buyer are more likely to get caught; those who already have one can avoid police stings.

Nor is al-Qaeda the only potential customer. Chechen rebels who attacked a Moscow theatre in 2002 had first considered an assault on a nuclear research reactor at the nearby Kurchatov Institute. Among other terrorist mischief in Russia, an article in the September 2006 issue of the Annals of the American Academy lists the casing of nuclear reactors, monitoring the trains that transport Russia's nuclear weapons and even a plan to hijack a nuclear submarine.

At a summit in Bratislava in 2005, the Russian and American presidents agreed to speed a global effort to secure all dangerous nuclear materials. This included repatriating fresh and spent fuel from the more than 100 nuclear research reactors in 40 countries that Russia and America between them supplied during the cold war. Some of these are being converted to run on less dangerous low-enriched uranium. Meanwhile, America's National Nuclear Security Administration is beefing up reactor security in those ill-governed places where it consists of poorly paid guards and flimsy locks.

Russia's concerns about terrorism are one incentive to fix its nuclear problems. Another is huge dollops of American cash. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, America has helped dismantle thousands of surplus nuclear warheads, consolidate a vast archipelago of nuclear materials, and find jobs for otherwise unemployed Russian weapons scientists.

The window for such co-operation is closing, says Laura Holgate of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an independent outfit that has paid for the return of some Russian reactor fuel from abroad. Much of the easier work in Russia has been done. But officials there still reject help at their most sensitive nuclear sites, where the bulk of the most dangerous materials are kept. Without America looking over its shoulder, says Ms Holgate, it is unclear that Russia will be so conscientious in maintaining security and prosecuting wrongdoers. And if, as Georgia found, it resents being told its nuclear controls aren't perfect, there won't be much outsiders can do to help anyway.

Well, two top-ten Russian ladies made it to the semi-finals of the ATP tour event in Tokyo Japan last week. Guess how many of them made it to the finals?

Yup, zero.

World #8 Elena Dementieva, the serveless wonder, was destroyed in easy straight sets by Martina Hingus, who retired from tennis and is now making a comeback, slicing through the "top ten" Russians like a hot Swiss Army knife through butter.

And world #1 Maria Sharapova (who is only #3 on the 2007 rankings, and #1 over the past 365 days because the real #1, Justine Henin-Hardenne, didn't play the Austrialian Open)? She was blown off the court in the first set by Ana Ivanovic of Serbia, a player not even ranked in the world's top 15. Sharapova managed to take only 1 game from Ivanovic in the first set and then quit after the first game of the second, crying about an alleged injury. Sharapova barely managed to squeak by hometown girl Ai Sugiyama in the quarters, losing the first set to a Japanese player not ranked in the world's top 25 (in the match previous, Sugiyama had defeated Russian Maria Kirilenko).

So much for the best-laid plans of Shamapova. Only two other top-ten players -- Hingus and the woeful Dementieva -- entered the Tokyo draw, so Sharapova undoubtedly thought she would have easy pickings in the land of the rising sun. Such a pity the scheme didn't work out. Well, better luck next time, Maria.

In a truly breathtaking display of hypocrisy, Maria tried to blame her "injury" on having to play two tournaments, Tokyo and Australia, back-to-back. But the only reason she was playing Tokyo was to collect a bunch of essentially free ratings points against also-ran competition. Nobody forced her to play Tokyo. That's to say nothing of the pathetic spectacle of a so-called professional "athlete" whining and crying about it being "too hard" to put forth all that work (just as Maria tried to blame her abysmal first-round performance at the Aussie Open on the weather).

LR retired the Sunday Funnies feature after the cowardly execution of Anna Politkovskaya by the Kremlin. However, she's now discovered such a talented Russian cartoonist that she feels it's appropriate to feature his work today. She thinks Anna would approve. Therefore, she offers four of his cartoons below. Another was already featured in the middle of last week, in case you missed it.

The letters inside the snake spell out: F-R-E-E-D-O-M.

Source: Ellustrator.

The tombstone reads: "Russian Democracy."

Source: Ellustrator.



The caption reads: "Ladies and gentlemen, we have word from the flight deck that the aircraft is now leaving the area of democracy, we apologize for any inconvenience."

Source: Ellustrator.

On each of the spent shell casings is written: "I had nothing to gain from this killing."

Source: Ellustrator.

La Russophobe is delighted to announce that the New Yorker has responded favorably to her request, bolstered by that of several readers, and placed Michael Specter's brilliant exposé "Kremlin Inc." up on the world wide web for all to see. Click through to read the important piece, and if you get a chance drop a note to the New Yorker to praise both the quality of Michael's reporting and their editioral decision to release the piece: themail@newyorker.com.

In response to a reader who commented on our response to the eXile by making disparaging comments about other people's command of Russian, LR's translator posted a couple of observations about mistakes the commenter had made in his own Russian. Now he offers readers a few general observations about this kind of discourse:

My last two notes bring me to a larger point, something I've noticed over the years, and this seems like as good a place as any to mention it. The people who are most prone to basing ad hominem arguments on other people's proficiency in Russian almost always fall into one (or more) of three categories:

1) Those who don't speak it very well themselves, but have always dreamed of being able to scold their fellow countrymen for being narrow-minded and provincial, especially about foreign languages (these are mostly Russophile expats);

2) Those for whom it is their sole qualification for speaking on Russian affairs (these are often Russian-Americans, who forget that foreign affairs, human rights, jurisprudence, etc. are all legitimate fields of inquiry in themselves);

3) Russians who are trying to get critics to shut up so they can hear the gentle music of their own propaganda machines. (Problem is, more and more of their critics are Russians themselves... that's where I come in.)

All (ALL) of the really competent Russian specialists I've known (and I've known a lot), regardless of whether they tended toward the Russophile orRussophobe side of the house, have religiously avoided making any mention of their or anyone else's proficiency in the language. I've been delighted sometimes to discover some of them had extremely high levels of fluency in the language, because they never mentioned it to me themselves, and their friends don't usually make a big deal out of it either. By contrast, almost every rabid Russophile I have ever met (with the exception of ethnic Russians, and I'm not sure they can be called "Russophiles" anyway) who claimed to speak Russian has disappointed me, usually very badly, when I've had the chance to hear them trying to do it. There's probably a deep psychological explanation for this phenomenon -- something that speaks to the origins of self-loathing and other inferiority complexes -- but I'll leave that to the specialists and those who like to speculate on such things.

LR would like to add: The very last (LAST) thing in the whole wide world that anybody who hopes for a better future for Russia should be doing is dissuading people from using the Russian language by attacking them for it when they do or by lording over them the fact that they don't. LR reported not long ago on the possible demise of the Russian language as it goes the way of the population, which is going the way of the dodo. Once again, we see a so-called Russophile doing far more harm to Russia than the country's worst enemies.

The Moscow Times reports that having nationalized the oil and gas industry, the Kremlin is now moving on the last remaining area of private ownership, minerals.

Vladimir Potanin's buyout of CEO Mikhail Prokhorov's blocking stake in Norilsk Nickel and other assets within the Interros holding company could well lead to state control over the company, one of the country's last few strategic assets in private hands, analysts said Thursday.

The change in ownership appeared largely to be a surprise to the market, but comes just weeks after Prokhorov was detained by French police during an investigation into a prostitution ring and could be linked to it in some way, analysts said. Under the deal, Potanin, one of the country's most politically savvy oligarchs who has taken care to stay loyal to the Kremlin, will have a stake of about 55 percent in Norilsk. Potanin and Prokhorov will split their shares in other Interros assets, including Polyus Gold, the country's largest gold miner.

Shares of Norilsk on the RTS rose 5.74 percent to $175 on Thursday.

Where Potanin will get an estimated $7.8 billion to take over Prokhorov's share of approximately 27 percent in Interros was not immediately clear. Interros gave no financial details of the buyout in its statement on the issue Wednesday. "There is absolutely no funding now," said Rob Edwards, metals and mining analyst at Renaissance Capital, referring to estimates that Potanin would need to raise extra cash for the deal. While it is unclear exactly where Potanin will get the money to acquire Prokhorov's share, it should be very straightforward for him to finance the buyout through loans, said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank. Servicing the debt could put more pressure on Potanin, however, and may lead to the buyout being a short-term one, with someone else stepping in over the next few months to take over the debts and assets, analysts said. Potanin may also wish to cash in some of his assets, which could lead to higher dividends or share buybacks, Deutsche UFG said in a note to investors Thursday. In any case, Potanin's move "is not the endgame but one in a chain of events," Edwards said.

Weafer agreed that the investment was short term rather than long term. The state or a state-controlled buyer, such as diamond monopoly Alrosa, will likely take control -- first of a blocking share and later perhaps of a controlling one, he said. Norilsk, the world's largest nickel producer, is a key strategic asset over which the state would like to have influence, Weafer said. In a note to investors Thursday, Renaissance Capital said it believed control over Norilsk Nickel would never be allowed to shift to a non-Russian or non-favored group.

The Guardian reports (hat tip Robert Amsterdam) that the Kremlin may have attempted to kill off one of the EHCR judges who has been ruling against it:

The former president of the European Court of Human Rights today claimed he was poisoned during a visit to Russia in late October - three days before the former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned in London. Luzius Wildhaber (pictured above), who retired last month as Europe's most senior judge, told a Swiss newspaper that he had fallen violently ill after a three-day trip to Moscow.The judge has been the subject of persistent criticism from Russia for upholding a series of complaints by Chechen human rights campaigners.

In an interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Mr Wildhaber said he had travelled to Russia to attend an international conference for constitutional lawyers. He said that on the last day of his trip he had gone on an excursion with another Swiss lawyer, Karl Eckstein, to the historic city of Vladimir, 112 miles east of Moscow. The two men ate a meal with officials.

Two days later, on his return to his home city of Basle, Mr Wildhaber collapsed. Doctors diagnosed severe blood poisoning and said that when an ambulance arrived at his house he was minutes from death. The judge was forced to take a month off work from his job in Strasbourg.

"After everything that I have experienced at the European court I simply have to take all possibilities into account," Mr Wildhaber said, adding that he had been threatened by Russia in the past. "The Russian government has repeatedly dubbed the court as Russia-phobic," he said.

Russian officials today dismissed Mr Wildhaber's allegations as laughable and said there was no evidence he had been poisoned on Russian soil. Valery Zorkin, the chairman of Russia's constitutional court, said the allegations were perplexing. The judge had seemed fine during his three-day visit, he said. "As far as I remember, food poisoning took place in reality ... it was merely food poisoning."

Russian officials also queried why the judge had gone public with his claims now, months after his alleged poisoning.

In the interview, Mr Wildhaber said he had decided to send his blood samples to a forensic laboratory after reading about Litvinenko, who was poisoned on November 1 with a massive dose of radioactive polonium-210. But when he asked for his blood samples, he was told the Swiss clinic had destroyed them. "I wanted to solve the puzzle," he said.

Mr Eckstein also fell ill. The lawyer found himself sleeping "18 to 20 hours a day" after their joint excursion, the judge said. "I suspect that - whatever it was - happened during our trip to Vladimir," Mr Wildhaber said.

Today a spokesman for the European Court of Human Rights said there was "nothing to indicate that the cause of Mr Wildhaber's illness - septicaemia caused by staphylococcal infection - was suspicious". "The fact that Mr Wildhaber fell ill shortly after returning from Russia provides no basis for the speculation in the media," he told the Guardian.

But officials conceded today that the Kremlin had been annoyed by a series of judgments by the European Court of Human Rights and regarded it as pathologically anti-Russian and biased. The court has regularly condemned Russian human rights abuses in Chechnya, and has ruled against complaints of discrimination by ethnic Russians in the Baltics.

But an autumn 2002 ruling appears to have especially incensed Moscow. The court upheld the appeal against extradition of a group of 13 Chechens wanted by Russia who had fled to Georgia.

The Neue Züricher Zeitung said Russia's ambassador to the Council of Europe turned up in Mr Wildhaber's office and said that unless the men were handed over within 24 hours Russia would blame the court for the Moscow theatre siege when Chechen extremists took 850 people hostage. "It was a vile form of blackmail," Mr Wildhaber told the paper.

The 70-year-old judge retired on January 18. He was unavailable for comment today.

Reuters reports: Russia's Emergency Ministry planned to fly a chemical laboratory on Thursday to the Omsk region in southern Siberia to analyse oily yellow and orange snow which has covered an area home to 27,000 people. "A special mobile chemical laboratory will enable us to carry out express analysis of the snow at the site," Viktor Beltsov, a spokesman for the ministry, said. The snow covered a 1,500 sq km area with 7,280 homes, Beltsov said. Omsk is a heavily industrial city with a number of oil and gas refineries.

{Photo courtesy of English Russia from Russian TV}

The LEDE reports:

Score another one for citizen journalists, as well as the digital technologies that have given rise to their number — and made institutional bad actors much more prone to discovery.

The latest auteur is Elena Kuritsyna, whose cellphone camera work has launched an investigation into a hospital in the southern Ural town of Yekaterinburg, Russia, where staff had apparently taken to dealing with the cries of infant orphans by gagging them.

The video (LR : click the LEDE link to watch) has caused waves across Russian culture, according to BBC News:

The patient who reported the incident, Elena Kuritsyna, had been in the hospital with her own children.

She said she heard the suppressed crying of young children in the next ward.

“I heard that a baby was mumbling in a neighboring room; when I looked in, I saw the baby with plaster over his mouth; he could not cry or do anything, was just mumbling,” she told Reuters television.

She approached the nurse in the ward and was initially told to mind her own business. Children were crying too loudly, and distracting nurses from their work, she was told.

She eventually persuaded the nurse to remove the plaster, but she says that afterwards the nurse did it again.

The nurse has been suspended and on Wednesday the head doctor at the hospital was reprimanded.

It was not an isolated incident. A criminal investigation has been opened and, according to the prosecutors’ press service, as quoted by the BBC, “children in the first year of life were systematically gagged with sticking plaster to make children behave quietly.”

The hospital said it was understaffed.

For the unfiltered condemnation of a blogger (now THAT'S a russophobe), click here.

Reuters reports:

Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic is hiding in Russia, a Bosnian newspaper reported on Thursday citing an intelligence source, but Russian authorities denied the comments.

"We got this information by wiretapping a telephone conversation abroad," an unnamed official of the State Investigation and Protection Agency told the daily Oslobodjenje.

The Russian embassy in Sarajevo denied the allegation and the Federal Migration Service in Moscow said it had no information pointing to Karadzic hiding in Russia.

"We have no information to that effect," a migration spokesman told Interfax news agency. "We have not issued entry documents to Karadzic."

Bosnian Serb wartime leader Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic are the two men most wanted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague for atrocities committed during Bosnia's 1992-95 war.

They are indicted for genocide in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys and the 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, during which about 11,000 people were killed.

They remain at large 10 years after the U.N. tribunal indicted them. Mladic is believed to be hiding in Serbia while Karadzic's whereabouts are disputed.

U.N. Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte, who is leaving her job in September, appealed to the European Union on Wednesday not to resume talks on closer ties with Serbia until it hands over Mladic and Karadzic.

Writing in the Moscow Times Maria Ordzhonikidze, senior secretary of the EU-Russia Centre, and Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Center, exposes Vladimir Putin as a blatant liar when he claims that Russians have friendly attitudes towards Europeans and are therefore not dangerous. This is a clarion warning call, heed it or take the consequences, Europeans.

The majority of Russians don't think of themselves as European but as representatives of a different civilization. Many are actually afraid of Europe and don't share what are generally considered to be European values, and this is leading to a sense of alienation from Europe. These were the results of an opinion poll from December by the Levada Center and commissioned by the EU-Russia Centre.

A full 71 percent of those surveyed didn't think of themselves as Europeans, and almost half (45 percent) consider Europe to be a potential threat (compared with 37 percent who did not see such a threat and 18 percent who were unable to answer). Of those who thought of the European Union as a threat, 39 percent identified the danger they believe it poses to Russian economic and industrial independence, 24 percent cited the danger associated with the imposition of a foreign culture, 24 feared the threat it posed to Russian political independence and, closing out the list, 13 percent identified the EU as a military threat.

This sense of alienation is also evident with regard to what are broadly considered European values: democracy, civil rights and market capitalism. Only 16 percent of those surveyed identified the "Western model" of democracy as the ideal (this same figure was 25 percent in 1996) and 35 percent said that they "prefer the Soviet system before the 1990s." Another 30 percent of those surveyed said that Western democracy "wasn't a fit for Russia" and 12 percent said it has had a "devastating effect on Russia."

Negative concepts like chaos, demagoguery and pointless chattering were most often associated with democracy by people from the lowest income groups (19 percent, or more than three times higher than the number for high-income respondents), among those with lower levels of education (23 percent, but just 4 percent among students and 9 percent among those with university educations), and more often in rural areas (15 percent, compared with 4 percent in Moscow). Positive associations were most often registered by the young, entrepreneurs, civil servants and members of law enforcement agencies. Perhaps most striking, 65 percent of those surveyed were unable to provide an answer as to what they understood "liberal democracy" to mean.

An understanding of a separation of powers was practically absent among those surveyed. Asked whether the activities of the judiciary and legislative branches should be under the control of the executive branch, an absolute majority of those surveyed answered that the judiciary (56 percent) and legislative (54 percent) branches should be at least to some extent.

Asked to label a group of concepts generally associated with democratic values as either positive or negative, just 33 percent chose the word "freedom" as positive, while 44 percent said they were positively predisposed to the idea of "private property" and 49 percent to that of "defending human rights." A large number of respondents chose capitalism (40 percent) and privatization (36 percent) as having a negative association. It is interesting that the processes of privatization and accumulation of large personal fortunes continue to become less legitimate in the public consciousness. At the beginning of the 1990s, about one quarter of those surveyed believed it was possible to earn a million rubles honestly. By 2006, this number had fallen to just 13 percent.

The distribution of the answers in the survey bore little dependency to the place where they lived, so regional identification appeared to have no bearing on attitudes related to Europe. Seventy-five percent of trespondents consider Russia to be a Eurasian state with its own particular path of development and its own values. Just 10 percent said that Russia is part of the West and should look for closer ties with the EU countries and the United States.

How can we reconcile these numbers with the rhetoric of those in power toward their Western partners about the concept of pan-European partnership or who, like President Vladimir Putin, call Russia "a historically and culturally ... integral part of Europe."

LR: Obviously, we can't. We can only gird our loins.

It seems that in the 21st century, just as in the 18th, Russia's ruling elites are far more Europeanized than the population as a whole. Peter the Great's order that the boyars shave their beards and don European clothing; the never ending arguments between Westernizers and Slavophiles; the Decembrist movement; the planting of Marxist economic theories in Russian soil; and finally the capitalist modernization of the rotting Soviet economy -- each of these initiatives from the top has been met with, if not passive resistance from the masses, then at least increasing ambivalence.

This is reflected in the fact that 94 percent of those surveyed said they "don't have any influence on the current situation" in the country or that their influence was "relatively small" or even "too small' (13 percent and 18 percent, respectively). Those who said that they exercised a "deciding" or " significant" influence on the path of their lives and the country numbered just over 2 percent.

Directly related to this is a very low sense of responsibility among respondents for what happens in the country. This is the case for the overwhelming majority of respondents (82 percent: 39 percent feeling "little" or "very little" responsibility and 43 percent said they felt no responsibility at all). Russians appear to have reconciled themselves to the idea that all significant decisions in the country are made independently of their opinion. The result is growing political apathy, as 17 percent of those surveyed said they would not vote in State Duma elections this December, 11 percent that they had yet to decide whether to vote and 23 percent said they were undecided for whom they would vote.

The worsening of Russian attitudes toward Europe and its basic values is an alarming indicator, revealing the insufficient (if not completely absent) effort on the part of the elites looking for Russian integration into a European system of values. The absence of a sense of responsibility among Russians for what is happening in the country, the average person's willingness to accept at face value the explanation of decisions as necessary by those on television, and attitudes of suspicion toward ideas like the separation of powers bear witness to the widening gulf in values between Russia and Europe.

This political passivity on the part of the public provides ruling elites with significant freedom to carry through a more Westernized policy line than the majority of Russians actually support. At the same time, the public's strong refusal to accept European values limits the government ability to follow a pro-Western foreign policy line, just as it acts as a brake on the introduction of further reforms to strengthen the market economy and further the democratization process. This split has been one of the main determinants of Russia's foreign and domestic policy course over the last seven years.

A Russian website has now picked up the story about the FSB using Litvinenko for target practice, and offers some photos documenting the involvement of Federation Council President and Putin lackey Sergei Mironov:




So it turns out that Russia is actually capable of doing something more outrageous than killing Litvinenko, and even more outrageous than using his photograph for target practice. It's capable of having one of its most significant officials, the Chairman of the Federation Council (equivalent to being the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate) openly participate in such doings. It's being reported that the insignia on the red beret is an emblem of the Russian security forces, and its clear they have used the center in the past. Why would Mironov be watching ordinary security guards, as the Kremlin is desperately trying to claim? But even if Mironov was only watching private security guards taking pot shots at Litvinenko, that's more than enough outrage all by itself.

Welcome to the neo-Soviet Union.

Financial Sense has an ominous article on the need for American vigilence against Russia and China:

History teaches that all nations, like all individuals, have a beginning and an end. No country is immortal. No nation is invincible. To make the point less delicately, America will one day cease to exist. And it may be useful, especially given the multiple crises now developing, to contemplate the mortality of the world’s most powerful country. What would the world be like without the United States? Would it be more violent or less violent? Would it be richer or poorer? Would there be more dictatorships in the world, or fewer, more freedom or more tyranny? The answers you give on these questions, if you are liable to have any answers, are ideologically defining.

There are those who claim that America’s destruction would be a good thing. The destroyers of America, by this reasoning, would be liberators and heroes. If we attempt to look at the case objectively, it is hard to think of America’s chief rivals for power as “liberators” in any sense of the word. China is a communist dictatorship and Russia is governed by thugs.

It is not nice to say that major powers like China or Russia seek the destruction of the United States. It is not nice to say that Russia and China are governed by thugs. But anyone who studies the foreign policies, chicanery, secret maneuvers and war preparations of Beijing and Moscow cannot honestly conclude otherwise. The fact that Russia and China are both assisting Iran’s development of nuclear weapons is more than suggestive. It is no accident that in America’s struggle against radical Islam, the Russian president has declared that Russia is Islam’s “best friend.” Before the fall of the Communist Party Soviet Union the central goal of Soviet foreign policy was to foster the downfall of the United States and the communization of the entire world. China, on the other hand, is a great country that suffered eclipse during the period of Western imperialism and colonialism. So China has reason to predicate its policy on the notion that “one good turn deserves another.” The reason for China’s opening to the West was not to enrich the Chinese bourgeoisie, or to adopt Western democratic values. The Chinese Communists sought an opening to the West so that they could get the investment capital and technology they needed for a modern military machine. Developing their economy is merely a necessary step in developing China’s new superpower status.

Some days ago China successfully tested an anti-satellite weapon. This remarkable capability didn’t develop overnight. As Washington Times correspondent Bill Gertz pointed out in his January 24 column, American defense officials concede that China’s Jan. 11 test is part of a “covert space-weapons program designed to cripple the U.S. military in a conflict.” The Chinese, to be sure, are publicly lying about the peacefulness of their intentions. “This test was not directed at any country and does not constitute a threat to any country,” said the Chinese Foreign Ministry. Oh yes, we all know that China couldn’t possibly want to shoot down American satellites. Beijing merely enjoys the challenge of shooting down its own satellites for meaningless target practice. In that case, it was a also a “practice” exercise when Chinese hackers attacked U.S. Naval War College computers in November. As one U.S. official told Bill Gertz: “The Naval War College is where the Navy’s Strategic Study Group is planning and practicing cyber-war techniques, and now they don’t even have e-mail access.”

In a 1999 book titled Red Dragon Rising, researchers Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett wrote: “We are deeply disturbed that senior PLA [People’s Liberation Army] officers have begun to talk among themselves about a preemptive strike using information warfare. In 1996, for example, a writer in the PLA’s main newspaper pointed out that ‘the enemy’ has ‘reconnaissance positioning satellites, AWACs, stealth bombers, aircraft carriers, long-range precision weapons’ but the PLA does not. A surprise attack, therefore, is not only justified but ‘is the only way to steer the course of the war in a direction favorable to China.’” Two years before 9/11, Temperlake and Triplett warned that a Chinese surprise attack on the United States “would be aimed at the American people – that is, the home front.”

Is this the policy of a peaceful and friendly nation?

Furthermore, China’s naval buildup directly threatens the economic lifelines of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan. The Japanese have expressed alarm at the appearance of Chinese warships close to their shores. Is it possible that Chinese naval power might one day force East Asian nations into Beijing’s political orbit? According to Chinese president and commander-in-chief Hu Jintao, China needs a navy that is prepared for war “at any time.” At a meeting of Communist Party delegates in December, dressed in a green military uniform, Hu explained: “We should strive to build a strong navy that meets the needs of our military’s historical mission in this new century and at this new stage. We should make careful preparations for future military battles to ensure that our forces can effectively carry out their mission at any time.”

And what is this “historical mission” of the People’s Liberation Army? Believe it or not, Chinese Communism is sworn to destroy Western capitalism and build, in its place, a new socialist civilization. This has been a central doctrine of the Communist Party of China since its inception. The development of capitalism in China is merely a necessary expedient, accepted for the sake of capitalism’s ultimate demise. It is through trade that China is building its economic position, and thereby its military position. Western capitalists should look to their own survival. But this is something they take for granted. Many businessmen would say that U.S.-Chinese enmity is absurd. That is to say, they ignore China’s military buildup, China’s infiltration of Canada, China’s strategic alliance with Mexico, China’s “partnerships” with Russia and Iran. Here is a strategic “pattern” that deserves our close attention.

It is odd that Washington should worry more about Iran, when the butchers of Tiananmen Square are manufacturing thermonuclear weapons like sausages. So many nuclear weapons, and one big, fat, hollowed-out country to drop them on. Given the preparations of China, does anyone really suppose America is going to die a slow death at the hands of social reformers, lawyers and downsizing experts? Even if one supposes a gradual weakening of the Republic, wouldn’t some overseas power take advantage before the sick animal keels over? And since it really was the barbarians that finished off Rome, ask yourself who is most likely to finish off America?

What about the Russians? All the leading intelligence defectors and dissidents from Russia seem to agree that the Kremlin ordered the death of KGB/FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko. Nearly all of them think that the Soviet system is back in power. And the United States, with its ties to Europe weakened, with its global image in tatters, with its army stuck in Iraq, finds itself unable to oppose Russia’s policy in Europe and the Middle East. Under present circumstances, no American politician would suggest a return to the Cold War. And so, the Kremlin advances on every front, in broad daylight, unchallenged and unfettered – nationalizing industries, muzzling independent newspapers and silencing opposition voices with bullets and radioactive poison. What do we suppose the Russian leadership is up to?

When Nikita Khrushchev bragged of Moscow’s future victory almost fifty years ago, he said to his Western listeners, “Your grandchildren will live under Communism.” If we think the time of reckoning is a long way off, we ought to remember that we are the grandchildren Khrushchev was talking about. Soviet Russia’s long-range strategy didn’t expect quick results. It was predicated on patience, on decades of deception. America is now in a weakened economic and military position. The Great Crisis cannot be passed along to yet another generation, because things are coming to a head. The position of the United States is approaching a low point, and America’s enemies know it. On Tuesday Iranian President Ahmadinejad told Syria’s foreign minister: “the United States and the Zionist regime of Israel will soon come to the end of their lives.” The end is near, he says. The time to strike is approaching. A BBC poll taken in 25 countries, involving 26,000 people, suggests that America is no longer as popular, as admired or favored as it once was. The tables have been turned and the dictators of the world are encouraged.

The number one security concern of the United States is the prospect of a massive terror assault against the American homeland using nuclear weapons. This is not a mythical threat. A successful assault against one city, killing five to fifty thousand people, would almost certainly trigger an unprecedented economic and political crisis in America. First, the dollar would lose its value. Second, cities would shut down and people would flee to the countryside. National paralysis and the collapse of entire industries could follow. A terrorist attack with nuclear weapons need only destroy a single city. The rest is accomplished by suggestion, by the psychological aftermath of history’s most profound failure. What government, what Constitution, could survive such a failure?

America is helpless, not knowing which way to turn as nuclear weapons are built and tested in one country after another. Some experts are afraid that America is going to launch a preemptive attack on Iran, to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. In the long run, all rogue regimes will acquire nuclear weapons. In the long run, terrorists will acquire nuclear weapons. Either they will be given the weapons, or Russian and Chinese special forces will place the weapons in America themselves, knowing that terrorists will be blamed. How could the United States retaliate if the attackers cannot be identified? And what becomes of Mutual Assured Destruction under such circumstances?

We already know from defector testimony that Russia's war plan incorporates the use of false flag terrorist diversionary operations in the early stages of the next world war. GRU defector Viktor Suvorov explained long ago that such operations were referred to as "gray terror.” The fact that Ayman al-Zawahri was named as a longtime agent of the KGB is the icing on the nuclear cake (as it were). The fact that Alexander Litvinenko – the man who fingered Zawahri – was recently poisoned by polonium-210, underscores the hardscrabble reality of the nuclear terror game. The United States government and President Bush aren’t looking at the problem squarely. They are looking away from the main threat, toward a tertiary threat. This is a fatal error, because the war we are in isn’t simply a war against Muslim extremists. It is a much broader, more deceptive conflict.

The United States has never been nearer to destruction.

Apparently, at a recent news conference "President" Putin was asked whether he agreed with Moscow "Mayor" Yuri Luzhkov that homosexuality is satanic. Sketchy reports indicate that he jokingly responded that homosexuality was connected to the nation's demography problem, specifically it's low birthrate. Is this another instance of Putin gone berzerk, as when he joked about the rape charges lodged against an Israeli government official by admiring the man's potency? If any readers have further information, please let LR know.

Kommersant gives us yet another reminder that life in 2007 Russia is no different from life in 1907 Russia for the vast majority of people. Then as now, a tiny cadre of superelite glide through the major cities in gilded carriages while the vast unwashed population languishes in extreme poverty and quite literally dies off. Russia has learned nothing from the extremes of Tsarist behavior, and moreover has learned nothing from the abuses of the post-Tsarist Soviet era. Now, it is combining both forms of failure into one utter nightmare of a society doomed to become "Zaire with permafrost."

The gap between Russia’s richest and poorest shows no signs of narrowing, according to a new study. The All-Russian Center of Living Standards has presented a report on incomes in Russia in 2006, outlining the emergence of well-off Russians with incomes over 20,000 per capita.

In a study on the income and living standards in Russia, the Center of Living Standards used data of the Russian Statistics Agency and the Pension Fund. The research says the average nominal wage in Russia in 2006 was 10,684, slightly higher than in official reports of the Statistics Agency. LR: That's $395 per month. And it's the average. Average means a huge segment of the population is below that, especially since Russia has a large number of millionaires. For every millionaire Russia has, it has to have roughly 3,500 people learning just $100 per month to keep the national average at $395 per person.

According to the study, the income gap between Russia’s 10 percent of riches and poorest people is not narrowing, contrary to reports of the national statistics agency. The difference is still seven-fold, 0.1 percent up last year, compared to 2005.

The percentage of Russians living below the subsistence level went down in 2006 to 11.9 percent from 13.3 percent in 2006. The Russian Center of Living Standards quotes 3,291 rubles a month as the subsistence level in 2006. LR: That's $4 per day. The Russian government claims $4 per day is enough to live on in Moscow, the world's most expensive city.

The report also shows that the number of people with incomes between 6,963 and 20,504 rubles grew from 38.7 to 40.4 percent last year. This is the category that the center’s experts call Russian middle class. In its recent study, the Sociology Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences estimated the number at 21 percent. LR: In Russia, a monthly income of $750 per month is considered high-end upper middle class. That's $40 per work day, or roughly $5 per hour for an eight-hour day. An upper middle class Russian doesn't even earn the American minimum wage. Russia is rolling in oil revenue, and this puny wage group increases by less than 2%? Something is rotten somewhere. Guess where.

The number of “well-off and rich” Russians with incomes higher than 20,500 rubles went up last year from 8.5 to 9.2 percent, according to the Living Standards’ research. LR: That is not a misprint. In Russia, you are "rich" if you earn more than $5 per hour.

ABC News reports:

An unspecified safety problem prompted an emergency shutdown at a Russian nuclear power plant, but no increase in radiation levels were reported, federal officials said Tuesday. The incident occurred at the first unit of the Balakovo plant around 11:15 p.m. Monday, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. The plant, located near the Volga River city of Saratov, about 450 miles southeast of Moscow, has four 1,000-megawatt pressurized water reactors. Nuclear regulators said the problem was located and corrected Tuesday morning and could be restarted later in the day. "Initial reports indicate the cause of the shutdown was a problem with the safety system. The reactor has been taken off-line," the Emergency Situations Ministry said in a statement. The Balakovo plant was the site of a false alarm in late 2004, when a turbine malfunction prompted a shutdown and rumors of a major accident sparked panic among nearby residents. Russian lawmakers recently passed legislation to restructure the country's nuclear power sector, which includes 31 reactors at 10 nuclear power plants, accounting for about 17 percent of electricity generation. President Vladimir Putin has pledged to build another 42 atomic reactors by 2030 and increase the proportion of electricity generation produced by nuclear plants to about 25 percent. Environmental groups have criticized government plans to keep older model nuclear plants operational, saying that graphite reactors like the one that exploded in Chernobyl and other types have serious safety flaws. About half of Russia's nuclear reactors are of the graphite and older models.

Despite these problems, Russia is moving forward to construct nuclear power stations in other countries. It is already deeply enmeshed in Iran, and now it has been announced that it will place numerous reactors in India:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered to build four new nuclear reactors for India. India's prime minister is calling the relationship with Moscow a new "strategic partnership" with energy at the center. The two countries were allies during the Cold War. These days, they're refreshing their friendship through energy and military cooperation. Putin will be the guest of honor at India's Republic Day celebrations Friday. Russia has been eager to reassert its traditional role as the chief supplier of nuclear know-how to India in the wake of a landmark civilian nuclear deal between New Delhi and Washington. Last year's US-India pact appeared to give American companies a strong position in India's nuclear market.

Last week, La Russophobe reported on a severe outbreak of hemhorragic fever in European Russia. This week, there is more bad news to report. Scientific American reports that "Russia has recorded its first cases this year of the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of bird flu in dead domestic birds, the country's animal and plant health agency said on Monday. Rosselkhoznadzor said in a statement the virus was detected in dead birds found in three domestic yards in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia. 'Yes, it's H5N1,' a spokesman for the agency said, when asked to confirm the strain of the virus. Rosselkhoznadzor said measures were being taken to prevent the spread of infection in the three settlements where cases were found -- Labinsk, Upornaya and Borodinskaya."

As usual, the even worse news was the classic neo-Soviet denial from Russian officals that there was any problem whatsoever.

Writing in Forbes, journalist Gary Weiss comments on Russia's spate of journalist killings:

A delegation of the Committee to Protect Journalists was in Moscow recently--a high-octane one, led by Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger and former Time Inc. editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstein. There were meetings with Russian officials and journalists, but this was not one of your standard feel-good cultural exchange projects.

The subject was--and is--murder. Thirteen journalists have been killed in Russia since 2000, in a brutal and systematic campaign to snuff out free speech and terrorize the former Soviet republics. One of the slain journalists was Paul Klebnikov, an American who was gunned down on the streets of Moscow in July 2004.

Now I'm realistic, or perhaps a bit cynical. I don't expect most people in this country to be too surprised or even upset about any of this. After all, this is Russia--the country that almost blew us to bits during the Cold War, and where American citizens live and work in an atmosphere of fear, violence and intimidation.

Still, you should care a great deal--you should be screaming and hollering, in fact--about the slaying of Paul Klebnikov, a brilliant investigative journalist who was editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. This brazen murder, which has never been solved, was a crime against America as much as it was against Paul, his family and his information-hungry Russian readers.

The time has arrived for our government to initiate an investigation, with the aim of apprehending and prosecuting Paul's murderers wherever they may be.

That could open up a hornet's nest of international complications, which is why a formal U.S. investigation has not been launched. But failure to act would play into the hands of the terrorists who carried out this murder. Let's review for a moment why Paul was killed, and why it requires a strong U.S. response that--for understandable reasons--has not yet been forthcoming.

Unlike the other brave Russian journalists who were murdered, Paul's audience was as much this country as it was Russia. He wrote books that shaped American perceptions of Russia's new elite, in addition to his groundbreaking Russian-language investigative reporting.

At the time of his death, Paul was believed to have been investigating a complex web of money laundering involving a Chechen reconstruction fund, reaching into the centers of power in the Kremlin and involving elements of organized crime and the FSB (the former KGB).

Paul was murdered to prevent you from knowing about any of this. His murder was intended to send a message: No one, not even an American citizen, is immune to the forces in Russia who believe that a free press impinges on their license to steal.

Paul's murder was, in other words, an act of terrorism, and it needs to be treated as such by this country.

By law, this country can prosecute the murderer of a U.S. citizen overseas when the U.S. attorney general certifies that the murder "was intended to coerce, intimidate or retaliate against a government or a civilian population." That's as neat a description of Paul's slaying as I have ever found.

Ironically, the Russian authorities--for their own purposes--agree that it was an act of terrorism. They've maintained that Paul's death was ordered by Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, a Chechen separatist leader and organized crime boss who is already branded a terrorist and wanted by Moscow.

Nukhaev is an obvious suspect because he was the subject of a book that Paul wrote, Conversation With a Barbarian--a critical one, as its title suggests. But Nukhaev is just too convenient a suspect, in the view of many Americans and Russians familiar with the case. For one thing, he is, conveniently, missing.

Two Chechens were put on trial as the actual triggermen in Paul's murder, and both were acquitted. Prosecutors appealed, and a new trial is set for Feb. 15. However, there is no assurance that the defendants will actually bother to attend the trial. Both were freed after the acquittal, and one is believed to have left the country. That alone makes the chances of obtaining justice at a new trial questionable at best.

Russian authorities have maintained that the gunmen were tasked to their mission by Nukhaev. However, Chechen gunmen and killers have been known to perform "muscle" work outside of Chechnya.

The first task of any American investigation would be to clear up the question of Nukhaev's culpability.

An American interagency group has been monitoring the Russian investigation, and that could be the nucleus for a formal U.S. investigation that would call on the resources of the intelligence community. But there must be a free and open exchange of information between agencies--and that, apparently, has not been happening on the crucial issue of Nukhaev.

Scott Armstrong, a veteran investigative journalist and founder of the National Security Archive, who has been following the Klebnikov case, has been told by law enforcement and intelligence sources that significant intelligence on Nukhaev and on Chechen hoodlum gangs has not been shared with law enforcement.

The U.S. needs to resolve its interagency differences and use the full resources of the intelligence community to determine if indeed Nukhaev ordered Klebnikov killed. If he did, we should find him, arrest him and prosecute him. If not, we should find out who did--and put him behind bars if Russian authorities are unwilling to do so.

Obviously, this will cause (to put it mildly) complications in our relations with Russia, which has resented even the private pressure that has been applied in the Klebnikov case.

One might also argue that it sets a precedent whereby other nations may seek to prosecute Americans under their definition of terrorism. All that needs to be taken into consideration, as does the impact of our relations with Russia. But these factors are, I believe, outweighed by our own national interest in preserving the safety of American journalists and businessmen living and working in Russia.

The parallels between Klebnikov's slaying and the murder of Don Bolles, an Arizona journalist slain in 1976, are becoming increasingly apparent. Bolles was killed for probing the mobsters and land-fraud schemes that plagued the Southwest in the mid-1970s.

The Bolles murder resulted in the creation of the Arizona Project, a consortium of journalists that was created to continue Bolles' work. Scott Armstrong and I, along with Richard Behar and others, are members of Project Klebnikov, which has similar aims in continuing Paul's legacy. (This column, incidentally, speaks only for myself, not for the project.)

Thanks to dedicated and relentless police work, Bolles' killers were eventually brought to justice. No such outcome is likely in Russia, because Russia today is more akin to the Arizona of the 1870s than the Arizona of the 1970s--replete with robber barons, overnight fortunes, corrupt sheriffs and gunslingers for hire.

That is a domestic affair within Russia, I guess--but not when terrorism against Americans is involved.

Our government has the tools it needs to speak back to the hoodlums who sent that message to America 30 months ago. Time to use them.

La Russophobe continues to be quite impressed with the ability of her new chatbox to generate content for the blog, which it has already done twice in its short period of existence. It seems it was quite a good idea to bring non-blogger members into the loop!

First, a reader clued us in on photographs of Vladimir Putin's version of Air Force One, and then a reader alerted us to the fact that Mark Ames, publisher of the eXile, is an employee of the Kremlin. No wonder he and the eXile hate us so much! Here's a post from March 2006 on the Big Soccer blog:

I freaking can't believe it... The new Russian government produced English language channel, Russia Today, is now running their streaming video feed...for those of you interested (works best with Real Player) paste this into your media player of choice:

http://www.webtelek.com/media/russiatoday.asx

Pretty professionally done, happened to watch "Vremya" & "Segodya" this evening , interesting how the news lineup in order of importance/emphasis was quite different. Anyway, the channel is mainly news, but they do run a documentary or two in between newscasts...so I'm watching tonight, they're running some documentary about the Siberian oil town of Khatimansisk, and who would you guess who is narrating the documentary??!! I about fell over....

None other than Mr. Counter-Culture & Whore-sampler par excellence, taking a break from his job as chief muckety-muck as editor of the eXile, Mr. Mark Ames. That's right, he's working for the Russian government!!! What a total sell-out! BTW, the web address for the new channel :http://www.rttv.ru

Apparently, Ames laid the groundwork for his approach to Russia Today state-owned TV with a post in July 2005 accusing American media of being similarly controlled by the state. Sturmovik! blog has also commented, saying: "The funniest & most ironic exable of this is RT employing Mark Ames, the Hunter S. Thompson wanna-be and chief editor of the notorious Moscow counter-culture ex-pat publication "The eXile" as their tour guide through the hinterlands of Russia; not surprisingly, the eXile makes no mention of this apparent 180 degree turn by Mr. Ames, who has make a career of castigating just about everything establishment." Sturmovik agrees that, as La Russophobe has previously reported, it appears the Kremlin has got its hooks deep into David-Johnson-affiliated Russia Profile as well.

By the way, if you Google Mark Ames you will find that LR's post about him back in September, which the eXile chose not to mention in its recent article about LR, is in the top 20 hits. So, that's probably another reason why he and his rag are a bit irked with us.

Here's what dear Mark had to say about America to a Russian reporter from the ROL website in March 2002, a few months after the Twin Towers fell:

ROL: Why are Americans so fat? Is it a question of diet or lack of exercise?

AMES: That's actually a serious question. The answer is to be found in their brains. A wave of advertising washes over them, saying: You will eat this! You will eat that! We have the very best hamburgers and hotdogs in the world -- completely full of sh*t. The people have sold themselves, and then when they see in movies the images of people with slender figures and look at themselves in the mirror, they are plagued by self doubt, feeling they are deformed, and to forget this doubt they AGAIN BEGIN TO GORGE THEMSELVES. Americans are also terrified of serial killers and maniacs, and the result is that nobody talks to anybody at work, and they even eat all alone. And it's so dull for them that they just keep stuffing themselves like pigs. It's simply amazing, I find, how much garbage can be stuffed inside one American at a single sitting.

Mark was apparently not aware that Americans live far longer, healthier lives than Russians, who are governed of their own choice by a proud KGB spy and whose diets, bereft of vegetables, consist largely of fried fat and vodka (hence short life span). He was also apparently not aware that just because nobody liked HIM at work in America, and so ignored him, that's not necessarily the case for everybody. Poor dear. He must have been so lonely!

So to sum up: It's just fine for Mark and the eXile to hate America, the world' s most successful country, as much as they like. But it's a high crime for LR to hate Russia, the world's least successful country, and she must be condemned for it. It's just fine for Mark and the eXile to publish anonymously written and sourced stories about LR, but it's highly suspicious if LR is anonymous. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with purporting to criticize the establishment while being employed by it, and nothing at all suspicious about attacking the enemies of your employer.