Ucrania: Putin decreta ser a Crimeia um Estado soberano e independente

Soberano e independente, entre aspas, como se diz, talvez duplas, ou triplas.

Trata-se, provavelmente, do primeiro Estado "soberano e independente", na história da humanidade e da moderna comunidade de nações, a ter a sua "soberania e independência" decretadas por um outro Estado.

Em mais alguns anos, essa modalidade de surgimento de Estados soberanos e independentes vai estar incorporada nos manuais de Direito Internacional.

Por enquanto, ainda não é o caso...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Putin signed a decree declaring Crimea as a “sovereign and independent” state 

France 24, 17/03/2014

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Monday signed a decree declaring Crimea as a “sovereign and independent” state one day after the region voted to separate from Ukraine in a disputed referendum condemned by Kiev and the West.

Putin’s declaration comes just hours after both the United States and the European Union imposed the heaviest sanctions against Russia since the Cold War, targeting high-profile Russian and Ukrainian officials with travel bans and asset freezes for supporting Sunday’s fast-track vote.
Ukraine’s turmoil has become Europe’s most severe security crisis in years and tensions have been high since Russian troops seized control of Crimea, which has now decided to merge with Russia. Russian troops are also massed near the border with Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine’s acting president raised tensions on the ground by calling for the activation of some 20,000 military reservists and volunteers across the country and for the mobilization of another 20,000 in the recently formed National Guard.
In the Crimean capital of Simferopol, ethnic Russians applauded the referendum that overwhelmingly called for secession and for joining Russia
Risk of further sanctions
The US, the EU and Ukraine’s new government do not recognize the referendum, which was called hastily as Ukraine’s political crisis deepened with the ouster of pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovichfollowing months of protests and sporadic bloodshed. In addition to calling the vote itself illegal, the Obama administration said there were “massive anomalies” in balloting that returned a 97 percent “yes” vote for joining Russia.
Obama warned that Russia could face more financial punishment.
“If Russia continues to interfere in Ukraine, we stand ready to impose further sanctions,” Obama said.
One of the top Russian officials hit by sanctions mocked Obama. “Comrade Obama, what should those who have neither accounts nor property abroad do? Have you not thought about it?” Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted. “I think the decree of the President of the United States was written by some joker.”
Moscow considers the vote legitimate and Putin was to address both houses of parliament Tuesday on the Crimean situation.
Ukraine ‘won’t give up Crimea’
In Kiev, acting President Oleksandr Turchinov vowed that Ukraine will not give up Crimea.
“We are ready for negotiations, but we will never resign ourselves to the annexation of our land,” a somber-faced Turchinov said in a televised address to the nation. “We will do everything in order to avoid war and the loss of human lives. We will be doing everything to solve the conflict through diplomatic means. But the military threat to our state is real.”
The Crimean referendum could also encourage rising pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine’s east and lead to further divisions in this nation of 46 million.
FRANCE 24’s Ukraine correspondent Gulliver Craggreported that Ukrainian troops have regrouped in strategic areas near the eastern borders as well as in the south, in areas joining Crimea.
“Ukrainian tanks are on the move,” he said. “Certainly the Ukrainian government’s attitude at the moment seems to be that it’s on a war footing and it is trying to gather the forces necessary to confront a potential Russian incursion.”
He added that tens of thousands of Russian troops have been carrying out military exercises to the east of Ukraine’s border and that a Russian missile system has been brought into Crimea.
A delegation of Crimean lawmakers was set to travel to Moscow on Monday for negotiations on how to proceed. Russian lawmakers have suggested that formally annexing Crimea is almost certain – with one saying it could happen within days.
“We came back home to Mother Russia. We came back home, Russia is our home,” said Nikolay Drozdenko, a resident in Sevastopol, the key Crimean port where Russia leases a naval base from Ukraine.
The Crimean parliament declared that all Ukrainian state property on the peninsula will be nationalized and become the property of the Crimean Republic. It gave no further details. Lawmakers also asked the United Nations and other nations to recognize it and began work on setting up a central bank with $30 million in support from Russia.

Putin allies targeted by sanctions
The US announced sanctions against seven Russian officials, including Rogozin, Putin’s close ally Valentina Matvienko who is speaker of the upper house of parliament and Vladislav Surkov, one of Putin’s top ideological aides. The Treasury Department also targeted Yanukovich, Crimean leader Sergei Aksyonov and two other top figures.
The EU’s foreign ministers slapped travel bans and asset freezes against 21 officials from Russia and Ukraine following Crimea’s referendum.
“We need to show solidarity with Ukraine and therefore Russia leaves us no choice,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told reporters in Brussels before the vote.“The ‘Anschluss’ of Crimea cannot rest without a response from the international community.”
He was referring to Nazi Germany’s forceful annexation of Austria.
Moscow, meanwhile, called on Ukraine to become a federal state as a way of resolving the polarization between Ukraine’s western regions – which favour closer ties with the 28-nation EU – and its eastern areas, which have long ties to Russia.
In a statement Monday, Russia’s foreign ministry urged Ukraine’s parliament to call a constitutional assembly that could draft a new constitution to make the country federal, handing more power to its regions. It also said country should adopt a “neutral political and military status,” a demand reflecting Moscow’s concern about the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO and possibly integrating closer politically and economically with the EU.
Russia is also pushing for Russian to become one of Ukraine’s state languages alongside Ukrainian.
Separately, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytsya visited NATO headquarters in Brussels to request technical equipment to deal with the secession of Crimea and the Russian incursion there.

Putin: o novo perturbador da paz europeia - Bill Keller (NYT)

December 15, 2013

Russia vs. Europe

By BILL KELLER

The world needs Nelson Mandelas. Instead, it gets Vladimir Putins. As the South African hero was being sung to his grave last week, the Russian president was bullying neighboring Ukraine into a new customs union that is starting to look a bit like Soviet Union Lite, and consolidating his control of state-run media by creating a new Kremlin news agency under a nationalistic and homophobic hard-liner.

Putin’s moves were not isolated events. They fit into a pattern of behavior over the past couple of years that deliberately distances Russia from the socially and culturally liberal West: laws giving official sanction to the terrorizing of gays and lesbians, the jailing of members of a punk protest group for offenses against the Russian Orthodox Church, the demonizing of Western-backed pro-democracy organizations as “foreign agents,” expansive new laws on treason, limits on foreign adoptions.

What’s going on is more complicated and more dangerous than just Putin flexing his political pecs. He is trying to draw the line against Europe, to deepen division on a continent that has twice in living memory been the birthplace of world wars. It seems clearer than ever that Putin is not just tweaking the West to rouse his base or nipping domestic opposition in the bud. He is also attempting to turn back 25 years of history.

The motivation of Vladimir Putin has long been a subject of journalistic and scholarly speculation, resulting in several overlapping theories: He is the boy tormented in the rough courtyards of postwar Leningrad, who put on a KGB uniform to get even and never took it off. He is the cynical, calculating master of realpolitik, who sees the world in conspiracies and responds in kind. He is a tortured Russian soul out of Dostoevsky, distressed by godlessness, permissiveness and moral decline. He is Soviet Man, still fighting the Cold War. He is a classic narcissist, best understood by his penchant for being photographed bare-chested on horseback.

Since his current presidential term began in 2012, Putin has felt increasingly that his overtures to the West were not met with due respect, that Russia was treated as a defeated nation, not an equal on the world stage. His humiliation and resentment have soured into an ideological antipathy that is not especially Soviet but is deeply Russian. His beef with the West is no longer just about political influence and economic advantage. It is, in his view, profoundly spiritual.

“Putin wants to make Russia into the traditional values capital of the world,” said Masha Gessen, author of a stinging Putin biography, an activist for gay and lesbian rights and a writer for the Latitudes blog on this paper’s website.

What, you may wonder, does Russia’s retro puritanism have to do with the turmoil in the streets of Kiev, where Ukrainian protesters yearning for a partnership with the European Union confront a president, Viktor Yanukovich, who has seemed intent on joining Putin’s rival “Eurasian” union instead? More than you might think.

Listen to the chairman of the Russian Parliament’s International Affairs Committee, Alexei Pushkov, warning that if Ukraine joins the E.U., European advisers will infiltrate the country and introduce “a broadening of the sphere of gay culture.” Or watch Dmitry Kiselyov, the flamboyantly anti-Western TV host Putin has just installed at the head of a restructured news agency. Kiselyov recently aired excerpts from a Swedish program called “Poop and Pee,” designed to teach children about bodily functions, and declared it was an example of the kind of European depravity awaiting Ukraine if it aligns with Europe. (Kiselyov is also the guy who said that when gay people die their internal organs should be burned and buried so that they cannot be donated.)

Dmitri Trenin, a scholar in the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is convinced this is not just pandering to a devout constituency, but also something more personal. In the past two years Putin has become more ideologically conservative, more inclined to see Europe as decadent and alien to the Orthodox Christian, Eastern Slav world to which both Russia and Ukraine belong.

“It’s tolerance that has no bounds,” Trenin told me. “It’s secularism. He sees Europe as post-Christian. It’s national sovereignty that is superseded by supranational institutions. It’s the diminished role of the church. It’s people’s rights that have outstripped people’s responsibilities to one another and to the state.”

To appreciate the magnitude of what Putin is doing, it helps to recall a bit of history.

In July 1989, the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, made a speech in Strasbourg that many took as an important step back from the Cold War. His theme was that Russia now regarded itself as sharing a “common European home” alongside its Western rivals. Mutual respect and trade should replace confrontation and deterrence as the foundations of the relationship. Military blocs would be refashioned into political organizations. What President Reagan dubbed “the evil empire” would be the good neighbor.

“The long winter of world conflict based on the division of Europe seems to be approaching an end,” Jim Hoagland, the chief foreign correspondent of The Washington Post, wrote at the time. It was a common theme.

When the Soviet Union unraveled a few years later, the largest of the 14 republics liberated from Russian dominion was Ukraine. While savoring their independence, many Ukrainians wanted to follow Russia on the path Gorbachev had announced.

“There was this slogan, ‘To Europe with Russia,’ ” said Roman Szporluk, former director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard. “Clearly that idea is now out, and I guess Putin must have decided to restore the empire.”

Nearly 25 years after Gorbachev’s “common European home,” Putin sounds like a common European home wrecker.

It is true that during the recent years of recession and austerity Europe has lost some of its dazzle. But it is still more alluring than Ukraine’s threadbare economy, presided over by an ineffectual and corrupt governing class. Ukrainians have never abandoned their hope to be part of the West. Protesters rallying at Independence Square in Kiev represent a generation that has studied, worked and traveled in Poland since it joined Europe, and that does not want to retreat to some shabby recreation of the Russian empire. They are backed, too, by a significant segment of Ukrainian business, which prefers Western rule of law to the corruption and legal caprice of Russia and Ukraine.

Putin may succeed in capturing Ukraine, but he could come to regret it. While he’s looking to the past, he might linger over the experience of an earlier potentate, Josef Stalin, who annexed western Ukraine from Poland. As Szporluk points out, Stalin thought he was being clever, but he ended up doubling his problems: He brought politically restive Ukrainians into the Soviet tent, and left a stronger, homogenous Poland no longer unsettled by its Ukrainian minority.

Likewise, if Putin dragoons Ukraine into his Russian-dominated alliance, he will need to pacify public opinion by showering the new member with gifts he can’t afford, and ceding it influence that he would rather not share. And even then, resentments of the young Ukrainian Europhiles will fester, and feed the already ample discontent of Russia’s own younger generation. As Trenin points out, “Ukraine will always be looking for the exit.” Putin may learn, as Stalin did, that a captive Ukraine is more trouble than it’s worth.

A piada da semana: Russia pacifista e moralizadora...

Leio no jornal do chefe da quadrilha (atualmente com muito tempo disponível para escrever não só no seu blog e artigos de jornal, mas também romances inteiros, a la Tolstoi) esta coisa magnífica:

Presidente russo, Vladimir Putin fez uma crítica velada aos Estados Unidos, nesta quinta-feira, ao descrever a Rússia como uma força para a paz e de moralidade...

Não é uma gracinha?
Ou ele estava fazendo piadas, ou tinha tomado muita vodka...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

A piada da semana: Putin Premio Nobel da Paz

Sem comentários (e precisa?)

Public Figures Nominate Putin for 2014 Nobel Peace Prize

Ria Novosti (Rússia), 01/10/2013

MOSCOW, October 1 (RIA Novosti) – Russian activists and lawmakers announced Tuesday that they plan to nominate Russian President Vladimir Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Supporters of the initiative say they want to see the Russian leader recognized for his efforts in mediating the ongoing civil war in Syria.

Crooner-cum-State Duma deputy Iosif Kobzon said Putin was “more worthy” of the award than 2009 recipient US President Barack Obama, arguing that the US leader had initiated aggressive military action in Syria while his Russian counterpart had made efforts to prevent the war from escalating.

Speaking to journalists, Beslan Kobakhiya, vice president of the International Academy of Spiritual Unity and Cooperation, described Putin as the “person of the year,” saying that he had proven his commitment to global peace through personal example.

The academy said that its letter nominating Putin for the award was received by the Nobel Committee on September 20.

The nominating group said it had not consulted Putin on the idea, but Kobzon, a fervent Putin loyalist, explained the president probably wouldn’t comment “because of his humility.”

Russian media have been circulating rumors for several weeks about Putin’s possible Nobel nomination for his role in the Syrian conflict.

Presidential administration spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to comment on the issue in a recent interview with Russia’s Izvestia daily, saying that tangible results in the Middle East should be reached before any “triumphant statements” could be made.

Putin has drawn much international praise for his government’s efforts to prevent a US-led punitive bombing campaign against Syria over the Middle Eastern nation’s alleged deployment of chemical weapons.

Critics of Russia have argued, however, that the Kremlin is primarily motivated by its desire to protect strategic interests in the region and that it has been supplying weapons to Bashar Assad’s regime.

The Nobel Committee formally does not comment on the names of nominees – or the people who nominated them – for 50 years after the prize is awarded.

Three other Russians have won the Nobel Peace Prize since the honor was founded in 1901. The most recent winner was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.

Former recipients are allowed to put forward and support new candidates, but the nominating group said it had no plans to consult Gorbachev about Putin’s suitability for the award.

The Nobel Committee’s deadline for 2014 submissions expires on February 1. The Peace Prize winner will be announced in October and presented with the award in a ceremony on December 10 in Oslo, Norway.

Nosso aliado no Brics: o democrata Putin - Der Spiegel

The Path to TyrannyPutin's Russia Is Becoming a Flawless Dictatorship

By Georg Diez, Walter Mayr and Matthias Schepp

Der Spiegel, August 13, 2012

DPA

Vladimir Putin is rapidly transforming Russia into a repressive state reminiscent of the Soviet Union, and the Pussy Riot trial is the climax in his campaign against the opposition. However, following massive media attention, his crackdown on the punk band could backfire.

The window through which the world currently views Vladimir Putin's Russia is narrow and can only be opened from the outside -- like the feeding door of a cage.

The window is part of the glass enclosure in which the defendants are held during trials in Moscow's Khamovniki district court. As long as it's open, it serves as their connection to the outside world. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was Russia's richest man until 2003 and has been its most famous prisoner since then, used it to deliver a couple of words to the world when he was put on trial here for a second time in 2010.
Last Wednesday, it was the voice of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova that was coming from the cage. Tolokonnikova, a 22-year-old student, together with two other members of the feminist punk bank Pussy Riot, were being charged with "hooliganism." When the verdict is pronounced on Friday, the women could be sentenced to up to three years in prison.
The charge is documented in videos showing the musicians, wearing ski masks, giving a performance on Feb. 21, 2012, in front of the wall of icons in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. The lyrics included the following: "Mother of God, Virgin Mary, drive Putin away," "Holy shit, shit, Lord's shit," and "The patriarch believes in Putin / Bastard, better believe in God."
In their closing statements to the court, the defendants tried to refute the charge of "hooliganism." Tolokonnikova, with her neatly plucked eyebrows and perfectly styled hair, unabashedly referred to other people who went to extremes to defend their beliefs: St. Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian church; the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was sentenced to death for his resistance to religious and secular rulers alike; and Gulag chronicler Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who predicted "that words will crush concrete."
Ridiculing Putin
Was it hubris or heartfelt? What will really be at stake in the court building on the banks of the Moskva River when the women of Pussy Riot are sentenced before the eyes of the global public? Some say it is merely a case of badly behaved, defiant regime opponents who would not have met with as much approval in Russia if it hadn't been for the regime's reaction, which included five-and-a-half months of pretrial detention for the accused, two of them young mothers. Others say that the case exposes the entire Putin system to ridicule.
The video of their performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on the Internet, and the images of Tolokonnikova's fiery statements against the Putin state will be viewed millions of times.
As a result, the attractive young woman and her companions have already achieved more than many of the opposition leaders and critical artists who have grown old in their resistance against Putin. The members of the punk band, notwithstanding their simple messages, stand for a Russia that is fed up with an arbitrary legal system, state control and corrupt elites.
Most of all, it has had enough of the man who had once promised to liberate his country from the legacy of the communist dictatorship, whose tough, opposition-crushing leadership style was met with great approval in large parts of the country at the beginning. Instead, he has guided his autocratic state along a path that is already heading for a repressive regime in which opposition members are arrested indiscriminately and their homes searched by the authorities, a regime where prosecutors shape their indictments to suit political requirements and intimidate opponents through interrogation. The whole thing is controlled by a man who could very well rule Russia with his tyrannical methods until 2024: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, 59.
'Flawless Democrat'
It was an oligarch, the media czar Boris Berezovsky, who orchestrated Putin's move into the Kremlin around the turn of the millennium. At the time, most Russians welcomed Putin, a judo practitioner and staunch opponent of alcohol. They had had enough of his eternally sickly predecessor Boris Yeltsin, who was increasingly drunk in public. The West hoped that the young, apparently inexperienced Kremlin leader would continue Yeltsin's foreign policy, which emphasized rapprochement, and that it would also be less erratic.
Putin's speech to the German parliament, the Bundestag, on Sept. 25, 2001, fueled expectations that the former KGB officer, who spoke German fluently, would modernize Russia and champion European values. Such illusions culminated in a now-famous comment by then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who, in November 2004, described his Moscow friend as a "flawless democrat."
Putin has since disappointed his German friends, whose expectations were in any case too high. They had refused to believe that Russia still viewed itself as an independent power between Europe and Asia, that 500 years of authoritarian rule under the czars and the communists, could not be shed overnight, and the reservations against the West would not simply disappear because Russians like to drink Coca-Cola and carry designer bags by Yves Saint Laurent.
They also knew too little about Putin himself, who, in the years of turmoil, had only made it as far as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.
Severity and Ruthlessness
Nevertheless, there had always been signs that Putin was convinced that he could only perform his duties with severity and ruthlessness. In the summer of 1991, for example, when the Soviet realm was collapsing, Putin moved into his office in St. Petersburg and promptly had the portrait of Lenin removed and replaced with one of Peter the Great.
A janitor had brought Putin two images of the czar. The first one depicted the young Peter, looking amiable and idealistic, a modernizer who wanted to open the "window to Europe" for his giant, backward country. Putin rejected the picture.
Instead, he chose one of a serious-looking older czar, marked by many battles and conflicts, one who had expanded his realm with new conquests, and one whose rule was so ruthless that he had his own son tortured to death after accusing him of being involved in a conspiracy.
Putin's preference for the ruthless version of Peter the Great could be symptomatic of the entire Putin era, which has already lasted for 12 years and, according to the constitution, could persist for another 12 years.
Solidifying Power
Putin, nervous and insecure in the early days of his rule, had hardly assumed the office of president before he used an overdue judicial reform to put all senior judges under the Kremlin's control. That move meant that the separation of the executive and the judiciary, a fundamental aspect of every Western democracy, had been suspended in a key area.
The war in the Caucasus offered the young president the opportunity to solidify his power. After repeated attacks by Chechen terrorists, which claimed hundreds of lives, Putin went about strengthening the Kremlin's centralized power and, in December 2004, eliminated the direct election of provincial governors by the people for the next eight years.
Putin also expected loyalty from the oligarchs, who had been coddled by Yeltsin. Those who did not toe the line were forced out of the country or inundated with trials. With the help of the FSB, the country's domestic intelligence agency, Putin created new empires of oligarchs devoted to him. From then on, the property of the wealthiest Russians was only secure if they remained loyal to Putin.
In his first two terms, Putin still tried to preserve a delicate balance between conservative hardliners and liberal-minded parts of the Moscow power elite. He used the struggle between the two camps over the global power's foreign policy direction and control over the most lucrative parts of the Russian economy to expand his own power. It gave him the role of an arbitrator, making Putin the ultimate judge.
Rolling Back Reforms
But after his four years as prime minister and his return to the Kremlin in early May, Putin abandoned his conciliatory approach. Demands for more democracy and development of Russia's weak civil society were suddenly viewed as subversive.

He quickly had his party, United Russia, which had increasingly taken on the structures and rituals of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the more than 10 years of its existence, drastically tighten laws against demonstrations. Leading members of the opposition were attacked with smear campaigns.
In only three months Putin, with the help of his absolute majority in the Duma, repealed the few reforms that his predecessor Dmitry Medvedev, with whom he had switched places, had managed to carry out. The president and his closest advisers saw these reforms as the real fuel for the mass protests that had become part of everyday life in Moscow since the parliamentary election at the end of last year. Most of all, Medvedev's essay "Forward, Russia," published in September 2009, had triggered hopes of a freer Russia within the well-educated urban middle class.
Putin's successor had created an atmosphere in which the middle class had become active, recognizing that a different, modern Russia could be possible. This political thaw had since been recognized as a mistake, says Moscow political scientist Vitaly Ivanov. Putin's team responded to Medvedev's stated principle that freedom is always preferable to the lack of freedom with the conviction that order is always better than disorder.

continuar neste link: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/spiegel-cover-story-on-pussy-riot-trial-and-putin-a-849697.html

O G8 menos 1: G7 + 0,5 (Russia): que tal voltar ao G5?

Complicadas essas decisões que se tomam com base em eventos de pura conjuntura. Depois fica difícil voltar atrás...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The No-Show

Dmitri TreninFOREIGN POLICY, MAY 11, 2012

Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision not to attend the G-8 summit and send Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as a stand-in has been seen by many as a bold snub to Washington and has raised important questions about the Russian leader's motivations. Beyond that looms the larger, and much more important, question about the future of Russia's foreign policy and its relations with the West. What if Putin's real motives, however, are exactly as advertised by his Kremlin aides -- that he needs to focus on forming a new government at home? If that's true, it offers a remarkable insight into the process of power balancing among the clans that make up Russia's cabinet. Either way, it's a hell of a way to begin a new term.

Unlike Putin and Medvedev's announcement last September that they had long planned to swap places, the G-8 decision must have been made only in the last few days. When Putin announced that he would not attend the May 20-21 NATO summit in Chicago, he did confirm for the May 18-19 G-8 summit, which was then moved to Camp David by Barack Obama's administration. Until early May, U.S. and Russian diplomats were working hard on the Obama-Putin meeting to be held at the White House on the margins of the G-8 summit. Putin's public statements on the eve of his May 7 inauguration indicated his willingness to work with the United States on matters of mutual interest and even "go really far" in that direction, as his foreign-policy aide put it. For that, of course, Putin requires a working personal relationship with Obama, the current and likely future president of the United States. Snubbing him would make no sense.

Dmitri Trenin

DIRECTOR
MOSCOW CENTER

More from Trenin...

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So, something must have happened quite recently to make Putin change his mind. Of recent developments, two things stand out: the demonstrations in Moscow on the eve of and on Inauguration Day and the remarkable tardiness in the shaping of the "Medvedev cabinet." The May 6 clashes with the police in the streets of Moscow added more bad press to Putin's mountain of criticism in the Western media. Were he to show up at the White House, he would run the risk of being asked uncomfortable questions at a Rose Garden news conference. Putin's irritation with the U.S. government's support for Russian NGOs active in election monitoring is well known, as is his criticism of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the State Department. The no-show at the media-heavy ritual of the G-8 summit, most of whose leaders congratulated Putin on his reelection only grudgingly or skipped congratulations altogether, thus appears to be a retaliatory strike.

It probably was not. Putin is anything but media-shy. In your face is what he likes. The May 6 Moscow "march of millions" attracted fewer people, despite the fine weather, than the massive February event a month before the presidential election, held in bitter cold. The march had no effect on Putin's inauguration and was overshadowed on the world scene by the French and Greek elections that same weekend. Western criticisms notwithstanding, Putin feels a winner -- and he certainly looked that way on election night. If anything, he likely would enjoy the spectacle of coming back to claim his place among the world's most powerful leaders, in spite of all the hopes, entreaties, and admonitions that he would not. Doing that in the United States, in particular, would have been a personal triumph and humiliation of his foreign foes.

But what looked initially a technical exercise -- forming the new cabinet -- appears less of a formality. Moscow is awash with contradictory rumors about who's in and who's out, and the general confusion is palpable. The truth is, the Russian government is a coalition, but not of political parties (which are insignificant as far as actual governing goes) as much as of the country's most powerful clans -- a diverse group that ranges from the titans of energy, metals, or other branches of industry to the captains of state-owned enterprises; from Putin's friends, Boris Yeltsin's old family, and Medvedev's classmates to the power players in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other regions.

The cabinet is not so much about policy as such, but about to whom and where money flows. Who controls what is essential to stability within the Russian elite who rule and own Russia at the same time. Arbitrating, brokering, and ultimately deciding the who and what in this situation is not something the new and once-again prime minister, Medvedev, can do alone. In a system where manual control takes the place of institutions, Putin is irreplaceable. The irony of the prime minister being sent on a mission abroad while the president single-handedly pulls the strings and forms his government for him underlines their respective roles -- and Medvedev's puppet status.

Putin's decision to stay away from Camp David means that he is putting the stability of his power structure above his diplomatic engagements abroad. This is not unusual for politicians. It also suggests, however, that striking the proper balance among the clans has become more difficult. If Putin, in his 13th year in power, is finding this a tricky task, the future of manual control does not seem bright.

Increasingly, Moscow's elites may think of turning to a more institutionalized method of balancing -- something of an agreement on the rules of the game, and an agreement, of course, to police that agreement -- so as to prevent any one clan from gaining too much power. When this happens, Russia's current absolute monarchy will evolve into a limited one. Putin believes, however, that Russia, in his time, can only be held together from above by a popular leader: himself. Call it authoritarianism with the consent of the governed.

Even if Putin's decision was primarily dictated by domestic concerns, his no-show will have foreign-policy implications. The G-8, which many in the West see as flawed because of Russia's membership -- and perhaps as overtaken by the economic realities of a changing world, better reflected in the G-20 -- is also being downgraded in the Kremlin's eyes. (Throughout the 1990s, the G-7+1 was the formula for Russian participation, but this was changed to the G-8 by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1998.) For Moscow, this is less a symbol of Russia's "belonging" to the global leadership team and more of a privileged contact zone, giving Russians access to the West, but without an obligation to align with it.

In the G-20, Russians are less conspicuous, but are also less put on the spot. The fact that Putin has decided to attend the G-20 summit in Las Cabos, Mexico, in June does not mean that he values the larger gathering more. Putin, the ultimate transactional politician, frankly hates international jamborees, seeing them as a waste of time. Mexico would have been a perfect destination for Medvedev, if only Putin had been able to travel to Camp David. Instead, now he has to make the trip in order to meet the only person whom he really wanted to talk to on the canceled trip to the United States: Barack Obama.

Much has been made in the media that Putin is now scheduled to visit China before he sees Obama in Mexico. There is less here than meets the eye, however. China and the United States are both hugely important to Russia, and an early visit to China -- to attend the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization -- makes a lot of sense, especially in view of political developments there ahead of the leadership change this October. Putin is unlikely, however, to build an axis with Beijing to spite Washington. Any remake of the Sino-Soviet alliance would just bring more trouble to the two countries than help advance their common interests, and it would be immensely awkward to operate.

With Putin formally back in the Kremlin, Russia's foreign policy will probably focus on gaining global expertise for domestic economic modernization, helping large international companies buy into Russia, promoting a form of global governance that would balance the West's dominance by means of such formal bodies as the U.N. Security Council and such informal ones as the BRICS, and protecting Russian security interests against threats both real and perceived, such as U.S.-NATO missile defense in Europe, by means of a massive rearmament program. Putin needs a meeting with Obama to determine how much alignment on these issues there can be between the two of them -- and how much he can get away with. Medvedev, at Camp David, will simply be on a reconnaissance mission.

This article orginally appeared in Foreign Policy.

Eleicoes na nova Russia putinesca: ate Gogol se remexeria...

Já tinha lido esta cronica do estrangeiro no Le Monde impresso, e tinha ficado com vontade de postá-la. Felizmente, a internet tem dessas surpresas: como temia o chefe Abraracourcix -- quem já leu Asterix sabe do que estou falando -- as coisas caem literalmente sobre a cabeça da gente.
Pois me caiu, e apresso-me a postar.
A crônica de como se fraudam eleições na Rússia de hoje, uma de nossas aliadas no Brics, a mesma, aliás, que anda ajudando Bachar Al-Assad a massacrar o seu próprio povo.
Como o Brasil também tem pruridos soberanistas, acaba embarcando na mesma canoa.
Maravilha. Não imaginava ver o Brasil alinha a ditaduras, mas tudo é possível quando a alma não é pequena, e pode abrigar mesmo os mais sórdidos sentimentos...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

"Les Ames mortes" revisitées

LE MONDE | 17.03.2012 à 13h20

Par Marie Jégo

Nikolaï Gogol pourrait se retourner dans sa tombe si ce n'était déjà fait, comme l'affirment les guides qui font visiter sa sépulture au cimetière de Novodievitchi. Un bon siècle et demi après Les Ames mortes, la Russie reste fidèle à l'esprit de Gogol avec la création de bureaux de vote "fantômes", lors de l'élection présidentielle du 4 mars, remportée par Vladimir Poutine avec 63,6 % des voix.

Le jour du scrutin, 24 bureaux de vote "provisoires" ont surgi à Moscou, 70 à Saint-Pétersbourg. "Ces bureaux ne figuraient pas dans le registre de la commission électorale de Moscou, les observateurs les ont découverts par hasard", écrit le quotidien des affaires Vedomosti dans son édition du mardi 13 mars.

Les locaux étaient fantômes, mais pas les résultats publiés par la commission électorale centrale (TsIK). Ils apparaissent très favorables au candidat Poutine, qui y a recueilli jusqu'à 90 % des voix. Dmitri Chtchedrine, observateur dans le petit bourg de Mosrentguen (sud-ouest de Moscou), a trouvé incidemment le bureau fantôme n° 3377 au marché du bricolage. La photo de ce local est visible sur le blog de Vladislav Naganov (http://naganoff.livejournal.com/47629.html).

Explication des autorités : comme le bureau de vote voisin, situé dans une maternité, ne savait que faire de ses électeurs, il a bien fallu en ouvrir un autre... sur le marché, désert en ce dimanche d'élection. "Personne n'y a jamais vu un électeur mais, selon les résultats, la participation était élevée et 87 % des pseudo-votants ont donné leur voix à Vladimir Poutine", rapporte l'hebdomadaire New Times.

Autre subtilité : le vote sur le lieu de l'entreprise, garanti sans observateurs. Hôpitaux, maternités, instituts, casernes, usines ont affiché un taux de participation hors norme (90 %, contre 65,39 % au niveau national). Là encore, le favori des urnes était Vladimir Poutine, avec en moyenne 70 % à 90 % des suffrages.

Autre technologie : les listes complémentaires. Selon la loi, l'électeur qui n'a puobtenir une procuration pour voter en dehors de son bureau d'origine peut s'inscrire sur une liste complémentaire jusqu'à trois jours avant la date du scrutin. Ces listes servent ensuite au "vote en groupe", quand le personnel d'une même entreprise, sous la conduite du contremaître, du brigadier ou du chef d'atelier, vientaccomplir son devoir d'un seul homme dans le même bureau de vote.

Ces listes complémentaires, impossibles à vérifier, ont décontenancé les observateurs. Konstantin Belov, observateur au bureau n° 1359 de Lioublino (sud-est de Moscou), rapporte que, au soir du 3 mars, la liste des électeurs tenait dans trois registres. Le 4 mars au matin, jour du vote, "il y avait un registre de plus". Konstantin Belov a remarqué qu'un groupe venu voter était composé d'ouvriers et d'employés des services communaux municipaux "dépourvus de passeports russes".

Constituées par les représentants de la municipalité dans les quartiers, les listes étaient assez insolites. Tantôt les entreprises mentionnées n'existaient pas, tantôt les électeurs étaient virtuels. Une semaine avant le scrutin, Mikhaïl, 42 ans, commerçant moscovite, avait dû transmettre les données (noms, prénoms, numéros de passeports) de dix personnes de son entourage, plus les siennes propres, au représentant de la municipalité dans son quartier. Ces personnes ne se sont pas déplacées pour voter, on l'a fait à leur place.

Autre nouveauté, les urnes mobiles ont battu un record avec 6,1 millions de votes à domicile, contre 4,5 millions aux législatives du 4 décembre. C'est bien connu, il y a en mars beaucoup plus de malades qu'en décembre. Là encore, la procédure était douteuse : "Dans plusieurs circonscriptions, 200 votes ont été recueillis en deux heures, c'est infaisable", explique Grigori Melkoniants, de l'ONG Golos spécialisée dans la surveillance du processus électoral. D'après les observateurs, Vladimir Poutine a recueilli 10 % à 16 % de voix en plus grâce à la fraude.

"L'art de la fraude s'est perfectionné entre les législatives du 4 décembre 2011 et la présidentielle du 4 mars 2012. Le 4 décembre, nous avions recensé beaucoup de bourrages d'urnes et la réécriture des bordereaux de décompte des voix, ce qui a suscité le mouvement de protestation que l'on sait. Pour la présidentielle, ces procédés ont perduré là où il n'y avait pas d'observateurs. A Moscou et à Saint-Pétersbourg, où ils étaient fort nombreux, la fraude a pris d'autres formes, moins détectables", constate le jeune homme.

Republica Putinesca da Russia: sort of, not really - Tom Friedman (NYT)

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Russia: Sort of, but Not Really

Denis Sinyakov/Reuters

Protesters in Moscow have gotten more brazen. This banner, which says “Putin, Go Away,” faces the Kremlin.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The New York Times, February 4, 2012

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AS a journalist, the best part of covering the recent wave of protests and uprisings against autocrats is seeing stuff you never imagined you’d see — like, in Moscow last week, when some opponents of Vladimir Putin’s decision to become president again, for possibly 12 more years, hung a huge yellow banner on a rooftop facing the Kremlin with Putin’s face covered by a big X, next to the words “Putin Go Away” in Russian.

The sheer brazenness of such protests and the anger at Prime Minister Putin among the urban middle classes here for treating them like idiots by just announcing that he and President Dmitri Mevedev were going to switch jobs were unthinkable a year ago. The fact that the youths who put up the banner were apparently not jailed also bespeaks how much Putin understands that he is on very thin ice and can’t afford to create any “martyrs” that would enrage the antigovernment protesters, who gathered again in Moscow on Saturday.

But what will Putin do next? Will he really fulfill his promise to let new parties emerge or just wait out his opposition, which is divided and still lacks a real national leader? Putin’s Russia is at a crossroads. It has become a “sort-of-but-not-really-country.” Russia today is sort of a democracy, but not really. It’s sort of a free market, but not really. It’s sort of got the rule of law to protect businesses, but not really. It’s sort of a European country, but not really. It has sort of a free press, but not really. Its cold war with America is sort of over, but not really. It’s sort of trying to become something more than a petro-state, but not really.

Putin himself is largely responsible for both the yin and the yang. When he became president in 2000, Russia was not sort of in trouble. It was really in trouble — and spiraling downward. Using an iron fist, Putin restored order and solidified the state, but it was cemented not by real political and economic reforms but rather by a massive increase in oil prices and revenues. Nevertheless, many Russians were, and still are, grateful.

Along the way, Putin spawned a new wealthy corrupt clique around him, but he also ensured that enough of Russia’s oil and mineral bounty trickled down to the major cities, creating a small urban middle class that is now demanding a greater say in its future. But Putin is now stalled. He’s brought Russia back from the brink, but he’s been unable to make the political, economic and educational changes needed to make Russia a modern European state.

Russia has that potential. It is poised to go somewhere. But will Putin lead? The Times’s Moscow bureau chief, Ellen Barry, and I had a talk Thursday at the Russian White House with Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov. I left uncertain.

All these urban protests, said Peskov, are a sign that economic growth has moved ahead of political reform, and that can be fixed: “Ten years ago, we didn’t have any middle class. They were thinking about how to buy a car, how to buy a flat, how to open bank accounts, how to pay for their children to go to a private school, and so on and so forth. Now they have got it, and the interesting part of the story is that they want to be involved much more in political life.”

O.K., sounds reasonable. But what about Putin’s suggestion that the protests were part of a U.S. plot to weaken him and Russia. Does Peskov really believe that?

“I don’t believe that. I know it,” said Peskov. Money to destabilize Russia has been coming in “from Washington officially and non-officially ... to support different organizations ... to provoke the situation. We are not saying it just to say it. We are saying it because we know. ... We knew two or three years in advance that the next day after parliamentary elections [last December] ... we will have people saying these elections are not legitimate.”

This is either delusional or really cynical. And then there’s foreign policy. Putin was very helpful at the United Nations in not blocking the no-fly zone over Libya, but he feels burned by it — that we went from protecting civilians to toppling his ally and arms customer, Muammar el-Qaddafi. It’s true. But what an ally! What a thing to regret! And, now, the more Putin throws his support behind the murderous dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the more he looks like a person buying a round-trip ticket on the Titanic —after it has already hit the iceberg. Assad is a dead man walking. Even if all you care about are arms sales, wouldn’t Russia want to align itself with the emerging forces in Syria?

“There is a strong domestic dimension to Russian policy toward Syria,” said Vladimir Frolov, a Russian foreign policy expert. “If we allow the U.N. and the U.S. to put pressure on a regime — that is somewhat like ours — to cede power to the opposition, what kind of precedent could that create?”

This approach to the world does not bode well for reform at home, added Frolov. “Putin was built for one-way conversations,” he said. He has overseen a “a very personalized, paternalistic system based on arbitrariness.”

Real reform will require a huge re-set on Putin’s part. Could it happen? Does he get it? On the evidence available now, I’d say: sort of, but not really.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 5, 2012, on pageSR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Russia: Sort of, but Not Really.