Obama Should Look Into Putin's Record, Not His Eyes

By Gary Kasparov, WSJ:

Even as Barack Obama faces front-page issues like Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, he will still have to find the time and courage to deal with a certain nuclear-armed autocracy that controls much of the world's oil and gas.

How should Mr. Obama deal with Russia's official president, Dmitry Medvedev, and Russia's real leader, Vladimir Putin? The choice is straightforward: Mr. Obama can treat them like fellow democratic leaders or like the would-be dictators that they are. His decision will tell the world a great deal about how seriously he takes his promises of change.

The is very eager to be accepted as an equal. It apparently hopes that Mr. Obama will send the signal that democracy in Russia doesn't matter, that the's crushing of the opposition and free speech is irrelevant, and that annexing pieces of neighboring Georgia is a local issue and not an international one.

Last week Mr. Medvedev was in France to meet with the leaders of Europe. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is also the current European Union president, tripped over his tongue to ingratiate himself and to present himself as a great peacemaker.

Mr. Sarkozy proudly announced that Russia had "mostly completed" its obligations to resolve the conflict with Georgia. But there is no way to "mostly" accept a dictatorship.

Russia's ruling elite has close allies among the European nations that Mr. Obama is expected to woo. I am far less concerned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's clownish remarks about Mr. Obama's "suntan" than about the way he so eagerly rushes to defend the commercial and political interests of Mr. Putin's clan.

Leaders like Messrs. Berlusconi and Sarkozy have no allegiance to the nation of Russia. Rather, they are defending Mr. Putin as a means to protect their personal and business relationships. Will Mr. Obama's desire to be the toast of Europe come at the expense of democracy in Russia? Mr. Obama must listen very carefully when European voices defend the Putin regime. Nearly always there is the hiss of gas or the bubbling of oil in the background.

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Kasparov's advice to Obama

OPINION
NOVEMBER 20, 2008
Obama Should Look Into Putin's Record, Not His Eyes
The U.S. has the chance for a fresh start on Russia relations.
By GARRY KASPAROV

Even as Barack Obama faces front-page issues like Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, he will still have to find the time and courage to deal with a certain nuclear-armed autocracy that controls much of the world's oil and gas.

How should Mr. Obama deal with Russia's official president, Dmitry Medvedev, and Russia's real leader, Vladimir Putin? The choice is straightforward: Mr. Obama can treat them like fellow democratic leaders or like the would-be dictators that they are. His decision will tell the world a great deal about how seriously he takes his promises of change.

The is very eager to be accepted as an equal. It apparently hopes that Mr. Obama will send the signal that democracy in Russia doesn't matter, that the's crushing of the opposition and free speech is irrelevant, and that annexing pieces of neighboring Georgia is a local issue and not an international one.

Last week Mr. Medvedev was in France to meet with the leaders of Europe. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is also the current European Union president, tripped over his tongue to ingratiate himself and to present himself as a great peacemaker.

Mr. Sarkozy proudly announced that Russia had "mostly completed" its obligations to resolve the conflict with Georgia. But there is no way to "mostly" accept a dictatorship.

Russia's ruling elite has close allies among the European nations that Mr. Obama is expected to woo. I am far less concerned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's clownish remarks about Mr. Obama's "suntan" than about the way he so eagerly rushes to defend the commercial and political interests of Mr. Putin's clan.

Leaders like Messrs. Berlusconi and Sarkozy have no allegiance to the nation of Russia. Rather, they are defending Mr. Putin as a means to protect their personal and business relationships. Will Mr. Obama's desire to be the toast of Europe come at the expense of democracy in Russia? Mr. Obama must listen very carefully when European voices defend the Putin regime. Nearly always there is the hiss of gas or the bubbling of oil in the background.

Last weekend Mr. Medvedev was in Washington to continue his new charm offensive. But Mr. Obama must remember that he was selected by over 66 million votes while Mr. Medvedev needed only one -- that of his predecessor, Mr. Putin.

Here is the full story.

Chess news from Susan Polgar

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Russia's Unsubtle Censorship

It's becoming clear that the Russian government is getting very, very paranoid about the financial crisis, and, as usual, their first target of harassment is the media.  Reporters and editors have been given strict instructions from the procuracy not to report on anything negative relating to the economy, or face ambiguous penalties.  I don't think this is too surprising, but rather disappointing that the authorities don't bother to work harder to carry out their censorship and violations of free press in a more subtle way ... this just looks bad.  So what in the world is left for government mouthpiece Russia Today to report?  With little irony, today they are carrying a story on Turkey's shortcomings in freedom of speech.  From the Wall Street Journal:

Prime Minister Putin was speaking a day after the Prosecutor General's office warned media outlets to be careful about how they cover the financial crisis. If news organizations can't report that there's a problem, they'll be hard-pressed to report that things are improving.

The point here is all too serious. A spokeswoman for the prosecutor told Interfax news agency that the office was not engaging in censorship but merely reminding media of their obligation to "publish credible information" and refrain from "information attacks" on financial institutions. To this end, she said, "permanent monitoring of the mass media materials" was necessary. That's another blow to a local press that already avoids topics that might anger the.

There's little doubt that Mr. Putin's predictions of an economic resurgence will be reported by the mostly state-owned media. So, too, will his tirades about how Russia's problems owe mostly to "cheap money-doping and mortgage troubles in the United States" -- with only minimal blame for his country's underdeveloped financial markets, heavy foreign-currency borrowing by its private sector and overdependence on energy resources.

The doesn't want Russians to think they've gone back to the woes of the Yeltsin era. With the meltdown around them kept off the front pages, Russians might instead recall an earlier era -- one covered dutifully, by Pravda.

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The Shares-for-Loans Bailout

More about what's not being shown on Russian television about the economic crisis from contributors to the Moscow Times:

One would have to dig much deeper to find other worrisome stories, like when some Russian banks refused to give out cash to depositors wishing to make early withdrawals on their fixed-term savings accounts. These issues are not mentioned in the mainstream media, but they are on peoples' lips. Moreover, there is hardly any debate about the structure of the planned bailout, which some are now calling the reversal of the loans-for-shares scheme of the mid-1990s.

We've blogged about Mikhail Fridman not being completely thrilled about the state budging in on Alfa Bank, but probably the most wildly elaborate extrapolation of this shares-for-loans process is the the theory coming out of RUXX that the government is preparing a takeover of Oleg Deripaska's hard earned 25% stake in Norilsk, the most prized Russian mining company, with a $4.5 billion loan (more than double the limit that economic officials had originally set for corporate bailouts). 

Accepting/kremlin help in the crisis may be an unavoidable Faustian bargain, but we would be very surprised to see the state actually take over a monster like Norilsk.

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360 degree panoramas in Google Earth

This week, we've started to feature another layer in the Google Earth Gallery, showing several thousand panoramic views provided by 360cities.net. This layer contains exciting 360 degree panoramas from a variety of great photographs taken all over the world!

Do you want to explore some beautiful spots in Central Park, or be impressed by the beautifully illuminated at night as seen from the Red Square in Moscow?


These amazing panoramas from 360cities.net will provide you another way to browse user contributed pictures and information in addition to our Panoramio and Wikipedia layers.

Are you also an enthusiast taking panoramic views? It's not difficult to add your images as Photooverlays to Google Earth on your own. If you want to share them with others, just follow the links in the balloons of the 360cities.net layer that will take you to the website to join the 360cities.net community.

Posted by Philipp Hirtz, Engineering Manager, Google Earth

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South Ossetian Ghost Towns

Tim Whewell of the New Statesman manages to get an early visit to one of the world's newest self-proclaimed nations, South Ossetia, and finds himself in a geopolitical purgatory.

It is easy to think of those people as mere playthings of Russia, a useful excuse for meddling in the affairs of a state - Georgia - whose president, Mikhail Saakashvili, the loathes. Vladimir Putin declared recently he'd like to "hang him by the balls". Over the past few years, Russia has handed out passports to South Ossetians. It helpfully allowed some junior Russian officials to become ministers in the South Ossetian government. It devoted considerable efforts to improving facilities for its 500 peacekeepers in the territory. And in August it claimed - with huge hyperbole - that it was being forced to invade Georgia to stop a "genocide" of Ossetians and rescue the survivors in a town that the Russian media reported had been razed to the ground.

Reach Tskhinvali and you find a place that, for all the gaping holes in walls and roofs, is still largely standing and working. On a first visit, it is hard not to be more shocked by what has happened to the ethnic Georgian villages on the edge of the town. After revenge attacks by Ossetian militias since the war, they are collections of burnt-out shells, some houses apparently even bulldozed by the authorities.

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Politics, Business, or Both in Venezuela?

From today's Financial Times about Dmitry Medvedev's extended trip to Latin America, figuratively following in the footsteps of China's Hu Jintao:

"The Russians want to demonstrate that two can play at this game," said Dmitry Simes of the Nixon Centre in Washington.

"Clearly, the visit is a gesture towards the US," he said. "While business is a consideration, and Russian clearly has business interests in Venezuela, I don't think you need to send President Medvedev for this. The trip is motivated by politics."

Others think we would be best to curb our concerns over the Russia-Venezuela relationship, pointing out that it really doesn't work as a tit-for-tat expression of spheres of influence.  A while back Joshua Keating wrote:  "Chávez and Evo Morales certainly aren't well-liked in Washington, but most foreign-policy mavens here see them more as angry buffoons or strategic obstacles, not serious threats to America's sovereignty. (...) But the shouldn't think that Americans will fret about developments in Bolivia in the same way that Russians worry about Georgia or Ukraine."

OK, if geopolitics and security are negligible, that leaves business - and given the presence of Russia's most famous oil bureaucrat in Venezuela, private income may be the biggest motivation at play here.  Certainly we can be confident that Venezuela's independent pursuit of a relationship with a distant foreign power won't likely end up becoming the justification for invasion by the United States - but then again Moscow and Washington have always had different conceptions of empire.

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