An editorial in The New York Times focuses on President Dmitry Medvedev’s increasingly visible silence on human rights issues such as the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

Nor has he reacted to the farcical new charges against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, the former top officers of the dismembered Yukos oil company who were arrested in 2003.

The charges then were tax evasion; now they have been expanded to the theft of Yukos’s entire oil production. If the first trials at least could have been explained as a political reckoning for a powerful and ambitious oligarch, the new ones are show, intended only to keep Mr. Khodorkovsky and his colleague in prison forever. “Power: carry out your laws,” Mr. Khodorkovsky demanded at the start of the trial.