RA’s Daily Russia News Blast – Jan 28, 2014

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny has published online his investigation into inflated contracts that, he says, allowed officials to embezzle billions of rubles during the construction of Olympic facilities in Sochi. The Times praised the accessibility and humour of Navalny’s interactive, English-language website which offers accolades for Sochi’s ‘champions of corruption’. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s winter dacha was exposed by journalist Andrei Malgin as ‘officially listed as a structure erected for the Sochi Olympic Games’. Medvedev suggested that ‘a reasonable quantity’ of government officials should be allowed back onto the boards of state-owned companies. The New York Times sees the Olympics under Putin (the new New Yorker cover says it all) as an attempt to prove that ‘Russia is the guardian of a culture that sets superior moral and political standards’. The International Olympics Committee says athletes who want to protest will be free to do so at news conferences, but warned them against making any statements on the podium ‘however good the cause’. Foreign Minister Igor Shuvalov has a piece in the FT ‘set[ting] the record straight’ on the Eurasian Economic Union.