RA’s Daily Russia News Blast – Feb. 13, 2008
TODAY: Putin threatens to target missiles at Ukraine but Russia wants a ban on the use of weapons in space; Russia’s ‘Corporate Raiders’; Boris Nemtsov suspends membership of Union of Right Forces. Vladimir Putin will give his seventh and final annual news-conference as President today. One journalist, in a bid to prove that Putin is “a failure, not a success,” says that in important respects, Russia’s economic reform “has gone backwards, particularly with the ever-growing role of the state in vital segments of the economy”. Another says “the strange paranoia and vindictiveness of Mr. Putin are on display everywhere, notably in Russia’s frozen far east, where Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, is languishing in a subarctic labor camp”. The story of another businessman who alleges his company was stolen from him by authorities (“Corporate Raiders”) can be found here.