RA’s Daily Russian News Blast – April 2, 2010
TODAY: Press keep mum on whether rights activist attacker will face charges; Medvedev visits Dagestan, urges ‘dagger blow’ against terrorists; 2 killed in car bomb in the troubled region; Strasbourg fines Russia over Ingushetia disappearance. Nurgaliyev misses deadline; military concerned about conscription-evaders; rapping.
Apparently the police have refused to say whether the man detained for attacking 82-year-old human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva will be prosecuted. European Parliament Member Joseph Daul has voiced concern about the assault. ‘We have twisted off the heads of the most odious bandits, but it looks like this is not enough’: Medvedev vows revenge in a surprise visit to Dagestan. See the five components of the President’s plans to crush terrorism here. The New York Times senses a Putinesque tone in Medvedev’s calls for tougher action. The director of the Sova Center suggests in an article on RFE/RL that Putin-style ‘over-the-top rhetoric is destructive’ and is doing little to aid social cohesion. A blast has killed two people in Dagestan and a bomb near a graveyard has been defused in the village of Oguzer near Kizlyar, where 12 people were killed on Wednesday. ‘Deputies are already preparing a bill that would allow the death sentence for convicted terrorists’, says a Georgy Bovt op-ed in the Moscow Times. The Independent has a useful Q+A. A profile of Doku Umarov. The European Court of Human Rights has fined Russia almost $98,000 over the disappearance of a man in Ingushetia, who they claim was kidnapped unlawfully by the FSB.
Apparently the slowness of Russia’s media to report the metro bombings ‘is indicative of the state of television journalism in Russia today’. Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev has missed a deadline (of his own making) to replace a 1991 law on the police.
Problems for the military: draft dodging on the rise. Find out why the Khodorkovsky trial has turned ‘tragi-farcical’. Apparently the Yukos founder’s lawyers plan to call ‘Western heads of state, chief executives of leading foreign companies and the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin‘ to the witness stand. A leading member of the Communist Party, Yuri Maslyukov has died in Moscow at the age of 72. A new documentary has brought to light at an alleged outbreak of HIV among small children in Uzbekistan in 2007.
‘Brazen well-fed faces with flashing lights and security speak from the television screen and say they aren’t afraid;While their children are in London and their money in the Cayman Islands’: rapper Dino MC 47 is the latest musician to take on the Kremlin elite.
PHOTO: President Dmitry Medvedev speaking during a meeting of local authorities at Russia’s southern city of Makhachkala on Thursday, April 1, 2010. (Mikhail Klimentyev / Reuters/RIA-Novosti)
