RA’s Daily Russian News Blast – Dec 17, 2009
TODAY: EU ceremony awards Memorial with human rights prize; Medvedev granted right to send troops abroad; less siloviki in the Kremlin post-Putin; NATO visit yields a cool response from Medvedev on Afghanistan; START treaty won’t be signed this year; bill could keep criminals out of nightclubs, but also out of jail; Yegor Gaidar.
The European Parliament awarded its prestigious Sakharov Prize to the Russian human rights group Memorial in October, and the ceremony was held in Strasbourg yesterday. Founder Sergei Kovalyov dedicated the prize to those who have died as a result of their struggles to expose malpractice: Memorial researcher Natalya Estemirova, lawyer Stanislav Markelov, journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Anastasia Baburova, ethnologist Nikolai Girenko, Farida Babayeva, ‘and many more‘. Kovalyov urged the EU to continue pressuring Moscow to respect human rights. The Federation Council has approved President Dmitry Medvedev’s request to be granted the right to send troops abroad without senators’ consent. The FT notes a perceived drop in the number of siloviki in the presidential administration since Medvedev came to power. ‘[Putin’s] choice of Mr Medvedev as successor indicates that he himself may have seen the siloviki as usurping too much power and wanted to trim their influence.‘