RA’s Daily Russian News Blast – Feb 8, 2011
TODAY: Medvedev signs police reform bill; Umarov claims responsibility for Domodedovo; Guardian reporter deported from Russia; Yashin police report falsified; Kuril islands spat continues; Khodorkovsky verdict will not be overturned; concerns about US missile defense; opposition registration, Sochi mascots, television coverage of Yeltsin anniversary.
President Dmitry Medvedev has signed into law the long-debated law-enforcement agency reforms, which will cut the number of officers by 20% and change the agency’s name from the Soviet-era ‘militia‘ to its czarist name ‘police‘. ‘[P]olls show most Russians don’t expect the changes to lead to improvements.‘ Announcing that the bill had been signed, Medvedev criticized officials for acting ‘unprofessionally‘ in response to the Domodedovo airport attack, calling for increased efforts to fight terrorism. Meanwhile, a newly-released video message from Doku Umarov, the leader of Russia’s Islamist movement, claims responsibility for the January 24 attack (click for video). Guardian reporter Luke Harding has been deported from Russia without explicit reason, although the newspaper’s editorial today, calling the deportation a ‘bad omen‘, blames Harding’s having reported ‘on the many deficiencies that increasingly disfigure Russian politics and society‘. AFP reports that the ban was an order from the security service, who consider Harding an ‘undesirable person‘, and notes that he had been reporting on Russia-related US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks just before his attempt to return to Moscow. This article lists the circumstances in which three other British journalists were frozen out of Russia in recent years.