TODAY: Protestors thwarted on Russia Day; Russia’s only convicted war criminal slain; Moscow fares badly in rule of law report; Magnitsky-linked officials fired; Khodorkovsky dispatched to unknown location.  Russia ignores UN talks on Syria; raises complaints over US cruiser’s entry into Black Sea; Vanauti recognizes Abkhazia.  Russia’s celebrity cheerleader, Sharon Stone.

28 people of a crowd of 150 who gathered on Moscow’s Teatralnaya Square on Saturday to stage an unsanctioned Day of Wrath rally have been detained, with opposition leader and rally organizer Sergei Udaltsov among them.  The protest was designed to coincide with ‘Russia Day’, a national holiday which marks the country’s re-birth as an independent state after the Soviet collapse.  This year the holiday falls exactly twenty years after Boris Yeltsin was first elected president of Russia: Will Englund in the Washington Post suggests that the feeling of democratic euphoria which swept the nation on that day in 1991 has long since faded.  Blaming a lack of progress on bureaucrats is just one tactic the ruling duo employ to deflect attention away from the failing of the power vertical, says RFE/RL.  On election fervor: ‘[A]s everyone listens for the latest whisper from the Kremlin or waits for the next somewhat contrived photo-opportunity, no one is much asking what is best for Russia.’   A former Russian colonel who served a jail term for murdering a Chechen girl in 2000 has been shot dead in Moscow.  The killing has been seen as an attempt to stoke tensions between nationalists, who sympathized with the disgraced colonel, and minorities in the capital.