Riots in Russia - Government raising tariffs on imported automobiles

Riots in Russia

Small demonstrations occurred in several Russian cities over the weekend in reaction to the government’s plan to raise tariffs on imported automobiles, and the riot police broke up one protest on Sunday in Vladivostok in the country’s far east, briefly detaining scores of people, news agencies reported.
While the demonstrations each drew only a few hundred people, they were perhaps the most visible evidence of discontent with the government over the financial crisis. When the price of oil was high and Russia’s economy was soaring, the government was broadly popular, but the recent downturn has caused growing public anxiety as unemployment has spiked and the value of the ruble has dropped.
In an apparent sign of the Kremlin’s concern over the tariff issue, it sent special riot police units to quell the protest in Vladivostok, according to witnesses quoted by news agencies. Other demonstrations over the tariffs have occurred there this month.
Amateur video posted online by people who said they were at Sunday’s demonstration in Vladivostok shows riot police officers dragging protesters into vans. The authorities said they broke up the demonstration because its sponsors had not received official permission to hold it.
A reporter for The Associated Press in Vladivostok said that police officers had beaten several people with truncheons, thrown them to the ground and kicked them. Several journalists were arrested.
Vladimir Litvinov, who leads a local rights group, told The Associated Press that officers behaved “like beasts” and should not have ended the gathering because it was peaceful and not political.
“We support a civilized resolution to all the problems, but when they send Moscow riot police to break up a gathering in our city, and they start breaking arms and legs and heads,” he said, adding: “People are very, very angry. It’s hard to predict what might happen now.”
Vladivostok, Russia’s largest port on the Pacific, is a major point for importing foreign cars into Russia. The government announced the tariffs on imported cars in an effort to protect the beleaguered domestic car industry.
The Federation of Russian Car Owners, a grass-roots advocacy group, has helped sponsor the protests, under the slogan, “Authorities: Raise the Standard of Living, not the Tariff.”

Twelve people dead in Russian mine (Murmansk region)

Twelve people were killed and six were injured in an explosion at an open-cast mine in Russia's northwest Murmansk region, a local emergency official said Friday.
Rescue workers had only recovered four bodies by midday Friday, more than 12 hours after the explosion and resulting fire, said Irina Gretskaya, a spokeswoman for the local division of the Russia Emergency Situations Ministry.
Other bodies are in hard-to-reach areas of the mine where the temperature remained high, she said.
All the dead miners were between the ages of 20 and 37, she said.
Murmansk is near the Barents Sea and Russia's northern border with Finland.
The mining company said the explosion happened during preparations for a controlled explosion at the mine, scheduled for December 15.
More than 19 tons of explosives had already been charged and another 30 tons were being delivered to the site at the time, when an unexpected blast went off inside the cargo truck that was delivering the explosives, the Apatit Mining Company said.
The Murmansk regional prosecutor's office has opened a criminal investigation into the explosion to see whether it violated explosion and mining rules, the Interfax news agency reported, citing the prosecutor's office.
The mining company develops apatite-nepheline ores used in the production of fertilizers.

Understanding Russia

These days everybody is talking about the necessity to understand Russia. Russian politics are different than ours. Russian politicians are by no means comparable to Western politicians and so on.
Is it or is it not paramount to understand Russia from within, when one wants to judge its behavior? I think not.
Russia is planning to be once more a superpower. We should not lose our time by learning more about its culture. Russia wants influence.
If Europe and the US does not stand strong, Russia will hit hard when nobody expects.

Russia's Constitution - no more than a piece of paper

Russia's president, who in November initiated constitutional changes to the presidential and parliamentary terms, said Friday that further amendments could be made to the Constitution.

"Is it possible there will be some changes to the Constitution in the future? I believe this question can be answered in the affirmative," Dmitry Medvedev said at a Kremlin conference dedicated to the 15th anniversary of the Russian Constitution.

"But fundamental rights and freedoms, and the presidential form of our state will never change, or at least not in the foreseeable future," he said. "The opposite threatens the existence of the state of the Russian Federation. Should anything like this happen, the consequences could be extremely bad."

During his November 5 state of the nation address, Medvedev proposed extending the current four-year parliamentary and presidential terms to five and six years, respectively. The announcement of the changes, which would apply to the next head of state and legislature, triggered speculation that they could be a pretext for the return to office of his predecessor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Russia's upper house of parliament approved the amendments extending the terms on November 26.

The constitutional amendments next have to be approved by at least two-thirds of regional legislatures. After that, the Federation Council will hold another session to endorse their decision. The amendments will come into force once they have been signed by the president and published in a government newspaper.

New Russian Party: Solidarity

After more than two weeks of repeatedly failing to find a venue to hold a conference, new democratic movement Solidarity looks set to finally hold the event on Saturday.
The movement, which has some of the most vocal critics of the Kremlin among its members, had been turned down by a string of potential host venues, including the Pulkovskaya and Pribaltiiskaya hotels, which both claimed to be booked on the requested dates.
Olga Kurnosova, the local leader of Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front, said the venue’s location is being kept secret to prevent the authorities from exerting pressure on the organization that has agreed to play host to the event.
Other venues had turned Solidarity down either after a direct order from the authorities or as a result of fear of official retaliation, Kurnosova said. In one case, Kurnosova’s agreement with the administrators at the Ministry of Atomic Energy’s Professional Advancement Institute lasted less than an hour.
Within minutes of Kurnosova leaving the building she received an apologetic phone call which informed her that the hosting of the conference had been forbidden by the institute’s rector.
“The authorities are clearly going to all lengths to prevent the conference from taking place,” Kurnosova said.
Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, Nikita Belykh and Ilya Yashin are among the leaders due to take part.
“I must stress that we are going to go ahead and hold the conference even if the current location suddenly becomes unavailable,” Kurnosova said. “If the worst comes to the worst, we can seat the panelists and organize the vote in a small venue and arrange an audio broadcast of the event outside through several loudspeakers.”
It is expected that the gathering will assemble at least 450 delegates to review a program of unification of liberal forces titled “300 Steps To Liberty.”
Democrats have said that unfair political competition, a climate of fear and intimidation created by the state with the use of police violence against civil protests, the political persecution of activists who challenge the government and widespread media censorship are obstacles preventing the creation of a unified opposition.

Sevastopol does not pay for Ukrainian school

The Sevastopol City Council has voted against partially financing the construction of the first Ukrainian-language school in this Black Sea port, RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service reports.
Of the more than 80 schools in Sevastopol -- which houses both the Ukrainian and the Russian Black Sea fleets -- only three schools are bilingual, where some classes are taught in Ukrainian but the majority in Russian.
There is no school in the city in which classes are only in Ukrainian.
The Ukrainian government supports the establishment of the Ukrainian-language school and has authorized 5 million hryvni (about $1 million) for its construction.
By law, the local government must contribute 20 percent of the costs, or 500,000 hryvni.
The Sevastopol City Council will vote on the issue again in December.

Russia - Bulava

(Bulava; known in Nato as the NX-30-SS)

MOSCOW - Russia has begun producing a new generation intercontinental missile, a senior government official said on Monday, after a successful test launch.

Russia's military hailed Friday's test of the Bulava, a submarine-launched ballistic missile that can carry nuclear warheads to targets more than 8,000 km (5,000 miles) away, after a host of mishaps that had raised doubts about its future.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, who oversees defense issues within the government, said another test launch would take place this year and that defense enterprises had already started large scale production of the weapon.

"By the end of the year another test of Bulava is planned," Ivanov told a cabinet meeting, state RIA news agency reported.

"At the same time our defense enterprises have started mass production," he said.
The 12-meter Bulava, which means "mace" in Russian and whose design is based on the Topol-M missile, was supposed to complete testing two years ago. But at least several public test launch failures had raised concerns inside the navy about the weapon.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said the Bulava missile can penetrate anti-missile shields such as the one the United States plans to deploy in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Russia has made much of a host of "new" missiles it plans to produce in response to U.S. plans to build an anti-missile system in Europe.

But many have been in development for years and are based on older Soviet designs, according to defense analysts.

The Bulava, which is known in NATO as the SS-NX-30, is a submarine version of the Topol-M which was begun in the 1980s but redesigned just after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
Colonel-General Nikolai Solovtsov, Commander of Russia's Strategic Missile Forces, said last week Russia had intensified efforts to develop new ballistic missiles.
He said the first of a new generation of Russian RS-24 intercontinental ballistic missiles would enter service in December 2009. On Monday, Solovtsov said Russia was developing weapons to counter U.S. plans to use space weapons as part of an anti-missile shield.

Russia's Dmitry Donskoy nuclear submarine test fired the Bulava on Friday from the White Sea. It hit the Kura testing site testing site on the Kamchatka peninsula in the Pacific and the exercise was a success, the navy said.

Russia's RIA news agency quoted an unidentified Defense Ministry source as saying on Friday it was the most successful test of the Bulava to date.

The previous test of the Bulava on September 18 was pronounced a success by the navy though some media said it had not been perfect.

Russia as an anti-American "world power"

A New York Post columnist and former Bush foreign policy adviser warns that the current Kremlin leadership is trying to extend Russia's sphere of influence beyond Asia, the Caucuses, and Europe.

Russian warships were recently deployed to Venezuela to coincide with President Dmitry Medvedev's visit to Caracas -- the first ever by a Russian president. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Russia's deployment of the naval squadron was "not a provocation," but rather "an exchange between two free countries."

Peter Brookes, a senior fellow for national security affairs at The Heritage Foundation, says Russia is signaling it has interests in Latin America. "I think it's to strategically distract the United States. I think it's a bit of payback for American warships which went into the Black Sea -- which Russia considers a Russian lake -- during the Georgian crisis a few months ago," he contends. "So I think that there's a lot of symbolism here in terms of this ship visit. I think it also says that Russia sees itself as a world power; it's not just a regional power."

A day after the U.S. presidential election, in his first major address since taking office, Russian President Medvedev delivered an extremely anti-American speech. Brookes believes that speech was a signal to the U.S. and the incoming Obama administration. However, he notes that the Russians have backed down a bit from their "harsh rhetoric" after an Obama foreign policy adviser said the president-elect had not committed to deploying a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe.