Russia Reform Monitor No. 1531, February 4, 2008
 American Foreign Policy Council, Washington, DC

An untransparent election in the offing;
Russia's suicidal youth

Editor: Jonas Bernstein
February 1:

A Moscow court has ruled that Vasily Aleksanyan, the jailed ex-vice president of the Yukos oil company who has AIDS and lymphoma, cannot be transferred to a clinic for treatment, NEWSru.com reports. The judge said Aleksanyan’s lawyers had failed to prove that their client has fatal diseases and requires treatment at a specialized clinic. Aleksanyan, who was jailed in 2006 on suspicion of embezzlement, claims he has been denied him treatment for AIDS because he refused to testify against Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev, who are serving eight-year prison sentences for fraud and tax evasion. Khodorkovsky has gone on a hunger strike in support of Aleksanyan.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) is threatening not to monitor Russia’s March 2nd presidential election unless Moscow eases restrictions on the number of monitors it can send and the duration of their stay, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports. Russia’s Central Election Commission’s is restricting the ODIHR mission to 70 observers, who will not be allowed to enter the country until three days before the election. ODIHR sent 387 observers to monitor Russia’s 2004 presidential election. Russian Foreign Ministry official Sergei Ryabkov, meanwhile, has accused the OSCE and ODIHR of playing “political games.”


February 2:

Three anti-Semitic attacks have taken place in Russia over the last two weeks, the Associated Press reports, citing the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia. On January 29th, a group of young men in Ulyanovsk painted swastikas on the walls of a synagogue and cursed at members inside. On January 27th, anti-Semitic slogans were scrawled on a Holocaust memorial in Volgograd. Last week, several young men burst into a synagogue in Nizhny Novgorod, throwing religious books out a window and beating up a security guard. According to the SOVA rights center, which monitors hate crimes, 67 people were killed and more than 550 injured in ethnically motivated attacks in 2007.


February 3:

Russia’s new ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, has warned Poland against deploying elements of a U.S. missile-defense system, Interfax reports. “I would like to remind my Polish colleagues of their recent history, which testifies to the fact that attempts to make Poland a state ‘on the confrontation line’ have always led to tragedy - in this way, the Poles lost nearly a third of their people in the Second World War,” he told the news agency.

Sir David King, who was the British government’s chief scientist adviser from 2000 through the end of last year, has accused President Vladmir Putin of masterminding the 1999 apartment building bombings in Moscow and other cities, which killed hundreds of people and were blamed on Chechen terrorists. “I can tell you that Putin was responsible for the bombings,” King told the Daily Telegraph. “I’ve seen the evidence. There is no way that Putin would have won the election if it wasn’t for the bombings. Before them he was getting 10 percent approval ratings. After, they shot up to 80 percent.”


February 4:

Russia has among the world’s highest youth suicide rates, Novye Izvestia reports. Nearly 3,000 Russians aged 5 to 19 killed themselves in 2007 – a three-fold increase over the 30 years ago. Serbsky State Research Center of Social and Forensic Psychiatry Director Tatyana Dmitriyeva said on January 31st that the number of suicides in Russia had dropped by 30 percent between 2001 and 2006, with 42,855 Russians committing suicide in 2006, NEWSru.com reported. Still, Russia has the world’s second-highest suicide rate, with Lithuania topping the list and Latvia in third place.

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