Word: putin
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Wednesday's NATO summit in Bucharest may be remarkable for the presence of Russia's President Vladimir Putin, leader of the power against whose precursor the alliance was originally created. Moreover, Putin will follow the summit by taking its most powerful leader, President George W. Bush, back to his vacation home at the Black Sea resort of Sochi. But the formal bonhomie won't hide the escalating tension in the relationship between Washington and Moscow. President Bush on Tuesday strongly backed NATO membership bids by the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia, a move fiercely opposed by Moscow, which...
...Whatever the state of their personal chemistry, then, Bush and Putin will engage each other over a widening chasm in the coming days. Besides NATO's expansion eastward, they also differ strongly over U.S. plans to deploy its missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland by 2012, ostensibly to intercept potential attacks from Iran. And Russia has been irked by the NATO powers' enabling of Kosovo's breakaway from Serbia, which Moscow deems illegal...
...Putin may have a compromise up his sleeve: If Russia's priority is to avoid Ukraine and Georgia being drawn into the NATO fold, a concession on the missile defense system may be part of the quid pro quo envisaged by the Russian president...
...taste of the paper's editorial outlook, just talk to Dmitri Muratov, its editor in chief. "Putin has created the largest, richest bureaucracy in the world, and the funds have been sucked out of society." Muratov calls the siloviki--the strong-arm factions that make up much of the Defense Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the secret police--a "business, whose only concern is hoarding money...
...West, there is a widespread and probably incorrect assumption that someone in the Kremlin had those journalists killed because they said (or were on the verge of saying) bad things about Putin. This belief is premised on another false assumption--that Novaya Gazeta poses a threat to the Kremlin. The paper claims a weekly readership of 1 million, but its ardently anti-Putin voice clearly has limited influence. In the recent presidential election, the main liberal candidate got 1.3% of the vote, while Putin's handpicked successor, Dmitri Medvedev, won more than 70%. As for Politkovskaya's death...