Sorry for the light posting yesterday - I wanted to give everybody time to heft their way through the Taglivini report.  Let's see if we can make up for yesterday today.  Here is a subtitled interview of Andrei Illarionov outside of the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.  The team at Khamovnichesky District have done a good job putting up a number of subtitled videos, interviewing the various visitors to the trial.

   

Andrei Illarionov: "Interest in Venezuela - this is part of the big strategy"

Grigory Pasko, journalist

President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev recently carried out visits to the countries of Africa. Before this we observed his voyage to the countries of Latin America. What is this intense interest of the Russian president in such faraway countries brought about by? Why not seek friends and partners in business closer to Russia? Medvedev himself said it this way: "...We did not devote that much attention to sufficiently faraway continents, ones such as Africa, Latin America, but now we are simply duty-bound to do this. This is our close-in-spirit neighbors, this is countries that we really have helped and which, on the

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The news from Georgia is pretty bad this week.  Russia is conducting large scale war games right on the border, the OSCE monitors have left, protests continue to split the country, and observers are wondering if Barack Obama will even say the g-word during his visit to Moscow.  Andrei Illarionov is predicting that if Russia has decided to re-invade Georgia, they will do so right after Obama's visit.This short video and article from RFE/RL takes a look at life in Gori, as the people attempt to rebuild their homes from the destruction of the last war while at the same time another invasion looms.

The speculation that Russia could bomb Georgia shortly after the visit of Barack Obama seems to suggest a whole new definition of what it means to hit the "reset button."  I don't think it will happen.  From Associated Press:

Former Kremlin adviser Andrei Illarionov predicted that if Russia were to take military action against Georgia, it would take place directly after Obama's visit and that Moscow would portray its decision as having been made with Washington's approval. He also said Russia doesn't want to occupy Georgia.

"The main goal is to turn Georgia into something like porridge, from a political, military and ethnic point of view," he said.

"Most important is the destruction of the political stability of Georgia," he told reporters.

Barack Obama's much-anticipated first trip to Moscow is approaching, but will the new President's peacemaking endeavours be as effective on the Kremlin as they has been in other contexts?  As Russia welcomes Iranian President Ahmadinejad to the SCO summit, leaving blazing protests and threats of a recount in Tehran, are American hopes of the Kremlin leaning upon the nuclear state dwindling?  The New York Times posits some interesting reflections upon the US President's first foreign trip to 'adversarial territory'. The Russian leadership that Mr. Obama will meet, according to Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a think tank, is representative of "a system based on an official mechanism of anti-Americanism'.As supplier of Iran's nuclear wherewithal, Russia can make a difference by acting to halt its drive toward a nuclear weapon.But what's the ...

Leon Aron has a very interesting new piece over at TheAmerican.com. We thought it was about time that somebody dusted off Max Weber's views on authoritarian political models for application to today's Russia. In addition to the characteristics of classic authoritarianism, Putinism has a number of other distinct features that bear a remarkable similarity to common components of fascism. Under Putin, the government became one of personal power, popularity, and legitimacy. Renewed senses of nationalism and nostalgia have also sprung up under Putinism: the Soviet Union is constantly glorified, external (Western) enemies lurk everywhere, and reclaiming the assets lost with the fall of the Soviet Union, such as Georgia and Ukraine, is a priority. Medvedev has closely followed the line of Putinism and seems to see the same enemies around every corner as ...

From Robert Skidelsky in the Financial Times: Despite the professionalism of the rescue mounted by the finance ministry and central bank – and the budgetary cushion provided by the stabilisation fund, brainchild of Andrei Illarionov, Mr Putin’s discarded economic adviser – Russia carries a heavy burden of political risk. This is the real economic legacy of the Putin years. Mr Putin does not understand the need for a degree of consistency between economic and foreign policy: or rather the reconciliation he has sought has been based on Russia’s energy windfall. If this has now ended, as seems likely, the key assumption of his politics – that Russia can use its energy power to boost its world power without paying much attention to the sensitivities of anyone but the Russian electorate – has been destroyed. Russia needs to scale down its geopolitical ambition to its real weight – that of an emerging ...

Former Kremlin economic aide Andrei Illarionov says Russia's sabre-rattling is scaring investors away, since "any investor thinking on a medium- to long-term perspective will decide to remove funds from states whose leadership isn't scared of war." A prominent American economist and author, meanwhile, advises against investing in Russia, which "needs to respect property rights, stop throwing business leaders into jail on trumped up tax charges, promote the rule of law, and treat foreign investors and business partners fairly. None of this is a sign of weakness, but of strength." Ever the voice of calm, Putin claims the 2009 Russian federal budget will be balanced even if oil prices fall below $70 per barrel. If the oil market dries up, there's always nuclear: Russia and India prepare to sign a nuclear energy deal. Libya, meanwhile, is pondering a $2 billion Russian arms purchase. And Russian investors ...

Or perhaps I should say Igor Sechin has just added another job to his long list of government portfolios and extremely profitable business perks. Today it was announced that the silovik grand wizard has been nominated to the board of electricity trader Inter RAO - which fulfills his longtime dream of getting his foot in the door of Russia's electricity game. As many of you recall, Sechin was eagerly tossing monkey wrenches into the privatization process of UES, the country's public utility, overseen by Anatoly Chubais, who surprisingly was successful in fending him off (very, very few people in Russian business can say something like that). After Rosneft failed in its lawsuit to block the reorganization of TGK-11, Sechin appears to have intelligently waited until the privatization was complete in order to get into Inter. As his ...