There is no direct link between the murder of Russia’s best-known campaigning journalist, Moscow’s clampdown on Georgians and Gazprom’s decision to go it alone in one of the world’s biggest energy projects, says the FT. But taken together, the three events reveal “a strand of increasingly intolerant nationalism that should send a chill through Russia’s neighbours and partners”.
The shooting of Anna Politkovskaya, best known for her accounts of government atrocities in Chechnya, was clearly a “politically motivated assassination”, says Garry Kasparov in The Wall Street Journal. “Even Russian politicians who always worked to contradict and downplay her reports” are publicly acknowledging that. Speculation as to who ordered the murder is meaningless; the ultimate responsibility lies with the political structure that Vladimir Putin has built. “The system that encouraged the crime, the logic that made it politically expedient for some of those in power, that is the true face of [Putin’s] Russia.”
Meanwhile, Moscow’s decision to ban trade, travel and postal links to Georgia is “a fresh reminder of just how paranoid and bullying the Kremlin’s foreign policy has become”, says The Wall Street Journal. This dispute was triggered by Georgia’s arrest of four Russian officers on charges of spying, after which the officers were promptly handed to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and
returned home. “This should have been the end of it”, but Putin’s
“rubber-stamp parliament” seeks retaliation by harassing Georgians living in Russia. What we are witnessing is “another fit of Russian pique at [Georgian president] Mikheil Saakashvili’s courageous decision to
yank Georgia out of Moscow’s orbit… and into the orbit of the West”.
Alongside these two incidents, Gazprom’s decision to reject foreign investment in the giant Shtokman gas field might seem trivial. But it shows how Gazprom’s actions are entwined with Putin’s policies, says Christopher Granville in The Times. The Kremlin thinks it has been “hoodwinked by its foreign partners” in past energy deals and does not plan to repeat the mistake this time. In addition, the decision to pipe the gas to Europe
instead of shipping it to the US is in line with Putin’s search for new political allies. But while the prospect of this gas will tempt Europe’s politicians to turn a blind eye, says the FT, it must not stop them from spelling out their concerns about the state of Russia.
By Graham Buck