As Expected . . .
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Authoritarianism | Contra Tyrannum | Dictatorship | Tyranny | Vladimir Putin — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Vladimir Putin "wins":
Exit polls showed Vladimir Putin's party winning more than 60 percent of the vote Sunday in a parliamentary election that could pave the way for him to remain the country's leader even when he steps down as president.
Read on . . .
The vote followed a Kremlin campaign that relied on a combination of persuasion and intimidation to ensure victory for Putin's United Russia party.
United Russia led the field with 61 percent of the vote, while the Communists--the only opposition party expected to win seats--trailed far behind with 11.5 percent, according to a poll conducted by the state-owned All-Russia Opinion Research Center.
The Kremlin has portrayed the election as a plebiscite on Putin's nearly eight years as president--with the promise that a major victory would allow him somehow to remain as leader after his second term ends next year.
Putin is constitutionally prohibited from running for a third consecutive term, but he clearly wants to stay in power. Many supporters have suggested his becoming a "national leader," though what duties and powers that would entail are unclear.
"The vote affirmed the main idea: that Vladimir Putin is the national leader, that the people support his course, and this course will continue," said party leader and parliament speaker Boris Gryzlov said after the exit polls were announced.
Pollsters said United Russia's performance would give it a crushing majority of 306 seats in the 450-seat State Duma, or lower house. The Communists would have 57 seats.
Well, at least the Communists are outnumbered. Not that the reigning political party in Russia doesn't remind one of the dark days of the Soviet Union.
After all, consider:
President Vladimir Putin signed a law on Friday suspending Russia's participation in a key post-cold war arms treaty, triggering an angry reaction from the US, which declared the move a "mistake".
In a significant new indication of the worsening diplomatic relationship between Moscow and Washington, Mr Putin personally ratified a law that means Moscow will suspend the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty (CFE) in a little under two weeks.
Western military experts believe the CFE, first signed in 1990, is a significant treaty that limits the number of battle tanks, heavy artillery, combat aircraft and attack helicopters deployed and stored between the Atlantic and Russia's Ural mountains.
It also contains a significant array of confidence-building measures, requiring all signatories to give other states advance notice of troop movements and missile launches.
Senior officials from the US and other Nato states said Russia was now all but certain to suspend the treaty from December 12, a deadline it gave earlier this year unless an agreement could be forged with Nato countries. "Russia has made a mistake in this unilateral behaviour of walking out of a major arms control treaty in Europe," said Nicholas Burns, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs.
Senior officials from other Nato states said Washington and its allies now needed to decide when they would themselves suspend the treaty provisions.
"From December 12, Russia will not be giving notification of its troop movements or allow external inspections," said a senior official from a Nato government.
"We will therefore see a gradual degradation in the application of the treaty. By March or April of next year we will have to decide whether we start to suspend the application of the treaty to our own forces."
This is for anyone who doesn't believe that what happens in Russia doesn't have consequences for us. More here.