Bush's Big Silence

Will the President Object to Russia's Regression?

By Fred Hiatt

If promoting democracy is President Bush's largest ambition, then Russia is his largest failure.

Not that President Vladimir Putin is the world's most repressive ruler -- far from it. Dictatorships in Burma, North Korea and Zimbabwe are more stifling. So, for that matter, are tyrannies in Russia's neighborhood, such as Belarus, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

But no other nation has regressed from openness to authoritarianism during Bush's time in office as dramatically and decisively as Russia -- and with less apparent objection from Bush.

Of course, no U.S. president is responsible for Russia's fate; Russians are. Yet Syrians and Egyptians will determine their own fates, too, and that doesn't stop Bush from wielding U.S. diplomacy and rhetoric to aid pro-democracy forces in their countries. His foreign policy is grounded in the belief that over time the United States can be a force for liberty throughout the world.

So his insouciance with respect to Russia is a mystery. Does it mask a calculation that what happens inside Russia just isn't as important as democratic development in the Middle East, given the U.S. war against radical Islamic terrorists? That it makes sense to keep Putin as a partner while fighting those more pertinent battles?

That would be a miscalculation, for at least three reasons. First, Russia is one front in the war. Its brutal tactics in the southern province of Chechnya are radicalizing Muslim residents there; growing Slavic nationalism risks alienating Muslim minorities in other parts of Russia; and Putin's succor of dictators in neighboring Islamic countries such as Uzbekistan helps create the kind of terror-incubators that Bush said after Sept. 11 could no longer be tolerated.

Second, while an authoritarian Russia may offer tactical cooperation from time to time according to its interests, it cannot be a strategic partner of the America that Bush described in his second inaugural address, because the two countries' values and goals will differ so sharply.

Third, and perhaps most damaging to Bush's strategy, is the negative example Russia provides. In the 1990s, democratization seemed inexorable. Countries were moving toward freedom at different speeds, and some hadn't moved at all -- but with the fall of communism, all eventually would. The ease and speed with which Putin has reversed course saps the sense of momentum and inevitability that could be Bush's biggest ally.

Irina Yasina, director of a pro-democracy foundation in Moscow, said the mood in Russia today resembles what Russians recall as the "stagnation era" under General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Yasina, 42, remembers as a 10-year-old being told by her father -- the now well-known liberal economist Yevgeny Yasin -- that he felt buried alive by the communist system.

"But at least then we knew that we were at the end of something," Yasina, a former journalist, said during a visit to Washington last week. "What is most frightening now is that we don't know whether something is ending or is only just beginning."

This month Putin signed legislation that could shutter Yasina's foundation and many other civic organizations. The law creates a Soviet-style bureaucracy to register nongovernmental organizations, leaving the qualifications so vague that the bureaucrats, or the Kremlin, will be free to license or reject as they choose.

Yasina's foundation is a likely target because it was founded, and is still largely endowed, by billionaire oilman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whom Putin has had confined to a labor camp near the Chinese border because the tycoon dared hint of a political challenge. The camp is a nine-hour plane ride followed by a 15-hour train ride from Moscow, but sometimes when his lawyers arrive they are told they cannot see their client because lawyer visiting hours coincide with forced-labor hours, Yasina said. Khodorkovsky's visit with his wife, promised for month's end, was canceled -- because, he was told, the visiting room is undergoing renovation.

This may seem petty, but pettiness and paranoia are hallmarks of a president who increasingly has isolated himself from anyone but former KGB agents like himself. The broadcast media are Kremlin-controlled, as are parliament, provincial governors, unjailed business tycoons and the judiciary. All of these sectors were free and independent when Putin -- and Bush -- took office.

Now, although they are weak and he is strong, Putin is going after civic organizations, because they are the final outposts of independent activity -- and because he is convinced that the CIA will use such groups to threaten his regime.

This is the man whom Bush will visit in July when Putin hosts a Group of Eight meeting in St. Petersburg. There will be fine photo opportunities in repainted czarist palaces, and the message Putin wants to send his subjects will be clear: I am a czar, and the leaders of the world's democracies do not care; they accept me. The question for Bush is whether he is happy to help Putin send that message.

The Washington Post, 1.23.2006

For Russia, dependence on 'a man-made disaster' - Print Version - International Herald Tribune

By Catherine Belton
THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 2006

OKTYABRSKOYE, Russia Stacked in Yury Filipchenko's bookcases are maps charting the vast deposits of uranium ore he discovered here 40 years ago that fueled the Soviet Union's transformation into a nuclear superpower.

The geologist's crammed bookcases also hold another legacy: thick reports that plot radioactive pollution zones, heavy-metal deposits and acid rain.

Filipchenko's village, Oktyabrskoye, is today a ramshackle collection of wooden huts and potholed roads surrounded by mine shafts and dilapidated uranium-processing facilities barely two kilometers, or 1.2 miles, away.

Once it was a prestigious place. Built in 1964 as the first outpost in the Soviet government's drive for uranium on Russian soil, the village spawned a town, Krasnokamensk, about 20 kilometers away and a uranium mine that became, for a time, the biggest in the world.

Now the village, located in eastern Siberia just 60 kilometers from the border with China, lies neglected and poisoned by uranium dust and radioactive gases. "This is a man-made disaster area," Filipchenko said, unfurling a map showing radiation and pollution levels from a nearby power station and uranium enrichment plant.

Uncovered mountains of discarded uranium ore dot the horizon, while just over the hill, a vast open crater marks the site of Russia's first uranium mine.

It is not just an environmental disaster. Lack of investment also bodes ill for Russia's nuclear industry, experts say. The Krasnokamensk mine is the sole uranium producer of any significance on Russian land, producing enough ore to supply half the needs of its plants. Without investment, the supply of ore from the mine will end.

"Krasnokamensk is of huge strategic importance," said Vladimir Chuprov, who heads the energy division at the Moscow office of Greenpeace and has closely investigated Russia's nuclear industry. "If it goes, then Russia loses 50 percent of its supply."

The condition of Krasnokamensk is typical of Russia's transformation to capitalism. It is no small irony that Mikhail Khodor-kovsky, one of the most vilified of Russia's oligarchs, is serving his eight-year sentence in the Krasnokamensk prison camp.

But it is not private business barons who have let the place go to seed. The Krasnokamensk mine and the plant that processes the ore into concentrated uranium ore, or yellowcake, are owned by a state nuclear agency, TVEL.

"We could take measures to improve safety, but we just don't have the money," said an official from the Priargunsky combine, which runs the mine, the processing plant and other facilities. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized by TVEL to speak to the press.

Without investment to build a new mine, the combine at Krasnokamensk will run out of ore in 2012, the combine official said. Currently it produces 3,000 tons of uranium a year, almost half the amount needed to supply Russia's nuclear power stations, said the combine official and Maxim Shingaryov, who heads the information center for the Federal Atomic Energy Agency, or Rosatom.

TVEL, with headquarters in Moscow, is run by Alexander Nyago, a former telecommunications executive from St. Petersburg who is reported to be close to President Vladimir Putin. It also owns other processing plants and sells fuel rods for nuclear power stations in Russia and abroad. In 2004, as world uranium prices climbed, the agency had an official profit of $164 million. With world yellowcake prices doubling over the past year to $33 per pound, profit is expected to be even larger in 2005.

Officials at the Krasnokamensk combine, however, say most of their cash goes toward paying taxes and wages for the company's 12,500 workers. Officially, the average monthly wage is 10,000 rubles, or about $350, low for an industry where the health risks are high.

Over all, Russia needs about 15,000 tons of uranium a year to run its power stations, fuel its nuclear submarines and meet its export agreements, according to researchers at the Natural Resource Ministry. What is not provided by the combine at Krasnokamensk partly comes from recycling fuel and uranium ore imports.

Mainly, however, the shortfall is made up from uranium stockpiled during Soviet times. But these supplies are being sold so quickly that they could run out as early as 2010, according to a report by Natural Resources Ministry researchers that was presented in 2004 to an international conference on the nuclear industry, held in Tomsk.

"Russia will be hit with a uranium crisis a lot earlier than 2020," said the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Moscow Times. "In the next seven to eight years it will turn from an exporter of natural uranium into an importer of it."

If the report is accurate, it could have serious consequences for world uranium markets. World uranium prices have been climbing partly because of a lack of information about Russia's stockpiles and partly because consumption worldwide is almost twice the quantity that is produced.

For much of the past decade, uranium prices had been so low that it made no commercial sense to invest in the mining industry, said Shingaryov of Rosatom. As recently as 2000, world uranium prices were as low as $7 per pound.

In written answers to e-mailed questions, Stanislav Golovinsky, a TVEL vice president, sidestepped the question of whether TVEL would raise the price it pays for yellowcake in line with world prices to allow wage increases at the plant. He said that TVEL did have a plan for constructing a new mine but gave no sense of urgency, estimating that the mines at Krasnokamensk have enough ore to last for 15 to 20 years.

Back in Soviet times, governments threw rubles at the nuclear industry.

Now, the state is besieged with problems that compete with the nuclear industry for cash. "The list is endless," said Gennady Pshakin, an expert on the nuclear industry. "Pensions, the military, the aircraft industry, the missile industry - they're all suffering."

Whether or not funds are disbursed to keep Krasnokamensk's industry going, it has been left with a dangerous legacy that urgently needs attention, environmentalists and residents say.

The last time a major environmental study was conducted was in the early 1990s. Filipchenko and other scientists, including a group of doctors from the state university in Irkutsk, spent months mapping levels of pollution from the mine, the plant and the nearby power station, which is fired with uranium-contaminated coal.

After some of the results were smuggled to scientists in Sweden and shared with Greenpeace activists, who used the data as part of a widely publicized report in 1994 on the dangerous state of Krasnokamensk, scientific investigation was stopped.

"No one has denied this data, but no one risks repeating the experiment," Filipchenko said.

What Filipchenko and his colleagues found were dangerously high levels of radon gas emanating from the cellars of scores of houses in Oktyabrskoye, mounting levels of uranium dust and residues of heavy metals like mercury. "The entire village is in a zone of acid pollution," Filipchenko said.

After the environmental studies reached the Greenpeace activists, federal officials in Moscow began spending money in the mid-1990s to resettle the residents. But since the 1998 financial crisis, there has not been enough money. Two hundred and forty families were resettled in Krasnokamensk; 680 families remain.

Back in 1964, Oktyabrskoye was built as temporary housing for the first group of geologists who arrived here and discovered the deposits, which is why it was located so close to the mines. When more deposits were found under the village, the government decided to go ahead and mine anyway.

As a result, radon gas seeps through cracks in the soil and into houses. In some houses, where owners dug underground cellars for storing produce, the levels measured were more than 10 times the norm, the 1994 study found; this was backed up by checks in 2001. Exposure to high doses of radon can cause lung cancer.

Those who remain in the village have become so inured to their surroundings that they gather scraps of uranium ore from the heaps beside the mines to fill potholes in the village roads. "They just take it and sprinkle it outside their own homes," Filipchenko said.

Gathered outside one of the run-down village shops, a group of residents said they had regularly tried to push their case for resettlement. "We live in the middle of an industrial zone," said Yekaterina Zimniyeva, a former mine worker who helped build the mines in the late 1960s. "No one should be living here."

Zimniyeva had her young grandson, who, she said, constantly suffers from chest colds. "Here, we eat uranium, we drink uranium, we breathe uranium," she said. "Everyone's legs here hurt terribly. People suffer heart problems, and there isn't anything to breathe."

Town doctors insist health problems, in the village and the town, are no worse than average.

"Radiation levels are no higher than they are across the entire Siberian Federal District," said Viktor Turanov, a surgeon in the oncological wing of Regional Hospital No. 4. "And the level of cancer is no higher than the average across all of Russia." He blamed the villagers' woes on poverty and unhealthy lifestyles. "Their legs would hurt less if they stopped smoking and started drinking less," he said.

But even those who live in the town believe their surroundings are unhealthy. One afternoon in a Krasnokamensk grocery store, two women whispered about coming medical checks for breast cancer with tears in their eyes. "Here, the graveyard is bigger than the town," one of them told this reporter.

But town officials insist that the health risks of living and working here are minimal. "The population of the town is stable," said Krasnokamensk's mayor, German Kolov.

There is little way of determining who is right because there are no conclusive studies available. Kolov recently ordered his health officials to produce a report detailing the causes of death in the Krasnokamensk region, but it is unclear when it would be ready and whether it would be public.

The mayor said he hoped the attention that the town has received since Khodorkovsky arrived at the nearby prison camp would help win more government funding for the resettlement of the Oktyabrskoye villagers.

Greenpeace's Chuprov, however, said he feared that the politically charged presence of the former oil tycoon could make it even harder to carry out environmental studies.

"We need to know how much dust is in the area," he said, calling for an independent investigation. "But it's not clear if the authorities are ready to allow this, especially now. If anyone dares to do this, it is likely they'll find themselves in the cell next door to Khodorkovsky."

International Herald Tribune, 1.12.2005

No Booze But Lots of Tea for New Year's

By Carl Schreck
Staff Writer

Russian tradition has it that how you celebrate New Year's will dictate the course of the next 12 months. This New Year's Eve, hundreds of thousands of people will hope for a better 2006 as they welcome the New Year behind bars.

What the country's most famous inmate, Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has planned for Saturday night is something of a mystery. But National Bolshevik Party leader Eduard Limonov, who was once the best-known prisoner, says any festivities are dependent on the goodwill of the warden.

Federal Prison Service head Yury Kalinin announced earlier in December that the number of people in the country's prisons and detention centers jumped by more than 45,000 this year, meaning that more than 800,000 will be incarcerated for New Year's and Orthodox Christmas on Jan. 7.

A late-arriving prisoner might be former Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov, whom Swiss authorities agreed to extradite to Russia according to a court ruling made public Thursday.

Thanks to local charity organizations across the country and a little rule-bending by prison authorities, the holidays have become more bearable, said Valery Abramkin, head of the Moscow Center for Prison Reform, a think tank.

"Luckily, compared with 10 years ago, local communities have started to think more about prisoners," said Abramkin, a former dissident who

spent six years in Soviet-era jails. "They send care packages and letters. In general, you could say citizens have become more sympathetic to the plight of prisoners."

Since 1993, Abramkin's organization has been conducting a holiday program whereby it delivers presents and supplies to juvenile and women's prisons in western Russia. This year, the organization is visiting about 10 prisons, delivering envelopes, notebooks and postcards, as well as fruit and chocolates, Abramkin said.

"The visits will run into February," he said. "We can't make it to all of the prisons by Christmas."

Officially, no alcohol is permitted, even as part of New Year's festivities, while lights out is at 10 p.m. on Dec. 31 and reveille is as usual at 6 a.m. on New Year's Day, a Federal Prison Service spokeswoman said. "If they want to watch New Year's Eve television shows, including the presidential address, they can watch a video recording the next day," said the spokeswoman, who declined to give her name.

It was unclear whether Khodorkovsky and his fellow inmates would have a chance to celebrate.

Khodorkovsky's lawyer Anton Drel, who returned to Moscow after visiting his client in the Krasnokamensk prison, near the Chinese border, on Wednesday, said the two had not had enough time to discuss New Year's preparations.

Maxim Dbar, a spokesman for Khodorkovsky's press center, said it was up to the prison administration to decide whether to allow inmates to stay up until midnight.

Prison officials could not be reached for comment Thursday.

While alcohol is taboo, Limonov said the administration of the Saratov region detention facility, where he was held during his trial on charges of illegal arms possession and terrorism, turned a blind eye to the 10 p.m. bed call on Dec. 31, 2002.

"I returned from court and ate smoked chicken and drank chifir with my comrades," Limonov said, referring to a strong brew of tea that gives an extreme caffeine buzz. "Then everyone was allowed to watch television until 6 a.m. -- the only night they didn't make us go to bed at 10 p.m."

Limonov said that during his detention in Moscow's Lefortovo prison in 2001, the prison warden wished the inmates a happy New Year shortly after midnight, while prison guards could be heard drinking and playing cards in the hallway.

"There was no alcohol for us. We were in a red prison," Limonov said, referring to a prison that is controlled by the camp administration, as opposed to so-called black prisons, which are regulated and enforced by jailed crime bosses.

Despite prison dry laws, procuring booze for New Year's toasts should not be a problem for many prisoners, said Naum Nim, editor of the magazine Nevolye, which deals with prison life.

"These days, you can get anything you want in prison, especially if you have money," said Nim, a Soviet-era dissident who twice spent New Year's behind bars -- in 1985 and 1986 -- before his release in 1987.

Nim's assessment echoed the words of Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky, who vented his frustrations at a Dec. 16 news conference. He said that for a price, many prison staff provided inmates with alcohol, cigarettes and cell phones.

Guards at one detention center allowed a suspect to meet with a woman and then drank vodka with him, Fridinsky said, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported.

According to Nim, celebrating New Year's in prison with alcohol was unthinkable during Soviet times. Tea was the object of desire.

"Usually, it was almost impossible to get any tea," Nim said. "But for New Year's, we would get tea, cake and cigarettes. But it wasn't a typical cake.

"There are more goods now and prisoners have access to tea and baked goods. But we would make our own pastry out of sukhariki with sweetened condensed milk," he said, referring to the dried bread snack.

The prison service spokeswoman confirmed that the administration in each prison would decide what kinds of New Year's festivities, if any, they would allow. "In many prisons, the inmates themselves organize concerts and perform skits, anything to raise their spirits," she said.

Prisoners may have a special menu for New Year's Eve, including pastries and salads, and some prisons are spruced up with holiday decorations, including New Year's trees, she said.

Prison officials often cut inmates some slack on New Year's so they can enjoy their own celebrations, Nim said.

"They want to get to the table themselves to eat and drink," Nim said.

Overzealous partying by prison guards could provide the more restless inmates with a window of opportunity, according to an essay by St. Petersburg journalist Yury Gavryuchenkov posted on the Zhurnal Samizdat web site.

Describing his New Year's Eve on Dec. 31, 1997, in a St. Petersburg detention facility, Gavryuchenkov wrote that the guards fell asleep at about 3 a.m. "If we had been able to open the cell door, we could have gone directly to Finlandsky Station to pick up some beer. But we couldn't get to the lock, so we just kept watching television."

In the most daring New Year's jailbreak in recent memory, Yevgeny Pechyonkin crawled to freedom through an 85-meter tunnel he had constructed at the UF-91/3 prison colony in Novosibirsk on Dec. 31, 2000.

Prison guards noticed he was missing only on New Year's Day. Police eventually caught up with Pechyonkin, a convicted conman and an engineer by trade, two years later.

Other holiday season escapes have been less successful. Eighteen teenagers wanting to go home for the holidays fled a prison colony near St. Petersburg on Dec. 23, 2002. Most of them were captured within a few hours, and the rest were rounded up a week later.

Staff Writer Anatoly Medetsky contributed to this report.

The Moscow Times, 12.30.2005

Putin, Khodorkovsky and the trial that rocked Russia

The trial of Russia’s richest businessman, Mikhail Khordokovsky this year sent renewed fear through Russian society with claims that the case was politically motivated.

On a rainy day in May, hundreds of demonstrators chanted “freedom, freedom” outside Moscow’s Meshchanski court. Inside, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was on trial accused of fraud and tax evasion. Eventually a verdict was reached, but the judge took several days to read out the sentence, adding to the length of the trial which had already dragged on for months.

Lawyer Robert Amsterdam thought the slow delivery of the final outcome was a deliberate ploy. "They want to make journalists lose interest”, he said at the time:
"As long as the media is here, they’ll try to draw out the sentence. The process is political. When the Kremlin decides the time is ripe, judgment will be passed.''

Political ambitions
Khodorkovsky was arrested in October 2003. At 40 years old he’d already accomplished a lot. He was the wealthiest person in Russia, the owner of the modern and successful Yukos oil company, and still very ambitious. He dreamt of merging Yukos and the oil firm Sibneft to make one of the world’s energy giants. Khodorkovsky was also interested in politics. He supported various opposition parties and wasn’t shy about his own political ambitions.

When the public prosecutor opened a case against Khordokovsky, the businessman understood that it was a serious matter. "I’m available”, Khodorkovsky said at a press conference just a few days before his arrest. "I’m not planning on becoming a political emigrant. I’m leaving on a business trip, but I’ll be back on Saturday. If the prosecutor has taken a decision by then, I’ll be at his disposal.''

Despite his obvious willingness to cooperate, Khodorkovsky was dramatically arrested and imprisoned by armed, masked men. At about the same time, the tax office bombarded Yukos with a series of demands running into billions of dollars. The successful company was forced to sell its main subsidiary, which ended up as part of the state-owned Rosneft oil firm. That meant that part of Yukos had effectively been renationalised.

Clashes
Despite the long-running trial, there was no let-up in the demonstrations outside court with Khordokovsky’s supporters often clashing with police. Finally on 31 May, the sentence was complete, nine years in a Siberian prison camp for Khordorkovsky and his business partner, Platon Lebedev.

While protests about the convictions carried on, there were also those who supported the legal action. Researcher Andrei Kortunov thinks many poorer Russians agree with the sentence. "They only think it’s a pity that Khodorkovsky is the only wealthy businessman to have been locked up,'' he says, "they’d like to see all the other rich people behind bars and stripped of their wealth. Many people hold this view, especially among the poorer population groups who lost more than they gained during the reform years.''

Unpredictable
For Russia’s growing middle class, however, Khodorkovsky’s case is proof that President Vladimir Putin can change the rules as he wishes. "Many young people are now thinking of pursuing a career abroad. Khodorkovsky is an important figure for them, the representative of a new generation, a modern manager, someone they want to be like,'' says Kortunov.

And Kortunov’s colleague, Mark Urnov, a former adviser of Boris Yeltsin, sees the Khodorkovsky case as a turning point. He thinks Putin made a mistake which has resulted in economic stagnation and a return of fear in society. "I’m convinced Russia would have been a model of economic development if the Yukos scandal hadn’t taken place and Putin had stuck to the political course he set before 2003,'' says Urnov:
"History would have judged Putin as a truly great president, but the Yukos affair has ruined that possibility for good.''

Radio Nederland, 12.30.2005

Ex-Prisoners Write Yukos Founder on New Year's

Former "prisoners of conscience" and rights activists including Andrei Sakharov's widow sent jailed businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky New Year's wishes and likened his fate to that of Soviet-era dissidents.

Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man as owner of oil company Yukos, is serving a prison term in Krasnokamensk on fraud and tax charges that human rights campaigners say are politically driven.

"Anyone, who even glanced at the documents in your case understands that the conviction of Khodorkovsky was illegal, unfounded and political," said a letter signed by 22 people and distributed by Khodorkovsky's spokesman.

Russian officials say he was merely a dishonest businessman who got caught.

"When a prison fence is in front of you for years in the forseeable future, even the traditional 'Happy New Year' starts to have a double meaning. We understand and remember this," the letter said.

"But you must celebrate it. Because the old year ought to be sent off properly. ... Only God knows what your New Year will be like, but we hope it will be no worse than 2005."

Among the signatories was Yelena Bonner, widow and fellow campaigner of Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist turned rights champion who spent years in exile for his activities.

Other one-time dissidents jailed in the communist period who signed the letter included Sergei Kovalyov, a co-head of rights group Memorial; Gleb Yakunin; and Pavel Litvinov.

The signatories also included Alexander Nikitin and Grigory Pasko, both of whom spent time in jail in Russia's post-communist era on spying charges brought after they exposed environmental disasters.

"In Krasnokamensk, you will mark the New Year six hours ahead of Moscow. It's not bad to live six hours ahead of the Kremlin and the general prosecutor. It means you will be free six hours earlier," the letter said.

The Moscow Times, 12.30.2005

Mikhail Khodorkovsky Might Go To Court Again�

Honor and Dignity

Yesterday, in Khamovniki Court of Moscow there was a first day of hearings of the case Federal Penitentiary Service (FPS) versus TV Channel Ren TV, TV anchor Marianna Maximovskaya, and attorneys of former head of YUKOS Mikhail Khodorkovsky and former head of MENATEP Platon Lebedev. Because defense did not show up at court the court session had to be postponed.
As Kommersant reported earlier (Dec.16, 2005) FPS did not like the program “Week with Marianna Maximovskaya,” which aired on Aug. 27, 2005. The program was about putting Platon Lebedev in solitary confinement and Mikhail Khodorkovsky announced a hunger strike because of that. The FTS considered the phrase of Maximovskaya about Khodorkovsky’s hunger strike as not true. The federal agency also saw statements of attorneys Evgeny Baru and Yuri Schmidt, who described the bad prison conditions of their clients, as “a slander against Matrosskaya Tishina penitentiary employees.” The FTS filed a law suit about defending its honor, dignity and business reputation and demanded from defendants a public retraction of their statements.

Maximovskaya and Ren TV channel lawyer Alexander Polozok came to court yesterday. However, instead of attorneys Baru and Schmidt, their colleague Vladimir Krasnov showed up. He presented documents to the judge that Evgeny Baru is visiting his client Platon Lebedev in prison facility located in village Harp. He also reported that Yuri Schmidt is currently sick. The court considered the reasons for not showing as satisfactory and postponed the hearing.

Maximovskaya also suggested inviting Mikhail Khodorkovsky to court as a witness for the defense: “FTS in its appeal says that my statement about Khodorkovsky’s hunger strike is false. Then, let him say personally in front of the court if he had a hunger strike or not.”

The hearings will be open again on January 19.

Kommersant will be monitoring the process.

Kommersant, 12.20.2005