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Putin ready to fix election,
intelligence chief claims
Luke
Harding
London
Guardian
Friday, March 2, 2007
Relations between the US and Russia appeared to sink
to a new low yesterday after Moscow angrily dismissed accusations
that democracy in Russia had taken a "back step".
Russia's foreign ministry called the accusation by
Mike McConnell, Washington's national intelligence director, in
a speech to the US Senate's armed services committee on Tuesday,
"outmoded" and "totally groundless".
Mr McConnell, an expert on the former Soviet Union, said Russia's
president, Vladimir Putin, was preparing to fix next year's presidential
elections so that the Kremlin's preferred candidate would win. "The
march to democracy has taken a back step. And now there are more
arrangements to control the process and the populace and the parties
and so on, to the point of picking the next leader of Russia,"
Mr McConnell said, at a hearing to discuss global threats to the
US.
"That's my worry, is the march toward democracy, the way we
understand it ... now being controlled in a way that it is less
of a democratic process."
Mr Putin had surrounded himself with "extremely conservative"
advisers suspicious of America, he said.
Yesterday the Kremlin accused Mr McConnell of harbouring obsolete
and outmoded notions about Russia.
The intelligence chief's assessments were "totally unfounded",
the foreign ministry's spokesman, Andrei Krivtsov, said. The exchange
came amid a sharp deterioration in US-Russian relations to what
analysts said yesterday was probably their worst level since the
US-led Nato bombing of Serbia in 1999.
Moscow has been angered by the US administration's plans to site
two anti-missile interceptor and radar bases in Poland and the Czech
Republic.
Mr Putin has ridiculed America's claim that the sites are meant
to deter a possible rogue attack by North Korea or Iran and has
said they are clearly aimed at Russia and its vast nuclear arsenal.
Last month he delivered his most scathing attack yet on US power.
Speaking in Munich, he accused the US of acting unilaterally and
seeking to become the world's sole decision-making "master".
Analysts said yesterday that public opinion on both sides was hardening.
"In Russia, Putin's speech has produced a tremendous effect
among those who want Russian primacy and think in terms of Russia's
empire," said Victor Kremenyuk, deputy director of Moscow's
US-Canada Institute. "In the US, a growing number of people
think that Russia has outwitted them. Instead of becoming a normal
democratic state it has become an energy superpower. They see it
both as a threat to the US and its allies in Europe."
Other observers said they expected the chill in US-Russian relations
to go on beyond the Bush-Putin era. "I think we are very close
to an arms race," Ivan Safranchuk, head of the Moscow bureau
of the World Security Institute, a US thinktank, told the Guardian.
"Neither side trusts the other. Russia reacts to the missile
defence sites. The US reacts to Russia's reaction."
The government-owned newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta said on Wednesday
that Russian scientists were alarmed by the US's High-frequency
Active Auroral Research Programme, or Haarp. They believed US scientists
were close to developing a system that would allow them to disrupt
an enemy's entire nuclear capability using ionic rays. Russia was
determined to develop a similar technology, the paper reported.
With increasing talk of a new cold war, Russia's political parties,
including the Communists, agreed this week to suspend their differences
on foreign policy.
"Russia has become stronger and America doesn't like it,"
Konstantin Kosachev, the head of parliament's foreign affairs committee,
told Moskovsky Komsomolets, a mass-circulation daily. "They
still have the same notions from the 1990s, when American became
the only political power centre on the planet."
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