Ophir

We're the Unholy Trinity of Satanic Putin-worshippers!

Alex_Ivanov

We need fourth one... and horses!

Feanor

Hmmm I don't have anything on horses. As for jail

Ophir

Pity she isn't age-qualified to stand for the Russian presidential election.

Officer of Engineers

Yep, we have a couple of teenagers here. I don't think I can stand 5 minutes listening to her babble and dealing with her attitude.

__________________
Chimo

Levsha

Hey... that's a coincidence!!!! I'm actually reading Lolita at the moment - written by a certain Russian imigre whose written English was certainly almost as good as you 3 Russkii guys!

Feanor, your "Familia" isn't Nabokov by any chance, is it??

Ophir

I wish I were a teenager...

That's why I want to see her in the Kremlin.

Feanor

No it's Сыногач. You don't need age to run in Russia elections. You need FSB backing.


Damn my second edit in 2 minutes. I think we majorly hijacked the thread.

braindead

well this sounds an unusual last name as little as I know about slavic names . Ancient name ?

__________________
....

Feanor

No. My dad was from Western Ukraine. Near Chernovtsui.

Dreadnought

Perhaps a loop hole to extend our stay in office further Vladmir?

__________________
Fortitude.....The strength to persist...The courage to endure.

astralis

Russia Working to Limit Election Observers

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/wo.../25russia.html

By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: October 25, 2007
MOSCOW, Oct. 24 — Russia has opened a diplomatic campaign to curtail the activities of election observers in the states of the former Soviet Union, proposing to cut the size of the missions sharply and to prohibit the publication of their reports immediately after an election.

The proposals, circulated confidentially last month by Russia at the headquarters in Vienna of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, would also forbid observers to make any public statements about a government’s electoral conduct in the days after citizens voted.

Taken together, the proposals would severely undermine the activities of the organization’s election-monitoring arm before two important elections in Russia: the parliamentary election planned for Dec. 2 and presidential elections next spring.

They are also the latest Kremlin effort to renegotiate standards for governing and international cooperation that it accepted after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and seem certain to lead to another impasse with the West.

The monitoring arm, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, or O.D.I.H.R., sends long-term and short-term observation teams, often numbering in the hundreds of people, to elections throughout the states of the former Soviet Union.

Ambassador Christian Strohal, the Austrian diplomat who leads the office, said the proposals appeared to be devised to limit the capacity and influence of objective assessments of the governments’ electoral conduct.

“All of this is an effort to redefine — not redefine, deconstruct — 10 years of one of the most credible election observations that there is,” he said in an interview last week in Vienna. “It is about a certain principle that there cannot be an institution that has an opinion that comes about in a professional manner, as opposed to a political or diplomatic manner.”

Whether Russia can force the hand of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is unclear. The 56-member group requires unanimous votes for its decisions. Russia’s proposals were co-signed by six other former Soviet states: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

But because the organization requires consensus, diplomats said, Russia can block other decisions at a meeting of foreign ministers scheduled for late November in Madrid, and try to exact concessions that could weaken the observers’ abilities.

Russia can also act unilaterally, by demanding conditions for the observers of the December elections for the 450-seat Duma, its lower house of Parliament. At the last Duma election, in 2003, Russia invited observers about three months in advance. This year, with the elections slightly more than five weeks away, Russia has yet to invite the observers.

Vladimir Y. Churov, chairman of Russia’s Central Election Commission, declined to reply to written questions, submitted to him on Tuesday, about the proposals and invitation plans. A Kremlin spokesman declined to comment on Wednesday.

But the newspaper Kommersant reported this week that Andrei Davydov, a commission spokesman, suggested that the number of observers this year would be tightly controlled. Organizations, he said, will be allowed “several dozen observers, and not 400 like the O.S.C.E. has proposed.”

Mr. Strohal said the Kremlin had not even agreed to allow a small advance group of observers to visit Russia and determine the nature and size of a mission.

Such a step would ordinarily be done months in advance. Russia has balked, though it has allowed similar assessments in the past. “We have asked several times for a needs assessment mission,” Mr. Strohal said. “They say, ‘What is it?’”

Bruce George, a member of Parliament in Britain who has been an observer at 18 elections, including contests in Russia, Georgia and Ukraine, said the delay had already prevented the observer mission from doing a thorough job. Allowing Russia to impose further conditions, he said, will encourage other countries with a history of tainted elections to set conditions unilaterally.

“This is part of an overall strategy to emasculate O.D.I.H.R,” he said, referring to the election-monitoring office. “Russia does this because it knows full well that, with the methodology and professionalism of O.D.I.H.R, there is no way that it will find that Russia’s elections meet international standards.”

Russia’s diplomatic effort to restrict the missions, and its administrative resistance to them, complete a public shift from its post-Soviet promises to encourage political freedom and plurality.

As the Soviet Union was starting to come apart in 1990, Russia and the states that were breaking away from the Soviet Union agreed in a meeting in Copenhagen to hold free and fair elections and to allow independent foreign observers to monitor them.

But Russia and other autocratic states have bristled lately under the monitors’ post-election reports and news media conferences, which have routinely found that elections run by centralized governments in the old Soviet sphere fall short of democratic standards. Sometimes the reports show that elections are clearly fraudulent and rigged.

The reports have raised questions about government legitimacy and commitment to democratic principles. They have also become a public archive of election-season abuses in the region, including manipulated vote counts, official crackdowns on the political opposition, the use of state resources to buoy favored candidates, and obstacles for opposition candidates and parties to register, assemble and campaign.

The findings are typically embraced by the United States and the European Union in assessing the political climate in former Soviet countries. Opposition movements cite the reports as evidence of unfair treatment or outright repression by the state.

Russia and other governments have accused the observers’ post-election reports and statements of playing a role in inciting street protests that have overturned tainted elections in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan since 2003. The Kremlin has called this ripple of so-called “color revolutions” a threat to regional stability and its own grip on power.

In 2004, as the Orange Revolution was overturning a rigged presidential vote for a pro-Kremlin candidate in Ukraine, Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, denounced the role of observation missions in a statement to the organization.

“Election monitoring is not only ceasing to make sense, but is also becoming an instrument of political manipulation and a destabilizing factor,” he said.

The Russian proposals, if approved, would silence the public statements immediately after an election, allowing them to be replaced by news conferences from progovernment observers — already the staples of state-controlled television news channels.

A copy of the proposals, stamped “restricted,” was provided to The New York Times by a Western diplomat who requested anonymity because under diplomatic protocol the document is considered confidential.

Its authenticity was confirmed by a Russian diplomat who requested anonymity because he is not an authorized spokesman. The proposals will be vigorously discussed when the foreign ministers meet in Madrid, the diplomat said. “We are presenting these proposals for putting the O.D.I.H.R. observation missions on a solid platform,” he said.

Under the “list of basic principles for the organization of O.D.I.H.R. observation of national elections” circulated by the Russian mission, several limits would be placed on the monitors.

Missions, often numbering several hundred people, should “include no more than 50 persons,” the list says, with no more than 5 percent from any one country. The monitors’ reports would be submitted to the host government and the organization only after the announcement of an election’s official results, which are typically a week or more after an election. Observers would not be allowed to make “any public assessments of the election” before this time.

Publication of the reports would require a separate decision of the entire 55-member organization — a structural delay that diplomats said would probably ensure that the reports would never be made public.

A senior American diplomat, speaking anonymously because he was not an authorized spokesman, said that the United States would resist the proposals, but that there was little chance now of a complete and objective assessment of the Duma elections.

“It is an unfortunate missed opportunity,” he said. “By the time we get to Madrid, I think we will all be in a state of regret.”

__________________
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

glyn

__________________
Semper in excretum. Solum profunda variat.

Feanor

There's only one thing Putins government will listen to:

Dreadnought

Dam shame its not the population of your country. Other wise things could be much different.