Russia: Putin TV Wants You to Think Italy Is a Bigger Story Than Crimea | The Daily Beast

Haven’t heard about the Veneto referendum to leave Italy? You’re not watching enough RT. Monday’s glorious Crimean exercise in democracy was not the only example of a European country devolving decision-making to the local level. The Italian region of Veneto also kicked off a referendum over the weekend that could see it separate from Italy. Presumably, you did not hear about this major shake-up in Italian politics, which has serious implications for the future of the European project, nay, the future of a united Europe itself. That’s because you’re likely a consumer of the hopelessly biased Western media, a mix of “corporatocracy” and state-run propaganda outlets like the BBC and France 24. They chose to ignore the Italian vote and focus all of their attention on the Crimean one, which, in a Russophobic fury, they have inaccurately portrayed as a sham election held under the watchful presence of a foreign military. This is the message you would have received if you bothered to watch RT, the multilingual global propaganda news channel funded by the Russian government. Because I am a glutton for punishment, I turned on the Internet livestream of RT America to learn how it was covering the Crimean referendum, which took place after Russia invaded the Ukrainian peninsula, violently installed a puppet as prime minister, and cracked down on the independent press. “Media coverage has been muted with the Crimean referendum getting center stage,” an RT anchor complained.

Russia: Duma passes bill allowing voters to contest election results | RT

The Russian Lower House has approved an amendment allowing the annulment of election results if voters complain of irregularities. The bill changing the federal law on the basic guarantees of voters’ rights has been presented following last year’s ruling of the Constitutional Court confirming that ordinary citizens can contest election results, though only in the constituencies in which they cast their votes. Previously, the processes of investigating violations at elections could only be started after complaints from candidates or participating parties.

Russia: Deputies Submit Bill Abolishing Mayoral Elections | The Moscow Times

Lawmakers from pro-Kremlin parties United Russia and LDPR have submitted to the State Duma a bill abolishing popular elections of mayors and city councils in major cities. Analysts said the legislation represents an attempt to increase the dependence of municipal authorities on the Kremlin and effectively liquidate their self-government. Some observers also interpreted the proposed measure as part of a Kremlin effort to consolidate power in reaction to the political crisis in neighboring Ukraine. The reform would apply to 67 large cities, including 56 regional capitals. The mayors of affected cities would be elected by city councils from among their members, while the city councils would consist of deputies delegated by newly created assemblies of city districts. City governments would be headed by city managers — executives appointed by commissions, half of which would be chosen by governors and the other half by city councils.

Russia: Crimean Parliament Dismisses Cabinet and Sets Date for Autonomy Referendum | The Moscow Times

The Crimean parliament on Thursday voted in favor of holding a referendum on whether to expand its autonomy and passed a no-confidence motion dismissing the region’s government. The referendum — set for May 25, the same day as Ukraine’s presidential election — was supported by 61 out of the 64 deputies who attended Thursday’s emergency session, the parliament’s press office told RIA Novosti. Crimeans will vote “yes” or “no” on whether the “Crimea has state sovereignty and is a part of Ukraine, in accordance with treaties and agreements.”

Russia: ‘None of the Above’ on Its Way Back to the Ballot | The Moscow Times

The State Duma’s Legislation Committee on Monday approved a bill reintroducing the “none of the above” option in all elections except for those choosing a president. The ballot option was introduced in Russia in 1991 but was removed in 2006. Its planned reintroduction has been widely interpreted as an attempt by United Russia to take votes away from opposition candidates. Legislation Committee chairman Vladimir Pligin, of United Russia, said that the option would be reasonable for municipal elections but that its relevance for State Duma and regional elections was open to discussion. The bill was submitted last October by Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the Federation Council, and other members of the parliament’s upper house. They argued that the option would help determine whether a particular vote was a protest vote against the ruling party or a genuine preference for a specific candidate.

Russia: Moscow court confirms election defeat for Navalny | Associated Press

A Moscow courthouse on Friday upheld the results of mayoral elections in which the Kremlin-backed incumbent narrowly avoided a run-off with opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Russian news outlets reported. The judge rejected Navalny’s claims that the campaign was marked by abuse of government finances and selected voter fraud, ruling that there were no grounds for a recount. Navalny’s success in the elections proved an embarrassment to his Kremlin-backed opponent, incumbent Sergei Sobyanin. Sobyanin got 51 percent of the vote, just avoiding the 50 percent cut-off that would have forced him into a second round against Navalny. Independent election monitor Golos also criticized the election result, saying that there had been no evidence of widespread vote-rigging but that isolated violations could have tipped the close election. Also Friday, another court that Navalny’s appeals trial will begin on Oct. 9. Navalny was sentenced in July to five years in prison for embezzlement in a case that he and his supporters describe as legally dubious and a punishment for his exposure of high-level corruption.

Russia: Putin foe Navalny to challenge Moscow election defeat in court | Reuters

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent, Alexei Navalny, said on Wednesday he would file hundreds of legal challenges to Moscow mayoral election results he says were rigged to give a Kremlin ally victory. Sergei Sobyanin, who was appointed mayor by the Kremlin in 2010 but called an early election to increase his legitimacy, won the vote on Sunday with 51.3 percent – enough to avoid a second-round run-off against Navalny, who had 27.3 percent. Navalny, an anti-corruption blogger who helped lead street protests against Putin in the past two years, has refused to accept the results and has cited election observers whose count put Sobyanin below the 50 percent threshold. “Everybody’s asking: Where are the lawsuits? If you’re unhappy with the results and believe there was fraud, why aren’t you complaining?” Navalny wrote on his blog. “I answer: We are preparing well-grounded legal complaints. It takes time.”

Russia: Navalny demands recount in Moscow mayoral race | Associated Press

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny demanded a recount Monday in Moscow’s mayoral election after official results showed that the Kremlin-backed incumbent barely escaped facing him in a runoff. Russia’s most respected monitoring group also questioned the accuracy of the vote. The Moscow Election Commission said Monday that former Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Sobyanin won just over 51 percent of the vote while Navalny garnered 27 percent in second place, a strong result for a Russian opposition leader. If Sobyanin, 55, had won less than 50 percent, he would have faced a runoff with the charismatic 37-year-old Navalny, who has risen to wide prominence in the past few years with his anti-corruption campaign. “We do not recognize these elections,” Navalny told reporters. “Sobyanin can’t consider himself the mayor of all Muscovites, he can’t consider himself a lawfully elected mayor unless he agrees to our demands and allows a recount of the vote.”

Russia: Opposition Leader Asserts Broad Problems in Moscow Race | New York Times

The Russian opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, on Thursday submitted to a court more than 50,000 pages of documents illustrating what he said were irregularities in Sunday’s voting in the Moscow mayor’s race in an attempt to prove that he won enough votes to force a runoff against the incumbent, Sergei S. Sobyanin. But the court refused to block the inauguration of Mr. Sobyanin, who barely cleared the threshold for an outright victory with 51.4 percent. He was sworn in on Thursday evening during a ceremony in the city’s World War II museum. According to the official returns, Mr. Navalny placed second with 27.2 percent. Yet, even as Mr. Navalny and his aides lugged 21 boxes of documents to the courthouse, they acknowledged not only that there was little hope of overturning the results, but also that the voting had been relatively fair. So they have adopted a new message: while the vote was generally free of blatant fraud like ballot stuffing, the election itself was rigged from the beginning.

Russia: Mayor’s Rival Contests Moscow Vote | Wall Street Journal

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny delivered an unexpectedly strong showing in Moscow’s mayoral elections, but still vowed to challenge the preliminary official results, which gave a majority to incumbent Sergei Sobyanin. Mr. Navalny said he didn’t expect to win himself, but was confident that his Kremlin-backed opponent had fallen short of the 50% needed to avoid a runoff. The final official count, with 100% of precincts in Moscow reporting had Mr. Sobyanin winning 51.37% with just under 1.2 million votes and Mr. Navalny 27.24% with 632,697 votes; the rest was split among four other candidates, according to the Moscow City Election Commission. The tension over the election raises the prospect of a repeat of the massive demonstrations against the Kremlin that were spurred by widespread allegations of falsification of votes in the Dec. 2011 parliamentary ballot. Mr. Navalny’s supporters received a permit to hold a rally Monday evening at one site of those protests. It wasn’t clear how large turnout was likely to be; recent opposition protests have been thinly attended.

Russia: Putin critic set to capture protest vote in Moscow polls | AFP

As Muscovites prepared Saturday to elect a mayor for the first time in a decade, many said they would support a controversial critic of Vladimir Putin who channels public anger against the Kremlin. On Sunday, they will have to choose from six candidates including Kremlin-backed incumbent Sergei Sobyanin and the main opposition candidate Alexei Navalny, who has campaigned under the shadow of a five-year sentence on charges he condemned as politically motivated. The candidacy of the 37-year-old anti-corruption blogger has made the race the first genuinely competitive Russian election since the heady first post-Soviet years, even if many harbour reservations about his tough anti-migrant rhetoric. Kremlin-backed Sobyanin, 55, is expected to win with a majority, while Navalny is set to come second with around 20 percent, according to opinion polls.

Russia: Elections to Elect Governors, Moscow Mayor After 9-year Break in Popular Votes | RIA Novosti

Millions of Russians will take to the polling booths on Sunday to cast their votes in regional and municipal elections. The most important race is happening in Moscow, where Acting Mayor Sergei Sobyanin faces off against Russia’s protest leader Alexei Navalny. Sobyanin, an ally and former administration head of President Vladimir Putin, is uniformly expected to win the mayoral seat by a wide margin. Turnout for Navalny, though, will determine to what extent Moscow residents oppose the Kremlin and its policies, political pundits said. “A sizeable part of the vote against Sobyanin will be against not the Moscow city government or the personality of the Moscow mayor, but against federal politics,” said Boris Makarenko, chairman of the Center for Political Technologies. “The Kremlin is receiving many signals that a sizeable part of the population has problems with how it is governing the county.” Authorities worked intentionally to keep Navalny in the race, in what analysts say was an effort to boost the legitimacy of the crucial vote after tens of thousands of Muscovites took to the streets to protest the 2011 parliamentary and 2012 presidential elections results. The opposition claimed the contests were rigged in favor of the Kremlin.

Russia: Key election watchdog struggles to get past Kremlin shutdown before polls | CSMonitor.com

Less than three weeks before Russians go to the polls to elect hundreds of local and regional governments, the country’s biggest independent election monitoring group, Golos, is struggling to reinvent itself after being effectively destroyed by a new law that requires non-governmental groups that receive funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents.” The outcome of Golos’ efforts will probably settle any debate over the intentions of Russian authorities when they framed the controversial NGO law, which requires all groups that receive any degree of foreign funding and engage in any kind of public outreach authorities deem political to register and self-identify in all their materials as “foreign agents” – a term that connotes “spy” in Russia. Russian authorities insist the law is just about reining in foreign influence and ensuring transparency in the NGO sector. Critics have argued from the start that the law is part of a battery of legislation that aims to straitjacket civil society, clamp down on free speech and, specifically, to prevent any repetition of the mass exposure of alleged electoral fraud in December 2011 Duma elections made possible by 50,000 trained citizen polling station monitors fielded by Golos.

Russia: Moscow to consider disqualifying Navalny from mayor poll | GlobalPost

The Moscow election commission is to consider whether to disqualify protest leader Alexei Navalny from taking part in elections for city mayor on September 8, the Russian capital’s election chief said Thursday. The commission would meet “soon” to discuss violations in Navalny’s campaign, Moscow election commission chief Valentin Gorbunov said. “If the violations exceed the norms established by the law than the question will be raised of cancelling the registration of the candidate,” Gorbunov said, according to comments confirmed by a spokesman to AFP. The spokesman, declining to be identified, refused further details.

Russia: More Parties Banned From Elections in Russia | RIA Novosti

More parties have been banned from regional elections in Russia this year than in 2012, despite the Kremlin’s attempted liberalization of political legislation, a new study said Wednesday. In total, 9.2 percent of the candidate lists submitted by parties for the September 8 elections have been banned, compared with 2.4 percent last year, according to a report by the Civil Initiatives Committee think tank, founded by longtime Kremlin insider-turned-critic Alexei Kudrin, a former finance minister.

Russia: Navalny accused of illegal foreign funding | Voice of Russia

Russian prosecutors said on Monday that Moscow mayoral candidate and opposition leader Alexei Navalny has accepted illegal donations from abroad to fund his electoral campaign. The allegations were immediately denied by Navalny. “The information about foreign funding for Navalny’s electoral campaign was confirmed during checks,” the Prosecutor General’s Office said in an online statement published on Monday. “More than 300 foreign individuals and organizations, and anonymous donations from 46 countries (including the United States, Finland, Britain, Sweden and Canada) from 347 IP addresses have been sent to the electronic fund of Navalny and members of his campaign headquarters,” the statement said. Navalny ridiculed prosecutors in a subsequent blog post, pointing out that a foreign IP address does not mean that a donation was made by a foreign citizen, and adding that all donations to his campaign were approved by Moscow’s Election Commission or were returned to the donors.

Russia: United Russia doubts legality of Navalny election campaign funding scheme | The Voice of Russia

The funding scheme that a Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny has been using extensively is in direct violation of the election legislation, the deputy head of the United Russia Party’s Central Executive Committee, Konstantin Mazurevsky said. According to the official, the election legislation contains a clear-cut definition of a voter’s free-will contribution, which means a gratuitous donation by a Russian citizen of their own money resources. The money is transferred to the candidate’s election campaign account. The law thus prohibits the so-called two-stage donations to election campaign accounts, whereby the money first comes from unidentified third persons to the donors that the candidate is familiar with, and then these individuals transfer the contributions in question on their behalf to the candidate’s special-purpose election campaign account as their own money, although this is not their money, Mazurevsky said.The United Russia official added that court practice bears out the unlawfulness of this kind of donation.

Russia: Navalny Arrives In Moscow, Vows To Win Mayoral Election | RFE

Convicted Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny has arrived in Moscow after being released on bail while he appeals his conviction on embezzlement charges. Addressing a crowd of supporters who were waiting to greet him at Moscow’s Yaroslavsky train station, Navalny thanked them and credited supporters with helping gain his release from detention in Kirov so he could campaign for mayor of Russia’s capital. Navalny said his freedom was a sign of the growing power of Russia’s people.  “We are a huge, powerful force and I am glad you are starting to recognize your power,” he said. The opposition leader and anticorruption blogger said the Russian authorities were starting to sense the power of the country’s people as well, and it made them nervous. “In court, their [officials’] hands were trembling and here they are trembling because in the courtroom there is no power, no authority but here [in the crowd] there is strength, here there is power,” he said. “We here are the power!”

Russia: Alexei Navalny convicted: The fates of Putin’s enemies | BBC

Russian anti-corruption blogger and opposition politician Alexei Navalny has been jailed for five years for fraud, after a trial he says was politically motivated. Mr Navalny could now be barred from running in the Moscow mayoral election set for September. He also joins a growing list of opponents of President Vladimir Putin who have ended up on the wrong side of the law or in exile, or have met their deaths in suspicious circumstances. When Mr Putin first became president in 2000, he immediately set about curbing the power of the oligarchs – the group of billionaires who exerted huge influence over Russia’s political system and media. His first victim was media magnate, Vladimir Gusinsky, the owner of NTV, a station that at the time was highly critical of Moscow’s war in the breakaway republic of Chechnya and was home to the satirical puppet show Kukly, which mercilessly mocked the new president. When Mr Gusinsky refused to allow the Kremlin to influence NTV’s editorial policy he quickly found himself charged with fraud in June 2000, and fled the country shortly afterwards. Within months, he was joined by his fellow media magnate and political fixer Boris Berezovsky.

Russia: Protest leader wins one battle and faces another | Reuters

Russian protest leader Alexei Navalny won a rare victory on Wednesday by being accepted as a candidate in a Moscow mayoral election which he sees as a stepping stone to challenging Vladimir Putin for the presidency. But his ability to contest September’s election and the next presidential vote in 2018 depend on a judge’s verdict on Thursday in the most prominent trial of an opposition figure in Russia since Soviet times. Navalny, who emerged from anti-Putin protests last year as the opposition’s most dynamic leader, could be sentenced to up to six years in jail on what he says are trumped-up charges of stealing 16 million roubles ($493,000) from a timber firm. That would bar him from running for mayor against Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin favorite, and from contesting the presidential election in 2018, in which Putin, Russia’s dominant leader for 13 years, could try to extend his rule until 2024.

Russia: Activist Navalny enters Moscow mayor race | BBC

Prominent Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny has registered to stand in September’s vote for Moscow mayor. Police briefly detained Mr Navalny as he addressed supporters outside the city’s election commission office where he submitted registration documents. The anti-corruption blogger, 37, faces a verdict next week in an embezzlement trial. He denies allegations he took $500,000 from a state timber firm and says the charges are politically motivated.

Russia: Moscow mayoral election to decide opposition’s fate | Russia Beyond The Headlines

Early elections for mayor of Russia’s capital will be held on Sept. 8. This will be the opposition’s zero-hour: The key electorate for opponents of the regime is represented most widely in Moscow. If the opposition does not win on its own turf, the protest movement may be forgotten for a long time to come. Last year’s elections in the Moscow suburb of Khimki were seen by many as a dress rehearsal for the upcoming battle for Moscow. Consequently, the voting there was closely followed by all of Russia’s political observers—as was the opposition’s defeat. Yet protest leaders have been offered the chance to take their revenge far sooner than they expected: The next mayoral elections in Moscow were scheduled to take place only in 2015. The opposition’s plans have been thrown into disarray by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin’s sudden resignation.

Russia: Electoral Watchdog Dodges Government Ban | RIA Novosti

Russia’s leading election monitor, known for accusing the Kremlin of vote rigging and suspended over its alleged “foreign agent” status, found a way to continue its operations, the group’s representative said. Nongovernmental organization (NGO) Golos, would transform into a new legal entity with the same function as before, its deputy head Grigory Melkonyants told RIA Novosti on Thursday. Golos was formally re-established as a non-profit foundation to monitor the elections on Friday, Russian media said, though the necessary paperwork would only be completed next week.

Russia: Prosecutor Urges Six-Year Sentence for Opposition Leader | New York Times

In closing arguments on Friday, prosecutors urged a Russian judge to convict the political opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny of embezzlement and sentence him to six years in jail — a verdict that would destroy his political career and eliminate him as a threat to President Vladimir V. Putin by imprisoning him until after the next presidential election. Mr. Navalny is the most prominent opposition figure in modern Russia to face prosecution, and he has accused the Kremlin of pursuing trumped-up charges as political retribution. While forcefully denying the allegations, he has long said he expects to be convicted in the trial, which was streamed live online from Kirov, a regional capital. The verdict is to be delivered on July 18. For more than a year, as Mr. Navalny helped to lead big street protests against Mr. Putin, the Kremlin seemed to waver between a desire to imprison him and a reluctance to galvanize his supporters by locking him up. Mr. Navalny has declared his candidacy for mayor of Moscow in an election to be held in September, but he has also said he hopes one day to be president.

Russia: Moscow Mayor Wants to Abolish Absentee Ballots | The Moscow Times

Acting Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has submitted a bill to the Moscow City Duma that would abolish the use of absentee ballots in city elections, but he said the proposed change would not be implemented before the upcoming mayoral election, a news report said Tuesday. Election observers say the widespread use of absentee ballots is among the techniques that made it possible for fraudsters to rig the results of several key recent elections in Russia, including the 2011 State Duma elections and last year’s presidential vote.

Russia: As election nears, popular opposition leader arrested in Russia | CSMonitor.com

The popular mayor of the Volga industrial city of Yaroslavl, Yevgeny Urlashov, has been detained on suspicion of corruption and extortion, just a few months before he was to head an opposition ticket in upcoming regional elections. Mr. Urlashov insisted Wednesday in an interview with the Internet TV station Dozhd that the charges against him are politically motivated. “I had been warned that they would get me out of the picture by any means possible,” he said. The Kremlin’s Investigative Committee said he and two aides are under suspicion of soliciting a $425,000 bribe from a private company in exchange for lucrative contracts to perform municipal services. Urlashov says his accuser is a prominent member of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party. Urlashov left United Russia in 2011, complaining of the party’s high-handed tactics, and joined the Civic Platform party led by liberal billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov. Running as an independent in the April 2012 mayoral polls in Yaroslavl, he overwhelmingly defeated the Kremlin’s chosen candidate, Yakov Yakushev, with almost 70 percent of the vote.

Russia: Vote monitoring group suspended under ‘foreign agent’ law | Reuters

Russia suspended an independent election monitoring group for six months on Wednesday, for failing to register as a “foreign agent” under a law that President Vladimir Putin’s critics say is part of a crackdown on dissent. The Moscow-based group, Golos, angered the government by publicizing evidence of fraud in a 2011 parliamentary vote that sparked opposition protests, and at the presidential election that returned Putin to the Kremlin for a third term last year. It is the first non-governmental organization (NGO) to have its operations suspended under the law Putin signed last July as part of a drive to decrease what he has said were efforts by Western countries to meddle in Russian politics. Golos denies it falls under the law, which obliges NGOs that receive any foreign funding and are deemed to be involved in political activity to register as “foreign agents”.

Russia: Election watchdog group must register as ‘foreign agent’ | UPI.com

Election monitoring group Golos must register as a “foreign agent” even though it says it does not get any foreign funds, Russian officials said Friday. The independent organization says it has not received money from outside Russia since November 2012, when a new law went into effect governing non-governmental organizations such as Golos, RIA Novosti reported.

Russia: Moscow mayor calls snap elections in test for Kremlin | NDTV

The Kremlin-backed mayor of Moscow Sergei Sobyanin Wednesday put his job on the line by calling snap elections two years before his mandate expires, in an apparent bid to outmanoeuvre the opposition after protests rocked the Russian capital. Sobyanin told President Vladimir Putin he was resigning but would himself stand in the elections which would be expected to take place on September 8 when other local polls are held nationwide. The election could set up an intriguing clash between Sobyanin, a technocratic stalwart of the ruling United Russia party, and virulently anti-Kremlin figures like the protest leader and anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny.

Russia: Moscow’s mayor steps down to fight election | Russia Beyond The Headlines

Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, announced Tuesday he is stepping down two years early to stand for a new term in office. Sobyanin suggested that the new mayoral election – Moscow’s first in 10 years – would take place on Sept. 8, the same day as the election for governor is scheduled to take place in the surrounding Moscow Region. The maneuver is largely being viewed as an effort to secure a five-year mayoral term at a time when his strongest potential opponents, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov and opposition activist Alexei Navalny, are likely to be deterred from running. Sobyanin announced his decision on June 4 at a meeting of Moscow’s Public Chamber, where its members urged Sobyanin, appointed mayor by then-President Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, to call early elections to boost his legitimacy among Muscovites. He is thought likely to continue as acting mayor after formally submitting his resignation to President Vladimir Putin, in the period leading up to the new mayoral election.