As Russian “president” Dmitri Medvedev was meeting with Barack Obama in London in an effort to “press the reset button ^[1]” on U.S.-Russian relations, his cruel KGB regime revealed that the effort was nothing more than a sham designed to buy time while Vladimir Putin consolidates his neo-Soviet regime.  Whether Obama will be duped by this is anyone’s guess.

Dmitri Solovyov

First, Russia put yet another blogger ^[2] on trial for the “criminal” offense of writing critically about the Russian government.  Dmitri Solovyov ^[3], a close associate of dissident leader Oleg ^[4] Kozlovsky ^[5] who regularly participated in Kozlovsky’s public demonstrations against Vladimir Putin’s anti-democratic policies, was charged in the city of Kemerovo with “hate speech” for republishing another blogger’s critical comments about Russian Interior Ministry and KGB (now FSB) officers on his Live Journal forum under his “dimon77″ screen name.  Solovyov now faces two years in prison for this “crime,” which consisted of accusing the KGB of prosecuting cases leading to “unjust verdicts” and “beating confessions” out of people, intimidation, and committing dissidents to psychiatric asylums.  It’s just the latest in a series of attacks ^[6] on the Internet; the last vestige of critical information in Putin’s Russia.

Lev Ponomarev

As if that weren’t enough, one of Russia’s leading human rights activists — and a staunch critic of the manipulated legal proceedings used to imprison oil tycoon and Kremlin rival Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Siberia — was brutally assaulted in Moscow. Sixty-seven-year-old Lev Ponomarev ^[7] was jumped by a gang of thugs just as Khodorkovsky’s second trial on embezzlement charges began in Moscow.  Ponomarev referred to the attack as a “contract hit ^[8].” Clearly aimed at silencing his activism ^[9] in an effort to grease the wheels under Khodorkovsky (who called for Putin to testify at his trial just the day before in open court), the attack  ominously echoes ^[10] the assassination of human rights attorney Stanislav Markelov ^[11].

Ponomarev was a founder of the Memorial human rights society ^[12] (Russia’s version of Amnesty International), and is a board member of the Solidarity opposition movement ^[13] founded by Boris Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov.  He has been openly critical of the Russian prison system ^[14] and the” roll-back” of rights under Putin.

In a strange and eerie twist, the Russian paper Novaya Gazeta revealed that attorney Robert Amsterdam, who represents Khodorokovsky and knows Ponomarev well, reported that just before Ponomarev was attacked his Wikipedia page was revised ^[15] by a member in the Russian city of Ryazan and stated that he’d been killed.

Let’s be clear:  Reflecting on cases like that of Markelov and firebrand journalist Anna Politkovskaya, it’s clear that both Solovyov and Ponomarev were lucky, because they lived to fight another day.  Ever since Vladimir Putin came to power, one opposition figure after another ^[16] has been killed in cold blood, and no one has been convicted for these crimes. This corruption of the Russian court system is widespread and debilitating. Russia scholar Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation wrote in the Washington Times ^[17]:

During the Boris Yeltsin presidency, the Russian courts, despite their corrupt practices and lack of judicial sophistication, slowly inched toward more independence. In 2002-03, however, a reversal began. The rulers increasingly use “telephone justice”  — senior state officials call upon judges and tell them how to decide cases under the guise of protecting “paramount state interests.”

Both Obama and Medvedev are lawyers (though, to be sure, the Russian education of a lawyer bears little similarity to  its American counterpart).  Yet Obama chose to ignore the law. Following his meeting with Medvedev, Obama focused on the issue of nuclear arms reduction, showering Medvedev with praise “for taking the time to visit with me today ^[18]” as if he were a supplicant and declaring, almost like a breathless schoolboy, that he was “excited” about being invited to visit Moscow in July. Not a word about human rights issues of any kind, much less any indication that any sort of challenge had been offered or any questions asked.  Under such circumstances, why shouldn’t the Kremlin think it can, quite literally, get away with murder?  In essence, it is being rewarded for doing so because Russia is far less able than the U.S. to wage a nuclear arms race given the total collapse of the Russian economy, and Obama seems to be offering the perfect pathway towards avoiding such a contest and therefore maximizing the impact of Russia’s nuclear forces.

More importantly, why should anyone who might consider standing up for human rights in Russia, like Solovyov or Ponomarev, think America’s so-called liberal president will have his back? It seems Barack Obama is willing to aggressively attack perceived human rights violations by the U.S., at Guantanamo for example, but not to stand up for oppressed peoples and American values abroad. That’s exactly the wrong message for America to be sending Russia at a unique historical moment when Russia is receptive to pressure because of its economic downturn and confused leadership structure. In a few more years, if the economy rebounds and Putin is firmly ensconced as “president for life” and Obama does nothing to reverse the trend, we will face a brutal new Cold War with a hardened neo-Soviet enemy.

George Bush looked in Putin’s eye and saw a trustworthy soul. A river of Russian blood followed. Medvedev just spat in Obama’s eye, and Obama seems not to have noticed. We can predict what will follow.