Putin Says U.S. Is Meddling in Election !!!!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: nytimes.com
November 27, 2007 Author: CLIFFORD J. LEVY


MOSCOW, Nov. 26 — President Vladimir V. Putin today accused the United States of trying to taint the legitimacy of upcoming Russian parliamentary elections by pressing a group of prominent independent election observers to abandon their attempts to monitor the campaign.

Mr. Putin contended that the monitors, who are deployed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, had canceled plans to appraise the parliamentary balloting at the urging of the State Department in Washington.

Mr. Putin’s statements in recent weeks have taken on an increasingly nationalistic tone as he has sought to muster support for his party in the elections on Sunday. Speaking to reporters today in St. Petersburg, he once again criticized what he suggested was foreign meddling in Russia’s affairs.

“According to information we have, it was again done at the recommendation of the U.S. State Department and we will take this into account in our inter-state relations with this country,” he said. “Their goal is the delegitimization of the elections. But they will not achieve even this goal.”

Mr. Putin later added that if Russia maintained strong armed forces, “We will not allow anyone to poke their snotty nose into our affairs.”

In describing the supposed role of the State Department in the decision, Mr. Putin was highlighting a charge first made last week by Russian election officials as they tried to explain why the monitors had withdrawn.

The chairman of Russia’s Central Election Commission, Vladimir Y. Churov, who was appointed with Mr. Putin’s support, said the director of the monitoring group, Ambassador Christian Strohal of Austria, visited Washington soon before the decision was announced.

Mr. Strohal’s aides said subsequently that the timing of the visit and the decision had been coincidental.

A spokesman for the State Department, Sean D. McCormack, said on Monday that R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, had spoken with officials of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but “there was no interference” in the plans for poll monitoring.

“This was their decision and their decision only,” Mr. McCormack said.

Mr. Putin has turned the parliamentary elections into a referendum on his leadership, and he has been stepping up his campaigning for his party, United Russia. In a major speech last week, he called his opponents tools of foreign governments, comparing them to jackals who hang around foreign embassies in order to obtain funds.

At the same time the Kremlin has used its control over the election laws, government agencies and the news media to ensure that the opposition has little if any chance of gaining a foothold in the next Parliament.

The election-monitoring arm, called the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, or O.D.I.H.R., announced on Nov. 16 that it was canceling the mission, saying that restrictions imposed by the Russian government had made it impossible for it to carry out its work.

Russian election officials had first delayed issuing visas to the monitors, preventing them from observing campaigning for Parliament around the country, as well as news coverage, as is customary. The officials then abruptly said they would sharply limit the size of monitoring group’s mission to only 70 people, down from 400 in the parliamentary election in 2003.

The State Department and European diplomats supported the monitoring group’s decision to withdraw.

On Monday, Urdur Gunnarsdottir, a spokeswoman for the group, said Mr. Putin’s assertions were “nonsense.”

“This was a decision that was simply based on the fact that we were not receiving any visas and time had run out,” she said. “The only consultation that took place was within our office with the people that plan these observation missions and carry them through. They have 150 observation missions under their belt. They know by now what needs to be in place to do this.”

O.D.I.H.R. has monitored every election in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Its presence was viewed as an effort by Moscow to ensure that elections complied with international standards.

But the Kremlin has in recent years chafed at the group’s reports, contending that they were biased against the government. After the 2004 presidential elections, which Mr. Putin won in a landslide, the group stated flatly that the campaign had not been conducted fairly. In recent months, Russian officials have maintained that monitoring group needed to be reformed.

Mr. Putin’s adversaries in Russia maintain that the Kremlin does not want the monitors because they would show that the elections were little more than a farce.

Over the weekend, the opposition coalition headed by Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion, held rallies and marches in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities. The rallies were broken up by riot police officers, with hundreds of people detained. Mr. Kasparov’s movement, Other Russia, says Mr. Putin is creating a Soviet-style dictatorship in Russia.

Mr. Kasparov himself was arrested in Moscow on Saturday when he tried to deliver a letter to the federal election authorities assailing the conduct of the election, and a judge sentenced him to five days in jail. On Monday, Mr. Kasparov lost an appeal of his sentence. European diplomats called for him to be released immediately, but he remained behind bars.