Russian Press - Behind the Headlines, July 5

Nezavisimaya Gazeta

Russia Creates DARPA Analogue

The Russian government is ready to give the green light to innovative defense research and development projects. Yesterday Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin presented a draft law on the Advanced Research Foundation, or FPI, in parliament. The foundation will be responsible for financing and otherwise assisting breakthrough R&D in the sphere of defense and security. With a potential budget of tens of billions of rubles, it would strengthen Rogozin’s standing as the government official responsible for the defense sector.

Under the law on the FPI drafted on Vladimir Putin’s directive last year, the foundation’s assets will include contributions from the government, revenues from the FPI’s activity, voluntary asset contributions and other legal donations. The government will allocate funds from the budget and federal property. The FPI’s director general is to be appointed by President Putin. The foundation’s management will not be authoritarian: its three-year programs are to be drafted and approved by the council of trustees, half of it representing the president and the other half the government.

Experts say the FPI’s creation is evidence of Rogozin’s growing influence. Rogozin is responsible for national defense and security and expensive modernization programs in the defense, nuclear and aerospace industries. A total of 20 trillion rubles ($621 billion) is to be invested in the rearmament of the armed forces and other security structures by 2020. Anatoly Tsyganok, head of the Military Forecasting Center, said it would be logical if 10percent of these allocations were channeled into the FPI. Earlier the media estimated the foundation’s potential budget for 2013 at 3 billion rubles ($93 million). Experts argue that consolidation of the research potential with financial and material resources is the only way in the current circumstances to close the widening gap in military research.

About 12,000 scientists are involved in military research in the United States, Tsyganok said. In Russia, a positive result would be assured if the FPI consolidates the efforts of at least 1,200 scientists. “We should not limit the search to the Defense Ministry, which has lost many of its research personnel following reforms,” he said. “The status of military researchers has plummeted. In the past, military institutes had colonels and generals on their faculties, while now the lecturers are majors with experience of commanding a battalion at best.”

The FPI, which Rogozin described as a “technological predator,” will be modeled after the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has been creating new technologies for military and national uses since the late 1950s. It is focused on short-term (2- to 4-year) projects implemented by small groups of researchers. DAPRA currently has about 240 employees and an annual budget exceeding $3 billion. We will know very quickly if its Russian analogue, the FPI, will be equally effective. Rogozin believes that the FPI will be created within a few months.

Izvestia

Initiators of ‘Foreign Agents’ Bill May Be Barred from EU, U.S.

Russian human rights activists and opposition politicians are considering establishing their own Magnitsky List and including in it the officials who initiated an anti-NGO bill and violated the peaceful public assembly rights.

The move is being planned as response to a United Russia-sponsored bill requiring all NGOs in Russia that receive funding from abroad to register officially as “foreign agents.”

Academic and author Andrei Piontkovsky, one of the Solidarnost (Solidarity) movement leaders, told Izvestia that they met with U.S. Congress representatives on July 4 to discuss sanctions against Russian officials.

“We are currently discussing the possible sanctions against the sponsors of the NGO initiative who invented the term ‘foreign agent,’ as well as those who violated the constitutional right to peaceful public assembly on May 6. The lists of Russian officials unwelcome in Europe and the United States are bound to be extended,” he said.

He is supported by opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. “Compiling a list similar to the Magnitsky List one would be a valid response to the NGO bill, but we need to identify the true initiators. There was no way [United Russia’s Alexander] Sidyakin could have invented it all by himself. More sponsors of this bill will be found at higher government posts who should be barred from the countries that , as they fear, are financing ‘agents’ in Russia,” Nemtsov said.

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, chief of the Moscow Helsinki Group, proposed a more drastic measure.

“These people should absolutely be barred from visiting the EU and the United States, and also from visiting the European Parliament in their official capacity. We have the Internet now, which is a powerful tool. We will soon know the names of everyone who voted for this bill and put these persons up for discussion on our website,” she said.

Alexeyeva said she is ready to give up foreign grants if the bill goes through parliament.

“Poverty is better than the stigma of a ‘foreign agent.’ I have written a letter to the president, in which I condemned this initiative and stated that MHG will stop receiving foreign grants if this bill is adopted,” she said.

She said the Helsinki Group worked for a long period without any foreign support.

“The MHG was established in 1976 and did not receive any grants before 1993. We’ll have to give them up. We’ll cut the staff and use volunteers instead. But this will not force us to stop our activity or admit to being a foreign agent,” she said.

The bill calls for any NGO engaged in political activity and using foreign funding to register as a foreign agent and submit itself for regular audit. Failure to comply with the requirement can earn the perpetrator a huge fine or a four-year prison sentence.

“Imposing travel restrictions on the bill’s sponsors is utter nonsense from the legal perspective,” Sidyakin said. “My job as a lawmaker is to introduce bills that I believe will benefit my country.”

RBK Daily

Pussy Riot Lawyers Allege Human Rights Violations

Pussy Riot defense team promised they would ask the U.S. authorities to put judge Natalya Konovalova on the list of undesirables to be attached to the Magnitsky Act should it pass into law.

This followed the Tagansky Court ruling that the accused members of the Russian feminist punk group Pussy Riot – Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina – had until July 9 to study the indictment and prepare their defense.

The group members were arrested in March after they performed a prayer at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, singing “Virgin Mary, drive Putin out.”

Law enforcement demanded that the timeframe for preparing the defense case be drastically curtailed last week after 100 Russian cultural figures came up with an open letter in support of the three. Investigator Khorkov declared that the “defense is intentionally dragging out the file-reading process.”

In protest, the rioters, who are facing a 7-year prison term each, announced an indefinite hunger strike.

According to lawyer Mark Feigin, there is no doubt that the judge has been steering towards a guilty verdict. “All our motions have been rejected. The judge’s decisions are ridiculous. This forces us ask the U.S. authorities to put judge Konovalova on Magnitsky’s List, if it is approved, because this bill is about human rights violations in general, not about the concrete Magnitsky case,” he said.

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