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49K views 217 replies 18 participants last post by  monkey247 
#1 ·
Marat's back in the Duma today. :) Watch it live on Vesti.ru (better transmission quality) or UStream.

Yes, I have a lot of time on my hands, like this guy. :p It's half term, it's Bank Holiday, and therefore 11C outside :rolleyes: ...

 
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#207 ·
All this political career is just so sad. From the beginning I thought it was a bad move but I said hey whatever makes him happy.. But now I am not sure is making him happy. This is far from what I envisioned him doing after tennis. If he wanted to do some good he should have stuck with charity work this kind of stuff.
 
#210 ·
Oh Horror.

I hope this isn't true.
If it is, i would be very curious of the nature of his work there.
Spoke too soon! Forgot about this, via VKontakte.

MARCH 15 (Saturday) at 14.00 ON INFORMATION sports committee in Yalta KULTSENTRE WILL BE MEETING WITH LEGEND world tennis player Marat Safin! Invites all tennis fans!
Nice to see he's not completely disconnected from tennis these days. :) Would've been, er, somewhat amusing if Marat had been Putin's ace up the sleeve in the ongoing international crisis. :p

Shaun Walker, the Guardian's Moscow correspondent, has also spotted Marat on the flight, travelling with Fetisov apparently. Via Twitter.
 
#213 ·
Ira! :hug:

Some say Putin is crazy. :eek: :lol: Dunno if it's safe to say it here. :bolt:

Marat is a smart person that's why I've never really worried about how he'd do after tennis. So hope he'll be alright and knows what to do.
I just wish for peace and .... reasonable leaders.
 
#216 · (Edited)
This is just horrifying. Unbelievable. Boris Nemtsov was a former deputy Prime Minister of Russia and the first governor of Nizhny Novgorod. He once said in a radio interview that he thought Marat was sexy.

55 years old. Leaves four children. Via the BBC website.

Russia opposition politician Boris Nemtsov shot dead


Boris Nemtsov was one of Russia's leading economic reformers in the 1990s (file photo from 2009)


A leading Russian opposition politician, former deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, has been shot dead in Moscow, Russian officials say.

An unidentified attacker shot Mr Nemtsov four times in central Moscow, a source in the law enforcement bodies told Russia's Interfax news agency.

He was shot near the Kremlin while walking with a woman, according to Russian-language news website Meduza.

"Several people" had got out of a car and shot him, it added.

Mr Nemtsov, 55, served as first deputy prime minister under the late President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s.

He had earned a reputation as an economic reformer while governor of one of Russia's biggest cities, Nizhny Novgorod.

Falling out of favour with Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, Mr Nemtsov became an outspoken opposition politician.
 
#217 ·
Really sad news. First because of his family but also for Russia.
I don't want to make any comment about Russia politics because I live too far from there. The only thing I know is that for a sucess government is necessary to have a strong opposition on the other side, otherwise the country will be on the regime of a dictatorship, which unfortunately happens in our neighboring Venezuela. I hope Putin has nothing to do with his death.
 
#218 · (Edited)
Really sad news. First because of his family but also for Russia.
I don't want to make any comment about Russia politics because I live too far from there. The only thing I know is that for a sucess government is necessary to have a strong opposition on the other side, otherwise the country will be on the regime of a dictatorship, which unfortunately happens in our neighboring Venezuela. I hope Putin has nothing to do with his death.
It's so sad. Surreal. I'm not sure it has sunk in for me yet. The point has been made in the media that, as Putin's fiercest critic, Nemtsov would have been under maximum state surveillance, so there's no way that a plot to kill him would have gone undetected. Even if Putin did not himself order the hit, it was allowed to happen by his regime.

Transcription of a Bloomberg interview with Sir Andrew Wood, British Ambassador to Russia 1995-2000.

What Boris Nemtsov's killing means for Russia

Manus Cranny: Nemtsov's killing – how much of a blow is that to alternative voice, opposition voice in Russia?

Andrew Wood: If it has an objective, it is to spread fear. No one is safe, it says. This is in the most public possible place. Security cameras on the whole time. It's heavily policed – although they're now saying the security cameras were being repaired so they didn't record anything. And there are all sorts of obfuscations going on as to the reasons, or who might have done it and so on.

Mark Barton: Is it worth, you know, speculating the reasons and who might have done it, Sir Andrew?

AW: I think the reasons and who is responsible is perfectly obvious. And that is precisely what they will try to conceal. It is clear that this was done by someone very close to the regime. I doubt whether there was an order signed by Putin, any more than there was an order signed by Milosevic in his case. But it is done by somebody, or a group, who wished to appeal to the higher leadership of the regime, and it is in the spirit of the regime.

MC: Any credence do you give, any credence at all, to this personal control that Putin is proffering to take over the investigation into this?

AW: Well, it'll go the same way as his personal control of the investigation into the MH17 downing of the aircraft. So it'll just spin upriver and no one will ever know who is responsible. They may well find a victim to accuse, but that is not the same thing at all.

MB: Mikhail Prokhorov's sister Irina says Russia stands a crossroads unless the government returns to civilised politics to avoid further escalation of violence. She says, I fear there'll be seriously tragic consequences for the country. Do you concur?

AW: Yes. I mean, it is a major wake-up call. We in the West are very impressed by the apparent support for Putin, and there has been a patriotically whipped-up degree of support for him. But if you ask Russians what they expect over the next six months, they can't tell you. Which is a bad sign. If you ask yourself the question, if he has such wonderful support, why is he frightened of criticism, you get another sort of answer. So I think it's very rigid - it's also at the same time very fragile - control.

MC: One of the [people] … Obama and Merkel obviously conveying their condolences and condemnation of the killing. But also Petro Poroshenko. I find this quite insightful. Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine said that Nemtsov was a bridge between Russia and Ukraine. Is that your interpretation, perhaps that he acted as some kind of a conduit, as a bridge, in those politic?

AW: I suppose what the Ukrainian president had in mind is to say that here was a leading Russian politician who understood that the war in Ukraine was not in Russia's interests, and it was in Russia's interests for Ukraine to develop into a civilised and effective polity. I assume that's what he meant. I don't believe that he acted as a conduit in the sense that he was being tasked by the regime to convey messages and act as a channel between the two.

MB: Nemtsov has once been talked about as a potential President-in-waiting, wasn't he? That didn’t quite happen. Putin became…

AW: But that was in '97 before the crash.

MB: Of course. Is it worth speculating? One of our journalists Leonid Bershidsky has written a very good piece over the weekend, what would Russia be like under Nemtsov if that path had continued, if he had become president. Can you imagine a Russia under Nemtsov, and what would Russia look like?

AW: Yes I can. When I left, I thought that there was at least a possibility that Russia would become gradually more governed by institutions and understood laws than it has. I thought that there was a possibility - not a very strong one, but a possibility - that the federal system would work effectively, that the new president would get on with the parliament, or Duma, and that therefore there would be a proper political dialogue between the leadership in the executive branch and the federal organs. Instead of which, the institutions in Russia have been entirely drained of meaning. The great thing about Nemtsov that you sensed immediately was not only that he was hugely, hugely alive, a very magnetic personality, very eager to talk and full of laughter as well as seriousness, but he also stood for ordinary human values. There's a lot of talk in Russia about special Russian values. The special Russian value in this description appears to be "might is right".

MC: Sir Andrew, give us just a very brief sense of what happens at this moment in time, diplomatically, behind the scenes, between countries like America [and] Russia, Britain [and] Russia, Germany and Russia, on piqued moments like this.

AW: Well, the first thing that happens, or ought to happen anyway, is for the countries of the West to begin to have an instinctive realisation of the sort of regime that now exists in Russia. For a very long time we have hoped that it would evolve into something more like, let's say, Poland, which would be the best fate that Russia could possibly have. This is very clear now that this is not going to happen. There is a consequent risk, which I wouldn't like to say when or how, but there is a consequent risk of a serious crisis in Russia, leading to a degree of violence in Russia. I'm not saying it's a certainty, it's just a risk, and we have to be aware of that. So you have to recognise that, on the one hand, you're dealing with Putin for the foreseeable future, but on the other hand you must project to Russia as a whole that you care about Russia, about human values in Russia as well, because there will be an aftermath.
 
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