Putin ready to fix election, intelligence chief claims

Luke Harding
The Guardian
Mar. 02, 2007

Relations between the US and Russia appeared to sink to a new low yesterday after Moscow angrily dismissed accusations that democracy in Russia had taken a "back step".

Russia's foreign ministry called the accusation by Mike McConnell, Washington's national intelligence director, in a speech to the US Senate's armed services committee on Tuesday, "outmoded" and "totally groundless".

Mr McConnell, an expert on the former Soviet Union, said Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, was preparing to fix next year's presidential elections so that the Kremlin's preferred candidate would win. "The march to democracy has taken a back step. And now there are more arrangements to control the process and the populace and the parties and so on, to the point of picking the next leader of Russia," Mr McConnell said, at a hearing to discuss global threats to the US.

"That's my worry, is the march toward democracy, the way we understand it ... now being controlled in a way that it is less of a democratic process."

Mr Putin had surrounded himself with "extremely conservative" advisers suspicious of America, he said.

Yesterday the Kremlin accused Mr McConnell of harbouring obsolete and outmoded notions about Russia.

The intelligence chief's assessments were "totally unfounded", the foreign ministry's spokesman, Andrei Krivtsov, said. The exchange came amid a sharp deterioration in US-Russian relations to what analysts said yesterday was probably their worst level since the US-led Nato bombing of Serbia in 1999.

Moscow has been angered by the US administration's plans to site two anti-missile interceptor and radar bases in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Mr Putin has ridiculed America's claim that the sites are meant to deter a possible rogue attack by North Korea or Iran and has said they are clearly aimed at Russia and its vast nuclear arsenal.

Last month he delivered his most scathing attack yet on US power. Speaking in Munich, he accused the US of acting unilaterally and seeking to become the world's sole decision-making "master".

Analysts said yesterday that public opinion on both sides was hardening.

"In Russia, Putin's speech has produced a tremendous effect among those who want Russian primacy and think in terms of Russia's empire," said Victor Kremenyuk, deputy director of Moscow's US-Canada Institute. "In the US, a growing number of people think that Russia has outwitted them. Instead of becoming a normal democratic state it has become an energy superpower. They see it both as a threat to the US and its allies in Europe."

Other observers said they expected the chill in US-Russian relations to go on beyond the Bush-Putin era. "I think we are very close to an arms race," Ivan Safranchuk, head of the Moscow bureau of the World Security Institute, a US thinktank, told the Guardian. "Neither side trusts the other. Russia reacts to the missile defence sites. The US reacts to Russia's reaction."

The government-owned newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta said on Wednesday that Russian scientists were alarmed by the US's High-frequency Active Auroral Research Programme, or Haarp. They believed US scientists were close to developing a system that would allow them to disrupt an enemy's entire nuclear capability using ionic rays. Russia was determined to develop a similar technology, the paper reported.

With increasing talk of a new cold war, Russia's political parties, including the Communists, agreed this week to suspend their differences on foreign policy.

"Russia has become stronger and America doesn't like it," Konstantin Kosachev, the head of parliament's foreign affairs committee, told Moskovsky Komsomolets, a mass-circulation daily. "They still have the same notions from the 1990s, when American became the only political power centre on the planet."