As many as 50,000 people protested in Moscow on Saturday against rampant electoral fraud which benefited Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in recent elections.
Protests also took place in 15 other cities from Russia’s Pacific coast to its southwest frontier, contradicting Putin’s public image, promoted by state-controlled media, as an adored and favorable leader.
In parliamentary elections last Sunday, Putin’s United Party retained a majority of seats as a result of widespread vote fraud, according to local and international monitors. Presient Dmitry Medvedev conceded this week that election laws may have been violated.
This prompted sweeping protests by tens of thousands of Russians acting on long-dormant political and economic grievances. Unusually, city authorities have been granting permission for rallies of up to 30,000 people, although hundreds of people have so far been arrested.
This "news" looks like typical anti-Russian propaganda you can see on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc.
Now lets try Critical Thinking 101.
Where's the evidence of "electoral fraud"? I see no links in this article to any "local and international monitors" who claim to have found massive fraud.
Are the oppositions parties (Communists, Socialists, and Ultranationalists) just being sore losers?
Who is funding and organizing these protests? Could it be the same organizations that cooked up the "Rose Revolution" and the "Orange Revolution"?
Putin isn't really popular, that's just propaganda in Russian state-controlled media. Ok. If this is true then let's see some opinion polls about Putin. You know opinion polls that were NOT done by the Russian media. Where are they? I see no links in this article.
And finally… who is going to benefit the most from chaos and instability in Russia? I think we all know the answer to that. It sure isn't going to be the Russian people.
I was expecting better than this from antiwar.com.
They have matured to a media outlet with secret donors
From what I've heard from the Amercian mainstream media (believe it or not), Putin still remains by far the most popular politician in Russia. I don't think that the public is really "in love" with Putin per se, it's just that they don't see any viable alternative.
I agree with the points "guest" has made. If Putin's party were going to rig the election, why did they lose so many seats? I've got a feeling that this "election was rigged" stuff will be the new propaganda tool directed at the Empire's enemies. We all remember the days when US presidents would call up their client dictators in the Middle east and South America and congratulate them on their election "wins." I think this is the same thing, but only in reverse. No leader the US has issues with will no longer win their elections fairly, because our mainstream media apparatus will make sure that we "know" the election was rigged, hence the leader of said country is not legitimate.
Last week on WBUR's On Point, Stephen J. Cohen, a Russian expert formerly of Princeton and now at NYU, pointed out that pre-election polls and exit polls, from non-Russian sources, predicted the outcome of the elections fairly closely. Also he pointed out that the results dealt a blow to Putin's party – a strange outcome for an election Putin is said to have rigged. That simply does not compute.
Cohen acknowledged that there were irregularities in the elections but he contended that these were the fairest Russian elections yet seen. The host of the program kept trying to push Cohen off these persuasive comments and back to the official narrative which is reflected, unfortunately and mistakenly in Glaser's account above.
It is also clear that those who gained in the election were the Communists and Social Democrats, and we may expect to see Putin grow closer to them. That is not something the US wants, but any instability seems to be desirable to US policymakers.
The fact of the matter is that Putin, and even more Medvedev, have tried making nice with NATO and the US but from Clinton through Bush through Obama, they have been double crossed every step of the way. Now perhaps they have learned their lesson.
So a handful of people think Russia would be better off without Putin and Medvedev. Poor Russia. Just wait and see how things go under president Berezovsky.
Putin’s own fault what has happened as he knows like Yugoslavia since the collapse of the USSR as outlined in Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard they want Russia to break apart and be divided into 3 separate states supporting pan-Turkic/pan-Turanian Islamic separatism to control the Caspian and Central Asian oil and gas reserves that bypass Russia and transit through Kosovo.
In 2002 MI6 and CIA tried to arrange an assassination against then US/EU support Serbian PM Kustunica because he wouldn’t support annexing Kosovo.
That’s really what this Al Qaeda network is that has a Turkic ethnic component spreading from the Balkans, the North Caucasus, Central Asia and Northern China.
The smoking gun that links this all together is a group of former Soviet military and intelligence personal affiliated with a company called Far West Gulf LLC that is connected to YUKOS, Halliburton, CIA, Oligarchs, Chechen and other terrorist group in Central Asia.
Yet there has been absolute silence on behalf of the Kremlin and the international media either simply ignores Chechen and Bosnian connection to terror attacks in African Embassy bombings, Madrid, Istanbul and 9/11 plus ones hardly ever covered in the news those in France with the planned chemical attack that was used in Colin Powells Iraq UN presentation and a failed rocket attack at a French airport.