Moscow Times - 10.27.2003

 

 

 

 

Moscow Times

Unbecoming Silence for 1 President

Editorial

One wonders what Vladimir Putin is thinking. The country's richest man is captured early Saturday as if he were a dangerous criminal on the run, and the president says nothing. 

It is inconceivable that his friends in the FSB sent men in masks to storm Mikhail Khodorkovsky's plane and drag him away without Putin's prior approval. 

But what happens next? 

From the beginning, Putin has left us guessing. After the campaign against Yukos broke into the open with the arrest of core shareholder Platon Lebedev on July 2, it took Putin nine days to comment and even then he was ambiguous. 

Putin said he was "opposed to arm-twisting and jail cells," and did not think this was the way to deal with economic crimes. But he qualified his remarks by saying that economic crimes should be punished. 

The market, still hopeful for a happy ending, read this as a signal that Lebedev would soon be released. He was not. 

Throughout the summer, Putin made only a few, always oblique, references to the Yukos affair and carefully avoided taking sides. 

About a month ago, his tone started to change. Speaking to U.S. journalists on Sept. 20 before heading to the United States for a meeting with President George W. Bush, while giving assurances that "the results of privatization will not be revisited in Russia," he said the investigation into Yukos had little to do with privatization. 

"We are talking about criminal activity, participation in criminal cases, even assassinations and murders during the mergers of the company. So how can we interfere with the work of the Prosecutor General's Office?" 

In an interview Oct. 4 with The New York Times, Putin turned on the oligarchs as a class. He said the state "appointed them as billionaires" and "they got the impression that the gods themselves slept on their heads, that everything is permitted to them." 

As Putin's rhetoric sharpened and Khodorkovsky refused to back down -- he all but dared the Kremlin to come after him -- perhaps the writing for his arrest was on the wall. 

But the storming of his plane at the airport in Irkutsk was alarming. Its sole purpose was as a blatant show of force by the siloviki faction fighting for control in the Kremlin. 

In challenging the president on television Saturday night, Anatoly Chubais for once was right. It is time for Putin to take responsibility for what is happening in this country. It is time for him to stand up and say where the attack on Yukos shareholders is going and more importantly where Russia is going.