All Blog Posts from World Watch

Tired of working amid corruption, a 32 year old Russian police officer has made an unthinkable video appeal directly to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. He says he now fears for his life, but thinks this whistle had to be blown.

"Vladimir Vladimirovich, I am appealing directly to you," says Major Alexei Dymovsky in his video, referring to Putin's by his traditional name. "You have been talking about corruption – you have been saying that not only should corruption constitute a crime, you said it should also be unseemly to engage in corrupt practices. But this is not the case in this country."

The words were more likely to come from a human rights activist or an opposition politician. But this rare outpouring of emotion came from within the Russian power structure, from Dymovsky, a cop in the city of Novorossiysk.

"I want you to know how we live – ordinary officers, ordinary policemen – those who solve and untangle (crimes) and detain (criminals), those who do the real work," Dymovsky said in his recorded speech, during which he looked visibly nervous and stumbled at times.

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Saudi Arabia is looking to purchase billions of dollars in weapons from Russia in an effort to get the Kremlin to scrap plans to sell surface-to-missile Iran, according to a Financial Times story this week.

But official Russian sources have not confirmed the Kremlin's willingness to agree to such a deal, reports CBS News' Alexei Kuxnetsov. In fact, even analysts with knowledge of the Kremlin’s policies sounded rather skeptical.

Back in 2007, Iran announced plans to acquire Russia's S-300 weapons system for upwards of $1 billion. Since then, Russia has been facing pressure from the United States not to go through with the sale.

According to the Financial Times, Saudi Arabia's offer to buy the latest version of the system, the S-400 – akin to the U.S. Patriot missile defense system – for $2 billion is the latest attempt to get Moscow to back out of its deal with Tehran.

“The U.S. pressure is the stick, and a huge Saudi arms package is the carrot,” Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow, told the Times.

Pukhov said the deal may actually go as high as $7 billion.

Alexander Khramchikhin, a senior analyst with the Institute for Political and Military Analysis in Moscow, told Kuznetsov that while a deal between Russia and Saudi Arabia could be theoretically possible, a "number of stumbling blocks" make its probability near zero.

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At least 20 people were killed and more than a hundred were wounded when a suicide bomber drove a minibus packed with more than 400 pounds of explosives through the gates of a police station in the center of Nazran, the largest city in Ingushetia, in Russia's North Caucasus.

Officials quickly promised that "policing against militants will be intensified, security around government buildings and on the roads will become tighter".

But some analysts believe that harsh enforcement of laws in the North Caucasus is fueling violence in the region, rather than effectively countering it.

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Hoping to revive the cooperative spirit of the early 1990s, Americans are coming to Russia to end a decade of mistrust.

President Barack Obama is expected in Moscow next week to discuss a wide range of issues with his counterpart Dmitry Medvedev and personally press the "reset" button on U.S.-Russia relations.

Hopes for a breakthrough are running high. Both sides have been unhappy about how low relations sank during the Putin-Bush era. Now, the two young presidents need to prove that cooperation on global issues is more than just words.

"Russia could be a partner, a country that would collaborate and make for better prospects for Obama's policies in both places, in Afghanistan and Iran," Dmitry Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center told CBS News. "Again, there is nothing more serious, nothing more important at this point for the administration than this."

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The world’s best minds are wrestling with how to overcome the global financial crisis and its dire consequences. They are wasting their time. They should come to Russia and ask for advice from the man who has a 100 percent remedy against the global recession – simply to legislate it out of existence.

Meet Vladimir Laptev, the head of the Noginsk district in the Moscow region. This month, the Noginsk administration published Laptev’s decree, banning local government officials from using the phrase "financial crisis" in their public speeches and statements. The decree also recommends that CEOs of locally-based companies – both private and government-owned – "rethink their decadent sentiments and spirits and continue working towards stimulating production."

Russia's mass media which are mostly controlled by the state did not play up Laptev's decree. But the Russian blogosphere immediately exploded with sarcastic comments. "I had thought that such astonishing idiots exist only in fairy tales," wrote one blogger. "It is the same thing as censoring a report on a tornado: "A light summer breeze devastated twenty households and smashed thirty cars," another one remarked.

Russian analysts were more reserved, but no less critical. "Mr. Laptev turned himself into a laughingstock with this decree," Mikhail Delyagin, head of the Institute of Globalization Problems and a famous Russian economist, said. "It was clearly done out of hopelessness and despair. If you cannot cope with a problem, you choose to pretend not to notice it. Like an ostrich which buries its head in the sand in moments of danger."

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“It is not like Leningrad under siege of course, but people have already started eating grass,” Svetlana Antropova, a trade union leader in the town of Pikalyovo woefully complained to a Russian newspaper. "They make nettle soup and dandelion salads. What other choice is there?”

The solution was promptly offered by Russia’s Prime Minister. Vladimir Putin arrived on an emergency visit in this company town and blamed the town’s woes on local officials and delinquent private owners of the Pikalyovo industrial enterprises.

“Why did you start running around like cockroaches only on the eve of my arrival here? Why wasn’t there anyone capable of making the right decisions well before that?" Premier Putin asked, sternly eyeing a group of businessmen and officials.

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In Russia, minors are often victims of street crime, human trafficking, parental neglect and family violence. Drug use and alcoholism among teenagers have reached shocking levels. After decades of turning a blind eye, the Russian government has finally acted. It hopes that a new 10 p.m. curfew law will help turn things around.

The Russian government has recently made it illegal for minors under the age of 18 to leave their homes between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. without an adult. So, no more night clubs … romantic dates under the moon … or surfing the Web at round-the-clock Internet cafes at night.

But some experts claim it is a trademark Soviet solution to a complicated social problem.
One child rights advocate characterized the move as conforming to a "police state mentality."

Tt is unclear how strictly the Russian police will enforce the curfew. Russian teenagers appear to be more confused than worried, but if asked what she'd do if stopped by a police officer after 10, one girl said, "We'll just pay a bribe."

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Asia might seem to some like an improperly chosen place for holding a European Union – Russia summit. But not if you have a specific message to get across to your partners.

Russia hosted a summit with its E.U. partners in the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, right on the border with China. And the message it had to deliver was pretty straightforward and pragmatic.

“If Europe continues to treat Russia and Russian initiatives as skeptically as it has been treating them, Russia could always turn in the other direction and diversify,” Alexei Makarkin, Vice President of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow-based think-tank, told CBS News. “The E.U. leaders got a chance to see with their own eyes that it would not be a problem for Russia to stop giving preferential treatment to Europe and turn to its Asian clients.”

Relations between Moscow and Brussels have remained seriously strained since last August, when President Medvedev sent Russian troops into Georgia to counter Tbilisi’s military effort to return a part of its country under Georgia’s jurisdiction.

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It has been a busy day for President Barack Obama. He held a joint presser with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, met with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Chinese President Hu Jintao and then paid a visit to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. According to CBS News Foreign Affairs Analyst Pamela Falk what Mr. Obama has accomplished thus far may deem him successful and the official meetings have not even begun.

Watch the video analysis below to find out why she thinks he is already proven success at the G20 and read more about her insight on the importance of the Obama-Brown relationship.

As President Obama heads into his first face to face meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, CBS News has learned the London session is a probable scene-setter for a formal U.S.-Russian summit as early as this summer.

A White House official says it is "quite likely" that the two leaders will set a date for a meeting in Moscow. The official says Wednesday's meeting is all about gauging "dynamics" between the two men.

Their meeting Wednesday was also expected to herald a re-opening of U.S.-Russian talks on nuclear disarmament.

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