Wednesday 31 March 2010
Poll: 80 Percent Of Kievans Want Mayor To Resign
Some 80 percent of those polled said they would like the mayor to resign without delays, while even more people – 89.1 percent – were unhappy with his work.
Only 6.9 percent of those polled gave a positive evaluation to his work. About 15 percent were undecided.
If the city mayoral election was to be conducted next weekend, Deputy Prime Minister Serhiy Tigipko would be the most likely winner.
He would receive 30.6 percent of votes, while city’s opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko would get 22.4 percent.
Former Mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko would come third with 8.2 percent of votes.
The Gorshenin poll was conducted by phone according to a representative sample. The margin of error is 3.2 percent.
Ukrainian Contractor Building Euro 2012 Stadium In Lviv Ousted After Criticism
KIEV, Ukraine -- The main contractor working on construction of the Lviv stadium for the 2012 European Championship is to be removed after criticism of delays at the site by UEFA president Michel Platini, a top cabinet official said Tuesday.
Ukraine Deputy Prime Minister Borys Kolesnikov said the contractor, Ukraine-based Azovintex construction company, will be discharged due to slow work. Platini said on Monday that construction in Lviv "has made no progress whatsoever."
Another Ukrainian financial and industrial group, Altcom, will be new main contractor instead with Azovintex still doing minor work on the stadium, Kolesnikov said.
Altcom deals with mining and construction. It's currently building a new runway at Donetsk airport, and has also been chosen as the main contractor to build a runway at Lviv airport.
Kolesnikov said earlier Tuesday that an international consortium of Ukrainian, Turkish, Croatian and Macedonian companies will build the stadium instead, while Azovintex will continue doing minor work on the stadium.
"The stadium will be built by late 2011 by all means," he said.
There is also concern at the lack of hotels to host fans and teams in Lviv, along with the slow construction of new ones.
Poor transport connections between the airport and the city centre add to the problems, according to Markiyan Lubkivskiy, the Ukraine Tournament Director for Euro 2012.
"Lviv is on the verge of an abyss. Very little time remains. Lviv (can do) nothing but meet all UEFA requirements. There is no choice," said Lubkivskiy.
Meanwhile, a construction company in Kiev said renovation work on the Olympic stadium, which is three months behind schedule, will catch up on its timetable by June.
Platini is expected to visit Ukraine next week.
Strauss-Kahn Is ‘Optimistic’ Ukraine, IMF Will Resume Program
“I’m rather optimistic that we will resume the relationship with Ukraine,” which “during the election period was put between parentheses,” Strauss-Kahn said in an interview today.
“The situation has changed over the last month, we have to reassess the situation and see what we can do together.”
An IMF team is in Ukraine having talks with authorities after President Viktor Yanukovych took office and managed to get a prime minister allied to him elected.
Mykola Azarov’s government is seeking a new loan program with the International Monetary Fund to help “reform the economy,” he said last week.
“We’re expecting the Ukraine side to move,” said Strauss- Kahn. “It’s their call when they have solved the domestic problem. The government will decide when they want to re-discuss the program.” What the mission reports back will remain “inside the IMF.”
Ukraine has received $10.6 billion from IMF since the former Soviet state secured a stand-by loan arrangement with the Washington based lender in late 2008 to stay afloat amid the global financial crisis.
Part of the loan was used to cover the state budget deficit and to back up payments for natural gas imports from Russia.
Blind Spots In EU-Ukraine Relations
After the Court refused to examine her evidence presented in eight bound volumes of documents and accompanied by videotapes, Yanukovych subsequently forced a vote of confidence on her governing coalition in the Ukrainian Rada (Parliament).
When Tymoshenko lost that vote, Yanukovych then set about building his own parliamentary majority, recently naming a cabinet to govern the country within the 30-day limit prescribed by the Constitution.
Professor of Political Science (Rutgers University-Newark, USA) and expert on Ukrainian affairs Alexander J Motyl remarks to ISN Security Watch that Yanukovych’s tactics in the matter may violate the country’s Constitution, of which Article 83 specifies that only a “coalition of parliamentary f[r]actions” may compose a governing majority (even though individuals may vote against their fraction on various particular pieces of legislation), while according to the parliament’s own rules “for a party to leave a coalition, its Rada fraction must vote to do so.”
Indicating some sympathy for Yanukovych’s “frustration at the need to herd cats,” Motyl nevertheless notes that his coalition of parties, making together only about 220 of the necessary 226, “fell short of the required parliamentary majority.”
Tadeusz Olszanski of the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw explains that by a “legal trick” Yanukovych had the parliament’s rules of procedure amended so as to allow “individual deputies (and not only parliamentary groups) to enter the coalition.”
It will take at least two or three months for the Constitutional Court to issue a verdict in the matter, with uncertain implications for legislation approved in the meantime.
Foreign relations
Rather than note such troublesome details, EU diplomats have preferred to congratulate themselves anonymously in the press on “playing their cards right” on Ukraine.
By this they mean that they avoided a “cooling down of strategic relations,” in part by coordinating messages from the European Commission and the European Parliament, and in particular, giving “no encouragement … to Yanukovich’s rival Yulia Tymoshenko, who had tried to challenge the legality of Yanukovich’s victory.”
It is likely that the European Parliament will play an important role in determining the future course of actual relations between Brussels and Kiev.
Alexander von Lingen, a former principal of the Secretariat of the Presidency of the European Parliament, and current director of the EquipEuropa analysis and training consultancy in Brussels, explains to ISN Security Watch that the European Parliament had already held its first bilateral meeting of the Parliamentary Cooperation Committee with Ukraine under the new government, addressing in the first instance such substantive issues as visa-free travel and other practical matters.
On the international level, Motyl says there could be positive results if Brussels “reinforces the commitment it made at last year’s energy summit to help modernize Ukraine’s gas pipeline, endorses good relations with Russia and Ukraine’s role therein, and gives Ukraine some kind of half-green, half-yellow light regarding eventual [EU] membership.”
The new foreign minister, Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, who has held the post in the past and is in Motyl’s words “a serious fellow and really genuine diplomat,” has already asked for precisely this.
Motyl criticizes the EU for having foregone already five years ago the opportunity to play a positive role in Ukraine.
“During the Orange governments of 2005-2006,” he says, “when it would have made an enormous difference, the EU never sent even the slightest half-clear signal to Ukraine about prospects for membership even in the distant future. Had they made even the most modest gesture, it would have given those governments the opportunity to mobilize the Ukrainian public around the EU agenda; but they did absolutely nothing.”
These criticisms are validated by longtime Brussels observer Alexander von Lingen, who agrees with Motyl, pointing out that “enlargement fatigue and Lisbon treaty ratification procedures” probably explain this in part, since the EU at the time had a “preoccupation with its own problems.”
He also remarks that Brussels “lost interest” in Ukraine after the latter, following the former’s wishes, shut down the last reactors at Chernobyl.
International implications of domestic developments
On the domestic side, Olszanski at the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw points to fissures among the parties composing the coalition itself, which is “far from being internally united,” as well as to “friction between representatives of the various influence groups” in Yanukovych’s own Party of Regions.
Concerning relations with the opposition, Motyl says that Yanukovych could have minimized tensions and gotten a prolonged honeymoon and general sympathy with “slightly smarter appointments [but] now he’s headed for disaster [as] certainly half and perhaps more than half of the population has turned against him.”
Von Lingen in the main agrees with them both, concluding that there is “at least confrontation in the future of Ukrainian politics, if not yet certain disaster: for example, when Tymoshenko was pushed out under [former president Viktor] Yushchenko, she waited until she had another opportunity to come back to power; she is a tenacious lady and does not give up so easily.”
Motyl points out a fundamental and very recent shift in Ukrainian popular opinion that has escaped most outside observers. Most people, he says, expected Yanukovych to execute only the principal functions of a government, such as passing a budget, and then call for new parliamentary elections in autumn.
However, “a wholesale and still ongoing seizure of the administrative apparatus” by Yanukovych and the people around him “occurred within no more than a week after the formation of the government, leaving the country in shock,” says Motyl, “from the realization that these people [around Yanukovych] have failed to change [after five years in the political wilderness] and sowing fears that … in the worst case [they may revert] to unsavory aspects of [the regime of Belarusian dictator Aleksandar] Lukashenka.”
One of the first tests of the new government’s competence will be how it handles theIMF mission to Kiev this week, which will discuss reinstating the (suspended) fourth tranche of the bailout program.
This will be an indicator for future relations with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and, still more sensitively, the European Investment Bank. The advisory opinions of the European Parliament will have weight in these later decisions on the European level.
Tuesday 30 March 2010
Vladimir Putin demands Moscow bombing suspects caught
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says catching the organisers of suicide bombings in Moscow on Monday should be a "matter of honour" for investigators.
He said the security services, who have been widely criticised in the media, should drag the bombing masterminds "from the bottom of the sewers".
Russians are observing a day of mourning for 39 people killed in the rush-hour attacks on two Metro trains.
Officials have blamed the bombings on militants from the North Caucasus.
Moscow says the main concern for Russia is whether Monday's bombings were the start of a new wave of attacks by rebels.
No group has claimed responsibility, but previous attacks in the capital have been carried out by - or blamed on - militants from Chechnya.
Security has been stepped up in Moscow, as police are reported to be searching for three people sighted with the bombers.
The Metro is back up and running, but commuters say the city was not yet back to normal.
"I feel the tension on the Metro. Nobody's smiling or laughing," university student Alina Tsaritova said.
The authorities say two female suicide bombers detonated bombs packed with pieces of metal at two separate stations during rush hour on Monday morning.
In a meeting with senior officials, Mr Putin urged investigators to find the organisers of the attacks.
"We know they're lying low, but it's a matter of honour for law enforcement bodies to scrape them from the bottom of the sewers and into the daylight," he said.
Much of Mr Putin's political reputation was built on his tough stance against rebels from Chechnya while he was president.
His successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, said the government would consider revamping anti-terrorism laws in a bid to prevent further attacks.
Some of the families of the victims have been expressing anger at their loss.
The grandmother of Valya Yegeazaryan, 17, who died in a hospital after the explosion at Park Kultury station, questioned what the authorities were doing to tackle militants.
"I cannot get my child back. There have been so many terrorist attacks, and yet what what have [the authorities] done?" said Valentina Yegeazaryan.
"Some time passes, and then the same thing happens again."
Meanwhile, mourners have been lighting candles and laying flowers at the sites of the blasts - the Lubyanka and Park Kultury stations.
As well as the 39 killed, some 70 people are reported to still be in hospital - some of whom are seriously hurt.
US President Barack Obama led international reaction to the attacks, saying Washington would "help bring to justice those who undertook this attack".
Foreign ministers from the G8 group of leading industrial nations also condemned the attacks at the start of talks on global security in Ottawa, Canada.
Security sources told Russian media that police were looking for two women and a man they suspected of helping the bombers.
The sources said the suspects had been identified through surveillance footage.
The co-ordinated attacks were the deadliest in Moscow since February 2004, when 40 people were killed by a bomb on a packed Metro train as it approached the Paveletskaya station.
Six months later, a suicide bomber blew herself up outside another station, killing 10 people. Both attacks were blamed on rebels from Chechnya.
Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov vowed last month to take the war to Russian cities.
More than 100,000 people have been killed in 15 years of conflict in Chechnya, and low-level insurgencies continue there and in the neighbouring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan.
The city's Metro is one of the busiest underground rail networks in the world, carrying about 5.5 million passengers a day.
Russia mourns victims of Moscow Metro suicide bombings
Russia is holding an official day of mourning after 39 people were killed and more than 70 injured in twin suicide bombings on the Moscow Metro.
As Russian President Dmitry Medvedev vowed to "destroy" the perpetrators, security was stepped up amid fears of fresh attacks.
No group said it had carried out the bombings but officials blamed Muslim militants from the North Caucasus.
Police are said to be seeking three people sighted along with the bombers.
The United States vowed to help bring to justice the perpetrators.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday he did "not rule out" tightening anti-terrorist legislation.
Two suspected female suicide bombers detonated bombs packed with pieces of metal at two separate stations on the same line during rush hour on Monday morning.
But the line on the Metro, one of the traffic-clogged Russian capital's most vital commuter assets, had resumed traffic by early evening on Monday.
"It's really terrifying," Vasily Vlastinin, 16, told the Associated Press news agency.
"It's become dangerous to ride the Metro but I'll keep taking the Metro. You have to get to school, to college, to work somehow."
Russians have been lighting candles and laying flowers in memory of the victims of the blast inside the Lubyanka metro station, where at least 23 people died, and the Park Kultury station, where the second explosion killed at least 12 people.
Another four people died in hospital, and officials have warned that the death toll could rise.
The main television channels have changed their schedules, dropping advertising and entertainment programmes.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, visiting the injured at a hospital in Moscow, said law enforcement agencies would "do everything to find and punish the criminals".
Mr Medvedev laid a wreath at the scene of one of the attacks on Monday. He called the plotters "beasts", adding: "We will find and destroy them all."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the Interfax news agency that militants operating on the Afghan-Pakistan border may have helped organise the Moscow attacks.
"We all know very well that clandestine terrorists are very active on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan," he was quoted as saying.
"We know that several attacks have been prepared there, to be carried out not only in Afghanistan, but also in other countries. Sometimes, these journeys go as far as the (Russian) Caucasus."
US President Barack Obama pledged that Washington would "help bring to justice those who undertook this attack" while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called terrorism a "common enemy".
"Whether you are in a Moscow subway or a London subway or a train in Madrid or an office building in New York, we face the same enemy," Mrs Clinton said in an interview with the Canadian network CTV.
Other foreign ministers from the G8 group of leading industrial nations also condemned the attacks at the start of talks on global security in Ottawa, Canada
Police are looking for two women who accompanied the bombers as well as a possible male accomplice, after identifying them and the bombers through surveillance footage, security sources were quoted as saying by Russian media.The head of Russia's intelligence service, the Federal Security Service (FSB), said investigators believed the attacks had been carried out by "terrorist groups related to the North Caucasus".
"Fragments of the bodies of two female suicide bombers were found earlier at the scene of the incident and examinations show that these individuals came from the North Caucasus region," Alexander Bortnikov said.
The co-ordinated attacks were the deadliest in Moscow since February 2004, when 40 people were killed by a bomb on a packed metro train as it approached the Paveletskaya station.
Six months later, a suicide bomber blew herself up outside another station, killing 10 people. Both attacks were blamed on rebels from Chechnya.
Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov claimed responsibility for that attack and vowed last month to take the war to Russian cities.
Chechnya's Kremlin-backed leader Ramzan Kadyrov condemned the attacks in Moscow, saying he would assist the Kremlin in hunting down the culprits.
More than 100,000 people have been killed in 15 years of conflict in Chechnya, and low-level insurgencies continue there and in the neighbouring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan.
The city's Metro is one of the busiest underground railways in the world, carrying about 5.5 million passengers a day
Saturday 27 March 2010
They fought the law – and won
While he had a bone to pick with the city's mayor, Sergei Bozhenov, who had beaten him in the October elections, he also claimed local investigators were trying to muzzle him and his colleagues in the opposition over allegations of official corruption.
Local investigators have disputed some of those claims, however.
Shein and five of his supporters began their fast on March 17 -- and within four days they claimed they had tasted success.
Officials from the federal Prosecutor General's Office have now pledged to take personal responsibility for the investigations against the would-be whistle-blowers under their personal control.
"The hunger strike was without doubt a success. Not only were our complaints heard, but we got [support]," Oleg Shein, a former Just Russia State Duma deputy,informed. "Our assessment of the situation coincided with their assessment. Even before we met them, they took the time to go over each case thoroughly," he said of officials in a special commission of the federal Prosecutor General's Office who traveled to the southern city to hear the case on March 20.
The Prosecutor General's Office could neither confirm nor deny these reports.
However independent analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky argued that it was too early for the protestors to claim a real triumph against the authorities, and noted Astrakhan's reputation as a city with one of the country's most murky business environments.
Concern from prosecutors would not necessarily translate into the cases being dropped, he said.
And although Shein is a prominent and popular figure in his hometown - pulling in 26 per cent of the vote on Oct. 11 amid claims of ballot-rigging - on a national level he remains obscure.
"If you dig into what goes on in the Astrakhan administration, you will unearth so many skeletons, and yes, that could be a powerful political playing card," Pribylovsky said. "But it's questionable whether the Kremlin would want to pursue such populist measures."
The October ballot turned Astrakhan into a hot spot for political conflicts that have been bubbling away in local administrations across the country, with the ruling United Russia party increasingly feeling the pressure of social tension due to the economic crisis.
As a result, analysts say the Kremlin allowed steam to be let off during the March 14 elections. In the southern Siberian town of Irkutsk, for instance, Communist-backed candidate Viktor Kondrashev managed to oust United Russia and became mayor.
And Shein's hunger strike has highlighted a heated battle between local investigators and opposition supporters in the aftermath of October's regional elections, widely described as some of the dirtiest Russia has seen in recent years.
It also underlined an escalating struggle for political influence in regional governments, as allegations of corruption against local officials become more virulent and widespread.
The cases in question include that of journalist Vladimir Anikin, a vocal critic of Astrakhan's mayor. In a December article published in his newspaper, Anikin alleged that the local Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor's Office bought a four-storey brick building from the mayor's wife for the equivalent of 10 million euros.
Shein and Anikin claim that the mayor had local investigators launch a criminal case against Anikin, who was called in for questioning about where he got the information about the real estate deal.
"The mayor should have applied as a citizen to a civil court," Anikin told The Moscow News. "Instead, he asked his friend, the director of the local investigative committee, to have a criminal libel case launched against me. It got to a point where he tried to get me prosecuted for jokes about the mayor that I published in my paper."
Asked about where got information about the deal, Anikin said it was from informed sources close to the case who talked to him on condition of anonymity.
Local parliamentarian Yevgeny Dunayev is also facing libel charges for criticising the mayor, Shein said.
Local investigators confirmed that they opened a criminal investigation against Anikin on claims from Bozhenov. The charges, however, were not libel but defamation of character.
Indeed, Anikin's article was virulently critical of local law enforcement, equating corrupt police and investigators with child molestors.
"And this is the person that Shein supported in his hunger strike," investigators added in an official statement provided.In another twist suggesting the level of corruption in Astrakhan's local political scene, the Astrakhan investigative committee has said that the "the hunger strike... was held in the Astrakhan Regional Duma, whose chairman, Alexander Klykanov, is on poor terms with the investigative directorate because his nephew... a police officer in the regional police department, has already been convicted of abuse of authority and is currently under investigation for his involvement" in a criminal gang that carried out paid killings.
The Astrakhan mayor's office refused to comment about the cases or about allegations related to the real estate sale.
Shein says that because of the legal separation of the Investigative Committee from the Prosecutor General's Office, prosecutors cannot actually stop the cases against the activists.
However, the high-level supervision of the investigation "will allow prosecutors to look at the cases objectively and it will help people in Moscow understand why local investigators don't want to look into corruption that takes place in Astrakhan," Shein said.
Second scandal on anti-smoking ads in Moscow
Not content with confronting the city with pictures of a sleeping baby used as an ashtray, anti-smoking campaigners in Moscow have followed up their shock campaign with a woman using a cigarette to slash her wrist.
Designers ADV Group drew plenty of flak for the first campaign - showing a cigarette being stubbed out on a sleeping baby - culminating in an official condemnation from the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service saying the posters could "harm the moral and spiritual development of children".
But the ad groups press secretary Irina Khmalinskaya said they also had letters of support from those who believe shock tactics are the only way to jolt smokers out of the habit. One supporter named Yulia wrote that the only way to reach smokers is to use "aggressive and grotesque images."
News Outdoor, the company responsible for displaying the campaign, had no further comment about the baby ads, saying they had all been removed.
And last week, the creative mastermind behind the posters Ross Sutherland of McCann Erikson tried to sooth the public outrage last week by saying that no babies were harmed during the making of the poster. It was all Photoshop.
Khmalinskaya says that adverts have to answer to all laws of competition and information that's available, thus be cutting edge, especially since they are sending a social message.
In Moscow 24 per of all people smoke, according to statistics from the city's public health department. They also say that 30 per cent of women and 60 per cent of men smoke. The number of women smoking has risen sharply since the mid 90s, when only 4 per cent were regular smokers.
Prosecutors fail to solve biggest criminal cases
What about investigations into the theft of billions of dollars in imported natural gas? Prosecutors can’t get to the bottom of it.
Alleged misappropriations of up to billions of dollars more in central bank assistance? The culprits got away.
Who ordered the murder of Georgiy Gongadze in 2000? That’s a tough one, despite hundreds of hours of incriminating audiotapes in the office of ex-President Leonid Kuchma and a reported confession from the policeman who actually strangled the journalist.
The General Prosecutors Office of Ukraine is where criminal cases go to linger and die, not get solved. And corrupt politics, like so much in the nation, is at the root of it all.
A recent example involves Ihor Bakai, the businessman and close ally of Kuchma, who fled to Moscow when investigators started several cases against him following the democratic 2004 Orange Revolution.
Kyiv’s Pechersk district court on March 23 ruled that criminal investigations against Bakai, who headed the state gas and oil monopoly Naftogaz from 1998 to 2000, should be closed for lack of evidence.
Bakai, who in 2003 was appointed head of the State Management of Affairs Department, an institution that manages properties on behalf of the president and cabinet under Kuchma, fled to Russia in December 2004. He was subsequently charged with illegally privatizing state-owned stakes in the Dnipro Hotel, Ukraina Hotel and the Ukraina Exhibition complex in Kyiv.
Yuriy Boichenko, spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, said on March 24 that his office may or may not appeal the court decision to throw out the charges. “We have not received a copy of the Pechersk court ruling,” Boichenko said. “By law, our office will have seven days to study it before deciding to appeal … or not.”
Boichenko said prosecutors will not follow political dictates and will, instead, follow the law in Bakai’s case.
But the critics have a different view. They says dozens of high-profile cases involving former state officials have been thrown out or muzzled by current Prosecutor General Oleksandr Medvedko and his predecessors.
The fault, they say, lies with the unwritten rule of impunity that exists between the rivaling business oligarchs and parties that have all-but-monopolized the country’s politics and economy. They often fight ruthlessly for power, but avoid putting opponents behind bars for fear of retribution. Instead, criminal cases are opened often just to show opponents who is in charge.
Many legal experts say a legal change in the powers of prosecutors is long overdue
The European Commission for Democracy Through Law, also known as the Venice Commission, has over the years compared Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office to the Soviet (and Czarist) style “prokuratura.” The general prosecutor controls a very powerful institution whose functions considerably exceed the scope of prosecutors in democratic nations.
According to the Constitution adopted in 1996, the authority of the prosecutor’s office is as follows: "Prosecution in court on behalf of the state; representation of the interests of a citizen or of the state in court cases determined by law; supervision of the observance of laws by bodies that conduct detective and search activity, inquiry and pre-trial investigation; and supervision of the observance of laws in the execution of judicial decisions in criminal cases, and also in the application of other measures of coercion related to the restraint of personal liberty of citizens."
A fifth function was added in constitutional amendments adopted in December 2004: “To supervise over the observance of humans’ and citizens’ rights and freedoms and the observance of laws on these matters by bodies of state power, local self-government, their officials and functionaries.”
Parliament made another step to broaden the prosecutors’ function through a new law adopted in first reading on March 14, 2009. The law would make it a very powerful and excessively centralized institution whose functions considerably exceed the scope of functions performed by a prosecutor in a democratic country, the Venice Commission opined in June 2009.
“The draft does not bring Ukraine any closer to complying with the commitment towards the Council of Europe that ‘the role and functions of the Prosecutor’s Office will change, transforming this institution into a body which is in accordance with Council of Europe standards,” the opinion said.
In other words, don’t expect any changes for the better anytime soon.
Key players in Ukraine's justice system
Volodymyr Kolesnychenko, High Council of Justice head
A lawyer and judge, Volodymyr Kolesnychenko was elected on March 22 as head of the High Council of Justice. Kolesnychenko headed the Uman local court in Cherkasy Oblast from 1990 to 2004. He is seen as a trusted ally of President Viktor Yanukovych. Former President Viktor Yushchenko named the Kirovohrad native to chair Kyiv’s Pechersk district court in June 2005, but sacked him days before calling snap parliamentary elections two years later. Accompanied by Party of Regions deputies, Kolesnychenko on April 5 barged into the Pechersk court and absconded with the seal. Days later, the High Council of Justice put him in charge of preparing dossiers for the initial appointment of judges and their dismissal for oath violations.
Oleksandr Lavrynovych, Justice Minister, ex-officio High Council of Justice member
A lawyer, Oleksandr Lavrynovych, on Feb. 25 left his job as deputy speaker of parliament to serve a third time as justice minister. After failing to advance the investigation into the 2000 murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze as head of the ad hoc parliamentary committee, former President Leonid Kuchma first appointed him to the post in 2002. Lavrynovych was reappointed after Viktor Yanukovych returned as prime minister in 2006. Lavrynovych was re-elected in 2006 and 2007 to parliament on the Party of Regions ticket. He is a top legal advisor and constitutional expert on Yanukovych’s team.
Serhiy Kivalov, chairman of the Judiciary Committee in parliament, High Council of Justice member
A lawyer, Serhiy Kivalov was the former Central Election Commission head who certified the rigged 2004 presidential election results in favor of Viktor Yanukovych, which triggered nationwide protests known as the Orange Revolution and the overturning of the election. Born in Tiraspol, capital of the breakaway Moldovan region of Transdnister, Kivalov worked as a police officer in Russia’s Sverdlovsk Oblast. He relocated to Ukraine’s Black Sea port town of Odesa in the 1980s to teach administrative law to police academy cadets. Kivalov took charge of the legal institute at the Odesa State University in 1997. A year later, he was elected to parliament, where he worked on the judiciary committee. Kivalov was reelected to parliament in 2002 and appointed Central Election Commission head in February 2004. Despite massive allegations of his role in election fraud, Kivalov was never found guilty by a General Prosecutor’s Office that is widely seen to be loyal and controlled by Yanukovych’s camp. He returned to parliament again in 2006 and 2007 as a member of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.
Oleksandr Medvedko, Prosecutor General, ex officio High Council of Justice member
Widely regarded as loyal to Viktor Yanukovych long before he became president early this year, Medvedko was first named prosecutor general in November 2005, and was renamed to the post in 2007. Like his predecessors, Medvedko failed to bring any top officials to justice despite massive evidence of wrongdoing – nor has he solved any of the long list of resonant crimes that have haunted the country since independence. His term ends Nov. 4, 2012. Medvedko served as Donetsk Region prosecutor from 1992 to 1999. Between 1999 and 2001 he headed the Donetsk Regional Prosecutor’s Office’s directorate for legal oversight of investigations. Medvedko worked in 2002 as first deputy prosecutor in Luhansk Oblast before being appointed deputy prosecutor general and moving to Kyiv.
Andriy Portnov, Deputy Chairman of the parliament’s judiciary committee, High Justice Council member
Andriy Portnov is a lawyer by profession and key legal advisor to opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko. Following military service, Portnov worked for several companies in the eastern Luhansk region before forming his own, the Ukrinformpravo legal office. He relocated to Kyiv in 1997, and worked as member of the State Securities and Stock Market Commission in charge of legal affairs. In 2002, Portnov opened his own legal office, Portnov & Parnters, in Kyiv. He was elected to parliament in 2006 and 2007 from Yulia Tymoshenko’s election bloc and was named High Council of Justice a member in May 2009. He has in recent years served as one of the most influential members of Tymoshenko’s team and has played a major role in her group’s strategy on constitutional reform and legal battles.
Vasyl Onopenko, chairman of the Supreme Court, ex officio High Justice Council member
Long viewed as a political ally of ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the influetnial lawyer and judge has worked in various courts and for the Justice Ministry since 1976. His son-in-law, Yevhen Korniychuk, served as deputy Justice Minister in Tymoshenko’s recently ousted cabinet, and earlier served as a lawmaker in Tymoshenko’s bloc. Onopenko also served as a lawmaker in Tymoshenko's parliament faction before being appointed head of Ukraine’s Supreme Court in 2006. The father-and-son-in-law duo has competed with Portnov for influence within the Tymoshenko camp on legal affairs. But on March 25, it was announced that Korniychuk had been appointed deputy head of state gas company Naftogaz, a sign that he has switched political camps. Insiders said Korniychuk could be on his way to joining the governing coalition loyal to President Viktor Yanukovych. What political sides his father will take, as head of the powerful supreme court, remains unclear for now.
Valery Khoroshkovsky, State Security Service (SBU) head
Billionaire Valery Khoroshkovsky has been deputy head of the SBU state spy agency since March 2009, in charge of the agency’s anti-terror unit. Khoroshkovsky has been a partner with controversial billionaire Dmytro Firtash in the nation’s most watched television channel, Inter. As one of Yanukovych’s biggest backers, Firtash has managed to get confidants appointed to many key positions, including chief of staff of the presidential administration and energy minister. In a major conflict of interest, Khoroshkovsky temporarily headed an SBU investigation against the state natural gas company, Naftogaz, alleging it had illegally siphoned billions of dollars of gas away from Firtash. Khoroshkovsky says one of his primary responsibilities as SBU head is to protect state secrets.
Volodymyr Sivkovych, deputy prime minister (in charge of law enforcement and corruption)
A Yanukovych ally, the trained economist and lawyer started his career by serving in the Soviet military and KGB, the Soviet Union’s former state security service (until 1992). After the USSR fell apart, the Kyiv native headed a number of business ventures (Vita Airlines and STB TV). He worked as an advisor to former President Leonid Kuchma before his reelection in 1999. Sivkovych was first elected to parliament in 2002 from the pro-presidential block. He was reelected in 2006 and 2007 from the Party of Regions.
Ukraine Needs A Russia That Is A Country Like Any Other – And So Do The Russians, Kiev Analyst Says
But in an essay posted online yesterday, Olesya Yakhno, a commentator for the Ukrainian portal Glavred, argues that this is the wrong or at least not the only question. And she insists that an equally or even more important issue for Ukrainians and Russians alike is “what kind of Russia does Ukraine need?”.
Her answer is that both need Russia to become for Ukraine a country like any other rather than revisionist state which seeks to dominate or even absorb its neighbors, thus threatening not only more conflicts in the future but rendering it almost impossible for Russia itself to make the transition to a modern, free and democratic country.
Since Yanukovich’s victory, she notes, “Russia has hurried to make a number of acts of obeisance of a public character toward the new Ukrainian leadership” in order to show that “the period of Russian-Ukrainian alienation is in the past,” that these past difficulties were the fault of President Viktor Yushchenko, and that “life is becoming better, life is becoming happier.”
At the same time, she notes, Russian commentators have hurried to specify “what kind of a Ukraine Russia needs,” arguing that Moscow needs a Ukraine which is “predictable” both at home and abroad, “semi-authoritarian” for whom “’stability’ is a euphemism for reform, and which makes Russian the second state language and the Moscow Patriarchate the main church.
Moreover, these Russian commentators have said, Russia needs a Ukraine which will not join NATO but will allow Russia’s fleet to remain in Crimea after 2017 and will meet the “business needs” of the Russian political elite, needs, which remain largely “outside of the framework of public discussions.”
And at the most general level, the Glavred commentator says, Russians “consider (or give the impression they do) that for effective cooperation and the conduct of a friendly policy between Russia and Ukraine, the preeminent factor is the level of loyalty of the Ukrainian president to Moscow.”
But in all these discussion, Yakhno continues, one question is missing: “what kind of Russia does Ukraine need?” And behind that question, for which Russian commentators have failed to provide any answer, is “another question,” one that if anything is more fateful: “What kind of Russia does Russia itself need?”
It is clear, the Glavred writer says, that “the format of bilateral Russian-Ukrainian relations depends more on Russia than it does on Ukraine,” something that is not a source for optimism because “even with friendly countries” like Belarus and Kazakhstan, Russia has difficulties maintaining close ties.
The situation with Ukraine in this regard is especially important, she says. While relations between Russia and Ukraine under Yushchenko were not especially good, “however paradoxical it may sound, his presidency despite all the anti-Yushchenko rhetoric of Russian politicians, had its benefits for the ruling Russian tandem.”
Ukraine, second only to Georgia, played the chief “anti-hero in the Russian public space.” And the existence of that image obviated the need for “real policy” and even “allowed the Russian powers that be to hide Russia’s lack of a serious strategy relative to the CIS countries in general and Ukraine in particular.”
In fact, Yakhno continues, it allowed Moscow the chance to “project Russia on a blank screen as a giant of geopolitics.”
There is no doubt that relations between Moscow and Kiev will improve now that Yanukovich is president. But “in order that cooperation bear a real and not exclusively declarative character, it is obvious that there will have to developed an integral and internally consistent philosophy of these relations,” a challenge above all for Russia.
That is because, Yakhno suggests, “the position of Ukraine through the period of independence was and is unchanged.” Yanukovich has “reaffirmed that the strategic goal of the foreign policy of Ukraine is European integration, alongside effective cooperation with Russia and the US.”
Given that “multi-vector approach,” she writes, “where Europe is conceived of as a political partner and model of the future, and Russia as above all an economic counter-agent and ‘reliable rear,’ inherited from the past,” Kiev’s choice will remain with the future, and “therefore, there will not be a cardinal turn of Ukraine toward the Russian Federation.”
And what that means, Yakhno says, is that “the real test for Russian-Ukrainian relations did not end with the departure of Yushchenko but only began with the installation of Yanukovich in office” because Moscow can no longer avoid facing the need to develop a real policy toward Kiev rather than hide behind denunciations of the Orange Revolution.
Whether Moscow is up to that task is unclear, she writes. Not only does Russia face a broad range of economic and political problems at home, but the regime itself is divided about what it wants and will do next. President Dmitry Medvedev clearly wants to see some kind of modernization, although “today few people in modernization Kremlin-style.”
As for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Yakhno continues, he has talked about three “possible variants of the development of the political system on the post-Soviet space:” Ukrainianization, which Russians understand to mean “political instability and a lack of control,” “harsh authoritarianism” (Turkmenistan), and semi-authoritarian Putinism as in Russia.
Putin clearly wants the third to continue in Russia, “even if this directly contradicts modernization,” as it almost certainly does. That is because, Yakhno insists, “modernization is possible only under conditions of ‘Ukrainianization’ or ‘authoritarianism,” the one allowing messy competition and the other marching forward under tight control.
The tension between the requirements of modernization and the needs of the members of the current set of powers that be in Moscow to remain in office, the Ukrainian analyst continues, are creating conditions for the rise of “subjectivism in politics,” a term taken from the Khrushchev period.
It refers, Yakhno says, to an approach which rejects “institutional forms of control” and thus opens the way for actions “which do not take into account the objective patterns of history and the real circumstances of the contemporary development of the country.” In short, it leads to decisions “based on faith in the all powerful nature of administrative and force decisions.”
Such an approach, now very much in evidence in Moscow, does not create the kind of Russia that Ukraine needs, Yakhno says. She then gives a list of six qualities that she argues Russia needs to develop if it is to have good relations with its neighbors and to develop and modernize at home.
First, she writes, Ukraine needs a Russia “which clearly understands its place in the contemporary world: a major, economically powerful and rich country with enormous natural resources and human potential but not a global or even a regional power.”
Second, Ukraine needs a Russia which “is not an empire but a contemporary nation state.” Third, it needs a Russia which “at least approximately believes in what it officially proclaims.” Fourth, it needs a Russia “which thinks in the categories of politics and not business camouflaged as politics.
Fifth, it needs a Russia which “decides above all its state tasks and not the tasks of big business.” And sixth, it needs a Russia “which can once and for all formulate an exhaustive list of its expectations from Ukraine,” thus allowing Kyiv to respond positively to those it agrees with and negatively to those it does not.
In sum, Yakhno says, “Ukraine needs a Russia will simply be another country, important and strong to be sure, but one of the other countries and not the boss, not the elder brother, and what is the most important thing, not an eternal factor in Ukrainian domestic politics.”
That will benefit both countries because “when the policy of Ukraine in the Russian direction finally becomes a foreign and not a domestic manner, then will take place the psychological liberation of Ukraine and its elite from Russia, and Ukraine finally will acquire its independence.”
Ukraine’s Premier Wants ‘Clean Slate’
“Perhaps, we must forget what happened between our countries over the past five years, turn the page and start our relations from a clean slate,” Azarov said in his opening remarks.
He was referring to the five-year presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, during whose tenure relations between the two countries were tested by several gas wars and other political feuds.
The current government, under President Viktor Yanukovych, who ousted Yushchenko in February elections, wants to repair the rift between the two neighbors as part of an effort to steer the economy out of its nosedive, Azarov said.
“We will do everything to rebuild our cooperation and our joint projects,” he said.
Azarov said he brought new proposals for Russia, possibly referring to a plan that would see operational control over Ukraine's giant gas pipeline network handed over to a consortium including Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz, Russia's Gazprom and European Union energy firms.
Ukrainian officials, including Yanukovych, have repeatedly floated the idea in past weeks. Even so, Azarov didn't even mention gas during his introductory speech.
“We may … reach some agreements soon; sign them and show that we don't simply exchange proposals but work constructively,” he said.
Putin, receiving his counterpart in the Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, was quick to note that this was Azarov's first foreign trip as prime minister.
“It's very pleasant. It's a good sign,” he said, before lamenting that the trade between the countries had decreased over the past few years. It is possible, he said, to restore previous trade levels or even raise them to new heights.
Afterward, the talks were continued behind closed doors and were still ongoing Thursday evening. Ukraine's new government believes that the current gas trade contract is charging an unfairly high price on imports from Russia.
Earlier Thursday, Gazprom urged Ukraine to store up enough gas during the summer to ensure smooth westward transit during the winter, the company said in a statement after its chief Alexei Miller met Azarov. About 80 percent of Gazprom's exports to Europe traverse Ukraine.
Opposition parties in Kiev promised a tough fight over the gas consortium plan, describing it as harmful to national security. A Ukrainian opposition lawmaker said there would be riots if the government handed some of the authority over the country's pipelines to Gazprom.
“If the government attempts to trade away Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and national interests, including strategic national assets, our people will be strong enough … to stand up for everything Ukrainian,” said Ostap Semerak, a senior member of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, named after its chief, the former prime minister.
“Radical methods of resistance, including physical defense of gas pipelines, are not ruled out.”
Drivers In Ukraine Suffer Europe's Worst Roads
"When you drive, you have to look for your route as there is hole after hole. The roads are so bad in small towns, that your wheels are coming off,” said Anatoliy Krivenko, a Ukrainian driver who frequently travels to different parts of the country.
Krivenko says that driving the roads in Ukraine is almost not doable because of all of the potholes. His car was severely damaged last winter, “I had to change a running gear and other parts. I have worn out the rotor four times,” he said.
According to the Ukravtodor, Ukraine's national road service, more than 60 percent of the roads are in need of a complete overhaul, with 30 percent of those considered to be in state of emergency.
To make matters worse, local and state roads in Ukraine have been increasingly damaged due to severe weather this winter. Temperature changes and the huge amount of snow on the roads caused melting water to penetrate Ukraine's poorly constructed roads, creating potholes of various sizes.
Elena Slavinskaja, an assistant professor from Ukraine's National Transport University, says that the main reason for the poor road conditions is the lack of financing and the low quality of road construction methods.
“The total amount of financing for the development of the public road network and its maintenance has consistently decreased,” Slavinskaja said.
“The road conditions are directly related to the quality of road-building materials, primarily the asphalt bitumen which is made from low quality petroleum,” she says.
The question of funding is a problematic issue for each sector in Ukraine. The reconstruction of the main roads is funded by the state budget, but this has not been developed yet.
Road service workers are attempting to repair the potholes. Officials say that if there is enough financing, they can manage to repair the potholes by the summer. However, this would require roughly $800 million in funds.
But according to Slavinskaja, who stated that Ukraine's roads are the worst in Europe, that would not solve the problem because the cracks would remain, through which water will once again penetrate creating new holes.
With construction of new soccer stadiums for the 2012 Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) championship in Ukraine already behind schedule, Ukraine's poor road infrastructure makes things worse. The government has promised to meet the financing needed to finish the projects in time for the championship.
Thursday 25 March 2010
Inside A Global Cybercrime Ring In Ukraine
According to court documents, former employees and investigators, a receptionist greeted visitors at the door of the company, known as Innovative Marketing Ukraine. Communications cables lay jumbled on the floor and a small coffee maker sat on the desk of one worker.
As business boomed, the firm added a human resources department, hired an internal IT staff and built a call center to dissuade its victims from seeking credit card refunds. Employees were treated to catered holiday parties and picnics with paintball competitions.
Top performers got bonuses as young workers turned a blind eye to the harm the software was doing. "When you are just 20, you don't think a lot about ethics," said Maxim, a former Innovative Marketing programer who now works for a Kiev bank and asked that only his first name be used for this story. "I had a good salary and I know that most employees also had pretty good salaries."
In a rare victory in the battle against cybercrime, the company closed down last year after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit seeking its disbandment in U.S. federal court.
An examination of the FTC's complaint and documents from a legal dispute among Innovative executives offer a rare glimpse into a dark, expanding -- and highly profitable -- corner of the internet.
Innovative Marketing Ukraine, or IMU, was at the center of a complex underground corporate empire with operations stretching from Eastern Europe to Bahrain; from India and Singapore to the United States.
A researcher with anti-virus software maker McAfee Inc who spent months studying the company's operations estimates that the business generated revenue of about $180 million in 2008, selling programs in at least two dozen countries. "They turned compromised machines into cash," said the researcher, Dirk Kollberg.
The company built its wealth pioneering scareware -- programs that pretend to scan a computer for viruses, and then tell the user that their machine is infected. The goal is to persuade the victim to voluntarily hand over their credit card information, paying $50 to $80 to "clean" their PC.
Scareware, also known as rogueware or fake antivirus software, has become one of the fastest-growing, and most prevalent, types of internet fraud. Software maker Panda Security estimates that each month some 35 million PCs worldwide, or 3.5 percent of all computers, are infected with these malicious programs, putting more than $400 million a year in the hands of cybercriminals.
"When you include cost incurred by consumers replacing computers or repairing, the total damages figure is much, much larger than the out of pocket figure," said Ethan Arenson, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission who helps direct the agency's efforts to fight cybercrime.
Groups like Innovative Marketing build the viruses and collect the money but leave the work of distributing their merchandise to outside hackers. Once infected, the machines become virtually impossible to operate. The scareware also removes legitimate anti-virus software from vendors including Symantec Corp, McAfee and Trend Micro Inc, leaving PCs vulnerable to other attacks.
When victims pay the fee, the virus appears to vanish, but in some cases the machine is then infiltrated by other malicious programs. Hackers often sell the victim's credit card credentials to the highest bidder.
Removing scareware is a top revenue generator for Geek Choice, a PC repair company with about two dozen outlets in the United States. The outfit charges $100 to $150 to clean infected machines, a service that accounts for about 30 percent of all calls.
Geek Choice CEO Lucas Brunelle said that scareware attacks have picked up over the past few months as the software has become increasingly sophisticated. "There are more advanced strains that are resistant to a lot of anti-virus software," Brunelle said.
Anti-virus software makers have also gotten into the lucrative business of cleaning PCs, charging for those services even when their products fall down on the job.
Charlotte Vlastelica, a homemaker in State College, Pennsylvania, was running a version of Symantec's Norton anti-virus software when her PC was attacked by Antispyware 2010. "These pop-ups were constant," she said. "They were layered one on top of the other. You couldn't do anything."
So she called Norton for help and was referred to the company's technical support division. The fee for removing Antispyware 2010 was $100. A frustrated Vlastelica vented: "You totally missed the virus and now you're going to charge us $100 to fix it?"
AN INDUSTRY PIONEER
"It's sort of a plague," said Kent Woerner, a network administrator for a public school district in Beloit, Kansas, some 5,500 miles away from Innovative Marketing's offices in Kiev. He ran into one of its products, Advanced Cleaner, when a teacher called to report that pornographic photos were popping up on a student's screen. A message falsely claimed the images were stored on the school's computer.
"When I have a sixth-grader seeing that kind of garbage, that's offensive," said Woerner. He fixed the machine by deleting all data from the hard drive and installing a fresh copy of Windows. All stored data was lost.
Stephen Layton, who knows his way around technology, ended up junking his PC, losing a week's worth of data that he had yet to back up from his hard drive, after an attack from an Innovative Marketing program dubbed Windows XP Antivirus. The president of a home-based software company in Stevensville, Maryland, Layton says he is unsure how he contracted the malware.
But he was certain of its deleterious effect. "I work eight-to-12 hours a day," he said. "You lose a week of that and you're ready to jump off the roof."
Layton and Woerner are among more than 1,000 people who complained to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission about Innovative Marketing's software, prompting an investigation that lasted more than a year and the federal lawsuit that sought to shut them down.
To date the government has only succeeded in retrieving $117,000 by settling its charges against one of the defendants in the suit, James Reno, of Amelia, Ohio, who ran a customer support center in Cincinnati. He could not be reached for comment.
"These guys were the innovators and the biggest players (in scareware) for a long time," said Arenson, who headed up the FTC's investigation of Innovative Marketing.
Innovative's roots date back to 2002, according to an account by one of its top executives, Marc D'Souza, a Canadian, who described the company's operations in-depth in a 2008 legal dispute in Toronto with its founders over claims that he embezzled millions of dollars from the firm. The other key executives were a British man and a naturalized U.S. citizen of Indian origin.
According to D'Souza's account, Innovative Marketing was set up as an internet company whose early products included pirated music and pornography downloads and illicit sales of the impotence drug Viagra. It also sold gray market versions of anti-virus software from Symantec and McAfee, but got out of the business in 2003 under pressure from those companies.
It tried building its own anti-virus software, dubbed Computershield, but the product didn't work. That didn't dissuade the firm from peddling the software amid the hysteria over MyDoom, a parasitic "worm" that attacked millions of PCs in what was then the biggest email virus attack to date.
Innovative Marketing aggressively promoted the product over the internet, bringing in monthly profits of more than $1 million, according to D'Souza.
The company next started developing a type of malicious software known as adware that hackers install on PCs, where they served up pop-up ads for travel services, pornography, discounted drugs and other products, including its flawed antivirus software. They spread that adware by recruiting hackers whom they called "affiliates" to install it on PCs.
"Most affiliates installed the adware product on end-users' computers illegally through the use of browser hijacking and other nefarious methods," according to D'Souza. He said that Innovative Marketing paid its affiliates 10 cents per hijacked PC, but generated average returns of $2 to $5 for each of those machines through the sale of software and products promoted through the adware.
ANY MEANS BUT SPAM
The affiliate system has since blossomed. Hackers looking for a piece of the action can link up with scareware companies through anonymous internet chat rooms. They are paid through electronic wire services such as Western Union, Pay Pal and Webmoney which can protect the identity of both the sender and the recipient.
To get started, a hacker needs to register as an affiliate on an underground website and download a virus file that is coded with his or her affiliate ID. Then it's off to races.
"You can install it by any means, except spam," says one affiliate recruiting site, earning4u.com, which pays $6 to $180 for every 1,000 PCs infected with its software. PCs in the United States earn a higher rate than ones in Asia.
Affiliates load the software onto the machines by a variety of methods, including hijacking legitimate websites, setting up corrupt sites for the purposes of spreading viruses and attacks over social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
"Anybody can get infected by going to a legitimate website," said Uri Rivner, an executive with RSA, one of the world's top computer security companies.
A scareware vendor distributed its goods one September weekend via The New York Times' website by inserting a single rogue advertisement. The hacker paid NYTimes.com to run the ad, which was disguised as one for the internet phone company Vonage. It contaminated PCs of an unknown number of readers, according to an account of the incident published in The New York Times.
Patrik Runald, a senior researcher at internet security firm Websense Inc, expects rogueware vendors to get more aggressive with marketing. "We're going to see them invest more money in that -- buying legitimate ad space," he said.
To draw victims to infected websites, hackers will also manipulate Google's search engine to get their sites to come up on the top of anyone's search in a particular subject. For instance, they might capitalize on news events of wide interest -- from the winners of the Oscars to the Tiger Woods scandal -- quickly setting up sites to attract relevant search times.
Anti-virus maker Panda Security last year observed one scareware peddler set up some 1 million web pages that infected people searching for Ford auto parts with a program dubbed MSAntispyware2009. They also snare victims by sending their links through Facebook and Twitter.
Some rogue vendors manage their partnerships with hackers through software that tracks who installed the virus that generated a sale. Hackers are paid well for their efforts, garnering commissions ranging from 50 to 90 percent, according to Panda Security.
SecureWorks, another security firm, estimates that a hacker who gets 1 to 2 percent of users of infected machines to purchase the software can pull in over $5 million a year in commissions.
Hackers in some Eastern European countries barely attempt to conceal their activities.
Panda Security found photos of a party in March 2008 that it said affiliate ring KlikVIP held in Montenegro to reward scareware installers. One showed a briefcase full of euros that would go to the top performer. "They weren't afraid of the legal implications, " said Panda Security researcher Sean-Paul Correll. "They were fearless."
BANKING
One of Innovative Marketing's biggest problems was the high proportion of victims who complained to their credit card companies and obtained refunds on their purchases. That hurt the relationships with its merchant banks that processed those transactions, forcing it to switch from banks in Canada to Bahrain. It created subsidiaries designed to hide its identity.
In 2005, Bank of Bahrain & Kuwait severed its ties with an Innovative Marketing subsidiary that had the highest volume of credit card processing of any entity in Bahrain because of its high chargeback rates, according to D'Souza.
Innovative Marketing then went five months without a credit card processor before finding a bank in Singapore -- DBS Bank -- willing to handle its account. The Singapore bank processed tens of millions of dollars in backlogged credit card payments for the company, D'Souza said.
To keep the chargeback rate from climbing even higher, Innovative Marketing invested heavily in call centers. It opened facilities in Ukraine, India and the United States. The rogueware was designed to tell the users that their PCs were working properly once the victim had paid for the software, so when people called up to complain it wasn't working, agents would walk them through whatever steps it took to make those messages come up.
Often that required disabling legitimate anti-virus software programs, according to McAfee researcher Dirk Kollberg, who spent hours listening to digitized audio recordings of customer service calls that Innovative Marketing kept on its servers at its Ukraine offices.
He gathered the data by tapping into a computer server at its branch in Kiev that he said was inadvertently hooked up to Innovative's website. "At the end of the call," he said, "most customers were happy."
Police have had limited success in cracking down on the scareware industry. Like Innovative Marketing, most rogue internet companies tend to be based in countries where laws permit such activities or officials look the other way.
Law enforcement agencies in the United States, Western Europe, Japan and Singapore are the most aggressive in prosecuting internet crimes and helping officials in other countries pursue such cases, said Mark Rasch, former head of the computer crimes unit at the U.S. Department of Justice.
"In the rest of the world, it's hit or miss," he said. "The cooperation is getting better, but the level of crime continues to increase and continues to outpace the level of cooperation."
The FTC succeeded in persuading a U.S. federal judge to order Innovative Marketing and two individuals associated with it to pay $163 million it had scammed from Americans. Neither individual has surfaced since the government filed its original suit more than a year ago. But Ethan Arenson, the FTC attorney who handled the case, warned: "Collection efforts are just getting underway."
Ukraine's New PM To Ask Putin To Lower Gas Prices
Ukraine's new President Viktor Yanukovych, who came to power in February after narrowly winning a presidential runoff, has been seeking to revise a long-term gas deal signed by ex-premier Yulia Tymoshenko and the Russian prime minister in early 2009.
In return for cheaper gas, Ukraine wants to offer Russia a stake in its gas transportation system, which currently accounts for about 80% of Russian natural gas exports to Europe.
Azarov was quoted as saying on Wednesday that Russia has set unreasonably high gas prices for Ukraine, which have further strained the country's meager finances.
"That is why the issue... will be on the first place during a meeting of the Ukrainian and Russian premiers," the Ukrainian government's press service said.
"We expect that a bilaterally beneficial draft project [on Russian gas supplies to Ukraine] will be worked out and we will jointly implement it. We should certainly find a compromise solution, which would make the development of Ukraine's economy possible," Azarov said.
Last year, Russia reduced its gas price for Ukraine by 20%, but in 2010 the market price, which fluctuates depending on oil prices, was introduced.
In the first quarter of this year, Ukraine will pay $305 per 1,000 cubic meters of Russian gas. The price will grow to $320 in the second quarter due to rising oil prices.
Ukraine's gas transportation system is Europe's second largest gas pipeline network and the main route for Russian natural gas supplies to European consumers.
In early 2000, Kiev and Moscow discussed the possibility of creating a gas transport consortium with the involvement of EU partners to manage and modernize Ukraine's Soviet-era gas pipeline network.
The project was put on hold when West-leaning president Viktor Yushchenko came to power in Ukraine in 2004.
Russia has made repeated attempts to obtain a stake in the Ukrainian gas pipeline network to modernize the system and ensure uninterrupted gas supplies to Europe. Ukraine has so far resisted, saying a consortium with Russia would jeopardize its sovereignty.
According to a poll conducted in Ukraine earlier in March, only 40.5% of respondents welcomed the idea of a gas consortium with Russia. 23.3% opposed the move.
Azarov was appointed prime minister after Yanukovych's chief rival, then Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, was dismissed after a vote of non-confidence on March 11.
Yanukovych has repeatedly claimed he wants to boost ties with Russia, which deteriorated during his predecessor Yushchenko's
Ukrainian Women Berate 'Neanderthal' PM For Sexist Remarks
Women's groups in Ukraine have angrily reported Azarov – who presides over an all-male cabinet – to the country's ombudsman following his remarks last week. They accuse him of gender discrimination and holding Neanderthal views.
Speaking on Friday, Azarov said Ukraine's economic problems were too difficult for any woman to handle.
"Some say our government is too large; others that there are no women," he said. "There's no one to look at during cabinet sessions: they're all boring faces. With all respect to women, conducting reforms is not women's business."
Ukraine's new woman-free government was capable of working 16 hours a day with "no breaks and weekends", Azarov boasted.
The prime minister's gaffe echoes comments made recently by the man who appointed him – Ukraine's new president, Viktor Yanukovych. During February's election campaign, Yanukovych declared that his female opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, should "go to the kitchen".
Today, Azarov's political enemies denounced him as an unreconstructed dinosaur. They said his derisory remark, snubbing half of the country's 46 million population, underlined just how out of touch he is with ordinary Ukrainians.
Seeking Lower Fuel Costs, Ukraine May Sell Pipelines
To prevent such blowups in the future, Ukraine’s new Moscow-friendly president, Viktor F. Yanukovich, has proposed an improbable solution. This week he opened negotiations with the Kremlin to sell control over the pipelines’ operations to a consortium including Ukraine’s usual antagonist in these disputes, Russia’s natural gas giant Gazprom, and an unspecified European company.
Russia has already negotiated similar agreements with Belarus and Armenia, where Gazprom owns stakes in the pipeline systems with implied vetoes over strategic energy decisions and in exchange sells gas at steep discounts. Belarus, for example, now pays $168 for 1,000 cubic meters of gas compared with $305 in Ukraine.
If Ukraine had the lower price, it would save about $3.7 billion a year, supporters of Mr. Yanukovich’s proposal say.
From Russia’s perspective, the deal would be a coup in the long-running quest for supremacy of the Eurasian pipeline network, sometimes called a modern version of the Great Game, after the 19th century struggle between Russia and Britain for colonial possession in Central Asia.
Even partial control of the Ukrainian pipelines, which carry about 80 percent of Gazprom’s exports to Europe, could eliminate the need for Russia to build a costly new pipeline under the Black Sea from Russia to Bulgaria around Ukraine, called South Stream.
But the idea — illegal under existing Ukrainian law — is controversial even though it would help put debt-strapped Ukraine back on its feet. Kiev spends billions every year subsidizing gas prices for consumers, and the International Monetary Fund has made reducing such outlays a condition for resuming lending halted last fall.
Ukrainians now pay about 30 percent of the true cost of heat and electricity, according to Olena Bilan, chief economist for Dragon Capital, a Kiev investment bank. The I.M.F. has suggested a variety of austerity measures, including politically unpopular steps like raising fees for residential heating.
That would not be necessary, however, if Mr. Yanukovich could swiftly close a deal with Moscow to lower the gas price.
The idea of transferring pipeline control to a Russian-European consortium may comfort some European consumers, but it sends chills through many Ukrainians, who remain fearful of creeping Russian influence after spending centuries as part of Moscow’s empire.
“When the Kremlin loans money, it doesn’t want interest, it wants political concessions,” Sergiy Terokhin, a former minister of the economy, said in a telephone interview from Kiev.
Iryna M. Akimova, Mr. Yanukovich’s chief economic adviser, said Mr. Yanukovich was merely fulfilling a campaign promise by negotiating with the Russians on gas, and if it helped meet international lending requirements, all the better.
“The new president considers it very important to build good economic relations with partners in the West and the East,” Ms. Akimova said.
Russia, U.S. near arms control deal
Discussions between the two sides continue on technical details but a deal is "really close," said State Department spokesman Mark Toner. "I would describe it as steady progress toward the end goal," he said. "We are extremely close but I'm not going to characterize a deal on that."
The agreement would replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) arms-control agreement between the United States and Russia, which expired in December 2009.
President Barack Obama hopes to talk to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev about the deal in the "next several days," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday.
The Czech government has agreed to host the signing of a new arms-control agreement between Russia and the United States in Prague once it is complete, a Czech Foreign Ministry spokesman informed.
The United States made the request, said Filip Kanda, the spokesman. He pointed out that negotiations on a new agreement continue in Geneva, Switzerland.
"It is too early to say what the date will be," he said.
Gibbs said Wednesday that the administration had always considered returning to Prague -- where Obama presented his vision for a world free of nuclear weapons last year -- for the signing. But "there are still something that need to be worked out," he said.
The new arms agreement would reduce the number of deployed strategic warheads each side can have. The United States currently has approximately 2,200 strategic warheads deployed; Russia has an estimated 2,500. Under the new agreement each side would be allowed between 1,500 and 1,675 nuclear warheads, officials have said.
The treaty also would limit the number of "delivery vehicles," the strategic bombers and missiles that carry the warheads, to between 500 and 1,100 for each side, officials have said. The current limit is 1,600 but the United States actually has 900 delivery vehicles; Russia has an estimated 600.
For the American side, Obama will have the final word on the precise numbers within the agreed-upon parameters.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, who met with Obama at the White House on Wednesday to discuss the START negotiations, said the president expressed confidence that "real progress is being made."
"I assured the president that we strongly support his efforts, and that if the final negotiations and all that follows go smoothly, we will work to ensure that the Senate can act on the treaty this year," said Kerry, who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a written statement.
Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Indiana, also attended the meeting.
Russian bombers 'intercepted in British airspace'
Britain's Ministry of Defence released images it said were taken earlier this month of two Russian Tu-160 bombers -- known as Blackjacks by NATO forces -- as they entered UK airspace near the Outer Hebrides islands off Scotland's northwest coast.
It said the March 10 incident, which resulted in crystal clear images of the planes against clear blue skies and a dramatic sunset, was one of many intercepts carried out by British Royal Air Force crews in just over 12 months.
"This is not an unusual incident, and many people may be surprised to know that our crews have successfully scrambled to intercept Russian aircraft on more than 20 occasions since the start of 2009," Wing Cdr. Mark Gorringe, of the RAF's 111 Squadron, said in a statement.
The RAF said two of its Tornado fighter jets from its base at Leuchars, on Scotland's east coast, were dispatched to tail the Russian Blackjacks as they approached the western Isle of Lewis.
"The Tornados shadowed the Russians as they flew south, then the Blackjacks turned north, just short of the Northern Ireland coast, and eventually left UK airspace," the statement said.
"After four hours, the Tornado crews stood down and returned to Leuchars."
Several of the images show the name Vasily Reshetnikov in Russian lettering near the cockpit of one plane. Reshetnikov was a celebrated Soviet pilot who fought on the Eastern Front in World War II.
Russian military authorities on Thursday confirmed their aircraft had been in the area, but denied any violation of British airspace.
"Our planes fly in strict accordance with the international rules government the use of airspace over neutral waters without violating the borders of foreign countries," Defense Ministry spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Drik confirmed.
"The routine flights by the Tu-160 missile carriers took place in accordance with those conditions on March 10. They did not violate British airspace, and objective control materials confirm that."
Experts say regardless of the exact flight paths, the increased sorties by Russian aircrafts in international airspace show Moscow is flexing its muscles as it re-emerges as a global military player.
"Russia is now an oil exporting state so they've got more money to spend on their armed forces after the 1990s when they were bankrupt," defense analyst Tim Ripley said.
Ripley said the increase in air activity began shortly before Russia's brief 2008 territorial skirmish with Georgia, but while it was a clear show of strength, it did not represent sinister intent.
While ties between Russia and the UK have been strained in recent years, Ripley said talks with Washington that look set to result in a new arms control deal were a clearer indication of Moscow's global military outlook.
Monday 22 March 2010
Racism on the retreat in Russia
An embassy source emphasised that although the 29-year-old's attackers had not been caught and a travel warning remains in force until May 31, they had no specific complaints against the Russian authorities.
"We are satisfied with the actions they have taken," he said. "In our judgement they are doing their best."
That attack in early March - and a fatal attack in Barnual last month - fed fears that Russia's radical racist fringe was preparing another string of attacks on foreigners in the run-up to Hitler's birthday on April 20.
But statistics show reports of race-hate crimes are on the decline for the first time in years - while courts are getting tougher on offenders.
Just this month, a Russian court handed down jail sentences of up to 23 years to nine members of the so-called White Wolves group for a series of murders. Other members of the gang got seven, 10, 15, and 17 years. 17-year-old Ivan Strelnikov got six and a half years in a correctional facility because of his age.
In February, a young man called Alexander Maslenikov, was handed an 11-year sentence for his 2007 stabbing of a Tanzanian in St. Petersburg. His victim survived, but six other people were given jail terms of at least two years.
And while suspended jail terms for attackers were common practice just a few years ago, today a killer who is found to have acted out of racial hatred can be put away from 25 years to life.
Human rights campaigners feel that these figures do reflect a genuine change in society, and aren't merely a symptom of minority groups feeling it is pointless to report racial attacks.
"The number of crimes became so high that they could no longer be ignored, and the out-of control situations like Kondopoga" - where riots broke out in 2006 after a fight between Russians and Chechens left two people dead - "forced society to address the problem," said Alexander Brod, head of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights and a prominent Public Chamber official. "Law enforcement bodies have become more aware of these crimes and have started tackling them."
They have realised, he said, that racial attacks pose a national security threat, causing potential retaliation in ethnic republics like Tatarstan, Yakutia, Bashkortistan and the north Caucasus.
According to figures from Brod's organization, 74 people were killed in racist attacks in 2009, a drop from 120 the previous year. Meanwhile, some 312 people were convicted - two of those locked up for at least 20 years, and 23 - for at least 10.
"The number of convictions has increased in the last year," he said, with about 40 long-term sentences being handed down every year.
The US State Department also noted in its latest human rights report that the number of reported hate crimes decreased in 2009.
New police measures and tougher legislation may be behind the improvement. Brod cited the 2008 creation of a special department within the Interior Ministry to target extremism as one of the developments.
Meanwhile, things changed in 2007 when amendments adding a new classification of racial or religious hatred to several articles in the criminal code were introduced. Semyon Charny, a hate crime expert at the bureau said: "Sentences of four-five years for murders committed by sane people - that just doesn't make any sense anymore. 11 years - that is more serious, 11 years is almost an entire life."
Problems remain, however. Little is being done to counter nationalist propaganda, and the laws that exist are often abused.
The 2002 law to counter extremism was broadened in 2007, allowing it to be applied widely to the opposition in general. This has led to rights activists and journalists being targeted for criticizing the government.
Brod says that adequate educational programs to address racist attitudes in schools and colleges have still not been implemented. And TV violence "isn't helping matters," he said.
Sociological polls show attitudes are not improving, and the level of hidden aggression is still high, he said.
Another dangerous tendency is that nationalist radicals don't just target individuals, but could plan full-scale terrorist attacks on mosques and synagogues.
Wrath in Russia, feminists in Kiev
But only a handful managed to garner more than 1,000 people - far short of the multi-party, 10,000-strong rally Kaliningrad saw in January.
In Moscow, about 300 people gathered for an unsanctioned rally at Pushkin Square, where Left Front co-leader Sergei Udaltsov began taunting city authorities about their fears of a mass protest while demonstrators brandished placards calling for Prime Minister Putin's resignation. Police quickly dispersed the rally, organized by Left Front and the For Human Rights movement, detaining about 70 people.
Garnering some 2,000 people, one of the largest rallies was held in Vladivostok, with the aid of the Communists, regarded as one of the few oppositionist forces in parliament. There it joined forces with the liberal Yabloko party and the TIGR movement of "initiative citizens" for a protest denouncing Putin and his government.
Other protests in St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad were held, but they barely drew more than 500 people.
Officials in Ukrainian PM Mykola Azarov's cabinet have been exorcising evil spirits and putting women in their rightful place, Russian and Ukrainian media reported.
Replacing Orange Princess Yulia Tymoshenko as the newly-appointed prime minister, Azarov reportedly got busy sanctifying his new work quarters. "It was very hard to breathe in there. After the sanctification it got easier, and I walked into the office," Interfax quoted Azarov as saying after calling in Father Pavel of Kiev's Pechersk monastery for an exorcism.
Meanwhile, local feminists staged a dressing-down of new prime minister for his remarks about a woman's place. A group of women from the FEMEN organization took their clothes off in front of the cabinet building and called for cabinet wives to abstain from sex to protest comments by Azarov, who, when asked about why there were so few women in his cabinet, said that "reforming Ukraine is no job for a woman," Rosbalt reported. Prior to that, President Viktor Yanukovich had said that "a woman's place is in the kitchen, not in politics."
Moscow reinvents the wheelchair
With the sterling performance of Russian Paralympians pushing the plight of Moscow's 1.2 million disabled people up the political agenda, City Hall was keen to announce a gold-medal package of measures to help the city's less able inhabitants.
But while transport chiefs aim to make the Filyovskaya metro line wheelchair-friendly from Alexandrovsky Sad to Kuntsevo and introduce more than easy-access buses and trolley-buses, experts say this doesn't go far enough.
Sergey Prushinsky, a manager for inclusive education development with the disability support NGO "Perspectiva", is a wheelchair user himself.
While the authorities claim 42 per cent of Moscow is adapted for the needs of disabled people, he disagrees - and believes lack of communication is costing the city money.
"We can see big sums are being spent on adapting city facilities to the handicapped, but it's possible to do this at a lower cost - just ask us what we really need," said Prushinsky. "Many officials who work in social departments have a Soviet-era perception of what should be done for disabled."
As far as the metro is concerned, Prushinsky rarely uses it because it is difficult without a helper.
But other transport is little more convenient - such as the "social taxi" introduced a year ago.
"It's half the price of a normal taxi, but it's more expensive than public transport and you have to book it two days in advance and can't change the time if you need to," said Prushinsky. "A lot of what happens in Russia makes the disabled feel like second rate people."
The same problems also affect the tourist industry - discouraging foreign travelers from coming and hampering would-be domestic visitors.
The "Social Adaptation" NGO is the only organisation working with disability tourism in Russia. Its head, Tatyana Melyakova, who is also disabled, suggested officials are trying to "reinvent the wheel" rather than adapt schemes which have been successfully implement abroad.
"We are taking a tour group to LA today this week and I'm glad that people will be able to see there exactly what should be done for to make our city comfortable for all people in society," said Melyakova.
Many handicapped people agree that western way of solving this problem is the best, as handicapped needs are taken into the account on a stage of construction without any special devices. In theory the same process exists in Russia - but it is often overlooked by construction firms.
Russia needs at least 50 years to make its main cities disability friendly, say the NGO experts. Now they have to go to the authorities and businessmen by themselves and plead for adapting city facilities, shops and hotels for disabled.
Against that background, the head of Moscow's Social Protection Department Vladimir Petrosyan announced plans to improve disabled access on the metro, and introduce 397 low-floor buses and 153 similar trolleybuses around town.
He also proposed fitting ramps to more apartment blocks, but acknowledged that there was a lot of work still to be done, RIA Novosti reported.
"Using metro by disabled is a serious problem, it is difficult to adapt it all at once, cause it's too deep and was built when the handicapped problems were not taken into the account," Petrosyan said.
Putin shows steel behind the smiles
Before meeting privately with Clinton at the Prime Minister's country residence, Putin, all smiles, surprised reporters by rattling off a list of perennial economic woes between the two countries that included declining trade turnover, the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment which restricts trade with countries that limit emigration, and continuous stalling over World Trade Organisation entry for Russia.
If declining trade turnover ($36 billion to $16 billion) isn't bad enough, another "systemic issue" is that Russia has been discussing WTO entry "for 17 years already," said Putin with a note of exasperation. "Only three questions remain. And we keep walking around this triangle. But in reality, they don't pose any serious significance either for the US economy or for our economy."
Putin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told The Moscow News that the three issues referred to in the speech are "difficult, unresolved issues that still remain" in the negotiations.
Clinton, meanwhile, said she was "committed" to Russia joining the WTO and that talks were ongoing to "facilitate" the process.
By way of a warm welcome, Putin praised past cooperation on combating terrorism and regulating conflicts in the Middle East, calling Clinton's talks with President Dmitry Medvedev and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov productive.
Though Lavrov had said earlier that the "reset has indeed become a reality," it appears that it could still be a challenge to keep a slew of unresolved issues from slowing it down.
Clinton's recent Moscow visit, her second since becoming Secretary of State, seemed to bring those issues to the fore. They were particularly distinct against a backdrop of pledges that the new nuclear reduction treaty between the two countries would be signed in April, without a date actually being set.
Missile defense linkage and verification procedures were two of the sticking points in the START Treaty negotiations, but any number of potential bargaining points appeared to be complicating the process.
For instance, during the Clinton-Lavrov meeting on Thursday, Putin, chairing an unrelated nuclear energy meeting in Volgodonsk, announced that Russia would soon start up its nuclear reactor in the Bushehr plant in Iran.
Although the start-up has already been delayed several times, the remark seemed to catch Clinton off-guard. "We think it would be premature to go forward with any project at this time because we want to send an unequivocal message to the Iranians," she told journalists.
Lavrov, however, insisted that Moscow would go through with starting up the reactor.
This, together with Putin's tirade of trade complaints on Friday, appeared to add additional pressure to ongoing talks between the United States and Russia.
Still, Putin, who had previously stood firm on not conceding to new sanctions against Iran, admitted Friday that this could be a possibility, deputy chief of staff for foreign affairs, Yuri Ushakov, told journalists.
While both President Dimitri Medvedev and Lavrov had suggested that new sanctions might be enacted by Russia, it was the first time Putin had done so.
However, sanctions "do not always resolve the issue, and in some cases could be counterproductive," Ushakov said, relaying Putin's statement to Clinton.
Sunday 21 March 2010
Russia to help Ukraine maintain sole submarine
"We are stepping up our work. We received an application of our Ukrainian partners on the technical maintenance of the submarine, which they repaired and which is going to be put to use," Vice Admiral Oleg Burtsev, first deputy chief of the staff of the Russian Navy, said here yesterday.
Relations between the Russian and Ukrainian Navies "are becoming reasonable and humane," he said.
The Zaporozhye diesel electric submarine is the only submarine possessed by the Ukrainian Navy.
It was built in 1972 under Project No. 641 (Foxtrot, under the NATO classification). Its surface speed is 16.4 knots, and the submerged speed is 16 knots. The length of the hull is 91 metres.