Tag Archives: Putin

Aid trucks hit by air strikes as Syria says ceasefire

Children walk near damaged buildings in rebel-held Ain Tarma, eastern Damascus suburb of Ghouta, Syria September 17, 2016

By Tom Perry and John Davison

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Air raids hit aid trucks near the city of Aleppo on Monday, a monitoring group reported, as the Syrian military declared that a week-long ceasefire was over.

The attacks were carried out by either Syrian or Russian aircraft, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding that there had been 35 strikes in and around Aleppo since the truce ended.

The Observatory said the aid trucks had made a delivery organized by an international organization to an area west of Aleppo. The United Nations and Red Cross said they were investigating the reports.

A local resident told Reuters by phone that the trucks were hit by around five missile strikes while parked in a center belonging to the Syrian Red Crescent in the town of Urm al-Kubra, near Aleppo. The head of the center and several others were badly injured.

The monitoring group said it was not clear if the jets were Syrian or Russian. Moscow supports President Bashar al-Assad with its air force. The Syrian military could not immediately be reached for comment.

The air strikes appeared particularly heavy in insurgent-held areas west of Aleppo, near the rebel stronghold of Idlib province. And in eastern Aleppo, a resident reached by Reuters said there had been dozens of blasts.

“It started with an hour of extremely fierce bombing,” said Besher Hawi, the former spokesman for the opposition’s Aleppo city council. “Now I can hear the sound of helicopters overhead. The last two were barrel bombs,” he said, the sound of an explosion audible in the background.

Abu al-Baraa al-Hamawi, a rebel commander, said the most intense bombardments had taken in place in areas west of Aleppo, the same area where the aid convoy was hit. “The regime and Russians are taking revenge on all the areas,” he said.

The raids came as what is likely to be the final attempt by the U.S. administration of President Barack Obama to find a negotiated solution to the five year old civil war appeared close to collapse.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said it was too early to call the ceasefire finished, and the United Nations said that only Washington and Moscow could declare it over, as they were the ones who had originally agreed it.

Washington said it was working to extend the truce but called on Russia to first clarify the Syrian army’s statement that it was over.

Russian and U.S. officials met in Geneva on Monday to try to extend the truce, and the International Syria Support Group – the countries backing the Syria peace process – was scheduled to meet on Tuesday in New York to assess the agreement.

But both the Syrian army and the rebels spoke of returning to the battlefield.

Syria’s army said the seven day truce period had ended. It accused “terrorist groups”, a term the government uses for all insurgents, of exploiting the calm to rearm while violating the ceasefire 300 times, and vowed to “continue fulfilling its national duties in fighting terrorism in order to bring back security and stability”.

Asked about the army’s statement, Kerry told reporters in New York that the seven days of calm and aid deliveries envisaged in the truce had not yet taken place.

“It would be good if they didn’t talk first to the press but if they talked to the people who are actually negotiating this,” Kerry said. “We just began today to see real movement of humanitarian goods, and let’s see where we are. We’re happy to have a conversation with them.”

Aid was delivered to the besieged town of Talbiseh in Homs province on Monday, the Red Cross said, for the first time since July. The convoy brought in food, water and hygiene supplies for up to 84,000 people, it said.

But most aid shipments envisioned under the truce have yet to go in, especially a convoy destined for rebel-held eastern parts of Aleppo, where some 275,000 civilians are believed trapped without access to food or medical supplies.

“I am pained and disappointed that a United Nations convoy has yet to cross into Syria from Turkey, and safely reach eastern Aleppo,” the U.N. Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Stephen O’Brien said in a statement.

The United Nations said it had received government approval to reach nearly all the besieged and hard-to-reach areas where it sought to bring aid, but access to many areas was still constrained by fighting, insecurity and administrative delays.

Already widely violated since it took effect, the ceasefire came under added strain at the weekend when Russia said jets from the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State killed more than 60 Syrian soldiers in eastern Syria.

Assad called that incident “flagrant aggression”. Washington has called it a mistake.

KERRY’S GAMBLE

The ceasefire is the second negotiated by Washington and Moscow since Russia joined the war. But while it led to a significant reduction in fighting at the outset, violence has increased in recent days and aid has mostly failed to arrive.

Plans to evacuate several hundred rebels from the last opposition-held district of Homs city have also overshadowed the agreement, with rebels saying it would amount to the government declaring the ceasefire over. The Homs governor said the plan had been postponed from Monday to Tuesday.

An end to the truce could doom any chance of the Obama administration negotiating a Syria breakthrough before it leaves office in January. Kerry overcame scepticism of other administration officials to hammer out the deal, gambling on cooperation with Russia despite the deepest mistrust in decades between the Cold War-era superpower foes.

Washington and Moscow back opposite sides in the war between Assad’s government and the insurgents, while both oppose the Islamic State jihadist group. Russia joined the war a year ago on Assad’s side, tipping it firmly in his favor.

The politburo chief of one prominent Aleppo rebel group, Fastaqim, said the agreement had “practically failed and has ended”, adding that it remained to be seen if anything could be done “in theory” to save it.

Zakaria Malahifji, speaking to Reuters from the Turkish city of Gaziantep, also indicated rebel groups were preparing for combat: “I imagine in the near future there will be action by the factions”.

Monitors reported clashes in and around Aleppo on Monday. The government blamed some of the violence on what it said was an insurgent assault, but another rebel official denied they had yet launched new attacks.

The opposition High Negotiations Committee spokesman Riad Nassan Agha said the government side had never committed to the truce: “Air raids by Russian and Syrian warplanes, which haven’t stopped, suggest the truce never started in the first place.”

(Additional reporting by Nikolaj Skydsgaard in Copenhagen, John Davison, Lisa Barrington and Ellen Francis in Beirut, Lesley Wroughton in New York, Stephanie Nebehay and Tom Miles in Geneva; Writing by Tom Perry and Peter Graff; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Pro Putin party wins landslide victory in Russian Election

Russian President Vladimir Putin greets Prime Minister and Chairman of the United Russia party Dmitry Medvedev during a visit to the party's campaign headquarters following a parliamentary election in Russia.

By Andrew Osborn and Dmitry Solovyov

MOSCOW, Russia, Sept 19 (Reuters) – Vladimir Putin won even greater supremacy over Russia’s political system after the ruling United Russia party took three quarters of the seats in parliament in a weekend election, paving the way for him to run for a fourth term as president.

With most votes counted, the party, founded by Putin almost 16 years ago after he first became president, was on track to win 76 percent of the seats in Russia’s Duma, the lower house of parliament, up from just over half in 2011.

That would be its biggest ever majority. Putin’s spokesman called it “an impressive vote of confidence” in the Russian leader and dismissed critics who noted a sharp fall in turnout.

Liberal opposition parties failed to win any seats. Dmitry Gudkov, the only liberal opposition politician to hold a seat before, said he had been beaten by a United Russia candidate.

“The question now is…how to live with a one-party parliament,” Gudkov said.

European election monitors said the vote was marred by numerous procedural irregularities and restrictions on basic rights. Russian officials said there was no evidence of widespread fraud.

Near complete results showed turnout was only around 48 percent, down from 60 percent in 2011, suggesting apathy among some Russians – particularly in Moscow and St. Petersburg – and a softening of enthusiasm for the ruling elite.

Putin, speaking to United Russia campaign staff a few minutes after polling stations closed on Sunday night, said the win showed voters still trusted the leadership despite an economic slowdown made worse by Western sanctions over Ukraine.

“We can say with certainty that the party has achieved a very good result; it’s won,” Putin said at the United Russia headquarters, where he arrived together with his ally, Dmitry Medvedev, who is prime minister and the party’s leader.

Alluding to the spluttering economy, which is forecast to shrink this year by at least 0.3 percent, Putin said: “We know that life is hard for people, there are lots of problems, lots of unresolved problems. Nevertheless, we have this result.”

Putin’s aides are likely to use the result as a springboard for his own re-election campaign in 2018, though he has not yet confirmed whether he will seek another term.

 

Members of local election commission count unused ballots at polling station following parliamentary election in Moscow

Members of a local election commission count unused ballots at a polling station following a parliamentary election in Moscow, Russia, September 18, 2016. REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev

 

“OVERWHELMING MAJORITY”

United Russia won 343 seats of the total of 450 in the Duma, the Central Election Commission said, after 93 percent of ballots had been counted.

That is up from 238 seats in the last parliamentary election, in 2011, and is enough to allow United Russia to unilaterally change the constitution, though Putin can run again under the existing one as he was prime minister between his second and third terms.

Other parties trailed far behind.

According to the near complete official vote count, the Communists were on track to come second with 42 seats, the populist LDPR party third with 41, and the left-of-centre Just Russia party fourth with 21 seats. All three tend to vote with United Russia on crunch issues and avoid direct criticism.

Among voting irregularities witnessed by Reuters were several people voting twice in one polling station in the Mordovia region of central Russia. Official results in another area showed a turnout double that recorded on the spot.

After the last election, in 2011, anger at ballot-rigging prompted large protests in Moscow and the Kremlin will be keen to avoid any repeat of that.

Ilkka Kanerva, a Finnish parliamentarian and special coordinator for the elections from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the OSCE had noted some improvements, including greater transparency when it came to administration.

But he said the overall picture was beset by problems. “Legal restrictions on basic rights continue to be a problem. If Russia is to live up to its democratic commitments, greater space is needed for debate and civic engagement,” he said.

TURNOUT DOWN

Election officials said on Monday that turnout was nearly 48 percent, substantially lower than the 60 percent turnout at the last parliamentary election across Russia’s 11 times zones, which stretch from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea.

Commenting on the turnout, Putin, at the United Russia campaign HQ, said it was “not as high as we saw in previous election campaigns, but it is high.”

His spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the “overwhelming majority” of voters had come out for Putin in “an impressive vote of confidence”. It would be wrong to call the turnout low, he said, adding that it was higher than in most European countries.

The return of an old voting system, under which half, rather than all, deputies were drawn from party lists with the other half decided by people voting for individuals, boosted United Russia’s seats. Near final results showed it won 140 seats under the list system and 203 seats from the constituency system.

REFLECTED GLORY

United Russia benefits from its association with 63-year-old Putin, who, after 17 years in power as either president or prime minister, consistently wins an approval rating of around 80 percent in opinion polls.

Most voters do not see any viable alternative to Putin and his allies and they fear a return to the chaos and instability of the 1990s, the period immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, if his rule ends.

Many voters are also persuaded by the Kremlin narrative, frequently repeated on state TV, of the West using sanctions to try to wreck the economy in revenge for Moscow’s seizure of Crimea, the Ukrainian region it annexed in 2014.

Putin has said it is too early to say if he will run in 2018. If he did and won, he would be in power until 2024, longer than Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the longest-serving Soviet leader aside from Joseph Stalin.

Liberal opposition politicians, the only group openly critical of Putin, failed to get over the five percent threshold needed for party representation in the Duma, near final results showed. They also failed to break through in constituency races.

(Additional reporting by Dmitry Solovyov and Polina Devitt in Moscow, Jack Stubbs, Olga Sichkar and Svetlana Burmistrova in Ufa, Andrei Kuzmin in Velikiye Luki, Gleb Stolyarov, Alex Winning and Vladimir Soldatkin in Saransk, Anton Zverev in the Tula Region, Anastasia Teterevleva in the Moscow Region, Maria Tsvetkova, Kira Zavalyova, Denis Pinchuk and Oksana Kobzeva; Writing by Christian Lowe and Andrew Osborn; Editing by Philippa
Fletcher)

Palestinian leader Abbas KGB spy in 1980’s according to documents

Gideon Remez, one of the Israeli researchers who said on Thursday that Soviet-era documents showed that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas worked in the 1980s for the KGB, speaks to Reuters during an interview in Jerusalem

By Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Soviet-era documents show that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas worked in the 1980s for the KGB, the now-defunct intelligence agency where Russian leader Vladimir Putin once served, Israeli researchers said on Thursday.

The Palestinian government denied that Abbas, who received a PhD in Moscow in 1982, had been a Soviet spy, and it accused Israel of “waging a smear campaign” aimed at derailing efforts to revive peace negotiations that collapsed in 2014.

The allegations, first reported by Israel’s Channel One television on Wednesday, surfaced as Russia pressed ahead with an offer by Putin, made last month, to host a meeting in Moscow between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Both leaders have agreed in principle to a summit, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Thursday, but it gave no date.

Gideon Remez, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Truman Institute, said an Abbas-KGB connection emerged from documents smuggled out of Russia by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin in 1991.

Some of the material, now in the Churchill Archives of Britain’s Cambridge University, was released two years ago for public research, and the Truman Institute requested a file marked “the Middle East”, Remez told Reuters.

“There’s a group of summaries or excerpts there that all come under a headline of persons cultivated by the KGB in the year 1983,” he said.

“Now one of these items is all of two lines … it starts with the codename of the person, ‘Krotov’, which is derived from the Russian word for ‘mole’, and then ‘Abbas, Mahmoud, born 1935 in Palestine, member of the central committee of Fatah and the PLO, in Damascus ‘agent of the KGB’,” Remez said.

Abbas is a founding member of Fatah, the dominant faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the main Palestinian nationalist movement. He became Palestinian president in 2005.

The documents cited by Remez did not give any indication of what role Abbas may have played for the KGB or the duration of his purported service as an agent.

A Palestinian official, who declined to be identified as he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said that Abbas had served as an “official liaison with the Soviets, so he hardly needed to be a spy”, without elaborating.

The official said any suggestion that the president was a spy was “absolutely absurd”.

Adding to the intrigue, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, whom Putin has tasked with arranging the Moscow summit, served two stints in the Soviet embassy in Damascus between 1983 and 1994, covering the period in which Abbas was purportedly recruited.

Bogdanov was in the area this week for meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials.

(Additional reporting by Luke Baker; Editing by Pravin Char)

Putin says he doesn’t know who hacked U.S. Democratic Party

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Vladivostok

By Jack Stubbs

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said he did not know who was behind the hacking of U.S. Democratic Party organizations but the information uncovered was important, Bloomberg news agency reported on Friday.

In an interview two days before a G20 meeting in China with U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders, Putin said it might be impossible to establish who engineered the release of sensitive Democratic Party emails but it was not done by the Russian government.

“Does it even matter who hacked this data?” Putin said. “The important thing is the content that was given to the public.”

“There’s no need to distract the public’s attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it,” he added. “But I want to tell you again, I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has never done this.”

The hacked emails, released by activist group WikiLeaks in July, appeared to show favoritism within the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and prompted the resignation of the body’s chairwoman.

A computer network used by Clinton’s campaign, and the party’s fundraising committee for the U.S. House of Representatives were also hacked.

Clinton, who polls show as leading Donald Trump in the campaign for the U.S. presidential election in November, has said Russian intelligence services conducted a cyber attack against her party. Some officials have suggested Moscow is trying to influence the U.S. election.

Putin dismissed the allegations. “We have never interfered, are not interfering and do not intend to interfere in domestic politics,” he said.

“We will carefully watch what happens and wait for the election results. Then we are ready to work with any American administration, if they want to themselves.”

Relations between Russia and United States hit a post-Cold War low in 2014 over the Ukraine crisis, and Washington and Moscow have since clashed over diverging policies in Syria.

Obama said in August he would discuss the cyber attack with Putin if Russia was responsible, but it would not “wildly” alter the two countries’ relationship.

The U.S. election contest has been hard fought and frequently dominated by both candidates’ attitudes toward Russia.

Clinton has rounded on her Republican rival Trump for his perceived praise of Putin and what she says is an “absolute allegiance” to Russia’s foreign policy aims. Trump, in return, has said Clinton’s own close ties to the Russian president deserve greater scrutiny.

Putin said both candidates were using shock tactics and that playing “the anti-Russian card” was short-sighted.

“I wouldn’t like for us to follow their example,” he said. “I don’t think they are setting the best example.”

(Reporting by Katya Golubkova,; Writing by Jack Stubbs,; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Mark Trevelyan)

Putin to hold high level meetings including talks with Erdogan

Russian President Putin shakes hands with Turkish President Erdogan during news conference following their meeting in St. Petersburg

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian leader Vladimir Putin will hold a number of high-level bilateral meetings on the sidelines of Sept. 4-5 summit in Hangzhou, China, a Kremlin aide told reporters on Tuesday.

Putin will hold talks with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Sept. 3 as the “process of normalization of relations between the two countries is under way”, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov said.

After the Russian jet was shot down in November last year near the Syrian-Turkish border, Russia imposed trade restrictions on Ankara. However, the relations started to thaw after conciliatory moves from Ankara in July.

Both already met earlier this month in St Petersburg

On Sept.4, Putin will discuss a need for “a new impetus in bilateral relations” with British Prime Minister Theresa May and he will also meet Saudi Arabia’s powerful deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman to discuss Syrian crisis.

Ushakov also said that a previously agreed trilateral meeting of leaders from Russia, Germany and France, who were poised to discuss Ukraine’s crisis, will not take place.

Instead, Putin will meet separately with French President Francois Hollande on Sept.4 – though the date is still being discussed – and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sept. 5.

Ushakov said that the meeting was called off due to a rising tension over Crimea peninsula.

Putin is also due to talk to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sept 5.

(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin)

Putin tells Erdogan he hopes Ankara can restore order after failed coup

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan attend their meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia,

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin told his visiting Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan he hoped Ankara could fully restore order after a failed military coup last month, saying on Tuesday that Moscow always opposed unconstitutional actions.

Erdogan’s trip to Russia comes as Turkey’s relations with Europe and the United States are strained by what Ankara sees as Western concern about how it handled the abortive coup, in which more than 240 people were killed.

Putin, one of the first to call the Turkish leader to offer his support in the putsch’s aftermath, has positioned himself as a reliable ally even though ties between Moscow and Ankara were thrown into crisis by Turkey shooting down a Russian military jet near the Syrian border late last year.

Welcoming Erdogan in a Tsarist-era palace just outside his home town, Putin signaled on Tuesday he was ready to improve relations with Turkey, which he said had gone from a historical high point to a very low level.

“Your visit today, which you made despite the really complex domestic political situation in Turkey, shows we all want to restart our dialogue and restore our relations,” said Putin, in preliminary remarks before the two men held talks.

Putin then offered Erdogan moral support over last month’s failed military coup.

“I want to again say that it’s our principled position that we are always categorically against any attempts at unconstitutional actions,” said Putin.

“I want to express the hope that under your leadership the Turkish people will cope with this problem (the coup’s aftermath) and that order and constitutional legality will be restored.”

Putin said the two men would discuss how to restore trade and economic ties and cooperation against terrorism.

Russia imposed trade sanctions on Turkey in the wake of the shooting down of its jet and the number of Russian tourists visiting the country fell by 87 percent in the first half of 2016.

Erdogan said Turkey was entering a “very different period” in its relations with Russia, and that solidarity between the two countries would help the resolution of regional problems.

He may also hope his trip to Russia will give pause for thought to some in the West who are nervous about the prospect of a rapprochement between Moscow and Ankara at a time when Turkey’s ties with NATO and the EU are under strain.

(Reporting by Olesya Astakhova/Andrew Osborn in MOSCOW and by Ece Toksabay, Tuvan Gumrukcu and Nick Tattersal in TURKEY; Editing by Alexander Winning)

U.S. weighs dangers, benefits of naming Russia in cyber hack

Hand in front of computer

By Warren Strobel and John Walcott

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Wary of a global confrontation with Russia, U.S. President Barack Obama must carefully weigh how to respond to what security experts believe was Moscow’s involvement in the hacking of Democratic Party organizations, U.S. officials said.

Publicly blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services would bring instant pressure on Washington to divulge its evidence, which relies on highly classified sources and methods, U.S. intelligence officials said.

One option for Washington is to retaliate against Russia in cyberspace. But the intelligence officials said they fear a rapid escalation in which, under a worst-case scenario, Moscow’s sophisticated cyber warriors could attack power grids, financial systems and other critical infrastructure.

Washington also has diplomacy to manage with Russia in Secretary of State John Kerry’s long-shot attempt to enlist Moscow’s help in ending the Syrian civil war and sustaining the Iran nuclear deal, as well as Russia-NATO tensions over Ukraine and Eastern Europe to manage.

“Despite how outrageous it is to interfere with a democratic election, the costs of coming out and saying the Russians did it would far outweigh the benefits, if there would be any benefits,” said one intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Russia has denied responsibility for hacking the emails of the Democratic National Committee. Also attacked were a computer network used by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the party’s fundraising committee for House of Representative candidates in the Nov. 8 election.

Other current and former officials are arguing for a firm response, however. They said the hack was the latest in a series of aggressive moves by Putin, including Russia’s annexation of Crimea, military intervention to rescue Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and funding of right-wing and anti-European Union groups in Europe.

Columbia University cyber security expert Jason Healey said at an annual security forum in Aspen, Colorado, on Saturday that the Russians had been very aggressive in cyberspace too.

“I think the president needs to start looking at brush-back pitches,” Healey said, referring to a baseball thrown near the batter as a warning.

NAME AND SHAME?

Intelligence officials and cyber experts said the intrusions themselves were not that unusual. American spy agencies conduct similar electronic espionage outside U.S. borders.

What made this hack a game-changer, they said, was the public release of the DNC emails, via the pro-transparency group WikiLeaks, in an apparent attempt to affect the election.

Government and party officials said they were unaware of any evidence that WikiLeaks had received the hacked materials directly from Russians or that WikiLeaks’ release of the materials was in any way directed by Russians.

The Justice Department’s National Security Division, which is overseeing the investigation, has publicly charged U.S. adversaries – known as “naming and shaming” – before.

The U.S. government blamed North Korea for a damaging attack on Sony Pictures, and in 2014 indicted five members of the Chinese military for computer hacking and economic espionage.

Among adversary nations with significant cyber capabilities, a list that also includes Iran, the Russian government is the only one the Justice Department has not yet charged.

Obama’s homeland security and counter-terrorism advisor Lisa Monaco said the government has developed “best practices” to investigate cyber attacks and decide when to make the results public.

Monaco, also speaking at the Aspen forum, said that in the Sony case, FBI investigators had high confidence North Korea was responsible. The attack was deemed destructive, as well as coercive, because it was retaliation for a movie parodying North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“Those two things, along with our confidence in the attribution and the ability to talk about it in a way that would not disclose sources and methods and hinder our ability to make such attribution in the future all combined to say, ‘We’re going to call this out’,” she said.

Elissa Slotkin, an acting assistant secretary of defense, said that for the next decade, the U.S. government faced a fundamental question in dealing with Russia: “How do you get the balance right?”

“Are we being too charitable and giving them too many opportunities to come back to the table, or are we providing such a high level of deterrence that we’re potentially provoking them?” Slotkin asked.

(Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball, Jonathan Landay and Arshad Mohammed; editing by Grant McCool)

Russian editor’s fired over stories that irked officials

Man walks towards RBC media group office building in Moscow

By Maria Tsvetkova and Polina Devitt

MOSCOW (Reuters) – A former editor of a Russian media group described how he and colleagues were pushed out over reporting that angered officials, in the first public account of the taming of Russia’s last big news organization willing to take on the Kremlin.

In his first public comments since his dismissal along with two other top editors from RBC media group in May, Roman Badanin told Reuters that he and his colleagues were fired in the wake of a campaign of pressure on the group’s billionaire owner that came to a head after they published a story on the “Panama Papers” leaks.

Last week, RBC managers presented the replacement editors, recruited from state-owned news agency Tass, who told a tense meeting with staff that there would be limits on what and how they could report, according to someone who was present.

RBC’s owner Mikhail Prokhorov, a metals magnate who also owns the Brooklyn Nets U.S. basketball team, had previously shielded its journalists. The group’s news agency, newspaper and television station wrote stories about Putin’s friends and family, and other taboo subjects like the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine.

But after the Panama Papers story in April, which was illustrated with a picture of Putin and alleged that a close childhood friend of the president’s had offshore accounts, the official pressure was turned up a notch.

“It was precisely after this, so I’m told, that the problems started,” said Badanin.

Days after the story appeared, masked law-enforcement officers raided the headquarters of Prokhorov’s holding company Onexim in what officials called a tax investigation.

A short while after, the head of a utility company owned by Onexim group was arrested on suspicion of fraud.

“Apparently the build-up of attacks on the owner became very powerful,” Badanin said. “Listen: searches, criminal cases against the management of the company, demonstrations under their windows. Everything at the same time.”

“PEOPLE WHO DON’T LIKE US”

Badanin said he had long been aware that officials were angry at RBC’s reporting: messages had been passed to its Kremlin reporters and other journalists. A nationalist group led by a pro-Kremlin member of parliament staged several protests in front of the group’s offices, accusing it of spreading pro-Western propaganda.

“Of course there are people in the Kremlin who don’t like us, that is nothing new,” said Badanin.

Under Putin’s 17-year rule, major television stations and newspapers have, one by one, come under the control of state firms or oligarchs loyal to the Kremlin, and their coverage has gone from combative to deferential.

However, RBC under Prokhorov’s ownership gained a reputation as the last big media company willing to write stories about the most sensitive issues. In the past two years it published articles on Putin’s daughter and the business interests of Kirill Shamalov, who Reuters reported last year is Putin’s son-in-law.

On May 13, the group announced that it was firing Badanin, the editor of its news agency, as well as group editor-in-chief Elizaveta Osetinskaya, and the editor of its daily newspaper Maxim Solyus.

One of the aims of the sackings “was that the editorial policy would become more cautious”, Badanin said.

Badanin said he had learned from executives in the media group that officials had, on occasion, called people close to the group’s owners to ask to have some articles removed.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied this: “Nobody, and they will confirm this, ever went to them (RBC) with a demand or a request to not publish anything, and certainly nothing was said to the owner. It is a gross exaggeration, an absolutely gross exaggeration.”

RBC declined to comment, as did Onexim, Prokhorov’s holding group.

By July 7, when RBC General Director Nikolai Molibog presented the new editors recruited from Tass, Elizaveta Golikova and Igor Trosnikov, many journalists had already handed in their notice and others were considering their positions.

Several journalists pressed the new bosses to say if there would be restrictions on what they could report to avoid angering the authorities.

“If someone thinks that you can (publish) whatever, just absolutely everything — that’s not the case,” Trosnikov said, according to a transcript of the staff meeting published by news site meduza.io and which was confirmed as authentic by the person present.

“I can’t say to you that there are no restrictions at all. They exist. If someone believes there aren’t any, they should write for themselves on Facebook.”

(Writing by Christian Lowe; editing by Peter Graff)

Kremlin says Turkey apologized to Putin over plane incident

Russia's President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during a meeting with the United Russia party members in Moscow, Russia, June 27, 2016.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has written to Russian leader Vladimir Putin to apologize over the shooting down of a Russian air force jet by Turkey’s military, the Kremlin said on Monday.

After the Russian jet was shot down in November last year near the Syrian-Turkish border, Russia imposed trade restrictions on Ankara. Putin had said they would not be lifted unless Erdogan apologized over the incident.

There was no immediate comment from Ankara.

In a statement, the Kremlin said Putin had received a letter from Erdogan “in which the Turkish leader expressed his desire to resolve the situation connected to the downing of a Russian military aircraft.”

“The letter states, in particular, that Russia is a friend to Turkey and a strategic partner, with which the Turkish authorities would not wish to spoil relations,” the Kremlin statement said.

It cited Erdogan as saying in the letter: “I want to once again express my sympathy and deep condolences to the family of the Russian pilot who died and I say: ‘I’m sorry.'”

The Turkish lira firmed to 2.9330 against the U.S. dollar from 2.9430 beforehand after the Kremlin said Erdogan had expressed his regret.

(Reporting by Jack Stubbs; Writing by Christian Lowe; Editing by Dmitry Solovyov)

Putin says Russia must strengthen as ‘aggressive’ NATO approaches

Russian President Putin

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia must boost its combat readiness in response to NATO’s “aggressive actions” near Russia’s borders, President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday.

Addressing parliament on the 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, Putin berated the West for being unwilling to build “a modern, non-bloc collective security system” with Russia.

“Russia is open to discuss this crucial issue and has more than once shown its readiness for dialogue,” he said. “But, just as it happened on the eve of World War Two, we do not see a positive reaction in response.”

“On the contrary, NATO is strengthening its aggressive rhetoric and its aggressive actions near our borders. In these conditions, we are duty-bound to pay special attention to solving the task of strengthening the combat readiness of our country.”

The U.S.-led military alliance is increasing its defenses in Poland and the three Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as part of a wider deterrent that it hopes will discourage Russia from any repetition of its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014.

Russia sees NATO’s deterrence plans as hostile.

Drawing historic parallels with the 1930s, Putin said humanity now faced a danger of failing to withstand the fast-spreading threat of terrorism, just as it once failed to unite against the rising power of Nazi Germany.

“The world community did not show enough vigilance, will and consolidation to prevent that war and save millions of lives,” Putin said.

“What kind of a lesson is still needed today to discard old and frayed ideological disagreements and geopolitical games and to unite in the fight against international terrorism?”

(Reporting by Denis Pinchuk; Writing by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Maria Kiselyova and Richard Balmforth)