← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · wild_bill
Thread ID: 12227 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2004-02-09
2004-02-09 02:56 | User Profile
NYT
February 8, 2004
Challenger to Putin for Russian Presidency Is Missing
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
MOSCOW, Feb. 8 - One of Vladimir V. Putin's challengers in next month's presidential election is missing, and the police and security services announced today that they had begun a search for him.
Ivan P. Rybkin (Jew?), a former Parliament speaker and national security adviser under Boris N. Yeltsin, has not been seen or heard from since Thursdayevening, raising fears among his family and campaign aides that something dire had happened to him.
"We are trying not to let such ideas come to mind," said Aleksandr V. Tukayev, a campaign official and the deputy chairman of Mr. Rybkin's party, Liberal Russia, "but it is hard not to think about it."
Mr. Rybkin's whereabouts have added a bizarre drama to a torpid presidential campaign that is universally expected to end with Mr. Putin's re-election on March 14.
Mr. Rybkin, 57, has been one of the most unabashed critics of Mr. Putin and his policies, but like Mr. Putin's five other challengers he has struggled to build political support and get his message heard, especially on state television. In polls, he has fared even worse than the others, receiving the support of fewer than 1 percent of voters.
Mr. Rybkin's Liberal Russia has been at the center of political intrigue and violence ever since it was created in 2002.
Its patron is Boris A. Berezovksy, a businessman and former Kremlin insider, who has become one of Mr. Putin's fiercest critics after moving to London in self-exile to escape fraud charges he says are politically motivated. Mr. Berezovsky first raised concerns about Mr. Rybkin's whereabouts in an interview on Friday.
Mr. Rybkin did not appear at a scheduled news conference on Friday, his aides said. Nor did he surface to make any statement on Saturday, as would be expected, when the country's election commission officially registered his candidacy in the election.
A spokesman for the Moscow police said that Mr. Rybkin's wife, Albina, submitted an official statement today about his disappearance. She told the police that her husband had not been seen since he arrived at their apartment sometime after 7 P.M. on Thursday and let his bodyguards go home. He was not there when his wife arrived after 11, she said.
Under Russian law, a person is not considered missing until three days have passed. Mr. Tukayev said that given Mr. Rybkin's prominence, the authorities should have begun a search immediately.
"In any civilized country, all the security services would be on their feet," he said.
In the last 18 months, two of the members of Mr. Rybkin's party in the Parliament, Sergei N. Yushenkov, and Vladimir I. Golovlyov, have been shot to death on the streets of Moscow in murky circumstances.
Shortly before he was killed, Mr. Yushenkov split with Mr. Berezovksy and another party leader, Mikhail N. Kodanev, has since been charged with the murder. Party officials say he has been falsely accused.
While the election commission refused to let the party participate in last December's parliamentary elections, Mr. Rybkin's supporters collected enough signatures to qualify him for a spot on the presidential ballot.
On Saturday, however, the chairman of the election commission, Aleskandr A. Veshnyakov, said the commission had provided prosecutors with what he said was evidence that some of his qualifying petitions were fraudulent. If that is proven, prosecutors could still disqualify him as a candidate.
Two other presidential challengers - Sergei Y. Glazyev, a leader of the nationalist Motherland Party, and Irina M. Khakamada of the liberal party Union of Right Forces - were also cleared today to run. But they too now face investigations into the veracity of some of the signatures they collected, election officials told the Interfax news agency.
Kseniya Y. Ponomaryova, Mr. Rybkin's campaign chairman, said in an interview tonight that another party official had spoken with him by telephone at 8:40 p.m. on Thursday. By 10 P.M., he was not answering his mobile telephone. Albina Rybkin said today that when she arrived home on Friday night, she found that her husband had taken off a shirt and left dishes in the kitchen, but there were no signs of a struggle or violence. His cars were still in the garage.
She discounted the possibility he was aboard the subway train struck by a bomb on Friday morning, killing at least 39, since he does not routinely use the subway. She also discounted the possibility that he had left on his own. "It is absolutely not like him," she said.
Mr. Rybkin, an agriculture specialist and former Communist Party member, has been a prominent political figure since the collapse of the Soviet Union, first as an opponent of Mr. Yeltsin and later as a security adviser to him. Mr. Rybkin participated in the peace talks that end the first war in Chechnya in 1996 and remains an advocate of efforts to end the second Chechen war, now in its fifth year.
As a candidate, he has criticized Mr. Putin, saying he was an authoritarian who is closely linked to the wealthy businessmen who wield disproportionate control of the country's economy, so long as they remain in the Kremlin's good graces. In an interview last month, Mr. Rybkin said he was concerned about the erosion of democratic freedoms in Russia and the continued economic hardship of ordinary Russians.
"Russia," he said then, "is turning a new and very shameful leaf."
2004-02-09 02:58 | User Profile
Putin has top ratings. To stir the shit now, as some idiots suggest he's doing, would be utter stupidity. One can argue that this is benefitial to Putin's detractors, so they can be behind it.
2004-02-10 23:52 | User Profile
Rybkin's explanation doesn't make sense. Did someone "ask" him to dissapear for a while? The greasy zhid Berezovsky was Rybkin's backer, as per the article.
By Alexander Reshetnikov
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin, whose mystery disappearance prompted talk of electoral dirty tricks, flew back to Moscow Tuesday looking weary despite saying he had merely taken an impromptu vacation.
A critic of President Vladimir Putin, Rybkin said he might quit next month's race. His main financial backer said his political career appeared anyway to be over.
Rybkin had left his wife and aides guessing fearfully at his fate for five days before calling from Ukraine to say he had been with "friends" and was "stunned" at the fuss.
Rybkin looked pale as he left a Moscow airport and gave puzzling answers to question. He railed against "arbitrariness" in politics and suggested he encountered difficulties in Kiev.
Rybkin, who had last been seen in Moscow Thursday, had resurfaced earlier in the day in the Ukrainian capital to tell Russian media he had left Moscow without telling his wife or campaign workers and could not understand the fuss this caused.
Speaking at the airport, the former speaker of parliament and negotiator with Chechen separatists said he was tired after what he had earlier called a holiday.
"I've come back feeling as though I have just completed a round of Chechnya (news - web sites) negotiations. I am pleased to be back," Rybkin said, wearing dark glasses and looking at the ground.
He dodged the question when asked whether he had been held against his will.
"It's quite difficult to hold me," he said. "I believe there are also good people in Kiev and I am very grateful to them.
"I have never seen or felt such arbitrariness in 15 years in politics," he said.
Like the other challengers in the March 14 poll, Rybkin poses no serious threat to Putin's bid to secure a second term.
But he has been strident in his criticism of the president, accusing him of crushing independent media and mismanaging the drive against Chechen separatists.
SHORT BREAK
Rybkin had earlier told Russian media that he had gone to Ukraine feeling he was entitled to a short break.
"I didn't disappear anywhere. I bought a newspaper today and was stunned," Ekho Moskvy radio quoted him as saying in Kiev. He told Interfax news agency: "I went to Kiev to my friends, walked around, switched off my cell phones, and didn't watch TV."
He had sought a respite "from the fuss which has surrounded me. I left fruit and money for my wife, who is now taking care of our grandchildren, but didn't tell her anything. I changed my jacket, got on the train and left for Kiev."
Exile billionaire Boris Berezovsky, Rybkin's main political backer, said the incident appeared to have finished the candidate's political career.
"I believe that if what he says is true, then he no longer exists as a politician. His political career is certainly finished ... This is not to Putin's advantage or to my advantage," Berezovsky, a bitter critic of Putin now enjoying political asylum in Britain, said by telephone.
Berezovsky said he met Rybkin in London last Tuesday and had "no explanation for the fact that he may have simply run off."
Rybkin, 57, went missing two days before being formally registered as a candidate for the presidential poll.
Rybkin is a senior figure in the small Liberal Russia party. Another party leader, Sergei Yushenkov, was assassinated last year and witnesses at his alleged killers' trial in Moscow suggest he was killed because of rivalries within the party.
2004-02-11 00:33 | User Profile
Good to see you back, wm. The evil axis of pagans on this forum needed reinforcements. I liked your serene avatar, some winter scenery, better, by the way.
Putin is too contemprorary and concrete for an avatar. Also, "avatar recognition" is a factor.