MOSCOW: In Russia, where all governors and mayors are either Kremlin nominees or hail from Kremlin-friendly parties, Yevgeny Roizman cuts an odd figure.
The mayor of Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city with 1.4 million people, is the only top regional official to openly criticize President Vladimir Putin. He has also called for a boycott of Sunday’s presidential vote, a move advocated by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is banned from running.
Yet Roizman still epitomizes the helplessness of Russia’s opposition in the face of Putin’s well-oiled government machine.
Roizman is an outlier in Putin’s system of government, where every official — from a village chief to the governor — explicitly answers to and serves the Russian president.
While millions of public workers are busy rooting for Putin and urging residents to vote, Roizman has dismissed the presidential vote as sham.
“You can ask anyone and everyone will tell you who is going to win this election. What’s the point in going to vote then?” he told The Associated Press.
But making public statements is the only thing Roizman is free to do. In the president’s “power vertical,” as Putin once named it, if those who oppose him are not already sidelined or jailed, they simply have no executive powers or budgets to take on the Kremlin.
A former convict and leader of a vigilante anti-drug movement, 55-year-old Roizman might seem unelectable. But in his hometown of Yekaterinburg in the Urals, he won a tight mayoral race against a pro-government candidate in 2013.
A visitor to Roizman’s office is immediately struck by the glaring absence of the one requisite symbol of power in Russia: a portrait of Putin. On his first day, Roizman hung a portrait of dissident poet Josef Brodsky. His office is open, and his hour-long interview with the AP was interrupted when a retiree stepped in to complain about his low pension.
When Roizman ran for office, one of his campaign promises was to improve the quality of water in this industrial city. But once elected, Roizman realized he was unable to do that.
“I have no budget to spend,” Roizman said. “The city has been stripped of its major powers, its major sources of income.”
Like other regional capitals, Yekaterinburg in the 2000s fell victim to Putin’s “power vertical” concept, which was presented as an antidote to lawlessness and the lack of coordination between the federal government and regional authorities.
But in the end, that policy simply forced Russian regions to send most of their revenues to Moscow. Now they receive back only a fraction. The system was supposed to help economically struggling regions like the North Caucasus, but it has angered wealthier cities like Yekaterinburg and Kazan, which feel they are paying for corruption and mismanagement several time zones away.
Roizman’s background reflects Russia’s ups and downs since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. He spent more than two years in prison in the 1980s for robbery and fraud, something he describes as a youthful mistake.
After stints making jewelry and researching local history, Roizman made his name by forming a volunteer group to stem a drug epidemic in the Urals. Official estimates in 2003 put the number of drug users in this region of 4 million at 235,000 people.
“We had a drug catastrophe,” Roizman recalled. “Ambulances were driving around picking up corpses from the sidewalks.”
Yekaterinburg, which still has some of Russia’s highest HIV rates because of the ‘90s drug epidemic, lies on the drug route that ran from Afghanistan and Central Asia to Europe. It’s about 1,050 miles (1,700 kilometers) east of Moscow. He says the police were at best helpless to deal with the drug dealers, and at worst profiting from the drug business.
Roizman and his colleagues began to track down and round up drug dealers and set up private rehab clinics to which desperate families sent their addicted relatives. Many credit the City Without Drugs foundation for fighting Russia’s narcotics epidemic, but others remember reports of drug users locked up in rehab clinics against their will.
Roizman vehemently denies any wrongdoing and says he saved the lives of “thousands.”
His 2013 win was also improbable because of his scathing criticism of the Kremlin.
Bashing the Kremlin from the sidelines is dangerous, but doing so within the system is almost impossible. Two other regional opposition leaders have been imprisoned on charges seen as retribution for their lack of compliance.
Nikita Belykh, former governor of the Kirov region who once employed Navalny as an unpaid aide, was arrested and sentenced this year to eight years in a high-security prison for accepting 600,000 euros ($740,000) in bribes.
Yevgeny Urlashov, who won a landslide victory in Yaroslavl’s mayoral race in 2012, was arrested a year later and spent three years in jail before being found guilty of accepting bribes and sent to prison for 12 1/2 years.
The popular Urlashov, who criticized the federal government for taking away the city’s taxes, posed a tangible threat to the Kremlin, Roizman said, because he convinced supporters to take to the streets.
“That scared them,” Roizman said.
Urlashov would not cooperate with local pro-Kremlin elites, so Moscow retaliated by cutting back the city’s budget. A year later, the mayor was slapped with bribery charges that many considered fabricated.
Roizman was going to run for governor of the Yekaterinburg region last year, a position that would give him a budget to spend, but he failed to gain enough required votes from local pro-Kremlin lawmakers to field his candidacy.
Roizman says he’s glad he didn’t get to run and win because of the inevitable Faustian bargains that he says all Russian politicians face under Putin. What would happen, he asks, if Kremlin authorities summoned him and offered to build the city a second subway line in exchange for his public support of the presidential election?
“What would I do?” Roizman said. “I’m ashamed to say it but I know what I would do: I would cast my eye and say ‘Everyone should to go to vote.’ I would trade it for the second metro line.”
Now, in a visible though largely powerless position, the only thing left for Roizman to do is “stay true to myself” and call for a boycott of Sunday’s presidential election.
“There will never be a fair election under this government,” he said. “They have only one goal: to stay in power forever.”
Russia’s rebel mayor calls for presidential election boycott
Russia’s rebel mayor calls for presidential election boycott
Malaysian court drops one of the graft cases against jailed former premier Najib Razak
Najib had already been convicted in his first graft case tied to the 1Malaysia Development Berhad state fund, or 1MBD, scandal and began serving time in 2022 after losing his final appeal in his first graft case.
But he faces other graft trials including Wednesday’s case in which he was jointly charged with ex-treasury chief Irwan Serigar Abdullah with six counts of misappropriating 6.6 billion ringgit ($1.5 billion) in public funds. The money was intended as 1MDB’s settlement payment to Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Company.
The Kuala Lumpur High Court discharged the pair after ruling that procedural delays and prosecutors’ failure to hand over key documents were unfair to the defense, said Najib’s lawyer, Muhammad Farhan. A discharge doesn’t mean an acquittal as prosecutors reserve the right to revive charges against them, he said.
“The decision today was based on the non-disclosure of critical documents, six years after the initial charges were brought up, which are relevant to our client’s defense preparation. Therefore the court correctly exercised its jurisdiction to discharge our client of the charges,” Farhan said.
Najib set up 1MDB shortly after taking power in 2009. Investigators allege more than $4.5 billion was stolen from the fund and laundered by his associates to finance Hollywood films and extravagant purchases. The scandal upended Najib’s government and he was defeated in the 2018 election.
Najib, 71, issued a rare apology in October for the scandal “under his watch” but reiterated his innocence.
Last month, he was ordered to enter his defense in another key case that ties him directly to the 1MDB scandal. The court ruled that the prosecution established its case on four charges of abuse of power to obtain over $700 million from the fund that went into Najib’s bank accounts between 2011 and 2014, and 21 counts of money laundering involving the same amount.
In addition, Najib still has another money laundering trial. His wife Rosmah Mansor and other senior government officials also face corruption charges.
Pakistan ends lockdown of its capital after Imran Khan supporters are dispersed by police
- The police operation came hours after thousands of Khan supporters, defying government warnings, broke through a barrier of shipping containers
- Tension has been high in Islamabad since Sunday when supporters of the former prime minister began a “long march” from the restive northwest to demand Khan’s release
ISLAMABAD: Authorities reopened roads linking Pakistan’s capital with the rest of the country, ending a four-day lockdown, on Wednesday after using tear gas and firing into the air to disperse supporters of imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan who marched to Islamabad to demand his release from prison.
“All roads are being reopened, and the demonstrators have been dispersed,” Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said.
Khan’s wife, Bushra Bibi, who was leading the protest, and other demonstrators fled in vehicles when police pushed back against the rallygoers following clashes in which at least seven people were killed.
The police operation came hours after thousands of Khan supporters, defying government warnings, broke through a barrier of shipping containers blocking off Islamabad and entered a high-security zone, where they clashed with security forces.
Tension has been high in Islamabad since Sunday when supporters of the former prime minister began a “long march” from the restive northwest to demand his release. Khan has been in a prison for over a year and faces more than 150 criminal cases that his party says are politically motivated.
Hundreds of demonstrators have been arrested since Sunday.
Bibi and leaders of her husband’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party fled to Mansehra in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where the party still rules.
Khan, who remains a popular opposition figure, was ousted in 2022 through a no-confidence vote in Parliament.
Anti-mine treaty signatories slam US decision to send land mines to Ukraine
- Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the mines “very important” to halting Russian attacks
- Ukraine receiving US mine shipments would be in “direct violation” of the anti-mine treaty
Siem Reap, Cambodia: Washington’s decision to give anti-personnel mines to Ukraine is the biggest blow yet to a landmark anti-mine treaty, its signatories said during a meeting.
Ukraine is a signatory to the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention which prohibits the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of land mines.
The United States, which has not signed up to the treaty, said last week it would transfer land mines to Ukraine to aid its efforts fighting Russia’s invasion.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the mines “very important” to halting Russian attacks.
Ukraine receiving US mine shipments would be in “direct violation” of the treaty, the convention of its signatories said in a statement released late Tuesday.
“In the 25 years since the Convention entered into force, this landmark humanitarian disarmament treaty had never faced such a challenge to its integrity,” it said.
“The Convention community must remain united in its resolve to uphold the Convention’s norms and principles.”
Ukraine’s delegation to a conference on progress under the anti-landmine treaty in Cambodia on Tuesday did not mention the US offer in its remarks.
In its presentation, Ukrainian defense official Oleksandr Riabtsev said Russia was carrying out “genocidal activities” by laying land mines on its territory.
Riabtsev refused to comment when asked by AFP journalists about the US land mines offer on Wednesday.
Ukraine’s commitment to destroy its land mine stockpiles left over from the Soviet Union was also “currently not possible” due to Russia’s invasion, defense ministry official Yevhenii Kivshyk told the conference.
Moscow and Kyiv have been ratcheting up their drone and missile attacks, with Ukraine recently firing US long-range missiles at Russia and the Kremlin retaliating with an experimental hypersonic missile.
The Siem Reap conference is a five-yearly meeting held by signatories to the anti-landmine treaty to assess progress in its objective toward a world without antipersonnel mines.
On Tuesday, land mine victims from across the world gathered at the meeting to protest Washington’s decision.
More than 100 demonstrators lined the walkway taken by delegates to the conference venue in Cambodia’s Siem Reap.
Turkiye scales down $23 bln F-16 jet deal with US, minister says
ANKARA: Turkiye has reduced its planned $23 billion acquisition of an F-16 fighter jet package from the United States, scrapping the purchase of 79 modernization kits for its existing fleet, Defense Minister Yasar Guler said late on Tuesday.
NATO member Turkiye earlier this year secured a deal to procure 40 F-16 fighter jets and 79 modernization kits for its existing F-16s from the United States, after a long-delayed process.
“An initial payment has been made for the procurement of F-16 Block-70. A payment of $1.4 billion has been made. With this, we will buy 40 F-16 Block-70 Viper and we were going to buy 79 modernization kits,” Guler told a parliamentary hearing.
“We gave up on this 79. This is why we gave up: Our Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAS) facilities are capable of carrying out this modernization on their own, so we deferred to them,” he said.
The sale of the 40 new Lockheed Martin F-16 jets and ammunition for them will cost Turkiye some $7 billion, Guler added.
Turkiye placed its order in October 2021, two years after the United States kicked the country out of the fifth-generation F-35 fighter jet program over its procurement of a Russian missile defense system.
Turkiye wants to re-join the F-35 program and buy 40 new F-35 jets, Guler also said.
Turkiye is one of the largest operators of F-16s, with its fleet made up of more than 200 older Block 30, 40 and 50 models.
Ankara is also interested in buying Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets, built by a consortium of Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain.
It is also developing its own combat aircraft, KAAN.
Ukrainian delegation visiting Seoul to ask for weapons aid, media reports say
- The group was expected to meet their South Korean counterparts as early as Wednesday, according to the report
SEOUL: A Ukrainian delegation led by Defense Minister Rustem Umerov is visiting South Korea this week to ask for weapons aid to be used by Kyiv in its war with Russia, according to media reports.
The delegation had met with South Korea’s National Security Adviser Shin Won-sik to exchange views on the conflict in Ukraine, the DongA Ilbo newspaper reported on Wednesday, without giving a source.
In an interview with South Korean broadcaster KBS in October, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv would send a detailed request to Seoul for arms support including artillery and an air defense systems.
The South China Morning Post also reported this week that a Ukrainian delegation was due to visit South Korea to request weapons aid, citing an informed source.
The group was expected to meet their South Korean counterparts as early as Wednesday, according to the report.
A spokesperson for South Korea’s defense ministry declined to confirm when asked whether a Ukrainian delegation had arrived in Seoul during a regular media briefing on Tuesday.
Seoul, which has emerged as a leading arms producer, has been under pressure from some Western countries and Kyiv to provide Ukraine with lethal weapons but has so far focused on non-lethal aid including demining equipment.
South Korea’s Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul, asked earlier this month whether Seoul would send weapons to Ukraine in response to North Korea aiding Russia, said all possible scenarios were under consideration and Seoul would be watching the level of participation by North Korean troops in Russia and what Pyongyang received from Moscow in return.