US president meets Russia opposition members
Interfax
Moscow, 7 July: At a meeting with US President Barack Obama Russian opposition members spoke about the difficulty of "resetting" relations in view of disparities between basic values in the Russian Federation and the USA, expressed their opinions about the (legal) case of the former head of the Yukos oil company, Mikhail Khodorkovskiy, freedom of speech and arrests of opposition members, and touched upon the missile defence problem.
"We have had a rather free exchange of opinions. Essentially, Obama did not ask anything and each of us said what they wanted to say. In particular, I spoke about the difficulty of 'resetting' relations," Boris Nemtsov, co-chairman of the Solidarity opposition movement, told Interfax on Tuesday (7 July).
In his opinion, "it is difficult to 'reset' relations because there is no trust".
"For the American leadership the basic values are freedom of speech and democracy, and for our leadership these are censorship and the authorities' monopoly on everything," Nemtsov said.
In his turn, Sergey Mitrokhin, leader of the Yabloko (party), said to Interfax that he had told Obama that "it is necessary to develop Russian-American relations in such a way that the Russian political and military elite is involved in joint projects, which would help the development of democracy in our country".
According to Mitrokhin, he also told the American leader about the "danger of deploying a unilateral missile defence system in Europe".
"Obama replied that he was revising decisions on European missile defence and said that possible joint actions with Russia in this respect in the future could not be ruled out," Mitrokhin said.
The former leader of the former Republican Party, Vladimir Ryzhkov, told journalists that the meeting "was absolutely open". According to him, "the second case against Khodorkovskiy and Lebedev (Platon Lebedev is the former head of the Menatep international financial organization - Interfax); journalists and freedom of speech; political prisoners in Russia; and beatings and arrests at opposition rallies, were discussed".
Ryzhkov said the most important thing was that the meeting had taken place. "The last president who had meetings not just with the authorities but also with the opposition was Bill Clinton," Ryzhkov recalled. In his opinion, Barack Obama has thus let it be understood that it is necessary to build relations not just with the Russian authorities but also with the opposition and civil society.
"Obama promised to help the dialogue between civil society in the USA and Russia," Ryzhkov said.
In his turn, Garri Kasparov, a co-chairman of the Solidarity opposition movement, who attended the meeting, also stressed the importance of the meeting with the opposition. "It was a rather brave move on Obama's part. Our meeting was open. He is informed about what is happening in Russia," the opposition member said.
In Kasparov's view, the American president, by holding meetings not just with officials but also with civil society and representatives of the opposition, has found a balance. "The US president is ready to build relations not just between the White House and the Kremlin but also between the American people and the Russian people," Kasparov said.
At the same time he said that the US president had made no direct comments on the Khodorkovskiy case and that the issue had been raised several times at the meeting.
"When I spoke I said that since Dmitriy Medvedev came to power the situation with human rights has deteriorated. I passed to Obama a brief list of Russian opposition members who have been arrested, attacked or killed in recent years," the Solidarity co-chairman said.
As was reported earlier, eight representatives of Russian opposition parties were included on the list of those whom US President Barack Obama met on Tuesday evening at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he is staying during his visit to Moscow.
At the invitation of the American side, Solidarity co-chairmen Boris Nemtsov and Garri Kasparov, former leader of the former Republican Party Vladimir Ryzhkov, Yabloko leader Sergey Mitrokhin, co-chairman of Right Cause Leonid Gozman, leader of the CPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) Gennadiy Zyuganov, lawyer and member of the Communist party Yelena Lukyanova and State Duma deputy and member of A Just Russia Ilya Ponomarev took part in the meeting.
("I have formed a positive impression about the US president. He is a very sincere person who believes in what he is saying, and democracy for him is a not a tool for achieving goals but a value in which he really believes," Leonid Gozman, co-chairman of the Right Cause party, said, according to an ITAR-TASS report.
According to Gozman, "in this sense he is a promising partner for Russia".
"Obama honestly wants to achieve success in relations with Russia, and I believe that his competent advisers on our country will assist him in this," Gozman said.
"The very fact that the meeting did take place is important," Boris Nemtsov said, according to the same report.
In the opinion of the CPRF press secretary, Aleksandr Yushchenko, the meeting "was held in a positive key". "The impression from the meeting is good. The new US president differs from the previous one in terms of his political methods," Yushchenko said, according to ITAR-TASS. "Bilateral relations between Russia and the USA might take a constructive turn now."
"The American president agreed with many of the positions which we expressed," Yushchenko said. "Obama admitted that at times the USA, too, had problems with the observance of human rights."
At the meeting, which lasted more than an hour, mostly it was representatives of the opposition who expressed their views and Obama had an opportunity to hear all of them. "One could see that the American president really wanted to understand what is happening in Russia," Gozman said. In his own address to the president Gozman said that "only a democratic Russia may be a partner of the USA" and asked Obama "not to believe fairy tales that Russia is not ready for democracy".)
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