In a recent article, Kathy Lally, Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post, gave a detailed account of U.S. [Department of State] officials visiting Russia. During this trip, it was revealed that the next stage of the “reset” policy would focus on human rights.
Michael Posner of the U.S. Department of State visited Russia to investigate the human rights situation.
Last week, a group of U.S. [Department of State] officials, headed by assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Michael Posner, visited Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan to meet human rights activists and Russian opposition leaders.
The goal of the trip was to investigate the ongoing human rights situation in Russia. As Lally writes: “Inside the country…democratic institutions are stunted, demonstrators supporting freedom of assembly are beaten and arrested, and the law is often used to punish enemies rather than protect individuals.” She quotes Posner, who during his visit said that “in this area…we [the U.S.] haven’t gotten progress over several years, we have a particular challenge.”
It’s a challenge indeed for the Obama administration, which despite several strategic achievements during the course of the “reset” (cooperation on counterterrorism, nuclear arms reduction treaty, etc.), is now getting more and more criticism for overlooking human rights issues. To make the “reset” policy less vulnerable to criticism, these issues will now be under closer scrutiny and will be dealt with more harshly.
In the words of Matthew Rojansky, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, this new stage of the policy might be called ”reset 2.0”: “The core of the software remains, but you get additional features.”
Still, it is not yet clear what those additional features will be.
In Nizhny Novgorod, Posner and Thomas O. Melia, deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau, met with local human rights activists. Among them was Stanislav Dmitrievsky, head of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, an NGO that investigates mass murders and other abuses in Chechnya. In his conversation with Posner, Dmitrievsky pushed for the United States “to take action against individuals rather than issuing ineffective broadsides, praising the Magnitsky list, an effort by Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) to ban visas for Russian officials connected to the death in pretrial detention of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a whistleblowing lawyer,” Lally writes.
This meeting highlighted the existing contradictions in the framework of the upgraded ”reset” policy: earlier this week Posner told Ekho Moskvy radio station that the U.S. government would not support the Magnitsky list proposed by Congress in April. He only said that those who violated human rights would be denied entrance to the United States in general.
The inconsistency of the policy was made obvious again at a meeting with students from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. During the course of the Q&A session, Mr. Posner was reluctant to give his assessment of Vladimir Putin’s return as president. “That’s for Russians to decide,” he replied.
It’s hard to imagine that Posner doesn’t know how Russian elections are corrupt and largely manipulated by the government, and that therefore Russian citizens are not participating in the decision-making process. Clearly, in order to succeed, the upgraded “reset” policy needs to become more assertive and consistent not only in word, but in deed as well.
Olga Khvostunova
