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The Moscow Times was the only newspaper represented at the Russian-American Business Summit where Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama spoke July 7

July 7, 2009 -- The Moscow Times published a special full-color issue of the newspaper timed to coincide with the visit of U.S. President Barack Obama to Moscow on July, 7, 2009.

The newspaper was presented at the Russian-American Business Summit, which was organized by the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) and the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) at the Manezh Exhibition Hall. The forum drew more than 700 key representatives of Russian and international business, the political elite and nongovernmental organizations.



Friday, July 10, 2009 Updated at 10 July 2009 13:11 Moscow Time.

The Moscow Times » Issue 2228 » Editorial

FSB Witness Must Make Putin Blush

28 June 2001Editorial

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Every time the local FSB in Voronezh speaks out on the case of American student John Tobin — convicted on drug charges in April and now serving a one-year sentence — the whole matter becomes more suspicious. If it were not that a young man is sitting in jail on a conviction that may well be nothing but the result of the misguided efforts of some provincial upstart with delusions of petty dictatorship, we might even think the whole thing farcical.

When the Tobin case originally broke, it will be recalled, the eager beavers at the Voronezh FSB were quick to go public with claims that they were "considering" filing espionage charges. After making a lot of noise and unprofessionally biasing the case before it went to trial, the spymasters had to admit they could come up with no more damning evidence that Tobin was a spy than that he had attended the Defense Language Institute and was a U.S. military reservist.

Now these tin-plated bureaucrats have trotted out a man named Dmitry Kuznetsov who claims that Tobin interrogated him more than three years ago when he was in jail in the United States on charges of embezzling grant funds from an American university. Kuznetsov claims that Tobin — who was 20 years old at the time — approached him in jail and tried to get him to work for the FBI. Tobin also quizzed him about a number of American professors who were his friends, Kuznetsov claims.

Instead of quietly investigating these seemingly improbable assertions and turning up testimony from Kuznetsov's American colleagues that he is a liar, a plagiarist, an unethical scholar and a thief, the Voronezh FSB immediately went public with their "evidence."

Kuznetsov's flimsy story, which would not constitute evidence of any crime even if it turned out to be true, "does confirm that the FSB was on the right track in suspecting Tobin of working for U.S. intelligence," Voronezh FSB spokesman Pavel Bolshunov said Tuesday.

OK. We live in a country where the justice system is so undeveloped that law enforcement officials are not worried about things like prejudicing cases or making specious public accusations. We know this.

But we are also living in a country where the president, the defense minister and other senior officials are proud products of the KGB and the FSB. Even if such embarrassing unprofessionalism by their provincial colleagues isn't enough to make them act, you would think it's sufficient to at least make them blush.