MOSCOW — Surprise, surprise.
I landed in Washington in the last week of June just in time to learn that Gazprom-Media boss Alfred Kokh was also in town, doing some more image-polishing. My first thought upon hearing this was: “That’s the end of Ekho Moskvy. He’s here to do damage control in view of the upcoming G-7 meeting in Genoa, to announce his firm intention to make Russia’s best political radio station even more independent – under state patronage – than it was before.”
Last Wednesday I returned to Moscow just in time to learn that five of the station’s editors and 13 of its best journalists had resigned in protest over a new Gazprom move to acquire final and complete control over the only independent national broadcast organ left in Russia. Hardly a coincidence.
Time and again, we must give credit to President Vladimir Putin. At the recent Slovenia summit with U.S. President George W. Bush, Putin conducted the finest counterintelligence operation of his career. He managed to recruit Bush, even as he allowed his American counterpart to think that just the opposite had happened.
Now I’m wondering what Bush is going to say as a eulogy to Russia’s free press. “I trust him until he proves different,” as the president explained in a post-summit interview to? Too late for that, I guess.
He’s proven different? Fat chance. Both administrations are in the heavy bargaining stage of a process that might be called “missiles in exchange for the Baltics.” The essence is that Russia will quietly allow the United States to abrogate the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, while Bush will not insist on expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders and will leave the Baltic states out of the alliance.
But the approach adopted by Bush – read my lips, and in exchange I will close my eyes on everything else including the demolition of Russia’s free press – is a shortsighted one.
