Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin may be best known for his harsh comments and policies, but it turns out that -- with apologies to ABBA -- he has a talent for a wonderful thing, 'cause everyone listens when he starts to sing.
The happy entertainer behind Putin's icy shell finally came out on December 10 at a charity fund-raiser in St. Petersburg. First making a ham-handed intro on a grand piano, Putin then performed “Blueberry Hill” in English to a clapping world celebrity audience that included Sharon Stone, Kevin Costner and Goldie Hawn.
Aided by a band and back-up singers, a gesticulating Putin, sporting an accent that makes Borat Sagdiyev sound mild, went full out, rasping into a microphone about love's sweet melody and how " all of those vows we made were never to be."
It comes as little surprise the Putin’s act received perhaps the most critical reviews from Russia’s neighbor, Georgia -- a country with a keen sensitivity to music that already knows something about Russian officials and broken vows.
“Why did nobody stop this?” read one post in a long list of comments in an online forum. “Could not at least Sharon Stone go up to him, smack him in the face and grit through her teeth: ‘Stop this, now!’”
One Georgian blogger pled with Putin's archival, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, to spare his country any similar embarrassment and never do the same. “Please, do not do that, Mr. President,” he begged.
If two territorial disputes were not enough, Georgia and Russia are now going head to head over which country has the least professional special services.
The network could have sent Moscow much more information if the Russian special services had not worked "unprofessionally," Merabishvili charged. “Who plants five or six agents in the same helicopter squad?” he mused.
The image of clumsy Russian special services again surfaced in the Georgian media on December 7 with revelations about a series of allegedly Moscow-orchestrated explosions in Tbilisi and western Georgia -- all of which failed.
After taking a short pause, the Russians retaliated in kind.
Commenting on the explosions, the Russian foreign ministry on December 9 termed the blasts "yet another show staged by the Georgian authorities" that " may have warranted a smile in sane people, if not for the news about the death of an elderly woman" during a November 28 explosion in Tbilisi. “This only speaks to the poor professional skills of the Georgian special services.”
The blasts were again an attempt by “Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili . . . to attract attention to himself as the leader of ‘the most democratic and successful state’ in the post-Soviet space, who is up against certain ‘evil forces’ in his reform efforts," the ministry charged. "Comments, as they say, are unnecessary here.”
Armenia's WikiLeak sensation came in the form of allegations about arms transfers to Iran. Azerbaijan took a knock on relations with Iran, Turkey and Russia. Never one to be left behind, Georgia has also jumped on the WikiLeaks bandwagon with alleged US embassy cables that blame the 2008 war with Russia on breakaway South Ossetia.
Georgian media have cited WikiLeaks for the documents, but there's just one catch -- the cables cannot be found on WikiLeaks, nor have any of the site's partner media organizations yet published them.
Georgian blogs which have re-posted the alleged cables do not provide a
link to a WikiLeaks source or otherwise identify how they found the
information.
Georgian news outlets, though, do not seem to have any qualms about this contradiction. Nor do local analysts appear to doubt the documents' authenticity.
WikiLeaks could not be reached to verify that the information came from its own site. The website, reportedly the target of cyber attacks, was not fully functional on November 29.
A case of leaking before WikiLeaking? We do not know.
Greater clarity about the WikiLeaks connection appears to exist in the case of Georgia’s neighbors, Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Don't heave a sigh of relief just yet about Georgia's pledge to not use force against Russia or Abkhazia and South Ossetia in a bid to reclaim the two breakaway territories. Russia says it wants Tbilisi to sign the pledge with the Abkhaz and South Ossetian de facto governments.
In a fiery November 23 speech to the European Parliament, Saakashvili expressed the hope that the pledge should put Tbilisi and Moscow back on speaking terms after a two-year break. The commitment, which echoes US and European suggestions, comes in response to Russia’s insistence on signing non-use of force treaties between Tbilisi and the separatist regions.
Later that evening, Tbilisi allowed Russian consular officers to meet with four Russian citizens detained by Georgia on espionage charges, Interfax reported a source in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as saying.
Saakashvili's statement followed an assertion by British Prime Minister David Cameron that both US President Barack Obama and he had raised the issue of Russia's ongoing troop presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia with Moscow during last week's NATO-Russia Summit.
Georgia’s main television channels spent the better part of the weekend and Monday sounding their trumpets about Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and US President Barack Obama's half-hour-long tête-à-tête at the NATO summit in Lisbon this Saturday.
For domestic audiences, though, the meeting per se is more important than what the two men actually discussed. Washington’s message amounted to the usual drill about the US supporting Georgia’s territorial integrity and Euro-Atlantic acceptance. Georgians have heard this before.
But they have not seen Saakashvili sitting down for a chat with Obama. Since the 2008 war against Russia, critics have charged that Georgia needs to have a new international face for doors to start opening for Tbilisi in Washington and key European capitals. Images of the Saakashvili-Obama handshake helped put a hole in that argument -- as Georgia's government-friendly TV stations were quick to realize.
Nonetheless, the fight goes on. Some Georgian opposition groups are stepping up wobbly efforts to regroup and launch a street protest sequel this week, which marks the seventh anniversary of the 2003 Rose Revolution that brought Saakashvili to power. Remembering the failed protests of the past, many ordinary Georgians, so far, are just responding with a yawn.
The Armenian National Security Service said it closely cooperated with their Georgian counterparts in cracking down on the smuggling scheme. An Armenian scientist told RFE/RL that a lack of uranium enrichment facilities within Armenia means that the nuclear bomb material could not have been produced locally.
There are so many things you can buy for a home collection in the Caucasus's flea markets these days: vintage Soviet posters, samovars, and, now it turns out, highly enriched uranium that will be wrapped in a cigarette box for your convenience.
Two days after its Russian spy crackdown drama and less than two weeks before the November 19-21 NATO summit in Lisbon, Georgia has unveiled the details of a nuclear smuggling case first mentioned this past spring.
According to information shared by the Georgian Interior Ministry with The Guardian and the Associated Press, Georgian police seized 18 grams of nuclear-warhead-grade uranium (89.4 percent-enriched) this March from two Armenian nationals who smuggled the goods into Georgia from Armenia by train. The detained smugglers, who have plead guilty to smuggling Highly Enriched Uranium, hid their wares in a pack of cigarettes inlaid with lead. The wares seem to have slipped past Georgia's US-funded radiation detecting devices, which have been installed at border crossings. Georgian Interior Ministry officials believe the goods were just a test sample from a major batch.
After unveiling the James Bond-like details of an alleged Russian spy conspiracy, Georgia has gone a step further with a gripping TV drama-documentary about the details of the alleged spy ring's operations. Secret messages sent via cheap Turkish flashlights-cum-radio receivers, chips installed in a mobile phone charger, coded messages encrypted in a song by the 1980s pop sensation Chris De Burg; this is just a short list of the alleged espionage antics uncovered by Georgian counterintelligence officials.
The Georgian Interior Ministry offered some details about the spy shocker at a November 5 news conference. Ministry officials said they had arrested 13 people, including four Russian citizens, on charges of supplying classified defense information to Russian intelligence services.
But this was just the trailer. The full premiere of the spy conspiracy was to appear in a prime time documentary aired by the government-friendly television station Rustavi-2.
The documentary, a mix of police footage, interviews and dramatization, told a story that nearly makes the Manchurian Candidate pale in comparison.
Secret meetings in a seaside hotel, infrastructure sabotages, explosions, recruitment of agents through threats and blackmail -- according to Rustavi-2 and the Interior Ministry, these are some of the dark workings of Russia's Georgian spy network. The only thing missing to qualify the documentary for a proper film noir was a femme fatale -- all the arrested suspects were men.
Could Georgia be holding in custody an Anna Chapman of its own?
Suspense is building up around an October 29 Reuters report that Georgia has arrested some 20 individuals on suspicion of espionage for Russia. Georgian police so far have neither confirmed nor denied the information.
When asked to confirm the news at a November 1 press conference, the Foreign Ministry passed the buck to the Interior Ministry. “The Foreign Affairs Ministry has no information about this. This case is being handled entirely by the Interior Ministry,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Nino Kalandadze. The Interior Ministry is expected to unveil the details of its case later this week.
Georgian news services reported on November 1 that the detainees include Batumi hotel manager Ruslan Galogre and, allegedly, his neighbor, a former Armenian Diaspora leader in Achara, the Black Sea region for which Batumi is the seat. Galogre’s wife confirmed her husband's arrest to Interpessnews agency.
Tbilisi, though, says that seeing is believing. The Russians have withdrawn from the village once before only to come back on the same day. “[W]e hope that these words will be matched by actions,” commented Georgian First Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria.
Karasin warned Tbilisi to keep its reactions down this time. “We seriously hope that the European Union Monitoring Mission persuades our Georgian partners to act within the boundaries of decency,” Karasin said.
Bokeria said that Tbilisi welcomes the Russian withdrawal even from the smallest area of Georgian territory. “[B]ut of course we view this only as a part and the first step in the process that must end in full de-occupation of Georgia,” he said.
