Moscow Daily Newspaper: The Gazette…

January 27, 2012, 1:45 AM EST

By Henry Meyer and Ilya Arkhipov

(Updates with Russian lawmaker’s comments in 21st paragraph.)

Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is stepping up rhetoric against the U.S. as his campaign for the March 4 presidential election intensifies after the biggest protests against his rule.

The U.S. “wants to control everything” and takes decisions unilaterally on key questions, Putin said on a campaign stop yesterday in the Siberian city of Tomsk, 3,100 kilometers (1,900 miles) east of Moscow. “Sometimes I get the impression the U.S. doesn’t need allies, it needs vassals.”

Putin, 59, is seeking a new term in the Kremlin amid the biggest challenge to his 12-year rule after fraud allegations at parliamentary polls sparked mass protests. The Russian leader, who has repeatedly accused the U.S. of interfering in other countries’ affairs, said last week that reports by a state-owned Moscow radio station supported American interests.

“The No. 1 reason Putin is doing this is elections. Jan Techau, director of the European Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Brussels, said yesterday in a phone interview. ‘‘It’s pre-election saber-rattling. This is vintage Putin.’’

Putin’s remarks added to anti-American rhetoric after a senior member of his ruling United Russia party said Jan. 24 that new U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is trying to fuel revolution by meeting with opposition leaders.

‘Reset’ in Relations

Efforts to improve relations with the U.S. under the so- called ‘‘reset’’ policy of President Barack Obama were spearheaded by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who agreed in September to make way for Putin’s return in March 4 elections.

Medvedev yesterday, while forecasting the disagreement between Russia and the U.S. over American plans to station missile-defense facilities in Europe would continue to bedevil relations and would get much worse from 2018 to 2020.

‘‘Medvedev’s departure is significant to the extent that Putin has a specific attitude to American leaders: he doesn’t trust them,” Fyodor Lukyanov, an analyst at the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow, said yesterday by phone. “The atmosphere will be less constructive.”

U.S.-Russia relations suffered a setback last year when the two nations disagreed over the NATO military campaign that led to the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and U.S.-led attempts to censure Syria at the United Nations for its crackdown on anti-government unrest, which Russia says is part of another attempt at regime change.

Jackson-Vanik

While the U.S. administration has pledged to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a Cold War-era law that barred favorable trade relations with the communist Soviet Union, American lawmakers have questioned annulling the measure and easing trade with Russia.

The Obama administration aims to repeal the legislation this spring, McFaul said on the radio station Ekho Moskvy yesterday.

Keeping the amendment in force risks making U.S. companies unable to take advantage of Russia’s pending entry into the World Trade Organization and deprive the country of a potential doubling of exports to Russia, according to a November report from the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

Trade between the two countries rose 35 percent in 2010 to $31.7 billion, according to the State Department.

Russia’s economy grew 4.2 percent in 2011, faster than the previous year’s 4 percent expansion, Putin said Jan. 12. The 30- stock Micex Index rose 0.7 percent to 1,498.79 yesterday, its biggest daily advance since Jan. 17. The ruble surged to its strongest level in more than two months, closing 0.5 percent higher at 30.72 per dollar.

Missile Defense

The U.S. and its allies say the missile-defense system is meant to protect against threats from outside Europe, such as Iran. Russia says the shield will blunt its nuclear capability and wants the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the U.S. to sign a binding treaty stating the system is not aimed at their defenses, something the Obama administration has refused to do.

Missile defense is “linked to the U.S. desire to strengthen its position as the leader of the Western world,” Putin said. “That’s why they don’t want to cooperate on an equal basis, either with the Europeans or us.”

McFaul, who hosted Russian opposition activists at the U.S. embassy last week, said Obama sent him to Russia to pursue the “reset” policy, rejecting as “nonsense” the accusations that he’s trying to interfere in Russian domestic politics.

Not the Point

“The point of the reset isn’t to prepare a revolution,” McFaul said in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper published yesterday.

Russian opposition groups, who accuse Putin’s party of inflating its vote in December’s parliamentary elections to about 50 percent from 30 percent, plan their next major protest on Feb. 4, a month before the presidential vote.

McFaul, a former professor at Stanford University who was the top White House adviser on Russian affairs before taking up his current post, was pilloried last week on Russian state television as aiming to export revolution.

“We want to understand if we are dealing with a new concept of an ambassador’s role,” said Alexei Pushkov, head of the Russian lower house of parliament’s foreign affairs committee. “Is he an ambassador to the Russian Federation or in part head of a non-commercial organisation promoting democracy?” Pushkov said by phone yesterday.

Twitter Messages

A non-career diplomat, McFaul has been using Twitter Inc. and Livejournal to get out his message, and posted links to the blog of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

“There obviously is a risk: the Russians can be pretty rough on ambassadors they disapprove of, as I know,” said Tony Brenton, U.K. ambassador to Russia from 2004 to 2008, who was hounded by pro-Kremlin youth activists after attending an opposition conference.

“We and the U.S. have to be very careful,” Brenton said yesterday in a phone interview. “We can’t be backing the opposition because that would have counterproductive effects, but what we can legitimately do is insist that Russia observes its international commitments to run honest and fair elections, to allow freedom of the press and freedom of opposition.”

Putin, who was president from 2000-2008, before handing over to Medvedev for four years after serving the maximum two consecutive terms permitted by the constitution, needs to win more than half the vote for a first-round victory.

“The primary concern of the Russian elite is control of the political process,” said Techau. “Now they’re losing control of the political system and this kind of anti-U.S. reaction shows just how nervous the Russian elite has become.”

–With assistance from Stepan Kravchenko in Moscow. Editors: Andrew Langley, Hellmuth Tromm

To contact the reporters on this story: Henry Meyer in Moscow at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net; Ilya Arkhipov in Moscow at iarkhipov@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net

January 27, 2012, 1:31 PM EST

By Henry Meyer

(Adds analyst’s comment starting in fourth paragraph.)

Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin may face a presidential run-off in March against Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov as his support fell for the first time since last month, according to two opinion polls.

Putin, who needs more than half the vote on March 4 to avoid a second round, will get 49 percent, according to the Jan. 21-22 survey of 1,600 people by the state-run All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, known as VTsIOM. He will receive 44 percent, according to a Jan. 21-22 poll of 3,000 people by the Public Opinion Foundation, known by its Russian acronym, FOM.

The Russian leader, 59, who suffered a slide in popularity in recent years, is facing the biggest challenge to his rule since he came to power 12 years ago after mass protests sparked by allegations of fraud in Dec. 4 legislative polls. The opposition plan their next major rally in Moscow on Feb. 4.

“The Kremlin will do everything to ensure Putin wins in the first round,” Stanislav Belkovsky, director of the Moscow- based Institute for National Strategy, said by telephone today. “But the situation is getting out of the Kremlin’s control.”

Nationalist Support

Putin’s voter support is as low as 37 percent, according to an opinion poll by the independent Levada Center, which surveyed 1,600 people on Jan. 20-23 and had a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points. Zyuganov would get 8 percent according to Levada and 11 percent according to VTsIOM and FOM.

The prime minister, whose election campaign has focused on shoring up nationalist support by promising to crack down on illegal immigration and using anti-U.S. rhetoric, won’t succeed in broadening his electoral base, said Belkovsky.

“The people who are swayed by this rhetoric are already Putin supporters,” said the analyst, a former Kremlin adviser. “The rest of the electorate is tired of his rule.”

A Jan. 14-15 opinion poll by VTsIOM released a week ago showed Putin’s voter backing rising four percentage points to 52 percent, with a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points. His support climbed one percentage point to 45 percent in a Jan. 14-15 survey by FOM, which gave no margin of error.

The opposition accused Putin’s United Russia ruling party of inflating its score from 30 percent to about 50 percent in the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections. The prime minister, who was president from 2000 to 2008 and is seeking a new six-year term after four years of his protege, President Dmitry Medvedev, insists the legislative polls were fair.

–Editors: Zoe Schneeweiss, Alan Crosby

To contact the reporter on this story: Henry Meyer in Moscow at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net

Vladimir Putin has told Sky News that he is ‘not concerned’ about recent mass protests calling for him to resign.

The Russian Prime Minister spoke exclusively on the campaign trail in Tomsk, Siberia as he tries to secure his victory in the upcoming presidential election.

‘Protests? What protests?,’ he joked when asked if he thinks the demonstrations will affect his chances of success. ‘I am not concerned. I think about the people – the ordinary people of Russia.’

‘Of course I see the protest groups and I think about what I can do with all of our citizens.’

After 12 years dominating Russia’s political scene, in the midst of a legitimacy crisis, this is Mr Putin’s first campaign tour that really matters.

While in Tomsk, he visited a university where about 100 students eagerly waited to speak with the prime minister.

The next generation of voters have formed a large part of the recent mass protests against his rule.

But Mr Putin had little to worry about on this trip – as with any campaign trail it is stage managed to the last detail.

For over three hours he charmed the fawning teenagers, deftly handling each pre-approved question. They showered him with tame, parochial problems – it became a bit like ‘Vlad’ll Fix It’ as he pledged to solve individual housing and health issues.

None of the students asked about the recent mass protests or his popularity slump but Mr Putin chose to address opposition claims of authoritarianism.

He said: ‘Our country is open. We are not a dictatorship and hopefully never will be again. We have an open and free econom, open country as a whole.’

With only five weeks until the election, most presidential candidates would be trumpeting a trip like this one – but Mr Putin’s team told Sky News it was a low-key visit.

This is perhaps a reminder that despite the protests, he remains peerless: he simply does not actually have to try that hard. It could also be a sign that he recognises that in the current climate his usual macho antics would not sit well.

Flattery goes into overdrive as one fan oddly compares Mr Putin to Steve Jobs and asked how he copes with such a demanding role.

The Russian leader replied that doing a job you love helps – a job that few could argue is in any real jeopardy.