Russian President Vladimir Putin's leading opponent in next month's presidential elections has accused the Kremlin of orchestrating a vicious media onslaught which has compared him to Adolf Hitler, made lurid charges about his sex life, and said he is funded by some of the businessmen against whom his campaign is focused.
Sergei Glazyev, who is trying to create a social democratic alternative in Russia, has been targeted by three acidic personal attacks in the media.
"Dirty tricks are the Kremlin's only weapon," he told a group of British journalists. "The Kremlin bureaucracy's idea is to have total control of the political scene. They are afraid of competition. They don't want democracy. The Kremlin organized a tender between public relations companies to produce the best lies."
A Kremlin spokesman haughtily dismissed the allegations, saying Putin's high poll ratings showed Kremlin officials could not be involved.
The tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda accused Glazyev of being funded by the London-based tycoon Boris Berezovsky. Similar accusations appeared yesterday in another large-circulation paper, Moskovsky Komsomlets, calling his candidacy, which advocates higher taxes on big business, "the last hope of the oligarchs."
Glazyev has also been depicted with a Hitler moustache on the cover of the glossy magazine Kompromat, which devotes a 66-page special edition to a detailed character assassination, including wild slurs that he has fathered four children outside marriage.
Sergei Solokov, the editor of Kompromat, which regularly targets prominent Russians, denied having links with the Kremlin. "If we did, then perhaps we would not be in court quite so much," he said.
But he conceded that he had no plans to write about Putin or the other candidates before the election. An economist and former trade minister who broke with the neo-liberal consensus a decade ago, Glazyev joined the Communist party in the hope of transforming it into a social democratic force on the pattern of the rest of eastern Europe.
When the Communists, under their veteran leader, Gennady Zyuganov, declined, Glazyev left and turned to nationalist groups for allies with whom to create the new party Rodina (Motherland). It got a surprising 9 percent in the December elections.
Some Kremlin officials initially supported it as a device to take votes from the Communists and speed their long-term decline.
Glazyev conceded on Thursday that he had discussed Rodina's approach with Putin at a Kremlin meeting last autumn, but "speculation that it was born in the Kremlin is not true. We need to establish social democracy which will combine the European experience of the welfare state with Russian traditions," he said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS