Democrat Eliot Engel, chairman of the U.S. Foreign Committee, and his Republican comrade, Michael McCall, introduced a draft resolution on the violation of human rights in Russia into the lower house. “The resolution calls on the Russian Federation to immediately release political prisoners, and the Trump administration to impose sanctions on those officials in the Russian government who are responsible for human rights violations,” Engel and McCall said in a statement.
In a draft resolution, the US Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury, in order to punish Russian officials, proposed using his powers in the framework of the Magnitsky Act, which generally became a universal tool for influencing those who behave inappropriately - from the US point of view - in a way.
Based on data from the US State Department, the OSCE and international human rights organizations, the resolution requires the Russian authorities to release about 300 people, and six are mentioned in it: Alexey Pichugin, Igor Rudnikov, Konstantin Kotov, Anastasia Shevchenko, Yuri Dmitriev and Dennis Christensen. The personalities mentioned (as well as articles of the Criminal Code) are very different.
Dane Christensen is a preacher of Jehovah's Witnesses *, an organization banned in the Russian Federation but completely legal in the United States. Dmitriev was attracted for depraved actions against a minor stepdaughter (in part in a similar case in the UK, human rights activist V.K. Bukovsky was pulled, and in the United States they are not patted in such cases). Kotova - for a systematic violation of the law on rallies. Pichugin, a former Yukos security chief, for organizing the killings on the orders of Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin.
And there is no certainty that other persons involved in the list are so flattered to be in the same company as Pichugin. Others, at least, can say: "I was not a villain and I did not rob the forest."
Although the quality of the list is understandable. In accordance with the long-standing custom of US deputies, they prepared it anyhow. You might think that the list of people who tortured Magnitsky was compiled with great knowledge of the matter. In the same way: those who were guilty, half-guilty, quarter-guilty, and dried with them on the same wattle fence. The strength of American democracy is not competence, but inexorable determination.
There is nothing to ask: it was so, it will be so. Another question is why now? “Dear Abram, I finally found the time and place ...”
After all, the draft Washington resolution does not resonate to any degree with domestic Russian sentiments and demands. Society as a whole is indifferent, but even the opposition public has forgotten their heroes in order. No one fits Pichugin at all, and the protection of others is far from active.
They can, of course, say that epidemic prohibitions are to blame - you will not picket and march. But the Internet is functioning. In the old days, all sorts of corporate petitions were written - now everything is dull. And if they appeal to something, then more and more to the distribution of public money.
Perhaps the expectation is that the resolution from across the ocean will wake civil society and encourage it to resume the defense of the unjustly convicted. Type: "The members of the US Congress themselves are with us!" But the activity of civil society, depending on American resolutions, does not make the most convincing impression.
However, most likely, no such complex reasoning was made in the Capitol. Just the food should not cool, and the Russians all the time need to show that sentinel freedom on the line. Hence the forthcoming 257th American resolution.
Its practical significance, both in the sense of releasing the “prisoners of conscience” and in the sense of pressure on Moscow, forcing it to cede the United States in some other matter (for example, Chinese or nuclear missile), is zero. The position on the chessboard is such that Russia does not particularly need anything from the USA (all the more so since Washington’s promises are not worth the paper on which they are written), and the USA needs a lot from Russia, because the overseas power is very confused.
Under these conditions, the next resolution on Russian affairs is simply autonomous activity for the sake of activity. A ritual that cannot be abandoned.
* The Jehovah’s Witnesses Management Center in Russia (Jehovah’s Witnesses) is a religious organization recognized as extremist and banned on the territory of Russia (decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of 04/20/2017, appeal ruling of the Appeal Panel of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of 07/17/2017).
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.