Fledgling Democracies

*Russia upped the ante this week in the stare-down with Georgia by sending additional troops to Abkhazia. Here, the Chicago Tribune has the back story and an analysis of Russia’s geopolitical aims in the conflict.

*Voice of America chats with Depty Asst Sec of State David Merkel, who says that Russia would do well to take a more “hands-off” approach to the former Soviet states.

• On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko urged Russia not to set aside the Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership, a key treaty setting out relations between the two countries. Russia’s parliament suggested voiding the agreement in retaliation for Ukraine’s EU and NATO ambitions. See the EU Business story here.

• Kazakstan, home to 3.3 percent of the world’s oil reserves, announced that its economy’s growth will slow in 2009, to 6 percent or less after seven years with and average growth of 10 percent thanks to the skyrocketing price of oil. A hefty supply of oil will not be enough to ward off the ill effects of the credit crunch, says this Kazinform story.

In news related to an earlier post, the lawyer for the NGO head who won a constitutional court showdown this week was attacked late Thursday, RIA Novosti reports. Skinheads allegedly beat the attorney on the head repeatedly with wooden sticks, and one attacker said he had “a mission to kill the lawyer.”

The “smuggling” case against Aslamazyan had press freedom significance - the NGO she ran trained broadcast journalists and more than 2,000 Russian journalists had directed a letter protesting her arrest to former president Putin her arrest prompted more than 2,000 Russian journalists to send an open letter of protest to former-president Vladimir Putin.

RIA Novosti (Russian News & Information Agency) political commentator Maxim Krans offers an interesting commentary on a recent World Public Opinion poll that found 44 percent of Russians believe the authorities have the right to control the media to preserve stability, while 69 percent consider Russia’s press to be free. Pollsters even found a significant number of respondents who believe the country’s media has too much freedom.

A handful of former Soviet republics are mentioned in Jonathan Fryer’s nice summary of the Freedom House presentation to the Association of European Journalists on Thursday (Fryer’s blog focuses mainly on European politics).

Freedom House uses a point system to rank countries’ media independence and categorizes them as “free”, “partly free” or “not free.”

Three guesses as to where Russia landed this year…

See Fryer’s post or the Freedom House site for more info.