Thug life in Russia

Factions within the siloviki thugocracy that runs Russia, having exhausted the possibilities of looting outsiders, are turning on themselves and using the courts as weapons to jail each other. This from Robert Amsterdam, international defense counsel for jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky writing in the Inernational Harald Tribune.

Russia is far more volatile than anyone now wants to believe. We do ourselves no favor by generously pretending that Russia is going to hold some type of “flawed” vote, when the real election will be determined by the scorecard of the clan wars.