Watch Putin: 'Don't Interfere' with Russia
CNN reports:
The United States scrambled to contain the fallout from the slow-motion leak of cables from its embassies worldwide Wednesday as new documents showed American diplomats casting a jaundiced eye toward corruption's grip on Russia.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally made "several dozen" calls to counterparts in other countries in an effort to mitigate the damage from WikiLeaks, a website that facilitates the anonymous leaking of secret information, a senior State Department official said. ...
WikiLeaks began releasing a quarter-million State Department diplomatic cables on Sunday, a process it said could take months to complete. Wednesday, it began posting a new string of documents from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, including one that blasted the Russian capital as a "kleptocracy" under now-ousted Mayor Yuri Luzhkov.
Luzhkov, who was fired by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in September, "oversees a system in which it appears that almost everyone at every level is involved in some form of corruption or criminal behavior," the February document states. But the Kremlin tolerated him because he could deliver votes for the ruling party of Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, it continued.
Another document described corruption as "pervasive and deep-rooted" in post-Soviet Russian society. While Medvedev announced an anti-corruption campaign in 2008, little had been done to implement it, the document stated. One Russian contact warned that Medvedev's plans were "hindered by an alliance between business and government bureaucracy -- business pays off the bureaucracy and bureaucracy defends business from real competition."
Luzhkov, in previous interviews with CNN, has denied any wrongdoing. And Putin, who served as president for eight years before Medvedev took office in 2008, hit back at remarks in another embassy cable from U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is quoted telling his French counterpart that "Russian democracy has disappeared and the government was an oligarchy run by the security services."
In an interview airing Wednesday on CNN's "Larry King Live," Putin called Gates "deeply misled" and said the United States wasn't without its own flaws.
"When we are talking with our American friends and tell them there are systemic problems in this regard, we can hear from them, 'Don't interfere with our affairs. This is our tradition and it's going to continue like that.' We are not interfering," he said. "But to our colleagues, I would also like to advise you, don't interfere either [with] the sovereign choice of the Russian people."
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