Referring to Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the news service said that the law will go into effect immediately on July 30. Earlier reports put that date at November 1.

Officially, the law creates a blacklist of web sites with content that the government deems to be dangerous for children. This refers first of all to child pornography, information on how to prepare or use narcotics, and information on ways to commit suicide or calls to do so.

Sites seen as containing this content will be banned without having to be subject to a court process.

Sites with other unlawful content, such as “war propaganda” and “inciting interethnic hatred” can also be blacklisted if a court deems necessary.

Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal media and technology supervisory body, will be responsible for monitoring compliance with the new law, and a special non-commercial organization will be in charge of tracking the internet for offending websites. The organization will then notify Roskomnadzor about a certain site, and Roskomnadzor will then notify the domain owner that their site contains illegal content. If that content isn’t deleted within 24 hours, the hosting company will be required to take it down. If it refuses, the site will be entered into the government’s blacklist.

Critics of the new law fear that its actual purpose is to begin to censor the Russian internet.

Wikipedia’s Russian page went dark for all of July 10 to protest the measure. Other internet companies that have spoken out against the law include Yandex and the Russian branches of Google and LiveJournal.

Members of the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights have also called for the law to be struck down.

“It’s a sign of the ineffectiveness of the system of government on the whole when, in order to resolve a basic question, one needs to appeal to the president, governmental representative or governor of a large region,” he said.

He also complained that “governors find out about decisions made by the government from the media – decisions that concern them personally, not things about what the socio-political course is going to be like over the next ten years or about international decisions, but about concrete economic decisions,” Medvedev stressed.

“The authorities have become alienated from one another,” he went on. “Even the governors, who I speak to often – they’re also falling out of the global flow of communication.”

“This means that our structures are bad; they don’t work,” Medvedev said in sum.

The comments come after the president’s recent announcement that he would not be running for reelection in March 2012, and that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would be running in his stead. Moreover, the two admitted that they had already agreed on this course of action at the beginning of Medvedev’s presidency in 2008.

Over the course of his tenure, Medvedev has often made liberal-spirited statements that project an image of progressive leadership and contrast with Putin’s more overtly authoritarian sensibilities. While analysts have long clashed over whether the president’s sentiments actually have any bearing on state policy, the revelation that he was never intended to remain in office longer than four years gives credence to the view that they were never much more than show.

Luzhkov and Baturina have recently been noted skipping around Europe in a probable attempt to flee the country, and now it appears that Bank of Moscow President Andrei Borodin may be joining them.

As RIA Novosti reports:

Bank of Moscow President Andrei Borodin has fled Russia after the police were ready to charge him with illegally granting a 13 billion ruble ($444 million) loan to Elena Baturina, wife of former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, sources said on Tuesday.

“Last week the police asked the court to relieve Borodin of his duties after which he was to be charged and a restraint on travel imposed,” a police source said.

A Moscow court rejected the request and Borodin then left Russia, the source said.

Banking sources told RIA Novosti that Borodin, whose duties are being temporarily performed by Bank of Moscow Vice President Sergei Yermolayev, was in London, where former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and his wife Yelena Baturina are thought to be resident. The Bank of Moscow said Borodin was on sick leave.

Investigators raided Premiere Estate, a property company owned by Baturina, in February as part of a probe into misuse of Moscow city funds in connection with the 13 billion ruble loan to her. Police also raided the Bank of Moscow and the homes of some of its directors.

Police think some of the bank’s staff helped embezzle money which ended up in Baturina’s account. The loan granted by Bank of Moscow was allegedly used in a complex series of deals to buy land in Moscow owned by Inteco, Baturina’s construction and real estate firm, at an excessive price, in order to slash the firm’s debts.

Both Inteco and Baturina have consistently denied any impropriety in connection to the deals.

Meanwhile, a fight for control over Bank of Moscow has been going on since February, when Russia’s second largest bank, state-controlled VTB announced a gradual acquisition of Bank of Moscow, the capital’s investment vehicle. The Moscow government sold its stake in the bank to VTB for 103 billion rubles after President Dmitry Medvedev fired Luzhkov last fall.

VTB now owns a 46.48% share in Bank of Moscow and plans to gain a 100% control. Borodin and his business partner Lev Alaluyev hold a 20.3% stake in Bank of Moscow.

Borodin gained a court injunction blocking the acquisition of Goldman Sachs’ 3.88% stake in the bank, which would have increased VTB’s share in Bank of Moscow to a controlling interest.

On Monday, Police Colonel General Nikolai Golovkin said an investigation of the incident concluded that the conflict arose after journalist Natalya Seybil made a remark about how Major Aleksei Klimov had parked his car, “and we also established his inappropriate behavior in the form of an assault of Natalya Seybil.”

“Following the assertion all circumstances by the administration of the Moscow Regional Main Department of Internal Affairs, a decision was made to fire the officer in question from internal affairs,” Golovkin explained. “The question is being decided on whether to file criminal charges and transfer materials to the Investigative Committee of the Moscow Regional Main Investigative Department of the Russian Federation to make a lawful decision.” He added that the order to fire Klimov was signed on April 4.

As Seybil told Ekho Moskvy radio on April 3, the attack came after a car pulled up to her building while she was outside walking her dog. The driver – Klimov – attempted to flirt with her and asked for her name, but the journalist brushed him off.

“I said: ‘Excuse me,’ – and kept walking. He began asking me again and I said ‘Vasya’ – and kept walking,” said Seybil.

After that, the man jumped out of the car, grabbed her hair and punched her in the face.

“After that, everything was like in a television show – hands on the hood of the car, he bent my arms behind my back, threw my phone to the ground. I called for the police. He threatened me, peppering it all with expletives. My neighbor came out and said: ‘What are you doing, that’s a woman!'”

At that point, Klimov flaunted his identification as a criminal investigative officer.

According to Seybil, the police officers who arrived on the scene released Klimov, saying that there was nothing they could do: “This is our chief,” they told her.

“I’ve been assaulted – my face has been punched, there are bruises all over my body and I had a hypertensive crisis,” Seybil told reporters.

Colonel Yevgeny Gildeyev, a communications officer with the Moscow regional police department, issued an apology to the journalist. “On behalf of the administration of the Main Department of Internal Affairs, I extend sincere apologies to Natalya Seybil. I hope that nothing like this ever happens again; indeed, only true professionals should be police officers,” he said.

Russia’s federal Investigative Committee says it is looking into the case.

Seybil has worked as the editor-in-chief of the talk show Pust Govoryat (“Let Them Talk”) on Russia’s state-controlled Channel One, as well as for the programs Gordon Quixote and Zakryty Pokaz (“Private Screening”).

The editor, Hussein Shadiev, was shot in the shoulder while driving between his office at Serdalo newspaper and his home late on Monday.

Local police say they are still searching for the assailants. “We don’t have any details yet, but we can say that, at the moment when Shadiev was traveling in Nazran down one of the city streets in his automobile, he was shot from an unknown weapon. It’s possible that the shooting was done from a pistol with a suppressor, because nobody heard the shot,” a source from Ingush law enforcement told RIA Novosti.

The source added that the bullet had grazed the editor’s shoulder and he had been hospitalized, but that his life was not in any danger.

“Republic President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov knows about the incident, law enforcement agencies are taking all necessary measures to establish the circumstances of the incident and to carry out an investigation,” acting presidential press secretary Bers Yevloyev told Kommersant newspaper. In his words, it was too early to say anything detailed about the attack. “In my recollection this is probably the first case where local journalists have been attacked,” said Yevloyev.

Shadiev’s colleagues say the attack could have been a reaction to an anti-corruption article published in the newspaper. “Yes, we didn’t carry out our own journalistic investigation, we don’t have the strength for that, but we gave publicity to incidents of corruption that were uncovered by law enforcement agencies, and somebody may not have liked that,” said Serdalo editorial deputy Yakub Sultygov.

The coalition includes a number of formerly high-ranking politicians who have since joined the Russian opposition, including former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, former Energy Minister Vladimir Milov, and former longtime State Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov.

The agreement signed by coalition members states that their goal is to prepare to participate in upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections. Specifically, they plan to choose a single candidate from amongst their ranks to run for president in 2012. Who precisely this is going to be will be decided at a national session of the coalition, members say.

Over the course of the coming year, the coalition plan to collect the 45 thousand signatures necessary to federally register a political party. Without this registration, the party would be unable to participate in any regional or national elections.

Boris Nemtsov said he doesn’t doubt that the required number of signatures will be collected, as “there’s a demand in the regions for a new party.” At the same time, judging by previous experience, the coalition isn’t excluding the possibility that problems hindering registration could arise nevertheless.

“In that case, we’ll go out and stand up for the 13th article of the constitution, which guarantees citizens the right to create a party,” said Nemtsov. “And there’s a 13th date in every month,” he added, referencing the protest movement in defense of the 31st article of the constitution, which is held on the 31st of every month with that date.

Members of the coalition stressed that the creation of For Russia without Tyranny of Corruption was something they were forced to do. Each of the four will remain the heads of separate opposition organizations, as they were before. “We joined together to overcome the barriers [to participating in elections] that come from unjust laws,” said Kasyanov. “But we have to respect even unjust laws.”

A small scandal broke out when the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti suddenly refused to allow the oppositionists to use the agency’s premises to hold Thursday’s press conference. While the agency originally agreed on Tuesday to lend out the space, they unexpectedly cancelled the conference an hour and a half before its scheduled time, citing “technical reasons.”

The oppositionists said the sudden cancellation was politically motivated.

Reporters at Gazeta.ru attempted to contact RIA Novosti to learn precisely what “technical reasons” means, but a press representative from the agency said she didn’t have that information. Editor-in-Chief Svetlana Mironyuk is out of town on a business trip, and press center manager Vladimir Aleksandrov was not reachable for comment.

In the end, opposition leaders invited journalists gathered for the event to Solidarity’s headquarters for the press conference.

Refusing to lend out space to hold meetings of the Russian opposition is a “systematic” problem, said United Civil Front Executive Director Denis Bilunov, “for example, in 2007.” At that time, the main victim of a variety of “technical mishaps” was the Other Russia coalition. For its first conference, organizers had to resort to “renting out the premises from precisely a western firm; we found a hotel that was of western ownership,” Bilunov said. Only then was the issue of being denied space resolved – for the moment. As to why opposition leaders have met with the same kind of problems once again, Bilunov remarked: “Clearly, election time is coming up, and the tendency is returning.”

As RIA Novosti reports, the city plans to build a multi-level parking garage underneath Triumfalnaya Square as part of two city construction projects, at least one of which had already been agreed upon in 2002.

The Grani.ru news portal cites experts as saying that such a garage would be inexpedient, as it could bring about an increase in the number of cars on Moscow’s already jam-packed central roadways. Scientific Director Mikhail Blinkin of the Scientific Research Institute (NII) for Transportation and Road Maintenance argues that supporting the lack of parking infrastructure in the city’s center would promote the switch from cars to public transportation.

The construction announcement comes one day after Strategy 31 co-organizer Eduard Limonov applied with the Moscow mayor’s office on Monday to receive sanction for the campaign’s upcoming rally on August 31. The application was co-signed by fellow organizers Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Konstantin Kosyakin.

In response to Tuesday’s announcement, opposition leaders said they still intend to hold their rally on August 31. “We’ll come to Triumfalnaya Square, what is this construction to us?” said Limonov. “Stunning. I haven’t seen something like this in a long time.”

Representatives of the pro-Kremlin youth movement Young Russia had also applied on Monday for sanction for their own rally on August 31, also on Triumfalnaya Square. The movement routinely organizers rallies that directly conflict with Strategy 31 events, providing an official basis for the Moscow government to deny sanction to the opposition.

Young Russia Press Secretary Natalia Maslova told the Kasparov.ru news portal that the youth movement managed to hand in their application just fifteen minutes before Limonov handed in the application for Strategy 31. “Our activists got in line outside the mayor’s office at twelve o’clock at night,” she said.

Strategy 31 rallies are held by the Russian opposition in defense of the constitutional right to free assembly on the 31st of each month with that date. In the thirteen months that the campaign has run, the Moscow city authorities have never once agreed to sanction the events. Recently revealed government documents verify that that the mayor’s office has lied about their reasons for refusing to grant official sanction, indicating that the decisions were politically motivated. The opposition routinely holds the rallies regardless, unsanctioned, and they are routinely brutally broken up by OMON riot police and other law enforcement agents. During the most recent rally on July 31, 100 of the 1000 participants were detained, many badly beaten. As a result, government representatives in the United States and Europe have criticized the Kremlin for failing to observe the fundamental civil right to free assembly.

Government authorities in Russia have repeatedly offered Strategy 31 organizers an unofficial compromise: the rallies could be sanctioned if the oppositionists agree either to a different location or to exclude Eduard Limonov from among the campaign’s official organizers. Despite initial disagreements, the organizers eventually agreed to reject all of the government’s proposals, insisting that the 31st article of the Russian constitution provides citizens with the right to peacefully assemble without any conditions from the government.

Two Russian opposition leaders appear to have agreed to make a compromise with Moscow city authorities in order to receive legal sanction to hold the next in the series of Strategy 31 rallies in defense of freedom of assembly, Grani.ru reports.

In a statement posted Saturday on her blog, former Soviet dissident and Strategy 31 rally co-organizer Lyudmila Alexeyeva indicated, albeit inadvertently, that she and fellow former dissident Sergei Kovalyov have decided to exclude National Bolshevik leader Eduard Limonov from the group of organizers who regularly apply for sanction with the Moscow mayor’s office.

The concession would fall in line with a proposal made by the presidential administration earlier this month to exclude Limonov and receive sanction as a result. At the time, opposition leaders – including Alexeyeva – strongly denounced the proposal.

However, the 82-year-old former dissident said that the compromise does not signify a defeat for the Strategy 31 campaign, and is rather a structural alternation.

“A concession to alter the composition of the group of applicants, from our point of view, is not a fundamental concession as long as the new applicants are well-known activists in the 31 movement,” says the statement.

“We don’t think that an acceptance of the conditions put forth by the Moscow authorities would signify defeat,” the statement goes on. “To agree to force out anyone else from these rallies would be a capitulation. But an agreement to hold the rally…with different applicants for the event is by no means a disgraceful agreement. This is a success all the same. Yes, not an entire one, but a success.”

However, the joint statement does not actually mention Limonov by name, and there are conflicting reports in the Russian media as to who the oppositionists are actually referring to. Citing information from RIA Novosti, the online news site Gazeta.ru is reporting that Alexeyeva herself plans to leave the group of organizers, and not Limonov. If this was the case, however, the logic would be hard to find, as there was never any indication that such a step would result in the Moscow authorities granting sanction to Strategy 31 events.

At the same time, commenters on Alexeyeva’s blog have chastised her and Kovalyov for composing a Soviet-style bureaucratic document that, while clearly speaking about Limonov, does not actually mention his name. The post itself does indirectly reference the earlier proposal by the presidential administration to exclude Limonov, as mentioned above: “to agree to force out anyone else would signify defeat.”

As of Sunday morning, Limonov himself had not made any statement in response.

The ex-CEO of former oil giant Yukos announced his hunger strike in a letter to Russian Supreme Court Chairman Vyacheslav Lebedev; his lawyers published its content on their website Tuesday morning. The letter outlines how a Moscow court ruling to detain Khodorkovsky and his co-defendant, Platon Lebedev, for another three months violates a procedural amendment introduced last month by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. The two are currently on trial facing charges from the Russian government of embezzlement that they dismiss as obviously untrue and politically motivated.

“The Khamovnichesky Court, by ruling on May 14, 2010, to extend my arrest, blatantly disregarded the changes recently incorporated into article 108 of the Criminal Procedure Code [UPK] of the Russian Federation,” says the letter. The changes referred to allow those charged with economic crimes to be released on bail except for under a limited number of circumstances: if their identity cannot be established, if they lack a place of residence in Russia, or if they have attempted to flee the country or hide from investigators. None of these circumstances apply to Khodorkovsky or Lebedev, who have been sitting out their 8-year prison terms in Siberia since 2005 as the result of a fraud case that was also widely viewed as politically motivated. Their lawyers had reminded the court of these amendments, which were introduced in response to the scandalous death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in pretrial detention last November, before the verdict was reached on Friday.

Nevertheless, Khodorkovsky goes on, “the court did not even consider it necessary to explain the reason for not adhering to the law.” Moreover, he said that he knew of other cases where the new amendments had been similarly disregarded. He stressed that while he the ruling had little effect on his own situation, his hunger strike was geared towards protesting the precedent that it would set.

“I can’t agree to something where the creation of a precedent in such a high-profile case would go unnoticed by the country’s administration, since it will immediately be replicated by corrupt bureaucrats in hundreds of other, less high-profile cases,” explained the former Yukos CEO.

Khodorkovsky said he wants “President Medvedev to know exactly how the law that was adopted altogether a month ago by his initiative… is being put to use, or, more accurately, is being sabotaged.” Therefore, he intends to strike until he gets confirmation that the president has received “exhaustive information” on the precedent being set by the Khamovnichesky Court in failing to adhere to existing law.

Supreme Court Chairman Vyacheslav Lebedev said that he has received Khodorkovsky’s letter and promised to look into the allegations and provide a response. Sources in Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service told RIA Novosti that they would be keeping track of Khodorkovsky’s health, but issued no official comment. President Medvedev has so far given no response.

Vadim Klyuvgant, a lawyer for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, reiterated his client’s sentiment that the Khamovnichesky Court ruling is a “sign of catastrophe” that “is not so bad for our clients as it is for the entire country and for its president.”

“Because if such sabotage is possible in a situation when the people wouldn’t be released anyway, then what can we expect or say in regards to any other person who could and should have been released as a result of this law?” said Klyuvgant.

In comments obtained by the Christian Science Monitor, political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky explained how Khodorkovsky’s decision “is a direct challenge to Medvedev to separate himself from the Putin era and enforce the laws that he himself has sponsored.” As Piontkovsky elaborated:

“Khodorkovsky is making it necessary for Medvedev to define his position,” says Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the independent Institute for Strategic Studies in Moscow. “His challenge is very clever, legally and politically. He isn’t demanding that he be freed, rather just for confirmation that Medvedev has been made aware of his case. . . The ball is now in Medvedev’s court. Will he choose to follow the logic of the law, and risk a damaging split with Putin? He will have to make a choice, and that could determine Medvedev’s own political future.”

Additional reading:
• Who Fears a Free Mikhail Khodorkovsky? – NY Times Magazine

Vladimir Markin, official representative of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia, said that investigator Sergei Pysin has been charged with neglect of duty. If convicted, he faces up to five years in jail.

Trifonova, who suffered from diabetes and chronic kidney failure, died of heart failure in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention facility last Friday. The businesswoman had been detained since December 2009, when she was arrested on suspicion of massive fraud. Her lawyer alleges that Trifonova was intentionally denied medical care so that she would die, immediately giving rise to comparisons in the Russian press to the case of Hermitage Capital Management lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The lawyer died last November, also in Matrosskaya Tishina, and also allegedly due to intentionally denied medical care. Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) officials admitted partial responsibility in that case.

After Magnitsky’s death, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had ordered massive layoffs from FSIN. Among those, says FSIN head Aleksandr Reymer, was supposed to have been Matrosskaya Tishina manager Fikret Tagiev. The newspaper Vedomosti reported on Tuesday, however, that Tagiev remains in charge of the facility to this day. FSIN officials in Moscow did not confirm whether or not this was the case.

President Medvedev ordered a federal investigation into Trifonova’s death on Saturday. In the meantime, at least two people have been fired in connection with the incident – Deputy Manager Aleksandr Filippov at Moscow’s regional investigative agency (and one of Pysin’s supervisors) and Valery Ivarlak, who also worked at the agency.

Trifonova’s lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, told the newspaper Gazeta that charging Pysin with negligence would sidestep his actual crime.

“I’m going to insist that it wasn’t negligence; there was clearly a direct intent here,” said the lawyer. In an earlier statement to the advocacy group Justice, Zherebenkov detailed how Pysin removed Trifonova from a Moscow hospital against doctors’ orders and sent her to a hospital 75 kilometers outside of Moscow that lacked the equipment she needed to survive. “I’m going to demand that he be charged with abuse; he knew perfectly well where he was sending her, and he should answer to the fullest extent,” he told Gazeta.

Zherebenkov said that he plans to have the proper documentation prepared by next Tuesday to request that Pysin be charged with abuse of his official authority – an offense punishable by up to ten years in prison.

Also on Tuesday, a group of prominent human rights advocates from the Russian Association of Independent Observers addressed a letter to President Medvedev demanding that those responsible for Trifonova’s death be brought to justice. The signatories included Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Andrei Babushkin, Valery Borshchev, Lev Ponomarev, and Aleksandr Goncharenko.

Speaking to the online news site Kasparov.ru, Borshchev lamented that “practically nothing serious was done after Magnitsky’s death. This allowed the situation to happen again.” He added that there was more blame to go around than just on Investigator Pysin. Odintsovsky City Court Judge Olga Makarova, for one, had stated publically that she wouldn’t grant Trifonova’s bail request unless she plead guilty.

The letter also includes a list of illnesses and asks the president to authorize a ban on allowing anyone suffering from them to be held in a pretrial detention facility. Right now, the list only applies to convicted criminals.