According to Nemtsov, who says he only learned of the ban today, the about-face was influenced by today’s resolution by the European Parliament criticizing Russian authorities both for refusing to officially register his political party and for introducing the travel ban.

“Seven hundred deputies – every single faction and party in the European Parliament – demanded the immediate annulment of the ban on my ability to travel outside of the country,” Nemtsov said in response to the announcement. “Naturally, Putin’s corrupt entourage got scared that it would be banned from Europe in return.”

The opposition leader said that decisions made by European institutions have a serious influence on the Russian government and that “this resource has to be used.”

“Here [in Europe – ed.] they have children, bank accounts, real estate, yachts that they ride on,” Nemtsov said of Russian civil servants. “They need to be brought to their senses precisely through Europe; they don’t understand anything else. As a matter of fact, this was a very optimistic incident; this needs to be kept up.” He added that other parts of the European Parliament’s resolution could be carried out in Russia under due pressure from Europe.

The Federal Bailiff Service, which first denied the travel ban altogether, said that an enquiry had concluded that the ban had been “premature” and would now be lifted.

According to Kasparov.ru, the ban was initiated by businessman Gennady Timchenko, who accused the two politicians of failing to fulfill a judicial order to change two remarks in their opposition report “Putin. Results. 10 Years” that he says damaged his reputation.

The ruling ordered Nemtsov and Milov to publically retract their assertion that Timchenko used his friendship with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to become a billionaire. While a retraction was published in the newspaper Kommersant, “Mr. Timchenko was unhappy that the font was too small in that retraction, so he demanded that we should be kept inside the country for six months,” Nemtsov explained to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

While providing an unexpected but immediate benefit to the two oppositionists, the European Parliament’s resolution was first of all dedicated to a scathing criticism of Russia’s recent refusal to register their new political party, Parnas, thus preventing its representatives from participating in upcoming elections for the State Duma and presidency.

Parnas’s predicament united virtually every political faction in the European Union, with the resolution garnering support from liberals, socialists, conservatives and members of the Green Party.

The document calls on Russian authorities to lessen the requirements for new parties to register and to guarantee equal conditions for all parties and candidates during upcoming electoral campaigns, including access to television broadcast media.

As a general rule, many oppositionists – including Boris Nemtsov, Garry Kasparov, Eduard Limonov and others – are not allowed to be shown on Russia’s state-controlled television.

Commenting on the resolution, Estonian Deputy Kristiina Ojuland said that “Putin has until September to come to his senses, although it’s already clear how the rails to the future State Duma have been laid.”

The four leaders of the People’s Freedom Party (known as “Parnas”) – Vladimir Milov, Mikhail Kasyanov, Vladimir Ryzhkov, and Boris Nemtsov – were joined by nearly two thousand demonstrators calling for free and fair elections and an end for the ruling elite.

Without being registered by the Justice Ministry, political parties are unable to appear on the ballot in Russian elections. The official reason for Parnas’s rejection was violations in document preparation; specifically, that several deceased persons were on the list of party members. However, Parnas leaders insist that the rejection was thoroughly politically motivated.

Parnas leaders will decide at a party congress on July 2 whether they plan to file suit against the Justice Ministry.

Party leaders Mikhail Kasyanov, Vladimir Milov, Vladimir Ryzhkov and Boris Nemtsov said it was necessary to hold a large-scale protest to unite opposition forces to fight against the current regime and to undertake a radical change of course. Forces independent from the ruling authorities, they said, could possibly be united by one slogan: “Not one vote to the Party of Swindlers and Thieves, the Front of Swindlers and Thieves, or to the leader of the Swindlers and Thieves or their acolytes,” referring to the ruling United Russia party and its leader, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

“Now it’s clear to everyone that the elections are going to be illegitimate, since independent parties are not taking part in them and the “Party of Swindlers and Thieves” and their acolytes are taking part,” said Nemtsov.

According to Milov, there’s a need to “switch to concrete forms of activity that will bring concrete results.” He also noted that although the party won’t be able to participate in State Duma elections this October, it may have time to forward a candidate for the presidential election in March 2012.

“The parliamentary elections are going to be a farce. One could assume the same about the presidential election. There’s no point in participating in a face,” Nemtsov argued.

Commenting on the Justice Ministry’s decision to deny the party registration, Kasyanov stated that he considers the party to be legitimate and fully formed, regardless of the government’s attempts to hinder its growth and the pressure it exerted on party branches in Russia’s regions. Milov also touched on the fact that recent polls give the People’s Freedom Party 9 percent of the overall vote in Moscow – above the 7 percent minimum needed to hold seats in the State Duma.

Kasyanov went on to call the denial “illegal,” as it contradicts Russia’s international agreements – in particular, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which contains a definitive list of singular reasons a government may deny registration to a political party: to prevent threats to national security, to prevent mass rioting, to prevent threats to the health of its citizens, and to defend human rights and freedoms.

Ryzhkov noted that the official reason given by the Justice Ministry as to why the party was denied registration – that the names of 13 deceased persons were on the list of party members – is moot considering that the 46,133 remaining names are still enough to register the party.

Moreover, the party has received word that government officials have been forcing some party members to write letters alleging that they were included in the party without their consent.

The United States and European Union have both expressed disappointment in the Russian government for turning down the party’s registration application.

The four party leaders said they “don’t see the point” in appealing the registration denial in court, but won’t make a final decision until the party conference on July 4.

Vladimir Milov, former energy minister and prominent opposition figure: “Most likely, the sentence is going to be harsh, and I never had any different predictions than that. This is Vladimir Putin’s personal vendetta: he has a personal stake in this. When the Yukos case had only just begun, Putin saw it as a battle for power and Khodorkovsky as a competitor, a real political adversary. And Putin fears him: this is clear from how aggressively he talks about the process.”

Political analyst Dmitri Oreshkin: “It’s too bad for Judge Danilkin. It’s clear that both Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were prepared for the fact that they would be convicted. It’s clear that we don’t have independent courts and that there are no chances in the foreseeable future of becoming a state ruled by law. But there are rules to the game, rules called “arbitrariness.” Any sentence more than 8 years would be cruel, so therefore it won’t overlap the term that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev already served. Ten, 12, or 14 years – it’s not even important. What’s important is that it’s going to be imposed not by the courts or the law, but by the government.”

Igor Yakovenko, secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists: “The commentary is just as banal and predictable as the sentence. Everyone I talked to recently nevertheless had hope that Judge Danilkin would suddenly turn out to be a human being, oriented on the law and not on his own job-related considerations; they hoped for a miracle that Medvedev would turn out to be the president and not what he actually is. But there was no miracle – the country, obviously, will keep on sinking for an unknown period of time. The 2000s will keep going, and that’s sad.”

The Telegraph gives a full account of the story:

Judge Victor Danilkin said the former chief executive of oil company Yukos and Platon Lebedev, his business partner, had been found guilty of illegally obtaining some $25 billion (£16.3 billion) in oil revenues from the now defunct company.

“The court has found that Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev committed embezzlement acting in collusion with a group of people and using their professional positions,” Mr Danilkin told a courtroom full of media and defendants’ relatives.

Mr Khodorkovsky’s legal team immediately announced it would appeal. His lawyers attacked the judge for bowing to outside pressure. “We have no doubt that the court was pressured and the court did not make an independent decision,” Vadim Klyugvant, a lawyer for Mr Khodorkovsky, said.

Mr Khodorkovsky and Mr Lebedev appeared unmoved by the verdict. Mr Lebedev was seen reading a book and exchanging notes with his defence team, while Mr Khodorkovsky exchanged glances with his mother.

Police arrested 30 people outside the courtroom where supporters of Mr Khodorkovsky chanted “freedom” and “down with Putin”. Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister and former president, dismantled Yukos after Mr Khodorkovsky challenged powerful forces in Russia’s establishment.

The defence has maintained that the charges, which amount to stealing all the oil Yukos produced between 1998 and 2003, are absurd and politically motivated. The verdict seemed not to take account of testimony by key public figures including German Gref, the head of Russia’s biggest state owned bank, who said in court that the oil trading scheme at the heart of the case was legal. The judge, who read the verdict for eight hours before adjourning yesterday, also dismissed a green light from audits of Yukos by PricewaterhouseCoopers as based on incomplete and false information.

International reaction raised enduring concerns about Russia’s judicial system.

The [British] Foreign Office said the conviction could threaten trade relations between Britain and Russia. A Foreign Office spokesperson said the law should be applied in a “non-discriminatory and proportional way” in order to sustain an environment “in which investors can remain confident that they can do business, and that property and other rights are soundly protected”.

Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, said he was “very worried”. “The way the trial has been conducted is extremely dubious and a step backward on the road toward a modernisation of the country … It is in the interest of our Russian partners to take these concerns seriously and to stand up for the rule of law, democracy and human rights.”

Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, [s]aid the verdict would have a “negative impact on Russia’s reputation” and raised “serious questions about selective prosecution – and about the rule of law being overshadowed by political considerations”.

Reading the full verdict and sentencing is expected to take several days. Most observers expect Mr Khodorkovsky to be in prison at least until 2017, although if the judge shows leniency he could be out in three years.

Mr Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, is reaching the end of an eight-year sentence for tax evasion, which was widely viewed as punishment for funding opposition parties in defiance of Mr Putin.

After the first trial, Yukos was broken up and its assets snapped up at knock-down prices by state-owned oil companies.

Mr Putin has made his views of the former oligarch clear. In a television phone-in on December 16 he compared Mr Khodorkovsky with Bernard Madoff, the convicted US fraudster. Mr Putin also said that “thieves should sit behind bars”, even though the court had not delivered a verdict.

At the same time, many members of the Russian opposition have expressed disappointment that the city has chosen to continue Luzhkov’s tradition of banning anti-government protests. On September 30, the mayor’s office turned down an application from opposition organizers to hold another Day of Anger rally on October 12. The rally went ahead today regardless, and, as happens in nearly every opposition demonstration that the Moscow authorities choose to ban, police violently cracked down on the protesters, detaining more than 30 according to a source in city law enforcement.

But along with decisions handed down by the authorities, another development on Tuesday brought some good news for the Russian opposition: Eksmo, one of the country’s two largest publishing houses, has released a printed version of “Luzhkov. Results,” a report written by Solidarity co-leaders Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov that scathingly criticizes the former mayor. While the document was the basis of a libel suit by Luzhkov against Nemtsov less than a year ago, it’s now being published in an edition of 20,000 hardback copies at 105 rubles (about $3.50) apiece. Ozon.ru will even ship copies abroad, for those able to navigate the Russian-only website.

Nemtsov explained how the publishing deal was reached:

“Immediately after Luzhkov’s dismissal, V. Milov and I were approached by the Eksmo publishing house with an unexpected proposal – to commercially publish ‘Luzhkov. Results.’ I explained to the guys from the publishing house that we’ve handed out 400 thousand ‘Luzhkov. Results’ at metro stations in Moscow over the past year.

However, this didn’t frighten the publishing house, and we negotiated a contract. And even made provisions for a symbolic honorarium.”

The book will include the entire text of the original report, plus updated information about events surrounding the mayor’s dismissal.

A description of the book by Eksmo reads: “A book by Boris Nemtsov – the first and, as of yet, the only independent investigation of the activities of Luzhkov for the 17 years of his rule.”

In the same spirit of ‘Luzhkov. Results,’ Nemtsov and Milov released ‘Putin. 10 Years. Results’ this past June. One million copies of the report (excluding samizdat copies) have been published, and the authors have been traveling throughout Russia since its release to distribute them.

“I asked if Eksmo would publish ‘Putin. Results,’ which we’re distributing all over the country for free,” Nemtsov said, following the news about the Luzhkov book. “They’re not yet ready for that.”

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.”

A truckload of 100,000 copies of the report, “Putin. Results. 10 Years,” were confiscated by St. Petersburg police on June 15, after the driver of the truck was reportedly found to lack the proper documents to bring a heavy cargo truck into the center of the city. Now, as of July 1, the activists working to distribute the self-published report have authorization to take the copies back, as no evidence of “extremism” had been found within their contents.

Meanwhile, a number of activists detained on June 18 for distributing the document on Vasilievsky Island, where the International Economic Forum was being held at the time, have been called in by police “for questioning,” said Kurnosova.

Wanton charges of extremism are commonly used by Russian law enforcement agencies to apply pressure to opposition groups that carry out activities deemed undesirable by the state.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is a forty-eight page analysis of the actions and policies of the former president and current prime minister, with topics ranging from corruption and crumbling infrastructure to population decline and the collapse of the pension system. The report’s authors, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov, say they intend to distribute the document all over Russia, and have printed one million copies to that end. However, aside from the 100,000 confiscated by St. Petersburg police and released yesterday, another 100,000 were taken by Federal Security Service agents on June 17. The authors have issued a call for Russian citizens to print copies in samizdat fashion to distribute on their own.

The document was written by two of Solidarity’s co-leaders, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov. As Nemtsov puts it, the pamphlet is meant “to tell the truth about the results of the rule of Putin and the tandem,” as the relationship between the prime minister and president is commonly referred to.

Immediately after the authors presented the report, its host website was hit by DDOS hacker attacks that rendered it completely inaccessible. Then, on Tuesday, police in St. Petersburg seized 100 thousand copies of the published report, a tenth of the total million that were printed by the organization.

As the Moscow Times reports:

Police seized pamphlets criticizing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on the eve of a high-profile business forum showcasing Russia, opposition leaders said.

St. Petersburg police confiscated 100,000 copies of a new report on Putin’s decade in power co-authored by Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, said Olga Kurnosova, head of the local branch of the opposition United Civil Front.

Kurnosova and Nemtsov contended that police were trying to keep the 32-page report [in PDF form; 48 in MS Word form – ed.] from the public and visitors at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which started Thursday.

“The police had the task of preventing the distribution of the report during the forum among its participants and citizens,” Kurnosova said.

St. Petersburg police declined to comment.

Police held the driver of the vehicle that was delivering the pamphlets for several hours, Kurnosova said.

She said police told her that they had sent the pamphlet to be checked for evidence of extremism — a tactic that opposition politicians say authorities sometimes use to stifle criticism — and that the check would take two or three days.

Nemtsov has co-written several reports highlighting corruption and other problems that he contends have gotten worse since Putin was elected president in 2000.

On Thursday, Nemtsov wrote on his blog that another 100 thousand copies of the report had been confiscated from the printing house by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers:

Instead of arguing with the theses in the report, denying the basis of the theses, they decided to show their effectiveness by acting in a Putin-like manner. Grossly violating citizens’ right to information, they decided, like in the good old days, to liquidate the opposition’s literature.

The reason is that facts and figures of the true results of Putin’s rule are laid out in the report. They tell us that they’ve built an effective state, while in fact, the level of corruption has reached monstrous proportions (on the level of the most backward African countries) in these ten years of rule. They assure us that the birth rate is rising, and that the death rate is falling – as a matter of fact, under Putin, Russia has been losing half a million people per year. They tell us that he has gained victory over the oligarchs and poverty – actually, there are more than 60 billionaires in the country, and 20 million poor. They tell us that Putin has pacified the Caucasus and gained victory over terror – as a matter of fact, in the ten years of his rule, the number of terrorist attacks has risen six times, and the regions of the Caucasus, receiving many millions in subsidies, have wound up outside of the Russian legal realm.

This is the truth that, in Putin’s opinion, Russians mustn’t know. This is where the actions of the security officials come from.

While distribution of the pamphlet started in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Solidarity is planning to release copies of the report all over Russia. For now, and especially given that police have apparently seized 1/5 of all of the printed pamphlets, the organization is encouraging citizens to print their own copies and distribute them in samizdat fashion.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is available in Russian by clicking here.

An estimated two thousand people attended a protest in the Siberian city of Irkutsk on Saturday, and another 1200 people attended an unrelated protest in the city of Samara on the same day. Among other demands, both groups had harsh criticism for the prime minister and called for him to immediately step down.

In Irkutsk, residents, workers, and environmental activists gathered to protest the reopening of the controversial Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill. After decades of protests, operations at the mill were finally suspended in October 2008 due to environmental concerns regarding the mill’s discharge of toxic waste into Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. However, a decree signed by Prime Minister Putin in mid-January allowed the mill to reopen, sparking renewed outrage from citizens and environmental activists internationally.

A coalition of ecological and civic organizations organized Saturday’s protest, and politicians from the local legislative assembly and Moscow showed up to support the effort. Leader Sergei Mitrokhin of the liberal Yabloko Party and co-leader Vladimir Milov of the Solidarity opposition movement were among those present. Activists from the banned National Bolshevik Party also attended the protest, holding a banner reading “People! Baikal! Victory!” – the acronym of which matches with the acronym of their party name in Russian.

Protesters singled out oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who has control over the mill, and Prime Minister Putin, who they accuse of covering up Deripaska’s unethical business practices, as the main targets of their enmity.

Irkutsk city officials had warned prior to the rally that security would be tight. Blaming “the current economic situation of Russia” for an increase in opposition protests, Deputy Internal Minister Mikhail Sukhodolsky promised that “no excuses will be accepted” for failures of the police to curb demonstrations.

Given that, the city dispatched a number of armored military vehicles to flank the demonstration. Photographs published online of the vehicles, one of which resembles a small tank, were decried on Tuesday by the Russian Internal Ministry as “provocational and not corresponding to reality.” In a statement to Kasparov.ru, Solidarity activist Ilya Yashin maintained that “my colleague Vladimir Milov took these photographs, and many people saw these machines.”

The increase in police forces was especially notable because of the comparatively small security presence at a January 30 rally in Kaliningrad, where 12 thousand people gathered to protest rising tariffs and to demand the resignations of the prime minister and local Governor Georgy Boos.

Demonstrators at a counter-protest in Irkutsk organized by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party praised the reopening of the mill, with between a thousand and 1500 participants holding banners with the phrases “Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill – our life” and “Thanks to the government for the opportunity to work in Baikalsk.” One placard directed at opponents of the mill read “Suitcase – Station – UNESCO.”

In contrast to their choices during the Kaliningrad rally, the regional branches of the token opposition groups Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) and A Just Russia sided with the United Russia counter-demonstration. State Duma Deputy and LDPR member Andrei Lugovoy, who is wanted by a British court for suspicion in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, travelled from Moscow to address the crowd.

The second protest, in Samara, was initially intended to be held “in defense of constitutional rights and freedoms.” In addition, however, protesters turned out to voice their disapproval of numerous governmental practices, including rising housing and utilities tariffs, crumbling infrastructure, and the failed modernization of the local AvtoVAZ automobile manufacturer. Among their concrete demands were the return of direct gubernatorial elections and the resignations of Prime Minister Putin and Samara Governor Vladimir Artyakov, who is also the former head of AvtoVAZ.

A number of civic and labor organizations took part in the rally in Samara, including the All-Russian Strike Committee, which was invited by AvtoVAZ factory workers. According to Committee coordinator Nikolai Nikolaev, several groups of auto workers from the cities of Tolyatti and Syzran were unable to attend the demonstration because police had blocked off the road.

Given the failed modernization of the auto manufacturer, Nikolayev said after the rally, “people discussed the issue of how to live from now on. The AvtoVAZ workers said that the authorities are not dealing with their problems.”

In their own way of dealing with their problems, regional police in Samara are planning to initiate criminal charges against the rally’s organizers. During the demonstration, voters rights activist Aleksandr Lashmankin called for participants to stage a repeat demonstration on March 5 – a statement that “was not covered in the application to hold the rally,” a police representative explained to the Interfax news agency.

The rally was organized by the opposition movement Solidarity, which has gained significant prominence in Russian politics since its inception little more than a year ago. Movement leaders Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Milov and Ilya Yashin traveled from Moscow to take part in the event.

With the exception of the Kremlin-backed United Russia, representatives of every political party in Kaliningrad were present at the rally: Solidarity, Yabloko, Patriots of Russia, the Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, and A Just Russia, as well as various regional social organizations.

The basis for the rally was the sharp increase of state duties on vehicle registration, as well as high customs duties on imported cars and increased housing and utilities taxes. Protesters demanded the resignation of Kaliningrad Governor and United Russia member Georgy Boos, as well as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his administration.

An analogous rally was held on the same day in St. Petersburg.

This is not the first time Russian car owners have come together in a large act of protest. Last December, five thousand people took part in a similar rally in Kaliningrad, demanding the annulment of high duties and taxes. The Federation of Automobile Owners of Russia initiated a process to form an official political movement last November, which they say would work to solve “the economic problems of the middle class and small businesses,” suffering from unfair vehicle legislation.