A former journalist, Gudkov is running for re-election as a candidate of the Yabloko (Apple) party, a liberal opposition group which had some success in the 1990s.
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Gudkov likens the Kremlin to a tiger.
The vote “is likely to be the cleanest election 1996”, analyst Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told The Associated Press.
“The result will be considered a good one”, said Konstantin Kostin, who ran the presidential administration’s internal politics department during the last election and now heads a think tank.
“If he says great things about me, I’m gonna say great things about him”.
“Participation in the voting is a civil duty for each of us, a manifestation of our honest feelings toward our country and care for its future”, he added. However, no one called for his impeachment or expressed anger for misleading the entire country, everyone felt sorry for the president and wished him a prompt recovery.
Gudkov has been crowd funding his campaign and estimates he has spent around $350,000 so far.
For Russian people, politicians hiding their health problem from the public, as well as their propensity to lie and deceive, is the rule rather than the exception.
Before the funding dried up Wednesday, Gudkov told Reuters why his fortunes mattered.
“(The current Russian leadership) may think there is a low-cost/high-payoff way to increase the perception that the system over here is chaotic and is not reliable”, said Courtney, now with the Rand Corporation.
“I don’t know him, I know nothing about him really”.
Trump’s position might even look, to some, like a welcome alternative to the risky escalation in USA rhetoric against Moscow, the moving of US forces into former Soviet republics bordering Russian Federation, and the prospect of a new Cold War between these two nuclear-armed nations.
The “color revolutions” – pro-democracy street protests that toppled governments from 2003 to 2005 in several former Soviet countries, including Ukraine – marked a turning point in relations between Russian Federation and the United States. On Wednesday, for example, three of the six front-page stories in the New York Times were about Russian Federation – its role in Syria, its latest high-profile hack and its secret influence campaigns in Europe.
Donald Trump has not only brought haters into the mainstream, he has normalized hate for a much broader swathe of the population who were perhaps already disaffected but had their grievances and latent prejudices held in check by social norms, observed Josh Marshall, publisher of TalkingPointsMemo.com, in his blog on Saturday. Speaking to CNN after the disclosure of her diagnosis on Monday, the Democratic nominee said that she had not considered the pneumonia was going to be “that big a deal” and had instead wanted to continue on with her campaign.
Pro-Kremlin officials are casting the parliamentary election as the fairest contest of its kind in modern Russian history.
The campaign involves investing in Kremlin-controlled media such as RT and Sputnik, planting disinformation and other covert activities. If there were a more textbook example of the narcissistic, brutal personality type from which authoritarian thugs are made, it is hard to imagine. Polls as recently as the previous year showed only a minority of the population in Crimea supporting a union with Russian Federation, making the claimed 97 percent tally in favor highly unlikely.
But these dramas have not dominated the vote and the Kremlin is confident. The vote was moved forward from December to September, a move that critics contend was created to keep turnout low, as summer holidays and the new school year keep people preoccupied.
“It was revenge for our activities on the street”, he said of the sale. Lev Gudkov, the centre’s director, says the designation makes it “impossible to work”. “I believe it is peace for our time”.
Politically though, since cutting interest rates stimulates the economy short-term, it helped Putin’s popularity.
“That means the system’s days are numbered”. This despite the fact that then, as now, we are probably safer than at any time since World War II.
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Russian “enemies”, which today include Clinton, should not expect any mercy from the Russians, who live by the thinking “we have enough of our own liars and we will not tolerate foreign ones”.
