11/13/07


Mr. Mogilevich would provide the U.S. with intelligence on Islamist terrorism if prosecutors opened negotiations to resolve his legal problems in the U.S. Federal prosecutors rejected that offer, lawyers and others familiar with the matter said. ...

The Mogilevich talks were brokered by a prominent Washington security expert named Neil C. Livingstone, who was briefly in the news during the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal for his work on terrorism issues with White House aide Oliver North.

He declined to discuss the Mogilevich talks, other than to say they involved “very sensitive issues.”

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He has more than a dozen names and is reputed to be the godfather of the Russian Mafia. For 15 years Semen Mogilevich has played a cat and mouse game with the world's intelligence services.

Vladimir Nekrasov was apparently swindled recently out of $20 million by business partners aka "Russian gangsters" in Denmark (Moskovskii Komsomolets - Murmansk, in Russian). On the same page, journalist Yuliya Latynina suggests a still fuzzier version of the Nekrasov-Mogilevich arrests than any yet: that Nekrasov was not the target

Earlier in the week the local Moscow police arrested reputed mobster Semyon Mogilevich in an operation that is seen as an attempt by Medvedev's to fire a shot across the bow of the siloviki (the circle of former intelligence and security services personnel) within the Putin Kremlin. Local city police units were used in the arrest as the Federal Security Service or other law enforcement bodies (all controlled by the siloviki) would likely have tipped Mogilevich. His arrest is part of a power struggle between them and Medvedev's faction over control of the Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom.

Interestingly, China is referred to in the article as "Podnebesnaya," which is an abbreviation of a common name used by Russians when they refer to China. It means "the subheavenly empire." This is almost a Russian variant on the English-language nickname for China, "The Middle Kingdom," but the complete Russian phrase for China of Podnebesnaya Imperia is closer to the Chinese term Tianxia, which means "under heaven." This phrase has long been used in political writing dating back to when the country was ruled by an emperor. According to this line of thought, the emperor was looked upon as the political leader of the entire world and not just China itself.

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This leaves a difficult decision in the hands of Russia's next president. Does he allow China access to the most sophisticated and latest defense technology available and gamble that it will never be used against Moscow, or does he bar any such orders from China in the interests of national security.