Official Acquitted in Russian Jail Death Case

Sergei Magnitsky died in jail in 2009 after his pancreatitis went untreated, and an investigation by Russia's presidential council on human rights concluded he was severely beaten and denied medical treatment. Prison doctor Dmitry Kratov was the only person to face trial in the case.

Judge Tatyana Neverova said she found no evidence that Kratov's negligence could have caused the lawyer's death. The acquittal was widely expected after prosecutors earlier this week dropped their accusations, saying they had decided there was no connection between Kratov's actions and Magnitsky's death.

The case has angered both Russian activists and the West. The U.S. Congress passed legislation this month in Magnitsky's name, calling for sanctions against officials — including Kratov — deemed to be connected with human rights abuses. The bill provoked retaliation from Moscow, including a measure barring Americans from adopting Russian children that President Vladimir Putin signed on Friday.

Magnitsky, a lawyer for the Hermitage Capital fund, was arrested in 2008 on suspicion of tax evasion by the same Interior Ministry officials he accused of using false tax documents to steal $230 million from the state. He died while in custody awaiting trial.

Government officials have dismissed calls to investigate police officials and the only official charged in his death was Kratov, who was deputy chief physician at the Butyrskaya prison where Magnitsky was held.

Hermitage's owner, Bill Browder, said the outcome of the trial shows the government's unwillingness to find and try the culprits.

"Even though Kratov was only a minor player in the overall persecution of Sergei, the fact that the Russian authorities can't even scapegoat their one scapegoat says everything about this case," Browder said.

Kratov pleaded not guilty to charges of negligence leading to death, saying he was unable to ensure medical care for Magnitsky because of a shortage of staff.

The prison doctor thanked "everyone who believed in me and my innocence" after the verdict.

The lawyer's family has described the trial as a sham, maintaining that Kratov played a minor role in the man's death and that officials responsible must face justice.

The lawyer's mother and attorney did not attend the ruling in protest.

"Participation in this court hearing would have been humiliating for me," Nataliya Magnitskaya said in a statement. "I understand that everything has been decided in advance and everything has been pre-determined."

Browder said that he does not doubt that "people responsible for Magnitsky's death are being protected by the president of Russia.

"In this case, there was overwhelming evidence of Kratov's involvement and his acquittal goes against any logic or concept of justice," he said

Valery Borshchev, a human rights advocate who spearheaded the presidential commission's investigation into Magnitsky's death, was outraged with the court's decision. Borshchev insisted that authorities must investigate overwhelming evidence collected by his commission that points to the fact that Magnitsky was tortured.

"Kratov and others are guilty because there were inadequate conditions to treat Magnitsky," he told the Interfax news agency. "The conditions in jail were torturous, and doctors didn't do anything to change that."

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Putin Signs Ban on U.S. Adoptions of Russian Children

“I’m a little numb,” said Maria Drewinsky, a massage therapist from Sea Cliff, N.Y., who was in the final stages of adopting a 5-year-old boy named Alyosha. Both she and her husband have flown twice to visit him, and they speak to him weekly on the telephone. “We have clothes and a bedroom all set up for him, and we talk about him all the time as our son.”

But the couple fear that Alyosha may never get to New York. The ban is part of a bill retaliating against a new American law aimed at punishing human rights abuses in Russia.

The law calls for the ban to be put in force on Tuesday, and it stands to upend the plans of many American families in the final stages of adopting in Russia. Already, it has added wrenching emotional tumult to a process that can cost $50,000 or more, requires repeated trips overseas, and typically entails lengthy and maddening encounters with bureaucracy. The ban will apparently also nullify an agreement on adoptions between Russia and the United States that was ratified this year and went into effect on Nov. 1.

The bill was approved unanimously by the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Parliament, on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Mr. Putin said he would sign it as well as a resolution also adopted Wednesday that calls for improvements in Russia’s child welfare system. “I intend to sign the law,” Mr. Putin said Thursday, “as well as a presidential decree changing the procedure of helping orphaned children, children left without parental care, and especially children who are in a disadvantageous situation due to their health problems.”

Mr. Putin also brushed aside criticism that the law would deny some Russian orphans the chance for a much better life in the United States. In 2011, about 1,000 Russian children were adopted by Americans, more than any other foreign country, but still a tiny number given that nearly 120,000 children in Russia are eligible for adoption.

“There are probably many places in the world where living standards are better than ours,” Mr. Putin said. “So what? Shall we send all children there, or move there ourselves?”

United States officials have strongly criticized the measure and have urged the Russian government not to entangle orphaned children in politics. “We have repeatedly made clear, both in private and in public, our deep concerns about the bill passed by the Russian Parliament,” a State Department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell, said Thursday.

Internally, however, Obama administration officials have been debating how strongly to respond to the adoption ban, and the potential implications for other aspects of the country’s relationship with Russia.

The United States relies heavily on overland routes through Russia to ship supplies to military units in Afghanistan, and it has enlisted Russia’s help in containing Iran’s nuclear program. The former cold war rivals also have sharp disagreements, notably over the civil war in Syria.

The bill that includes the adoption ban was drafted in response to the Magnitsky Act, a law signed by President Obama this month that will bar Russian citizens accused of violating human rights from traveling to the United States and from owning real estate or other assets there. The Obama administration had opposed the Magnitsky legislation, fearing diplomatic retaliation, but members of Congress were eager to press Russia over human rights abuses and tied the bill to another measure granting Russia new status as a full trading partner.

Mr. Putin loudly accused the United States of hypocrisy, noting human rights abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and he pledged to retaliate. But he held his cards even as the lower house of Parliament, the State Duma, approved the adoption bill by a large margin, followed by unanimous approval by the Federation Council.

Although his decision has been eagerly awaited, Mr. Putin seemed blasé at a meeting with senior government officials on Thursday. When Vladimir S. Gruzdev, the governor of the Tula region, said, “I would like to ask: What is the fate of the law?” Mr. Putin replied, “Which law?”

David M. Herszenhorn reported from Moscow, and Erik Eckholm from New York.

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Four Killed When Russian Airliner Crash Lands

The crash during peak holiday travel ahead of Russia's New Year's vacation, which runs from Sunday through January 9, cast a spotlight on the country's poor air-safety record despite President Vladimir Putin's calls to improve controls.

Television footage showed the Tupolev Tu-204 jet with smoke billowing from the tail end and the cockpit broken clean off the front.

Some witnesses told state channel Rossiya-24 they saw a man thrown from the plane as it rammed into the barrier of the highway outside Vnukovo airport, just southwest of the capital, and another described pulling other people from the wreckage.

"The plane split into three pieces," Yelena Krylova, chief spokeswoman for the airport, said in televised comments.

Police spokesman Gennady Bogachyov said: "The plane went off the runway, broke through the barrier and caught fire."

The pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer and a flight attendant were killed and the other four crew members aboard - all flight attendants - were in a serious condition in hospital with head injuries, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.

Officials said earlier that there were 12 crew on board.

The mid-range Tu-204 was operated by Russian airline Red Wings and was travelling from the Czech Republic, Krylova said.

WARNING

Wreckage from the crash was scattered across the highway and the plane's wings were torn from the fuselage, witnesses said.

"We saw how the plane skidded off the runway ... The nose, where business class is, broke off and a man fell out," a witness, who gave his name as Alexei, said. "We helped him get into a mini-bus to take him to the hospital."

Another witness described pulling four people from the wreckage when he arrived at the scene before emergency service workers. "We could not get the pilot out of the cockpit but we saw a lot of blood," he told Rossiya-24.

Russian investigators said preliminary findings pointed to pilot error as the cause of the crash.

Russia's aviation authority said it had sent state-owned Tupolev a warning ordering it to fix problems that may have caused a Tu-204 with 70 aboard to go off a Siberian runway on December 21 after suffering engine and brake trouble on landing. It said similar problems had occurred before.

The billionaire owner of Red Wings, Alexander Lebedev, said the airline had already carried out the order on its Tu-204s. Red Wings' website said it operated nine of the aircraft.

Lebedev said the Tu-204 in Saturday's crash was built in 2008 and that the pilot was experienced, with 14,500 hours of flying time. He offered condolences to the victims' families and promised financial compensation and other help.

Russia and other former Soviet republics had some of the world's worst air-traffic safety records last year, with a total accident rate almost three times the world average, the International Air Transport Association said.

A passenger jet crashed and burst into flames after takeoff in Siberia in April, killing 31 people, and an airliner slammed into a riverbank in September 2011, wiping out the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl ice hockey team in a crash that killed 44 people.

The Russian-built Tu-204, which is comparable in size to a Boeing 757 or Airbus A321, is a Soviet-era design that was produced in the mid-1990s but is no longer being made. There have been no major accidents reported involving Tu-204s.

(Writing by Alissa de Carbonnel; Editing by Steve Gutterman and Alison Williams)

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Foreign Automakers See Potential in Russian Market

Even as G.M. is scaling back elsewhere in Europe, the company is ramping up production in Russia, a country that is becoming a bright spot for G.M. and much of the rest of the automotive industry.

Trickle-down oil wealth and the spread of easily accessible auto financing are lifting sales, which rose by 40 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period a year ago. G.M., Ford, Volkswagen, Nissan and Renault are all opening new plants, or intend to do so soon.

The new G.M. line in this picturesque town, an old center of the Russian car industry on the Volga River, will manufacture 30,000 Aveo sedans a year. Cars, held up on jacks, move along the assembly line and end up in a brilliantly illuminated inspection room, where every inch is carefully examined; the factory is trying to get defects down to G.M. standards. If all goes well, production will start in January.

The site is one of half a dozen facilities that G.M. runs in Russia, where the Detroit carmaker intends to invest $1 billion over the next five years. The money is a good bet today, analysts of the Russian market say, for the same reason that politics here recently got a jolt with street protests: the Russian middle class is rising, and becoming a force in both commerce and public life.

“I would put Russia in the same breath as China,” Timothy E. Lee, the head of G.M.’s international division, said at a groundbreaking ceremony for a plant in St. Petersburg last summer, which will make midprice sedans.

Russians are snatching up foreign-branded cars. The Hyundai Solaris was the best-selling vehicle in Russia last year. And Hyundai, Nissan and Renault all did well in the first 11 months of this year, with sales increases ranging from 11 to 23 percent.

Over all, Russian sales are now approaching three million cars annually, according to the Association of European Businesses, a group that tracks sales here as part of its efforts to promote trade between Russia and the European Union.

Russia is projected to surpass Germany and become the largest car market in Europe in 2014. It is already nipping at Germany’s lead. In August, Russians bought more cars than Germans did, before sales tapered off in the fall.

International car companies say the best way to benefit from the growth is through investing heavily in Russian manufacturing, elbowing aside local brands.

Russia’s automobile industry survived the financial crisis not through subsidies, though these were handed out, but through a willingness to embrace foreign manufacturers — even if that hurt homegrown brands like the Lada and the Volga, the model once made in the plant here.

Russians have shown little nostalgia for their own cars.

“I’m glad they’re gone,” said Nikolai Chernyshov, a 34-year-old lawyer, as his family spilled out of a Ford Focus at a shopping center. He has not shed a tear, he said, for the Lada he once drove.

“No matter what effort we put into making them better, they never got any better,” he said.

The Volga, an overpowered slab of steel, was once the vehicle of choice for K.G.B. agents. It even had an ominous nickname, the Black Raven. But the cars often broke down, diminishing their cachet.

Last year, the last Volga rolled out of the Gorky Automobile Factory, clearing enough floor space for three foreign manufacturers — G.M., Volkswagen and Mercedes — which collectively now employ about 5,000 people.

“We are only helped by being brutally honest with ourselves,” said Bo Andersson, a former G.M. executive hired in 2009 to manage the transition.

“It’s a shame we lost the Volga,” Aleksandr Kazanin, a worker here, said. “But we’re still here. We kept our jobs.”

Avtovaz, the maker of Russia’s other main brand, the Lada, is also charting a future based on a strategy of forming joint ventures with foreign car companies — in its case, Nissan of Japan and Renault of France.

Just this month, the French-Japanese alliance formalized an agreement to buy a controlling stake in Avtovaz from the Russian government, bringing all of the country’s car industry under foreign management or ownership for the first time in the post-Soviet period.

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Russian Parliament Sends Adoption Ban to Putin

Enactment of the adoption ban, which was developed in retaliation for an American law punishing Russians accused of violating human rights, would be the most severe blow yet to relations between Russia and the United States in a year marked by a series of setbacks.

Since Mr. Putin returned to the presidency in May, Russian officials have used a juggernaut of legislation and executive decisions to curtail United States influence and involvement in Russia, undoing major partnerships that began after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In September, the Kremlin ordered the United States Agency for International Development to cease operations here, shutting a wide portfolio of public health, civil society and other initiatives. And officials announced plans to terminate a joint effort to dismantle nuclear, chemical and other nonconventional weapons known as the Nunn-Lugar agreement.

Russia also passed a law requiring nonprofit groups that get financing from abroad to register as “foreign agents,” sharply curtailing the ability of the United States to work with good-government groups, and another law broadening the definition of treason to include “providing financial, technical, advisory or other assistance to a foreign state or international organization.”

The adoption ban, however, is the first step that takes direct aim at the American public and would effectively undo a bilateral agreement on international adoptions ratified just this year, which took effect on Nov. 1. The agreement called for heightened oversight in response to several high-profile cases of abuse and deaths of adopted Russian children in the United States.

About 1,000 Russian children were adopted by parents from the United States in 2011, more than any other country, and more than 45,000 such children have been adopted by American parents since 1999.

Pavel Astakhov, Russia’s child rights commissioner, told news agencies on Wednesday that the ban if enacted could prevent the departure of 46 children who are ready to be adopted by parents from the United States. Some of those adoptions have already received court approval, he said. And some lawmakers said that they believed the bilateral agreement on adoptions with the United States would be void as of Jan. 1, even though Mr. Putin, at his annual news conference last week, said that changes to the agreement require one-year notice by either side.

The proposed ban has opened a rare split at the highest levels of the Russian government, with several senior officials speaking out against it. And it has provoked a huge public outcry and debate, with critics of the ban saying that it would most hurt Russian orphans, many of whom are already suffering in the country’s deeply troubled foster care and orphanage system.

In debate on Wednesday, lawmakers said that they felt an imperative to retaliate for a law signed by President Obama earlier this month that will punish Russian citizens accused of violating human rights, by prohibiting them from traveling to the United States and from owning real estate or other assets there.

Lawmakers also said that Russia, which has more than 650,000 children living without parental supervision, should take care of them on its own. The vote in the Federation Council was 143 to 0.

“We need to set a plan for the future,” said Valery V. Ryazanksy, a senator from the Kursk region. Then, reiterating a slogan adopted by many lawmakers in recent days, he declared: “Russia without orphans!” Gennady I. Makin, a senator from Veronezh, gave it a slight twist: “Russia without orphanages.”

Several child-welfare advocates have mocked this sort of rhetoric, noting that more than 80,000 children were identified as in need of supervision in 2011 and that the country has been unable to find homes for the vast majority of children eligible for adoption.

There were slightly more than 10,000 adoptions in Russia in 2011, about 3,400 of which were by foreigners.

In addition to banning adoptions by Americans, the bill approved on Wednesday would impose sanctions on American judges and others accused of violating the rights of adopted Russian children in the United States.

A number of cases involving the abuse or even deaths of adopted Russian children in recent years have generated publicity and outrage in Russia, including a case in which a 7-year-old boy was sent on a flight back to Russia alone by his adoptive mother in Tennessee.

The Russian law was named for Dmitri Yakovlev, a toddler who died of heatstroke in Virginia in 2008, after his adoptive father left him in a parked car for nine hours. The father, Miles Harrison, was acquitted of manslaughter by a judge who ruled the death was an accident.

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Russian Soccer Fans Marching Backward to Intolerance

The largest fan club of Zenit St. Petersburg, the two-time defending Russian champion, has demanded that the team include no black or gay players.

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