Russia's foreign ministry says Western governments are pressing Russians living in their countries to keep them from voting in next month's State Duma election, and that the Baltic states are the most energetic about it. The claim came from Maxim Raider, an ambassador-at-large who is deputy head of the ministry's elections commission, in an interview with RIA Novosti. His formulation was that despite their international human-rights obligations and their loud declarations of commitment to democracy, some Western countries are indeed attempting to pressure Russians resident there so as to obstruct the expression of their will.
He had gone further on Friday. The greatest concern, he said then, comes from states where clinical Russophobia has infected most of the governing elites — not only Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia but also Poland, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. He did not rule out provocations at overseas polling stations on voting day.
Ведомости, reporting the same interview, attaches the one concrete incident on the record. At the end of June the Russian embassy in Latvia warned that from 1 July Latvian police were checking the identity documents of people visiting the Russian mission in Riga. That is the embassy's account rather than the Latvian authorities'. The paper also notes that the ministry has repeatedly alleged discrimination against Russian speakers in the Baltic states, and that its spokeswoman has said the region will not avoid a case at the UN court over it.
The vote itself runs over three days, 18 to 20 September, for the ninth convocation of the Duma. RIA lists the parties standing: United Russia, the LDPR, the Direct Democracy Party, the Greens, A Just Russia, Rodina, the Communist Party, the Pensioners' Party, Communists of Russia and New People.
On the size of the overseas operation the two accounts do not agree. Both say Russians abroad will vote in 152 countries. RIA puts the number of polling stations at 312; Ведомости, citing the central election commission's August decision on overseas voting, puts it at 319. Neither figure can be checked against the other from what has been published.
Ведомости adds a domestic data point of its own: on July figures from the state pollster VTsIOM, 56 percent of Russians had already settled which party they would vote for.
Why it is on the board
Third on RIA Novosti's most-read list when we collected.
The two accounts are the same interview handled differently. RIA ran it, so it carries the quotation at length, the earlier Friday remarks, the party list and the polling-station count. Ведомости takes the claim as reported, marks it as RIA's, and spends its space on what can be dated — the June embassy warning, the election commission's August decision, the pollster's figure. One paper is the channel; the other is checking what the channel said against a calendar.
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