After Yukos, West doubts Putin's motives

Russian President Vladimir Putin begins his summit with democratic European leaders Thursday with dented democratic credentials.

Mr. Putin insists that the arrest of Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky on tax and fraud charges is simply a case of law enforcement. But analysts say that concerns in Europe and Washington - about the selective use of the law and a government freeze of some 40 percent of the shares of Khodorkovsky's company - are putting Russia's future under a cloud.

"Putin has brought a much greater respectability for Russia in the world" during three years in office that have brought swift economic growth, says Stephen O'Sullivan, head of research at the United Financial Group in Moscow. But now, he says, "That has clearly been called into question. If it was even-handed, people around the world would be applauding," Mr. O'Sullivan says. Instead, Russia's richest man is widely seen to have been targeted because of thinly disguised political ambitions that challenged Putin.

The affair has given rise to a fresh sense of instability, at a time when Russia's markets were beginning to boom.

For centuries, Russia has been defined by the strong hand of the state, exercised by authoritarian leaders. Putin vowed to bring instead a "dictatorship of law" to Russia, when he took power after the turbulent post-Soviet era of the 1990s led by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.

But often the law has been used as a tool to topple the super-rich business tycoons, or "oligarchs," who emerged during the rigged privatization of Soviet assets in the 1990s and who expected their political clout to match the size of their checkbooks. Two were forced out of Russia and had to relinquish control of vast media and other holdings. Mr. Khodorkovsky, who Forbes figures is worth $8 billion, was the latest who did not adhere to the July 2000 deal Putin struck with the tycoons not to dabble in politics. He's now eating fish soup in a bleak Moscow detention center.

"This is part of a long-term game plan orchestrated by Putin himself, to eliminate sources of opposition," says Michael McFaul, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford and an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Anybody who has power [in Russia] is totally scared," said Mr. McFaul, during an interview in Moscow.

Khodorkovsky is known to have funded several parties, including opposition parties. In recent years, the tycoon has also worked hard to improve his image in the West. His philanthropy has included contributions to the US's Library of Congress and to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

On the EU-Russia summit agenda is a discussion of "common democratic values that underpin EU-Russian relations," according to an EU statement issued Tuesday. Regarding the Yukos case, EU leaders meeting Putin are to "recall the need for the fair, nondiscriminatory and proportional application of the law by the Russian authorities," and that defendents "must be granted due process."

US officials have also taken a tough line, even as Russian-born American ci- tizen Simon Kukes took over the leadership of YukosSibneft Tuesday, after Khodorkovsky stepped down as CEO in a statement from his jail cell Monday.

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