Fears of attempted acts of terrorism against the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia continue to multiply causing some U.S. Oly,pic team members to have hired their own additional security details that include former Navy SEALS as detail members. Meanwhile, new reports of the graft and corruption - and the gross ripping off of Russian citizens - by Putin cronies make the 2014 Winter Games perhaps the most corrupt in history. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at a new release by opposition leaders in Russia that details the corruption and the huge amounts of money more or less stolen by Putin's sycophants. Here are excerpts:
It was inevitable that Alexey Navalny would do something big with the Olympics. The opposition leader famous for his anti-graft muckraking — and put on show trial for bogus “embezzlement” charges — couldn’t let the biggest racket in Russian history pass without his own peal-back of corporate cronyism, cost inflation, and outright criminality. The upcoming 2014 Winter Games in Sochi is now estimated to have cost more than $50 billion, a price tag higher than the last 21 Winter Games combined and more expensive than any Summer Games ever held.
The names and figures behind each building, hotel, media center, and ski slope are detailed: who did the building, who paid for it, who really paid for it, and who got fired or indicted.
But the Foundation’s real service is adding meat on the bones of what most Russians already suspected. A poll taken last year found that two-thirds of the country is convinced that much of the money allocated for Sochi was either misused or “simply stolen.”
An Olympic media center, for instance, which will house 8,000 journalists, was built by Inzhtransstroy Corp. Ltd., a company 51 percent-co-owned, through a subsidiary, by Arkady Rotenberg, Vladimir Putin’s old friend and judo partner—and, naturally, a billionaire. Opposition figures Boris Nemtsov and Leonid Martynyuk, who have produced their own report on Sochi corruption (also translated by The Interpreter) say that enterprises owned or affiliated with Arkady and his brother Boris, who’s also matey with Putin, were the second-highest recipients of state funding for Sochi, following only Olimpstroy, the state corporation overseeing all preparations for Sochi, and just ahead of Yakunin’s Russian Railways.
Or consider the Shayba ice rink, where the figure skating competitions will be held. The rink cost $98.5 million, making it more than one and a half times more expensive than other Olympic equivalents. It’s also wholly funded by private wealth — in this case, that of Iskander Makhmudov, an oligarch close to Vladimir Yakunin, who heads the stage agency Russian Railways, the general partner of the Sochi Games.
Mafiosos crawling into bed with industrialists is hardly unconventional for Russia. As disclosed in a U.S. State Department cable published by WikiLeaks, at least one Spanish prosecutor, José Grinda González, who presciently described Russia, Belarus, Chechnya, and Ukraine as “virtual mafia states,” believed that Petrov, known as vor v zakone — “thief in law” — was working with the collusion of state officials. Grinda alleged that Russia’s transnational organized crime networks seek “to be a complement to state structures” and that the Kremlin’s strategy was to use the mob “to do whatever [it] cannot acceptably do as a government.”
The Sochi Olympics has garnered more anxious global press coverage for the increasing likelihood of Islamist terrorism, against which all the various Russian security services are set to deploy a staggering 100,000 personnel throughout Sochi and its outlying territory to protect an estimated 4.4 million tourists. “You’ve got people from different departments of different agencies sent from all over the country,” said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s intelligence organs. “They might be of some deterrent effect, but they know nothing about how to identify a suicide bomber.” At least five “black widows”— female suicide bombers — are now thought to be planning an attack, with one possibly already inside the “ring of steel” that more resembles a DMZ around Sochi, which is just a quick trip away from the North Caucasus regions where jihad and brutal state responses to it are daily phenomena.
Rather ominously, as Soldatov told me, “there was no statement from any security officials in Sochi regarding this issue about female suicide bombers.” Moreover, news of the black widows didn’t come from the Russian press, it came from the Western press, which the former then recycled. Putin is sounding his usual macho and bombastic self, but the State Department has issued a travel warning to Americans during the Games, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Friday, “If we need to extract our citizens, we will have appropriate arrangements with the Russians to do this.”
Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute recently wondered if Sochi could “become Russia’s moment of truth, prompting national soul-searching and spurring the movement for democratization?” Aron compared Sochi to the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, a travesty of fallen bridges and “uninhabitable” athletic villages which rippled into a wave of successful anti-corruption politics and the election of a new opposition party in four Indian states. Even if Russia doesn’t have an equally free and fair electoral system, the domestic backlash from a major international humiliation must loom large in Putin’s mind.
Even a power outage, of which there have been many in Sochi already, could see the lights go off in the middle of a slalom or double-axel. In that event, only one man will be held accountable — and it’ll all have been his own fault.
Ultimately, any mishap that may occur will be the responsibility of the International Olympic Committee which should never have awarded the 2014 Winter Games to Sochi.
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