More Russian Silliness

It sounds like a broken record, but here we go again with the Russians:

The most outspoken Kremlin opponent in Russia's presidential contest was denied a spot on the ballot yesterday by election authorities who said tens of thousands of signatures on his nominating petitions were forgeries.

Former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov angrily rejected the official claims and accused President Vladimir V. Putin of ordering his removal from the March 2 election.

Kasyanov, a liberal politician who was running as an independent, urged voters to boycott the vote.

"The country is moving deeper into a totalitarian deadlock," he said at a news conference yesterday. "This election without choice is a mockery of citizens of Russia."

Opinion polls showed support for Kasyanov hovering between 1 and 2 percentage points, giving him little chance of posing a significant challenge to Putin's hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev. However, Kasyanov could have brought an element of unpredictability to a campaign carefully orchestrated by authorities, embarrassing the Kremlin with his criticism.

Putin and his people just continue to do more and more to damage the view of Russia as a modernizing western democracy. The fact of the matter is that, more and more every day, Russia is reverting back to the old totalitarian ways with which they are most familiar. And I'm not sure if there is any foreign policy failure (and yes, that does include the war in Iraq) by the Bush Administration any larger than it's failure to deal with the Russians in a way that prevents this sort of thing from happening.