Stop providing Putin with democratic credentials, Kasparov tells West

By accepting Vladimir Putin as a democrat, Canada and otherWestern governments have allowed the Russian president to continue running the country like a police state,former chess champion Gary Kasparov claimed Tuesday.

In a luncheon speech to Toronto's Empire Club, Kasparov said that to his dismay, the West's most powerful democratic leaders are continuing to treat Putin as one of them.

"In Putin's Russia today we have no civil society, no human rights, no rule of law and yet two weeks ago, the leaders of the free world sat down in Germany and treated Vladimir Putin as an equal."

Kasparov told his audience of mainly Canadian business people that Russia is quickly becoming a dictatorship, adding that all the national television networks are now controlled by Putin and his band of former KGB officers. And the once powerful Russian Parliament has become a toothless Kremlin lapdog, he said.

Kasparov'sstrong words of condemnation for the Kremlin fall squarely in line with his record of voicing dissent against the Putin administration.

In April, Kasparov, who is chairman of Russia's United Civil front, was arrested along with 170 demonstrators at a 5,000-strong march in Moscow.

The following month, he was prevented by police from boarding a flight to Samara, where he planned to take part in a protest march coinciding with a Russia-EU summit.

"The glimmer of democracy during Boris Yeltsin's years, however messy, [is] being entirely extinguished … Russia today is a police state masquerading as a democracy," Kasparov said.

Kasparov added that Putin "needs the help of the free world" to maintain that illusion and urged the Canadian government and other countries to "stop providing Putin with democratic credentials."

Kasparov said the democratic opposition in Russia doesn't expect the West to win their fight for them. But he said if the West would begin to shred Putin's cover story that he's a democrat, the Russian public would start to ask questions.

"The message to send to Moscow is that Putin cannot act like [Belarus President Alexander] Lukashenko, or [Venezuelan Leader Hugo] Chavez, or [Zimbabwe President Robert] Mugabe and be treated as a democratic leader."

Kasparov alsoaccused the Kremlin of being behind the murders of critics such as investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

"I do not know the name of the exact person who murdered Anna Politkovskaya but I know their address."