Obama Interview With Putin Critics Risks Russian Backlash

Barack Obama is to give an interview to the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta ahead of his trip to the country, in the clearest sign yet that his administration will take an unexpectedly tough approach in its dealings with Moscow.

The White House confirmed last night that Obama will give an interview to the paper's editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov. He will also meet the former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, who co-owns the paper.

Novaya Gazeta is famous for its critical reporting of the Russian government. Its special correspondent Anna Politkovskaya – a scathing critic of the former president and now prime minister, Vladimir Putin – is one of four of its reporters to have been murdered. She was shot dead in Moscow in October 2006.

Formally, Obama is merely following in the footsteps of Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, who granted his own interview in April to Novaya, which is published on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. But the decision suggests Obama is taking a robust approach to Russia.

This week the paper published its own investigation into the origins of last summer's war between Russia and Georgia. The Kremlin has blamed Georgia's pro-US president, Mikhail Saakashvili, for the conflict. But according to Novaya, the Kremlin planned its invasion of Georgia long in advance, sending columns of tanks before hostilities erupted in South Ossetia.

Ahead of Obama's inaugural trip to Russia, there has been a wide-ranging debate inside his administration on how to engage with the Kremlin after the disastrous Bush years. By last autumn, relations between Moscow and Washington had sunk to their lowest since the cold war and the early 1980s.

Foreign policy realists have argued that to "reset" relations with Moscow, and to secure Russia's support for crucial US priorities like Iran and Afghanistan, Obama should ease up on his support for human rights. Idealists have called for a vigorous values-based engagement with the Kremlin.

Writing last week in the Moscow Times, the Russian analyst Lilia Shevtsova noted: "The outcome of Obama's visit to Moscow will depend on the willingness of the US side to see the differences between the national interest of Russia and the interests of Russia's ruling elite."

She said Obama had a unique chance to "tell the world what US policy towards Russia will be under his administration" – suggesting that his policy was likely to emerge as "what philosopher Francis Fukuyama called 'realistic Wilsonianism', a combination of pragmatism and values".

Human rights groups have called on Obama to raise the issue of murdered Russian journalists during his two and a half day Moscow trip. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) wrote to the president on 29 June pointing out that 17 journalists had been killed in Russia since 2000.

Only in one case had the killers been convicted and in no cases had the masterminds been caught. According to the CPJ, Russia is now the world's third most deadly country to work as a reporter – after Iraq and Algeria. It said Russia had a "very troubling record of impunity in attacks on the press", with investigations hampered by "influence from external political forces".

On June 29, Vyacheslav Yaroshenko became the latest Russian journalist to die, after he was attacked and severely beaten in April. Yaroshenko was editor-in-chief of a regional newspaper in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. His paper, Corruption and Crime, had reported on corruption in law enforcement agencies.

It is not yet clear whether Obama will give his interview to Novaya Gazeta in Washington this weekend or Moscow, or if he will meet the Russian media tycoon Alexander Lebedev. The London Evening Standard proprietor co-owns Novaya with Gorbachev, and is the main source of funding for the paper.

Given the Kremlin's control over most of the Russian media, Novaya's survival is something of an anomaly. Journalists on the title say the paper is allowed to carry on because it gives the Russian government a chance to rubbish western claims that there is no freedom of speech in Russia.

It is also an indispensable source of information for the Kremlin's feuding factions, they say.