Hereafter:

There is no reason to doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long-time protege, Dmitry Med-vedev, will win the presidential election scheduled for March 2. Still, the principled refusal of European election monitors to send observers to Russia was a symbolic gesture worth making. The Kremlin’s conspiratorial innuendos about a Western plot to weaken the new Ru-ssian state only underlines the value of that gesture.

The Kremlin even changed the rules for the funds it allocates to the Election Commission. Putin alluded to the rebuff of the monitors’ requests when he warned of foreign “interference in the course of political struggle in Russia.” It is a commonplace among Put-in’s circle that Western observers were instrumental in producing the Orange Re-volution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, former Soviet republics in which public revolts against rigged elections threw out pro-Russian regimes.

There is no reason for a new Cold War, and there are good reasons to eliminate unnecessary provocations of Moscow, such as the planned deployment of a faulty missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic. But the West need not acquiesce in the Kremlin’s suppression of grass-roots democratic groups, its abuse of human rights, and its disregard for democratic elections and the rule of law. — The Boston Globe