On the one hand, Moscow's mayor Yuri Luzhkov publicly condemns xenophobia and last week called for harsher laws against hate speech and hate crimes, saying on April 15 that: "The government must ensure the tranquility of all people regardless of the color of their skin... Xenophobia is a disease that may eventually endanger this country. The main reason for such crimes is the absence of a real punishment." At the same time, his subordinates running the city's law enforcement agencies impudently contradict him and President Putin by denying that racist violence is a problem.

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A few days after the city's chief prosecutor harshly criticized human rights activists for supposedly exaggerating the problem of hate crimes in Russia, Moscow's chief of police Vladimir Pronin denied that there is an organized neo-Nazi movement in Moscow, according to an April 10, 2008 report by the Russian Jewish web site Jewish.ru. Speaking on TVTs television on Tuesday, Mr. Pronin said that, "There is no organized skinhead movement in Moscow, there are just individual excesses." He added that in the first two months of the year, Moscow police registered around 60 crimes motivated by extremism, and that prosecutors opened three hate crimes investigations. As usual, he tempered these numbers by emphasizing that foreign citizens are more likely to commit crimes than Russian citizens, according to police statistics.

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