Quotes of the Day

The terrorism trial of alleged ringleaders in last May's bloody unrest in the Uzbek city of Andijan threw up a new alleged co-conspirator last week: the U.S. embassy in the capital, Tashkent. Defendant Tavakalbek Hojiev told the court the embassy had funded plotters to overthrow the autocratic regime of Islam Karimov in a Ukraine-style revolution.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, on a brief, frosty visit to Tashkent, rejected the charges. But the claim underlined how low U.S.-Uzbek relations have plummeted since the May killings, when according to independent estimates as many as 500 mostly unarmed civilians were killed by Uzbek security forces. Since registering its concerns, the U.S. has been ordered out of the Khanabad airbase-a key base supporting Washington's war on terror-and will be gone by early next year.

Russia's star, meanwhile, is brightening. Russian security officials helped investigate the uprising, the start of the terror trial coincided with a joint Uzbek-Russian antiterrorist training exercise, and when Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov visited Tashkent, Karimov hailed the "dynamically developing" relations between their two states. Within Uzbekistan, meanwhile, a vicious crackdown continues: one of the most outspoken human rights activists, Zaidjakhon Zainabitdinov, has not been heard of since his detention in late May. Another, Yelena Urlayeva, is being held in a psychiatric hospital and has reportedly declared a hunger strike.

Moscow's strategy in Uzbekistan seems to be one of looking for cracks in alliances and then widening them. It may be trying this now with Ukraine. Almost immediately after she was fired as Ukrainian Premier, Yuliya Tymoshenko, until now a bitter critic of Russia and its policies, quietly flew to Moscow to meet with senior prosecutors and, Time has learned, President Putin. Afterward, Russian prosecutors announced that they had withdrawn an international search warrant against Tymoshenko on bribery charges. She left Moscow praising Valdimir Putin as a "fine, worthy leader," a man "Russia could be proud of."

• PAUL QUINN-JUDGE
• Uzbekistan alleges U.S. funded bid for an 'Orange Revolution'