The London Evening Standard.

Since 1827 London, UK has seen the publication of a newspaper called "The Evening Standard." As you can probably guess from the name the Evening Standard differs from most other newspapers by being published in the evening rather then the morning. Since around the 1960's this has meant that it's readership has been made up almost exclusively of middle-class Conservative commuters who want to read vanity pieces telling them how great their chosen political ideology is on their long railway journeys from London where they work back to places like Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Sussex where they live.

In January 2009 The Evening Standard was brought from the Daily Mail group by Russian billionaire and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev. At the time there were wild, cold war era conspiracy theories that Lebedev would use the paper to pump out pro-Russian propaganda or, god forbid, balanced reporting. What actually happened was that Lebedev did nothing of the sort limiting his editorial control to simply writing large cheques to allow the editorial team to carry on as they've always done. The only change was that Lebedev's takeover coincided with the rise of freesheets such as "Metro, the London Paper and London Lite." Being free these obviously cut into the Evening Standard's circulation so in October 2009 Lebedev also started giving away the Evening Standard  free and in the process pretty much killed off all the other freesheets massively booting the Evening Standard's circulation.

The 2012 London Mayoral Election was the first such election where Evening Standard was available for free but the editorial team did what they'd done at all previous elections - campaign for the Conservative Party candidate by running a smear campaign against the Labour Candidate Ken Livingstone. The fact that this was the first election where the Evening Standard was actually being read by London voters means that it's editorial line was probably the deciding factor that saw the Conservative's Boris Johnson beat Ken Livingstone by some 60,000 votes.

So as far as I know there isn't actually anyone called Boris Lebedev and I have no idea of Alexander Lebedev's relationship with Vladamir Putin or anyone else at the Kremlin. I just brought it up last night partly to hear the sound of my own voice and because I was starting to see parallels between the policing of the anti-Putin rallies in Moscow and NATO's efforts to prevent violence in the wake of the Serbian general election. You see making Russia justify it's actions in the policing of anti-Putin rallies it defines the terms of what is acceptable for NATO peacekeepers to do to Serb nationalists who continue to protest the occupation of Kosovo by Albania. Eventually this will reduce those Serb protests and help make the occupation of Kosovo permanent.

So while I understand that the people protesting against Putin have lots of legitimate concerns the international backers of the protests are less concerned with corruption and the independence of the Judicary and more concerned with intimidating Russia into dropping it's opposition to things like the occupation of Kosovo and what's currently going on in Syria.