Investigators standing over the body of the lawyer Stanislav Markelov in Moscow on Monday. He and Anastasia Baburova, a freelance journalist, were killed after he held a news conference.

The lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, had just left a news conference where he announced that he would continue to fight against the early release from jail of Yuri D. Budanov, a former Russian tank commander imprisoned for murdering a young Chechen woman.

Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old journalist who was with Mr. Markelov, was also killed, according to a spokeswoman for a newspaper where she worked as a freelancer, Novaya Gazeta, which is highly critical of the government. The two were shot.

Officials said they believed that Mr. Markelov, 34, was the primary target, having brought cases against the Russian military, Chechen warlords and murderous neo-fascists. With a laundry list of his potential enemies, authorities refrained from naming any suspects.

“Investigators are looking into various theories, including that the murder was linked to the victim’s professional activities,” Vladimir I. Markin, a spokesman for the investigative wing of the Prosecutor General’s Office, said of Mr. Markelov.

The murder bore the characteristics of a contract killing, a not-uncommon phenomenon in Russia. Even so, the audacity of Mr. Markelov’s murder surprised some commentators.

“Even when organized crime in the 1990s was rampant, such a killing would have been considered bold and horrific,” said a correspondent from Vesti television.

Mr. Markelov, who was the director of the Rule of Law Institute, a civil liberties group, gained prominence recently representing the family of Elza Kungayeva. She was an 18-year-old Chechen whom Mr. Budanov, the former tank commander, admitted strangling in his quarters in March 2000, just as the second post-Soviet war in Chechnya was beginning to rage.

Mr. Budanov was sentenced to 10 years in prison but was given early parole for good behavior.

Mr. Markelov, at the news conference just before his death, told reporters that he might file an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights against the early release of Mr. Budanov, who was a decorated colonel of the Russian Army before he was stripped of his rank. In an interview last week with The New York Times, Mr. Markelov said he might also file a lawsuit against the administration of the prison that released Mr. Budanov last Thursday.

The decision to free Mr. Budanov set off street protests and outraged some human rights groups and Chechen officials. It reignited long-simmering tensions years after a decade of intermittent war in Chechnya, a southern Russian republic, was replaced by tenuous stability.

But Mr. Budanov was also revered by nationalists as a valiant fighter who helped wage a bloody but necessary war against separatist rebels in Chechnya. Some now see Mr. Markelov’s murder as revenge for his efforts against a Russian hero.

“The murder of Markelov, I consider a bold open warning by the ‘party of war’ to democratic Russia,” Nudri S. Nukhazhiev, Chechnya’s human rights ombudsman, said in a statement. “Today, there are no facts or evidence of the direct participation of Budanov in this crime, but I am more than certain that it was committed by his supporters with his consent.”

Mr. Markelov phoned the father of Ms. Kungayeva, the slain teenager, a few days ago to complain that he had received death threats, the father told the Interfax news agency.

Lela Khamzayeva, another lawyer for Ms. Kungayeva’s family, was adamant, however, that the killing of Mr. Markelov could not be linked to his connection with Mr. Budanov, because his role during the actual proceedings against the former colonel was, as she put it, “insignificant.”

“If someone is trying to link this murder with Markelov’s participation in the Budanov case, well, that’s just ridiculous,” she said.

Given Mr. Markelov’s propensity for challenging the Russian authorities and others known to settle scores violently, the list of potential suspects is lengthy.

He worked closely with Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist with Novaya Gazeta and strong critic of Russia’s Chechnya policies, who was murdered in Moscow in 2006.

He often defended the interests of those, like Ms. Kungayeva, who became ensnared in the violent and often arbitrary military justice of the Chechen conflict or the tyrannical rule of Chechnya’s violence-prone leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, in the war’s aftermath.

“He handled almost every case opened as a result of the work of Anna Politkovskaya,” said Nadezhda Prusenkova, a spokeswoman for Novaya Gazeta.

While he was not involved in the current trial of three men accused in the murder of Ms. Politkovskaya, Mr. Markelov did work on the case of another murdered Novaya Gazeta journalist, Igor Domnikov, who died in 2000 from wounds caused by a hammer blow to the head.

Mr. Markelov has also represented victims of neo-fascist and xenophobic violence, a phenomenon that has been expanding annually both in frequency and intensity, according to experts.

At least 10 people were killed and 9 others injured in racist attacks in Russia in the first two weeks of 2009, said Aleksandr Brod, the head of the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, Interfax reported.

Ms. Baburova, the freelancer who was killed Monday, began working for Novaya Gazeta last October. She cited Mr. Markelov in her most recent article about fascist groups, published on Saturday.

In it, the lawyer criticized the authorities for their handling of a case against the leader of a violent nationalist group, who was sentenced to three years in prison for arranging the murder of a man from Tajikistan and putting video of the killing on the Internet.

With Ms. Baburova’s death, Novaya Gazeta has lost four reporters to murder or other mysterious circumstances since 2000.

In Sofia, Bulgaria, hampered by the gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine, commuters rode in an unheated tram on Thursday. The European Union said gas should flow again soon.

The agreement means that gas supplies could resume soon, perhaps as early as Friday, or more likely over the weekend, if no further hitches arise.

Russia cut off all gas deliveries through Ukraine on Wednesday after the dispute escalated, leaving European countries like Bulgaria shivering during a bitter January cold snap.

Ukraine said it would allow Russian experts to join the European Union mission to monitor gas flow through the country, The Associated Press reported from Kiev.

Valentyn Zemlyansky, spokesman for Ukraine’s state gas company Naftogaz, said members of the European Union mission would tour gas pumping stations together with the Russian experts, the A.P. reported, adding that the European Union monitors were expected to arrive in Kiev on Friday.

Russia has said it would restore supplies of natural gas through Ukraine if its officials were included in a monitoring mission.

The European Union said Thursday that gas supplies to the Continent should start flowing shortly after a deal was completed.

“This deployment should lead to the Russian supplies of gas to E.U. member states’ being restored,” the Czech government, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, said in a statement, The Associated Press reported.

Russia cut off the flow of gas on Tuesday as part of a pricing dispute with Ukraine, creating shortages in many European countries. The impact of the gas cuts was felt most severely in southeastern Europe, where hundreds of thousands of people in Serbia, Bosnia and Bulgaria were without heat.

Russia, which first cut off gas shipments just for Ukraine, on Wednesday cut off all gas exports to Ukraine, including those destined for Europe, saying Ukraine was diverting some gas for its domestic use.

The pricing dispute centers on Russia’s desire to sharply raise the price for the gas it sells to Ukraine, as well as Ukraine’s desire to raise the fees that it charges Gazprom to ship gas to the European Union. Gazprom is seeking to raise the price Ukraine pays for gas to $450 per 1,000 cubic meters from $179.50 last year. Ukraine has reportedly offered a little more than $200 per 1,000 cubic meters. Russia also wants to collect what it says are fines for late payments on previous shipments.

Gazprom halted all shipments to Ukraine for domestic use on Jan. 1, then stopped gas exports for transshipment through Ukraine on Wednesday, saying its western neighbor was taking gas from the pipeline meant for European customers. The cutoff left Ukraine and 17 other countries in Europe facing either no new gas supplies or a sharp reduction in the middle of winter.

In a European parliamentary committee hearing on Thursday, Evgeni Kirilov, a member from Bulgaria, which depends almost completely on Russia for its gas, said he could not understand “how two of the biggest countries in Europe can be so uncivilized and irresponsible.” He added: “We are hostage to this irresponsibility.”

Mr. Putin blamed Ukraine’s leaders for the shutoff and suggested they were unwilling to cut out a middleman company, RosUkrEnergo, owned by a business ally of the Ukrainian president, Viktor A. Yushchenko. Mr. Putin said he suspected some politicians of seeking to use proceeds from gas “as financial resources in future political campaigns.”

Speaking on Russian television on Thursday, Mr. Putin offered to raise the transit fees that Russia pays to ship gas across Ukraine, saying the two countries needed to shift, “as quickly as possible to a market relationship.” In exchange for a market rate for gas, he said, Russia would pay transit fees of $3 to $4 for each 1,000 cubic meters transported 100 kilometers, or 62 miles. Gazprom last year paid Ukraine $1.60 and had said it would pay $1.70 this year.

While there are political overtones to the dispute, most experts attribute it primarily to commercial interests. “The genesis of this is in Russia’s move away from barter agreements with the former Soviet republics toward market prices,” Andrew Neff, an energy analyst at IHS Global Insight in Ankara, Turkey, said. “You can blame either one, but both sides seem to have shot themselves in the foot.”

Several countries are relying on their own limited reserves of gas

The two sides have blamed each other for halting gas flows.

Ukraine’s Naftogaz said Russia’s Gazprom halted supplies at 0744 local time (0544 GMT). Gazprom said Ukraine had closed the last remaining pipeline.

The EU depends on Russia for about a quarter of its total gas supplies, some 80% of which is pumped through Ukraine.

The list of countries that have reported a total halt of Russian supplies via Ukraine includes Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Serbia, and Austria.

Italy said it had received only 10% of its expected supply.

The row comes amid a cold snap across Europe that is likely to push up demand for gas.

Bulgaria says it has sufficient supplies for just a few more days.

Many other countries are now tapping strategic reserves, built up to cope with just such a development, says the BBC’s Europe correspondent Nick Thorpe.

Power stations have been told to switch to fuel oil where possible, while big industrial users have been told to prepare to limit or halt use.

Some 12,000 households in the eastern Bulgarian city of Varna had been left without central heating, authorities said. Nearby Dobrich was also affected.

In many former Soviet bloc countries whole towns and areas rely on a single centralised heating system, so that when that shuts down, every household is affected.

Hungary’s gas transmission company said it had limited the natural gas consumption for industrial users on Wednesday, while Budapest airport was switching from gas to oil heating, Reuters news agency reported.

Hungary expects to use 64m cubic metres of gas on Wednesday, down from 68m cubic metres, the company said.

Venting anger

Russia and Ukraine have been blaming each other for the disruption to Europe’s energy supplies.

Gazprom has accused Ukraine of shutting off the final pipeline carrying gas to Europe, but the Ukrainian gas company has said that would be impossible, since the taps are in Russia.

Correspondents say the differing versions offered by the two countries show how far apart they are, and that the row is rapidly becoming a means for venting anger caused by poor political relations.

Talks between Naftogaz and Gazprom aimed at resolving the crisis are due to resume in Moscow on Thursday – after the Christmas public holiday on Wednesday in Russia and Ukraine.

Gazprom will also discuss the matter with the EU on the same day.

The European Commission has demanded that gas supplies to the EU are immediately restored.

‘Theft increasing’

Russia stopped supplying gas to Ukraine on New Year’s Day in a row about unpaid bills and the failure to agree a new pricing contract.

On Monday, Gazprom decided to cut exports through Ukrainian pipelines by a fifth to compensate for the amount it said Ukraine was siphoning off supplies intended for Europe for its own use.

Gazprom has said Ukraine was stealing 15% of gas delivered across its borders and that theft was “increasing by the hour”.

On Wednesday Gazprom deputy chief executive Alexander Medvedev said there was no “physical possibility” of Russia bringing gas to European customers because of the shutdown of pipes going though Ukraine.

He also warned that in cold weather gas needed to flow through the pipes to keep them operational, and that failing this, “the system could not be restarted very quickly”.

Ukraine has denied stealing gas, saying technical problems are disrupting the onward flow of gas to Europe.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said in a letter to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso that his country had not used “a single cubic metre of Russian gas” to meet its own needs.

The new EU member states in central and eastern Europe are heavily – and in some cases entirely – dependent on Russian gas imports.

However, Germany and Italy together account for nearly half of the Russian gas consumed in the EU.

Gazprom has promised to pump extra supplies through other pipelines – the Yamal from Arctic Russia through Belarus to Germany, and the Blue Stream to Turkey under the Black Sea.

A similar row between Gazprom and Ukraine at the beginning of 2006 led to gas shortages in several EU countries.

Much of the EU's gas from Russia arrives via Ukraine

Russia’s gas giant Gazprom said it turned off the taps at 0700 GMT, when its contract to supply Ukraine ended.

Ukraine insists it has paid off its debts to Gazprom, but Russia contests this. The two countries have also failed to agree on a price for 2009.

The EU urged Russia and Ukraine to resume negotiations and not to let the dispute disrupt supplies to Europe.

A similar row between Gazprom and Ukraine at the beginning of 2006 led to gas shortages in several EU countries.

Pipes across Ukraine carry about a fifth of the EU’s gas needs.

The new holders of the EU presidency, the Czech Republic, urged the parties to “rapidly reach a successful outcome” to their dispute.

“All existing commitments to supply and transit must be honoured,” it added.

Both Russia and Ukraine insist that gas supplies transported via Ukraine to the European Union will continue as normal.

An official at Gazprom’s headquarters in Moscow said: “We have fully cut off supplies to Ukraine as of 10am (0700 GMT) today.”

“Usually we supply 390 million cubic metres per day, of which 300 million is transit gas for Europe. Today supplies are running at 300 million cubic metres. We continue supplying Europe in full,” Reuters quoted him as saying.

Ukraine’s state energy firm Naftogaz confirmed that supplies had dropped off steadily, and said it would start pumping gas from its reserves.

Ukraine says it has built up enough reserves to see it through the next few months.

‘Eager for conflict’

“The debt to Gazprom for gas supplied earlier was not paid. Despite verbal statements from Kiev, Gazprom did not see any money in its account,” said Gazprom’s chief executive Alexei Miller said.

He criticised Ukraine’s stance during the negotiations as “unconstructive”, and said Gazprom had no legal reason to continue supplying gas to Ukraine.

Mr Miller said the contract to supply gas depended on the full settlement of £2bn in gas bills and late-payment fines levied by Gazprom.

He also suggested that Kiev was seeking to provoke a wider dispute, saying he was “forming the impression that there are political forces in Ukraine which are very eager to see a gas conflict between our two countries”.

Naftogaz said it has paid $1.5bn (£1bn) in outstanding bills to RosUkrEnergo – a Switzerland-registered gas trading company which is acting as an intermediary – but not the fines imposed by Gazprom.

Gazprom is the world’s largest gas producer and supplies a quarter of the European Union’s gas needs – and 42% of its imports. Most of that is transported via Ukraine.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin had earlier warned Ukraine not to disrupt the transit of gas to Europe.

He warned of “very severe consequences” for Ukraine in terms of its relations with both Russia and European countries.

Mr Putin said Gazprom had been generous in offering Ukraine a price of $250 per 1,000 cubic metres of gas in 2009, given that the price in Europe was currently more than $500.

He said he understood that Ukraine was in “a difficult economic situation” which was worse than Russia’s, but put the dispute down to a “war of the clans” between the Ukrainian Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, and President Viktor Yushchenko.

The ambassador, Dmitry O. Rogozin, said the lunch, at an Italian restaurant near NATO’s suburban headquarters outside Brussels, was a step toward more normal relations after the brief Georgian-Russian war in August.

“The most difficult thing is to make the first step,” he told reporters. “We are at the beginning of the difficult route to restore trust.”

In mid-January, there will be “an informal NATO-Russia Council meeting at the level of ambassadors,” Mr. Rogozin said.

The NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, made no direct comments, but a spokeswoman, Carmen Romero, said the two men had “agreed to look at ways to restart the engagement.” She said the two sides hoped to hold an informal meeting of the council at the ambassadorial level next month.

NATO cut off formal ties with Moscow in the aftermath of the August war and said there would be no “business as usual” until Russia agreed to pull its troops back to their prewar positions and cancel its recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which are parts of Georgia.

But the beginnings of the war remain disputed, with many NATO allies believing that the Georgian leadership either began the war or fell headfirst into a Russian trap, giving Moscow a pretext to invade. Most Western European countries, dependent on Russia for oil and especially natural gas, have been eager to restart relations with Moscow despite its continued occupation of the two secessionist regions, and they overcame hesitation from the Bush administration and some Eastern European countries, which wanted Moscow to pay a stiffer price.

Still, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made her last visit to a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting on Dec. 2, she agreed that the United States would not object to a gradual, phased re-engagement between NATO and Russia. “The idea of working through a kind of informal contact, with the NATO-Russia Council, is not a problem for us,” Ms. Rice said then. Mr. de Hoop Scheffer was to initiate the informal contacts with Mr. Rogozin.

In an interview the next day with The New York Times, Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said, “Russia is such an important factor in geopolitical terms that there is no alternative for NATO than to engage Russia.”

What mattered in the conversation with Russia, Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said then, was to try to understand “what was behind Georgia” and the short war, and whether it meant a lasting change in Russia’s attitude toward international law, sovereign borders and the “disproportionate” use of force.

He said he would report back to NATO foreign ministers, probably in March, on whether to deepen contacts with Russia still further.

The softer American position on contacts with Russia was seen as a trade-off with Germany, which agreed to defer a decision on the precise mechanism for future NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine — effectively, to an Obama administration.

In Moscow on Friday, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov said Russia had conditions, too. “Now, when our NATO colleagues talk about restoring relations,” he said, “we will insist that the restoration of ties starts with the discussion of the causes of the Caucasus crisis which our NATO partners dodged in August.”

The United States ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker, said on Friday, “We signaled our unhappiness with Russia using military force to invade Georgia and change borders by force of arms, yet we also signaled a desire for a cooperative relationship with Russia.”

The European Union also has renewed dialogue with Moscow.

Belarus special anti-terrorist troops commandos leave a polling booth during pre-term parliamentary elections in September.

ZHODINO, Belarus — The voting monitor began his rounds on election day here at Polling Place No. 7. “Issues? Violations?” he asked the poll workers, glancing around like a casual sightseer. They said no, so he left

The monitor, Kholnazar Makhmadaliyev, breezed from one polling site (“What’s up, things O.K.?”) to another (“Everything fine here?”), shaking a lot of hands, offering abundant compliments and drinking toasts of brandy with this city’s mayor.

Such went Mr. Makhmadaliyev’s stint on a large observer mission spearheaded by the Kremlin that concluded that Belarus, a former Soviet republic and an ally of Russia, had conducted a “free, open and democratic” parliamentary election in late September.

The Kremlin monitors’ version of reality, though, clashed with the one described by a European security group, whose own monitors dismissed the election as a sham tainted by numerous shortcomings, not the least of which was vote rigging.

The monitors dispatched by the Kremlin did not report anything like that. Nor did they raise concerns about Belarus’s security service, still called the K.G.B., which had exerted harsh pressure on the opposition, imprisoning several of its leaders over the last year and thwarting their campaigns. Or about state-controlled television broadcasts repeatedly branding opposition leaders as traitors.

Or, for that matter, about the final results: a sweep of every single seat in the 110-member Parliament for supporters of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, often described as Europe’s last dictator.

The Kremlin under Vladimir V. Putin has sought to bolster authoritarian governments in the region that remain loyal, and these election monitoring teams — 400-strong in Belarus alone — are one of its newer innovations. They demonstrate the lengths to which the Kremlin will go to create the illusion of democracy and political freedom in Russia and other former Soviet republics, even though their structures of democracy have been hollowed out.

The monitors play a critical role in creating that democratic veneer, solemnly giving their customized assessments and formal reports, which are then promoted by the government-controlled media. They also provide a counterweight to independent observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who consistently denounce these same elections.

The goal for the Kremlin is to convince the public — and, perhaps, even foreigners — that these governments are lawfully elected and representative of the popular will.

“These monitors really illustrate what is happening in the post-Soviet space,” said Andrei Sannikov, an organizer of European Belarus, an opposition movement. “The monitors bless everything — in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, places where we know there are no real elections. These leaders want to be accepted and seen as truly democratic, even though they are unreformed and unchanged. They want to present themselves as equal to the American president.”

Ultimately, Mr. Sannikov said, “they want some kind of legitimacy, especially in the eyes of the West.”

A Sphere of Influence

By backing these leaders, Russia has also reaped economic benefits and maintained its regional sphere of influence. It has done so even while seeking to destabilize pro-Western neighbors, most notably when it invaded Georgia in August in response to what it said was Georgian aggression. Belarus, which has 10 million people, is the only former Soviet bloc nation to Russia’s west that maintains warm ties with the Kremlin.

The United States and its NATO allies have also sought good relations with many of the authoritarian governments in the region, to offset the Kremlin’s influence, to maintain military bases and to increase business opportunities. Still, the West has generally refrained from endorsing the results of elections in these countries.

Senior Russian officials tend to tie themselves in knots explaining how governments that have crushed opposition movements can conduct fair balloting. The officials refer to Western election monitors as a tool that the West uses to smear Russia and other former Soviet republics.

Vladimir A. Pekhtin, a vice speaker of the Russian Parliament who supervised the Kremlin monitors in Belarus, said every recent election in the former Soviet Union had been democratic and fair. He included countries like Uzbekistan, whose president has ruled since the end of Communism and was re-elected last year with 88 percent of the vote.

Asked about the conclusions of Western monitors in Belarus, Mr. Pekhtin said, “Do you want me to tell you honestly? They just made it up, invented it, to try to show that there was some kind of rot.”

Still, even some insiders acknowledge what is at work here.

Igor Y. Yurgens, an adviser to President Dmitri A. Medvedev who heads a liberal-leaning think tank set up by Mr. Medvedev, described these missions as doing little more than currying favor with neighbors.

“It’s a pretty clumsy thought that the near abroad can be consolidated only through this, through being polite to the authorities in place,” Mr. Yurgens said.  “They regard it as a diplomatic endeavor — be good to your ally,” he said, referring to the Kremlin. “Don’t poke him in the eye when the whole of the West is poking him already.”

An Unlikely Monitor

As he canvassed polling places at a rate of one every 5 or 10 minutes, Mr. Makhmadaliyev, the Kremlin monitor in Zhodino, allowed that he knew little if anything about Belarus’s political situation. That was understandable, given that he is from a village in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, in Central Asia.

The observer teams typically work under the umbrella of the Commonwealth of Independent States, an alliance of former Soviet republics controlled by Moscow. In Belarus, many monitors were Russians, but some were from friendly countries like Tajikistan that have particularly checkered human rights records.

Mr. Makhmadaliyev, 60, won a parliamentary seat last April in Tajikistan, where the elections tend to be as fair as those in Belarus. A member of the ruling party, he received 86 percent of the vote, officials said.

He admitted that he had received no training in election monitoring but said that did not concern him. His sole aim, he said, was to assess whether election day was orderly in Zhodino, a city of 65,000 people about 25 miles from the capital, Minsk.

Rumpled and courteous, he wore a blue armband that identified him as an official observer. He took no notes. And everywhere he went — polling sites in schools, recreation halls and apartment buildings — the responses to his brief questions were the same.

“Everything is fine here,” said Larisa A. Chichina, the senior official at Polling Place No. 7, which was in a cultural center.

He pronounced himself satisfied.

Still, to judge an election based only on whether people can physically cast ballots is a little like reviewing a restaurant based solely on the quality of its waiters.

Election experts say it is equally important to determine whether candidates can conduct their campaigns without pressure, whether the government denies the opposition access to the news media, particularly state television, and whether votes are tabulated fairly.

But Mr. Makhmadaliyev said he would not delve into those issues in Zhodino.

“It doesn’t interest me at all,” he said. “I am interested in whether people can vote on their own, whether people are given the freedom to vote.”

(The monitoring mission later released a report declaring that the overall election climate, including the news media coverage, had been free and fair throughout Belarus.)

Mr. Makhmadaliyev also said he saw no reason to conduct post mortem interviews with the two candidates in the district to ask about their experiences. If he had, he would have heard the loser, Aleksandr V. Volchanin, from the pro-Western opposition, contend that the vote count had clearly been falsified.

Election officials said Mr. Volchanin, a 46-year-old paramedic, received 24 percent of the vote, but he said the tally was highly suspicious because of a delay of several hours in announcing it.

“I think that they were very strongly thinking about what figures they wanted to put out there,” Mr. Volchanin said.

The winner, Dr. Vasily V. Lutikov, 51, a Lukashenko supporter, said Mr. Volchanin was looking for excuses.

“Of course, he is going to complain,” Dr. Lutikov said. “He is upset — no one voted for him.”

A Kremlin Counterattack

The rise of these shadow monitors can be traced in part to Russia’s presidential election in March 2004. Mr. Putin won a second term in a landslide, but there was a major blemish: the O.S.C.E.’s observers called the contest far from democratic. This seems to have spurred the Kremlin to counterattack.

Russia began a campaign to undercut monitors from the group, which is an alliance of more than 50 countries that includes Russia and other former Soviet republics.

The Commonwealth of Independent States, which had already been dispatching informal monitoring missions, adopted a formal policy of doing so, officials said.  The missions are now overseen by a former director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, Gen. Sergei N. Lebedev, whom Mr. Putin installed as the commonwealth’s executive secretary last year. General Lebedev said in an interview that the West applied double standards, scrutinizing elections in the former Soviet Union far more closely than those elsewhere.

“We have a principle — the main principle — which is to objectively evaluate the situation, and not interfere in internal affairs,” he said. “We cannot evaluate the political system of a country. Our main goal is not to find shortcomings, as Russian’s say, to find bugs.”

Mr. Putin and his aides have lately evinced even more hostility to the O.S.C.E., calling for drastic cuts in its monitoring teams. They have also imposed such heavy restrictions on the group’s activities that it refused to monitor Russia’s presidential election in March 2008.

(The Kremlin monitors did — and found no problems.)

In the end, the Kremlin monitors in Belarus seemed to play just the role envisioned for them: helping to neutralize negative findings by the Western ones.

As Lidia M. Yermoshina, chairwoman of Belarus’s central election commission, put it: “If you are guided only by the O.S.C.E. report, you might become desperate. You need something to cheer you up.”

Mr. Lukashenko had invited the Western monitors because he said he was confident that they would endorse the election and was hoping for better relations with the West, which had imposed stiff sanctions on Belarus after opposition leaders were imprisoned in 2006.

But the Western monitors came down hard, so it was no surprise that the state-controlled television news focused mostly on the Kremlin teams.

Even Mr. Makhmadaliyev, the Kremlin’s monitor in Zhodino, made a television appearance.

“At all the polling places, we have noted a very good mood among the people,” Mr. Makhmadaliyev told a reporter. “They are coming to elect those who most deserve it.”

With that, he hustled to his next stop, walking right past a large sample ballot that directed people to vote for President Lukashenko’s candidate.