The Real Russia. Today. Anatoly Chepiga's childhood classmate IDs him, the Kremlin promises to look into it, and Lilia Shevtsova says the Putin regime is rotting

Thursday, September 27, 2018

This day in history. On September 27, 2003, a 7.3-magnitude earthquake hit Russia's Altai Republic, killing three people and causing as much as $33 million in damages. It was the strongest recorded earthquake in the region in more than 240 years.

• Journalists say they've figured out who ‘Ruslan Boshirov’ really is
• Russian journalists find a childhood classmate who confirms that one of the Salisbury suspects is really a man researchers say is a GRU colonel
• The Kremlin says it will look into reports that one of the Salisbury suspects in fact a decorated GRU colonel
• Lilia Shevtsova says the Putin regime has avoided a crisis by deciding to rot instead
• Ivan Davydov says Moscow and Russia's regions are finally on the same page, politically speaking
• Pavel Aptekar is generally impressed with the Kremlin's negotiating coup in the North Caucasus
• Moscow's brief taste of political liberalization is drowning in pig's blood, says RFE/RL
• The New York Times has a new photo report about a remote Russian town where the locals track down and repurpose fallen ‘space junk’
• The U.S. Congress is unlikely to pass any new sanctions on Russia until after the November elections

GRU colonel, Hero of Russia, Chechen War vet 🎖️

The cathedral-obsessed, possibly gay fitness instructor “Ruslan Boshirov” is an invention by Russia’s Military Intelligence Directorate — a fake identity given to GRU Colonel Anatoly Chepiga, according to the third investigative report by Bellingcat and The Insider about the two Russian men identified by the British authorities as the likely culprits behind the attempted murder of Sergey and Yulia Skripal in March (as well as the apparently accidental homicide of British citizen Dawn Sturgess). Bellingcat began its work with only the two targets’ photographs and their cover identities, before a “deductive search” led them to a school photo of Chepiga in Chechnya. Russia’s Foreign Ministry says the information about Boshirov’s real name is “fake news.” Personal documents issued to “Ruslan Boshirov” were already circulating in the media. Funny passport numbers link a whole web of suspected Russian intelligence operatives. Russia’s Federal Security Service is reportedly trying to hunt down the Interior Ministry staff members who “sold off” passport and identification documents belonging to “Petrov” and “Boshirov.” Roman Dobrokhotov, the chief editor of The Insider, says he doesn’t know how Bellingcat acquired the personal files on “Boshirov” and “Petrov,” and insists that he’s broken no laws.

• Read Meduza's timeline of events in the scandal surrounding the Salisbury suspects.

“Yeah that’s Tolya” 🔍

A woman living in the town of Berezovka, in Russia’s Amur region, says she recognizes Anatoliy Chepiga as “Ruslan Boshirov,” one of the suspects identified by British authorities in the Salisbury attack that killed British citizen Dawn Sturgess and hospitalized former double agent Sergey Skripal and his daughter.

“Yeah that’s Tolya,” the woman told the newspaper Kommersant, on the condition of anonymity. She says the two were close back in high school, and she recognized his voice, when he appeared in a television interview with Margarita Simonyan on RT. The woman has only good things to say about Chepiga: “He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and never got involved with any bad crowd.”

Another woman in Berezovka told Kommersant that Chepiga served in “the secret service” in various “hot spots” after graduating from a military academy. “His mother would cry,” the woman said, adding that she last saw him roughly 10 years ago, but she didn’t recognize the photos of Chepiga published in the news media. “He was already almost bald,” the woman said. “He’s not very similar to this photo. He had an unguarded look, but this one’s looking up from under his eyebrows. Though his eyes were dark brown.”

Berezovka is located about 23 miles from the town of Nikolayevka, where Chepiga was born. Kommersant says it learned that Chepiga’s family spent many years in Berezovka before moving to Blagoveshchensk, the Amur region's administrative center.

“We'll look into it” 🤥

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday that he knows nothing about anyone named Anatoly Chepiga — the military intelligence colonel investigative reporters say is the real identity of Salisbury attack suspect “Ruslan Boshirov.” Peskov redirected journalists’ questions to the Russian Defense Ministry, while promising to review the reports about Chepiga.

“Like you, we’re just learning about this investigation released in the media that talks about certain people resembling certain other people,” Peskov told reporters. “We are operating on information announced by the president and later repeated by the civilians themselves [‘Alexander Petrov’ and ‘Ruslan Boshirov’],” Peskov told reporters.

Opinion commentary

⏳ Shevtsova on Russia's idiot rulers

In a Facebook post on September 27, Kremlinology expert Lilia Shevtsova tackled the increasingly popular subject of the Russian government’s mounting foreign and domestic policy failures. In the text, she points to U.S. sanctions, pension reform, Viktor Zolotov’s “duel” challenge to Alexey Navalny, the unmasking of the Salisbury suspects, Primorye’s invalidated gubernatorial results, the Russian plane shot down in Syria, the hole on the Russian component of the International Space Station, “new lies” about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, and more.

Shevtsova argues that the authorities are undermining Russia’s own state infrastructure to save their skin, valuing loyalty above all else, even when it leads to monumental incompetence. As a result, Shevtsova says, the country has avoided a “crisis,” which is unfortunate because crises are a natural catalyst for change and development. Instead, she argues, Russian “society and its superstructure” are starting to “rot.” In a rather awkward metaphor, Shevtsova says, “Rotting prevents collapse: that which is rotting cannot collapse.” Once you put the image of a decaying pumpkin out of your mind, however, Shevtsova’s concept becomes clearer: The Putin regime maintains its grip on power by “outsourcing” the monopoly on violence to “volunteers,” staving off its immediate collapse.

Shevtsova believes a collapse is nevertheless inevitable, and she’s convinced that the Kremlin knows it, too, but is unable to change course. “In 1991, the autocracy survived by throwing out the Soviet state,” Shevtsova says. “Today the autocracy is trying to survive by turning the post-Soviet state into thin plywood while singing about being a great power.”

✊ Davydov on the end of the Kremlin's “safety cushion”

In an op-ed for Republic, columnist Ivan Davydov argues that Russia’s regions outside Moscow have finally wrestled from the capital the ability to influence the national political agenda. In the past, Davydov says, relatively affluent problems have dominated the national discourse because these “first-world” issues are what mobilize activists in Moscow, while alienating the rest of the country. The Kremlin has exploited this divide (what Davydov calls a “safety cushion”), for example when Uralvagonzavod foreman Igor Kholmanskikh famously offered to bring his “boys” to Moscow to disperse the city’s ungrateful democracy protesters in 2011.

Davydov credits the Bolotnaya protests in 2011 and 2012 with restoring direct gubernatorial elections, which paved the way to the recent upsets in several runoff elections, where voters supported “technical candidates” just to spit in the eye of the establishment, thereby “turning the situation inside-out.” Davydov also says Russia’s regions owe their recent political mobilization to Alexey Navalny’s nationwide “franchise” system, set up during his doomed presidential campaign. Despite the failure to get on the ballot, Navalny’s scheme helped break Moscow’s monopoly on national politics, tapping into the energies of brave young people ready to risk their safety for political mobilization.

With pension reform, Davydov says, the Putin regime announced an end to state paternalism, only to discover that state paternalism — not the Kremlin’s geopolitical feats — is what fuels the regime’s popularity. Raising the retirement age has “torn down the wall” between Muscovites’ first-world squabbling and the rest of the country’s real problems, he argues.

Davydov’s text has a provocative subtitle — “Does the typical Russian citizen realize that pension reform is the direct product of geopolitical success?” — but the question only appears at the end of his op-ed, with no real explanation, though his earlier remarks about paternalism suggest that he blames the Putin administration for abandoning state paternalism for the sake of foreign adventurism.

🗺️ Aptekar on Moscow's peacemaking in the North Caucasus

In an editorial for Vedomosti, Pavel Aptekar argues that the Kremlin likely orchestrated the border demarcation agreement between Chechnya and Ingushetia, signed on September 26. (Read Meduza’s full report on this accord here.) According to Aptekar, officials in Moscow had to navigate a political minefield to ensure that the leaders of both republics could claim “not only a personal victory, but also a victory for their respective peoples.”

This was especially difficult because — in addition to the long history of certain Chechen-Ingush borderlands changing hands — Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov has made several provocative remarks about the territory in recent years, as part of his unofficial campaign to become the informal leader of the entire North Caucasus. Meanwhile, Yunus-bek Yevkurov, the head of Ingushetia, has faced criticism at home that he’s too soft when dealing with neighbors. In other words, the Kremlin had to get the two republics off their collision course, and it apparently succeeded, Aptekar says.

Read it elsewhere 📰

🐷 Drowned in pig's blood

In a new report for RFE/RL, Robert Coalson and Lyubov Chizhova write about the dashed hopes of opposition figures who won roughly 20 percent of the local council seats in Moscow in September 2017. “One year later, the political signals in Moscow are coming in the form of severed pig heads and vandalized cars.” For all the grisly details, read the story here at RFE/RL.

🚀 Space junk

“Space junk from rockets launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia ends up in the remote Mezensky District, where residents repurpose it for hunting sleds, tools and boats,” writes Evelyn Nieves in a report for The New York Times, which features gorgeous, sometimes haunting photos by Raffaele Petralla. Read the story here at The New York Times.

👄 Read my lips: no new sanctions (until later)

“The U.S. Congress is unlikely to pass any new sanctions on Russia, including proposals that would affect its sovereign debt and energy projects, until after the November elections,” reports Bloomberg. Read the whole story here at Bloomberg.