The Real Russia. Today. A taxonomy fiasco costs Russian Internet users access to Sci-Hub; Meduza tracks down a surprisingly influential bag-woman; and guidelines for Moscow City Hall’s propaganda are revealed

Story of the day

Russian scholars lose access to a pirate website because of a wasp. In September 2011, a student from Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan created the controversial website Sci-Hub, which now offers a database of more than 62 million academic papers and articles available for download, using educational proxies to bypass subscriptions that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. This month, Elbakyan blocked all Internet users in Russia from accessing Sci-Hub, after taking offense to Russian scholars mocking her political views and naming a parasitoid insect in her honor. Story in English

Special Meduza content

Ulyukayev’s impressive bag (wo)man. In a transcript of a conversation between Rosneft head Igor Sechin and then Economic Development Minister Alexey Ulyukayev, read out this week at the latter’s trial, there are several mentions of a Rosneft employee named Shokina. This was the woman tasked with bringing Ulyukayev a “basket” that he says he thought contained sausages. In fact, the bags he accepted from Rosneft concealed a $2-million bribe. The employee in question appears to be Olga Shokina, who’s worked at Rosneft since 2014. Meduza special correspondent Ivan Golunov learned more about her history, discovering that she spent years managing a holding company owned by “the Kremlin’s favorite chef,” Evgeny Prigozhin, and even received a medal “for merit to the Fatherland” directly from Vladimir Putin. Story in English

Take the Putin quote quiz! “So what, now everyone needs to be released because they work in culture? This would seem strange.” This was Vladimir Putin’s response when asked this week about the house arrest of independent stage director Kirill Serebrennikov, and it’s far from the Russian president’s most puzzling reaction to a major news event. Don’t believe us? To prove it, we’ve collected another eight examples of baffling Putin remarks about headline news. Take our quiz

Russia and the world

The geopolitical graveyard. Vladimir Putin said on Thursday he thought the North Korea crisis would not escalate into a large-scale conflict involving nuclear weapons, predicting that common sense would prevail. But he said he believed North Korea’s leadership feared any freeze of its nuclear program would be followed by what amounted to “an invitation to the cemetery.” Story by Reuters

Bad company

• “We awarded your compatriot Mr. Tillerson the Order of Friendship, but he seems to have fallen in with the wrong company and to be steering in the other direction.” — Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin took a jab at Rex Tillerson on Thursday, joking that the U.S. Secretary of State had “fallen in with the wrong company” since he had awarded him a Russian state honor for his contribution to Russian-U.S. relations. Story by Reuters

Hyperlinks and national security. Police have charged the analytical “Sova” Center and its director Alexander Verkhovsky with violating Russia’s laws on “undesirable organizations.” According to “Sova,” officials say it committed this misdemeanor offense by including in its website’s “About Us” section hyperlinks to the Soros Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy (two organizations recognized by the Russian government as “undesirable”). Story in English

Russian troll farms’ deep pockets. Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that the social network has discovered that it sold ads during the U.S. presidential campaign to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company’s findings. Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said. Story by The Washington Post

Moscow City Hall

Now Russia’s liberal opposition and Muslim protesters have something in common. Moscow city officials have rejected a permit request for a protest outside the Myanmar embassy on Friday, September 8, demonstration organizers told the television station Dozhd. The mayor’s office reportedly refused to grant a permit for the protest because organizers failed to note the purpose of the demonstration, and because the area outside Myanmar’s embassy lacks the space apparently needed to accommodate a public assembly as big as organizers hoped to rally. Story in English

The arithmetic of Moscow’s local propaganda. When writing news stories in local newspapers about Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, authors observe a “Three Moscows, Three Sobyanins,” where the mayor’s name has to come up three times, staff writers at regional news media told the Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev. Meduza reviewed several dozen news stories and confirmed that Sobyanin’s name does in fact appear exactly three times in most local news stories about him. Kovalev argues that Moscow City Hall exercises tight control over the editorial policies of local newspapers, distributing weekly guidelines to newsrooms that allegedly describe what topics should be discussed in published stories and how certain stories should be written. Story in English

Efforts to honor Nemtsov hit another roadblock. Moscow City Hall says a memorial plaque installed outside the former home of murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was erected illegally. Officials from Moscow’s Monuments Department cite a city ordinance prohibiting memorial plaques honoring anyone who died within the past 10 years. This time period can be reduced to two years, officials say, but that requires approval by a government commission and a permit from the Moscow Prefecture. The plaque in question appeared at 3 Malaya Ordynka Street on September 7 at the initiative of municipal deputy Sergey Markov, who argues that it’s on private land and therefore legal. Nemtsov was shot and killed on February 28, 2015. A court convicted the gunman, Zaur Dadayev, of murder and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. Dadayev’s accomplices also received long prison sentences. Story in Russian

Also in the news

• A training accident in St. Petersburg. A Russian soldier died on Thursday at a military base outside St. Petersburg during tank exercises, according to Defense Ministry officials. Another five enlisted men from the same engineering group were also injured when a tank shell ricocheted during a training exercise. Story in Russian