The Real Russia. Today. Thankless firefighting, a VPN joke, and rallying the world against ‘fake news’

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

• Meduza speaks to four firefighters about their daring, dangerous, and thankless profession
• The prime minister's spokesperson says she was only kidding about using VPN to access Telegram
• Rosneft plans to buy back $2 billion of its own shares
• A Libertarian leader explains how his team got a permit to protest Internet censorship
• Moscow still wants to internationalize the fight against “fake news”

Firefighting in Russia 👨‍🚒

On Sunday, March 25, a fire at the “Winter Cherry” shopping center in Kemerovo killed 60 people, including dozens of children. Firefighters couldn’t reach the building’s top floor, where moviegoers were trapped inside a theater. Relatives of the victims have accused the firefighters of abandoning these people. Meduza correspondent Irina Kravtsova spoke to several firemen from cities across the country about the tragedy in Kemerovo, and asked them about their profession, which suddenly seems far less heroic and romantic to many Russians.

• Read the full story: “‘It’s not easy telling parents that their child is dead’ Four Russian firefighters talk about saving lives and taking the blame”

She was only joshing 🤥

On Tuesday, when State Duma deputy Natalia Kostenko asked her Facebook followers not to contact her on Telegram (writing, “I’m not receiving your messages there”), Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s long-time spokesperson Natalia Timakova told her in a comment that she should install VPN on her phone. “It’s very simple. And it works all the time!” Kostenko later hid the post from the public, and on Wednesday Timakova wrote in a separate Facebook comment that she had only been “trolling” Kostenko.

The Russian federal government has blocked millions of IP addresses since April 16, trying to cut access to the instant messenger Telegram, which was banned for refusing to surrender encryption keys to the Federal Security Service in accordance with recent anti-terrorism legislation.

Rosneft's great buy-back 💰

Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer, is planning to buy back $2 billion of its own stock by 2020 in an effort to “enhance shareholder returns.” “The medium-term buy-back would be financed through the organic free cash flow generation and divestments of non-core assets. The execution of the share buy-back program would start in Q2 2018 subject to the receipt of customary corporate approvals,” the company said in a press statement on Tuesday. Rosneft says it also plans to decrease capital expenditures by 20 percent to 800 billion rubles ($12.6 billion), and boost the company’s working capital by the end of the year by 200 billion rubles ($3.1 billion).

How the Libertarians got that permit 📢

In a Facebook post on Tuesday evening, Russian Libertarian Party chairman Sergey Boiko tried to dispel conspiracy theories about how his group obtained a permit for Monday’s Internet freedom rally in Moscow. Boiko says he believes two factors allowed him to get the city’s permission: (1) the Libertarian Party isn’t made up of activists who regularly appear in the opposition media, and (2) the authorities were apparently happy to issue permits to demonstrations occurring before May 5 (two days before Vladimir Putin’s next inauguration).

Boiko says the Libertarians worked closely with Alexey Navalny’s activists to stage the April 30 protest, which drew as many as 12,300 people.

Russia wants to stop Western “totalitarianism” and fight fake news internationally 🗞

Moscow is making another push at the United Nations to internationalize the fight against “fake news,” arguing that independent efforts have proved insufficient and allowed Western countries to disguise their “totalitarian” crackdown on “dissent” and “unwanted media outlets” as part of a democratic and humanitarian campaign. According to Maxim Buyakevich, who heads the Russian Foreign Ministry’s international information desk, the UN should take charge of the fight against fake news, to protect “such fundamental principles of international law as equal access to information for all and freedom of expression.”