The Real Russia. Today. Vekselberg's bailout, another Russian warbird crashes, and Volokolamskers head to court

Thursday, May 3, 2018

• Viktor Vekselberg’s “Renova Group” says it needs a government bailout (or two)
• Telegram cancels plans for a public ICO after record-breaking private investment
• Russia loses another warplane in Syria
• The Defense Ministry implements new phone restrictions on staff
• Sheremetyevo opens a new domestic terminal
• Volokolamsk protesters take a hated local landfill to civil court
• Russian asylum applications to the U.S. hit a post-Soviet high
• Another Roscosmos official lands in jail

Viktor Vekselberg's modest proposal 🤑

Still reeling from the U.S. sanctions announced in early April, Viktor Vekselberg’s “Renova Group” conglomerate is asking the Russian government for a bailout. According to the newspaper Kommersant, the company has ambitiously proposed several forms of assistance. Renova says it doesn’t expect to get everything on its wish list, but the company says it needs some kind of state support to avoid major layoffs.

What does Renova want?

• Refinancing in state-owned banks (secured on Renova’s 26.5-percent stake in Rusal) of 820 million euros ($982 million) in loans from Western companies
• Preferential treatment when it comes to awarding state contracts to its subsidiary industrial and developer holdings
• Tax breaks, including zero tariffs on imported raw materials and restrictive import duties on direct competitors’ products, as well as an embargo on imported mineral water and sodas

According to Reuters, the U.S. government has frozen between $1.5 and $2 billion in Renova’s assets. The Russian government has vowed to provide assistance to the companies hurt by Washington’s “oligarch” sanctions, and the State Duma is currently considering legislation that would authorize various “counter-sanctions.”

Telegram has enough dough, thanks very much 💰

After raising a staggering $1.7 billion from private investors for its blockchain project, the instant messenger Telegram has canceled plans to seek public investment, according to The Wall Street Journal. The new cryptocurrency project is called the Telegram Open Network, which the company says it hopes will grow into a “a Visa/Mastercard alternative for a new decentralized economy.”

A source told The Wall Street Journal that Telegram may have been spooked by the stricter regulations it might have encountered, if it pressed ahead with a public initial coin offering.

Russia's fighting men 💪

💥 Another plane goes down

A Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jet crashed in Syria on Thursday, killing both pilots. Defense officials say the plane wasn’t shot down, but experienced engined failure after taking off from Khmeimim air base, probably after colliding with a bird.

After roughly two and a half years in Syria, the Russian military has lost more than 80 soldiers. Moscow’s single greatest loss of life came on March 6, when a military transport plane suffered a technical malfunction and crashed while trying to land at Khmeimim air base. All 39 people onboard were killed.

🤫 Loose lips...

Pitched as a cost-cutting measure, the Russian Defense Ministry has introduced new internal restrictions on telephone use, according to the newspaper Kommersant. The ministry has reportedly divided its staff into five categories of access, where the time and amount of money an individual can spend on telephones connected to public networks are limited. A source told the newspaper that the new rules are really intended to reduce sensitive information leaks and expand the ministry’s control over its staff.

This wouldn’t be the Defense Ministry’s only recent attempt to crack down on leaks. Officials have encouraged soldiers to stay off social media and disable geolocation on their phones. The Defense Ministry has also tried to cut the number of mobile phones in the field, distributing cryptographically protected Russian-made devices to commanding officers.

Sheremetyevo just got bigger ✈️

Moscow Sheremetyevo airport’s new terminal B opened for business on Thursday. The inaugural flight for the terminal, which will serve domestic air travel, was to Saratov. Within a month, the terminal will board flights to another 45 destinations in Russia. For transferring passengers, the new terminal is connected to terminals D, E, and F by an underground tunnel beneath one of Sheremetyevo’s runways.

Terminal B was designed to accommodate as many as 20 million new passengers a year, bringing the airport’s total annual capacity up to 55 million passengers. According to the newspaper Vedomosti, the terminal cost $264 million to build, and the connecting tunnel ran another $243 million.

Taking the trash protests to the courts ⚖️

The Volokolamsk City Court has registered several civil lawsuits against the owners of the over-capacity “Yadrovo” landfill, which has sparked local protests for the past several months. The court will hear three lawsuits on May 7, and another two hearings are scheduled for early June. The total damage claimed in the lawsuits is roughly 5.5 million rubles ($86,225). Volokolamsk residents have filed a separate lawsuit, as well, demanding the immediate closure of the garbage dump. Moscow Governor Andrey Vorobyov, meanwhile, has already promised to shut down the facility by June 15.

Since the beginning of the year, Volokolamsk locals have staged protests against the Yadrovo landfill. City officials have declared a state of emergency because of hydrogen sulfide leaking into the air, and several dozen schoolchildren have sought medical attention due to the effects of air pollution.

Uncle Sam, please save us 🇺🇸🇷🇺

“The number of asylum applications by Russian citizens in the United States hit a 24-year high in 2017, jumping nearly 40 percent from the previous year and continuing an upward march that began after Russian President Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012,” reports Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The news agency obtained the 2017 statistics, which have yet to be released publicly, under a Freedom Of Information Act request.

• Read the full story here.

Another spaceman behind bars 🚀

A Moscow district court has jailed Vladimir Borisov, the head of Roscosmos’s state aviation department, on charges of large-scale fraud. The ruling was made on April 24 but only reported on May 3. Roscosmos told reporters that the allegations against Borisov concern his work in the aviation industry in 2013, before he started working for the state corporation.

Borisov isn’t the first official from Roscosmos to be jailed as a suspect in a criminal case. In March 2017, Roscosmos executive director Vladimir Evdokimov was found dead in his jail cell with stab wounds. He’d been arrested on charges of embezzling 200 million rubles ($3.1 million) in real estate. Following an internal investigation, 14 prison staff were subjected to “strict disciplinary measures.”