The Real Russia. Today. Navalny's Saturday showdown, Putin's low-key inauguration, and criminal GPS

Friday, May the Fourth be with you! ⭐️

• Police start rounding up organizers a day ahead of Navalny's nationwide protests on Saturday
• The Kremlin is planning a subdued inauguration for Monday
• Two journalists escape a small fine for “unruly behavior” in a courtroom
• A Moscow court fines demonstrators for throwing paper airplanes at the FSB's headquarters
• Meduza speaks to a linguist who helps the justice system lock up “extremists”
• The Admiral Kuznetsov's repairs will cost a cool billion
• Another Russian billionaire asks the government for a bailout
• A small business owner faces prison for buying a few GPS trackers
• The nerve agent used against the Skripals was definitely manufactured as a weapon
• The White House hasn't followed up on Trump's invitation to Putin
• Roskomnadzor blocks dozens of Web anonymizers and VPNs
• Russia's federal censor flaunts its sense of humor
• Roskomnadzor's former spokesman loses his stuff

The story to watch this weekend: Anti-Putin protests 📢

✊ Navalny's folks are back at it

In several cities across Russia, police have started detaining activists involved in organizing Alexey Navalny’s nationwide anti-Putin protests planned for May 5. Officers have reportedly detained members of Navalny’s staff in Tambov, Ryazan, and Krasnoyarsk. The social movement “Open Russia” says police have also detained two of its activists in St. Petersburg and Krasnodar who worked with local Navalny teams.

Russian opposition activists often come up with titles for their protests, and Navalny is calling Saturday’s nationwide demonstrations “He’s Not Our Tsar” — a nod to an earlier campaign against Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, called “You Don’t Call Him Dimon.” Navalny failed to obtain permits for his rallies in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, and police have threatened to detain anyone who assembles unlawfully.

What happened last time? In 2012, a day before Putin’s last inauguration, several thousand people protested in Moscow against his return to the Kremlin. More than 30 demonstrators were later convicted of inciting or inflicting violence on police officers in a controversial campaign known as the “Bolotnaya Square Case.”

🤫 The Kremlin wants a quiet inauguration

Vladimir Putin’s inauguration ceremony on May 7 will be a simpler, lower-key affair than his past inaugurations, sources tell the television station Dozhd. This time, there won’t be a presidential motorcade through Moscow, avoiding the awkward footage of 2012, when Putin drove through the capital’s almost totally empty streets.

For his inauguration on Monday, the president will stay within the Kremlin’s grounds, leaving his office and driving to the Grand Kremlin Palace, where he’ll take the oath of office at Andreyevsky Hall. The 2018 inauguration will involve one new feature: after swearing the oath, Putin will step outside to meet briefly with volunteers who worked on his presidential campaign. The Kremlin previously entertained the possibility of holding the entire inauguration ceremony outdoors.

In the Russian criminal justice system, politically based offenses are considered especially heinous ⚖️

🗞 Two journalists dodge a (tiny) bullet

The St. Petersburg Dzerzhinsky District Court has lifted a 500-ruble ($8) fine imposed on two reporters from the website Mediazona, who were convicted of “shoving” a security guard and using “obscene language” in an effort to gain access to a courtroom on January 27 where one of the “Penza Case” terrorist suspects was being arraigned.

On May 3, the St. Petersburg Central District Court filed a defamation lawsuit against Mediazona for publishing a story in November 2017 claiming that police officers apparently tortured several leftist activists suspected of plotting terrorist attacks. The court is demanding that Mediazona delete its report, and it also wants Yana Teplitskaya, a representative from a local prisoners’ rights watchdog group, to delete her social-media posts claiming that police have abused the “Penza Case” suspects.

Months earlier, in October 2017, the St. Petersburg Central District police department filed a similar lawsuit against Teplitskaya. Investigators have refused to open a criminal case in response to her allegations.

✈️ They fly like paper, get fined like grains

A Moscow district court has fined several protesters 10,000 rubles (about $160) each for a rally on April 16 outside the Federal Security Service’s headquarters. Rallied by Pussy Riot star Maria Alekhina, the demonstrators tossed paper airplanes on the sidewalk outside the FSB building, in support of the instant messenger Telegram. The judge ruled that the airplanes “disrupted transportation and pedestrian traffic.” Alekhina and Dmitry Enteo (a conservative Russian Orthodox activist and former love interest) were each sentenced to 100 hours of community service.

🤡 Polycode texts — how do they work?

The number of “extremist” crimes committed in Russia has been growing for the past several years. According to the “Sova” analytical center, police launched 563 extremism investigations in 2016 and 858 new cases in 2017. Most of the suspects in these investigations are ordinary Internet users who have expressed their political views on social media. Dozens of these people have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that they are the victims of illegal persecution. Many of the sentences handed out for extremist crimes are based on linguistic analyses provided to the authorities, and these experts rarely contradict investigators’ charges. Meduza correspondent Irina Kravtsova spoke to Igor Ogorelkov, the head of the Moscow Research Center’s linguistics department, to find out what qualifies as online extremism. (It turns out that Russia’s experts are still working on that one.)

• Read the full interview: “Don’t ‘overdo’ it online, if you fear the fuzz: A linguist explains the messy science that fuels Russia’s anti-extremism policing”

Stop wasting my time. You know what I want. 💰

⚓️ Fixin' Ole Smokey

Russia is reportedly spending almost $1 billion dollars to renovate its one aircraft carrier, the smoke-billowing “Admiral Kuznetsov.” A source told the news agency Interfax that this price tag represents a “fairly optimistic version of the repairs and modernization” that are apparently “already signed and approved” for the Kuznetsov.

Commissioned in 1991, the Kuznetsov made international headlines in late 2016, when it bellowed thick smoke on its journey through the English Channel to the shores of Syria, where it took part in Russia’s military intervention on behalf of the Syrian government. When it returned home for repairs, sources told the media that the renovations could cost as little as 22 billion rubles ($347.3 million). There’s no official timeline for the restoration work, but the Defense Ministry reportedly expects to have the carrier back in its fleet by 2021.

💸 Another modest bailout

Alexey Mordashov, the billionaire owner of Power Machines, has reportedly written a letter to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev asking for a bailout, following recent U.S. sanctions. According to the newsletter The Bell, Mordashov is counting on preferential financing through the Russian Export Center (a state-owned institution that supports the development of the non-commodity exports) and a prohibition on state companies demanding that Power Machines provide public guarantees. He’s also reportedly asked the Central Bank to advise Russian banks to offer cheap credit to companies targeted by American sanctions.

On April 12, at a government commission on import substitution, Mordashov asked federal officials for preferential treatment in the domestic market and requested help with accessing foreign markets.

Viktor Vekselberg’s “Renova Group” conglomerate is also reportedly seeking a government bailout, including the 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 with state contracts, and major tax breaks. 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.”

Be careful what you buy online 📦

Investigators are debating whether to open a criminal case against Artem Laptev, the founder of the food-delivery service “VkusLab,” for ordering several GPS trackers from China, which he planned to put on his couriers. Since 2011, it’s been illegal in Russia to trade in equipment designed to record information in secret, and Laptev faces up to four years in prison, if charged and convicted. The fact that the couriers would have known about the GPS trackers has apparently not dissuaded law enforcement from moving ahead with their investigation.

For all this trouble, Laptev never even received the GPS trackers. He bought them last July through the Chinese eBay-like website AliExpress, but the shipment was detained by customs officials who flagged the goods as “devices intended for recording information secretly.” Without ever using the trackers, just buying them could be enough for felony charges, Laptev told the newspaper Kommersant, adding that he wasn’t even aware of Russia’s ban on “secret information recording.”

This wouldn’t be the first enforcement of Criminal Code Article 138.1. In early April 2018, a local man in Volgograd was charged with illegally trading in information recorders when he bought a pair of sunglasses with a built-in video camera. In 2016, a man in Moscow was prosecuted for trying to sell a keychain with a video recorder. The Attorney General’s Office says there’s a government working group currently trying to “tweak” this legislation to clarify when it should apply.

Definitely weaponized ☣️

Five times as much Novichok was used to poison the Skripals than an entire country would need to develop for research activities, says Ahmet Uzumcu, the director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. British officials say 50 to 100 grams (from about a quarter cup to a half a cup) of liquid nerve agent were used in the March 4 attack on former spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter. The relatively large amount of Novichok means “it was almost certainly created for use as a weapon,” Uzumcu told The New York Times on Thursday.

Uzumcu says he’s taking steps to add the nerve agent discovered at Skripal’s home (one of a series of chemicals created under the code name “Novichok”) to the list of chemical weapons monitored by his organization. Once that happens, signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention (like Russia, the UK, and the United States) will be required to declare any production or stockpiling of this compound beyond 10 grams.

Pillow-talk diplomacy 🇺🇸🇷🇺

After his March 18 presidential blowout, Vladimir Putin got a congratulatory call from Donald Trump and an invitation to visit the White House. More than month later, however, there have been “no further steps taken” to facilitate this top-level meeting, says Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “We’re waiting,” Peskov told reporters on Friday.

Internet war meltdown extravamayhem 🌏

⛔️ No cheating the censors

On Thursday, Russia’s federal censor blocked 50 Internet anonymizers and VPN services that provided access to the instant messenger Telegram, according to Vadim Subbotin, the agency’s deputy director. Roskomnadzor isn’t saying, however, which services it’s actually banned.

Since April 16, the Russian authorities have blocked roughly 20 million IP addresses, including servers operated by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Digital Ocean. Roskomnadzor’s crackdown has disrupted a wide range of unrelated online services that rely on cloud computing hosted on blocked servers. Telegram, meanwhile, has remained accessible to most Russian Internet users by utilizing a variety of circumvention tricks.

What about Viber? Subbotin also said Russia's censor currently has no plans to add Viber to the government's registry of “information dissemination organizers,” which is how Telegram came under requirements to share encryption keys with the Federal Security Service. Telegram said in February 2018 that it had 15 million users in Russia (10 million of whom opened the app at least once a day) — behind only WhatsApp and Viber with 25 million and 21 million users in Russia, respectively.

😕 Roskomnadzor has a laugh

Russian federal officials have a wonderful sense of humor and they’re desperate for people to know it. Roskomnadzor, the agency responsible for blocking millions of IP addresses in an effort to cut off access to Telegram, is calling on the public to create elaborate origami soccer balls and throw them out their windows in sync at 7 p.m. on Sunday.

The flashmob, ostensibly in support of high quality communications during the FIFA World Cup, is clearly intended to mock a similar campaign by Telegram, in which the instant messenger’s supporters fly paper airplanes out their windows at the same time on Sunday in defense of Internet freedom.

Roskomnadzor announced its flash mob on its official Vkontakte page, sharing a link to a 20-minute YouTube video explaining how to construct an origami soccer ball. In comments on the Vkontakte post, hundreds of Internet users angrily demanded that the agency stop disrupting online services unrelated to Telegram.

😬 Roskomnadzor isn't laughing about this

Roskomnadzor's former press secretary, Vadim Ampelonsky, has had a rough time since October 2017, when he and two colleagues were placed under house arrest on charges of large-scale fraud. Investigators later reclassified the charges to embezzlement (lowering the damages caused from 23 million rubles to six million rubles — almost $100,000), but he still faces up to 10 years in prison. On Friday, May 4, things got even worse: a Moscow district court seized Ampelonsky's property.

Ampelonsky and his accomplices are suspected of billing the government for work by fictitious staff and keeping the wages for themselves.