The Real Russia. Today. Another MH17 investigation, Sberbank CIB’s flustercuck, and Russia’s ‘tax adjustments’

Thursday, May 24, 2018

• Another investigation says the Russian military brought down MH17
• A Russian financial analyst loses his job for criticizing Gazprom and Rosneft
• Yulia Skripal finally speaks, but Russian diplomats are worried as ever for her safety
• The BBC reports that Poroshenko paid a hefty kickback to Trump’s personal lawyer
• Ukraine blacklists a Kremlin-controlled media holding company
• Rusal tries to wriggle free from U.S. sanctions against Oleg Deripaska
• The FBI seizes a supposed Russian botnet
• Two Internet search engines drop Telegram links from their results
• Russian schools introduce a new “family studies” elective
• Russia’s finance minister promises no new taxes, but hints at “adjustments”
• Police detain yet another Navalny activist who helped promote anti-Putin protests on May 5

JIT on MH17 and Russia’s 53rd ✈️

A press conference on Thursday by the Joint Investigative Team stated what has become obvious for many observers around the world: the Buk missile that shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 people on board, was fired from a Russian military unit. The announcement on May 24 pinned the deadly incident on Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade. Open-source researchers at Bellingcat had already identified the same brigade as the likely source of the missile. Russia has denied any military role in eastern Ukraine, despite compelling evidence to the contrary.

A most unethical financial analyst 🤨

Sberbank SIB fired one of its analysts for “gross ethical violations,” and then it fired his supervisor. On May 22, Sberbank CIB fired an analyst named Alex Fak after he authored a report criticizing executive decisions by the company Gazprom. The document leaked to the media on May 21, though it was intended only for Sberbank CIB’s clients. In the report, the analyst argues that the chief beneficiaries of Gazprom’s export pipeline projects aren’t Gazprom’s shareholders but the contractors hired to build them, which happen to be companies controlled by some of Vladimir Putin’s closest friends.

According to Sberbank President German Gref, the firm dismissed Fak and his supervisor, Alexander, Kudrin because they “broke the company’s internal regulations” and “committed gross ethical violations.”

The Sberbank CIB report predicted that Gazprom’s pipeline projects will lose lots of money. In their report, Fak studied the construction of the export gas pipelines the “Power of Siberia” (to China), the “Nord Stream 2” (to Europe, along the bottom of the Baltic Sea), and “TurkStream” (also to Europe, along the bottom of the Black Sea). The analyst found that the “Power of Siberia” will cost $55.4 billion, which is more than Gazprom can recover in export sales to China, leading to an estimated $11 billion in losses.

Last fall, Sberbank CIB analysts criticized Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. Fak’s report said Rosneft was expected to reduce its debt after acquiring control of TNK-BP in 2013 — especially when oil prices crashed in late 2014. Instead, Rosneft spent $22 billion on new acquisitions “without any clear focus.” Shortly after the report leaked to the media and caused the scandal, Sberbank CIB annulled it, apologized to Rosneft, and sent clients a revised copy that redacted some of the passages about Sechin.

Read the whole story at Meduza: “A Russian financial analyst criticized Rosneft for accruing debts and Gazprom for losing money to Putin’s friends. Now he’s out of a job.”

Yulia Skripal finally speaks, and Moscow is as concerned as ever 🇬🇧🇷🇺

In an interview with Reuters, Yulia Skripal, the daughter of the poisoned former Russian intelligence officer who spied for the British, says she hopes to return to Russia eventually, despite nearly dying in a nerve-agent attack on her father. Thirty-three years old, Yulia was in a coma for 20 days. “We are so lucky to have both survived this attempted assassination. Our recovery has been slow and extremely painful,” she said in a written English statement.

Russia’s embassy in Britain says Yulia’s statement appears to have been written originally in English and translated back into Russian, heightening Moscow’s concerns that she is being held in the UK against her will. The embassy says the British government continues to violate the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

How Petro learned to stop worrying about Manafort and love the Donald 🇺🇦🇺🇸

In August 2016, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko allegedly authorized the leak of a pro-Russian political party’s so-called “black ledger,” apparently showing millions of dollars funneled to Paul Manafort, then Donald Trump’s campaign manager. The leak cost Manafort his job and imperiled the Trump campaign, helping Hillary Clinton in what was expected to be her rout of Trump. Of course, the 2016 race ended rather differently, and Kiev was left in an awkward position when the White House changed hands. Sources now tell the BBC that Poroshenko made a secret payment of at least $400,000 to Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, to get on the president’s good side and gain Washington access. The kickback supposedly helped facilitate Poroshenko’s White House visit in June 2017, after which Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency reportedly halted its investigation into Manafort and the Trump administration greenlit lethal aid to Kiev. Diplomacy in action!

• Read the story here at the BBC.

No Ukrainian market for you, Russian propagandas 🗞

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has added news outlets controlled by the Rossiya Segodnya media holding company to the country’s sanctions list, blocking access to publications like RIA Novosti, R-Sport, and Prime, and freezing RIA Novosti Ukraine’s local assets. Earlier in May, Ukrainian security agents arrested the chief editor of RIA Novosti Ukraine, charging him with treason for leading Moscow’s information warfare efforts in Kiev. Russian officials responded by launching a criminal case, accusing Ukrainian officials of obstructing a journalist’s lawful activity and knowingly prosecuting an innocent person. In May 2017, Ukraine blocked several of the Russian Internet’s biggest services, including Vkontakte, Mail.ru, and Odnoklassniki.

This week, Poroshenko also extended Ukraine’s sanctions to the billionaires Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller, and VTB chairman Andrey Kostin.

Rusal’s tries to boogie-woogie free from U.S. sanctions 🇺🇸🇷🇺

After just three months on the job, Alexander Buriko has stepped down as Rusal’s CEO. The company is also losing seven members of its executive board, effective on June 28. The board members will be migrating to seats on the board of directors at En+ Group (another company owned by Oleg Deripaska). The personnel shuffle is part of Rusal’s efforts to shake free from U.S. sanctions imposed in early April targeting “oligarch” Oleg Deripaska. In May, the U.S. Treasury said its beef is with Deripaska, and it is prepared to drop sanctions against Rusal, En+ Group, and GAZ Group, if Deripaska divests.

The FBI grabs a Fancy Bear botnet server 👾

On Wednesday, the FBI announced that it’s seized a key server in what is believed to be a Russian botnet composed of hundreds of thousands of infected routers and other networked devices around the world. The malware network supposedly belongs to the hacking group identified as “Fancy Bear” or “Sofancy,” which cyber-threat experts have traced to Russian military intelligence. The same group is thought to be responsible for the cyber-attack on the U.S. Democratic National Committee. The U.S. Justice Department’s press release does not mention Russia, however.

One more reason not to search the Web through Sputnik or Mail.ru 🔍

If you’re one of the weirdos who uses the Internet search engines Mail.ru or Sputnik, you’re no longer seeing Telegram hyperlinks in your search results. On Thursday, Roskomnadzor told the newspaper Kommersant that these two search engines have connected to Russia’s Federal State Information System, which automatically restricts access to blocked online resources. The two biggest search engines in Russia that people actually use, Yandex and Google, haven’t started removing hyperlinks to Telegram, but Roskomnadzor claims that the companies are currently testing this process.

What’s happening with Russia’s Telegram block? Since April 16, Roskomnadzor has blocked millions of IP addresses in an effort to cut off access to Telegram. Thanks to some technical wizardry (read about that here), the instant messenger is still working for most Russian users, but the federal censor has managed to disrupt hundreds of other online services using cloud services blacklisted by the government. Business groups say Roskomnadzor is abusing its authority; they’re calling for an investigation by the Attorney General’s Office.

Schooling the family values into you 👩‍🏫

Education officials are encouraging a new elective course on “Family Life Studies,” according to the newspaper Kommersant. The new subject is a joint project between the Education Ministry and the National Parent Association. The recommended curriculum emphasizes the need for lessons on “the foundations of family psychology,” “age pedagogy,” “male and female culture,” “family life patterns,” “family education,” “family law,” “the foundations of healthy lifestyles and meaningful recreation,” “forms and methods of studying family history,” “spiritual and moral development,” “the formation of a culture of behavior,” and “the formation of civic self-awareness in children.” Teachers and parents across Russia can expect to receive these “methodological recommendations” by June 1.

No new taxes, but maybe a few “adjustments” 😉

First Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Anton Siluanov says Russia has no plans to change its tax system in the next six years, but there will be “adjustments.” Siluanov stressed the government’s need for “stable conditions,” arguing that taxes are key to maintaining this stability. What kind of “adjustments” should Russia’s stability-rich citizenry expect? Siluanov says the government is once again considering measures to simplify the tax code, in order to encourage more businesspeople to stop working in the economy’s “gray sector,” where profits and expenses are under the table and off the books.

The Russian media has repeatedly said the government is discussing major tax reforms, including the introduction of a progressive income tax, higher insurance fund taxes on salaries, and more indirect taxes. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has also signaled that the government will propose raising the country’s retirement age to maintain the pension system’s sustainability.

Another Navalny activist nabbed 👮‍♂️

Police have detained another figure in Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption movement, this time grabbing Ivan Zhdanov, a lawyer for the Anti-Corruption Foundation, outside the organization’s office in Moscow. Zhdanov is charged with promoting unpermitted anti-Putin rallies on May 5 — the same offense that landed Navalny and his press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, in jail for 30 days and 25 days, respectively. In the same investigation, Russian law enforcement officials have also detained multiple anchors reporting on the YouTube channel Navalny Live.

What happened on May 5? Across the country, police detained more than 1,600 demonstrators, including 158 minors. On May 15, Alexey Navalny was sentenced to 30 days in jail for organizing the “illegal” rallies. On May 23, the Moscow City Court rejected Navalny’s appeal.