The Real Russia. Today. Russia's trolls poke Robert Mueller, Putin flashes some Teflon, and Deripaska's new spook CEO

Friday, June 15, 2018

On this day in history. On June 15, 1984, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR said to hell with George Orwell and formally established September 1 as “Knowledge Day” (День Знаний). The day marks the start of the school year and it's a pretty big deal for youngsters — especially first graders.

• Russia's Internet trolls want to see Mueller's evidence, but he says Prigozhin has to show up to claim it
• The Kremlin says Putin isn't “participating” in Russia's pension reforms
• Ukraine's human rights commissioner is denied access to political prisoner Oleg Sentsov
• Russia's Black Sea Fleet is reportedly on high alert because of Kyiv
• Ukraine decides to broadcast Russia's FIFA World Cup, after all
• Trump allegedly, privately sides with Russia's krym nashists
• Meduza shares healthy shopping tips for Russian grocery stores
• Meduza talks to mixed martial artist Jeff Monson about his city council ambitions in Krasnogorsk
• Oleg Deripaska's Basic Element conglomerate now has a former spook as CEO

Russia's trolls hit back at Mueller 👾

It’s all well and good to indict Russia’s “troll factory” for foreign election meddling, until it hires lawyers who demand access to the “unclassified but sensitive” data you used to build your case. That’s the lesson special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have learned in Washington, where his team has asked a federal judge to limit the information that can be shared with Concord Management and Consulting LLC, the corporate power behind Evgeny “Putin’s Chef” Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency.

“As long as Prigozhin chooses not to appear personally in front of this Court, he is not entitled to review any discovery in this case,” prosecutors wrote, warning that the U.S. government “has particularized concerns about discovery in this case being disclosed to Russian intelligence services.” Concord’s attorney, Eric Dubelier, has dismissed the case as a “make-believe electioneering crime” invented by prosecutors.

Dubelier’s statement to the district court has some real zingers, in fact. He calls Mueller an “unlawfully appointed special counsel” and says Mueller’s protective order is based on “a hysterical dithyramb about the future of American elections.” Read the whole thing here.

Who’s Prigozhin again? Evgeny Prigozhin makes headlines for many reasons these days: he’s the rumored founder of the Internet Research Agency, Russia’s most notorious “troll factory,” and he runs a catering empire that wins enormous government contracts. Last year, his businesses won contracts to feed Moscow’s public schools worth 47 billion rubles ($827.2 million). He also allegedly owns the “Wagner” private military company, which has reportedly signed an agreement with the Syrian government to help “liberate, protect, and develop” Syrian oil fields currently occupied by hostiles.

Russia's Teflon prez 🛡

On Thursday, immediately after Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced the government’s plans to raise Russia’s retirement age for the first time in modern history and hike the VAT by two percent, MediaZona chief editor Sergey Smirnov joked on Twitter: “When Putin learned about the pension reform and raising of the VAT, he was furious.” He was mocking the president’s Teflon political status, where Putin gets credit for all the times the state boosts social spending, but is mysteriously blameless any time the government fouls up or steps back.

Smirnov gets clairvoyance points this week, because Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday that Putin “isn’t participating in the pension reform process,” calling it “the [Medvedev] government’s prerogative.” Peskov also highlighted Russia’s very real and hardly unique demographic challenges, pointing out that Putin’s previous promise not to raise the retirement age was more than 13 years ago. The current plan is something economic experts are working out, Putin’s spokesman says.

On June 14, Dmitry Medvedev unveiled a plan to raise Russia’s retirement age for men from 60 to 65 by 2028 and from 55 to 63 for women by 2034. The reforms would start as soon as next year. According to the proposal's explanatory note, women are getting a bigger increase because of “changes in their social status.” In other words, there's more gender equality now, so saddle up, ladies.

“Brotherly nations”

🏃‍♀️ Jumping the gun in Siberia

Things were going so well. Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova made it to Russia, where she would visit the imprisoned filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who’s a month deep into a life-threatening hunger strike. Her Russian counterpart, Tatyana Moskalkova, was supposed to go to Ukraine and meet Kirill Vyshinsky, a Russian journalist now jailed in Kyiv. But on June 15, officials in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Sentsov’s new home in Siberia, told Denisova that she couldn’t meet him. Moskalkova says Denisova came to Russia too soon, before she reciprocally went to Ukraine, violating the agreement between Moscow and Kyiv.

Oleg Sentsov was sentenced to 20 years in prison for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks in Crimea. There has been an international campaign to lobby for his release. Read Meduza’s summary of why his case matters here. Sentsov has been on a hunger strike calling for the release of Russia’s Ukrainian political prisoners since May 14.

During his live call-in show on in early June, Vladimir Putin said he isn’t currently considering exchanging Sentsov for Vyshinsky. The president argued that Sentsov was convicted of plotting terrorist attacks, while Vyshinsky was arrested in Ukraine last month for his actions as a journalist. “You can’t compare these things,” Putin explained.

🚢 You can crush us / You can bruise us

Sources close to the Russian military told Reuters on Friday that Russian naval forces have been put on heightened alert in the Black Sea “to discourage Ukraine” from trying to disrupt the FIFA World Cup. Moscow has dismissed the reports, saying that the Black Sea Fleet is operating normally. Reuters says it was unable to confirm the rumor.

📺 Don't touch that dial

The National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine (UA:PBC) has decided to broadcast this summer’s FIFA World Cup, after all, despite the fact that it’s happening in Russia, the country that annexed Crimea from Kyiv. UA:PBC’s decision was motivated by the fact that it doesn’t want to lose its broadcasting rights for the next soccer World Cup, which the company purchased together with the rights to this year’s tournament. The 2022 contest will take place in Qatar.

UA:PBC hasn’t revealed what it spent to acquire the 2018 and 2022 World Cup broadcasting rights, but it's been paying off this purchase in annual installments. After Russia and Ukraine entered a state of de facto war in 2014, UA:PBC started missing these payments, jeopardizing its rights to broadcast the 2022 tournament. In the end, UA:PBC sold the rights to the TV networks NTN and Inter.

In May, Ukrainian lawmakers debated a draft law that would have banned the broadcast of the 2018 World Cup, but it failed to pass. In February, the Football [Soccer] Federation of Ukraine announced that it wouldn’t accredit Ukrainian journalists to report from Moscow this summer. Ukraine’s national soccer team didn’t qualify for the World Cup this year. The tournament started on June 15 and isn’t over until July 15.

😵 Donald's moral support

Donald Trump allegedly told G7 leaders that Crimea is Russian because everyone who lives there speaks Russian, two diplomatic sources told BuzzFeed News. Trump supposedly made the remarks over dinner last Friday during a discussion on foreign affairs at the G7 summit in Quebec. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to speak on the matter. Read the story at BuzzFeed.

Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. 🛒

Are you going to be in Russia at all during the FIFA World Cup? If so, and if you plan to do any grocery shopping, Meduza has put together an 11-step guidebook that’s just for you. Read all 11 steps, or peril may find you. The guidebook is all about how to be a smart, healthy shopping in Russian grocery stores. Here are the questions asked and answered:

1. I’m perfectly healthy. Why should I be reading this?
2. In Russia, where on food labels can I read about this stuff?
3. What else in my food can kill me?
4. But it’s always better to choose products made from natural ingredients, right? They’re supposed to be healthier!
5. What does it mean when foods are called “environmentally friendly” or “organic”?
6. But it’s better to avoid foods with GMOs, right?
7. What about vitamin-enriched products? Should I grab every one I can find?
8. What if I find food that’s labeled “whole grain”? Is that good?
9. Maybe I should get children’s food, instead? It’s got to be higher quality, right?
10. Do I have to become fluent in all the little markings they put on food labels, like “EAS” and those little arrows?
11. That’s a lot to take in. Can you tell me one more time, in a nutshell, what I should look out for?

He's ready to lead Krasnogorsk to the future 🌄

Mixed martial artist Jeff Monson is the proud winner of United Russia’s primaries in Krasnogorsk, and now he can run for a seat on the city council. Monson even has the governor’s endorsement. It’s quite a feat for a man who only last month acquired Russian citizenship (and renounced his U.S. citizenship). Monson is known for his love of Russia (especially its Soviet past), and he recently opened a martial arts school in Krasnogorsk. In an interview with Meduza, he explained his turn to Russian politics.

• Read the interview: “‘If I enter a competition, I expect to win’: Russian citizenship in hand, mixed martial artist Jeff Monson is running for city council outside Moscow”

Meet Deripaska's new spook CEO 🕵

The new general director of Oleg Deripaska’s industrial group “Basic Element” is reportedly Valery Pechenkin. Before coming to the company in the early 2000s, Pechenkin spent more than 30 years working in Russian intelligence, according to the magazine RBC. From 1997 to 2000, he even served as deputy director of the Federal Security Service and managed the agency’s counterintelligence department.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned a dozen companies associated with several prominent “Russian oligarchs.” “Deripaska has said that he does not separate himself from the Russian state. [...] Deripaska has been investigated for money laundering, and has been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official, and taking part in extortion and racketeering. There are also allegations that Deripaska bribed a government official, ordered the murder of a businessman, and had links to a Russian organized crime group,” the Treasury said in a press release on April 6. Following the imposition of U.S. sanctions, the value of shares in Rusal and En+ plummeted.

In May, after just three months on the job, Alexander Buriko 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. 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.