The Real Russia. Today. A long-time Soviet interpreter on the Trump-Putin summit, a major arrest in a bribery scandal, and Russia's amazing disappearing ‘negative’ police news

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

This day in history. One hundred years ago, in Yekaterinburg, on the night between July 16 and 17, 1918, the Russian Imperial Romanov family and all who accompanied them into imprisonment were shot, bayoneted, and clubbed to death.

• Meduza asks a long-time Soviet interpreter to put the Trump-Putin summit in historical context
• Bill Browder fires back at Putin
• U.S. officials arrest a suspected ‘Russian agent’
• Federal agents detain a top Moscow investigator in a mob-bribery scandal
• The European Court of Human Rights sides with Pussy Riot and Anna Politkovskaya's relatives in two rulings against Russia
• The Council of Europe's human rights commissioner asks Russia's Attorney General to help a human rights activist jailed in Chechnya
• Here's how much ‘negative’ news stories disappeared from Russian police websites during the World Cup
• The Russian government could get the right to impose special payments on citizens buying stuff on foreign online stores
• 100,000 march in Yekaterinburg in memory of the last Tsarist family
• Sberbank and VTB Bank say clients’ personal data was not included in search results on Yandex

Like the failed summit before the Cuban Missile Crisis 🤝

On July 16, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump held bilateral talks in Helsinki. The leaders of the United States and Russia haven’t met quite like this, at a formal summit in a third country, for almost 15 years. To get a sense of a diplomatic event like this, Meduza special correspondent Ilya Zhelgulev spoke to Pavel Palazhchenko, who served as a interpreter for General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Palazhchenko participated in many similar bilateral summits in the late 1980s.

• Read the full interview: “Long-time Soviet interpreter Pavel Palazhchenko puts the Trump-Putin meeting in historical context”

📬 Return to sender

“The biggest mistake that Putin made in his offer today to effectively swap me for the 12 Russian agents is that he went to the wrong head of state. Although I was born in America, I emigrated to the United Kingdom 29 years ago and am a British citizen. If he really wants me, he better go talk to Theresa May, who might have a few choice words for him after Russian agents spread the military-grade nerve agent Novichok across the cathedral town of Salisbury, England.” — Bill Browder, in a special column for Time magazine

RussiaGate 9000 🕵️

On July 16, the U.S. Justice Department announced that police in Washington, D.C., had arrested a Russian citizen the day prior on charges of conspiring to act as an undeclared agent of the Russian government. Her hearing his set for July 18. According to U.S. officials, 29-year-old Maria Butina “worked at the direction of a high-level official in the Russian government who was previously a member of the legislature of the Russian Federation and later became a top official at the Russian Central Bank.” This official, Russian Central Bank Deputy Chairman Alexander Torshin, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in April 2018 in the so-called “Oligarchs List.”

Butina allegedly “developed relationships with U.S. persons and infiltrated organizations having influence in American politics,” in order to advance Russia’s state interests. She faces up to five years in prison, if convicted.

For background on Butina’s efforts to influence Republican politicians and the National Rifle Association, see this article in The New York Times.

Moscow's mob-bribery scandal lands its biggest fish yet 👮

On Tuesday, federal agents detained Moscow Investigative Committee head Alexander Drymanov, who reportedly submitted his resignation recently. According to the news agency Interfax, Drymanov is finally a suspect in a bribery scandal involving his department, where high-ranking Moscow Investigative Committee officials accepted money from gangsters to facilitate Andrey “The Italian” Kochuikov’s early release and reduce the charges against him. Kochuikov is a known associate of the mobster Zakhariy “Young Shakro” Kalashov. In March 2018, Kalashov and Kochuikov were sentenced to nine years and 10 months in prison and eight years and 10 months in prison, respectively.

In previous testimonies, some of Drymanov’s subordinates already tied him to the bribes from Kalashov. Denis Nikandrov, Drymanov’s former deputy, says he gave the money to his supervisor. Specifically, Nikandrov says he paid his boss 9,850 euros (about $11,565) “no earlier than May 19, 2016,” as thanks for a promotion and for his general support. In mid-July, Interfax reported that Drymanov had filed for extended leave, followed by his resignation.

In the same scandal, former Colonel Mikhail Maksimenko, who led the Federal Investigative Committee’s Internal Security Directorate, was fined 165 million rubles ($2.6 million) and sentenced to 13 years in prison for accepting a $500,000 bribe. Maksimenko was also stripped of his rank as colonel and banned for life from working again for a state agency. He maintains his innocence.

The money might not have come directly from the mob. In early February, the news agency Rosbalt published a report claiming that the bribes didn’t come from Kalashov, but from from two businessmen: Oleg Sheikhametov and Dmitry Smychkovsky. The latter figure reportedly has extensive ties to the investigators involved in releasing Young Shakro’s man, and he may have even attended one of Drymanov’s birthday parties. There’s currently a warrant out for Smychkovsky’s arrest, but he’s hiding in London.

The European Court of Pay Up, Russia ⚖️

Pussy Riot

The European Court of Human Rights has ordered the Russian government to pay compensation to the three members of Pussy Riot convicted of “hooliganism” for performing their infamous “punk prayer” at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow in February 2012. Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were each awarded 16,000 euros ($18,775), and Ekaterina Samutsevich was granted 5,000 euros ($5,870). The ECHR also says Moscow must compensate the women for 11,700 euros ($13,730) in legal expenses. According to the court, the women were denied their right to a fair trial.

Responding to the verdict, Russia’s Justice Ministry told reporters that Moscow still has three months before the ruling takes effect, during which time the government can file an appeal. All three Pussy Riot members were originally sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” Samutsevich’s punishment was later commuted to probation. Alekhina and Tolokonnikova were imprisoned for more than a year before they were both released in a general amnesty ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Anna Politkovskaya

The European Court of Human Rights has ordered the Russian government to pay 20,000 euros ($23,460) jointly in non-pecuniary damages to four relatives of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in October 2006. The ECHR found that Russian law enforcement officials failed to carry out an effective investigation into Politkovskaya’s murder, failing to meet requirements for adequacy, promptness, and the involvement of relatives.

In 2014, the Moscow City Court convicted five people of carrying out the murder, sentencing the perpetrators to prison terms ranging between 12 years and life imprisonment. Police never found the person or persons who commissioned the assassination, however. The ECHR ruled that Russian investigators focused for years exclusively on rumors that Boris Berezovsky was tied to the murder, despite a lack of evidence to support this theory. “Furthermore, given Anna Politkovskaya’s work covering the conflict in Chechnya, the investigative authorities should have explored the alleged implication of the officials from the Federal Security Service or from the administration of the Chechen Republic, even if such allegations were eventually proved unfounded,” the ECHR argued.

Saving Oyub 🙏

Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Dunja Mijatović has written an open letter to Russian Attorney General Yuri Chaika, asking for the release of human rights activist Oyub Titiev, who was detained in January 2018 on drug possession charges that he denies. In the letter, Mijatović cites a recent report by Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council, which criticized the police response to Titiev’s claims that he is being framed. Mijatović also points out that Russia’s own human rights commissioner, Tatyana Moskalkova, and the head of the Presidential Human Rights Council, Mikhail Fedotov, have both called repeatedly for moving Titiev’s case outside the North Caucasus, demonstrating “doubts as to the likelihood that Mr. Titiev’s rights will be safeguarded if the case remains in the Chechen Republic.” Closing her letter, Mijatović asks Chaika for information about “specific actions” by the Attorney General’s Office in response to the report issued by the Presidential Human Rights Council.

A good news month 📅

Online purchase fees 🛍️

The Russian government could get the right to impose special payments on citizens making purchases on foreign online stores, if new amendments added to the second reading of draft legislation are adopted. The reforms already have the support of a parliamentary committee, though a vote on the updated bill isn’t yet scheduled.

On June 18, Finance Ministry tax and customs policy head Alexey Sazanov reportedly said the threshold on duty-free online purchases would fall to 500 euros a month as soon as July 1, 2018, though an unnamed ministry representative later clarified that this is still under debate. According to Vedomosti, Russia’s Federal Customs Service also wants the duty-free threshold lowered, advocating a 20-percent tax on all purchases from foreign online stores.

In Russia today, you can buy up to 1,000 euros ($1,154) or as much as 31 kilograms (68 pounds) in a month from foreign online stores without paying a special tax of 30 percent (not to exceed four euros per kilogram, or $2.10 per pound).

A 13-mile march 🕯️

In Yekaterinburg, on the night of July 17, more than 100,000 people joined a religious procession in memory of the last Tsarist family, who were executed 100 years ago today. Patriarch Kirill, Sverdlovsk Governor Evgeny Kuivashev, and Urals Federal District Presidential Envoy Nikolai Tsukanov joined the march, which stretched 21 kilometers (13 miles), from the Church of All Saints (built where Nicholas II and his family were murdered) to Ganina Yama (where the royal family’s remains were supposedly taken after the execution). Watch video footage of the procession here.

Nothing to see here, move along 🏦

Sberbank and VTB Bank say their clients’ personal data was not included in search results on Yandex, which until recently was indexing large amounts of private information made public on Google Docs. Earlier this week, search engine expert Pavel Medvedev revealed that he was able to find personal data from Sberbank clients and information about people shared on the websites of VTB Bank, Moscow’s Transport Department, and the travel aggregator Trip.com.

Spokespeople for Sberbank told Interfax that its experts analyzed every hyperlink that appeared online and found no personal data belonging to its clients. VTB Bank told the news agency TASS that no client information reached the open Internet. “It’s been established that the incident occurred through the fault of a third party. At the same time, information concerning bank secrets was not transferred to third parties,” VTB Bank said in a statement, giving no further details.

On the evening of July 4, Russian Internet users realized that the search engine Yandex has been indexing a surprising array of information stored on Google Docs, including files containing passwords, credit card numbers, and corporate documents. Yandex’s press service says the company’s actions were perfectly legitimate, but within hours of the discovery the search engine stopped producing any hyperlinks to Google Docs. In this special report, Meduza took a closer look at what information accidentally leaked to the public, and how it might have happened.