The Real Russia. Today. London says ‘Alexander Petrov’ and ‘Ruslan Boshirov’ tried to kill Sergey Skripal, Russia braces for tougher U.S. sanctions, and a feminist faces felony hate speech charges

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

This day in history. On September 5, 1996, just a few months after winning reelection as president, Boris Yeltsin announced in a television interview that he would undergo heart surgery. After a quintuple heart bypass surgery that November, Yeltsin spent months hospitalized. Roughly 11 years later, he died of congestive heart failure.

• British authorities name the Russian suspects in the Salisbury attack
• Russian journalists dig up information about the secret agents who allegedly carried out the Salisbury nerve-agent attack
• Russia’s Security Council is bracing for tougher U.S. sanctions
• Russian politician kills two people in traffic collision and keeps driver's license, while feminist faces felony charges for joking online about ‘asses and pussies’
• Kemerovo opposition activist is arrested for sharing ‘Nazi’ pics ahead of protests against pension reform
• Crew members probably didn't sabotage the International Space Station
• Relatives of the young men who recently attacked Chechen police officers have been forced to flee the republic

British intel revealed 🔓

“Today marks the most significant moment so far in what has been one of the most complex and intensive investigations we have undertaken in Counter Terrorism policing; the charging of two suspects — both Russian nationals [aliases: Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov] — in relation to the attack on Sergey and Yulia Skripal. I would like to thank the Crown Prosecution Service for their independent assessment of the evidence in this case.” Read the whole statement by Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, national lead for Counter Terrorism Policing, in relation to the Salisbury and Amesbury Investigation.

“We were right to say in March that the Russian state was responsible. Based on a body of intelligence, the government has concluded that the two individuals named by police and the CPS are officers from the Russian military intelligence service.” British Prime Minister Theresa May comments on the Crown Prosecution Service’s findings.

What was Moscow’s response?

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told reporters on Wednesday that the photos and names released by British authorities “tell us nothing.” “Once again, we urge the British side to drop the public accusations and information manipulations and pursue practical cooperation through law enforcement channels,” she said. Moscow has fervently denied any role in the March 4 “Novichok” nerve agent attack in England, despite British allegations that the poison came from Russia.

“Alexander” and “Ruslan” 🕵️‍♂️

On September 5, British counter-terrorism officials put names and faces to the two suspects they blame for carrying out the March 4 “Novichok” nerve agent attack in England against Sergey Skripal and his daughter. London says “Alexander Petrov” and “Ruslan Boshirov” are likely pseudonyms for military intelligence agents, but that hasn’t stopped the Russian news website Fontanka from digging up everything it could find about men with these names.

Fontanka’s sources say Boshirov was born on April 12, 1978, and registered at a 25-story apartment complex in Moscow on Bolshaya Naberezhnaya Street. In July 2015, he was ticketed and fined twice for traffic violations by the same bailiffs’ department, though the case numbers for these tickets seem to reflect separate departments. Neither the online portal for Moscow’s magistrate office nor the city’s misdemeanor database have any record of a man named Ruslan Boshirov.

Fontanka also telephoned several people who live in the apartment building where Boshirov is registered, discovering that the only resident at his supposed address is an elderly woman. Neighbors say they’ve never seen any man enter the apartment, but some suggested that she might have a son who never visits.

On social media, Boshirov is similarly hard to track down. Accounts created in 2014 with this name are mostly inactive. A Facebook page registered under “Ruslan Boshirov” has just a single friend: a young woman from Ukraine. On Vkontakte, Boshirov indicates that he graduated from the geography department at Moscow State University in 2004.

Sources told Fontanka that Boshirov and Petrov received their current passports roughly two years ago, and have since made frequent trips to Europe. Between September 2016 and March 2018, the two men visited Amsterdam, Geneva, Milan, and repeatedly went to Paris. Before the Salisbury attack, Petrov made at least one trip to London, arriving on February 28 and leaving on March 5.

Fontanka was able to find out even less about Petrov. A man with his name and birthdate is registered as a staff member at the federal state unitary enterprise “MicroGen,” Russia’s biggest producer of immunological products. MicroGen operates nine branches nationwide, working mostly with vaccines, and reports to Russia's Health Ministry.

Bracing for worse 🚫

Russia’s Security Council thinks tougher U.S. sanctions are coming. According to the magazine RBC, the group has already collected action plans from Russia’s Finance Ministry, Economic Development Ministry, Industry and Trade Ministry, Central Bank, Vnesheconombank, Rostec, and other agencies. The Security Council is reportedly exploring the possibility of signing international agreements condemning the application of American laws outside the United States, apparently hoping to insulate Russia against the secondary sanctions imposed by the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. Russian officials might also seek to expedite the purchase of technological products that might fall under future U.S. sanctions, and develop “alternative international payment systems” based on “quantum technologies.” Spokespeople for Russia’s Security Council refused to comment on the rumors.

The U.S. Treasury Department most recently targeted Russia on August 27, in response to Moscow’s alleged role in the Salisbury nerve-agent attack. Since the beginning of the year, the U.S. Congress has introduced more than a dozen draft laws that would impose additional sanctions on Russia.

One justice system. Two worlds. ⚖️

Federal investigators in Omsk are pressing felony hate speech charges against a feminist activist over a dozen blog posts from 2013 to 2016. Lyubov Kalugina is accused of using Vkontakte to “incite hatred of men,” says the “Sova” human rights center. Officials first started building their case against her last year, following a complaint filed by an unnamed person living in Birobidzhan. Kalugina says she’s being tried for extremism “because of some jokes about asses, pussies, and intra-feminist debates.”

Felony charges over some Internet posts. Again?

Again. Kalugina joins a growing population of Russian Internet users unlucky enough to fall afoul of the anti-extremism police. Also in the headlines in recent weeks is Maria Motuznaya, a 23-year-old who faces felony charges in Barnaul because she posted allegedly racist and religiously insensitive memes.

The glut of criminal cases against Internet users has provoked some public outrage lately, especially when contrasted with courts’ frequently lenient treatment of state officials. On September 3, for example, a district court in Tyumen dropped the felony charges against Dmitry Eremeev, the chairman of the city’s legislative assembly, after finding him responsible for a traffic collision that killed two people. After paying roughly three million rubles ($44,000) to the victims’ families (equal to his reported annual income), following a hearing that lasted just 40 minutes, Eremeev was fined an additional 160,000 rubles ($2,345). He even gets to keep his driver’s license.

Prosecutors say they plan to challenge the verdict, and United Russia’s regional branch later revealed that Eremeev’s membership in the party has been suspended, but critics have been quick to point out that Eremeev avoided any jail time, while folks like Kalugina, Motuznaya, and many others could go to prison for several years.

Why are the Russian police so concerned about online hate speech?

The growing number of extremism prosecutions is, to some extent, a consequence of Russia’s exploding Internet use. “More people have started using the Internet. We used to analyze books, leaflets, and posters. When everyone moved online, we started looking at Internet content, and that’s where we stumbled into this uncharted territory,” Igor Ogorelkov told Meduza in May. The head of the linguistics department at a center that provides expert testimony to Russian law enforcement, Ogorelkov admitted that Russian extremism policing is still chaotic.

At the same time, new laws criminalizing forms of offensive speech found commonly online (racist jokes, sacrilegious memes, and so on) have armed the authorities with tools that make it easy to prosecute young, typically impressionable suspects. In January 2016, for example, the website MediaZona reported that police have exploited Russia’s “information laws” to pad their solved-crime statistics, charging Internet users who share pornography and bullying them into plea bargains.

Is the government doing anything about this worrying trend?

On September 5, the All-Russia People's Front (a “social movement” launched in 2011 to offer Vladimir Putin a national political vehicle outside the political party United Russia) announced that the Attorney General’s Office has ordered police across the country to report every felony extremism case. Federal prosecutors reportedly plan to monitor these investigations, in order to prevent excessively “liberal” interpretations of Russia’s legislation against hate speech.

In June, President Putin instructed the All-Russia People's Front and the Attorney General’s Office to analyze the country’s policing of extremism, after he received a question during his annual call-in television show about criminal cases against Internet users.

Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova has joined the chorus of public figures in Russia calling for lighter punishments against Internet users accused of spreading extremist or offensive content. “I believe it’s important for us not to expand artificially the number of people with criminal records,” Moskalkova said on August 17. Two days earlier, Deputy Communications Minister Alexey Volin endorsed draft legislation that would reduce “criminal memes” to a misdemeanor offense.

Mail.ru, the parent company that owns Vkontakte (where most cases against Russian Internet users begin), has also called for decriminalization and amnesty for people already convicted of illegal speech, so long as their actions led to no violent outcomes.

Russian police have been prosecuting Internet users for “hate speech” more and more. In 2011, courts convicted 149 people of “extremism.” Last year, more than 600 people suffered this fate.

It ain't easy running with Navalny 👮

Stanislav Kalinichenko can’t seem to catch a break. In early August, he was released from pretrial detention in Kemerovo after four months of incarceration on charges that were ultimately tossed out. What was Kalinichenko’s crime? He hit a cop while a group of them were beating and strangling him during an interrogation. When he came to court on September 5, appearing as a witness in a case, police officers arrested him again, this time on charges of publicly displaying Nazi symbols in a post on Vkontakte — two years ago. Apparently, he once shared a GIF that featured a few German fascists. Investigators have said nothing more about the context. Kalinichenko faces a fine of up to 2,000 rubles ($30) or, more importantly, 15 days in jail.

Why come after Kalinichenko for a two-year-old GIF?

Stanislav Kalinichenko is a blogger and oppositionist who supports the anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny. The sudden effort to put Kalinichenko behind bars for the next two weeks could be part of Russian law enforcement agencies’ nationwide effort to lock up the leaders and promoters of Navalny’s September 9 protests against the government’s plan to raise the country’s retirement age.

Navalny will miss the upcoming demonstrations, as he is currently serving a 30-day jail sentence for organizing similar unpermitted rallies in January. (On September 5, he lost his appeal against the jail sentence.) Police have targeted the Navalny coalition’s local leaders, as well, in Novosibirsk and Moscow, for example.

That hole was there 🕳️

The hole drilled into the Russian module on the International Space Station was made and plugged (unsuccessfully) before it was ever launched into orbit, three sources in Russia’s rocket and space industry told the news agency RIA Novosti. A commission assembled by the rocket and space corporation Energia, which developed and built the “Soyuz” module, has reportedly determined that the plating was damaged before the equipment was sent to the International Space Station. Sources say the panel was plugged with a special glue that unexpectedly didn’t hold.

This apparently negates the “homesick cosmonaut” theory floated by Russian State Duma deputy Maxim Suraev, who said on August 4 that a “mentally unbalanced” crew member may have tried to expedite their return to Earth.

One for all, and all for one 👊

Vladimir Putin says he’s no fan of collective punishment, but it’s alive and well in Chechnya, where relatives of the teenagers who recently staged four coordinated attacks on police officers have reportedly been expelled from the republic. Locals told journalists from Caucasian Knot that a town hall meeting was planned in the Shalinsky District to condemn the families and force them from their homes, but it was later called off, when local officials decided that it would attract too much publicity. Before fleeing Chechnya, the assailants’ relatives worked as teachers, doctors, and civil servants.

What were these attacks?

On August 20, five individuals (including adolescents) attacked police officers in Grozny and the Shalinsky District. All five assailants died, and the terrorist group ISIS later claimed responsibility for the violence.

Is collective punishment common in Chechnya?

Not just in Chechnya, but throughout Russia’s North Caucasus. In October 2017, Meduza published a special report about the questionable practices of local police and the widespread persecution of anyone with ties to armed insurgents. The authorities, it turns out, are often working at cross purposes, trying to return ex-convicts and former suspects to society, while hounding these same people until normal life is impossible. Read the article by Sasha Sulim here.