The Real Russia. Today. Primorsky Krai's gubernatorial debacle, a Petersburg businessman is gunned down, and more MH17 denials

Monday, September 17, 2018

This day in history. On September 17, 1939, the USSR invaded Poland without a formal declaration of war. The assault came 16 days after Germany invaded from the west. Secretly orchestrated in protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the military operations and annexation were complete by October 6. Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland until the summer of 1941.

• The Communist candidate was winning Primorsky Krai's gubernatorial race — until the last minute
• The numbers suggest strongly that Russia's Primorye election was stolen
• Mistranslation fuels Maria Zakharova's latest wisecrack
• St. Petersburg businessman with rumored mob ties is found dead in car riddled with bullets
• Russia's Defense Ministry unveils its latest MH17 denial
• Columnist Oleg Kashin dissects Russia's peculiar ‘week of national disgrace’

Russia's strangest election all year 🗳️

On September 16, the Primorsky Krai held a runoff gubernatorial election between acting Governor Andrey Tarasenko of United Russia and challenger Andrey Ishchenko of the Communist Party. In the first round on September 9, the incumbent won 46.6 percent of the vote against Ishchenko’s 24.6 percent. Before the runoff election, Tarasenko met publicly with Vladimir Putin, and the president assured him that “everything would be fine” with the second round of voting.

A few last-minute tweaks.

With 95 percent of the region’s voting precincts reporting, however, Ishchenko was winning the race with almost 6 percent more votes than Tarasenko: 51.6 percent to 45.8 percent. After another 2.87 percent of the precincts reported their results, Ishchenko remained ahead, but his lead dropped to just 3.3 percent. Afterwards, the preliminary tally published on the Central Election Commission’s website suddenly didn’t update for at least an hour.

With 99 percent of the votes counted, the Communist challenger had lost the race. Once 99.03 percent of voting precincts reported their results, Tarasenko surged ahead, putting him up 49.02 percent against Ishchenko’s 48.56 percent. Once 99.1 percent of precincts had reported their results, Tarasenko’s lead grew to a now insurmountable 1.49 percent.

No fair.

The Communist Party says the election results were falsified. According to Ishchenko, vote tallies were altered in Artem, Ussuriysk, Nakhodka, and Vladivostok’s Sovetsky District. In Ussuriysk, there were allegedly irregularities in at least five precincts, each of which added up to 1,200 votes for Tarasenko, according to Pavel Ashukhmin, a territorial election commission member from the Communist Party.

At Vladivostok’s Sovetsky District election commission, according to Communist Party representatives, officials tried to eject observers from the room where they were logging vote tallies in the state automated system. When that didn’t work, emergency workers arrived and evacuated the building, claiming that smoke had been reported. An inspection of the premises, however, turned up no traces of a fire.

Tarasenko, meanwhile, has accused the Communist Party of buying votes. The party supposedly spent roughly 40 million rubles ($587,200) on at least 24,000 votes, says the incumbent’s campaign. Observers from the Communist Party also allegedly interfered with the work of election commissions. “They didn’t let the commissions work normally,” a campaign representative told Interfax. “It was only when they got tired, when the commissions started working normally, that it turned out that a lot of the ballots they had been marked invalid were in fact okay, and that’s why there was such a breakaway by the morning.”

Here's how the incumbent explains it.

A spokesperson for the Primorsky Krai’s Central Election Commission attributes the last-minute change to the particulars of how voter precinct data was logged. Commission supervisor Evgeny Shevchenko says vote tallies were being uploaded “ahead of schedule,” which led to the delay in updates later on. The final results came in from more remote areas, in particular the city of Arsenyev (population 52,470), where Tarasenko won.

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Ishchenko has promised to organize protests against the election results, and he also announced a hunger strike. On Facebook, he said the Communist Party is contesting the results in Artem, Ussuriysk, Nakhodka, and Vladivostok’s Sovetsky District. On the morning of September 17, Ishchenko and several Communist Party activists assembled in Vladivostok’s Central Square, outside the Primorsky Krai's administrative building, which was guarded by the police. After initially calling for a tent encampment in the square, Ishchenko later told supporters that “it would be enough” to gather there everyday from “six in the morning until dusk,” until the runoff results are overturned. (Gennady Zyuganov apparently talked him out of the idea of staging a “permanent protest.”)

Asked what he thinks Vladimir Putin will make of the election results, Ishchenko told Meduza that he expects the president will be “upset.” “When the federal TV networks show that Ishchenko was winning with 95 percent of the votes in, and then this changed dramatically, and 40,000 [votes for Tarasenko] were added from somewhere, well I hope Mr. Putin will make the right decision, and the preliminary voting results will be corrected and the real vote tallies will be uploaded to the automated system.”

Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov is calling the election results a “criminal outrage,” and has demanded that President Putin convene a committee to review potential voter fraud in the race. Zyuganov also promised nationwide protests on September 22, directly accusing Primorsky Krai’s election officials of falsifying votes “all through the night.” On September 17, the Communist Party filed its first lawsuits against election results in the Ussuriysk City Court.

Teasing recognition

Russian Central Election Commissioner Ella Pamfilova has teased the possibility that her agency might not recognize the Primorsky Krai’s results. Speaking on September 17, Pamfilova said the federal commission won’t approve the final vote tally until it’s reviewed all reported violations. She’s also appealed to both the Tarasenko and Ishchenko campaigns, urging them to share any information about potential irregularities. At the same time, Pamfilova said Sunday’s race was the product of a “heated, competitive battle” that demonstrates the “positive effects” of her agency’s efforts to increase transparency in Russian elections.

By the numbers 📈

On September 16, the Primorsky Krai held a runoff gubernatorial election between acting Governor Andrey Tarasenko of United Russia and Andrey Ishchenko of the Communist Party. In the first round on September 9, the incumbent won 46.6 percent of the vote against Ishchenko’s 24.6 percent. As precincts reported their results on election day, however, the challenger appeared to be on his way to an upset victory, holding onto a more-than-five-point lead with just five percent of the precincts left uncounted. But then something happened, and Tarasenko suddenly shot ahead. Meduza explains why there’s every reason to believe that something was criminal election fraud.

The race’s leader changed very suddenly

Communist Party candidate Andrey Ishchenko was winning the election with 98.77 percent of all precincts reporting, but he began losing when the last 0.97 percent of results started coming in.

The sudden shift isn’t mathematically impossible…

With 95 percent of precincts reporting, Ishchenko held a solid five-percent lead over Tarasenko, still leaving the incumbent with a theoretical chance of victory, but only if the remaining uncounted precincts had big turnout and nearly everyone there voted for the acting governor.

… but it contradicts common sense.

The election monitoring group Golos attributes the election’s sudden shift to results from just four precincts (0.26 percent of all polling stations). At these sites, Tarasenko picked up 13,595 votes — every single vote cast, plus a few extras (given that only 3,000 voters can be registered at a single precinct). Ishchenko, meanwhile, managed to lose five votes at these sites (which is only possible theoretically if repeat ballots were logged).

It turns out that Primorye has some very strange polling stations

According to Golos, the acting governor regularly won more than 90 percent of the votes cast at individual polling stations in certain areas of Ussuriysk. This is quite irregular, but it’s even more suspicious when considering the fact that these precincts were some of the last to report their results.

The Communist Party says vote tallies were simply rewritten

Communists say Tarasenko owes his breakthrough to city election officials in Ussuriysk, who the party says simply changed the reported vote tallies from two dozen precincts, stuffing ballots for the acting governor and subtracting them from Ishchenko. The stunt allegedly netted the incumbent 20,000 votes more votes than polling stations actually recorded.

Some polling stations reported abnormally high turnout

Stuffing ballots for one candidate simultaneously increases the overall turnout, which is why abnormally high turnout at some precincts could be evidence of stuffed ballots or counting violations. Electoral statistician Sergey Shpilkin created several graphs showing the distribution of turnout at polling stations throughout Primorye and found abnormal peaks at several precincts. At most polling stations, however, the elections seem to have taken place without apparent abnormalities, Shpilkin says.

Oopsies 🤦‍♂️

“U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley accused Russia on Monday of ‘cheating’ on U.N. sanctions on North Korea and said Washington has “evidence of consistent and wide-ranging Russian violations.” Read the story at Reuters.

Following a poor translation of these remarks by the state news agency TASS (which claimed that Haley had accused Russia of helping in the assassination of Kim Jong-nam), Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova joked on Facebook that the Americans were “close to cracking the Kennedy assassination.”

Riddle him this 💀

On September 17, about 15 minutes north of St. Petersburg, police found a Mercedes on the side of the highway riddled with six bullets apparently fired from an automatic weapon. Inside, officers discovered the body of Bardi Shengeliya, a businessman with reported ties to Russia’s criminal underworld who’s served multiple times as a key witness against fellow conspirators and corrupt cops. It was Shengeliya’s testimony that put away Tambov mafia boss Vladimir Barsukov (Kumarin) for 15 years. Most recently, Shengeliya testified that former Colonel Mikhail Maksimenko, who led the Federal Investigative Committee’s Internal Security Directorate, received a $50,000 bribe to launch a criminal case against fellow investigators who supposedly stole Shengeliya’s wristwatch. Maksimenko maintains his innocence.

In April 2018, Mikhail Maksimenko was sentenced to 13 years in prison for accepting a $500,000 bribe to try to free a criminal working for the mobster Zakhariy Kalashov (known as “Young Shakro”). Maksimenko was also stripped of his rank as colonel and banned for life from working again for a state agency. Three other law enforcement officers testified against him, including one of his former subordinates. Maksimenko maintains his innocence.

The court ruled that Maksimenko received the money to help free Andrey Kochuikov (known as “The Italian”), who took part in a deadly shootout at a Moscow cafe in 2015, where two of Kalashov’s men died. Kalashov was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison for extortion.

MH17 denials, again ✈️

On September 17, the Russian Defense Ministry presented more claims that it wasn’t responsible for supplying the weapon that destroyed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014. Based on “declassified archives,” Russian officials once again said the missile that downed the plane was fired from territory controlled by the Ukrainian military. The Defense Ministry also played an excerpt from an audio tape where a man identified as a colonel in the Ukrainian army discusses bringing down “another Malaysian Boeing.” Finally, Russian military officials accused foreign investigators on the Joint Investigation Team of doctoring video footage to produce evidence that the “Buk” missile system responsible for the MH17 disaster was delivered from Russia and then snuck back across the border.

Eliot Higgins, the founder of the open-source intelligence group Bellingcat, responded to the Defense Minstry’s new claims, tweeting, “I expect some very stupid people will be very excited about the Russian Defense Ministry’s MH17 press conference.” In subsequent tweets, he explained that Moscow was merely “misinterpreting the shadows and objects” in video footage, and concluded that “Russia’s ‘experts’ don’t have a clue what they’re talking to, and don’t have access to the same original source material we have.”

In an official reaction, the Joint Intelligence Team said it would review Moscow’s new materials, but pointed out that information supplied by Russian officials in the past “was factually inaccurate on several points.” The JIT also restated its conclusion that the missile that downed MH17 was brought from Russia, returned to Russia, and fired from an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists.

Interpreting the “week of national disgrace” as a “junta” ploy

Borrowing a quip from journalist Ilya Vasyunin, columnist Oleg Kashin argues in his latest Republic text that hard-liners in Russia’s power structures are deliberately undermining the country’s image and the appearance of law and order in an effort to force Vladimir Putin into full-fledged authoritarianism “where closed borders will seem a blessing because all that lies abroad is a guaranteed trip to the Hague.” Kashin cites three events in the past week that have embarrassed the Kremlin: (1) the near defeat of United Russia’s candidate in Primorye’s gubernatorial race, (2) the incoherent and ridiculous version of events presented in a televised interview by the two Salisbury attack suspects, and (3) the Defense Ministry’s decision to rehash the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 disaster.

According to Kashin’s theory, the sudden decision to falsify Primorye’s race in favor of acting Governor Andrey Tarasenko wasn’t a “brazen, cynical” move, but a “frightened, desperate, panicked” last resort by the “more humane group” in the Russian establishment — the “anti-junta.” In Kashin’s theory, this latter group of elites is comprised of the figures who want to keep ties open with the West, if only for selfish reasons.

Kashin’s text, which he admits is thoroughly conspiratorial, was published before the Defense Ministry’s press conference on MH17. He speculated that Russia’s “week of disgrace” might drag on, if the military’s conference ended up appearing to outsiders like a cynical admission of guilt.