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The Real Russia. Today. The GRU agent behind ‘Ruslan Boshirov,’ Chechnya and Ingushetia trade borderlands, and Putin plays his hand in Primorye

Source: Meduza

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

This day in history. On September 26, 1977, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was commissioned. In April 1986, the station infamously caught fire, leading to the most disastrous nuclear power plant accident in history.
  • Bellingcat and The Insider track down the GRU agent behind the ‘Ruslan Boshirov’ cover identity
  • Chechnya and Ingushetia trade borderlands, prompting protests from Ingush against the ‘surrender’ of historically contested territory
  • Putin appoints new acting governor in Far East region where Communist challenger was poised to win third-round election
  • Russian State Duma adopts second reading of legislation raising the retirement age

They got him 🕵️‍♂️

Bellingcat and its investigative partner The Insider say they have “established conclusively” the identity of one of the suspects in the poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal, and in the homicide of British citizen Dawn Sturgess. Say goodbye to “Ruslan Boshirov” and hello to Anatoliy Chepiga, the highly decorated GRU officer behind the phony name.

How they tracked him down

How did they do it? “Bellingcat began its work with only the two targets’ photographs and their cover identities,” before “searching deductively.” The researchers made and then tested a series of assumptions, guessing that “the two suspects were GRU officers with a focus on West European covert operations.” “[K]nowing their approximate age, we contacted former Russian military officers to inquire what specialized schools would have provided appropriate training.” This led the team to the Far Eastern Military Command Academy, and a yearbook photo that included a photograph of someone resembling Boshirov nearby text referring to graduates who’d received the Hero of Russia Award. Armed with this information, online searches dug up “a certain Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga.” Leaked Russian telephone databases tie this individual to the address of the GRU’s 14th Brigade in Khabarovsk.

At this point, the research veers from open-source intelligence to leaked information, as Bellingcat and The Insider “obtained extracts from the passport file of Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga” in order to validate the hypothesis about him being “Boshirov.” In his 2003 passport photo, it turns out, Chepiga is a dead ringer for the photos of “Boshirov” circulated by the British authorities. Chepiga’s 2003 place of residence, moreover, identifies the same Khabarovsk military unit found in the telephone records.

The direct Putin connection

What’s the significance of Chepiga’s colonel rank? Sending a highly decorated colonel back to a field job would be “highly extraordinary,” and would imply that “the job was ordered at the highest level,” an unnamed “former Russian military officer of similar rank as Colonel Chepiga” told Bellingcat. Given Chepiga’s Hero of Russia Award, it’s also probably that Vladimir Putin has met him, as these medals are handed out personally by the Russian president.

Read Bellingcat’s full report here.

The Duma marches ahead with pension reform 🧓

On September 26, the Russian State Duma adopted the second reading of legislation that will raise the country’s retirement age from 55 to 60 for women and from 60 to 65 for men. Amended slightly according to recommendations by Vladimir Putin, the revised bill softens some aspects of the original legislation (the hike to women’s pension age is now three years fewer, and certain pension benefits will remain unchanged).

Lawmakers are expected to vote on a third and final reading of the pension reform legislation on Thursday, September 27. Once the Federation Council and President Putin endorse the bill, it will become law.

Since the government announced plans to raise the retirement age, Russians have expressed less support for President Putin and especially the ruling political party, United Russia, and thousands of opponents have staged protests across the country. United Russia’s leadership believes its poor showing in certain regional elections earlier this month was a direct result of the party’s support for pension reform.

Primorye gets new gubernatorial blood, courtesy of Vladimir Putin 💉

The Kremlin has revealed its next step in Primorsky Krai, where invalidated voting results recently snatched away the incumbent governor's suspicious runoff election victory: Vladimir Putin is appointing Oleg Kozhemyako, currently the head of the Sakhalin region, to be Primorye's new acting governor. The president also said he won't object if Kozhemyako decides to run in the third-round gubernatorial election, which is scheduled to take place in the next three months.

At least for now, the reshuffling renders jobless Andrey Tarasenko, who couldn't hold onto a second-round victory over his Communist challenger. Andrey Ischenko, Tarasenko's erstwhile rival, will now likely face off against another Putin-endorsed United Russia incumbent.

A source told the newspaper Vedomosti that Tarasenko spent the past several days in Moscow, meeting with officials from the Putin administration. After speaking to Igor Levitin, a top presidential adviser, Tarasenko was reportedly being considered for an appointment as deputy minister of transport.

Chechnya and Ingushetia are border buddies again 🤝

On September 26, the heads of Chechnya and Ingushetia signed an agreement securing the border between the two Russian republics. According to Yunus-bek Yevkurov, the deal strengthens a border that’s been in place “since Ingushetia’s independence” (in 1992), while making “a few small revisions at the bottom, in the plains,” and exchanging “inch for inch” uninhabited “croplands owned by state unitary enterprises.” An official statement on the Ingush government’s website says the border revisions “will only affect mountainous wooded areas.”

At the time of this writing, it’s still unclear what lands were actually traded, and news agencies have published contradictory information. Initial reports claimed that Ingushetia exchanged Malgobeksky District for Chechnya’s Nadterechny District, but it later turned out that Ingushetia has given part of Sunzhensky District to Chechnya, in return for part of Nadterechny District.

Both Kadyrov and Yevkurov say the “historic” agreement will smooth relations between their two peoples. On Telegram, Kadyrov wrote, “Until this moment, there has been no legally established border between these two subjects of the Russian Federation, giving enemies of the Nakh peoples grounds for various political provocations.” In a statement on the Ingush government’s website, Yevkurov called the agreement a “compromise,” noting that both sides managed to “avoid conflicts,” as well as “possible bloodshed and blood grudges.”

The day before the agreement was signed, protests broke out in Ingushetia, entry into the capital was blocked, and Internet access in major cities was disabled

In late August 2018, the social movement “Support Ingushetia” reported that construction equipment and armed security forces from Chechnya suddenly appeared at a forest not far from the village of Arshty (which has long been the subject of territorial disputes between Ingushetia and Chechnya). “They started cutting down valuable lumber, destroying the rich topsoil, and changing the natural landscape,” the news website Caucasian Knot reported. The director of a local conservation park later confirmed these claims.

At the time, Ingush Nationalities Policy Minister Muslim Yandiev said that the Chechen construction crew wanted to push the Ingush checkpoint a kilometer (0.62 miles) deeper into the republic. “We explained to them that the border passed through here. We showed them the map. I don’t know what they were after. The work has stopped now, and the checkpoints haven’t moved,” Yandiev said. According to Alvi Karimov, Ramzan Kadyrov’s spokesman, the construction crew was only repairing the roads in the area, “for residents of both Ingushetia and Chechnya.”

On September 5, Caucasian Knot reported that the Chechen work crew and team of security forces had not only continued their work, but they’d actually “advanced 15 kilometers [9.3 miles] deep into Ingushetia’s Sunzhensky District.” Neither Khalid Tankiev (Yevkurov’s press secretary) nor the local prosecutor’s office would comment on the situation.

On September 25, Sunzhensky District head Isa Khashagulgov announced his resignation on his Instagram channel. Timur Akiev, the head of the human rights group Memorial’s Ingush branch, told Meduza that locals started receiving instant messages that same day calling them to a demonstration outside the Sunzhensky District administrative building, claiming that Khashagulgov had resigned “in protest” against the decision to surrender parts of the district to Chechnya. (Khashagulgov denies these rumors, saying he stepped down voluntarily.)

According to Caucasian Knot, about 70 people attended the rally, which attracted a large police presence (leading to at least one arrest). The protesters called on the public to assemble for a march the next day against the looming territory swap.

On September 26, about 50 people joined an unplanned demonstration in Sunzha, and more than 100 protested in Magas, Ingushetia’s capital. According to the news outlet Kavkaz Realii, Magas Mayor Beslan Tsechoev addressed the demonstrators, trying to get them to disperse, before police officers accomplished with their clubs what the mayor’s words could not. Kavkaz Realii also reported (and Timur Akiev confirms) that security forces placed concrete blocks across roads leading into the city, closing it off. During these protests, Internet access suddenly started failing in Magas and Nazran, and service became spotty across the rest of the republic.

When the dust had settled, it turned out that protesters’ fears were justified, and Ingushetia had in fact relinquished parts of the Sunzhensky District to Chechnya.

Chechnya and Ingushetia have been arguing over the Sunzhensky District for 25 years, and the feud has included armed clashes

After the breakup of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1992, with Chechnya’s eastern regions in open rebellion against Moscow, there was no officially established border between Chechnya and Ingushetia. In the 2000s and 2010, the territorial dispute between the two republics focused on areas of the Sunzhensky District and the urban district of Sunzha. In the 1930s, before the formation of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, part of these lands belonged to the Chechen Autonomous Region, which acquired the area after the liquidation of the Sunzhensky Cossack District.

In 1993, Ingush President Ruslan Aushev and Chechen separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev signed an agreement that recognized nearly all of the Sunzhensky District (with the exceptions of the town of Sernovodsk and the village of Assinovskaya) as part of Ingushetia. Ten years later, Chechen President Akhmat Kadyrov (Ramzan’s father) and Ingush President Murat Zyazikov signed a protocol recommitting to these terms.

The territorial dispute reignited in 2005, when Ramzan Kadyrov (now the acting head of the Chechen government) said, “It’s well known in neighboring regions, like in Chechnya itself, where the border ran before the republics’ unification, and where it should go after the breakup.” Over the next several years, both republics set up demarcation commissions that worked on their own versions of the border agreement. A federal law passed in 2009 also required defined boundaries for municipal entities.

The conflict intensified between 2012 and 2013, when Kadyrov called it a “well-known fact” that the Sunzhensky District and “significant territories” of the Malgobeksky District “are part of Chechnya.” Kadyrov also accused the Ingush authorities of lobbying Moscow for additional land from neighboring Chechen districts.

In late 2012, the Chechen parliament adopted a law to develop Chechnya’s Sunzhensky District (which formally included just Sevnovodsk and Assinovskaya) by forming six new municipal settlements on land claimed by Ingushetia. “We have on hand the necessary legal paperwork and historical materials, which can’t be said about the Ingush side. As for the notorious agreement with Dudayev about transferring Chechen lands — he was not the legitimate president, and all his decisions and executive orders have been annulled,” Kadyrov said. In response, Ingushetia leader Yunus-bek Yevkurov said the Sunzhensky District represents an “integral part of Ingushetia.”

A few months later, Kadyrov proposed adding another village to the Chechen parliament’s new law on developing the Sunzhensky District, arguing that more than 1,500 Chechens lived in Arshty, vastly outnumbering the town’s 161 Ingush residents. In April, security troops from Chechnya and Ingushetia clashed in Arshty, where the Chechen authorities claimed to be carrying out a special operation to help capture rebel field commander Doky Umarov (who was killed a few months later). In Ingushetia, officials insisted that the Chechens wanted to stage a public demonstration in favor of reabsorbing the village. Afterwards, Ingush security forces installed checkpoints throughout Arshty, and Yevkurov ordered police not to admit Chechen law enforcement into the area without permission.

Yours, Meduza

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