The Real Russia. Today. New spy allegations against Russia, thousands protest in Ingushetia against a border deal with Chechnya, and a law professor reexamines the 1993 constitutional crisis

Thursday, October 4, 2018

This day in history. Tanks bombarded the Russian parliament building, while demonstrators against President Yeltsin rallied outside. Officially, 187 people were killed in the violence.

• Spymania, continued
• New American and Dutch allegations against the GRU
• Soccer players, taxi receipts, and car registration documents work against Russia's not-so-secret agents
• Moscow dusts off an old conspiracy theory about chemical weapons testing in Georgia
• Thousands protest against a controversial border agreement in Ingushetia
• National Guard General Viktor Zolotov insists that you believe he stopped a suicide bomber outside the Kremlin
• Human Rights Watch wants Mikhail Benyash freed
• Law professor Sergey Tsyplyaev speculates about October 1993's alternate histories

Spymania, Part 9,000 🕵️

Behold the seven Russian hackers outed by Western officials on Thursday: Alexey Morenets, Evgeny Serebryakov, Ivan Ermakov, Artem Malyshev, Dmitry Badin, Oleg Sotnikov, and Alexey Minin. These men allegedly work for Russia's Military Intelligence Directorate and either hacked or tried to hack various antidoping agencies, the International Association of Athletics Federations, FIFA, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a Pennsylvania-based nuclear energy company, as well as a whole lot more in a whole series of hacker attacks. The agents then leaked intentionally misleading fragments of some athletes’ personal data under the guise of the “Fancy Bear” hacktivist group, hoping to boost international sympathy for Russia in a doping scandal that has cost the country several medals and got it banned from the 2018 Olympic Winter Games.

Three of the suspects named on October 4 were indicted back in July, when the U.S. Attorney General’s Office charged them with crimes related to meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. The Justice Department’s new investigation was carried out independently from previous cases, but it reached similar conclusions.

The hackers operated primarily from Russia, but sometimes they went into the field, in order to hack local WiFi signals. All seven suspects are currently thought to reside in Russia, but the United States says it’s eager to “get its hands” on these men and “bring them to justice.”

The Americans

“The U.S. Justice Department has charged seven Russian military intelligence officers with hacking anti-doping agencies and other organizations. An indictment announced in Washington on Thursday says Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, targeted the hacking victims because they had publicly supported a ban on Russian athletes in international sports competitions and because they had condemned Russia’s state-sponsored athlete doping program,” according to The Associated Press. Three of the men indicted were also named in a July indictment by special counsel Robert Mueller that “that accused Russia of hacking Democratic email accounts and facilitating the release of stolen emails.” Read the story here at AP.

The Dutch

“Dutch military intelligence disrupted a Russian cyber-attack on the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Dutch defense minister has said. The attack, which was thwarted with the help of British officials, came after the cyber-crime unit of the GRU Russian military intelligence directorate had also attempted a remote attack on the Porton Down chemical weapons facility in April and on the UK Foreign Office in March. Both attacks were unsuccessful,” according to a report by The Guardian. Read it here.

⚽ Outed by soccer

“One of the Russian men accused by Dutch security services of trying to hack into a chemical weapons watchdog participated in a Moscow football league as part of what was colloquially known as the ‘security service team,’” a former teammate told The Moscow Times, which tracked down a current team member.” The man told the newspaper, “Our team is known as the ‘security services’ team.’ Almost everyone works for an intelligence agency.” Read the story here.

🚖 Save those receipts?

The “Be Taxi” company has verified the authenticity of a receipt seized by the Dutch authorities from an alleged GRU agent. “Yes, that’s one of our receipts. The driver, Tsvetkov, is on shit right now,” a company spokesperson told the magazine RBC.

On October 4, the Dutch Defense Ministry revealed that it deported four Russian military intelligence operatives in April 2018 after disrupting their attempt to cyber-attack the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. At a press conference on Thursday, Dutch officials identified the four individuals, including a man named Alexey Morenets, who was reportedly carrying a receipt for a taxi ride to Moscow Sheremetyevo airport from an address located at a building complex that houses the GRU’s “cyber forces.”

🚗 Dumb car registration

The investigative news websites The Insider and Bellingcat reported on Thursday that there are 305 cars registered at the Moscow address of a Russian military intelligence division blamed by Western governments for launching a series of hacker attacks over the past several years. The address, 20 Komsomolsky Prospekt, belongs to Military Unit Number 26165, and one of the cars is registered to Alexey Morenets, whom Western intelligence agencies say is one of the GRU officers responsible for carrying out successful and attempted hacker attacks against targets in the West.

According to The Insider and Bellingcat, all 305 people who registered their vehicles at 20 Komsomolsky Prospekt provided their passport information and mobile phone numbers, and some even listed the military unit as their place of work.

“In essence, this means that any person with access to the State Road Traffic Safety Authority’s database (and this is one of the most accessible databases in Russia) can get the names, passport information, and mobile phone numbers of several hundred GRU staff — and not just ordinary employees, but staff in the same military unit that’s been accused of the most scandalous hacker attacks in recent history,” said The Insider.

Rumors of his death are greatly exaggerated ⚰️

On October 4, BuzzFeed published a long-read story about how Alexander Poteyev, the Russian turncoat who outed Anna Chapman and her bumbling team of sleeper-agent spies in 2010, is probably alive and well in America. Read the article here at BuzzFeed.

What about Rumsfeld's lab? 🔬

Facing new hacking allegations from officials in the West, the Russian Defense Ministry dusted off an old conspiracy theory on Thursday, warning that an American biopharmaceutical company supposedly killed dozens of patients at a lab in the Republic of Georgia in 2015 and 2016, allegedly while testing a new drug against Hepatitis C. At a press conference on October 4, Russian officials unveiled their allegations against Gilead Sciences, which Russian state news agencies subsequently said belongs to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (who reportedly owns several million dollars of shares in the company and served on the board of directors from 1988 until 2001, before heading the U.S. Defense Department).

The Russian Defense Ministry’s claims are based on data collected by Igor Giorgadze, Georgia’s former state security minister, who believes that the U.S. Defense Department secretly tests chemical weapons at the Pentagon-financed Richard G. Lugar Center for Public Health Research in Georgia.

Russian allegations against the Lugar Lab are nothing new. In a April 2018 story for the website Coda, titled “Does the U.S. Have a Secret Germ Warfare Lab on Russia’s Doorstep?” Giorgi Lomsadze reviewed the “inside story” of this “Kremlin disinformation campaign.”

Ingushetia is having problems 🗺️

Yunus-bek Yevkurov, the head of Ingushetia, is facing a major crisis, following a recent territorial-exchange agreement with Chechnya that was meant to resolve a decades-long border dispute in the Sunzhensky District. On October 4, Ingushetia's Popular Assembly adopted the first reading of legislation endorsing the deal brokered by Yevkurov, but nearly a dozen deputies later complained that the vote had been rigged. According to Ruslan Mutsolgov, the head of Yabloko's local branch, only five deputies supported the bill, while 15 voted against it, and four deputies intentionally ripped up their ballots.

Following the contested vote by the Popular Assembly, thousands of protesters gathered outside the parliament building in the capital city of Magas, demonstrating against the ratification of the border deal. At one point, Yevkurov tried to address the crowd, but someone threw a bottle at him, prompting his security detail to start firing into the air over the protesters. Despite the intimidation tactics, a large crowd remained in the city's square overnight, demanding that Yevkurov withdraw his signature from the agreement with Chechnya.

Appealing to the public in a video posted on Instagram, Ingushetia's leader asked people to go home and stop demonstrating. “The fact that I've created comfortable conditions for you over the past 10 years as head of the republic and done everything to make you feel like a democratic society doesn't mean you can violate the laws so brazenly and embarrass our republic,” Yevkurov said.

• Want to know more about this controversial borderland trade? Meduza wrote about it in detail on September 26. Read the story here.

Zolotov the peacemaker 💣

Viktor Zolotov, the same Russian National Guard director who recently challenged Alexey Navalny to a “duel,” wants you to know that he talked down a suicide bomber outside the Kremlin on Wednesday. And if you don’t believe him, you’re invited to accompany Zolotov to the North Caucasus to witness counter-terrorist training exercises in the mountains.

On October 4, in a special announcement on the National Guard’s official website, the agency stated that a man identified as “D. Yu. Shalai” parked an armored Mercedes-Benz G-Class in Vasilevsky Spusk square near St. Basil’s Cathedral, threatening to detonate an explosive if he wasn’t granted an immediate face-to-face meeting with the head of the National Guard. When Zolotov was informed of the situation, he immediately rushed to the scene and began negotiating with the bomber, the agency says.

According to the National Guard, Shalai said he has been trying for some time to reach President Putin, in order to pass along information about the shortcomings and regulatory violations of Russia’s prison system. Zolotov then convinced the man to let him remove a backpack and gas cylinder from the car’s backseat, which he then turned over to the bomb squad. Afterwards, Zolotov sat in the car with Shalai, where they continued their conversation. “General Zolotov expressed his regret regarding Shalai’s decision to use an unlawful method to convey his information to the country’s leaders,” the National Guard’s press office says. Zolotov then convinced the man to step out of the vehicle and turn himself over to the authorities peacefully.

The National Guard says it was compelled to publish this detailed retelling of Wednesday's standoff because “various resources on the Internet and on social media are spreading distorted commentaries about this incident, including characterizing it as a staged event.”

Apparently infuriated by the accusation, Zolotov has extended an invitation to those who doubt his actions, “and other seekers of alternative viewpoints who have a burning desire to participate in such ‘staged events,’” to come with him to the North Caucasus, where National Guard troops train alongside other counter-terrorism units. The sight will reveal “the full beauty of the work done by our staff and combat personnel,” the agency promises.

A beaten lawyer ⚖️

“Police in Krasnodar, in southern Russia, arrested a defense lawyer, held him incommunicado, and beat him in detention,” Human Rights Watch said in a press release on October 4, calling for Mikhail Benyash’s immediate release. “Authorities should also drop the politically motivated charges against him.” Police arrested Benyash in Krasnodar on September 9, as he was meeting with a client who was going to take part in protests against the government’s plans to raise the pension age. Read the press release here.

Remembering '93 💥

In an op-ed for the newspaper Vedomosti, law professor Sergey Tsyplyaev comments on the 25th anniversary of tanks shelling the Russian White House, arguing that the presidency’s main adversary in 1993 constitutional crisis was really the popularly elected Congress of People’s Deputies, not the “parliament” elected by the congress (Russia’s Supreme Soviet). Tsyplyaev says the “unlimited powers” granted to the congress by constitutional amendments adopted in 1989 put it on a collision course with the Kremlin, creating (1) constitutional instability, and (2) transforming Russia’s congressional leader into the political system’s de facto most important figure. When Yeltsin lost control over the congress, he lost the state’s most vital power lever.

In the summer of 1993, faced with self-liquidation under a new constitution that featured “checks and balances,” and weakened by tensions between the federal and regional governments, the Congress of People’s Deputies had limited options, Tsyplyaev says: (1) “a historic intra-elite compromise,” (2) the presidency’s capitulation, (3) the use of force, or (4) mobilizing the support of the masses.

A deal failed because of Russia’s “cultural rejection of compromise” and thanks to soured relations between the leaders of the conflict’s opposing sides; while the Kremlin’s surrender would have been assured, had everyone continued “playing by the rules,” but the congress couldn’t maintain its federal-regional solidarity. So what we got was a mix of violence and popular mobilization that led to the Kremlin’s victory and a new constitution that replaced checks and balances with a super powerful presidency. How Russia is now supposed to build a society premised on the republican principle of “All power from the people, to no one fully!” is a riddle for the future generations of political scientists, Tsyplyaev concludes.