The Real Russia. Today. Uproar in Ingushetia, new allegations in Russia's FSB-FBI data sharing treason case, and Oleg Sentsov ends his hunger strike

Friday, October 5, 2018

This day in history. On October 5, 1976, current Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov was born. Kadyrov is best known today around the world for the numerous human rights violations attributed to his regime, including forced disappearances, widespread torture, and crimes against humanity.

• Thousands in Ingushetia are staging the boldest protest Russia has seen in decades
• Photos of Ingushetia's mass protest against a border deal with Chechnya
• Columnist Vladimir Frolov says Russia's GRU isn't to blame for Russia's ongoing diplomatic backlash
• Historian Sergey Medvedev says Oleg Kashin is wrong about treason and unmasking the GRU
• Allegedly threatened with forced feedings, Oleg Sentsov calls off his hunger strike
• How the U.S. dethroned Kirsan Ilyumzhinov as the leader of the World Chess Federation
• Alexander Gabuev explains how 305 GRU agents gave themselves away in car registration documents
• Political analyst Lincoln Pigman says a partial decriminalization of online hate speech laws is a ‘tactical retreat’
• The Dutch police are reportedly still working closely with the FSB
• India agrees to buy S-400 surface-to-air-missile systems

Braving gunfire, rain, and National Guardsmen ✊

Yunus-bek Yevkurov, the head of Ingushetia, is facing a major crisis, following a controversial territorial-exchange agreement with Chechnya that was meant to resolve a decades-long border dispute in the Sunzhensky District. Meduza summarized the past two days' dramatic events here, and published photographs from the rally here.

10-million-dollar allegations 💰

The newspaper Kommersant reported on October 5 that former FSB Information Security Center agent Sergey Mikhailov and his three accomplices allegedly received $10 million for giving the FBI classified data about Pavel Vrublevsky, the former head of the payment services company Chronopay.

Mikhailov is charged with copying confidential files from a felony case in 2013 against Vrublevsky onto a compact disc. Mikhailov supposedly handed over the disc to his subordinate, Dmitry Dokuchaev, who then allegedly gave the data to Ruslan Stoyanov, an expert at Kaspersky Lab. Prosecutors say Stoyanov subsequently gave the disc to Kimberly Zenz, then an analyst at the U.S. firm Verisign, who brought it to the FBI. (Zenz has denied that such an arrangement ever took place.) A businessman named Georgy Fomchenkov allegedly performed Stoyanov’s role in a later hand-off, as well.

Sources told Kommersant that the charges against Mikhailov and Stoyanov (who maintain their innocence) do not mention the $10 million because investigators were unable to verify the exact amount of money promised to the conspirators.

As early as 2010, Vrublevsky started accusing Mikhailov and Stoyanov of leaking emails and documents seized from his company by the FSB, saying the latter was “feeding privileged information about important Russian hackers” to Zenz, who was dating one of Stoyanov’s colleagues. In January 2017, commenting on the news that Mikhailov and Stoyanov had been arrested on treason charges, American cyber-crime journalist Brian Krebs wrote, “Based on how long Vrublevsky has been trying to sell this narrative, it seems he may have finally found a buyer.”

In a tweet responding to Kommersant's report, Krebs wrote on October 5, “I call BS on this story, and am willing to bet that [Vrublevsky] paid for its placement. These Russian cyber-crime fighters that Vrublevsky hates so much are on trial for their lives (literally) because they did the right thing in a country where no one does.”

All four suspects in the case have been locked up at Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison since December 2016. In April 2018, journalists reported that Dokuchaev and Fomchenkov signed plea bargains. Kommersant’s sources say both men will testify against Mikhailov and Stoyanov in closed hearings at the Moscow District Military Court. Dokuchaev, incidentally, was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department in early 2017 for his alleged role in the 2014 heist of 500 million Yahoo user accounts.

Dokuchaev and Fomchenkov reportedly claim to have shared information with foreign intelligence agencies only “informally,” denying that there was anything criminal about the exchange. Sources told the magazine RBC that they were only trying to help punish cyber-criminals operating outside Russia and therefore outside their jurisdiction. Lawyers for the two suspects refused to comment on the story.

Debating the GRU

🧟 Frolov says the GRU is just doing its job

In an op-ed for Republic, columnist Vladimir Frolov argues that the public has embraced two “popular myths” about the GRU, amid the almost constant news stories about the spy agency’s misadventures. First, Frolov says it’s wrong to assume that the GRU independently pursues its own foreign-policy prerogatives. He also argues that it’s wrong to blame GRU agents for the diplomatic fallout of their operations, which he describes as messy but effective. Responsibility, Frolov claims, lies with “the higher-ups” who should have consulted other agencies about the diplomatic risks of these “active measures,” and thought harder about the merits of mobilizing a whole cyber-espionage campaign that didn’t benefit Russia in any tangible way.

The second myth that Frolov tries to bust is the theory that some rival law enforcement agency is intentionally undermining the GRU by unmasking its agents. There is bureaucratic competition, he says, but it doesn’t manifest as treason or the disclosure of state secrets. (Frolov says journalists needn’t resort to these felonies, either, echoing the sentiments of a recent op-ed by Oleg Kashin.)

👎 Sergey Medvedev says Oleg Kashin is dead wrong

In a long op-ed for Republic, historian Sergey Medvedev counters a recent article by columnist Oleg Kashin that claims oppositionists risk treason when they help foreigners unmask Russia’s spies. According to Medvedev, Kashin’s argument is built on an outdated Hobbesian view of the world that acknowledges only zero-sum competition and misses the benefits of a more interconnected international community.

Medvedev also says Kashin parrots the authorities’ own self-serving rhetoric that equates patriotism and regime loyalty, despite the fact that Moscow’s covert operations (in Salisbury, in Ukraine, in Syria, in the United States) have actually harmed Russians’ national interests (this observation echoes one of the arguments made above by Vladimir Frolov). Medvedev likens Kashin’s logic to the “My Country, Right or Wrong” inscription above the gates that led into Nazi Germany’s Buchenwald concentration camp. (Kashin shared this passage from Medvedev’s article on Facebook, apparently ridiculing the comparison.)

Medvedev also argues that Russians have had to rely on foreign assistance for many of the “watchdog” and humanitarian services that healthy civil societies provide for themselves, suggesting that Russian sovereignty is already fluid enough to accommodate collaboration with Western intelligence agencies in the unmasking of GRU operatives responsible for illegal acts abroad.

Sentsov says he's been pressured to call off his hunger strike 🍽️

Oleg Sentsov is ending his hunger strike after 145 days, saying that he was threatened with forced feedings. Convicted of plotting terrorist attacks in Crimea, Sentsov launched his hunger strike on May 14, demanding the release of 64 Ukrainian political prisoners currently incarcerated in Russia (not including himself). On May 28, Sentsov agreed to receive supportive care, and on July 19 he consented to eat two tablespoons of a nutrient mixture. Over the course of his hunger strike, Sentsov reportedly lost 44 pounds and his pulse dropped to below 40 beats a minute.

Read it elsewhere

♟️ Dethroning the lord of chess

For years, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov “lorded over” competitive chess, until U.S. sanctions in 2015 for allegedly providing financial assistance to Bashar Assad’s government in Syria ultimately doomed his reelection and “dethroned” him as president of the World Chess Federation. In a special report for FiveThirtyEight, journalists Pete Madden, Patrick Reevell and Oliver Roeder explain Ilyumzhinov rise and fall. Read the story here.

🚨 Corruption and state erosion

How did 305 GRU agents end up sharing their personal information on a traffic records database that’s now exposed and embarrassed Russia’s Military Intelligence Directorate? In w tweetstorm on October 5, Carnegie Moscow Center senior fellow Alexander Gabuev offered up the following explanation (retweeted approvingly by several Moscow-based reporters):

• “The largest intelligence blunder in modern Russian history” boils down to Russia’s “all-penetrating corruption and state erosion.”
• GRU agents exposed their personal information for the sake of claiming advantages over traffic police (e.g. you can’t get stopped or fined for drunk driving).
• The data leak’s “root cause” is “a combination of a wrecked values system,” “notorious incompetence,” and “banal corruption.”

💻 The RuNet tactical retreat

In a column for the Carnegie Moscow Center, political analyst Lincoln Pigman says the Kremlin’s proposal to soften the criminalization of hate speech is merely a “tactical retreat,” prompted by “rare resistance from both the Russian public and the political elite, forcing the Kremlin to support changes to the country’s main anti-extremism law.” Read his article here, and read Meduza’s summary of the drawbacks to Putin’s new plan for Criminal Code 282.

👮 With friends like these...

“Despite political tensions with Russia, the annexation of Crimea, and the shooting down of flight MH17, the Dutch police service appears to be working closely together with the Russian security service FSB. Since 2009, FSB agents have been visiting the Netherlands, where they have also been meeting with officials of the FBI,” says a report by the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. Read the story here in English.

🚀 S-400s to India

“India agreed a deal with Russia to buy S-400 surface to air missile systems on Friday, the two sides said, as New Delhi disregarded U.S. warnings that such a purchase could trigger sanctions under U.S. law.,” according to a report by Reuters. Read the story here.