The Real Russia. Today. Moldova’s new president, plus Russia’s ‘strategic restraint’ in Karabakh and Moscow’s failure to shake free from imperialism

Monday, November 16, 2020

• What you need to know about Moldova’s 2020 elections and first woman president
• New podcast episode: What to expect in the years that follow a bloody six-week war
• Opinion and analysis: Frolov parses the Karabakh settlement, Lipsky ponders Biden’s Russia policies, Litavrin processes COVID-19 in Russia’s prisons, and Abalov and Inozemtsev pontificate on Russia’s failure to move past imperialism
• News briefs: suing Peskov, Irina Slavina’s case, Putin’s cousin, hands off the Family Code, and a very suspicious pillowcase

Feature stories

🗳️ Maia Sandu’s victory in Moldova

On Sunday, Moldova held a second round of voting in its 2020 presidential elections. Opposition candidate Maia Sandu won, becoming the first woman president in the country’s history. Sandu defeated the incumbent head of state, Igor Dodon, who is often referred to as one of Vladimir Putin’s main supporters in the former USSR. Sandu, on the other hand, is considered a pro-EU, anti-corruption candidate.

🎧 ‘The Naked Pravda’: The Nagorno-Karabakh truce

A six-week war in Nagorno-Karabakh has ended disastrously for Armenia. Judging by the map, the situation on the ground will revert mostly to the conditions in place before Yerevan’s 1991 war with Baku, leaving Azerbaijani artillery perched just outside the breakaway republic’s capital city and the 50,000 souls who call it home. The big difference this time around is the presence of Russian peacekeepers — about 2,000 of them — who will be there to monitor a Kremlin-brokered truce. Not formally part of the trilateral settlement but still very much involved in the conflict is Turkey, which is expected to field its own monitors in Azerbaijan, albeit outside the Karabakh region.

For a better understanding of the violence that took place in this area since late September, and to explore what it means to have won or lost in this war, “The Naked Pravda” turned to three experts: Neil Hauer (a Canadian journalist based in the Caucasus who’s reported extensively on conflicts in Georgia, Syria, and Nagorno-Karabakh), Richard Giragosian (the director of the Regional Studies Center, an independent think tank based in Armenia), and Rob Lee (a former Marine engineer officer and a current doctoral student at King’s College London).

Opinion and analysis

🛡️ In Nagorno-Karabakh, Russia’s strategic restraint is in da house

In an op-ed for Republic, columnist and former diplomat Vladimir Frolov makes a spirited defense of Russia’s actions in Nagorno-Karabakh, swatting away criticisms from Western analysts, Russia’s opposition, and Kremlin loyalists who argue that Moscow emboldened its enemies and betrayed its “Christian allies.” Frolov describes the trilateral settlement announced on November 10 as compatible with Russia’s new “strategic restraint” (see Meduza’s October 29, 2020, newsletter), explaining that the peacekeeping contingent deployed to Azerbaijan is a relatively small risk for big rewards (ending the bloodshed, blocking France and America without shutting them out of the peace process entirely, and bolstering Russian influence in the South Caucasus). Frolov also emphasizes that the Kremlin carefully avoided overcommitting in the region, aware that there’s little public support for a major intervention.

At the same time, Frolov acknowledges that Putin pledged and deployed troops to Karabakh on flimsy legal grounds, using the Federation Council’s permission for Russian intervention in Syria as a free pass to send troops anywhere at any future time. The status of the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region itself, meanwhile, hasn’t been resolved, and Yerevan, Baku, and Moscow all apparently expect different things here, ranging from the fantasy of independence, the lands’ total Azerbaijani subjugation, and a multiconfessional hodgepodge guarded indefinitely by Russian peacekeepers. 

For the foreseeable future, Armenian sovereignty has been reduced to something like Abkhazia’s, says Frolov, who also argues that Moscow doesn’t want to see Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan ousted in another coup and replaced with hardliners who would seek to undo “Putin’s Plan” in Karabakh by restarting the war. Despite vitriol in the media about Pashinyan belonging to George Soros, he’s now beholden to Vladimir Putin more than anyone, for his political future and perhaps his very life, Frolov says.

🕊️ Back to basics with President Biden

In an op-ed for Novaya Gazeta, deputy chief editor Andrey Lipsky says there’s a chance for improved U.S.-Russian relations with President Biden, though Moscow can expect the return of traditional Democratic (big “D”) rhetoric on human rights. Joe Biden is also more committed to Eastern Europe’s struggles against Russian influence, which will restore some of America’s interest in Ukraine and the Baltic states, for example. 

When it comes to sanctions, Washington may have exhausted all its options, short of a mutually painful escalation that might be justifiable only if Russia continues its bad behavior internationally.

On the other hand, a breakthrough could be possible in arms control negotiations, which diplomats could perhaps build on to reach talks on cyber-defense. A cyber treaty could go a long way, argues Lipsky, to normalizing bilateral relations and boosting the role of experts in a field overcrowded by “propagandists and hawks.” 

☣️ Russia’s lying liars who lie (about COVID-19 in the prison system)

In an article for Mediazona, journalist Maxim Litavrin catalogs the largely undocumented spread of coronavirus through Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, which has been extremely reluctant to release data to the public or confirm outside reports of infections. For this information, Litavrin relies on members of public monitoring commissions who visit prisons to speak to inmates and observe living conditions, as well as other human rights activists, journalists, and inmates’ lawyers and relatives.

In a pattern that repeats across the country, Russia’s prison officials have apparently avoided diagnosing likely COVID-19 cases, left prisoners to handle the illness on their own, and refused to disclose test results. Since the start of the pandemic, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service has acknowledged only about 1,600 coronavirus infections, including just a single, solitary death. (For comparison, at the time of this writing, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons has recorded 3,336 COVID-19 cases and 140 deaths among inmates.)

👑 Where Russia’s post-Soviet post-imperialism went all wrong

Historian Alexander Abalov and economist Vladimir Inozemtsev have a new book which they vow is built on “historical facts and the logic of state development,” according to Republic. An excerpt published online makes it apparent that Abalov and Inozemtsev embrace a grand view of “facts and logic.” In the text available at Republic, the two authors argue that Russian elites have “Muscovized” the country’s post-Soviet development by trying to resurrect the most stagnating, repressive aspects of Russia’s imperial past, which lack even the great ambitions of peak imperialism in the Tsarist and Soviet eras.

Abalov and Inozemtsev say Russia’s post-Soviet leaders have abandoned the USSR’s late emphasis on human capital as the driver of economic progress and shifted their focus to sectors that could be consolidated in the state’s hands and controlled with the minimal involvement of most society. All states extract and redistribute rents, Abalov and Inozemtsev admit, but these actions by Russia’s modern-day petrostate are conducted chiefly to serve the elites’ material interests rather than improve the public good. The justifications offered for this process, the authors claim, are “irrational” ideas about “national expediency.”

In their assessment of Russia’s post-Soviet trajectory, Abalov and Inozemtsev settle on a version of path dependency, arguing that the elites’ efforts to revive Muscovite and Russian imperial practices were both “quite natural and apparently inevitable,” as well as the result of a variety of factors, ranging from popular expectations, elites’ commercial interests, and objective economic trends, which they say makes it wrong to attribute the imperialist revival to a few random personal factors. If this turn was predetermined, however, Russia’s future is up for grabs, they say. Moscow lacks the strength economically and socially to serve as the post-imperial consolidation point it wants to be, meaning that Russia’s current economic system isn’t a post-Soviet endpoint. In other words, another major destabilization with unpredictable results lies ahead.

Other news in brief

• ⚖️ Suing Putin’s mouth. Alexey Navalny has filed a defamation lawsuit against Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who recently accused the anti-corruption activist of working for the CIA.
• 🕵️‍♂️ Open and shut. State investigators in Nizhny Novgorod say there’s no need for a criminal case on incitement or inducement to suicide over the death of local journalist Irina Slavina, who self-immolated on October 2. A journalists’ union says harassment by law enforcement drove her to kill herself.
• 🗳️ Not all in the family. Russia’s Supreme Court has dissolved the political party “People Against Corruption” just months after Vladimir Putin’s cousin, Roman Putin, became its chairman. The group hasn’t fielded candidates for seven years in a row.
• ⚖️ Too tense for the time being. Lawmakers have withdrawn two pieces of legislation that would have amended Russia’s Family Code, following a backlash against the proposed changes to child protective services and the rights of transgender people.
• 👮 Trick or treat? The wife of Tomsk Mayor Ivan Klyayn reportedly threw a pillowcase full of her family’s banking records out of a window moments before investigators searched their home on Friday. Her husband was recently arrested on charges of abusing his office.

⚖️ This day in history: 171 years ago today, on November 16, 1849, a Russian court sentenced 28-year-old writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky to death for anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group. The lucky duck, his sentence was later commuted to hard labor. Dostoyevsky didn’t die until 1881 at the age of 59.