The Real Russia. Today. How Rosneft skirted sanctions to make a major acquisition in 2014, Pskov’s TikTok outlaw, and Frolov plays ‘kiss, marry, kill’

Tuesday, February 9, 2021

• Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s TASS interview, in a nutshell 
• iStories traces the shell companies Rosneft used for a blockbuster purchase in 2014
• Mediazona talks to a woman facing police problems thanks to some colorful TikTok content
• Opinion and analysis: Frolov takes Condoleezza Rice’s old adage for a spin, and Gaaze explains Navalny’s ‘theater’ feat
• News briefs: Navalny’s Valentine’s Day plan, the Kremlin’s spending, and Evgeny Prigozhin the Unwanted

Feature stories

🕊️ ‘Double standards everywhere’

In a 30-minute interview with the Russian state news agency TASS, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova slammed Western diplomats for their recent shows of support for imprisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny (this comes after Moscow expelled three European diplomats on February 5). She then went on to accuse the West of having “double standards” when it comes to political prisoners and criticized the “policy of containment” allegedly directed towards Russia and China. Here’s what Maria Zakharova said, in a nutshell. 

Other feature reporting

💰 Rosneft’s smoke and mirrors

Roman Shleinov — iStories

iStories journalist Roman Shleinov reports that Rosneft used a chain of shell companies founded by individuals loosely connected to affiliated firms to acquire 13 percent of the Italian tire-manufacturer “Pirelli” in 2014 for 554 million euros (now about $670.6 million). iStories says the scheme — allegedly designed to insulate the Russian oil giant from Western sanctions — could facilitate corruption, insofar as the public can’t see who is earning what from services rendered to Rosneft. 

Shleinov’s most scandalous discovery (the find that informs his editors’ headline) is that a company registered in Luxembourg to a then 27-year-old dance instructor is the entity that actually bought “Rosneft’s stake” in Pirelli. Meet Aya Belova, the founder of “Long Term Investments Luxembourg” and the daughter of Sergey Belov, whose business connections to the “Region” investment group (which manages Rosneft’s retirement money) apparently made his family the right figureheads for the Pirelli deal in 2014.

Belova’s Luxembourg firm has changed hands several times since then. Last year, it was renamed “Tacticum Investments” and sold to Arkady Mutavchi, a former executive at a supplier for the Kremlin’s Property Management Department. Financial disclosures for Tacticum Investments show massive debt to the Credit Bank of Moscow (MKB), the same institution that Rosneft used to attract foreign-currency financing after the start of Western sanctions. Earlier this year, MKB owner Roman Avdeyev bought Tacticum Investments.

iStories points out that Rosnet used a similar chain of affiliated firms, founded by many of the same figurehead owners, to take over Khodorkovsky’s Yukos empire almost two decades ago.

👮 How to get an apology from a TikToker

Ludmila Savitskaya — Mediazona

Ekaterina Belyaeva, a 32-year-old woman living in Pskov, could face police charges for a pair of angry videos shared on TikTok where she insulted local law enforcement after becoming enraged by their apparent mistreatment of the city’s opposition protesters last month. In one video, she shouts obscenities at a police van from her car. In the other, she leaves a sack of dirty laundry outside the city’s FSB headquarters. Two days after her second stunt, somehow having identified her from the TikTok videos, officers arrived at her registered home address and delivered a summons. 

Belyaeva was later questioned alone in a room without her husband present. She says her family cannot afford to hire a lawyer. Surrounded by police and members of the regional Interior Ministry’s press office, Belyaeva says she was pressured (albeit nonviolently) into recording an apology for her TikTok activity. She says the authorities promised not to release the video on social media. In the event that she was charged with a criminal offense for her insults against the police, the officers told her, this recorded apology would help her in court.

Within days, the video appeared online in several popular local VKontakte communities. After Belyaeva spoke to journalists about the incident, she was summoned again and told that she might be charged with the felony crime of insulting a police officer or the misdemeanor offense of disorderly conduct. She was due at the police station for further questioning on February 9, 2021.

Opinion and analysis

🕊️ Forgive, ignore, and punish

Vladimir Frolov, columnist and former diplomat — Republic

Frolov says Russia’s foreign policy in the aftermath of Alexey Navalny’s imprisonment is a spin on the strategy Condoleezza Rice articulated in 2004 amid the unpopular Iraq War (“Punish France, ignore Germany, and forgive Russia”). The Kremlin’s new approach (essentially “divide and conquer”) is to “forgive America, ignore France, and punish Germany and the EU.” More granularly, Frolov explains, Russian diplomats will try to do whatever they can to “routinize” the Navalny case, to prevent the issue from becoming an area where the West can meddle in what Moscow views as a purely internal matter. At the same time, strong reactions from the West can benefit the Kremlin by seemingly bolstering the Russian authorities’ claims that the nation is besieged by interventionist foreigners.

“Forgiving America” boils down to ignoring the Biden administration’s “aggressive rhetoric” (letting it “hang in the air” in order “to demonstrate the weakness of America’s ability to exert influence inside Russia”) and using Washington’s willingness to engage in high-level talks as a means of legitimizing Russia’s status on the world stage. 

Meanwhile, Angela Merkel must suffer for defending Navalny, which the Kremlin considers an effort to discredit Putin and “promote regime change.” Frolov says Moscow also wants to punish the European Union for supposedly using its “normative superpowerdom” in the Navalny case, hence the harsh treatment of EU Foreign Minister Josep Borrell on his recent visit to Moscow. But the Kremlin went too far, says Frolov, in humiliating Borrell and the EU. His visit was an opportunity for serious negotiations, and the Putin administration threw it away just to telegraph another message about Russian sovereignty.

📺 Alexey Navalny figured out how to stage a better show

Konstantin Gaaze, political scientist — Proekt

Alexey Navalny’s feat as an oppositionist, says Gaaze, is that he’s managed to hijack elements of Russia’s political theater to disrupt the routine that has allowed Vladimir Putin to remain in power for two decades. Navalny has redirected the public’s attention away from “Kremlin tower” intrigue and debates scripted by the presidential administration toward the more fundamental issue of Putin’s continued rule — an “obvious and imminent landmine” that the authorities have tried to conceal by means of distractions and phony crises. Gaaze doesn’t say Navalny’s challenge will succeed, but he credits the opposition politician with “breaking” the cycle Putin has used in the past.

More news in brief

• 🤳 Navalny’s associates announce protests (it’s more like a flashmob) planned for February 14
• 💸 Kremlin denies reports of plans to unveil $6.7 billion spending package to ease discontent (no such goal and no planned one-time payments)
• 🕯️ Relatives of journalists killed in CAR speak out against memorial sponsored by oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin (they hold him partly responsible for the murders)

🎙️ Tomorrow in history: 14 years ago tomorrow, on February 10, 2007, speaking in Munich, Vladimir Putin criticized the United States’ “almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations.” The speech is now widely considered to be an early milestone in the confrontation between Russia and the West, particularly with NATO.