The Real Russia. Today. The diplomatic history behind Joe Biden’s ‘Killer Putin’ remarks

Friday, March 19, 2021

• Historian Sergey Radchenko reviews the bad blood and diplomatic restraint of U.S.-Russian relations over the decades
• Growing up in Russia, Olga Filimonova dreamed about outer space. Now she works for NASA and helps send rovers to Mars.
• Meduza asked an expert how China’s Internet censorship really works
• News briefs: Novaya vs. Kadyrov, the mad shaman, Eurovision controversy, and a penalty for the underpants picket

Feature stories

🕊️ Getting along with killers (1,700 words)

In an interview published on March 17, U.S. President Joe Biden said he considers Vladimir Putin to be a “killer,” prompting the Russian president to respond a day later with a schoolyard retort that translates loosely to the phrase: “Look who’s talking!” In what sounded more like a threat than a salutation, Putin also wished his American counterpart good health. Meduza asked historian Sergey Radchenko, a professor of international relations at Cardiff University, how this week’s “killer” tension compares to U.S.-Russian diplomacy in years past. 

🛰️ ‘When I saw the footage of the landing I shed a few tears’ (1,470 words)

Olga Filimonova grew up in Petrozavodsk, a small city in northwestern Russia. Ever since she was a child she dreamed about outer space and was fond of mathematics, but she switched to studying English when she didn’t get into the math program at St. Petersburg State University. After moving to the United States, however, she went back to pursuing her cosmos dreams. Today, she’s been an engineer at NASA for more than six years. Among other things, she worked on the Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021. In her own words, Filimonova tells Meduza about her journey to get to NASA, her work on the Perseverance rover, and her dreams for the future of space exploration.

🔒 A game of cat and mouse (1,130 words)

In March 2021, the Russian authorities launched another attack on Western Internet services. Following its attempt to throttle Twitter, the federal censor, Roskomnazor, threatened to block the network in Russia entirely unless it removes certain “illegal content” (which includes, as it turns out, the accounts of independent media outlets). There’s a number of reasons why a “Great Russian Firewall” based on the Chinese system is impossible in Russia, but many Russian officials (as well as pro-Kremlin pundits and media outlets) have long expressed their approval of the “Chinese model” of Internet regulation and called for the introduction of at least some of its elements in Russia. To find out more about how Internet censorship really works in modern China, Meduza spoke to Leonid Kovachich, a specialist in China and digital technologies. 

News briefs

• ⚖️ Novaya Gazeta puts potential lawsuit against Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov to a vote (readers will decide if the paper goes to court)
• 🩺 Yakut shaman Alexander Gabyshev declared mentally unfit (compulsory treatment could be on deck)
• 🎤 Community organization seeks official inquiry into Manizha’s Eurovision entry (they say her signature tune is hate speech)
• ⚖️ Russian film director fined for underwear protest outside FSB headquarters (it turned out to be a $135 picket)

🎖️ Tomorrow in history: 29 years ago tomorrow, on March 20, 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin introduced the Hero of Russia award, making it the nation’s highest honorary title. Most early recipients were Chechen war veterans and cosmonauts.