The Real Russia. Today. Russia’s latest school attack

Monday, December 13, 2021

• International: Russia’s UNSC veto, Putin talks to BoJo, EU sanctions Wagner, and Russian rapper Morgenshtern denies ‘foreign instructions’
• Law and order: new podcast episode (on human rights law), an attack in Serpukhov, the dubious witnesses against Yuri Khovansky, sentencing Yaponchik’s killers, Constitutional Court upholds prison information restrictions, Memorial defends itself against Putin’s criticism, KPRF’s Valery Rashkin now can’t leave home at night, and a Moscow dentist is stabbed
• Public health: cutting out foreign pharmaceutical competition, and an antibody-test pathway for Russians who got foreign-made jabs

International

🕊️ Russia vetoes first-of-its-kind U.N. Security Council resolution casting climate change as threat to international peace and security (India also voted no, while China abstained. Dissenting diplomats said that adding the climate crisis to the Security Council’s purview would only deepen global divisions and politicize “a scientific and economic issue.”)

☎️ Putin chats on phone with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (Putin criticized Kyiv’s “destructive course on derailing the Minsk agreements” and “stated the need to immediately begin talks in order to develop clear international legal agreements that can preclude NATO’s further eastward advance and the deployment of weapons that pose a threat to Russia in neighboring states,” while Johnson “emphasized the UK’s commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, and warned that any destabilizing action would be a strategic mistake that would have significant consequences.” The two leaders also discussed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Glasgow.)

⚖️ EU sanctions Wagner PMC over human rights violations in Ukraine, Syria, and Libya (The mercenary group “is responsible for serious human rights abuses,” the EU concluded. The sanctions list includes three Russian energy companies working in Syria’s oil and gas sector.)

🕵️ Conservative activist wants Russian rapper Morgenshtern investigated for supposedly accepting foreign money to focus his music on violence, drugs, and belittling the USSR’s WWII victory (Safe Internet League head Ekaterina Mizulina told Irina Shikhman in a December 12 interview that Morgenshtern and other performers and bloggers take foreign money and act on foreign instructions to subvert Russia’s youth. She based these claims on a report from a website that journalists have tied to Russia’s intelligence community. Last month, Morgenshtern left the country and ceased ticket sales for his spring 2022 Moscow performances after federal investigators announced a probe into his lyrics, exploring charges of drug propaganda.)

Law and order

🎧 The Naked Pravda podcast: Human rights law in Russia (25 minutes)

The lawyers and journalists who worked with the Team 29 project specialized in Russia’s most hopeless political prosecutions — the treason case against journalist Ivan Safronov, the extremism charges against Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption movement, and dozens more indictments all but doomed to convictions. Earlier this year, the project was forced to disband after Russia’s federal censor started blocking its website. In November 2021, the Justice Ministry designated Team 29’s former members as “foreign agents” and many of those people subsequently fled the country. Valeria Vetoshkina, today’s guest on The Naked Pravda, is one of those people.

Also on this week’s show: Filmmaker Alexander Sokurov lectures Vladimir Putin about Russia’s “constitutional crisis”; analysts and experts battle in op-ed columns and online over the right strategy in Ukraine; moving closer into the Kremlin’s orbit than ever, the social network Vkontakte gets new owners; and the head of Russia’s Federal Investigative Committee has no sense of humor and no patience for exoneration.

💣 Former student detonates improvised explosive outside Orthodox school in Russia, injuring 12 (5-min read)

An explosion on the grounds of an Orthodox school injured 12 people in the Russian town of Serpukhov on the morning of December 13. The improvised bomb was detonated by 18-year-old Vladislav Struzhenkov, a former student at the school. Struzhenkov was severely injured in the explosion and hospitalized in critical condition. While his motives remain unclear, pupils at the school told journalists that Struzhenkov was “bullied” by his teachers. Following the explosion, law enforcement raided Struzhenkov’s home and reportedly confiscated a variety of weapons. Investigators have opened a criminal case and intend to interrogate Struzhenkov once his condition has improved.

⚖️ Yuri Khovansky’s trial: Former police officers recite identical testimony in case against blogger over an ‘illegal song’ (4-min read)

Video blogger Yuri Khovansky has been locked up since June, awaiting trial on charges of “justifying terrorism.” For months, he’s claimed in letters released to the public through his lawyers that the police are trying to frame him for performing a banned song about the deadly 2002 Nord-Ost siege. The case against him, Khovansky says, relies on false testimony from a handful of witnesses who claim he played the song in 2018. He says he performed the piece (which he now renounces) only once, in November 2012, which should exonerate him under the statute of limitations. Journalists at the news outlet RBC obtained copies of the case evidence against Khovansky and found that significant portions of the prosecution’s witness testimony repeat identical phrases and even whole paragraphs of text. Two of the three witnesses also appear to be former police officers.

⚖️ Moscow court sentences killers of mafia boss ‘Yaponchik’ (Little Japanese) to a combined 31 years in prison (A week earlier, a jury convicted Dzhambul Janashia and Murtazi Shadania of illegal weapons possession and assassinating Vyacheslav Ivankov in October 2009. In April 2021, after agreeing to a deal with prosecutors, a third suspect was sentenced to 14 years in prison for his role in the murder.)

⚖️ Russia’s Constitutional Court upholds prison agency’s refusal to let inmates discuss torture by police and investigators with human rights observers (The court rejected three lawsuits from public monitoring commission members in Moscow and St. Petersburg, ruling that prison officials can prevent conversations during visits with inmates about abuse and even torture suffered at the hands of the authorities before an inmate arrives at a prison facility. The decision will likely undermine efforts to document torture in detention centers across Russia, which is reportedly widespread. Earlier this year, for example, activists leaked a massive archive of videos showing the torture of inmates at a prison in Saratov.)

⚖️ Memorial International says it corrected the mistake Putin mentioned last week more than three months ago (During a recent meeting with the Presidential Human Rights Council, Putin responded to a question about the federal case against Memorial by pointing out that the human rights group accidentally listed three Nazi combatants among the victims of the Stalinist Terror. Memorial’s executives say the group’s lack of necessary resources makes such errors possible, and researchers do their best to correct any inaccuracies as quickly as possible. Prosecutors currently seek Memorial’s dissolution, accusing the institution of “justifying the activities of terrorist and extremist organizations” and repeatedly violating Russia’s requirements for “foreign agents.”

⚖️ Moscow court forbids Communist lawmaker from leaving home at night, hunting, or contacting other suspects in illegal-hunting case against him (Valery Rashkin’s been stripped of his immunity as a State Duma deputy and now faces up to five years in prison for shooting an elk without a license. Though he now admits to killing the animal, the case has politicized overtones, given Rashkin’s rising star in the Communist Party and past flirtations with the anti-Kremlin opposition.)

🦷 Disgruntled patient attacks his dentist in Moscow, offering another case study in crime reporting and ethnicity (The stabbing left the dentist in serious condition. A report by TASS did not disclose either man’s ethnicity, but the popular Telegram channel Readovka put the subject front and center, writing, “Armenian Patient in Moscow Stabs Uzbek-Dentist for Bad Service.” Last month, iStories and Novaya Gazeta released a joint investigation about how some journalists “deliberately criminalize” migrants and ethnic minorities in reporting.)

Public health

💊 Hoping to boost domestic drug manufacturers, Russia wants to cut foreign competition out of public procurement (7-min read)

In mid-November, Russia’s Ministry of Industry and Trade (Minpromtorg) published a draft decision that would give Russian drug manufacturers a leg up in public procurement. The proposal would ensure that drugs produced in the Eurasian Economic Union at all stages of manufacturing would be favored in public procurement auctions, automatically beating out international competition. To test drive this initiative, Minpromtorg has proposed a pilot project involving 15 drugs used to treat HIV, cancer, diabetes, and tuberculosis. But NGOs warn that the proposed procurement rule could lead to shortages of vital medications.

💉 Russians inoculated against COVID-19 with foreign-made vaccines can take antibody tests and receive certificates good for six months (Russians who think they recovered from COVID-19 but were never tested can also take an antibody test and receive a six-month certificate, if the results indicate a past case of the disease, Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova announced on Monday)