The Real Russia. Today. Minecraft ‘terrorism’

Thursday, February 10, 2022

• Domestic policy: the Minecraft plot, another pandemic record, Google’s abuse, a charity under pressure, and (interview) a former detective switches sides
• Foreign policy: (interview) Russia’s top spy trashes his U.S. counterparts, a tense meeting of the foreign ministers, talks in Berlin lead nowhere, antsy diplomats in Kyiv, and TJ is blocked in Belarus

Domestic policy

⚖️ Russian court sentences 16-year-old to five years in prison over plot to blow up virtual FSB building in video game (3.5-minute read)

A Russian court has handed down sentences for terrorism to three teenagers from the Siberian town of Kansk. The boys were arrested in the summer of 2020 for posting leaflets with political slogans on the local FSB building. After searching their phones and uncovering a “plot” to blow up a virtual rendering of an FSB building in the video game Minecraft, investigators charged the teens with making explosives and training to participate in terrorist activities. On Thursday, a military court in the Krasnoyarsk territory sentenced one of the defendants, 16-year-old Nikita Uvarov, to five years in prison. The two other defendants in the case received suspended sentences.

😷 Russia breaks another pandemic record, registering 197,000 new coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours (Russia has reported record-breaking numbers of new coronavirus infections nearly every day since January 21.)

💸 Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service fines Google for abusing YouTube’s dominant position in the online video market (The agency declared YouTube’s rules for blocking accounts “opaque, biased, and unpredictable,” arguing that this infringes on users’ interests and limits competition in related markets. The amount of the fine has yet to be determined.)

🚑 Threats force St. Petersburg charity to suspend mobile HIV/STD clinic for transgender people (The nonprofit’s director of development, Alexey Lakhov, said their social media pages have been receiving negative comments and threatening messages ever since they opened the prevention clinic. The charity decided to suspend operations after two masked men showed up at the mobile clinic to question the legitimacy of their work and promised they’d “come back.”)

⚖️ (Interview) Former state investigator, now a defense attorney, fields questions about Russia’s justice system

Speaking to the website Advokatskaya Ulitsa, former major cases senior investigator Rustam Gabdulin explained his decision to leave the Federal Investigative Committee and become a defense attorney. Throughout the text and with little success, the interviewer tries to get Gabdulin to criticize or defend Russia’s justice system, but he mostly avoids direct answers, saying either that he is unfamiliar with the details of an issue or that he can’t generalize. As a lawyer, Gabdulin says he plans to work mostly in economic disputes, particularly cases involving construction and real estate.

Gabdulin admitted that investigators make mistakes, but the only incident he discussed in detail was how he personally worked to get charges dropped against six people wrongly accused and jailed for crimes related to Moscow’s summer 2019 protests during city council elections. Asked about quotas driving investigative work, he acknowledged that statistics aid the evaluation of detectives’ work but denied any systematic corruption. Do different branches of law enforcement protect one another to avoid accountability for mistakes and corruption? “I’ve never heard of such arrangements.” Would he now be able to defend Alexey Navalny? “No comment.”

The former investigator did offer opinions on a handful of issues. For example, he endorsed a proposal to use different judges for arraignment hearings and trials, which he says is a “logical” way to prevent “negative stereotypes” from developing in the judges’ minds. He also argued that current regulations force investigators to complete too much paperwork, which not only limits the time they can spend on actual investigative work but also makes it nearly impossible to attend any training or educational seminars or conferences. (He says he never managed to attend any supplemental trainings in his 20 years on the job.) Gabdulin also says he supports reforms that would enable defense attorneys to request expert reviews, which is currently something that requires an investigator’s approval.

Gabdulin was more reluctant to discuss questions about pressure on bar associations (he argued that these groups already do a good job defending their rights), restrictions on lawyers against bringing recording equipment into prisons when meeting with clients (“it’s hard to answer,” he said), and demands that attorneys sign nondisclosure agreements with investigators (“this shouldn’t interfere with anything”). Asked about the persecution of human rights lawyer Ivan Pavlov, Gabdulin declined to say much beyond: “I’m not familiar with the details of this case.”

Foreign policy

🕵️ (Interview) Head of Russia’s foreign intelligence trashes U.S. counterparts and denounces Western ‘aggression’ and ignorance

In an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergey Naryshkin repeated allegations that “the regime in Kyiv” is incapable of independent decision-making due to “nationalists and Western sponsors,” who he says are pressuring the Zelensky administration to renounce the Minsk agreements and attempt “to destroy the people’s republics” in the Donbas. Ukraine is playing host not only to NATO instructors, says Naryshkin, but also “squads of jihadist fighters.” The start of an offensive against the separatists could be a “staged provocation.”

Naryshkin spent much of the interview trashing his American counterparts, blaming the U.S. intelligence community for bungling or twisting data that led to (illegitimate, in his view) military operations in Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan (though he admits that the U.S. war in Afghanistan, both thwarted some threats to Russia and bought Moscow “some breathing room” in the region). Ultimately, evaluations by American intelligence agencies “are politicized” and “do not reflect existing realities.”

Asked about the CSTO’s recent peacekeeping mission in Kazakhstan, Naryshkin argued that “terrorist groups” exploited the peaceful beginnings of protests based on economic grievances, recycling the tactics used by “destructive political forces” to stage “color revolutions,” like in Ukraine in 2014.

Naryshkin referred to Western sanctions as a “weapon of geopolitical struggle” and “an act of economic aggression.” The Western world “unfortunately still doesn’t fully understand the danger that growing distrust between states poses to humanity’s existence.”

🗺️ British foreign secretary confuses Russian regions with Ukrainian territory during talks in Moscow (Kommersant reported that when Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov asked Liz Truss if she recognizes Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions, the British foreign secretary replied that the UK would never recognize this claim. According to Kommersant, Truss, who had apparently confused the Russian regions with the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, was “delicately” corrected by Britain’s Ambassador to Russia. Later on, Truss told the Russian press that she thought Lavrov was referring to parts of Ukraine.)

🕊️ ‘Normandy’ talks in Berlin fail as Russia walks away feeling no Western pressure on Ukraine to implement Minsk agreements, though both sides will keep talking (The previous meeting in Paris ended with at least a symbolic document, but this time there was nothing, despite nine hours of talks. “Kyiv can consider the absence of a result to be a victory,” reports Vladimir Soloviev for Kommersant.)

✈️ Russian embassy in Kyiv ‘actively considering’ temporary withdrawal of non-essential staff from Ukraine (Earlier in the day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the ministry would advise non-essential diplomatic staff to leave Ukraine for a while, citing the fact that Western embassies have already announced similar evacuations.)

❌ Belarusian Information Ministry blocks Russian news site TJournal (Editor-in-chief Sergey Zvevda said it’s unclear why the site was blocked. TJournal has reached out to the Belarusian Information Ministry to try and find out the reasoning behind the decision.)