The Real Russia. Today. Evaluating the Kremlin’s claims on Kremenchuk, demanding accountability in Georgia, and NATO formally names Russia its biggest ‘direct threat’
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
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Major recent events from Meduza’s News Feed
- ⚖️ Repeated ‘discrediting the military’ fines for an independent Yekaterinburg news outlet
- 🎭 Moscow officials fire Gogol Center’s leadership, ending the theater’s avant-garde era, says former director Kirill Serebrennikov
- 🕊️ EU officials are reportedly near ‘compromise deal’ on transport to Kaliningrad
- 🪖 Russia and Ukraine trade 144 captured combatants (each)
- 🛡️ Updated NATO Strategic Concept names Russia as ‘most significant and direct threat’
- 🥗 Reuters reports minor scandal at NATO Madrid summit involving ‘Russian salad’ on the menu
- 🤖 Russian electronics repair centers are reportedly running out of replacement parts, due to sanctions
- ♂️ London and Moscow trade barbs about gender, machismo, and violence
- ⚠️ Space agency Roscosmos reports DDoS attack on its website
- 🚨 Airstrikes on civilians in Mykolayiv
- ⏲️ British national captured while fighting for Ukraine in ‘DNR’ appeals death sentence
Feature stories
- 🕯️ Journalist Shura Burtin reports from the aftermath of the shopping center attack in Kremenchuk
- 🔍 Meduza evaluates the Kremlin’s claims in the wake of Russia’s airstrike on a crowded mall
- ✊ Protests in Georgia demand accountability for failure to secure EU candidate status
Shura Burtin reports from Kremenchuk in the aftermath of the shopping mall missile strike (9-min read)
A Russian missile strike hit the Amstor shopping center in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, late in the afternoon on Monday, June 27. According to the latest reports, the attack killed up to 20 people and injured 59 others; at least 21 people are still missing. Ukrainian Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky said on Wednesday that rescue workers are still recovering body parts from the wreckage, but there is no longer any hope of finding survivors. Journalist Shura Burtin, who is reporting for Meduza from Ukraine, traveled to Kremenchuk on Monday to cover the immediate aftermath of the strike.
The Kremenchuk missile strike: what the evidence shows (9-min read)
On Monday, June 27, a Russian airstrike on a shopping mall in Kremenchuk, a city in Ukraine’s Poltava region, killed at least 20 civilians; dozens more are still unaccounted for. Kyiv called the strike a terrorist act and an “intentional attack on a civilian target.” Russian officials initially claimed the attack was a “Bucha-style false flag,” but the Russian Defense Ministry soon acknowledged that a strike had indeed occurred. In Russia’s telling, however, a strike “on a foreign munitions warehouse” caused some of the weapons stored there to detonate, damaging a nearby defunct shopping mall. Meduza explains the holes in Russia’s story.
Georgians are calling for their government to resign after it failed to receive EU candidate status (9-min read)
In mid-June, the European Commission voted against recommending that Georgia recieve EU candidate status, recommending instead that it be granted the “European perspective.” Now, if Georgia wants to join the EU, it will have to take specific steps that, according to the EU, will strengthen its democracy. After the announcement, protesters from Georgia’s Sirtskhvilia (“Shame”) movement led thousands of people in a rally they called Going Home — to Europe. Another rally followed the European Parliament’s official refusal to grant the country EU status. That time, the protesters demanded the resignation of the government — and gave them an ultimatum.