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The Real Russia. Today. Friday, September 9, 2022

Source: Meduza

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Opinion and analysis

🪖 Helping war criminals’ relatives

Olga Romanova, civil rights activist (The Insider): Based on work by the Russia Behind Bars organization, Romanova describes how government-affiliated mercenary groups (namely the Wagner PMC) are recruiting inmates at Russian prisons to fight in Ukraine. The first reports predate the February 24 invasion: convicts in the Rostov region started being transferred elsewhere in mass, supposedly due to construction work, though public contract records indicated no such projects. Romanova says recruiters initially targeted special penitentiaries that house incarcerated former security officials, but these inmates largely refused to join up. Next, recruiters turned to “the so-called Chechen battalion.”

Romanova draws special attention to reports that recruiters are allegedly promising lighter sentences or even release to inmates who agree to volunteer in Ukraine — offers that likely have no legal force (see Leonid Nikitinsky’s article below). Much of her organization’s knowledge of these affairs comes from the wives and relatives of prisoners who were targeted by recruiters or went missing after departing for Ukraine. (For example, a state investigator in St. Petersburg threatened a lawyer working for Russia Behind Bars, warning that drugs would be planted on him if he kept asking questions about an inmate’s legal status after he was released to fight in Ukraine.) Romanova speculates that Wagner and other private military companies will be reluctant even to pay inmates for volunteering to fight, given that mercenary work is technically illegal in Russia.

Romanova claims that only 10 percent of the first inmates sent to Ukraine in mid-July are still alive. In total, roughly 5,000 inmates have been recruited, but PMCs could mobilize as many as 50,000 prisoners, if they expand their recruitment eastward, beyond European Russia. By violating Russia’s prison laws and sending so many men to kill and die without the promised compensation, Romanova argues, everyone involved in the recruitment campaign (mercenary leaders, prison officials, and the Kremlin alike) now has a personal stake in both “eternal Putin and eternal war.”

This civil rights work can get tense, and some wives are all business: When she talks to convicts’ wives who are trying to secure the return of their late husbands’ bodies from Ukraine, Romanova says she tells the women that their spouses are “war criminals.” She also says that prisoners’ relatives are mostly interested in ensuring payment for their husbands’ combat (salary, awards for being wounded on the battlefield, and so on).

⚖️ The illegality of the contracts offered to inmates recruited for mercenary work in Ukraine

Leonid Nikitinsky, journalist and legal scholar (Novaya Gazeta Europe): As either labor agreements or civil-law transactions, the contracts offered to inmates volunteering to fight with mercenary groups in Ukraine likely won’t hold up in Russian courts, mainly because no PMC is in a position to guarantee either amnesty or pardons to prisoners. The timeframe for any general amnesty ordered by the State Duma would still return many inmates to prison after completing their Ukraine contracts, says Nikitinsky, and it’s farfetched to expect Putin to reverse his stinginess about presidential pardons all to honor an informal, rumored relationship with mercenary recruiters.

The illegality of it all is nerve-wracking: The anxiety Romanova describes among prisoner-volunteers’ wives presumably comes from the suspicion that their husbands have signed contracts that can’t be enforced legally. Perhaps this is why many relatives focus their personal lobbying on securing payment, knowing that amnesty or pardons are unrealistic.

🗳 Navalny’s righthand man justifies the team’s wartime activism

Journalist Ilya Azar interviews political activist Leonid Volkov (Novaya Gazeta): Much of this interview focuses on Team Navalny’s strategic voting initiative, “Smart Vote,” which was the group’s main political project before Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine. Volkov defends the initiative, arguing that anything disrupting the Kremlin’s political control is inherently desirable and important to challenging foreign perceptions that Russians actually welcome the Putin regime. Nevertheless, Team Navalny has scaled back its candidate endorsements in 2022 and limited Smart Vote to just Moscow’s races. Also, due to both moral considerations and the group’s need to court the favor of Western elites, Smart Vote now refuses to endorse candidates who support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (In years past, the initiative often urged supporters to vote for Communist Party candidates who did not criticize Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, but Volkov says the program remains “strategic” because Smart Vote itself can now sway elections, at least in Moscow, by the sheer force of its endorsements.)

Asked about firebombing recruitment centers and derailing trains, Volkov praises “anything that puts pressure on Putin and prevents him from killing Ukrainians,” but he insists that these actions shouldn’t be organized formally due to the high risk of imprisonment and low chances of “success.” Terrorist attacks against the Russian authorities or attempts to assassinate the head of state were more practical in previous centuries when the state was relatively weaker. (Though Volkov speculates that more Ukrainians will carry out attacks in Russia, and he says the FSB’s claim that a Ukrainian national killed Eurasianist activist Daria Dugina “looks plausible.”)

Volkov says Team Navalny’s efforts to get Western states to impose targeted sanctions on specific Russian elites are designed to “make Putin toxic and isolate him.” Volkov defended the team’s decision to remove some individuals from the list (for example, the creators of the NtechLab facial recognition neural network) after they privately agreed to collaborate with Navalny’s activists.

Asked why Team Navalny doesn’t urge its supporters to donate to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Volkov maintained that Kyiv’s military effort needs too much money to benefit significantly from crowdfunding, arguing that only Western states have the resources to make a difference. Also, he insisted that different groups make their own contributions — money from the West, soldiers from Ukraine itself, and “information” and sanctions lobbying from Team Navalny. When Russia loses the war on the battlefield, says Volkov, it will spark a “religious crisis” domestically, as faith in Putin crumbles. (The “information work” by Team Navalny would presumably pay off in this situation, though Volkov doesn’t explain how.)

Team Navalny retains a Russian perspective despite its antiwar posturing and exodus from Russia: It’s no secret that Alexey Navalny’s reputation isn’t stellar in Ukraine, where many still remember his reluctance to denounce Russia’s annexation of Crimea fiercely enough. Not only does Volkov rationalize the team’s refusal to support donations for the Ukrainian military by dismissing all crowdfunding efforts for the armed forces, but he also bristles at Azar’s question about Marina Ovsyannikova, the Russian state TV editor who ran on stage during a news broadcast with an antiwar banner. “I don’t read the Ukrainian media,” he told Azar. “I’m a Russian politician, and with all the sympathy I have [for Ukraine], and despite the fact that I understand that Putin must be defeated in the war, the Ukrainian media has its own agenda, and I don’t really care about it.”

All the familiar infighting within Russia’s opposition is still there: At times in the interview, despite the anti-Kremlin opposition’s decimation and desperate need for unity, Volkov still takes shots at fellow oppositionists like Mikhail Svetov, Maxim Katz, and Dmitry Gudkov, refusing to ignore their criticisms of Smart Vote and Navalny’s sanctions list.

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