The Real Russia. Today. Monday, April 29, 2024

The war in Ukraine

• ⚖️ Kyiv’s extreme measures: Ukraine partially suspends participation in European Convention on Human Rights while martial law is in effect
• 👶 Sister’s guardian seeks to undo Russian politician’s secret adoption in occupied Ukraine: Last year, investigative journalists reported that Russian politician Sergey Mironov adopted a one-year-old girl named Margarita from occupied Kherson. Now, the guardian of the girl’s older sister has come forward to say that she wants to adopt Margarita and reunite the two sisters. (The guardian resides in Greece after fleeing occupied Kherson.) Mironov has denied the adoption story, though journalists say they’ve obtained proof in the form of documents and private family correspondence. Mironov’s wife also reportedly came close to adopting a two-year-old boy from Kherson but stopped the paperwork after learning that he suffers serious health problems. Russian human rights officials have refused to investigate the matter.
• 🧑‍✈️ Russia’s new airfield outside Belgorod: Journalists at RFE/RL have shared high-resolution satellite photos showing that the Russian military built a new airfield outside Belgorod, roughly 75 kilometers (47 miles) from the border with Ukraine. The airfield is near the city of Alexeyevka, an important logistics hub for the Russian Armed Forces used for vehicle modifications and repairs, as well as landing helicopters and larger aircraft, including Il-76 transport planes.
• 📍 Ukraine briefly loses access to Telegram bots used for help locating Russian military: Telegram briefly suspended access to several chatbots used by Ukraine's security agencies to collect reports from occupied Ukraine about the whereabouts of Russian military hardware and personnel, Reuters reported on Monday. A Telegram spokesperson said the bots were "temporarily disabled due to a false positive but have since been reinstated.”
• 🪖 The worst is yet to come? In a Twitter thread on Monday, Polish OSINT researcher Konrad Muzyka shared a pessimistic analysis of Ukraine’s current battlefield situation, calling it the most dire since March 2022. Muzyka attributed the problems to a lack of weapons and soldiers and to the slow construction of fortifications. He also argued that the resumption of military supplies from the U.S. will reduce the disparity in Russian and Ukrainian weaponry but won’t change the course of the war. Muzyka studied satellite images and concluded that Ukraine is late in building a unified defensive line, having invested instead in separate defensive points that are now being surrounded. Russia’s superior numbers will make it harder for Ukraine to “plug holes” in its defenses by redeploying available troops. “Ukraine’s darkest hour is yet to come. Everything is just beginning,” wrote Muzyka. 
• 🪖 On the bright side of Avdiivka: In a more optimistic analysis of Ukraine’s situation, particularly around Avdiivka, researchers at The Institute for the Study of War argue that “Russian forces remain unlikely to achieve a deeper operationally significant penetration in the area in the near term” following Ukrainian troops’ “withdraw from other limited tactical positions along the frontline” to the west.

🪖 The Avdiivka front and Krasnohorivka: Ukraine’s line of defense under pressure as Russia gains footholds on the eastern front (4-min read)

After two months of intense fighting, the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) have yet to secure a solid defense near Avdiivka. It took Russian troops only a few days to advance seven kilometers (a bit over four miles) into the AFU’s most vulnerable area, and they were able to capture the village of Ocheretyne with little resistance. The AFU’s defense to the north of Avdiivka was split in half, leaving only the battered 47th Mechanized Brigade available to counter Russian forces in this critical sector. Now, all Ukrainian-controlled territory in the southern and western parts of the Donetsk region is under threat.

🛂 New law makes it harder for draft-age Ukrainian men to get passports (6-min read)

Ukrainian authorities passed a law banning passport renewals and limiting other consular services for draft-age Ukrainian men living outside of the country. The law comes just weeks ahead of new regulations set to tighten mobilization procedures in the country with the aim of drafting as many as 500,000 more people into Ukraine’s Armed Forces. The restrictions on new passports will potentially make it easier for Ukraine to return draft-aged men living abroad, some of whom left in order to avoid fighting. News of the ban resulted in long lines at passport centers in European cities last week.

Russian domestic affairs

• 🧠 Tucker Carlson speaks to Aleksandr Dugin: American pundit Tucker Carlson has released another interview recorded during his February trip to Moscow: a 20–minute sitdown with Russian far-right political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. In their conversation, Dugin lambasts “woke progressivism,” arguing that liberalism as an ideology is so keen on rebelling against collective identities that transgenderism has set the stage for a “final liberation,” which he describes as a transhumanist jump to artificial intelligence. Dugin repeatedly cites Hollywood films like The Matrix and Terminator as prophetic glimpses of liberalism’s endpoint. Fielding a question from Carlson about how “liberals defended Stalinism for 80 years” and then “flipped against Russia” in 2000 when Putin came to power, Dugin claims that liberals feel threatened by Putin’s defense of “traditional values.”
• 👮 Attacked man finds himself charged by police over his dyed hair: A man in Moscow tried to file a police report after being beaten and robbed at a downtown bus stop, but officials instead charged him with the misdemeanor offense of "discrediting" the army because he appeared at the police station with his hair dyed blue, green, and yellow (leading to concerns of pro-Ukraine sympathies). The authorities also reportedly handed him a summons to appear at a local military recruitment center, telling him, they’d force him to “kiss his native soil in the trenches,” the man told the human rights project OVD-Info.

🎧 The Naked Pravda: How Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov dies (27 minutes)

According to a new investigation from Novaya Gazeta Europe, Chechnya Governor Ramzan Kadyrov was diagnosed with pancreatic necrosis in 2019 and isn’t long for this world. Since then, he’s supposedly undergone “regular procedures,” including surgeries, at an elite hospital in Moscow. A bout of COVID-19 in 2020 reportedly further degraded his health, kicking off another round of sudden weight loss. His kidneys reportedly started to fail and fluid built up in his lungs, making it difficult for him to speak and walk. On this week’s episode of The Naked Pravda, Meduza spoke to journalist Kirill Martynov, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta Europe, to dig into these revelations and learn more about the predicament of Russia’s second-worst autocrat.

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As the world turns

• ✈️ Baltic warnings of a Russia-caused air disaster: The foreign ministers of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are blaming Russia for GPS jamming, warning that it risks causing an air disaster after the interference with navigation signals forced two Finnish flights to turn around mid-journey, reports The Financial Times.
• 💰 Big bank tax money for the Kremlin’s coffers: The largest Western banks that remain in Russia — Raiffeisen Bank International, UniCredit, ING, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, and OTP — paid the Kremlin more than €800 million ($858.1 million) in taxes last year, “a fourfold increase on prewar levels, despite promises to minimize their Russian exposure after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” reports The Financial Times.
• 🇩🇪 Espionage driven by fear of nuclear war: A Bundeswehr officer has confessed to spying for Russia, saying he shared military secrets with Moscow out of fear of a coming nuclear war. He told a court in Dusseldorf on Monday that he hoped to learn when the bombs would start falling so he could “protect his family in time.” The man also expressed remorse about his actions and said he was in a very bad psychological state at the time.
• 🕵️ ‘The Czech illegals’: Investigative journalists at The Insider have identified two alleged deep-cover Russian spies working as arms dealers who aided GRU Unit 29155 (Moscow’s “assassination and sabotage squad”) in carrying out bombings of weapons depots in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. Naturalized Czech citizens, the Šapošnikovs allegedly used their arms dealing business and hotel in Greece as cover to assist the GRU in attacks across Europe. The couple, Nikolai and Elena Šapošnikov, reportedly provided physical access, intelligence, and logistical support to facilitate the GRU's sabotage operations. 

🇦🇲 Armenians protest government’s decision to return four villages to Azerbaijan, in photos (5-min read)

In early March 2024, Azerbaijan demanded that Armenia hand over eight villages along the two countries’ borders. To avoid a new war, Yerevan agreed to transfer four villages to Azerbaijani control; the border delimitation process is now underway. Local residents, however, oppose the decision; they want Armenia to refuse to concede any territory and have appealed to international human rights organizations for help. Photographer Egor Kirillov traveled to the border village of Kirants, which is still Armenian territory, to photograph residents’ fight against the transfer.

🇹🇯 Tajikistan says hundreds of its citizens stranded in Moscow airports as Russia bars them from entering (3-min read)

Hundreds of Tajikistani citizens are currently stuck in Moscow airports, according to the country’s foreign ministry. As of Saturday night, 954 people from Tajikistan were being held “in unsanitary conditions” in Vnukovo Airport’s temporary detention zone, including people studying at Russian educational institutions under the Russian government’s foreign student quotas. Meanwhile, dozens of other Tajikistanis are reportedly stranded in the city’s other airports.

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