The Real Russia. Today. Tuesday, April 30, 2024

The war in Ukraine

• 🛂 Kyiv’s promises to Ukrainian men abroad fearing forced repatriation and mobilization: Commenting on the decision to suspend consular services abroad for mobilization-eligible men, Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine Olha Stefanishyna said on Tuesday that the Ukrainian authorities would not forcibly repatriate these men. Officials in Kyiv say consular services will remain available to men abroad who keep their military registration records updated (though there’s currently no mechanism for doing this from outside Ukraine). Stefanishyna emphasized to Deutsche Welle that registration for the draft doesn’t automatically send an individual to the front.
• 🪖A disappeared article about disappeared soldiers: An article about five Russian military officers who disappeared after refusing to fight in Ukraine has vanished from Telegram’s long-form blogging platform Telegraph. Journalists at Astra Press released the report in December 2022 and say they didn’t delete the text from Telegraph. Telegram has not commented on the unpublished article. Astra’s story describes how five officers were moved to a secret camp for conscientious objectors and never heard from again. For its report, Astra spoke to soldiers who have survived the camp and to the five officers’ mothers.
• 🪖 Locals in Belgorod have been buying up guns and ammo: Journalists at Holod Media report that illegal military arms trafficking has spiked in Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine and has become the target of regular Ukrainian shelling and occasional incursions from Ukraine. Holod studied local court records and found 71 sentences in the first two years of the war. Most of the cases ended with probation or community service, but journalists found one instance where three defendants were sentenced to multiple years in prison for building a cache with enough weapons, explosives, and ammunition to carry out “multiple terrorist attacks.”
• 🇰🇵 Proof that Russia fired at least one North Korean missile at Ukraine: Missile debris recovered from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv revealed that Russia fired a North Korean Hwasong-11 series ballistic missile, United Nations sanctions monitors told a Security Council committee in a report seen by Reuters on Monday. Russia’s procurement of North Korean weaponry would violate the arms embargo imposed on North Korea in 2006. Last month, Russia vetoed the annual renewal of the U.N. sanctions monitors that have observed enforcement of U.N. sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs for the past 15 years.

🆘 How Ukrainian refugees are ending up homeless in Russia (12-min read)

After the start of the full-scale war, tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees from Mariupol and other Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories ended up in St. Petersburg. Many hoped that in a big city, they’d have better chances of finding work and providing for their families. For some, however, this has proved impossible, and they’ve ended up on the streets. Over the course of six months, the St. Petersburg news outlet Bumaga followed two Ukrainian refugees who, after fleeing the war, found themselves homeless in Russia.

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The law, order, and political freedom

• 🔥 Get to the choppa! A court in Moscow has jailed five suspects in the recent destruction of a military helicopter outside the capital. The arsonists reportedly acted in coordination with Ukraine’s intelligence community, which shared footage of a burning Ka-32 aircraft on April 26. Anonymous Telegram channels report that four of the suspects have also confessed to setting fire to a railway relay box in Moscow. The men allegedly shared photos and videos in correspondence posing with large amounts of cash, supposedly received from the Ukrainian military.
• ⛔ The continuing crackdown on Memorial human rights activists: Russia’s federal censor has blocked the website of a project to support politician prisoners launched by the Memorial human rights group. The project’s website became inaccessible without a VPN in Russia on April 30, though regulators haven’t yet formally added it to their registry of blocked websites. In late 2021, courts ordered the dissolution of Memorial’s human rights center on the grounds that it violated Russia’s “foreign agents” disclosure rules.
• 🇺🇸 Former NSA employee gets 262 months in prison for attempted Russia espionage: A former National Security Agency employee was sentenced Monday to nearly 22 years in prison for attempting to sell classified information to Russia. Jareh Dalke, 32, pleaded guilty last year to six counts of attempting to transmit classified National Defense Information to an individual he believed to be a Russian agent, the U.S. Justice Department reported on Monday. That person was an FBI online covert employee. Dalke requested $85,000 in return. The FBI arrested Dalke in September 2023, moments after he transmitted five files, four of which contained top-secret information.

✊ How a Russian inmate sued Moscow, told off Yevgeny Prigozhin, and popularized Meduza in his prison (10-min read)

In 2014, Yekaterinburg native Alexander Paranuk was arrested on what he says were fabricated drug charges. He spent most of the next decade in prison. But that didn’t stop him from becoming a writer, producing his own prison news program, getting into a verbal tussle with Yevgeny Prigozhin, and disseminating more than a few Meduza articles among his fellow inmates. Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova spoke to Paranuk about his time in prison and how 10 years behind bars changed his views about Russia.

⚖️ Listing and locking down the Kremlin’s public enemies

The Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service’s registry of “terrorists and extremists,” which includes not just convicts but also mere suspects and defendants, now includes more than 14,500 people (as well as more than 550 organizations), each facing enormous restrictions (such as spending limits and frozen bank accounts) and serious consequences (job loss, liability for normally legal speech, and so on). Litigating your way off this list is a complicated process that requires beating criminal charges or overturning a verdict. Rosfinmonitoring’s registry includes people charged or convicted of more than 25 offenses related to terrorism and extremism, including heavily politicized crimes like “publicly justifying terrorist acts.” 

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