The Real Russia. Today. Tuesday, May 21, 2024

The war in Ukraine

• ☢️ Russia’s tactical nuke drills get underway: Troops in Russia’s Southern Military District have begun the first stage of drills to test the preparation and use of non-strategic (tactical) nuclear weapons. The exercises include practice receiving ammunition for the Iskander missile system, equipping missile carriers, and covertly advancing the weapons to positions for missile launch preparations. During these exercises, Russia’s Aerospace Forces will drill equipping warplanes with hypersonic missiles and patrolling designated areas. Moscow says the unscheduled exercises are a response to “provocative and threatening” remarks by Western officials about sending more advanced weapons (and possibly even NATO-member soldiers) to Ukraine.
• 🇺🇸 Kyiv official says key Washington policy is ‘absolutely unfair’: Ukraine’s top national security official, Oleksandr Lytvynenko, told The Financial Times that the United States “should lift its ‘absolutely unfair’ ban on the Ukrainian army using American-supplied weapons to strike targets inside Russia, in order to help thwart Moscow’s new offensive.” Lytvynenko also called on Kyiv’s allies to strengthen their sanctions regime against Moscow to keep Russian new technological developments locked down.

💰 Economist Jan Pieter Krahnen on designing an effective ‘Marshall Plan’ for Ukraine (10-min read)

In late April, the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a network of hundreds of economics researchers from around the world, published a new report on the future reconstruction of Ukraine’s economy. While the organization released its first “Ukraine Reconstruction Plan” in March 2022, its new recommendations are significantly more detailed and reckon with the harsh realities of the grinding, years-long slog the war has become. Meduza special correspondent Margarita Lyutova spoke to one of the report’s key authors, Jan Pieter Krahnen, a finance professor at Goethe University Frankfurt and a member of the German Federal Finance Ministry’s Academic Advisory Board.

🗳️ Zelensky’s term should have ended on May 20. Here’s how Ukrainians feel about him staying in power without an election. (8-min read)

May 20 marked five years since Volodymyr Zelensky was inaugurated as Ukraine’s president. Ukrainian law mandates that presidential terms cannot exceed five years. However, the law also requires the president to remain in office until a new head of state is in place — and with martial law currently in effect, Ukraine’s elections have been postponed. Predictably, Russian propagandists and politicians have pounced on this contradiction, claiming that Zelensky’s presidency is now “illegitimate.” Meduza spoke with representatives from Zelensky’s office, Ukrainian opposition politicians, and ordinary citizens to learn how people in Ukraine feel about postponing the vote and what it means for the Zelensky government’s legitimacy.

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Russian law and human rights

• ⚖️ Kara-Murza’s poisoning appeal is rejected: The Moscow City Court has rejected a lawsuit from imprisoned opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza accusing federal investigators of failure to act in response to two attempts on his life. Kara-Murza survived two poisonings, one in 2015 and another in 2017, which journalists at Bellingcat and The Insider have tied to the same FSB group that allegedly poisoned Alexey Navalny with Novichok. The court upheld previous rulings by lower courts that found no illegal conduct in the Investigative Committee’s decision not to open criminal cases after the poisonings (despite discrepancies in official paperwork about whether investigators were ever audited).

⚖️ What it’s like to serve on a Russian jury

Russia introduced jury trials in 1993, and they’ve become virtually the only chance for a not-guilty verdict in Russia’s criminal justice system (juries acquit roughly one-third of defendants while this rate in other courts is less than one percent). However, only a small number of cases in Russia come before juries, and studies show that Russia is gradually phasing out juries entirely as prosecutors contest their verdicts through judges and get the tough sentences they sought initially. For an individual juror’s perspective, journalists at Bumaga Media spoke to “Tatiana,” a woman in St. Petersburg, about her experience serving jury duty in a trial that ran weekly between September 2023 and April 2024. The charges in the case were hardly pedestrian: the illegal purchase and possession of weapons, robbery, drug production, racketeering, and the use of counterfeit documents. Tatiana’s jury acquitted one of the defendants and convicted the other two, which apparently dissatisfied the prosecutors.

Tatiana also told Bumaga about the jury selection process, the jurors’ pay scale (which doesn’t cover transportation or meals but does pay full-day honoraria, even on days when the trial lasted just an hour), and the jury’s final deliberations. Tatiana said her personal interest in the judicial system and the rare opportunity to express her civic position through official state channels motivated her to accept jury duty, and the process itself triggered a “complex moral dilemma” as she grappled with the facts of the case and her past brushes with the courts as an activist.

🏳️‍🌈 When the Kremlin got serious about ‘eradicating all public manifestations of gay life’

A new report by The Insider describes how Russia’s expanded crackdown on the “international LGBT movement” has ravaged formerly gay-friendly clubs nationwide. Repressive new laws and court rulings and police raids have forced the cancelation of drag shows, led to strict new dress codes, and caused spiraling disillusionment among members of Russia’s queer community. Police draw on anonymous complaints and even seize clubs’ own security camera footage to build their “gay propaganda” cases, while “nationalists armed with brass knuckles and bats” intimidate and bully security guards and patrons alike, cultivating an atmosphere of fear and danger.

As clubs try to adapt to Russia’s increasingly anti-gay climate, dress codes and other unpopular policies drive away the few remaining patrons who haven’t already fled mobilization or anti-gay political persecution. Relocating to more metropolitan areas in search of greater tolerance has led some to realize that the situation is even worse in places like Moscow. Many drag artists who can’t emigrate have lost their livelihoods and found work at hair and nail salons.

Now that Russian law enforcement has the capacity to treat gay culture as felony extremism, the legal risks of operating or even attending a gay club are severe. Some institutions survive through rigorous compliance with anti-gay legislation while maintaining a low public profile, but no level of compliance or silent running guarantees that the authorities won’t come knocking.

♀️ A rare, colorful consolidation of patriotic and opposition forces in defense of human rights

Earlier this month, human rights activists helped 19-year-old Chechnya native Lia Zaurbekova flee abroad to get away from her abusive family. Zaurbekova managed her escape on May 16 with the help of police officers in Moscow who distracted a large group of Chechen men (including her father) who came to return her to Chechnya against her will. Having failed to grab her in Moscow, Zaurbekova’s father Beslan has since vowed to continue searching for his daughter abroad. Beslan also accuses Lia’s boyfriend (reportedly an ethnic Russian man) of “confusing” her and has threatened to “punish” him if he doesn’t convert to Islam. Separately, Chechen State Duma deputy Adam Delimkhanov says he’s taken personal control over Zaurbekova’s case and echoed her father’s threats and allegations against her partner.

According to Holod Media, the Zaurbekova case has united two radically different groups of supporters: women’s rights activists and chauvinist z-bloggers. The latter community has rallied to Zaurbekova in opposition to the anti-Russian, Islamist motivations that guide her abusive family and the Chechen authorities. For example, “Men’s State” founder Vladislav Pozdnyakov has accused Zaurbekova’s relatives of being Nazis and condemned the Moscow police for failing to stand up to Chechen “Wahhabis.” Holod Media reports that others in Pozdnyakov’s camp have also couched their support for Lia Zaurbekova in xenophobic criticisms of Chechens. 

Russian policy and politics

• 📡 UNSC arms politicking: Moscow and Washington continue to play resolution games at the U.N. Security Council, which rejected a Russian-drafted text calling on all countries to prevent "for all time" the placement, threat, or use of any weapons in outer space. The resolution even failed to get the minimum nine votes needed for a veto, which Russia slapped on an American resolution last month calling on countries to prevent an arms race in outer space. Washington has accused Moscow of launching a satellite into low Earth orbit that “is likely a counter-space weapon presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit.” Russia has insisted that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty already bars signatories from placing such weapons in orbit around the Earth.
• 🚗 Russia’s prime minister balks at Chinese parts in new Russian car: At a car expo in Nizhny Novgorod on Tuesday, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin criticized the Gorky Automobile Plant for using too many foreign components in its rebooted Volga series. “Where’s your steering wheel made now? Is it Chinese? We’d like the steering wheel to be Russian. It’s not as hard as localizing the transmission and all other parts,” Mishustin said, after sitting in the car, before adding that the vehicle “looks modern.”
• 👻 Prigozhin’s ghost pops up again: Investigators at the Dossier Center project report that Russia’s newly appointed defense minister, Andrey Belousov, previously “curated” the activities of mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. The project says it obtained a copy of Prigozhin’s “personal calendar” and an archive of Belousov’s emails reportedly showing that the two met privately to hammer out policies that would later be refined and shared with President Putin. According to the Dossier Center, Belousov received a research paper as early as 2018 arguing that private military companies would be a vital component of Moscow’s confrontation with the United States and Great Britain and in the expanding “gray zones” of international conflicts. The authors of the paper in Belousov’s inbox advised that PMCs should be formed under the state’s full control. They identified Prigozhin’s Wagner Group as a Defense Ministry company.
• 🪖 The Russian military’s anti-corruption campaign continues: Police have arrested Major General Ivan Popov, the former commander of Russia’s 58th Army. According to rumors on Telegram, he is suspected of fraud that caused more than 100 million rubles ($1.1 million) in damages. Two other reported suspects in the case are a Krasnodar-based businessman and a Southern Military District officer. Telegram channels say the major general will be charged with selling roughly 2,000 metric tons of metal products intended for the construction of fortifications to defend occupying Russian troops in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, where Popov served.
• 👑 Personnel shakeup in Chechnya continues: Chechnya Governor Ramzan Kadyrov has appointed his eldest son Akhmat to serve as the republic’s minister of physical fitness and sports. For the previous three months, 18-year-old Akhmat Kadyrov served as Chechnya’s youth affairs minister — a position that now falls to Ramzan Vismuradov, one of Ramzan Kadyrov’s sons-in-law and the son of a commander of Chechnya’s “Terek” special rapid response unit. Earlier in the day on Tuesday, Kadyrov announced the resignation of acting Prime Minister Muslim Khuchiev and the appointment of longtime deputy Isa Tumkhadzhiev in his place. The personnel changes continue a reshuffle in Grozny that has included the resignation of Chechen Parliament Speaker and close Kadyrov ally Magomed Daudov, whose next role remains unclear.

⛓️ Olga Romanova says profit motives make Federal Penitentiary Service Russia’s most ‘anti-war’ agency

In an interview for The Insider, literary critic Nikolai Aleksnadrov spoke to Olga Romanova, the director of the civil rights organization Russia Behind Bars, about the past and present of Russia’s prisons. Romanova’s core argument is that private profits drive policy within the Federal Penitentiary Service, shaping attitudes and practices related to prisoner labor, troop recruitment, and trends in persecution and torture. The “merger” between Russia’s state authorities and the criminal world has established a transactional system that determines how prisons are administered. Romanova says this “interpenetration” ensures shared interests in how rights and privileges are extended (and denied) to inmates, particularly when it comes to forced labor and protections against abuse.

Thanks to these administrative linkages between officials and criminals, Russia’s shifting geopolitics reverberate in the prison system and trigger purges of the latest “public enemies” from inside the “crime committees” that share power at penitentiaries. Romanova says this happened to Georgian “thieves in law” after Russia’s brief war in 2008. She claims that radical Islamists seized the vacuum left by ousted Georgian criminal bosses. Romanova also argues that an ongoing campaign by prison officials against all Muslim inmates escalated further in the aftermath of the Moscow concert hall terrorist attack in March 2024.

According to Romanova, the Federal Penitentiary Service’s reliance on kickbacks and the embezzlement of profits derived from forced labor has — somewhat counterintuitively — made the agency the most anti-war in the federal government. The reason for this attitude is that the war has diluted prisons’ labor pool and diverted funding that might otherwise have maintained or even improved the industrial infrastructure at prison facilities. In other words, the recruitment of prisoners and redirected federal spending have reduced the income of corrupt prison officials (and cut earnings for all the other bureaucrats who collect their own rents in this chain). 

 🍿 Struggling Russian movie theaters fall back on pirating Hollywood

Russian movie theaters have resumed the illegal screening of Hollywood films. According to a report by Current Time, Russian cinemas briefly caved to demands from domestic film distributors, who interpreted the box-office success of a recent adaptation of the children’s character Cheburashka to mean that Russia’s film industry could boost profits while sustaining theater chains. Cheburashka proved to be an exception, however, and cinemas have now returned to “pre-show screenings” of Hollywood blockbusters ahead of Russian short films. These screenings are illegal, as Hollywood film studies and distributors imposed a boycott on Russia after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. 

The pro-Kremlin television network Tsargrad now promotes links to streamable pirated copies of Hollywood films on a companion website. To justify the embrace of Western culture (including all the Harry Potter movies and 2024 Oscar-nominated films), the movies are presented as “trophy films” — the Soviet term used to describe foreign (largely German, Austrian, and Italian) documentaries and feature films brought to the USSR as spoils of war in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

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