The Real Russia. Today. Monday, July 8, 2024

The war in Ukraine

• ✈️ FSB says Ukraine tried to hijack a strategic bomber: Russia’s Federal Security Service claimed on Monday that it’s prevented an attempt by Ukrainian intelligence agencies to recruit a Russian pilot to hijack a Tu-22M3 supersonic strategic bomber. The pilot was reportedly offered $3 million and Italian citizenship. In a video shared by Russian officials, the pilot in question (concealing his identity behind a helmet) says a Ukrainian intelligence agent contacted him on Telegram and also threatened his family when making the recruitment offer. (For some reason, the footage shows a pile of dollars in large bills, though the FSB’s story suggests the pilot never received the money.) Two years ago, the FSB claimed to have prevented a similar operation by Ukraine to hijack three Russian warplanes. In August 2023, Maxim Kuzminov famously hijacked a Mi-8 helicopter and flew it to Ukraine. He was later killed in Spain, presumably by Russian spies.
• 🇭🇺 What Putin told Orbán: Journalists obtained a copy of a letter Viktor Orbán sent privately to European leaders where the Hungarian prime minister described what he learned from his meeting last week with President Putin. In the text, Orbán said Putin is convinced that time is on Russia’s side in the Ukraine war. Russia’s president also expressed surprise that Zelensky rejects a temporary ceasefire. At the same time, leaders in both Moscow and Kyiv told Orbán that they worry any ceasefire deal could be exploited for “covert redeployment and regrouping.” Additionally, Putin told Orbán that he remains committed to preliminary peace terms established in March 2022, when Russian and Ukrainian negotiators discussed security guarantees for Ukraine together with a neutrality pledge from Kyiv and Moscow’s right to veto foreign military assistance.

⛑️ Russian missile attack on cities throughout Ukraine kills scores, hits children’s hospital (5-min read)

Russian forces carried out a large-scale missile attack on Kyiv and other cities throughout Ukraine on Monday. At least 22 people were killed and at least 82 injured in the Ukrainian capital, according to the Kyiv authorities. In the entire country, at least 36 people were killed and at least 140 injured, according to Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office. In Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi District, a Russian missile hit Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital, the largest pediatric hospital in Ukraine.

On July 8, a Russian missile hit the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv during a widespread attack on cities throughout the country. According to the Ukrainian authorities, Russian forces deliberately targeted the hospital and other civilian infrastructure in the capital. According to preliminary reports, at least 10 people were killed and at least 35 were injured in Kyiv, and at least 21 people were killed and 68 injured throughout the country. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that people are still trapped under the rubble from the strike on the hospital, which he called “one of the most important children’s hospitals not only in Ukraine but also in Europe,” adding: “Okhmatdyt has been saving and restoring the health of thousands of children.”

🏥 Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital has treated patients throughout the war. Today, a Russian missile strike killed one of its doctors. (5-min read)

The Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital treats as many as 18,000 patients annually, offering a wide range of diagnostics, surgeries, and cancer treatments. Following the Russian attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described Okhmatdyt as “one of the most important children’s hospitals not only in Ukraine, but also in Europe.” Meduza describes the facility’s long history and how it’s operated throughout Russia’s full-scale invasion.

🪖 Russia is coercing prisoners recruited from occupied Ukraine into signing indefinite military contracts (4-min read)

Hundreds of former prisoners who were recruited by the Cascade unit, a military formation affiliated with the Russian occupation administration in the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” have been forced to continue fighting long beyond the six-month service periods they were promised and are now being coerced into signing indefinite contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry, according to new reporting from iStories.

🇰🇵 What the Kremlin’s new defense pact with North Korea means for the Russian army fighting in Ukraine (7-min read)

On June 19, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a strategic partnership agreement. North Korea has long been supplying Moscow with weapons for its war in Ukraine, but the new pact could increase the flow of North Korean arms to the Russian military. And while the quality of these weapons might be questionable, the sheer quantity could more than compensate. Journalists from the independent outlet iStories spoke with North Korea experts to understand the implications of the new agreement for weapon supplies and whether it’s possible that North Korean soldiers could now be deployed to fight alongside Russia in Ukraine.

⛔ Meet Sergey Novikov, the Kremlin’s top arts censor

A new joint investigation from Meduza and iStories profiles Sergey Novikov, “the chief censor of Russian culture” and the official responsible for blacklisting artists and entertainers who criticize the Kremlin and its policies too openly. As the head of the presidential administration’s Public Projects Office, Novikov has worked to silence anti-war cultural figures by holding emergency meetings with industry leaders where he communicates justifications for the invasion of Ukraine and conveys what he argues is the necessity of unquestioning loyalty to the Kremlin. In his spare time, oddly enough, Novikov is also an accomplished opera director, and he reportedly uses this status, too, to influence and infiltrate Russian arts culture. Here are some of the profile’s highlights:

From local journalism to the Kremlin

Novikov built a relationship with politician Sergey Kiriyenko through his work at a local radio station in Nizhny Novgorod and then joined Kiriyenko’s team as spokesperson after the latter’s appointment as a presidential envoy to the Volga Federal District. Novikov then followed Kiriyenko to Rosatom, acting as the state corporation’s press liaison. In this new role, he reportedly maintained a good relationship with the media, even appearing for several years on a popular TV game show sponsored by Rosatom.

The Kremlin’s division of labor for the mass media

Alexey Gromov oversees Russian television, while Sergey Kiriyenko manages online and print media. Assisting the latter’s work, Sergey Novikov is also in regular contact with reporters. Sources told Meduza that he sometimes contacts journalists himself to leak “sensitive information,” typically about United Russia or Kremlin personnel changes, but he’s also acted in certain emergencies. For example, Novikov contacted journalists in August 2020 to circulate “analysis results” (later refuted by German doctors) that showed no trace of poison in Alexey Navalny’s blood after he was attacked with Novichok.

Novikov also telephoned Proekt journalist Mikhail Rubin when the latter was writing an article about Alexey Gromov, warning Rubin that it “might be very dangerous.” Two unidentified men later broke into the home of Rubin’s parents and questioned them on camera, asking if their son was ashamed for “selling out his homeland.” Rubin told Meduza that he suspects Novikov only called him to try to suss out what he was writing and how damaging it might be to the Kremlin.

Novikov now holds regular “debriefings” with major outlets’ editors-in-chief (Gromov sometimes attends these meetings) where he instructs the journalists not to write too much about certain issues (such as rising inflation and tax hikes). He also provides the Kremlin’s desired framing for sensitive stories, explaining when to use particular phrases for specific state initiatives.

Controlling nonprofit and cultural PR

Novikov is also partly responsible for the Kremlin’s efforts to cultivate patriotism among young people. This work reportedly doesn’t excite him much, but his 25-year-old daughter Ksenia works as an event organizer in this sphere. Additionally, Novikov serves on the supervisory boards of the Internet Development Institute, which develops “patriotic” propaganda content, and the state-created nonprofit Dialog, which disseminates fake stories (especially about Ukraine) under the guise of facilitating better communication between citizens and the government. 

A week before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Novikov criticized the Circle of Good charity for failing in its PR efforts and announced that Dialog would take over these duties. He’s commandeered PR actions not just at charities but also in advertising, going so far as to screen background music and entertainers headlining events to prevent platforming anyone with openly anti-war views. His office has also hounded the heads of charities and nonprofits who have publicly criticized the invasion of Ukraine, threatening to revoke funding and grants if they don’t recant. (Novikov’s staff follows through on these threats, too.)

Novikov is responsible for the distribution of grants through two presidential funds, which he steers to organizations working in occupied Ukraine in support of Russia’s invasion. Leaked documents from the Putin administration show that Novikov has also overseen numerous projects in occupied Ukraine, mobilizing local “opinion leaders,” integrating Donbas teenagers into Russian society, locating missing persons, placing recent Russian college graduates in jobs in Luhansk and Donetsk, staging “patriotic cultural and educational” events in occupied Ukraine, and more.

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Catch the latest issue → ‘Long live the test ban’: In the twilight of the Soviet Union, ordinary people across Kazakhstan united against nuclear testing. Now a new generation of activists is picking up the mantle. (13-min read)

🧠 Kotkin on Russia’s losing history and possible futures

Last week, Meduza published an interview in Russian with historian Stephen Kotkin about what he argues is Russia’s repeating failed grand strategies to assert itself as a great power globally. The conversation builds in part on his recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Five Futures of Russia.” Here are a few of Kotkin’s biggest observations in our interview:

Institutional failings: “The problem with this strategy is that they never actually build a strong state — they build a personal rule. And the personal rule conflates the fate of the personal ruler with the fate of the country. So, the forced modernization usually has some type of short-term success, a growth spurt in the economy and then it hits a wall and gets to stagnation."

Deterrence and diplomacy: "Successful foreign policy is about strength deterrence, but it’s also about diplomacy. If you have only diplomacy with no strength, it won’t work, you can’t get a good deal, and you can only capitulate. But if you only have a strong deterrence and no diplomacy, you never get a deal. And the deterrence can in fact backfire and frighten the other side into saying that they’re losing, they’re in trouble, they have to react, they have to respond. [...] It's absolutely essential to get stable relations without capitulation, without provoking war, right in that middle area, between capitulation or appeasement and provocation of horrible war — strength plus negotiation.”

Analogies in Ukraine to the 1938 Munich Agreement: “The problem with that analogy for Ukraine is it’s not Munich because nobody gave Putin anything. He took it, he seized Crimea, he seized the Eastern Donbas, he seized the Sea of Azov. So, Munich 1938 is the wrong analogy for Ukraine. A better analogy is Poland in 1939 when Hitler took most of it and Stalin took another piece, and Britain and France declared war on [Germany] but didn’t do very much. This is Poland where he took it already. And now you have to fight to get it back.”

Russia’s great power ambitions: "It’s up to the Russians themselves to decide whether they want to be a great power or not. And it would certainly be much easier to manage their place in the world if they decided they didn’t have to be a power of the first rank. [...] It’s not up to me, but if Russia were to relinquish the great power ambitions that exceed its capabilities, it would be much easier to manage Russia’s position in the world. It would lower the costs that the Russian people have to pay. And it will reduce the amount of failures again and again, of these forced modernizations hitting a wall into stagnation and regimes toppling and maybe the system going down like it’s happened twice in history."

How nationalists could ‘save the day’: "They feel as patriots that Russia is losing [against the West], that Russia needs to retrench, that Russia needs to stop the current trajectory that it’s on. Not to save Ukraine, but to save Russia. Rescue Russia, invest again in Russia, maybe not transform Russia into France [...] so, Russian nationalism can rescue the situation in some ways."

Meanwhile, in Russia

• ⚖️ Six years for Berkovich and Petriychuk: Judge sentences playwright and theater director for ‘justifying terrorism’ with play
• 💾 Darkweb spies on Russian emigres: Journalists at Agentstvo Media reported that one of Russia’s aggregation services that allows searches of leaked personal data has compiled a list of individuals who supposedly fled Russia in one of three recent emigration waves (the start of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s partial mobilization, and the armed mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin). Agentstvo, which is not releasing the name of the service, says it ran the names of 10 emigres through the database and got mixed results (some people’s travels were accurately described, some people were absent entirely, and others’ travels were misidentified). Agentstvo points out that such leaked personal data had aided political repressions in the past, such as the firings of persons who registered with a “Free Navalny” initiative.

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