The Real Russia. Today. Wednesday, July 10, 2024

The war in Ukraine

• 🎯 Kyiv wants Biden to lift targeting restrictions on long-range U.S. missiles: Zelensky administration adviser Andriy Yermak told POLITICO on Tuesday that Kyiv is lobbying the Biden administration to allow Ukraine to use longer-range ATACMS to strike targets inside Russia, beyond the attacks already underway in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed more than a decade ago. “If the White House approves the change, it would erase one of the administration’s final remaining red lines on the Ukraine war,” reports POLITICO.
• 🇭🇺 Orban shuns Biden on U.S. visit: After declining to ask President Biden for a meeting during this week’s NATO summit in Washington, D.C., Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will reportedly travel to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump to discuss his recent meetings with the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, and China, reports The Guardian.
• 💣 FSB claims more thwarted Ukrainian attacks: Russia’s Federal Security Service has claimed again that it prevented multiple covert attacks allegedly orchestrated by Ukrainian intelligence agencies. On Wednesday, the FSB said a crew member of the “Admiral Kuznetsov” aircraft carrier reported that a Ukrainian agent contacted him via social media and tried to use “psychological influence techniques” to compel him to carry out a “terrorist attack” on the ship. FSB agents who investigated the case also say they arrested a Russian national on charges of involvement in an alleged Ukrainian plot to send three deadly mail bombs disguised in gift wrapping to the addresses of senior Defense Ministry officials.
• 🪖 Celebrating Russia’s fallen hero-criminals: Journalists at Verstka Media have found at least 408 memorials in 58 regions across Russia honoring convicts recruited from prisons who died fighting in Ukraine. The memorials include plaques at housing complexes and schools, street stands, and special installations at schools, museums, and more. The largest group of memorialized prisoner-soldiers were convicted murderers, while other major groups were convicted of drug crimes, robbery, and other violent offenses. Vertska Media found two memoralized rapists. Fifty-six of the memorials are located at educational facilities, including some kingergartens. 
• ⚖️ Video surfaces showing apparent execution of two Ukrainian POWs: Ukraine’s General Prosecutor has opened a war crimes investigation into the apparent execution of two unarmed Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered to Russian invasion forces in the Zaporizhia region. Video of the killings, which reportedly took place in June 2024, has circulated online.
• 🇺🇸 Ukraine’s F-16 flying ops are coming this summer: The U.S., Netherlands, and Denmark say they’ve begun providing Ukraine with American-made F-16 fighter jets. “Ukraine will be flying operational F-16s this summer,” the White House announced.
• 🐦 𝕏 warns users against reading Bellingcat investigation: On July 9, 𝕏 warned users after clicking on a hyperlink to Bellingcat’s report identifying the Russian missile that hit Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv. The social network’s warning said “this link may be unsafe,” explaining that “𝕏 or our partners” considers the link to be “potentially spammy or unsafe.” In a tweet that same day, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins asked, “Unsafe to who, Putin?” At the time of this writing, 𝕏 no longer warns users when clicking on the story, and 𝕏 users themselves have added a Community Note stating that Bellingcat “has a high credibility rating” and that “this link is safe.” Billionaire and 𝕏 owner Elon Musk has previously described the investigative news outlet Bellingcat as a “psyop.”
• 🇨🇳 For first time, NATO formally accuses Beijing of enabling Russia’s Ukraine war: In a declaration on Wednesday, NATO leaders accused the Chinese government of becoming “a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine” and demanded that Beijing halt shipments of “weapons components” and other technology critical to the Russian military, in what The New York Times is calling “a major departure for NATO, which until 2019 never officially mentioned China as a concern.” However, the declaration does not specify what costs NATO might impose if Beijing doesn’t change course. (The U.S. Treasury has published the names of Chinese front companies and manufacturers funneling Western tech to Russia as part of the Biden administration’s campaign to “win over skeptics” inside NATO, the NYT reports.)
• 💾 Russia’s hospital-hitting missiles are packed with Western components: The Kh-101 Russian missile that hit Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv relies on Western-designed components (mainly intended for civilian use), weapons experts and Ukrainian officials told The Financial Times, estimating that Russia now manufacturers nearly eight times more of these missiles than before February 2022, but is “still dependent on parts from Western countries, particularly the U.S. “Russia buys them through front companies in the Middle East and south-east Asia,” said scholar Pavel Luzin.
• 🔥 Darknet-coordinated arson attacks against Ukrainian soldiers’ cars: Journalists at iStories report that contracts have started appearing on one of the largest Russian-language Darknet forums offering up to $2,000 for arson attacks against Ukrainian soldier’s cars in Lviv, Kyiv, Odesa, and other cities. Ukrainian officials are reportedly investigating four such arsons carried out in different cities this week. The contracts are being listed by recently registered accounts with no other visible online activity. One of these individuals described himself as a “pacifist” acting out of “hooligan motives.”

🏥 Four stories of patients from Okhmatdyt, the Kyiv children’s hospital Russia bombed (7-min read)

On July 8, a Russian missile struck the Okhmatdyt hospital in Kyiv — Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital and one of the country’s oldest medical institutions. The attack killed at least two adults and mostly destroyed the hospital’s toxicology ward, as well as intensive care and surgery units. Okhmatdyt treats up to 18,000 children annually, including those with rare and severe diseases. Since the start of the full-scale war, the hospital has continued to care for children, including those injured in Russian attacks. Drawing on Okhmatdyt’s social media posts, Meduza shares four stories of Ukrainian children who received treatment at the hospital Russia destroyed.

📷 French photographer Antoine d’Agata on capturing the invisible pain of war in Ukraine for Jonathan Littell’s new book (13-min read)

Just before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, French-American writer Jonathan Littell and French photographer Antoine d’Agata traveled to Kyiv’s Babi Yar ravine, where the Nazis carried out one of the Holocaust’s largest massacres in September 1941. Littell and d’Agata’s goal was to document how the site of such enormous tragedy preserves its history and exists in the present day. However, Moscow’s full-scale war forced them to broaden the scope of their project to reflect a reality where war crimes are not just a horrific chapter in Ukraine’s past but a part of its daily life in the present. The resulting book, titled An Inconvenient Place, was published in French in late 2023. 

Now, Meduza has released its first-ever Russian-language translation. Photographer Antoine d’Agata has also undertaken other assignments in Ukraine, working for The New York Times, Le Monde, and Magnum. He even helped the Ukrainian military in Kharkiv compile a photo archive of deceased Russian soldiers for future exchanges. Meduza spoke with d’Agata about his experiences working in a war-torn country and how he maintains his ability to empathize.

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Human rights and the law

• ☦️ Outspoken former monk turns to Putin for pardon: Father Sergiy (Nikolai Romanov), a fundamentalist former Russian Orthodox monk, has reportedly petititoned Vladimir Putin for a presidential pardon. The founder of the Sredneuralsk Convent (located outside Yekaterinburg), Sergiy has been behind bars since December 2020 after he denounced coronavirus lockdowns, called for the ouster of Patriarch Kirill and President Putin, and seized control of the convent amid a property dispute with church officials (leading to him being defrocked and excommunicated). He is currently serving a nearly seven-year prison sentence for inciting religious hatred and allegedly encouraging his parishioners to consider suicide. The 69-year-old Sergiy has also reportedly petititioned Putin twice to be made a soldier and sent to fight in Ukraine (his first request was rejected due to his age). 
• 🏥 After a week, Vladimir Kara-Murza’s lawyers finally manage to see him: Lawyers were finally granted access to jailed opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza on Wednesday, after trying for nearly a week. Attorney Vadim Prokhorov wrote on his Facebook page that Kara-Murza is hospitalized in Omsk and in stable condition, albeit still suffering from polyneuropathy, a severe chronic illness causing nervous system malfunction (a condition that should prevent him from being incarcerated at all). Kara-Murza’s lawyers say he was transferred to the prison hospital in Omsk for medical exams, but they did not learn the results of these tests. In April 2023, Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison for multiple alleged felonies, including “treason.”
• ⚖️ Five suspected Taliban terrorists convicted in Yekaterinburg, one week after Putin called group Russia’s ‘ally’: A military court in Yekaterinburg has convicted five suspected Taliban members of plotting a terrorist attack against the city’s subway system. The defendants, who were sentenced to between 16 and 25 years in prison, maintain their innocence, saying they were framed and forced to incriminate themselves and were only in Yekaterinburg to earn money as ordinary construction workers for their families back in Tajikistan. (Despite warming relations between the Kremlin and the Taliban, the latter has been a banned terrorist organization in Russia for the past two decades. Though Foreign Ministry and Justice Ministry officials advised President Putin in May 2024 that the Taliban movement can now be removed from Russia’s list of terrorist organizations, there’s been no formal decision to do so. Last week, Putin said the Taliban are Russia’s “allies in the fight against terrorism.”)

Russian domestic policy

• 📈 Putin’s tax hikes get green light: State Duma deputies adopted the third and final reading of legislation that raises and dramatically expands the progressive nature of Russian income taxes and significantly raises corporate income taxes. Finance Ministry officials estimate that the tax hikes will bring in an additional 533 billion rubles ($5.8 billion) annually.

🏗️ Russia extends mortgage program for qualifying families

Russia’s Finance Ministry has extended a family mortgage program until the end of the decade, continuing preferential loans at 6 percent to qualifying households. Families in the Moscow and St. Petersburg areas are eligible for loans at this rate with a 20-percent downpayment when borrowing up to 12 million rubles ($132,000), while residents elsewhere can borrow half as much at the 6-percent rate. The program is available to families with small children, families with disabled children, families in small towns, and families in some underdeveloped towns. The Finance Ministry has proposed an additional 66.2 billion rubles ($727 million) in federal funding to prolong the program. 

On July 1, Russia ended a massive pandemic-era preferential mortgage program that helped support families and stimulate new housing construction and adjacent industries but also drove up new housing prices. Roughly 66 percent of Russians postponed home purchases due to the mortgage program’s end, and another 11 percent took out loans earlier than they’d planned, according to the news outlet RBC. Following the Finance Ministry’s announcement on July 10, VTB Bank immediately resumed its receipt of applications for family mortgages.

Press freedom (or lack thereof)

• ⛔ MT joins ‘undesirable’ list: Russia’s Prosecutor General declared The Moscow Times an “undesirable organization,” banning the independent English-language newspaper from operating in Russia
• 💰 PayPal suspends fundraising access for Alexey Navany’s ACF: The Anti-Corruption Foundation revealed on Wednesday that PayPal has suspended the organization’s ability to “conduct any further business” using the money-transfer service. PayPal reportedly told the foundation that it violated its policy against hate speech or “the financial explotation of a crime.” 

🧠 Elizaveta Osetinskaya assesses the state of Russia’s exiled free press

In an interview prompted by her outlet’s decision to place its newsletters behind a paywall to recoup some of its losses caused by Russia’s persecution of the free press, The Bell founder Elizaveta Osetinskaya spoke to Meduza about the state of the industry. What follows are some takeaways from her conversation with Elizaveta Antonova.

Sources: Osetinskaya described three kinds of sources who no longer want to talk to her correspondents: (1) entrepreneurs like Fyodor Ovchinnikov who run businesses in Russia, (2) business people who have emigrated but still haven’t fully divested from Russia and now want to stay “under the radar,” and (3) business people who have fully left Russia and now avoid their past associations with the country. Osetinskaya noted that the second group is especially sensitive The Bell’s status as a “foreign agent,” and she said “undesirability” followed by criminal allegations of extremism and terrorism are even further on the danger scale, but even “foreign agency” is enough to worry many would-be sources with assets in Russia.

YouTube: Osetinskaya said the potential blocking of YouTube in Russia would be a “very big problem” for independent journalists, but she also pointed out that Western social media platforms have perhaps reduced the chances of such censorship by bending to the Russian authorities’ pressure. Osetinskaya said Russian independent journalists have managed to win the support of numerous Western lobbyists and state regulators, but it’s nevertheless been insufficient to influence the policies of Silicon Valley giants.

Managing risk: “There’s a psychological phenomenon where people outside of Russia tend to exaggerate the risks of being in the country, while people inside the country tend to underestimate them,” Osetinskaya told Meduza, describing the moral dilemma exiled news outlets face when hiring stringers living in Russia to carry out the fieldwork their own correspondents can no longer do.

The Russian authorities have succeeded in making the free press ‘toxic’: Meduza asked Osetinskaya repeatedly about The Bell’s budget, especially the share of its income that comes from grants. She warned that sharing information about resources is dangerous and later added that narratives about supposedly indepedent journalists under the control of foreign and moneyed interests mean that even full transparency about income and spending wouldn’t satisfy a cynical public. “The mass consciousness has already labeled us as ‘enemies,’ and we won’t be able to convince people otherwise until mainstream thinking in the country changes,” explained Osetinskaya.

As the world turns

• 🚨 Intelligence warns of Russian-backed sabotage: U.S. military bases across Europe were placed on a heightened state of alert last week for the first time in a decade after American officials received intelligence that “Russian-backed actors were considering carrying out sabotage attacks against U.S. military personnel and facilities,” CNN reported on Tuesday.
• 🏦 Russia (maybe) plans disengagement from Raiffeisenbank: Russia’s Central Bank is reportedly considering removing Raiffeisenbank from its official list of “systemically important credit institutions,” where Russia’s banking sector holds roughly 78 percent of its total assets. The list currently includes 13 banks, only two of which are foreign institutions (Raiffeisenbank and UniCredit). Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, European regulators and U.S. officials have been pressuring Raiffeisen Bank International to curtail its activities inside Russia, though The Financial Times reported in April 2024 that the bank had actually posted job vacancies for more than 2,000 positions in Russia that year. RBI insists that it is still trying to sell its Russian division.
• 🇯🇵 Japan arrests Russian exporter: Japanese police have arrested a Russian national named Andrey Sova on charges of illegally exporting roughly $258,500 in goods through South Korea to Russia that can be used for military purposes (specifically, jet skis, marine engines, and used motorcycles). Local news outlets say it’s the first arrest in Japan associated the export of products to Russia sanctioned in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

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