The Real Russia. Today. Thursday, July 11, 2024

The war in Ukraine

• 🇩🇪 CNN reports Russian assassination plot against German arms manufacturer: Multiple U.S. and European officials confirmed to CNN that American and German intelligence agencies foiled a plot earlier this year by the Russian government to assassinate Armin Papperger, the CEO of German weapons producer and automotive supplier Rheinmetall, which has been producing artillery shells and military vehicles for Ukraine. “For more than six months, Russia has been carrying out a sabotage campaign across Europe, largely by proxy,” reports CNN, saying the series of plots “helps explain the increasingly strident warnings from NATO officials.”
• 🇭🇺 Orban and Trump, sitting in a tree: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban traveled to Florida on Thursday and met with former President Donald Trump. “We discussed ways to make peace. The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!” Orban later wrote on social media. This was Orban’s second visit to Mar-a-Lago since March and follows meetings in Europe and Asia with the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, and China.
• 💰 Gig-economy military recruitment: Officials in Tatarstan are offering members of the public 100,000 rubles (roughly $1,100) for every man they can persuade to enlist as a contract soldier. The region already offers some of the highest bonus incentives for enlisting at roughly 1.5 million rubles ($16,500) in a combined, one-time payment. Tatarstan initially offered 50,000 rubles for helping with recruitment but doubled the reward after just a few days.

🪖 In Russia’s Buryatia, high military death rates make the war impossible to ignore. A new report reveals how it’s become normalized. (17-min read)

In the fall of 2023, researchers from the Public Sociology Lab (PS Lab) visited three of Russia’s regions — the Sverdlovsk region, Krasnodar Krai, and Buryatia — to study residents’ views on the full-scale war in Ukraine. During their trip, the sociologists managed to conduct 75 in-depth interviews and compile three detailed ethnographic diaries (each with about 110,000 words). Below, Meduza shares an English-language summary of the team’s report from their work in Buryatia, which has paid a higher price for Russia’s war against Ukraine than nearly any other Russian region.

🛂 Russia is developing a new ‘data exchange’ system to help the FSB catch conscripts trying to leave the country (3-min read)

Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been tightening conscription rules and increasing penalties for draft evasion. One amendment, passed in April 2023, bars anyone who’s been served a summons from leaving the country until they report to the military authorities. To streamline enforcement of this policy, the Russian authorities are developing a new “electronic data exchange” system between the Defense Ministry and the FSB’s border service to ensure that men called up for service can’t leave the country. Here’s what we know about the new system and when it might be operational.

🏥 After a Russian missile hit Ukraine’s top children’s hospital, medical staff rushed to save their patients. One doctor tells her story. (8-min read)

During a deadly Russian missile barrage on Kyiv on July 8, Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital suffered a direct hit. More than 600 patients and at least that many medical staff were inside the Okhmatdyt Hospital at the time of the strike, which killed two adults and injured more than 50 people, including seven children. Another child who was evacuated from the hospital later died. In the aftermath of the strike, Meduza interviewed Anna Brudna, a doctor in Okhmatdyt’s bone marrow transplant division who was at the hospital at the time of the attack. Here’s what she saw.

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Human rights, justice, and the courts

• 🚨 Navalnaya is listed as ‘terrorist’ after arrest warrant: Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service added Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, to its official list of “terrorists and extremists”
• 🧟 Russian authorities move against zombie book that lampoons Putin: Russia’s Prosecutor General has ordered bookstores to stop selling a novel by Ivan Filippov about a zombie apocalypse in Moscow, claiming that the story threatens to incite a public panic, including but not limited to bank failures, a collapse of the energy grid, and mass hysteria, according to documents sent to multiple book vendors and the novel’s own publisher. Filippov’s novel “Mouse” (released last year) has especially angered Russian Z-bloggers, as the book’s zombie outbreak (which Meduza stresses is fictional) begins with an infected rodent escaping from a laboratory that is researching a serum to prolong Vladimir Putin’s life.
• ⚖️ Nine years for 30 bucks: A court in the Tomsk region sentenced 21-year-old artist Tatyana Laletina to nine years in prison for alleged treason. The details of her case are not public, but friends told the news outlet Mediazona that she was arrested in February 2024 for donating $30 to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. It’s unknown if she confessed to the charges. Both her attorney and mother declined to speak to journalists. 
• 🛂 Innovations in remote persecution: Russian police have reportedly found a new means of making life more difficult for opposition activists in exile: invalidating their Russian passports. Two activists from the Omsk region said on Thursday that Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry voided their passports almost immediately after they applied for renewed documents. Other activists living abroad in exile have reportedly encountered the same issue.
• ⚖️ Prison awaits another exiled Russian opposition politician: A Moscow court has sentenced in absentia politician Leonid Gozman to 8.5 years in prison for writing online about Russian war atrocities committed in Ukraine. (The formal felony conviction was for knowingly spreading “false information” about the Russian Armed Forces.) Gozman fled Russia in late 2022 after multiple arrests for his writings on social media.
• ⌨️ Russia to force bloggers with 1,000 subscribers to register with government: Russia’s federal censor is expanding its fight against online anonymity by enforcing requirements that bloggers with daily audiences that exceed 1,000 people must provide the agency with their full names and addresses (in order to receive “legally significant information”). Roskomnadzor already manages a registry of “information dissemination organizers,” which are technically required to store user data inside Russia and make it available to the Federal Security Service upon request.
• 🏳️‍🌈 Federal lawmakers want to ensure no gay debit cards for kids: Members of the State Duma’s Family Protection Committee have asked Sberbank to discontinue its children’s debit cards featuring a cartoon “rainbow unicorn,” claiming that parents have complained to the authorities that the cards look like endorsements of gay pride, which is illegal in Russia. At the time of this writing, Sberbank had yet to respond to the concerns.

⚖️ Filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev on the historic conviction of two theater artists for ‘justifying terrorism’ (4-min read)

On July 8, a Moscow court sentenced theater director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk to six years in prison each. According to the Russian authorities, the women “justified terrorism” with their production of Petriychuk’s play “Finist the Bright Falcon,” which is based on the experiences of Russian women who moved to Syria and married ISIS fighters. In response to the women’s conviction, renowned Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev wrote a column for Meduza reflecting on what the ruling shows about the state of Russian society.

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