The Real Russia. Today. Friday, July 12, 2024

The war in Ukraine

• 🇩🇪 The plot against Rheinmetall’s CEO: “We will not allow ourselves to be intimidated by Russia and will continue to do everything we can to prevent Russian threats in Germany," German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on Friday, commenting on reports that German security services thwarted a Russian plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, the head of Europe’s biggest weapons producer, after being informed by U.S. intelligence.
• 🪖 Desperate to desert: Russian soldier reportedly opens fire on unit mates near Ukrainian border, killing at least two
• 🧯 Insulting or life-saving, you decide: Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, squabbled publicly with a local woman who complained that the government’s offer of fire extinguishers to residents living in towns bordering Ukraine is “insulting.” Gladkov assured the woman that it was locals who requested the fire extinguishers because emergency workers can’t reach areas under Ukrainian attack.

🪖 As Russia pushes on multiple fronts, cracks are appearing in Ukraine’s defenses (6-min read)

Russian troops have stormed settlements on the outskirts of Toretsk, north of Donetsk, creating a new crisis for the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU). The Ukrainian command is scrambling to find reserves to close the defense gaps, redeploying units of the 95th Air Assault Brigade from the Kupyansk front to the Toretsk area. The Ukrainian army is also facing a crisis on the Kupyansk front, where Russian forces are advancing toward the Oskil River. This river is crucial for supplying AFU forces positioned on a large bridgehead on the borders of Ukraine’s Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions, and now this supply line is at risk. Additionally, Russian troops are continuing their offensive north of Toretsk, around Chasiv Yar, and to the west, on the Avdiivka front.

These developments suggest difficult months ahead for the Ukrainian army; currently, the AFU lack sufficient forces to halt the Russian attacks. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian command is continuing to move reserves to Kharkiv and Vovchansk with the ultimate, though distant, goal of pushing the Russian army back across the region’s border with Russia, thereby freeing up forces for other fronts.

🌊 A new scare over dam attacks and flooding in Ukraine

Russia’s Foreign Ministry has accused the Ukrainian authorities of plotting to destroy dams at the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Plant and Kaniv Reservoir in order to blame Moscow for new war crimes. In a statement on Friday, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed that research published by the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute about possible flooding scenarios resulting from the dams’ destruction reveals Ukraine’s intentions. (Zakharova also said that the same institute published a similar report before the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant’s dam, though the only such research wasn’t released until three days after the dam was destroyed.) National defense officials in Kyiv say Moscow is trying to spread fear among Ukrainians (apparently to fuel calls for capitualation), but Kyiv officials simultaneously stress that Russia lacks the conventional weaponry needed to take out the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Plant and Kaniv Reservoir dams.

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Catch the latest disptach → Dispatch from Odesskoye: In remote Siberia, one family opposes a war their Ukrainian neighbors support (16-min read)

Russian domestic affairs

• ⛓️ More fallout from last month’s Rostov prison uprising: Human rights activists warn that Russian prison officials might be torturing inmate Magomed Alkhanov into a false confession that he had advance knowledge of a prisoner uprising by his cellmates that occurred in June 2024. Alkhanov and at least two other inmates at the same pretrial detention center in Rostov have been transferred (apparently without a court ruling) to another facility in Taganrog. On June 16, six prisoners armed with knives and shivs and brandishing an Islamic State flag took two guards hostage and demanded to be released. The guards were eventually freed and all but one of the hostage-takers were killed. The incident led to the resignations of two local senior officials and disciplinary measures for more than a dozen prison staff.
• ⚕️ Parents of sick boy win long-fought campaign for costly medicine: After more than two years of desperate campaigning and crowdfunding, the parents of a four-year-old boy in the Yekaterinburg area secured publicly supplied risdiplam to treat his spinal muscular atrophy. Misha Bakhtin first developed symptoms within weeks of being born and has been treated with a variety of medications ever since. For the past year, Misha’s father and then his mother have picketed outside government offices, in Moscow’s Red Square, and in city centers to demand that their son receives risdiplam, which costs roughly 14 million rubles ($154,000) per year.

🗳️ To keep Russia’s protest-prone Khabarovsk region under control, the Kremlin takes a lesson from a former governor who got too popular (7-min read)

Three years ago, the Kremlin was facing a serious dilemma: Sergey Furgal, the popular governor of Russia’s protest-prone Khabarovsk region, had just been arrested, and he needed to be replaced by someone more “reliable.” The person they landed on, Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) member Mikhail Degtyarev, never became very popular with voters; in addition to lacking the populist appeal of his predecessor, he hailed from the faraway Volga region and filled his administration with “outsiders” like himself. In May 2024, Degtyarev was appointed Russia’s Sports Minister, and the Putin administration sent yet another “outsider” to take his place: Dmitry Demeshin, a member of the ruling United Russia party. 

This time, however, both the candidate and his Kremlin backers appear to have learned some lessons from the Furgal saga: though he’s still only acting governor, Demeshin regularly makes a show of scolding local officials, wears military-style clothing, and has tried to distance himself from United Russia. Ahead of the gubernatorial election in Khabarovsk, Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev explains how the Russian authorities plan to ensure the region stays under control.

🛜 Traffic speeds reveal that Russia’s YouTube slowdown is targeted throttling, not Google Global Cache ‘equipment failure’ (3-min read)

On July 12, Russian telecommunications officials warned that YouTube upload and download speeds are slowing nationwide, supposedly due to failures of the Google Global Cache equipment used to ensure fluid access to Google services in Russia. In an interview with Meduza, I.T. expert Mikhail Klimarev explained that the equipment Google left in Russia to operate its Global Cache is indeed aging, but more recent information measuring Russian Internet traffic speeds indicates that the authorities are throttling YouTube specifically. Additionally, a source in Russia’s telecommunications industry confirmed to Meduza that the government actually started slowing YouTube speeds on July 11, initially limiting its experiment to the ISPs Rostelecom and Tele2. (The news website Gazeta.ru later reported that two of its sources say the state authorities plan to block YouTube outright, beginning in September.) Here’s what we know about Russia’s covert YouTube crackdown.

🧑‍✈️ Superjet crashes outside Moscow, killing three, after repairs reportedly with import-substituted engine parts

A Sukhoi Superjet 100 crashed outside Moscow during a ferry flight on Friday, following recent overhaul repairs. All three crew members (the only people aboard the plane) died in the crash. The mayor of the town where the plane crashed shared a photo online of the crash site but later deleted the image. Sources told the state news agency RIA Novosti that the crash may have been caused by simultaneous dual-engine failure. The aircraft last flew with passengers on May 3 before being sent for repairs. State officials are reviewing potential air transport safety violations, and investigators searched the factory that recently conducted the plane’s maintenance (though officials say this is standard procedure with fatal crashes).

The crashed Sukhoi Superjet reportedly used French-Russian PowerJet SaM146 turbofan engines, for which France stopped supplying spare parts, technical support, and repairs in 2022, following the invasion of Ukraine. Two years before the invasion, Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation announced plans to develop an import-substituted version of the SSJ-100 with a Russian-made PD-8 engine, but the government announced in May 2024 that the new aircraft’s certification was being postponed until 2025. United Aircraft Corporation another of its SSJ-100s repaired with import-substituted systems completed its test flight and landed safely.

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