Meduza’s latest daily newsletter: Tuesday, August 6, 2024 Ukrainian Telegram channels post POW interrogation videos, journalists counting Russian war deaths say they can’t keep up, and two West African countries cut ties with Kyiv

The war in Ukraine

• 🪖 Too many dead soldiers to count: Journalists from Mediazona and BBC News Russia have confirmed the deaths of 61,831 Russian soldiers in Ukraine by name, including over 2,000 confirmed in the last two weeks. In a Telegram post, Mediazona said it currently has a backlog of soldiers’ deaths to confirm: “The number of obituaries is rising so quickly that [we] can’t keep up.” (The journalists’ count only includes soldiers whose deaths can be verified from sources like obituaries and funeral announcements, so the real number of Russian soldiers killed is much higher. Last month, Meduza and Mediazona estimated it at 120,000.)
• ✉️ North Ossetian organizations demand authorities reveal casualty numbers: More than 10 NGOs in Russia's North Ossetia have released an open letter calling on their governor, Sergey Menyailo, to disclose the number of soldiers from the republic who have been killed in the full-scale war in Ukraine. Additionally, they demanded that he declare a week of mourning for the war dead and ask Putin to ban the drafting of indigenous Ossetians. Mediazona and BBC News Russian have confirmed the deaths of over 530 soldiers from North Ossetia (but the total number is likely significantly higher).

⚰️ POW lists published by Ukraine include dozens of Russian soldiers Moscow declared dead or missing (5-min read)

Many of the Russian soldiers whose names appeared on POW lists published by Ukraine in March 2024 had previously been declared dead by the Russian military and “buried” by their families, according to new reporting from iStories. Relatives of several soldiers included on the lists told journalists that the Russian Defense Ministry sent them sealed coffins it claimed contained the soldiers’ remains but failed to provide the results of DNA tests. Meduza shares key findings.

🪖 Moscow says fighting ongoing as troops repel Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region (4.5-min read)

On Tuesday morning, Russian pro-war social media groups and Telegram channels from Russia’s Kursk region began reporting that clashes had broken out in several areas along the Russian-Ukrainian border. At around 5:00 p.m. Moscow time, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported that up to 300 AFU servicemen, supported by 11 tanks and more than 20 armored combat vehicles, had attacked Russian border guard positions in the morning. The ministry said Russian forces continued to repel the attacks and had already destroyed 16 Ukrainian armored vehicles. Later, it reported that the Ukrainian detachment attempting to break through into the Kursk region had retreated after suffering losses, but it edited the message to remove the words about the retreat soon after.

• 🪖 Ukrainian Telegram channels post POW interrogation videos: Ukrainian Telegram channels posted videos that appear to show the interrogations of three Russian soldiers who were captured during Ukraine’s apparent cross-border raid on Tuesday. Two of the men in the clips identify themselves as conscripts from Russia’s 488th Regiment (journalists later confirmed their identities). The men say a sergeant was captured along with them. A third man introduces himself as a member of Russia’s 17th Border Protection Battalion. The soldiers say that they were sent to border positions to “prevent a breach” but that when they came under attack, their commanders ignored their requests for four days and “abandoned” them. All three men say they were captured by Ukrainian troops “while crossing the border.” The total number of Russian soldiers captured during the incursion is unclear, but a video posted by the Ukrainian Telegram channel Crimean Wind shows at least six prisoners being marched down a road in a line. The Ukrainian authorities have not commented on the video or on Tuesday’s clashes as of this writing.

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🇵🇱 Catch the latest edition → ‘Everything is better’: Why a growing number of migrant workers from Uzbekistan are choosing Poland over Russia (15-min read)

Nearly a year has passed since The Beet first reported on Russia’s not-so-covert effort to enlist Central Asian migrants to fight in Ukraine. Since then, the situation for migrant workers in Russia has only grown more precarious, especially in the aftermath of the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack in March. After arresting four Tajik citizens as the prime suspects, the Russian authorities launched a renewed clampdown on migrants, deporting nearly 40,000 foreign nationals for allegedly breaking migration laws so far this year. State Duma lawmakers, meanwhile, have adopted legislation that tightens controls over migrants inside Russia, facilitates deportations, and strips away the citizenship of naturalized Russian citizens who fail to register for military service. With the Russian market also losing its economic appeal, some Central Asian workers have started to look for opportunities elsewhere. For The Beet, journalist Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska reports on why a growing number of migrant workers from Uzbekistan are choosing Poland.

Russian domestic affairs

• 🤐 A terrorism-first for Vladimir Putin: The double attacks in Dagestan in late June that claimed 27 lives are the first major acts of terrorism during Putin’s presidency about which he hasn’t said a word publicly, reports Agentstvo Media. On June 23, terrorists simultaneously attacked synagogues and Orthodox churches in Makhachkala and Derbent, shot at traffic police officers, and exchanged fire with special forces for several hours. The violence killed 17 police officers, five civilians (including an orthodox priest), and five militants. The day afterward, the Kremlin’s spokesman indirectly conveyed the president’s condolences over both the Dagestan attacks and a downed missile in Crimea that killed four and injured scores on a beach in Sevastopol. 

🛜 Russian authorities inform local Internet service providers that most YouTube access is now capped at a piddling 128 kbps (2-min read)

The Russian authorities have notified the country’s major telecom operators that YouTube playback speeds on many Internet connections are being throttled to 128 kbps — fast enough for normal audio listening but insufficient for streaming videos at resolutions above 240p (which is 12 times below high definition). This information was reported to Meduza by a source in Russia’s telecommunications market. In July, this same source was among the first to reveal that YouTube’s slowdown in Russia is the deliberate work of the federal censor and not, as the authorities claim, the result of aging Google Global Cache equipment. Independent experts have since verified that Roskomnadzor, not Google, is responsible for YouTube’s significant loading delays in Russia. Meduza explains how far Russia’s crackdown on YouTube has gone.

🙇 How reverence for Stalin stopped being a fringe view among Russian politicians (20-min read)

Russian politicians are increasingly speaking about Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin not as a tyrant or orchestrator of mass repressions but as a charismatic leader and a strong statesman. Officials hang his portraits on the walls, the country has over 100 monuments to him, and the Communists of Russia party has opened a “Stalin Center” (and is planning more throughout the country). The independent outlet Novaya Vkladka recently took a closer look at the trend of growing admiration for Stalin in Russia and how the authorities have encouraged it since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Meduza shares an abridged translation of their report.

🎞️ See the trailer for a new documentary about Soviet sexologist Igor Kon — and support Meduza to watch the film early

“Why I Swam Upstream” is a new documentary from the Berlin-based film studio Narra and the independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg about the Soviet and Russian sociologist, psychologist, and philosopher Igor Kon. In the mid-1980s, Kon became widely known to the Soviet public as the country’s first (and, for many years, only) sexologist, making frequent media appearances in which he spoke openly about one of the most taboo topics in Soviet society. In the Putin era, when conservatism and “traditional values” became Russia’s official ideology, Kon became a de facto enemy of both the state and the Russian Orthodox Church. As Igor Sadreev shows in his film, he fought for the ideas of individual liberty, equality, and tolerance right up until his death in 2011.

With permission from the Bereg cooperative and Narra film studio, Meduza has released “Why I Swam Upstream” online. It’s currently available to those who have donated to support our work. You can get early access by supporting our YouTube channel here (Click “Join”).

As the world turns

• 🇮🇷 Cool your jets, Tehran: Putin has asked Iranian Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for a “restrained response to Israel's suspected killing of the leader of Hamas, advising against attacks on Israeli civilians,” two senior Iranian sources told Reuters. Former Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, recently appointed as the Russian National Security Council’s secretary, reportedly delivered the message in meetings on Monday with top Iranian officials.
• 🇳🇪 Two West African countries cut diplomatic ties with Ukraine: Two days after Mali broke diplomatic ties with Ukraine over its suspected involvement in an ambush by Tuareg rebels against Russian Wagner Group fighters and Malian troops last week, Niger has announced it is doing the same. On July 29, after heavy fighting between Tuareg militants and Malian pro-government forces reportedly left dozens of Russian mercenaries dead, Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov said that the rebels had “received the information, among other things, that was necessary to carry out a successful military operation against the Russian war criminals.” A high-ranking Malian official later accused Yusov of “admitting Ukraine's involvement in a cowardly, treacherous and barbaric attack” that led to the deaths of Malian soldiers.

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