Meduza’s latest daily newsletter: Wednesday, August 7, 2024 Telegram channel blogger and former DNR commander is imprisoned, Russia bans and confiscates Simon Shuster’s Zelensky book, ‘foreign agency’ shutters another charity

The incursion into Russia’s Kursk region

• 🏥 Z-correspondent’s obits are greatly exaggerated, for now: Pro-invasion blogger Yevgeny Poddubny was hospitalized on Wednesday after being seriously injured in a Ukrainian drone attack in Russia’s Kursk region. Despite early reports that Poddubny was killed, Russia’s state news media and acting Kursk Governor Alexey Smirnov later revealed that he is alive and has regained consciousness. However, the news agency TASS later reported that Poddubny remains in critical condition.
• 🕯️ Pregnant woman among civilians killed in Kursk region: At least five people have died in Ukraine’s attack on Russia’s Kursk region, including a 24-year-old pregnant woman named Nina Kuznetsova. Friends told the news outlet 7x7 that Kuznetsova, her husband, and their two-year-old son reportedly came under automatic gunfire when trying to flee the town of Sudzha in their car. 7x7 journalists could not verify the details of Kuznetsova’s death.

💥 Fighting continues in Russia’s Kursk region as Ukrainian troops reportedly advance further into Russian territory (6-min read)

On August 6, pro-war Russian Telegram channels reported that a Ukrainian formation had crossed the border and advanced into Russia’s Kursk region. Later that day, Russia’s Defense Ministry and Federal Security Service (FSB) both separately confirmed the incursion. According to pro-war channels, the fighting is ongoing and Ukrainian troops continue to advance toward the town of Sudzha. Here’s what we know so far.

🪖 How deep into Russian territory has Ukraine’s surprise August incursion reached? (3-min read)

On August 6, 2024, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) entered Russian territory near the city of Sudzha in the Kursk region. The scale of the Ukrainian operation remains unclear, but Meduza reviews what is known about how far the Ukrainian military has advanced. Several battalions of the AFU’s 22nd Mechanized Brigade, reinforced with special forces and air defense systems (and possibly battalions from other regular brigades), crossed the Russian border into the Kursk region on the night of August 6. By evening the next day, these troops had deeply penetrated Russian defenses, facing very weak forces. 

Meduza summarizes the AFU’s seven biggest achievements in the Kursk region by the evening of August 7.

💥 Russian woman recounts fleeing the border region where Ukrainian forces are reportedly advancing (4-min read)

On Wednesday, Russian pro-war Telegram channels reported that Ukrainian forces had taken control of multiple settlements in Russia’s Kursk region and were advancing towards the town of Sudzha, a district center. Early afternoon local time, the channel Rybar reported that Ukrainian troops had captured the Sudzha gas metering station, a key transit point for natural gas flowing from Russia to Europe. The Ukrainian authorities have not yet commented on the reports. Journalists from the independent outlet Verstka spoke to a woman from Sudzha who evacuated from the town on Tuesday with her family amid heavy shelling. In English, Meduza shares her account of the family’s escape.

🇺🇸 U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller comments on the Kursk incursion

What is Washington’s position on the operation?

“We are in communication with the Ukrainians about this particular operation. [...] I will leave it to them to speak to what kind of operations they’re conducting and what their goals are. It’s appropriate that they speak to that publicly, not us. [...] Ultimately, the decisions about how Ukraine conducts its military operations are decisions that Ukraine makes.”

Can the Ukrainian military use U.S.-supplied weapons in Russia’s Kursk region?

“Nothing has changed about our policy with respect to strikes across the border. [...] With respect to allowing the equipment that we provide to be used in strikes across the border, to target Russian military sites across the border, nothing about that policy has changed. [...] With the actions they are taking today, they are not in violation of our policy.”

⚛️ Questionable defenses at the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant

Russia’s National Guard announced on Wednesday that it’s taken “additional measures” in collaboration with the Defense Ministry and FSB Border Guard Service to protect the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant amid a surprise incursion by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. (The agency did not specify what these measures are.) Kursk’s regional government also says it’s allocated additional forces to the National Guard in the area. The nuclear plant in Kursk is located roughly 70 kilometers (about 45 miles) from the Ukrainian border. Ukrainian troops have reportedly penetrated some 15 kilometers (approximately 9 miles) into Russian territory, but some observers have speculated that the contingent could turn toward the power plant.

An employee at the Kursk NPP told the news outlet iStories that the plant’s management “has no plan in case of attack”—not even bomb shelters for the staff. He also said the plant’s security force is entirely made up of women “because they gathered up all the men and sent them over there [to Ukraine].”

🪖 Doubts about Operation Kursk

Military analysts Pasi Paroinen and Rob Lee have questioned the wisdom of Ukraine’s ground incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Paroinen, an analyst with the Black Bird Group, a Finland-based open-source community that assesses satellite imagery and social media content from the battlefield, told The New York Times that “this seems like a gross waste of men and resources badly needed elsewhere,” adding that, “operationally and strategically, this attack makes absolutely zero sense.” Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, wrote on social media that past cross-border attacks carried out by anti-Kremlin Russian fighters aligned with Ukraine “had little effect on the fighting” in Ukraine and “did not have serious domestic political ramifications for Putin.”

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Russian domestic policy and politics

• 📚 Russia bans, confiscates Simon Shuster’s Zelensky book: Customs officers at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport reported on Wednesday that they intercepted a single copy of journalist Simon Shuster’s recent book, The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky. The Russian authorities have banned the book for supposedly threatening the country’s “national security, political or economic interests, and public morals.” The man responsible for ordering The Showman from a vendor in Poland told officials that he “collects historical literature” and intended it for personal use. He now faces a fine as high as 2,500 rubles ($30).
• 👋 Russian charity closes shop following ‘foreign agent’ designation: The “Help Needed” charitable foundation, which emerged in 2013 from a grassroots campaign by photojournalist Mitya Aleshkovsky, announced on Wednesday that it will cease all operations by the end of the month. In a statement shared with journalists, Help Needed explained that fellow charities and corporate partners have cut ties, following the Justice Ministry’s decision to designate the organization as a “foreign agent” on March 1. Calling its new status in Russia “a huge mistake,” Help Needed said it is no longer able to support its “hundreds of projects in various regions” across Russia and now finds itself in a situation “where there are no correct choices or clear rules of the game.”

🏳️‍🌈 In his own words, one gay Russian official describes working for a government that doesn’t believe he should exist (9-min read)

It’s no secret that homophobia has become official state policy in Russia. Last November, the country’s Supreme Court banned the nonexistent “international LGBT movement” as an “extremist organization.” Police conduct raids on LGBTQ+ clubs and same-sex couples face jail time for kissing or holding hands in public. Of course, countless queer people have no choice but to live in this new reality, and some of them even hold official positions. The independent media outlet Holod spoke with a gay man who has worked in government for over six years to understand why he continues to collaborate with a state that believes he shouldn’t exist.

🔍 Ukrainian POW who died in Russian prison killed by blunt force chest injury, autopsy finds (2-min read)

Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr Ishchenko, who was taken captive by Russian forces while defending Mariupol in the spring of 2022, died from a closed chest injury caused by “contact with a blunt object,” according to a Ukrainian forensic report published on Wednesday. Ishchenko’s death was first reported on July 31 at a hearing in the Russian authorities’ case against him. Here’s what we know about his death.

⚖️ Moscow court imprisons Telegram channel creator and former Donetsk separatist commander

A Moscow court sentenced Andrey Kurshin, the creator of the Telegram channel Moscow Calling, to 6.5 years in prison for disseminating allegedly false information about the Russian military. (At the time of Kurshin’s arrest, his Telegram channel had almost 90,000 subscribers.) After he goes free, he will also be prohibited from administering online resources for an additional four years. Kurshin was prosecuted for two posts in late 2022 about Russian attacks on a dam in Kryvyi Rih and a maternity ward in the Zaporizhzhia region.

Kurshin fought with Russian proxy forces in the Donbas in 2014 and 2015, rising to the rank of divisional commander and earning the rank of lieutenant in the self-proclaimed DNR, but he later adopted a more moderate position on the war, criticizing the invasion and both Moscow and Kyiv. During Kurshin’s trial, it emerged that he had worked in rocket engineering since 2009, including as a chief engineer at a Russian defense enterprise. For his apparent lack of loyalty to the Russian Armed Forces, Kurshin fell out of favor with prominent Z-bloggers, several of whom have boasted about filing formal complaints against his Telegram channel and assisting in the prosecution that’s now led to his prison sentence. 

As the world turns

• 🚨 Inigo Montoya can’t save you from this: On Wednesday, the FBI and state police raided the upstate New York home of former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who’s become an outspoken supporter of Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. According to the local newspaper Times Union, Ritter said the investigators were there to execute a search warrant “related to concerns apparently the U.S. government has about violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.” Officers removed more than two dozen boxes from his house. In June, the U.S. State Department seized Ritter’s passport as he attempted to fly to Russia for a conference.
• 🇵🇱 Former Russian opposition activist jailed in Poland is charged with felony public endangerment: Polish officials are charging Russian national Igor Rogov (a former coordinator of the Open Russia opposition movement who faced police brutality in Minsk) with two counts of endangering public safety by “creating the danger of an explosion or dissemination of poisonous substances.” Police arrested Rogov in late July in Sosnowiec, while he was studying as a graduate student at the University of Silesia. The specifics of the case are not yet known.

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