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Meduza’s latest daily newsletter: Tuesday, August 13, 2024 Panicking conscripts’ parents petition Putin, Lithuania welcomes Kaliningrad’s ‘demilitarization’ in apparent troop redeployment, Nemtsov’s killer gets cushy Mariupol assignment

Source: Meduza

The Kursk incursion

  • 🇱🇹 The ‘demilitarization’ of Kaliningrad: In a meeting with President Zelensky in Kyiv on Tuesday, Lithuanian Defense Minister Laurynas Kasciunas said that Moscow is redeploying troops from Kaliningrad to the Kursk region, effectively “demilitarizing” the Russian exclave. “It’s happening thanks to the bravery of your soldiers, thanks to your decisions,” Kasciunas told Zelensky. Also on Tuesday, Ukrainian army spokesman Dmytro Lykhoviy told POLITICO that Russia has relocated a “relatively small” number of units from the occupied regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. 
  • 💥 Moscow reports skirmish 18 miles from Ukrainian border: Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a Telegram post on Tuesday that its troops repelled Ukraine’s incursion force in the Kursk region’s Korenevsky district, almost 30 kilometers (more than 18 miles) from the Ukrainian border. On Monday, Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi claimed that the UAF controls 1,000 square kilometers (about 385 square miles) of Russian territory, though Meduza estimated two days earlier that Ukraine had occupied only about a third of this land in the Kursk region.
  • 💰 Gas finds a way: Neither Russia nor Ukraine intends to halt flows via the Sudzha gas-intake station in Russia’s Kursk region, “even as fighting continues near a key cross-border transit point for the fuel,” people “with knowledge of the matter” told Bloomberg. Both sides have strong financial incentives to keep the gas flowing: transit fees for Ukraine and pipeline gas sales for Russia, mostly to Austria, Slovakia, and Moldova, which have not found alternatives to Gazprom.
  • 🐈 No housepet left behind: How volatile and chaotic are things in the Belgorod region, Russia’s other border area under Ukrainian assault? On Monday, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov mostly evacuated the Krasnoyaruzhsky district (which shares a boundary with the Kursk region), but a day later he said the situation there is “normalizing” and that he hopes its 11,000 refugees can soon return home. The governor made this optimistic pronouncement when asked about abandoned house pets.
  • 🇺🇸 POTUS has entered the chat: In his first public comments on Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region, U.S. President Joe Biden called the surprise offensive “a real dilemma” for Vladimir Putin. “We've been in direct contact, constant contact, with the Ukrainians. That's all I'm going to say about it while it's active,” Biden told reporters in New Orleans on Tuesday.
  • 🪖 The Akhmat Not-So-Special Forces: Journalists at Agentstvo Media verified that seized documents released by the Ukrainian military indicate that its 225th Separate Assault Battalion did, in fact, engage and defeat Chechnya’s Akhmat Special Forces in battle. Akhmat commander Apti Alaudinov previously claimed that Ukrainian troops bypassed his fighters’ strongholds at the border. Agentstvo confirmed that at least two of the four Akhmat fighters identified in the documents shared by the Ukrainian military are with Chechnya’s special forces.

🪖 Send in the conscripts

Parents in the Murmansk region have started circulating panicked messages and at least one formal petition to President Putin after being informed of plans to deploy their recently conscripted sons to the Kursk region, where Ukrainian incursion forces have been advancing into Russia for more than a week. Unlike the men swept up in Russia’s “partial mobilization,” Russian conscripts are younger men whom Putin previously promised not to send into combat. The conscripts in Murmansk completed their initial military training only earlier this month, taking their service oaths in the 80th Motorized Rifle Division on August 3. 

In their letter to Putin, parents complain that their sons haven’t served the minimum four months or received the required training to be deployed in a combat zone. Human rights workers told the outlet Agentstvo Media that preparations are also being made in other regions to deploy new conscripts to Kursk.

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The war in Ukraine

  • ⚖️ Streamlining the criminal-justice recruitment pipeline: Russia’s Supreme Court has drafted legislation that would extend exoneration perks to defendants in ongoing felony cases that are already offered to convicts and suspects who enlist with the military to fight in the invasion of Ukraine. Under the proposed reforms, the justice system would suspend ongoing trials while defendants are enlisted and dismiss them entirely upon receipt of a medal, discharge for medical reasons, reaching the military’s maximum age for combat, or the end of the “special military operation.” According to a law adopted in March 2024, this deal is not available to persons convicted or suspected of crimes related to extremism, terrorism, or threats against Russia’s constitutional order and national security. 
  • 🪖 Cancel your vacation to Sumy, please: Ukraine’s Joint Chiefs of Staff has restricted access to the Sumy region to officially registered residents, citing “increasingly intense combat operations” and “the activation of enemy sabotage and reconnaissance groups.” The region borders Russia’s Kursk region, where a Ukrainian incursion force launched a new offensive a week ago. Kursk regional officials have evacuated civilians from multiple districts in the path of Ukrainian troops.
  • 🪖 Falling recruitment reportedly raises odds of new mobilization: Three people “close to the Kremlin and the Russian Defense Ministry” told Bloomberg that regional officials are fulfilling only two-thirds of their military recruitment quotas, making another round of mobilization possible “as soon as the end of this year,” which the authorities might present “as a rotation measure to rest frontline troops.”

⚖️ A group of Russian commanders are secretly on trial for imprisoning, torturing, and killing their own soldiers, new investigation finds (8-min read)

​​The Russian authorities have launched a classified criminal case against a major general from the army’s 6th Motorized Rifle Division and his subordinate officers for allegedly imprisoning, torturing, and murdering soldiers in their unit. The case was first reported by journalists from the Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne who say they obtained information about it from a source in the Russian Investigative Committee.

🩴 One of Nemtsov’s killers is now freed from prison and living comfortably in occupied Mariupol

Journalists at Novaya Gazeta Europe report that Temirlan Eskerkhanov — one of the five men from Chechnya convicted of organizing opposition leader Boris Nemtsov’s assassination in February 2015 — has been stationed comfortably and safely in the occupied city of Mariupol. On August 9, Russia’s state media revealed Eskerkhanov’s release from prison and pardon for enlisting with the Russian military. He reportedly went free in March 2024, supposedly to join dangerous combat operations with an assault unit in the Donbas. 

The Defense Ministry reportedly changed policies earlier this year and began enlisting Chechen prisoners, whom they’d previously avoided freeing from prison to fight in Ukraine. Unlike Eskerkhanov, many released Chechen prisoners quickly die in battle. Sources told Novaya Gazeta that these soldiers’ relatives are pressured to sign documents falsifying their cause of death, which denies their families veterans’ benefits and subsidized military burials.

Novaya Gazeta reports that Eskerkhanov left prison and was immediately assigned to serve under Vakha “Ranger” Geremeyev, an adviser to Ramzan Kadyrov and the brother of Federation Council Senator Suleiman Geremeyev. “Ranger” and his men allegedly control Mariupol’s illegal scrap metal business, looting the factories destroyed and abandoned in Russia’s capture of the city. Eskerkhanov regularly travels back and forth to his hometown in Chechnya where he’s “greeted like a hero.” According to Novaya Gazeta, the Kadyrov regime is now lobbying to secure a similar release for Zaur Dadaev, the gunman who actually shot and killed Nemtsov.

Russian politics and policymaking

  • 👮 Respect their authority, or else: As part of the Internal Affairs Ministry’s new anti-extremism strategy, the agency has reportedly drafted legislation that would introduce fines and even public service suspensions for regional officials who fail to comply with decisions issued by Russia’s Federal Anti-Extremism Interagency Commission (which the Internal Affairs Ministry leads). In late July, journalists learned that the agency’s new strategy would feature quicker turnaround times for updating its “list of extremist materials” and official definitions of concepts like xenophobia, Russophobia, extremist activities, financing of extremist activities, and terrorism.
  • 🔱 Yes, you can sail the seven seas: “Russia has trained its navy to target sites deep inside Europe with nuclear-capable missiles in a potential conflict with NATO,” The Financial Times reported, citing a cache of 29 secret Russian military files obtained through “Western sources.” The records, drawn up between 2008 and 2014, highlight the advantages of using nuclear strikes “at an early stage,” approach tactical nuclear weapons “as potentially war-winning weapons,” and theorize the use of so-called “demonstration strikes.”

📺 As the Kremlin cracks down on YouTube, Russians cancel Internet contracts and organize protests (5-min read)

In early August, YouTube playback speeds in Russia began plummeting to near-unusable levels. While the Russian authorities have publicly blamed Google’s supposedly aging infrastructure, independent experts have confirmed that the federal censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, is behind the nationwide throttling. And privately, Russian officials have notified the country’s major telecom operators that YouTube playback speeds are being capped at 128 kbps on many Internet connections. Russians haven’t taken calmly to this. Many are blaming their Internet providers and canceling contracts, while others are organizing protests. Perhaps most surprisingly, even some Russian officials have voiced their dissatisfaction, and one political party has launched a petition urging the authorities to reverse course. Meduza explains the fallout from the first weeks of the Kremlin’s YouTube crackdown.

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