Meduza’s latest daily newsletter: Wednesday, August 14, 2024 Russian election officials authorize early voting in ‘border regions,’ WSJ report pins Nord Stream bombings on Valeriy Zaluzhniy, Mikhail Fridman challenges oligarch sanctions in court

The Kursk incursion

• 🪖 A promising if imprecise Pentagon assessment: U.S. officials have monitored Russia withdrawing “some of its military forces” from Ukraine to the Kursk region to respond to Kyiv’s surprise offensive there, reports The Wall Street Journal. Washington is “still seeking to determine the significance of Russia’s move and didn’t say how many troops the U.S. assesses Russia is shifting,” according to the newspaper. Analysts have argued that part of the Kursk incursion’s success depends on its ability to force Moscow to peel off troops from the Donbas, especially because Ukraine itself has diverted troops from the embattled region.
• 🪖 Counting and confirming Ukraine’s new Russian POWs: Studying missing-person reports shared on social media, journalists at iStories have confirmed the identities of at least 29 soldiers who disappeared in the first days of Ukraine’s Kursk offensive. Most or possibly all of the soldiers are conscripts — not to be confused with more experienced, generally older contract or mobilized soldiers. (On August 13, Volodymyr Zelensky reported that “hundreds of Russian soldiers” have surrendered to Ukrainian troops. A day later, Ukrainian military commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said his army had captured “more than 100” Russian combatants in just the past day. Meduza is not able to verify these claims.)
• 👋 Kursk officials pull civilians from another town: Officials in Russia’s Kursk region announced the evacuation of another settlement on Wednesday, ordering law enforcement to assist civilians in leaving the small town of Glushkovo. Meduza analysts have tracked Ukrainian incursion forces entering the town of Vnezapnoye, roughly 15 miles southeast of Glushkovo. Kursk officials have already announced the evacuations of five other districts in the region, all but one of which borders Ukraine.
• 🚧 The world needs ditch-diggers, too: BBC Russian Service journalists spotted more than 30 online job vacancies for “around-the-clock” work digging trenches and building fortifications in the Kursk region. Most of the job advertisements don’t specify the number of workers needed. One posting from an employer in Crimea states that the work will be safe and “outside the combat zone.” Russia’s armed forces have reportedly started building defensive lines near the Kursk nuclear power plant and digging trenches near the town of Lgov and outside the city of Kursk itself.
• 🪖 Shipping out the conscripts: Journalists at Radio Svoboda spoke to human rights activists and soldiers’ parents in Russia to decipher where in the country the military is drawing conscripts for planned deployments to the Kursk region. According to the report, the scale of these transfers is currently limited to a handful of places: Murmansk, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, Belgorod, Rostov, and Tyumen. The conscripts in Murmansk are scheduled to be transferred to Kursk, but not until September (suggesting that military planners don’t expect a quick resolution to Ukraine’s incursion). 
• 🕊️ An armed offensive even an anti-war committee can’t reject: The exiled opposition politicians and public figures that belong to the Anti-War Committee of Russia released a statement on Wednesday expressing the group’s support for Ukraine’s offensive in Russia’s Kursk region. “We view this step as Ukraine exercising its right to self-defense and taking retaliatory actions in response to the ongoing large-scale invasion by Putin’s forces into a sovereign state,” the committee said, adding that its members regret that Russian civilians have been harmed in the offensive. (The group called on Ukrainian soldiers to observe the Geneva Convention and “make every effort to minimize harm to noncombatants.” 

🧠 Rumor has it Putin tasked his ex-bodyguard with ending Ukraine’s cross-border offensive. Is Alexey Dyumin really Russia’s ‘shadow defense minister’? (4-min read)

In a televised meeting with his security team on Monday, Vladimir Putin called for Ukraine’s forces to be “driven out” of Russia’s Kursk region, where Kyiv’s cross-border offensive is now in its second week. Almost immediately, Russian pro-war Telegram channels began reporting that the task of pushing Ukraine’s troops back over the border had been assigned to presidential aide Alexey Dyumin, who’s been in his post for just three months. Would the Russian president really put a civilian official in charge of such a high-profile military operation? And who is Dyumin anyway? Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev explains.

🪖 A week on, Moscow has yet to halt Kyiv’s unexpected incursion, but Russian pressure hasn’t let up on the front lines in Ukraine (5-min read)

Over the past week of fighting in the Kursk region, Russian troops have been unable to stop the Ukrainian advance. The Ukrainian brigades involved in the operation have captured the town of Sudzha, pushed west to the outskirts of Korenevo (a district center), advanced halfway to Lgov in the north, and launched a major raid eastward toward Belaya, another district center. The deepest incursion into Russian territory has reached at least 27 kilometers (about 17 miles) northward. Although the Ukrainian advance has slowed, the Russian military command will likely need to deploy additional reserves to the border if it wants to stabilize the situation quickly.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) have successfully brought support units, including artillery and drone operators, into the Kursk region, enabling them to sustain their offensive. Their primary objectives are to expand their foothold, secure supply lines, and prevent Russian formations from coordinating across different fronts or receiving reinforcements. Already, Russian forces are no longer able to strike the rear of the Ukrainian group in the Kursk region with FPV drones — a weapon widely used by Russian troops.

🕊️ Russian elites expected Ukraine’s incursion to end within days. Now they’re starting to panic. (5-min read)

According to Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine now controls roughly 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) of Russia’s Kursk region — almost as much territory as Russian forces have captured in Ukraine since the beginning of this year. More than 120,000 people have been evacuated from Russia’s border areas, while hundreds of civilians and dozens of Russian conscripts are missing. Journalists from the independent outlet Verstka set out to learn how Russia’s political elites are feeling about Ukraine’s ongoing cross-border offensive.

🪖 Captured Russian soldiers seen in Ukraine, not far from border, as Zelensky claims hundreds of POWs taken during incursion into Kursk region

Blindfolded Russian prisoners of war being transported in Ukraine’s Sumy region, near the Russian border, on August 13. Since August 6, Ukraine has been conducting an operation in Russia’s Kursk region. On the evening of August 13, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that “hundreds of Russian soldiers” had already surrendered and said Kyiv plans to exchange them for Ukrainian soldiers and civilians held by Russia. Zelensky added that all captured Russians “will be treated humanely.”

🧠 Residents of Russia’s Kursk region on fleeing Ukraine’s offensive, searching for missing relatives, and whether their views on the war have changed (9-min read)

In just the first week of its cross-border offensive in Russia’s Kursk region, the Ukrainian Armed Forces managed to push at least 27 kilometers (17 miles) into Russian territory. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Kyiv currently controls dozens of Russian settlements. The regional authorities have reported that about 120,000 civilians have been evacuated from the affected areas and that 180,000 people are subject to evacuation orders. The independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg spoke to two evacuees about what they’ve experienced over the last week.

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Russian domestic affairs

• 🚌 Bus bullies say bye-bye to bars, for now: The two men who attacked 87-year-old Dmitry Grinchy on a bus in Moscow last week have been released from jail on their own recognizance, likely under travel restrictions, pending trial for felony disorderly conduct, reports iStories. The assailants punched Grinchy, twisted his arms behind his back, and dragged him office a bus to a police officer, believing that he had insulted the memory of fallen Wagner Group mercenaries. Grinchy says he merely mentioned to the men that the NKVD executed his father and other close relatives in 1937. 
• 🗳️ Russia election officials open door to early voting ‘along Ukrainian border,’ forgetting 2022 annexations: Russian federal election officials have authorized early voting in all regions bordering Ukraine (Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk, Voronezh, and Rostov), Krasnodar Krai, and in Crimea and Sevastopol, which Moscow annexed in 2014. Voting can begin as soon as August 28, and not just at polling stations but also “at home” and in irregular areas where organizing polling stations isn’t possible. (The official announcement from Russia’s Central Election Commission describes the affected areas as “border regions,” which apparently forgets the Russian state’s annexation of four new Ukrainian regions in 2022 that technically removed Voronezh, Rostov, Krasnodar, and Crimea from Ukraine’s borders, as Moscow understands them.) On September 8, Russia will hold gubernatorial elections in 21 regions and local parliamentary elections in 13 regions.

As the world turns

• 🕵️ Accused deep-cover Russian ‘illegal’ had a Moscow apartment just a stone’s throw from GRU HQ: Journalists at the news outlet The Nightly obtained “internal Russian Government documents spanning two federal ministries” that show accused Russian spy Kira Koroleva, whom Australian officials arrested on July 11, was secretly employed by the high-tech corporation RusBITech, which works as a contractor for the Federal Security Service, the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control, the Defense Ministry, and the Foreign Intelligence Service. Employed as an Australian Army information systems technician, Koroleva had top-secret security clearance and allegedly obtained Australian Defense Force material to share with Russian authorities.
• 🇺🇸 Another American behind Russian bars, though only for two weeks, if he’s lucky: A Moscow court jailed a U.S. citizen named Joseph Tater for 15 for disorderly conduct after he acted aggressively with hotel staff and then resisted arrest. Videos released on Telegram show Tater in a jail cell swearing in English at the cameraman and arguing in Russian with police officers.
• ⚖️ Mr. Fridman will see your butt in court: Russian billionaire and Alfa Group cofounder Mikhail Fridman has filed a lawsuit against the state of Luxembourg in the Hong Kong International Arbitration Center to challenge the freezing of his assets in various countries that he owns through Luxembourg-based holding companies. Fridman seeks $16 billion in compensation for what his lawyers say is an illegal expropriation carried out to enforce E.U. sanctions. Fridman’s lawsuit is based on a treaty signed in 1989 between Belgium, Luxembourg, and the USSR (and Russia as the Soviet Union’s successor) that requires compensation payments when seizing investors’ assets “for the public interest.” Other Russian billionaires have tried to use the courts to fight for their foreign assets, but Fridman’s case could become the first litigation to challenge the fundamental legality of European sanctions against Russian oligarchs.
• 👾 Say hello to ‘COLDWASTREL’: Researchers have uncovered “at least two separate spear-phishing campaigns” targeting Russian and Belarusian nonprofit organizations, Russian independent media, international NGOs active in Eastern Europe, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer. The cyberattacks relied on “carefully tailored information that aligns with a target’s personal and professional experiences and activities.” The revelations come from a collaboration between Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline, the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, and three NGOs. Read Access Now’s summary here and their full report here.

Correction: An earlier version of this text misidentified Steven Pifer as a former ambassador to Russia (and misspelled his name). Meduza apologizes for the mistakes.

💥 WSJ reports ‘the real story of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage.’ (Ukraine did it, says the newspaper.)

An investigation published by The Wall Street Journal reveals how “a drunken evening” between senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen led to Kyiv’s special operation to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines in late September 2022. Correspondent Bojan Pancevski writes that Zelensky initially approved the plan but tried to call it off after the CIA asked him to “pull the plug.” “Zelensky’s commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who was leading the effort, nonetheless forged ahead,” reports the WSJ, noting that Zaluzhniy (who now serves as Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.K.) calls these allegations “a mere provocation.” However, “four senior Ukrainian defense and security officials who either participated in or had direct knowledge of the plot” told Pancevski that the pipelines were “a legitimate target in Ukraine’s war of defense against Russia.”

Pancevski’s report describes in detail how Ukraine’s sabotage team carried out the bombings using a small sailing boat and a team of six operatives.

The Nord Stream bombings caused the largest-ever recorded release of natural gas (equivalent to Denmark’s annual CO2 emissions). A senior German official familiar with the probe told the WSJ that the attack was serious enough to qualify as “a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO” were it not for Germany’s special relationship with Ukraine. The Ukrainian military officers who directly commanded the pipeline bombings told the WSJ that they view the operation as a success for loosening Russia’s grip on Europe’s energy supply and forcing Russia to keep sending gas through Ukraine (accruing transit fees to Ukraine). 

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