Meduza’s latest daily newsletter: Thursday, August 15, 2024 Kursk officials deny hiring spree for trench-diggers, FBI raids Virginia country home of analyst Dimitri Simes, Ukraine establishes commandant's office in newly occupied Russian territory

The Kursk incursion

• 👷 Kursk has its own ditch-diggers, thank you very much: A press officer for the Kursk governor’s office said on Thursday that dozens of trench-digging vacancies listed on the classifieds platform Avito are fake. The region already has enough construction workers, she explained, and the government hires through different channels. The spokeswoman declined to comment when asked about the regional government’s Telegram channel reposting a message from a channel called War With Fakes claiming that the job listings are the work of Ukrainian military psyops. Avito spokespeople told the news outlet RBC that the website is now hiding the vacancies in question until it can confirm that the construction companies that posted them are advertising real jobs.
• 🪖 Meet your new police force, Kurskians: Ukrainian military commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi revealed on Thursday that Kyiv’s incursion force in the Kursk region has established a commandant's office under the supervision of Major General Eduard Moskaliov “to ensure law and order and address all the local population’s needs.” Syrskyi reported to President Zelensky that Ukrainian troops have penetrated 35 kilometers (22 miles) into Russian territory and now control 82 settlements across 1,150 square kilometers (444 square miles), though Meduza’s analysis desk estimates that the incursion force has actually seized 45–50 settlements and occupied no more than 700 square kilometers (270 square miles). Reports from the Russian Defense Ministry on Thursday indicate that the Ukrainian army advanced another two kilometers (about 1.2 miles) over the previous 24 hours.
• 🪖 Confirmed death of Russian conscript in Kursk: A hometown gym has confirmed that 22-year-old Artem Dobrodumsky was killed in combat with Ukraine’s incursion force in the Kursk region. Dobrodumsky, who grew up outside Rostov, is one of the first Russian conscripts known to have died in Ukraine’s surprise offensive. An officer at Dobrodumsky’s former cadet corp school told reporters that he learned of Dobrodumsky’s death on August 14.

💥 A Sudzha resident on how the Russian authorities stood by silently as civilians fled the Ukrainian advance (10-min read)

Over the past week, the Ukrainian army has captured dozens of settlements in Russia’s Kursk region, including the city of Sudzha. While regional authorities claim that thousands of civilians were evacuated, many locals say they were left to fend for themselves, with no information or assistance from officials. The independent media outlet Holod spoke with a Sudzha resident who escaped the city with her children about what it was like to flee under fire and whom she holds responsible for the situation. 

🥅 Top Zelensky advisor Mykhailo Podolyak on the political goals of Ukraine’s ongoing incursion into the Kursk region (6-min read)

In the 10 days since Ukrainian forces began an unprecedented incursion into western Russia, officials in Kyiv have offered only restrained comments. Though there’s a lot of speculation about Ukraine’s aims, the ultimate goal of the ongoing offensive remains unclear. To find out more about how the Ukrainian army’s foray into Russia’s Kursk region could change the tide of the war, Meduza special correspondent Elizaveta Antonova spoke to Mykhailo Podolyak, the top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

🧠 Nikolai Patrushev sees 2008 echoes in Ukraine’s Kursk incursion

Presidential adviser Nikolai Patrushev (Russia’s former National Security Council secretary and a notorious foreign policy hawk) spoke to the newspaper Izvestia about his recent appointment as chairman of Russia’s Maritime Board — a new entity created by Putin this week to coordinate shipbuilding, the development and production of naval equipment, and more. 

In an interview that spanned American political meddling around the world and Russia’s naval posture in different oceans and seas, Patrushev directly addressed Ukraine’s ongoing offensive in the Kursk region, claiming that NATO members and Western intelligence agencies were “involved” with the incursion’s planning. “This criminal action is driven by the anticipation of the imminent and inevitable collapse of the neo-Nazi Kyiv regime,” said Patrushev, comparing the operation to the Georgian army’s August 2008 operation in the South Ossetian conflict zone, which he describes as a “military gamble” organized from Washington. “I believe that the Georgian people know that they are paying with their suffering for the actions of the Americans,” Patrushev added.

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Russian domestic affairs

• 📺 Russia’s RuYouTube moment: The Russian video-sharing platform Rutube announced on Thursday that it now allows users to transfer up to 2,000 videos from their YouTube channels. The new feature comes as Russia’s federal censor has been throttling and, in some cases, blocking YouTube for millions of Internet users across the country. (Opposition activists and independent media organizations working in exile have relied on YouTube as one of Russia’s last-remaining platforms beyond the Kremlin’s control.)
• ⚖️ High schoolers ratted out by their principal catch a pretrial break: A court in Nizhny Novgorod decided against jailing two 11th graders charged with the felony offense of spreading false information about the Russian military, electing instead to place the two teenagers under pretrial conditions of release. The two suspects landed in trouble with the police after their principal reported them for sharing a video on a Telegram channel with 26 subscribers where they complained about their teachers and talked about the war in Ukraine. Police initially charged the two high schoolers with a misdemeanor offense of “discrediting” the army, but the charges were made criminal after a “forensic linguistic analysis.” If convicted, each suspect could face up to 10 years in prison.

🔍 Russia’s Investigative Committee refuses to open criminal investigation into Navalny’s death, says widow Yulia Navalnaya (3-min read)

Russia’s Investigative Committee has refused to open a criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding Alexey Navalny’s death. The branch of the Investigative Committee in Russia’s Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, the region where Navalny died in prison last February, sent his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, a ruling dated July 26 and signed by inspector Alexander Varapaev informing her that no criminal case would be opened in connection with her husband’s death. Inspector Alexander Varapaev, who led the inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Alexey Navalny’s death in prison, appears to have been promoted in April, reports Verstka Media.

Correction: Meduza’s August 14 newsletter misidentified former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer as a former U.S. ambassador to Russia (and misspelled his name). We apologize for the mistake.

As the world turns

• 🇧🇾 Lukashenko says Russia and Ukraine are giving Washington what it wants: On Thursday, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko urged Moscow and Kyiv to begin peace negotiations, claiming that only “high-ranking persons of American origin” benefit from “all this bickering.” Lukashenko said he has classified “facts” proving the U.S. interest in the war’s continuation but declined to say anymore.
• 🇺🇸 Washington considers jassing up Ukraine’s air force: The Biden administration is “open” to supplying Ukraine with Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff long-range cruise missiles (JASSMs), a source in the White House told POLITICO. The 2,400-pound rockets carry 1,000-pound warheads, and it would require transferring “sensitive technologies” to enable Ukraine’s jets to launch the weapons, says the news outlet. “The JASSM, developed by Lockheed Martin and first fielded in the early 2000s, has been used by the U.S. sparingly in combat and has been shared with only a handful of close allies,” says POLITICO.
• ⚖️ Another American citizen lands a trip to Russia’s prison system: A court outside Yekaterinburg sentenced dual Russian-American citizen Ksenia Karelina to 12 years in prison for donating $52 to the U.S-based charity Razom for Ukraine. The judge also fined Karelina 300,000 rubles (about $3,360) and placed additional restrictions on her freedom to remain in effect for 18 months after she leaves prison. Police arrested Karelina in February 2024 when she flew from California to Yekaterinburg to visit family in Russia. The FSB argues that she raised money to buy “tactical medical supplies, equipment, weapons, and ammunition” for the Ukrainian armed forces. Razom for Ukraine describes its core humanitarian work as “aid in the form of tactical medicine, hospital supplies, and communication equipment.”

👮 Knock knock, Gospodin Simes

On Thursday, the FBI raided a Virginia country estate owned by Russian-American political analyst Dimitri Simes and his wife. The couple reportedly bought the 132.6-acre property in 2021 for $1.63 million. The FBI’s spokeswoman told the local newspaper Rappahannock News that it was a “court-authorized law enforcement activity” and declined to comment further. 

Simes is reportedly out of the country and told Rappahannock News that he is “puzzled and concerned” because no law enforcement agency has contacted him about a search of his property. “I certainly will take steps to get proper information and then to take proper action,” he said. Simes currently cohosts a show on Russian state television. His name appears repeatedly in the Mueller Report because of his ties to both Trump campaign officials and Russian state officials, but he was never charged with any illegal behavior.

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