Meduza’s latest daily newsletter: Tuesday, August 20, 2024 Top incel blogger charged with statutory rape, Ukraine bans religious organizations connected with Russia, and the average signing bonus for contract soldiers hits 1 million rubles

The Ukraine war

• ☦️ Verkhovna Rada vs. UOC: In a vote of 265 to 29 (with four abstentions and 24 absents), Ukraine’s parliament adopted a law on Tuesday “prohibiting the activities of religious organizations connected with Russia,” effectively outlawing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which announced its full independence and autonomy from the Moscow Patriarchate in May 2022 but never declared full autocephaly. Though the church denies support for Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s police have repeatedly raided UOC premises and prosecuted its clergy on charges of spreading Kremlin propaganda and “inciting hatred.” 
• 👷 Europe’s ‘economic tug of war’ with Ukraine: Bloomberg reports that Central and Eastern European countries are “reticent” to lose Ukrainian refugees who are alleviating labor shortages, despite President Zelensky’s bilateral diplomatic efforts and public messaging attempts to repatriate the more than six million Ukrainians who remain abroad. “Our economy needs workers,” Poland’s deputy interior minister recently said, justifying the extension of legislation that grants refugees access to the labor market and social benefits.
• 🫗 No late-night drinking near the nuclear power plant, please: The acting governor of Russia’s Kursk region has instituted a ban on alcohol retail sales after 5 p.m., effective Wednesday, in the Kurchatovsky district and the city of Kurchatov (home to the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant). Acting Governor Smirnov said in a message that the new public safety measures mirror restrictions already in place in nine other districts and the city of Lgov and are meant to facilitate the regional authorities’ ongoing counter-terrorism operation.
• ⚖️ Conviction for defendant in alleged Crimea assassination plot: A Russian military court has sentenced a man from occupied Melitopol to 18 years in prison for plotting to blow up the car of Sergey Aksyonov, who’s headed the Republic of Crimea since Moscow annexed it in 2014. Thirty-five-year-old Ihor Korchynskyi was convicted of three separate felonies: planning an act of terrorism, training to carry out a terrorist attack, and illegal possession of weapons. Russian officials say Korchynskyi trained under the guidance of Ukraine’s securty services and retrieved the needed explosives from a stash in Simferopol. (It’s unknown if he confessed to the allegations.)
• 🪖 More reports of Russia’s capture of Niu-York, en route to Toretsk: Russia’s military claimed on Tuesday that its forces in Ukraine’s Donetsk region have captured the town of Niu-York after “overcoming a large Ukrainian troop formation,” describing the advance as the capture of “one of the largest settlements in the Toretsk metropolitan area and a strategically important logistics hub.” Meduza could not verify Moscow’s claims, and the state news agency TASS reported hours earlier that Ukrainian soldiers were still defending a chemical plant in the town. The Ukrainian OSINT project DeepState reported later on Tuesday that Ukrainian troops still control 20 percent of Niu-York, adding that advancing Russian forces have already turned their attention to the next town in the region: Nelipivka. (Z-bloggers reported Russia’s capture of Niu-York on August 19.)
• 🪖 A return to ammo shortages: For the first time since the U.S. allocated $61 billion in aid in April, Ukrainian troops in the Donbas have started rationing shells for their canons because their ammunition has been “reallocated for the incursion into Russia’s Kursk region,” reports The Financial Times, noting that “Ukraine has also moved upwards of 10,000 troops, including many of its elite airborne forces and mechanized brigades,” from the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions.
• 🪖 In his latest eyebrow-raising video, Alaudinov accuses Ukrainian troops of war crimes: Akhmat Special Forces commander Apti Alaudinov claimed in a new video shared on Telegram on Tuesday that Ukrainian occupation troops are using children at an orphanage in the Kursk region as human shields and have supposedly executed multiple civilians in the area. Alaudinov offered no evidence to corroborate his allegations. Russian officials say Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region has claimed the lives of 17 civilians and led to the hospitalization of 75 local residents (a quarter of whom are children). Since Ukraine’s surprise offensive, Alaudinov has become one of the most public military figures commenting on events, often defending his soldiers from Chechnya, who allegedly fled from Ukraine’s invasion force.
• 🕊️ No peace (or ceasefire) — only revenge: Could the offensive into Russia’s Kursk region be Kyiv’s ticket to “ending the ‘hot stage’ of the war this year,” as President Zelensky said he planned to do in a July interview with the BBC? No, two “two former senior Russian officials close to the Kremlin” told The New York Times, arguing that the invasion of Kursk makes potential ceasefire talks “more remote.” The newspaper’s sources said Vladimir Putin’s focus would now be “revenge, not peace.”
• 🇺🇸 Get off our lawn, Yankees: Russia’s Foreign Ministry summoned the U.S. government’s senior diplomat in Moscow, Charge d'Affaires Stephanie Holmes, to protest recent reporting from the Kursk region by journalists at The Washington Post and CNN, who traveled to the region accompanied by Ukrainian occupation forces. Russian officials say the journalists illegally entered Russia to conduct “propaganda coverage of the Kyiv regime's crimes.” Last week, Russia’s Federal Security Service announced felony charges against two Italian journalists for reporting from occupied Sudzha. The FSB is now reviewing the American reporters’ trips for possible criminal charges.

🇳🇵How Russia lured hundreds of men from Nepal to fight in Ukraine, leaving many of their families in financial ruin (25-min read)

In the summer of 2023, an unlikely trend began dominating TikTok feeds in Nepal: dozens of videos showed Nepali men bragging about joining the Russian army. According to these foreign fighters, the service conditions were comfortable, the work was safe, and the salaries were higher than anything on offer back in Nepal. To many young Nepali men sitting at home, moving to Russia seemed like a no-brainer; all they had to do was take out a loan to pay a middleman for a visa and a plane ticket. They didn’t realize that they were only seeing footage from training centers, where Nepali recruits spend a few weeks at most before being sent into the line of fire. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Nepali men have enlisted in the Russian army over the last two years, and at least dozens of them have been killed. Some of these men were the sole breadwinners for their wives and children. Irina Kravtsova, a special correspondent for Novaya Gazeta, traveled to Nepal to hear the stories of these men, the families they left behind, and the activist leading the fight for the government to intervene.

💬 Meduza’s readers weigh in on Ukraine’s ongoing foray into Russia’s Kursk region (12-min read)

In an interview with Meduza last week, top Zelensky aide Mykhailo Podolyak said that Ukraine’s ongoing incursion into the Kursk region aims “to shift the war to Russia’s territory” and highlight the failure of the country’s military and civilian leadership. As he put it, the Ukrainian leadership expects this to have “serious social consequences for Russia.” Meduza asked readers to tell us how they feel about Ukraine’s Kursk offensive and how it has influenced their views.

👁️ Watch your digital butts, borderfolk

Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry has issued a memo advising civilians, soldiers, and security officials in the Belgorod, Kursk, and Bryansk regions to observe strict safety measures to prevent the Ukrainian armed forces from accessing their personal data and local geolocation information. Specifically, the agency urges people in the three regions bordering Ukraine to avoid the use of home surveillance cameras and dating websites. The Interior Ministry also says locals should refrain from sharing dashcam videos online and streaming while driving on highways, which could leak footage of Russian military equipment. Soldiers are advised to remove captured fellow servicemen from any chats and delete any contact records that contain photographs or nicknames (like “Pasha FSB”) that could be used to link individuals to security agencies or the military.

A “counter-terrorism operation” has been in effect in the Belgorod, Kursk, and Bryansk regions since August 10, declared four days after the Ukrainian army invaded the Kursk region in a surprise offensive that has captured dozens of towns in the region.

🪖 No better business than war, if you’ll risk it

Journalists at iStories report that Russians enlisting as contract soldiers can now earn an average of almost 1 million rubles (almost $11,000) in federal and regional signing bonuses. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the regional governments’ signing bonuses alone are nearly twice this amount. iStories notes that one-time payments to enlisting contract soldiers across Russia exceed the average local incomes by several times — most egregiously in Karachay-Cherkessia, where the government’s signing bonus is 68 times higher than the average monthly salary. 

Despite these enormous financial incentives (which the Kremlin has encouraged nationwide), fewer soldiers have apparently enlisted in the military than officials claim. OSINT researchers at the Conflict Intelligence Team reported earlier this month that federal spending indicates that the Defense Ministry paid signing bonuses to 214,000 fewer men than it claimed to have recruited since the fall of 2022.

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Russian domestic affairs

• ⚖️ Navalny is dead, but the persecution of his former lawyers continues: A panel of three Supreme Court justices rejected a request from three of Alexey Navalny’s former lawyers to move their case from the Vladimir region to Moscow, where four of the case’s five witnesses and all the defense’s defendants and attorneys live. Representatives for Vadim Kobzev, Alexey Liptser, and Igor Sergunin argued that officials are prosecuting their clients in Vladimir to keep the trial under investigators’ influence and to ensure convictions. The three lawyers are accused of “participating in an extremist organization” by communicating information from Navalny to his team in exile. (Navalny died in February 2024 under mysterious circumstances.)
• 🚁 Putin visits Chechnya and Beslan for first time in long time: For the first time since December 2011, Vladimir Putin visited Chechnya on Tuesday night. The president arrived by helicopter from Beslan, where he paid his respects at a local memorial and met with the mothers of several children killed in the 2004 terrorist attack, which claimed the lives of 334 people, including 186 children. (Until Tuesday, Putin hadn’t visited Beslan since 2008.)

🕯️ Kremlin publishes video of Putin’s first meeting with parents of Beslan school siege victims in 19 years, but edits out their questions (3-min read)

On August 20, Vladimir Putin visited the town of Beslan, the site of the 2004 school siege that killed 333 people and saw more than 1,000 taken hostage. For the first time in two decades, Putin met with members of Mothers of Beslan, an advocacy group for parents whose children were victims of the attack. Later in the day, the Kremlin released a video of the meeting, though not before editing out all of the mothers’ comments and questions for the president. According to Agentstvo Media, the women were notified of the event just a day in advance, and while many of the organization’s members wanted to speak with Putin, only three were ultimately allowed to attend. Here’s how the meeting played out.

👮 Russia jails top incel blogger

A day after his arrest in St. Petersburg, 46-year-old “incel [involuntary celibate] leader” Alexey Podnebesny was charged with lewd acts and statutory rape. Conservative activist Ekaterina Mizulina, who heads the Safe Internet League, was reportedly instrumental in notifying the police of Podnebesny’s alleged illegal acts with a 15-year-old. On her Telegram channel, Mizulina shared several videos showing Podnebesny groping and kissing a young girl. Journalists at Bumaga report that at least five police reports have been filed against Podnebesny in the past four years for predatory sexual behavior.

Before his arrest, Podnebesny accused his ex-wife of providing the footage to Mizulina, which he says was recorded as a joke. He later claimed that the girl in the videos lied to him about her age and then spread rumors that they slept together in an attempt to “show off and grow her popularity.” Podnebesny has established himself as an incel figure on Telegram (63,000 subscribers) and YouTube (39,000 subscribers) by embracing the group’s trademark misogynistic rhetoric, campaigning against so-called “vaginocapitalism” and “femofascism” and demanding that sex “be made accessible” to all men.

As the world turns

• 🏦 Russian banking problems in Kyrgyzstan: Two banks in Kyrgyzstan — MBank and Keremet Bank — have indefinitely suspended online transfers through the mobile apps for three Russian banks under Western sanctions: Sberbank, MTS Bank, and T-Bank. Last week, MBank recently announced that it would use only non-sanctioned banks to process incoming transfers from ruble-denominated accounts.
• 🇵🇱🇩🇪 What’s a little disagreement between friends, eh? The Wall Street Journal reports that the bombings that destroyed the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines have “ignited a dispute” between Poland and Germany. The newspaper recently revealed that a team of Ukrainians carried out the attacks while using Poland as a logistical base. Over the weekend, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk tweeted that the “only thing” “all the initiators and patrons of Nord Stream 1 and 2” should do “is apologize and keep quiet.” WSJ reports that Polish police previously ignored a German arrest warrant seeking one of the suspected crew members. Late last week, Polish officials informed Germany that the suspect had left the country and asked if German police would still like the local authorities to search his home outside Warsaw. “The letter was seen by German authorities as ‘adding insult to injury,’” a source told WSJ.

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