Meduza’s latest daily newsletter: Tuesday, August 27, 2024 Pavel Durov’s secret travel, a three-trillion-ruble company disappears, and a new TV show imagines Joe Biden lost in Russia

Russia’s politics and economy

• 👴 New TV show will depict undercover Joe Biden getting lost in Russia: The Russian television network TNT is working on a new comedy series about Joe Biden, RBC reported on Tuesday. The show, titled “Goodbye,” imagines the U.S. president making an undercover trip to Russia to find out for himself why the West’s sanctions are failing. After losing his documents and getting stuck in the country, the fictional Biden befriends a “real Russian patriot,” moves into a Soviet-era apartment, and begins working as an English teacher to earn money for his trip home. Meanwhile, the CIA mistakenly brings a Russian pensioner who resembles Biden back to the U.S. to carry out the president’s duties. Biden will reportedly be played by actor Dmitry Dyuzhev.
• 🦌 Same car, different elk: A car registered to former Russian lawmaker Valery Rashkin, who was convicted of illegal hunting three years ago after police pulled him over for drunk driving and found a butchered elk in his car, had another unfortunate elk encounter on Tuesday when it hit one of the sizable cervids in the Saratov region. According to TASS, Rashkin was not in the vehicle and nobody was injured (except perhaps the elk).

🫨 What’s causing the Russian ruble to fluctuate wildly against the dollar and euro, even as it holds steady against the yuan? (14-min read)

August has been a turbulent month for Russia’s currency market. According to official exchange rates set by the Central Bank, the ruble initially weakened, losing over 10 percent of its value against the dollar, only to rebound just as quickly. Meanwhile, on the stock exchange, market dynamics told a completely different story, sparking debates among economists about the underlying factors behind the fluctuations and which rate should be considered “correct.” Meduza explains what’s been happening with the ruble and what experts think may lie ahead for the Russian currency this fall.

🪄 Little-known Russian company disappears after reporting trillions of rubles in profit

A new investigation from the Russian-language broadcaster RTVI examines a little-known Russian company called Banknota LLC that, according to financial reports, took in 3.7 trillion ($40.4 billion) rubles of revenue and made a net profit of 3.4 trillion ($37.1 billion) rubles last year — more than any other Russian company except Rosneft and Gazprom. Despite apparently earning the equivalent of 8.5 percent of Russia’s GDP after its creation in June 2023, Banknota has now “disappeared,” RTVI reports. The address the company was registered under now leads to a garden supply store in a shopping center on a Moscow highway, though a sign bearing the mysterious business’s name is still mounted above the entrance. An archived version of the firm’s now-deleted website says it offered home, auto, and business loans, though it did not have a banking license.

Russia’s Unified State Register of Legal Entities lists Banknota’s sole owner as Dmitry Frolov, a Moscow resident who the database notes has been “deemed unreliable by the Federal Tax Service.” Journalists from RTVI found that Frolov has multiple past convictions for petty theft, with his last sentence handed down in 2022. The following summer, five companies were registered in his name, including Banknota, though his brother believes he was in prison at the time. The journalists were unable to get in touch with Frolov, though they learned that in May of this year, he told tax authorities he was neither the founder nor the chairman of Banknota.

Banknota’s real owners and true revenue source remain a mystery; experts interviewed by RTVI said it’s impossible that the company earned trillions of rubles through lending alone. In December 2023, the firm informed the Russian tax authorities that it had a branch in Belarus, though no such branch appears in Belarusian business databases. If it does exist, according to experts, the company’s owners may have used it to transfer money abroad.

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Telegram and Pavel Durov

🤷 Why Russian officials aren’t losing sleep over Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s arrest (6-min read)

The Russian authorities were hardly fazed by the arrest on Saturday of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, whom French investigators say is being questioned in connection with charges including complicity in money laundering, drug trafficking, and child pornography distribution. According to sources who spoke to the investigative outlet Verstka, officials in Moscow saw Durov’s arrest as inevitable because “in the current geopolitical reality,” it would be impossible for someone like him to remain “completely neutral.” Meduza shares Verstka’s findings in English.

🛬 Leaked documents show Pavel Durov secretly visited Russia dozens of times after moving away

Pavel Durov, the Russian tech mogul arrested in Paris on Saturday, has traveled to Russia more than 50 times since moving away from the country a decade ago, iStories reported on Tuesday, citing leaked border crossing data from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).

In 2014, Durov sold his stake in the social media service he founded, VKontakte, and moved out of Russia, writing: “There’s no going back. Especially after I publicly refused to cooperate with the authorities.” He also published a manifesto titled “Seven Reasons Not to Return to Russia” in which he criticized the country’s system of government.

The next year, however, Durov traveled to St. Petersburg — and he made at least 41 more trips to Russia over the two years that followed. These visits continued after Moscow passed the “Yarovaya law,” which requires companies to let the FSB access user messaging data, and even after the Kremlin launched a propaganda campaign against Durov’s app Telegram following its refusal to comply with the law. His last visit for several years came in December 2017, after the messenger had been fined the equivalent of about $14,000 for ignoring an FSB request. The Russian authorities banned Telegram in April 2018 but were unable to block users from accessing it.

Durov next returned to Russia in the summer of 2020, soon after a U.S. court blocked Telegram from launching a cryptocurrency called Gram. On June 4, Durov wrote on his channel that he would welcome a removal of the Kremlin’s block on the app and that its administrators had begun removing “extremist propaganda” (Moscow’s stated reason for banning the service) more actively. He vowed to support the Russian authorities if they wanted to fight terrorism without violating citizens’ right to secrecy of correspondence.

On June 18, 2020, Russia’s federal censorship agency announced that it was “unblocking” Telegram in light of Durov’s “stated willingness to counteract terrorism and extremism.” That evening, the billionaire flew out of Russia from St. Petersburg. Over the next year and a half, he visited Russia multiple times, with his last visit in October 2021. During this period, iStories notes, Telegram blocked Alexey Navalny’s Smart Voting bot (designed to help Russians mobilize against ruling party candidates), and other opposition tools ahead of the September 2021 State Duma elections.

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