Meduza’s latest daily newsletter: Tuesday, September 3, 2024 Russia’s August gains in Donbas were biggest in two years, Starlink vendors fail sanctions stress test, and Justice Ministry tinkers with ‘foreign agents’ registry

The war in Ukraine

• 🕯️ Remembering Ukraine’s fallen top guns: The Wall Street Journal profiles Andriy “Juice” Pilshchykov and Oleksiy “Moonfish” Mes, two of Ukraine’s “top gun” pilots who lobbied publicly and intensely for shipments of F-16 fighter jets to Kyiv and have since died in the line of duty. Pilshchykov was killed in a combat training plane in August 2023, and Mes died a year later in a crash that also destroyed the first of Ukraine’s new F-16s. “The best thing we can do to remember these guys that have fallen is just double down and make sure that they didn’t die in vain,” U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham told the newspaper.
• 🪖 Russia made biggest gains in Donbas in two years amid Ukraine’s Kursk offensive: Based on data published by the Ukrainian OSINT project DeepState, journalists at Agenstvo Media report that Russian troops in Ukraine seized 355 square kilometers (almost 140 square miles) in August 2024 — more territory than in any month since July 2022. The lion’s share of these gains were in the northern part of the Donetsk region, where Russia’s army steadily advanced toward the city of Pokrovsk. During this time, Ukrainian forces captured an estimated 813 square kilometers (almost 314 square miles) of Russian territory in the Kursk region. 
• 🪖 Zelensky hints at his ‘victory plan’ in Kursk offensive comments: President Zelensky told NBC News that Ukraine plans to hold the lands its troops seized in Russia’s Kursk region “indefinitely” as Kyiv tries to force Moscow to the negotiating table. Zelensky added, “We don’t need their land. We don’t want to bring our Ukrainian way of life there.” He said the captured territory is integral to his “victory plan” to end the war.”
• 🚨 Another Ukraine veteran accused of murder after returning home: Moscow police have arrested a Ukraine war veteran for the murder of an 11-year-old girl in Nizhny Tagil. The 40-year-old suspect, identified as Vladimir, reportedly had prior felony convictions for rape and sexual violence offenses in 2020 before he served in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The victim’s father told the Telegram channel Baza that the suspect rented a room in a neighboring apartment.

🕯️ Russian missile strike in Ukraine’s Poltava kills at least 47 people and injures over 200 (3-min read)

A Russian missile strike killed at least 47 people and injured more than 200 in the Ukrainian city of Poltava on Tuesday, according to the Ukrainian authorities. Russian troops launched two ballistic missiles, hitting the campus of the Military Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies and a nearby hospital, said President Volodymyr Zelensky. This strike is one of the deadliest and most devastating by Russian forces since the start of the full-scale war. The Ukrainian president condemned the attack and urged the West to expedite the delivery of air defense systems to Ukraine.

🛰️ A global constellation of willing suppliers

Journalists at Novaya Gazeta Europe found multiple official Starlink vendors around the world that expressed willingness to sell to the reporters posing as representatives of a virtually anonymous company based in Kazakhstan — despite international sanctions, export control recommendations, and the potential transfer of the Starlink terminals to the Russian military. Some suppliers of the ground antennas and receivers needed to connect to SpaceX's Starlink satellite network declined cooperation, citing various reasons, but others agreed to brainstorm sales schemes to navigate Starlink’s market restrictions and customs rules in the region. (SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claimed in February 2024 that “no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia,” amid allegations by the Ukrainian Armed Forces that Russian troops are using Starlink terminals in combat zones.)

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Russian domestic affairs

• 🎒 1,300 hours of brainwashing: Agentstvo Media estimates that Russian grade schools now devote 12 percent of their instructional time to state propaganda — up from 6 percent last year and just 3.4 percent in 2022. Two key components in the school system’s new curriculum: (1) a controversial history textbook coauthored by staunch conservative and presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky; and (2) special guidelines issued to teachers to present social studies as an endorsement of Russia’s greatness. (Agentstvo’s study is based on averages, and the outlet notes that different teachers handle the state’s guidelines differently.)
• 🕵️ Supposed offramps from ‘foreign agency’: Russia’s Justice Ministry has removed nearly 200 of the legal entities on its registry of “foreign agents,” mostly to purge the list of associations and organizations created specifically to abide by Russian regulations. The ministry also removed 13 of the 465 people from its “foreign agents” registry. Justice Minister Konstantin Chuychenko described the delistings as evidence that it’s easy to avoid “foreign agent” status through compliance, but human rights lawyers at Department One say Russia’s courts are still very reluctant to hear lawsuits against unfair designations.
• ⚖️ Another criminal reposter: A court in Arkhangelsk has fined a local woman 100,000 rubles ($1,140) for two posts on Vkontakte that allegedly “discredit” the Russian army. In August 2023, 63-year-old Rita Shumaeva shared a link to a Radio Svoboda documentary about a movement of draftees’ wives. This January, she wrote about a young doctor killed in a Russian attack on a hospital in Kherson. (Repeat defamation offenses of this sort can be prosecuted as a felony in Russia.)

🕵️ Russia’s ‘FARA clone’ becomes a corrupt clobbering stick

Novaya Gazeta Kazakhstan spoke to journalist Ilya Shepelin and media lawyer and activist Galina Arapova in a long conversation about Russia’s “foreign agent” laws and enforcement. Shepelin and Arapova argued that the “foreign agent” registry itself has become a “second front” in elite infighting — a means to “settle scores” between political rivals by engineering enemy “designations.” Shepelin and Arapova point out that Russia’s Justice Ministry has started designating government-friendly persons and groups (like the Telegram channels Brief and Nezygar), though Novaya Gazeta’s two sources were also quick to point out that the Justice Ministry itself only administers the list. Actual designations are reportedly the work of the presidential administration and National Security Council (after the FSB gathers initial evidence). According to Shepelin and Arapova, the non-opposition groups and persons added to the registry more recently aligned themselves with entities that ultimately failed to solve their own problems.

🔬 Inside the Russian authorities’ plan to develop anti-aging technology — even as they keep sending soldiers to die in droves (15-min read)

In early 2024, Vladimir Putin declared that Russia needed a new “national project” aimed at “preserving the health” of the country’s citizens. Lawmakers got to work, and just a few months later, they unveiled an initiative with the catchy name “New Health Preservation Technologies.” One of its priorities is to combat aging — an idea that’s long interested Russian officials, most of whom are far from spring chickens. The authorities forecast that the overall project will “save 175,000 lives” by 2030, and they’ve pushed forward with it even amid the full-scale war in Ukraine, in which tens of thousands of Russians have been killed. Meduza teamed up with RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit Systema to find out who got Putin thinking about immortality, how his longtime friends the Kovalchuk brothers are involved, and what organ printing has to do with any of this.

🚦 Russian traffic deaths are on the rise, in part due to wartime airport closures and crashes caused by soldiers (2-min read)

Fatalities from car crashes on highways leading to southern Russia rose for the second year in a row during this year’s summer vacation season, according to a new report from Verstka Media based on traffic police data. Traffic deaths on Russia’s M4, P22, and P217 highways between the beginning of May and the end of July increased by 20 percent from 2023 to 2024. In the first seven months of this year, Russia had a total of 7,430 traffic deaths. That’s 105 more than in the same period last year, 284 more than in the first seven months of 2022, and 140 more than in the first seven months of 2021.

Telegram drama

• 🇰🇷 Changing winds at Telegram? In a development that could indicate a changing approach to government oversight at Telegram, the messenger has reportedly complied with a request from South Korea’s media regulator to remove certain deepfake pornographic content. Telegram founder Pavel Durov is currently under felony investigation in France for the network’s noncompliance with state officials. The South Korean government says Telegram has apologized for ignoring the local regulator and even “shared an exclusive email address for future communication,” reports the Yonhap News Agency.

📳 Russian officials are still using civilian messaging apps for state business — despite the risks (7-min read)

Days after his August 24 arrest in Paris, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was indicted on multiple charges related to his refusal to cooperate with French law enforcement and his failure to moderate illegal activities on the platform. In Russia, the incident sparked rumors that Telegram could be blocked, with sources telling Baza that Kremlin, government, and security officials were advised to “clean up” their work-related communications. However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that any such recommendations had been issued, and Russian officials told the independent outlet Verstka that they haven’t received any new guidelines and continue to use their usual messaging apps for communication.

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