Meduza’s daily newsletter: Tuesday, October 1, 2024 Russian troops execute 16 Ukrainian POWs, anti-Kremlin opposition infighting, round 9000 (Katz vs. FBK), and Russian State University for the Humanities to honor slain Daria Dugina

The fall of Vuhledar: How Ukraine lost the ‘fortress town’ and what its capture could mean for the war’s future

Russian forces have captured the town of Vuhledar in the southwest of Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Fighting over the settlement has been ongoing since late March 2022, when Ukrainian units entered the frontline town. The Ukrainian defense, led primarily by the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, withstood several major assaults by Russian forces over the 2.5 years that followed. However, by fall 2024, the remaining soldiers were forced to abandon their positions under the threat of encirclement. The fall of one of the Ukrainian army’s most well-known “fortresses” carries significant symbolic weight. And although the town’s capture doesn’t pose an immediate threat to Ukrainian defenses in Donbas, its loss could have serious long-term consequences for Ukraine’s military.

Covered in Meduza’s report:

• What we know about Vuhledar’s capture
• Vuhledar’s strategic significance
• What does Vuhledar’s fall mean for Ukraine?

Opposition infighting, round 9000: Team Katz vs. Team Navalny (again)

A new investigation from politician and YouTube blogger Maxim Katz accuses the Anti-Corruption Foundation of “laundering” the reputation of Alexander Zheleznyak and Sergey Leontiev, the former owners of the now-defunct Probusinessbank, which lost its license in 2015 amid allegations of embezzling clients’ money through a network of offshore companies. The two bankers face arrest warrants if they ever return to Russia. For years, they’ve lived in the United States, where Zheleznyak established a U.S. legal entity for the Anti-Corruption Foundation in 2021. Leontiev was reportedly donating $20,000 monthly to the foundation as recently as 2022.

Though Russian prosecutors have built a case against Zheleznyak and Leontiev, Katz says his team doesn’t trust the Russian authorities and relied instead on court records in other countries, bank account statements filed by the companies involved in Probusinessbank’s alleged money-laundering schemes, and the bank’s contracts.

Katz argues that Zheleznyak and Leontiev have tried to “cleanse” their reputations in the West by buying their way into the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s work through donations and talking up unrealized initiatives like a plan to issue a Navalny-branded credit card that would have earned a 1-percent cashback reward for the foundation. In return for this support, claims Katz, Team Navalny shares its good name with two corrupt bankers, like in May 2017, when then-executive director Vladimir Ashurkov submitted an affidavit to a court in Liechtenstein, which has become “the basis of all future legal and political defenses for the bankers in European countries.”

While many of the claims in Katz’s investigation have appeared elsewhere (for example, in a Financial Times report published in December 2022), his focus on the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s role in the story (and especially his history of bad blood with the organization and its team) has made it the latest anti-Kremlin opposition infighting. Anti-Corruption Foundation leaders Leonid Volkov and Maria Pevchikh promised to respond to Katz but also dismissed the investigation’s seriousness. In December 2022, Volkov told FT, “We had to rely on the people we trust. Can I sign it with my blood that they didn’t steal anything from their bank? No, I can’t.” On Tuesday, he wrote on his Telegram channel, “Maxim’s accusations that we were involved in ‘reputation laundering’ for Probusinessbank shareholders are false.”

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Meduza’s feature reporting

• 🪖 Russians deserting the army often turn to their families for help — but in small communities, hiding can prove impossible
• 🧠 American historian Amy Knight sizes up Russia’s ‘war weary’ elites

The news in brief

• ⚖️ Russian authorities reportedly planning to send 40 percent of criminal defendants to war after changes to legislation
• ⚖️ Billionaire Petr Aven has filed a defamation complaint in Latvia against Russian activist Dmitry Savvin (who recently obtained Latvian citizenship), claiming that Savvin posted “derogatory and false statements” about him on Facebook. Aven’s complaint also highlights a recent investigative report by Latvian television alleging that Savvin may have received money from a foundation connected to former Yukos executive Leonid Nevzlin, though Savvin denies this.
• 🚨 The FSB reported on Tuesday that it carried out a special operation across 78 regions of Russia against “members of radical internet groups,” arresting 39 people between the ages of 14 and 35 and interrogating 252 individuals, including 156 minors. Officials claim the suspects fell under the influence of “banned Ukrainian terrorist organizations” and supposedly plotted “armed attacks in educational and religious institutions.” The suspects allegedly used Discord to communicate with their “Ukrainian handlers.”
• 🛂 State Duma lawmakers passed the first reading of draft legislation raising penalties for organizing illegal migration into Russia, adding provisions that empower the state to seize property and valuables obtained through this activity. Deputies also adopted the second reading of another bill that tightens rules for obtaining residency permits through simplified marriage procedures (adding a three-year wait period).
• ✡️ Officials in St. Petersburg reversed their rejection of a permit request for a memorial service honoring Jewish people in a nearby city killed by the Nazis in 1941. A local Jewish Community Center reported on Monday that their permit request was denied due to pandemic restrictions on public assemblies, though the same memorial service was allowed in the previous three years. (City officials telephoned the center to announce that the event could go ahead.)
• 🎓 The Russian State University for the Humanities’s Ivan Ilyin Higher Political School will likely be renamed after Daria Dugina, the propagandist killed in August 2022 in a car bombing likely intended for her father, right-wing Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin (who chairs the school). According to the Student Anti-Fascist Front (which has demanded dropping Ilyin’s name from the school in light of his Nazi sympathies), at least one archaeologist from the school has already attended a conference as a scholar from the “Darya Dugina Higher Political School at RSUH.”
• 🪖 Russian troops executed 16 Ukrainian POWs in towns outside Pokrovsk, says Ukraine’s Prosecutor General. Footage circulating online shows prisoners lining up and being shot, with wounded POWs being “finished off.” Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin called it the largest known mass execution of Ukrainian POWs yet. Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets has contacted the U.N. and International Red Cross about the Geneva Convention violation.
• 👩‍🍼 The Ukrainian government’s new Demographic Development Strategy states that 33.1 million people currently live on territory still controlled by Kyiv — almost 11 million fewer than in January 2022, before Russia’s full-scale invasion. According to research by the Institute of Demography and Social Studies at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine’s population could shrink to 25.2 million by 2051.

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