Meduza’s daily newsletter: Wednesday, October 2, 2024 Zurich Film Festival cancels screenings of controversial ‘Russians at War’ documentary, Medvedev returns to corporate management, and Putin promotes a ’new elite’ veteran

💰 Fearing public discontent, the Kremlin tells Russian state media not to report on its defense spending hike

In late September, the Russian government submitted a draft budget for 2025–2027 to the State Duma for approval. The plan calls for a record-setting 41 percent of federal spending to go to national security and defense, leaving little doubt that the war in Ukraine is the Kremlin’s top priority. With many citizens struggling economically amid ongoing inflation and labor shortages, the Putin administration fears that news of a military spending boost will hurt the authorities’ approval ratings — and has instructed the pro-Kremlin media to cover the budget accordingly, Meduza’s sources say.

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The news in brief

• ⚖️ A district court in Krasnoyarsk sentenced regional legislative assembly deputy Alexander Gliskov to 10 years in prison for threatening to fire a local roadways official if he didn’t pay a 5-million-ruble ($52,660) bribe. Gliskov’s attorneys dispute the testimony against their client and point out that the alleged victim was once investigated for abusing his office. (Gliskov is a relatively prominent LDPR party member who won almost 12 percent of the votes in last year’s gubernatorial race. Party leader Leonid Slutsky has lobbied for his release.)
• 🍿 The Zurich Film Festival has canceled public screenings of the controversial documentary Russians at War, citing unspecified “security concerns.” Organizers say the film’s director, Anastasia Trofimova, will not attend the festival “due to the current situation.” The ZFF’s organizing committee also says it’s not currently prepared to discuss the movie in interviews. (The Toronto International Film Festival also recently canceled public screenings of Trofimova’s documentary amid safety concerns and protests from Ukrainian groups.)
• 🇵🇱 Poland’s domestic counterintelligence and security agency will reportedly take over Lithuanian police’s investigation into the March 2024 assault on Leonid Volkov in Vilnius. Volkov’s colleagues at the Anti-Corruption Foundation say the involvement of Poland’s Internal Security Agency suggests the involvement of foreign intelligence agents, possibly corroborating the foundation’s reports that former Yukos executive Leonid Nevzlin conspired with Russia’s FSB to kidnap Volkov.
• 🛜 Russian National Security Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev has replaced Sergey Ivanov as Rostelecom’s board chairman, marking Medvedev’s return to state-owned corporate management for the first time since 2008 (when he stepped down as Gazprom’s board chairman to serve as Russia’s third president). (The new gig positions Medvedev as a key figure in the company’s ongoing throttling of YouTube access.)
• 🧑‍🧑‍🧒 Declaring Russians’ very “human nature” to be at stake, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin chewed out New Party deputies for opposing draft legislation to ban “childfree” advocacy alongside so-called “gay propaganda.” Addressing the opposed MPs, Volodin reasoned that many of them wouldn’t exist if their parents had been exposed to “the promotion of rejecting childbirth.” (New People deputy Ksenia Goryacheva has warned that the proposed ban would only panic and pressure the public without remedying Russia’s declining population.)
• 👮 Russian federal investigators have opened a felony case against the Universal Anonymous Payment System (UAPS) and the cryptocurrency exchange Cryptex on charges of organizing a criminal community to carry out unlawful access to computer information, improperly handling payment funds, and illegal banking activities. Officials executed 148 raids across 14 regions of Russia (though most were in the St. Petersburg area) and arrested 96 suspects. (Last month, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Cryptex and an associated Russian national on illicit finance allegations. That same individual, Sergey Ivanov, is reportedly among those arrested in Russia.)
• 🪖 Vladimir Putin appointed Artem Zhoga — a former commander in Russia’s “DNR” proxy armed forces — as his presidential envoy to Russia’s Ural Federal District, making him the highest-ranking Ukraine War veteran to win a position in Putin’s administration. (The Kremlin has called these soldiers the country’s “new elite,” though few have actually found political prominence, so far.)
• ⚖️ Nikita Zhuravel — the man physically assaulted in jail last year by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s son and later sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for burning a copy of the Quran (supposedly on orders from Ukrainian intelligence agents) — now faces treason charges for allegedly sending Ukrainian officials information about Russian military transportation, including video footage of trains and aircraft.

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