This was Russia today, Monday, October 21, 2024 Sanctioned British blogger Graham Phillips receives temporary asylum in Russia, Justice Ministry wants to classify public info amid insurgency threats, and Russian propaganda targets Tim Walz
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Today’s main story: Leaked emails show how prison officials deliberately made Navalny’s life unbearable — and then tried to cover their tracks
Another document drop about Navalny? What’s new here? Meduza obtained hundreds of emails between employees of Correctional Facility No. 6 in Russia’s Vladimir region, where Navalny spent most of his prison time. The docs show how prison officials took deliberate measures to make Navalny’s life in prison unbearable and covered their tracks.
Critics have questioned how Navlany managed to get messages from behind bars to the outside world; some even claim that his team in exile was ghostwriting his political treatises. The emails in Meduza’s report indicate that prison officials “established complete control over Navalny’s communications with his lawyers” as early as September 2022, but they never seized a single document passed between the two sides. “They inspected all the documents, checked everything, and didn’t stop anything — and then they said it was a crime,” said a familiar with Navalny’s case proceedings.
What about the medical emergency that ultimately led to Navalny’s death? When he was first brought to the Vladimir region prison, a paramedic examined Navalny and noted several chronic conditions, including high blood pressure, which should have warranted specialized treatment. He never got any.
(2) The Naked Pravda: North Korea's role in the Ukraine War
For a crash course in Russian-North Korean relations and a hard look at recent claims from the Ukrainian and South Korean governments of thousands of North Korean soldiers flooding the battlefield in Ukraine, Meduza’s English-language podcast welcomed Dr. Fyodor Tertitskiy, a lecturer at Korea University and a leading researcher on North Korean politics.
Some topics covered in this 29-minute episode:
- The historical context of North Korea’s military strategy
- Differences in North and South Korean diplomatic strategies
- Potential North Korean military aid to Russia and its consequences
- China’s role in the Russian-North Korean alliance
- The historical context of North Korean relations with Russia and the USSR
- Nuances in North Korea’s symbolic gestures to Vladimir Putin
We got The Beet. Don’t miss Meduza’s weekly newsletter (separate from the one you’re reading here)!
(3) Meanwhile, in Russia
🪖 The former mayor of Vladivostok has evaded the rest of his prison sentence by enlisting with the military to fight in Ukraine. In April 2019, Igor Pushkarev was sentenced to 15 years for bribery and abuse of office.
- Pushkarev is the second former Vladivostok mayor to trade a prison cell for combat: In December 2023, Oleg Humenyuk enlisted to escape his 12-year sentence. (Kommersant)
⚖️ Blogger Dmitry Ivanov (better known as “Kamikadze D”) was sentenced in absentia on Monday to eight years in prison for posting videos about Russian war atrocities in Ukraine. A Moscow court convicted him of spreading “false” information about the Russian army.
- In February 2023, a few weeks after the Russian authorities blocked Ivanov’s website, Google permanently deleted his YouTube channel, where he had 1.7 million subscribers. Google reportedly offered no explanation. Ivanov’s replacement channel now has roughly 60,000 followers. He emigrated from Russia in 2017. (Mediazona)
📱 Russian government officials bought four times as many iPhones in the first nine months of 2024 as in that period a year earlier — spending more than 6.9 million rubles (almost $70,000) — despite a June 2023 ban on iPhone use by state agencies. (Vedomosti)
🧑🌾 Elena Panfilova, who founded the Russia chapter of Transparency International, argued in a recent essay that the Russian authorities are deliberately trying to return the country to a form of “neo-feudalism.” Under this system, ordinary Russians are re-enserfed through economic and regulatory incentives to become “a silent mass for production, the military, and childbirth.” Panfilova emphasizes the dumbing down of Russia’s higher education system — a process she says is designed to accelerate the lower classes’ industrial production and human reproduction rates while cultivating political passivity. (Novaya Gazeta)
🇬🇧 British blogger Graham Phillips was granted temporary asylum in Russia on Monday. In a video shared by the Internal Affairs Ministry, Phillips said he still considers himself a “British person” but accused his homeland of “harassing” him over his pro-Kremlin propaganda work. (MVD spokeswoman Irina Volka, Telegram)
- Throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Phillips has repeatedly interviewed prisoners of war, arguably participating in coercive interrogations for propaganda purposes that violate the Geneva Conventions. The U.K. government has sanctioned Phillips for his role in producing and publishing pro-Russian disinformation and propaganda.
🛂 In a sharply upturning trend, Russian courts ordered the expulsion of roughly 86,000 foreigners in the first half of 2024 — putting the country on pace to deport 40,000 more people than the year before. Court records also show a marked increase in convictions and fines for violations of immigration rules.
- In 2025, Russian police will gain the authority to deport migrant workers for certain misdemeanor offenses without the need for court orders. Meanwhile, annual immigration into Russia last year was still 1 million people below pre-pandemic levels. (iStories)
🏦 An investigative report by Andrey Zayakin drawing on "numerous previously unpublished interviews” with Life Financial Group founders Sergey Leontiev and Alexander Zheleznyak alleges that the banking infrastructure they established (including Probusinessbank) was actively used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars from state prosecutors, evade legal regulations, and move funds offshore before regulators could intervene.
- For example, offshore entities controlled by Probusinessbank’s owners made enormous loans to an investment company that belonged to Sergey Leontiev's family trust, which “played the stock market game” using depositors' money through unsecured loans. The profits (more than $190 after taxes) “went into [Leontiev’s] pocket, while the depositors carried the primary risks.” (The Insider)
- Leontiev and Zheleznyak recently returned to news headlines in Russia following an investigation by oppositionist Maxim Katz alleging that the bankers donated money to Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation in exchange for “reputation laundering.”
(4) The Ukraine war
🔍 Victoria Roshchyna’s body was not returned in the most recent body exchange, according to Ukrainian coordination officials, who say they’re still in talks with their Russian counterparts about the repatriation of the journalist’s remains.
- Roshchyna disappeared in August 2023 while reporting from occupied eastern Ukraine. More than a year later, Russia’s military confirmed that she died in September 2024 while in captivity. Her cause of death remains unknown. (Suspilne)
💥 A microelectronics plant in Bryansk said on Monday that it recently suffered an “overnight terrorist attack” that damaged its energy infrastructure and disrupted production. The report apparently concerns a Ukrainian drone attack, but it’s unclear when exactly it occurred. (Kremniy El Group)
🇺🇸 U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made an unannounced trip to Kyiv on Monday (likely his last as Pentagon chief), but he and the Biden administration continue to deny the Zelensky administration’s requests for a NATO membership invitation and permission to fire American weapons deeper into Russia. (The Wall Street Journal)
📚 Ukraine’s former Armed Forces commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, has written a book titled My War. It’s reportedly the first installment in a trilogy, to be followed by Our War and Their War. Sources close to Zaluzhnyi, who now serves as Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.K., deny that he plans to launch a political career. (Babel)
🪖 Belgorod’s former lieutenant governor has deployed to Ukraine after enlisting with the military to avoid a five-year prison sentence for bribery. Konstantin Polezhaev was fired in July 2023 for failing to organize housing reconstruction in border towns targeted by Ukrainian shelling. (BelRu)
🏭 “Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov and his associates are removing and selling off [Mariupol’s] modern metallurgical equipment, shipping scrap metal to Russia for use by its sanctions-crimped carmakers and hawking industrial gases to Moscow’s space program […].” (The Wall Street Journal)
🤫 Russia’s Justice Ministry has drafted legislation allowing local, regional, and federal state agencies in areas under martial law to classify information about their activities (for example, locations, events, and work hours). The ministry said the measures are necessary to defend against terrorist, extremist, and insurgent attacks. (RBC)
- In October 2022, Vladimir Putin declared martial law in four regions of occupied Ukraine: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson.
(5) As the world turns
🗳️ Yulia Navalnaya, widow of the opposition leader Alexey Navalny, says she intends to run for president if she ever returns to Russia. However, she stipulated that her return isn’t possible while Vladimir Putin is in power. Russian officials have issued an arrest warrant for her on felony charges of “extremism.” (Meduza)
🇺🇸 Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed recent comments by Joe Biden expressing willingness to begin talks “without preconditions” with Russia, China, and North Korea "to reduce the nuclear threat.” Lavrov said the outgoing U.S. president’s invitation “is a trick” and an attempt “to score points” domestically for the Democratic Party. (Russia's Foreign Affairs Ministry)
🇬🇪 Russian spies reportedly hacked the Republic of Georgia’s Foreign Ministry, Finance Ministry, Central Bank, and key energy and telecommunications providers, accessing electricity companies, oil terminals, media platforms, and government departments between 2017 and 2020. The data penetration arguably gives Moscow the power to sabotage the small nation’s critical infrastructure. (Bloomberg)
🇪🇺 E.U. member states are reportedly planning to renew talk of new sanctions against Russia in January, when Hungary will lose its control of policy discussions to Poland as the EU’s presidency rotates. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has used Hungary’s presidency to bring sanctions talk to a virtual halt. (POLITICO)
🇺🇸 Recent allegations against vice presidential candidate Tim Walz were apparently engineered by a Russian propaganda unit. Disinformation experts believe several viral deepfake whistleblower videos accusing Walz of sexually assaulting a former student are the work of the “Russian-aligned network” Storm-1516. The bogus assault charges reportedly originated with John Dougan, a former Florida cop who now lives in Moscow and runs a network of pro-Kremlin websites. (WIRED)
🇲🇩 Amid reported cash-for-votes schemes that funneled tens of millions of dollars from Russia directly into the bank accounts of more than 130,000 Moldovans, the country’s electorate narrowly backed a referendum endorsing continued E.U. accession talks. The results were an “upset for President Maia Sandu,” who failed to secure a resounding public mandate for the policy.
- Sandu’s presidency will be on the line in a November 3 second-round run-off against her main rival, Alexandr Stoianoglo, whom Moldova’s pro-Russian Socialist party supports. (The Financial Times)
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