This was Russia today, Wednesday, October 23, 2024 Russia’s federal censor considers banning online messenger phone calls, Moscow tests new ‘remote recruitment’ army ploy for its army, and Zelensky orders backup ‘internal action plan’
Howdy, readers! Today was day two of the Russia-hosted BRICS summit, and whaddayaknow, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres controversially attended, traveling to Kazan and joining representatives of more than 30 countries, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and others.
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Today’s main story: The Pentagon has confirmed North Korean troops are in Russia. Here’s what that means for the war in Ukraine.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has acknowledged evidence that North Korean troops are in Russia, but he stopped short of endorsing Ukrainian and South Korean intelligence reports that the soldiers are headed for combat. “If they are co-belligerents, [if] their intention is to participate in this war on Russia's behalf, that is a very, very serious issue,” Austin told reporters in Rome.
So, what happens next? The independent outlet iStories spoke to a North Korea expert to learn more about these troops, the problems they might face on the front lines, and whether any country has a chance to intervene and stop their deployment.
The bottom line: If China, South Korea, or the United States hope to stop Kim Jong Un from sending troops to Russia, their options are limited and vary in potential effectiveness. For the U.S. and Ukraine’s other Western allies, the primary way to pressure Russia is by increasing military aid to Ukraine.
(2) Crowdsourcing Telegram “transparency reports” to map the network’s claimed compliance with governments around the world
It’s a new era of openness from Pavel Durov’s beast, sorta: In early October, a month after Telegram’s founder was arrested in Paris on charges related to the network’s alleged noncompliance with French state officials, researchers discovered an official bot that allows users to obtain “transparency reports” about the number of times Telegram fulfilled a local government’s requests for users’ IP addresses and/or phone numbers (and the number of affected users).
Crowdsourcing for better transparency: Because the bot only provides data for the country where the account demanding data is registered, mapping Telegram’s data sharing worldwide has proved difficult. Meduza asked its readers to share their own transparency reports from Telegram’s bot.
We got The Beet. Don’t miss Meduza’s weekly newsletter (separate from the one you’re reading here)!
(3) Meanwhile, in Russia
🗳️ Yulia Navalnaya’s recent announcement that she is prepared to seek Russia’s presidency if the Putin regime ever collapses has proved controversial among pro-Kremlin propagandists and Putin critics alike. (RFE/RL)
🔫 A student in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug fired a plastic air pistol on school grounds, causing mild injuries to one victim. The shooter reportedly has a juvenile record and will face still-unspecified felony charges. (RIA Novosti, Telegram)
- Tuesday’s air pistol incident in Gubkinsky follows two attacks by students armed with hammers against teachers and classmates in September.
☎️ Russia’s federal censor is considering a ban on phone calls placed through foreign online messenger apps that fail to comply with a data-sharing mechanism the agency hasn’t yet developed. Roskomnadzor says 99.5 percent of Russia’s phone companies now cooperate with its “Anti-Fraud” system (run by the agency’s powerful Main Radio Frequency Center) designed to thwart telephone scams by blocking calls from spoofed and suspicious numbers. (RBC)
- Ostensibly to combat telephone scammers, the Russian authorities have imposed more and more restrictions (and surveillance) on the sale and purchase of SIM cards.
🤬 Filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov committed a hate speech offense in public remarks in August 2022 when he (1) argued that the Ukrainian language itself has become a form of Russophobia and (2) said classroom instruction in Ukrainian would be "catastrophic." However, the Moscow regional police who confirmed this also declined to press charges, citing the expired statute of limitations, according to documents shared by the anti-Kremlin activist who reported Mikhailkov. (Committee 2024, Telegram)
🕹️ Russian gamers have been unable to update their Nvidia graphics card drivers without a VPN. The American company stopped renewing and selling software licenses in Russia in 2022, but this is the first major disruption in consumers' access to driver updates.
- The outage is related to a firewall issue and may only be temporary. (DTF)
🇮🇱 State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin floated the idea of extraditing economist Anatoly Chubais, accusing the former Kremlin official of orchestrating illegal privatizations of Russia’s energy sector during his 10-year tenure as the chairman of the electric energy holding company RAO UES. (RBC)
- Chubais’s role in Russia’s Yeltsin-era privatizations has made him a controversial figure for decades.
- Russian officials, especially Volodin, have criticized Chubais repeatedly since he resigned as Vladimir Putin’s presidential representative and emigrated to Israel in March 2022 after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In September 2023, Putin said Chubais was “hiding” in Israel and joked that he might as well have changed his name to “Moshe Izrailevich.”
😺 Libraries, rec centers, and other public spaces in Russia have started holding “preventative talks” to warn parents about the dangers of “quadrobing” — a subculture popular primarily among youths where participants imitate animals, notably by moving on all fours. Elsewhere in Russia, some grade schools have invited psychologists and even priests to deliver similar warnings to schoolchildren about quadrobing. (Mediazona)
- The subculture’s critics in Russia have connected quadrobing to the supposedly broader scourge of foreign “destructive ideologies” threatening the country’s traditional values.
(4) The Ukraine war
💰 A human rights group warns that the Russian military appears to be testing a scheme to “recruit conscript soldiers remotely for contract service,” wherein young men called up for non-combat duty are wired signing bonuses without ever agreeing to enlist as contract soldiers.
- Journalists have identified multiple cases of unsolicited payouts to conscripts in military units stationed in Russia’s Kurgan and Chelyabinsk regions. Activists warn that soldiers who don’t immediately return the money are at risk of being sent to fight in Ukraine. Complicating matters, some unit commanders have impeded conscripts’ access to banks. (Meduza)
🕊️ Volodymyr Zelensky says a mutual cessation of aerial attacks on power grids and cargo ships could lead to peace talks with Russia. In comments to journalists in Kyiv on Thursday, Ukraine’s president also said Russia’s readiness to negotiate “depends firstly on the U.S. elections,” clarifying that he expects America’s focus to return to Europe once the next president is chosen. (The Financial Times)
⏳ While publicly advocating his “victory plan” in the U.S. and Europe, President Zelensky has reportedly tasked his administration with drafting an “internal action plan” for virtually all levels of state policy that aims to “do everything possible to maintain unity and achieve results in various areas of Ukraine’s development.” Zelensky reportedly intends to present this domestic action plan to the nation before the end of the year. (BBC News Ukrainian)
🪖 Chechen “Akhmat” Special Forces commander Apti Alaudinov defended his unit against allegations of inappropriate behavior by claiming that Russian troops in the Kursk region have committed 187 crimes, including rape and murder. Alaudinov, who also serves as a deputy chief of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Main Military-Political Directorate, made the remarks in an interview with z-blogger Maxim Kalashnikov. He did not specify the time frame of these alleged crimes. (Agentstvo Media)
- In mid-August, a video circulated online apparently showing Chechen soldiers looting a store outside Kursk during the region’s evacuation in response to Ukraine’s armed incursion.
🇺🇸 Zelensky’s “victory plan” carries unacceptable “escalatory potential” for Washington, a senior Ukrainian official told The Economist. “They say it’s a non-starter, though part of the problem is they don’t tell the [Ukrainian] president that to his face,” the source said. (The Economist)
🇰🇿 Kazakhstani court records show that a Russian deserter sent home this summer supposedly requested the deportation himself. During a 13-minute hearing in June, Kamil Kasimov formally asked to be returned to Russia, although he was wanted there for desertion. The court granted his request, ignoring the fact that Russian military police had abducted Kasimov in Astana and detained him at a local base. (Bes Media)
- In August 2024, a Russian military court sentenced Kasimov to six years.
🇬🇧 U.K. Armed Forces Minister Luke Pollard revealed on Twitter that the Royal Air Force has now trained 200 Ukrainian pilots. “These pilots will soon be flying Ukrainian F-16s,” Pollard said of the latest graduating class. (Luke Pollard, Twitter)
🪖 A man sentenced to 3.5 years for his alleged role in the killing of Daria Dugina, the daughter of Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin, is now in Ukrainian custody after enlisting with the Russian military to avoid prison time and deploying to Ukraine for combat. Alexander Suchkov says he was injured during a drone strike and was later captured by Ukrainian soldiers in Luhansk. (Novaya Gazeta Europe)
- Suchkov helped forge the car registration certificate used by the alleged car bomber who killed Dugina, but he says he wasn’t aware of the assassination plot.
(5) As the world turns
🇧🇾 Alexander Lukashenko says he would consider pardon requests from Belarusian political prisoners, including Maria Kolesnikova, one of the country's most prominent jailed opposition leaders.
- The long-time head of state falsely told BBC journalist Stephen Rosenberg during a combative interview at this week's BRICS summit in Kazan that Kolesnikova's relatives haven't tried to visit her in prison. Kolesnikova's family fears for her safety and says it hasn't received so much as a letter from her since February 2023. (BeltaBy)
🗳️ The lower house of the Belarusian National Assembly has set the country’s next presidential election for January 26, 2025. Alexander Lukashenko, who has held the office since 1994, says he will seek a seventh term. (Meduza)
- Earlier this month, state investigators charged 22 oppositionists with plotting to disrupt the country’s next presidential election and seize control of the government. The case is a response to a platform adopted at a conference in Lithuania by exiled Belarusian democratic forces denouncing Lukashenko and calling for “unified efforts to free political prisoners and end repressions.”
- The largest protests in the regime’s history broke out in 2020, during Belarus’s last presidential election, when Lukashenko claimed victory despite overwhelming evidence of fraud and voter intimidation.
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