This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued an order making the entire period from May 1 through May 10 a paid nonworking holiday. The extended vacation will encompass the May 3 Labor Day holiday and Victory Day, which is marked on May 10 this year.

The April 23 decree was justified as a measure aimed at containing the spread of COVID-19 and improving the health of Russian citizens. It adds four additional days off to Russia’s calendar of holidays for this year only.

Many Russians took to social media to express an array of pointed views on the seemingly uncontroversial topic.

Historian and politician Boris Ykemenko wrote on Telegram that “it is about time.”

“The idea of having a 10-day May holiday has been obvious for many years,” he wrote. “People have been skipping out of work and their studies as much as possible anyway. Moreover, in May people leave the city — some rest, while the majority dig in their gardens and generally live actively. By comparison, in January they spend the whole 10 days sitting around, getting sour, and drinking.”

In recent years, Russians have gotten paid holidays between New Year’s Day and January 7, which is Orthodox Christmas.

“Russia is a dacha country,” agreed former Russian Planet editor Pavel Pryanikov in a post on Telegram. “People need lots of days off when the weather is good. A week in August would be nice, too, so people could gather mushrooms and harvest their potatoes.”

Several wags urged the Kremlin to give the country a vacation from New Year’s to Victory Day. While the satirical Twitter account Tyotya Roza went even further and announced: “Putin has declared 2021 a nonworking year.”

Leonid Volkov, a close associate of imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, wrote on Twitter that the Kremlin had one reason for declaring the long holiday. “For 11 days, we will have no news from Aleksei or about Aleksei,” he wrote. He noted that lawyers are not allowed to visit Russian prisoners during holidays.

Others, however, criticized the Kremlin for dumping the costs of the holiday on businesses. The opposition Telegram channel Sputnik And Pogrom, calling Putin “the president of the Bunker Federation,” estimated that each nonworking day would cost the country 130 billion to 150 billion rubles ($1.75 billion to $2 billion).”

“This celebration of life will be held at the expense of employers,” the channel wrote.

Likewise, former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a staunch Kremlin critic who spent 10 years in prison on tax-evasion charges he says were politically and economically motivated, noted on Facebook that Putin “hasn’t worked one second in the private sector” and so didn’t hesitate “to hang all the costs for this on entrepreneurs.”

Political analyst Vasily Kashin wrote on Facebook that it was ridiculous “to introduce such holidays unexpectedly when deadlines have already been set without taking them into account.”

Writer and commentator Oleg Kozyrev wrote on Twitter that all around the world, a coronavirus lockdown means “clear rules and compensation for businesses.” In Russia, however, it means “rest some more and employers will pay. They’ll pay and go belly up and fire you.”

But such difficulties are a price the Kremlin is apparently willing to pay to give a “treat” to state-sector workers like bureaucrats, teachers, and the like.

“You can tell immediately that [Putin] is on the state budget,” wrote Kaliningrad journalist Alla Sumarokova on Facebook. “Only people sucking from the budget can be happy about a holiday from May 1 to May 10. Apparently, only state-sector workers and those close to them will be eating in June.”

Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting by RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Ivan Belyayev.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

On March 20, 2012, a decree signed by Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov was published by the Russian government. The decree set out a system of payments to military servicemen “for special achievements in the service.”

Section 4 of the order, which was first highlighted by RFE/RL’s Russian Service, stated that “servicemen of military units 99450, 74455, and the structural unit of military unit 29155 are paid a monthly supplement.”

At the time, little attention was paid to the decree: Little was known about the units, which fell under the umbrella of the feared-and-respected military intelligence agency known as the GRU.

In the years that followed, however, these units burst into the public eye appearing in indictments, sanctions announcements, and political statements from Washington D.C. to the Black Sea.

Unit 29155 in particular has grabbed outsized attention, having been linked by 2018 to an alleged coup plot in Montenegro and the near-fatal poisonings of a former Russian military intelligence officer in England and an arms dealer in Bulgaria.

Now, Czech government allegations that the unit’s members were behind a 2014 explosion at a Czech ammunition depot have blown up relations between Prague and Moscow, with both sides expelling diplomats and exchanging angry rhetoric.

“These are the guys you send in because you want to break stuff,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security services.

Here’s a look at the Russian military intelligence unit that has captured the attention of Western intelligence.

Evolution of An Intelligence Unit

The GRU — whose official name is the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation — is not a new entity. It’s been around for decades, operating first in parallel with the KGB and then, after the Soviet breakup, with the KGB successor agencies: the Federal Security Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service.

In addition to providing more traditional tactical battlefield intelligence for Russian commanders, the agency also oversees several special forces units known as spetsnaz, some of which are charged with sabotage-type operations. It engages in electronic surveillance and recruitment of foreign spies, and, more noteworthy, cyberespionage and offensive cyberoperations — hacking into adversaries’ computers, and possibly even inserting destructive code into computer systems.

GRU spetsnaz units played a prominent role in the Soviet and Warsaw Pact invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. And they played an instrumental role in the 1979 coup in Afghanistan, that led to a disastrous decade of intervention by Soviet troops.

The 2008 war with Georgia, in which the GRU also played a leading role, was considered a victory by the Kremlin but exposed major problems in Russian forces. The Kremlin undertook major reforms, including with the GRU.

Unit 29155 and similar units were likely established during these reforms, Galeotti and other experts said.

Since 2018, the overall agency has been headed by a naval officer, Admiral Igor Kostyukov, whose direct line of authority is to the chief of the general staff, General Valery Gerasimov, and the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, a close confidant of President Vladimir Putin.

That means major operations that could have significant political consequences — like using a Soviet-era military-grade nerve agent that was developed in contravention to international law — likely get top-level Kremlin approval, or at least a heads-up.

A Wedding Near Moscow

The highly secretive nature of intelligence operations, in Russia or anywhere, means there is scant verifiable information about Unit 29155: its budget or its staffing.

However, journalists, open-source researchers, and law enforcement agencies in Western countries have been able to compile a substantial amount of information about the unit.

29155 is reportedly connected to Special Operations Forces Command, whose headquarters is based in Senezh, north of Moscow. Its commander is believed to be Major General Andrei Averyanov, whose daughter was married at a site near Senezh in 2017.

Averyanov became publicly prominent in late 2019, when The New York Times, RFE/RL, and other media uncovered photographs and video from the wedding that showed Averyanov’s presence, as well as that of a man named Anatoly Chepiga, who is also believed to be a member of Unit 29155.

At the time of the wedding in 2017, Chepiga was not publicly known. But his face and a pseudonym — Ruslan Borshirov — became front-page news about nine months later, when the former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia nearly died in Salisbury, England.

British officials said the Skripal were poisoned with a secret nerve agent called Novichok, and they alleged two GRU officers were the culprits.

The open-source research organization Bellingcat later published evidence identifying the men under their true names: Chepiga and Aleksandr Mishkin.

Eight months later, in November 2018, the GRU observed its 100th anniversary in Moscow, in a ceremony attended by Putin himself.

“As commander-in-chief, I of course know, and this is no exaggeration, about your unique abilities including in conducting special operations,” he said.

A Flood Of Revelations

In addition to resulting in the expulsion of dozens of Russian diplomats from Britain, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere, the Skripal case prompted intelligence agencies throughout Europe to reexamine old cases.

That included the near-fatal poisoning in April and May 2015, in Sofia, of a Bulgarian arms dealer named Emilian Gebrev. Bulgarian prosecutors made little public headway in the case until four years later — and more than a year after the Skripal poisoning — when they announced they were reopening their investigation, partly because of information from British authorities.

That December, Bulgarian officials said their investigation was focusing on five alleged GRU agents, including a top officer who purportedly oversaw the team that targeted Skripal. The next month, Bulgarian prosecutors announced charges against three Russians.

In a joint report with Der Spiegel and The Insider, Bellingcat, utilizing flight tracking information, leaked databases, and cell phone records, said as many as eight GRU officers from the same unit — 29155 — may have traveled to Bulgaria in the weeks surrounding the poisoning.

In a new analysis published on April 22, utilizing some of Bellingcat’s travel data, RFE/RL’s Bulgarian Service tracked the travels of some of the known GRU officers in and out of Bulgaria, and found the visits occurred around the times of a series of unexplained explosions that occurred at Bulgarian weapons and armaments facilities in the country in 2014 and 2015.

At least one Bulgarian official, former Defense Minister Todor Tagarev, called on authorities to reopen their investigations into the explosions.

Galeotti said the year 2014 appears to be pivotal in GRU operations — the year the agency, and 29155 in particular, became more aggressive and far-reaching in its operations. Why 2014?

That’s when the months-long Maidan protests in Ukraine culminated in violence against the demonstrators and the ouster of Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych. Russia reacted by seizing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, and fomenting a war in eastern Ukraine that continues today.

“What we didn’t quite realize, which is what makes the Czech case really interesting, is that 2014 marks the beginning of the process, a reaction to what was seen as the continuation of [the] Maidan, and this belief [in Moscow] that the West is trying to steal Ukraine from us,” Galeotti said.

“Russia considered itself at political war with the West and from that point was willing to wage that war on Western soil,” he said.

“They were willing to conduct fairly dangerous operations as far back as 2014,” he told RFE/RL.

Montenegro Plot, Ukraine Weapons?

Unit 29155 is not widely known for cyberattacks and hacking activities. Those have been spearheaded by other GRU divisions — Unit 26165 and Unit 74455, which have been indicted by U.S. authorities on charges of election-related hacking — and the Foreign Intelligence Service.

But 29155 has been linked to at least one attempted cyberintrusion. In October 2018, Dutch officials said that GRU agents allegedly tried to hack into the computers at the headquarters of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. The organization was deeply involved in the investigation of the substance used in the Skripal poisoning.

Two years earlier, in October 2016, Montenegrin authorities claimed they thwarted a plot to take over the country’s parliament building and assassinate the prime minister in a bid to block Montenegro from joining NATO.

In the investigation and trial that followed, 14 people were charged, including Serbian and Russian citizens. Prosecutors charged two Russian military intelligence operatives, Eduard Shishmakov and Vladimir Popov.

Shishmakov and Popov were among those convicted — in absentia in their case — in May 2019. But a Montenegrin court overturned the verdicts in February 2021, citing “significant violations of criminal procedure,” and asked the High Court to retry the case.

Popov is a pseudonym of a man tentatively identified as Vladimir Moiseyev, who also traveled back and forth to Bulgaria at least four times in 2014, all around the same time as four separate explosions at Bulgarian arms manufacturers.

On October 16, 2014, meanwhile, an arms depot near the eastern Czech town of Vrbetice exploded under mysterious circumstances; the bodies of two Czech men were later recovered.

It’s unclear how far the initial Czech investigation into that blast, and another one nearby two months later, proceeded.

But on April 17, at an unusual evening news conference, Prime Minister Andrej Babis announced that Czech intelligence had determined that Unit 29155 was to blame for at least the first explosion. Czech police said they were seeking the same two men wanted in Britain for the Skripal poisoning for questioning.

Other revelations have come out since Babis’s announcement. Bellingcat reported that Averyanov was in Vienna in October 2014, just before the Vrbetice explosion, and that one of the two Russians now linked to the blasts posted a photograph of Prague’s Old Town on October 11.

In another twist, initial reports said the ammunition at the depot that detonated was collected and owned by Gebrev, the Bulgarian arms dealer, and may have been destined for Ukraine as it fought Russian-backed fighters in eastern Ukraine, something partly corroborated by top Ukrainian security officials.

Gebrev has denied the arms were his, or that they were destined for export to Ukraine.

Tor Bukkvoll, a researcher who specializes in Russian security at the Norwegian Defense Ministry’s Defense Research Establishment, said the Czech revelations, while not revolutionary, add further detail suggesting how early and aggressively the GRU was in deploying this unit.

“This demonstration, showing the [Russian] willingness to engage in these kinds of missions, and go into other countries — and perform these kinds of operations — this is really scary,” he said.

RFE/RL Russian Service correspondents Mark Krutov and Sergei Dobrynin contributed to this report

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Few if any of the workers and volunteers in structures tied to imprisoned Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was surprised earlier this month when prosecutors in Moscow began procedures aimed to officially label them “extremist organizations.”

“From the very beginning…it was understood that sooner or later this structure would be deemed ‘extremist,’” said Zakhar Sarapulov, head of Navalny’s office in the Siberian city of Irkutsk. “About two months ago we had a staff meeting and we discussed this and predicted that it would happen in the immediate future.”

Leonid Volkov, the director of Navalny’s network of regional offices who is currently living abroad out of concern for his safety, told Current Time the same thing.

“I would quote a Russian classic — ‘I knew it would be bad, but I didn’t know how soon,’” Volkov said. “We understood that there would be a new wave of attacks on our offices. We already survived a big attack in 2019, when all of our equipment was stolen, all our bank accounts were frozen, and so on. They thought that we couldn’t adapt, but we did, and we found ways to continue our work.”

“This new attack,” he conceded, “looks even more frightening, I’ll admit.”

On April 16, the Moscow prosecutor’s office appealed to the Moscow City Court with a request that three Navalny organizations — the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), the Citizens’ Rights Defense Foundation, and his regional network — be officially labeled “extremist organizations.” The court has announced it will hold a closed hearing on the prosecutor’s request on April 26.

The Russian authorities have been widely criticized for using the country’s vague anti-extremism legislation for political reasons. “Anti-extremism laws are frequently used to increase censorship and state control: silencing political opposition, journalists, and civil society,” the NGO Article 19 wrote in 2019.

If the Navalny organizations are deemed “extremist,” all of their employees could face arrest and prison terms from six to 10 years. In addition, the organizations’ donors — tens of thousands of Russian citizens who have made donations — could also face prosecution for purportedly funding extremism.

“There can be no doubt that the court will grant the prosecutor’s request,” Sarapulov said. “I think every employee here will have to make up their own mind what to do. I can’t speak for the others. For my own part, I can say that I will continue working at Navalny’s office even after it is deemed ‘extremist.’ Of course, we will try to minimize our risks by rebranding, although most likely they will not let us register another legal entity.”

Not Surprised

Navalny himself has been in custody since he returned to Russia in January following weeks of recovery from a nerve-agent poisoning that he says was carried out by Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives acting at the behest of President Vladimir Putin. In February, Navalny was given a 2 1/2-year prison term on charges he insists were politically motivated.

On April 23, he said he would begin winding down a hunger strike he started on March 31 to protest what he called a deliberate campaign to undermine his health.

Navalny’s organizations flatly deny any extremist activity and are convinced the Kremlin is persecuting them for political reasons in the run-up to national legislative elections that must be held by September 19.

“Navalny’s offices and the FBK have always been organizations that insisted on the right of citizens to protest peacefully,” Sarapulov said. “We have never been extremists or terrorists. All that we have done is to investigate corruption and call on people to come out onto the squares of our cities and demand their constitutional rights.”

Ksenia Pakhomova, a volunteer at Navalny’s office in the Siberian oil city of Kemerovo, learned about the “extremism” threat when she emerged from serving a nine-day administrative jail term for participating in a demonstration outside the prison in the Vladimir region where Navalny was being held until he was recently transferred to another prison with better medical facilities.

“I wasn’t surprised at all by the news that they want to proclaim us ‘extremist,’” she said. “I was only surprised that it took so long. I thought Putin would try to shut us down earlier.”

Silent Majority?

Pakhomova said the attack on Navalny’s groups was motivated by growing public opposition to Putin, a 68-year-old former KGB officer who has ruled Russia as president or prime minister since 2000. She said the relatively small number of people who turn out to protest was backed up by a much larger pool of behind-the-scenes supporters.

“When you are jailed, you know that you will not be forgotten,” she told RFE/RL. “Someone will help you by gathering information about detainees. Others will give legal aid. Others will bring you water and food. Others will contact your relatives and friends. All this is happening naturally, voluntarily, but also effectively and efficiently. Any structure would envy such self-organization.”

Employees of Navalny’s organizations face risks from the looming “extremism” label, Pakhomova said, but volunteers are less vulnerable.

“Among volunteers who are getting no salary, as far as I know, no one is planning to give up,” she said. “People who previously tried to avoid politics now have fewer illusions. Their minds are being changed by Navalny’s investigations into the illegal assets of government officials and by Navalny’s arrest. But most of all by the mass detentions during the protests in January and February.”

“For example, my friend’s father used to support Putin,” she added. “But when he found out about my arrest and why I was arrested, he stopped watching [state-run] Channel One. He probably isn’t going to go to a protest, but he definitely isn’t going to vote for Putin and his kind anymore. And there are more and more people like him.”

‘A Protest Against Dictatorship’

Anastasia Korsakova, the head of Navalny’s office in the southern city of Krasnodar, said the Moscow prosecutor’s request was a sign that “they have given the green light to political repressions.”

“But no one among our volunteers or staff has said they might quit or is even talking about the possibility of future problems,” she added. “Of course, we are living in constant expectation of detentions, fines, trials, arrests. But you can’t really prepare in advance for being imprisoned. No one is ready for prison.”

Sarapulov, from Navalny’s office in Irkutsk, said his group maintained a closed chat group in which he posted that anyone who wants to leave the organization was free to do so without judgment.

“No one is leaving,” he said. “Not one person.”

And he agrees that the protests in Russia will continue. “It doesn’t matter what you are protesting against in Russia — against raising retirement ages or the rape of the constitution or tax hikes,” Sarapulov said. “It all comes down to one thing — our country has been ruled by one person for 20 years…. Any protest is a protest against dictatorship. There is nothing more important in Russia today than the struggle between dictatorship and democracy.”

Written by Robert Coalson based on reporting from Russia by Aleksandr Molchanov, Maria Chyornova, and Grigory Kronikh of RFE/RL Russian Service. Tatyana Voltskaya and Svetlana Prokopyeva of RFE/RL Russian Service’s North.Realities and Saikhan Tsintsayev of Current Time contributed to this report

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

It’s one of Russia’s major exports, a source of symbolic pride and commercial revenue: atomic energy, in the form of civilian technology to build and maintain nuclear reactors around the world. State-owned company Rosatom is the driver of that policy, with ambitions for nearly $15 billion in revenues from outside Russia by 2024.

Now, a snowballing spy scandal in the Czech Republic, involving a pair of 7-year-old explosions and Russia’s military intelligence agency, threatens to pull the plug on one of Rosatom’s higher-profile international forays: a new $7 billion-plus nuclear power facility in the Czech Republic.

With relations between Prague and Moscow thrown into turmoil — the head of the Czech Senate called the 2014 blasts an “act of state terrorism” — Czech government officials said on April 19 that they were kicking Rosatom out of the bidding for the project in Dukovany, about 220 kilometers southeast of Prague.

The Czech deputy prime minister, Karel Havlicek, said the decision was made out of “security.” The final bidding process would be limited to companies from France, the United States, and South Korea, he said.

Rosatom described the decision as politically motivated.

“We regret this decision of the Czech authorities, because the Russian and Czech nuclear industries had serious prospects for the development of a mutually beneficial partnership, not only in the Czech Republic, but through joint work in third countries as well,” Rosatom said in a statement.

“The Russian offer envisioned the involvement of hundreds of Czech and European companies in the Dukovany nuclear power plant expansion project, which could have included contracts worth billions of euros. Thus, by excluding Rosatom from the tender, the Czech authorities are pushing aside their own national industry.”

“This is a game changer,” said Pavel Havlicek (no relation to the deputy prime minister), a political analyst at the Prague-based Association for International Affairs. “In terms of rhetoric, diplomacy, politics, this is a very significant gesture, that things will not be the same in the future.”

Nuclear Ambitions

The Czech Republic generates more than one-third of all its electricity from nuclear power, from two sites: one, in Temelin, about 120 kilometers south of Prague, with two reactors, and the other at Dukovany, with four reactors. All are Soviet designs; the first went into operation in the mid-1980s.

Both facilities are majority owned by the state energy company Ceske Energeticke Závody (CEZ).

Rosatom, and its immediate predecessors, has been the main holder of contracts for helping to maintain the reactors, and also for reprocessing spent fuel. The U.S. energy giant Westinghouse was brought in after the 1989 Velvet Revolution to modernize two of the Temelin units and also supply some of its fuel. But the Czech authorities later switched the fuel supply back to Russia.

Russia now supplies all fuel for Czech reactors.

By the mid-2010s, the Czech government forecast a substantial increase in power demand and the need to switch the country’s electricity supply away from coal. So it decided to build another unit at Dukovany and held talks with six companies, including Rosatom and Westinghouse.

Czech relations with China, plagued for years by criticism from mainly liberal Czech lawmakers concerned about Beijing’s authoritarian policies, ultimately led to China General Nuclear Group being frozen out of the process.

Rosatom, meanwhile, was long seen as a leading contender, given Moscow’s history with the Czech nuclear industry.

“For Rosatom, it’s both money and prestige,” said Martin Jirusek, an energy expert and an assistant professor at Masaryk University in the Czech city of Brno, and managing editor of the Czech Journal of Political Science.

He said the costs for building the new Dukovany facility were probably closer to $12 billion, when ancillary costs are figured in. The government’s time line for finishing construction in 2029, and starting generation by 2036, was already unrealistic, he said, even before the spy scandal

October Parliamentary Elections

Despite the heated rhetoric and the move to remove Rosatom from the bidding, it’s not a certainty that will happen, Jirusek said. The current stage that Rosatom is being removed from entails a security review by Czech government agencies.

And there’s nothing at this stage to prevent Rosatom from being allowed to rejoin the process, depending on the outcome of October parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic.

“Kicking Rosatom out of the screening process is kind of a big deal. But at the same time, it doesn’t say anything about the future of the process,” Jirusek said.

If the ruling coalition — led by Prime Minister Andrej Babis’ ANO Party — wins a new mandate, that would potentially reopen the door for Rosatom. And President Milos Zeman, who supports closer business and political ties with Moscow, has said openly in the past that Rosatom should win the tender.

Zeman aside, Czechs’ opinion of Russian policies, while never particularly warm, soured markedly after Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, Havlicek said.

The latest spy scandal means the issue of Russia’s role in Czech society is likely to be a prominent election issue; opposition groups have already come out with strong, clear statements critical of the Kremlin.

That includes the opposition president of the Czech Senate, who called the findings that a Russian military intelligence unit was behind the 2014 deadly explosions at the ammunition depot an “act of state terrorism.”

“This is about credibility of the country, our position in the world. Czechs are bit of an egotistical people,” Havlicek said. “We want to be seen. We want to be recognized. And we don’t want to be subordinate to Russia.”

“We know what it means to be dependent on Russia,” he said.

Atomic Soft Power

Since being established in 2007, Rosatom, which was formed out of a reorganization of the Atomic Energy Ministry, has played an important role expanding Moscow’s commercial ties outside the country.

Between 2009 and 2018, Russia accounted for 23 of 31 export orders for nuclear power facilities around the world, according to a 2020 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank. And the company initiated construction on 10 reactor units overseas between 2007 and 2017. That compares with just four between 1986 and 2007.

In its 2018 annual report, the company said it had $133 billion in overseas orders spanning a 10-year period. Nearly three-quarters of that figure came from construction of nuclear plants; the rest came from fuel supplies and uranium products. Its reported overseas revenues that year were $6.5 billion

Unlike with private companies in the West, like Westinghouse, Rosatom is state-owned. For customers, that means Rosatom can provide contract sweeteners, like financing backed by the Russian state.

The company has become an instrument of “soft power” for the Kremlin, Jirusek said. He said there were parallels with another major Russian state-owned company — Gazprom — whose natural-gas exports to Europe and elsewhere have been tinged with political calculations.

“I see there is a strong government hand in what Rosatom has been doing lately, and the support the Russian government gives…resembles how the government did that with Gazprom a decade before,” he said.

“To help it clinch contracts abroad, it often comes with political strings. It’s a geopolitical thing,” he said

This post was originally published on Radio Free.