In past years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has spent the bulk of his multi-hour annual news conference embracing friendly questions, deflecting problematic ones, trying to show empathy for average Russians, extolling new weapons, and lambasting the West, among other things.

This year’s event will be different in at least one regard: Instead of sitting at a dais in front of hundreds of journalists, Putin will be taking questions via video conference at his residence outside Moscow.

Nonetheless, it’s reasonable to expect more of the same.

To be sure, 2020 has been one of the more challenging years in the two decades since he came to power: Like many countries, Russia has been battered by the coronavirus pandemic; its economy continues to sputter. The constitutional gymnastics that have paved the way for Putin to stay in power for many more years have drawn scorn from opponents who say they make a mockery of Russian democracy.

And what about the fresh evidence that Russian security agents used a sophisticated nerve agent to attack a Russian citizen, anti-corruption crusader Aleksei Navalny?

Here are some of the tougher questions Putin might not be asked — and the answers he might not give if he is asked — at the December 17 event.

QUESTION: Why are wages stagnating and pensions being cut for average Russians, even as the national rainy-day fund is among the largest in the world?

ANSWER: Among the biggest successes Putin can claim since returning to the presidency in 2012: Russia’s fiscal condition is among the strongest in the world. The National Wealth Fund is on track to reach 12.5 trillion rubles ($164 billion) this year, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in October.

That more than meets one of the main goals of the fund when it was set up years ago: to help cushion the economy in the event of a shock, such as an economic downturn or Western sanctions. (Another goal was to help sop up excess cash flowing through the economy during high oil prices, and prevent runaway inflation.)

The question for a growing number of Russians: What about us?

Even before the coronavirus pandemic, many Russians were unhappy with dwindling prosperity. Disposable incomes were falling. Public opinion surveys showed that around 65 percent of Russian households had no savings whatsoever. Bankruptcies were on the rise. Overall poverty increased to 14.3 percent — more than 20 million people — and a hike in the value-added tax rankled.

And then the pandemic hit. Like in many other countries, the government imposed lockdowns to try curb the spread. Unlike in other countries, the Kremlin opted for a relatively miserly approach to supporting out-of-work Russians, spending about one-tenth the amount that countries like Germany and the United States did to buoy their economies.

Overall, the International Money Fund estimates the Russian economy will shrink about 4 percent this year and then begin a slow recovery in 2022.

Expect Russians to grow impatient if livelihoods continue to stagnate. Don’t expect Putin to be heavily challenged on the question in the news conference.

QUESTION: Why is the government spending trillions of rubles on major new weapons systems, like the Avangard hypersonic missile or a new intercontinental ballistic missile called the Sarmat? Are you preparing for a war?

ANSWER: Like with the rainy-day fund, a core policy of the Putin administration has been modernizing and upgrading the country’s military capabilities. The 2008 war in Georgia shone a harsh light on Russian fighting tools and tactics, and since then the government has invested heavily in both new weapons and restructuring the armed forces.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, military spending increased by 30 percent in real terms between 2010 and 2019. Since Putin first arrived in the Kremlin in 2000, it’s increased by 175 percent. This year, it’s estimated at around 3.9 percent of GDP. (While sizable, that figure is dwarfed by military spending in the United States, which spend about 10 times that of Russia, and China, which spend about four times as much.)

Still, the Kremlin has made spending money on and showcasing its newest weapons a priority, and state TV regularly brags about the capabilities and might.

Russia, which has played a major role in the Syria war and has continued to stoke the conflict in eastern Ukraine after occupying and seizing Crimea in 2014, may not be preparing for some new military action abroad.

Still, bragging about military capabilities taps into nostalgia for some Russians who remember the formidable Soviet armed forces. And projecting Russian power, for example in Syria, strikes a patriotic chord with some as well.

In 2019, the Levada Center polling agency found the armed forces were widely popular among Russians — more popular than Putin.

QUESTION: Have you authorized the targeted assassinations of Russian dissidents, reporters, opposition activists, and former military agents who you have deemed to be “traitors”?

ANSWER: In a 2019 interview with the Financial Times, Putin was asked about the case of Sergei Skripal, the former Russian military intelligence officer who nearly died a year earlier after being targeted with a Soviet-era military-grade nerve agent known as Novichok.

At the time, Skripal was living in England, having been sent there in a spy swap in 2010 after serving years in a Russian prison for treason for passing secrets to Western intelligence.

“Treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that [this] is the way to do it. Not at all. But traitors must be punished,” he said.

Skripal’s case was not an isolated one: a series of Russian dissidents, reporters, and others have fallen mysteriously and suspiciously ill over the years, in and out of Russia. Arguably the best known was Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former Russian security officer who died in 2006 after ingesting a highly radioactive isotope known as polonium-210.

And this August, Navalny fell violently ill on a plane in Siberia, was hospitalized and then flown to Berlin, where German authorities identified a Novichok-related substance as the cause.

On December 14 — three days before the news conference — the open-source research group Bellingcat published a major investigation that concluded agents from the Federal Security Service (FSB) had surveilled Navalny for years.

The report, published in conjunction with The Insider, Der Spiegel, and CNN, also said the agents, some of whom had expertise in toxic substances, were in his vicinity at the time he was allegedly exposed to the toxin. Navalny has accused Putin of trying to kill him.

In Moscow, the initial response to the report was muted. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov canceled his daily phone briefings; Russian reporters suggested Peskov wanted to avoid having to respond to questions about Navalny. In comments to reporters during a trip to Zagreb, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the reports “not serious” and accused the United States and “Western partners” of being behind it.

Coming on the heels of other reports exploring the possibility of a secret Russian chemical-weapons program, the Bellingcat investigation is likely to increase pressure on Western governments to more forcefully respond to Russian actions.

Given the unwelcome outside scrutiny on Russia’s security apparatus, and given that the Kremlin tries to keep close control on these sorts of events, it seems unlikely that anyone will be allowed ask Putin about it.

And if he is asked, Putin — himself a former director of the FSB — may avail himself of the opportunity to praise the security forces. And also send Kremlin opponents and Western countries a sharply worded warning, not unlike he did in the Financial Times interview.

QUESTION: Earlier this week, the U.S. government announced a major cyber-intrusion into the computer systems of several major departments. Initial reports pointed the finger at Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and said the sophistication and complexity of the hack suggested it was approved at the highest levels of the Kremlin. Did you authorize it? And if so, why? Given how you have indicated a readiness to work with the incoming Biden administration on a basis of “mutual respect,” this cyberattack appears to be not only very damaging, but potentially hostile.

ANSWER: Russia’s cyber-capabilities are among the most formidable in the world. And that doesn’t even to take into consideration the private world, or the underworld, where Russian hackers are renowned.

As far back as 2007, if not earlier, it was clear that offensive cyber-activities were being embraced in Moscow. That was the year that Estonia was hit with a wave of crippling attacks that paralyzed government websites, ministries, banks, and newspapers. The sophistication of the attacks, and the events that were believed to have prompted them, led Estonia to blame Russia, something Moscow denied.

Since then, Russian intelligence agencies are believed to have ramped up cyber-operations. The FSB enlisted former hackers to build up its cyber-operations, something that ultimately caused major embarrassment for the agency.

In 2016, amid the U.S. presidential election campaign, the servers of the Democratic Party were breached, leading to the theft of thousands of e-mails, which were then leaked and published. Researchers identified two so-called “Advanced Persistent Threat” operations: one run by either the SVR or FSB, the other by Russian military intelligence, known widely as GRU.

Twelve GRU officers were named publicly in a 2018 indictment issued by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which provided other precise details including addresses of the offices where they worked and even blockchain transactions for the Bitcoins that the GRU allegedly used to purchase things like server space.

In October, a U.S. federal grand jury indicted six GRU officers with a wide-ranging cyber-campaign that utilized destructive malware to hack the Ukrainian power grid and the 2018 Winter Olympics.

While none of the GRU officers seems likely to ever see the inside of a U.S. courtroom, the U.S. criminal filings have served partly to “out” the officers, to put Moscow on notice that U.S. intelligence is watching — possibly as a deterrent effect.

Putin may not be asked about Russian cyber-operations, never mind about Russia being blamed for one of the biggest cyber-breaches in U.S. history.

If he does answer, it may be with a smirk.

QUESTION: Given the coronavirus pandemic, what exactly will be the situation with children’s summer camps next year?

ANSWER: Putin might in fact address this sort of question, which is a genuine one that was mentioned on air by a presenter at NTV, the Gazprom-controlled TV channel whose Kremlin coverage is unabashedly positive.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

MOSCOW — In March, a strange story swept through Russian online media: Police and agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB) had raided the St. Petersburg apartment of the bishop of Cherepovets and Belozersk.

According to the sketchy reports based on anonymous law enforcement sources, the authorities discovered a laboratory for producing illegal drugs there. They claimed that a mysterious 22-year-old identified as “Kain Montanelli” was living in the flat and producing and selling narcotics.

The bishop, Flavian, was dismissed from his post by the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church “for health reasons” and sent to an obscure monastery in Vologda, a sprawling region north of Moscow and east of St. Petersburg. Flavian’s lawyers denied the accusations against him and said that he’d resigned as bishop of his own accord.

St. Petersburg police at the time did not issue a statement about the raid and no arrests were reported.

Flavian, whose birth name is Maksim Mitrofanov, is now living in London. He spoke exclusively by telephone with RFE/RL’s Russian Service to tell his version of the story. He denies allegations of wrongdoing and alleges that the FSB is punishing him for refusing to serve as an informant.

The case marks the first time in the post-Soviet period that the FSB has gone after such a high-ranking cleric in the Russian Orthodox Church.

Bishop In Vologda

Flavian was born in Saratov in 1975. His grandmother took him to church at an early age and by the age of 13 he was serving as an altar boy, he said. He graduated from a seminary in Saratov and became a priest in 1997. For a while he taught in the same seminary, rising to become director of academic programs.

He served in the cathedral in Samara and, in 2007, was sent to serve at the Russian Orthodox cathedral in London. In 2009 he bought an apartment in London and was granted British citizenship. He says that he was given the 200,000 British pounds to purchase the flat by his father, a research physicist who had emigrated from Russia in the early 1990s.

In 2014, he was given the opportunity to become a bishop when the bishop of Vologda was promoted to metropolitan. “So I made the stupid move of leaving peaceful London and moving to Vologda,” Flavian said. The Vologda eparchy was split into three parts and Flavian became the bishop of Cherepovets and Belozersk.

Russian Orthodox priests must be married, and Flavian had earlier taken a wife. He had a son from his marriage. However, to become a bishop, Flavian had to take orders as a celibate monk. Even though Orthodoxy does not recognize divorce, in Flavian’s case, a divorce decree from the secular authorities in Saratov was enough to satisfy the church.

As a bishop, Flavian increased the number of monasteries in his eparchy from one to three, increasing the number of monks and working priests as well. His official salary was 1.5 million rubles ($20,500) a month.

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill began giving Flavian political assignments, he said. He was made co-head of a joint commission on relations with the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church.

In 2018, he traveled to Syria and Lebanon — officially to bring humanitarian aid to the region, but unofficially to convey an unspecified sum of money to the Orthodox patriarch of Antioch and All the East in exchange for his support in Moscow’s opposition to the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

Kain Montanelli

In 2017, Flavian said, he met a young Russian man going by the name of Kain Montanelli (RFE/RL knows the man’s real name but has agreed to conceal it due to the sensitivity of the situation). Flavian said Montanelli told him he’d been born into the large family of a priest in the Ural Mountains city of Kurgan. He said he was regularly beaten as a child, forced to kneel on dried peas, and to pray for hours at a time. After he finished school, he ran away to Yekaterinburg. For a time he worked as a waiter, and he failed the entrance exams needed to get into an academic institute.

He then moved to St. Petersburg, where he supposedly applied to enter the FSB academy, but failed the physical examination.

“I came to love him,” Flavian told RFE/RL. “It was some sort of sublimation for me, I think. I did not have good relations with my father and my relations with my son are essentially material. But now I had a real spiritual connection. I began to show him the world. We traveled around Europe. I took him to London.”

Flavian rented a St. Petersburg apartment for Montanelli and paid him 40,000 rubles ($550) a month to work as his assistant.

Asked whether the two men had a physical relationship, as was hinted at in negative terms in many of the news stories that appeared in March, Flavian responded: “Your question is absurd. Monks do not have sexual relations.”

After a while, Flavian said he noticed that Montanelli began to have some money. The young man claimed he was earning cash by selling knock-off Western-label designer goods.

However, in December 2019, Montanelli and two of his friends were arrested and charged with manufacturing drugs. Investigators claim that the trio began selling marijuana. Later, on the so-called dark Internet, they became acquainted with someone going by the alias “President.” Flavian believes that President was an FSB agent.

The young men bought a dacha outside St. Petersburg and President allegedly gave them money to set up a laboratory to produce synthetic drugs. When the dacha was searched, investigators claimed that about a ton of narcotics precursors were seized.

‘A Dialogue With The Devil’

Flavian’s St. Petersburg apartment was also searched at that time, although the story did not leak to the media. He was questioned and tested for narcotics. Agents seized his passport, his credit cards, his mobile phones, and 570,000 rubles ($7,775) in cash, according to the official report, a copy of which RFE/RL has examined. No drugs were found at the apartment.

But during the search, Flavian said, he was questioned by an FSB lieutenant named Krasavin. The name M.K. Krasavin is listed on the police report of the search. “He said that they know all about me and that they have been tracking me since 2007,” Flavian said. “We need information about your contacts.”

Flavian said that since his time in London, he was acquainted with numerous people working at the United Nations and other international organizations, as well as with people connected with various Russian oligarchs. He said that the FSB had tried to recruit him several times, sometimes approaching him through friends in St. Petersburg or employees in his office in Cherepovets.

“I told him that I would not cooperate with an organization that was up to its elbows in the blood of Russian priests and the Russian people,” Flavian recalled. “The holy fathers warn us not to enter into dialogue with the devil because you will lose. That organization is purely diabolical. And that’s what I told him to his face.”

The matter seemed to have died down until March, when local media were full of reports citing unnamed law enforcement sources that a “drug laboratory” had been found in Flavian’s apartment and hinting at “inappropriate relations” between Flavian and Montanelli. Flavian travelled to Moscow to consult with Metropolitan Dionisii, the patriarch’s chief of staff.

“Dionisii said to me: ‘Why didn’t you cooperate with them? Why do you need these problems? Everyone cooperates,’” Flavian recalled. Flavian said that he was instructed to sign a letter of resignation on health grounds and sent to the Pavlo-Obnorsky Monastery, some 70 kilometers from Vologda.

FSB Pressure Mounts

, returning to St. Petersburg. There he remained undisturbed until 5 a.m. on December 2.

That’s when an FSB operational group headed by Lieutenant Krasavin appeared to search the apartment, Flavian said. He claimed that he and a guest who was also there were roughly manhandled by the agents, forced to the floor and left bleeding and bruised. The search continued until 1 p.m. According to the police report, which RFE/RL has seen, nothing illegal was found.

“‘Take your toothbrush and a change of underwear,’” Flavian said he was told. “‘You are going to be arrested.’”

“I told them that I wouldn’t take anything with me and that if I was arrested, I would immediately begin a hunger strike to the death.”

Flavian was held at the local headquarters of the St. Petersburg branch of the FSB until 9 p.m. He was led into an interrogation room where he was confronted by one of the young defendants in the Montanelli drug case, who mechanically claimed that he knew Flavian and that Flavian had given him 500,000 rubles ($6,800) to start a drug laboratory.

Flavian denies ever meeting the man before.

Flavian showed RFE/RL a letter from Montanelli’s lawyer, Nadezhda Zhirinova, to the High Ecclesiastical Court of the Russian Orthodox Church in which she claims that her client had been under pressure from the FSB to provide information “about any foreign property or bank accounts” owned by Flavian and about his contacts abroad with “church employees, UN employees, employees of the Council of Europe, and people in the inner circles of Russian oligarchs.”

The letter adds that these conversations were “unofficial” and took place without the presence of defense counsel.

Zhirnova declined to be interviewed for this story.

At 9 p.m. on December 2, Flavian was released from custody without being charged or ordered to remain in the city. He was immediately summoned to Moscow to see Metropolitan Dionisii again.

“I explained the situation to him and he told me that I was myself to blame and that I don’t understand what is going on,” Flavian said. He added that Dionisii ordered him to return to the monastery under threat of being disgraced.

“I understood that he had reached an agreement with the FSB that I would await my summons not in custody but in a monastery,” Flavian said.

He pretended that he would comply, but two days later, he was on a plane to Britain.

Written by Robert Coalson based on reporting from Moscow by Sergei Khazov-Cassia of RFE/RL’s Russian Service

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Russian state media has been slow to react to a detailed investigation reportedly showing that Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny was poisoned by members of the Federal Security Service (FSB), raising questions about whether authorities have been caught off guard.

Bellingcat said in its December 14 report that it had used “voluminous evidence in the form of telecoms and travel data” to conclude that Navalny was poisoned by operatives from the FSB, the successor to the KGB, during his trip to the Siberian city of Tomsk in August.

The British-based open-source research group, with the help of several media outlets including the Insider, a Russian investigative website, Der Spiegel, and CNN, published the names and photos of the FSB operatives taking part in the poisoning operation as well as a timeline of events.

The group said that the operatives are part of an FSB-operated boutique poisoning facility, an allegation that, if true, would indicate Russia is in violation of international chemical-weapons agreements.

Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press spokesman, canceled his daily briefing with media for December 15 and 16, triggering speculation he was seeking to avoid answering questions about the report.

The Kremlin said he needed to prepare for Putin’s traditional year-end marathon press conference, which will be held on December 17.

Channel One and NTV, two of the nation’s leading state-owned TV stations, have been silent so far about the report while state-owned online media have also largely skipped the topic.

RT, a state-funded news agency targeting a foreign audience, raised questions about the credibility of the group’s report, highlighting different versions given by Navalny and his team of how he came into contact with the poison.

RT also sought to discredit Bellingcat, describing it as “a US government-funded” outfit and saying its reported use of GPS data to identify the location of FSB agents “will do little to dispel suggestions that its team is working closely with intelligence agencies.”

Others on social media also pushed the notion of the report as a Western intelligence operation, claiming the work required to collect and analyze the data is beyond the capacity of volunteers and investigative journalists.

Possibly in reference to that notion, Yevgeny Popov, host of the popular 60 Minutes talk show on state TV, said on his Telegram channel on December 15 that it’s “now official” that Navalny works with the CIA and MI6.

Navalny said the day before that his own team had checked Bellingcat’s investigation and confirmed its findings.

Maksim Mironov, a finance professor in Spain, dismissed criticism of the report as a foreign intelligence job.

In a December 15 blog post, he said that it was not hard to analyze personal data dumps, pointing out that he has written detailed reports for scientific journals about corruption based on his analysis of leaked Russian data.

Perhaps in reaction to the data leaks that Bellingcat reportedly used to identify the FSB agents, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin on December 15 reminded Rostelecom, the state-controlled telecom company, to keep people’s personal data safe.

In what seems to be the only official Russian comment on the investigation so far, Dmitry Polyansky, the nation’s deputy ambassador to the UN, dismissed it as a Western-financed operation.

In a December 15 tweet, Polyansky said the “biggest shock” from the Bellingcat report is that with a “zero level of expertise, creative imagination and Western money you can ‘discover’ everything.”

Putin’s spokesman Peskov did comment to the media — shortly before the Bellingcat report was posted — about a December 12 article by British newspaper The Sunday Times, which claimed Russian state actors tried to poison Navalny a second time in Tomsk prior to his evacuation to Germany. Peskov called the British report “bullshit,” TASS reported.

Bellingcat said the phone metadata of 12 FSB operatives from the clandestine FSB unit specializing in working with poisonous substances showed that they had shadowed Navalny during his trips across Russia over the past three years.

The operatives flew alongside him to more than 30 overlapping flight destinations, and appear to have made at least two attempts to poison him prior to the Tomsk operation.

Navalny, who is currently in Germany where he is recovering after being poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent, said his case was now solved despite the absence of an official investigation in Russia.

Nonetheless, two opposition deputies in the St. Petersburg parliament have prepared a collective appeal addressed to Russia’s Investigative Committee calling on it to investigate the allegations in the report, Kommersant reported.

The deputies had earlier appealed to the Investigative Committee to look into Navalny’s poisoning but were rebuffed, the newspaper said.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.