Two Russian nationals are among four men who have pleaded guilty to cybercrimes that targeted banks and companies across the United States, resulting in millions of dollars of losses, the Justice Department said on May 7.
The four men — Aleksandr Grichishkin, 34, and Andrei Skvortsov, 34, of Russia; Aleksandr Skorodumov, 33, of Lithuania; and Pavel Stassi, 30, of Estonia — provided so-called “bulletproof hosting” services to a network of cybercriminals, according to court documents.
The bulletproof hosting operation rented Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, servers, and domains to cybercriminal clients who in turn used the technical infrastructure to disseminate malware that could gain access to victims’ computers and steal banking credentials, the Justice Department said in a news release.
“Over the course of many years, the defendants facilitated the transnational criminal activity of a vast network of cybercriminals throughout the world by providing them a safe-haven to anonymize their criminal activity,” said Special Agent in Charge Timothy Waters of the FBI’s Detroit Field Office.
The malware hosted by the organization attacked U.S. companies and financial institutions between 2009 and 2015, the Justice Department said.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas L. McQuaid said organizations that aid cybercriminals in deploying malware are “no less responsible for the harms these malware campaigns cause, and we are committed to holding them accountable.”
According to court filings and statements made by the defendants, Grichishkin and Skvortsov were founding members of the operation and its proprietors.
All four pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to engage in a Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) in U.S. District Court in Michigan. Each defendant faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison at their sentencing hearing later this year.
Law enforcement partners in Germany, Estonia, and the United Kingdom assisted the FBI in its investigation.
U.S. prosecutors said they were seeking a 17-year prison sentence for a former U.S. Army Green Beret who pleaded guilty last year to years of providing classified information to a Russian military intelligence agent.
The filing on May 7 in U.S. federal court in Virginia follows Peter Debbins’s guilty plea last November to a federal Espionage Act charge.
According to the court filing, Debbins, 46, had a 15-year relationship with Russian intelligence dating back to 1996 when he was an exchange student from the University of Minnesota and on a visit to Russia for an independent study program gave an alleged Russian handler the names of four Roman Catholic nuns he had visited in Russia.
Two years prior, according to U.S. prosecutors, Debbins, whose mother was born in the Soviet Union, traveled to Russia for the first time and met his current wife in the central city of Chelyabinsk. Debbins’s father-in-law was a colonel in the Russian air force.
Debbins told Russian intelligence he considered himself a “son of Russia,” and “thought that the United States was too dominant in the world and needed to be cut down to size,” according to the indictment filed last year.
Court filings show that Debbins joined the U.S. Army as an active duty officer in 1998 and served through 2005, the last two years as a Special Forces officer.
While on assignment in Azerbaijan, he was discharged and lost his security clearance after violating protocols. That included bringing his wife with him to Azerbaijan and allowing her to use a government-issued cell phone, according to the court filing.
After being discharged from the military, he worked as a civilian for U.S. military contractors, in some cases in counterintelligence, including work as a Russian linguist.
The original charging indictment alleged that he provided information and names of his fellow Special Forces members while he was on assignment in Azerbaijan and Georgia.
According to his guilty plea, Debbins admitted that the Russian agents used the information he provided to evaluate whether other Special Forces officers could be persuaded to cooperate with Russia.
It wasn’t immediately clear when Debbins will be sentenced.
The Justice Department secretly obtained the phone records of three Washington Post reporters who wrote about the federal investigation into ties between Russia and former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, the newspaper said on May 7.
The action appears to have been aimed at identifying the reporters’ sources for stories published in 2017 during the early months of Trump’s administration as federal investigators scrutinized whether Trump’s 2016 campaign had coordinated with Russia to sway the election.
The newspaper said the three reporters received notice that their phone records had been seized in letters dated May 3.
The Post said the Justice Department did not specify the purpose of the subpoena to obtain the records or identify any articles at issue, but the newspaper said the period in question was April 15, 2017, to July 31, 2017.
During that time the Post published a story about classified U.S. intelligence intercepts indicating that in 2016 Jeff Sessions, who would later become Trump’s attorney general, had discussed campaign issues with Russia’s then-ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.
The phone records include who called whom, when calls were made, and how long calls lasted, but do not include what was said in the calls. Investigators often hope such records will lead them to the sources who leaked sensitive information to reporters.
The letters sent to the reporters do not say when the Justice Department approved the decision to subpoena their records, but a department spokesman said it happened in 2020 before the end of the Trump administration.
Cameron Barr, the Washington Post’s acting executive editor, demanded that the Justice Department say why it seized the data.
“We are deeply troubled by this use of government power to seek access to the communications of journalists,” Barr said in a statement. “The Department of Justice should immediately make clear its reasons for this intrusion into the activities of reporters doing their jobs, an activity protected under the First Amendment.”
Justice Department guidelines for leak investigations mandate that such actions are allowed only when other avenues for obtaining the information have been exhausted, and that the affected reporters must be notified unless it’s determined that it would interfere with national security.
“While rare, the Department follows the established procedures within its media guidelines policy when seeking legal process to obtain telephone toll records and non-content email records from media members as part of a criminal investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” department spokesman Marc Raimondi said in a statement quoted by the Post.
Raimondi said the targets such investigations are not the reporters but “those with access to the national defense information who provided it to the media and thus failed to protect it as lawfully required.”
The Justice Department also said it had received a court order to get e-mail records from the reporters but did not obtain them. The e-mail records sought would have indicated who e-mailed whom and when but would not have included the contents of the e-mails.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made a veiled dig at Russia and China when he told the UN Security Council that the actions of some big powers are sending a wrong message to other countries.
In a virtual session chaired by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on May 7, Blinken stressed the need to uphold international commitments, focus on human rights, and respect the principle of equality of all nations.
Blinken said that when UN member states — particularly permanent council members — violate these rules and block attempts to hold accountable those who violate international law, it sends the message that others can break those rules with impunity.
He didn’t name any countries, but his remarks appeared aimed especially at China and Russia, which along with the United States and its allies France and Britain are permanent, veto-wielding powers of the 15-member council.
Blinken’s comments come amid spiraling tensions between Washington and Moscow over issues including Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region, the conflicts in eastern Ukraine and Syria, alleged meddling in elections in the United States and other democracies, cyberattacks allegedly from Russian hackers, and the poisoning and jailing of Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny.
WATCH: U.S. Doesn’t Accept ‘Spheres Of Influence,’ Blinken Says In Comments Aimed At Russia
Washington and Beijing are also at odds over influence in the Indo-Pacific region and human rights in Hong Kong and the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where the treatment of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups has drawn condemnation from the international community.
Blinken said countries don’t respect a founding UN principle of sovereign equality — according to which every sovereign state possesses the same legal rights as any other sovereign state in international law — when they “purport to redraw the borders of another” country, threaten force to resolve territorial disputes, claim entitlement to a sphere of influence, or target other countries with disinformation, meddle in elections, and go after journalists or dissidents.
Blinken also said that governments that insist what they do within their own borders is their own business don’t have “a blank check to enslave, torture, disappear, ethnically cleanse their people, or violate their human rights in any other way.”
U.S. President Joe Biden has said that the time and place for his proposed summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, are still being worked out.
“I’m confident we’ll be able to do it. We don’t have any specific time or place. That’s being worked on,” Biden told reporters at the White House on May 7 when asked about meeting Putin in June — during his planned trip to Europe.
He said that Russia’s massive buildup of military forces near Ukraine’s border and in annexed Crimea “does not impact my desire to have a one-on-one meeting” with Putin.
“And you’ll notice he had more troops before. He’s withdrawn troops.”
Biden in April offered a meeting in a third country to discuss spiraling tensions over issues including military threats to Ukraine, the SolarWinds cyberattack on U.S. computers, and Russia’s treatment of jailed opposition activist Aleksei Navalny.
“We’re working through the question of some logistics – place, location, time, agenda, all the specifics – that was always going to happen at a staff level. It’s really up to them what they want to achieve,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters on May 7.
Biden has repeatedly stated that while he will be tough on Russia over any hostile policies, he is also seeking to cooperate where the two sides have mutual interests. This includes on such issues as nuclear proliferation, climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, North Korea, and fostering peace and stability in Afghanistan.
On May 7 in Kyiv, Blinken denounced Moscow’s “reckless” actions against Ukraine and said the United States is considering Ukraine’s request for “additional” military assistance to help deter Kremlin aggression.
WATCH: U.S. Doesn’t Accept ‘Spheres Of Influence,’ Blinken Says
Last month, Russia amassed tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine’s borders as well as in Crimea, the biggest mobilization since Moscow seized the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014 and war broke out in eastern Ukraine, where Russia is backing separatists.
For his first overseas trip since taking office in January, Biden plans to join the other leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) major industrialized nations for a summit in Britain set for June 11-13.
He will then fly to Brussels to participate in a NATO summit on June 14 and attend an EU-U.S. meeting with the bloc’s 27 leaders.
Amnesty International says it has decided to redesignate Aleksei Navalny as a “prisoner of conscience,” after the human rights watchdog earlier this year stopped referring to the jailed opposition politician as such over past comments he made that reached “the threshold of advocacy of hatred.”
Navalny “has not been imprisoned for any recognizable crime, but for demanding the right to equal participation in public life for himself and his supporters, and for demanding a government that is free from corruption,” the London-based human rights group said in a statement on May 7.
“These are acts of conscience and should be recognized as such.”
Amnesty International announced in February it would stop referring to the Kremlin foe as a “prisoner of conscience” on the grounds that in the past he had made comments over his alleged advocacy of violence and discrimination and comments that included hate speech.
But the group said in its latest statement that the Russian government and its supporters used that decision to “further violate” Navalny’s rights.
As a result, Amnesty International launched a review of its approach to the use of the designation “prisoner of conscience” and decided as an interim step to “not exclude a person…solely based on their conduct in the past.”
“We recognize that an individual’s opinions and behavior may evolve over time. It is part of Amnesty’s mission to encourage people to positively embrace a human rights vision and to not suggest that they are forever trapped by their past conduct.”
The designation of an individual as “prisoner of conscience” doesn’t imply the endorsement of their views by Amnesty, it said.
By confirming Navalny’s status as a “prisoner of conscience,” the watchdog is “highlighting the urgent need for his rights, including access to independent medical care, to be recognized and acted upon by the Russian authorities,” according to the statement.
Navalny is serving a 2 1/2 year prison sentence on embezzlement charges that he says were trumped up because of his political activity.
He recently ended a hunger strike that he had been holding to demand he be examined by his own doctors amid what he has described as a “deliberate campaign” by Russian prison officials to undermine his health.
The 44-year-old has been in custody since January, when he returned to Russia following weeks of medical treatment in Germany for a nerve-agent poisoning in August 2020 that he says was carried out by operatives of the Federal Security Service (FSB) at the behest of President Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin has denied any role in the poisoning.
His incarceration sparked numerous protests across Russia which were violently dispersed by police.
Navalny’s anti-corruption organization has targeted many high-profile Russians, including high-ranking government officials.
In the course of his political career, he has also come under criticism for his association with ethnic Russian nationalists and for statements seen as racist and dangerously inflammatory.
KARAKUL, Russia — A wildfire has ravaged a 16th century Tatar village in Siberia that authorities had planned to turn into a tourist attraction.
The Omsk Tatars National and Cultural Autonomy group said the fire that started on the afternoon of May 6 lasted for about 15 hours and completely destroyed 25 buildings, including 14 private houses and a shop in the village of Karakul in the Omsk region that borders with Kazakhstan.
Firefighters were brought to the site as the wildfire reached the village, but they couldn’t overcome heavy winds that fanned the flames across the village.
Karakul is a unique, centuries-old settlement of Siberian Tatars with very old wooden houses, carrying traditional Tatar carvings on the buildings’ facades, windows, and doors.
The village is also known across Russia for preserving ancient Siberian Tatar culture and traditions going back to the time of the Khanate of Sibir.
The Omsk Tatars National and Cultural Autonomy group has launched a fundraising campaign to help restore the village.
PRAGUE — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has called on Russia to stop “targeting” journalists after one of its contributors lost an appeal against her inclusion on Russia’s controversial registry of “foreign agent” media.
“Lyudmila is not a ‘foreign agent’ — she, and RFE/RL journalists Denis Kamalyagin and Sergei Markelov, are Russian nationals providing objective news and information to their fellow citizens. We call on the Russian government to stop targeting journalists and blocking the Russian people’s access to information,” RFE/RL President Jamie Fly said in a statement late on May 6.
Russia’s so-called “foreign agent” legislation was adopted in 2012 and has been modified repeatedly. It requires nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign assistance and that the government deems to be engaged in political activity to be registered, to identify themselves as “foreign agents,” and to submit to audits.
Later modifications of the law targeted foreign-funded media. At the end of 2020, the legislation was modified to allow the Russian government to include individuals, including foreign journalists, on its “foreign agents” list and to impose restrictions on them.
Activists have described the “foreign agent” legislation as “restrictive” and intended “to demonize independent groups.”
Savitskaya and four other people — Sergei Markelov, a freelance correspondent for the North.Realities (Sever.Realii) of RFE/RL’s Russian Service; Denis Kamalyagin, editor in chief of the online news site Pskovskaya gubernia and a contributor to RFE/RL’s Russian Service; human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov; and artist and activist Darya Apakhonchich — were included in the “foreign agent” media list in December 2020. The ministry did not give any justification for why these individuals were listed.
‘You Have Turned Everything On Its Head’
In court on May 5, Justice Ministry representatives presented as evidence against Savitskaya articles she had written about anti-government protesters, alleged torture in Russian prisons, and the blocking of electronic communications in the areas around prisons.
They also presented a large number of documents marked “for official use only” from the Interior Ministry, the Prosecutor-General’s Office, and other agencies that Savitskaya and her attorneys were not allowed to examine. They have said they will appeal the case to a higher court.
In her closing statement at the appeal, Savitskaya ridiculed the country’s justice system saying the Justice Ministry was “fighting against the wrong people” as all she was doing was “simply” reporting the facts and writing “in such a way that the authorities pay attention to the misfortunes of citizens and help them with their problems.”
“You have turned everything on its head, Justice Ministry representatives. You call a person whose work is to help people a ‘foreign agent.’ But the real foreign agents are not here in this courtroom. They are in the Kremlin and the State Duma,” she told the court.
“They are the ones who every day are passing repressive laws, taking away the rights to life and liberty from citizens, and barring people under the threat of prison from speaking the truth. They are the agents of some sort of foreign-to-us-all totalitarian state. They are. Not me. I am a journalist and I remain a journalist,” she added.
Savitskaya’s defense argued that none of the materials presented indicated that she was working at the behest of any foreign power.
In her remarks, Savitskaya noted that the Justice Ministry “made an interesting selection of my articles” in an attempt to “make me out to be a politician.”
“You cleverly forgot to include my articles about veterans who are living in rotting shacks; about the prisoners in concentration camps, who at the state’s orders are huddling in railway-station closets; about the child diabetics who are not being given the medicines they need; about the Pskov paratrooper who voted for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin his entire life and died during a military mission in Syria and about his wife, who was not granted his military pension,” she said.
“People in judicial robes and military epaulets with ranks bow obsequiously to our jaded authorities, which remain nonetheless an insatiable conspiracy. The law is finished and only terror remains. ‘Do you think this regime will last forever?’ I asked in court. The three in epaulets and the one in the judge’s robe remained silent. They all understand — it is just that today [the system] came for someone else,” she added.
In 2017, the Russian government placed RFE/RL’s Russian Service, six other RFE/RL Russian-language news services, and Current Time on the list.
Earlier this year, Russian courts began imposing large fines against RFE/RL for failing to mark its articles with a government-prescribed label as required by rules adopted in October 2020. RFE/RL is appealing the fines.
RFE/RL has called the fines “a state-sponsored campaign of coercion and intimidation,” while the U.S. State Department has described them as “intolerable.”
In an interview with RFE/RL during a one-day visit to Kyiv on May 6, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken vowed to stand up “for the right of journalists to do their jobs.” His comments came as RFE/RL finds itself under increasing pressure in Russia, where authorities demand that it identify itself as a “foreign agent” in accordance with legislation that critics say is designed to crack down on independent media and NGOs. In recent weeks, RFE/RL has been confronted with multiple legal challenges and a record amount of fines for refusing to label its content. The targeting of RFE/RL has raised concerns the Russian government may be moving to shutter RFE/RL’s operations inside Russia. Blinken was asked whether he thought there was a chance to influence the situation.
A verdict is expected on May 11 in the trial of 19-year-old OIga Misik, who became well-known after reading from the Russian Constitution to riot policemen in Moscow in 2019. Misik delivered a fiery courtroom speech which has been widely discussed on social media. She faces up to three years in prison for splashing paint on government buildings during a protest last year.
To receive Steve Gutterman’s Week In Russia via e-mail every Friday, subscribe by clicking here. If you have thoughts or feedback, you can reach us directly at newsletters@rferl.org.
Halfway between opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s grim winter homecoming and September parliamentary elections that will test President Vladimir Putin’s legitimacy, analysts say Russia has entered a new era of repressions that poses risks for the Kremlin — and will be hard to reverse.
Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.
‘A Major Policy Shift’
When Federation Council speaker Valentina Matviyenko scheduled a meeting of the upper house of parliament after President Vladimir Putin’s state-of-the-nation speech last month, she said it would follow an address for a “new time.” It was unclear what she meant, and speculation that her remarks signaled some aggressive move by Moscow — such as a merger with Minsk or a new offensive against Ukraine – has not been borne out so far.
But she was not wrong: It is a new time.
Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, the Federation Council
Since Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny was jailed upon his return to Russia in January — and arguably since his poisoning last August, or even earlier — there has been a substantial alteration in the Kremlin’s approach, analysts say, and one that will be hard to reverse, even if Putin wants to.
Different observers have put it in different ways: One wrote of a “worst-case” scenario coming true; another said that Putin’s Kremlin is “killing off hope”; while a third tweeted that the Russian state has gone “all in on repression.”
Still another said the level of “repression and authoritarianism” in Russia today “marks a milestone in the political decay and intellectual debasement of late Putinism.”
“There is no way of escaping the realization that a major policy shift has taken place in Russia,” Mark Galeotti, an analyst, author, and expert on the state security services, wrote in an article published in The Moscow Times on May 1.
“A regime that for 20 years sought to be an exemplar of a kind of ‘hybrid authoritarianism,’” he wrote, has shifted to a more menacing style of rule that “could be called post-post-authoritarianism — or maybe just plain, old-fashioned authoritarianism.”
‘Fearful’ Kremlin
Since Navalny’s return, this shift has for some, at least, come to seem inevitable. Each week, perhaps even every day, has brought multiple fresh signs of an intensified crackdown on dissent — what Freedom House called Putin’s “vicious efforts to silence dissenting voices” ahead of parliamentary elections in September.
“The attempted murder of Aleksei Navalny in 2020 and his imprisonment…. This year was just the most prominent demonstration of the regime’s cruelty,” the U.S. government-funded NGO said in its annual Nations In Transit report, released on April 28. Russia’s National Democratic Governance score dropped to its lowest possible position, the report said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin now sits on “a throne of bayonets and billy clubs,” writes political analyst Mark Galeotti.
But like other major moves that have ratcheted up tensions with the West in recent years, such as the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, it was not easily predictable. And it was not widely predicted — certainly not before it became clear, just 14 months ago, that Putin would hand himself the option of seeking two more six-year terms after his current Kremlin stint ends in 2024.
“I didn’t think the Kremlin would go all in on repression as quickly and as deeply as it has,” Sam Greene, a political analyst and director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London, said in an April 30 thread on Twitter.
In November 2018, Greene “looked at the challenges facing Vladimir Putin, the options on his menu, and tried to predict what he’d do,” he wrote. “Looking back, I was right about most things, but wrong about one. I wish I hadn’t been.”
Among four paths Putin might choose to take in a bid to solve his problem, Greene wrote in 2018, one was to “break the constitution” by “engineering an end to term limits” for himself, as Greene accurately predicted Putin would do.
The Risks Of Repression
But he predicted Putin would stop short of seeking to “break the people,” to turn to “wholesale repression in order to cow opponents and make democratic legitimacy less important.”
Greene guessed wrong, he wrote, because he “misunderstood the cost-benefit analysis from the Kremlin’s point of view.”
He thought that Putin would reason that “increased repression created risks, if only because it could spark an unpredictable dynamic of contention,” and would decide not to take that risk, Greene wrote. But in the Kremlin, “the question was evidently posed differently: Was it riskier for the Kremlin to have an autonomous opposition, or to have none? The answer is clear.”
Riot police detain pro-Navalny protesters in Moscow on February 2. “I didn’t think the Kremlin would go all in on repression as quickly and as deeply as it has,” says analyst Sam Greene.
Putin’s administration “has gradually concluded that it is no longer bound by the niceties of democratic procedure,” Greene went on. “The Kremlin — much like the Chinese authorities in Hong Kong, or its neighbors in Minsk — has decided that outright repression is now a legitimate form of governance.”
Other analysts have also suggested they thought, or at least hoped, that such a dire turn of events was unlikely as well as unfortunate.
“I am struck by the extent to which Russia today, and US-Russian relations today, resemble the worst-case scenarios of those ‘possible Russia futures’ studies we wrote in the 90s and oughts,” Olya Oliker, Europe and Central Asia director at the International Crisis Group, wrote on Twitter on April 30.
Greene bet against the “break-the-people” option because, he wrote, “Given that the relationship with the opposition was manageable, why risk it?”
Galeotti suggested that he also struggled to understand why the Kremlin decided to take the path it has chosen.
Despite years of challenges to the viability of a “hybrid” or “postmodern” brand of authoritarianism that “relied largely not so much on fear and force as control of the narrative,” he wrote, Putin’s “regime was still solidly in power. There was no meaningful opposition, the elite were either content or fearful of losing what they had, and the state’s capacities, from financial reserves to repressive capabilities, in healthy surplus.”
“This makes it all the harder to explain “the apparent decision to drop the mask and turn to much more openly repressive measures,” he wrote.
‘A Throne Of Bayonets’
He indicated there may have been several factors. One of them: The challenge mounted by Navalny, whose arrest and imprisonment have sparked several rounds of nationwide since his return on January 17 following treatment for the nerve-agent poisoning he blames on Putin. Another: Sheer momentum.
“Once you start along some roads, it’s hard to stop,” Galeotti wrote. “When [Navalny] survived and defiantly returned to Russia the regime clearly felt it had no alternative but to imprison him, lest it look weak. And once his movement began to hold mass protests, which spread beyond the usual metropolitical set and into towns and cities across the country, then the ‘logic’ of cracking down more broadly became hard to resist.”
Another ingredient is the Kremlin’s narrative — deep-rooted and still growing, it seems, despite a lack of evidence — according to which the West, and in particular Washington, is bent on undermining Russia and pushing Putin from power. There’s debate about whether Putin and other Russian officials believe that, but Moscow’s actions suggest that may not matter much.
Russian riot police patrol to prevent possible protests in support of Navalny in central Moscow in February.
In any case, Galeotti wrote, while “the scale of repression can and will be modulated depending on the needs and fears of the Kremlin at any time,” the road the Russian state has taken “is not a path that can be retraced.”
“Putin’s is now a throne of bayonets — and billy clubs — and he will have to sit on it,” he wrote in The Moscow Times article.
Greene, too, warned that Putin and his government have passed a point of no return. They will share the risks run by other states that have cracked down hard, from China to Belarus, where Alyaksandr Lukashenka has chosen violence and repression as the means to retain power amid determined opposition to his 26-year rule following a deeply disputed election last August.
“China may never again be able to govern Hong Kong with the consent of its residents; Lukashenka’s rule will last only as long as the police are content to keep him in power,” Greene wrote. “For the Kremlin, too, there is no turning back.”
Russian regulators on May 6 approved Sputnik Light, a single-dose version of the country’s Sputnik V vaccine against the coronavirus.
The regulatory approval, which will allow it to be marketed and administered as a separate COVID-19 vaccine, came even though advanced testing to ensure its safety and effectiveness is still ongoing.
The two-dose Sputnik V will remain “the main source of vaccination in Russia,” said Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) CEO Kirill Dmitriev, whose organization bankrolls the Sputnik vaccine.
Sputnik Light will be exported “to our international partners to help increase the rate of vaccinations in a number of countries in the face of the ongoing fight with the pandemic and new strains of coronavirus,” he said.
Dmitriev said in a statement that “the single dose regimen solves the challenge of immunizing large groups in a shorter time, which is especially important during the acute phase of the spread of coronavirus, achieving herd immunity faster.”
Russia faced criticism last year for authorizing Sputnik V before advanced trials had started and for offering it to medical workers while those trials were under way.
But Sputnik V, which has been approved in several countries, overcame initial international skepticism after peer-reviewed results published in the medical journal The Lancet showed it to be safe and 91.6 percent effective against COVID-19.
Russia’s own vaccination drive is currently lagging. According to Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, 13.4 million people in Russia, or just 9 percent of the country’s 146 million people, had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine as of May 6. About 6 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated.
Russia’s official death toll from COVID-19 along with those of several other countries came under question on May 6 in a new estimate by researchers at the University of Washington.
The university’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation puts the number of COVID-19 deaths at 6.9 million globally — more than double that of a widely cited tally by Johns Hopkins University.
The estimate is based on a comparison of pre-pandemic death trends with deaths from all causes during the pandemic adjusted to remove deaths that couldn’t be directly attributed to the virus.
It has long been acknowledged that official government figures likely are undercounts because not all deaths occur in hospitals and because not all COVID-19 deaths can be confirmed by a test.
The University of Washington researchers believe the largest undercounts are in India, which may have close to three times more deaths than the official 221,000, and Russia, which the researchers calculate has had more than five times the 109,000 official government count.
“The one that’s been the most underrecorded is the Russian Federation,” Christopher Murray, director of institute, said.
The data also suggest the U.S. death count is more than 905,000, far higher than the 580,000 estimated deaths in the Johns Hopkins tally.
The United States does not recognize “spheres of influence,” seeing it as an idea “that should have been retired after World War II,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service while on a visit to Kyiv on May 6. While making his remarks in response to a question by Olena Removska on U.S. reaction to a recent warning by Vladimir Putin that the West should not cross Moscow’s “red lines,” Washington’s top diplomat also said that sticking to this concept was “a recipe not for cooperation, but for conflict.”
KYIV — Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the United States is considering Ukraine’s request for “additional” military assistance to help deter Kremlin aggression following a massive buildup of Russian forces near their shared border.
Kyiv has requested U.S. air defense systems and anti-sniper technology, along with a possible deployment of Patriot missiles in Ukraine.
Blinken told RFE/RL on May 6 in an interview in the Ukrainian capital, where he met with the country’s top leaders, including President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, that the Pentagon is “looking at what additional assistance — beyond the very significant assistance that we’ve already provided, including equipment — would be helpful to Ukraine right now. That’s a very active consideration.”
The United States has provided nearly $5 billion in financial, humanitarian, and military aid — including lethal, anti-tank weapons — to Ukraine since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and backed separatists in two of its eastern provinces, sparking a war that has killed more than 13,000.
Blinken’s first trip to Kyiv since being tapped by President Joe Biden earlier this year to lead the State Department comes just weeks after Russia deployed more than 100,000 troops near the border with Ukraine in what the United States called an act of intimidation.
Russia has withdrawn some of the troops and equipment, but much still remains, posing a serious and immediate threat to Ukraine, Blinken said.
“Russia has the capacity on pretty short notice to take further aggressive action, so we’re being very vigilant about that…and also making sure that we’re helping Ukraine have the means to defend itself,” Blinken said in the RFE/RL interview.
Ukraine has called on the United States to threaten to exclude Russian banks from the SWIFT messaging system as a way to deter Kremlin aggression.
Some analysts say exclusion from SWIFT, which facilitates secure and fast communications between financial institutions, would be a significant blow to Russia’s economy.
Blinken said the United States “will consider every reasonable option” to deter Kremlin aggression against Ukraine, but declined to comment directly on the possibility of using SWIFT.
The top U.S. diplomat reiterated the Biden administration’s message that the United States is not seeking an escalation with Russia.
However, he said the United States does not accept the concept of “spheres of influence” and will respond to any Kremlin aggression that threatens Washington’s interests or those of its partners.
“If we allow those principles [of no spheres of influence] to be violated with impunity, then that is going to send a message, not just to Russia. It’s going to send a message in other parts of the world as well, that those rules don’t matter, that countries can behave any way they want,” he said.
Blinken said it was “a recipe for an international system that falls apart.”
Last month the United States and the European Union sought to send a global message about its stance on human rights and democracy when it announced coordinated sanctions against Russian officials over the incarceration on Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
Those sanctions came on the heels of punishments imposed on a series of Russian individuals and companies in connection with the Kremlin’s alleged poisoning of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny with a nerve agent and the hacking of U.S. government agencies.
Those alleged actions have increased the already severe strains in ties between Russia and the West, long seen by both as being close to, at, or below Cold War lows since the start of aggression against Ukraine in 2014.
Russia has continued to pressure Navalny and his supporters even after this imprisonment, seeking to shut down his network, which has published journalistic investigations into alleged corruption among the nation’s top officials.
To that end, in the May 6 interview, Blinken condemned Russia’s mounting pressure on independent media, including RFE/RL, saying it was a sign of Kremlin weakness.
“I think that countries that deny freedom of the press, are countries that don’t have a lot of confidence in themselves or in their systems. What is there to be afraid of in informing the people, and in holding leaders accountable,” he said.
Russian researchers say more than 150 endangered seals have been discovered washed up dead on the shores of the Caspian Sea over the course of several days.
Viktor Nikiforov of the Moscow Marine Mammals research center said on May 6 that the Caspian seals have been found on the shores of the sea in the region of Daghestan.
The exact cause of the deaths is still unknown.
They may have been caused by “industrial pollution, fishing, or poaching when seals get caught in the nets,” Nikiforov said, adding: “Maybe this is the consequence of climate change or several causes at the same time.”
Alimurad Hajiyev, the director of the Institute of Ecology and Sustainable Development of the Daghestan State University, said that many of the marine mammals were found entangled in fishing nets.
The researchers said the seals were discovered some 100 kilometers south of the regional capital, Makhachkala, and 50 kilometers north of the city.
Makhachkala, Daghestan
The Federal Fisheries Agency in the North Caucasus said it had dispatched inspectors to carry out a count.
The Investigative Committee said it was also looking into the matter.
The Caspian seal is the only mammal living in the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water.
The endemic species has for decades suffered from overhunting and industrial pollution in the sea, and their number is now estimated at less than 70,000, down from more than 1 million in the early 20th century.
In December 2020, Russian authorities reported the death of more than 300 seals on Dagestan’s Caspian shore.
Listed as a threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) since 2008, the seal was included in Russia’s Red Data Book of endangered and rare species this year.
The Caspian Sea, shared by five riparian states — Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Turkmenistan — boasts vast oil and gas reserves.
Pollution from hydrocarbon extraction and declining water levels are posing a threat to many local species and putting the future of the sea itself at risk.
It was one of the most sophisticated digital fraud operations in the history of the Internet, by some accounts scamming between $10 million and $30 million over the roughly four years it existed.
Dubbed “Methbot” by security researchers, the operation used thousands of infected computers around the world to falsely inflate web traffic to dummy websites and defraud advertisers. A related, overlapping scam, dubbed “3ev,” used infected residential computers linked to real human users.
This week in a U.S. federal court in New York City, the Russian man accused by U.S. authorities of being a ringleader of the group, Aleksandr Zhukov, went on trial for wire fraud, money laundering, and other charges.
One cybercrime researcher described the setup used to run the Methbot network as “the most costly botnet fraud in history.”
Extradited to the United States after being arrested in Bulgaria in November 2018, Zhukov has pleaded innocent. Seven other people, mainly Russians, have also been indicted.
“The cybercrime in my indictment is just [the] imagination of [the] FBI, and I wish to go to jury,” Zhukov told the U.S. court in April 2019.
The case is the latest example of U.S. law enforcement going after alleged Russian cybercriminals around the world, a trend that has infuriated the Kremlin, which has accused the United States of hunting Russian citizens.
But written into the code of the Methbot case, there’s also technical intrigue: The network of servers that was allegedly used by the hackers has been under scrutiny to determine whether it was used by Russian state-backed hackers, or intelligence agencies, to hack into U.S. political parties
“Differentiating between what is ‘cybercrime’ and what is nation-state activity, such as espionage, is getting increasingly difficult, especially concerning Russia,” Mathew Schwartz, executive editor of the industry journal DataBreachToday, told RFE/RL. “In part, this is because some individuals who have day jobs as government hackers — or contractors — seem to hack the West in their spare time — for fun, patriotism or profit.”
‘Are You Gangsters? No, We Are Russians’
According to U.S. court records, the Methbot scam first took form in September 2014, when Zhukov and five other men from Russia and Kazakhstan allegedly rented more than 1,900 computer servers at commercial data centers in Texas and elsewhere and used them to simulate humans viewing ads on fabricated webpages.
Eventually, the scam grew to include more than 850,000 Internet addresses, supported by hundreds of dedicated servers located in the United States and in Europe, mainly in the Netherlands.
In a September 2014 text message obtained by U.S. investigators and published by prosecutors, Zhukov, who had moved to Bulgaria in 2010, allegedly bragged about the scope of the scheme to another man who was part of the effort: “You bet! King of fraud!”
“Are you gangsters? No, we are Russians,” the other man responds, according to a U.S. transcript.
In December 2016, White Ops, a U.S. cybersecurity company that specializes in digital ad fraud and botnets, published a report that pinpointed much of the technical information about the operation and its financial damages. Those findings were later corroborated by researchers at Google.
Differentiating between what is ‘cybercrime’ and what is nation-state activity, such as espionage, is getting increasingly difficult, especially concerning Russia.”
Methbot, White Ops concluded, “was the largest and most profitable advertising fraud operation to strike digital advertising to date.”
On November 6, 2018, Bulgarian police raided the apartment in the Black Sea port of Varna where Zhukov was living and, with U.S. law enforcement present, questioned, then arrested, Zhukov, seizing his computer hardware and cell phones. U.S. authorities unsealed a 13-count indictment against him and seven other Russian and Kazakh nationals later that month.
Zhukov was extradited to the United States two months later, in January 2019.
Another key player was a Kazakh man named Sergei Ovysannikov, who allegedly was involved in the overlapping botnet scheme called 3ve. The scheme was tied to at least $29 million in fraud and allegedly involved more than 1.7 million infected computers. Because the infected computers were in homes, they were linked to real human beings, making it harder to detect.
“However you want to look at it, from an illicit profit-generating perspective, that counts as super lucrative,” Schwartz said.
Ovysannikov was arrested on a U.S. warrant in Malaysia in October 2018. He later pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court.
Yevgeny Timchenko, another Kazakh national who was also allegedly linked to the 3ve scheme, was arrested in Estonia the same month as Zhukov and later extradited. The other men named in the indictment are still at large, according to U.S. officials.
The Steele Dossier
Though the fraud allegedly committed in the Methbot and 3ve schemes was lucrative, the underlying technologies and infrastructure used have interested security researchers and experts tracking state-sponsored hacking efforts, particularly those involving Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, and other countries with developed hacking capabilities.
The complicated setup used to run the Methbot network was extensive and expensive, according to one cybercrime researcher, who described it as “the most costly botnet fraud in history.”
A sizable number of the servers that the Methbot operation rented and utilized were owned and maintained by companies affiliated with XBT Holding S.A., which is owned by a Russian venture capitalist named Aleksei Gubarev.
Russian tech entrepreneur Aleksei Gubarev arrives at the High Court in London in July 2020.
That holding includes a group of web-hosting businesses also known as Webzilla, which has operations in Dallas, Texas, as well as in Russia, and which has specialized in services aimed at Internet advertisers, gaming companies, software developers, and e-commerce businesses. Among its web-hosting domains are DDoS.com, 1-800-HOSTING, and SecureVPN.com.
A series of reports by the McClatchy newspaper network and the Miami Herald documented how major web viruses have spread via XBT’s infrastructure.
While known within the tech industry, Gubarev’s name and his companies burst into wider public view in January 2017 with the publication of a collection of memos written by a former British spy named Christopher Steele.
The memos, which were written in 2016, included salacious, unverified allegations against then-U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump. It later emerged that the work was commissioned by a Washington law firm on behalf of the Democratic Party.
The collected memos, which had circulated among reporters in Washington but were published first by BuzzFeed, were known as the Steele Dossier.
One memo alleged that XBT/Webzilla and affiliated companies played a key role in the hack of Democratic Party computers in the spring of 2016, which resulted in the leak of e-mails that many believe helped harm former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Trump. The memo also alleged Gubarev had been coerced into providing services to Russia’s main domestic security agency, known as the FSB.
Subsequent U.S. intelligence reports and law enforcement indictments blamed the hack on Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU. Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, called the SVR, has been implicated both in that hack and the more recent SolarWinds intrusion of U.S. government and corporate servers.
Gubarev has denied the allegations and sued BuzzFeed in U.S. court for publishing the Steele Dossier. That lawsuit was ultimately thrown out, but during the process, a technical expert who had served as chief of staff of the FBI’s Cyber Division in Washington, D.C., testified on behalf of BuzzFeed’s lawyers.
The expert, Anthony Ferrante, said that Russian cyberespionage groups had used XBT servers to conduct “spear-phishing” campaigns against Democratic politicians, and XBT-owned infrastructure had been used to support Russian state-sponsored cybercampaigns.
Ferrante asserted that the size of the Methbot operation, and the fact that a large number of IP addresses were first added to XBT-affiliated servers in late 2015 and then suddenly shut off in December 2016, meant an XBT employee would have had to do that manually.
That, he said, pointed to the likelihood that XBT managers knew the company’s infrastructure was being used for illegal activity.
“Additionally, the operation was a large scale ‘botnet,’ which is consistent with statements made in the [Steele] Dossier,” Ferrante wrote.
‘Unsung Heroes’
A press spokesman for Ferrante’s Boston-based consulting company declined to comment further on the case.
Gubarev, who reportedly lives in Cyprus, could not be immediately located for comment.
In an e-mail to RFE/RL, however, his U.S. lawyer confirmed that XBT had hosted some of the Methbot operation. But, he said, Gubarev and XBT executives were in fact “unsung heroes” because, he said, they canceled the account and preserved hard drives as evidence.
“The reason that the government is able to make its case now is because of the fast action by Mr. Gubarev and Webzilla,” Val Gurvits, a lawyer based in the Boston suburb of Newton, told RFE/RL.
Gurvits also said that while “bad actors” misused Webzilla’s network, “not a single reputable source found that Webzilla was at fault for any such misuse.”
“The truth is that my clients have always taken extraordinary measures to ensure that its networks are not misused,” he said.
Schwartz, of DataBreachToday, said the Methbot case shows how blurred the line has become between run-of-the-mill online criminal activity and state-sponsored cybercampaigns of the sort used not only by Russian intelligence, but also the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. National Security Agency, and intelligence agencies around the world.
He also said agencies are increasingly using commonly available malware, and even criminal-run infrastructure, as part of “the cybercrime-as-service ecosystem.”
“For spies, using infrastructure built by — and for — criminals makes sense, because it’s more difficult for victims or foreign intelligence agencies to tell if any given activity is criminal or government run,” he said.
Lawyers of the Team 29 (Komanda 29) judicial group have appealed a decision to restrict the activities of jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK)
The Team 29 said in a statement that its lawyers Maksim Olenichev and Valeria Vetoshkina filed the appeal with the Moscow First Court of Appeals on May 6.
The Moscow City Court ruled on April 27 that the activities of the FBK and another group associated with Navalny, the Citizens’ Rights Defense Foundation (FZPG), must be temporarily banned from using media, placing materials on the Internet, taking part in elections and referendums, and carrying out some banking operations.
A day earlier, the Moscow prosecutor halted all activities of Navalny’s regional offices and petitioned the court to do the same for the FBK and FZPG as the prosecutors didn’t have the authority to do so on their own.
The move is part of a broader initiative by the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office, which seeks to have the Moscow City Court label the FBK, the FZPG, and Navalny’s regional headquarters, as “extremist.”
That proposal has been condemned by international and domestic human rights groups who say that if the Navalny organizations are labeled as “extremist,” their employees and those passing on information about them could face arrest and lengthy prison terms.
Vetoshkina said in the May 6 statement that some of the restrictions could not be imposed by a court.
“For instance, within current laws, the ban to hold public events is irrelevant for a foundation since it cannot organize them by law. Therefore, the court went beyond the current legislation, which indicates that its goal is to create maximum obstacles for the organization’s activities. It is obvious that the FBK’s operations do not impose any danger to the rights, freedoms and lawful interests of a wide number of people because they fully correspond to legal requirements,” Vetoshkina said.
The leader of Team 29, noted that Russian lawyer Ivan Pavlov was briefly detained in Moscow on April 30 and accused of disclosing classified information about the ongoing investigation of one of his clients, former journalist Ivan Safronov.
A Moscow court then barred Pavlov from using the Internet, mobile telephones, and communicating with witnesses in Safronov’s case, which caused a public outcry across Russia.
On May 3, Pavlov issued a statement, saying he and his team will continue to defend all their clients, including Navalny’s groups, despite the restrictions imposed on him.
The European Union has approved the participation of NATO members the United States, Canada, and Norway in a project aimed at speeding up the movement of troops and military equipment around Europe.
The May 6 decision marks the first time the EU has opened up an initiative from its Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) pact, which aims to deepen defense ties, to outside partners.
The pact was agreed by EU leaders in December 2017 amid heightened tensions between the West and Moscow over Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.
Moscow annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in March 2014 and has been backing separatists in eastern Ukraine in a war that has killed more than 13,000 people since April 2014.
The bloc has since earmarked 1.7 billion euros ($2 billion) from its joint budget until 2028 to improve so-called military mobility, something NATO deems as crucial in the event of a conflict with Russia.
Beyond border red tape, the smooth deployment of forces whether by land, sea, or air is also often hindered by ill-adapted infrastructure.
At their first in-person meeting in more than a year in Brussels, the 27 EU defense ministers gave the greenlight for the United States, Canada, and Norway to join the bloc’s military mobility project, led by the Netherlands.
The three countries’ “expertise will contribute to the project and, with it, to improving military mobility within and beyond the EU,” the bloc’s foreign policy chief and meeting chairman, Josep Borrell, said in a statement.
“It will make EU defense more efficient and contribute to strengthen our security.”
German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer hailed the move as a “quantum leap in concrete cooperation when it comes to ensuring that troops can be deployed in Europe across national borders.”
“Talking about military mobility, making sure that troops can be moved across borders within Europe is a very important issue not only for the European Union but also for NATO,” she added.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who met with the EU ministers, also welcomed the move, and noted that “non-EU allies play an essential role in protecting and defending Europe.”
The United States and its NATO allies have enhanced their presence in the eastern part of the alliance, in part to help reassure Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland that they will be defended in case of any Russian aggression.
Canada is leading a NATO battlegroup stationed in Latvia, and non-EU member Norway is involved, too.
At their meeting in Brussels, EU defense ministers are also expected to discuss the situation in and around Ukraine.
A Russian journalist labeled as a “foreign agent” has turned the tables on several local lawmakers in the northwestern region of Pskov, sending them money to make them associates.
Denis Kamalyagin, the chief editor of the Pskovskaya gubernia newspaper who was labeled by a court as a “foreign agent” in December, said on May 5 he transferred unspecified amounts of money via his mobile phone to the region’s governor, the mayor of the regional capital, Pskov, and a lawmaker representing the region in the Russian parliament’s lower chamber, the State Duma.
Kamalyagin told Dozhd TV and the media outlet Meduza that he transferred the money in January and informed the Justice Ministry about it in a report that he must provide regularly as “a foreign agent.”
He said his goal was to prove that the law on “foreign agents” must be reconsidered.
“It is clear that according to current law, anyone who has a personal website and receives money from abroad can be designated a ‘foreign agent,’” Kamalyagin said, pointing out that the law had been applied selectively so far.
“In theory this means that during the election [campaign in September], these comrades would have to allocate 15 percent of their [campaign] billboards to show that they are associated with foreign agents,” Kamalyagin said.
Only after he publicly announced the stunt did the three officials transfer the money back.
Russia’s so-called “foreign agent” legislation was adopted in 2012 and has been modified repeatedly.
It requires nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign assistance and that the government deems to be engaged in political activity to be registered, to identify themselves as “foreign agents,” and to submit to audits. Later modifications targeted foreign-funded media.
In 2017, the Russian government placed RFE/RL’s Russian Service on the list, along with six other RFE/RL Russian-language news services, and Current Time, a network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
At the end of 2020, the legislation was modified to allow the Russian government to include individuals, including foreign journalists, on its “foreign agents” list and to impose restrictions on them.
The Russian state media monitor Roskomnadzor last year adopted rules requiring listed media to mark all written materials with a lengthy notice in large text, all radio materials with an audio statement, and all video materials with a 15-second text declaration.
The agency has submitted hundreds of complaints against RFE/RL’s projects to the courts, with the total fines levied at around $1 million. RFE/RL has appealed the moves.
RFE/RL has called the fines “a state-sponsored campaign of coercion and intimidation,” while the U.S. State Department has described them as “intolerable.”
Human Rights Watch has described the foreign agent legislation as “restrictive” and intended “to demonize independent groups.”
A court in the western Russian city of Pskov has denied an appeal by RFE/RL contributor Lyudmila Savitskaya contesting her inclusion on Russia’s controversial register of “foreign agent” media.
The Pskov court ruled on May 5 that Savitskaya’s inclusion on the Justice Ministry’s list was lawful. Savitskaya’s attorneys said they would appeal the ruling.
Savitskaya and four other people — RFE/RL contributor Sergei Markelov, human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov, artist and activist Darya Apakhonchich, and Pskov newspaper editor Denis Kamalygin — were included in the “foreign agent” media list in December 2020.
The ministry did not give any justification for why these individuals were listed. All five are appealing their inclusion on the list.
In court on May 5, Justice Ministry representatives presented as evidence against Savitskaya articles she had written about anti-government protesters, alleged torture in Russian prisons, and the blocking of electronic communications in the areas around prisons.
In addition, they presented a large number of documents marked “for official use only” from the Interior Ministry, the Prosecutor-General’s Office, and other agencies that Savitskaya and her attorneys were not allowed to examine.
Savitskaya’s defense argued that none of the materials presented indicated that she was working at the behest of any foreign power.
In her closing remarks to the court, Savitskaya argued that she was merely doing her job as a professional journalist.
“These days, not a single state mass-media outlet is reporting about the real problems confronting people, But Radio Svoboda does,” she said, referring to the Russian Service of RFE/RL.
“I was labeled a ‘foreign agent’ because I am shouting out to everyone about injustice and about people who are being persecuted. But everyone needs to know that the real foreign agents today are sitting in the Kremlin and in the State Duma, because they are working against Russian citizens and against a happy Russia in the future, while I am working for them,” she added.
Russia’s so-called “foreign agent” legislation was adopted in 2012 and has been modified repeatedly. It requires nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign assistance and that the government deems to be engaged in political activity to be registered, to identify themselves as “foreign agents,” and to submit to audits.
Later modifications of the law targeted foreign-funded media. At the end of 2020, the legislation was modified to allow the Russian government to include individuals, including foreign journalists, on its “foreign agents” list and to impose restrictions on them.
In 2017, the Russian government placed RFE/RL’s Russian Service, six other RFE/RL Russian-language news services, and Current Time on the list.
Earlier this year, Russian courts began imposing large fines against RFE/RL for failing to mark its articles with a government-prescribed label as required by rules adopted in October 2020. RFE/RL is appealing the fines.
RFE/RL has called the fines “a state-sponsored campaign of coercion and intimidation,” while the U.S. State Department has described them as “intolerable.”
Human Rights Watch has described the foreign agent legislation as “restrictive” and intended “to demonize independent groups.”
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on Russian lawmakers to withdraw three bills under discussion, saying they “would add new dangerous tools” to an already “significant arsenal of legislative weapons” being used in the country’s crackdown on dissent.
HRW said in a statement on May 5 that two of the bills proposed by a group of lawmakers the day before would expand the impact of Russia’s law on “undesirable” organizations.
One bill would extend the ban on participating in activities of organizations blacklisted by Russian authorities as “undesirable” beyond the country’s borders, allowing the government to ban foreigners residing in Russia and stateless persons from taking part in the activities of such groups.
It also would allow the Russian authorities to designate a foreign or international organization as “undesirable” if they decide that such a group acts as an “intermediary,” transferring funds or property to support the operations of “undesirables.”
Another new bill involving “undesirables” introduces amendments to the Russian Criminal and Criminal Procedural codes to make it easier to open criminal cases on charges of affiliation with “undesirable” organizations.
‘Death By A Thousand Cuts’
The third bill would allow the authorities to impose lengthy bans on potential candidates for the parliament’s lower chamber, the State Duma, if they are associated with groups deemed “extremist,” even if they were associated with the group before it received that designation.
“These bills are a far-from-subtle attempt to deprive the Kremlin’s political opponents of legal means of political participation and to instill ever more fear into Russia’s civil society.
“For years now, and with particular ferocity in the past six months, the Russian authorities have been trying to inflict death by a thousand cuts on civil society and meaningful political opposition,” Hugh Williamson, HRW’s Europe and Central Asia director said in the statement.
The bills appear to be thinly veiled attempts to target Russian politicians and activists even remotely associated with jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK).
A court in Moscow is expected to designate the FBK and Navalny’s two other groups — the Citizens’ Rights Defense Foundation and his regional teams — “extremist” later this month following a request by the city’s prosecutors. One FBK lawyer, Lyubov Sobol, has announced her intention to run for a seat in the State Duma in September.
HRW emphasized that it was “hardly a coincidence that the bills are being proposed only a few months before the September parliamentary elections.”
“There appears to be a clear aim to isolate Russia’s civil society and force many of its activists abroad into self-imposed exile under a threat of criminal sanctions, as well as to delegitimize and punish anyone affiliated with or actively supporting…Navalny,” Williamson said.
“Russian authorities need to stop the attempts to drag the country behind a new Iron Curtain and start demonstrating respect for fundamental human rights and democratic values.”
The pressure on Navalny has intensified greatly in the past eight months, starting with his poisoning in Siberia in August 2020.
But it goes back at least as far as December 2011, when Navalny helped lead protests prompted by anger over evidence of election fraud that benefited the Kremlin-controlled United Russia party and dismay at Vladimir Putin’s plans to return to the presidency in 2012 after four years as prime minister.
The elections must be held by September 19 and the United Russia party has been polling at historically low levels. Many observers link this to the government’s latest crackdown on Navalny and his colleagues, as well as on other dissenters and independent media outlets.
Being sufficiently able at your job is a good thing. But beware the trappings of zeal. When it comes to the business of retaining an inventory for humanity’s annihilation, the zealous should be kept away. But there Admiral Charles Richard was in April this year, with his siren calls, urging the US Senate to consider a simple proposition. “Sustainment of modernization of our modern nuclear forces … has transitioned from something we should do, to something we must do.” As Commander of the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM), he was aching to impress the Senate Committee on Armed Services that the nuclear deterrent was there to be polished and improved.
Much of his address as part of the Posture Statement Review should be treated as the conventional lunacy that comes with that cretin-crusted field known as nuclear deterrence. “Peace is our profession” remains the somewhat obscene motto of STRATCOM, and it is a peace kept by promising the potential extinction of the human species.
For the Admiral, strategic deterrence is the holy of holies. If it fails, “we are prepared to deliver a decisive response, decisive in every possible way.” This decisiveness will be achieved “with a modern resilient, equipped, and trained combatant-ready force.” To avoid the failure of such deterrence also required revisiting “a critical forgotten lesson that deterrence operates continuously from peacetime, through the gray zone, worldwide, across all domains, and into conflict” [Richard’s emphasis].
The fate of the US (Richard humourlessly calls it safety and security) is indelibly linked to an “effective nuclear triad; a reliable and modern nuclear command, control and communications (NC3) architecture; and a responsive nuclear weapons infrastructure.”
Deterrence is a fetish, an idol. “Strategic deterrence,” he explained, “is the foundation of our national defense policy and enables every US military operation around the world.” Linking the nuke to impunity and roguish behaviour (the Admiral would see this as preserving freedom, of course), he makes an ominous observation. “If strategic deterrence fails, little else… no plan or capability, works as designed” [Richard’s emphasis].
According to the Admiral, the fundamentals of deterrence had not changed in this century. Principles keeping terror in play remained. Adversaries had to be assured they would suffer greater loss than any gain derived from their offensive actions. “The spectrum of conflict today, however, is neither linear nor predictable” [Richard’s emphasis]. In a candid revelation, Richard showed his worldview with jaw dropping sharpness. “We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.” The unanswered question here is what would make such an adversary behave in that way.
Part of the concern is a fear of old age in the weapons department and what Richard accusingly calls underinvestment. The nuclear mechanisms that have been in place are suffering gout and rot, though the military-industrial complex is always bound to exaggerate the ills. The presence of old computer systems is being frowned upon despite the obvious advantages these have in the face of misfiring or cyber security.
The message to lawmakers is clear: spend more on nuclear weapons. If system capabilities are eroded such that ICBMs are cut from the triad, the commander recommends returning to that maniacally dangerous formula of keeping nuclear armed US Air Force bombers airborne and on permanent alert. The world can look forward to more nuclear accidents occasioned by pilot error and technical fault.
Central to the latest update is the continuing concern shown towards Russia and China. Russia slots into the role of old adversary, being the “pacing nuclear strategic threat,” given its aggressive modernisation drive, which was 80% complete. China, however, was proving a menace. The capabilities of both powers meant that the US was “facing two nuclear-capable peer adversaries at the same time” for the first time in its history. Much in the spirit of the Cold War “missile gap” between the US and the USSR, Richard takes it upon himself to inflate Beijing’s credentials in order to woo the Senators. China was “already capable of executing any plausible nuclear deployment strategy within their region and will soon be able to do so at intercontinental ranges as well.”
In his oral testimony, the Admiral was beside himself regarding weekly revelations about China’s capabilities. The stock of current intelligence information on China’s nuclear arsenal, given a month’s lag, was probably dated by the time it reached STRATCOM. He could only conclude that “China’s stated ‘No First Use’ policy declaration and implied minimum deterrent strategy” should be questioned. Richard was also convinced that Beijing had moved a number “of its nuclear forces to a Launch on Warning (LOW) posture and are adopting a limited ‘high alert duty’ strategy.”
Richard is gloomy in warning, and duly italicises for his audience. “If we find out we were wrong, decisions to divest or delay could take ten to fifteen years to recover and render the nation unable to respond to advancing threats.” He continues in italics. “Any decision to delay or defer recapitalization requires us to be absolutely sure for the next 40 years, that we don’t need the capability to deter threats, many of which we can’t predict.”
Through social media, US Strategic Command proved laid back in discussing prospective Armageddon. Richard’s words on war being neither linear, nor predictable, and the possibility that adversaries might consider nuclear use as their least bad option, was tweeted as a taster on April 20. Newsweekconsidered it “bizarre”. Those at STRATCOM evidently did not.
Being sufficiently able at your job is a good thing. But beware the trappings of zeal. When it comes to the business of retaining an inventory for humanity’s annihilation, the zealous should be kept away. But there Admiral Charles Richard was in April this year, with his siren calls, urging the US Senate to consider a simple proposition. “Sustainment of modernization of our modern nuclear forces … has transitioned from something we should do, to something we must do.” As Commander of the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM), he was aching to impress the Senate Committee on Armed Services that the nuclear deterrent was there to be polished and improved.
Much of his address as part of the Posture Statement Review should be treated as the conventional lunacy that comes with that cretin-crusted field known as nuclear deterrence. “Peace is our profession” remains the somewhat obscene motto of STRATCOM, and it is a peace kept by promising the potential extinction of the human species.
For the Admiral, strategic deterrence is the holy of holies. If it fails, “we are prepared to deliver a decisive response, decisive in every possible way.” This decisiveness will be achieved “with a modern resilient, equipped, and trained combatant-ready force.” To avoid the failure of such deterrence also required revisiting “a critical forgotten lesson that deterrence operates continuously from peacetime, through the gray zone, worldwide, across all domains, and into conflict” [Richard’s emphasis].
The fate of the US (Richard humourlessly calls it safety and security) is indelibly linked to an “effective nuclear triad; a reliable and modern nuclear command, control and communications (NC3) architecture; and a responsive nuclear weapons infrastructure.”
Deterrence is a fetish, an idol. “Strategic deterrence,” he explained, “is the foundation of our national defense policy and enables every US military operation around the world.” Linking the nuke to impunity and roguish behaviour (the Admiral would see this as preserving freedom, of course), he makes an ominous observation. “If strategic deterrence fails, little else… no plan or capability, works as designed” [Richard’s emphasis].
According to the Admiral, the fundamentals of deterrence had not changed in this century. Principles keeping terror in play remained. Adversaries had to be assured they would suffer greater loss than any gain derived from their offensive actions. “The spectrum of conflict today, however, is neither linear nor predictable” [Richard’s emphasis]. In a candid revelation, Richard showed his worldview with jaw dropping sharpness. “We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.” The unanswered question here is what would make such an adversary behave in that way.
Part of the concern is a fear of old age in the weapons department and what Richard accusingly calls underinvestment. The nuclear mechanisms that have been in place are suffering gout and rot, though the military-industrial complex is always bound to exaggerate the ills. The presence of old computer systems is being frowned upon despite the obvious advantages these have in the face of misfiring or cyber security.
The message to lawmakers is clear: spend more on nuclear weapons. If system capabilities are eroded such that ICBMs are cut from the triad, the commander recommends returning to that maniacally dangerous formula of keeping nuclear armed US Air Force bombers airborne and on permanent alert. The world can look forward to more nuclear accidents occasioned by pilot error and technical fault.
Central to the latest update is the continuing concern shown towards Russia and China. Russia slots into the role of old adversary, being the “pacing nuclear strategic threat,” given its aggressive modernisation drive, which was 80% complete. China, however, was proving a menace. The capabilities of both powers meant that the US was “facing two nuclear-capable peer adversaries at the same time” for the first time in its history. Much in the spirit of the Cold War “missile gap” between the US and the USSR, Richard takes it upon himself to inflate Beijing’s credentials in order to woo the Senators. China was “already capable of executing any plausible nuclear deployment strategy within their region and will soon be able to do so at intercontinental ranges as well.”
In his oral testimony, the Admiral was beside himself regarding weekly revelations about China’s capabilities. The stock of current intelligence information on China’s nuclear arsenal, given a month’s lag, was probably dated by the time it reached STRATCOM. He could only conclude that “China’s stated ‘No First Use’ policy declaration and implied minimum deterrent strategy” should be questioned. Richard was also convinced that Beijing had moved a number “of its nuclear forces to a Launch on Warning (LOW) posture and are adopting a limited ‘high alert duty’ strategy.”
Richard is gloomy in warning, and duly italicises for his audience. “If we find out we were wrong, decisions to divest or delay could take ten to fifteen years to recover and render the nation unable to respond to advancing threats.” He continues in italics. “Any decision to delay or defer recapitalization requires us to be absolutely sure for the next 40 years, that we don’t need the capability to deter threats, many of which we can’t predict.”
Through social media, US Strategic Command proved laid back in discussing prospective Armageddon. Richard’s words on war being neither linear, nor predictable, and the possibility that adversaries might consider nuclear use as their least bad option, was tweeted as a taster on April 20. Newsweekconsidered it “bizarre”. Those at STRATCOM evidently did not.
The Group of Seven (G7) advanced democracies has wrapped up its first in-person meeting in more than two years with a pledge to bolster collective efforts to counter Russia’s “irresponsible and destabilizing” behavior, but offered little concrete action aside from expressing support for Ukraine.
“We are deeply concerned that the negative pattern of Russia’s irresponsible and destabilizing behavior continues,” the top diplomats of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States said in a joint statement on May 5 following talks in London.
The ministers cited “the large buildup of Russian military forces on Ukraine’s borders and in illegally annexed Crimea, its malign activities aimed at undermining other countries’ democratic systems, its malicious cyberactivity, and use of disinformation.”
“We nevertheless will continue to bolster our collective capabilities and those of our partners to address and deter Russian behavior that is threatening the rules-based international order, including in the areas of cyberspace security and disinformation,” the statement said.
The G7 meeting set the tone for next month’s summit of the group’s leaders in Cornwall, England.
It came amid heightened tensions between Russia and the West over issues including Russia’s military threats to Ukraine, alleged meddling in elections in the United States and other democracies, alleged state-backed hacking, and the poisoning and jailing of Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny.
Russia’s recent military buildup near the Ukrainian border and in Crimea, seized by Moscow in March 2014, has raised concerns about a major escalation of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, where fighting between government forces and Moscow-backed separatists has killed more than 13,000 people since April 2014.
The Russian military said last week that most of its troops had returned to their permanent bases.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was flying to Kviv after the G7 meeting to “underscore unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression” and to “encourage progress on Ukraine’s reform agenda,” according to the State Department.
In their statement, the G7 ministers said they were “deeply concerned about the deteriorating human rights situation in Russia, and the systematic crackdown on opposition voices, human rights defenders, independent civil society, and media.”
On Belarus, they raised their concerns about “the political and human rights crisis following the fraudulent” August 2020 presidential election, and called on the authorities to “hold new, free, and fair elections conducted under international observation.”
Condemning Iran’s support to “proxy forces and non-state armed actors,” the G7 ministers called on Tehran to “refrain from destabilising actions, and play a constructive role in fostering regional stability and peace.”
They also called on Tehran to release foreign and dual nationals they said were being held arbitrarily in Iranian prisons.
The statement also criticized China for “arbitrary, coercive economic policies and practices” and urged it to stick to international trade rules and “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms,” in particular among ethnic and religious minority groups such as mostly Muslim ethnic Uyghurs in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Despite a lack of material evidence, and no established intention of harm, a trio of Russian 14-year-olds are facing lengthy prison sentences after being charged with “training for terrorist activities” in a case that initially alleged the schoolboys were planning to destroy a virtual Federal Security Services (FSB) building they created in the popular computer game Minecraft.
The case, which has attracted widespread attention due to the age of the accused and the notion that child’s play could constitute terrorism, appears to have entered a sort of legal Nether — Minecraft’s hell-like alternate dimension.
Russia’s Investigative Committee earlier this year dismissed the original case opened in November against schoolmates Nikita Uvarov, Denis Mikhailenko, and Bogdan Andreyev after determining that their relationship did not have the necessary structure, subdivisions, or distribution of functions “to regard this group as a terrorist community.”
And the remaining charges against them under Article 205.3 of the Russian Criminal Code — “training for the purpose of carrying out terrorist activities” — no longer cite their alleged plans to “blow up” an “FSB building” in Minecraft as evidence they had established an online terrorist network.
But the pupils at School No. 21 in the Krasnoyarsk Krai city of Kansk are not in safe mode by any means: The three still face from seven to 10 years in prison on charges that stem from their detention nearly a year ago for pasting leaflets supporting a jailed anarchist on the local FSB department building.
A screenshot from Minecraft, the computer game in which the teenagers were purportedly “training for terrorist activities.”
Following their arrest in June after two days of interrogation, investigators determined that the boys had constructed at least one Molotov cocktail and set it alight in Kansk in March 2020. The following May, prosecutors allege, the three used another Molotov cocktail to set fire to an abandoned building.
And at some point between late May and early June they allegedly produced and detonated an “Ammokisa” explosive, for which investigators did not provide a gauge of strength but which was reportedly a crude and weak device using antiseptic tablets.
To buttress the argument that the three were engaged in dangerous activities, investigators have reportedly homed in on communication shared between the three on Telegram and VKontakte in which they discussed the American rock musician Kurt Cobain and his “fierce revolutionary struggle,” the “Yellow Vests” movement in France and anti-government protests in Belarus, and the tsarist-era Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin.
‘Rude’ Boys
The three schoolboys have been described by their parents and school officials as curious yet rebellious students with an interest in anarchy.
“They were normal children, like usual, like other kids,” school director Sergei Kreminsky told Current Time in September, three months after they were arrested after pasting leaflets supporting jailed university student Azat Miftakhov on the building of the local FSB department. “In the case of some of their parents there was insufficient control. They were rude, snapped sometimes at school.”
That the three were facing serious charges, the school director and current City Council deputy representing the pro-Kremlin United Russia party said: “Well, since the investigation is under way, it means they are guilty, I think. What else?”
The boys did not hide their interest in chemistry from their parents, and Svetlana Mikhailenko, Denis’s mother, told Current Time recently that she was aware of their pyrotechnic activities.
“I always knew where the child was, even when they were making these bombs,” she said. “But it was a small, childish prank, a child’s bomb.”
Photos displayed in Denis Mikhailenko’s home, showing the teenager as a young boy.
Svetlana Mikhailenko also told the Russian-language media network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA that the investigators skewed the boys’ testimony, replacing their description of the devices as “bombochki” — little bombs — with “bombs,” and focusing on the amount of material required to make them.
Anna Uvarova, Nikita’s mother, spoke to Current Time following an April 16 court hearing. She said in the family’s apartment that following her son’s detention in June, investigators searched her home from 9 p.m. until 5 a.m., seizing but eventually returning a toy musket that she shows to the cameras.
But after they realized that a case was being built against the three boys, “we looked at what was in their phones” and saw that they had recorded a video of them throwing a Molotov cocktail.
‘Evidence’ Working Against Them
The case against the three boys contains no material evidence — no caches of explosives, no weapons. And while Vladimir Vasin, a lawyer for the Russian legal-defense organization Agora who is representing Uvarov, cited a previous case in which an activist in Russia was imprisoned for 10 years for throwing a Molotov cocktail in a public case, in this case there was no harm, and no intention of harm.
“The guys were really cooking something up with chemicals and were playing with something,” Vasin said. “But they went far into a field, to a deserted place, and did it there.”
Russian lawyer.Vladimir Vasin
“One was very fond of history, the other loved chemistry,” he said of the boys. “And as I know my client, he had no thoughts of doing anything” more.
Unfortunately, Vasin said, to Russian prosecutors “the go-to recipe is a confession — the queen of evidence.”
Mikhailenko and Andreyev each provided confessions of guilt — while facing a mix of “pressure, threats, and promises,” according to the news site Baza — to “undergoing training in order to carry out terrorist activities” following the initial interrogations into their pasting leaflets on the FSB building.
The two have since retracted their confessions and Mikhailenko’s mother, in comments to Current time, said that investigators tricked the parents into implicating their own children.
Uvarov refused to confess — a decision the teens’ parents believe led the FSB to accuse him of being the leader of a group they say never existed, and of sending him immediately to pretrial detention, where he has remained for 11 months.
Close Comparisons
The case has drawn comparisons to other cases in which young people in Russia with views not in step with the official line have been accused of extremism and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences.
Miftakhov, the avowed anarchist and graduate student at Moscow State University for whom the three teens were expressing support in their leaflets, stands as a prominent example.
In January, the 25-year-old was sentenced to six years in prison for aggravated “hooliganism” after being found guilty of involvement in an arson attack against the ruling United Russia party’s office in Moscow in 2018.
The Russian human rights organization Memorial has said that his body showed signs of torture that Miftakhov, who denies the charges against him, said were the result of investigators’ attempts to force a confession.
In late 2020, eight young men and women were found guilty of charges that they had created an extremist group called New Greatness with the intention of overthrowing President Vladimir Putin’s government. The eight received punishments ranging from four-year suspended sentences to seven years’ imprisonment after an FSB agent infiltrated their chat group and suggested they turn it into a political movement.
Another alleged member received an 18-month prison sentence in 2019 after cutting a deal with investigators, and yet another left the country and applied for asylum in Ukraine. All 10 are considered by Memorial to be political prisoners.
Also in 2020, a regional court’s decision in Penza was described as “heinous” after seven activists belonging to a group called Set — or the Network — were sentenced to prison terms of six to 18 years after being found guilty of planning terrorist attacks to destabilize Russia’s presidential election and hosting of the World Cup in 2018.
The defendants all said the group never existed, and that while they shared anti-fascist views they merely played BB-gun war games together. Several of the young men said they were subjected to torture in order to extract their confessions.
Human rights groups believe the case was fabricated by the state as a signal to others who express political views that run counter to the government.
Date With Destiny
Today, Nikita Uvarov, Denis Mikhailenko, and Bogdan Andreyev sit in pretrial detention awaiting their own trial, for which a date has yet to be set.
Uvarov’s lawyer Vasin, speaking while riding on a train to see his client, falls short of saying the entire case was fabricated, but does note that there have been three cases accusing adolescents of terrorism in Krasnoyarsk Krai in the last year alone.
He said he struggles to imagine how such situations involving youths play out.
“My colleagues and I were discussing how it could have been done — invite the police to the children’s room, I don’t know, to summon the director of the school to for a meeting” to try to talk and sort things out,” Vasin said. “But instead, boom! — immediately to interrogation. Two days of interrogation. A third interrogation. Endless interrogations.”
Ten years ago, he said, the matter might have been settled by a spanking with a belt, but “now everything is different. And it will get worse.”
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Michael Scollon based on reporting in Krasnoyarsk Krai by Current Time correspondents Aleksei Aleksandrov and Kirill Ralev
Due to COVID-19 restrictions a women’s prison in the Latvian capital, Riga, and a farm were among the unlikely venues for a Russian documentary film festival. ArtDocFest is held in Moscow every year, but amid growing repression and intimidation began holding events in Riga in 2014. This year’s top prize winner was Silent Voice, the story of a gay Chechen MMA fighter who fled to Belgium after getting death threats.
The media-freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says the Russian government’s “draconian and defamatory” decision to list the Meduza website as a “foreign agent” may force one of the country’s most popular independent news sites to shut down.
The listing is “a massive blow to media pluralism in Russia,” the Paris-based RSF said in a May 5 statement.
“We call on the Russian Justice Ministry to abolish this draconian and defamatory register of ‘foreign agent’ media, which exists solely to enable the government to tighten its grip on the press,” said Jeanne Cavelier, RSF’s director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Meduza, which is based in Latvia, is one of Russia’s most popular and influential media outlets, claiming some 13 million unique visitors each month.
The Russian government included Meduza in the “foreign agent” register on April 23. Meduza is appealing the designation and has launched a crowd-funding campaign to compensate for lost advertising revenues that forced it to curtail operations.
Just in the last week, Meduza closed its offices in Riga and Moscow, slashed staff salaries, and halted the use of freelancers.
The European Union on April 24 said “it is extremely concerning that Russian authorities continue to restrict the work of independent media platforms, as well as individual journalists and other media actors.”
Russia’s so-called “foreign agent” legislation was adopted in 2012 and has been modified repeatedly.
It requires nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign assistance and that the government deems to be engaged in political activity to be registered, to identify themselves as “foreign agents,” and to submit to audits.
Later modifications of the law targeted foreign-funded media, including RFE/RL’s Russian Service, six other RFE/RL Russian-language news services, and Current Time, a network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
Earlier this year, Russian courts began imposing large fines against RFE/RL for failing to mark its articles with a government-prescribed label. RFE/RL is appealing the fines.
RFE/RL has called the fines “a state-sponsored campaign of coercion and intimidation,” while the U.S. State Department has described them as “intolerable.”
Human Rights Watch has described the “foreign agent” legislation as “restrictive” and intended “to demonize independent groups.”
As President Vladimir Putin’s government intensifies its crackdown on all forms of dissent, many Russians who oppose him have found inspiration in the closing remarks Moscow State University student Olga Misik made last week at her trial.
Writer Nikolai Kononov posted on Twitter that the speech Misik made in court on April 29 “will end up in school textbooks.”
St. Petersburg artist Yuly Rybakov shared Misik’s remarks in full on Facebook and wrote: “With such children, Russia does have a future!”
The student’s defiant speech joins the ranks of the impassioned courtroom addresses of dissidents that have characterized the two decades of Putin’s rule and go back at least as far as the Soviet era.
Misik and two other young defendants, Ivan Vorobyevsky and Igor Basharimov, are charged with vandalizing government buildings. In a gesture of support for those they consider political prisoners, they hung banners on a railing outside a Moscow district court on August 8, 2020, and then splattered red paint on a security booth outside the Prosecutor-General’s Office building. Prosecutors claim they caused 3,500 rubles ($47) in damages.
Defense attorneys say that the documents provided by prosecutors concerning the alleged damages were falsified and that no harm was caused by the water-soluble paint.
Under the charges, they could face up to three years in prison when Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court delivers its decision on May 11. Prosecutors, however, have asked for two years of “restricted liberty” for Misik and one year and 10 months for the other defendants, according to the independent OVD-Info monitoring agency. During the trial, the defendants have been under a limited form of house arrest, unable to leave home between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., to approach within 10 meters of government buildings, to attend public events, or to use means of communication.
Misik, who turned 19 in January, has long been actively involved in protests against Putin’s government. She attracted national attention in August 2019 during a protest against the government’s decision to disqualify virtually all the opposition candidates running for seats on the Moscow City Duma.
Misik protested by reading the Russian Constitution out loud to a heavily armed phalanx of riot police in body armor – an act that for many distilled the relationship between the Russian state and the people in recent years.
Olga Misik reads the Russian Constitution in front of a phalanx of riot police at a protest in Moscow in July 2019.
In October 2019, she was detained on Red Square while conducting a one-person picket by holding up a large piece of blank paper.
In February 2020, she was detained in Penza while organizing a demonstration of support for the accused in the so-called Network (“Set”) case, which activists say was fabricated by the security forces.
In her closing speech to the court in the vandalism case, Misik insisted that she had never been afraid during her years of activism.
“I am often asked if I am afraid,” she told the court. “More often by people from abroad than those in Russia because they don’t know the specifics of our lives…. They don’t know the feeling of hopelessness that we take in with our mother’s milk. And that very feeling of hopelessness atrophies all signs of fear and infects us with a learned helplessness. What is the point of being afraid if your future does not depend on you.”
“I was never afraid,” she said. “I felt despair, helplessness, hopelessness, confusion, anxiety, despair, anger, but neither politics nor activism every infected me with the feeling of fear.”
‘Sad And Sickened But Not Scared’
Misik said she was not afraid when police came to arrest her in the middle of the night and threatened her with prison.
“I joked and laughed because I knew that as soon as I stopped smiling, I had lost,” she told the court.
She added that she was not afraid when the police van drove her away or when she remembered her father, whom she saw cry for the first time in her life.
“I was sad and sickened, but not scared,” she said.
Misik added, though, that she began to be afraid and to experience panic only after she found herself under modified house arrest.
“And now it seems to me that all the fear that has accumulated in me over the last nine months is concentrated here and now in my final speech, because public speaking is more frightening to me than the prospect of being sentenced,” Misik said.
“Someone once said that you can’t be afraid if you know that you are right,” she continued. “But Russia teaches us to be afraid all the time. It is a country that is trying to kill you every day. And if you are not part of the system, you are already as good as dead.”
She said that in her support of those unjustly imprisoned, she thought about her future children.
“When my children ask me what I was when all this happened, when they ask how I could allow this to happen and what did I do to fix it, I won’t have anything to tell them,” she said. “What can I say? That I held a picket outside the FSB? That is laughable.”
And then she asked Judge Aleksei Stekliyev: “And what about your children? When they ask you where you were when this happened, how will you answer them? That you handed down the guilty verdicts?”
She stated that she did not regret participating in the vandalism protest.
“If I could go back in time, I’d do it again,” she said. “Even if the death penalty threatened me, I’d do it again. And I’d do it again and again and again…. They say that repeating the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is madness. Then hope is madness. And ceasing to do what you consider right because everyone around you thinks it is hopeless is surrendering to helplessness. I would rather look insane to your eyes than helpless to mine.”
‘We Will Win’
She closed her speech with a reference to Sophie Scholl, a Munich university student who together with her brother, Hans, was executed by guillotine in 1943 for her resistance to the regime of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
“She was condemned for leaflets and graffiti, while I have been tried for posters and paint,” Misik said. “Essentially, we were both persecuted for thought crimes. My trial has been very similar to Sophie’s trial and today’s Russia is very similar to fascist Germany. Even facing the guillotine, Sophie did not abandon her convictions and her example has inspired me not to seek a deal. Sophie Scholl is the embodiment of youth, sincerity, and liberty. And I really hope that I am in this way like her.”
“The fascist regime collapsed in the end, just as the fascist regime in Russia will fall,” she said. “I don’t know when this will happen – a week, a year, a decade. But I know that we will win because love and youth always win.”
Olga Misik at a Moscow protest in 2019.
The transcript of Misik’s speech has been shared widely on social media, and more than 45,000 people have signed an online petition calling for her release.
Andrei Chvanov, from Tatarstan, wrote on Facebook: “I just read her final speech. And you know what? I felt ashamed. Because my threshold of fear is much lower…. She holds strong, jokes, writes, and is 100 percent sure that she is right. And she is right. She sees the truth. And she is not afraid. Not many people in our country have such a gift.”
Another Facebook user urged people to “help Olga Misik, if only because her closing statement is the strongest closing statement of all those I have read.”
“It is a very powerful statement,” another user wrote on Facebook. “It will force the judges and prosecutors to think about what Russia will be like tomorrow. To see that there are inalienable human rights.”
RFE/RL’s Russian Service contributed to this report
Russia has filed protocols against Facebook and Google for what Roskomnadzor, the country’s communications regulator, says is the social-media networks’ failure to remove banned content.
The official TASS news agency on May 5 quoted a court source as saying five protocols against both Google and Facebook were received by the court, with potential fines amounting to 200 million rubles ($267,000) each.
Another social-media giant, Twitter, has already been handed protocols for similar violations, which could see it fined as much as $320,000, the source added.
The moves are the latest in a major dispute Moscow has with global social-media platforms over content allegedly related to political protests.
Russian critics of the Kremlin routinely use international social networks to get around state control of the media and reach tens of millions of citizens with their anti-government messages.
Imprisoned Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny in January used U.S. social-media networks to organize some of the largest anti-government protests since 2011-12.
Russian authorities have gone as far as to threaten to ban social media. Even though they have recently backed away from such threats, Russian regulators have punitively slowed user connections.
No date for the hearing has been set, TASS said. Roskomnadzor, Twitter, and the court did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
