Visiting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Islamabad on April 7 that Russia will provide unspecified military equipment to Pakistan as the two countries increase cooperation to fight terrorism.
Russia and Pakistan will also conduct joint naval and land exercises, he said.
Lavrov’s two-day visitmarks the first to Islamabad by a Russian foreign minister in nearly a decade and is widely regarded as part of an effort to foster deeper bilateral relations that have warmed only recently.
Lavrov’s meetings with Pakistani officials followed a stop in rival neighbor India and were expected to touch on efforts to establish peace in another neighboring country, Afghanistan.
“We stand ready to strengthen the anti-terrorist potential of Pakistan, including by supplying Pakistan with special military equipment,” Lavrov said.
Moscow has recently sought to assert greater influence in conflict-torn Afghanistan as the United States and other Western powers try to extricate themselves from a two-decade war.
Russia is also helping to construct a gas pipeline between Pakistan’s port city of Karachi and eastern Lahore.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said Islamabad welcomes Russian expertise on rail and energy-sector modernization.
Qureshi also said Pakistan will purchase 5 million doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine against COVID-19, which is being used in dozens of countries but has run into regulatory delays in the European Union.
Pakistan’s security establishment is seen as close to the Afghan Taliban, which is fighting the central government in Kabul amid stalled intra-Afghan peace talks, and is said to wield leverage to influence that militant group’s actions.
A May 1 deadline is approaching for U.S. and other foreign troops to leave Afghanistan in line with an agreement Washington signed with the Afghan Taliban in Qatar in February 2020.
Afghanistan has seen a nationwide spike in bombings, targeted killings, and violence on the battlefield as common ground evades peace negotiators in Qatar.
U.S. President Joe Biden has warnedthat the May withdrawal deadline will be difficult to meet, raising the prospect that the entire agreement with the Taliban will unravel.
Later this month, Taliban and Afghan government representatives are expected to gather for a U.S.-backed international conference in Turkey meant to give new impetus to peace talks.
ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia — The father of Ivan Zhdanov, the director of jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), has been remanded in custody on a charge of abuse of office, which he and his supporters reject.
The Rostov regional court on April 7 upheld an earlier decision by a lower court in the city of Rostov-on-Don to keep 66-year-old Yury Zhdanov in pretrial detention at least until May 21.
Yury Zhdanov, who took part in the hearing via a video link from the detention center, and his lawyers requested the court transfer him to house arrest due to his age and the danger of getting infected with the coronavirus while in custody.
Zhdanov said at the hearing that many of those in his cell are sick. He said earlier that the cell he is kept in is so overcrowded that inmates have to sleep in shifts due to the limited number of beds.
Yury Zhdanov was sent to pretrial detention after police searched his home on March 26.
His son said last week that he had “no doubts that the criminal case was launched because of me and my activities.” He called his father’s arrest “absolutely a new level of villainy and turpitude from the [Russian] presidential administration.”
According to Zhdanov, before retiring last summer his father worked as an official in a remote town for several years.
Investigators now accuse Yury Zhdanov of recommending the town’s administration provide a local woman with a subsidized apartment, though it later turned out that the woman’s family had previously received housing allocations.
The apartment was later returned to municipal ownership in accordance with a court decision and no one among those who made the decision was held responsible.
Navalny’s FBK is known for publishing investigative reports about corruption among Russia’s top officials, including President Vladimir Putin.
The latest report focused on a lavish Black Sea mansion that Navalny’s team called “a palace for Putin,” capturing worldwide attention with almost 116 million views on YouTube.
The report showcases a luxurious, 100 billion ruble ($1.32 billion) estate near the popular holiday town of Gelendzhik that it said Putin effectively owns via a complex trail of companies.
The Kremlin has denied the report, saying “one or several [businessmen] directly or indirectly own” the property, adding that it “has no right to reveal the names of these owners.”
Train convoys of heavy Russian military equipment, seen on multiple videos on social media, reportedly shipping from Siberia to the border regions of Ukraine.
The Kerch Strait Bridge to the occupied Crimean Peninsula shut down briefly, apparently for a major shipment of weaponry.
An uptick in shelling along the line of control separating Ukrainian forces from Russia-backed fighters in eastern Ukraine. Ominous rhetoric on Russian state TV.
Is the Ukrainian-Russian “cold war” about to go “hot”?
Amid talk of war, here are six questions framing the flareup in tension between Russia and Ukraine — and some potential answers.
Ukrainian soldiers patrol along a position at the front line with Russia-backed separatists not far from Avdiyivka in the Donetsk region on April 5.
Isn’t There Already A War?
Yes. The conflict in the eastern Ukrainian region known the Donbas began seven years ago this month and despite multiple cease-fire agreements, has never really ended. More than 13,000 people have been killed since April 2014, according to the United Nations, and more than 1 million have been displaced.
Since July 2020, 45 Ukrainian military personnel have been killed and nearly 320 wounded, a Ukrainian official said last month.
Since late March, though, there’s been a noticeable uptick in Russian troop movements close to Ukraine’s borders and into Crimea, which Russia seized in March 2014.
It’s also set off alarm bells in Western capitals.
What’s With All That Equipment?
Over the past two weeks or so, there’s been a steady accumulation of photographs, video, and other data suggesting major movements of Russian armed units toward or near Ukraine’s borders and into Crimea.
That’s sent open-source researchers, journalists, and others to try to geolocate the imagery and divine the intentions of Russian military command, not to mention the Kremlin.
One prevailing theory is that this is merely a show of force aimed at spooking or intimidating Kyiv and sending a message to the West that Russia is willing to put “boots on the ground” — and a lot of them — very quickly.
“The ostentation with which the troops are being moved confirms that Russia is saber-rattling rather than contemplating a blitzkrieg,” Maksim Samorukov, a fellow with the Moscow Carnegie Center, said in an opinion piece published on April 5.
Observers have also pointed out that Russia has done large troop movements in the past, in connection with regular military exercises, without invading. Some analysts say these deployments don’t seem to make sense in that context.
What Does Russia Say?
Not much, or not much that’s clear.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov last week turned away reporters’ questions about the troop movements, saying that there was nothing to fear and that the repositioning of armed units within Russia’s borders was a strictly domestic concern.
When it comes to Crimea, though, Kyiv and the West — and nearly all of the rest of the world, for that matter — do not accept that, because they do not accept Moscow’s claim to the Black Sea peninsula.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Southern Military District, the command unit with responsibility for areas near the border with the Donbas and the North Caucasus, announced it was conducting an annual readiness check, with several dozen related exercises being held between March 29 and April 30. (The district also technically oversees Russia’s military command for Crimea.)
A few days earlier, Russia’s defense minister added further to the fog. On March 25, Sergei Shoigu announced that a paratrooper unit based in the northwestern city of Pskov, the 56th Air Assault Brigade, would be reorganized, and redeployed to the Crimean port of Feodosia. The closure of the Kerch Strait Bridge was reported to be connected with the transport of related equipment.
A convoy of Russian military equipment is seen on the move in Crimea on March 24.
But while Russia regularly conducts large-scale, district-wide training exercises — often involving thousands of troops, and dozens of units, across wide areas — some observers have said the scale of the equipment movement seen of late is far beyond normal.
On April 6, Shoigu announced broader-scale exercises in all military districts nationwide.
Isn’t There A Cease-Fire?
The oft-violated cease-fire in eastern Ukraine stems from the Minsk accords. A two-part deal, the second was signed in February 2015 by Ukraine and Russia, along with Russia-backed separatists who hold parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was also a signatory.
There’s also the Normandy Format: a grouping made up of Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany that has been trying to end the conflict. That goal has been elusive due to factors that include Russia’s funding and support for the militants in eastern Ukraine, internal Ukrainian politics, and German and French wavering on how forcefully to confront Moscow — and how much support to give Kyiv.
In a statement issued on April 3, the German Foreign Office called for restraint in the current tension, but also used the phrasing “all sides” — which drew criticism from some officials who said it equated threatening Russian troop movements with Ukraine’s defensive posture in the Donbas. (As of April 7, there was no public evidence suggesting Ukraine is doing similar large-scale equipment movement — and unlike Russia in Crimea, any deployments it is making are inside its borders.)
The European Union, meanwhile, has spoken up in support of Ukraine. But the bloc’s lead diplomat, Josep Borrell, was humiliated when he traveled to Russia in early February in an effort to mend fences with Moscow, leading observers to conclude that the EU has little leverage with Russia in this specific context.
Moscow may be trying “to make it clear to the West that the more it backs Ukraine rhetorically, the more the potential risk that it might be forced to make good on its promises,” Mark Galeotti, an analyst and author on Russia, wrote in a column for BNE Intellinews. “This is, after all, something the Kremlin thinks Europe in particular is unwilling to do.”
What About The United States?
Observers also say the timing and scope of the Russian maneuvers suggest a challenge to the United States and in particular President Joe Biden. He’s been one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters dating back to the period leading up the outbreak of war in 2014, when he was vice president.
Washington hit Russia with sanctions after the seizure of Crimea, and despite his often-conciliatory rhetoric, Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, kept those sanctions in place.
Biden’s administration has signaled a more confrontational approach: neither reset nor escalation, U.S. officials have said repeatedly since Biden took office In January. “We have asked Russia for an explanation of these provocations, but most importantly what we have signaled directly with our Ukrainian partners is a message of reassurance,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said on April 5.
Ukrainian Army personnel display U.S. Javelin anti-tank missiles during a military parade marking Independence Day in Kyiv on August 24, 2018.
The new U.S. administration has hit Moscow with economic sanctions in response to the near-fatal poisoning of opposition activist Aleksei Navalny with a military-grade nerve agent and to his imprisonment when he returned to Russia from Germany three days before Biden’s inauguration. The administration has also threatened unspecified action for a massive cyberattack on U.S. government computers, which it has blamed on Russian intelligence.
On April 2, in Biden’s first phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the U.S. leader pledged “unwavering” support. That call was preceded by calls between top U.S. defense and military officials and their Ukrainian counterparts.
While the EU has provided hundreds of millions of euros to help Ukraine build a more functional, and less corrupt, government, the United States has provided weaponry and training to Ukrainian forces, including anti-tank missiles, night-vision goggles, and counter-battery radars.
That effort continued on March 1, with the U.S. Defense Department announcement of another $125 million in new aid: “capabilities to enhance the lethality, command and control, and situational awareness of Ukraine’s forces through the provision of additional counter-artillery radars and tactical equipment; continued support for a satellite imagery and analysis capability; and equipment to support military medical treatment and combat evacuation procedures.”
The Kremlin bitterly opposes the notion that Ukraine could someday join NATO. But while Kyiv’s membership in the alliance seems to be a distant prospect, that hasn’t stopped Zelenskiy from making public statements about it. “We are committed to reforming our army and defense sector, but reforms alone will not stop Russia,” he said on Twitter after speaking with NATO’s secretary-general. “NATO is the only way to end the war in [the] Donbas.”
What’s Russia’s Endgame?
If there is a Kremlin endgame beyond a couple of big military exercises and relocating a combat brigade, it’s certainly not clear to Washington, Kyiv, or other Western capitals.
But one other place to look for guidance is how Russia has handled other simmering conflicts in its backyard. These so-called “frozen conflicts” have persisted in several places since the Soviet collapse, including Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as well as Transdniester in Moldova.
In all of them, Russian forces have deployed and remained, either as peacekeepers or as fully garrisoned units, though in reality, they go in unilaterally without the blessing of the United Nations or the OSCE and end up destabilizing the status quo in favor of Moscow.
Deploying international peacekeepers to the Donbas under the aegis of the Vienna-based OSCE has been discussed in the past. Those proposals, however, have been hung up on questions including whether they would be allowed to patrol the Russian-Ukrainian border or merely the line of control in Ukraine.
Many observers say that Russia seems unlikely to risk a renewal of full-scale war or an attempt to seize more Ukrainian territory, at least for the time being. James Sherr, the former head of Chatham House’s Russia program, has suggested that putting a Russian peacekeeping force inside Ukraine may be Moscow’s desired endgame.
“A localized escalation, dramatic and devastating, leading to the deployment of Russian ‘peacekeepers’ on the current demarcation line, is probably the most realistic option,” he wrote in a commentary for the International Center for Defense and Security in Estonia.
Jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny has tested negative for the coronavirus as concerns over his health mount after he was moved to a prison sick ward with a severe cough and temperature.
“The first test showed a negative result. However, for some reason, they took a second analysis from him. We do not know that result yet,” Navalny’s lawyer, Olga Mikhailova, said on April 7.
With Navalny only months removed from a poison attack that forced doctors into putting him in a medically induced coma for weeks, his associates, including Anastasia Vasilyeva, his personal doctor and the head of the Alliance of Doctors trade union, attempted to see the Kremlin critic on April 6, only to be rebuffed by prison officials.
Police later detained Vasilyeva and at least nine other supporters gathered outside the prison.
President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic is currently incarcerated in what is known as one of Russia’s toughest penitentiaries, Correctional Colony No. 2 in Pokrov, about 100 kilometers east of Moscow.
Navalny, 44, said in an Instagram post published by his allies on April 5 that he had a “severe cough” and a fever of 38.1 degrees Celsius, after a third prisoner in his crowded quarters had been sent to the hospital with suspected tuberculosis.
Navalny has been on hunger strike for nearly a week to protest what he says are deliberate attempts to deprive him of sleep and the failure of authorities to provide proper medical treatment for back and leg pain. His lawyers say that since entering prison last month Navalny has lost a total of 13 kilograms, including 5 kilograms over the past week.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said Navalny would receive the necessary medical care but no preferential treatment.
Navalny’s health condition is potentially precarious because he spent months last year recovering in Berlin from poisoning by a military-grade nerve agent while traveling in Siberia. Navalny has accused Putin of ordering security agents to assassinate him with the poison, something the Kremlin denies.
Navalny was arrested at a Moscow airport in January upon his return from Germany on charges of violating his parole, sparking large-scale protests.
A Moscow court in February found him guilty of violating the terms of his parole from an older embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His suspended 3 1/2-year sentence was converted into jail time, though the court reduced that amount to 2 1/2 years for time already served in detention.
The European Union’s drug regulator will begin its investigation next week into the clinical trials in Russia of the Sputnik V vaccine and whether those tests — to ensure efficacy and safety — followed “good clinical practice,” the Financial Times reports.
The U.K.-based newspaper cited anonymous sources familiar with the European Medicines Agency (EMA)’s approval process as expressing ethical concerns over the testing of Sputnik V in preparation for its use in the fight against COVID-19 in Russia and around the world.
It quoted Kirill Dimitriyev, the head of the Kremlin’s sovereign wealth fund, which backed Sputnik V’s development, as saying “there was no pressure [on participants in testing] and Sputnik V complied with all clinical practices.”
EMA approval will hinge in part on determining whether the Russian clinical trials met so-called GCP standards, the newspaper reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin mounted an all-out race for a vaccine ahead of domestic registration of the Sputnik V vaccine in August before a third stage of clinical tests on large segments of volunteers could be completed.
It is being widely used in Russia and dozens of other countries despite early misgivings about data secrecy and reliability among medical experts.
A study published in February in The Lancet, a prestigious peer-review publication in the United Kingdom, eased some international concerns by saying Sputnik V “appears safe and effective.”
But it has received neither U.S. nor EU regulatory approval, although EU members Hungary and Slovakia have purchased it, even as the scramble for vaccinations to beat COVID-19 around the world intensifies.
The European Union’s drug regulator will begin its investigation next week into the clinical trials in Russia of the Sputnik V vaccine and whether those tests — to ensure efficacy and safety — followed “good clinical practice,” the Financial Times reports.
The U.K.-based newspaper cited anonymous sources familiar with the European Medicines Agency (EMA)’s approval process as expressing ethical concerns over the testing of Sputnik V in preparation for its use in the fight against COVID-19 in Russia and around the world.
It quoted Kirill Dimitriyev, the head of the Kremlin’s sovereign wealth fund, which backed Sputnik V’s development, as saying “there was no pressure [on participants in testing] and Sputnik V complied with all clinical practices.”
EMA approval will hinge in part on determining whether the Russian clinical trials met so-called GCP standards, the newspaper reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin mounted an all-out race for a vaccine ahead of domestic registration of the Sputnik V vaccine in August before a third stage of clinical tests on large segments of volunteers could be completed.
It is being widely used in Russia and dozens of other countries despite early misgivings about data secrecy and reliability among medical experts.
A study published in February in The Lancet, a prestigious peer-review publication in the United Kingdom, eased some international concerns by saying Sputnik V “appears safe and effective.”
But it has received neither U.S. nor EU regulatory approval, although EU members Hungary and Slovakia have purchased it, even as the scramble for vaccinations to beat COVID-19 around the world intensifies.
Vladimir Litvinenko, the rector at the St. Petersburg State Mining University who chaired the committee that awarded Russian President Vladimir Putin his doctorate in 1997, has become one of the new members of the Forbes billionaire’s list.
In its annual rating of the world’s wealthiest people, released on April 6, Forbes estimated Litvinenko’s assets at $1.5 billion.
Forbes said Litvinenko’s wealth jumped on the back of a rise in the share price of Moscow-based PhosAgro, a chemical holding company that produces fertilizers and phosphates.
The 65-year-old Litvinenko owns almost 21 percent of the company.
“The company’s share prices increased from 2,443 rubles ($31.8) per share (April 6, 2020) to 4,163 rubles ($54,2) per share (April 6, 2021),” Forbes wrote.
Litvinenko, who has been rector at the university since 1994, also led Putin’s election campaign in St. Petersburg on three different occasions.
In 2006, researchers at the Brookings Institution in Washington who studied Putin’s thesis said they had found that 16 of 20 pages of the thesis’s key section had been either copied in full or with minimal changes from a textbook titled Strategic Planning And Public Policy, written by University of Pittsburgh professors David I. Cleland and William R. King in 1979 and translated into Russian in 1982.
Putin’s thesis was titled Strategic Planning Of The Reproduction Of The Mineral Resource Base Of A Region Under Conditions Of The Formation Of Market Relations.
In a 2006 interview with the magazine Vlast, Litvinenko said that he had “no doubts” that Putin wrote his thesis himself.
Litvinenko’s daughter, Olga Litvinenko, told RFE/RL in 2018 that her father wrote the thesis for Putin after he became the university’s rector with the president’s support.
Putin has never commented publicly on the allegations.
MOSCOW — The jailed former governor of Russia’s Far Eastern region of Khabarovsk Krai, Sergei Furgal, whose arrest in July sparked unprecedented protests, has tested positive for the coronavirus.
Furgal’s lawyer, Mikhail Karapetyan, said on April 7 that his client was tested the previous day in Moscow’s Lefortovo detention center, where he is currently held after being charged in 2020 with being involved in several murders that took place more than 10 years ago.
He and his supporters reject the charges, calling the case politically motivated. He was dismissed from the post after his arrest.
“The defense team is very much concerned about the illness because, as Furgal himself has said, he has problems with his lungs and fears that the illness may cause complications,” Karapetyan said, adding that his client is currently in a two-week quarantine and therefore will be unable to meet with his lawyers.
According to Karapetyan, a motion has been filed demanding investigators allow Furgal to be released from pretrial detention due to the illness.
The 51-year-old Furgal was elected in 2018 in a runoff that he won handily against the region’s longtime incumbent from the ruling United Russia party.
His arrest on July 9 sparked mass protests in Khabarovsk and several other towns and cities in the region by his supporters that until recently were held on an almost daily basis.
The protests highlighted growing discontent in the Far East over what demonstrators see as Moscow-dominated policies that often disregard their views and interests.
Amnesty International says some measures to tackle the coronavirus pandemic have aggravated existing patterns of abuses and inequalities in Europe and Central Asia, where a number of governments used the crisis “as a smokescreen for power grabs, clampdowns on freedoms, and a pretext to ignore human rights obligations.”
Government responses to COVID-19 “exposed the human cost of social exclusion, inequality, and state overreach,” the London-based watchdog said in its annual report released on April 7.
According to the report, The State of the World’s Human Rights, close to half of all countries in the region have imposed states of emergency related to COVID-19, with governments restricting rights such as freedom of movement, expression, and peaceful assembly.
The enforcement of lockdowns and other public health measures “disproportionately” hit marginalized individuals and groups who were targeted with violence, identity checks, quarantines, and fines.
Roma and people on the move, including refugees and asylum seekers, were placed under discriminatory “forced quarantines” in Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Hungary, Russia, Serbia, and Slovakia.
Law enforcement officials unlawfully used force along with other violations in Belgium, France, Georgia, Greece, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Romania, and Spain.
In Azerbaijan, arrests on politically motivated charges intensified “under the pretext” of containing the pandemic.
In countries where freedoms were already severely circumscribed, last year saw further restrictions.
Russian authorities “moved beyond organizations, stigmatizing individuals also as ‘foreign agents’ and clamped down further on single person pickets.”
Meanwhile, authorities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan adopted or proposed new restrictive laws on assembly.
Belarusian police responded to mass protests triggered by allegations of election fraud with “massive and unprecedented violence, torture and other ill-treatment.”
“Independent voices were brutally suppressed as arbitrary arrests, politically motivated prosecutions and other reprisals escalated against opposition candidates and their supporters, political and civil society activists and independent media,” the report said.
Across the region, governments in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, France, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan “misused existing and new legislation to curtail freedom of expression.”
Governments also took insufficient measures to protect journalists and whistle-blowers, including health workers, and sometimes targeted those who criticized government responses to the pandemic. This was the case in Albania, Armenia, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
In Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, medical workers “did not dare speak out against already egregious freedom of expression restrictions.”
Erosion Of Judicial Independence
Amnesty International said that governments in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere continued to take steps in 2020 that eroded the independence of the judiciary. This included disciplining judges or interfering with their appointment for demonstrating independence, criticizing the authorities, or passing judgments that went against the wishes of the government.
In Russia and in “much” of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, violations of the right to a fair trial remained “widespread” and the authorities cited the pandemic to deny detainees meetings with lawyers and prohibit public observation of trials.
In Belarus, “all semblance of adherence to the right to a fair trial and accountability was eroded.”
“Not only were killings and torture of peaceful protesters not investigated, but authorities made every effort to halt or obstruct attempts by victims of violations to file complaints against perpetrators,” the report said.
Human Rights In Conflict Zones
According to Amnesty International, conflicts in countries that made up the former Soviet Union continued to “hold back” human development and regional cooperation.
In Georgia, Russia and the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia continued to restrict freedom of movement with the rest of the county, including through the further installation of physical barriers.
The de facto authorities in Moldova’s breakaway Transdniester region introduced restrictions on travel from government-controlled territory, which affected medical provisions to the local population.
And in eastern Ukraine, both Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists also imposed restrictions on travel across the contact line, with scores of people suffering lack of access to health care, pensions, and workplaces.
Last fall’s armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan resulted in more than 5,000 deaths and saw all sides using cluster munitions banned under international humanitarian law, as well as heavy explosive weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated civilian areas.
Both Azerbaijani and Armenian forces also “committed war crimes including extrajudicial execution, torture of captives and desecration of corpses of opposing forces.”
Shrinking of Human Rights Defenders’ Space
Amnesty International’s report said some governments in Europe and Central Asia further limited the space for human rights defenders and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) through “restrictive laws and policies, and stigmatizing rhetoric.”
This “thinned the ranks of civil society through financial attrition, as funding streams from individuals, foundations, businesses and governments dried up as a consequence of COVID-19-related economic hardship.”
The Kazakh and Russian governments continued moves to silence NGOs through smear campaigns.
Authorities in Kazakhstan threatened over a dozen human rights NGOs with suspension based on alleged reporting violations around foreign income.
Peaceful protesters, human rights defenders, and civic and political activists in Russia faced arrests and prosecution.
In Kyrgyzstan, proposed amendments to NGO legislation created “onerous” financial reporting requirements, while “restrictive new NGO legislation was mooted” in Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, and Serbia.
Police detained the head of the Russian Alliance of Doctors, Anastasia Vasilyeva, on April 6 after she requested permission to examine Aleksei Navalny inside a prison around 100 kilometers from Moscow. The Kremlin critic has been moved to a sick ward in the facility amid reports of a possible tuberculosis outbreak there.
A Russian court has ordered a fine against the popular video-sharing application TikTok in the country’s latest major dispute with a global social platform over content allegedly related to political protests.
The Moscow court ruled on April 6 that TikTok failed to delete content that it said was related to unsanctioned demonstrations, according to local reports.
Russian critics of the Kremlin routinely use international social networks, including Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube, to get around state control of the media and reach tens of millions of citizens with their anti-government messages.
Some local reports suggested the TikTok fine — 2.6 million roubles ($34,000) — pertained to alleged appeals to minors urging them to join political demonstrations.
Russian authorities this week backed off slightly from a threat to ban the Twitter social network but have punitively slowed its user connections and announced suits targeting fellow Western digital giants Google and Facebook.
TikTok is owned by China’s ByteDance and reports nearly 700 million active users worldwide.
India and Pakistan have banned TikTok in the past, citing politically contentious posts, and then-President Donald Trump sought unsuccessfully last year to ban it in the United States.
Russia’s state communications regulator said on April 5 that it wouldn’t ban Twitter amid a dispute over content related to protests but would continue to slow the U.S. social network’s speed inside the country until the middle of May.
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.
A Russian court on April 2 levied a nearly $120,000 fine against Twitter for failing to removes posts related to those protests.
The Russian regulator has also focused its complaints against Twitter over alleged failures to remove child pornography and content the overseers said encourages drug use and suicide among children.
Twitter said it has a zero-tolerance policy regarding child pornography and other content deemed harmful.
Roskomnadzor began slowing the speed of traffic on Twitter last month.
In its April 5 statement, the regulator said it would not ban Twitter yet after it claimed the platform took down 1,900 of 3,100 posts with banned content.
Russia’s efforts to tighten control of the Internet and social media date back to 2012, shortly after the largest anti-government protests in years.
Since then, a growing number of restrictions targeting messaging apps, websites, and social-media platforms have been introduced in Russia.
St. George slays a dragon on an ammunition-box panel from the front lines at Avdiyivka, Ukraine.
Klymenko says: “Most people think of this war as of something very far away. It was important for me to show people that the war is real, that this ammunition box is real, and it stored real weapons that killed real people.”
He told Reuters: “I don’t want this war to exist. And I don’t want this project to exist either.”
Russia’s Alliance of Doctors trade union has called for jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny to receive “qualified treatment” after he was moved to a sick ward after complaining of a cough and temperature.
Navalny said in an Instagram post on April 5 that doctors had officially diagnosed him with a “severe cough” and a temperature of 38.1 degrees Celsius, which indicates a slight fever, after a third prisoner in his quarters had been sent to the hospital with suspected tuberculosis.
Sergei Ryabkov, the deputy head of the medical trade union, told Current Time late on April 5 that while the prison infirmary has “professional doctors,” they work in conditions where they are not provided with enough equipment to manage a patient.”
“The medical infirmary at the penitentiary is an isolation ward. They isolated [Navalny] because he showed symptoms of an infectious disease. That is good, but what he needs is not just isolation but qualified treatment,” Ryabkov said, adding that the union will hold a “humanitarian action” near the prison to support Navalny. Current Time is the Russian-language TV network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic is currently incarcerated in Correctional Colony No. 2, about 100 kilometers from Moscow, which is known as one of the toughest penitentiaries in Russia.
Navalny said his prison unit consists of 15 people, three of whom have been hospitalized with suspected tuberculosis since he arrived.
Tuberculosis is a potentially serious infectious disease that mainly affects the lungs and is spread from person to person through tiny droplets released into the air, mainly via coughs and sneezes.
It has largely been eradicated in developed countries and a person with a healthy immune system often successfully fights it.
In his April 5 post, Navalny said his prison unit has been fed clay-like porridge and frozen potatoes. He is currently on a hunger strike to demand better conditions. Malnutrition and weight loss undermine an immune system’s ability to fight tuberculosis.
“I have a legally guaranteed right to invite a specialist doctor at my own expense. I will not give up this right as prison doctors can be trusted just as much as state TV,” the 44-year-old said in the Instagram post.
Navalny had previously complained of acute back and leg pain as well as sleep deprivation by guards.
Navalny criticized recent news reports by state-owned media that he is serving in a prison with comfortable conditions. He invited state media correspondents to come stay the night in his prison with tuberculosis-infected cellmates.
Russian police arrested Navalny in January upon his return from Germany on charges of violating his parole while abroad, sparking large-scale protests. The anti-corruption fighter had been recuperating in Berlin for several months after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in Siberia.
Navalny has accused agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service of attempting to assassinate him with the poison.
A Moscow court in February found him guilty of violating the terms of his parole from an older embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His suspended 3 1/2-year sentence was converted into jail time, though the court reduced that amount to 2 1/2 years for time already served in detention.
Navalny’s imprisonment has caused a chorus of international criticism, with the United States and its allies demanding his unconditional release and vowing to continue to hold those responsible for his poisoning to account.
The Pentagon says it is watching Russia’s military activities in the Arctic “very closely” as signs mount of Moscow’s ongoing efforts to boost its presence in and around its northernmost territories.
The statement by the U.S. military comes amid reports of advanced weapons tests and satellite imagery showing continued buildup of bases, storage, and equipment on Russia’s Arctic coastline.
“Without getting into specific intelligence assessments, obviously we’re monitoring it very closely,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told a briefing on April 5. “Nobody’s interested in seeing the Arctic become militarized.”
Rapid melting in the Arctic brought on by climate change has opened increased shipping and resource-exploitation opportunities in polar regions, intensifying a race to project power and defend national interests by coastal and other powers.
The region is also thought to be home to enormous oil and gas deposits.
Russia’s navy used nuclear-powered submarines to break through thick Arctic ice late last month in an apparent display of power in the Far North.
Washington has also cited the refurbishment of Soviet-era installations, new port construction, search-and-rescue centers, and a fleet of new icebreakers that includes nuclear-powered craft.
Kirby noted that the region “is key terrain that’s vital to our own homeland defense and as a potential strategic corridor between the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the [United States].”
“We’re committed to protecting our U.S. national-security interests in the Arctic by upholding a rules-based order in the region, particularly through our network of Arctic allies and partners.”
Washington last year boosted aid to Greenland to strengthen military ties in the Arctic region, after a public offer floated by then-President Donald Trump to buy that vast autonomous Arctic island angered Denmark.
China describes itself as a “near Arctic state” as it, too, tries to lay the foundations for greater shipping and mining activities in the region.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he has “significant concerns” about Russia’s military buildup near its border with Ukraine.
In a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on April 5, Johnson also voiced “unwavering support” for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, Johnson’s office said.
He is the latest Western leader to speak with Zelenskiy in recent days amid reports of significant Russian troop movement near Ukraine’s border.
U.S. President Joe Biden spoke with Zelenskiy on April 2 about the buildup in his first call with the Ukrainian leader since taking office in January.
Fighting between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists in two eastern provinces has spiked in recent weeks despite a cease-fire agreement reached in the summer.
In the meantime, Russia has been moving troops toward its border with Ukraine in what Moscow says is an exercise. The United States has called it an attempt to intimidate Ukraine.
During the call with Johnson, Zelenskiy asked the United Kingdom and its allies to beef up their presence in its neighborhood, according to a readout of the conversation published by the Ukrainian president’s office.
“Russia’s recent actions pose a serious challenge to the security of Ukraine, NATO member states, and the whole of Europe,” Zelenskiy said.
He also urged Western nations to impose tougher sanctions on Russia for its destabilizing activities and invite Ukraine into NATO’s Membership Action Plan. The action plan is a NATO program of assistance designed to help countries wishing to join the alliance meet its criteria.
Russia is opposed to Ukraine joining the military alliance and recently warned NATO countries against sending troops to support Ukraine.
Ukraine has been battling the Russia-backed separatists in a low-simmering war since 2014, when protesters in Kyiv toppled Kremlin-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych.
More than 13,000 people have been killed in the ensuing seven years. Russia is demanding Ukraine give the separatist-controlled regions greater autonomy, which would effectively prevent the country from joining NATO.
Ukraine has blamed the Russia-backed separatists for the recent spike in hostilities, while Moscow has pointed the finger at Kyiv.
Russia, which forcibly annexed Crimea in 2014 after long denying the presence of its troops there, has consistently denied involvement in the fighting in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk regions despite significant evidence to the contrary.
Some analysts have suggested that the recent actions may be Russia’s way of testing the new Biden administration’s commitment to Ukraine.
Russia’s state communications regulator has backed down from banning Twitter amid a dispute over content on its platform.
However, it said on April 5 that it will continue to slow the speed of the U.S. social network inside the country until the middle of May.
Russia has been engaged in a fight with U.S. social media, including Twitter, over content it deems prohibited, such as calls to join political protests.
Russian critics of the Kremlin use social networks, including Twitter and YouTube, to get around state control of the media and reach tens of millions of citizens with their anti-government messages.
A Russian court on April 2 levied a nearly $120,000 fine against Twitter for posts related to anti-government protests in January.
The Russian regulator has also focused its complaints against Twitter over the network’s apparent failure to remove child pornography as well as content encouraging drug use and suicide among children.
Twitter said it had a zero-tolerance policy regarding child pornography and other content deemed harmful.
Roskomnadzor began slowing the speed of traffic on Twitter last month as a response to what it called Twitter’s refusal to remove content it deemed impermissible. It threatened to ban the network if it did not comply.
In its April 5 statement, the regulator said it would not ban Twitter yet after it claimed the platform took down 1,900 of 3,100 posts with banned content.
Rokomnadzor said Twitter had sped up the removal of content following a Russian request to 81 hours. However, that is still below the 24-hour time limit stated in the law.
Twitter said in a statement that it had been in contact with Roskomnazdor but did not confirm it had taken down 1,900 posts.
“It was a productive discussion about how we can both work to ensure that reports of such illegal content are dealt with expeditiously,” Twitter said.
Russia’s efforts to tighten control of the Internet and social media date back to 2012, shortly after the largest anti-government protests in years.
Since then, a growing number of restrictions targeting messaging apps, websites, and social media have been introduced in Russia.
Jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny says a third prisoner in his quarters has been sent to the hospital with suspected tuberculosis since his arrival last month.
In an Instagram post on April 5, Navalny said the latest health check by prison doctors stated he has a “strong cough” and a temperature of 38.1 Celsius, which indicates a slight fever.
President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic, 44, is currently incarcerated in Correctional Colony No. 2, about 100 kilometers from Moscow, which is known as one of the toughest penitentiaries in Russia.
Navalny said his prison unit consists of 15 people, three of whom have been hospitalized with suspected tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis is a potentially serious infectious disease that mainly affects the lungs and is spread from person to person through tiny droplets released into the air mainly via coughing and sneezing.
It has largely been eradicated in developed countries and a person with a healthy immune system often successfully fights it.
In his April 5 post, Navalny said his prison unit had been malnourished with clay-like porridge and frozen potatoes. He is currently on a hunger strike to demand better conditions.
Malnutrition and weight loss undermine an immune system’s ability to fight tuberculosis.
Navalny criticized recent news reports by state-owned media that he is serving in a prison with comfortable conditions.
He invited state media correspondents to come stay the night in his prison with tuberculosis-infected cellmates.
Russian police arrested Navalny in January upon his return from Germany on charges of violating his parole, sparking large-scale protests.
The anti-corruption fighter had been recuperating in Berlin for several months after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent.
Navalny has accused agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service of attempting to assassinate him with the poison.
A Moscow court in February found him guilty of violating the terms of his parole from an older embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His suspended 3 1/2-year sentence was converted into jail time, though the court reduced that amount to 2 1/2 years for time already served in detention.
Navalny’s imprisonment has drawn a chorus of international criticism, with the United States and its allies demanding his unconditional release and vowing to continue to hold those responsible for his poisoning to account.
MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law a controversial bill that opens the door for him to potentially remain in power until 2036.
The bill, which was recently approved by the lower and upper chambers of parliament, aligns the election laws with constitutional changes approved by voters last year.
One of the constitutional changes resets Putin’s term-limit clock to zero, allowing him to seek reelection when his current term expires in 2024, and again in 2030 if he wishes.
Under the current election laws, a president is forbidden from seeking a third consecutive six-year term. Putin is currently in his second consecutive six-year term.
The constitutional amendments were initiated in January 2020 by the 68-year-old Russian leader, who has been running the country as prime minister or president since late 1999.
The nationwide vote for the amendments held last summer sparked protests in Moscow that were dispersed by law enforcement.
According to the results of a poll by the independent Levada Center last month, 41 percent of Russians do not want Putin to stay in power after his current term expires in 2024.
EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell has assured the Ukrainian government of “unwavering EU support” in the conflict with Russian-backed separatists in the east of the country.
Borrell said on Twitter on April 4 that he spoke by phone with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and added that he was “following with severe concern the Russian military activity surrounding Ukraine.”
He said the matter would be further discussed at the next meeting of EU foreign ministers.
Borrell’s call with Kuleba comes after a call on April 2 between U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in which Biden sought to reassure Zelenskiy of “unwavering” U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Ukrainian and Russian-backed separatists in the Donetsk region have accused each other of attacks over the weekend.
The tensions come after Ukraine alleged last week that Russia had been massing troops at their shared border.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded by saying that Russia was “moving troops within its own territory at its own discretion, and this shouldn’t concern anyone.”
Russia, which annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014, has consistently denied involvement in the fighting in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk regions despite significant evidence to the contrary.
“Russia is not interested in any conflict with Ukraine, especially a military one,” Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko told state news agency RIA Novosti in response to the recent allegations.
Germany, Russia, France, and Ukraine are part of the so-called Normandy Format set up to try to resolve the Ukraine conflict.
Germany and France recently expressed concern about the “growing number of cease-fire violations.”
“We are closely monitoring the situation and in particular Russian troop movements and call on all sides to show restraint and to work towards immediate de-escalation,” they said in a statement.
On March 16, the United Kingdom announced it was significantly raising a self-imposed cap on its overall nuclear stockpile, from a previous target of 180 warheads by the mid-2020s to a new cap of 260. The decision was outlined in the United Kingdom’s Integrated Review, a landmark strategic update, which also said the country will no longer declare the size of its operational warhead stockpile (previously 120), or the numbers of warheads and operational missiles deployed on submarines (previously 40 and no more than 8, respectively). A previous review in 2015 had left open the possibility of a future change in nuclear posture, although the vaguely phrased caveat was not much noticed at the time.
Russia’s government has extended a space cooperation agreement with the United States until 2030, one of the few remaining partnerships between Moscow and Washington amid spiraling relations.
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin approved and signed the extension on April 3, the government said in a statement.
The original cooperation agreement, signed in 1992 and extended four times previously, laid the groundwork for wide-ranging, space-related projects and research between NASA and Roskosmos, the two countries’ space agencies.
That has included joint work on the International Space Station, and Russia’s ferrying of astronauts and supplies and equipment to and from the orbiting station. Following the U.S. decision to ground its space shuttle fleet, Russia’s Soyuz and Progress spacecrafts became the sole means of transport to get to the station.
That has changed recently as private space companies including SpaceX have neared gaining NASA approval to fly people to the station, a move that will deprive Roskosmos of much-needed revenues.
Bilateral cooperation has continued even as the United States imposed sanctions on Russia for its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula, and other punitive measures.
The U.S. Commerce Department last month said it was tightening sanctions on some exports to Russia, but was partially excluding certain items such as those related to aviation and space.
The orbiting station, meanwhile, is approaching the end of its predicted lifespan, having flown about 400 kilometers above the Earth for more than 20 years.
In recent years, the station has been hit with leaks and depressurization concerns.
Roskosmos recently announced an agreement with China to explore building a joint lunar base. And NASA is gearing up for more missions aimed at exploring Mars.
A Russian defense industry executive and alleged intelligence officer has been added to the FBI’s most-wanted list for his alleged involvement in the theft of trade secrets from a U.S. aviation company.
The FBI said on April 2 on Twitter it is seeking the arrest of Aleksandr Korshunov, 58, saying he is suspected of conspiring to steal trade secrets from the company to benefit Russia.
Korshunov worked for Russian state-owned aviation company United Engine Corporation (UEC), while also serving as an intelligence officer with Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the FBI said.
UEC appointed Korshunov in 2009 as its director of marketing and sales, the U.S. law enforcement agency said in a statement accompanying the tweet that includes a photo of Korshunov.
Korshunov’s job was to encourage Western aviation companies to work with UEC to advance Russia’s aviation technology, the FBI said.
“It is alleged that, between 2013 and 2018, Korshunov conspired and attempted to steal trade secrets from an American aviation company, the FBI said. “He hired engineers employed by a subsidiary of a large United States aviation company to consult on the redesign of the Russian PD-14 aero engine.”
Korshunov was able to acquire the company’s confidential, protected, and unique engineering patterns, plans, and procedures “for the benefit of Russia,” the FBI said.
Korshunov has been sought by the FBI since August 2019, when he was indicted by the U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was arrested later that month in Italy at the request of the United States.
But his lawyer told TASS that he returned to Moscow in the summer of 2020 “accompanied by Russian law enforcement under arrest.”
Russian authorities said Korshunov was wanted in Russia to face charges of embezzlement and fraud, TASS said.
He was extradited to Russia “under the decision of the Italian Justice Ministry and in accordance with the relevant request,” which Italy’s judiciary had approved before the U.S. sought extradition, the report said.
The original U.S. complaint accused Korshunov and Maurizio Bianchi, the former director of an Italian division of General Electric (GE) Aviation, of hiring former GE employees to prepare a technical report on jet engine accessories using the U.S. company’s intellectual property.
GE Aviation is one of the world’s largest suppliers of civilian and military aircraft engines and has a factory in Cincinnati. It completed the acquisition of an Italian manufacturer of aviation components in 2013.
The Russian Embassy in Washington said its diplomats protested Korshunov’s detention after it was announced in 2019, calling it “illegitimate.”
The number of Russians who have died from the coronavirus has surpassed 225,000, the nation’s statistics agency reported on April 2.
The data published by Rosstat covers the 11-month period from April 2020 through February 2021.
The figure puts Russia third globally for the most coronavirus-related deaths after the United States and Brazil, which have reported 553,000 and 325,000 fatalities, respectively, from the disease, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
The Rosstat death toll is more than double the widely reported fatality figure provided by the Russian government’s coronavirus task force and which is used by John Hopkins. That figure, which now stands at 99,000, does not take into account deaths that are determined at a later date following an autopsy to have been coronavirus-related.
The Rosstat data released on April 2 shows that 29,493 more Russians died in February compared with the same month last year, a possible reflection of the monthly coronavirus death toll.
February had one more calendar day last year compared with this year.
Russia is one of the few countries that has developed a vaccination proven to be highly effective at preventing the coronavirus, putting it in a good position to slow its own death toll.
However, many of its citizens have been hesitant to receive a shot of the home-grown Sputnik V vaccine.
As of last week, less than 5 percent of the Russian population had been vaccinated.
Some have blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the vaccine’s slow acceptance inside the country.
The Kremlin said Putin received his vaccination on March 23, months after the start of the rollout and behind closed doors.
Global coronavirus statistics are murky and some countries, such as China and Iran, are believed to be underreporting deaths.
China, where the coronavirus pandemic originated, has officially reported less than 5,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins.
News agencies last year reported that crematories in some cities in China, the world’s largest country by population, were so busy due to the pandemic that they were operating around the clock.
A Russian court has fined Twitter nearly $117,000 for failing to delete what officials describe as banned content amid growing Kremlin pressure on U.S. social-media companies.
The April 2 decision against Twitter is the first in a series of rulings expected in the coming days against U.S. social-media companies in Russia. Cases are currently ongoing against Facebook and YouTube.
The cases all pertain to content published on their platforms in January that called on Russians to protest the arrest of Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny.
Russia’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor described the postings as “inciting teenagers” to take part in “illegal activities” or “unauthorized mass events.”
Navalny was detained by Russian police in mid-January upon his return from Germany on charges of violating his parole.
Navalny had been recuperating in Berlin after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent during a trip to Siberia in August to investigate local corruption. Navalny has accused officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, of trying to assassinate him with the nerve agent.
Tens of thousands of Russians around the country heeded the calls to protest on January 23 and January 31, making them among the largest anti-government demonstrations in years.
Russia later sentenced Navalny to jail for more than two years in a case he says is aimed at punishing him for surviving the poisoning.
The fines against U.S. social-media companies are part of a larger Kremlin strategy to weaken their influence in Russia, analysts say.
The strategy also includes slowing traffic speed and developing domestic equivalents to YouTube.
The Kremlin controls major media assets, including television, but social-media platforms, which are growing as a source of information for Russians, remain outside its control.
Navalny and his supporters have deftly used YouTube and Twitter to spread his anti-government message to millions of citizens.
Russia last month slowed the speed of Twitter and threatened to ban the social-media service outright.
Twitter at the time said it was “deeply concerned by increased attempts to block and throttle online public conversation.”
Leading human rights groups in Russia have condemned the country’s role in abuses in Syria, including its participation in the bombing of civilian targets.
The condemnation comes in a 198-page report, billed as the first report on the deadly conflict by Russian rights groups, including the prominent Memorial human rights center and several other organizations.
The report includes more than 150 interviews with witnesses and survivors based in Russia, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Germany, Belgium, and other countries.
“Focusing on the plight of these civilians, we conclude that much greater responsibility for Syria’s future lies with all state parties to the conflict, Russia foremost among them,” the report says.
“The overwhelming majority of our interviewees do not see Russia as a savior, but as a destructive foreign force whose military and political intervention helped bolster the war criminal heading their country,” the report added.
“Some of the people we interviewed revealed that they or their loved ones had been victims of Russian bombings,” it said.
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The report accuses Russia of abuses in Syria, including bombing civilians indiscriminately and backing Syria’s regime, which has been accused of widespread atrocities including the use of chemical weapons.
The report calls on Moscow to conduct independent investigations into the Russian Army’s bombardments in Syria and pay compensation to victims.
The authors of the report said it was compiled mainly to present information about human rights abuses in Syria to Russian readers, where “we have the sense that Russian society is not adequately informed about this conflict in which our country has played a key role.”
Russia, along with Iran, has played a critical role in helping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad remain in power despite a 10-year conflict that has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions.
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Aleksei Navalny started a hunger strike in prison, while the father of a top ally of the Kremlin opponent was arrested in a move that one political analyst said echoed the Stalin era. The war in Syria passed the 10-year mark, the Kremlin tried damage control following a full-throated expression of support for Burma’s junta as it massacred protesters, and tensions rose amid fresh questions about Russia’s intentions in the Donbas.
Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.
‘Getting Worrisome’
So far in 2021, the biggest Russia news has come from inside the country — certainly since January 17, when Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny was arrested at the airport upon his return from Germany, where he spent five months in treatment after a nerve-agent poisoning he blames on President Vladimir Putin and the Federal Security Service (FSB).
Since then, events have rushed along at a rapid pace — but at the same time may seem almost like they are occurring in slow motion, a nightmare sequence that one might like to stop with the push of a button but is powerless to affect. Almost every day brings a new development that seems worse than the last, or at least equally bad.
There have been large protests, a harsh crackdown, and a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for Navalny, who charges that he is being denied adequate medical treatment in what he called a “deliberate strategy” of harm — and is essentially being tortured in his cell through sleep deprivation.
A screenshot of an Instagram post published on March 31 shows a photo of a handwritten statement in which Navalny declared a hunger strike.
On March 31, Navalny announced a hunger strike to protest his treatment, demanding that his jailers adhere to the law and that a doctor of his choice be allowed to visit him.
“I have the right to invite a doctor and to receive medicine. They are not allowing me either one,” Navalny said in an Instagram post. “The pain in my back has spread to my leg. Parts of my right and now also my left leg have lost sensation.All joking aside, this is getting worrisome.”
Another Kremlin opponent, Vladimir Kara-Murza, expressed concern in more concrete terms, writing in The Washington Post that after the nerve-agent poisoning in August, which Navalny and many others say was an assassination attempt, “the Kremlin is trying to kill him again — this time slowly, painfully and in the confinement” of the prison where he is being held.
The situation contains echoes of the fatal plight of Sergei Magnitsky, a whistle-blower whose death in jail in 2009 has played a substantial part in defining Putin’s rule and souring Russia’s relations with the West.
Navalny himself is not the only one under pressure: Many of his associates and allies across Russia have been prosecuted, mainly on administrative charges linked to the protests held in January, and jailed, fined, or placed under house arrest in what Kremlin critics say is a concerted campaign to curtail Navalny’s reach from behind bars, blunt the challenge he poses, and reduce the chances of fresh protestsahead of parliamentary elections expected in September.
‘Fathers And Sons’
Associates, allies — and also their relatives, in at least one case. On March 27, the father of Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), was detained and jailed on an abuse-of-office charge stemming from a matter related to his preretirement job as a small-town official.
Zhdanov said he had “no doubt” that the arrest of his father was Kremlin-orchestrated punishment for his own work at FBK, which has produced several investigative reports revealing evidence of high-level corruption — including an exposé, published two days before Navalny returned to Russia, on a sprawling Black Sea estate that it called “a palace for Putin.”
Yury Zhdanov, 66, faces up to four years in prison if tried and convicted. Pretrial detention puts “what remains of his health” in jeopardy, said Ivan Zhdanov, who blamed the Kremlin and said Putin’s administration had reached a “new level of villainy and turpitude.”
Pretrial detention puts “what remains of [my father’s] health” in jeopardy, says Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
The elder Zhdanov’s arrest was “in keeping with Soviet-style ‘justice,’ in which not only were parents made to pay for the ‘sins’ of their children and vice versa, but also siblings and other relatives were punished for each other’s ‘misdeeds,’” wrote Andrei Kolesnikov, head of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
“By arresting family members of persecuted individuals, today’s authorities openly declare themselves to be the direct successors of Stalin’s repressive system,” Kolesnikov wrote in an opinion article in The Moscow Times under the headline: Fathers and Sons: A Kremlin-KGB Remake.
The Kremlin’s main focus seems likely to remain on domestic events through the end of summer, given the test that United Russia — the party that serves as one of Putin’s main levers of power nationwide but is deeply unpopular — faces in the State Duma elections, which must be held by September 19.
The timing of the vote means there is little chance of a letup in the pressure on Navalny, his allies, and anyone inside Russia who is seen as threat to the Kremlin.
But there’s plenty happening beyond Russia’s borders.
For one thing, the month of March marked a decade since the start of the war in Syria — and a decade of Russian support for President Bashar al-Assad’s government in a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven millions from their homes.
Moscow’s involvement in the war is often described as having begun in September 2015, when Russia launched a campaign of air strikes targeting Assad’s foes and also stepped up its military presence on the ground, helping turn the tide in his favor when his back was against the wall.
A fresh reminder of Moscow’s role since 2015 came on March 30, when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a humanitarian aid package for Syrians in their own country and abroad.
In a statement, Blinken said that the Syrian people “have faced atrocities, including Assad regime and Russian air strikes, forced disappearances, [Islamic State] brutality, and chemical-weapons attacks.”
Aiding Assad
Concerns about Russia’s actions in Syria are mainly focused on the last half-decade as well. Among many other reports, they were underscored by an October 2019 report in The New York Times about an investigation that found that Russian pilots had bombed hospitals four times in the space of 24 hours that May.
But Moscow has been behind Assad since the war started in 2011 with a government crackdown on protests, lending him military support — albeit on a smaller scale before 2015 — and crucial diplomatic backing in the UN Security Council and other forums.
Moscow’s backing for Assad — not to mention Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, and others — might make a recent incident in Burma seem unsurprising. But the timing was such that the Kremlin, which rarely if ever admits to much of anything, let alone apologizes, appears to have felt the need to distance itself in this case.
Visiting Burma to mark the Southeast Asian country’s Armed Forces Day, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Aleksandr Fomin met on March 26 with General Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of the junta that took over after a military coup on February 1.
Fomin called Burma a reliable ally and strategic partner and said that Russia “is committed to a strategy aimed at bolstering relations between the two countries.”
Russian Deputy Defense Minister Aleksandr Fomin meets with Burmese military officials on March 26.
The following day, the junta chief called Russia a “true friend” — and, amidst lavish cerebrations of Armed Forces Day, security forces killed 114 people, according to local media, in the deadliest violence since mainly peaceful protests erupted after the military coup.
Even given Russia’s other relationships, the Kremlin’s tendency to shrug off accusations of violating human rights at home or condoning such actions abroad, the military official’s visit left observers wondering what the Russian state thought it had to gain with an expression of strong support for the junta amid the bloodshed.
‘Really Worried’
In any case, the Kremlin climbed down — or sought to soften the damage to its image amid outrage over the deadly violence — two days later.
“We are really worried by the growing number of civilian casualties,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters in a regular phone briefing with Russian and foreign media outlets. “It is a source of deep concern and we are following the unfolding situation in [Burma] really closely.”
Peskov, Putin, and other Russian officials have also voiced concern about the prospect of a new flare-up in the seven-year-old war in eastern Ukraine, where Moscow has given military, political, and financial backing to anti-Kyiv forces who have held parts of two provinces in the region known as the Donbas.
The sincerity of such remarks has been questioned in Kyiv and the West, where an escalation of fighting in the Donbas and Russian troop maneuvers near the Ukrainian border — as well as in Russian-controlled Crimea — have sparked concern about Moscow’s intentions at a time when its ties with the United States and the European Union are severely strained.
Kyiv has accused the Russia-backed forces in the Donbas of stepping up cease-fire violations, and four Ukrainian servicemen were killed on March 26 in what the Ukrainian military said was a mortar attack — the highest single-day toll since 2019.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited the front line in the eastern Donetsk region on February 11.
The war in the Donbas has killed more than 13,000 people since April 2014, when it erupted after Russia fomented separatism across eastern and southern Ukraine and seized the Crimean Peninsula after Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was pushed from power by a pro-Western, anti-corruption protest movement known as the Maidan.
Observers are wondering whether Russia may be gearing up for a new offensive in Ukraine or sending signals to the West, making a show of force to warn Washington and the EU against imposing new sanctions or other forms of pressure on Russia over its treatment of Navalny and other issues.
That seems to be just what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was doing — sending a signal, a warning, a threat — when he said on April 1, quoting what he described as remarks by Putin, that “anyone who tried to start a new war in the Donbas will destroy Ukraine.”
Putin spokesman Peskov, commenting on the reported movements of Russian military forces near the Ukrainian border and in Crimea, said that Russia “moves its troops within its own territory as it sees fit” and that these movements “pose no threat to anyone.”
“That’s not exactly going to assure anyone,” Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on Twitter.
The OPEC+ group of oil producing countries, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, has agreed to increase oil output gradually over the next months.
Signaling expectations of rising post-pandemic demand for oil, ministers noted in an April 1 statement “improvements in the market supported by global vaccination programs and stimulus packages in key economies.”
The OPEC+ group — made up of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, including Russia — has been coordinating about 7 million barrels per day (bpd) in production cuts to maintain prices in response to lower demand during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Under the latest agreement, OPEC+ countries agreed to increase production by 350,000 bpd in May, 350,000 bpd in June, and 450,000 bpd in July, Kazakhstan’s Energy Ministry said.
Iran’s oil minister, Bijan Zanganeh, confirmed the group would boost output by a total of 1.1 million bpd by July.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak told the Rossia-24 TV channel that his country would increase oil production by 114,000 bpd in the May-to-July period within the OPEC+ framework.
However, with coronavirus case surges in Europe and elsewhere potentially impacting energy demand, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman cautioned that any decision could be “tweaked” in the alliance’s monthly meetings.
Before the meeting, Abdulaziz said that “the reality remains that the global picture is far from even, and the recovery is far from complete.”
Saudi Arabia, which in previous OPEC+ talks had agreed to make steep cuts to maintain oil prices, will phase out its additional voluntary cut by 250,000 bpd in May, 350,000 bpd in June, and 400,000 bpd in July.
Oil prices have been on a run in the past six months, with benchmark WTI and Brent crude jumping from around $40 per barrel in November to above $60 today.
Novak was more optimistic about rising demand.
“Today, there are figures that are much more positive concerning the market, including the level of stocks, which have considerably fallen as demand increases,” Novak said.
“Vaccination is already yielding positive results so that demand is recovering,” he added.
With reporting by AFP, Bloomberg, Reuters, and TASS
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